It is painful to look at SingPost’s (SGX:S08) 10-year chart. The stock has fallen from around S$1.59 in June 2016 to S$0.33 today. This approximately 80% drop is a massive destruction of shareholder value that dividends cannot offset.
SingPost was once a reliable, high-yield dividend stock; today it looks like one of the worst blue-chip investments of the decade.
To understand whether it can ever recover, we have to look at the structural damage of the past decade, how its biggest backers pulled away, and whether the latest survival plan under new leadership actually holds water.
What Went Wrong in the Last 10 Years?
SingPost’s decline is a textbook case of a legacy business getting trapped between a dying cash cow and a failed pivot that was also incredibly expensive.
- The Death of Domestic Mail: Traditional letters used to have decent profit margins. Over the last decade, digitalisation (think digital bank statements, government apps like Singpass, and WhatsApp) caused domestic mail volumes to fall off a cliff. In FY25/26, domestic letter-mail volume
- fell 13.5%, and the post-office network shrank to 40 outlets from 43 a year earlier.
- The “E-commerce Logistics” Trap: SingPost tried to replace letters with e-commerce parcel deliveries. However, parcel delivery is a brutal, low-margin, capital-intensive price war. It found itself competing directly against aggressive growth-focused such as Ninja Van, J&T Express and Shopee, all of which were willing to invest heavily to gain market share.
- Overseas Misadventures: To grow, SingPost spent hundreds of millions buying overseas logistics firms (like TradeGlobal and Jagged Peak in the US). These acquisitions ended up being absolute disasters, resulting in massive write-offs and impairments that severely dented the company’s balance sheet. At the end, TradeGlobal was bankrupted and SingPost sold it for an undisclosed amount which is likely to be negligible, a far cry from the over S$200 million it paid for, a very significant amount for SingPost.
- Management Turbulence: The top leadership team has been a rotating door of executives. Most recently, a major governance crisis occurred when three senior executives, including the previous Group CEO Vincent Phang, left the company due to the alleged mishandling of a whistleblower report.
What Did Alibaba and Singtel Do?
Historically, SingPost’s two anchor shareholders were supposed to give it an unbeatable edge: Singtel providing institutional stability, and Alibaba bringing in huge e-commerce volume. Instead, both giants have steadily taken steps back.
- In 2014/2015, Alibaba bought a substantial stake in SingPost to build an e-commerce logistics hub in Southeast Asia. However, Alibaba later shifted its focus heavily toward its own internal logistics arm, Cainiao, and Lazada. Alibaba cut its direct stake in SingPost, and the two companies mutually agreed to unwind their joint venture in 2025. Alibaba also ceased to be a substantial shareholder, having sold its stake to below 5%.
- Singtel remains the largest shareholder (~22%), but it is currently going through its own massive corporate restructuring. Singtel is aggressively divesting “non-core assets” across its entire portfolio to unlock cash. There has been market speculation that Singtel wants to eventually divest its entire stake in SingPost.
How Bad Are the Latest Results?
Strip away the one-off gains and FY25/26 was grim. Revenue fell 23.1% to S$376.1 million, dragged down by a 55.2% collapse in international revenue, while full-year operating profit dropped 68.9% to just S$11.8 million.
The headline net profit of S$60.9 million looks respectable — until you look underneath it. That figure was propped up by S$19.2 million of exceptional items and a S$38.1 million accounting derecognition of aged trade payables, not by the business actually earning money. Strip those out and underlying net profit was only S$10.7 million, down 57%. Worse, the core Logistics & Letters segment swung to an operating loss of S$6.1 million for the year, from a S$35.8 million profit previously.
The one bright spot is property: the Property Assets segment lifted revenue 2.0% to S$80.7 million and delivered S$45.2 million of operating profit — by far the group’s most dependable earner. When the steadiest part of a logistics company is the building it operates out of, that tells you most of what you need to know about the state of the operating business.
SingPost’s strategic reviews
SingPost’s strategic review involves selling off non-core international assets to pay down its debt which went as high as $1.2 billion and focusing on high-margin segments.
The biggest component of the review was the divestment of its Australian business (Freight Management Holdings). While Australia was a profit driver, Singpost concluded that its value was not being reflected in SingPost’s stock price.
The sale completed in March 2025 and was valued at an enterprise value of roughly S$900 million. This generated a gain on disposal of approximately S$302.1 million for the group. It effectively recycled capital that had been locked up in Australian operations to address the company’s debt.
SingPost’s valuation
SingPost’s market cap at $0.33/share works out to around $730 million, around half of its book value of $1.4 billion, 12x earnings of $60 million and 2x revenue of $376 million. This valuation itself is not demanding.
It also holds S$534.4 million in cash — or S$603.8 million including synthetic deposits — against about S$350 million of borrowings, leaving net cash of roughly S$254.2 million.
The most valuable part of the SingPost book is probably its investment properties valued at just over $1b. It comprise mainly the crown jewel asset Singapore Post Centre at $900 million. There are also various properties worth nearly $100 million and some warehousing assets classified as Investment properties. Some of these properties were redesignated from plant and equipment to investment properties as SingPost shuttered some post offices and leased them out to external parties.
SingPost operates a network of 40 post offices islandwide of which SingPost owns around half of them. Effectively, SingPost can choose to sell all its investment properties as well as carry out a sale and lease back scheme of all current property that it owns and occupy if it wishes to. The total potential cash here to be unlocked will be over $1 billion.
If SingPost ever does unlock everything, resulting in over $1.2 billion in net cash on its books, it would mean that the stock is currently trading below its realisable value and there seems to be a viable path for SingPost to deliver a 100% gain from this price should SingPost choose to go down this path. However, SingPost said that it would not sell its crown jewel asset.
However, if they choose to invest their capital in a bid to seek a sustainable future proof business model as well as to scale, then it will depend on how the new leadership and how it plans to deliver returns.
The New Leadership and the “HDB” Pivot
To stop the bleeding, SingPost has been undergoing an aggressive restructuring, bringing in a seasoned technology leader to steady the ship.
The New CEO: Mark Chong
Appointed as Group CEO, Mark Chong is a 28-year Singtel veteran and its former Group Chief Technology Officer. His appointment represents a clear shift: SingPost is no longer trying to be just a traditional logistics company; it wants to lead with technology, automation, and asset-light operations to cut costs.
The Last-Mile Pivot: SingPost@MyBlock
SingPost@MyBlock is a convenient postal initiative that turns your residential letterbox nest into a two-way postbox. It lets you drop off letters, postcards, and small parcels directly at your HDB or condominium block without needing to walk out and hunt for a street postbox, a POPStation locker or visit a physical post office.
To back up this domestic pivot, SingPost also unveiled a S$30 million automated parcel sorting facility at its Tampines hub. This massive tech upgrade significantly reduces manpower dependency, allowing automated arms and scanners to process higher volumes of small parcels at a fraction of the cost.
By utilizing existing HDB infrastructure, SingPost avoids paying expensive rent for new parcel lockers or storefronts. They already visit every single HDB block every single day; turning those letterboxes into a two-way funnel leverages an infrastructure advantage that competitors such as Ninja Van, J&T Express or Shopee can never replicate.
Can SingPost Ever Recover?
The short answer is yes, SingPost can recover, but it will never look like the blue-chip stock it used to be.
If recovery means returning to its former glory as a S$2.00 stock with decent margins and fat dividends from selling of stamps for both domestic and international mail, the answer is a clear cut NO. That world is gone forever.
However, if recovery means becoming a stabilized, tech-driven, profitable logistics business, there is a viable path forward.
It cannot compete globally with DHL, FedEx, or regional players like Ninja Van on price but it can become an automated, hyper-local monopoly that handles the last mile cheaper than anyone else in Singapore.
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