26 SEP 2026 — StarHub and Keppel told the Singapore Exchange on 23 September that they are discussing the sale of M1, Singapore's third-largest mobile operator. Both filings say the same thing about the odds: nothing is certain.
No price has been named, no structure agreed and no timetable set. A different buyer had a deal for the same business four months ago, and it did not survive.
What was actually filed
Keppel holds a controlling interest in M1. Its filing says it is in ongoing discussions with StarHub about a possible transaction, and that there is no certainty or assurance that any transaction will materialise.
StarHub's wording is firmer still. As reproduced by Light Reading, it says there is no certainty or assurance whatsoever that the discussions will progress beyond the current stage, or that any transaction in respect of M1 will arise.
That is a holding announcement, the weakest form of disclosure a listed company makes. It confirms that talks exist because the market would otherwise be trading on rumour. It commits to nothing at all.
The deal that collapsed in May
M1 has been close to a sale before. Simba agreed in August 2025 to buy M1's telecommunications business for S$1.43bn, about US$1.12bn. That agreement lapsed in May 2026 after Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority suspended its review of the transaction amid an investigation into Simba.
The regulator did not reject the sale. It stopped considering it, and the agreement expired while it waited. Anyone reading the new filings should weigh that. The last M1 sale failed at the regulator rather than at the negotiating table.
Who owns both sides
The buyer and the seller are not strangers. TNGlobal reports that Temasek, the Singapore state investment company, is a controlling shareholder of both StarHub and Keppel.
That does not make approval easier, and it may make it harder. A sale between two companies under common influence invites questions about price that an arm's-length sale does not raise, and the competition question is unchanged by who owns the shares.
What has not been agreed
No filing names a price, says whether StarHub would buy M1 whole or only parts of it, as Simba proposed to do with the telecommunications business, or gives a date by which the talks either produce an agreement or end.
Nor has any regulator said anything. The authority that suspended the Simba review has not commented on these discussions, and no approval process has begun, because there is nothing yet to approve.
Why it would be a first
Singapore has had the same set of mobile network operators for years, and no two of them have ever combined. A StarHub purchase of M1 would be the first consolidation among the country's mobile carriers.
Regulators have spent a decade building competition among four networks in Singapore. That is the question the Infocomm Media Development Authority would have to answer, and why a deal between the second and third operators is harder than its price alone would suggest.
For now there is a filing that confirms a conversation. The companies were careful to say it might be nothing, and on the evidence of May they had reason to be.
