Echo Investment S.A. ($ECH)

Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you at the quarterly results presentation of Echo Investment. And it's safe to say that we started this year strongly. My name is Weronika Ukleja. I'm the company spokesperson. And today, we're going to talk about the first couple of months of 2026 and Echo Group's solid performance. The details will be presented to you by our top management. So please welcome Nicklas Lindberg, our CEO; and Maciej Drozd, our CFO. Good morning, gentlemen. After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. So if you have any questions, please stay with us until the end. And now without any further ado, Please, Maciej, take it away.

Thank you. So we indeed had a great quarter. So let's look at the highlights of what exactly happened, what were the main events of that period. So firstly, we had strong residential sales, 13% increase year-on-year. We sold 602 apartments in that period. We also handed over 730 apartments, and that was a huge increase compared to 24 that we handed over in 2025. Warsaw City Council approved our project in Kabaty which will be a great project in that area of Warsaw, which is close to forest, and we are very, very proud of the future project that we deliver to inhabitants of Warsaw. We sold Brain Park A, which is the second phase, which was sold in the development for 34 million. And we had a profit of 10 million compared to the loss of 85 million a year ago. And we also continued the leverage by repaying 50 million of Echo bonds in February '26. But we didn't stop there. So after the end of the quarter, we got antimonopoly clearance for the landmark deal of the sale of 5,300 apartments by Resi4Rent, our subsidiary. What we say on this slide is that the closing is planned in May 2026. And I have great news because we just closed this deal this morning. So it's signed, it's official. It was announced. So we are very, very happy, and Nicklas will tell you more about this landmark deal that was just closed. We continue office developments. We sold the last phase of Brain Park project in Krakow for 40 million, but we're also starting the project. So in Q2, we started another phase in our landmark development of Towarowa22. We repaid 40 million of public bonds maturing in that period, and we got financing for 2 modern studentitaries in Warsaw in total 1,000 beds. So we continue to develop also in that area. Let's have a quick look at our financial data. So net profit for that period was over PLN 10 million, and it was in line with consensus. So no surprise. And again, it was much better than a year ago, but we'll talk about the details of what caused the change, what caused the improvement and what are the drivers of our results closer to the end of this presentation. So again, what were the main events that you would like to highlight that happened in this period. And on this slide, you have a total of buildings that we sold this year and that we still plan to sell. So we sold again, 2 phases of Brain Park in Krakow. We just closed Resi4Rent portfolio sale but we still have 2 other buildings in cities in Rroontrancco for sale. So it's for Swobodna and Wita projects. By doing that, we release cash and we apply the cash according to our strategy to reduction of debt to dividend and to new projects. On the following slides, you have more details of projects that were sold, and they were all sold because of great tenants, very high technical quality, green certificates that we obtained for these buildings and great location. On this slide, you see the details of Resi4Rent landmark transaction, PLN 2.4 billion value of transaction, 6.3% yield and really truly landmark transaction for -- not only for Poland, but for the entire CEE market. So where does it take us? What are strategic directions that we are taking? In the Commercial sector, we focus on new projects in Warsaw CBD. We continue to develop and divest projects in regional cities, but our new focus is really Warsaw CBD as proven by our Towarowa22 projects and by acquisition of new projects at Koka Street next to our landmark brewery development. In leading sector, we continue to develop Aricom, in particular, in popular segment. We continue to develop PRS projects in Resi4Rent, and we continue to develop student space platform where we have new 1,000 beds under construction in Warsaw. In finance, we repay project debt, obviously, when we sell the projects, but we also repay debt at the corporate level and more details will be following. We invest money that comes from this sales in CBD, Warsaw developments, and we obviously continue to pay dividends. On this slide, you have details related to what I just said about the sources and uses of funds. So at the top of the slide, you can see what already happened from the 2024 until now, until May 2026. So we have generated free cash flow of around 680 million from the disposals after repayment of project debt. And it was applied for the debt reduction of over 300 million, dividend payment over 300 million and also acquisition of a project in Warsaw CBD. At the bottom, you see the transaction that just closed. So it is described as something to be settled, but yes, it will be settled in a few days. But now it's closed. And it will generate for Echo for us free cash flow of around 300 million. And again, we will apply it to further debt reduction to dividend payment and also to acquisition of projects in Warsaw. So all of that leads us to a more capital-efficient business, a business when we invest less equity, but achieve better, more efficient results from what we are doing. It is important also to draw your attention to our landmark projects because our company is really mainly about projects that we are doing. And obviously, Towarowa22 is the main such project. We are advancing. We are already -- we have already completed one project and sold it to our partner. We started last year another office building. We started this year, next office building and also we are starting residential projects in Archicom. One of them will be completed this year and the second started this year. If you look at the map that is in front of you, you see these areas with different colors. So the voilet part is already completed. So we developed this office building, and we sold it last year. You see green area in the center, and this is very, very unique Tofecta Park, which is a great value for both for tenants and for people who are buying residential apartments. And residential apartments are blue color, and they are developed by Archicom. And as I already mentioned, Archicom is close to complete the first building and started this year another residential building in this blue area. And at the top, you see the orange part which we developed together with our JV partner, AFI. We started here one office building and 1 residential building, and we also -- and it was already last year, and we started this year another 12,000 building in the left part of this orange area. So you can see that now the entire area is under development. And in a few years, it will be new Warsaw -- new part of Warsaw that everybody will be proud of. Nicklas?

Thank you, Maciej. Talking about the living and resi for sale market that we -- like Maciej said before, we had a strong first quarter of the year. We increased our sales by 13%. We continue seeing that we will increase further in the coming quarters. So we're still maintaining our targets that we had before to sell between 3,200 and 3,500 apartments. We handed over 730 versus 24 last year. Here, we're going to continue focusing on hitting our target of handing over about 3,000 apartments this year. We see here also that what is the most important thing for us in Archicom today is the popular segment. We are growing in the popular segment in all the different markets, especially a big focus today is on Warsaw, where we're having a lot of projects ongoing as a landmark project in the city center, where we are focusing now to be able to grow more in the popular segment. We are constantly buying more land for our portfolio to continue growing to hit our continuous rising targets. So the long-term target is still that we're going to hit 4,000 sold per year and then being on the top developers in Poland. You see on the market that now you see that it's stabilizing. You see there is a strong sale on all the different markets. We see that we're hitting the top leading position in many of the markets where we're being present. We also see now that, that has happened historically peak of starting new projects has slowed down, and we see the sales are catching up. So we are very positive about the residential market, but we see a lot of potential for us to continue growing and taking a stronger part of that market. Here is how you see the slide I talked about how we are growing in the popular segment, where we want to have half of our portfolio in the popular segment that we're going to hit this year. And going forward, we're going to keep that balance between the popular segment and the segment where Archicom has historically having the most of their projects ongoing. So this is a plan that we have been talking about for multiple quarters here. We are implementing the plan. We are keeping the profitability on all our projects, but we continue growing and creating our landmark destination project, but this is very appreciated by the clients on the market. You see here the sales, how it's going between the different quarters and also seeing forward how much we are selling in the different cities around Poland. Here, we continue growing in all our markets. Katvits is a market where we now did a project, and we're not going to continue doing that project. Long term, we have said that market is something we're evaluating to be replaced by Tri-City, which is always an interesting market for us to continue looking at. We're having it on our radar. We are monitoring. We make sure when it's the right moment to enter, we will enter the Tri-City market. Today, we also see here a good potential to continue growing in Warsaw. And that is one of the main focuses we're having today to continue growing in the popular segment of Warsaw, which is the biggest market in Poland, where we need to take a bigger market share going forward, especially in the popular segment. Handovers, you see compared to last year, we will have a much more balanced handover between the different quarters that we had earlier. And we are positive that we're going to hit the targets of the handovers. And here, we are focusing a lot now to make sure that we hand over apartments, we make sure that they are delivered to clients on time at the right quality that the clients are looking for. The offer around the different market is today around 3,200 apartments. We're going to start up a lot of the apartments now in Q2, but it's not visible here. But also roughly, we want to have around 4,000 apartments in offer constantly to make sure that we have 1 year of sale always in the offer on the different markets. And here, you see we're growing dramatically in Warsaw, Rrosla and also in Krakow, that is the most popular market on the Polish market. You also see Wuch and Poznan that are very strong markets for us in Wuch we are selling a lot of apartments, the same in Poznan, where we are the dominant players in the market. We are in 6 different markets. Tri-City and Warsaw is where we see the most potential growth, where we're going to continue putting a lot of focus now going forward. And as I said before, for us, Warsaw is in the popular segment, in the outskirts of Warsaw, where we want to take a much bigger market share where we're having today. And we think with our quality and our competence and to deliver the right product for that market, we can take a much bigger market share as well on the popular segment in Warsaw. In the living and Resi4Rent that has been a very, very interesting market for us. We were the pioneers getting into the Resi4Rent market. And now as we said today, Maciej said before, we closed the deal where we sold 5,300 apartments to TAG, which is a landmark deal of EUR 575 million. So it's a very big deal. But to be very clear here, we are still very, very much focused on the Resi4Rent market. We will have this year 3,000 under operations by the year-end, and we continue starting up another 1,000 apartments, and we are really focusing here to grow again up a new platform in this area. So to be clear there, what we have sold off is the assets we are keeping still the Resi4Rent and we continue growing it. We are also finishing Aio projects, unit-by-unit sale, both in Brotzla and in Warsaw. In Brozla, we are now fully sold. In Warsaw, we will be fully sold by the summer, which has been a very clear signal that we have a very, very good product that we can sell off also unit by unit in the areas that it's on the residential zoning. And especially the brewery has had a very, very big interest. We will be able to have sold 450 units in a very short period of time at the top end of the Polish market. This here is an example that the market is working. And this is the first institutional sale of this size. And I think this is also one of the deals that is going to fundamentally change the PRS or Resi4Rent market in Poland. And we see already now there is a lot of interest for new players to enter. And also to be clear, the institutional market or the Resi4Rent market in Poland is just in the beginning. It has a lot of potential to grow and it's still a very small part of the market compared to many other mature markets around Europe. So here, we are a very, very strong believer. We want to continue growing. And this is as part of the strategy that Maciej talked about before. We want to have an asset-light strategy. When we build up a big platform, we will divest and then we will reinvest, like Maciej said before, in reducing our debt, paying dividend and continue investing in the platforms. So this is in line with the model of Echo in all the different areas. And here is a little bit saying how we had the platform until today and how we continue growing. In the coming quarters, we're going to talk a lot more about how we're growing the platform, what we continue doing, how we are focusing on building up a new platform for the future where we, again, it's going to go above 5,000 apartments, which is really showing that we are -- continuous focusing in this markets. We continue striving to be among the market leaders in the market, but we will always recycle the capital back to our shareholders. Living segment and student housing is another very, very interesting part of our business. We started it close to 2 years ago. We have 3,000 beds secured. We have 1,200 ready, and we have 1,100 under construction. We are now going to hand over already this year 500 beds, but we're going to hand over in September this year for the new academic year, which means that already after 2 years of operation, we will have 1,700 beds up and running, which shows really how quickly we have been able to grow this platform on a market where we see a huge potential. Here, we are focusing on 2 cities. We are focusing in Warsaw, and we are focusing in Krakow at the moment. And here, we see potential to continue growing. We're going to start up more projects and we're going to see how we can continue building another successful platform going forward. And also during this period, we get financing for 2 of our assets. The difference between students and Resi4Rent is that the students have rooms around 14 to 16 square meters, in average students is 33 square meters. So it's a totally different building we're doing. We're doing much more social areas. We focus on the green areas. We focus on all areas around. And I think what we are delivering here is a unique product to the market that is really going to be appreciated by students and their parents going forward. We have done it in Krakow where you see some pictures here. One of them is in Krakow Wita, that is our destination project that we are this year finishing with the last office buildings, and then we'll be ready for full project where we really have transformed a big part of the city. And we do this all in prefab. So in that way, we will be quickly able to deliver the project to the market, which is crucial in this area. From we start until we deliver, it's a very quick period of time. Here, you see the different projects that we're doing. You see Warsaw, the 2 projects. And Warsaw is a very, very important market, both for Resi4Rent and for students. And this is where we put a lot of our potential to continue growing. We have been extremely successful in securing land in Warsaw, which has -- which is and will be going forward, a very difficult task. So here, we have a very good team on the ground securing land. We are building it quickly, and we're delivering great projects to the students. So I'm very hopeful for this part of our business. Commercial office and retail. During this quarter here, we have now sold off Brain A in the first building. We have construction on Swobodna that is now 16,000 square meters. It's really up and running now. We are now advancing in the last leases. So in the coming months, we will be above 80% leased in this building. And we see also that we are starting up both the office tower that we started last year on Towarowa, and we're also starting up the next building. We see all our office markets a very, very strong interest from tenants. They are really looking forward to the projects we're delivering. There's a scarcity of new projects being delivered, which I think we have a huge benefit of being able to continue having a business that is standing on multiple legs and can continue growing on businesses where other ones having a struggle to continue developing. The fundamentals are great. We see rental growth on all our markets. Vacancy is going down, and this is in the new build. In the secondary market, we see there is much more of a struggle. And most of these projects today, we are looking at conversion to convert them into other uses, which will benefit us as well to grow our other parts of our business. The pipeline is the lowest for a very, very long time. So this is a fundamentals that is really telling us to do more offices. That's why we have been very bullish of starting up new offices in Warsaw and also we are completing ones in the regional cities. And in the coming months, we will then deliver to you also very strong leasing results in all these projects. So what we said before, like Maciej is saying, it's crucial for us to continue growing our business in Warsaw and finding more land. We see that from the investors also, both local and international investors, Poland comes more and more on the radar. And this is a market where you want to invest, you see growth. You see that there is a lot of people coming back to the office. You see there is a new development, and you also see a lot of hard-working people here. I really think this is a shift in the fundamentals of the market, and we will see a totally different capital allocation to Poland as a market that is very interesting as a growing market. Swobodna is a fantastic building that we have built next to midpoint that we sold a couple of years ago. It's a beautiful building spot on in the city center of Rotla that we have delivered with terraces on multiple floors that is really showing -- this is something that is really for new tenants coming back after COVID, having a place that is between offices and the home. So it really is an interesting place. Wita is a part of a destination project next to the railway station in Krakow. It's a fantastic location. And here, we have a very, very high leasing interest. And shortly, we will come back to you with some more positive results on this one. But it really has been a success with this project, and this is one of the projects we are very proud to be delivering in Krakow. If you look from a construction point of view, we have a lot of office projects under construction. I think in this aspect, we are now the biggest office developer in Poland, continue starting up new projects. We have a very high pre-leasing ratio in all our projects. And you will see in the coming quarters, we're going to report a lot of leases coming up in all the different projects we're having all over Poland. So from my perspective, I'm very, very bullish about the office market going forward. Guboska is one of the projects that we bought now that Maciej said before, opposite of brewery, where we're going to then demolish the existing building and building a 20,000 square meter office in the city center, just opposite of brewery where we delivered before 108,000 square meters of mixed use. So we are really going back to basic. This is our home turf. This is what we know, and this is where we're going to continue delivering new projects for the investors and for the tenants. CitySpace is a business that we have talked about for a long time. We have now renegotiated the old leases. We continue focus on making sure that we deliver the best offices on the market. What you see here as there's a scarcity of new office being delivered, there's a huge interest in doing short-term leases with CitySpace. So we see this business growing. We will open up more locations going forward. It is a profitable business for us today now, and we're going to continue focusing on growing this business to make sure that we deliver good results for our shareholders and also make sure that we have a good complement to our offices, but this is focused on Warsaw. We're going to continue being much bigger than we are today in the Warsaw office market. Galleria and Mini continue doing a stable performance. We see tenants are renegotiating. We see that we are continue having a higher turnover. We are also seeing that this area here where we activate the outdoor areas, we continue getting more new tenants in there. We see this is really a center that we believe in. We're going to stabilize it. And I think this year or next year, we have stabilized the center, and then we are constantly monitoring what's the next to do with this center in line with our strategy of never keeping assets longer than they mature, and we think we can get the right value out of the assets. From an ESG perspective, which is super important for us, we are focusing on being sure that we can do the reduction, we can do the decarbonization, but also what Maciej said before, what is important for us over the ESG criteria is also to deliver the 2 hectares parks that we do in Towarowa, but we're really giving back things that is visible to the inhabitants of the cities, and we're bringing back a lot of green areas to the cities, which I think many of the Polish cities are missing today is these green areas that makes the whole city center come back to life.

Okay. So thank you. So let's go back to the financials, and let's look in more detail at what we delivered in Q1. So obviously, you can see the strong margin driven by handovers and by 30% achieved margin on sales, which is in line with our strategy. It is driven by the mix of projects. Of course, this can vary from quarter-to-quarter, higher in premium segment, a little bit lower in popular segment, but 30% is a good result, and we are satisfied. Fair value gain had a small impact on the result, but I think we should focus on the cost now and see that selling expenses are flat year-on-year despite of the fact that the sales are growing in Archicom and of course, promotion of the brand, Archicom collection is an expensive exercise. So that's a big part of this cost, but they are flat already. Also, if you look at general and administrative expenses, you can see some growth but actually, most of this growth is really driven by the change in long-term incentive provision. So actually, it's good news because it reflects the growing value of the company. It's a noncash expense. You can see that our financial costs, the interest went down. Our net financial costs went down by around 10 million. We have negative movement on foreign -- on FX on our liabilities and -- but that's reversible depending on, of course, on the level of euro to PLN rate. So we are more focused on driving down in a sustainable way our cash interest that we pay, and this happened. We are 10 million lower, but we intend to push it even more further down. We got a positive contribution from our JVs. And the end result is 10 million, which is positive and in line with the consensus. When we look at our balance sheet, we don't see a lot of movement compared to year-end. But what we clearly see is that our inventory went slightly up, and this is reflecting growing residential business. So obviously, it's a good sign. We have marked here assets to be disposed. So Brain B is already done. Vitaraaku and Sport Rosa, as Nicklas mentioned, is something closer to the year-end. And at the bottom, you also see in JV section and in that section, you have Resi4Rent portfolio as part of it. And as we already said, we expect a very big inflow coming from that part. So we will convert that value into cash. And speaking about cash, at the end of Q1, it was strong, close to 400 million, which is a good level and giving us a lot of comfort. When we look at our liabilities, again, not a lot of movement, but clearly, long-term financial debt went down. Prepayments of residential customers went up, financing high inventory, financing growing business of Archicom. And what is highlighted on this slide is a 31.7% net debt ratio which is the ratio that we would achieve at the end of Q1 if both Brain B and Resi4Rent transaction happened in Q1, right? And the reason why we decided to highlight that is to show you the clear trend on which we are moving to the lower net debt ratio, and we want to continue that in the coming quarters. So when we look at the liability profile, you can see that not much is remaining in 2026 to be repaid. It's only 65 million of bonds that are maturing this year. But when we look at '27, '28, I would divide it into 2 parts. The gray part is these are bonds that are issued by Archicom. And in Archicom, our plan is, of course, to continue to grow the business, and we do not have fundamental need to decrease liabilities. We will use that opportunity to finance growth of Archicom as needed. But in Echo, we have a clear direction, and this is lower part, the green part of this graph, where we want and we will continue to decrease these values. So they will go down. We reduce it from free cash flow coming from asset disposals. And we do this in a proactive way as well. So we will not necessarily wait for the maturity of these bonds, but we'll use call options to prepay them earlier. So that's the plan. And I want to repeat that we have 2 parts, Archicom part, which is stable and that will be used and Echo part where we want to proactively reduce these debt levels before maturities. Dividend, we already actually paid advance for dividends coming from 2025 year. So it was PLN 0.80 per share, high level. And our strategy looking forward is, as was already said, is to use cash coming from disposals, from deals to pay dividend, to reduce debt and to continue to invest in our business. Thank you.

Thank you, gentlemen. I think it's time for our Q&A session. And I'm happy to start with congratulations because we received from our viewers, congratulations on our great quarter. Thank you. We appreciate it. And the question follows concerning our closing of the deal with Resi4Rent. And when do we expect financial windfall from Resi4Rent deal? After debt repayment, how much that free cash flow do we see this transaction unlocking for us? Maciej please take it.

Sure, sure. So I think that free cash flow actually was already mentioned in one of the slides. So that's over 300 million coming net, meaning after all the debt repayments, et cetera, at Resi4Rent. So this is money coming to Echo, which is cash, we can apply it as we want. And this is going to come part of it shortly, almost immediately, part within a few months, but it will be definitely in a short period of time where we can use this money as we wish.

Thank you. We already talked a little bit about student-based platform and our plans for its future development. Nicklas, can you please talk in detail because we have 1 project -- 2 projects in Krakow. We are preparing for more. So what's the future plan for the platform concerning -- which cities do we consider for it to grow?

Today, we have decided we have done Krakow to start with, then we've done Warsaw. We're not going to do more students in Krakow because we have 2 dominant players student homes there. We're going to continue doing more in Warsaw, which is the market that we see potential for further growth in. Another market that we are analyzing, but we are still in the early stages is in Rrotla's an interesting market also to enter. But at the moment now, we are focusing on Warsaw.

Warsaw. Okay. And next question about student housing. Have we got investors interested in the student houses?

Student houses is in the early stage. We started 2 years ago, like we said before, we want to build up to 3,000 to 5,000 apartments or student homes before we're starting to look for an investor in this one. So at the moment, we are not actively looking for investors. We'll continue building a platform. We are more focusing on operations. We're leasing it out. We're delivering a platform. We get all the procedures and routines into place. So this question is too early. The platform is not in that stage to be stabilized and for us to look for investors for the platform because for the simple reason, we don't think we got the full value out of the assets yet.

Okay. So this question will take in a year or so. But changing the subject for a second because Nicklas, you highlighted a lot that we are focusing on CBD of Warsaw, but we have a question about our future projects in regional cities. When do we expect sentiment for this office markets to improve?

It's very difficult to say. For us, it's -- or for me as a CEO, it's important to allocate the money where the most use for the investors of the business. And what we see today in the regional cities is we are delivering great projects. There's a great interest for the best projects in the regional cities, and we are seeing there's a lot of investor appetite. We are seeing at the same time, there's a much bigger appetite for investors to buy CBD Warsaw where the rents are higher, the construction costs are roughly the same. So what we are seeing here is that we get much more returns for investors by doing things in Warsaw versus doing in the regional cities. And the investments we have today in the regional cities is better that we allocate that for our residential business or for Resi4Rent or for students where we see a much bigger investor appetite at the moment. Saying all of this, it's not like we are leaving the regional cities. We will constantly monitoring it. Once it will come back, I don't know. I wish I would know. But it's -- but we will continue monitoring and we are absolutely not leaving it. We are saying at the moment, this is not something where we will get the best return of our money, but we will constantly monitoring and analyzing when it's the right time to come back.

Can we expect this year further projects to be launched in Resi4Rent?

In Resi4Rent, we have launched quite a few projects, and we launched one recently in Krakow. I think during the second half of the year, you will see further launches in Resi4Rent to be continuous growing the platform because that's one of the critical things now. We need to start up a lot more projects to continue being among the big players where we need to be 5,000 apartments or more.

And now changing subject to residential and our Archicom business. Please tell us more about our plan on popular segment and its launch in Warsaw. Can we expect some multistage projects being kicked off?

In Warsaw, we are looking at -- today, we're looking at the popular segment in Warsaw. Multistage projects, of course, we have a lot of them in Mokotow, as you can see being launched. We have the whole modern Mokotow that is ongoing. We have 2 more Lex developers in Warsaw that we're going to be launched. So it's -- there will be a lot of multiple of this -- multiple phases projects. We're also going to do the same in the popular segment where we continue growing. And one of the things that we're looking at the funds coming into us will also be used to continue growing our land banking residential because it's crucial for us today to get up closer to 14,000, 15,000 apartments in the land bank to continue being ready for getting up to 4,000 or more apartments sold per year, where we need to continue growing our land bank in the right segment. And as I showed in the earlier slides, we want to move from 40% to 50% in the popular segment, which shows we need to buy a lot in the popular segment. And we see a huge potential in Warsaw, where we today, I think we have only scratched the surface of the potential we are seeing in Warsaw for continuous growth of Archicom.

And in this way, I think you answered my next question regarding our approach to the land bank size and that we are growing it. So I will just move to our intention regarding the debt reduction. And we have a question that Echo had announced intention to reduce debt and had no plans to engage in bonds market activity. So why the decision to issue bonds recently?

It's a very good question. So let me take a step back. We -- our strategy around the bonds is, of course, to reduce indebtedness, but also one of the reasons to do that is to reduce the interest cost that I also mentioned that we are successful already in that -- on that way, but it's not the end of the way. So one of the ways to reduce interest cost is just to repay -- reduce debt, but another way is to benefit from the improved market conditions from strong liquidity in the market and from tighter margins. So what we are working on right now is to improve -- is actually to improve the terms of the existing bonds. And technically, it is a new issue, but fundamentally, it's really a change of the pricing, change of the terms for better terms. So we are not increasing. We are, I would say, improving the terms, benefiting from the performance and from the market situation.

But also what Maciej is saying here, it's not in conflict with our strategy. We still continue reducing the debt. But this is just a way for us to continue reducing the debt, but also getting better term on our existing debt. So it's clearly in line with our strategy.

Clearly. And with this reference transaction, I think it's fair that everyone is interested about the dividend. Maciej, you already talked about it, but do you wish to comment it any further?

Well, I think obviously, it comes at each quarter, right, the question about dividend, like question on bonds. And obviously, the way to communicate to the market is through the current report and not through the conference. But I would put it this way. I think our strategy was made clear, right, on one of the slides, and it was repeated. And I think we are not -- I mean, we generally work in a quick and decisive way. So I think you should expect that you will learn about that in due course. And I would like to leave it at that.

Perfect summary. And the last question because we have one last question. I think maybe, Nicklas, can you take this one? Because our viewers would like to know how do we assess the risk associated with the Iranian conflict, its impact on construction costs and interest rates? And how do we manage them?

If you look from a construction perspective, in the early phase of the conflict in Iran, we saw that this will affect the prices of steel and aluminum and other things that are crucial for our development. What we did then early is that we secured on all our projects, the biggest parts of our contract. So most of our projects is today -- we have already secured 80% or more of the cost on our contracts in the subcontractors that we're having on site. So we did that in a hedge in a way that we early secured the right pricing on all our projects to be able to continue delivering the results that we are expecting on our projects. We are monitoring this closely. We don't have as much of a challenge with the steel prices or the aluminum prices, which we're monitoring. Today, you need to put in perspective that we have close to 50 projects ongoing across Poland, and we are a very big purchaser of all the different things. Today, what we are seeing is -- what we are moving a lot is labor. We need to make sure that we are in a very labor-intense business so what we are focusing now is to be able to deliver on time in all our different products, and we're moving around a lot of labor between our different products.

I think we have time for one last question. And this one is about investment apartment purchases. And do we notice decline in investment apartment purchases after the introduction of short-term rental restrictions in Poland?

We have been growing our business last quarter by 30%, 40%. We continue growing our business now in the second quarter going forward. Most of our buyers are not in the aspect of the short-term rental market, what we're seeing here today. We do a mix of apartments that is for the people who want to live permanently or people who will rent it out for a longer period of time. It's not in -- so we are -- very few of our business is in the Airbnb area of the rental. So we have not seen that effect yet going forward we don't know what the market will bring, but this is not a big part of the sales, what we will be doing of our 3,500 apartments annually.

Looking at the clock, I think our time is done. Thank you, gentlemen, for the great presentation. Thank you to our viewers for joining us today. And if you have any further questions, please contact Grzegorz Iwanski, our Head of Investor Relations, or me directly. And have a lovely day, and we'll see you in September. Bye.