Sirius Real Estate Limited (SRE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to today's presentation of the Sirius Real Estate Group's year-end results for the financial year ending 31st of March 2023. My name is Andrew Coombs. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Sirius Group, and I'm joined this morning by Alistair Marks, who is the Group Chief Investment Officer and Interim CFO. Together, we will take you through this morni0ng's presentation. And if I could start by reminding you all that Sirius now operates in both the German and U.K. markets, under the brands of Sirius in Germany and BizSpace in the U.K. Please can we start by turning to Page 3 of this morning's presentation. As you know, we are an on balance sheet, best-in-class owner and operator of mixed-use light industrial business parks on the edge of key towns in both Germany and the U.K. The group currently operates nearly EUR 2.5 billion of real estate, EUR 2.1 billion of which is wholly owned by the group. And as you can see on Page 3, we have a fully integrated operating platform with over 450 employees in 150 locations across Germany and the U.K. We are listed on the main markets of the London Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and we have U.K. REIT status. I'm pleased to tell you that as you'll see in these results, we are now generating more than EUR 100 million of funds from operations which is very important because our policy is to distribute 65% of that number as dividend. And of course, because we're distributing 65% and retaining the remaining 35% we are nearly 1.5x covered in terms of our dividend payment. So we are highly sustainable in that respect. If we go across to Page 4, what we can see is that Germany is a well-diversified economy. It's spread across several large autonomous regions. The German light industrial asset class is one where the replacement cost is between 200% to 300% of the value that we tend to pick real estate up for. So there is plenty of headroom here for Sirius to pack value to its tenants and customers before we start getting to a point whereby competitors can simply build it from new and rent it out to our tenants. In terms of gas reserves, Germany is now at 75% full capacity coming out of the winter. This time last year, it was less than 30%. What you'll see from this presentation is that Germany really has got a grip of the weaponization of gas, having replaced the Russian supply previous Nord Stream 1 that was cut in September by increased supplies from Holland and from Norway and also by getting the LNG terminals or the liquid nitrogen gas terminals up on the North Sea up and running. And over 5% of the total national supply is now coming from liquid nitrogen with that likely to accelerate over the next 12 to 18 months. Despite all this, Germany is now in a technical recession. However, it's due to grow its economy by 0.2% and if we were to believe the forecast this year, and that's likely to accelerate to about 10x that, nearly 2.5% next year. Notable that inflation is falling over the last 2 months in Germany. It's gone from at the headline level, just over 7.5% to around 6.5% in the last month or so. And there are a number of other very positive aspects that are coming out where the German economy is concerned. If I can get you to turn across to Page 5, maybe we can look at the U.K., where we think there are particularly strong rental growth opportunities. We've grown the price per square foot in the U.K. business by nearly 15% in this year. We think a lot of that is driven not only by the strength of our platform and our operating processes, but also by the macro that there is a chronic lack of supply of industrial property in the U.K. That chronic lack of supply is being magnified by the fact that demand is increasing and supply isn't even static, it's reducing because for a number of different reasons, industrial properties being repurposed. So we have a perfect storm in the U.K. whereby people need more of the type of property that we own, and there's less of it about. We also see that regional investment is helping where the U.K. is concerned. And I know there's been a lot of talk about leveling up. But if you look at where we are in the political cycle in the U.K., there is money that's being put into leveling up, and that's only due to increase over the next 2 years leading up to the next election. And if you look at the rise in production efforts in the U.K., yes, there is a rise in nearshoring, but the thing that is most apparent is the Post Brexit trade friction. It is more and more difficult to bring things in from Europe that people were importing Pre Brexit and as a result of that, what we're seeing, particularly in the north of England, is we're seeing more and more companies grow up who are producing and distributing things that previously would have been bought in from Europe. And of course, that is one of the factors that is increasing the demand for the property that we own and rent out under the BizSpace brand. So if we look at the highlights on Page 6, this is a story that's all about very strong rental increase, strong rental increase that's driving a 36.9% increase in funds from operations. What that's done is for the first year seen the Sirius Group break through the EUR 100 million FFO mark. This has led to a 28.8% increase in dividend. And as you'll see on Page 47, not now, but maybe at your leisure, we first paid a dividend in 2014. 9 years later, we are making dividend payments that are 10x higher, the dividend that we paid for the year ending 2015. In fact, this is now the 18th consecutive rising dividend, including through the COVID period. So 18 times we have demonstrated to the market that the word progressive that we've been using for nearly a decade is something that we are willing to deliver on. Despite COVID, despite the Ukraine war, despite a number of other different factors. I may also remind you that whilst our dividend is currently nearly 1.5x covered, it has never been less than 1.3x covered. So not only have we delivered on that promise of progressive, we've done it in a very responsible and very sustainable way. In this set of results, we are moving the dividend from EUR 4 -- sorry, EUR 0.0441 to EUR 0.0568 . So that's where the 28.8% in increase comes from. There are lots of other highlights, which we will see as we go through this presentation. But at this point, maybe I can just leave you with a thought about the dividend, I ask you to turn to Page 7 and hand over to Alistair who will take you through the income statement.

So if you look at the income statement on Page 7, you can see our bottom line profit this year is EUR 87 million. which is slightly down from last year. But I think considering everything that's going on in the world and particularly in the markets that we operate, I think that's an excellent result. The reason why it's actually down from last year is because if you look at the net valuation gains and when I say net valuation gains, I mean, valuation change plus the impact of CapEx. So last year, we had about EUR 146 million net valuation increase, whereas this year, it's a deficit of about EUR 8 million. And that EUR 8 million is made up of about EUR 22 million increase in valuation less around about EUR 30 million of CapEx. And I'll talk about that in a bit more detail in this presentation. But yes, that is the major change as far as our bottom line is concerned from last year. But I think most importantly, if you look at our cash profit and Andrew alluded to this, our FFO number, we've cracked the EUR 100 million, EUR 102 million FFO this year. If you look at where we were when we first started this campaign to get to EUR 100 million, back in March '19, we reported an FFO of EUR 48 million. So back then, our ambition to more than double our FFO in a 5-year period seemed very ambitious, but we've been able to do it in 4. So we're very pleased with that. And when we look at it on a per share basis, I think it's even more impressive because we've raised only a small amount of equity to actually do that. And again, I'll go into that in a bit more detail later. But that EUR 102 million FFO is around about 9% on our market cap and about 8.1% on our EPRA NTA. So if you look at our actual cash earnings as a percentage of market cap, it is quite impressive, and I think there's still quite a bit to go, and you'll see that, that will become evident as we go through the presentation. But that 37% increase in the FFO whilst we've had some benefit of the full year of BizSpace and the full year the acquisitions we acquired last year, a big chunk of it has come from organic growth. 7.7% like-for-like rent growth this year across the 2 jurisdictions is a record for the company. And considering where the market is at the moment and what we've had to deal with, I think that is a pretty impressive result. And I think if you look at how we've achieved it, focusing more on price rather than increasing the occupancy or the vacancy potential opportunity that's coming from that is preserved but we've been able to achieve this huge like-for-like rental increase. So I think organically, things have gone exceptionally well, and we've done it in a way where we preserve the opportunity going forward. If you flip over the page to a per share basis, you can see NOI of 13.5%. We've had about a EUR 0.026 per share increase in NOI. So if you look at our dividend of about EUR 0.057, EUR 0.026 has come from increasing NOI. So that illustrates why a lot of this has come organically or how this has come organically. And if you look at the FFO per share, EUR 8.74 million that's about a 29% increase on last year. And obviously, we're paying out the same ratio as we did last year. So that 29% is reflected in the dividend as well. But if you look at where we want to get to, I've mentioned 9% FFO yield and share price we want to get that to 10% as quickly as possible. And if you look at what we need to do to get to a 10% FFO yield on the current share price, it's only about EUR 11 million more FFO. And if we talk about 10% FFO yield on the EPRA NAV, it's about a EUR 24 million increase in the FFO from where we are. And I will talk a little bit about the potential that we have left in the portfolio and what I sort of think we can achieve over the next few years. But that EUR 11 million to get to 10% on the current share price doesn't seem too difficult at this stage over the next couple of years. Flipping over to the balance sheet. And I think one of the key things that underpins our ability to be able to really exercise that growth in a way where it's on a fairly low risk basis is the strength of our balance sheet. And I think the key thing to note on the balance sheet is, first of all, the cash we have, EUR 124 million of cash, of which close to EUR 100 million of that is free. That gives us a nice cover in order to be able to use it to grow in the future and also deal with what investments we need to invest into the portfolio and anything else. In addition to that, the EUR 2.1 billion of assets, we've been able to preserve the valuations, and we'll talk about that a bit later in the presentation as well. But around about EUR 1.6 billion, almost 75% of those assets are unencumbered is pretty similar to last year, but that is a huge thing as far as just working out the risk in this business, EUR 1.6 billion unencumbered assets gives us a lot to play with. Should we have to deal with any issues on the secured banking facilities. And also, as far as the debt is concerned, we've refinanced a lot of the debt that's expiring and there's only EUR 50 million or EUR 49 million of debt expiring in the next 3 years. So less than EUR 50 million, so less than 5% of our debt is expiring in the next 3 years. So there's nothing really to deal with on the banks going forward for the next 3 years. And if you look at where our covenants are, we've got a lot of headroom there as well. So I think we are in a very strong position as far as our balance sheet is concerned. And if you look at NAV per share, we've been able to grow that this year, albeit about 1% and but I still think the fact that we've been able to grow that year that this year is quite a positive result as well. And finally, on a per share basis. I think on this slide, the key thing this shows is if you look at our recurring profit both from Germany and also the U.K. it's around about 0.08. If we talk about FFO EUR 0.087. This illustrates how well the dividend is covered. So with only EUR 0.057 that we've paid out this year, EUR 0.052 now we paid out, EUR 0.057 we've earned this year. The dividend is extremely well covered. And when we talk about the potential growth in our recurring profits, going forward, I think that will actually increase as well. So all in all, good results, and I think we're in a very strong position going forward.

So if I can just talk about the organic growth in Germany. Really, I think what I would draw your attention to here is the rate per square meter. And whether you look at like-for-like or if you look at general rate per square meter, you can see that the overall increase is in excess of 8%. If you then just look in the bottom left-hand corner, the last 4 roads, New lettings, New letting rate per square meter and Move-outs. What you can see is 164,184 Square meter plays 164, 562 Square meter, but the big difference is they're moving out at EUR 7.47, and we're bringing them back in at EUR 8.68. Now to bring them back in a leverage of EUR 8.68, that means that we're selling, in some cases, up to EUR 10. So what you're seeing is you're seeing a sales rate up probably 1/3 higher than the underlying rate of move-outs. But actually, when you blend it into the P&L, you're seeing about an 8% increase. But this is where the power of the platform really comes in because sure, there's some market in here, sure there's some prices are going up and people will pay more. But that kind of level of increase in the German market across -- don't forget, 164,000 square meters, 1.6 million square feet of sales to be able to drive that consistently by 8% on average what you're talking about is having, in some cases, to sell well in excess of 15% to 20% increases to customers. You can only do that with a proper platform. And you'll only be able to sustain it with a proper platform. That is not just market that is also the national sales force throughout Germany and the way that the platform works and the demand that is generated. And if we go across the page, what you can see is that 164,000 square meters of move-outs was just under EUR 15 million of revenue walking out the door. It was replaced by EUR 16.6 million of new sales, EUR 3 million of that EUR16.6 million was assisted with CapEx spend i.e., we had to refurbish or change the space. And then you see the icing on the cake being the EUR 6.3 million of additional price that you bring that new 164,000 square meters in NAV. Sounds very simple on paper. In practice, there are lots of moving parts, but that's how we've managed to get to where we've got to in Germany. And if we look at the valuation effect of that, Alastair, maybe I can hand over to you.

Yes. So if you look -- and we're looking purely at Germany at the moment. So in Germany, we've had a EUR 21.6 million increase in the valuation. That has come about with the EUR 8.2 million increase in rents more than offsetting the 40 basis points of yield expansion we've seen in the portfolio at the moment. We spent about 24.4 million of CapEx in the German portfolio. So we've had a slight deficit as far as the P&L is concerned, with a little bit more CapEx than the valuation increase. But if you look at that CapEx, whilst we've had some benefit of that coming through this year, I think the bulk of the benefit from that CapEx investment is going to come through over the next few years because that investment is largely improving the quality of the portfolio and improving our ability to get higher prices going forward. But where we've actually ended the year at is with a gross yield of 7.3% and a net yield of 6.6%, around about 40 basis points expanded from the prior year. And if you look at where the market is trading at the moment, we believe that is still quite higher than what we're seeing transaction-wise in the market. And I think we're at that point where buyers and sellers haven't really found that place where the market should be trading out. We're seeing a few distressed transactions where people need to sell, but generally, sellers, if they don't need to sell, they're not accepting lower prices and buyers aren't prepared to pay the price of yesteryear. So we're at that point where we haven't found that balance where you're going to see a large volume of transactions happening. It's more the exceptions rather than anything that's normal. So -- but I still think that the valuations that we have in our books probably going to be higher than where that market is going to end up. So whilst we have seen some yield expansion, I still think they are relatively conservatively valued compared to where the market will probably end up.

When you say high, you mean the yields are higher, not the values are higher.

The yields are high. Correct, good point. And as far as acquisitions are concerned, we spent -- we bought assets at EUR 41.5 million purchase price and the value of EUR 44.8. So that increase in valuation is just about offset the acquisition costs. So that seems to me like those assets have actually been purchased quite well. If you flip over the page and look at the portfolio split between value-add and mature. What you will see firstly is that valuation wise, we've seen roughly about a 2% increase in the valuation, the value adds, whereas the mature assets have stayed broadly flat. And if you look at the rent increases, we're talking about close to 8% increase in the value add and about 6% on the mature assets. So key thing to note, even though the mature assets are mature with around 95% occupancy, we're still seeing almost 6% increase in rents on those assets which shows that there is still quite a bit of reversion in the portfolio, and we are able to capture inflationary increases that are built within our contracts. And you'll see that almost 90% more than 90% of our assets of our tenants are on contracts with rent increases embedded within the contracts. Occupancies have dropped slightly, and this is the point I was making before in the fact that we've had this record like-for-like rental growth in the year, but the opportunity within the vacancy has actually increased even with the like-for-like portfolio. We've seen -- you can see up there, 272,000 square meters of vacancy we started the year with now at 280,000 on the like-for-like portfolio. And when you add in the acquisitions, we're back up to close to 300,000 square meters vacancy from which further rental growth is going to come from. And if you look at the potential of that, there's around about 90,000 square meters within that 300,000 square meters, which is going through the CapEx program. At the moment, only 35% of the assets are mature. And if you look at our plans over the next 3 years, we're looking to get the occupancy of the portfolio close to 90%, and I'd like to see close to 70% of those assets in the mature category. And if we can achieve that, that's roughly around about 120,000 net take-up of that vacancy. And if you look at potentially what that's worth to the rent roll, it's worth around about EUR 12 million. And if you look at this year, and Andrew mentioned that we've seen 6.3 million increase from inflation and contraction rent increases as well as a little bit on renewal. If we can get another EUR 10 million over the next 3 years, that is close to what we need to get to that 10% FFO -- running FFO on the current EPRA NAV. So there is still a lot of potential left in the portfolio. And a lot of that, and if you look at how that's going to transpire into valuation if we can actually get to 70% of the assets in the mature category, you can see that the mature assets are valued on a tighter yield than the value add. So even if yields go out, improving the quality of the assets, taking them from value add into mature naturally is going to create yield compression, regardless of what the market does. So there is still a lot to come on the income side, but also I believe there's still more to come on the valuation side going forward. And obviously, the CapEx program, if you flip over to Page 15, is key to that. We've transformed and completed almost 50,000 square meters in the period. We've replaced almost half of those, 24,000 and have come from the acquisition. So the asset recycling has replaced almost half of the space that we've transformed in the period. We spent almost EUR 7 million. We've increased the rent from the assets going through this CapEx program by about EUR 3 million. And as you can see, we continue to invest less per square meter than what we budget for. We continue to rent the space at more per square meter than we actually budget for. We've currently got the completed space at 73% occupancy. So I think 82% is our target. I'm pretty confident that we can exceed that with a bit of time. So this CapEx program is actually going better than we're actually planning. And if you see what's actually still to come, just over 40,000 square meters is left to transform from the suboptimal space, another EUR 12.6 million to invest and potentially another EUR 5.5 million rent roll. But in addition to this, we're also looking at upgrading space that we get back. So if you look at the space in the vacancy, which is poor quality, which we're looking to upgrade before we relet, there's almost 47,000 square meters we've identified which we're looking to invest about EUR 7 million into to get between EUR 3.5 million to EUR 4 million extra rent from that, sitting in the vacancy. So if you combine that with what's left in this CapEx program, that's the 90,000 square meters of space that's going through refurbishment at the moment. We're looking to spend just under EUR 20 million on that space to get close to EUR 10 million extra rent. So 90,000 square meters of the vacancy spent EUR 20 million to get EUR 10 million extra rent. That's what's left in the CapEx program. And that's what's part of the 300,000 square meters of vacancy, which I think is going to help deliver those rent returns that I was talking about before. If you flip over to the asset recycling. I think we've been very successful on the asset recycling this year. If you look at the key things we're trying to achieve from it, first of all, we want to prove the valuation of the assets in our books. Secondly, we want to replenish the opportunity that comes from the CapEx investment program. And thirdly, we want to move on assets where we think have either maxed out on their potential or they're noncore, and they're in locations and have characteristics which we see a -- we see difficulties with going forward. And if you look at what we've actually achieved to date as far as that's concerned, we've sold EUR 45.8 million of assets at close to 25% increase on book value. So that more than proves that the book values we think are conservative or there's still the ability to actually achieve much more than what the book values are. Secondly, we've been able to use that money to buy 45 million of assets with much more opportunity and almost replace the operating income that we've lost. So the assets we sold had EUR 1.9 million of NOI. The assets we bought have got EUR 1.6 million of NOI. So we've almost replaced all of the NOI. And if you look at the assets that we've sold Magdeburg and Wuppertal, for example, are in locations we see as being difficult for us going forward. And in the case of Magdeburg, the vacancy, it's just not economical to invest into that. So we are getting rid of assets in noncore locations that we see challenges with going forward. In the case of Camberwell, that's an asset. We're just taking advantage of a strong market, which it was at the time when we sold that and Ipswich is similar to Magdeburg and Wuppertal and that's a challenging location vacancy that requires a huge amount of CapEx that just is not economically viable for us to do. So we've got rid of a number of problem assets, and we've acquired assets in Dusseldorf and Dry Ice key locations for us with great opportunity going forward. So all of those points I've mentioned as to what we want to achieve from asset recycling are evident in what we've actually done in the year.

Great. Thank you, Alistair. Can I maybe turn to the U.K. now. And the U.K., as you can see, is a story of nearly 15% increase in pricing. Now there are lots of reasons for that. One of the reasons is the reason or one of the reasons why we bought BizSpace because we believed it to be an under-rented vehicle. So there is some catch-up in there. There's also some repositioning of the products and services that BizSpace makes up to its customers. And there's some market in there as well. You go back to this point that there is a chronic undersupply of industrial property in the U.K. That supply is not improving. It's getting worse for lots and lots of reasons. And the demand is increasing. This is a perfect storm. There could not be a better time in the history of industrial property in the U.K. to be in that market. Germany has got lots and lots of things that are great about it. The U.K. is a different market, but right now, there is a perfect storm in the U.K. and it's a store made of multiple different factors, but there could not be a better time to be in this market than right now. That's one of the reasons why in the U.K., we are going for a price-driven strategy. So we are not in a situation whereby we are predominantly looking for occupancy and trying to drive volume through the business. What we're doing is we're trying to realize the benefits of pricing because that's where the greatest returns are at this point. Now we need to do that in a relatively customer-centric way. So this is not just about pushing your prices up as hard as you can. This is about a sustainable strategy that delivers value to customers and make sure that you're not just using inflation as a reason for increasing price. And that's one of the reasons why you're seeing the price increase by 15% with inflation being less than 15% because what we're doing is we're changing the value proposition to our customers. And in doing so, they are demonstrating they're willing to pay more money for that increase in value. But watch BizSpace because whilst we do not plan to drive this occupancy down below 85%, what we will continue to do is to go for a price-led strategy in the U.K. Note the difference between U.K. and Germany. In Germany, what's happening is you're seeing headline inflation coming down. And you will probably see underlying inflation begin to drop off. You're not seeing that at this point in the U.K. And it's not until we start to see 3 consecutive months of headline inflation coming down and potentially underlying inflation start to drop off we will go back and relook at the price-led strategy in the U.K. So there is very much a science behind this. And we are looking at the economic factors very carefully as well as managing internally our proposition to our customers. But it's a different market to Germany. And that's one of the reasons why we want to diversify into it. If you go across the page, you can see that effectively, what's happened is the revenue from the move-ins and the move-outs has balanced itself out. Obviously, occupancy is a different matter. And you can see that the uplift, the GBP 4 million uplift in rents is effectively the icing on the cake. What we've seen is the rent roll go up by 8.5% despite the fact that there's been a 4% drop in occupancy. If we look at what that means at valuation level, well, what it means is the rental increases have effectively canceled out the yield shift and whilst there's been a small decline in U.K. valuations, we basically matched the yield shift with the increase in revenue. Again, different market from the German market. If I can then maybe talk a little bit about the recycling in the U.K. Alistair has explained that we recycled Camberwell and Ipswich within the group's recycling. Camberwell at a loss of 400,000 of net income. And Ipswich, you can see was making a loss. What I would draw your attention to is we have lined up in exclusivity, GBP 10 million worth of acquisitions, which will immediately replace that lost NOI with GBP 1 million worth of new NOI. And we're looking to move on those quite quickly in the next few weeks. I'd be very disappointed if we weren't completed on those by sort of early September-ish, and we would expect to see the full effect of that income coming into the second half of the year. So you can see a really good example of what Alistair was talking about, which is proving the value of the assets and recycling tired capital into opportunities that are a lot more exciting going forward. Let's not forget the EUR 100 million. If we go back to 2016, this business was kicking off about EUR 25 million of FFO. If we go back to just when we hit COVID in early 2020, that had gone up to EUR 55 million. From 2020 to '23, we've taken the 55 million to north of 100 million. Now about half of that has come through the acquisition of BizSpace, but the other half has come from, as Alistair explained, organic growth both in the U.K. and Germany. That means that we've delivered on our 5-year ambition within the 5-year time scale, and it means that we've realized that ambition by expanding into the U.K. market by investing our capital into value-added opportunities in Germany. And by driving that CapEx program, where we're typically getting more than 25% return, sometimes up to 50% into the intelligent use of CapEx that is deployed off the back of the intelligence, the clear line of sight that we get into our local markets. So not is it intelligent use of CapEx, but it's done in a relatively risk-free format because we're not inventing it and inflicting it on the market, we're building back using the CapEx to do so based on what we see with our direct line of sight into the market. So one of the biggest difficulties I have is explaining to people how these returns can be so good at such a low risk. The reason for that is the platform that it's taken us over a decade to develop and really hone. That is what at this point in a changing market gives us such a huge advantage in terms of mitigating risk. If you then go across to Page 22, we talk about the future. And the future is really about the operational momentum to get to somewhere between EUR 112 million and EUR 115 million of FFO The ambition is to get to EUR 115 million, and we've got EUR 35 million of question mark over the next 5 to 7 years in terms of how we're going to solve that problem. But we've got operational momentum to around about EUR 115. And that is including absorbing the effect of EUR 8 million of extra interest cost and EUR 4 million of increased overheads. So this is not a pie in the sky, Allice in Wonderland, fictitious stream. This is realistic planning in the same way as 5 years ago, we set out the plan to get to EUR 100 million. We didn't let COVID stop us. We didn't get let the situation Ukraine stop us. We delivered within that 5 years. What we're talking about here is a 5- to 7-year plan to get to the EUR 150 million. And the first step of that, which is already operationally imply is that bound to EUR 115 million. So as we go through the coming years and reporting periods, just as we have done over the last 5 years, you'll hear me talk about the operational momentum. You'll hear me talk about the gap to EUR 150 million. And what we'll be looking to do is use operational and balance sheet initiatives to be able to close that gap. And before we get to the end of the 7 years, make sure this business is delivering EUR 150 million of FFO, which, as we all know, is the key thing that drives that dividend. And right now, in today's market, there is only one thing I think we can be certain of, cash. Everything else is theory. The one thing we can be certain of is cash. And that's why we are focused on the continuing momentum of our FFO. Alistair, do you want to talk about financing?

So what you see on the financing is that we've refinanced about EUR 230 million of debt this year, almost one year in advance of when it expires. And what that means is that of the EUR 975 million of debt that we've got outstanding, only EUR 49 million needs to be refinanced in the next 3 years. That is EUR 35 million on the Schuldschein and a 14 million Sparkasse facility that we have in Saarbrücken against the Saarbrücken assets. EUR 20 million of that EUR 49 million we need to deal with this summer. We're already in discussions with the current holders of that debt. They're very keen to extend that. So that looks like we'll be able to either refinance it with them or potentially there's other options that we can move towards if we want to, but that should be relatively easy to deal with, which means there's about EUR 30 million of debt we need to deal with in 2025. All very manageable, especially when you consider we've got more than EUR 100 million of free cash sitting on the balance sheet at the moment. But as I mentioned to you before, EUR 735 million of the EUR 975 million is unsecured debt and 240 million is secured. But our net LTV of 41.6% has stayed stable. But if you look at the interest rate, 1.4% that will actually increase to 2.1% when the new facilities that I've just mentioned kick in. So again, whilst there is an increase there, that's roughly around most of the EUR 8 million that Andrew was talking about, in our FFO ambition, but still at 2.1% interest cost that is still relatively low considering what else there is in the market. But I think from a financing perspective, we're in a very strong position as I mentioned, all the covenants, have got plenty of headroom whilst the net LTV is slightly above 40% and we have got plans to get that below and we will get below 40% very quickly. But I think we're in a strong position as far as the financing is concerned.

So if we just look at the summary, what we're talking about here is strong FFO growth of just under 37%, taking us to a run rate of EUR 102 million, so not run rate taking to an achievement of EUR 102 million of FFO. We're talking about that being driven by strong rent roll growth in the U.K., particularly strong but also strong in Germany as well. We're seeing the 18th consecutive progressive dividend increase, and that's increasing to EUR 0.0568 from somewhere around about EUR 0.044 previously. So an increase of just under 29%. As Alistair explained, we have a strong balance sheet with EUR 1.6 billion of unencumbered assets and EUR 124 million of total cash on the balance sheet at the moment. We have just under EUR 100 million , i.e., EUR 99.2 million of that cash unrestricted. Alistair has been successful in the early renewal of the BerlinHyp and the PBB loan, which means we have less than 5% of debt coming up for expiry in the next t 3.25 years. And we have also increased our debt expiry to 5 years. If we have a look at the outlook going forward, what we would say is that the new year, the new financial year has started well and that the group is trading in line with market expectations where FFO expectations are concerned. We're saying that the occupancy in Germany is stable and that we are seeing the easing of energy prices. And we believe that the energy crisis that we saw a year ago in Germany is all but behind us. The company continues to assess further growth prospects in both Germany and the U.K. on an opportunistic basis, and that includes the recycling of mature assets in both markets in order to have the freedom to reinvest capital in whichever market proves to be the most opportunistic. We see organic growth opportunities remaining strong, particular -- or particularly with further investment into that 90,000 square meters of vacant space that Alistair talked about earlier on. And we see the opportunity for the group to take advantage because partly of its strong platform of the high inflationary environment, but we are mindful that inflation won't continue for good, and we're likely to see, certainly in the German market inflation starting to come off in the next 12 months or so. Thank you very much indeed for your time this morning. All that remains for Alistair and I to do now is to try and answer any questions you might have. Thank you.

It's Matt Saperia from Peel Hunt. Can I ask a couple of questions, Andrew and Alistair. First one, obviously, a very strong year for growing rate. Particularly in Germany, I was wondering if there are any different subsectors where it's been easier to grow rate than it would be in others? And I guess a follow-on from that, are there particular parts of the market where you've seen demand for certain types of products against other ones? And then following on from that, on the platform, I was wondering how you're getting on in bringing across best practice from Germany into the BizSpace business?

Great. There's quite a few questions there. Let me see if I can start with the subsectors point. I think you probably know that what we try and do across our customer base of 10,000 tenants is make sure that we don't have too much dependency on any one subsector. So it's really not the case of us saying, this is a very strong subsector, and this is the reason why we encourage more and more tenancy from it, more a case of us making sure that we really kind of spread our dependency on any particular sector. But what I would say to you is that if you look at Germany and if you look at our business in terms of accommodating people who manufacture things, particularly heavy industry. What they have is a very high dependency on utility. If I think about [ GKN ] as an example, who make carbon fiber in massive autoclaves, spending somewhere in the region of about EUR 2 million a year on electricity. For them, it's not just about the rent. It's about the cost of production and the cost of production is about the cost of utility. And that's been something that's hit their business extremely hard since February of last year. And even though, as you can see on this page, the German government subsidizes, for example, electricity to 0.13. What Sirius is able to do is supply it to its customers at [ 11.7 ]. So what that means is if you are a manufacturer in Germany and you're using a lot of electricity or a lot of gas, and Sirius is providing it to you, you've got a commercial advantage. And therefore, you really want to be with Sirius. And therefore, when we talk about lifting the rent, you don't really want to have a conversation that's about trying to confront the landlord with the rent. You want the landlord to keep supplying you your utilities at lower the market rates for as long as possible because that is a competitive advantage to you. And that's not a massive part of our business, not 50% of our business. It's more like sort of 20% to 24%. But for that quadrant of customers, who are in the business of manufacturing in Germany, being with Sirius in COVID was a big advantage because of the way that we operate it. Being in business with Sirius now we are a strategic partner because we are determining in part the cost of their production, and that's really valuable to them. So I know that's only the first part of what you asked. But can you just remind me, what's the second piece?

The second bit was on bringing best practice across from Germany platform [indiscernible].

So there are 2 areas where we've really started to get some traction on that. The first area is around the sales platform. So in particular, the inbound call center that we now have in the U.K., the sales metrics. In the U.K., we are now regularly bringing in more than GBP 1 million worth of new customers every month. So that's nearly 100 new customers a month. And of course, that's really important because when you're having those price conversations with the existing tenants and you're driving for that 15% uplift, your own staff need the confidence that the company can recruit new customers. If somebody says, no, I'm not going to pay, I'm going to leave. But also, you need to be able to demonstrate to your existing customer base that the space really is worth what you're talking about. And there's no better way of doing that than with the queue of customers coming in and viewing the space and signing and signing contracts. So the sales area has definitely been one very, very big area. What we're seeing in terms of the marketing platform is we're seeing real improvements in the website now. We've opened up some new channels in the U.K. from a marketing perspective that are proving particularly efficient. So you've probably seen about half of the best practice that we would expect to bring over. You've probably seen about half of it getting traction at the moment. It will take at least another year for the other half 2. And of course, it's not just like flicking a switch. It starts to get traction and then you finesse it constantly over a long period of time. People forget, it's taken us over 10 years to develop the platform that we've got in Germany. So it's beginning to happen about halfway there, still plenty to go.

James from Peel Hunt. Maybe just on the LTV. Can you talk a little bit about where you would like to see that get to over the coming 12, 18 months and then obviously, linked to that, you talked a bit about selling assets, particularly some of the more mature assets in the portfolio, both in Germany and the U.K. Should we expect some of them to be into in Germany that titanium JV. Is that something that we could see happen. And again, I'm definitely getting ahead of myself here, but as part of your kind of longer-term ambitions, the EUR 150 million do you think in due course, you could potentially replicate a JV in the U.K. as well? Is that under consideration?

Okay. So 3 questions there, really LTV, titanium and titanium. Let's start with LTV. Look, I can't emphasize enough that with 75% of your debt is corporate debt, net debt-to-EBITDA ratio is really, really important. And that's what the credit agencies look at. And that's the bread and butter of what keeps us going. Absolutely except that people look at LTV. Arguably, net debt-to-EBITDA is more important at the moment, but the fact people look at LTV means LTV is important, and it's going to be considered. And it's important, of course, because people get worried about when yields blow, what's going to happen to LTV. Well, that's now. That's happened. That's where we are. And as a result of that, we're at 41.6% LTV at the end of March were actually as we stand today at 40.6% and as Alistair has explained, we want to bring that down. But lots and lots of people stay at a 30% LTV so that when things blow now, they can be at 40%. Well, we started at just under 7%. We are where we are now and our LTV is at 40.6%, and we'd like to see it in the 30s. But I think the point that I would like to draw people's attention to is the reason we manage low LTVs is for this point in the cycle, it's where we are now. And we're managing now to just under 41%, and we want to get it down into the 30s. And that's what we'll be focused on doing. And part of that is through the recycling of assets. Part of that is by generating one day enough income to beat the bloating of yields and start adding to the value. And part of it, of course, is the natural amortization that we pay on the -- just under 250 million of mortgage-backed debt that we've actually got. So we're taking active steps to do that. Will we want to sell assets in titanium? I definitely want to get to a point whereby together with our JV partner, we say, look, we need to prove the value in titanium to the market, to our joint venture partner to ourselves. And naturally, we will need to recycle some assets to do that. The point at which we do that in the market is critical. We're not under any pressure to recycle in the JV. But it's something that I think it would be healthy for us to do. If I move on to the U.K., why do we have a JV? Well, we have a JV for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons is so that we have another source of capital to partner with. So that we can get involved in things that are more immediately capital intensive than maybe Sirius could digest on its own on its balance sheet. Now in Germany, that's typically more than EUR 40 million. Let's say in the U.K. that is more than GBP 50 million. Would we look to maybe JV opportunities that were sort of EUR 50 million plus, we probably would. I'm not sure we'd get many people that would be interested. I think you'd have to be in the EUR 100 million plus. And of course, we would consider that in a strategy of alternative uses of capital, and it would be logical that we would go first to our existing partners. So it's there in the landscape, the toolbox that we'd use. We've got good relationships with people as we've proved in Germany. But do we have any immediate plan to go and do a JV now. No, not really. We got more immediate plans to try and use that JV in Germany, not to be EUR 450 million, but to be a lot more -- sorry, not to be EUR 340 million, but to be a lot more than it actually is. But I'd like to think we're ahead of the game, ahead of the game in terms of 95% of our debt is locked down. We already have joint venture partner and relationships. When other people are looking at banking and partners, what we're looking for is the opportunities to actually partner with and the opportunities to actually spend the bank lending on. Does that answer your question?

It's Rob James from BNP Paribas Exane. A couple of questions from my side. So just one on the EUR 115 million target, which unfortunately sounds a bit like EUR 150 million. What's the time frame for that to get to the EUR 115 million ? Secondly, just on like-for-like rental growth, obviously, you said very, very strong year this year, occupancy was down, I think it was about 400 basis points on a like-for-like basis. Does that mean that you push rents a bit too hard this year? And then the final one, which we can always come back to afterwards is on unencumbered assets. So again, there was a figure in the presentation earlier on unencumbered assets. When I look on Slide 76, which shows the current position in terms of your UAR versus the covenant. I wonder if you could tell me what the incremental borrowing that you could undertake on a secured basis to get to a position where you're UAR would fall to the covenant level.

Alistair, could you [indiscernible].

If you can't now it's the [indiscernible] .

I calculated for that one.

But before you do, maybe I can try and answer the other 2.

And I should say, sorry just to interrupt. The reason why I'm asking is because I'm thinking ahead to the corporate bond refi to the extent to which you could look to refinance some of that with secured borrowing rather than not secured.

Okay. Let me come to the -- did we push pricing too hard. If you look at what we where we've lost the occupancy, it's been in the U.K. And if you look at what we've effectively done there is we've grown by 8% in terms of the rent roll and lost 4% occupancy. The way I look upon that is we've gone from 90% occupancy to just under 86%. We've replaced that income, and we've grown the rent roll. And we've still got 4% additional capacity to at some point in the future, even if we gave that away at half price to yield extra revenue. So I think the strategy in a period of time is economically successful. I think at 85% occupancy is still strong. If you look at your fixed costs and where your margin is at 85%, that's still good. If you crash your occupancy to 75%, I agree, that would have been a really, really silly thing to do because whilst you might have been able to produce economics that were positive, the effort in building back occupancy from 75%, those 15 percentage points, that's a long journey. But to play around with less than 5% and to get 8% more. I think that's sensible. So there's no black and white answer, but my judgment would be I think we've done okay on that. What we now need to do is we need to build that occupancy back a little bit before we strip back on price again. Now Rob, I do apologize because what was your first part of your question?

[indiscernible]

Yes. Thank you. So look, when we talked about the EUR 100 million, we never said it was a target. We said it was an ambition. We didn't put a timescale on it. But of course, everybody murdered us for how long, how long, what's the time scale and we explained it depends how you do it. It depends on how much of it is organic, how much of it's acquisitive. But we eventually said, look, it's between 3 and 5 years, depending on how it how it unfolds. And then COVID came along and everything else came along, we did it in 5 years. I don't particularly want to get pushed into a timescale for the EUR 150 million . But if you did push me, I'd be saying 5 to 7 years rather than 3 to 5 years because of where we are in the economic cycle. But I think the interesting thing is success in both cases kind of looks like 5 because when we said 3, 5, we didn't know about COVID and Ukraine. If we're saying 5 to 7 because of the economic cycle, and we can find a way of delivering in 5, that would be great. But the timescale of the ambition, I would say, would be in a 5- to 7-year time scale. Now do you want to answer any of -- or do you want to answer any of the questions or.

I have to answer the question. But just the EUR 115 million just on that, that was purely on the existing portfolio. And if you look at our plans, there are plans in place to get there were close to there in 3 years, but obviously.

You're talking about EUR 150 million -- 150.

I understand both. But just to clarify that because then you sort of almost alluded to the EUR 115 million in 5 to 7 years, which probably is pushing that back a bit. But if you look at the unsecured debt covenants, so the 2 main ones are being under 35% secured LTV and also having 1.5x unencumbered assets to unsecured debt. So I think of the EUR 700 million of bonds, we could refinance EUR 500 million of that with secured debt and a EUR 200 million unsecured bond facility, and we'd be fine still.

Okay. We've got a couple of questions come. The 2024 FFO per share consensus on your website is below this year's result and would imply a decrease going forward.

And that's because it hasn't been updated based on the analyst forecasts that have been published this morning but it will be updated. What sort of timescale Alistair before you can update that?

It should be within the next week or 2, we'll update them.

Okay. Great.

Okay. And then we've got another question here. Have you started exploring the use of AI in the platform?

Yes.

Simple.

Okay. And the last one -- can I just say why really complex subject, exploring it firstly as a defense because it can be used against you in terms of from a marketing perspective, from a people drawing off your own brand, et cetera. So first, we need to understand it. So if there's any threat to us, we can defend against it. Secondly, we need to work out how it can be used in the positive sense of the word for the business as a whole. But yes, we have.

Great. The last one, you haven't done any acquisitions in Germany since October? Do you start to see opportunities?

[indiscernible] let me just say yes.

Yes, there are opportunities out there. But as I mentioned, we still haven't got the sellers to the pricing point where we see that there's good value and it's going to be accretive to what we've actually got. It's getting closer, but I think it's going to take a bit of time before we get to that point before we jump into that. But I think as far as replacing assets, there are some assets we're looking to sell. So I think there's some acquisitions that we're looking at that would be suitable for asset recycling. But to use fresh equity for, we haven't got to the pricing point where we think it's accretive at this stage.

But you should expect some recycling. So you should expect some acquisitions from recycled capital because the market -- where the market is at the moment, we can see how we can do that.

Okay. Great. That's it from the webcast as well.

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. Really appreciate your time. Thank you.