Aevis Victoria SA ($AEVS)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Aevis Victoria SA publication of the 2025 annual results. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Antoine Hubert.

Thank you very much. Welcome to the presentation of 2025 annual results. We just published our annual report this morning. And I'm here with Fabrice Zumbrunnen, CEO of Aevis Victoria; and Michel Keusch, CFO of Aevis Victoria. As you know, Aevis Victoria is an investment company and focusing on service to people. Our investments, if you take a look at this slide, our main investments, Swiss Medical Network and VIVA, our insurance product that we have with Visana. They represent 59% of the investment. MRH Switzerland, our hospitality, and Batmaid represents 19% of our investment. And infrastructure, so our 30% shareholding into Infracore, and Swiss Hotel Properties represents 22% of our investment. This year 2025, if we can highlight some event, it was the takeover in December 2024 of Spital Zofingen. This was the fourth public hospital that Swiss Medical Network has acquired. The first one was in 2012, Hôpital de La Providence in Neuchâtel, and then with Hôpital Générale Beaulieu, the 2 hospitals of Saint-Imier and Moutier, and now in 2024, Spital Zofingen. This has triggered important growth within Swiss Medical Network. Michel Keusch will go into detail. But this also confirms that Swiss Medical Network has the ability to work together with the public sector. I will hand over to Michel Keusch for the fiscal year 2025 performance. Michel?

Yes. Hello. Good morning, everyone. I will run you through the 2025 figures. A lot of different moving parts. I will try to be concise to show you actually how the development was during the year. To start with on this first slide, you see the Aevis Group consolidated figures, where you see a good development of turnover, plus 13.5%, obviously driven by acquisitions. On the other side, you will see a resilient EBITDAR and declining EBITDA. This is obviously related to the moving parts from 1 year to the other when it comes to sale of participations. So that's why it's more interesting to look at the different parts, which we are going to do now later on, to look at all the different participations. Last year, obviously, we sold a stake in Swiss Medical Network. Obviously, this creates some EBITDAR and EBITDA. And as a result, this year, we don't have this, hence, this decline, but which is not representative of a bad operating performance. It's simply that we are lacking this development, this profit from last year. The next slide is maybe a bit more interesting, and this is how we are going to show you Aevis Victoria more and more in the future, to focus on the NAV, which is a good reflection of the sum of the parts. All the different parts are -- some of them are in cruising speed. Some of them are in ramping mode or some of them are maybe loss-making, but still have value. So it's more interesting to look at the sum of all these different values in the portfolio and to see how this is developing. And here, you see this year, the NAV per share is up 7.8%, reflecting that the group is continuing to create value. The second interesting KPI is to compare this NAV with the current share price, and we see that the discount is at the highest level ever, actually close to 50%. And the third KPI is the LTV ratio, looking at the debt at the Aevis Victoria level, at the holding level and comparing with the value of the participations. And you see here a very sound LTV ratio of about 7%, stable year-on-year. Now more interesting, looking at the different participation. On the next slide, you see the Healthcare segment. This is the biggest part of the group. Swiss Medical Network, you see strong revenue development, plus 22%, obviously related to the acquisition of Zofingen and Centro Medico. However, on a pure organic basis, you see at the bottom, it's still 2% organic growth. And then increase in EBITDAR and increase in EBITDA resulting from this development, but you see that the margins are declining, not massively, but still it's going from 16.6% to 15.9% when it comes to EBITDAR, which is the key indicator, and slightly down for the EBITDA margin. Now how can we explain this margin decrease? I propose to go on the next slide where you see the split between the underlying business on one side, the blue part of the pie chart, and the gray part, which is the 2 acquisitions, Zofingen and Centro Medico. And then you see the split in terms of growth, but also in terms of margins. And you see clearly that the 2 acquisitions together have margins of EBITDAR margins of 9.3%, which is way below the level of 17% we have in the underlying business, hence, the dilution. However, if you look at the underlying business development, you see that year-on-year, we improved from 16.6% to 17.2%. So this is the key element for us that on one hand, our underlying business is continuing to improve year after year. So this is our first indicator. And the second indicator is that acquisitions, this is the history of the group, are always coming in the group with a low level of margin, and this is how we create value, because we try to buy acquisitions at a reasonable price, reposition them and then create a lot of value. So the dilution per se is actually a good indicator, because it shows that value will be created. A second way to look at the business on the next slide, Slide 11, is to look at the split between hospitals and ambulatory. Why is it important? Because most of our peers are focusing on the hospital side. We have a very proactive strategy to invest in ambulatory, which is a low-margin business for the time being. But it's a strategic business, and we'll talk about it later on. Fabrice will talk about integrated care. Ambulatory is something we need for the development of integrated care, but it's also something we need to be prepared for the EFAS new system, which will be from 2028 onwards. So it's a strategic investment. We think margins can go up in the ambulatory part. It's a question of time. But for the time being, you can see this as a self-inflicted pain that we have. You see that margins in the ambulatory is 6.6% EBITDAR, which is also strongly diluting the margins for the division. If you look at purely hospitals, you see that this is continuing to improve. We are now moving from 19% last year to 19.7%. So a very, very pleasant development. I'm switching to the hospitality business. Here, we had a very good trend during 2025, organic growth of 4.5% and margins improving, EBITDAR moving up 50 basis points from 23.1% to 23.6%, very good development in all of our hotels, mainly in the Zermatt destination, but also in Zurich, for example, where we had very pleasant development. The next slide shows the business which is related to hospitality, which is the real estate segment for the hotels, so Swiss Hotel Properties. Here, we see the market value at about CHF 900 million, up 2.3% year-on-year, which is actually quite a good performance, because at the same time we have sold some noncore businesses. So we had some divestments of about CHF 11 million. So despite those divestments, we still have an increase of the value of the portfolio, which is related to revaluation. EBITDA is very strong, plus 52%, but this is obviously reflecting the sale of noncore assets, which has increased more than proportionally the EBITDA. Margins are otherwise always pretty stable at about 90% EBITDA margin. And you see that thanks to those divestments of noncore assets, we further improved the LTV. So going from 46.5% to 45.4%. A decrease, obviously, in the LTV is something which is positive. So that's why we have an improvement on the ratio. Even you see the bulk going down, but it's to be seen as a positive. Next slide, less important in terms of revenue contribution. Obviously, it's still not a big segment at the group level, but this is the segment where we put all our ventures, all our start-up operations. It is obviously, by nature, still loss-making. This is the segment where we have mainly the Nescens brand and also the Genolier Innovation Hub. This is still detracting about CHF 11 million EBITDA for the whole year. But both businesses have a very good business plan. We are very confident, but we're still on the ramp-up phase, so still detracting EBITDA at the group level. Lastly, our Infracore stake. This is not consolidated, but we have a 30% stake, where we see also a very pleasant development for the market value of the portfolio, CHF 1.4 billion, up 6% year-on-year, strong EBITDA margin, and an LTV which is very, very solid at 44.5%, very conservatively financed. As a summary of all that, on the next slide, Page 16, you have a summary of the cash flow statement and the balance sheet. I just put on the right side the key highlights to make it simpler. What you see is that we had a very strong free cash flow during the year, CHF 129 million, obviously influenced by divestments of real estate. This strong free cash flow helped a strong debt repayment. And at the bottom on the balance sheet, you see that this debt repayment had a positive impact on all the KPIs and all the ratios. Leverage ratio is further reducing from 53.4% to 49.9%. The equity ratio is improving slightly at 29.1%. If we put the equity-like loans in there, we have an adjusted equity, which is even higher. So the real equity ratio is about 33%. And you see on the net debt level, a reduction of CHF 113 million. On the next slide, Slide 17, this is just a quick snapshot to show you the breakdown of the debt, which since last year we show this now every time we publish results to show you that this level you see at the top of the chart, CHF 865 million, which is the net debt for the whole group, is broken down in the different silos. You have CHF 164 million at the holding level and then CHF 261 million on the Swiss Medical Network part, CHF 10 million for MRH, nothing -- or CHF 1 million for the others, and CHF 405 million for SHP. It's important to look at it this way because you see that actually half of the debt is related to Swiss Hotel Properties, which is purely mortgage lending based with a very, very solid LTV ratio of 46.5%. On the other side, on the Swiss Medical Network part, the debt can be broken down between hospitals and ambulatory hospitals. This is what we look at. This is how the banks are looking at for our covenants. And here, we have typically net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of about 3x on the operational debt. This part is obviously completely benefiting from this deleveraging that you see now year after year in our business. And lastly, before I give the word to Fabrice, a quick word on the sum of the part, which shows you what we mentioned before that looking at the different parts of the business, you have an equity value per share of CHF 26.15, which shows a discount with yesterday's price of about 51%. I will now give the word to Fabrice, who will give you an overview on the strategy and also give you an update by division.

Thank you, Michel. Good morning, everyone. In this part of the presentation, we would like to make an update on our health care strategy. Last year, Swiss Medical Network could pursue its unique path in the healthcare market, Swiss market. And as you know, our industry faces many, many challenges with escalating costs, rising chronic diseases, aging population, and we are really convinced that our way of doing things, transitioning from a fee-for-service to a true value-based care is the way to go and the right strategy. In the next slide, you see what covers our ambition. We have a very unique offer with insurance offering on one side and this ambition of continuum of care, which enables us to cover every aspect of the patient journey. Obviously, the Aevis footprint, as you see at the bottom of the slide, is not covering every aspect of this footprint -- of this continuum of care. But with collaborations, we are able in now 3 regions to have a very unique capitation model and with very good results in the first year. In Réseau de l'Arc, we could achieve a very strong result of 11% optimization of costs. Next slide, please. And you see there our 3 regions. By the way, our recent acquisitions of Centro Medico and Spital Zofingen enabled us to enlarge our footprint with integrated care regions, and we are now preparing the next region in the Bern area, so a city, a new region for you. But as you see, we were able, with the right amount of agility, to offer, in different settings, our capitation model, our unique model, covering really all the aspects of the patient journey. And we think that with this ambition, next slide, please, we will be able to generate new revenues. You see on the right side of the slide, our initial business plan, and we are really following this year-by-year. We are perfectly on track. And next year, we will, as last year, double our members or memberships for VIVA. And then we will exceed 10,000, let's say, even 14,000, 15,000 members. It will be the breakeven point for our business model. Now on the other side, healthcare infrastructure. We could communicate yesterday -- the day before, a very important step for us. This is a very interesting slide that we are showing now over a quite long period of time. We really think that there is a strong sale and leaseback opportunity in the Swiss market because of the credit crunch with the eviction or the disappearance of Credit Suisse, but also with the reality of the Swiss Care Health business, and we are very happy to acquire See-Spital in Horgen. This is a unique positioning, the only hospital on the Southwest side of the Lake Zurich, very, very solid hospital, and we are very happy that we were able, with Infracore, to acquire the real estate that is to say building and land. And this is a promising step, and we think that we will have other opportunities in the future. Then I will hand over to Michel for the outlook.

Yes. Coming back to the outlook, as you know, and we discussed this morning, for the hotel business, we're not giving an outlook. The year started well, but it's obviously a segment where we don't have the visibility. So we're never giving a precise outlook. However, on the Swiss Medical Network side, we are giving an outlook, both in terms of growth and margins. In terms of growth for the model, you can expect 2% to 3% growth per annum on an organic basis. It could be more, but we try to stick to this as a guidance. For the margin, we should have a very good development for the next couple of years. As you see on this chart, on the left side, you have the starting point, which is what we just reported for 2025, EBITDAR of 15.9%. From this level, we should go to more than 20.5% for 2026. Now this could sound or look aggressive, but there are reasons to explain that. You see on the chart the 3 main elements that will help us move from 15.9% to 20.5% in 2026. First, you have the normalization of electricity costs. We had hedging in place until the end of last year. Those have now expired, which means that we are back to the spot prices, which are massively below the prices we were paying, and I think we'll at least save CHF 2 million on that basis. The second element is the cost optimization programs. It's several programs that we put in place last year. So all the costs incurred by these programs were charged on the 2025 exercise. However, you will see the benefits in '26 and onwards. So here, there will be, among others, CHF 3 million from overhead, CHF 2 million from a new IT contract, CHF 2.5 million from a new facility management contract and so on. This will help the development of margin. The third point is the ramp-up of acquired turnaround cases. This is what I was saying at the beginning, when we do an acquisition of a diluting hospital, we see that as good news, because it means we will create value. The history of the group over the past 20 years has shown that every hospital we bought has been moving up the curve of profitability. And we still have about 40%, 45% of the portfolio, which has EBITDAR margin below 10%. So this shows you the considerable upside we still have to improve the profitability of the division. So this brings us to 20.5% for the year 2026. It's not the end of the story. From that level, we think we can go up to 23% in the midterm with additional elements. The first one is still the ramp-up of acquired turnaround cases. This continue and will continue to be the main driver year after year for margin improvement. Second element, as Fabrice just explained, are all the effects from the integrated care. We are now reaching breakeven. And from this moment onwards, you have a very scalable business model that could bring a lot of additional profitability. And at the end, you always have the M&A pipeline, which is also a good way to add additional profitability. So that's why we are very confident to have this 23% EBITDAR margin reached in the midterm. On the next slide, just an illustration to show you the portfolio as it stands today in terms of the hospitals and the profitability with the green points are the units with EBITDA margin above 20% and all the other ones below the ones that will continue to move up the curves. So finally, yes, I don't know if you want to say a word. Okay, just a quick word. So as a conclusion, as we explained during the presentation, the strategy outlook is a further focus on deleveraging, which will continue year after year. We are now in good territory. As you've seen, the real estate business is very well financed with very low LTVs, and the rest of the business is benefiting from the deleveraging. We will continue to invest in services to people. This is our focus, and we have a good pipeline of projects in the 3 areas, in health care, in hospitality, and also in real estate. As a financial outlook, so hospitals, we've just talked about it in detail. Hospitality, as said, good start of the year, but no specific guidance. And on the infrastructure side, we have a positive performance of the tenants. So this will be reflected in the improving valuations. And as Fabrice was saying, a very interesting story now on the Swiss market for sale and leaseback transaction, which will add another growth element for the infrastructure business. So with this, thanks a lot for your attention, and we are all available for your questions.

[Operator Instructions].

I have a question here by chat. How is the See-Spital, Horgen, acquisition by Infracore financed? Does Aevis need to participate in the financing? Are you looking at GZO Wetzikon? So for See-Spital, Horgen, there is financing through equity from Infracore provided by the shareholder MPT and Aevis. And there is financing provided through Swiss banks for See-Spital. This is an acquisition by Infracore. Regarding GZO Wetzikon, Swiss Medical Network has been approached by some creditors of GZO Wetzikon and has been asked if Swiss Medical Network could envision to take the operation of Wetzikon if some investors buy the asset. We have signaled that we were supporting such a solution, and we were interested in taking the operation of Wetzikon. This would also allow Swiss Medical Network to develop VIVA in this area. So it could be a strategic move that could be beneficial for Swiss Medical Network and also for the region by maintaining primary and secondary care in Wetzikon, maintaining all the labor in -- there is more than 1,000 employees in Wetzikon. And Swiss Medical Network has this experience to integrate a public hospital. As I said before, we already did it in the past for public hospitals. So that's something that Swiss Medical Network has demonstrated. So that's the answer for this question.

[Operator Instructions] At the moment, we have no questions via the telephone.

Since there is no question at the moment, I will take profit of this time to maybe dive a little deeper into integrated care. So integrated care, as you see on this slide, the idea is to go from sick care, because we are all talking about health care. But currently, we are living in the world of sick. The persons are paying premium, so they're interesting the insurance company and the state. But the so-called health world has no interest in healthy person. And that's why we think that we are working in a sick care environment. And we want to transition to an integrated care approach, that means taking care of the people when they are healthy already. And to do this integrated care approach, you need to consolidate the different providers, primary and secondary care. You have to also have the ability to do some research and education, because if you want to hire the best doctors and the best people, you need to give them the ability to do research and to do education. And also the third component is the health plan that we developed with Visana. And the role model for this is Kaiser Permanente. On this slide, you can see that Kaiser has 12.6 million members. They have 23,000 physicians, some 300,000 people, and 39 hospitals. And they are doing only 143,000 hospital stays for 12.6 million people. If you compare to Switzerland, with 9.1 million people, we have 38,000 doctors, 500,000 people working in the health care sector and 276 hospitals. That triggers 1.4 million hospital stays per year, which makes Switzerland the vice champion after Germany. And we see clearly that this problem is triggered by much better reimbursement in hospital, in inpatient treatment than in outpatient treatment. And so the VIVA that we created with Visana is an insurance product. First of all, this insurance product is dedicated to our integrated care network, so Rete Sant'Anna with Aare-Netz. You can see that the VIVA premium are always among the best -- I mean, the least expensive premium and also that the increase of this premium have been a lot lower than the average. You can take Canton of Bern, VIVA increased 3.9% in 2 years, so '24, '25, '26; and the Bern average was 9.3%; in Neuchatel, 4.7% against 7%; and in Jura, 8.3% against 13.9%. In Ticino, also revised #2; Canton Solothurn #1; Aargau #2; and Luzern revised #7. CSS is very strong in this canton and has a lot of very interesting products. If you take a look at this slide, this explains how it works. So I mean, the integrated care organization is, Réseau de l'Arc, Rete Sant'Anna, or Aare-Netz. We work with every insurance according to tariffs. So I mean TARDOC, DRG, et cetera. But we have our own population, our own members, currently slightly over 7,000. And with this members, we treat them with the most efficient way possible. And at the end of the year, there is a comparison between our population and the exact same population outside the system. And the savings can be calculated. And this saving is shared between the insurance, which allows the insurance to keep the premium low, and between the integrated care organization. Of course, what's important also is that our population, the VIVA members, if we send these people outside Swiss Medical Network to Inselspital or to University Hospital of Zurich, these costs are included in our budget. So we are responsible with VIVA of all the costs for a member. And that's the big difference, and that's where the incentives are in line with the interest of both patients and providers. I have a new question. So is it your target that dividend can be paid for '26 in '27? How are the shareholder loans up to CHF 20 million secured? Is there any plan these loans are repaid part and full of the next year? So of course, this loan will be repaid over the next years. It is planned so. These shareholder loans are not secured and are part of employment contract. And is it our target that dividend can be paid for '26 in '27? Of course, the good result from '25 from some of our investments are triggering dividend. So dividend for '25 will be paid to Aevis in '26. The result in '26 forecasted for Swiss Medical Network and for the other division will allow to resume the dividend policy. I just want you to remember that until end of '25, we were prohibited to pay dividend for the hospitality side, because the hospitality received payment from the government during the COVID period. And these payments paid in 2020 and in 2021 were coming with the condition not to pay any dividend until end of 2025. Another question. Can you give insight into the possible IPO of Infracore? So this is a separate project that is run by Infracore. Aevis is only a 30% shareholder. So the information about Infracore and the IPO are communicated separately. So we cannot give more detail into that other than we are working on this possibility to do an IPO. We have another question, which is hotel business, what impact have you been since the Iran war regarding booking? So as I said, there is booking and cancellation. For now, there is no -- I mean, it's neutral. So we have not seen, until now, a decrease in the activity. Of course, there are a few people canceling, also people that cannot travel because of the closure of some airports. But there are also new bookings, because I think Switzerland is seen as a safe destination and Switzerland is open for business and also very attractive for the summer tourism. That's what we can say. We are monitoring very closely the situation, of course, and we will inform the market accordingly when we have something new. I think I've answered all the written questions. I don't know if there is further question on the phone.

So there are no questions via telephone.

Okay. So thank you very much for your attention. And we, of course, through our Investor Relations, are always ready to meet and to discuss investment in our company. Thank you very much for your attention, and have a good day to everybody.