Aldar Properties PJSC (ALDAR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Aldar Properties Q4 and Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Call. My name is Daisy, and I'll be coordinating this call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to your host, Mohamad Haidar from Arqaam Capital, to begin. So Mohamad, please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Aldar Properties Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. This is Mohamad Haidar from Arqaam Capital, and I am joined today by Mr. Talal Al Dhiyebi, Group CEO of Aldar; and Mr. Greg Fewer, Chief Financial and Sustainability Officer of Aldar. Over to you, Talal.

Thank you, Mohamad. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Aldar's full year 2020 results. My name is Talal, and I'm the Group Chief Executive at Aldar Properties. I hope you and your families are all keeping well and safe, and I appreciate you joining us for today's call. I'd like to start by providing an overview of our very busy year and highlight our new operating model, which is key to the accelerated growth and transformation of the Aldar group. I'll then hand over to my colleague, Greg Fewer, who's our Chief Financial and Sustainability Officer, who'll speak more in detail on our financial performance during the period. Firstly, it's important to view Aldar's progress over the last year in the context of the wider Abu Dhabi's effective response to the global pandemic. The government has acted decisively to protect the health and safety of residents and to support the economy, including measures to sustain confidence in the real estate market in particular. The UAE has been administrating a very high rate of testing across the Emirates since the early days of the pandemic. And we have amongst the highest vaccination rates in the world. In parallel, Aldar was quick to take on its own responsibility and implement safety measures across all of our properties as well as launching a AED 190 million program of support to our customers, tenants and school communities. On the business front, we finalized a public-private partnership with the Abu Dhabi government as their trusted real estate partner, where we're taking over an initial program of AED 40 billion worth of government capital projects to be delivered over the next 3 to 5 years, providing a strong and predictable flow of development management fees. This year, we also announced a new operating model to propel the company to the next level in terms of scale and breadth of activity as we capitalize on growth opportunities. The model promotes agility and accountability throughout the organization with 2 core businesses, Aldar Investment and Aldar Development, each led by their own Chief Executive Officer. They're Jassem Busaibe as the CEO of Aldar Investment; and Jonathan Emery as the CEO of Aldar Development, who recently joined the Aldar team, both reporting to me as the group CEO. It's a very exciting transformation that reflects Aldar's maturity and enable us to enhance our key pillars, including customer centricity, digital transformation, operational efficiency and sustainability. In terms of our financial performance, the company has shown considerable strength, thanks to our robust balance sheet and our diversified and agile business model. We reported a 17% increase in revenue for the full year of 2020 as well as an 8% rise in gross profit. Our net profit for the year held firm at AED 1.93 billion and 28% growth in net profit for the fourth quarter alone, rising to AED 729 million. On that, the Board has recommended to reward our shareholders with a cash dividend distribution of AED 1.14 billion or AED 0.145 per share, becomes our eighth year within our transparent and well-governed progressive dividend policy, delivering sustainable returns to our shareholders. In summary, our results are remarkable, given an extremely challenging macroeconomic environment with lots of uncertainty. It reflects the strength of our diversified business model, our amazing capability and talent base, our high standards of corporate governance and a clear strategies of our core business. We successfully exited some non-core assets accretively in 2020 to the tune of AED 1.2 billion, most notably the district cooling assets and a hotel, which is reflected in our 2020 performance. And we have allocated AED 2 billion of growth capital during 2021, which will be across our various business units: Development, and in particular, Egypt; Investments, to grow our recurring income assets; Aldar Estates, where we acquired Pacific last year and Asteco earlier in 2021, continue to grow that; as well as Education, where we've seen incredible organic growth and further opportunities for consolidation. This, combined with the long-term fundamentals of the UAE economy and sustained investor confidence in Abu Dhabi's real estate sector will empower us to succeed in 2021 and beyond. I will now hand over to Greg to walk us through the financial results.

Thank you, Talal. I'll run through some remarks to go over our core full year results and we'll open up the call to some questions. As Talal mentioned earlier, Aldar has achieved a very strong performance, driven by a record year for Aldar Development while our portfolio of investment properties held firm. Aldar Development's revenue increased 60% to a record AED 5 billion and gross profit for the business reached AED 1.4 billion in 2020, up 31% for Aldar Development. We had a very strong fourth quarter, delivering record sales of AED 1.6 billion, representing a 65% increase year-on-year and record quarterly revenues of AED 1.6 billion, or the double the level for the same quarter in 2019. As at the end of December 2020, 90% of our Development pipeline has been sold. This includes Noya on Yas Island, which sold out its first phase of over 500 units on its launch day earlier in November. The Development business has also performed strongly on a cash collection basis with AED 4 billion collected in 2020 from units handed over and projects under development. We also expanded our third-party development management pipeline almost eightfold with the agreement signed with the government of Abu Dhabi to manage an initial program of AED 40 billion of capital projects. Including Aldar's own capital expenditure programs and legacy government infrastructure contracts announced earlier, Aldar will manage a total of approximately AED 50 billion of real estate infrastructure projects to be delivered over the next 3 to 5 years in Abu Dhabi. Turning to Aldar Investment. The business produced a solid net operating income of AED 1.6 billion, representing a 7% decline versus 2019. The income-generating property portfolio has held up well on account of stable and high occupancy in our residential and commercial segment, which has offset some of the softness in the retail and hospitality segments. Occupancy remained steady at 88% across the portfolio, which benefits from long-term and committed lease contracts. At year-end, the average WAULT is approximately 4 years across the portfolio. We are now seeing improvements in the hospitality and retail segments following the easing of lockdown measures. Retail sales in the fourth quarter are approaching previous year's levels and footfall continues a positive trend, increasing quarter-on-quarter. Our hospitality assets, which were impacted significantly by the global travel restrictions, rebounded in the fourth quarter as we partnered with the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi here to host several event bubbles on Yas Island, including notably the UFC Fight Island event and a very successful and safe Formula 1. As a result, in the fourth quarter, Aldar Investment registered an NOI, net operating income, of AED 473 million, a 24% increase from the previous quarter. During the year, we made 2 profitable investment exits. The first was the Saadiyat district cooling assets and the second was the Abu Dhabi Golf Club Complex and The Westin Hotel, both acquired in 2018 as part of our TDIC asset acquisition. Together, these exits generated AED 1.1 billion and are the result of our successful asset management and capital recycling strategy in action. Moving to what we used to call our adjacent businesses for our principal investments group, where NOI was up 22% in 2020. Provis, the property management company, which will be contributed to our new Aldar Estates property management platform, and Khidmah together produced a combined gross profit of AED 50 million in 2020, a 20% increase on 2019. Aldar Education reported a 25% increase in gross profit to AED 122 million in 2020. Student numbers have grown significantly over the last 3 years with the company now well-established as the leading provider of private education here in Abu Dhabi. Overall, Aldar maintains extremely strong cash and liquidity position with AED 5.5 billion of gross cash, comprising of AED 3.3 billion of free and subsidiary cash, AED 800 million of restricted cash and AED 1.4 billion of cash in escrow to support our projects. Our average debt maturity to date stands at 4.5 years with no immediate loan repayments coming up until August of this year and our average cost of debt stood at 2.9%. Aldar's strong performance in 2020 paves the way for a new transformational phase of growth across our businesses. This will also involve an emphasis on recycling of capital and further investments into expansion, both locally and internationally, as Talal mentioned. Finally, I'd like to give you a quick update on our sustainability agenda. I'm very pleased to be reporting that a wide range of ESG rating agencies and index providers have recognized the progress that Aldar is making in its sustainability journey, including ESG Invest and MSCI, amongst others. We have made considerable progress on our commitments with specific reference to our carbon-neutral action plan. We've also invested in the ATMAH program, the GCC's first social impact bond, an innovative and outcome-driven approach that mobilizes the private sector to address social issues and truly change lives. A key pillar of our sustainability strategy is integrating into our community. And this social bond program with ATMAH is one of our proudest achievements over the year. In parallel, our projects support Abu Dhabi's vision of promoting livability and quality of life in local communities. And our In-Country Value Program continues to deepen the local contractor and consultant base. We've also made a serious commitment in connection with the workers' welfare audits that have begun auditing our primary contractors against the company's Worker Welfare Policy. Our aim is to continue making progress in implementing sustainability goals in areas of environmental standards, procurement and workers' welfare. And I very much look forward to giving more detailed information on our initiatives in the coming months in the future. Sustainability is something we take very seriously here at Aldar. And we look forward to progressing our portfolio of initiatives over the coming years. And with that, I'm very happy to pass the call back to the operator, and we'll open the floor to questions for Talal and myself.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Steve Bramley of HSBC.

Great set of results. I just had a couple of questions, if I may. The first thing that you sort of looked very well -- one of the things you put onto paper in the results is the Egypt market. And I'm just interested to get an understanding or a bit more of a handle on where you are actually in that process in reality, how much capital you're perhaps likely to contribute to that in 2021 and how you're going to go about entering the market. Just like to get a better understanding about what your ambitions are over there and what we could see in 2021.

Thanks, Steve. I'll answer your first question. So on Egypt, where -- it's a very important market for us. In fact, it's one of the most important real estate markets in the region. We've identified it as the key area of growth. We're at a very advanced stage of entering that market. We were hoping it was going to be in 2020. But obviously, with the constraints of the pandemic, that was delayed to 2021. We are looking at a number of ways in which we can enter into that market and establish our platform over there. It's going to be particularly focused on Aldar Development, more than Aldar Investment. There may be pockets of recurring income. But we see 80% to 90% of our exposure in the Egyptian real estate market in the develop-to-sell market, where we think we can leverage our brand and build mixed-use communities, both single and multifamily homes and bring together a lot of the other parts of our business, including our education, our property and facility management businesses and so on and so forth. The total growth capital that we have, which includes Egypt, is around AED 2 billion allocated for 2021. That will revolve around on the Development side, primarily on Egypt, but also some of that will go towards acquiring recurring income assets across Aldar Investment that may also be domestic. Exact breakdown of that and the exact details of what we may do, we will be sharing more details over the coming weeks and months. But we really want to make a very strong footprint and hit the ground running in Egypt. But obviously, there's a lot of intricacies in that market. We need to do it right. We need to make sure that we do our due diligence, learn from what others have done and build up from that and make sure we don't repeat also the mistakes of others that rushed into those markets without clearly understanding the way that market operates, which, to some degree, is different, too, to the UAE or other markets. I hope I've managed to answer your question, Steve. And I think you had -- you said you had another question as well.

Yes. That's very, very helpful. That's a good answer. So I had another question. You've already done very well and made significant progress with the ADQ deal. So I'm not, for a minute, suggesting that AED 30 billion is a figure that one should be disappointed at all. But what I'd like to get a little bit more of an understanding on is this -- in terms of the opportunity, is this something that you are like to add to in the mid- to medium-term and potentially add to quite significantly? Or should we -- and you've done well. But should we just say, "Right, the ADQ deal is what we should really just focus on now for the next few years"? Or are you likely to grow that source as management fee income over the medium term? And if so, I don't know whether your...

Great question. Sorry. Sorry, go ahead, apologies.

No, that was it. Over to you.

Thank you, Steve. I'd like to answer that in multiple ways. So first of all, before we get to the AED 30 billion, the announcement is that Aldar is now the trusted real estate partner for the government of Abu Dhabi that will deliver all of this, if you like, strategic expenditure. 80% of what Abu Dhabi spends in terms of its capital projects are on infrastructure and on housing. And we're going to be focusing on those in particular, the current value of live projects, one of the portfolios that was transferred to us, was AED 30 billion. There was a second bucket, which is under Musanada, which is AED 10 billion of cost to complete. We are currently managing AED 5 billion that we announced in 2019, which is on 3 projects, which was Saadiyat, twofour54 and Al Falah. So that takes you to AED 45 million, in addition to our own portfolio of around AED 5 billion, which is our typical develop-to-sell homebuilder market. So that brings you to a total of around AED 50 billion. Anything beyond that, Steve, it will be a stretch, and we would ask you to come and help us manage. So we think that's quite a big substantial area. But that's not a one-off. This is a franchise and a revised operating model, where the government has now entrusted us to become their capital infrastructure partner. And at the same time, and again you can hear a lot of this, a new group structure, we are managing third-party assets under Aldar Investment, projects like WTC, projects like Abu Dhabi Plaza and so on, amongst others. Between Aldar Investment, between Aldar Estates, whether those are on the asset management or the property management side, those equate to more than $2 billion worth of assets under management, which we earn fees for deploying our investment and property management capability and franchise. As well as in the education field, what you saw is some of the incredible growth we've had great organic growth from our existing portfolio in Aldar Education. But we've also taken over the management over the last 2 or 3 years of the ADNOC schools as well as government schools that we're now also managing on their behalf. And that's allowed us to grow from 3 years ago 7,000 students to 23,000 students across our owned and managed school portfolio. So this concept of Aldar's maturity and the trust and the capability to be able to deploy our management skills across each one of the core sectors of the operating model is a recurring theme that you're going to see and a part of our business. That does not mean that we're not going to focus on us accretively deploying capital and generating sustainable returns for shareholders.

Our next question comes from Hosam Sakr of ADCB Bank.

Yes. My question is more of -- you've obviously talked about all these achievements in the revenue and the sales and in the schools and all this in a very difficult market for the real estate. So can you just tell me what was the strategy? What did you do that made you so successful that others aren't?

Thank you for your question. I can't comment on others, but I can comment on ourselves. I think we have a very clear and robust strategy that we announced over 5 years ago about diversifying the business across development and asset management, making sure that in asset management on a recurring income perspective, we're diversified across asset class. When we announced the strategy back in 2015, 2016, around 10% to 15% of our overall book and performance came from a recurring income portfolio. That has since grown to between 50% to 60%, depending on the period and cyclicality around the Development business. And we've maintained and we'll continue to maintain a diversified approach across asset classes and individual assets and not have exposure just to one [ to afford ] the bigger risks to investors. On the Development side, we are diversified in terms of our destinations on Saadiyat, Reem, Yas, which are our core, but also outside those 3 integrated destinations and across the value stream, from high-end apartments to land plots to middle-income projects and how fast we've been able to swap from one to another. I think the trust in our brand and our focus on customer and sustainability has been there. It's nothing out of the ordinary. But we are well governed. We deliver on our promises. We reward shareholders. And we will continue to do so in a very clear, concise, well-governed, transparent and a sustainable way. It may seem like tag words that others use. For us, you can see it in everything that we do. If you take sustainability as an example and you read our sustainability report, you'll see how serious we are when it comes to that and how that delivers sustainable returns for shareholders. Anything more that I would have to disclose will be part of the art of the game and the trust that shareholders have in us to continue delivering returns for them.

So for example -- that's well. I'm talking more specifically that nobody expected the pandemic. And you mentioned that in Yas, the 500 units were sold in the same day in a pandemic environment. And that's what I'm trying to -- was it a pricing? What made it so attractive for it to be sold in 1 day?

I don't think it's pricing. When you look at real estate, real estate is about products, it's about price, it's about location, it's about community. And what we were able to do is not sell at a price point in the middle of nowhere. But we were able to package together a high-quality product in an integrated community on Yas Island at the right price point at what we believe was the right time. We went out to our customers that we maintain a very close and intimate relationship with. We've done this successfully. By the way, this was not a coincidence. We've done it in the past on projects, like when we entered the land plot market. We did it on the bridges. We did it at Water's Edge. And we've done it successfully in Noya. And we're going to continue to repeat that success on and on. We took over 2 projects as far as the TDIC transaction that we're struggling to sell under a different platform, notably Jawaher and Mamsha Al Saadiyat. And we have since been able to extract tremendous amount of value for that. The investors are looking for a good bargain, whether it's on the equity side, whether it's in terms of real assets. And we've seen appreciation of both real assets and equities across many different sectors, but in particular in Aldar, on the trust that people have seen based on their previous investments and how we delivered on their promises.

Our next question comes from Taher Safieddine from JPMorgan.

It's Taher from JPMorgan. And again, congrats on a solid set of numbers. A couple of questions, if I may. The first one is on the development management. I mean, I see one slide with more disclosures, especially around the AED 40 billion worth of projects. I mean, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but should we expect, just based on the numbers you've put through, that this should translate into an annual revenue run rate of around maybe AED 400 million and an NOI of AED 320 million, given the 5% fee and the type of the contract, which is the fee only? So this is my first question. And my second question is if you can just comment on the 2021 guidance, please, that you have on -- in the presentation. How should we think about Aldar Development actually achieving another year with AED 3.6 billion worth of sales? If you can just give us some color on where do you see the pockets of demand? Is the Grove project included in that? Or it's going to be more of a Noya-type of units? And finally, just on Aldar Investment. Again, you provided a guidance of single-digit NOI growth on FY '20. I mean assuming there's a solid recovery, don't you think this is going to be a bit conservative? And if you can just give us some color there on the drivers of this guidance, please.

Thank you very much for your questions. So on the first question, yes, you're absolutely correct in terms of the guidance of the AED 400 million and the AED 320 million as a run rate. We will expect that to grow over the next few years as this platform also picks up pace. It may grow higher than that in some years and come down in some years. But we think it will stabilize just north of that number. We're going to continue to provide more disclosure. Obviously, that is fed and funded entirely by the government. But we're going to continue to give you as transparent information as we can give you over the coming period. But the numbers that you suggested were right. Those are majority housing and infrastructure projects, both social infrastructure and hard infrastructure as in roads and utilities as well as schools, police stations, hospitals and clinics in addition to the government's national housing program, so over 25,000 houses. Obviously, they're low-income houses and land plots that are a part of that overall number. So I hope that answers that. On the second question, we're providing the same guidance this year, which is around AED 3.5 billion, AED 3.6 billion of sales. We're feeling quite confident that we will be able to achieve that. We think it will come across a number of areas. We still have a little bit of inventory left over from some of our previously launched projects. We are relatively -- we have a high sales rate across our current projects. But we still have some inventory remaining in projects like Mamsha or Mayan, Alghadeer, in particular, where we'll continue to sell those, and Water's Edge. We're going to continue to launch new projects similar to Noya that will be part of that. The Grove, as you rightfully said, will also be part of that number. And we're also looking at new villa developments as well at different price points than Noya, both on Yas and Saadiyat as well as some other destinations where we're seeing a significant pickup in demand when it comes to horizontal development. Just to shed more light on that. West Yas, which is one of our developments that we launched a few years ago that we're fully sold out on, we actually saw a 7% to 9% increase in prices in the secondary market on West Yas in 2020 if you compare March, April prices to December pricing. So as that community is now becoming established, we're really seeing that. We saw that based on the demand, where we completely sold out Yas Acres, that was around 75%, 80% sold at the start of 2020. On Aldar Investment as well, we think it's again a realistic and a conservative guidance at this point to provide mid- to high single-digit growth based on this year. It depends on the pickup in the hospitality sector. That is probably the most hit and will take the longest to recover. Retail is also going through an interesting transformation. And we're going to have more disclosures around Yas Mall and some of the transformation that we're going ahead with over there to be able to extract more value from our retail portfolio. And then not much change and we're seeing more stability when it comes to the residential and commercial portfolio. And then it will depend on how fast we can deploy our growth capital into accretive investment opportunity.

Okay. Perfect. That's very helpful. Sorry, just one final follow-up. Just looking at the dividend policy, Investment and Development, now that there's a new upcoming stream of income, which is these fee-based projects and clearly prefunded, working capital-neutral, these come under the development umbrella. I mean is it fair to assume or look at maybe the payout range that you have, 20% to 40%, might be changed towards these fee-based projects now that they're going to be a significant part of your business? Is this something to consider? Or we should always think about fee-based projects still under development and still subject to the payout range of 20% to 40%?

I'll let Greg answer that question. But what we will -- I just want to highlight again is that our debt and our dividend policies will remain transparent. They will remain well-governed. And Aldar will not come and surprise investors ever and retract from commitments that are out there in normal circumstances. And we proved that and that resilience during the pandemic and post as we're going through this recovery state still with the level of uncertainty. Greg, do you want to highlight any more details on how that forms part of the Development dividend?

Yes. And Taher, just as a strict matter of policy, the fees are generating in the Development business and they're subject to the Development policy range. Now that said, there's a lot of degrees of freedom that we have in those ranges. And we have definitely been committed and we've attached the word progressive dividend policy to our thinking for the last 10 years. And I think we've been able to demonstrate a very clear bias towards a progressive dividend for our shareholders, including through COVID and including the one that was recommended yesterday with the Board. So I think we're not paying out anywhere near the top end of that range right now. I think with a steady, predictable fee stream of income, that certainly gives us more latitude to move up that scale and to maintain that progressive nature to our dividend as we continue to grow. And just want to add a bit of color just on the guidance is I think -- I wouldn't say we struggled a bit coming up with those guidances. I mean I think it's important for everyone to know that there's -- it's a very unique environment to be talking about guidances, where we're sitting in lockdown, there's not tourists coming in right now. But I think there is an important conveyance that we wanted to get across today, which is that we feel good and much better about 2021 than we did in '20. There's many more reasons to feel great. The vaccination campaign is significant. And we are world leaders here in the vaccination of our residents, and that's going to go a long way towards opening up and being able to handle different curveballs that this -- that the bug will throw at us over the year and get people circulating more and getting back to a normal recovery. So we see a lot more reasons to be positive than negative. We feel good about our bases, like the core development management franchise. We saw strong finish in 2020 in terms of launch. That really showed us that there was pent-up demand. And so we're going to be starting this year addressing that pent-up demand, guiding towards this similar number that we hit last year in overall sales. But the key is growth. You've got very credible, significant growth coming in development management, coming from this multiples increase in the fee-based business. That will more than double for us in 2021 over where it's been historically. And as Talal mentioned, we're generating surplus capital. The best thing about what happened to us in 2020 was not only does the construction industry keep moving, but our customers kept performing. We collected over AED 4.5 billion of cash during COVID. And that's putting us in a very strong capital position, where we can both reward the shareholders with dividend and allocate capital for growth. So AED 2 billion is what our expectation is to deploy over the course of 2021 towards growth initiatives.

That growth will always be very accretive and transparent growth. We don't have pockets of where we're going to sit there and have to invest massive sums of money on infrastructure or other things to unlock value. The ability of Noya and other things shows you the value of our land bank, which we will be disclosing also more details in 2021 and how infrastructure-enabled this is. So the investments require a certain amount of capital to generate quite accretive returns to our shareholders.

Our next question comes from Ayub Ansari from SICO.

Congratulations on a fantastic set of results. I had a question regarding your recent press release on investment and startups, specifically property technology startups. So I just want to understand what is exactly prop tech. Is it something -- I'm assuming it's something out of the box, maybe investment in data centers or fulfillment centers or maybe even hydroponic farming. So some color on that would be really good. And lastly, of your AED 2 billion in growth capital allocated for 2021, how much of that would go to these startups?

I'll just start by saying in asset management and development, we're strongly looking at the logistics space and data centers as an active investment that we want to continue to develop new and potentially acquire data centers or logistics assets. But we've announced it in the past, we haven't found the right opportunity yet. There are a number of deals that we are looking at. And we're hoping to be able to deploy some of that growth capital into that particular sector in both Development and Investment during 2021. However, that is different to some of our -- I know it's related to tech, our investments, prop tech strategies where we're investing in a number of venture capitalist funds and accelerators to come up with different ideas. You mentioned some, whether it's in hydroponics, whether it's in construct tech, whether it's in prop tech that allows us to develop better construction technology methodologies or better ways in which we manage our assets. I invite Greg, who has been instrumental with some of his colleagues, in shedding some more light into why we're investing into this space and what does it mean both from an earnings perspective as well as from a culture perspective for the organization.

Yes. So the prop tech reference for us is more about connecting our business to the regional and global innovation community. So I mean so many people have sort of criticized real estate and construction over the years as being slow to innovate and slow to onboard latest technologies. And we've recognized that. And so we've set up focus teams, who are -- we've got an innovation team who specifically organize to connect with founders in the region, to gestate new companies in Abu Dhabi, to meet new and innovative startups from around the world, who are making groundbreaking innovations across many products and services that make real estate companies both owners and managers of real estate, of which we are all those things, more efficient and get closer to our customers and just achieve things faster. So much innovation happens out there in the start-up community. In fact, right now, we've got an active campaign that we partnered with startAD called Scale Up, where we've launched a worldwide program inviting founders and technology companies to submit their ideas around the built environment to us, where we have a competition. And we will review them and fund and purchase product from some of these interesting founders. But just the start-up community is very important for large corporates like us to have an organized and structured connectivity with them because they are a tremendous source of innovation, which drives value for our shareholders. So that's prop tech as we describe it. And we've allocated about AED 150 million, not a huge amount of money, but to invest into some of the funds that the global prop tech funds that are great nexus of activity and ideation that we're going to connect -- that we're connecting with.

So just to continue on that data area across all of our assets, and we invested in a data lake and connecting data and customer-centricity information, around that, to be able to better predict future launches or lease management and stuff is a very important sector that we're going to invest in and [ edu tech ] as well and looking at technologies, especially with the whole learn-from-home share that we have successfully been able to go out. And in other areas, even where we're not investing, we're deploying technologies to help improve the efficiency across our business. One of them is on testing and vaccines, we've vaccinated 85% of our workforce. So 19,000 people across our malls, schools, hotels and so on. Checking people when they come into our malls every day or our hotels in a very analog way would have taken out hours of inefficiency from our system. We were able to partner with some digital solution providers to be able to provide quite a swift way of ensuring that all the staff coming into the facilities or when we're doing bubbles, like the UFC or F1 that were very successful global events, were done using a lot of technology to assist us in managing what we're calling green or safe zone. That's just one example where sometimes it generates returns and sometimes it just revolutionizes your operation from a very, very efficient pace.

Yes. And just -- so just to give one further example, just Matterport is a company that has hit the news recently with going public in the $3 billion transaction. So Matterport is a company that allows you to create visualization tools. So for people like us, who sell real estate, you can create imagery and actually transact and sell real estate online by giving buyers a very real and visceral sense of a property. So when we were locked down in April, May, June, we were wondering how the heck we're going to sell real estate. And we adopted this solution. It worked really well. It generated and enabled the AED 3.6 billion of sales that we're reporting today. And it was an innovation from what was a start-up company, which, of course, is now worth maybe $3 billion. But that's just an example of the kind of innovation that's happening around the planet that we need to connect to here in Abu Dhabi to transact and to create value.

Yes, that sounds really exciting. Just a follow-up question on this, the logistics assets, are you looking for assets only in UAE or they can be of global nature?

We really see the logistics play as a regional play. So we're currently talking to a number of partners. We really believe the play -- we don't think at some point, it could go global. But we're very realistic in our expectations. And we really think there's a big gap in the market to develop high-quality warehouse and logistics facilities to attract some of the businesses. This is very much aligned to the government's industrial strategy, the global trends of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what we're seeing today with the move towards technology. A lot of those technological providers will want a presence in the region, whether it's for last-mile deliveries, whether it is for storage, whether it is for data centers or whether it is for industrial and technological uses as you're seeing today in agri tech and other areas that Abu Dhabi is investing in, maybe not directly related to us. But there's a facility and a gap for us to be able to fill and hopefully expand into becoming a regional landlord of choice in the logistical space.