Lesha Bank LLC (QFBQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello and welcome to the Lesha Bank Conference Call. I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Mr. Phibion Makuwerere to begin the conference. Phibion, over to you.

Thank you, Bravesh. Good afternoon to you all. Thank you for joining us for Lesha Bank's 4Q and FY 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Phibion. I'm a senior research analyst at QNB Financial Services. On today's call, from Lesha Bank's management team, we have Muhammad Tauseef Malik, who is the Chief Financial Officer. And as usual, Mr. Malik will, first, go over the performance; and we will have a Q&A session immediately after. I will now turn over the call to Mr. Malik to begin the call. Over to you, sir.

Hi. Good afternoon. [Foreign Language]. This is Muhammad Tauseef, CFO, Lesha Bank. We will just give you a small brief on the performance. And then we can go to the question-and-answers, if any. The net profit of Lesha Bank shareholders -- the bank shareholders' profit is QAR 94.4 million as of 31st December 2023, which is 25.1% increased over the period year. During the year, the fee and dividend income reached to 81.8 million. Total assets stood at QAR 6.3 billion as of 31st December 2022 -- 2023, up 20% compared to the previous year which was QAR 5.2 billion. The bank's investment reached to QAR 2.7 billion, up by 34% from QAR 2 billion on 31st December 2022. The bank total customer deposits remained flat at QAR 3 billion by the year-end 2023. The bank total equity increased by QAR 1.2 billion from QAR 1.1 billion as of 31st December 2022 -- sorry. [ It may be some ] [indiscernible]: As of 2023, it is QAR 1.2 billion. And last year, 2022, it was QAR 1.1 billion. Some ratios we will explain. The return on average equity is 7.97%. Average return on assets is 1.63%. The book value is QAR 1.10. EPS is QAR 0.084. The capital adequacy ratio is 19.45%. And the AUM as of 2023 December is QAR 6.2 billion, increased by 18%. Previously, it was QAR 5.2 billion as of 2022 December. So this is the brief overview. Please, if you have any questions, forum is open for you to ask any questions [indiscernible].

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of [ Mark Combes from TFI ].

I'm interested to hear your -- just your overall bank strategy for the year and also more for the medium term, where you're planning to focus and what your moves are and what the strategy is. That's all from my end.

Thanks for asking the question. We have recently got approval for our strategy. If you have -- as you are aware, that this year, the new CEO has already been appointed. We are working more on the funds. Recently, we want to focus more on Qatar plus the GCC market because the -- we have seen that there is a good interest by the investors particularly on Qatari market and the GCC market. We are focusing on that. Plus, definitely, as we have some real estate exposure already outside, we will be focusing on that also, but we are also planning to launch some of the funds in the long run so that we can have a more consistent income. The real estate price was not good in the -- previously because of the high interest rates. So we are expecting that the real estate prices will be better. And we will start investing more in the international market also.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Ejayan Al-ahbabi from Al Rayan Investment.

This is Shabbir Kagalwala from Al Rayan Investment. I just want to follow up from your earlier question. You mentioned about the funds, so what will be those funds? Will it be real estate, private equity? What areas of focus will be those funds which you mentioned in Qatar and the GCC?

Thanks, Shabbir. There are different kind of funds. It's not only one. Yes, real estate fund, as you know, there is no real estate fund as of now in Qatar. We are looking for that, but there are other funds also we are looking. I don't think so -- I will be able to disclose the name, due to some reasons, but we are looking for [ 4, 5 ] new funds, which will be disclosed soon in the market once we are able to launch it.

All right. And coming back to the real estate investment in the U.S. What's the -- what's an update on those? Like are you planning to add more to that, wind down those? So what's happening at that front?

See. All our real estate portfolio, we have all -- for all the investments, we have exit [indiscernible] which we have planned according to our strategy. We are planning to invest more, but it's case-to-case basis, not -- we are not focusing fully that we should invest heavily. And once the market will get better in the near future, as everybody is expecting, when the interest -- once the interest rates will go down, we are -- definitely we'll plan more investments in U.S., but whatever the existing investments we have, we have a planned strategy for that, when and why we should exit and what time we should exit.

All right. And [ then you ] would be in commercial real estate. Or it will be multi assets, if you can...

It depends. It's not [ necessary ]. Again, as I've mentioned before, it's case-to-case basis. It can be mostly commercial because it's a -- high-yield investments, but it depends on case-to-case basis.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand the call back to Phibion Makuwerere.

Thank you, Bravesh. If there are no additional questions, let's conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining us and for all your questions. And I would like to thank our CFO from Lesha Bank, Mr. Muhammad Malik, for availing himself for the call. Please join us again for then -- for future calls. Have a good afternoon.

Yes, thank you very much, everyone. If you have any questions further, either you can e-mail us or you can call me directly to ask any further questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.