In this briefing:
1. Snippets #17: PTTEP’s Winner Curse, Huawei’s Crisis
December turned out to be more eventful than expected. Guess not everyone is waiting peacefully at home for Santa to hop by. Here’s a quick run-down on stories that have impact (at least indirectly) on Thai equities.
- Winning bids, losing confidence. PTTEP crushes Chevron in a mighty bid to secure the Bongkot and Erawan fields, but investors responded by driving their shares down 6%. Energy guru Manoon Siriwan pushes back on the bears saying that while costs are high, getting Erawan field on a greenfield basis should more than outweigh the negatives.
- Huawei and trade wars. Trump’s trade wars take a strange turn following the arrests of Huawei CFO and Canadian citizens in China. As commerce and politics gets mixed up, talks abound about Apple moving production to Vietnam or…Thailand?
- ERC puts the final nail to Glow’s coffin. This is lamest ruling ever! ERC rejects GPSC’s appeal saying that other industrial estates are already monopolies, and they don’t wanna turn MapTaPhut into another one. Their reasoning defies logic and forced us to capitulate on our Glow position.
- End of the LTF era. As the tax exemptions from LTFs are phased out, critics point that equities-based programs favor the rich over the poor, while the Puay Ungpakorn Institute points out that insurance companies could benefit from this unfortunate event.
- CP Group Routs the Mighty BTS in its bid for the high speed railway project, though their victory still predicates on the terms of government subsidy. Though this CP Group entity isn’t listed and many consortium members are foreign, two listed Thai consortium members include BEM and ITD, the country’s biggest construction company.
