IN A Facebook posting, investor Chan Kit Whye wrote: "UIS to wind up. Selling off its portfolio could put selling pressure on those stocks. Looks like UIS owns 1 million SembMarine shares. Depends on whether UIS does a married deal or sells quickly. UIS share price already gap up close to its NAV of 1.50. Don't chase anymore."

Hardly known to most investors, UIS is a closed-end fund -- probably the only one -- listed on SGX.

It announced last Friday that it had received a request from a controlling shareholder -- UOB and UOB Holdings -- to convene an EGM to seek shareholders' approval to self-liquidate and return the net proceeds to shareholders. 

That caused the stock to jump 27 cents, or 24%, to $1.395 -- which is a small discount to the latest NAV of $1.52.

UIS holds a diversified portfolio of equity and fixed income investments in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Korea, Hong Kong, United States, Thailand, Australia, Japan, Germany, China, and others.

We got hold of the list of its Singapore stock investments, as shown here.

UIS_PORTFOLIO 

SembCorp Marine is the largest holding in absolute value (S$4,2 million as at end-June and $4.57 million as of last week).

But that's a tiny % of its market cap of $9.55 billion and its sale is unlikely to cause a signficant downturn in the stock price -- especially if the shares are sold gradually over a period of time. 

That also applies to the rest of the holdings of which, interestingly, nearly 50% are REITs.

Non-dividend plays include two palm oil companies (Golden Agri and Indofood Agri) and Vard Holdings, which builds offshore support vessels used in the offshore oil and gas exploration and production and oil services industries.

UIS' holding of Vard has gone down in value to $860,000 (from $1.085 million in the above table), which is also a fraction of its market cap of S$1 billion.

For the full list of other investments of UIS, check out its interim report.

Featured recently on NextInsight, Morph Investments is among the big shareholders of UIS. See: .MORPH: A successful value fund manager you haven't heard of


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Comments  

#4 Tosca 2013-10-28 15:35
Hi, do you have any record of previous Closed-end fund liquidated in SGX. What was the discount of these fund compared with NAV prior to the suspension of the stock. Thanks.
#3 Kit Whye Chan 2013-10-28 06:29
officially UOB claimed that the new consolidation rules will make it mandatory for UIS to be a consolidated into UOB which make the numbers very messy. I remember there was a time when one angmo want to oust Wee Cho Yaw out of UIS Board, and I am sure Chairman Wee must be very hurt and angry. This is a good excuse to close this company.
#2 Hub Trading 2013-10-28 06:23
Y UIS wanna liquidated? Is it becoz there is no opportunity in SG mkt?
#1 Kit Whye Chan 2013-10-28 06:22
Wow! UIS hold so many Singapore shares. If selldown is rampant, those shares will get hit. But I believe Wee Cho Yaw will make an orderly exit without disturbing the share price too much.
 

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