Radius Residential Care Limited (RAD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm Brien Cree, the Executive Chair. Is it a little bit loud? It feels loud here. I'll move it back a little bit. Executive Chair and Founder of Radius Residential Care. I'm pleased to welcome you all to our fifth Annual Shareholder Meeting as an NZX-listed company. Today's meeting is being held both in-person and online through Computershare's online meeting platform. For those of you who have joined us here at the Akarana Marine Center, if we need to evacuate the venue, we'll hear alarms and should follow the instructions of the Marine staff. Please leave the building and make your way to the car park by the Marine, which is behind us here. Please do not use the lift. I'm not even sure if there is a lift. Is there a lift? No. If there is a medical emergency, we will let the Marine Center staff know that assistance is required. I'm pleased to confirm that we have a quorum, given we have more than 5 shareholders present online or by proxy. I now declare this meeting open. The items of business for the meeting and the resolutions to be considered by shareholders are contained in the Notice of Meeting that was released to the NZX on the 7th of July. I would now like to introduce my fellow Directors who are in attendance today. Please, if you could raise your hands as I call your name. We have Duncan Cook. Duncan is Chair of the Remuneration and People Committee and a Director of the company since 2010. Mary Gardiner. Mary is an Independent Director who joined the Board in 2020. Mary is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee. Bret Jackson. Bret is an Independent Director who joined the Board in 2014. Bret is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee and the Remuneration and People Committee. Hamish Stevens. Hamish is also an Independent Director. Like Mary, Hamish joined the Board in December 2020. Hamish chairs our Audit and Risk Committee. Then we have Tom Wilson. Tom was elected to the Board at the 2023 Shareholder Meeting and is also an Independent Director. Tom is a member of the Remuneration and People Committee. I would also like to introduce members of our senior management team who are here today. We have Andrew Peskett, our CEO. We have Jeremy Edmonds, our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer. We have Richard Callander, our Chief Operations Officer. We have Sam Carey, General Manager of Revenue. We have Trish Evers, General Manager of People. And we have Antony Challinor, Chief Digital Officer. And we have Shereen Singh, who is the General Manager for RConnect and in-home services. Welcome also to our lawyers, Harmos Horton Lusk; our auditors, Baker Tilly Staples Rodway and our registrar, Computershare. The order of proceedings is that I will speak to our strategy and growth. Andrew will update you on operational and people matters and our performance in the first quarter of FY '26, and I will then attend to the resolutions. There will be several opportunities for you to ask questions. When asking a question in the room, please use the microphone and introduce yourself by name. Any media present, we welcome you and ask that you remember that this meeting is for shareholders, but Directors will be happy to talk to you after the meeting. We have 3 resolutions today. The first relates to payment of Baker Tilly Staples Rodway, our auditors. The resolution authorizes Directors to fix the remuneration of the auditors. The second resolution relates to the reelection of Bret Jackson as a Director. And the third resolution relates to the approval of the refreshed executive team long-term incentive plan. We will address each resolution in turn later in the meeting and invite questions specific to each of the resolutions at that time. For those of you attending online, a guide to virtual meetings is included with the online meeting material. If you have a question to submit during the live meeting, please select the Q&A tab on the right side of your screen at any time. Your questions may be moderated or if we receive multiple questions on one topic, amalgamated. Voting today will be conducted by way of a poll. We will now open the online voting for all resolutions. If you are eligible to vote at this meeting, you will be able to cast your vote under the vote tab. Each resolution will allow votes to be submitted. You have the ability to change your vote up until the time I declare voting closed. If you need to leave the meeting early, please ensure your vote is cast before you exit. For those of you in the room, if you do not have a voting paper, please indicate now by raising your hand and a member of Computershare's team will assist you. Voting papers will be collected at the end of the resolution in voting section of the meeting by Computershare's team, who will act as scrutineers, and the results will be posted to the NZX later this afternoon. I will now take you through our strategy and growth program. Radius Care is New Zealand's leading provider of high-acuity aged residential care and health services, operating 24 aged care homes across New Zealand and 4 retirement villages. We are a leading provider of essential and specialist health care services with our 2,000 exceptional people delivering exceptional care to our residents and delivering returns to shareholders through capital growth and tax paid distributions. At Radius Care, we take pride in being New Zealand's leading provider of high-acuity aged care, dedicated to ensuring the well-being of our residents as they age gracefully within our residential communities and increasingly in their homes. With a deep understanding of what quality individualized care entails, we operate our 24 care homes and 4 vibrant villages spanning from the far north as far north as the Bay of Islands to the southernmost city of Invercargill. At a time when some operators are scaling back aged care provisions, we are in growth mode as summarized by the key items below. Profits and cash flow have increased due to operational efficiencies, high occupancy rates, which are currently over 95% and the focus of high-acuity care beds. We are expanding through capital-light acquisitions, revenue diversification and extending home care services as a health services company. We have several opportunities to acquire land and have several landlord-funded building contracts to build 80 to 100 bed care homes throughout New Zealand. These brand-new purpose-built care homes will help to partially alleviate the looming shortage of care beds. We also acquired the 109-bed St Allisa care home in Christchurch in May of 2025. Aligning with our capital-light growth strategy, the land and buildings were sold to a private investor and leased back to Radius Care. We acquired the business for just under $1.1 million. St Allisa is expected to contribute to Radius Care's earnings from the second half of FY '26. This acquisition demonstrates the favorable economics of targeting expansion primarily through leased care homes. In October 2024, we acquired a 51% stake in Cibus Catering Limited. Cibus is a specialist catering provider that prepares over 6,000 daily meals for aged care homes and boarding schools. Cibus contributed $4.1 million in revenue and $0.5 million EBITDA to Radius Care for the period from October '24 to March '25. The acquisition strengthens Radius Care's diversification strategy and positions Cibus for growth in the aged care and broader food service sector. Radius Care has also expanded into in-home care services, providing support to private and ACC-funded clients. From March 1, 2025, we began to offer hospital-level rehabilitation services nationwide to ACC clients. These services focus on recovery, independence and quality of life, addressing issues such as spinal injuries, traumatic brain injuries, musculoskeletal injuries and postsurgical rehabilitation. The move aligns with government strategies and public demand as New Zealand's aging population increasingly prefers to remain at home with support. The initiative helps ease hospital congestion, reduce inpatient costs and expand Radius Care's market reach while staying true to our core mission of delivering personalized, high-quality care. The Radius journey began over 20 years ago with just one care home and a strong personal motivation to build a business that puts quality care at the heart of our operations. Through our unique processes, systems, culture and people, we've developed RadPro. RadPro is what makes us different. Fundamentally, RadPro is an operational template that incorporates and supports resident-centric decision-making, continuous improvement and care home leadership. We expect to progressively invest in advanced technologies and AI to support RadPro. As an example, we've already been able to significantly enhance the effectiveness of our staff training modules by incorporating multilingual podcasts. These podcasts help to build a deeper understanding of the training content, increase engagement and keep staff more connected to the learning process. As a result, our training programs are now more inclusive, accessible and impactful across our diverse workforce. Whilst it is primarily used to drive our current business efficiently, we consider that RadPro could be utilized both within New Zealand and overseas by companies that are currently struggling to make care financially sustainable. An updated capital management framework, including a revised dividend policy was approved by the Board in May 2025. This updated framework is designed to allocate investment in capital-light growth while supporting reinvestment in our core operating assets, sustainable dividend growth and reduced leverage. With the economics in favor of leased care homes, we expect the majority of future care homes, whether newly-built or carefully-targeted acquisitions to be supported by private property investors. Our strong FY '25 performance enabled us to continue to pay dividends. The total FY '25 dividend was $0.0145 per share, representing a gross fully-imputed dividend of $0.02 per share. The dividend was 47% of AFFO, which is available funds from operations and was in line with our target dividend payout ratio of 40% to 70%. This dividend payment supported sustainable dividend growth while maintaining room for us to invest and expand. After a successful year, we are fully anticipating growth across key financial metrics in FY '26, being underlying EBITDA, underlying EBITDAR per bed and AFFO. Andrew will talk more specifically to our FY '25 results in the next slide. We continue to be the leaders in aged care in New Zealand. And as always, we owe enormous thanks to our residents and their families for their continued support and to our exceptional people for their resilience and passion for delivering exceptional care. I now hand you over to Andrew.

Thanks, Brien. Can everybody hear me? Great. Well, again, welcome, and I'm going to give you a brief business update from the last financial year and a trading update that was released to the NZX again this morning. And I'm delighted to be here for my fourth ASM as the CEO with the business performing well, and we're embarking on our ambitious growth strategy, as Brien has outlined earlier. So on FY '25, as you can see on the slide, our focus on enabling our exceptional people to provide exceptional care to our 2,000 residents is producing strong customer feedback, audit results, financial results and ultimately, return to you as shareholders. Brien's update touched on our excellent performance in FY '25. And so to recap, the key results from last year were underlying EBITDA of $23.5 million, operating cash flow, which is a key metric for us of $20 million and reduced debt levels to $67.7 million. As always, it is our exceptional people, our nurses, our health care assistants, activities coordinators, kitchen assistants, gardeners, maintenance people and everybody else that works at our 24 care homes that have produced these results by doing a wonderful job every day, providing, as Brien said, exceptional care to our residents. We call it EPEC or exceptional people delivering exceptional care. So more on our people. You can see on the slide, 3 of our wonderful employees at Windsor Court on the barbecue at Balloons over Waikato. I think I've got that right, Sam. And I'd just like to talk quite a bit about our people and what they do every day and how that connects into the business. At Radius Care, our strength lies in our people and our systems and our processes, as Brien outlined. From frontline staff to care home managers, we continue to build a workforce that is committed, skilled and trusted. Our investment in leadership, training and staff well-being is about more than running excellent care homes. It's about creating a culture of care. The result of this is evident in the voices of our staff, the loyalty of our teams and the care ultimately that we provide to our 2,000 residents. Following FY '24's theme, our employees continue to be well engaged. And as you can see on the slide, the second number there, our facility managers' Net Promoter Score is a positive 74, which is a reasonably extraordinary result and has increased year-on-year. Pleasingly, 60% of our facility managers and regional managers have been appointed from internal promotions within Radius Care, which is fantastic and shows that we are hiring and retaining the right people who are dedicated to Radius Care and the work that we do for our residents. We build talent within our own workforce, beginning with hiring the right compassionate people who have strong ties to their communities. When managerial roles arise, we start by looking at our own talent to identify those ready to step up and take on leadership roles as evidenced by the 60% of internal promotions at care home senior leadership level. Again, on this slide, our turnover has reduced from last year 27% to 17%. So that's very pleasing, and we continue to monitor that and watch that track down. Our care home audit results are strong. In the financial year '25, we had 12 audits, which is effectively half of our care homes were audited and 10 of those audited resulted in maximum 4-year certification results from the Ministry of Health. Against the industry average, so 10 out of 12, an excellent result. I think the industry average is probably around 20% to 30% at maximum. So we're very pleased with our audit results in FY '25, and that continues to be a strong focus in FY '26 and beyond. This indicates the high-quality care standards, the strong compliance and operational excellence of our care homes. And in recognition of the incredible service of our people, the Board continues to support the issuance of long service loyalty share scheme, which provides those employees who have been at Radius for 10 years with $1,000 worth of Radius shares on their 10-year anniversary. Before I move on to our current performance, I wanted to also extend an enormous thanks to our amazing nurses, carers and to all of our exceptional team who provide uncompromised care and support to our residents at Radius Care homes around the country. Thanks, team. I recently worked an 8-hour shift. Some of you may know, some may not, at one of our care homes at Taupaki, the 3:00 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. And I can tell you that the compassion and courage and commitment of our exceptional people is very difficult to put into words. The bonds that I formed with our Radius carers and our residents through this shift will remain with me for a long time and lessons were rich. I'm scheduled to work another morning shift at Waipuna later this month, and I look forward to the learnings from there. So in closing on this slide, thank you again to our 2,000 people that work so hard for the company. I'm very proud to support you and work for an organization with such a focus on care and our people. So like this slide, off script slightly, the graph at the top is pretty critical to tracking our performance. You can see the red line is the start of this financial year. And our occupancy over the last 16 months has tracked very strongly starting in April last year at 92%. And as Brien said, over 95%. In fact, today, our occupancy is 95.8%. So you can see that continued increase in occupancy in the top slide on this page. And the rest of the page as released to the NZX this morning provides an updated guidance on our FY '26 first half. For those that don't recall, in June, we provided a trading update on our key metric of underlying EBITDA to say that for the first half of the financial year '26, our underlying EBITDA would be between $12 million and $15 million compared to the first half year last year of $10.6 million. Strong trading has continued since the June update. So now we expect for the first half of this financial year underlying EBITDA to be in the range of $14 million to $16 million. So the range has been upgraded from $12 million to $15 million to $14 million to $16 million. As previously reported, this is a result of a number of improved metrics, including the occupancy that we talked about currently at 95.8% and trading in the year-to-date in the late 94%, a strong mix of higher acuity and revenue residents such as hospital and ACC residents and very strong village resales where resale stock is sold quickly by our sales team. Thank you, Sam, and settled quickly for our outgoing residents. We also extended our core debt facility with the ASB, thank you, to 3 years with reduced margin in line fees. Interest cost savings in excess of $1 million should provide additional growth to both AFFO and to net profit. And in the last few months, we've had the funding increase from the ministry confirmed at 4% from 1 July, which was higher than our expectations and budget. So my final slide before I hand back to Brien. As we covered earlier, we are in a period of growth. Our focus on high-acuity care, continued refining of RadPro, expansion into adjacent offerings and strategic acquisitions is setting us up well for future success. In closing, we are really focused on continuous improvement at Radius Care. Our focus on delivery of exceptional care, our record trading for the first 4 months of FY '26 and our many significant growth opportunities have us looking to the future with considerable optimism. Thank you to you, all of our shareholders, both here and online, for the chance to present Radius Care's results and strategy story to you today. And finally, thank you, Brien and the Board for, first of all, employing me several years ago and your continued support and mentoring of me in my role. I appreciate it. I look forward to answering any questions, chatting after the meeting over a sausage roll and continuing to lead our exceptional people who provide our residents with exceptional care. I'll now hand back to Brien. Thank you.

Thanks, Andrew. I think at this point, we'll take questions, firstly, from shareholders attending online and then from the room. No online questions yet. We want to give people a chance to ask one if there's -- how do we know, we haven't got a screen that -- anything coming through? No. Any questions from the room?

My name is Maddy. Mr. Cree, my question is regarding RadPro. Could you please provide some more details and examples on what exactly RadPro is and how developed it is and how it's going to serve Radius Care's broader plans?

Sure. Okay. RadPro is fundamentally the operating system and structure that we developed over the last 21 years. So it has come from -- it's almost -- if you think of it as the perhaps infrastructure that runs the company. So it encompasses all aspects of our operation from educating staff through to the culture of our staff within our facilities, the systems and processes that we have developed in-house to run the business to make it efficient and profitable. It includes tools that we've developed over the last 20 years, which manage our staffing and our rostering. So these are all proprietary things that over the last 20 years have been developed. And what we've realized more recently is that it is actually a fundamental operating system that manages aged care facilities, and we are now developing that further out into home care. So RadPro is probably the -- if you like, it's the naming of the system that we use, which makes us successful. And we think that long term, there are opportunities not just in New Zealand, but outside of New Zealand to perhaps promote that system. So we're working on building it into a platform that could be marketed. I'm not going to say it's going to change the world, but we think there's an opportunity there. So that's what RadPro is. No questions online. Anyone else in the room? All good? Right. We'll carry on. Before I move on to the formal part of the meeting, I just want to thank Matt Loughlin from ASB. Matt is sitting down in the front here going, [ what the heck ]. ASB have been a key partner in our journey over 20 years, and Matt has been a huge support to the company. So I just wanted to call him out and thank him personally.

Matt, we won't make you speak, but yes, thank you very much from management for supporting us through the years. Thank you.