Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the half-year results 2021 of Investis Group conference call and live webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions or comments in writing via the relative field. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Stéphane Bonvin, CEO of Investis Group. Please go ahead, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to our half-year 2021 results presentation. Thank you for your interest in our company. I have today with me René Häsler, our CFO, and Laurence Bienz, our Investor Relations. The agenda of this presentation will be as follows. I will start with the highlights of this half year, and I will continue with the market trends. René Häsler will present you the financial overview, and I will conclude with the outlook before the Q&A session. Highlights of this half year, 2021. We had really an excellent half year on both segments. The impact of COVID, as already mentioned earlier this year, was very small, and it doesn't impact our business. The continuing improvement of our operations makes that we were able to deliver a solid result, and this year after year. This result shows that our strategy is the good one in any circumstance. Regarding the result on group level. The revenue went up 14% to CHF 102 million. The operating profit before evaluation up 6.1%. We could achieve an impressive EBIT of CHF 155 million compared to CHF 62 million of last year. This give us now a substantial increase in our NAV per share to CHF 82.50, excluding the deferred tax. Regarding properties. We had this revaluation gain of CHF 131 million. That shows the quality of our portfolio, the good locations of our properties, but also that we are able to transform the rent potential into real rent. This like-for-like rent increase came up +1.6% for this first six months. We could also reduce our vacancy rate to 2.7% compared to 3% last year. Here again, I repeat that all our properties which are under refurbishment, they are counted in this vacancy rate. Regarding the real estate services. We could grow the top line through acquisition, but also organically. We bought, during these first six months, these two companies, Rohr AG and analysisLAB, and they are now since the first of April, consolidated. Regarding the EBIT margin, we could increase it to 8.8% thanks the improvement in our operation, the digitalization, and also that we want to have only profitable contracts. Almost all subsidiaries improved their operating margin. The market trends. As you know, we follow different metrics to guide us for our investments strategy. It's the demography, one of the most important, the construction activity, the regulation, and of course, the capital markets. Regarding demography. Switzerland had, for this first six months, again, a net migration of 26,000 people. For the canton of Geneva, for the last 12 months, we had 2,690 new inhabitants in Geneva, +0.5%. Also with this pandemic, we can see that the demography continue to grow. Of course, this is mainly due to quality of Switzerland makes that is going forward, we see improvement in the demography. Regarding the construction activity. We have a higher construction activity at the moment, but that will not cover the pending demand in the free market. It's still a high entry order for home ownership, and this will support the demand for rented apartments. Regarding regulation, still, we think that the tax regime for corporation in the Lake Geneva region, which one is one of the most attractive, will support the positive migration. Regarding capital market, I will come later on. If you look more in detail in the real estate market in Geneva. We can say that despite the stronger construction activity, there is no significant change in demand in the residential market. Most of the apartment that will come to the market will have controlled rents by the canton and will not change the dynamics in the free market. The demand for apartment in the free market remains high, which is reflected also on the price trends. The rents for all non-new homes offered in the free market is up by 0.8% for the last 12 months. If we look for the previous year, it was exactly also the same 0.8% for the same 12 months period. The vacancy rate in the residential sector in Geneva is the lowest of Switzerland, 0.49 versus 1.72 for the national level. Also, what I mentioned just before, the population of Geneva has the highest proportion of rented housing, 78%. All these elements makes that we continue to be very confident in this market, which is, we told it already many times, how the USP of Investis. Regarding the real estate market of Switzerland. If we look into the residential market, you can see on the graph on the left that you have four areas with very low vacancy rate. This is Geneva, Zug, Zurich, and Basel. What's very important to note is that the number of construction application is declining again, and the strongest decline was recorded in the canton of Geneva, Basel-Stadt, and Zug, where you have the highest vacancy rate in Switzerland. Again, we can see that this situation, going forward, of low vacancy rate will not change. Geneva has not only the lowest vacancy rate, but also the lowest stock of units for rents, and this is due to the high density of the canton because we can say that the canton of Geneva is a city canton, and it doesn't help to have units, I would say, around the city center. On the next graph on page 10, that's also very important to note. We can see that the offered rent in the market for the free apartments that they are now for rent, they are almost 25% higher than the current lease in Geneva and Lausanne. This means that we disclose that we have this certain rent potential on our portfolio. If we look into the offer, you can see that this is 25% for the global market of Geneva and Lausanne. What we see on our portfolio is that very often we are able to rent much higher than this 13%, or what CBRE gave us as rent potential. On the next slide, here we can see that for the period from 2011 to 2020, the Lake Geneva region has a lower rental reduction than the rest of the region of Switzerland. This is mainly due to the controlled rent. It's also due that, we explain it, that we have a fluctuation of our tenant of approximately 10% per year. We can see on this graph that for Lausanne and Geneva, the lease duration is higher than the rest of Switzerland, more than 10 years. The next slide shows again that the Geneva vacancy rate is declining again and well below the national trend, which is actually climbing again. We add now a new graph, which is also very interesting to understand why, in Geneva, you have a low share of house owners. It shows that Geneva has the lowest disposable income of Switzerland. That makes that the people are not able to save money to become owner, they have to stay as tenant. That makes why this market is very interesting. Now, about the financial market. On this graph that we show since years now, we can still see that the residential net yield continue to decrease parallelly with the 10-year Swiss bonds. We, by Investis, still continue to see a very low environment of the interest rate for the next 5-year minimum. Negative. We think also that next year, the Swiss francs will become stronger. This is due to the normalization after COVID situation in Europe. We think that Switzerland is not in a much better situation than our neighbors. Swiss National Bank will have to fight again to keep the Swiss francs low. This means that always we still see that the risk that the interest becomes more negative, higher than they become positive. The next slide, this is this property that we show since the IPO. We can see that during these last six months, we could increase the rent by 4.3%. We did the calculation for the last seven years, what was the average rental increase. It comes to +3.2%. This shows then that thanks this increase of the rent plus the yield compression, we have year after year a higher evaluation. For these first six months, we had CHF 2.2 million more valuations for this property. To sum up, as I said before, Lake Geneva region is Investis' USP. We have low vacancy rate. We are in a very low interest rate environment. We don't see any change there. The number of residential properties in city center does not grow. We are in a region where we have the highest demand. We have also one of the higher rental costs of Switzerland. Also the highest potential for rents, with the high rents per square meter. To conclude, we think that the concentration of our portfolio in this market makes that Investis has one of the most valuable and resilient portfolio of Switzerland. Now, René Häsler will present you the financial overview. Thank you, Stéphane. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, also from my side. I turn directly to page 19, where you see these four important graphs on the right-hand side, which characterizes our two segments very nicely. Starting maybe with the figures. We closed the six months with just over CHF 100 million of revenue. Once more, a net profit, which is slightly higher than the turnover, at CHF 132 million. Of course, that is due to the strong revaluation gains that we could accommodate in the first six months. When we look at the two segments, the two kits that we have in our organization. We have, on the one side, the portfolio, which is asset heavy. 98% of our balance sheet is covered from properties with steady cash flows. Cash generation is 70% coming from properties. Also service is constantly improving and marking the importance within our group. They post 72% of our revenues, but also generate 30% of our cash flow. Those real estate services, very important to us. Strong performance on low invested capital. If we look into the portfolio a little bit more in detail. The revenue up 0.5%. This is lower than the like-for-like rental income of 1.6%. This is due to the three sales that we did in the second part of last year when we sold some commercial properties. We are back with the revenues. When we look at the full property rents that we have in the portfolio, we are now at CHF 63 million, with a vacancy of 2.7%. That should lead to rental incomes of about CHF 30 million going forward. On the right-hand side, important, our like-for-like rental growth. The low vacancy rate. We still have some properties that we want to fill, that we are repositioning. That will then also show even lower vacancy rates, I would say, in the years to come. The revaluation gains, again, are the result of both lower discount rates, but also the already mentioned higher cash flows in the portfolio. On the next slide, we see the characteristics of this portfolio. Still the same as you know it. We are residential. We have over 3,000 apartments. 93% is residential, mainly in Geneva and Lausanne. 69% in Geneva, 25% in Canton of Vaud. The apartments are smaller apartments, one to three rooms, which is the characteristic of our portfolio, which also is what our tenants look for. Vacancy rates Geneva, we are down to 1.2% since we filled in that one property that we repositioned in Geneva. Vaud will follow the track in the future so that we will also have then vacancy rates below 2%, as expected. Commercial is rather less important. Also there we have some vacancy. On the next page, Stéphane mentioned it, our rent potential. CBRE is always looking at our market rents, and they rated that these rents could be 13% above our current levels. Still some room for high rents. That 13% is the same number as the year-end, despite the 1.6% higher rent link can be posted like-for-like. Important to note is 75% of our contracts are linked to the CPI, Swiss Consumer Price Index, not to the interest rate. That gives us protection when interests should even decrease further. We have the tenant turnover of 10%, which actually produce this like-for-like rent income. The target remains the same, 1%-2% on a yearly basis for this like-for-like rent income. That's for the portfolio. I would say no news compared to before. We are working on, I would say, improving the quality of the portfolio as before, and that was also a result in the valuation. Our service, getting more and more important. We have revenue of CHF 74 million compared to the CHF 62 million last year, is on the one side, the two acquisitions, Rohr AG, facility service company, similar to Hauswartprofis AG, and analysisLAB, another company that is doing asbestos analysis as their core business. Rather small company, posted a turnover last year of CHF 2 million and is well integrated into our facility service business. EBIT margin in the service, 8.8%. A notch above last year, despite that we purchased a considerable turnover in Rohr with margins that are still, I would say, below average. You might remember that in facility service, in the concierge segment, we expect margins of above 5%. Rohr is not yet there. Here I would like to mention that Rohr is consolidated since first of April. The first three months are not in our figures. There Rohr is rather a black zero, if not a red zero in the margin. They are very seasonally impacted. The strong season is coming in the third quarter, and then the fourth quarter is then again a lower margin business again, because due to weather conditions, you cannot always perform the specialty services that they do or that they offer. Nevertheless, 8.8%. I would say going forward, these margins should stay or even slightly increase, when we then integrate all the companies together. For once, the COVID-19 effects that we had in our group were a little bit stronger in the service business than in the property part. I hope with the vaccine getting distributed to everybody, we can get over that pandemic and go back to normal business as before. The margin, we are very glad that we could again post this 8.8%. On the next slide, you simply see the past development of turnover and the EBIT margin. We are now in this high single-digit band that we don't want to use, and will continue. If you look on page 25, below the operating profit, we see financial income and financial expenses, which are explained. The tax normal at around 15%, since most of the profits are coming from Geneva and Vaud, which have tax rates below 15%. EPS of CHF 10, which is also a result of the strong revaluation in the portfolio. Balance sheet is normally a rather boring slide, since we have actually three positions in the balance sheet. Is the portfolio on the one side, the financing on deferred tax on the other side, which results then in a strong equity of 51% or CHF 900 million as per end of June. Financing on the far right. You see that we have credit lines available, CHF 382 million. Part of it is used with the bank credits, we still have unused credit lines of CHF 267 million. Comfortable situation for refinancing of the bond in November. We are not yet sure whether we do a bond or use the credit lines. I would also mention that in July, we issued our first private placement. All financing is done unsecured, so we are also available for private placements should there be extra cash in market. This financing leaves us with an LTV of below 40% at 39%, despite the investments we did in the real estate service business. I'm sure you saw it in the half year report that we invested CHF 40 million into these acquisitions in the first 6 months. That's in a very short overview, the financials from my side, and I hand over to Stéphane for the closing remarks. Thank you, René. For the outlook 2021, we remain very positive in the Swiss housing sector. Immigration into Switzerland and especially into the Lake Geneva region will continue. We will continue to expand our portfolio through targeted acquisition, always in the Lake Geneva region. The demand for residential properties in prime Swiss location remain healthy. We will also continue to develop our real estate service, by focusing on acquisition and profitable revenue growth. As just René mentioned it, we have a low debt, strong balance sheet, and this gives us a low average borrowing cost, and we don't see any change there. The operating profit for 2021 is expected to be much higher than previous year due to the continued solid performance of both segments. Thank you for your attention. We are now ready for the Q&A session. We will now begin the question and answer session. The first question comes from Pascal Furger from Vontobel. Please go ahead, sir. Good morning. I have 3 questions. The first one is on property valuation. Here, obviously very strong. So far, you were basically the leader in the Swiss universe, if I'm not mistaken, at least in relative terms. Also in general, you report a quite meaningful revaluation gain since your IPO. My question is this story now over or what is your view on that, and what basically are the next triggers? The second question on the annualized rental income. It's up like 7% to CHF 63 million. Can you please provide a sort of a bridge where this is coming from or which properties you purchased, at what prices? Just to get a bit of a feel there. The last question is on your non-core investments. You sold a stake in Flatfox for CHF 2.6 million, I saw. There is many different platforms in the Swiss market, so why did you sell it? Maybe at some point in the future, you could give us sort of an overview on sort of all your other non-core investments. It appears this also captures some value that would be helpful. Thank you. Maybe first question, property valuation. Maybe if you look into our competitors, you can see that the discount rate they use is much lower than ours. I think that this morning, your colleague mentioned that we have, or you mentioned it, that we are still reasonable with our evaluation. What we have to look is, at the end is the market, where state the market today in the transaction. Actually, if we take the gross yield of our portfolio is around 3.7%, 3.6%. If you look really the transaction market, you've seen the start of this year, you had this huge transaction of the portfolio, from Metin Arditi. It was at 2% gross yield. In between 2%-3.6%, I think we have still there a huge potential. The answer is no, it's not at the end. Also what I mentioned regarding the interest rate and the capital market. Switzerland, finally, I say always, we are like a marathonian, and we had to stop to run during three months. Now we start again to run and we will be very soon fit again. If you look around us, our neighbors, they were already all very fat. They became fatter for these last three months, and they are not able to run. This is why, if I do a calculation of the value of Swiss francs, I think that the Swiss National Bank will have these next months, some stress. We will stay in this negative area for a long time. Of course, the market of residential property is very attractive. You see a slow slide that people is going from the 10-year Swiss bond, where it's negative, to the residential market. For us, I see it's still very positive, and I think that we will have a higher evaluation. Now, maybe the second question. I hope I answered to the first one. For the second one, maybe René will answer regarding the annualized rent income. Yes, sure, Pascal. It is correct. We are up what is it? CHF 4.5 million. If you look in the portfolio details on page 30, you see the three properties that we bought. It's three properties in the canton of Vaud in the range of CHF 25 million. That is, on the one side, contributed CHF 900,000 to the full occupancy rent. Then we have that property development that we listed in the last, what was it? Three years, which is the Alaïa Bay down in Sion, a very attractive new leisure location, which is not daily in the press, but daily in the social media. That contributed CHF 2.2 million to the gross rental income. With the acquisition of Rohr, we also bought the property, which also generated CHF 700,000 of rental income. These three elements will give you the details for the CHF 63 million. If I take the last question, the sale of Flatfox. As you know, we were a very minority shareholder. The founder and the other shareholders together decided to sell the company. Since we were bound by a shareholder agreement, we also had to sell with them. That is the reason why we did sell the stake. We didn't want to sell, but economics sometimes force you to follow the majority. As simple as it is. Since 100% of the company was sold to Mobiliar, the insurance company. Yes. Maybe to add on this topic regarding the startup. We are invested in several startup in the PropTech environment. Of course, we have some investment. They are really strategic and industrial for us. For example, one company is Properti, which is developing a software for really institutional owner for property management. As you know, we are invested in Batmaid. We have a very small also in PriceHubble. We have also in a very promising investment where we believe strongly in the blockchain, this is Taurus. Some of them, they are strategic, majority of them, because, as you know, we provide services, and we think that it's very important to innovate. Our politics is always when we want to transform something in our business, we prefer to do it on the site in a startup, because it goes faster, it's cheaper, and we are able to bring a new mentality in the business. That's really the way we follow. Of course, we had almost in all this participation that we have, like you've read that PriceHubble, the new valuation was CHF 110 million. Batmaid post-money is also much higher. Taurus will be also very soon do another round at a much higher valuation. Of course, we are not disclosing a lot because it's not our main business. As we are finally an industrial in real estate service business, and we have to invest, and we have to follow what's happening in the future. That's really our way to go into the innovation. It's quite difficult to give you numbers to disclose a lot of things, because also we don't have in all company the control, and we decide everything. Perfectly clear. Thank you very much. You're welcome. The next question comes from Philipp Mettler from ZKB. Please go ahead, sir. Good morning. I do have two questions. First one, after the integration of Rohr AG and analysisLAB, how far are you able to increase the margin until the end of the year? The other question is going to the property segment. Are you planning to buy or sell any other properties in the second half year? If yes, where? That's the 2 questions. Maybe I'd say I start with the margin one. I expect that the margin will not decrease and be stable at the level we are seeing it now. Since I don't have a crystal ball to look into it's a guess. The second one, Stéphane, maybe you want to cover that. Yeah. For now, I don't say that we have really in pipeline, we do every week offer. I cannot say that we have actually a big deal that would change fundamentally the business of Investis in the pipeline in both side, buying or selling. For now, it comes or it doesn't come. As I told before, many properties that we are able to buy, are property that are not in the market, and that it's more with our network, we can buy directly from the seller. And to sell- Okay For now, we have nothing in course. You're still comfortable with the properties in the Valais region? In Valais, the main thing is Alaïa now. We are in discussion to sell a small building, but nothing, it's around CHF 5 million. We are more going out of the Valais. Alaïa, I don't know if you've been there, but you should go, and you should try, and you will see than that every week, if you like the surf, you will come back. That is an attractive investment. Of course, in the valuation, this makes the big part of this 4%. The other commercial buildings in the region of Valais, are they connected with Alaïa Bay? Yes. You have Alaïa Bay, Alaïa Chalet. You have also Alaïa Lodge, which is the hotel. The commercial buildings? The 3 are. also connected with Alaïa? Okay. Yeah. Good. Thank you so much. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and 1. The next question comes from Marc Wyss from Maerki Baumann. Please go ahead. Good morning. I have only one detailed question regarding the FTEs in the property segment, which you decreased or halved from 10 to five. Could you give us the reason for that? Is that a bit a change of the occupancy management, or what's the reason? Thanks. Maybe, you know, that was always my goal. We had never had so much people in the property segment. We own Hauswartprofis, we own Privera, and we work with a refurbishment company, the name is Minisal. What we decide is that finally, all our properties are managed by Privera. All our concierges, they are also managed by Hauswartprofis. Finally, also, all the refurbishment we do, the technical team we had, we push it into Minisal. Why? Because if you have only 2, 3 people on the technical side working in our office, they are less efficient to work in this Minisal team. This company is almost doing maybe the half of the turnover with us, and it was a small company 25 years ago, and they grow thanks to us and thanks to also other partners. They know exactly our policy. It was more efficient to have this technical team into Alaïa-- Sorry, into Minisal than by us. This explains this change. Thank you. Maybe I can add another one about relating to ESG. Could you give us kind of an update to when can we expect ESG reporting initiative from your side? We are working on it. As I said last year, we receive already from Signa-Terre. Overview. Overview of our portfolio. We start to refurbish the worst property we have in the portfolio in Geneva. We also now are in discussion to enter in an SSREI index. We are adding now in 15 properties solar panel. We spoke to all our partner where we have for white goods. [Foreign language]? White goods. White goods, yeah. White goods. For the lift, et cetera, that we want to have better energetic performance on all the new material we buy. We are also working on the project éco21 for all the property which are not in éco21, is that in all the common parts of the property is a program that you do with Services Industriels de Genève, really to reduce the consumption of any energy. We are quite doing a lot. For the report, we are also working on it. We can expect something in the annual reporting then, relating to the reporting side. I mean, the initiatives are very good and welcome, but the investors also need some reports about it to compare, to get the numbers and all that stuff. Can we expect that something at the end of the year, or what do we have to expect? How much time we have to wait for that? Maybe I take that. In the annual year-end report 2021, you will not have a detailed ESG report. That would anyhow be disclosed separately. When we do publish it is when we are ready, and we are not yet ready to give you a report as to the others since a couple of years. Okay. Thank you. Welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would like to turn the conference back over to Stéphane Bonvin for any closing remarks. I have one additional question that came in through the chat, which came in from Johannes Schwab, from SFP. Low housing developments in Geneva, what about the rezoning and the redevelopment of Geneva West Industrial Zone towards housing mixed zone, higher competition looking forward in the Geneva housing market? In Geneva, when you have the industrial zoning, it's quite complicated because you have a foundation who owns almost all the plots. There is also big discussion because as you know Geneva, now they have with some big place, they are doing more and more residential, but you have also industry, artisanal, et cetera, who need space. When I speak with La Fondation des Terrains Industriels in Geneva, they want to expand. They want to have more space. For now, it's like La Praille. La Praille, we speak about 55,000 new apartments. Finally, you have still people with small company working there, and if you take all this space to do residential, you have no more space for this company. It's not easy. We will see some change during the time, but it's not that in one year you will have 50,000 new apartments. Geneva is not so easy. We saw now, for example, La Caserne des Vernets, Quartier de l'Etang. It was possible because Claude Berda bought, during 10 years, many property, all the small garage, all the small entities. To do Quartier de l'Etang, he had to invest and to buy not only the real estate, he bought the companies, the garage, car seller, etc. I'm not sure that institution, they're ready to do that. We know it. It will come. I think this will be the normal. It will continue with the normal rate of construction in Geneva. That was, I think, the last question. The sec- Another one. I have another one. What size of acquisition or investments in million Swiss francs would be needed to launch a capital increase? Wow. We have a leverage of below 40%. If suddenly we have a portfolio or possibilities to purchase CHF 200 million plus, or even CHF 300 million, of course, then that would be time for a capital increase. Yeah. I don't know whether. Yeah. Mine also. CHF 250 million. That was my idea. Okay. Thank you again for your interest in Investis, and we wish you a good day. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. See you soon. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. 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