In recent years, Singapore Post (SingPost) (SGX: S08) has been facing challenges regarding its corporate governance and the S$230 million acquisition of TradeGlobal – a loss-making e-commerce company based in the U.S. In May this year, SingPost reported a massive S$185 million impairment loss on TradeGlobal after admitting the acquisition had “underperformed”.
To make things worse, just days before SingPost’s 2017 AGM, a summary report on the review of SingPost’s acquisition of TradeGlobal was released by the law firm WongPartnership. The report exposed problems with SingPost’s corporate governance and the lack of due diligence surrounding the TradeGlobal deal.
With that in mind, I decided to go to the AGM to find out how SingPost plans to handle the issue and turn TradeGlobal around.
The AGM started with the announcement that Chairman Simon Israel was hospitalized and unable to attend the meeting. He pre-prepared a speech for shareholders that was ......