Dividend trend shows strength of S'pore companies

A LOT of conversations out there nowadays are about how terrible the stock market is - followed by, say, "I'll buy Keppel Corp (which has fallen some 50 per cent from its April high) and leave it for my children". Others moan how they must "cut off their fingers", which is a Cantonese saying translating roughly to "never venture into stocks or mahjong" - which kind of indicates how investment is perceived by some.

That kind of talk is more likely to come from the older generation. But you would have thought they would be more resilient, having gone through previous bear markets, like the 2008/9 global financial crisis - and the more terrible 1997/8 Asian financial crisis, which saw the value of many properties crash 50 per cent and the Straits Times Index (STI) fall below 1,000.

Putting the situation into perspective last month was OCBC's chief executive Samuel Tsien in an interview with the Singapore Exchange (SGX). Referring to non-performing loans (NPLs) - which are in focus given the slowdown in regional economies, lower demand from China and higher interest rates - he said: "We need to put this into the right context. NPLs have been extremely low by any standards. So even if they were to rise, we need not panic as they are, in a way, normalising, and this is not unexpected. Nonetheless, I don't expect NPLs to increase to a level of grave concern."