Business Desk :
Summit Group Chairman Muhammed Aziz Khan, in a recent interview with Singapore’s financial daily, The Business Times expressed his definite ideas about the sort of commercial relationship Singapore should have with Bangladesh.
“Singapore should think of itself as a Manhattan, and Bangladesh as one of the states of the US. I think that is becoming the future role of cities like Singapore. Bangladesh, rather than try to raise another capital market, should take advantage of the Singapore capital market -debt as well as equity,” he said.
Khan is the chairman and principal owner of the Singapore-based Summit Power International (SPIL), which was set up in 2016 to raise capital for the continued expansion of his power-generation business.
The power plants owned by the company have a total installed capacity of 1,941megawatts (MW). Construction of a further 583 MW of capacity is underway. The company also has a floating storage and regasification unit with a capacity to process 500 million cubic feet of LNG per day.
SPIL is also eyeing deals for power-generation projects in Bangladesh that its partners have taken on, and is looking for opportunities in India and Pakistan.
To fund its ambitions, it had looked into the idea of listing in Singapore – going as far as obtaining an eligibility-to-list letter from the Singapore Exchange (SGX) in 2018, but the company eventually decided against it.
“The valuation we would have been listing at, because of market conditions, was not satisfactory to us,” said Ayesha Aziz Khan, managing director and chief executive of SPIL, and also the eldest of Khan’s three daughters.
“The feel that we got from the private equity side was much better.”
In October 2019, SPIL announced that JERA Co had acquired a 22% stake for $330 million. JERA is owned by Japan’s TEPCO Fuel & Power and Chubu Electric Power Co. The deal with JERA facilitated the exit of a group of investors led by International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank.
SPIL has not completely abandoned the idea of a public listing though. Ayesha Aziz Khan said: “In the future, when infrastructure (assets) are better valued, when the investors are ready to come into this space in a much more realistic manner, we will again look at it.”
