Category: 3. Business

Baker McKenzie, together with its member firms Baker McKenzie Wong & Leow in Singapore and HHP Law Firm in Indonesia, has advised Twinwood Family Holdings Limited, part of the Sampoerna Strategic Group (“Sampoerna Group”), on the divestment of its entire 65.721% stake in PT Sampoerna Agro Tbk (“SGRO”), to AGPA Pte. Ltd., a subsidiary of POSCO International Corporation (“POSCO International”; Stock Code: 047050.KS), a Korean conglomerate engaged in trading, energy, steel, and agribusiness.

The deal represents a key milestone in Sampoerna Group’s business transformation, enabling the company to seek new opportunities that are in line with current business needs and market trends. The transaction also marks a new chapter for SGRO as it embarks on the next phase of its growth under POSCO International’s management control.

Indonesia’s palm oil industry accounts for around 60% of total global production, with crude palm oil exports of about 50% of total global exports. SGRO is a leading listed company in Indonesia operating palm plantations across Sumatra and Kalimantan. It also owns a specialized palm seed subsidiary and research institute that together hold the second-largest share in the domestic palm seed market.

The cross-border deal team was led by Principals Theodore Heng (M&A) and Bee Chun Boo (M&A), with the support of Senior Associate Alexa Jiang, Associate Gerald Lim and Trainee Willy Wai in Singapore as well as Partner Daniel Pardede (M&A), Associate Partner Bimo Harimahesa (M&A), Senior Associate Bratara Damanik and Associate Naztasha Cesty (Capital Markets) in Jakarta. 

The core team was further supported by multidisciplinary experts across Singapore, Indonesia, Seoul and Dubai, including: Principals Shih Hui Lee (Tax Advisor) and Emmanuel Chua (Dispute Resolution); Partners Iqbal Darmawan (Capital Markets), Seong Hoon Yi (M&A) and Stephanie Samuell (M&A); Senior Associates Santri Satria and Shawn Joo; and Associates Ernest Low, Sharon Tay, Novrita Nadila Humaira, Devinka Adira, Samuel Evan Hardy, Jose Guardiola and Pricilla Patricia.

With more than 2,700 deal practitioners in over 40 jurisdictions, Baker McKenzie is a transactional powerhouse. The Firm has the broadest M&A footprint of any law firm globally, with more than 1,300 locally qualified and globally experienced M&A lawyers. The team excels at advising clients on their most complex, cross-border M&A matters and has advised on more than USD 600 billion in M&A transactions in the last five years (Refinitiv; 2020-2024).

 

Real estate agents in Victoria will be legally required to reveal a property’s reserve price a week before auction, under nation-first laws to crack down on underquoting.

The Allan government on Thursday announced the major reform that would be introduced to parliament next year.

Under the changes, agents must publish the owner’s reserve price at least seven days before auction day or a fixed-date sale. Real estate agents that fail to disclose within the timeframe will be unable to proceed to auction or sale.

Illegal underquoting is an industry tactic used by some agents who advertise a property for less than the estimated selling price or the owner’s asking price. They do this to draw buyers in and drum up competition.

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Victoria’s consumer affairs minister, Nick Staikos, said the government wanted to ensure the housing market to be fair.

“Underquoting isn’t fair and it’s young Victorians and families paying the price,” he said in a statement.

Last year, a Guardian Australia analysis of property sales data showed underquoting (here defined as any sale where the final price exceeds 10% of the pre-sale price guide) is more prevalent in Sydney (20% of sales) and Perth (18%), and least prevalent in Canberra, Hobart and Darwin.

The analysis found the mismatch between the price guide on property ads and the final sale price was worse for houses than townhouses or apartments and is much more likely when the property is being sold at auction than at private sale.

Under the changes, real estate agents would be required to update all marketing materials to reflect the reserve price and stop using any previous advertising that does not contain the reserve price.

The proposed laws come after the Victorian government earlier this month introduced stricter guidelines for agent’s selection of comparable properties to determine a home’s price guide.

The guidelines aim to ensure agents use the most appropriate comparable local properties when determining a home’s likely price before auction, factoring in things like the dwelling’s age and any renovations.

Consumer Affairs Victoria can ask for evidence from agents showing how they chose the three most comparable properties, and penalties apply for not providing these records.

Last week, the NSW government announced new rules for real estate agents that would mandate price guides on all advertising and a statement of information offered to buyers backing up their estimated sales price – similar to Victoria’s existing system.

In NSW, agents who underquote can be fined up to $22,000 and lose their commission and fees earned from the sale of an underquoted property.

In Victoria, agents who underquote risk fines of more than $11,000 for each breach, or penalties of over $38,000 under the Estate Agents Act.

But the head of consumer research at Finder, Graham Cooke has previously told Guardian Australia these regulations often don’t work – and underquoting keeps happening.

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In a factory complex in Noida, an industrial hub outside New Delhi, Vinod Sharma, the managing director of an Indian electronic component maker, is trying to improve the skills of a small part of India’s vast but poorly trained workforce.

“We teach people from zero,” says Sharma at Deki Electronics, which supplies capacitors to an array of industries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Even day-to-day life in the workplace has to be taught, he says. “We have to go to the extent of teaching them how to walk on the stairs, how to walk in the corridor, because they have never been in a building like this,” says Sharma.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi focused on boosting Swadeshi — locally made products — as punitive US tariffs squeeze export industries and threaten to put a damper on the world’s fastest-growing large economy, the opportunities for India’s workforce of more than 600mn have rarely been greater.

Yet government officials and leaders in industries from services to manufacturing to energy lament a critical shortfall of practical training, digital literacy and soft skills.

Modi has said that “skill development and employment are crucial needs in India”, at a time when he is luring in multinationals such as Apple, as he seeks to establish India as a manufacturing and services hub to rival the likes of China.

The UN’s most recent estimates from June have put the country’s population at 1.46bn, comfortably ahead of China’s 1.41bn, with nearly 68 per cent of Indians falling within the working age group of 15 to 64.

But only 4.4 per cent of its workforce aged 15 to 29 is formally skilled, according to India’s finance ministry, while the skill development ministry acknowledged that only just over half of India’s graduates have the “skills needed by a modern economy”.

This is “significantly lower than other large Asian economies”, noted a World Bank report last year, adding that “although India’s education system is of high quality, the supply of skilled labour is mediocre”.

According to the International Labour Organization, India’s “industry involvement in training is still low” with only 36 per cent of companies participating in upskilling programmes, against 85 per cent in China, 52 per cent in Russia, and 51 per cent in Brazil.

This year Modi kicked off several training and internship schemes, including a flagship government project with India’s top 500 public and private companies — including Jindal, Reliance and Tata — aimed at addressing the yawning skills gap. It has a five-year goal of placing 10mn young workers in industries including energy, automotive, food and banking.

Anil Bahuguna, chief of skill development at state-run energy company ONGC, which is participating in one of the government’s programmes, says that when it comes to oil and gas, the available labour force has “low technical exposure to field machinery and this adversely impacts the time and cost of a project”.

As India “navigates rapid technological and economic change, skills gaps, cited by 65 per cent of organisations as a major barrier, threaten to slow progress”, the government said when it rolled out “India Skills Accelerator” this year, the latest in a string of training programmes aimed at boosting employability.

These programmes form part of a drive to move away from India’s traditional placement landscape where workers used to get basic training through jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises.

“India’s skilling infrastructure has always been very, very small,” says Pronab Sen, an economist and former principal economic adviser to India’s Planning Commission, adding that as the economy expands and grows more sophisticated, “we need to meet the demands of the organised sector, the big companies”.

Abhinav Baliyan, managing director of Educator Extraordinaire, a company that runs vocational training centres in Jharkhand, says India has been unable to cash in fully on its “demographic dividend” of a vast growing working-age population.

This is partly because of a poorly skilled workforce. Four-in-five employers have reported difficulty finding the skilled talent they need in 2025, says recruiter Manpower, more than the global average, even as India has a higher demand for workers with IT and data skills than in China and Singapore.

While the Confederation of Indian Industry estimates that 10mn to 12mn young people enter the labour market annually, some 300mn farm and non-farm workers are already in need of being skilled, reskilled or upskilled to “achieve higher productivity”, says Manish Sabharwal of recruitment company Teamlease.

There are more people that need skills than what we can actually offer in general

But the growing population could also put further pressure on fast-skilling the workforce. For Sourav Roy, chief of corporate social responsibility at Tata Steel, “there are more people that need skills than what we can actually offer in general” in India.

Rituparna Chakraborty, a board member at the Goa Institute of Management, says: “I don’t think we’ll ever have enough skilled people because India is in a position where more and more jobs will come dragging more people into the workforce, which means skilled workforce demand will keep on going up.”

Online skilling platform upGrad’s chair Ronnie Screwvala says that at the moment, India has a large pool of well-trained engineers and graduate-level workers in technology and computer sciences, but not enough focus has been put on practical skills. Indians now need training that “can offer immediate relevance”.

That much is clear to Ayush Tiwari, a graduate in biotechnology and beneficiary of the latest government programme. He is now an intern at the waste management unit of listed chemical company DCM Shriram in the state of Uttar Pradesh: “In the past six months, I have learned practically what I yearned for when I was studying.”

Back in Noida, 18-year-old Sachin Kumar, who travelled 700km to take a placement at what Deki calls its “Garden of Knowledge” training centre, is one beneficiary of India’s latest push on skills development. “I am not just learning to be a machine operator, but pretty much how to do anything at all,” he says.

MJ Song, a South Korean working mother with a four-year-old son, considers herself lucky because she has been able to work for one company for more than 15 years without her career being hindered by starting a family.

Her employer, a unit of Shinhan Financial Group, offers generous pay and benefits such as baby bonuses, childcare allowances and flexible working, allowing her to balance work and family life in a country notorious for long working hours and rigid corporate cultures.

Song took two years of maternity leave after her son was born then worked for four hours a day for a year, receiving half her normal salary. Shinhan also allows women to work two hours fewer a day during pregnancy and employees with children in their first two years of primary school to start work an hour later.

“I am satisfied with my job as the salary is high with a lot of benefits for working moms,” says Song. “The workload is heavy, but my PC gets automatically turned off after 6pm. It has been relatively easy to balance work and family life, while most of my friends have quit their jobs after childbirth.”

Korean financial groups have been one of the most coveted workplaces among female graduates, thanks to their competitive pay and childcare-related perks, despite technology causing wider cuts to the industry’s workforce.

Financial groups are also notable for their relatively high number of female workers in the male-dominated, manufacturing-driven economy. Female workers account for more than half of the financial sector workforce, about double the average in South Korea’s 500 biggest companies by sales, according to research group Leaders Index.

Labour expert Bae Kyu-shik says: “Financial companies have become good employers for women, thanks to their high pay and strong internal welfare benefits.”

Women boast an average 14.5 years of service at Korean banks versus men’s 15.4 years, while women’s annual salaries average Won96.9mn ($66,100), compared with Won128.4mn for men, Leaders Index data shows. Similar to the manufacturing sector, most Korean bank staff retire in their mid-fifties, but they usually receive generous severance pay and packages that amount to several years’ salary if they retire early.

Foreign lenders in Korea, such as Citibank and Standard Chartered, also offer flexible work for parents with young children, reduced hours for pregnant women and longer paternity leave. They also offer baby bonuses, although these are less generous than those from local counterparts.

As the country addresses the world’s lowest fertility rate of 0.75 per cent, Korean banks have been at the forefront of the government-led initiative to solve it by offering various childcare benefits. The demographic crisis poses a huge challenge for sustaining economic growth and providing pensions and healthcare for an ageing population.

But economic and cultural discrimination means many Korean women remain reluctant to marry and have children. South Korea has the highest gender pay gap among rich countries, with women paid almost a third less than men, despite their above-average level of tertiary education, reports the OECD.

There are equal opportunities for hiring, but they are not equal positions

South Korea’s male-oriented corporate culture and working hours — some of the longest in the OECD — remain a barrier to women’s labour participation, with more than 15 per cent of married women quitting jobs after having children, according to government data, while those who keep working struggle to progress in their careers.

The government has been spending heavily to counter the low birth rate, with financial groups going beyond national requirements by offering baby bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars and up to three years of maternity leave, as well as flexible working for parents with children aged below 10 at school. Statutory leave is up to a year and a half.

Banks such as KB Kookmin and Woori last year started offering up to three years of “parental resignation” programmes for employees with children aged below seven, on top of a two-year childcare leave, with the guarantee of returning to the same position.

There are limits, however. Despite the government policy to support paternity leave — a father with a child under eight can take up to a year and a half off — men taking the leave remains at a single-digit rate at most banks because of social norms that still regard childcare and household duties as a woman’s job.

Despite the high proportion of female workers, few are at executive level in the financial sector, as most women work in retail banking, rather than higher-margin businesses such as corporate and investment banking, which are seen as better for promotions.

“There are equal opportunities for hiring, but they are not equal positions,” says Park Ju-geun, head of Leaders Index, noting there is still a 30 per cent pay gap in banking. “Women still don’t have many opportunities for promotions as they are barred from key operations like strategic planning, sales, marketing and treasury departments.”

The number of female executives is increasing after legislation in 2022 banned single-gender boards at companies with assets of more than Won2tn. But women still hold only 12.7 per cent of executive positions at South Korean banks, although this is higher than the 8.1 per cent average across the country’s 500 biggest companies, according to Leaders Index.

There are signs of improvement, however. Internet-only lender Toss Bank and the South Korean unit of Citibank both have female chief executives, while some banks offer leadership and mentoring programmes for women.

“Women are often hired for supplementary positions, so most fail to move up the ladder,” says Oh Hee-jung, deputy head of the Korean Finance & Service Workers’ Union. “Like in other sectors, the glass ceiling still exists in the financial sector, with most women struggling to shatter it.”