Share buybacks reach $100m in October

Find out the top 5 stocks.

For the month of October, there were a total of 112,318,000 shares repurchased by 29 stocks with a total consideration of S$96.6 million.

According to a report by SGX, among these 29 stocks, four stocks were constituent stocks of the Straits Times Index (STI) – Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Sembcorp Industries, Singapore Airlines and Wilmar International.

The five stocks with the highest total consideration made in October were Singapore Airlines, Wilmar International, Pacific Century Regional Developments, Lian Beng Group and Hyflux. These five stocks had a combined total consideration of S$65 million.

Here’s more from SGX:

Share buybacks is a simple process where a share issuer repurchases some of their outstanding shares from shareholders through open market transactions. Some examples are that a company may have surplus cash after taking into account of its ordinary capital requirements and financing for possible projects or it may wish to enhance the return on equity of the company. Additionally, if the company has an employee share option policy, it can also have more flexibility through share buyback to issue and allocate shares based on the share options that are exercised.

Once shares are bought back they will be converted into treasury shares which means that are no longer categorised as shares outstanding.