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Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Temasek under new CEO.

 Temasek is getting a new leader to help grow our SG champions and invest strategically worldwide on the PE side. Let’s hope the new Mgmt shakes things up on the governance focused boards and also replace ceo who fail to deliver much faster and actually deliver on the next gen of SG Champions.


Temasek under mdm had a mixed performance in my opinion. Total shareholder return of 6% last 20 years.      I think this compares badly against top quartile PE Fund blended with S&P or ACWI 60/40.


First half of tenure from 2004 to 2010/11 great performance riding the Sg/asia/oil&gas boom. Credit must be given. But 2nd half from 2012 to now, bad. 


Mainly caused by TLC portfolio not growing well. Just look at Singtel, our TLC industrials, Mediacorp/SPH, SIA etc only capitaland, dbs are fine. As major shareholder, much should have been done to take board and Mgmt to task.


The other major contributor to relatively poor last 9-10 years is missing investing in strategic champions where we invest at PE stage (0.5b-2b) and which realize big gains when listed and they really scale. Obvious example will be SEA and to lesser extent Razer. 


Moving forward I hope to see :


- Boards role include more of add business value

- Mgmt and board that are removed faster if not performing

- benchmarking to top PE funds with talent to run like top PE fund managers for the non TLC side of portfolio. This means picking new winners better and also helping them more. 

-invest bigger chunks and drop the small size cheques. Or set up new entity with talent to do the smallish ones. And then make sure they get the bigger cheques based on the initial stake so that we own 10-30% of these giants ultimately and can really build the next gen of Sg champions with govt/people ownership.


This last point i think miss out right now. There are unicorns being created now with small Temasek indirect stakes via VCs and heliconia.  But we somehow have not been able to follow on the later big rounds. Eg patsnap, ninjavan...