Dipula Properties Limited ($DIB)

Earnings Call Transcript · May 14, 2026

JSE ZA Real Estate Retail REITs Earnings Calls 47 min

Highlights from the call

Dipula Properties Limited reported strong interim results for the first half of fiscal 2026, with revenue growing by 7% to ZAR 811 million and distributable earnings increasing by 20% to ZAR 310 million. The company maintained a dividend per share of ZAR 0.275, reflecting a consistent 90% payout ratio. Management raised guidance for full-year earnings growth to a range of 7% to 8%, indicating confidence in the portfolio's performance despite external economic pressures.

Main topics

  • Strong Revenue and Earnings Growth: Dipula achieved a revenue increase of 7% to ZAR 811 million and a 20% rise in distributable earnings to ZAR 310 million. Management stated, "This is attributed to organic growth on our standard portfolio complemented by some accretive acquisitions and improved occupancy levels."
  • Portfolio Expansion and NAV Growth: The property portfolio expanded by 12% to ZAR 11.5 billion, with NAV increasing by 16% to ZAR 7.4 billion. Management noted, "Our balance sheet remains fairly strong, which is evident with our property portfolio growth."
  • Improved Tenant Retention: Tenant retention improved significantly to 90%, up from 79% in the previous year. Management highlighted, "We're not losing tenants and we're leasing new space, which is always a positive thing for the portfolio."
  • Interest Rate and Economic Concerns: Management expressed caution regarding potential interest rate increases and their impact on disposable incomes. They stated, "There could be some medium-term implications there for the sector as a whole."
  • Focus on Retail and Industrial Sectors: The retail sector continues to dominate, contributing two-thirds of total gross income, while industrial properties showed growth due to recent acquisitions. Management indicated, "We expect the bias towards retail will continue in future."

Key metrics mentioned

  • Revenue: ZAR 811 million (vs ZAR 758 million prior year, +7% YoY)
  • Distributable Earnings: ZAR 310 million (vs ZAR 258 million prior year, +20% YoY)
  • Dividend per Share: ZAR 0.275 (consistent with prior period)
  • NAV: ZAR 7.4 billion (vs ZAR 6.4 billion prior year, +16% YoY)
  • Tenant Retention Ratio: 90% (vs 79% prior year)
  • Portfolio Growth: ZAR 11.5 billion (vs ZAR 10.3 billion prior year, +12% YoY)

Dipula's strong interim results and positive guidance indicate a solid investment thesis, particularly in the retail and industrial sectors. However, rising interest rates and economic uncertainties pose risks that investors should monitor closely. Future performance will depend on the company's ability to manage costs effectively and maintain tenant retention in a challenging economic environment.

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Izak Petersen

Executives
#1

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Dipula's Interim results for 2026. Sudesh and I will be taking you through these results. We're doing the presentation from our office in Johannesburg. If you look at the top left corner of the screen, you'll see that there's a section there that allows you to post your questions. We'd appreciate that you load all of your questions there, which we'll deal with at the end of the presentation. So our presentation is split up into 3 sections. I'll give you a business update. Sudesh will go through the financials. And then as I said earlier on, basically, we'll then do a way forward and questions after that. So going in the wrong direction here. Yes, I think if you look at our performance for this past 6 months, they basically tell you a 5-point story. Its earnings growth, portfolio expansion, reduced gearing, improved tenant retention and stable occupancy. That's basically in a nutshell, what really drove these numbers, but we'll break that down for you and kind of explain what's going on. Just in summary, I think we've experienced good top line growth and basically relatively lower expense growth during the period. And our distributable earnings obviously had a very nice boost, a combination of things in that, that we'll break down to throughout the presentation. Very decent leasing activity. In terms of just new leases, we did about ZAR 147 million worth of leases. That's almost 26,000 square meters. Lion's share of that is in retail. We'll chat about that later. And basically, from a lease renewal point of view, also doing very well with quite decent tenant retention. So we're not losing tenants and we're leasing new space. That's always a positive thing for the portfolio. Look at that tenant retention ratio overall, we're sitting at 90% at interim last year, that number was 79%. So I think a lot of the effort that's going in from the team is really paying off in terms of keeping those tenants in those spaces. I need not remind you that we've also been allocating a fair amount of capital in making those properties attractive for the tenants. From a portfolio perspective, just in summary, portfolio has grown by ZAR 1.2 billion from about ZAR 10.3 billion last year to ZAR 11.5 billion. That's 12% increase in portfolio. And we haven't compromised NAV in the process as our NAV has actually also grown by entire ZAR 1 billion to ZAR 7.4 billion from about ZAR 6.4 billion in Feb 2025. That's a 16% increase in NAV. Also just a reminder that we only value this portfolio once a year. So the valuation that you're seeing in there is obviously up to the end of August last year. So we haven't actually done any valuations for this period. We will be undertaking that process closer to year-end. The NAV per share has also trended upward, basically by a healthy 4%. And at the same time, that has increased by a modest ZAR 200 million from about ZAR 3.8 billion to ZAR 4 billion. And what this is indicative of, if you just take those numbers, portfolio growth, the slight growth in debt and uptick in NAV basically means that our balance sheet is looking really good at the moment. We're gearing at 34%. I mean we haven't raised a huge amount of money in the market. I mean this is all mainly our portfolio doing the work here. Interest rate hedge at the moment at 73%, so fairly well protected. And basically, to speak to the cash generative nature of the portfolio at the moment, you'll see that our ICR basically is 3.4x compared to 2.8x last year. So really looking good from that point of view. Just in terms of what we're seeing in the environment, obviously, it started off like [ 0.747 ], lots of positive sentiments out there in the market, but interest rates having trended downward for the past few years. And obviously, the events of the Middle East have kind of changed that picture somewhat at the moment. Very, very fluid situation there. And you'll see that in terms of just how much volatility there is in the market now at the moment. Unfortunately, that's leading to a situation where global inflation is trending upward and the geopolitics that are just so difficult to get your mind around. We try not to focus too much on that. I mean, obviously, we've got a very good awareness of what's going on in the world, but we know that most of these things are beyond our control, so we need to deal with the controllables. And indications at the moment are that globally, there's this risk that interest rates might increase and disposable incomes obviously are being affected by this and the fuel price increase as we've seen in the country is not easy on pockets. And it's just something that one needs to be aware of in terms of what that means from a risk point of view. As far as we're concerned, in terms of our experience around offices, definitely stabilizing, definitely seeing what -- is reporting out there, but it's tough. I mean every time you move a needle there, something else gives a type of thing. So it's really been a tough few years for offices for us up north here. And that's obviously affecting our numbers, which are mainly driven by retail and industrial. So strategically, what we've been doing is really making that office number insignificant in our lives, and that's the strategy going forward. It's not quite the seller's market for that asset class either. So you need to find other ways of managing that. From a portfolio point of view, occupancy at a stable 93% sort of very similar to where we were at the end of the period in 2025, but good improvement from where we were at year-end as we were sitting at about 8.5% vacancy in -- at that juncture. Portfolio growth, as I said, exceeded ZAR 1 billion, and it's a combination of ZAR 700 million worth of acquisitions and portfolio revaluation growth. And what's very nice about what's the story of Dipula over the years is that we started with a relatively small asset on average. So that's increasing quite nicely. It's increased by more than ZAR 10 million on average to ZAR 73 million from ZAR 61 million in the prior period. And our average escalations are still at an inflation protective level of about 7%. And as I mentioned in the intro, tenant retention really looking good at 90%. So yes, offices are definitely something that we need to find solutions for and work our way through that. Our focus is still on strengthening the portfolio, bringing in quality tenants, quality assets and really ensuring that we look at that resilience. I think when market conditions change to what we're seeing happening, whether it's going to be a sustained or long term, whatever, you just need to make sure that your portfolio can actually kind of live through these various extreme cycles that we're experiencing off late. So just looking at the portfolio holistically, basically, we sold ZAR 130 million worth of properties or well, that's the proceeds, ZAR 130 million, around about book. And basically, a fair chunk of that had transferred at year-end, but we had spent about ZAR 56 million in refurbs. And there's quite a bit more that we're doing in that space. And basically, our vacancy is sitting at 7%, as I said earlier on, tenant retention at 90% and the overall WALE on the portfolio at the moment is 2.4 years. We just talk a little bit about lease expiry. You'll see that in 2026, we still got about 133,000 square meters of renewals that we need to do between Feb and August. That number is sitting at about 181. I mean the determining factor there is not necessarily whether tenants are going to renew or not when you see that number. Determining factor is when that lease actually comes up. But looking at the retention ratio, we should actually be in a position to renew most of those leases. But the expiry profile is getting stretched to later years. If you just look at that graph, which is quite great with most of your exposure sort of end loaded. From a leasing perspective, basically achieved ZAR 103 a square meter on average. I mean the number is very difficult to read if you look at it in isolation. So I'll just go into each sector and just to give you some insight there in terms of what's going on. But the overall average escalation that we achieved on all of these new leases that we did was 6.5%. And on the renewal side, good 6% positive reversion achieved on expiring leases and escalation is about 6.5%. And all of these renewals were done at average WALE of 3.2 years and the new leases were done at the average WALE of 3.5 years. Both these numbers, the WALE are an improvement on the prior period. Last year, new leases just under 3 years, this year, 3.5 years. This year, renewals, 3.2 years compared to 2.6 years in the prior year. If we just move on to retail, star performer in our context. I mean that portfolio has grown to about ZAR 7.7 billion from ZAR 6.5 billion, and that's both acquisitions and basically the revaluations. But you would remember that of that ZAR 700 million odd last year, lion's share of that acquisitions were retail. And we're still allocating most of our capital into this area, and we'll continue to do so. Our occupancy is sitting at a healthy 95% at the moment. And our weighted average rentals across the portfolio increased by 5%. And the focus is on occupancy through retention initiatives that are ongoing, making it worthwhile for these tenants to stay in our properties and ensuring that we've got appropriate spaces for them to remain. And I think strategically, obviously, there has been a fair amount of CapEx deployed here, value enhancing, property enhancing type of activities being undertaken. And the average value per asset has increased very nicely to about ZAR 100 million per asset in the retail portfolio from ZAR 80 million in the prior year. So that's quite pleasing. Weighted average rentals are sitting at ZAR 170 versus ZAR 162 in the prior year. So if you're asking what's driving that top line growth of 7%, it comes from the fact that your rentals are actually growing in the portfolio and that your retention, which is cheaper than new lets is sitting at 91%. That's also a driver of performance. We speak a little bit about trading and turnovers on the portfolio. So a modest increase of 1.2% between the 2 periods. And we had positive growth in most of these categories, except for furniture and household as well as hardware. It appears as though there's a fair amount of pressure on our hardware guys at the moment, less money going into discretionary spend. And the number kind of makes sense because you can see hardware is coming down and household and furniture is also coming down. So those 2 things are linked somehow. But also, if you remember, I think there was a fair chunk of money that went into home improvements during the COVID years and that because people obviously spent all that money adding that study, doing whatever they were doing because they were working from home. And perhaps there was quite a big run then that's kind of just giving back at a moment. But yes, still growth in turnovers. And I think the key number for us that we're monitoring is that your cost of occupancy as a percentage of turnover is still sitting at a healthy 4%. Just in terms of some of the works we're doing, this slide just shows you some of the major revamps that we're busy with now at the moment. Nothing really to talk about. But basically, we are doing work at Unzimkhulu. We acquired that adjoining property at Gezina that we're adding to the center here. And Belle Ombre, we're about 80% there with a pre-let. So that's a trigger. So we're going to start doing the work on that property now. We've got our plan approvals for Protea Point extension, and that should start now in June also. Looking at offices, as I said, pressure here. Vacancies are fairly sticky. I mean we sold some properties here, but we also had some additional vacancies coming on stream. And you can see there that vacancy number has actually gone up from 19% to 23% between the 2 periods, but it's exactly where it was at year-end. This particular sector is really becoming insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. You can see that GLA has dropped from 125,000 square meters to 110,000 square meters. And our exposure from a net income point of view has dropped all the way down to about 12%. We think that, that's going to drop even lower going forward below the 10% mark by year-end. So that, I think, deals with the issue I was mentioning earlier about the fact that there's definitely still pressure there on the office side of things. And rentals remain relatively resilient period-on-period, but it's just a question of like the vacancies being fairly sticky that this does tend to draw back the performance. But our tenant retention was about 96% here. And basically, as I mentioned earlier, exposure has reduced in both income terms and GLA terms. From a leasing perspective, basically, you can see that a lot of our -- firstly, lease expiry from a lease expiry point of view, we've got about ZAR 4 million per month worth of exposure coming up in the latter part of 2026. And then most of it is then tail ended to about 2029. Hopefully, we get to renew most of those leases. And basically, we did about 3,000 square meters of new lets in this portfolio during the period. And from a renewals point of view, we did about 2,000. So a lot of that leasing activity is tail ended to the second part of the year. Industrial, another star performer for us. Exposure has increased. And that's thanks to the acquisitions that we announced. We bought 2 industrial properties, one of [ Park ] and another one a large distribution center last year. And our occupancy is sitting at a healthy 97%. And we're achieving average escalations of 7%. And we're very keen to increase our exposure in industrial as those opportunities sort of present themselves and one can capitalize on them, we definitely would do that. So moving on to the leasing activity on industrial. 2027, there's a few leases expiring there that we need to deal with. not affecting the numbers at all in this period. And then basically, from a deals point of view, last year, we did 5,600 new leases. And this year, we have done almost 13,000 square meters of new leases at an average rental of ZAR 71. Weighted average escalations on those new deals was 6% with a WALE of just under 2 years. And renewals-wise, also last year, we only spoke for about 4,000 square meters. This year, so far, we've done about 12,000 square meters of renewals at a positive reversion rate of close to 5%. So residential, very stable at the moment, noncore area for us, involved in various discussions to disposal of the portfolio. That's going very well at the moment. But we're still seeing a positive change in rentals here. They've gone up 3% on average. And basically, occupancy has also gone up quite nicely for us here, basically sitting at 94%. We were sitting at 91% in the prior year. So the vacancy has reduced from 9% to 6%. So it's stable. It's really contributing positively towards the bottom line at the moment, but it's small. So just look at ESG, mainly been involved in clean power, solar PV installations are now in excess of -- it's almost 17,000 kilowatt peak. That number was sitting at about 6 when we last reported. So there's been a fair amount of capital allocated in this area. We are involved in various water security and conservation initiatives. And our B-BBEE level has improved quite significant from the prior period where we were sitting at a 4, we're now sitting at a 2, and we will definitely be at 1 in a short space of time. CSI and community relations are key to our ESG initiatives. I think we engage quite keenly with communities around our properties. And I think our workforce obviously increasing in line with the portfolio. I think we had about 86 people. We've added another few people to the headcount. We're now sitting at 91 people. Just a reminder, we do everything in-house. There's only a little pocket of the portfolio that's managed externally, and we think that's really working great for us. We're also involved in various processes of trying to automate more just to improve our operating environment and become more efficient. And I think this automation is also contributing towards what you're seeing in terms of our cost growing slower than our revenue. I'll hand over to Sudesh.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#2

Thanks, Izak. Good morning, and thank you for your time today. As Izak alluded to, we've managed to perform and provide a solid set of results as illustrated by some of the highlights I put in front of you. Revenue has grown by 7% to ZAR 811 million, and that assisted us in achieving distributable earnings of ZAR 310 million, that's 20% up from the prior year, which combined has translated in achieving a dividend per share of ZAR 0.275 and this includes a 90% payout ratio, which is consistent with the prior period. Moving on to our balance sheet. Our balance sheet remains fairly strong, which is evident with our property portfolio. That has grown by just around 12%, up to ZAR 11.5 billion. And this includes a combination of some of the fair value positive adjustments that we saw in August, combined with some of our accretive acquisitions that we've done in the last 6 months. Our debt has increased but marginally by just over 5%, and that was required to assist us with regards to supporting our expansion. Combined with our property portfolio, these are the 2 single largest contributors to our NAV. They assisted in growing our NAV to ZAR 7.4 billion, that's 16% up from the prior period. If we have to move on to our distribution statement, you see that revenue has grown by 7%. And this is attributed to a couple of reasons. I think the first would be organic growth on our standard portfolio. This would be complemented by some accretive acquisitions that Izak alluded to earlier as well as improved occupancy levels in our portfolio. Whilst we have grown revenue by 7%, we've seen that property expenses have seen growth of just below 5%. These costs have been contained, and this is as a result of a couple of reasons. The first being a few cost initiatives that management have deployed successfully, and this was further complemented by our solar initiatives that enabled us to be less dependent on grid consumption. Combining this has resulted in our NPI growing by just below 9%, and this is obviously showing both top line growth and margin contraction as well at a property level. Our administrative costs have seen a slight increase of 12%, and this is largely attributed to certain once-off costs that were required in order to support once-off staff movements in the portfolio. Our finance cost has seen a saving of just below 11%, and this is as a result of the current interest rate environment. And we also managed our RCF efficiently by adding surplus funds, obviously, into our RCF over time. This takes us to a distributable earnings of just under ZAR 310 million, which is 20% up from the prior period. The composition of our portfolio remains fairly stable with a significant component in our retail sector. I think 2/3 of our total gross income is effectively from our retail sector, and it is a bias that we expect to continue in future. We have seen an increase in our industrial sector, and that's in line with our acquisitions we've seen over the last 6 months. The office and the residential sector has remained fairly stable from the prior period. We've seen that efficient cost management measures across all sectors have supported income growth and has assisted management in optimizing efficiency through the portfolio. In saying that our NPI is fairly consistent with the prior year with a particular bias towards retail. And as we move on to our growth aspirations, we do expect the bias towards retail, if anything, will increase. Our total cost-to-income ratio has improved from 43.5% to 42.8%. There has been significant improvements across all sectors. To touch on a few, we find that retail has remained fairly stable. There has been marginal improvement in the office sector. There have been larger improvements in the industrial and residential sectors, and these are also attributed to certain successful objections we made with regards to municipal tariffs and other costs we were successful on, and this impacted largely the residential and the industrial sector. Our admin cost-to-income ratio remains fairly competitive, still at a 4.2% cost-to-income ratio. Moving on to our statement of financial position. Our total assets has grown by just over 12%, and that's largely attributed to the growth in our property portfolio. We touched on it earlier. It's on the back of fair value positive adjustments, which we have seen towards the end of August 2025, and this was complemented by some of our accretive acquisitions that we've done in the current period, roughly around ZAR 700 million. Our working capital components, mainly receivables and cash is required -- we have seen growth or increases, and this was required to support the operations of our business, particularly with the requirement with higher municipal deposits required on several properties and other property-related guarantees provided. Taking into account our current interest rate environment, it's not surprising to see the fair valuation of our financial instruments being affected. What you can see is that in the prior period, we had a net asset position. And currently, you see a net liability position in terms of our swaps. Our debt has increased by just under 6%, and this was a requirement in order to support our growth expansion, where we completed this by a combination of increase in debt as well as capital raise, which you'll be familiar with. It takes us to a net asset position of ZAR 7.4 billion, that's 16% up from the prior year. And if we articulate this to a NAV per share, it's a growth of just over 4% to ZAR 7.3. This is quite an informative slide. I find that it gives you a good understanding on our debt profile as well as key treasury metrics. As mentioned previously, our balance sheet is in a very strong position with very conservative gearing with our LTV being currently at 34%. That's below the 36% in the prior year. Our ICR also has improved to 3.4x compared to 2.8x in the prior year. Our weighted average cost of capital has dropped from 9.3% to 9%, and our hedge position has improved to 73%. Our weighted average debt expiry has also improved from 3.1 years to 3.4 years, and our weighted average hedge expiry remains at 1.8 years. Towards the end of Feb, we managed to successfully refinance around ZAR 2 billion of our debt facility. And in doing so, we managed to increase the tenure of the ZAR 2 billion debt, increasing it by 2.5 years to -- sorry, 2.4 years to 4.8 years, and we also managed to improve our margin on the debt by a weighted average saving around 24 basis points. What this has done for us is it basically has left majority of our debt towards the medium-term horizon. It provides us some flexibility with regards to limited pressure regarding refinance in the near term. To summarize this slide, I think we are well positioned with regards to our debt profile, lower conservative debt, increased hedge cover, ICR improving and moving our expiries further out, it positions our business quite favorably in line with our growth aspirations. On the slide on the right, you do see our expiries. And what's important also to note is that we do have ZAR 800 million of hedges that are falling up within one year, but it's important to note that the bulk of these hedges are actually expiring in the month of August. And concluding on the cash flow slide, it's interesting in that it provides a good understanding of our cash flow movement within the 6-month period that's overlaid within the comparative period. An important point to draw from the cash flow slide is the strong ability of the fund with regards to cash generation ability from operations. We've had a positive inflow of ZAR 446 million inflows, which was required and utilized to support the increase in distributions year-on-year of ZAR 279 million. We've also embarked on our growth aspirations, as Izak alluded to. And that combined with CapEx on the portfolio, we required an outflow of ZAR 729 million. In order to fund this expansion, we've completed this by a combination of new debt of ZAR 250 million as well as a capital raise of ZAR 555 million. Considering all of these flows, it takes us to a closing cash balance at the end of Feb close to ZAR 110 million, and it puts us in a liquidity position considering our current cash balance as of a few days ago and our access to surplus funds to around ZAR 530 million currently. Thank you. Izak, back to you.

Izak Petersen

Executives
#3

It's time for -- just in conclusion, I suppose the big question in everybody's mind is the outlook for interest rates, what's next there. I wish we had a crystal ball. But I think regardless of what happens to interest rates in the next 2 months or so, we don't see that as a factor that would significantly influence our performance. Obviously, for 2026, that is obviously, if the situation is sustained, inflation tracks upward, and the reserve banks respond in a manner that they usually do and pressure on the customer continues and that sort of thing, there could be some medium-term implications there for the sector as a whole. So that's really something that we're keeping our eyes and our ears on the ground for. I think for us, it's key for us to focus on controllables. And that's basically work this portfolio hard, keep a close eye on costs and basically acquire in such a way that we make our sort of the defensive nature of our portfolio even more of a factor in terms of how we're running matters here. I think with adversity is always opportunity. We need to be on the lookout to see what opportunities this situation sort of throws our way. And definitely in the market for portfolio enhancing acquisitions in our key sectors, that being retail and industrial. And we will maintain, obviously, in the process, a very prudent capital allocation as we've been doing over the years shield that balance sheet from being too sensitive to sort of short-term spikes in interest rates. And we remain South Africa focused. Key things that have been driving our performance over the past 20 years, focus on being defensive, cover all key geographies in South Africa. Basically, we're out of the Northern Cape now because obviously, there isn't much density there from a retail perspective. But these northern parts of South Africa are still very interesting because the numbers are here and that sort of thing. So that's absolutely still our focus. And we have upgraded our guidance to 7% to about 8%. And obviously, I think in there is the assumption that the world doesn't tomorrow just come to an end because of what's going on. But there are some positive signs, I think with the U.S. President in China now, markets are responding very positively towards the [ thing ]. And hopefully, the situation in the Middle East will get sorted out soon. And then all these concerns that might slow down things would probably be something of the past. Thank you, and we'll open up the floor now for questions.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#4

Starting off with Anchor Stockbrokers. Trinity has a few questions. The first is Dipula has now a total capacity of 16-megawatt peak. Congratulations on this milestone. How does this fare relative to the portfolio energy consumption? And what are our future plans regarding solar expansion?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#5

Trinity, thank you for that question. I think, obviously, this has been trickling in over like a -- I think both of that is like, again, sort of end loaded towards sort of the latter part of this period, a lot of what we've added there. And there's still capacity to roll out more. That's not even covering 20% of our consumption at the moment. And we haven't even looked at things like storage and beds and all of that. So it's a long-term project for us or medium-term project for us, and we're looking at various ways of optimizing in that particular space.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#6

And a follow-up on that, Izak, is how much cost savings were attributed to solar expansion in the first 6 months? And how would this compare to 2025? I don't have that number. . .

Izak Petersen

Executives
#7

I don't have that exact number, but we can come back to you on that.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#8

Another question on Trinity. What drove the revaluation loss of ZAR 38 million on your residential portfolio? And why is this indicative of realizable value of ZAR 379 million, given that you plan to dispose of this portfolio in its entirety?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#9

So Trinity, I think if you recall, we had a fire incident in one of our residential assets that we're now busy rebuilding. So that asset has been written down and hence, that revaluation loss there. So it was related to that. So that should be reinstated to full value as we rebuild the asset.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#10

And second -- the first year, NOI run rate for residential and assuming you dispose the residential portfolio at current book value, at what yield would you need to recycle the capital for it to be accretive to NAV?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#11

Yes. So probably 9 and above would be where the recycling will be positive for us.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#12

Another question from Trinity. What is the average margin improvement on the ZAR 2 billion debt that was refinanced?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#13

It was 24 basis points.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#14

And what was the average premium discount to book on recent disposals?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#15

The disposals were around about book. I think there was a slide of that ZAR 150 million, I think about ZAR 6 million loss to book.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#16

From Catalyst Fund Managers, Marcus has a question. So if I take the 30.55 bps for interims and assume no increase in the second half, you already get to a 7% DIBs growth year-on-year. Are you expecting flat DIBs growth for the second half? This seems conservative considering a full period of lower debt costs and external coming online for the full period.

Izak Petersen

Executives
#17

Marcus, I think we've got a one-on-one with you sometime next year. Maybe we can unpack the numbers some more there and have a chat about how you're looking at the numbers and how we're looking at the numbers.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#18

Tony from Anchor Securities. To what extent is Fairvest involved and the contact between the 2 entities?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#19

To what extent is. . .

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#20

To what extent is Fairvest involved and the contact between the 2 entities?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#21

We're engaging with Fairvest along sort of similar lines to what we're doing with other shareholders and the relationship is very good.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#22

Daniel from Harvard House. Congrats on the strong set of results. Can we expect improved trading density growth in the second half of the year? And I understand that the first half was a high base. Was the trading density growth similar across all regions?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#23

So I can't really predict the trading density for the second half of the year because we're not -- we obviously receive these numbers about a month or 2 months after the retailers have done them. But I mean if I have to sort of answer that question sort of just applying my anecdotal sort of logic, it would appear that perhaps there's some pressure on retail now at the moment given the increase in fuel price and basically the inflation ticking up. So if inflation is going to affect volumes and fuel price is going to affect disposable incomes, then maybe you might actually have modest growth to sort of flattish growth, but that's entirely anecdotal. I mean I really don't need a crystal ball for that sort of thing. So what was the second part of your question?

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#24

And I understand that the first half was a high base. Was the trading density growth similar across all regions?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#25

Yes. From a region point of view, I think we gave you a bit of color about what happened in December, where basically a lot of the growth came out of Limpopo, KZN and the Eastern Cape in our portfolio. So again, sort of looking forward and ahead, I'm not quite sure what that number is going to be doing. We've got a funny year-end in that Feb and August are not big trading periods. And obviously, from a fair point of view, you've got December in between. But I mean, between now and August, you don't really have things that drive retail all that much. But obviously, every year is exactly the same in terms of how the holidays fall and how people's shopping patterns are. But we'll see what happens towards the end of the year. But I think the key thing is to maybe follow what feedback you're receiving from the retailers. But I mean, just generally speaking, the guys are expressing concern around inflation and what that might do to volumes and so on.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#26

Christian [ Seko ] from Standard Bank. Can you give us an idea of the yield expected on the retail redevelopments?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#27

Nine percent and higher is what we expect on those redevelopments.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#28

Okay. Lwando from Ninety One. How is management thinking about potential equity raises at current valuation levels?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#29

Yes. So I mean, I think we will never raise money just to either repay debt or sit on the cash type of thing. All equity raises are going to be based on -- if we do go to market, would obviously be based on a compelling acquisition story. That's basically our philosophy around it. So it's not -- we don't want to sit on massive amounts of excess liquidity -- but we really want to do things in a responsible way wherever we're raising, the acquisitions have to justify that. It has to be income enhancing at least income neutral at worst. But our key thing here in terms of where we're trying to position the company is portfolio improvement, resilience improvement. I mean that's the key thing in the Board's mind when they think about capital raises.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#30

And Seko has one more question. What proportion of your industrial portfolio? Is it logistics focused versus manufacturing?

Izak Petersen

Executives
#31

We've got very little manufacturing. In fact, no manufacturing whatsoever. I mean we've got light industrial type facilities. So between sort of many units and basically logistics, that's the lion's share of our industrial portfolio. We do have a slide, I think in our year-end presentation that breaks down those industrial assets into their subcomponents. So I will just send you that information.

Sudesh Moodley

Executives
#32

That's all the questions.

Izak Petersen

Executives
#33

So thank you very much and all the best for the volatility.

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