Thursday, July 12, 2007

Facts about the Singapore Market

Hope this serves as a list of good-to-know for people investing in Singapore. These no.s can be used as some kind of benchmark when analyzing co.s and some are really quite interesting! Here is goes:

There are roughly 700 listed co.s in Singapore but only 50 in the STI index. In terms of market cap size, 6 co.s make up roughly 50% of the STI index.

11 co.s have more than SGD 10bn in market cap.
88 co.s have between SGD 1-10bn in market cap.
Slightly less than 300 co.s have between SGD 0.1-1bn in market cap.
The smallest listed entity had 6mn in market cap.
The co. probably paid more than 6mn to brokers, auditors and SGX. Hehe!

The whole of Singapore stock market cap is roughly SGD 600bn.
This is roughly 1% of the world’s market cap which is roughly SGD 70trn (or USD 40trn). This is also 3x our GDP which is roughly SGD 200bn. Rough, roughly, roughlier... The world is filled with uncertainty!

Only 5 co.s generate more than SGD 10bn in sales.
These 5 co.s are: 1 electronics company, 1 airline, 1 telco, 1 shipping co. and 1 distributor for cars.

Only 50 plus co.s generate more than SGD 1bn in sales.
The smallest 8 listed co.s in Singapore generate less than SGD 1mn in sales. (Pathetic right?)
Makes one wonder whether we should ask some of our ministers to list themselves on the stock exchange since they could generate more than that.

Only 5 co.s generate more than SGD 1bn in operating profits (or OP). So much so for Singapore Inc huh? Btw, 1 Integrated Resort will probably generate only SGD 150mn in OP.
Only 2 of the top 5 sales co.s are in the top 5 OP generators.
3 of these co.s are banks.

55 co.s generate SGD 100mn-1bn in OP (IR goes here!).
Slightly less than 200 co.s generate between SGD 10-100mn in OP.
Slightly more than 200 co.s generate between SGD 0-10mn in OP.
Which leaves slightly more than 100 loss-making co.s that are listed in Singapore.
This means 1 out of 7 co.s listed in Singapore are loss making!

About 150 co.s have more than 10% Return on Capital or ROA.
The average Return on Capital is 0.5%.
You have 20% chance of picking a winner, if you picked a loser, you might as well put that money under your pillow. Stock-picking is a dangerous game.

About 150 co.s have more than 5% Earnings Yield
(or a PER of less than 20x).
The average Earnings Yield is 4.2% or PER of 24x.
This means: even if you picked the winner, chances are it's already in the price. i.e. dating a chio babe at an expensive price.

About 60 co.s meet the above 2 criteria which is:
ROA greater than 10%
Earnings Yield greater than 5%.
If you buy all these 60 co.s today, you probably have a 12% chance of outperforming the STI on a 1-year investment horizon. Stock-picking is a bit better than Toto or 4D.

Other financial ratios of the Singapore stock market include:
Average Dividend Yield is 3%
Average Price to Book is 3.5x
Average Debt to Equity is 0.6x
Average ROE is 9.5%

These no.s are quite different from those listed on conventional sources probably bcos I included the a lot of kuching kurau names which have ridiculous ratios like ROE of -200% and Dividend Yield of 100% etc (no time to clean them mah, I can’t just blog whole day, can I?).

Anyways, hope these info help next time you need to analyse something. In investment, knowledge is power!

2 comments:

  1. what software or website did you use to extract these values?

    ReplyDelete
  2. some no.s like GDP and mkt cap are info collected over the yrs, some no.s are generated off the screening tool in poems, the online broker outfit of phillip capital, a brokerage in Singapore

    ReplyDelete