29th June 2013
IT may seem rather nondescript but the appointment of joint managing directors and the presence of Kumar Tharmalingam over at the Sunway group may be an indication of the direction the company would like to take. Or at least, the market it would like to have.
Sarena Cheah and Ong Pang Yen were appointed as joint managing directors of the property development division at Sunway Bhd effective May 1. They replace Ho Hon Sang who left at the end of last month.
Cheah and Ong brushed aside the joint positions, saying that having two MDs is nothing new.
“I take the younger and the female perspective,” says Sarena, 39.
Ong, 52, says: “No, she is not understudying me. We complement each other.”
There’s the emergence of what a property consultant calls “a third force” in the form of Kumar Tharmalingam, previously chief executive officer at Malaysia Property Inc and whose previous mandate was to promote Malaysian properties abroad.
Cheah says Kumar is the executive director in the chairman’s office and is on the senior management board.
“He brings to Sunway 35 years of best business practices in real estate and regional property experience,” Cheah says.
Kumar is an advisor on regional and domestic property trends. He will guide the company’s expansion plans in Malaysia and internationally, Cheah says, adding that the company will remain in key cities in Malaysia although it has projects in Singapore and China. Kumar joined the group in January.
Cheah joined the group 18 years ago. Her father is Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah, Sunway Group founder and chairman. Ong has been with the company for 20 years and has just returned from China. His previous international postings include Africa and Cambodia.
Sarena says having joint managing directors will enable the group, which currently has an order book of RM4.2bil of projects to “address issues faster and better.”
“What is important is corporate sustainability,” says Cheah.
She says the current order book of RM4.2bil is the highest ever reached thus far and that she is particularly excited about two projects, namely the 23.4-acre Sunway GEO, whose success hinges on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and other forms of public rail transport that will be built there and Sunway Iskandar in Johor’s Iskandar Malaysia.
The company has 1,800 acres in Johor, which puts it among the top land owners there after the UEM Sunrise group (about 9,000 acres) and Tan Sri Lim Kang Hoo’s Iskandar Waterfront Holdings Sdn Bhd (about 4,000 acres). Sunway has a total landbank of 3,800 acres.
“Sunway Iskandar is planned to be a thriving hub within Iskandar, and home to a global community,” she says.
Cheah says the company is excited to go to Iskandar and it plans to replicate another award-winning world-class township there.
“(That) 1,800 acres will enable this vision to become a reality,” she says, adding that Iskandar Malaysia has the strong support of top political leaders in Malaysia and Singapore.
On Johor’s average monthly household income of RM4,658 (at 2012) and property prices going on par with Klang Valley pricing, she says the positive gain reflects a combination of factors.
These include the multi-billion investment in the transformation of the city, the catalytic projects there such as LegoLand and EduCity and the improved connectivity and accessibility between Johor and Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
Incidentally, the Klang Valley’s average monthly household income is RM7,805 and Penang RM5,055.
Although Cheah is excited about the property-transport link in two of its major developments, she says the company has other pending projects which are equally noteworthy. This being the 23-acre Sunway Velocity in Cheras, a 50:50 joint venture with landowner Fawanis Sdn Bhd with a gross development value of RM3.8bil and Sunway Damansara, in Kota Damansara where it has 12 acres of undeveloped land also near the MRT station.
“Again, the public transport link will be the flavour of our development (in Kota Damansara),” she says.
The company has smaller land banks in Melawati and Shah Alam.
Overall, the company is slating total launches of RM1.5bil in key cities in the Klang Valley, Penang, Ipoh and Johor using a four-tier strategy which involves optimising land value, master plan and develop, construction and injecting it into a real estate investment trust.
Their first township in Sunway Integrated Resort City (SIRC) was built on mining land and the company has built into that location several value-added components like medical, educational, retail and a theme park, she says.
When it was first planned decades ago, the strategy was to create a destination.
The plan is to replicate the SIRC strategy in their township development in Ipoh and Iskandar using different themes.
Other than the 1,800 acres in Johor, the company has land in Ipoh, Penang and the Klang Valley. The Ipoh theme is environment-driven while in Johor, they will complement what competitors are doing, she says.
Sunway Iskandar enables the company to tap into the local and international market. Although the company has projects in Singapore and China, their main focus will remain local.
The gross development value of its Novena project in Singapore is about S$915mil, of which Sunway’s stake amounts to 30%, Cheah says.
As for its projects in China and in view of an expected slowdown there, Cheah says it has started construction this year and will consider launching it in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Developers in China need to complete 25% of its project before they can sell it.
Cheah says the main components of the company’s RM4.2bil order books are RM1bil worth in property development comprising internal projects (Sunway Velocity, The Pinnacle, Sunway Putra Place and Sunway University New Academic Block), and RM1.9bil in infrastructure comprising mass rapid transit, light rail transit and BRT projects.
The rest of the RM1.3bil are pretty evenly spread among KLCC projects (RM500mil), precast jobs (RM500mil) and external construction projects (RM300mil).
[Source]
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