Good day everyone, and welcome to today's Shurgard Interim H1 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and one on your telephone phone. Please note this call may be recorded and I will be standing by should you need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn today's call over to Caroline Thirifay. Please go ahead. Thank you, Ashley. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the H1 2021 results. I am here with Marc Oursin and Jean Kreusch. Before we begin, we want to remind you that all statements other than statements of historical fact included on this call are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by the statements. These risks and other factors could adversely affect our business and future results that are described in our earnings release and in our publicly reported information. You can find a press release and an audio webcast replay of this conference call on our shurgard.eu website. With that, I will turn the call over to Marc Oursin. Thank you, Caroline. Good morning, everybody. We are very happy to share with you this set of strong results for the quarter and our half year. Starting with the half year, at constant exchange rate, our revenues have gone up by 7.7%, which is by the way an acceleration between Q2 and Q1. We have been able to deliver growth also of 7.2% for our Net Operating Income for the same period of time. This has been actually fueled by a very strong growth of the revenue of our same-store pool, and we have been able to grow by 5.1% during this period of time for the half year. This growth of revenue for the same-store has been also strongly positioned with the growth of the occupancy. We grew by 2.1%, which is also an acceleration between Q2 and Q1, so the volume effect. We have been able to grow our NOI margin, so the rate of margin, by 0.6 percentage points over the same period of last year. Regarding our rental collection, I would say nothing particular, business as usual, a great performance with 98.4% of collection. All in all, we have been able to deliver a growth of our adjusted European Public Real Estate Association earnings of 10.5% and reaching more than EUR 61 million for these earnings. The pipeline is pretty strong. It's presenting for the current year 2021 and the next year 2022 and starting 2023 with 7% total footage close to 87,000 sq m, which is a total CapEx value of a bit more than EUR 180 million. The board have decided to go for a dividend of EUR 0.55 a share, which is more than 12% growth versus the same period of last year. The payment will be in October. If we have a look more specifically at Q2, which is actually an exceptional one in terms of performance. As I mentioned to you previously, the growth of Q2 is at 8.4% in terms of revenue for the old stores, while Q1 was at 7.1%, so you see the acceleration. Actually amongst that performance, the U.K. have been tremendously increasing. Q2 old store, we increased by 16.2%, and while for the whole half year, sorry, it has been 12.3%. The margin has been also increased significantly by 9.1%, while Q1 was at 5.2%. You can see the acceleration. Again, if you focus more on the same-store, which is around 95% of our portfolio, you see that the performance of Q2 in terms of revenue is very significant, 6.2%, while Q1 was at 4%, with again, the U.K. performing very well at 10%, and three markets above 7%, that are the Netherlands, Belgium, and also Denmark. Great performance. All markets are positive and strongly positive. The occupancy has been the highest ever we got for the same-store with 91.7% for Q2, which is a 2.6% growth versus last year. As a reminder, Q1 was at 89.11%. Margin has been increased by 0.7%. I will let Jean Kreusch continuing the presentation and share with you the overview on the financing, also the more details regarding our performance. Thank you. Thanks, Marc. Combined with the steady growth of our earnings in 2021, as Marc explained, we end the first six months of the year with a very robust balance sheet. Our loan-to-value at 17.6% and our Net Debt to EBITDA at 3.8x were in line with what we reported at December 2020. Our cash position at June 30 was EUR 77 million. In July, we refinanced a EUR 100 million tranche maturing with the proceed of a EUR 300 million green US Private Placement with a maturity in 2031 and a coupon at 1.24%. Our EPRA net tangible assets at EUR 2.8 billion grew by 9.5% versus December 2020. Moving on to our financial performance for the first half of the year. Our real estate operating revenue for the second quarter and the half year grew respectively by 8.6% and 7.8% at constant exchange rates. The increase is mainly driven by our same-store performance. Our net income from real estate operations in the first half of the year grew by 7.4% to EUR 88.1 million at constant exchange rates. A strong performance as we cut some costs last year, such as marketing expenses during lockdowns. Our General and Administrative expenses increased due to higher development costs as we build up our team, some one-off expenses relating to Environmental, Social, and Governance certifications, and Value-Added Tax refunds received last year. Finally, our adjusted EPRA earnings grew by 10.4% at constant exchange rates to EUR 61.4 million. On page six, our income from property by segment at constant exchange rates demonstrate a strong growth of our same-store and new stores. In our same-store segment, we had a very strong six months, with a closing occupancy at 91.7%, up 2.6 percentage points versus last year. We had outstanding average same-store occupancy in the second quarter, with Sweden at 92.8%, Denmark at 94.6%, and U.K. at 89.1%, up by a stunning 6.4 percentage points year-on-year. Our same-store average in-place rent increased by 2.7% over 2020. Both occupancy and rates contributed to the 5.1% increase year-on-year over same-store revenue at constant exchange rates. Same-store NOI margin improved by 0.6 percentage points to 62.4%. On page seven, our three levers of growth are contributing to the 8.4% increase in NOI, with the same-store growing by 6.1% at constant exchange rate and contributing EUR 4.9 million to the growth, while the acquisitions and developments added another EUR 1 million of NOI. Moving on to our cash flow on page eight. We invested EUR 46.6 million in developments of properties done versus last year, as we have not yet done any acquisitions in 2021. The cash outflow from financing of EUR 64.8 million reflected our payments of dividends, interest, debt financing costs, and the purchase of the lease of our first stores in Brussels. On page nine, we continue to show a robust balance sheet geared for growth. Our EPRA Net Tangible Assets grew by 9.5% to EUR 2.8 billion, following positive fair value revaluation of our investment properties, mainly resulting from positive impact of higher rates and a compression of the cap rates. On the debt side, I mentioned earlier the drawdown of the EUR 300 million green USPP in July. In the first half of the year, we also extended our EUR 250 million undrawn revolving credit facility by two years to 2025. Marc will now take you through our development pipeline on page 10. Thank you, Jean. We're on page 10. Strong pipeline, as I said originally. The good news are that for 2021, everything is on track, so we have already opened all the redevelopments that we're foreseeing. Regarding the new developments, out of the seven that were supposed to be open, three have opened, and the remaining four are on track to be open before December. For the remaining four months that we are facing. Regarding 2022, we have already, I would say, Fed the pipeline. We will open five properties next year. Four will be in Paris area and one in Cologne, in Germany. On the top of that, we have already started to feed 2023 with a new acquisition that we have done in the West Inner London recently. All in all, this pipeline is representing 87,000 sq m. As I said, again, globally EUR 180 million, which is 7% of our total rentable footage of the company. Very significant. Now let's go to page 11, and talking about the digitalization of the company with an example, which is what we call eRental. Just a couple of words regarding eRental. Again, you can make an analogy of that by thinking of airline companies, where from the need you arrive to a boarding pass on your smartphone. Well, here it's the same logic. From the need of storage and through Google, you end with a move-in in Shurgard. That's this full 100% experience for our prospect and then customers. We actually get the benefit probably of the COVID, the fact that people were locked down and looking for storage and went on that process. We have been able during the whole half of this year to roll out in all markets this technology for all our customers. Amazingly, we have been able to do 10,000 already eRental contracts at the end of June for our seven countries. Very significant volume. At the scale of the company. Which means that these 10,000 move-ins through eRental do represent now 20%-25% of our total contracts done during the same period. Very significant. An interesting point is the fact that at least another 25% of the total eRental are done outside the opening hours of the shops or properties. Which means early in the morning and late in the evening. The other interesting point is that there is no difference in the way customers are, I would say, behaving later on. We don't see any change in the retention of our customers. They stay with the same length of stay. We don't see any variances there. Thirdly or lastly, of course, generation Z and millennials are more in favor of technologies than the other ones, especially baby boomers and generation X. This is what you see, proportionally, generation Z and millennials do represent 56% of our eRental versus a 40% when we look at the, what we call walk-in customers that are majoritively generation X and baby boomers. I will pass slide 12, which is giving you the details of the different generations and the spread to hour of day of this eRental, but happy to answer to your questions regarding that later on. To conclude, page 13, a couple of points. The first one is, yes, definitely strong performance for H1 and Q2. The second one, we have a robust and growing pipeline representing 7% of the footage of the company. We are very active and working hard in Mergers and Acquisitions. For the first month of Q3 are demonstrating an acceleration, so it means the acceleration continues after Q1 and Q2, which are good news. Last but not least, based on all this information and results, we have deciding to raise up the guidance for specifically this year 2021 from 4%-6% growth of the total company revenue to 8%-10%. Thank you, and I thank also our teams, of course, for their commitment and these great performances. We are now happy to answer, Jean and I, to your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Marc and Jean. Now we open the line for your questions. Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, that is star and one on your touchtone phone. We can take our first question from Frédéric Renard with Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, very well, Frédéric. Okay, cool. Well done with the result. I have just four small questions. Maybe the first one to start is that I see that the annual NOI margin at the same and non-same store level is going slightly down. Can you comment a bit on that? The next question would be on the EUR 5.7 million recovery from proceeds from insurance company. Do you expect another one in H2, or can we assess that it will not be the case going forward? The third question I would have is your view on occupancy rates going on in 2022 and 2023. Finally, a question on M&A. Are you still guiding for EUR 50 million acquisition this year? Thank you. Jean will take number one, number two, and I will go for number three and number four. Yes, and our margin are slightly down. This is not unexpected, Frédéric. If you recall last year, our expenses were down as we cut down on marketing largely. That explain why this year we are slightly down on margin. We expect that to stabilize and be back on a margin compression once our expense level are back to normal. 2020 was exceptionally low on operating expenses. As far as insurance recovery goes, we're not expecting any further amounts coming through. That was a one-off in the first half, and, no, we don't expect that anymore. Okay. Thank you. This is Marc speaking. Frédéric, regarding the occupancy rates for 2022, 2023. First of all, the current occupancy rate and what could happen for the next year. Starting with the situation today. It is true that the occupancy has gone up significantly in all markets. This is mainly due to two things, the move-in and move-out. Meaning that move-in have been positive if I am taking the same-store pool, very comparable perimeter of properties. If we look at the half year, but also Q2, we have a very strong acceleration of the volumes of move-ins of people renting into our properties in Q2 by 9.7%, while the half year is at 2.8%. At the same time, the move-outs were flat for the half year, 0.2%, which means that clearly you get the benefit of filling up the property. This is globally the case for all markets. 2022, 2023, clearly, I don't have a crystal ball for 2023. It's pretty far away. At least I can talk about the remaining four months, so September to December. That's why, again, we have raised the guidance for this specific year due to the fact that what we have already done for the first half, plus what we have seen, how this first half was built up, this acceleration between Q2 and Q1, and we see the same trend in terms of acceleration in July and August. We think that we are comfortable by raising up the guidance. 2022, it's a different story. We don't know yet. We don't have the view of how customers prospect will behave. I simply can say that, and again, reiterate that for the time being, the volume of activity on the web is still pretty strong, is higher than 2019. I take on purpose 2019, which was a stable year before the drama that the world went through in 2020 and early 2021. 2022, Frédéric, I cannot comment either. Regarding your fourth question, regarding the level of M&A. I do confirm that we will be in a level that is in the range that you have mentioned. Thank you, Marc. Thank you. Thank you for answering my questions. You're welcome. Once again, as a reminder, that is star and one for your questions. We'll take our next question from Marios Pastou with Societe Generale. Please go ahead. Hi there. Good morning. Thank you for this morning's update. Just a few questions from my side. Firstly, I just wanted to go into your revised guidance a little bit on your 8%- 10%. Are you able to split this out for what your expectations are for your same-store portfolio, which is included in that figure? Secondly, just going back and circling back onto the trends you're seeing in July and August, can you give a bit of a comment on whether this is occupancy-driven, rental-driven, or a mixture of the two? Thirdly, I noticed there is a bit of a valuation loss on your investment properties under construction. I just wondered if you could give a bit more commentary around the details of the cash flows here, and I think there's a mention of regulatory requirements in the report itself. Any information that would be appreciated. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Marios. This is Marc speaking. I will answer you regarding the revenue, specifically the same-store and the trends for the occupancy in July and August. Jean will come back to you regarding the investment of the properties. Regarding the guidance, obviously, we had given at the beginning of the year, I would say like every year since the Initial Public Offering, a guidance of 1.5%-2.5% for the same-store. When you look at the performance of H1, the same-store have done 5.1% at constant exchange rates, which is much higher. Globally, what I can say is that, the way we have raised up proportionally, on the old store should be more or less coming from the same-store. That's logical, knowing that same-store are globally around 95% of the total revenue of the company. That's what we're expecting. Secondly, actually, thank you for that. The link is perfect with the trend of what we see in terms of the performance of July and August. Where is it actually coming from? What is the volume effect? What are the rates also effect? Clearly when we look at Q2, actually, as I said, we have a strong volume effect. We have 9.7% growth of our move-ins for Q2, specifically same-store. At the same time, the move-outs are higher by 6.1%. Globally, of course, we get a gain of occupancy, which is very significant, 2.3 percentage points. When I'm looking at the in-place rent, same thing. In-place rents are growing in all the markets. The total company is actually at 3.2%. We have this volume effect, and then we have the value effect, if you prefer. The value effect is around 3.2%. This is coming from a couple of things. Actually, first, we are having a move-in rate. If you prefer, our new customers getting in are getting in with higher rates than last year. Last year, we did some discounts during this period of time, I mean Q2, especially May, June in France, also in the Netherlands and in the U.K. We have, if I look at the global performance of Q2 in terms of rates, we get the benefit that we are not overspending in discounts. That's why these move-in rates are going up. The fact that the existing customers are getting increases as usual, while last year we postponed and we waived for a couple of months the increase of the existing customers. The combination of newcomers with a higher price and existing ones getting an increase, as they should have, is actually bringing this rate of revenue. That's why we expect to see this effect also in the coming months before the year-end. I think the third question regarding the investment property valuation, I will let this to Jean. Yeah. Regarding your question on the loss on property under construction. It's just a timing effect. We anticipate to catch that back once they're open. Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Marios. Once again, as a reminder, that is star and one for any questions. We'll take our next question from Tim Leckie with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just one from me. Given the robust performance last year and now accelerating strong growth seen this year, have you thought or had any conversations internally about perhaps carrying some more financial leverage? I appreciate there is development spend and potential acquisitions ahead, but does the recent performance give you increased confidence to carry some more debt to drive equity returns? Thanks. Thank you, Tim. We're still remaining on our guidance of 25% loan-to-value. That's what we are targeting. We're not there yet. Yes, we're expecting to gradually increase our leverage towards that conservative target of 25%. We're expecting to go up, but as we already communicated, we continue to stay on that conservative balance sheet of 25% loan-to-value as a target. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you, Tim. We'll take our next question from Max Nimmo with Kempen. Please go ahead. Hi there. Morning. Just to kind of follow up on Tim's question there. We've kind of consistently been below that 25% Loan-to-Value, and is that because the valuation side of things has been stronger than perhaps you might have anticipated, or is that still building into the assumption that you're going to get there in the medium term? Because I've just noticed we've been below 20% for quite some time. I'm just wondering if that's because of the valuation side of the portfolio has been stronger than you guys expected? Thanks. That's correct, Max. The valuation is obviously increasing, as you have seen, quite strongly, and that's obviously helping us in a way keeping our LTV where it is. As you've seen, it hasn't moved from December 2020, despite the fact that we continue to invest and pay dividends. You're right in your assumption. As I mentioned to Tim, over time, we're planning to go to 25%, which gives us significant dry powder to do acquisitions. Yeah. You can kind of increase your capacity that way if you see that trend of valuation still going in that same direction, I guess. Indeed. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Max. Once again, it's star one for any questions. There appears to be no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Caroline for any additional and closing remarks. Thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to reconnecting in this venue soon. Thank you to all of you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.