On the investment and business angle, the budget had been tasteless to say the least. The incentives for domestic investment this time around was uneventful; at least last year's focused on real-estate properties. We believe those who had changed hands in property transactions last year would be smiling when they read this and for the those that could not afford physical properties investment would have also made some decent money on property stocks.
Of course, the beginning was flavourful bliss but the end..., bitter to the core. The benchmark index KL Property Index was down almost half -46%, (noop.... that is not a typo mistake, yes its the BIG -46%) from its peak of 1,216.42 in July 07 to today's 651.00 level. Anyways, thats the past and this year unfortunately is not fantastically different.
Snippets:
- Witholding tax for REIT dividends by foreign investors was reduced from 20% to 10% and for individual resident and non-resident investors, the reduction was from 15% to 10%. [Not exciting, Malaysian REIT had always been uneventful and very people invest in them. For the benefit of those who do not know what's a REIT. REIT stands for Real Estate Investment Trust - pretty much like a unit trust fund (Public Mutual and the likes) but only focuses on propert real estates only. This type of trust is only traded on the stock market and CANNOT be bought from a unit trust consultant. The typical form of return offered by REITs are dividends, so for those who wants better return than Fixed Deposit, you might want to explore REIT as an alternative.]
- Properties costing less than RM250k will get 50% stamp duty exemption for their loan agreements.
- Civil servants' tenure for new housing loans raised from 25 years to 30 years.
- Tax treatment on group relief enhanced by allowing losses for the purpose of offsetting increased from 50% to 70% (Best to consult your tax agents on what does this mean, we are not entirely sure but it has something to do with tax-offsets on loss-making subsidiaries.)
- In the effort to promote Malaysia as an Islamic financial hub, government is granting tax exemption status for a period of 3 years for fees and profits earned by institutions
undertaking activities relating to arranging, underwriting, distributing and trading of non-RM sukuk issued in Malaysia and distributed outside Malaysia.
This will be the last piece and will conclude our series of Budget 2009 Special Alerts. If you had missed out, click Part 1: Domestic Consumption and Part 2: Infrastructure Development
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