Mapletree planning $682m fund in Vietnam

Source : Straits Times - 3 Jul 2008

REAL estate firm Mapletree Investments is setting up a US$500 million (S$682 million) fund to invest in properties in fast-growing Vietnam, to be launched within 12 months.

The Temasek Holdings unit said it is setting up the fund to ‘harness Vietnam’s rising development cycle, and to tap into the growing affluence of the middle-class segment of its population’.

Mapletree unveiled its plans for the fund in its recently published annual report.

It is ‘currently in the advanced stages of evaluating several projects comprising a wide spectrum of property types, from office, retail and residential to industrial and service residential properties, with a view to seed a new Vietnam fund with these assets over the next few months’.

Mapletree spokesman Shae Hung Yee said the company plans to launch the fund, which will be at least US$500 million in size, within the next 12 months.

This timeline, however, may be altered depending on ‘market conditions’, she said. ‘We will make sure the time is right before starting any fund,’ she added.

Mapletree’s fund will include its own seed money, said Ms Shae, who added that the firm is considering ’syndicating the fund’ out to like-minded investors with aligned interests.

The move is part of Mapletree’s efforts to tap into the high growth potential of emerging markets such as China, India and Vietnam, said chairman Edmund Cheng in the company’s annual report.

Mapletree posted a net profit of $1.04 billion for the financial year ended March 31, down 3 per cent from the year before.

On Tuesday, it announced that it had completed a $1.71 billion acquisition of industrial landlord JTC Corporation’s assets in Singapore.

The JTC properties, comprising 39 multi-storey factories and 23 offices and warehouses, had originally been slated for a real estate investment trust. Plans to list the trust were subsequently scrapped due to poor market conditions.

Mapletree owns and manages $5.7 billion worth of real estate assets in Singapore, including the VivoCity mall and St James Power Station. It manages about $4.8 billion worth of assets in the region. The latter figure includes the recent JTC acquisition.