New shareholder may be 'new blood' needed for Cordlife's anaemic trajectory

LET'S face it - Cordlife Group is long overdue for a reset. The mainboard-listed cord blood banking and family diagnostic services provider has done nothing remarkable in recent years - except to survive.

Its one big hurrah was six years ago, when it sold its shares and convertible notes in China Cord Blood Corp - mainland China's first and largest cord blood group - and pocketed handsome gains, sharing the sweetness with shareholders in the form of a special dividend of S$0.13 per share.

The company's much-trumpeted goal to expand in South-east Asia has come to little. And the controversial exit of its long-serving chief executive Jeremy Yee, which revealed cracks in the company's board and management, has not helped. India, a market it had banked on and where it had splurged on marketing to bring in big volumes, took more than it gave back.