3.50% Cashback on everything with the newly launched HSBC Advance Credit Card

[Update] Flash Sale: 
Citi Premier Miles card: $170 NTUC Vouchers
OCBC 365 Credit Card: $100 Chope vouchers + $80 cash back on apple pay

Apply here

Does getting 3.5% cash back on everything you spend sounds good to you? Yes this is on everything and not just on selected items which most credit cards limit on. You can get cashback on your online purchases, paying your bills, dining out, petrol and even paying your school fees. Its simple, get cash back on everything you spend on.

The 3.5% cash back is applicable for HSBC advance banking customers who will get additional 1% cash back. For all other customers, receive 2.5% cash back on all purchases with a monthly spend of >S$2,000, or receive 1.5% cash back with a monthly spend of S$2,000 and below. No minimum spend required. Cash back is capped at S$70 per month (S$125 for HSBC Advance Banking customers)

What’s more, for the month of June only, if you apply through the below link, you’ll get an exclusive offer of $150 NTUC FairPrice vouchers upon meeting a minimum spend of $600 in the first month of card approval.

HSBC credit card holders have many great benefits including the eligibility for a GV movie card for movie tickets of $7 on weekdays and $8.50 on weekends. This is good for movie lovers.

Apply for the HSBC advance credit card below to get your $150 NTUC FairPrice Vouchers:

*Bank's standard offer is not applicable

If 3.5% cash back is too little for you, how about a 10% cash back? The CIMB Platinum Mastercard gives you just the cash back you need with 10% cashback on Travel and Health, Beauty & Wellness. Charge a min. of S$500 with at least 8 transactions of $30 or more posted within the same statement month. Cashback is cap at S$60 per statement month.

There is additional 0.2% cash back on all other spend with no cash back cap. No minimum spend required. This card is free for life with lifetime annual fee waiver.

In addition, get $70 worth of EZBuy vouchers when you apply for the card by clicking on the image below. If you're not familiar with EZBuy, they are a dedicated provider of professional online shopping services. You can get good deals on the website where they ship goods from China, Taiwan, USA for more than 500,000 Singaporeans. If you see people queuing up to collect their goods near some MRT stations or neighbourhoods, they are most likely collecting from EZBuy.

Apply for the CIMB Platinum Mastercard below to get your $70 EZBuy Vouchers:

If NTUC or EZBuy vouchers are too boring for you, there is also a promotion to get $125 Tung Lok vouchers. This is applicable for the American Express CapitaCard.

Get 20,000 STAR$ after first successful transaction. Additional 30,000 STAR$ with a total spend of S$888 within 6 months of card approval. 5000 STAR$ gets you $5 CapitaVoucher so 20,000 STAR$ is equivalent to $20 CapitaVoucher. Earn 15 STAR$ for every S$1 spend in CapitaLand Malls and 5 STAR$ for every S$1 spend anywhere else.

Apply for the American Express CapitaCard below to get your $125 Tung Lok Vouchers:

There are other cards on promotion such as the popular OCBC 365 credit card which you can find here. You can get $100 Chope gift card and more NTUC vouchers for each application.

Apply for the cards that suits your needs today.

All vouchers/promotions are only valid for sign ups in the month of June 2017 only

ComfortDelgro Stock Analysis- Will It Survive the Uber & Grab competition?

Recently, a stock familiar to most of us caught my attention. I've been wanting to write on ComfortDelgro but did not do so until now as I had to read and dive in deeper on the company. ComfortDelgro is known to us as a taxi company where Comfort's taxi ply the roads of Singapore day in and day out. However, its business is more than the taxi business itself which makes it harder to analyse. Their annual report also didn't really break down the information I needed so I had to go to different sources just to find the info I wanted.

What got me interested in ComfortDelgro's business is that its stock price have fallen significantly after a bad financial result in Q1 FY2017. The stock price is at a 3 year low now and its quite fairly valued in my opinion.

Here's the share price of ComfortDelgro for the past 3 years:

Let's get deeper into ComfortDelgro's business to understand more about whether this would be a good investment?

Dissecting ComfortDelgro's business 

ComfortDelgro's business is not just in Singapore. They have businesses in 35 cities and 7 countries. The countries are Singapore, China, Australia, UK, Ireland, Vietnam and Malaysia. 64% of its revenue comes from Singapore and 36% from the overseas markets.

ComfortDelgro breaks its business into the following segments:

1. Public Transport Service Business
2. Taxi Business
3. Bus Station Business
4. Automotive Engineering Business
5. Inspection and Testing services Business
6. Driving Centre Business
7. Car Rental and Leasing Business

As we can see, their business is all in the transport industry. Close to 90% of its revenue comes from the public transport service and taxi business so I will focus more on these areas in this article. 

For the public transport service business, it is further broken down into the bus (scheduled & unscheduled) and rail business. For bus, it is operated under the subsidiary of SBS transit which we are all familiar with. ComfortDelgro also have their own bus chartering service with a total fleet of 348 buses. For rail, it is also operated under SBS transit which runs the North East Line (NEL), Punggol and Sengkang LRT as well as the new Downtown line (DTL). 

Latest Q1 FY17 Financial result of ComfortDelgro

Public Transport service business

For FY2016, SBS transit's revenue was $1098 Million. Base on its latest Q1 FY17 results, SBS transit contributes about 50% to ComfortDelgro's public transport service segment with about 75% from bus and 25% from rail business. In Q1 FY17, revenue for the public transport business segment was up about +0.75%. This was mainly from the increase in SBS transit's bus revenue after the transition to the bus contracting model (BCM) effective 1 September 2016. It seems like under the BCM, it benefits the operator more. Another increase was due to higher rail revenue from higher ridership from the DTL and NEL/LRT. DTL ridership grew by 19.1% while NEL and LRT ridership is still growing as well. This was offset by the lower fares which was implemented in 2016. 

For Australia business, revenue increased due to favourable currency of a stronger AUD while for UK, revenue decreased due to unfavourable currency of a weaker pound. 

Taxi Business

For the taxi business, revenue decreased by about 5.7% due to lower rental income in Singapore. Elsewhere in UK, China, Australia and Vietnam, revenue from its taxi business decreased as well. For UK, the decrease is due to an unfavourable currency from a weaker pound while in other countries, it is due to lesser rental fees and also a smaller fleet. This reflects a challenging environment for the taxi business due to the rise of private hire cars such as Uber and Grab.

For its other business segments, the rest remain stable except for automotive engineering services which see a lower revenue due to lower volume of diesel sold to taxi drivers and a drop in the repairs and maintenance of taxi and bus assembly jobs.


Should We Invest In ComfortDelgro's Business? 

The situation doesn't look that good for Comfort's taxi business but for the public transport service business, I would think there is much optimism ahead. Furthermore, its share price has dropped significantly from about $2.70 to about $2.40 in less than a month. It is currently trading at a PE ratio of 16x with dividend yield of about 4.2% and with gearing of 12.8%. I think this is a fair valuation for a big company like ComfortDelgro. If we compare to other similar companies such as MTR in HK, they are trading at a PE ratio of 32x, not forgetting SMRT which was delisted at 22x PE ratio.

Moving forward, I believe ComfortDelgro's bus revenue will be higher as it reflects a full year of revenue under the BCM. We have already seen higher revenue due to BCM in the last 2 Quarters since the bus industry in Singapore transited into it. DTL 3, which is run by SBS transit will also start revenue service in October this year which we should see higher revenue for its rail business as well. The straits times has reported that ridership on the DTL will double to about 500K daily ridership compared to about 245K now. Adding on, fares in Singapore are expected to continue increasing as the government has already signalled to the public transport council that fares have to keep up with costs involved to continue to be sustainable. The fare review is ongoing now and expected to be completed early next year.

The competition in the taxi industry should also be more or less stabilised now with the impact already factored in. Once the currency for the Pound turns favourable, we should see positive results for them again. I've bought some shares of ComfortDelgro at $2.42 as of now. There are certainly some risks and many factors to consider but personally I've weighed them and invested an amount I'm comfortable with. Let's see how things evolve later on.

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Being Smart or Having Luck In Life and Investing

Is it better to be born lucky or to be born smart? Veteran banker Wee Cho Yaw said that the late former deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee once told him that it is better to be born lucky than to be smart. This is an abstract from an article on Straits Times which I chanced upon and it really made me think about life. If you did not know, Wee Cho Yaw is the chairman of the United Overseas Bank and United Industrial Corporation in Singapore.

Some people are just lucky while some are smart. How smart we are can be practice and trained while how lucky we are is determined by fate. Is this sentence true? I beg to differ and as written by the Straits Times, it gives us some insight on how our luck can be changed for our lives once and for all.

It is better to be lucky in life

Let's dive in deeper on the topic of luck. I believe luck is a force that is created in our minds. There was a period in my life where I felt I had the worst luck. I was lost, had no opportunities and often failed in many things which I did. Be it in exams or investing, nothing seems to go well for me. Then, I decided I should do something about it to change my luck once and for all.

Did my luck change? Yes it did. Today, I feel I am lucky enough or maybe I just choose to count my blessings. Sometimes life may still not go well but I still choose to believe it is temporary. This is an important aspect for lucky people.


How to change your luck?

Studies have shown that lucky people enjoy certain common traits - thinking positively, seizing "chance opportunities", and adopting a resilient attitude when they encounter a setback. This was what was written in the Straits Times article. This resonates with me a lot especially the part on thinking positively. I realised when I changed my mind to think positively, my luck changes as well.

We've all heard about the law of attraction and how when we think bad things will happen to us, it will indeed happen in one way or another. Likewise, if we think good things will happen to us, somehow good things happen later. I believe this is more of a mindset change which allows us to seize opportunities when the time comes. When we believe that opportunities will come, we will realise when it comes and take advantage of it. But when we believe opportunities do not come to us, even if its right in-front of us, we won't even realise it. That's the difference when we have a positive mindset.


Investing requires some luck

While I do not advocate investing as gambling (which requires a lot of luck to win), however, investing requires some luck too. For investing, we have to understand the business and learn how to choose companies wisely. But, whether a company does well moving forward depends on some luck. How the share price moves depends on whether other investors or big players see the value of the stock. When the value is seen, the share price moves up when investors invest in the company. Also, some companies may just win some big contracts which increases their profits by many folds. There is some elements of luck in this as well.


Do you want to be lucky?

Luck can be changed in our lives. If you want to be luckier, start from changing your mindset. It is the crucial first step to see opportunities in your life. If you are facing setbacks now, see it as temporary. Always believe in the best can change the situation you are in right now. Lastly, think positively. This opens up your mind to take advantage when opportunities presents itself.

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