alstria S.à r.l. (AOX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the alstria First Quarter 2025 Results. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this call is being recorded. Today, I am pleased to present Olivier Elamine. Please begin your meeting.

Thank you very much, and welcome from Sunny Hamburg this morning. My name is Olivier Lamin. I'm the Chief Executive of alstria, and I'm very happy to present the first quarter 2025 result this morning. Before we go into the presentation, a brief look at the disclaimer and the duty to update -- disclaimer about the forward-looking statement and the duty to update. And then without undue delay, let's move into the heart of the presentation. All in all, the first quarter 2025 have developed according to our expectation with -- and the operation has been supported by a strong leasing performance, which is reflecting the strength of the office market in Germany on the leasing side. Our revenue are slightly up year-on-year at EUR 49 million. Our FFO at EUR 18 million. I'll come back to that in a minute. There's a lot of seasonality in the FFO with -- on the balance sheet side, the quarter was mainly driven by the new bonds that we issued and our return to the public market. And then as I mentioned before, very strong leasing results with -- where we almost tripled compared to the same quarter last year. And finally, our return, and I'll come back to this in more detail in a second, to the transaction market with a disposal of 2 smaller assets in the altria's portfolio. If we look at the portfolio itself, no major changes here. If you've been following altria for a while, the portfolio values is still at around EUR 4.2 billion. As you know, we like to have midsized assets. So average size of the asset is pretty much unchanged. Valuation yield is pretty much stable and our contractual rent is very much, where it used to be at around EUR 201 million with the EPRA vacancy rate slightly up at 8.6%. If we look into the lettings, we had a really strong start of the year in the first quarter of 2025 with around 66,000 square meters of new leases and renewals, which compared to around 24,000 square meters a year ago. What we have seen in the marketplace on the leasing side is the return of large corporates to the letting market, which obviously helped to improve the numbers in terms of take-up. And you can see that we also have secured around EUR 66 million -- EUR 58 million, excuse me, of future income versus EUR 15.6 million a year ago. So a strong leasing performance, which we expect to continue throughout the year. The leasing market in Germany is still improving, and we're still finding reasonably strong demand in most of the markets in which we are operating. What we have done also in the first quarter of 2025 is the return to the transaction market -- and when you keep on with the strategy we started a few years ago, whereby we're selling some of the weaker assets that we have in the portfolios, something that we called at the time, sell the periphery and buy the center. Here, we are focusing on the periphery for the time being. And we returned to the disposal with the sale of 2 smaller assets, one in the outskirt of Hamburg near to the airport in Bostela Chasse and another one in Dortmund, which marked the exit from the Dortmund market. For alstria, as you know, we are focusing mainly on 5 markets in Germany, which are Hamburg, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Berlin. And so we're also slowly exiting some of the smaller markets in which we are and the Dortmund sale here achieved that for us. If we move now to the implication on the financials and the balance sheet. From a profit and loss perspective, as I already mentioned before, our gross rental income is slightly up. The FFO margin is also slightly up with the FFO increasing slightly. This is mainly driven by the reduction in SG&A. We have been pretty disciplined in the way we've been managing our costs over time, and we're achieving a slightly reduction in SG&A this quarter again. We have -- and I wanted to highlight that we have adjusted our accounting policy. And so if you compare our number between Q1 2025 and Q1 2024, there is a bit of change in the way we've been accounting for things, which mainly reflects the fact that now that we are not consolidated anymore into the books of our parent company, we have also revert back to the old alstria accounting policy, which we believe is -- provide a better overview of the dynamic at the company level. You will have all the detail of the change in the accounting policy in our Q1 report. It obviously doesn't change the bottom line, but we believe provide more clarity on the cost structure of the company moving forward. If we look now on the balance sheet, the main change here is obviously not very visible because it relates essentially to the bond issuance and the liability management exercise that we have done. So what you see on the slide is essentially reflecting investment property, which is flat compared to the beginning of the year, which essentially translates the asset sales and the CapEx, which kind of offset each other. The equity is slightly up, reflecting the -- essentially the gain that was made by the company over the quarter. And our net financial debt is slightly up, which reflects the new bond that we have issued and the transaction cost, which were related to that issuance. So we did issue a new EUR 500 million bond. And in parallel, as you know, we've issued EUR 164.5 million of mortgages with an average maturity on both sides of 6 years, which basically allow us to increase the overall average maturity of the debt of the companies. And we used the proceeds of the bonds to basically buy back a substantial amount of our existing bonds in bonds 3, 4 and 5. As you can see on this slide, the remaining EUR 84.4 million will be used to basically repay the residual part of the 2025 bonds, which is due in the September this year. We currently have around EUR 434 million of liquidity available, which is around EUR 200 million of undrawn RCF and EUR 134 million of unrestricted cash, which was on the balance sheet, sorry. On the date of 31st of March. If we take a view at our debt portfolio overall, our average cost of debt is slightly up, obviously, since the issuance of the bond at 3.1%. Our net LTV at 57.6% is essentially increasing by the effect of some of the proceeds being used for general corporate purposes. Net debt-to-EBITDA is at [ 15 time 0.5% ] and our average debt maturity increased by almost a year and now is higher than 3 years at 3.8 years with our debt to debt plus equity remaining pretty much stable at 61%. The next maturity that we have in 2025 is essentially a bond that matured in September, which we already discussed and is covered and a mortgage loan for which we have an option to extend, and we're currently working on refinancing that last bit, which mature in August. But we are, for all practical purpose, cover for all our 2025 maturities and now working on addressing the 2026. If we move now to the outlook and close this short presentation, we're confirming our financial guidance for the years with revenue of EUR 192 million and FFO of EUR 52 million. So far, the company development has been pretty much in line with our plan. The investment markets are expected to remain reasonably weak, but with slow recovery. I think we're showing that through the 2 transactions that we're seeing. And we are actually considering the sale of other smaller assets of a similar shape and form of the one that we have disposed earlier this year. So again, selling the periphery and then potentially investing more in the core of our markets. So we are pretty positive that the early green shoots that we're seeing right now in the investment market are gradually lead to a recovery, and we expect the market to normalize throughout 2026 and following. The leasing market, as we discussed, is still the bright spot in the overall market position, we still have a pretty decent pipeline with strong tenant demand in most of the markets in which we are. The large lease activity is back in the market and then slowly increasing as we have large corporates coming back into the market. So we are rather positive on that front as well. So we see really a positive dynamic at that level, and we would expect that to continue. So far, we haven't seen any material impact from all the macro events, which are taking place here and there, which is not to say that they would not happen, but at least we are not seeing them as of now. And that will be all for today for the short presentation of the Q1 results. I'll be happy to take questions, if any. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] We have no questions. Please proceed.

Well, thank you very much for joining us today, and thank you very much for your interest in the company. Yes, I guess the numbers and the performance is speaking for itself. If you have any follow-up questions regardless, we're obviously available, Ralf and myself. You know where to find us, so we'll be happy to address them. But in any case, thank you very much for your interest, and we're looking forward to speaking to you again for the half year presentation. Thank you very much. Have a nice afternoon. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session for today. The conference has now ended. You may all disconnect your lines.

Thank you very much.