More people in S’pore doing pawn just to get by - thanks to PAP!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Rolex for Casino Cash Fuels Singapore Pawnshop Growth

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/ro...062618582.html

Yeah Lee Ching recalls when a lady walked into her pawnshop in Singapore and pledged a $10,000 diamond-studded gold Rolex watch to bankroll casino spending. She never came back for her jewelry.
Pawnbrokers are proliferating across Singapore as gamblers seeking short-term loans add to demand for quick cash from people struggling to make ends meet in the world’s most expensive city. The number of pawnshops in the city-state surged to 214 this year from 114 in 2008, according to a report by DMG & Partners Securities Pte. Loans disbursed by the industry jumped to S$5.5 billion ($4.4 billion) in 2013 from S$1.6 billion in 2007, government data show.
“Pawnshops are the most-frequent automated teller machines for regular gamblers,” Ivan Ho, president of Singapore Pawnbrokers’ Association, said in an interview this month. “They need capital and pawnshops offer them loans that are reasonably priced.”
Since Singapore’s two casinos opened in 2010, about 20 percent of the increase in pawnbroking activity is driven by clients raising money for gambling, said Ho, who’s also the owner of Heng Seng Pawnshop Co. The rest comes from business owners and low-income individuals who need quick cash to pay hospital bills and other unexpected costs.
“I pawn my jewelry when the need arises,” said Vikki, a businessman who runs his own security agency and asked to only be identified by his first name. “The biggest loan I got was S$70,000 to cover salaries of my staff when payments from customers got delayed.” He was speaking last week outside the ValueMax Group Ltd. pawnshop in Little India, just across the street from competitor Maxi-Cash (MCFS) Financial Services Corp.
Shares of ValueMax, Maxi-Cash and MoneyMax Financial Services Ltd. (MMFS) were all unchanged as of 12:08 p.m. in Singapore, while the benchmark Straits Times Index gained 0.2 percent.
Living Costs
S. Pandian, a 50-year-old construction supervisor from India, was pawning a chain and gold ring at the same ValueMax shop. He said he earns about S$1,600 a month and sends most of it back to his family, making it hard to cover living costs.
ValueMax, Maxi-Cash and MoneyMax dominate the industry, owning almost 40 percent of all pawnshops in Singapore, according to DMG. Yeah Lee Ching, in whose shop the $10,000 Rolex was pawned, is the executive director of ValueMax.
The three companies raised a combined S$103 million from initial public offerings in the past two years to fund expansion, regulatory filings show. For MoneyMax, which forecasts revenue will climb to S$100 million in two years, it was the opening of the casinos that created a market opportunity.
Soaring Prices
“In Macau, you see casinos and pawnshops,” MoneyMax founder Peter Lim Yong Guan said in an interview on June 12. “That gave us an idea.” While Macau might have been the inspiration, MoneyMax’s Singapore clientele has turned out to be mainly people seeking money for living costs rather than gambling, he said.
The republic topped Paris, Oslo, Zurich and Sydney in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Survey released in March. An influx of foreign workers has contributed to competition for jobs, congested public transport and surging home prices. The gap between the richest and the poorest Singaporeans rose in 2012 to the widest since 2007, before narrowing last year, according to government data.
The pawnbroking industry also got a boost as surging gold prices increased the amount of collateral borrowers could access, said Yeah, executive director of ValueMax, the biggest such broker by market value in Singapore. Spot gold climbed to a record $1,921.17 an ounce in 2011 before tumbling 28 percent last year.
Get Lucky
Whatever the reason clients need cash, it’s not a pawnbroker’s job to ask. “Sometimes we hear the customers saying maybe we’ll get lucky this time,” said Henry Kiew, who works at the ValueMax outlet in Little India, a 15-minute drive from the Marina Bay Sands casino. “Then we know they’ll go to try and win back losses.”
Shadow lenders, also known as “matao,” extend loans to gamblers backed by valuables, according to Ho, of the pawnbrokers’ association. The client gets 50 percent to 60 percent of the value of their jewelry, lower than the 80 percent to 90 percent rate offered at pawnshops.
If the customer doesn’t pay in three days, the matao takes the valuables to pawnshops and passes on the pawn ticket to the original borrower, Ho said. The pledge can be redeemed by anyone who produces the ticket, said Ho, adding that pawnshops do not know mataos or their representatives.
Stiff Penalties
The city’s Registry of Pawnbrokers has not been informed of any unlicensed pawnbroking activities in casinos, it said in an e-mailed response to questions. The penalty for such an offense is a fine of as much as S$20,000, with a subsequent conviction leading to a possible prison term of as long as a year, said the regulator, which operates under Singapore’s ministry of law.
Spokesmen for Marina Bay Sands and Genting Singapore Plc (GENS)’s Resorts World Sentosa declined to comment for the story.
Singapore identified pawnbroking as an industry where controls can be improved to curb money-laundering and terrorism financing, according to the country’s national risk assessment report in January. As transactions in the industry are mainly cash-based, risks are posed by clients repaying debt using illicit funds and pawning illegally-obtained items, the report said.
Pawnbrokers conduct basic checks to ensure they do no deal in illicit goods, and maintain records on customers to counter money-laundering and terrorism financing, the Registry of Pawnbrokers said. Amendments to industry rules this year will introduce more obligations to encourage vigilance among brokers, it said.
Revenue Growth
The combined revenue of Maxi-Cash, MoneyMax and ValueMax will increase 8.7 percent to S$577.7 million in 2014 from a year earlier, according to DMG. MoneyMax will add four outlets to bring its total to 40 by the end of the year, said Chief Financial Officer Choi Swee Weng.
Combined gaming revenue of the city’s two casinos will rise to $6.5 billion this year from about $6.3 billion in 2013, according to CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. There were 15.6 million overseas visitors to Singapore in 2013, compared with 11.6 million in 2010, when the gaming venues first opened, according to data from the tourism board.
“The performance of the casino resorts will be one of the key drivers empowering the pawnbroking industry moving forward,” DMG analysts Jarick Seet and Terence Wong wrote in their May 30 report.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Burgos in Singapore at [email protected]; Sanat Vallikappen in Singapore at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sarah McDonald at [email protected]; Chitra Somayaji at [email protected] Jim Powell, John McCluskey


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