3i Group plc (III) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to 3i's FY '21 Annual Results Presentation. I'm Simon Borrows, the CEO of 3i group. Also on the line with us is Julia Wilson, our CFO. We plan to go through the presentation that has been put on our website this morning. It's been an extraordinary year since our results presentation last May. And despite all the ups and downs of the pandemic, the 3i team has adapted well to remote working and maintained its focus on building long-term portfolio value. At 3i, we've been very careful about the health and well-being of our team. And whilst the good news is that so far, no one at 3i has become seriously ill from coronavirus. We have been supportive of anyone who has had to deal with family issues or the various indirect effects of the pandemic. The rollout of effective vaccines is clearly a game-changer for returning to everyday life and to getting economies back to a more normal rhythm. The latest news on the reduction in infections and the lifting of lockdown restrictions across Europe and the U.S. is very encouraging. Delivering a solid performance in the face of the pandemic from both our PE and Infrastructure portfolios has underpinned a very strong result for the group, and it has launched us into the new financial year with real momentum. In the financial year to 31st of March, we produced a 22% total return on equity. And that's after a circa GBP 400 million foreign exchange translation loss and GBP 126 million pension noncash accounting charge. Private Equity produced a 30% gross investment return. While the Infrastructure team produced 16%. We again generated good cash income, which covered our operating cash costs and produced GBP 23 million profit. And we finished the year with net debt of GBP 750 million after investing GBP 0.5 billion into new and existing PE investments. That strong performance means that we are proposing to increase the annual dividend by 10% to 38.5p from 35p. With our focus on proprietary capital, 3i is quite a rare beast in the private market sector. As our focus is on the combination of sustainable growth and long-term compounding of value. While the overriding goal in most of the sector seems to be raising and deploying ever bigger pools of capital as fast as possible. As an investment institutional business, our model is to allocate, invest and manage proprietary risk capital. We do that from a platform that has good and responsible values, a grounded team culture, a prudent financial approach and a wide international reach through our well-established office network. Our investment executives are able to use knowledge from our broader portfolio experience and learnings to grow and improve each individual investment. That approach only works with rigorous processes, robust central control and an uncompromising attitude to the resilience of the investment portfolio, all of which is governed by the 3i Investment Committee. We combine these rigorous processes with thoughtful theme-led origination as well as having an appetite to hold our best investments for the longer term. The systemic assessment of the sustainability profile of our investments is not just a risk management tool, it's also a framework to assess value-accretive opportunities which arise from the development of solutions to sustainability challenges within our portfolio. As this slide shows, we have not just invested in companies that have a positive impact, we've also supported a number of companies such as [ SVAC ] and Scandlines in their transition to a low-carbon footprint. We will soon publish our sustainability report, which addresses these themes in more detail. Now I'd like to focus on our current portfolio performance. We had a very different set of portfolio reviews this March to the ones we had in March 2020, when we recalibrated almost all the company budgets for likely COVID impacts. In our wash up a few weeks ago, Julia and I, and the other members of the Investment Committee, were struck by just how much momentum there was in the portfolio. We also saw how much of that momentum was down to our careful selection of structural growth trends as well as the overriding discipline on pricing of new investment and asset management. Even though the pandemic is far from over, this was a really good set of portfolio company reviews. Okay. Let's take a look at FY 2021 in more detail. Our Private Equity team has performed very well, generating a 30% gross investment return, with 87% of our PE assets by value growing their earnings over the year. We invested about GBP 500 million of 3i cash in the year. Of that GBP 500 million, only GBP 66 million was further investment to provide liquidity support to the portfolio. The bulk of the cash went on 3 interesting new investments and a number of strategic bolt-ons. Last year, we focused our efforts on helping the portfolio navigate through the worst effects of the pandemic, while slowing realizations and refinancings. Given the broad recovery markets as well as the generally improved economic conditions, we expect to pick up the flow of realizations and refinancing cash over the balance of this financial year. We've seen very good growth across the PE portfolio this year. 7 of the top 20 companies grew their earnings faster than Action, with 6 of those in excess of 20%, as you can see here. The next table looks the reverse of last year's version, and all the better for it. Apart from Action, we have 11 companies that have seen material growth in value, which further demonstrates the momentum and quality in the portfolio. Travel and automotive were challenging sectors last year, as you can see on the right-hand side. As you will have heard in March, Action performed remarkably well in 2020, delivering 14% earnings growth and 10% sales growth, and that solid performance was delivered despite significant store closures and restrictions across 5 of the 12 months of 2020. Unfortunately, significant restrictions have continued in the early part of 2021, with Action facing major closures and restrictions from January to May this year. Action lost ground in January and February compared to the strong months last year. But it had a very good March, which was ahead of budget, and that meant Q1 run rate EBITDA finished ahead of last year. And despite the fact that Action still faces significant restrictions in Germany, France and the Netherlands, April has closed well ahead of last year, and May has started well, and we expect most restrictions to have been lifted by the end of this month. Action opened its first 2 Italian stores in late April, and both stores have started ahead of expectations with the Turin store performing in the top 10% of all Action stores. We think that north of Italy should be a very good market for action. And these pilot stores certainly seem to be reinforcing that view. More broadly, Action is still on track with its target to open 300 stores this year and currently has at least GBP 500 million of cash on its balance sheet. Further lockdowns in Europe cannot be ruled out later in the year, but the Action team remains very determined to get back on track with its 5-year plan as soon as possible. We've seen some standout performances in the Private Equity portfolio this year, including from Royal Sanders, which we bought in 2018. Royal Sanders has produced excellent earnings and cash flow this year combining significant organic sales growth with 2 recent bolt-on acquisitions. Those acquisitions look set to maintain strong momentum at the business. There is no question that Royal Sanders has seen some exceptional trading from hand gel and sanitizer demand this year. And Julia will say more about how we accounted for that aspect of Royal Sanders profits in the year to March. Cirtec Medical has had another strong year, and generated good growth across the majority of its device verticals, also delivering excellent profit and cash growth. And Luqom, which was our first e-commerce only retail investment, has produced a year of stellar growth, doubling sales and EBITDA over 2019 as well as making 1 new acquisition in April. Luqom is an unusual e-commerce retailer in that it generates good EBITDA margins and very strong cash flow. That strong financial performance over the last few years has allowed the management of Luqom to finance significant investments in logistics and sourcing as well as launching a new B2B offering and completing 2 acquisitions. We were very cautious about new investment last year, particularly as we saw a confluence of pandemic uncertainties. At the same time, Private Equity firms, family offices, SPACs and other investment vehicles were trying to deploy significant amounts of dry powder. But we think our selective approach has paid off, with some interesting purchases in pet food, online retail and recruitment process outsourcing. And we followed up some recent investments with strategic bolt-ons at SaniSure, a bioprocessing platform, Evernex and GartenHaus, as you can see here. We continue to be creative and careful when looking for new investments in our favorite sectors. And SaniSure, which we talked about at our Capital Markets Day last September, is a great example of what I'm talking about. Having done the heavy lifting on the integration last year, the U.S. European group has started this year well, and we are anticipating a very good year of growth. Infrastructure has had another solid year, producing a 16% gross investment return. 3iN had a 20% appreciation in the share price as well as GBP 26 million of dividend income for the group. We also had a GBP 74 million distribution in March from Regional Rail, one of our U.S. investments, which is performing well. And finally, it's been a tough year for Scandlines, with a gross investment return of 6%. That was mainly a result of order controls restricting passenger traffic for much of the year and the first part of this year. But freight has been very resilient to this, trading in line with 2019 levels. We anticipate a strong bounce back in passenger traffic as the vaccination rollout in Northern Europe gains further traction. Okay. I hope that's given you a good sense of portfolio performance and investment activity. And I'll now hand over to Julia to focus on the financials.

Thanks, Simon. When we presented our results to you this time last year, it was in the early days of the pandemic, and there were a lot of uncertainties and unknowns. I said then that it had been the most difficult set of valuations I've ever been involved with. And we know that on the day, some people were concerned that we haven't been cautious enough in our approach. We now have the knowledge of 12 months of experience and can see how our portfolio has actually performed compared to the judgments that we had to make in those early days of lockdown. The pandemic is still not over. We still have a small number of investments that are directly challenged by government measures. And we have still had to make a few judgment calls in our valuation approach. But as you've just heard from Simon, the vast majority of our companies have proved to be very resilient, with excellent performance and real future potential. It's that performance that underpins our NAV per share of 947p, and a total return on opening shareholder funds of 22%. We achieved that 22% return despite a 41p FX translation hit from sterling, which strengthened materially against the euro and the dollar. And it's also despite the 13p accounting impact of derisking the U.K. defined benefits pension plan that I talked about at the half year. While we're on this slide, I should also mention that the 19p of net carry payable is higher than it would normally be. This is not a bad thing. It is because of the strong performance of investments in our 2016-2019 vintage, that's companies such as Royal Sanders, Luqom and Cirtec, mean we've started accruing for carry on that vintage for the first time. And when you first start accruing for a carry vintage, you start with an element of catch-up, and that's about 6p of the 19p. In a year when we've held back on realizations, unrealized value growth of 243p is the driver of the 18% increase in NAV per share. Infrastructure had a solid year, and Scandlines was not a big contributor this time. So as you'd expect, the majority of that unrealized value growth comes from our Private Equity portfolio, which generated GBP 2.2 billion of value growth. As you can see here, Action accounts for GBP 1.2 billion of that GBP 2.2 billion as a result of its increase in earnings and the half turn increase in its multiple. But it's notable that the rest of the Private Equity contributed almost the same amount, and I'm going to come back to that in more detail in a minute. Turning first to Action. Just heard from Simon all about how Action has dealt with the challenges of 2020 and into 2021. We've made 2 particular valuation judgments to reflect the excellent resilience of the business, and our confidence in its continuing growth potential. Firstly, we've increased the run rate EBITDA multiple from 18x to 18.5x. Over the course of the year, the average LTM EBITDA multiple of the peer set that we referred to, has increased from 16.1x to 19.4x, but there's obviously been quite a lot of volatility in the peer group. Five Below has maintained its premium rating. Interestingly, it was the only U.S. peer which had to close stores, a bit like Action, for a material period of time. The rest, such as B&M, managed to trade throughout the year with relatively few restrictions. So again, when we do the side-by-side analysis, Action has continued to look very strong compared to this group. That, together with our confidence about Action's future delivery, means we think that a half turn increase is appropriate. As I just mentioned, we continue to use a run rate EBITDA approach. That means adjusting the LTM EBITDA for the stores that have been opened by the period end. That run rate adjustment was lower this time because Action opened fewer stores in 2020. Now that we've had the benefit of seeing Action respond to managing multiple permutations of lockdown and government restrictions through a full 12 months, we've also made a small number of adjustments for COVID effects. A lot of you attended the Capital Markets presentation and will recognize this slide, which Action's CEO, Sander, put up to explain the profile of performance during 2020. And now this shows like-for-like sales, which of cause correlate very strongly with EBITDA. April 2020, which is P4 on this chart, was in hindsight, an extraordinary month. All stores, except the Netherlands were shut, and the decision was made to close parts of the DC network and essentially move into cash-preservation mode. Twelve months on, we can put P4 into context. We're now confident that the EUR 20 million EBITDA loss incurred in April 2020 is not at all representative of Action's maintainable earnings. So we've added that loss back, making April last year a 0 contribution to EBITDA. And that means our valuation is effectively based on the 11 months to the 31st of March 2021. We don't make this sort of judgment lightly, but we now know that April was the only month in 2020 when Action lost money. And having seen the trading performance in this April, too, we believe it is the right call to make as we think about a fair value. Putting those components of multiple and earnings together, our post-discount, enterprise valuation of Action is EUR 12.6 billion. And that gives you a 3i balance sheet value of GBP 4.6 billion for our holding. Coming back to the rest of the portfolio. We have seen some excellent performance, underpinned by the thematic approach that we've been applying in our investments. The GBP 788 million of performance increases come from the likes of Royal Sanders, Luqom, Cirtec and Tato. Investments exposed to the travel and automotive sectors dominate the GBP 252 million of performance decreases and the DCF movement. Now I've talked regularly about our approach to setting multiples when we value our Private Equity companies. You'll recall that we referenced a set of comparable quoted companies, but in almost all cases, we end up applying a multiple, which is lower than the average multiples of those reference companies. This is because we take a long-term view. We look at sector averages over a 3, 5 or even 10-year period. We'll look at transaction data if we can get reliable inputs. We think about how far into our investment case we are at the moment, and whether we have passed important milestones to be more confident about achieving our objectives. And we'll also consider how close we are to moving into a realization phase when near-term market conditions are more relevant. The effect of this approach has been to create a degree of buffer in our valuations, particularly in the sort of exuberant markets that we're seeing at the moment. However, there are times when a combination of a sector rerating, good progress in our investment case and the performance in an investment, mean that the buffer that we've created is just too big to justify as fair value. Then we need to increase the multiple we're using. And we've actually done this that this time for a few of our strongest performers. That is particularly for those investments related to the health care and tech sectors. I've shown you this slide once before. As you can see, there is still a healthy gap between our multiples and the average of the peer sets that we use. Given the significant valuation increases seen in a number of sectors in listed markets over the last 6 months. Another feature of our valuations this time is that for the vast majority of our investments, we've reverted to our usual approach of using last 12 months earnings to the 31st of December 2020. You may remember that this time last year, we've moved many valuations to the 31st of March forecast. That approach was the best way at the time to anticipate some of the COVID effect. We have made a few adjustments to earnings to normalize some of the one-off effects of COVID, particularly in relation to our retail and travel-related businesses, such as Hans Anders and arrivia, for example. I said we formed a view in the case of Action that 1 month's EBITDA loss was exceptional with the benefit of 12 months experience. We have also been able to form a view on what might be called exceptional profits in the case of Royal Sanders and GartenHaus. And so we've reduced the earnings we have used to value both businesses. In this -- in the case of Royal Sanders, this reduction was material at EUR 9 million. Finally, as you can see here, we've continued to apply more judgment in the companies with continued challenges. So that might include forming a view on maintainable earnings or temporarily moving the valuation to a DCF. These businesses now account for less than 5% of our portfolio value, but we continue to believe that their longer-term prospects will improve as government restrictions are lifted. So all in all, an excellent year for Private Equity in terms of returns, with a gross investment return of 30%. And in addition to helping our portfolio companies navigate through this tricky year, the team has also invested more than GBP 500 million, and that's despite the very competitive market conditions. You'll note that only GBP 66 million of that total equity investment was to provide liquidity support, with the rest being in new, further and bolt-on investments. Simon talked about high pricing and too much capital chasing attractive investments also had an impact on our infrastructure business and meant that new investment was focused on bolt-ons for the existing portfolio companies. And that existing portfolio did well, which underpinned the gross investment return of 16%. Infrastructure also delivered proceeds of GBP 104 million, including the GBP 74 million from our investment in Regional Rail. And 3iN, provided the majority of the cash income of GBP 67 million. Scandlines had a good performance in its freight business, which offset the challenge from leisure travel restrictions. As the business prioritized liquidity management, it was agreed that it would not pay a dividend to its shareholders in 2020. And of course, as the Scandlines dividend is usually a significant contributor to our cash operating profit, but the resilience and strong performance of the Private Equity portfolio overall meant that we still made a GBP 23 million profit in the year ahead of what we might have expected. As I've said before, we're simply aiming to break even on this profit measure. But this year has reminded us of the strategic significance of doing so. Unlike in the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 and even at the most uncertain times in March and April last year, at no point did we have to discuss the possibility of selling any investments to pay the cost of running our business. And the strength of our balance sheet has also meant that we have not had to accelerate any realizations to continue to invest. In June last year, we were able to issue a new GBP 400 million 20-year bond. And in December, we increased our RCF to GBP 500 million and extended this out to 2026. This means we finished the year with liquidity of GBP 725 million after investing more than GBP 500 million and paying dividends to shareholders of about GBP 340 million. We are planning for a more active pipeline of refinancings and realizations in FY '22, and start the year with good momentum from a resilient portfolio that is performing well. In that context, the Board is recommending an increase of 10% in our total dividend. So we have announced today an intention to pay a second dividend for FY 2021 of 21p, bringing the total dividend to 38.5p for the year. Thank you, and I'll now hand back to Simon for some closing remarks before we turn to Q&A.

Thank you, Julia. Well, what an unusual year. Probably not a year that anyone planned or prepared for. We spent a fair amount of time at the 3i Group risk committee over the last 9 years, trying to come up with ever more creative stress test scenarios for the group and its portfolio. But no one quite came up with a global health pandemic, combined with governments locking down significant parts of society and economies for protracted periods of time. In other words, the last 12 months have introduced a novel set of challenges, which our companies had not really expected or prepared for. We knew the situation could be very serious when we went through our portfolio company reviews in early March last year. That's why we rebased budget, prioritized cash conservation at the portfolio and introduce COVID filters around our investment and divestment decisions. We also tuned up our communications, both internally at 3i and out into the portfolio. Our goal was to make sure no one was sinking, and that we could bring the benefit of our experienced team and the group's balance sheet to any difficult situations. We knew we had a quality portfolio with broad exposure to structural growth themes as well as having strong cash-generative business models. But in truth, it's taken the last 12 months for us to realize just how good our companies are in some of our favorite verticals. And that's because today's portfolio at 3i has been constructed with consistent investment discipline, resulting in carefully selected assets, purchased at sensible prices. And the weight of our portfolio lies in strong consumer trends such as value retail, various health care verticals and the growing exposure to companies which sit on the right side of technological disruption. Let me just close by saying thank you to the 3i team, and to the teams in our portfolio companies who've shown impressive adaptability and resilience over the last year. I look forward to meeting them all again in person as well as all of you on this call as we roll through the lifting of the remaining restrictions and return to face-to-face meetings and social gatherings. Thank you, and we're now happy to take questions. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Philip Middleton of Bank of America.

Three things, actually. Firstly, I wonder if Julia could comment on the multiple movement in the valuations. I think there's more going on here than just pushing up the multiple on a few companies, isn't there? Isn't this also sort of residual effect of companies where you've taken a view on valuation. So the actual effect from multiples isn't as large as it might seem? Second, I wonder if you could just comment on how you see your leverage progressing next year, assuming you do make the sort of realizations you're intending. Did you expect to realize more than you invest? Or are you happy with the current level of leverage? And third, I just wonder if you could say a word about the COVID charity you've run, which seems quite interesting.

Thanks, Philip. Then let me start. Yes, you're right. The multiple bar does include more than just the sector rerating movements that I talked about a few minutes ago. So within there, we've got a couple of companies that are in the more challenged sectors, where we've taken a view on their value and where they've got a negative earnings movement that's been compensated by a positive multiple movement. That's a little over 1/4 of the movements that you see in that bar, I would say. So -- and I would expect that to transition out as those businesses come through to -- back into recovery mode. So that's not quite the same sort of movements I've talked about. And then on our leverage, we're at GBP 750 million net debt, 8% gearing. We said that we'd look at net cash of GBP 500 million to net debt of GBP 750 million in normal markets. As we go into this year, depending on the sequence of investments and realizations, we wouldn't be uncomfortable if that -- the net debt went up a little more from there. But we've got a reasonably good line of sight of the realizations and the refinancings that should now come through. A combination maybe of companies that we might have been getting ready for sale last year if it wasn't for the pandemic, some that are just coming to that point of maturity. And then some longer-term [ hold ] businesses with strong cash generation that definitely lend themselves to thinking about refinancing before we even think about the Action question, to be honest. So I don't know sitting here today, what that's -- the profile of those is going to be coming through the course of the year. But we feel quite comfortable with the position that we've got.

Okay. On the third point, I mean, just finishing on that, we are planning to, just on your basic question, realize more than invest this year. But as Julia says, the timing of that will -- may vary. On the COVID funds, this is not a company-sponsored funds. This was something that was decided amongst the executives. And it's really using funds that have been set aside for -- and earned from performance for the executives and others within the group. And we decided that it was appropriate to more than match 3i's normal charitable support in this difficult situation. So we agreed that we'd take GBP 5 million from those pots. And we dispersed it pretty rapidly across the geographies where we have important offices. So that was North America, Europe and India, in particular. And we felt there was a lot of pain being felt by a whole number of pretty basic charities because of the lack of funding they were receiving. So we targeted it pretty quickly, and we've done virtually the entire GBP 5 million. So it was a one-off exercise.

We'll take our next question from Michael Sanderson of Barclays.

Three questions, if that is okay. The first one, Simon, you started off in your comments mentioning holding periods for the assets and willing to hold for longer. I mean we're obviously very aware of the situation with Action. But I guess, it would be helpful if you could provide color about maybe some of the other assets in the portfolio you're thinking around holding periods? And what would define what would -- why you would hold them for longer, which ones you might hold for longer? The secondly, Julia, on your valuation piece where you showed the multiples versus the peer group. Just interested what might characterize those assets where you're holding it above the peer group? And just to understand the dynamics there. And then third one also your way, Julia, around carry. You say you're now sort of starting to accrue on the latest vintage. Just wanted to understand whether that changes at all, any guidance you would -- well, the numbers we should think about carry accruals in the future?

Okay. Thanks, Mike. I'll deal with the first part, and then Julia will pick up the other 2. I mean holding periods. We -- as I said in my talk, we're different to most other people who play in the private market space because we, in the main, have permanent capital. And one of the great benefits about permanent capital is that we don't have set time scales for holding investments before we need to realize in order to raise a new fund. So we do have the benefit of that capability. We've demonstrated a number of times already in terms of the holding period of both Scandlines and Action. And we do think, within our portfolio, although the light shines very heavily on Action all the time, there are a number of other platform assets that could well be suitable for similar compounding value-type approaches over the longer term. And they will emerge in due course in the coming years. But you can see from the growth and the dynamism in the portfolio that I guess so far that there are some very promising groups, which are capable of long-term growth, but I'm not really going to get into specifics at the current time.

Okay. And then on the multiple chart. Yes, I don't mind telling you that one of those -- bear in mind, this is an LTM multiple chart. One of the companies that it is marginally above the comp set is Action. And the other is one of our strongest performing operational businesses. And indeed, we might go back and have a look at the peer set that we're using for that business because it's had such good performance with its buy and build strategy as well. So we feel very comfortable about that. While we're on that chart, I'd also say that the ones -- if I call them, the rerating moves that we've done, particularly around health care and tech sector, they are still towards the left-hand side of that chart. So there's still quite a big gap between where we're holding them, even though we've moved them up and where the sectors are currently being held. So that -- they were the 2 points for me on that slide. On the carry, no, we haven't really changed the guidance. It's why we try to give you guidance around that because, as you know, carry is fiendishly complicated. And you'll always get something coming out. It's good news that we're now accruing for 2016 -- 2016-'19 vintage. But I don't think you need to change the way that you're modeling it particularly because all of these different bits come out over a period of time to come out in the wash, really.

We'll take our next question from Jens Ehrenberg of Citi.

Just a couple of questions from my side. Two on Action, really. So firstly, if I think about the like-for-like growth throughout 2020, in particular looking at periods, 6 to 10. I mean that seems to be higher than what you've seen historically. Is it -- would you expect that to be somewhat sustainable going forward? And if that was the case, if we had everything equal, could that mean that you probably reach your 5-year targets a little bit earlier than expected? I appreciate it's early doors just -- yes, how to think about that. Then the second one also on Action. I appreciate you have the 300 store opening target for this year. Now I think, Simon, you've said that the target is to be back on track with the 5-year plan as soon as possible. It sounds to me like you may have a little bit of catching up to do. How can we think about store openings this year? Is that likely more skewed towards the second half of the year? And I suppose, just mechanically, if we think about the next year, which I appreciate is a long way out. That wouldn't change much in terms of the valuation, given that you value the business on the run rate. Is that fair? And the last one, just a quick one on exits. If we think about the magnitude, would you expect that to be -- and again, I appreciate it's difficult to guide on that, but would you expect that to be closer to historic levels? Or would there be some sort of catch-up from the lower levels that you've seen in the last year? I know I've been rambling on for a moment now, but I would appreciate any color you can give me.

So Jens, I didn't catch all of that third question. What was the question?

Were you talking specifically about Action's exit?

No. Sorry, on exits -- portfolio exits in general, is -- how do we think about that? Would that likely be closer to historic levels? Or is there some sort of catch-up given that you have seen lower exits from the last year, is there anything sort of left over?

Yes. Okay. Let me take those. Action, like-for-like growth last year. I mean as you see from the Slide 24 that Julia talked to, P6 to P10, very strong like-for-likes. And what's the interesting thing about those green bars as well is that we did have availability issues that we told people about because of the partial shutdown of the DC network. Across much of that time line, we didn't really feel we got back to respectable availability levels in store until the latter part of P9, and you can see the benefit of that in P10. So in some ways, some of those numbers may have been depressed. Sitting here today, we are comping incredible like-for-likes because it was quite difficult up until mid-May last year in terms of lockdown relative to this year. So like-for-likes are not meaningful at the moment, and they're off the charts. They're about to become more meaningful because it was from the second half of May onwards that we got all stores back last year, and we saw a very big reopening wave across the network. It's not clear to us how much of the reopening wave we will see this year compared to last year. So that's an open question. We'll know more by the time we report our Q1 in July. But the fundamental trading in Action, when the stores have been opened this year, has been very, very strong. So we're not expecting any disappointment there. It's just very hard to call at the moment. In terms of 300 stores, we always weight store openings for the second half of the year. That's just the way the sort of property teams seem to work. So we do have a very busy last third of the year in terms of meeting that 300 target if we're going to meet it. And the only caveat I'd have in there is that's a 300 target as long as we don't have significant COVID interruptions towards the end of this year. And if we do, then you may see, we pull that back a bit. But at the moment, that's exactly what we're planning for and so far we're very much on track with that. I mean, in terms of exits, we don't want to give too much guidance because, as you can see from today's markets, there's still a great deal of volatility around. And we only want to sell things if the conditions are right. But we are planning to sell an amount that is certainly higher than we're planning to invest this year. So that's really about as much guidance as I want to give at this stage. I'll be happier to give more when we get to the interims, I think.

We'll take our next question from Shamoli Ravishanker of Morgan Stanley.

I had 3 questions as well, please. So firstly, on Action. Are there any comments you're making on the time line regarding the potential refi transaction? Is it still definitely happening this year? Or is it dependent on clarity around COVID? The second one on Action, a bit of a follow-up on the previous question of sustainability. Is it fair to say that there are some structural changes in the buying behavior, such as consolidation of shopping venues that would be net positive for Action's trading even versus pre-pandemic, the dynamics, so a step up? And finally, on the investment environment. Any development you might have seen since you last updated the market given pickup in activity? Are you seeing deal time lines compressing? And does that impact your investment process at all?

Okay. Thanks, Shamoli. Let me take those. I mean in terms of Action, refi distribution, all of that stuff, we really want to stick to our policy that we're going to address that when it's appropriate to do that. And we need to be sure that we've seen the back of most of the virus or a significant amount of the virus, and we need to be sensitive to the general environment. So we are certainly going to be planning for a distribution at some point because of the cash buildup in the business, which will increase over the year. But I think it's too early to give any real guidance on that. As I say, we're being sensitive to where we are in the COVID situation. In terms of shopping habits, while we can't call what the reopening effect might be this time in, say, France, where we're still only selling essentials, but trading very strongly with that. And in Holland, where we restricted to 1 customer for 25 square meters, and in Germany, where there are many different restrictions at the moment. We do feel that people are prioritizing shopping destinations. And certainly, when we've been able to reopen stores in different geographies after closures, we've noticed that people spend more time in the stores, and are filling their baskets very well. So that's 1 thing that we're observing. So we do think there has been some change in habits and prioritization. And we think Action is well placed in that regard. It was voted most missed store in Holland through the lockdown, and it won a similar prize in its category in France as well. So we think there's a fundamental interest in Action being fully open. In terms of...

Investment environment.

I think we feel it's very heated at the moment, and it's probably even more heated on infrastructure than on private equity. So we are trying to be as creative as we can to put money to work. We have an interesting WIP in both divisions, interestingly enough. But a lot of it is pretty one-on-one in terms of dialogue, and is looking at similar themes to what we've looked at in the past and building, if you like, platforms together from a number of sources. And we have a good WIP in terms of bolt-ons to our bigger and stronger investments as well. So that's how we're going to be tackling this environment because there's an awful lot of money chasing the same number of deals, I'm afraid.

There are no further questions over the phone. I'd like to hand the call back to you.

Thank you. There are a few questions from Chris Brown from JPMorgan through the website. The first is, can you guide on weighted average valuation multiple for the PE portfolio ex Action? And the second is what is Action's net debt-to-EBITDA at the end of March 2021?

Yes. So the net effect of all of the changes we've made, bearing in mind that it's our bigger companies that are -- that have been -- the ones that have been rerated, means that we've gone up a couple of -- nearly a couple of turns on the weighted -- post-discount weighted average multiple. So it's just below 13x now on a post-discount basis. And obviously, that's excluding Action. Do you want to pick up the Action net debt question?

I don't have the specific number off the top of my head. But it's now below 4x. So it's between 3.5 and 4x.

I don't believe we have any further questions from the website. If there are -- I believe there's one more question, one more on the call.

Yes. We have one more question on the phone, and it comes from Luke Mason of Exane BNP Paribas.

Just a couple of questions and follow ups. I guess on new investments, I hear your comments around competition for deals. For the investments that you have made, are you kind of underwriting at similar return level and assumptions that you have historically? And given the competition for assets, is there any kind of change in target industries? Or it seems like more of a shift towards smaller size bolt-on deals where there's perhaps less competition. And then secondly, just on exits, again, interesting in the chart, some quite big gaps between a few of the health care and technology assets in terms of multiples that 3i value versus the market. Is there kind of an incentive to accelerate the exit process for some of those assets to realize that value at all?

Thanks, Luke. We're not compromising the returns. We have a return objective out there, which is a mid- to high teens returns through the shareholders. And as I said in my statement, we'd like to beat that return. So that remains our target and our ambition, and that goes as to everything in terms of how Investment Committee makes its decisions. I mean I think we are seeing a shift in deals. So we are thinking about starting smaller, being more proactive in building up, but we're still very much focused on the 4 sectors that we've been consistently investing in for the last 7 or 8 years now. And I guess the healthcare side of things has seen more activity in recent years. And we do have a good WIP that spans all of our verticals at the moment. So not really -- no change in return aspiration. And if anything, maybe a slightly smaller approach. In some cases, but not in all cases. We're still looking at 1 or 2 sizable things as well, but probably not as -- not uniformly across the piece. And...

On exit, if that was...

Yes. I think we're not in the game of accelerating things because we need money. We very much took that decision last year. Some of those assets in the health care space, we think are potential to hold for longer term, some is not the case. But there will be some of our high-growth assets could well be sold over the next year or 2.

And there are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back to our host.

Okay. Thanks for your attention this morning. We appreciate it, and we hope that's given you a good impression of the year. Thanks very much.

Thank you very much.