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It's is merely privatized in name. They're basically owned by the government. Shareholding just passed from one government body to another.
by sfifs 10y ago
It's is merely privatized in name. They're basically owned by the government. Shareholding just passed from one government body to another.
- dnautics 10y agoBoth comfortdelgro and SMRT are publicly traded companies, hardly "privatized in name". Can you buy shares in BART or Caltrain?
- sfifs 10y agoSMRT is owned (bought out) by Temasek. It's not traded anymore. Even before the privatization, Temasek owned a majority of shareholding http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/majority-of-smrt-shareholders-vote-in-favour-of-rail-asset-sale/3166256.html http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/majority-of-smr... Comfortdelgro is certainly widely owned - but they're into busses and taxi mainly, not infra heavy stuff like subways. For various reasons, Governments will make state owned companies publically traded. That doesn't mean they're not going to toe the government line in decisions if it has majority stake.
- dnautics 10y agoNorth East Line, Sengkang lines are run by ComfortDelGro. I wasn't aware that SMRT was bought out by the government recently (the last time I rode the MRT, last year, it was still private). It doesn't seem that the buyout was orchestrated as some sort of bailout, especially given that the systems seem to be solvent enough to support at least one for-profit. It, then, remains to be seen if refolding SMRT will result in a net degradation or net improvement in services... This will be an interesting 'control' experiment.