Investment
SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust Closes $650 Million Series X and Series Y Senior Unsecured Debenture Issues – GlobeNewswire
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES OR OVER UNITED STATES WIRE SERVICES
TORONTO, Dec. 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust (“SmartCentres” or the “Trust”) (TSX:SRU.UN) announced today that it has closed its previously announced private placement of $350 million aggregate principal amount of Series X senior unsecured debentures and $300 million aggregate principal amount of Series Y senior unsecured debentures. The Series X debentures carry a coupon of 1.740% and will mature on December 16, 2025 and the Series Y debentures carry a coupon of 2.307% and will mature on December 18, 2028. The debentures were offered by a syndicate of agents with Scotia Capital as the lead left bookrunner, RBC Capital Markets, BMO Capital Markets, CIBC Capital Markets, National Bank Financial and TD Securities as joint bookrunners and co-leads, and Desjardins Securities, Canaccord Genuity, Casgrain, HSBC Securities (Canada), Industrial Alliance Securities and Stifel Nicolaus Canada as co-managers. DBRS Limited has provided SmartCentres with a credit rating of BBB (high) with a stable trend relating to the debentures.
The net proceeds to SmartCentres from the sale of the Series X debentures and Series Y debentures, together with cash on hand, will be used to refinance existing debt, including the repayment of its $350 million Series T senior unsecured debentures due 2021, the redemption of its $150 million Series M senior unsecured debentures due 2022, and the redemption of its $150 million Series Q senior unsecured debentures due 2022.
This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities in any jurisdiction. The debentures offered have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 and state securities laws. Accordingly, the debentures may not be offered or sold to U.S. persons except pursuant to applicable exemptions from registration requirements.
About SmartCentres
SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust is one of Canada’s largest fully integrated REITs, with a best-in-class portfolio featuring 166 strategically located properties in communities across the country. SmartCentres has approximately $10.4 billion in assets and owns 33.8 million square feet of income producing value-oriented retail space with 97.4% occupancy, on 3,500 acres of owned land across Canada.
SmartCentres continues to focus on enhancing the lives of Canadians by planning and developing complete, connected, mixed-use communities on its existing retail properties. A publicly announced $11.9 billion intensification program ($5.4 billion at SmartCentres’ share) represents the Trust’s current major development focus on which construction is expected to commence within the next five years. This intensification program consists of rental apartments, condos, seniors’ residences and hotels, to be developed under the SmartLiving banner, and retail, office, and storage facilities, to be developed under the SmartCentres banner.
SmartCentres’ intensification program is expected to produce an additional 59.3 million square feet (27.9 million square feet at SmartCentres’ share) of space, 27.1 million square feet (12.3 million square feet at SmartCentres’ share) of which has or will commence construction within the next five years. From shopping centres to city centres, SmartCentres is uniquely positioned to reshape the Canadian urban and urban-suburban landscape.
Included in this intensification program is the Trust’s share of SmartVMC which, when completed, is expected to include approximately 11.0 million square feet of mixed-use space in Vaughan, Ontario. Construction of the first five sold-out phases of Transit City Condominiums that represent 2,789 residential units continues to progress. Final closings of the first two phases of Transit City Condominiums began ahead of budget and ahead of schedule in August 2020 and as at December 9, 2020, 1,063 units (representing approximately 96% of all 1,110 units in the first and second phases) had closed with the balance of units expected to close before year end. In addition, the presold 631 units in the third phase along with 22 townhomes, all of which are sold out and currently under construction, are expected to close in 2021. The fourth and fifth sold-out phases representing 1,026 units are currently under construction and are expected to close in 2023.
Certain statements in this press release are “forward-looking statements” that reflect management’s expectations regarding SmartCentres future growth, results of operations, performance and business prospects and opportunities. More specifically, certain statements including, but not limited to, statements related to the anticipated use of proceeds of the offering, SmartCentres’ expected or planned development plans and joint venture projects, including the described type, scope, costs and other financial metrics, and the expected timing of construction and condominium closings; and statements that contain words such as “could”, “should”, “can”, “anticipate”, “expect”, “believe”, “will”, “may” and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts, constitute “forward-looking statements”. These forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of assisting Unitholders and financial analysts to understand SmartCentres development potential and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Such forward-looking statements reflect management’s current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management.
However, such forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements, including risks associated with potential acquisitions not being completed or not being completed on the contemplated terms, public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, real property ownership and development, debt and equity financing for development, interest and financing costs, construction and development risks, ability to obtain commercial and municipal consents for development. These risks and others are more fully discussed under the heading “Risks and Uncertainties” and elsewhere in the SmartCentres most recent MD&A, as well as under the heading “Risk Factors” in SmartCentres’ most recent annual information form. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, including those discussed under the heading “Outlook” and elsewhere in SmartCentres’ MD&A, SmartCentres cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. These forward-looking statements are made as at the date of this press release and SmartCentres assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances unless otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.
Material factors or assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making an estimate set out in the forward-looking information may include, but are not limited to: a stable retail environment; relatively low and stable interest costs; a continuing trend toward land use intensification, including residential development in urban markets and continued growth along transportation nodes; access to equity and debt capital markets to fund, at acceptable costs, future capital requirements and to enable our refinancing of debts as they mature; that requisite consents for development will be obtained in the ordinary course, construction and permitting costs consistent with the past year and recent inflation trends.
Investment
What is Islamic halal investment and why is it on the rise?
|
The global Islamic halal economy is set to reach a market value of $7.7 trillion by 2025, more than double the $3.2 trillion it reached in 2015 and significantly higher than the $5.7 trillion it was valued at less than three years ago in 2021, according to industry experts.
A report by the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions revealed last year that the global Islamic funds market has grown by more than 300 percent over the past decade, with nearly $200bn now under management globally.
The statistics depict a rise in both demand for halal – or “sharia compliant” – investments and opportunities.
Investing is permitted under Islam, but certain aspects of investment practice – such as charging or paying interest – are not. This has traditionally meant a lack of opportunities for Muslim savers and investors in the past.
What is halal investment?
Halal is an Arabic term meaning “permitted” and stipulating that:
- Transactions cannot involve “riba” (interest).
- Investments must not be made in “haram” (unlawful) assets or commodities such as pork products, alcohol or military equipment, among others.
- Investments cannot be made based on “gharar”, which has been described as “highly uncertain transactions or transactions that run contrary to the idea of certainty and transparency in business”.
“Halal investment is basically managing your money and finances in line with your faith,” Omar Shaikh, director of Islamic Finance Council UK (UKIFC), told Al Jazeera. “Muslims believe that earning money in a way which is halal is better than earning money (even if that is more) in a way that is harmful to society and against the morals of the religion.”
Umar Munshi, co-founder and managing director of Islamic finance group Ethis, said sharia compliance is key, but institutions and investors looking for ethical investments need to go even further to ensure a business is completely ethical.
“The actions of a business must not have a negative impact on society or the environment,” Munshi told Al Jazeera. “So it’s not only compliant, but refraining from having a negative impact. Investing in a tobacco company, for example, may be sharia compliant, but it’s not good for society.”
How does halal investment work?
One example of halal investment is Islamic business financing, which works using new models of profit-sharing, sharia-compliant insurance and sukuk, an Islamic financial certificate that represents a share of ownership.
Unlike with conventional bonds – a form of IOU that investors can buy in order to receive interest payments – sukuk investors receive partial ownership of a business and then receive profit payments, which are generated over time. These payments are made instead of interest in order to ensure sharia compliancy.
“Islamic finance as a sector is barely 30 years old, with the past 15 years seeing the most development,” Shaikh from UKIFC said. “It takes time to educate and create awareness and as this has happened, more banks have focused on servicing the demand for halal investing. This in turn helps to create more products, which then creates more demand.”
Why is halal investment becoming more popular?
A Goldman Sachs report published in December 2022 estimated that by 2075, five of the world’s 10 largest economies – India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Egypt – will have Muslim populations amounting to more than 850 million people.
As the population rises, so does its demand for financial products. According to the State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2023, published by research group DinarStandard, some $25.9bn was invested into sharia-compliant investments in the financial year 2022-23, marking a 128 percent year-on-year growth.
“In general, it [halal investment] is on the rise. People are a lot more educated and more aware of how their dollar impacts the socioeconomic landscape globally,” said Siddiq Farid, co-founder of SmartCrowd, a real estate investment platform based in Dubai.
“They are a lot more cautious, too, hence leading to more ethical investing, which halal investing is a big component of. It’s on the rise, particularly around the younger generation. The millennials, they are a lot more aware socially. People realise exactly where their money is going and how it’s being used.”
An increase in opportunities for halal investing and their ease of access are also cited as reasons driving the rise in demand.
Israel’s war on Gaza and its impact
More recently, the rise in demand for halal investments has received an additional boost as consumers boycott brands seen as supporting Israel and its war on Gaza.
The war, which has seen more than 32,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza, has “adjusted” the mindset of these investors, Farid said.
“Halal investment has been increasing steadily and it has accelerated further in the past six months, mostly among millennials and people under 40,” he said.
“But in the past, it’s more of these people just looking for something halal. As long as it’s not haram, it’s fine. Now, there’s more awareness of not only halal, but halal aligned with values and faith. All these boycott movements have got people much more aware that something may be halal, but you might not necessarily want to use it, be associated with it or invest in it.”
How has technology contributed to the rise of halal investing?
FinTech Magazine reported in December last year that while Muslims make up nearly a quarter of the world’s population, barely one percent of financial assets qualify as sharia compliant. This is set to change, say experts, with the arrival of “fintech” – financial technology that can make investing much more accessible for ordinary consumers and individual investors.
“Muslims are generally not as well educated when it comes to investing, and this is partly due to a lack of available options for them as Muslims. Even basic information pertaining to sharia-compliant investments is often not available to most of the Muslim population,” said Ibrahim Khan, co-founder of the online financial platform Islamic Finance Guru, in an interview with FinTech Magazine.
However, the rise of social media has contributed to an increased awareness and significant growth in sharia-compliant finance. In addition, fintech has made halal investment options, which are often much more convenient and easy to use with a smartphone or laptop, more accessible.
Consultancy group McKinsey & Company published research in January this year showing that “revenues in the fintech industry are expected to grow almost three times faster than those in the traditional banking sector between 2023 and 2028”.
“Your phone is often physically the closest thing to you. Fintechs are able to start from this paradigm and build solutions that are efficient and enhance transparency and choice for retail customers. This is where a lot of the action is at. Many banks are now creating fintech-based solutions or acquiring fintech players,” said UKIFC’s Shaikh.
Munshi added the selling point for fintechs is the age of the target audience.
“The younger generation is more open to investing online,” said Munshi, whose company operates an online platform and community for alternative finance and investment opportunities.
The same research by McKinsey & Company showed that the fintech industry raised record capital in the second half of the 2010s. Venture capital funding grew from $19.4bn in 2015 to $33.3bn in 2020, a 17 percent year-over-year increase.
As of July 2023, publicly traded fintech companies had a combined market capitalisation of $550bn, double that of 2019, the research said.
Investment
Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon
Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.
Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.
The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.
Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”
Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.
To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.
Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:
Investment
Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch
Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.
The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.
Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.
Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.
Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.
What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.
It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.
Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.
That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.
We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.
-
Business22 hours ago
Trump’s media company ticker leads to fleeting windfall for some investors
-
Media23 hours ago
Kate media frenzy and conspiracies: key takeaways
-
Art23 hours ago
New public art sculpture planned for Peachland
-
Investment23 hours ago
Amazon spends $2.75 billion on AI startup Anthropic in its largest venture investment yet
-
Art22 hours ago
‘Eye-wounding erection’: UK public art that is loved or hated
-
Politics19 hours ago
Alberta Politics: UCP ahead of NDP by 15-points. Naheed Nenshi is the most well-known and well-liked NDP.
-
Sports21 hours ago
Here’s what we know about the allegations against Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara
-
News19 hours ago
Canada to get ‘Renters’ Bill of Rights’: Justin Trudeau