Eastnine AB (publ) (EAST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and very warm welcome to Eastnine's Third Quarter Presentation. My name is Kestutis Sasnauskas; and with me, Britt-Marie Nyman, Deputy CEO and CFO. And today, we will guide you through our third quarter results of 2025. Before I start, I urge you to post your questions during our presentation, and we will answer them right after the presentation is done. So let's move into the third quarter. We continue experiencing tailwinds in our operations. Our rental revenue is growing 45% in comparable portfolio at 3.1%. Profit from property management up 48% and per share is 35%. All of these figures depend very much on our last acquisition in Poland, and this growth is mainly attributed to that. But we're also very, very happy to see strong performance in comparable portfolio as well. We also have positive value changes in our portfolio, though slight, there's no dramatic change, mainly driven by growing market rental levels in the market, which result into positive revaluation of our portfolio. We also refinanced some of our debt and increased our leverage a little bit. This is all in preparation for further -- future acquisitions. During the quarter, we concluded an extended a lease contract with ROCKWOOL, one of our key tenants in Poznan. The contract grew from almost 7,000 square meters to over 9,000 square meters and extend for another 7 years. We're also working on establishing operations in Poland. We have country manager in place since August already and 4 employees starting in December and February. So all in all, business is as planned. If we look over period, continued growth figures are more impressive. Again, rental revenue growing 59% and comparable portfolio at strong 4.4%. Profit from property management, up 49% and per share 36%. So again, very strong performance. Unrealized value changes at EUR 24 million over the period. Net letting slightly negative, but we are coming from very high level of occupancy with closer to 97%, slight drop from last quarter, but still significantly above the start of the year. Surplus ratio at almost 94%. Again, very strong operational metrics continue. So if we look at Eastnine at a glance, we are a property company in the fastest-growing part of Europe with core markets today being Poland, followed by Lithuania and Latvia. And if you look on overall size, I mean, we have 272,000 square meters, almost EUR 1 billion in property assets, 97% occupancy rate. We expect our annual revenue to reach EUR 62 million, properties yield 6.1% with 47% leverage and average interest of 4.4%. And you can see some of the names of our key tenants. I will go into that a little bit later in the presentation. If you look at Eastnine as a long-term investment over the last 10 years, the share outperformed most of our benchmarks, both EPRA index and -- this is EPRA Developed Market Index and Real Estate Index in Stockholm, so both in euro and SEK. And if we look on the targets that we -- of course, our overreaching target is to deliver attractive return -- total return to shareholders, but also growth with high profitability as we have continued doing it right now. So over the year, we return our investment through Eastnine, returned around 8%, over the 5-year period, around 18%. Our property portfolio is growing 47% over 1 year and an average of 24%. And this is the ambition that we intend to continue on this growth. If you look historically on our asset base, assets more than doubled over the 5 years, and profit from property management close to 3x. So if we look a little bit on the sort of the market and the long-term trends, and I continue talking about it, it's just very, very important to understand where we are. We are actually in the fastest part of Europe -- fastest-growing part of Europe, with Poland topping the growth over the last 25 years. But even for the next coming 5 years, the growth in Poland is expected to be among the highest in Europe. So are the other 2 Baltic markets, which are considerably smaller, but at the same time, developing and evolving extremely nicely. Again, if you look at the growth parameter, is very important, but it comes as well with very nice investment metrics. We are in the market with the lowest rental levels and in combination with the highest yields. The capital values are significantly below of the surrounding markets, which is a kind of wrong assumption in the longer term. I think that this gap will sometime close. We don't know when it -- of course, there's certain factors affecting it. But I think it is very, very important to remember that this combination, again, in combination with the same financing opportunities as we have in the other European markets is very, very compelling. If we look at the market per se, I think we are in a bit of a different universe compared to our Nordic peers. We are in a market where rental levels are growing in general and especially in the sort of prime segment. And if we look over the last 5 years, the rental levels in markets like Vilnius increased by 41%; Riga, 19%; Warsaw, 18%; and Poznan, 16%. So positive dynamics, and this dynamic started to accelerate even more over the last 2, 3 years, mainly driven by increased construction costs and inflation. So it's not a kind of market sentiment-driven. It's more driven by the underlying cost, et cetera. So still a very, very positive environment. The demand also remains very strong in our segment. If we look on the yields, we, again, in the market were -- probably the shift in yields have happened pretty quickly. If you look on Warsaw, we are up 150 basis points compared to the lowest levels back in '21, 125 bps in the Baltics and Poznan around 100 bps. Of course, Poznan comes from a significantly higher level already. So that change of 100 bps is pretty motivated. But the positive thing is over the last 2 years, these yields are now stabilizing, and we see that probably with dropping financing costs, those yields are probably peaking in general. And if you look on maybe separate transactions, this kind of gap from the top to the -- from the bottom to the top, is closer to 200 bps if we look in places like Warsaw. The other important aspect of the vacancies in the market. In general, we see that vacancies have increased over the years in all markets. It's probably following the sort of normal global trends. Warsaw is the only market that actually is more or less flat since the level of 2017. And it is -- these are statistics for the total market. If we look for prime segment, these statistics differ quite a lot. But if you look on our portfolio, our occupancy was very stable over the years at a very high level, above 90% all the time. And today, we are still at 96.7%. And we also are in the market of increasing rents. And if you look on sort of the graph on the right, you see the latest trends in our core buildings and the rents are upwards -- ticking upwards. And this is, again, a little bit different sentiment from most what we see in other markets. But the prime segment, prime properties in best locations, they continue to deliver very stable returns, and they are in a very high demand as most of the tenants are actually looking for higher quality products. So this flight-to-quality trend continues and is very, very strong in our region. If we look on our portfolio overall, 31% of the value is in Warsaw, 22% in Poznan and Vilnius with 40% remains our biggest market. We are very focused on offices. We basically do only office, so 96% of our portfolio is only entire -- dedicated to offices. And those offices are very modern. So despite these very high yields, this is a very, very modern and young portfolio. If we look on our tenant base, we are exposed to the most exciting part of the economy. It's IT, it's finance, it's e-com, it's medical health and medical segment. And in general, if you look on our tenant list, these are very strong, either very strong local regional players or multinationals. And of course, the best properties attract the strongest tenants. WAULT is at 3.6 years. Average rent still very low, which is at almost SEK 2,500 per square meter. And this is in the prime segment again. So it's -- we should not forget that. There is just a slide to show you our portfolio. I mean, it's the same as it was in the previous quarters. We haven't done any acquisitions yet. And if we look on sustainability part, 100% of our portfolio is sustainability certified. We certify under LEED and BREEAM standards. And in BREEAM, we only have Outstanding, and in LEED, we have -- most of our properties are -- or almost all of our properties are in Platinum and only one in Gold, which is again the highest standards of environmental certification. 82% of our revenue is EU taxonomy aligned. Green financing stands for 88% of our total financing. We received 5 stars in GRESB with 91 points, and we are among top 20 in our -- in the -- all universe of real estate companies. We are #2 in our segment of listed peers in Europe, I think. And if you look on our energy performance, we continue working very hard on reducing our energy intensity in the buildings. This year, so far, we reduced our energy intensity by 4.5%. And if we look on -- this is in total portfolio. And if we look on our buildings per se, without tenant electricity, it's down 7.2%. So on this, I will leave over to you, Britt-Marie, to discuss more the quarterly figures.

Thank you very much, Kestutis. Once again, new record results from Eastnine, both during the quarter and the period. This is mainly due to the acquisitions in Poland last year, of course. You can see that both rental income and net operating income increased substantially. But it's also good to see that income in a comparable portfolio increases by 3% in the quarter and 4% in the period, and this is related to indexation and the higher occupancy in average. The acquisitions, of course, also increased the interest expenses and decreased the interest income since we used partly cash in the acquisitions, while the increase in expenses was partly offset by decreased interest rate level. We saw profit from property management increasing by nearly 50%, both during the quarter and the period, and we saw positive unrealized value changes for properties during the quarter -- third quarter and the first quarter, meaning that the period was also positive. This was related to changes in Poland. History is, of course, important, but future potential is even more important. And in the earnings capacity, we compare the situation by the end of previous quarter and also 1 year back. It's a theoretical assessment. It's not a prognosis. And as you can see, the profit from property management compared to 1 quarter back decreased by 3%, and this is because we had slightly lower occupancy by the end of September this year compared to the end of June. And we also saw an increase in interest expenses in the earning capacity due to the additional loans that we decided upon in the end of September. If you compare 1 year back in the earning capacity, we had -- we can see a huge increase during this 12 months, 33% on the bottom line profit from property management, and this is, of course, related to the acquisition of Warsaw units in November last year. A little bit about financing and some key figures. The LTV decreased somewhat during the last quarter, down from 48% to 47% after amortizations and increased property values. The liquidity is slightly higher after additional financing. The interest rate level and the ICR on the same level. The debt ratio continues to decrease and capital tie-up period increased after additional and new financing -- additional and refinancing, sorry, and the fixed interest period slightly lower, but we have some new swaps starting during the fourth quarter, which will have an effect on both fixed interest period and the share of fixed interest. And as you can see, we don't have any maturities left in 2025. These EUR 2 million, as you can see, they are only amortizations. And we also said in the report that related to the very good market conditions on the credit market, we might even refinance something more early before maturity. So we are looking into that, and not really much maturing in '26, '27 and '28, a little bit more in '29, of course. The debt sources are the same as in the end of previous quarter, except for a change. SEB is nowadays our largest bank after the additional financing during the third quarter, followed by Berlin Hyp, Erste and Helaba. The property value has increased by 47% during the last year. And the main reason is the acquisition in Poland in November. But if we look at the unrealized value changes for properties, they were EUR 5 million during the third quarter versus -- which is up 0.5% versus second quarter. And the yield requirements, they were unchanged during the quarter, 6.6%. If you look into the share, you can see that the liquidity and the trading in the share has increased substantially during this year, 216% for the first 9 months, up compared to the same period last year. The number of shareholders has also increased, up 8%, 6,400. NAV increased by 4% during the first 9 months in SEK and 7% in euro. And total return for the shareholders during the last year is 8% 12 months and in average during the last 5 years, 18%. So that was all.

So before we conclude, of course, we are in the active phase of preparation for new acquisitions. We're accumulating bigger cash positions. And of course, we work continuously on looking into opportunities to grow our portfolio primarily in Warsaw.

So please continue posting questions. We will start by answering those we already received. The first one. Hi, and once again, congrats to yet another strong report. Could you, if possible, elaborate a bit more around size, in million euro, overcoming acquisition? And is it currently only Warsaw that's in focus for Eastnine?

Of course, we are focusing primarily on Warsaw because Warsaw is where we see the biggest opportunities to build our position. We could do something in the markets we are already existent as well. We don't exclude that, but Warsaw is our key priority today. In terms of size, I think it would be inappropriate to comment. But we believe that we have a really very strong balance sheet today with 9x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. And if we look on forward-looking figures, it's going down to 8.4%. So of course, we have a possibility to increase a little bit our leverage and, of course, do quite significant acquisitions. We normally do relatively sizable transactions.

[ In your ] markets, do you expect highest upside from rental growth or yield compression?

It's very difficult to speculate about the yield compression. But of course, implications of yield compressions are huge. Should the yields start going down, we would see very, very significant uplift in values. At the same time, cash flow is something that we work very hard to make sure that it continues growing and our earnings per share continue growing at a very strong pace. So focus is very much on that. Of course, the rental levels and the rental contracts normally are longer. They are fixed for a longer period of time. So we have a kind of inflationary adjustments. And you can see actually in our like-for-like growth over the 9 months, we are growing a bit faster than the average inflation, we are doing 4.4% like-for-like growth versus inflation of just below 2 -- around 2 or something, if I recall correctly. So -- but since we have contracted rents, maybe the yield could happen -- moves can happen faster.

Given how supportive banks are right now, how much higher leverage are you comfortable with in terms of LTV or net debt related to EBITDA? Perhaps, we shouldn't give an exact figure, but somewhat higher at least. As Kestutis said, the net debt in relation to EBITDA is only 9 today, and it's decreasing further if you look at the earnings capacity. So I would say it's a bit higher at least then and no problem...

I think in general, I mean, we would try to keep it over time just below 10, definitely just to be on a prudent side. At the same time, it could initially go over 10x when we do acquisitions with the potential of reducing it over next coming 12 months as it happened when we did acquisition of Warsaw units. So in general, you should look on the long-term or maybe earnings capacity figure for what we target, and we probably target somewhere to be around 10 or in a comfortable zone, just below 10.

Are you considering taking up bond financing? And if so, what terms, interest rate and amount issued could we expect from a bond issue? I would say some time, yes, I guess, but it's not right now, perhaps because the interest from banks are -- it's very, very good in the market with very low margins, meaning that with our fairly low LTV, we can still borrow some more money in the banks. It's not a problem. So as long as that possibility is cheaper than bond financing, I guess, it will be the best for us, but sometime in the future, yes.

Yes. I guess, it's very much driven by transaction to transaction. So should there be a very attractive transaction that we can actually use part of the financing with bonds, we will do it as well.

And all these questions will be related to what kind of acquisitions we actually do.

Exactly. So everything is very much related for the further acquisitions. But today, we are accumulating cash for further acquisitions by refinancing by debt mainly.

Update on dividend policy, 30% of EPS. What is long-term goal for increase in EPS per year or next 5 years, dividend per share should increase in line with EPS growth? I don't think that we actually can say anything more about that. That will be a decision for the Board to give a proposition for the AGM. In the end, we have our dividend policy to follow.

But the dividend policy that is communicated is 30% of the profit from property management after tax. And of course, we also said that we expect the dividends to grow as our profit from property management is growing very rapidly. So in general, I think this is -- there's nothing new to communicate, yes.

I guess, that was it. Any more questions? So please post them.

Okay. It seems that no more questions are coming in. So thank you very much for listening to us today, and we look forward to present to you another exciting Q4. Thank you.

Hopefully. In February. Thank you.