Glomac group managing director and CEO Datuk Seri Fateh Iskandar Mohamed Mansor
PETALING JAYA: Glomac Bhd
is confident that sales in its current financial year ending April 30, 2023 will be able to surpass the RM160mil achieved in its previous financial year, underpinned by new property projects.
Glomac group managing director and chief executive officer Datuk Seri Fateh Iskandar Mohamed Mansor said sales in the current financial year had already surpassed RM120mil so far.
He said Glomac will be stepping up its development activities with RM469mil worth of new launches, particularly in the third and fourth quarters of the current fiscal year.
However, Fateh Iskandar conceded that the property sector and the economy as a whole would still see firm challenges ahead, including the expected global economic slowdown, interest rate hikes and labour shortages across many sectors.
“We continue to appeal to the government to make the process of hiring foreign workers easier, but I believe the number one wish on many local developers’ minds would be the reintroduction of the Home Ownership Campaign (HOC),” said Fateh Iskandar after the group’s annual general meeting yesterday.He said the HOC will be able to assist the property sector in navigating through more expected choppy waters ahead.
The HOC is a government home-owning campaign that was initially launched in January 2019 and ended on Dec 31, 2021, after having seen a number of extensions.
With more relaxed home purchasing criteria and incentives, it was introduced to support homebuyers looking to purchase a property while encouraging the sales of unsold properties.
Fateh Iskandar said these ‘boosts’ from the government are still necessary as there continues to be talks of an upcoming global economic slowdown and recession, as well as rate hikes with many central banks around the world.
On the domestic front, he said the situation is compounded by the labour shortage problem that delayed the completion of several projects.
Responding to a question on the recently tabled Budget 2023, Fateh Iskandar is thankful that the government has allocated about RM95bil to boost the construction sector, as this will also result in a spillover effect into other segments.
“This will also benefit more than 140 other industries which are interrelated to the construction sector.
“However, we continue to appeal to the government to extend the stamp duty exemption for first-time home buyers from 75% to 100%, as well as to extend this benefit to buyers of second or third homes, as the Malaysian market is a huge “upgrading” market,” Fateh Iskandar elaborated.
Meanwhile, on the back of a positive financial year 2022, where the group attained a 36% year-on-year group profit increase to RM37.9mil, Glomac shareholders have also approved the final single-tier dividend of 1.5 sen per ordinary share for the year ended April 30 2022, which translates to a dividend yield of 5.4%.
