Golf v cricket: Optimism lost in perspective

THE article, ‘Golf set to be the next big thing in India’ (ST, May 23), sets out hugely optimistic arguments that golf will skyrocket to popularity in India.

Your India Bureau Chief in New Delhi projects that ‘in cricket-mad India, the next big sport could well be golf’, citing ‘by some estimates, 400,000 Indians play the game’.

He seems lost in perspective with regard to the two sports, at least in terms of participation.

At its most basic level, cricket can be played with anything even remotely resembling a bat and ball and in a small confined space.

In an ordinary football field, half a dozen groups can be seen playing their cricket matches simultaneously.

This can hardly be the case with golf, where even a nine-hole course needs a comparatively vast area.

Golf is also by no means a cheap sport and, as your article reveals, it seems to be targeted at the ‘rich and the famous’, unlike cricket which is played by even poor urchins in the streets and by-lanes in India.

A recent article stated that ‘20 per cent of Asians still live on US$1 per day’ and this could easily be said to apply in full measure to India.

It is unlikely therefore that an elitist and expensive game like golf will command mass appeal from a lay public which is poor.

And if, as your writer expresses, ‘the next big sport (in India) could well be golf’, what figure does he have in mind from the present 400,000?

In a population of over a billion, even many times more would still leave it as insignificant as it now is.

Source:
Paper: Straits Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 26, 2007

Tee off in Jakarta and Manila – A number of other golfing hotspots are steadily gaining in popularity with the regional golfing fraternity

6WHILE Singapore offers some exceptional golf courses to play on, there’s something rather appealing about rustling up a few good buddies and jumping on a plane to play regional golf. Aside from the prospect of playing a few rounds over a couple of days or a long weekend, it’s a good opportunity to test out one of the many new and challenging layouts on our doorstep.

Thailand, Malaysia and Kunming in China may be firmly at the top of many lists, but a number of other golfing hotspots, in and around the Indonesian capital Jakarta and Metro Manila in The Philippines, are steadily gaining in popularity with the regional golfing fraternity. BT checks out some of their first-class courses.

Cengkareng Golf Club (www.cengkarenggolfclub.com)

This semi-private club is practically located in-between the runways at Jakarta’s international airport, and is a mere five-minute taxi ride from the terminal. Venue of the 2005 Indonesian Open, Cengkareng has one 18-hole layout designed by Walter Raleigh Stewart which is a walking course.

While general manager Howie Roberts is reluctant to release monthly flight numbers, he does say that it’s one of the busiest 18-hole facilities in the region and one of the best maintained. ‘Our course is one of the best conditioned courses in South-east Asia,’ he says. ‘We put money into it and re-invest in course maintenance.’ The club allows the public to play on weekdays and weekends.

Damai Indah Golf & Country Club (www.damaiindahgolf.com)

Featuring two 18-hole championship courses – the Robert Trent Jones Jr designed Pantai Indah Kapuk (PIK) and the Jack Nicklaus designed Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD), which both opened in 1992 – this club played host to the Asian Tours Enjoy Jakarta Astro Indonesia Open this year.

Next week sees the Jakarta World Junior Golf Championship 2007 being played on the BSD course, which was named best golf course by Golf Digest in 1999, and also one of the best golf courses in Asia-Pacific in 2000. The private club was founded by an Indonesian real estate developer who also owns the Ciputra Golf and Klub Keluarga in Surabaya. The BSD course, which attracts between 4,000 and 4,500 flights per month, was Nicklaus’ first signature course in Indonesia, while the PIK course, which is the only facility in Jakarta to offer nine holes of night golf, sees monthly flights of between 6,000 and 6,500. Facilities include an Olympic-sized swimming pool, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, driving range, practice bunker, and putting and chipping greens.

Emeralda Golf Club (www.emeraldagolfclub.com)

This exclusive private club consists of three nine-hole courses which opened in 1995 – two were designed by Arnold Palmer (River and Lake courses) and one by Jack Nicklaus (Plantation course).

The River’s most difficult hole is the dog leg par-4 sixth which requires a well-placed tee shot rather than a huge drive from the tee box, due to the creek running along the fairway, and an accurate second shot with bunkers left and right and a creek at the back of the green.

The Plantation’s par-4 third looks pretty straightforward with one fairway bunker, but it’s the second shot which requires spot-on club selection with the small green protected by five bunkers. Aside from the 27 holes, with a further Nicklaus-designed nine being built, the club also hosted the 2006 Indonesian Open.

Eagle Ridge Golf & Country Club (www.eagle-ridge.com)

Eagle Ridge is one of the largest golfing facilities in The Philippines, with four 18-hole championship courses designed by Nick Faldo, Andy Dye, Greg Norman and Isao Aoki.

A semi-private club, allowing public access, its majority shareholder is St Lucia Property Development Company, a major player in golf club development and which is in the process of completing a number of other golfing and real estate projects in the country. All four courses are quite different and challenging in their own way, but the Faldo course, with its undulating fairways and numerous bunkers, is testing even for the experienced golfer.

The par-4 ninth is a long uphill hole, especially when played against the wind, and it is imperative to hit a long straight drive and to have that extra bit of confidence when hitting your approach onto the green, as there is a deep hazard on the right hand side of the fairway. Facilities include three club houses, resort style facilities with indoor and outdoor sports and accommodation.

Riviera Golf & Country Club (www.therivergolf.com)

Having hosted three Philippine Opens, this semi-private club, whose majority shareholder is the AFP-RSBS (the Armed Forces of the Philippines Retirement and Separation Benefits System), boasts two stunning 18-hole championship courses designed by Bernhard Langer and Fred Couples.

One of the signature holes of the Langer course is its spectacular par-3 17th which features a 30m drop to an island green with a ravine running at the back, front and sides of the green. Both layouts are testing, though, for both advanced players and beginners, with tricky tee and approach shots on many of the holes, where club selection and accuracy is key.

Wack Wack Golf & Country Club (www.wackwack.com)

Founded in 1930, this famous club is one of the oldest in The Philippines, and features two 18-hole championship courses – the East and West. Venue of the year’s Philippine Open, the East course’s par-3 16th is considered the signature hole of the club by Gary Player.

At 207 yards long, with its green surrounded by bunkers, it is often described as a make-or-break hole; it’s a tough, long hole. The shortest par-4 on the East course is the 343-yard seventh which can either be a birdie chance or an absolute disaster, depending on where your tee shot lands.

A 125-yard long artificial lake guards the left side of the last part of the fairway, narrowing the remaining side on the right to around 50 yards at the most.

Source:
Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 26, 2007

Golf set to be the next big thing in India

NEW DELHI – ON most weekends, New Delhi tycoon Ashwani Khurana steers his Mercedes-Benz limousine to a 109ha property he owns in Manesar, some 35km out west on the highway to Jaipur.

Around the sprawling property, called Unitech Karma Lakelands, he is building 225 villas, a clubhouse and a resort hotel set amid lush greenery dotted with water bodies full of fish.

At an average price of 70 million rupees (S$2.65 million) for a little over 6,000 sq ft, the villas are not cheap, because real estate prices are booming as Japanese and German firms set up manufacturing units in the area.

Mr Khurana, however, believes he has an ace up his sleeve: a nine-hole international-size golf course he has built in the middle of the estate.

‘Selling the villas will not be an issue,’ he said confidently. ‘Both real estate and golf are hot, so to speak. Besides, my project will appeal to all who have an eco-friendly orientation.’

India has always been known as a cricket-mad nation, but the next big sport in the country could well be golf.

By some estimates, 400,000 Indians play the game. Retired Wing Commander Satish Aparajit, who heads the Indian Golf Union, said the union is adding life memberships by the hundreds every month, with the total recently passing 7,000.

The national broadcaster Doordarshan now offers a 6am feature, called View Of Golf, and ESPN and Ten Sports have an avid following when golf is on.

Advertisers are taking notice. One TV ad features the popular Kapil Dev, a former India cricket captain, and shows him alighting from a helicopter onto a golf green, then addressing the audience after holing his putt.

Mr Dev is a single-handicapper, as is Ajay Jadeja, another national cricketer now retired.

While the army and civil services have produced some nifty players, Indian golfing professionals are also gaining increasing attention worldwide.

Last month, on the opening day of a wind-blown Augusta Masters, India’s Jeev Milkha Singh finished even par, one better than World No. 1 Tiger Woods and four better than Phil Mickelson.

Jeev, son of the legendary Olympic sprinter Milkha Singh, is the hottest Indian prospect currently, showing up in tournaments around the world.

In the 2006 season, he played 39 tournaments in 17 countries and won four, including the prestigious Volvo Masters on the European tour.

Others, such as Jyoti Randhawa, Arjun Atwal and Gaurav Ghei, have been making their mark as well.

It has helped too that Fijian golfer Vijay Singh, who briefly held the No. 1 spot while Woods was retooling his swing, has Indian roots. So does Daniel Chopra, a Swede.

‘It is a matter of time before we create world beaters in the game,’ said Mr Brandon de Souza, who runs Tiger Sports Marketing, a company that specialises in sponsoring golf tournaments.

‘Indians are not very good at contact sports, but mentally, they are very strong,’ he added.

Four years ago, when Burmese-American Albert Mya-San arrived in Bangalore to run a software company, he knew of fewer than 10 people at the Karnataka Golf Association course who played to a handicap of five or lower. ‘When I left recently to move to Delhi there were at least 30 people that had a zero to five handicap. The younger generation of Indians has really picked up golf,’ he said.

More importantly, money is flowing into the game. Sponsorships are rising as the corporate set moves into the sport.

Hero Honda, India’s biggest maker of motorcycles, backs the Indian Open, after starting as a hole-in-one sponsor several years ago. The prize money was 30 million rupees at the most recent Open.

Foreign companies like HSBC, Maersk and Nokia have also discovered that the sport can be a serious marketing tool in India.

Last year, the 50 big events Tiger Sports handled included making arrangements for several companies that flew in high-value clients and contacts for the British Open.

One reason talent is set to sprout is that new golf courses are springing up around the country.

India has always had some of the oldest golf courses outside Britain, but they were mostly set in military cantonments or seats of colonial administration. The Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the oldest of them, was established in 1829.

Mr de Souza says a lot of his business also comes from real estate developers such as Mr Khurana who seek to lift the value of their property by adding golfing facilities as an attraction.

The reason is simple: India’s clubby elite of top bureaucrats and senior armed forces officers have cornered most memberships for themselves. The newly rich, whose parents were neither senior civil servants nor military brass, simply have no access to membership, regardless of the money they are willing to put down.

Today, the biggest factor holding back a golfing explosion is a lack of public courses and driving ranges. There is just one public course in all of India.

Fully half of India’s estimated 220 courses are owned and managed by the armed forces. For that reason, getting in can be a problem for civilians. Besides, the quality of a golf course is often dependent on a unit commanding officer’s attitude to the game.

Many Delhi-wallahs, for instance, count themselves fortunate that General J.J. Singh, the current army chief, is an avid golfer.

All that will change with the advent of private golf courses. For instance, all the new courses in the booming suburb of Gurgaon and its neighbourhood, including Mr Khurana’s Karma Lakelands, are in private hands.

‘The explosion hasn’t yet happened. It will come in the next five to 10 years,’ said Mr V. Krishnaswamy, India’s most prolific writer on golf and an adviser to the Asian Tour. ‘The haves want to play golf, and their numbers are growing.’

Source:
Paper: Straits Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 23, 2007

He makes lifestyles of the rich more affordable – Former photojournalist Nicklaus D’Cruz set up a thriving business offering people access to 7,000 golf clubs in 15 countries without needing individual memberships. Now he has set his sights on something loftier: an aviation club for amateur pilots

ENTREPRENEUR Nicklaus D’Cruz once walked out on a million dollars.

At the impetuous age of 26, he quarrelled with a business partner and abandoned his RM1.6 million (worth about $1 million at the time) investment in a Malaysian country club he had helped turn around.

He then ’spent a year being completely broke’, scraping by on only RM10 ($4.45) a week.

The situation may have been unthinkable for most.

But it was just par for the course for Mr D’Cruz, now 40 and chief executive of OAAG, a golf company he helped start in 1997. OAAG used to stand for Organisation of Asian Amateur Golfers but the full name has been dropped and only the acronym is now being used.

The home-grown firm offers its more than 10 million members a chance to play at 7,000 golf clubs in 15 countries without needing individual memberships at each club.

From being a loss-making venture when it was launched officially in 1998, OAAG went into the black in 2003 and has doubled its revenue and profit every year since then, although growth last year slowed to between 20 and 30 per cent.

Last year, turnover hit $10 million, making OAAG the world’s largest golf club without real estate. Members can tee off at greens as diverse as St Andrews Links in Scotland, known as the home of golf, and Mission Hills Golf Club in China, the world’s largest golf facility.

Backed by OAAG’s success, Mr D’Cruz turns up for the interview at the Tower Club in Republic Plaza looking every inch the flourishing entrepreneur, flanked by two assistants and a public relations executive.

Dapper in a crisp white shirt and grey Hugo Boss suit, he is the picture of calm and charm.

The rashness may have subsided, but Mr D’Cruz has lost none of the passion or appetite for risk that made him start again from scratch, all those years ago.

Over a three-hour lunch, the father of two boys recounts a history peppered with anecdotes of adventure and stories of survival.

Having left the army in 1988 without a university degree – here Mr D’Cruz shakes his head at the recollection of his failing scores in Malay – he joined The Straits Times and then The New Paper as a photojournalist.

It was the fulfilment of a childhood dream, he says, and a period he still looks back on fondly.’I remember covering floods, one of the first big stories we had,’ he reminisces with unexpected enthusiasm, considering he ‘walked down Bukit Timah Road chest-deep in water’.

After a few years in the media industry, he embarked on his ill-fated Malaysian venture.

He ran Club Bukit Rasah in Seremban for just under a year, in which time he added a Chinese restaurant, karaoke rooms and a disco, and raised the club’s monthly turnover from RM35,000 to RM250,000.

The value of his investment grew correspondingly and the loss of it hit hard.

‘I was fairly young and brash at the time,’ he says matter-of-factly of his walking-out incident, with the assurance of one who has learnt his lesson well.

‘I literally made my first million when I was 25 and I lost everything when I was 26.’

But Mr D’Cruz rallied quickly and fell back on his three loves – photography, language and golf – to write a series of columns on golf courses around the world.

Life as a roving golf journalist had its fair share of glamour, as tourism boards sponsored his flights, hotels and travel expenses.

Mr D’Cruz clearly came away from the experience with a taste for the finer things in life, as I discover when he orders lobster spring rolls and wagyu beef steak for lunch.

This penchant for luxury also extends to his choice of cars, says the owner of a Porsche Boxster 6 and a Lexus 460.

And it has been the key to his success as an entrepreneur, as he carves a niche in making the lifestyles of the rich and famous more affordable.

‘When I wanted to play golf, I couldn’t really afford it, so I started OAAG, which was meant to make golf more accessible,’ he says.

At OAAG’s launch, it had tie-ups with only three golf courses. The firm ran at a loss for years due to insufficient capital.

As his partners backed out one by one, Mr D’Cruz was left with 91 per cent of the business and a $700,000 debt.

‘I told myself I wouldn’t play golf until we turned ourselves around, and I literally stopped for three years.’

By stepping up OAAG’s marketing and introducing corporate memberships, the avid golfer cleared all the debt in one year.

OAAG now employs 80 staff members around the world, none of whom plays golf, says Mr D’Cruz.

‘Golfers love to play golf. If I send them out to talk to golf clubs, they end up playing a round of golf, they talk to maybe one club a day. Non-golfers visit five clubs in a day,’ he explains with a laugh.

OAAG aims to be in 50 countries in the next five years to become the first global golf company. But Mr D’Cruz has already set his sights higher – all the way to the sky, to be precise.

Having shown that he has the same handicap for business as he does for golf – an impressive nine – he now plans to open an aviation club.

The newly licensed pilot is sinking $15 million into what will be the region’s first one-stop aviation club, where members can learn to fly as well as rent, buy and store their own planes.

He has leased 40 hangars in Johor for 15 years and bought eight new autopilot planes, in addition to a second-hand Cessna 170 for himself.

The club will be launched in a few months. Like OAAG, it is to Mr D’Cruz a ‘blue ocean’ company: one that dominates a niche so completely that there is no chance for the cut-throat competition that would lead to a ‘red ocean’ of bloodletting.

Mr D’Cruz once thought he would run OAAG forever. But the budding serial entrepreneur also has another essential business trait: pragmatism.

Even as OAAG celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, Mr D’Cruz is preparing for the possibility of selling the company.

‘It is ripe for the selling,’ he says.

‘I am always on the lookout for the next opportunity.’

THE MENU

Tower Club Maine Lobster Minute Spring Roll (with pickled ginger and grapefruit dressing)

Hot Mushroom Soup (with foie gras salpicon)

Stew of Petit Gris Escargot

Succulent Wagyu Beef

‘I come to the Tower Club quite often, because the service here is very good. They greet you by name when you arrive.’ MR NICKLAUS D’CRUZ

Source:
Paper: Sunday Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 13, 2007

Jennifer Norris mind tips

1. Focus on what you want: often, golfers know very well where they don’t want the ball to go, and focus on that. Unfortunately, the subconscious mind clicks on to anything you highlight, whether good or bad for your game, and will target the bunker, water or trees, if that’s what you’re worried about. Focus on what you do want: perfect placement, the green, a hole-in-one.

2. Move on: every shot is different, and if you’ve got part of your mind on your last shot, you’re sapping your own strength and confusing your mind as to what you really want to do. The last shot might not have been great, but to give your mind a chance to redeem itself this time, you have to let it go.

3. Be distracted: give yourself a break between shots, and use all your senses. Feel the sun on your shoulders, the smell of the grass, the sound of your walking and talking. It gives your mind a mini-vacation to recharge, so it can refocus properly when you get to the next shot.

Source:
Paper: Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 12, 2007

A good game is all in the head – There are now a number of hypnotherapy techniques which golfers can use to improve themselves mentally

IT’S no secret that golf is primarily a mental game. Just ask any professional or amateur player. As golf great Ben Crenshaw once said: ‘I’m about five inches from being an outstanding golfer – that’s the distance my left ear is from my right.’

Golfers who want to improve their game tend to try the physical stuff first, and that usually involves purchasing the latest drivers with the mammoth heads or the latest technology-filled balls which promise more loft, spin and distance, rather than addressing the more crucial problem of what’s going on in their mind.

It’s a common problem, according to Jennifer Norris, a certified hypnotherapist and founder of Singapore-based Grey Matter Network (www.greymatternetwork.com), a hypnotherapeutic and subconscious excellence centre.

‘A number of techniques are available to help improve the mental side of the golf game, which is just about all of it,’ says Ms Norris. ‘Golfers often take good care of the external aspects – their clubs and other gadgets that promise golf enhancement – while forgetting that their inner thoughts and beliefs about how well they can do affect every drive and putt, with often disastrous results.’

She adds: ‘Hypnosis has been used by many professional athletes and golfers, including Tiger Woods.

‘It’s a natural state that people go into regularly, for example, when they are watching a movie or reading a good book. Sports people experience it when they are in a state of flow and everything other than the task at hand fades away.’

Grey Matter Network offers a basic mental golf training programme called HypnoGolf 1, with participants undergoing hypnosis as well as other techniques that will look at the subconscious mind, and which will release inhibiting factors like a particular belief or emotion.

There are also advanced courses that help to focus on specific aspects or increase mental rehearsal.

‘Basically, there are three types of mind – the unconscious, subconscious and conscious – and most training works with the conscious mind, telling you what to do, all the technical stuff,’ says Ms Norris. ‘In actual fact, being in the feeling mind is the subconscious, which is like your hard drive and all your programming, and so this is everything you pull in throughout your life, like habits and behaviours. They say practice makes perfect, but I don’t believe that – it’s only perfect practice which makes perfect.’

Ms Norris, 37, continues: ‘Beliefs are the most important things between being a great golfer and an average one. Golfers on the whole know very well what they don’t want, not what they do want. One of the laws of the mind is that where your focus goes, your energy flows. If you’ve ever shot one good shot, it’s recorded in your mind and your body knows exactly what to do, and so that shot can be replicated over and over – it’s there.’

Businessman Gerald Ng, 41, underwent three one-hour sessions with Ms Norris several years ago.

‘I had a handicap of 18 at that time and was a very inconsistent golfer with a wild swing, playing one round below 80 and then the next one above 90,’ he says.

‘I’m now playing off a 10 and am scoring either in the high 70s or low 80s. The hypnotherapy helped me, certainly from a mental aspect.’

He adds: ‘I’m sure I still hit bad shots but now I tend to focus on the positive aspects of the game and have stopped calling myself names. The trick is to focus on what you are trying to achieve and not what to avoid, and that’s what Jennifer taught me.’

He adds: ‘I was sceptical beforehand but after I put the things I learned into practice, I gradually understood the changes in my game more and more.’

The idea of hypnotherapy might be a little off-putting for some, but Ms Norris says: ‘I always go over the myths. To be honest, everyone’s been hypnotised thousands of time without their knowledge: daydreaming, when you focus on a deadline, book or computer game, or when time flies – that’s a form of hypnosis, focused-concentration.’

Mr Ng adds: ‘Lately, I’ve been practising mental golf. The night before a game just as I’m falling asleep, I picture myself playing the perfect 18 holes on the course that I’ll be playing the next day; the perfect tee shots and putts. I just focus on that and find it very effective, as the next day you know that in your subconscious you have played that perfect shot and you can do it again.’

BreathingSpace@DivotDivas (www.divotdivas.com) also offers yoga and meditation sessions for golfers. They consist of breathing techniques and physical warm-ups to release restlessness of the body and the mind so that one can be in a relaxed state for meditation.

‘In general, even before we go into the golf aspect of it, we do some deep relaxation breathing and sounds which help to centre and relax you,’ says resident teacher Kasi Ramakrishnan.

‘The golf aspect of it usually deals with a bit more visualisation, and once you’re in a relaxed state we can use simple imagery like a golf course, golf clubs and movement with golf clubs which help you to focus better on your game.

‘It’s a form of anchoring using your breath and using the sound to anchor that feeling of serenity, centredness and confidence.’

He continues: ‘By the time they finish the course, they would have the tools to access that state of peace and calmness. But there must come a point where it becomes effortless, so at that point the techniques aren’t necessary.’

Singaporean John Wee is one of 25 worldwide certified GolfPsych instructors, a programme developed by Deborah Graham and Jon Stabler (www.golfpsych.com), which has been tried out by a number of pro golfers, including Fred Couples, Mark OMeara and Tom Kite.

‘The most important part of the game of golf is having those mental skills and unfortunately here and in the region, the awareness level of this kind of training is relatively low,’ says Mr Wee, who has been involved in various aspects of golf for the past 18 years.

The GolfPsych programme consists of an initial interview followed by a personality test, which includes discussing and matching up eight champion personality traits for golf devised by Dr Graham. These include good focus, abstract thinking, tough-mindedness, self-sufficiency and confidence. The third step is mental skills training, which involves breathing, meditation, regulation of thoughts and visualisation.

All the programmes have take-away tools and materials so that participants can continue to do the exercises at home. ‘My goal is to make myself obsolete as quickly as possible,’ says Ms Norris. ‘The idea is that everyone has this power within them and though I’m a mental coach, a lot of people can take the materials and improve at home.’

Source:
Paper: Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 12, 2007

HSBC cuts sponsorship – Bank stops funding World Cup after three years, shifts its focus to golf

HSBC, title sponsor of the Singapore leg of the Wakeboard World Cup circuit for the past three years, has decided not to sponsor this year’s event.

The reason? The bank has decided to focus its efforts on golf instead.

Said Audrey Wong, its head of country marketing: ‘We have decided to concentrate our sports sponsorship on golf in Singapore, as an extension of our global branding platform.

‘It is also an important part of our continuing effort to promote sports participation and contribute to the development of the sports industry in Singapore.’

The bank sponsors the HSBC Youth Golfers programme, the Her World Golf Challenge and the annual HSBC Golf Challenge.

It declined to reveal the amount it has invested in the Wakeboard World Cup over the last three years.

Following HSBC’s withdrawal, the Singapore Water-ski and Wakeboard Federation is in discussions with other potential corporate sponsors.

General manager Paul Fong thanked HSBC for its support, which he said has ‘helped promote wakeboarding, established the Wakeboard World Cup as a premier international event here, and positioned Singapore as a top wakeboarding destination’.

This year’s competition is certain to be one of the highlights of WaterFest Singapore 2007.

It is scheduled for late September, at either the Bedok Reservoir or the Marina Bay pontoon.

The WaterFest is a three-week long water-sports festival, and this year’s activities are likely to be centred on the newly-built pontoon.

Singapore hosted the fourth and final leg of the Wakeboard World Cup from Sept 30 to Oct 1 last year, following Qatar, France and China.

Boasting a purse of US$60,000 (S$91,000) last year, and US$50,000 in 2004 and 2005, the event drew crowds of about 9,000 annually. This year’s prize money has yet to be decided.

In the past, the likes of four-time X-Games champion Dallas Friday, and current men’s and women’s champions Danny Harf and Emily Copeland have wowed fans with their flips, spins, and other gravity-defying stunts.

Despite HSBC’s withdrawal, young enthusiasts can still expect a leg up from the bank.

It will continue to sponsor the HSBC Junior Riders Wakeboarding programme, which it has done since 2005.

The programme is designed to expose primary school pupils to the sport, free of charge.

Said Fong: ‘Its continued support of our junior development programme is testament that it still has wakeboarding at heart.

‘This will ensure that we have the next generation ready to represent Singapore internationally.’

Source:
Paper: Straits Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 9, 2007

Guangzhou govt acquires Ascott’s country club

ASCOTT Group’s Masters Golf & Country Club has been compulsorily acquired by the Guangzhou Municipal People’s Government for $198.7 million.

In a statement released on Sunday, Ascott, which is part of CapitaLand, said the compulsory acquisition arose as a result of the planned construction of the Guangzhou Wuhan public railway lines over part of the 934,498 square metres of land occupied by the country club.

The acquisition includes a 6,000-sq-m club house, and an 18-hole golf course with a 64-bay public driving range.

Ascott said the compensation amount was based on the valuation carried out by independent valuers appointed by the Guangzhou Land Office, and will be paid out in stages with the entire sum expected to be received by June 30.

The club was developed in the mid-1990s by one of the merger entities before the formation of The Ascott Group and was financed mainly by shareholders’ loans. Ascott said that as provisions were made in the past to write down the shareholders’ loans, the transaction will result in an estimated write-back of $91 million.

The write-back is expected to be booked in the Ascott Group’s accounts for the financial year ending Dec 31, 2007. As at March 31, the net asset value of the country club was $29.1 million – constituting 2.7 per cent of the net asset value of the Ascott Group of $1.07 billion.

For the three months ended March 31, the net profit attributed to the country club was $600,000, or about 5.7 per cent of the net profit of the Ascott Group of $10.4 million.

On the back of Ascott’s Q1 performance and the announcement of the Ascott Residence (China) Incubator Fund, Macquarie Research rated the stock ‘outperform’ in a note released last week.

Macquarie Research adjusted FY2007 earnings by 30 per cent to account for portfolio gain from the sale of Hotel Asia. Macquarie Research’s 12-month price target for the stock was $2.25 per share.

UBS Investment Research rated Ascott Group stock ‘Buy 1′.

It said that Q1 2007 revenue was 3 per cent above its forecast but Ebitda margin fell from 26 per cent in Q1 2006 to 20 per cent in Q1 2007. As a result, EPS was around 34 per cent below its forecast.

‘We expect margins in Asia to stay at 20-25 per cent given that mature assets would be divested to Ascott Residence Trust (ART),’ UBS said.

Source:
Paper: Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: May 1, 2007