PPHE Hotel Group Limited (PPH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the PPHE Hotel Group Limited Annual Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses which is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Greg Hegarty. Good morning to you.

Good morning. Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to our PPHE 2023 Annual Results. Today, I'm Greg Hegarty, I'm the co-CEO of PPHE. I'm joined on my left here by Daniel Kos, Chief Financial Officer; and our EVP of Commercial Affairs, Robert Henke. Before we just kick off into our presentation, I'd like to show you a short video, which shows you our investments on your openings and our future pipeline. [Presentation]

Thank you, Alex. Good morning once again. For those of you that are new to the PPHE story and are watching us for the first time. Alex, can you move to the next slide, please. And the next one. I'll give a quick introduction as to who PPHE are. So essentially, we are an integrated owner, operator and developer of hospitality assets, mainly hotels in city center locations as well as resorts and the number of cap sites in Croatia. We are currently active in 8 countries and have 51 properties, which are valued externally every year and the most recent valuations from December last year gave us a portfolio value of GBP 2.2 billion. What makes us unique in our sector is that we have this integrated offering of owning, developing and operating assets. So if we can move on to the next slide, please. We have a number of differentiators that we would like to go through with you today. So first of all, the business model, as I said, it's quite typical in our sector to either own property or develop assets or upgrade properties. We do all of this in-house. We have our own in-house management platform with every single specialist skill required to develop, launch and operate hospitality properties. This is done through our teams, which are located in the core markets where we are active today, being the U.K., the Netherlands, Croatia and Germany, and then we have single assets in other marketplaces, which we can go through in the presentation today. We always like to develop and operate hotels with a development angle or a repositioning opportunity. This gives investors an upside opportunity. So we create more value through the redevelopment and repositioning of assets over and above the acquisition price initially paid for the property. The second differentiator is that we have grown the group from a single property 35 years ago into what it is today into that 51 strong portfolio through capital recycling. And we do this all based on the asset value in our balance sheet. So we tend to refinance our properties after a successful number of operational years. or we take third-party equity, but we haven't been diluting our shareholders in the growth since the IPO in 2007. So very much is a homegrown portfolio on the back of the quality of the assets. The additional component #3 on this slide, is the platform. As I described, we have every single specialist scale in the business today. We have a strong track record. We are an award-winning management company as well and have managed through various economic cycles, including the downturn, obviously, and the pandemic, which is now well behind us. We have fully recovered. But the platform itself is its own independent store value. We don't engage a third-party operating, but every property in our ownership, every property that we manage on behalf of partners or third-party owned assets, has entered into a management agreement with the platform. So essentially, we have income in the center on the back of these properties and that's usually an incentive fee as well based on their operating performance if we meet certain targets. This platform is ready for growth. We will be opening a number of new hotels this year, which Greg will elaborate on. And these hotels are serviced through our platform. So it is fully scalable and has its own value. The Board is heavily involved in the business, in particular, the 2 founding shareholders and principles of the business. They currently own just over 43% between them of the shareholding and they started this business nearly 35 years ago. The management team has been with the business for quite some time. The average tenure is well over 10 years. And the environment is very much of an entrepreneurial environment. We can move on to the next slide. This sort of summarizes what I prescribe. We tend to buy a plot of land, a tired office, hotel with repositioning potential. We then operate once we have redeveloped, we operate the hotel, maximize the value recycle the capital that we've invested, and then we invest in the new and next opportunity. And this is sort of an ongoing mechanism that we've been using for the last 3 decades. Moving on to the next slide, our financial capital stack manual.

Thanks, Robert. So as Robert alluded to, our strategy has been to unlock capital on the back of our assets. And we do that in many different ways. We do that in terms of equity partnerships, but we also raised capital in the back of assets in terms of debt. And the reason we do that is that we get access to capital on the back of fair values. That business model can make our balance sheet a bit more complex, and this picture tries to simplify our balance sheet. So if you look at our assets reported in our financials, they are presented at historical cost less depreciation. As Robert already mentioned, we get valuations in every year. So if you look at the gross asset value at a fair value, there's a difference of GBP 750 million. So gross assets are at GBP 2.6 billion. And just to reiterate, 16% of those assets are in Central London and Central Amsterdam, and about 8% is the pipeline, which is opening in the coming months. You can see that 63% of that gross asset value is funded by equity, that's equity of PPHE shareholders, but that's also the equity of our minority partners. About 9% is financed by ground rent structures on certain hotels in London, we have sold the land under an asset and leased it back for over 100 years, giving us access to very low-yielding financing, CPI cap, so linking to CPI but caps typically around 4%. It's nonrecourse, and we have no covenants on that. So 28% of the assets have been funded by regular bank debt funding. We have just over GBP 700 million in bank debt and about GBP 170 million of that relates to the pipeline that is opening in the current months. The average cost of debt currently sits at 3.5%. It is all fully hedged, and we have a remaining maturity of about 4 years. And this is all nonrecourse asset-backed debt.

Moving on to the next slide. I've already explained that we have the property portfolio on one side, and then we have the management platform as its independent store of value. There's a few additional elements that I wanted to [indiscernible]. One is that as a group, as a company, we have a very strong relationship in place with the Radisson Hotel Group, which is one of the larger hotel companies in the world. We have exclusivity to utilize their Park Plaza brand in Europe, Middle East and Africa. That agreement is exclusive to us and also in perpetuity. So that's given us a lot of successful development cases in London, in Amsterdam, and Croatia and beyond, where we can basically develop our Plaza-branded hotels, knowing that we can plot these hotels into Radisson's ecosystem in terms of technology, buying power, the marketing and loyalty networks that they possess. So we're able to compete with much larger brands. In addition to that, we've extended our partnership recently so we can now leverage all of Radisson's brands. And in our pipeline, you'll see that we're about to open our first Radisson RED branded properties, and we've opened a Radisson luxury hotel as well last year. So our offering has gone from being Park Plaza and art'otel focus to much more diverse stepping into different market segments. The platform, as I said, has its own value. So in 2012, the EBITDA generated was GBP 12 million. We have a target that we're internally sort of wanting to hit is the GBP 15 million target for the platform itself, which will obviously benefit from the new hotels coming online between now and the end of this year. So the growth is going to come through efficiencies, new technologies, new openings, and obviously, increased performance in our existing assets. Now moving on to the next slide. We'll now go through the 2023 highlights. Greg?

Thanks, Robert. So from a strategic and operational update point of view, we had a solid performance with excellent year-on-year growth in revenue and EBITDA. Specifically, revenue surged by 25.6% to GBP 416.6 million and EBITDA escalated by 36% also to GBP 182.2 million. Our recovery post the pandemic has surpassed expectations for normalization of booking levels across key market segments, including leisure, corporate, meeting and events has contributed significantly to our success in 2023. Amidst the inflationary pressures, we have honed our operational strategies to enhance our EBITDA, achieving an impressive improvement of over 2 percentage points. Further, an organizational review by a specialist top 5 audit company has guided us in realigning our business towards sustained growth. leading our strategic adjustments in our organizational structure. These adjustments aim to opt our food and beverage, consolidate our supply chain and harness technology to enhance our operational efficiency and support in our support functions. Significant milestones in our development pipeline include the opening the art'otel London Battersea earlier in 2023, which is managed by PPHE, investments in our Arena FRANZ Ferdinand property in Austria, further investments in Arena Stoja in our campsites in Croatia, boosting our market presence in these areas where we've enhanced accommodations. The launch of the art'otel Zagreb later in 2023 also opened expanding our footprint in European capitals. We also have the introduction of our first 2 Radisson RED properties and one in Belgrade, which opened actually earlier this week, and a second in Berlin, which will be open in time for the year 2024 football tournament. We also had achievements in our asset optimization strategy with a planning approval for our pioneering subterranean hotel in Victoria in London. This is a 179 key assets, which is actually going to be built below our existing Park Plaza Hotel in Victoria and operated as a separate business but obviously, with the synergies of one hotel. We also worked significantly on our sustainability footprint. We have advanced our ESG strategy substantially building on a refreshed approach, which we initiated in 2022. We have strengthened our team in this area. We have augmented -- and augmented that team with some external consultants to help foster and target our effectiveness in our ESG framework. Our commitment to the sustainability is evident in our ongoing investments and our renewable energy, energy reduction initiatives, widespread adoption of our BREEAM certification in our new properties and the comprehensive scoping of our Scope III emissions to solidify our ESG commitment overall. Thank you. Yes. Looking towards the pipeline, we have made significant progress with our GBP 300 million development pipeline, which has posed to enhance our EBITDA upon stabilization by GBP 25 million. It's an ambitious pipeline but not only does it underscore our commitment to the growth and both showcases our strategic mix of our new developments and asset optimization and also it shows that we are repositioning our projects across all of our key markets. We have further growth opportunities in our portfolio with the expansion, which include our 2 land sites, 2 in London and 1 in New York, offering substantial growth opportunities for the group. Additionally, we are advancing in our asset optimization project in Victoria, which I've already mentioned. And we're also looking at how we can undertake a repositioning exercise of more of our properties in Croatia. We are on schedule with our 2024 project openings, making significant milestones. In April, we are due to open our landmark artotel London Hoxton which is 356 rooms, 55,000 square feet of co-working space, art, gallery, spa, food and beverage and destination gym. This hotel is planned to soft open in April. We are a full opening by October 2024. We're really excited about it. It's going to be an amazing opening and a real contribution to our business. I'm also pleased to say that we opened a hotel this week, which was Radisson Hotel in Belgrade, 88 rooms also featuring co-working space, meeting and event facilities, and we're excited to see that growing the company. The Radisson RED Hotel in Berlin, as I've already alluded to, is currently going through a transformation project. which will take back from a Park Plaza hotel into a Radisson RED, which is an upscale brand, which is due to open in time for the year. And again, contributing to our upper upscale premium lifestyle brand artotel, we have Rome opening in the second half of this year. This will be a premium hotel next to Via Vento in the center of Rome. We're really looking forward to that coming on board. We're also continuing to enhance our current portfolio our focus extends to maximizing the performance of recently invested properties, including Zagreb. We opened the artotel Zagreb in November last year. So we're continuing to launch this property into the market. We also opened up 5-star luxury property a Radisson Collection in Croatia called Brioni which is also now going to benefit from its full year this year. And we also invested in NASSFELD in Austria, which is currently ongoing ski season this season, which is currently underway, demonstrating our commitment to operational excellence and strategic growth. This strategic expansion will enable us to optimize and underscore our dedication to enhancing our market presence in these territories. And also, we're going to focus on our operational efficiency and profitability, setting a solid foundation for our future growth trajectory.

One page further, Alex. Thank you. In terms of revenue, we reported close to GBP 450 million of revenue. That's up 26% versus last year. If you see where this came from, it's mainly driven from a double-digit increase with increase occupancy of 12 percentage points, but also still showing a solid rate growth of 4%. Particularly looking at occupancy reported at 72.4%. Pre-pandemic, we used to report levels in the '80s. We are confident that we can get our occupancy back, but we're doing this very careful not to go on the back of rate drops. So in Amsterdam and London, we already see the occupancy trending back to where they were. Markets like Germany and Croatia, they need a bit more time, but we're confident that we can rebuild occupancy in the future. We reported an EBITDA of GBP 128 million, which is a growth of 36% on last year. EBITDA margins close to 31%. This year, margins were negatively impacted by the utility prices, which were GBP 10 million of 2019. That's a reflection of 1.8% in terms of margin. We're quite confident to get that back, given that energy prices are stabilizing currently and actually going back closer to the levels that we saw in 2019. We'll have some hedges in this year running, they're running out next year. So we do expect margins on the back of utilities going back from '25 onwards. In terms of EPRA earnings, we reported GBP 50.1 million after-tax EPRA earnings. This is more than doubled versus last year. Per share, this comes down to GBP 1.18 earnings per share, which is also the basis for our reinstated progressive dividend policy. So we're paying a 20 -- we're proposing to pay a 20p final dividend, bringing the total dividend to GBP 0.36, which reflects about 30% and of EPRA earnings. And we expect to grow this with the EPRA earnings to grow with the new openings. Going to the next slide, thank you. In terms of our cash flow, we generated a strong operational cash flow of GBP 126 million. Part of that has been used for debt service, GBP 82 million. That debt service is GBP 32 million of normal loan repayments. So as a normal course of business, we repay our loans typically 25%, 30% of the nominal over the maturity period and GBP 25 million was due to bank interest. We've invested GBP 121 million in CapEx. If you break that down to expansion and maintenance CapEx, expansion CapEx came down to GBP 106 million and maintenance CapEx at GBP 15 million. And the expansion CapEx, the majority of that is obviously for our Hoxton project, which is opening in the coming 2 months. That CapEx has been funded with $83 million worth of new bank financing and equity partnerships contributing to that development. We've also had a $16 million capital return in the year in terms of dividends and in terms of share buybacks that we did last year. So overall, quite a healthy cash position of GBP 150 million with access to a further GBP 30 million in terms of undrawn rolling facilities. Our business model is backed by prime real estate. As I said, 60% in key locations in London and in Amsterdam. This gave us an EPRA NRV per share of GBP 26.72. That has been fully valued again by sales last year for the key cities and UniCredit in Croatia. In part of these valuations, we saw the cap rates going up slightly, which were largely offset by the increased operational results, which I will show later in the presentation. And I would like to reiterate that close to GBP 3 of our share price is currently locked in terms of pipeline. So that GBP 3 is not yielding as we speak but obviously, in the coming months, that will open and then we'll start actually yielding. Going to the next slide, you'll see that our NRV increased this year with 6.2%. The majority of that is due to positive property valuations. As I said, values did not of the discount rates used between 775 and 825 in London in Amsterdam. However, our results and also prospective results did offset that increase in rates. Looking at the interest rate curve. We are currently looking to be peaking. The curve is showing a decline in rates, which would indicate a positive outlook in terms of our property valuation. That's also something we see in recent market activity. In the appendix to the slides, we have presented to you a few market -- recent market transactions. We obviously are very active in today's market, also looking at deals that are pending. And we can comfortably say that our valuations are in line with the prices that hotel assets are going for. And I think that's quite specific in our asset class, where in the retail and in offices, you see that declining income or income that's not really reflective of inflation, with rate increases, obviously, those asset classes are declining. Our asset class typically links to inflation. So whereas we have seen increases in interest rates, also our results have gone up and provided a good offset against those rate increases.

Thank you, Daniel. So looking at our current performance and future outlook. This year has commenced on a positive note, mirroring of the booking levels observed at the start of the previous year. This period has highlighted continued balance in demand across leisure and core complemented by rising Meeting & Events business in our business, which is instrumental to continue supporting our occupancy rates. We've successfully maintained our average rates, a testament to our dynamic pricing and market positioning. Our economic resilience despite the challenges posed by ongoing inflationary pressures, we remain confident with our ability to align our performance with the market consensus for the year. We also continue with our strategic partnership with Radisson. And as we've already seen, we're set to enhance our portfolio with a further 2 Radisson properties this year and the second coming in Berlin, Kudamm. Most of all, we're looking forward to the anticipated growth and looking forward to our highlight openings. So we have several main properties opening this year, with entries also into new markets. These strategic openings are expected to substantially contribute to an additional GBP 25 million EBITDA upon stabilization. So all in all, a good, solid, robust performance, well controlled, great pipeline ahead of what we've got. And most of all, we're looking forward to answering any questions you may have.

[Operator Instructions] Greg, Daniel, Robert. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And Robert, if I may now hand back to you to chair the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Sure. Thank you very much. The first question that's coming is around sort of growth for the business as a whole. And I'll summarize what Greg sort of outlined before I hand the question too, Greg. EBITDA growth is going to come from the organic growth seen in the existing hotels. As Greg summarized in his update, we have the pipeline that is hitting the market this year coming online, expected to generate GBP 25 million worth of EBITDA growth on stabilization. We have the land sites and opportunities in Croatia for growth. We have new opportunities and maturing recent investments. Greg, over and above all of this, is there a desire for PPHE or intend to develop outside of the M25 in the U.K. marketplace? And if so, what sort of areas and what sort of sort of the deal criteria that you would be looking for?

Yes. All right. Thanks, Robert. Good question. Well, first of all, I've got to say, we have a development team. The company's got a dedicated team, which look at all of the cities in terms of target cities. We do have target cities, obviously, in the U.K., cities like Manchester, Edinburgh, for example, a good well-performing cities. Whenever we invest in something, we want to make sure it has a certain level of IRR in anything we do. We look at IRR more than actually what does the asset generated. What about -- what does it generate for the amount of capital we're going to deploy into the hotel itself. So with that in mind the team are focused, we do have an area. One of the main reasons also doing a partnership with Radisson was also to make sure that we can diversify our portfolio. So what's also advantageous to us is that we look at assets now which aren't just upper upscale assets. We could look at mid-scale assets. And as we've already demonstrated what we're doing with the Victoria and subterranean concept, These are going to be mid-scale assets. So we're also looking at different asset classes to what we've looked at in the past. So yes, so with that in mind, the ones we've got coming about, we've got a property on Westminster Bridge Road, which is in the pipeline and in planning. We have a property which has already been approved for planning on the [ 840 ], which is also going to be a significant addition on top of this, which is currently in our land bank and to be developed. And we have New York as well. So with that in mind, we are very open. We're very entrepreneurial. We look at the U.K. We look at, obviously, European cities more as well with the European hospitality fund, which we got coming about. And actually, our seed asset in Rome is going to be part of our hospitality fund as well. So overall, we take development very seriously, but we are cautious and we want to make sure that we invest in the right thing, and we want to make sure we have the right return.

Thank you. Daniel, I'm going to hand this question to you. 2023 has been a strong year for shareholders in terms of shareholder returns, the buyback, the dividend what is sort of the future strategy for the dividend -- in the dividend policy? Where do you see this -- what's your principle?

Yes. So prepandemic, we've always had a progressive dividend policy, the earnings that we were making. So as long as earnings are growing, we are linking the dividend to those earnings. We expect to pay 30% of our EPRA earnings and as I just alluded to, we reported GBP 1.18 this year, but we're opening a very substantial part, more than GBP 300 million of portfolio in the coming months. On the back of that, we do expect earnings growth and there, we also expect increase dividends.

Thank you. On the pipeline, Greg, one of the terms that we use internally as well as in the presentation that is stabilized trading. Can you sort of explain how we sort of open in hotels end what stabilized trading means?

Yes. So typically, we sometimes may open hotels differently to our competitors. We actually phase our hotel openings. So for example, let's just take Hoxton. We're opening it in mid-April. We will open the public areas, the guest service areas and the facilities and as demand grows for a property because as much as I would like to say, a hotel doesn't open at 84% occupancy by itself on day 1. So we actually phase our occupancy to make sure it gives us the right level of return, coupled with the right level of profit conversion as of a property operates and open. So when we're gaining momentum, we're gaining occupancy and demand, we will increase more of the hotel. However, stabilization pretty much predominantly looks at year 3 of the property. So 1 be opening this year, 2 to ramp up; and 3 is a full year stabilization and fully performing.

Excellent. I think, Daniel, the next one is probably for you, or maybe Greg wants to contribute as always, is sort of the inflationary pressures that we've been faced with in the last year, especially the wage increases, but also on the construction side, how are we managing through all these increases? And what's the outlook going forward?

Well, our industry, and particularly in the U.K., I think we also pre-pandemic, we've been used to substantial pay increases. With the introduction of the National Living Wage, for instance, we had double-digit pay increases every year. And we didn't really suffer in terms of margins because obviously, our top line is growing, but also we constantly look at our business and operations and see how we can make that more efficient. That's also something we've done this year. So as Greg alluded to, we've an external review and basically put a mirror in front of us in which areas we could perform a bit better and kind of get more efficiency out of the increases that we're seeing because also this year, across our territories, minimum wages are increasing 10%. So we have to look at how to make it more efficient. So you can think of things like looking at our F&B offering, basically set as streamlining that. We are looking very closely at the back office currently. And I know AI is a best work at the moment, but it does help a lot in terms of repetitive tasks such as surface tasks that we obviously, as a big company have. That's something we're looking at. And something else is that, as some of you might be aware, we are running our own housekeeping company here in London with 900 FTEs. We've implemented quite a disruptive software at the moment, which enables us to kind of plan capacity much better. given that that's one of our largest payroll cost that we have, we believe that we can be more efficient on that end. So it's really looking at every angle to make sure we can cover the payroll increases. And like we've done in the past, I'm confident that we'll be able to do so.

And we've also benefited from the growth of the company because, one, as we have asset concentration, more inventory in an area, we've been able to efficienize the supply chain, for example, and benefit there as well. So that's really, really helped us indeed. And one good thing about our company is our hotels are in amazing locations very well invested in. And we've been able to pass average rate increases directly to our consumers for the quality and the service of the asset they're getting for.

So that's sort of probably a nice bridge to the next question. What does that do to EBITDA margin moving forward? Given that we've presented a 2.2% uplift year-on-year. Where do you see this trend?

Well, if you can see the margins that we've shown in 2019, you can say that approximately 1.8% in terms of margin decrease versus '19 was caused by the utility prices. And as I alluded to earlier, utility prices are coming down. So we do expect that to come back to us in the near future. Then another 1.8% is due to pay increases in the past year. And again, as I alluded to, our pay increases have been quite substantial over the last few years. I do expect that to normalize because inflation is coming down. So I do expect to pay increases to normalize as well. So on the back of the projects I've just explained, we do think that also that percentage can come back into our margins.

Excellent. Greg, on pipeline. A final question that's been submitted so far, unless there's any last minute questions upcoming. But on pipeline, how do you prioritize sort of openings and developments in sort of the year ahead where you've got so many new openings?

I would say it's actually opportunistic, Robert, to be honest, as much as I would like to say, it's strategic, but it very much depends on the supply chain, the developer, the phasing of the construction in terms of able to implement. But obviously, when we're looking at a project, and we're looking at capital, if we are looking at 2 areas in one city, for example, we will prioritize one with the highest rate of return and the highest benefit to the profitability of the company, coupled with what it does for the brand.

So do you want to explain maybe what that means in terms of guest feedback and sort of getting that right from Day 1?

Yes, exactly. So as we've -- as I alluded to before, the way we open hotels is to make sure everything is ready, and we don't have the wet paint on the walls, et cetera, or the pool is not working or the restaurant is not fully open. So it's important that we get our properties implemented, trained in, opened up and ready for sale on day 1.

Excellent. Sounds like an exciting year ahead.

It is, it is.

I saw a question, Robert, coming in, but it's not here anymore, but in terms of how does EBITDA convert to cash, which I think is an important question. I think when we underwrite properties or new properties, we typically, in terms of cash profile, have our EBITDA and the 2 major expenses that we have is our maintenance CapEx, which typically sits at 4% of total revenue. That's not something we make up. That's an industry-specific indicator. That's also what we use to underwrite on buying new properties. That's also what our valuers use in terms of value in our property. So the 2 main costs that we have is obviously the maintenance reserve and the interest charges. So the amortization, I do not calculate. For me, it's part of an outgoing cash that we will get back up to the moment that we do refinance. So in terms of interest, we could say that the interest that we're paying on our properties are around 30% to 40% typically. So 30% to 40% of the EBITDA is paid into interest and then you have the percentage that we pay in maintenance reserves. So typically, we will generate in excess of 50% of the EBITDA in cash. And then depending on how the partnership works on a property is either shared with our partner or it's going fully to us. So I hope that clarifies.

Excellent. Now that concludes the Q&A with the time allocated for it.

That's great. Thank you very much, Robert, Daniel, Greg. And of course, the company can review your questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the invested company platform. But before we directing investors to provide you with their feedback, which in turns is particularly important to the company, Greg, could I please ask you for a few closing comments.

Yes, absolutely. As we've already reiterated, it's an exciting year ahead. 2024 has started off positively. I'm pleased to say the anticipated growth of our company in the next year is very, very strong, and it's being materialized. We have demonstrated strong economic resilience and the ability to convert profit with all of these inflationary measures, and we've got solid strategic partnerships and growth opportunity ahead of us. So with that in mind, thank you very much indeed.

Greg, Daniel, Robert. thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback and also that the Board can better understand your views and expectations. This would only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure we'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of PPHE Hotel Group Limited, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.