Premium Automobiles teeing up to buy Sime Darby Business Centre for S$55 million

[SINGAPORE] Will the third time be the charm for a sale of Sime Darby Business Centre?

A deal seems to be under way again for the property at 315 Alexandra Road, next to the Ikea store, this time at S$55 million.

The prospective buyer is Premium Automobiles, currently the authorised distributor for Chinese car brands Avatr, Deepal, XPeng and Zeekr.

Premium, controlled by Hadi Widjaja Tanaga, declined to comment on the matter.

The company was the long-time authorised dealer for German luxury marque Audi from 1999. It ceased selling Audi cars in 2024, as the brand began running its own retail operations in Singapore.

Two earlier deals fall through

Aster (Alexandra) – understood to be a Blackstone-Sime Darby Property joint venture – entered into a put-and-call option agreement with Premium Automobiles in late October for the purchase of the 83,102-square-foot (sq ft) site. The plot has a balance land tenure of about 29 years of the original 99 years from March 1956.

Market watchers expect the transaction to be subject to the approval of JTC Corporation.

CBRE is understood to be brokering the sale.

Currently on the site is a five-storey clean and light industrial building, with a three-storey annexe at the rear. On the rooftop of the annexe is a car park; there are also car parking spaces on the ground floor of the property.

The property is mostly empty and is expected to be sold on a vacant possession basis.

The former main tenant of the site was Performance Motors Ltd (PML), an authorised dealer for BMW controlled by the Bursa-listed Sime, previously known as Sime Darby.

PML occupied showroom space and a workshop in the building, which it used for its BMW motorcycle and used-car retail operations. In late 2022, PML shifted these operations to 1 Ubi Road 4.

The site is zoned for Business 1 use, with 2.5 plot ratio under the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s Draft Master Plan 2025. This would translate to a maximum gross floor area (GFA) of 207,754 sq ft – 16 per cent more than the existing GFA of 179,189 sq ft.

No land betterment charge is payable to build up to the 2.5 plot ratio.

The S$55 million price works out to S$307 per sq ft based on the existing GFA of 179,189 sq ft.

Aster was formerly known as Sime Darby Property (Alexandra). In May 2023, it granted an option to purchase the Alexandra Road property at S$68 million to Eagle Land (Credit), a car dealership business for new and used vehicles that was then headed by Thomas Yap.

In July 2023, Eagle Land exercised the option and lodged a caveat. In December 2024, it withdrew the caveat. Yap exited the group recently.

This marked the second time that a proposed sale of the property fell through.

In January 2021, Aims Apac Real Estate Investment Trust (Reit) announced that it had entered into a put-and-call option agreement to buy Sime Darby Business Centre for about S$102 million. However, in July 2022, the Reit announced the planned purchase had fallen through.

At the time, the Reit manager said that the “re-negotiation of the principal terms and conditions of the acquisition were not concluded”; hence, the necessary regulatory approvals were not obtained by the target date of Jul 1, 2022.

Distributor of China EVs

Like other automotive companies here, Premium has rapidly diversified its brand offerings to pivot to China electric vehicles (EVs), acquiring the distributorship of Avatr, Deepal, XPeng and Zeekr and introducing them to Singapore over the past two years.

The brands are well known in the China car market, with Avatr and Deepal under state-owned carmaker Changan, and Zeekr under Zhejiang Geely.

XPeng is known for its smart driving systems and assistive vehicle technology. It is dual-listed on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges, and has attracted investments from Alibaba, BlackRock and Volkswagen.