Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the presentation of the Q1 figures 2022 of DIC Asset AG. Today's call is being recorded. I now hand you over to the host, Sonja Wärntges, CEO of DIC Asset AG. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to DIC's Q1 2022 results conference call. As always, I'm here with my colleague, Patrick Weiden, CCMO of DIC Asset, and the colleagues from accounting and investor relations. As usual, we will give you a short presentation of our results and highlights for the Q1 2022, followed by a Q&A session. Ladies and gentlemen, our start was very successful, as well as from the operational, as from the strategic side. We are on the way to best in class on many levels. Let me highlight some milestones that we have reached. We completed our first 3 acquisitions in other European countries for the third logistics fund, and we will continue to push ahead with this in the future. The acquisition of VIB Vermögen AG is a key factor in our strategy and is along our way to become the national champion for logistics and offices in Germany. Now managing assets of more than EUR 13 billion. We have also made significant progress in our ESG strategy. This was just recently also certified by leading ESG rating firms. The good start into the year led to a slight FFO increase to EUR 26.7 million. Our letting teams performed very strongly in the Q1 and signed a total of around 65,500 square meters on site. Around 40,000 square meters were let to the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. All in all, we saw a strong like-for-like rental growth of 3.3% on our real estate platform. The lease expiry volume in 2022 was therefore reduced to 1.5%. The AGM, which was held on the twenty-fourth of March, approved a dividend proposal of EUR 0.75 per share. For 41% of our shares, the shareholders chose the scrip dividend option. Since our strategic decision to increase our logistics exposure back in the summer of 2020, we made a lot of progress there. Now we successfully closed our first logistics investment outside of Germany. In total, we bought three assets at total investment costs of around EUR 171 million for the RLI-GEG Logistics & Light Industrial III Institutional Fund, which was launched this year. In addition to classic core plus logistics real estate, this fund invests in light industrial and urban logistics real estate. With these investments, we have positioned ourselves in the Netherlands, the European heartland, and we are close to all major transport and trading routes. In addition, we bought one logistics property in Germany in the metropolitan area, Cologne-Bonn. We announced this acquisition yesterday. With this latest acquisition, the fund is already up to around 80% of its planned targeted volume. Besides this organic growth, we have also driven the inorganic expansion and reached good milestone with the majority takeover of VIB Vermögen AG end of March. We have entered into a business combination agreement with VIB and have determined the key points for future collaboration. Currently, we are in the process of reviewing the total portfolio of VIB, which will be part of the commercial portfolio going forward. Within the balance sheet investments, our commercial portfolio, logistics will play a dominant role in the future. Saying this, we will see the fully consolidated results in the Q2. End of March, we show our stake of 36% under the investments in associates amounting to around about EUR 514 million. Also, last but not least, we warmly welcome the roughly 40 VIB employees to the DIC family and are looking forward to their expertise in logistics. Together, we will open a new chapter and write another success story. Ladies and gentlemen, we have made a lot of progress in our ESG activities and were therefore awarded with the best in class result from the renowned international rating agency, Sustainalytics. We understand ESG is a key element in our daily working processes and implemented ESG measures in all units of our organization. With an overall score of 9.2 ESG risk rating, DIC counted among the top 3% within the real estate industry during the last reporting period, ranking 25th out of 1,046. Among the top 5%, 6 out of 160 among the real estate management companies. We also achieved a significant improvement in our S&P CSA rating for 2021, as we were able to increase the score by 8 points to 26. By the way, we will publish our next sustainability report next week, and the report will include our historical performance, but also more important, also a new set of qualitative and quantitative ESG targets. On our next slide, you see the development of our main income stream. Our income stream showed further growth year-over-year. Driven by our strategic and operational excellence, our net rental income increased by 8% year-on-year to EUR 21.1 million in the Q2. The net rental income increased in particular due to the good letting performance and the acquisitions over the last 12 months. The ongoing expansion of our institutional business led to an increase of real estate management fees by roughly 6% to EUR 25.4 million. While asset management, property management and development fees were slightly up at EUR 8.6 million, the transaction fees rose stronger to EUR 16.8 million. In addition, we generated income from associate companies of EUR 4.5 million, in particular due to the higher contribution of transaction-related income from investments. The profit for the period adjusted for non-recurring effects reached EUR 14.4 million below the previous year, mainly due to the much higher profit on disposals at the beginning of last year. Now let's look at the details of the development of the FFO. As mentioned, compared to the previous period, the main income streams, net rental income and real asset management fees increased. Our OPEX increased in line with the growth of the platform. Additional costs derived from the takeover of VIB and were adjusted within the FFO calculation. The net interest result decreased due to the new financings in 2021, and therefore higher volume of debt compared to the previous period. The growth of our main income pillars outweighed the negative effects from OPEX and the net interest result. In total, as mentioned before, our FFO reached EUR 26.7 million. The FFO, too, is at the same level as we only had negligible disposals in the commercial portfolio in the Q1. Let's look at our valuation and adjusted NAV, which takes into account both the value of our balance sheet portfolio as well as the full value of our asset management business. The successful growth of our integrated real estate platform and our strategic expansion of the logistics asset class was already reflected in the year-end 2021 valuation. Therefore, the change on the NAV per share as of end of March 2022 was mainly driven by the comprehensive income in the Q1. The adjusted NAV as of the balance sheet date reached 25.8 EUR per share. On the next slide, I just want to give you the usual quick update on our financial structure. Our financing activities are far-sighted and increasingly green. As of the balance sheet date, the loan to value increased by 660 basis points, mainly due to the ongoing takeover of VIB in the Q1. Factoring in the full value of the institutional business, the adjusted LTV stood at 47.8%. One of our main priorities after the takeover of VIB is the reduction of the group LTV towards our strategic level of below 50% in the next months. As of the balance sheet date, we had already drawn EUR 285 million out of the VIB bridge loan to finance the acquisition of 36% of shares of VIB. An additional EUR 250 million were used at the beginning, sorry, of the Q2 to fund the remaining. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by while we're experiencing a momentary interruption in our conference call. Please stand by. Please go ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the interruption of technical problems. We were on slide nine and I discussed the financial structure. As of the balance sheet date, we had already drawn EUR 285 million out of the VIB bridge loan to finance the acquisition of 36% of shares of VIB. An additional EUR 250 million were used at the beginning of the Q2 to fund the remaining VIB share acquisition to a total of now 60%. The bridge has a maturity of two years and gives us sufficient flexibility. Therefore, we do not have any short-term pressure to refinance the transaction, neither via a new debt instrument nor via a capital increase, especially not in the current market environment. With the liquidity of more than EUR 450 million cash and the sales price for the Uptown coming, also the flexibility of our platform business model, we will work on a deleverage of our balance sheet. Nevertheless, we continue to have a close look on the capital markets and will use a possible open window at a later point in time. Ladies and gentlemen, we just published our new guidance a couple of weeks ago, including the VIB contribution for nine months, which we confirm today. We are currently in the process of including the VIB portfolio into DIC's commercial portfolio and consolidating the numbers. This also includes a deep look into the valuation of the VIB portfolio during the next weeks. This was my presentation. Thank you for taking the time to join our conference call today, and now we are happy to answer your questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Once again, that is star one for your questions today. We will pause for a brief moment. Our first question today comes from Andre Remke from Baader Bank. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, Sonja. A couple of questions from my side. I would prefer to do it one by one, starting with transaction market and your view on that. Did you already experience some reluctance, so to say, of clients to invest at this point in time, given the macro risk and probably higher alternative interest rates? Good morning, Andre. Thank you for the question. I think it's the most important and interesting one at that point of time. If you look at the transaction market in the Q1, you see that the volume has doubled versus the Q1 last year, last year. I think that shows, with 50% office and 24% of logistics, that we are on the right way. It also shows that the confidence in the German market is there. You see that foreign investors are coming back because Corona has an end, so to say. People from other countries can come to Germany and have a look at the assets and so on and travel again. I think we will see a dip there, because of the war and the uncertainty which is in the market. I think the numbers for the Q1 show that in the long run the German investment market is attractive. It will be attractive, maybe with a little bit lower prices. Office and logistics are still a remaining basis in the investment market. At the end of the day, it is driven by users and tenants. As we also saw in the Q1, this is a very fundamental basis, but a very stable basis in Germany. Okay, thank you. Did you not experience any questions or more evaluations by your clients because they get offered now 150 basis points higher alternative investment? Or they are completely relaxed or are they your clients in a wait-and-see mood at the moment? I think it's a little bit different. As the difference in the clients itself. Yes, on the one hand, the family office, they are looking even more on attractive investments than in the past. You see, some of the pension funds, they are a little bit in a wait-and-see position and discussing what they are doing. Then you have all the banks which have to invest in real estate assets. They are also looking very deeply in what happens, but I think they all together think that real estate investments are stable on the long run. We expect that the prices will go down a little bit, but at the moment, we don't see it, yeah. With the inflation and the interest rates, being as high as they are in the moment, the market has to change. This also the institutional funds are expecting. I think if you buy something now, you have to do a very clear business plan, and these are, at the moment, lower yields than we had in the past. On the other hand, we think it will come back, in the third or Q1. We will have to deal with the new situation. Nobody knows how it goes on with the war in the Ukraine, and I think this will be the most important point for all the other parts in the business. We see not a very negative behavior at the moment. It's more a wait-and-see. From this point of time, you do not have any concerns on your given guidance ranges when it comes to acquisitions and disposals. You are quite confident to reach this and not to come in the situation like in with the outbreak of the COVID crisis, two years ago, that we will see the same behavior by investors. Yeah. As explained, we see a different picture here, and I think with our platform, we are able to use the different picture, different views from investors on the market. We see that they are very different, as explained, some minutes ago. We have now bought VIB, so we have grown our commercial portfolio, a lot, so to say. We are in the phase to look at the values there and how the numbers look like after the consolidation. The VIB team is doing evaluation at the moment. We are waiting for the numbers there, and then we will decide what we do for the rest of the year. What we see is that, or what we think is that we will advise some of our institutional investors to maybe sell some of their investments when they are at a very attractive point at the moment. I think we will have, at the end of the year, a little bit more of selling activities. As far as for the transactions and the acquisition side, we have bought 60% of the stake. That means more than EUR 1.5 billion with today's valuation of assets. I think we have done a lot of transactions in the Q1 for the rest of the year. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Next question is on the refinancing. You mentioned that you are not in a hurry to refinance this because you have two years' time. One simple question, the bridge loan until 2024, is it at a fixed rate or it's a floating rate? No, we have some steps included there. We are on a very, very low level at the moment compared to today's interest rates. Even the highest one is for us very attractive. Just had some discussions with the banks, for sure. At the end of the day, we have this bridge loan on attractive conditions. Nevertheless, we will work to refinance it because we do not want to have this bridge loan in the long run. We have bought time to do it if it's appropriate. At the end of the day, it was a good discussion for us and a good interest rate. Also the increases over the next 18 months in three steps will not bring us to excessive interest rates. Okay, perfect. Lastly, on the consolidation of VIB, could you provide any indications of a potential goodwill from the transaction? As far as I would assume, you will revalue the portfolio of VIB. Do you already have a timeline in your mind? Lastly, do you consider for DIC in total to change your at cost valuation to a fair value methodology, as already VIB did? At first, VIB is having a look into its valuation, not we. We will see what comes out of this, and we expect this end of May, beginning of June to be ready in the first step. There's a lot of assets which the evaluators have to look at. At the end of the day, I cannot say what the numbers look like, but you can imagine that we have had a lot of thoughts into the right price for us, what we have to invest in VIB not to pay more than we want to, not to pay more than it's worth. We expect the respective number to come out from this valuation from the evaluators of VIB. At the end of the day, we will see it when the numbers come, but we are sure that we see the right number then there, and this is in line with our sales price for the shares. The fair value accounting, I think it would be the worst time to change our accounting method at that point of time into fair value. We are happy that we had the cost accounting in the past, and we will stay with the cost accounting in the future. No need and no chance to change it at the moment. We also will look and discuss with VIB what they are doing in the future. You told us that VIB guys are looking into their own valuation, but they already had a valuation at year-end last year. Is it not a topic of an external appraiser? Yeah, an external evaluator is. They have. Hired. They have hired an external evaluator and they are doing the re-evaluation. As usual, discuss this with VIB, and then we will see what VIB says, and the evaluator had found out about values and assets. Yeah. The appraiser is a new one in comparison to last valuation at year-end 2021. Yeah. That's right? Yeah, it's a. Okay. Yeah, it's an international big company who will look at this. Okay. Thank you very much. That's from my side. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question now comes from Stefan Scharff of SRC Research. Please go ahead. Good morning, Sonja. Good morning, gentlemen. Andre took most of the questions. Just a little follow-up about the financing of VIB Vermögen. You have about EUR 500 million to finance, and your plan is still, let's say, EUR 400 million to buy debt products and EUR 100 million about new shares, about an equity issue. Is that a good assumption or is this still the ratio we should expect? Good morning, Stefan. Yeah, Andre had the right questions. I can confirm this. Yeah, that was our plan. We said when we did the transaction or we started the transaction to buy the majority stake in VIB, that we will refinance this on the one hand with a 10% capital increase and on the other hand with a capital market debt financing. This is still the plan, yeah. But at the moment, this, it does not... It's on an economic perspective, it's not possible from our side, yeah. Mm-hmm. As said, we are not in a hurry. We have the time for the refinancing. But if you look in our balance sheet, you can see that we have a lot of liquidity, more than EUR 450 million at the end of March. We have also got the sales price of the sale of the Uptown Tower. We have a lot of liquidity on our balance sheet and in our bank accounts. With our business model, we have the possibility to refinance it also in another way, not only by doing a capital markets refinancing. We look at the market and we have some time, and so we will decide on a later point of time what we do and how we pay this back. Even if the debt product or an equity hike come at a later point, you still have the possibility and you still have the financial scope to grow your portfolio on a quite steep growth path? Definitely. Okay. Another question is about your acquisition outside Germany, the Netherlands. What was your experience here and what maybe expect to come in the other quarters of this year? Let's say Belgium or Luxembourg, is this also a topic and what to expect here? Yeah, we have two funds in place, which can invest in the European market, not only in Germany. We have started with logistics because we think that the ways for logistics expect also foreign investments. Therefore, we have made a market entrance in the Netherlands for the first or at first. This was not easy. We have to learn a lot about Mm. Taxes, accounting, and so on. We got a trust from the investors, our institutional investors, but also from the investors who sold us the assets, that they trust in us and that they are confident we can do it. Therefore, we bought the three assets in one time, so to say. We are looking in the market, but at the end of the day, we only do it if it's appropriate. Therefore, you can see the yields, the different yields in the different countries. If you look on the yields of logistics in Germany, you can see that the assets are even more expensive than they were three months ago. I think it makes sense to look in Belgium, to look in Austria, to look in the Netherlands. Maybe also in France or Spain. At first, at the moment, we have a lot to do with integration of VIB and not expand in other European countries for the moment. Okay. As you reported yesterday, the Euskirchen deal, what is your general assumption for the yield compression or is there still a yield compression to come in logistics markets? Yeah, I think when we started our thoughts of to grow also in logistics, we had yields of 6%, yeah. Now we have yields of 3.5%, and it's even near to office. The yield compression is there and it will stay there. Even if you look on the war and Corona, it's a driver for logistics and therefore for the yield compression. I think we said we want to have a quarter of our portfolio of logistics assets because of this attractive market. With the closing of VIB, we are nearly there then I think. At the end of the day, it was the right decision to go into logistics markets and we have the possibility and the trust to grow there. In combination with office, it's the really right thing to do at the moment, yeah. Okay. One last question is slide seven of your presentation. It's the FFO bridge, and you mentioned there EUR 3.8 million in other adjustments of VIB transaction costs. Perhaps you can say a little bit more here. Yeah. It's as always, if you do a transaction, it's advisors and all the guys who assisted us in getting this transaction done, yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As a brief reminder, that is star one for your questions today. We now move on to Manuel Martin of Oddo BHF. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, Sonja. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions, maybe one by one. The first question would be on the rental market. According to your presentation on page two, we have learned that the letting performance was up year-over-year, however, mainly driven by 40,000 square meters from Deutsche Bank. Could you elaborate a bit on the rental market? Because without that huge rental transaction, it seems to be a rather muted Q1. Is that in line with the market? Maybe you can tell us a bit about that. Yeah. Good morning, Manuel. If you look on the letting market on the Q1, it's also a different picture. What we see is that it takes even longer to get the things done. If you have German companies who want to rent, it's much more easy than if you have foreign companies. The best thing is to have a company who wants to rent in the town where they rent. It's very different at the moment. On the other hand, with this big contract, we have, on the one hand, a renewal, on the other hand, a new letting there. We have the new work concept here, and I think it's a very good example of what's going on in the letting market at the moment. Everybody is thinking about new work. How do I bring the people back in the office? What do they want? And so on. Also a company like Deutsche Bank is thinking a lot of this, yeah. We see it in general that there are more smaller searches in the market. These are not because the company want to reduce their spaces, but they want to expand and are searching for additional spaces where they can be more flexible. 1,000 square meter, 1,500 square meter. In addition to their existing office space, yeah. I think this is the lack of co-working which is now there. In the past, a lot of companies have used co-working for this expansion, and they are not there anymore. They want to rent their own spaces in 500-1,500 square meters. I think that's the most important market at the moment. There are big searches in the market, but it takes a long time to get the contract done. With all the different problems, Corona, Ukraine war and so on, it's always a lack of time of 2-3 weeks to think about this and to decide that they want to go on. The market is there, but it takes much more time and much more work to get it done. Mm-hmm. I see. Follow up on that. Any impact on rental prices or incentives, tenant incentives? No. At the moment, we do not see an increase of incentives. As you see, we have 3.3 like-for-like rental income plus, so to say, even in our Commercial Portfolio as well as on the institutional business side. What the question is is shorter lease contracts. Not everybody is asking for 10-15 years. In the public market, yes, but in industrial market, not. They are thinking of shorter times of seven-eight years, maybe five years. But it's not a question of incentives or rents. My last question, maybe I missed the point. On page six, you illustrated that the income from associate companies increased to EUR 4.5 million from EUR 2.5 million last year. Could you give us a detail on that, or was there a special reason for that increase? Yeah. This reflects the replacement of the Uptown Tower. Because it was warehousing and we shared there, we have the increase when we bought it out in the Q1. Okay. Maybe I've been a bit slow this morning. You replaced the Uptown Tower. The Uptown Tower has disappeared from the balance sheet from warehousing. That's what I saw. Then you booked a special profit from that, and that appeared in the result, or how can I understand that? Yes. We had until end of March, we had the Uptown in our balance sheet, and then we sold part of Uptown, yeah. It was not sold to one investor, but step by step. Therefore, we had it as an associated company in the meanwhile, and therefore, when the other stakes went out, we have income from this associated company, yeah. At first we consolidated it, and then we had, yeah, we had it at equity in the balance sheet. Oh, okay. When we sold the last set, we have now around about EUR 10 million to sell. It was income from associated companies. Okay. That's very clear. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We now take our next question from Philipp Kaiser of Warburg Research. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Just a small follow-up on the financing side. As you mentioned, you have a comfortable liquidity position, so there's no need and no hurry regarding the capital increase. We can kind of bridge finance it out of cash. Assuming there will no capital increase until year-end, would that have some implications on the target LTV by year-end and on your acquisition pipeline for the Commercial Portfolio during the year? Would you might kind of lower your acquisition targets for the Commercial Portfolio due to the kind of bridge financing with cash, given the current circumstances? That would be helpful. Yeah. Good morning. As said, I think we have overfulfilled our acquisition target for the Commercial Portfolio with buying the 60% stake and getting all the values of the assets in our Commercial Portfolio in the Q1. For the refinancing, yeah, I think it's the worst case that we have the bad market conditions until the end of the year here in place. We hope that it will go better in the third or Q4. If it's not appropriate, we will not do a capital increase, yeah. That's what I said in the past, and that's what I'm saying now. It has to make sense, yeah. On the other hand, we are working on our de-leverage, as also said. I think with the platform and our different possibilities here in the institutional business as well as on the Commercial Portfolio, we have some ideas how to de-leverage and how to get LTV down. Apologies for the brief interruption. Please stand by as we're getting the speaker back online. Please go ahead. I'm awfully sorry for this interruption. We will clarify this. Sorry. To answer your question, as said, the plan was to do a capital increase and to refinance the bridge loan in capital markets investment debt. At the end of the day, it's not appropriate. We have our plans what we can do to bring the leverage down until the end of the year. With our business model, we think that should work or it should work. We have also other ideas how to come there. As said, we have to have a clear picture on VIB, the consolidation of the numbers and how it looks like, and then we will decide what we do. Hopefully the market is coming back in Q3, Q4, and we will do the refinancing then step by step with the different possibilities we have. Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. As there are no further questions in the queue, I'd like to hand the call back over to you for any additional or closing remarks. Hi, it's Peer speaking. Thank you for joining us today for our conference call and presentation of the Q1 results. As usual, if you have any follow-up questions, please do not hesitate to contact my colleague, Max, or me. We are available the whole day. Thank you for taking the time today. Bye-bye. Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.