David Teoh’s Tuas shares plunged 70pc on Monday, turning a brutal session on the ASX into a wipeout for the telco billionaire’s market bet. The collapse came as investors were already braced for a hard day, and the stock’s slide gave the market one more reason to retreat.
Monday was a horror day on the ASX, with the local market under pressure from rising bond yields around the world, the growing Iran energy shock and the federal budget, all of which had weighed on sentiment since the weekend. Tuas was caught in that broader selloff, but its fall stood out for its scale and speed.
Teoh had been trying to build a Singapore empire through Tuas, making the company one of the clearest expressions of his ambition. Instead, the day exposed how quickly a market story can move from expansion to damage when investors lose patience and conditions turn against it.
The tension for Teoh is not just the loss on a single trading day. It is whether Tuas can recover any credibility after a 70pc plunge while the market remains unsettled by higher yields, geopolitical risk and the shadow of the federal budget. For now, Monday leaves him with a much harder question than the one he set out to answer: how to keep building when the market has already decided to run the other way.
