Salam International Investment Limited Q.P.S.C. ($SIIS)

Thank you for standing by. My name is Janice, and I'll be the operator with you for conference today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Salam International Investments Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Phibion. You may begin.

Thank you, Janice. A very good afternoon to you all, and I would like to welcome you to the Q1 2026 Conference Call for Salam International Investments. And on the call today from the management team of Salam is Abdul Salam Abu Issa, the Chief Executive Officer; Hekmat Al Younis, the Chief Financial Officer; Suleiman Al-Khateeb, Executive Director, Corporate Development and IR Officer; Abdul Rahman Pasha, Corporate Finance Manager. And as usual, they will first go over the Q1 performance, and then we have a Q&A session afterwards. Let me turn over the call to Abdul to begin. Over to you, sir.

Good afternoon. Thank you very much. We are pleased to announce our first quarter results for 2026. Salam has achieved a revenue for Q1 of QAR 431 million, up from QAR 399 million the same quarter last year. Our gross profit has increased from QAR 118 million to QAR 125 million, a 6% increase, which resulted in a growth of 33% on our net profit from QAR 21 million to QAR 28 million. Overall, borrowings have also been reduced by around QAR 54 million and our finance costs in general have also been reduced. Obviously, for us, it's been a very good quarter despite the challenges that happened with the political situation in the last month. So we are very pleased with the results, and we hope that things will stabilize very quickly for us to keep up the momentum of positive results. I'll keep it brief, and we're open for questions and answers. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from the line of [ Wei Chao ] of AlRayan Investment.

This is Chao from AlRayan Investment. I have 3 questions, please. The first one is on the interior and fit-out segment. We have seen a good growth over there. Could you let us understand what has driven that growth? And is this sustainable over the next few quarters? Second question...

Shall I do...

Yes, yes, that's fine. That's fine, yes.

Okay. Regarding the fit-out, the main driver for growth is our growth in the Saudi market. We have entered the Saudi market a few years ago, and it's been picking up and growing organically. Since the last 2 years, there's been good results in Saudi. So for this year, definitely, a contribution is Saudi Arabia. Is it sustainable? Yes, because the amount of projects there is very good, and our pipeline is healthy for the foreseeable future.

Okay. Great. The second question is on the associate line. There's also a good growth over there. Could you elaborate what -- on the associate line, associate profit? Could you let us know what happened there?

No, no, there was growth last year. That's why you see the growth this year. But this line of business is doing very well. And always, we will be making the money there. So you see the impact of this year. It's only because of last year, there was a loss from one of their associates. This year, there is only...

Okay. And also maybe in general, has there been any impact -- what kind of impact did you see from the conflict? And how did it affect you operationally?

I think as everyone, logistics has been a problem. In general, it's not too long of a period to affect our project-based company. So the impact will start -- could be showing if things last longer. But a month, usually, we have enough projects to keep us going. In terms of retail and distribution, yes, the month of March has been affected, but we actually started the year, January and February with a strong start to the year, actually better than expected. So overall, it offset. So now the sentiment is coming back from retail distribution. So we hope that we will continue to be -- it will be affected for sure, we cannot deny, but not a worrying situation at the moment. Project-wise, all governments in the region are obviously reviewing, but we believe that we still have the capabilities to get thing -- project to get us through this year until things normalize again.

There's no other questions in queue at this time. That concludes our Q&A session. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.