OUE

Real estate player OUE has inked a deal for land in South Jakarta's central business district.

Its subsidiary will pay 1.63 trillion rupiah (S$149 million) in promissory notes for some 8,000 sq m of plots zoned for commercial use, "free and clear of all encumbrances", in a conditional sale and purchase agreement with Asiatower Sudirman on Tuesday.

The board said the transaction is not expected to have a material effect on the net tangible assets or earnings per share of the group for the year to Dec 31.

The deal was in the ordinary course of business, it added, with the value reached on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis that took into account the location of the land and its floor area ratios, among other factors.

Under the terms of the conditional sale and purchase agreement, the OUE unit is to pay 10 per cent of the deal price within 30 business days from the agreement being signed. The rest of the payment is to come on the closing date, which would usually be about one year later.

Creative Technology

Punters who have been trying to gauge the sales uptake for Creative Technology's newly launched Super X-Fi Amp headphone amplifier will probably have to keep guessing.

The company has remained secretive about orders so far, saying only that it sold 600 units in the first 20 minutes that its sxfi.com online store went live at 6.34pm on Monday.

Creative founder and chief executive Sim Wong Hoo said in a statement last night that consumer interest has been heartening. "In barely 20 minutes, we clocked in an amazing 600 units sold... It actually took Sound Blaster four days for us to reach 600 units when we launched it at Comdex 1989 (the computer expo trade show) in Las Vegas."

The Sound Blaster sound card, Creative's most successful product, went on to sell over 400 million units worldwide.

Mr Sim noted that an element of "pent-up demand" was behind the initial launch numbers for the Super X-Fi Amp, adding: "You probably can't expect this number to scale linearly at this initial phase. It's early days yet, and we are just testing out the product in a small market like Singapore."

The market has been divided over how well Creative's computational audio technology known as Super X-Fi will be received by the public. Creative shares fell seven cents or 1.11 per cent to finish at $6.22 yesterday, after jumping 12 per cent last week on rumours of the impending launch.