First Pacific Company Limited

Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this online briefing to discuss First Pacific 2024 full-year financial and operating results. The results presentation is available on First Pacific website, www.firstpacific.com, and at the Investor Relations session presentation page. This resource briefing is being recorded, and the replay will be available on First Pacific's website this evening in the Investor Relations session. For participants from the media, please note that the Q&A session is open for you restless and endless only. If you would like to raise questions, please contact us when the meeting is finished. Today with us is our Executive Director, Mr. Steve Plum, and he will come in in a minute, and our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Joseph Ng. Our associate directors, Mr. John Wyand and Mr. Stanley Yao, and other senior executives from the head office in Hong Kong. Over to you, John, for the presentation, please.

Thanks very much, Sarah. One or two housekeeping points as we begin. Most of you, if not all of you, are probably aware that we update this presentation from time to time, certainly every quarter with results of operating companies that report on that basis. and often more frequently with changes in minority shareholdings. Second, please be aware that when you see something in this book that is underlined, it's almost certainly a hyperlink. So, if you're looking at it on screen, you can, for example, looking at the table of contents, rush to that page. or if you are looking at the beginning of the MPIC section and it says financial highlights underlined, you click there and it will take you to the appropriate place in the MPIC website. Okay, to begin, let's go to page four for a quick glance at our pie chart most of us are familiar with. Indo food, the biggest of our assets, the green, blue, and red are our core holdings. and others are there in purple. These values are as of the end of December. Since the end of December, our stake in MPIC has increased from 46.3% to 49.9%. That information is correct at the far end of the book where you see the economic interest in all the units that we've got. um the valuations of the companies here are at uh the closing share prices as of the end of 2024. mpic and plp of course are a book value specifically for mpic at the 5.2 phases per share uh it was privatized at in the autumn of 2023. quickly to the next page um probably a little surprise to all of you who follow the nine month numbers of our units uh we've had some record highs Record-high contribution, record-high recurring profit, record-high full-year distribution to shareholders by the grace of our CFO, Josephine, who joins us here this afternoon. um so we paid out a total of 25 and a half hong kong cents per share to our shareholders with uh because the earnings were superb and the cash flows remained strong as they were from the previous year a few details on that are on page six you can see dividend income bottom left chart a little bit down from the record buy set in 2023 but overall our bound chief cash flows etc remain quite strong We've retained two investment grade credit ratings. I think it's for over two years now. As you can see up left there, we've got no borrowings following due this year. Got about 200 million due in 2026. And then our only bond is due in 2027. That's about a bit less than a quarter of all of our borrowings. But as you can see from the pie charts down at the bottom, fixed rate borrowings are a little bit over half of the total. We have an interest coverage ratio at the end year of four times. Our comfort level, as many of you are aware, is three times or higher. And there are some details about the interest rates we pay and the maturities there in the bullet points. But let's move very quickly on to Indofood. 2024, I think, was the 11th year in a row of record high revenues at Indofood. Certainly, the EBIT and the core profit were at record highs, and so were many of their sale numbers. We're looking at page 7, where we've got the EBIT margins in the blue box, showing that Noodle's full year margin of 25.9% is the highest full year margin we've ever seen. um for that food group and it has been the big driver of their profit rising from high to high we expect indoor food will continue strong into 2025. um if you look two pages further along on page nine you can see there that the biggest increase in sales has again been to the noodles division and they make up a total as you can see of 46 of all sales it's the biggest i think instant noodle maker in the world it's increasingly international as the time series of geographic sales breakdown shows you down at the bottom of that page And we expect sales in all of those regions to continue growing through 2025. Page 10, the next page shows you some time series data about their borrowings and cash flows and so on. Absolutely fascinating numbers. I think they are, but let's move on in the interest of time to Metro Pacific, the privately owned holding company in the Philippines on page 11, where we see the power, the toll roads, the water, the big main businesses, followed by healthcare. It's now 27 hospitals and then some other smaller businesses. To recap on page 12, that company was privatized in the autumn of 2023. If you want details of its operations and earnings, you really have nowhere else to go except to First Pacific, where we own just about half of MPIC, or GT Capital, which is the second biggest shareholder, just under 20%. Now, the numbers on page 13, again, show lots of record highs, record high contribution, record high core profit. we see that these numbers were driven mostly by power followed by water and roads water and roads were boosted by higher tariffs power by higher sales and increasing production of electricity in its rapidly growing electricity generation business Metro Pacific hasn't got any formal forecasts for full year 2025, but current trends suggest that it will be another strong year. Page 14 shows you a little bit about balance sheet and cash flow over at MPIC. Record high dividend income during 2024, as you can see in the box on the top right. We can get into more detail on the MPIC details. companies in the Q&A, but because we're such a big and diverse group, let's just hit the highlights in the narrative. So we're leaping ahead now to page 21 for a few brief words about PLDT. Again, some record highs, record high sales and service revenues, rather, and record high EBITDA. All three of its main businesses delivered stronger sales. And if you look at the breakdown of service revenues there on the bottom right, you've got, as in the past few years, mobile data and SMS showing the strongest growth, and then fixed line data also growing strongly, and fixed line voice as well. Mobile voice is the only major source of service revenues that is down, and we expect PLDT going forward to continue growing quite adequately. And remember, they're an important source of dividend income for us. They pay 60% of core profit to shareholders. Now, on page 23, we've got the FinTech that is controlled by PLDT. They're the biggest shareholder with 38%. of the only telco in the Philippines to have a banking license. The column charts at the bottom show you that they are growing very strongly, depositors more than doubling over the course of the past couple of years, deposit balances growing very strongly, and loan dispersals, as you can see, are up enormously. They moved into profitability in December 2024, and we would expect that in the early months of 2025, we might continue to see that strong performance. For a specific, you'll see in the footnotes there, owns directly about 1.4% of Maya. Our economic interest, I think, is a little over 11%. Details are in the back of the book. Regarding the future of Maya, you can ask us about that in the Q&A. Stanley Yang, our head of corporate development, I'm sure would be delighted to talk to you about that. Over on page 25, Pacific Light Power followed record performance in 2023 with a more moderate pace of earnings in 2024, mostly because of lower blended non-fuel margins. Nevertheless, they continue to be a strong and important payer of dividends to Earth Pacific. Recently, looking to the future, they were awarded a power project of 600 megawatts of hydrogen-ready CCGT. which should go into operation in January 2029. Stan, am I inaccurate on that 600 megawatts? Is it 670?

It's capable of more, but the contract with EMA is 600.