BEST'S COMMENTARY: HSBC'S ACQUISITION OF AXA SINGAPORE HIGHLIGHTS SINGAPORE LIFE INSURANCE GROWTH PROSPECTS

SINGAPORE, Aug 26 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- The recent agreement to acquire AXA Insurance Pte Ltd (AXA Singapore) by HSBC Insurance (Asia-Pacific) Holdings Ltd (HSBC Insurance) demonstrates the continued growth potential of Singapore’s life insurance segment, according to a new AM Best commentary.

In its new Best’s Commentary, “HSBC’s Acquisition of AXA Singapore Highlights Singapore Life Insurance Growth Prospects,” AM Best states that demand for long-term financial planning and health protection is continuing to support Singapore’s life insurance market prospects. The HSBC Insurance-AXA Singapore deal takes place at a time when the Singapore life market has seen a strong rebound in weighted new business premiums recorded in the first half of 2021. In addition, recent and future life insurance growth is expected to be supported by the city-state’s attractiveness as a home for affluent and high net worth individuals.

Generally, AM Best is of the view that life insurance companies with international expertise in investment and wealth management have notable advantages in designing sophisticated products with more attractive investment terms and features — an important value proposition amid the current low-interest rate environment. Nonetheless, life insurers with product offerings that include significant investment risks/guarantees have to balance the attractiveness of these products with the capital requirements that arise for the insurer.

The health and employee benefits lines of business also remain important growth drivers for life insurers in Singapore. Nonetheless, AM Best notes that companies engaging in these line of business continue to face underwriting performance challenges, particularly for individual medical and critical illness products. In Singapore, aside from group health business, which delivered adequate profitability in 2020, health insurance is viewed as a difficult line of business due to the weak results of long-term individual policies.
 

To access a copy of this commentary, please visit http://www3.ambest.com/bestweek/purchase.asp?record_code=312005.

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specialising in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright © 2021 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210825005791/en/


Contact

Tran Nhat Trung
Financial Analyst
+65 6303 5019
trung.tran@ambest.com

Christopher Sharkey
Manager, Public Relations
+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5159
christopher.sharkey@ambest.com

Myles Gould
Senior Director, Analytics
+65 6303 5020
myles.gould@ambest.com

Jim Peavy
Director, Communications
+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5644
james.peavy@ambest.com

Source : AM Best

--BERNAMA

Grafana Labs secures US$220 million, hastening open source visualisation, observability platform global adoption

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 25 -- Grafana Labs, the company behind the world’s most ubiquitous open and composable operational dashboards, has announced a US$220 million Series C investment round, co-led by new investors Sequoia Capital and Coatue, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital, and GIC. (US$1 = RM4.211)

As part of the funding, Carl Eschenbach, partner at Sequoia and former President and COO at VMware, and David Schneider, general partner at Coatue and former President at ServiceNow, will join the company’s board of directors.

The ‘actually useful’ free forever tier of Grafana Cloud provides the industry’s most generous no-cost observability stack, and with the funding round, Grafana Labs is adding 50GB of traces to the 50GB of logs, 10,000 series of Prometheus metrics, and 3 Grafana dashboard users that come with the free offering.

Both Grafana Cloud and the on-premises Grafana Enterprise Stack offering include access to free and commercial plugins, such as Elasticsearch, Jira, Datadog, Splunk, AppDynamics, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, ServiceNow, and more.

“It’s been an incredible year at Grafana Labs, highlighted by the rapid adoption of Grafana Cloud, the growth of our Loki logs and Prometheus metrics offerings, the introduction of Tempo 1.0 for tracing, and the continued development of the Grafana frontend,” said Grafana Labs co-founder and CEO, Raj Dutt in a statement.

“This new investment of capital, as well as the addition of two highly experienced technology executives to our board, will focus us on accelerating product development to support our community’s and customers' success.”

Eschenbach said: “We’re eager to partner with Grafana Labs and look forward to working with Raj and team to continue building world-class observability products.”

Grafana Labs has doubled its headcount since the beginning of the year, with nearly 500 Grafanistas working remotely in more than 40 different countries. 

For more information, visit www.grafana.com.

-- BERNAMA

Arowana bags 3 Gold Stevie Awards at the 2021 International Business Awards

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 20 -- Arowana, the established B Corporation accredited investment group, has been awarded three sought-after Gold Stevie Awards at the 18th Annual International Business Awards, the world’s premier business awards programme.

Arowana has been awarded Gold in Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 100 employees), Achievement in Organization Recovery and Chairman of the Year, according to a statement.

Arowana was awarded a Gold Stevie for Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 100 employees), recognising its unique purpose and approach to building companies that it invests in and operates.

As a B Corp, Arowana is selectively focussed on enterprises that serve a real purpose, working directly with companies that deliver a positive impact to all stakeholders.

Meanwhile, Arowana’s Gold Stevie Award for Achievement in Organization Recovery recognised its successful turnaround of VivoPower International.

In March 2020, VivoPower's share price was below US$1.00 with a market cap of US$10 million; seven months later, following a transformational intervention by Arowana, VivoPower’s price achieved an all-time high of US$24.00. (US$1 = RM4.236)

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Arowana, Kevin Chin was awarded the Gold Stevie Award for Chairman of the Year for his leadership in successfully driving innovation across Arowana’s group of companies as well as for the execution of VivoPower’s turnaround.

Arowana was also awarded three Bronze Stevies for Company of the Year - Business or Professional Services (Medium-size), Energy Industry Innovation of the Year and Achievement in Growth.

-- BERNAMA

Hyatt enters definitive agreement to acquire Apple Leisure Group

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 -- Hyatt Hotels Corporation has announced that Hyatt has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Apple Leisure Group (ALG), a leading luxury resort-management services, travel and hospitality group, from affiliates of each of KKR and KSL Capital Partners LLC for US$2.7 billion in cash. (US$1 = RM4.241)

The transaction is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement.

ALG’s resort brand management platform AMResorts® provides management services to the largest portfolio of luxury all-inclusive resorts in the Americas under the AMR™ Collection brand portfolio.

The acquisition also includes ALG’s membership offering, Unlimited Vacation Club®, travel distribution business ALG Vacations®, as well as destination management services and travel technology assets.

Following completion of the transaction, ALG’s business will continue to be led by current ALG Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alejandro Reynal and the current ALG leadership team. Reynal will become a member of Hyatt’s executive leadership team and report to Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian.

Hoplamazian, who is also Hyatt president, said: “The addition of ALG’s properties will immediately double Hyatt’s global resorts footprint.”

“ALG’s portfolio of luxury brands, leadership in the all-inclusive segment and large pipeline of new resorts will extend our reach in existing and new markets, including in Europe, and further accelerate our industry-leading net rooms growth.

“Importantly, the combination of this value-creating acquisition and the US$2 billion increase in our asset sale commitment will transform our earnings profile, and we expect Hyatt to reach 80 per cent fee-based earnings by the end of 2024.”

ALG’s hotel portfolio consists of over 33,000 rooms operating in 10 countries. The portfolio has grown from nine resorts in 2007, to approximately 100 properties by 2021-end and has a pipeline of 24 executed deals with a large number of additional hotels in the development process.

At closing, Hyatt expects to fund more than 80 per cent of the purchase with a combination of US$1.0 billion of cash on hand and new debt financings, and the remainder with approximately US$500 million from equity financing.

Hyatt has secured a US$1.7 billion financing commitment from J.P. Morgan. Cash proceeds from the US$2 billion asset sale programme are expected to be used to pay down debt, including debt incurred to fund the acquisition.

More details at www.hyatt.com.

-- BERNAMA

ECLOUDVALLEY FIRST AWS CONSULTING PARTNER IN ASEAN TO ACHIEVE AWS MACHINE LEARNING COMPETENCY

 SINGAPORE, Aug 12 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- eCloudvalley Technology announced that it is the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner to achieve the AWS Machine Learning Competency status in the ASEAN region.

AWS Machine Learning Competency Partners have demonstrated expertise delivering machine learning (ML) solutions on the AWS Cloud. These partners offer a range of services and technologies to help businesses create intelligent solutions, from enabling data science workflows to enhancing applications with machine intelligence.

As one of the fastest growing areas in technology, ML is a highly sought-after skillset in today’s job market as The World Economic Forum states a significant increase in the number of firms to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in their 2020 report. The benefits of ML are endless as it is an open platform which provides users with controlled access to resources with granular permission policies, while choosing from a comprehensive set of services for data analysis together with data storage, business intelligence, batch processing, stream process and data progress orchestration. Achieving the AWS Machine Learning Competency positions eCloudvalley to serve a growing market in the Asia Pacific region looking to automate operations.

eCloudvalley has successfully helped mobile advertising solutions and content developer PureTech Global to leverage AI to optimize their billing revenue by implementing a time-series forecasting model using Amazon Forecast, a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts, to predict the optimal times for sending renewal notices for each of PureTech’s applications. eCloudvalley has also assisted PureTech Global to successfully deploy Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), storing raw historical data to train AI models and develop insights generated after forecasting. AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, is utilized to provide compute resources for analysis and forecasting.

“We have benefited from the support received from AWS and eCloudvalley, and continue to benefit from AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities like machine learning.”－ John Lim, Chief Technology Officer, PureTech Global.

AWS enables scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

"Now more than ever, businesses are looking to transform themselves with the latest ML solutions on AWS. To help customers make the right choices when finding the most qualified AWS Partner for the job, we launched the AWS Machine Learning Competency to help customers easily identify expert AWS Partners who have deep expertise and a solid track record of success in this area," said Conor McNamara, Managing Director, AWS ASEAN. "We are delighted that eCloudvalley is the first AWS Consulting partner in ASEAN to achieve this competency. We look forward to innovating together and continuing to serve our customers in Southeast Asia with innovative and validated AWS Partner technology and consulting offerings.”

In 2021, eCloudvalley has participated in the AWS Managed Service Provider Program which helped grow and promote its business. eCloudvalley also holds the AWS Migration Consulting Competency status, demonstrating its ability to help enterprise customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS. In addition, eCloudvalley also has achieved the AWS Data and Analytics Competency status, demonstrating its success in helping customers evaluate and use the tools and best practices for collecting, storing, governing, and analyzing data at any scale.

eCloudvalley has also achieved AWS SAP Competency status, with the experience, tooling, methods, and best practices to streamline migration or transformation through integrated SAP solutions. These services extract key data from cloud-based SAP solutions, conducts analytics on the data, and utilizes the results to assist users in building a framework for digital transformation besides focusing on recolonizing the traditional IT models in various ways, from IT infrastructure to development methodology, triggering the business culture within an organization through offering Next-Generation Managed Services. Finally, eCloudvalley’s AI/ML team provides a complete solution, from platform construction to scheme design, training model to parameter tuning, and business situation interview to deployment and online operation, assisting customers from start to the end with their digital transformation journey.

About eCloudvalley

Founded in 2014 as a born-in-the-cloud partner focused entirely on AWS services, eCloudvalley has grown to 400+ employees with geographic footprints across APAC region, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and United States. With a mission to evolve the customer’s business with cloud technology, eCloudvalley has built a professional technical team with over 500 AWS certifications and has served 1,000 enterprises to perform any digital transformation.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210801005001/en/


Contact

Melody Wee
+65 6223 2062
eCloudvalley Technology
www.ecloudvalley.com
Email us at info@ecloudvalley.com 

Source : eCloudvalley Technology

--BERNAMA

CRADLEPOINT LAUNCHES NEW PARTNER PORTAL TO OPTIMISE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND DEPLOYMENT OF 5G AND WIRELESS WAN

 Cradlepoint Cascade Enhances Partner Experience Through a Streamlined Dashboard and Comprehensive Resources

MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug 11 (Bernama-GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cradlepoint, the global leader in cloud-delivered LTE and 5G wireless network edge solutions, today announced Cradlepoint Cascade, a new engagement platform for Cradlepoint’s award-winning partner program. The platform offers channel partners a streamlined experience to roll-out and monetise Cradlepoint’s industry-leading solutions that will enable business customers to capitalise on the era of 5G and Wireless WAN.

Cascade offers members of the Cradlepoint Partner Program a sleek and simple platform that provides a single pane of glass experience for partners, along with an extensive collection of resources to help deliver a pervasive, secure, and software-defined Wireless WAN edge to customers. Capabilities of Cascade include:

· Customer Insights and Management: Partners have full access to the data that matters, including details on exactly how many licenses each one of their customers has, how many are being used, and which ones are in or out of compliance. Partners also have full insight into exactly when subscriptions expire and when they are up for renewal.

· Sales Support and Management: Users have access to resources that assist in the sales process, including product collateral, technical details, pricelists, key contacts, and the ability to register deals.

· World-Class Training: Through Cascade and Cradlepoint University, Cradlepoint offers partner enablement including training with a focus on product positioning, solutions and technology classes, developer training, and certifications to position partners as leaders in the market. In addition, partners can invest in guided journeys to train staff with 30, 60, or 90-day plans to accelerate revenue and expand reach.

· 5G for Enterprise Branch Specialisation: Leading partners selling Cradlepoint’s 5G for business solutions can achieve 5G for Enterprise Branch Specialisation through Cascade, a certification eligible to partners that meet a series of sales, technical, and business proficiency criteria.
 
“At Cradlepoint, we are leading the way when it comes to providing solutions that help organisations realise the promise of Wireless WAN and 5G, but this would not be possible without our incredible ecosystem of partners,” said Eric Purcell, senior vice president of global partner sales at Cradlepoint. “Cascade is simply about ensuring these partners have the tools and resources they need to do their job effectively. By adding this new portal to the Cradlepoint Partner Program, we are only bolstering our collective efforts to deliver effective solutions that transform businesses and drive results.”

A global leader in cloud-delivered 4G and 5G wireless network edge solutions, Cradlepoint’s NetCloud platform and cellular routers deliver a pervasive, secure, and software-defined Wireless WAN edge to connect people, places, and things anywhere. Members of the Cradlepoint Partner Program benefit from best-in-class training, implementation guides, and educational and demand-generation tools to help drive customer engagement and success. 
 

For more information on Cradlepoint’s Partner Program, visit https://cradlepoint.com/partners/for-partners/. 

Partner Quotes

“Cradlepoint’s partner support has been outstanding and the Cascade platform is the next chapter, offering us all the resources to support our customers even better, from marketing to generate new opportunities all the way to renewals of existing estates,” said Ivan Landen, CEO, Blue Wireless.

“Cradlepoint offers true plug and play devices that unlock the power of mobile broadband internet. This means business grade internet connectivity can be unleashed and setup within minutes securely, anywhere! Cradlepoint’s previous Partner Portal supported partner practices through deal registration, sales/ technical support, as well as subscription and account information. The new Cascade portal will provide an even better user experience with improved UI and workflow. The Cascade portal is also customisable to individual needs and requirements, which will help partners better manage their practices,” said Eunice Hong, CEO of OneSystems Technologies Pte Ltd.

About Cradlepoint
Cradlepoint is a global leader in cloud-delivered 4G and 5G wireless network edge solutions. Cradlepoint’s NetCloud™ platform and cellular routers deliver a pervasive, secure, and software-defined Wireless WAN edge to connect people, places, and things — anywhere. More than 25,000 businesses and government agencies worldwide, including many Global 2000 organisations and top public sector agencies, rely on Cradlepoint to keep mission-critical sites, points of commerce, field forces, vehicles, and IoT devices always connected. Cradlepoint was founded in 2006, acquired by Ericsson in 2020, and operates today as a standalone subsidiary within Ericsson’s Business Area Technologies and New Businesses. Cradlepoint is headquartered in Boise, Idaho, with development centres in Silicon Valley and India and international offices in the UK and Australia. www.cradlepoint.com.  

Cradlepoint Media Inquiries  
Biana Chamlet, PR Manager
Cradlepoint
Biana.chamlet@cradlepoint.com
M. +61452 516 069

Source: Cradlepoint

--BERNAMA

GRAB TO PARTICIPATE AT UPCOMING INVESTOR CONFERENCES

 SINGAPORE, Aug 9 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Grab Holdings Inc. (“Grab”), Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, announced that its management team is scheduled to present at the following virtual investor conferences. Attendance is by invitation only for clients of each respective firm. Interested investors should contact their respective sales representative to register and schedule one-on-one meetings.

· Monday, August 9 (U.S.), Grab Chief Financial Officer Peter Oey will be presenting at the Cowen Internet & Media Bus Tour.
· Wednesday, August 11 (Asia), Peter Oey will be presenting at a Tellimer hosted forum, titled “Grab: The rise of the ASEAN Superapp”.
· Wednesday, August 25 (Asia), Grab Head of Asia Investor Relations Ken Lek will host a group presentation at the Macquarie ASEAN Virtual Conference 2021.
· Thursday, August 26 to Friday, August 27 (Asia), Peter Oey will host several group and one-on-one meetings at the JP Morgan ASEAN TMT & Fintech 1x1 Forum.
· Wednesday, September 1 to Friday, September 3 (Asia), Grab President Ming Maa will present at the Morgan Stanley Virtual Asia TMT Conference.
· Monday, September 6 (Asia), Peter Oey will present at the 22nd Credit Suisse Asian Technology Conference.
· Monday, September 6 (Asia), Peter Oey will be participating in a panel discussion at Moody’s Emerging Markets Summit - Asia.
· Wednesday September 8 (U.S.), Peter Oey will present at the Wolfe Research TMT Conference.
· Monday, September 27 (U.S.), a recorded interview between the President of Principal Asia, Thomas Cheong and Grab CEO Anthony Tan will be played at the Principal Global Investment forum.
· Thursday, October 28 (Asia), Ming Maa will present at The Barclays Asia Virtual Forum. 

http://mrem.bernama.com/viewsm.php?idm=40714
 

PRESTIGE BIOPHARMA'S INSTITUTIONAL SHAREHOLDERS, APPRECIATE ITS HIGH GROWTH POTENTIAL AND INVEST WITH A LONG-TERM VIEW

SINGAPORE, Aug 2 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Prestige BioPharma Limited (PBP)’s IPO lock-up will be partially released on August 4, 2021. PBP is the first Singapore based company to be listed on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI). IPO process usually requires early investors and insiders to lock-up their stock for at least 180 days.

Amid this season of uncertainty, PBP’s major institutional shareholders shared their confidence in the company’s potential future growth and the Sputnik COVID19 vaccine CMO business.

One of the financial investors of PBP, Samsung Partners’ CEO, Mr. Deuk Yong Seong commented, “we highly appreciate PBP’s company value and will invest with a long-term view” and “we evaluated PBP’s biosimilars and First-in-Class pancreatic cancer treatment as a strong growth engine when we decided to invest in PBP, and our view is still the same”. 

Samsung Partners and KB Securities’ investments have been made through the privateequity fund, ‘KB-SP Private Equity Fund IV’, and the fund’s end date is in November 2022. This fund is holding 3% (1,805,705 KDR) of the share capital of PBP. 

PBP’s largest financial investor is ‘Octava Fund Limited (Octava)’. Octava and its related parties are holding approximately 17.35% (10,428,740 KDR) of the share capital of PBP. Octava has been serving as PBP’s long-term strategic partner from the very beginning of the company. 

Octava’s investment director, Mr. Tan Ting Yong commented, “Octava takes a long view on its investments in PBP. The current share price of PBP does not reflect the true potential of PBP. PBP’s recent venture into the COVID-19 vaccine production business will not just diversify its revenue streams but also help to save lives. Octava believes that there is substantial room for PBP share price to appreciate and has no plans to liquidate its holding of PBP shares when the lock-up restriction is lifted”.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210801005087/en/ 

Contact 

Media enquiries:
Global Communication Team
Prestige BioPharma Ltd.
www.prestigebiopharma.com
Yujin Suh
Tel: +65-6924-6535
info@pbpsg.com
yujin.suh@pbpsg.com 

Source : Prestige BioPharma Limited 

--BERNAMA