CTF Services Limited (659) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining NWS Holdings Financial Year 2023 Interim Results Analyst Presentation. I'm Catherine from the IR team and today's MC. First of all, let me introduce our senior management members joining today's presentation. Mr. Gilbert Ho, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer; Mr. Jim Lam, our Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Ben Wong, Director of Corporate Development, Investment, Investor Relations and Sustainability. For today's agenda, Gilbert will first walk you through the key highlights of our company's results and strategy. After this, Jim will present to you the financial highlights, and then Ben will cover the performance of individual business segment and then followed by the Q&A session. If you have any questions, please enter your questions into the text box on the left-hand side of the screen. Without further ado, let me pass the time to Gilbert. Gilbert, please?

Thank you, Catherine. First of all, thank you very much for joining this analyst presentations. The first thing I would like to thank you, especially for our long-standing investors, this year, we are celebrating our 20th listing anniversaries, and we launched our new vision mission and core values with a mission of connecting people, goods, capital through a portfolio of market-leading businesses. Over the last 5 years, the company has gone through a transformation. With now, we have a number of businesses in our portfolio, including our roads, construction, insurance, logistics and facility management. Only on the 2023 first half alone, we have completed our disposal of our aircraft leasing platform. We also acquired the remaining 60% of Sui-Yue Expressway and also the completion of 40% in Guiwu Expressway. We also announced the expansion of Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway. For our future investment targets, we will focus our capital and resources on roads, more the logistics as well as our expansion of FTLife in the Mainland. And certainly, we will maintain a prudent, measured approach to balance between risk, return and noncash mix. With the border reopening and the economic recovery in the Mainland, a number of our businesses will be our key beneficiaries of such border reopening, including our roads, our logistics, insurance and facility managements. Certainly for our roads, the traffic flow recovery facilitated by the exit from COVID-19 as well as the economy recovery. Same for logistics, the occupancy in the logistic properties in the Mainland and throughput of CUIRC is set to increase. For insurance, there will be a lot of pent-up demands from Mainland visitors, and the APE for Mainland visitors before COVID is around 30% of the total APE. That will add up to our existing APE alone. And needless to say, for the facility management, including Hong Kong CEC, Free Duty and clinical hospitals will all benefit from the border reopening. At the same time, we have been optimizing our balance sheet and strengthening our fundamentals. In terms of optimizing the capital structure and reducing interest costs, we have done a number of actions over the last half year. We have redeemed USD 92.3 million of senior notes, with a total outstanding now is $243 million. We have also redeemed $280 million of our senior perpetual capital securities. We also planned to issue Panda Bonds in the PRC, which will have interest expense savings and also a reduction in the net equity volatility by better matching RMB assets and RMB liabilities. At the same time, we have done a number of value-accretive acquisitions to generate sustainable recurring cash flow and AOP. As mentioned before, we have done a number of acquisitions in the Road segments as well as in the Logistics segments. In terms of the dividends, over the last 20 years, we have consecutively paid out our dividend. And also, we continue to crystallize and deliver value for our shareholders and [ therefore ] our sustainable and progressive dividend policies. So for this interim period, we proposed a 30% -- $0.30 in our income dividend. I will now pass on to Jim to talk about our financial highlights as well as the performance by segments.

Sure. Overall, we saw a 3% decline in our recurrent businesses AOP during the 6-month period from July to December 2022. Page 8, please. Our revenue during the period increased by 8% to $17.6 billion. Overall AOP declined by 11% to $2.1 billion, of which our core business AOP declined 25% year-on-year to $1.64 billion. And that our AOP on strategic portfolio increased by 1.5x to $460 million. In the same period last year, we saw the contribution of about $390 million profit from SUEZ NWS and also an AOP of about $274 million from Goshawk. So if you exclude all this discontinued or disposal of operation, and also -- and further strip out strategic investment contribution and Wai Kee contribution, our recurrent businesses AOP declined by just 3% year-on-year. Nonoperating loss amounted to about $213 million during the period, which stemmed mainly from the disposal of a legacy project. Finance costs increased by 37% to $312 million, which was driven mainly by the increasing interest rate, the HIBOR rate in particular. Our profit for the period amounted to $1.46 billion, a decline of 22% year-on-year, of which $296 million is attributable to the holders of our perpetual capital securities and $1.16 billion is attributable to the shareholders of the company, which represents a decline of 27% year-on-year. In terms of the AOP performance by segment, our Roads segment saw a 29% decline in AOP to $685 million. The decline was driven mainly by the containment measures against COVID-19 in the Mainland; the reduction in toll free for trucks by 10% during the fourth quarter of 2022 and approximately 8% decline in renminbi exchange rate against Hong Kong dollar; and also the absence of financial incentive received in the first half of fiscal 2022 associated with our investment in Changliu Expressway and Sui-Yue Expressway. If you exclude the renminbi depreciation impact and also the financial incentive a year ago, AOP of the period for the Roads segment declined by just 20% year-on-year. There was no contribution -- low AOP contribution for our Aviation segment during the last period. The reason is because we have reclassified Goshawk's aircraft leasing business to [ as a half ] asset since June 2022. The Construction segment AOP declined by 7%, but contribution from Hip Hing remain stable at around HKD 400 million. Our Insurance segment saw an AOP increase of 10% to $540 million, which was driven mainly by the effective expense management, reduction in medical claims and also change in variation interest rate in response to the increase in market interest rate. The Logistics segment saw a sharp 50% increase in AOP to $480 million. The increase was driven mainly by the solid performance of ATL; strong increase in earnings of CUIRC, which benefited from the continued increase in demand for multimodal transportation service in China and also is increasing capacity following the completion of the new Guangzhou terminal. The segment also benefited from the fresh contribution from our newly acquired logistics warehouses in Chengdu and Wuhan. Facility Management saw a 21% decline -- a 21% reduction in AOL to $128 million. All the 3 major businesses within the Facility Management segment, namely GHK, HKCEC and Free Duty, saw reduction in the AOL during the period. Overall, our AOP declined 11% to HKD 2.1 billion. Just to recap, if you strip out the discontinued or disposal of operation, strategic investment as well as Wai Kee, our recurring businesses AOP during the period declined by just 3% year-on-year. Over to you, Ben.

Thank you, Jim. I will now walk everyone over on the Roads, Construction and Insurance of our core businesses. So for our Roads portfolio, this interim, we have been continuing enriching our portfolio to capture long-term growth, namely with 3 transactions that we have carried out this year. We signed an agreement to acquire the remaining 60% of Sui-Yue Expressway in December. We completed the acquisition of 40% of Guiwu Expressway in Guangxi in November. And as mentioned earlier, on Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway, the Guangzhou-Zhuhai section, we are now investing in expanding the toll road. Secondly, if you look at the overall traffic flow in the toll revenue, it's down about 10% and 6%, respectively. And as Jim has mentioned earlier, this year, the AOP declined 23%, mainly -- 29%. But if you're excluding the RMB depreciation, it's down 23%. It's mainly driven by some of the COVID containment measures rolled out in the Mainland. So if you look in terms of what's in front of us, we continue to see the economy recovering in Mainland, which will also push the traffic flow. And hopefully, the worst is behind us, and we'll continue to pursue opportunities to further enrich our road portfolio to benefit from the constructive long-term economic outlook and growth in the Roads as well as the Logistics segment. So moving on to Construction. We continue to anticipate increase in tender supply fostering a positive outlook. Hip Hing AOP contribution remained stable at $403 million. New contracts awarded to Hip Hing Group for this interim is about HKD 4 billion. Contracts on hand is at $57.5 billion, and the backlog is at $33.2 billion. We have a contract portfolio of 68% to private and 32% to government and institutions. And the outlook for our Construction segment, we continue to be positive, with more projects coming online from the Hong Kong government and the development of Northern Metropolis. We'll continue to venture and expand into civil-related projects such as site formation and excavation work. We'll continue to push for more safety and the usage of technologies for Hip Hing to improve the efficiency and safety within Construction. Moving on to Insurance. FTLife's insurance is well positioned to capture the Mainland visitors amid challenges we have experienced over the last 6 months. We continue our relentless effort in offering innovative insurance products taking care of our customers' needs, and we clinched a few awards from 10Life, which is an independent third-party insurer platform -- insurance product platform. Our overall APE is down 31% to $727 million, maintaining our ranking of twelfth among all Hong Kong life insurance company as at September 30, 2022. VONB is down about 39%, and the margin is at about 30 -- the VONB margin is at about 30%. If you look in the public statistics that was disclosed by IA, overall in the third quarter of 2022, FTLife is only down about 4%, whilst the market was down 41%. And if you look at the year-to-date numbers for calendar year 2022, FTLife's number is down about 24%, whilst the market is down 32%. Our embedded value is down 19% to $17.3 billion, which is continually impacted by interest rate hike and unfavorable equity performance for the first half of 2023 fiscal year. Moving on to some of the key metrics. Solvency, obviously, still standing at 364%, well above the minimum requirement. Our agents is slightly over 2,400 agents. And the ratings from Fitch and Moody's continue to be strong at A- and A3 stable. Our long-term growth outlook remains unscathed, driven by solid demand for our products as well as the rising awareness of health care, and we continue to be very positive about MCVs after the border reopening. And in the next -- over the next 12 months, obviously, HK IFRS 17 will have an impact on the financials, and we're working very closely to make sure that, that is in place as well, as we'll also see the new implementation of HK IFRS 17 will significantly reduce accounting mismatch between financial assets and insurance contract liabilities, whilst it will adjust insurance contract liabilities considering market fluctuations of assets. And in short, that will also have some impact on our P&L and the way we account for on the equity side as well. Moving on to strategic portfolio. Logistics, obviously, is a very bright spot for this year, and thanks to some of the portfolio optimization that we have done whilst disposing some of the noncore assets such as Goshawk and putting that capital into acquisitions mode that we have done this year. We have acquired 6 logistic centers in Chengdu and Wuhan, as we disclosed previously. And the 5 newly acquired properties continue to ramp up and overall occupancy reaches 90%, whilst when we disclosed it during our acquisition as of June 30, it was only 86.7%. And those logistic properties in Chengdu and Wuhan now account for 15% of our logistics AOP, which is very good news, with immediate AOP contribution to the segment and to the company. ATL remains very solid, keen demand in ATL's warehouse space with 2% rental growth and our occupancy is very strong at 99.2%. We have also recently signed an SPA to acquire 90% of a logistics property in Suzhou Industrial Park just 2 days ago. And in terms of the recovery, we are a strong believer of the economic recovery in Mainland, and that should push up the outlook for Logistics as well as Roads. Moving on, continuing with CUIRC, which is an investment that we have made many years ago, and it's going stronger and stronger, with strong demand of multimodal transportation service and increase in terminal capacity. Throughput grew 18%, AOP grew 43%. We continue to look for opportunities such as expansion in the Zhengzhou terminal capacity, Xian capacity, which is to be completed in the first quarter of 2023. As I mentioned earlier, we remain positive on the outlook, and all the signals are pointing at the right direction for the growth of the Logistics segment. Moving on to Facility Management. Improvement continues to be on track. If you look at the overall segment AOL, it has reduced 21%. If we specifically look at GHK, the EBITDA increased 285%, with further improvement in AOL. And if you look at the regularly utilized beds, it's increased from 238 to 264. And if you look into the HKCEC, the recovery continues, which accounts for about 17% of the segment AOL. And as you would imagine, with the border reopening, we do see a lot more inquiries as well as some of the original booking now expanding the footprint on the current events. And if you look into our Free Duty shop, it's now finally reopened in January and in February for the Lok Ma Chau & Lo Wu shops, which has been closed for a number of years due to COVID and the border closure, and we have seen positive results coming from the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, which has been a positive for not just the segment, but also for the business overall. So if you look overall for the Facility Management segment, we continue to see a positive outlook, continue of narrowing AOL, and all signs are pointing towards a strong recovery for the 3 subsegments within Facility Management. And moving on to ESG. A quick recap on some of the ratings by MSCI. We are at A. We are also in the Hang Seng Corporate Sustainability Index. This year, on the ESG awards, we have received recognition for our ESG efforts, especially also in the corporate governance such as the Best Corporate Governance and ESG awards 2022 by HKICPA, Hong Kong Sustainability Award Certificate of Excellence by HKMA, as well as a regional award by the MORS Group, awarding us the Asia Corporate Excellence & Sustainability awards. Moving on to our journey and the implementation, obviously, the road remains a long, winding road for ESG, but it's never -- it will continue. And this really reinforces our commitment to sustainability. As you see, we have been pushing and pushing throughout the last few years. For example, in 2020, we have conducted a pilot climate physical risk assessment for HKCEC. In 2021, we have conducted our first group-level transition risk assessment. And last year, in 2022, we have conducted climate physical risk assessment of 2 key toll roads. So moving forward, we'll continue to develop our road map to net 0. And also, we are also achieving the 2030 climate targets that we have set. So in terms of the sustainability-linked financing, we are continuing to push. And hopefully, that will benefit us as a company, not just on the financial side, but also our -- to reinforces our commitment in sustainability. Some of the highlights for the projects that our business units are working on, for example, electrifying construction sites through the battery energy storage systems. We continue to look into ways to improve energy efficiency at HKCEC, cooling our facility with sea water. And obviously, for the new West Lake service center at Zhiyi, we continue to provide a lot of green facilities or different measures to reduce carbon emission as well as providing -- such as providing electric car charging stations. So I think this is a wrap-up for our interim. So I'll pass it on back to Catherine.