6/1/2026

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Good morning everybody and welcome to today's presentation of Sirius Real Estate's full year results for the period ending March 31st, 2026. My name is Andrew Coombs, I am the Group Chief Executive Officer of Sirius and I'm joined this morning by Chris Bowman who is the Group Chief Financial Officer of Sirius Real Estate. we will take you through this morning's presentation. As you all know, Sirius is an on-balance sheet, best-in-class owner and operator of mixed-use light industrial business parks on the edge of key towns in Germany and the UK. Please remember that Sirius has for the last four and a half years operated in both the German and the UK markets under the brand of Sirius in Germany and for the last four and a half years under the brand of BizSpace within the UK. The group currently operates over 3 billion euros of property, 90% of which is wholly owned. This consists of over 160 sites and nearly 2,000 commercial buildings. We have 76 sites in the UK, 78 sites in Germany and 7 sites within the Titanium Joint Venture. If we turn to page 6, we can look at the highlights for the period. The Sirius Group is a rigorous, well-run and growing organisation. We have proved the resilience and the reliability of the business model during Brexit, during COVID, during the Liz Trust budget, the Ukraine war and the gas crisis in Germany. and most recently through a period of rising interest rates in Europe and the UK, during which time we have successfully protected valuations despite yield expansion. And in that time, we have continuously grown our revenues, increased our dividend payments, and as I have said, we've made sure that the value of our properties goes up, not down. In the period to March 31st, 2026, we once again grew the group like-for-like rent roll by more than 6%. And as a result of acquisitions in the period, we have grown total rent roll by more than 11%. So I'm pleased to report to you another year of business as usual for Sirius, despite the macroeconomic headwinds and political uncertainty of recent months. We have increased our FFO to more than 133 million euros, which has resulted in a 4.5% increase in FFO per share. And I'm pleased to tell you that we will be paying a dividend of 3.22 cents for the second half of the year. This brings the total dividend for the period to 6.4 cents, which is 4.1% up on the previous year. But where does that leave us in terms of the ambition of this company going forward? Because everything I talk to you about is in the past. Let's spend a couple of slides looking forward. As you know, we have an immediate ambition to get to 150 million euros of FFO. And I say immediate because we should now be less than one year away from achieving that 150 million FFO ambition. And that's why six months ago, we started to roll out our plans to extend our achievement in future years to beyond 150 million and onto the new ambition of 175 million euros of FFO. Now, I know you're all going to ask me when. Well, these are ambitious goals, and they focus the team at Sirius and BizSpace on how. If we were to commit to when, they wouldn't be ambitions, they'd be targets. The importance of the ambition is it focuses our thoughts and our activities on the how. And as you can see, aside from our core business of owning multi-let, out of town industrial parks, two very important pieces of the how are now coming into the picture. namely defence and self-storage. And if you turn to page 8, we can spend a little bit of time talking about our self-storage ambitions. Sirius has been operating its smart space self-storage products in Germany for over 15 years now. Today we are live in over 30 locations in Germany, serving just over 4,000 customers. In the UK, we're doing something similar in just four locations. As you know, we hired Tom Lampard last year. Tom is a former director of Look & Store, and more recently, Shoreguard. He has a great deal of experience in overseeing the planning, the building, and the opening of new self-storage stores. I'm delighted to tell you that we've already started to build our first dedicated self-storage store in Berlin. And we will soon begin the conversion of a small number of sites in the UK into dedicated self-storage stores. And we can see a path to more than doubling our revenues from self-storage. And of course, these stores in every single case, will be even more high-yielding than our traditional core sites. Let's now turn to page nine and look at defence. So back in June of last year, in fact almost to the day, we appointed Angus Fay as a strategic advisor to CIRIS. His remit being to advise the company on the defence sector. At the time, we sought to understand what was happening. Because we believed, and we still do believe, defence capabilities are underpinned by industrial capacity. And that capacity is normally housed in industrial properties. Therefore, if you own industrial property in scale, defence will become unavoidable. And we wanted to understand what sort of effect this might have on the asset class as a whole. By September, it had become clear that this opportunity was one that Sirius should be participating in. And we purchased just over 60 million euros of assets in Munich and in Bedford. Assets that contain tenants from the defence sector. Then in February of this year, we raised capital and purchased a further 140 million euros of defence-related assets in Germany. As you can see from this slide, this leaves us with a portfolio of just over 200 million euros at nearly 9% gross yield. And our ambition is to continue going in order to build somewhere around 500 million euros of defence related property portfolio, at which point we will seek third party capital to form a joint venture focused on the defence sector. We are at least one year away from that, maybe two, but our goal is clear here, our ambition is to go it alone to half a billion and then to go further than that with the help of third-party joint venture capital. That is our ambition. So 150 million of FFOs in our sights. We will not be stopping there. We're already planning the journey to 175. Within that plan, we will be scaling up our presence in self-storage, And where defence is concerned, we've acquired 200 million in 12 months, and we plan to build to 500 million in the future. Perhaps I can now hand over to Chris to take you through the income statement.

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Andrew. Morning, everybody. I'll just spend the next few pages going through the highlights of the income statement and the balance sheet, and then come back later as well and just talk about some of the capital allocation issues. decisions that were made during the year. So as you've already heard Andrew speak about the FFO, very pleased to have another year of very healthy growth of FFO, 8.4% up year on year to finish the year at €133.5 million. That focus on FFO funds from operations, the cash profits of the business after tax and after financing expenses runs through the entire business. We are not a jam tomorrow real estate business. We're about capturing cash income today. So rental income level, you can see we were up 11.4% year on year to 239.8 million of rental income. I can tell you we actually finished the year with rent rolled well in excess of 250 million euros today. So there is growth baked into our portfolio for the year ahead. Looking further down, just to highlight, we obviously still have the JV with what is now BNP, previously called AXA, with €350 million of assets in Germany. That has been very healthy returns for us. We have €75 million of capital invested in that JV. And as you can see, we've made 8 million return. There was a performance fee in the prior year. That's why it's slightly down. But in terms of ongoing returns there, they continue to be very healthy double digit returns on our equity. Service charger recoverables. This is obviously a focus of the business. This is part of our DNA of doing better than the competition in terms of recovering our property expenses. As we've had a very active year of acquisitions, then we tend to see a slightly higher recoverables as we inherit other people's recovery strategies that will return to more normal levels. We expect to typically recover 92% of property expenses off mid eight years of occupancy. Coming further down, you can see corporate costs and overheads, very pleased to say that we've kept that to a 3% increase despite a portfolio which obviously increased over double digits. So you're seeing operational leverage there. We are getting more efficient. We are doing more with less. We are bringing obviously technology into the business, but also the platform is able to scale. That has driven an 11.6% EBITDA increase to 158.3 million. And you obviously see the benefits of that operational leverage there, offsetting that initial increase in the service charger recoverables. Finance expense continues to be the biggest headwind that the business faces. We are on a journey of going from obviously very, very cheap cost of debt into what I call more normal levels. So I would guide to around 4% incremental cost of debt. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. But you can see net finance expense, 23 million, of which there was a 36 million interest cost with a 13 million income. I would guide you towards the year ahead. The income will be very low single digits. The interest cost will be marginally higher in the year ahead. Tax, you can see we've brought our current tax charge right down 1.8 million from 6.8 million the prior year. We've had some very successful tax structuring during the year, merging loss-making entities, well, entities that have losses in them with our profit-making entities at a property level that's allowed us to release some of the losses in a very efficient manner. I think going forward you should expect that tax charge to return to mid-single digits level, but a very healthy performance this year. And that all feeds into the FFO as I've said, 133.5. Adjusting items I talked about in the first half. There is an unrealised foreign exchange translation in there. There are finance fees associated with our activity, particularly on the RCF and the bond markets. But those together, some of those are one-offs, which will roll back out, in particular the FX. I would then just highlight the surplus on the revaluation. So 110 million increase in our investment properties. That's a reflection of that focus on driving rental income. Yields have essentially been stable. Andrew will come on and talk about those a little bit more later. But they are essentially stable. We have capitalized on the benefit, particularly in Germany. of the upside in rental income. That then feeds through to the NAV, which I'll talk about in a second. But net you get down to a profit for tax up 5% at 211 million. Just putting that into a waterfall, I think when we drive that FFO, that then allows us to grow a dividend. So for the 25th consecutive period, we are very pleased to be announcing an increasing dividend. As Andrew said, 3.22 cents in the second half gets us 6.4 cents overall for the year. The waterfall down from NOI, 207 million, take off the costs and the finance expenses for FFO, together with those adjusting items of FX and finance fees, again, all going in the right direction to drive a dividend growth. Flipping on to the balance sheet, fairly self-explanatory, obviously highly, highly active year for acquisitions of property. In terms of what actually hit the balance sheet in the year, it was roughly €400 million of assets that actually fell in in terms of completions during the year. Together with that valuation uplift of €110 million, you saw an increase in investment properties of just over €500 million. The cash balance, therefore, has shifted slightly down from 604 million to 410 at the year end, reflecting that move into assets. We also did a bond tap during the year for 105 million, and we did an equity raise for 88 million. So piece those three items together, they flowed into the 400 million of completions of assets during the year. I'll just highlight as well, there's quite a big shift on the tax line. You can see that deferred tax dropped from 110 million down to 86 million. I flagged this at the first half, but you see the full effect now of the German government's fiscal stimulus measures have included reducing the corporate tax rate in Germany, which goes from 15% down to 10% over the course of five years from 2028. So that's a real live example of the fiscal stimulus in action. What does that mean? That means that our embedded profits on our portfolio, there is essentially a lower potential tax liability associated with those, so that allows that deferred tax release. But that is obviously direct evidence of the effect of that stimulus, which hasn't actually even come yet. And so it's not actually affecting the economy, but from a sort of deferred tax perspective, we've got visibility on it. That drives down. We've got the three different NAVs there. The basic reported NAV is up 7%. That includes the effect of that deferred tax release. The adjusted NAV, which is the one that we focus on, that strips out the deferred tax, and then the EPRA as well. So each of them up 7%, 5%, and 4% respectively. I will hand back to Andrew now to go through country-by-country KPIs.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

So in terms of Germany, the strongest market in the period, as you can see, annualised rent roll up by nearly 18%, obviously partly driven by the acquisitions and partly driven by the 7.3% like-for-like organic growth. Occupancy increased and so did rates. You can see that the move-ins reflecting the new business sales volume was 12% up on the previous year. But, you know, we need to be careful. It's not all good news. We're closely managing the rate in terms of the move-outs. You can see people are moving out at roughly the same level they're moving in at. We normally like to have, you know, a decent 50 cents or so up on the move-in rate versus the move-out rate. Sorry, we've got that. What I mean is March 25 to March 26, instead of driving in, instead of driving down the move-out rate, it's moved up by three cents. So a marginal difference, but nonetheless, these areas are narrowing rather than getting further apart. And then if you look at the move outs, you see that actually the move outs are 34 square meters higher, whereas the move ins are only 26,000 square meters higher. What's missing here is the expansions, the customers who stay but buy more. But suffice it to say, whilst it's the strongest of the two markets, we're still having to work very, very hard to use the platform to keep everything in balance. Sometimes you can see that just pure new business alone will overcome what's moving out. We're having to use both new business and also expansions to be able to make sure we get that extra 1% in occupancy and we continue to drive the rate upwards. If we go across the page and look at the waterfall effect, as you can see, we're losing nearly 21 million, but we're gaining 24.3 in terms of the move-ins. And then really it's the like-for-like uplifts that get us that good healthy growth from 140 to 150. We then have acquisitions on top, and you can see that's how we grow the rent roll by nearly 18% within the year. And then if you look at the acquisitions here on page 15, on the left you can see Dresden, so Silicon Saxony, effectively where all of the offshore chip manufacture from years gone by has been moved back into Germany. This is a particularly strong market. You can also see Geilenkirchen. Geilenkirchen is near to a strategic NATO air base, close to the Dutch border. This is not one of our defence plays, but we love the location of this asset. And the fact that it is located where it is has only added to the reason as to why we bought this high yielding 10.2 gross yielding asset. And then Munch & Gladbach, which we think has got a lot of opportunity based on the low price, the high vacancy. and the fact that it's so well located in an area like Mönchengladbach. But if you have a look at the capital rate per square meter of less than 250 euros per square meter, that clearly is part of the strength of this asset. Then you go across the page again, and you come into the defence-related stuff. Fieldkirchen is where the company makes the night-viewing devices and the laser technology for the German army. Kiel... is 60% Rhine metal so electronics for armoured fighting vehicles and Fulda that was announced last week is where the body armour for the Bundeswehr So, effectively, the anti-ballistic and Kevlar plates are made for the German army. And, of course, with the two new divisions, including the 45th Division in Lithuania, the need for this kit is expanding quite rapidly. So, all of this is growing government-backed, very, very sticky defence income, hence why we bought it. Chris, over to you.

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

Okay, so just coming back to capital allocation and how we put our, particularly our CapEx budgets to work. So just on slide 17, you can see part of a core pillar of the serious growth strategy is how we transfer what are our value-add sites and transform those into our mature sites. And today, roughly 64% of our portfolio in Germany is value-add That is 1.4 billion euros of book value. And it has just under 300, sorry, it has 270,000 square meters of vacant space, which we can put relatively modest amounts of capital into to transform into higher quality, more lettable, at higher rates space to drive occupancy, rate, and ultimately value. So, just to give you an idea of how much that actually leverages in terms of value, if you look at the capital value per square metre on average of our value add, that sits at €928 per square metre. Whereas we see the 36% of our portfolio which we consider mature, that currently sits at €1,357 per square metre. The opportunity to drive up what is 46% upside in value is huge there from a valuation perspective, but also what it does is there's an opportunity there to go from 7.61 euros a square metre rate up to 8.31 euros a square metre, and to reduce what is 100 basis points of of service charge leakage between 7.9 and 6.9 gross and net yield to reduce that down to just 30 basis points. So net-net, the benefits are not just a value, not just a top-line rental income, but also to reduce leakage as well of service charge and to the benefit then also of the entire site when we put capital to work of improving the quality of the entire site, which isn't even captured in here, which is then the knock-on benefit to the other space on site as well. So just moving over the page, I'll give you some examples of where we've put our CapEx to work year to date. So total CapEx invested 48.8 million. That's roughly split two-thirds, one-third between Germany and the UK. Really, the value-add CapEx is where we move the assets from value-add to mature. In Germany, 15.6 million euros. You can see some examples there on the right-hand side, some of the pictures there, taking space and doing, as I say, very modest spend, so low-risk spend. This is often redoing floors, this is redecoration, some reconfiguration of space, dividing up space into smaller units, for instance, which may be more lessable at a higher rate and at greater scale. Andrew's touched on self-storage. That's obviously been a core part of how we take vacancy, put self-storage units into that vacancy, and again, drive income. You can see the example there at Goppingen. That's first floor space at Goppingen, which had been empty for years when we bought that site. That site sits right next door to an existing independent self-storage provider. That self-storage provider is full. So the market opportunity was already proven by our essentially competitor next door. So again, low risk. I'll touch on new builds in a second. Renewals, small numbers, but continues to be very, very high returns for us. Works and DSG within UK and Germany, there's roughly 5 million euros of spend in each. That has been, in Germany, a focus on PV systems, where we get a double-digit cash return on that spend. In the UK, that's been a focus on the EPC certification process and continuing on the journey of cautiously going on the EPC journey, given the lack of regulatory clarity that we have from the UK government on that. Just flipping over the page. What does all that mean on a three-year basis on the value-add capex? We have spent over the last three years €29.2 million on value-add capex. On average, we've achieved a return on that investment of 38%, and that is still on the journey. So some of that space will have only just been very recently refurbished. You can see that the occupancy at 80%, there is still further to go. So I expect that ROI to actually trend towards over 40%. Renewals, relatively small numbers, but very, very profitable for us, over 50% ROI. And this will continue to be really, really good use of our CapEx spend to generate really high ROIs and drive occupancy, income, and rates across the portfolio. Moving on to new builds. I started talking about new builds, I think, probably this time last year. I said at that point that we would carefully allocate capital to new build projects. These projects compete for capital against acquisitions of new sites. So this is putting in development into our existing sites on either surplus land or space which at the moment is, for want of a better word, essentially derelict, but I'll talk about that in a second. On the left-hand side is what we've done. So at Gartenfeld, many of you have been to our site in Berlin, just outside Berlin, Gartenfeld. We've built three new production halls, warehouses. All three of those spaces have rented immediately. You can see we've achieved rates of over €13 a square metre against budgeting. We were budgeting just under €11. To give you an example, the local emergency services have taken one of those halls in its entirety on a long-term lease. It is expensive to build in Germany. So development will only make sense where the returns are available. So the yield on cost on that site was 9%. We still are able to generate 21% IRR because the site is valued below 6% already. And this has continued to improve the quality of the site overall. On the right-hand side, what do we have in the pipeline? We have 20 million projects in progress. One of those on the bottom left of the right-hand side, you can see in progress the build of our self-storage, standalone self-storage site at Gartenfeld in Berlin. On the bottom right, we bought a site in Hamburg earlier this year. There is a new build opportunity there, which we are just starting on as well, the right-hand side site. essentially box that you can see there as an existing tenant is expanding into that space. So this is not speculative development. We have the tenant already signed up. On the top left, a self-storage type product, garages as well, has been very successful in the German market. We're building 72 garages that are existing Hanover site on surplus land. And then on the top right, at our Dresden metropolis site by the airport, There's an opportunity to fully refurbish an existing, what was the officer's mess of that site. It's an old Air Force site. And we are investing around 5 million euros into that site as well. All of this, we are targeting IRRs of around 20%. That's obviously highly, highly attractive compared to the acquisitions opportunities as well. But it's also... and an area which will be complementary to acquisitions. So, as I say, it will not work everywhere in Germany, but where it works, the opportunities are great. And I'll hand back to Andrew to talk about the UK.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Okay, so whilst we are still very positive about the UK market, comparative to Germany, UK is the market that was less strong throughout the period we're talking about. And whilst you can see that we increased the analysed rent roll by even more than the 18% we did in Germany, we were working off a lower base in the UK. And we were more dependent on acquisitions for that increase in the rent roll. We did increase the like-for-like rent roll by 4.6%, and we did that through increasing rate and also occupancy. But if you look at the move-outs at the bottom of this page, what you can see is that this was more a story of managing churn than it was a story of increasing new business sales. And you can see that in as much as the 25 move outs versus the 26 move outs were actually 50,000 square meters less. You can see that the new business in the UK was challenged. particularly in the fourth quarter of the last calendar year when the politicians in the UK dealt with the budget in the way they dealt with it. That hit our UK business and our tenant demand particularly hard. That cost us sales in that period. Fortunately, although new business sales were down by 22,000 square metres year on year, we were able to more than make up for that in terms of managing the churn within our business. We are still faced with the challenge that people are moving out at £18.50 per square foot and we are attracting new people in at £2 less. That is very much a story of regional offices. And it's a story whereby we're able to maintain occupancy in regional offices in the UK, but we are having to work much harder on price in order to do that. So again, you see the strength of the platform here in the UK with the assistance of the centralised platform in Berlin. You can see that the power of that platform mitigates the risk. and that we are able to bring this all together to give total growth of nearly 20%, like-for-like growth of nearly 5%. But we have had to work much harder this year, in particular because of Q4 at the end of last year, than we have at any time in the last four and a half years. If you see that reflected on the waterfall, what you can see is that the like-for-like move-outs and move-ins, we lose just under a million, and we need the uplifts to be able to make it back to that 64.1%. and you then see the effect of vantage and acquisitions which gives you that nearly 20% growth. We go across the page and look at some of the acquisitions. I've talked about Bedford which is the defence related acquisition. This is where they make component parts for the ejector seats for fighter jets. It's also right next to where the planned development of Universal Studios is going to be. So both from a defence perspective and also from a local property perspective, it would be quite difficult to go wrong in Bedford in the next couple of years. Hartlebury is the 171 acre site just south of Birmingham. And the key point about this is that 80% of that 171 acres is undeveloped. So there is huge development possibility for Hartlebury. And then we have Chelcroft on the right hand side. which again has significant development and releasing opportunity. We have very strong inquiries from a very large supermarket to develop the front of this site. We have over 3,000 homes going up next door. They're currently being built. And we've already re-let a couple of the units here at significantly higher prices than we had in the business plan. Plus we have the opportunity to develop some of the buildings at the back on the right hand side of the site and create effectively a new product similar to the stuff that Chris has already shown you in Berlin Gartenfeld. So lots and lots of opportunity in this site. Chris.

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, on to slide 24. I'm really just going to highlight one thing really on here. So you can see that there's 513 million euros in total of acquisition activity that we've either completed or notarized in the period. So hugely active period for us. I'll just highlight that that brings with it 36 million of NOI. Now only half of that NOI hits the P&L in FY26. So the full year effect still to come for the year ahead, the year we're now in, we essentially have baked-in growth to come from all of that acquisition activity, as well as, obviously, tackling service charge leakage, tackling occupancy, tackling development opportunity, capex spend, et cetera, and upside. Now, we've acquired all of those assets at an average of 8.2% gross yield, 7.6% net yield. That is higher yields than our existing portfolio stands on. So we're acquiring overall better pricing than we already have our portfolio at and with opportunity in it as well for upside, as well as obviously that baked in growth to come through on the P&L. I just highlight we continue to look for recycling opportunities, Fungstadt being the most significant still to come. So that will complete during this summer for 30 million euros. And in the meantime, we continue to look at opportunities as well for recycling of assets.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

So in summary, FFO has grown by 8.4% to $133.5 million. At per share level, it's grown by 4.5%. And we should be on track in the next 12 months to get to our ambition of $150 million. We've been able to increase like for like rent roll across the group at 6.4%. And as Chris has just explained, we have acquired over 500 million euros of new property, only half of the P&L effect having hit this year, the full effect being in the post for next year. We have a clear strategic focus on our core German and UK businesses together with increasing focus on revenues from defence and self-storage sectors. We've grown our dividend for the 25th consecutive time. We've grown it by 4.1% year-on-year. And in terms of the balance sheet, we have over €700 million of undrawn facilities and cash sitting on the balance sheet. In terms of the outlook, as I've said before, the UK suffered a weak Q4 of last calendar year, Q3 of the last financial year due to the economic effect of the political instability around the budget of November last year. However, the UK ended the financial year with strong momentum and I'm pleased to tell you that momentum has continued into April and May. The year finished strongly in both Germany and the UK and we have seen continued strong trading in both those countries, despite what we're seeing in Iran. And that's not to say that we won't see an effect from Iran. We are cautious. But up until now, we have seen no negative effect in terms of what's happening in Iran. Germany, like for like growth, continues to demonstrate the strength of the German operating platform. And the group continues to assess further opportunities in both Germany and the U.K. future growth we think is going to be propelled by the current operational momentum so that 500 million plus of property, the momentum of that, the full momentum of that has still not hit the P&L in terms of the full year effect and we will see that in this current year to March 27. So thank you very much indeed for your time and attention. Chris and I will now try and answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much indeed.

speaker
Tom Musson
Analyst, Berenberg

Thanks, Jim. Good morning. It's Tom Musson from Barenburg. Just a question on the long-term ambitions in the self-storage market. It seems like you're formalising a bit this morning. I know you share your road to 15 million euros in revenue. Are you ultimately thinking that you want storage now to become a much more meaningful proportion of the total asset mix. I just wonder how you see that playing out longer term. And you mentioned yields there being higher than the core portfolio. Can you help quantify that?

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, look, we like storage. We always have. And we think that we are different from the traditional self-storage providers. And You know, what we've seen in the self-storage market over many, many years now is, and it's gathered more pace recently, is typically lots and lots of people, particularly businesses, they start with a self-storage box and then they move to a bigger self-storage box. And then sometimes they move to two self-storage boxes. And what we're seeing with the introduction of, you know, industrial outside storage containers is, is what people have started to do is when there's not a big enough box and they need more than one, they move away from self-storage and into containers. Now, the traditional self-storage operators, for whatever reason, have decided not to address this. We think there's an opportunity because somebody as a business comes to us and they've got a workshop and they use a self-storage box and it gets bigger And then they need something bigger than a box, typically more than six square meters. They have a container. And then maybe they need a couple of containers, and all of a sudden they're not in containers anymore. They're in a 500 or 600 square meter storage hall, which is an ideal customer for us. And what we've done is we've stuck with them all the way through their journey. When they started off and they needed that storage box, we provided that in a basement. Then when they needed to be bigger, we could do that. And when they needed to go outside and use a container, we did that. And then when they needed to migrate from a container to a proper storage hall, then we did that too. So we can address that journey in a way that we don't think anybody else in the market actually can. In addition, what we've learned from Tom working with us is that the hardest thing for a self-storage company to do is to find the plot to build on. Well, we already own those plots. We have 150,000 square metres of non-income producing land. In Berlin Gartenfeld, where we're talking about, it's opposite a site where 5,000 new homes are currently being In Chalcroft, we've got 3,000 new residences being built next door. We have a site in Potsdam. There's lots and lots of key sites we already own, whereby the most difficult thing for self-storage companies to get land, we've got it already. So we think that there's a real opportunity that we can exploit here. We think we can address a much broader range of the customer journey than anybody else in the market is able to do. And we think we can scale this quite quickly. And, of course, the beauty of that is that because it's more high yielding than the core of what we do, this is naturally accretive. All we've got to do is hurry up and get on and do it. So, yes, you will see it becoming a more important part of the mix at Sirius. And we'd like to think that it probably gets valued at a higher income multiple than maybe some of our more traditional services that we provide.

speaker
Tom Musson
Analyst, Berenberg

Okay, thank you. Maybe a second one just on your intention. You mentioned to seek a JV partner or bring in third-party capital on your defence assets. Do you have any idea today what sort of form you might want that JV to take in terms of economic ownership, economic split? Would the titanium JV be considered for that or are you thinking this is with new third-party capital?

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

So, look, it's very, very early. It's going to take us at least another year, 18 months to build the portfolio to the extent that we seek a partner. It's important that you get to a certain level before you seek the partner because the type of partner you could get today is different from the type of partner that you would get when you're half a billion looking at getting beyond a billion. So it is really important to establish scale before you go and start to discuss JV with partners. And, of course, part of that discussion would be their ambition as well as ours, and that would help drive out the proportionality of ownership. But one thing is clear to us. Sirius is never going to be a predominantly defence-related property company. We don't want that. It needs to be a proportion. It needs to be a minority proportion, not a majority proportion. However, the dilemma is that the opportunity in industrial property that defence presents is far bigger than anything Sirius could digest with its own capital. So it needs to go and seek partnership. And, you know, we don't need to decide on proportions yet. We don't need to make some of the key decisions you're alluding to at this point. But what is important is that we have a vision, we have a strategy, we set it out. And what is important is people understand that this will always be a minority, not the whole of what we do. And that because of the size and scale of the opportunity, we think we're going to need to partner with third-party capital. Thank you.

speaker
Matt Spear
Analyst, Peel Hunt

Morning, it's Matt Spear from Peel Hunt and thanks for the presentation. I have two questions. The first one on capital recycling. Views on sort of the quantum over the year edge. Is it going to likely be more than we've seen over the last couple of years? And then I guess perhaps some of the follow-on. Chris, you've got the bonds maturing imminently. Can you just talk us through thoughts, not necessarily on that one, but the future refinancing over the next sort of 12 or 18 months? Thank you.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

We're big believers in recycling. We recycle every year. We recycled in the year we're talking about here. We will recycle in the year that we're in. We're not going to put ourselves under pressure to sell specific amounts because that's how you get to really bad decisions in property. When you turn up and you either have to buy or you have to sell, that's where the person either buying or selling is able to sense that and you're driven into, you know, corners that you never really should paint yourself into. But suffice it to say, Chris has talked about Funkstadt, There will be other recycling both in the UK and in Germany. And we certainly would look at the cash we've got on our balance sheet, further recycling. Chris is going to talk about bonds. These are all sources of capital for the coming year. And recycling will definitely happen. be part of that. In the past, we've typically recycled 30 to 50 million a year. I would think we're probably recycling more than that in this next 12 months.

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

As for future refinancing, yes, we have a 26 bond which matures three weeks today. So that is essentially dealt with from the liquidity that's on the balance sheet at the moment. So moving ahead, looking towards November 28th, There's 465 million bond outstanding. And that's the last of what I call a kind of low-cost debt. So that's part of the journey back to what I think of as a normal cost of debt of around 4%, which is where we've been issuing most recently. We are entirely Euro-denominated, and I would expect that to continue to be the case, given particularly the differential between Euro swap rates and gilts has widened even further in recent months. As for how to deal with the November 28th, it is, as ever, this is not an existential risk for us. We've got great support from the bond markets, from the banking markets. So it's really a case of how, not if. And core to this, I wouldn't underestimate the importance of the RCF that we put in place this year, just gone, so we've now got €300 million undrawn RCF. Strategically, you should expect us to look to run with the majority of that RCF undrawn. That is flexibility on the balance sheet and that will be core to getting through bond refinancing windows in the most efficient way possible. I don't ever want us to have our backs against the wall having to meet an auditor's requirement for going concern sign-off and having to be active in the bond market when it might not be the right moment to be active in the bond market. The RCF gives us a great deal of flexibility on the balance sheet to pick our timing as to how and when we tackle refinancing. Having said all that, we are a listed company, FTSE 250 listed. We can't leave things to the last minute, so you will see us always have sufficient liquidity on the balance sheet to deal with short-term refinancings. I would expect us to be active dealing with the 28 bond at the back end of 27, and then thereafter, at least partially, and then thereafter, you know, be opportunistic about accessing the bond markets, the refinancings in the run-up to it as well, with a combination of the RCF as well.

speaker
Pam O'Libram
Analyst

Beyond Eastman, Pam O'Libram, just coming back to your self-storage ambitions, across the UK and Germany, is the opportunity more in residential or commercial self-storage? I'll follow on from there.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

So, look, this is another thing we've noticed. Traditional self-storage operators don't seem to be particularly fond of businesses. And we know this not just from what they say in their presentations but from the market research we've done on businesses, particularly businesses, you know, at competing storage sites where you literally stand outside the site and you say to people, you know, have you ever been in another form of storage? Quite a lot of them will tell you, yes, they've been with traditional self-storage, and they'll tell you why they've left. And it's a mixture of reasons, including the amount of space they need, but those reasons also include that, you know, those businesses feel that as well. Now, we welcome people from residences into our self-storage facilities in the UK and in Germany, and we also welcome businesses. And whether we ended up with a situation whereby the majority of our customers were business customers rather than domestic, we would be comfortable with that. Of course we'd be comfortable with that because, you know, if you look at what we are, we are essentially a business-to-business provider with, through self-storage in particular, a very, very small amount of B2C. And again, that's very different from your typical self-storage providers who are typically... B2C providers who kind of have some B2B and want to be really careful they don't get too much of it so you know we are again different in that respect and we are happy to invite both markets but what we recognize is that we offer greater value in the whole of the customer journey where B2B is concerned than we do B2C Does that answer your question, Bourne? Are you trying to get at something else?

speaker
Pam O'Libram
Analyst

No, I think that answers my question. I guess it follows then that you wouldn't consider any M&A opportunities for existing operators.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Well, I mean, look, we're a bit small in the self-storage kind of space to be thinking about any of the large people. And I can tell you right now, we have considered M&A options with much smaller operators. But, you know, it is sometimes quite difficult when people are running what typically is a lifestyle type business, you know, the concept of aligning themselves to a much bigger organization is sometimes a bridge too far. So, you know, smaller operators, yes, of course we would consider that, but there is a very different mindset for, you know, between sort of starting up a operation of, you know, 15, 20 sites and becoming part of and being aligned to, a much larger corporate entity. So, you know, we'll try and build, we'll try and acquire, we'll try and do lots and lots of things. But we'll only do things if people are willing to be 100% aligned with us. We won't entertain, you know, any sort of special agreement for people to run side companies. We can't. We're a publicly listed company. And, you know, we're probably just better off to get on and build it ourselves.

speaker
Matthew Norris
Analyst, Gravis

Matthew Norris from Gravis. Great set of results. Thank you. Slide 19, CapEx investment programs. Can you flesh out what the next – this slide looks at the past three years. What about the next three years? What should we expect in terms of CapEx investment programs? How should the return on that investment differ in the future to the past? And what's the difference between the returns you generate in Germany and the returns you generate in the UK, please?

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so good question. So thank you. These numbers are purely for Germany. You should expect to see similar kind of returns going forwards. And, for instance, we are targeting doing at least 100,000 square metres of refurbishment each year for the next three years. So that's the opportunity within the value-add portfolio. We look to tackle that over a number of years. We sometimes get questions from shareholders saying why not do more, why not do it faster, etc. There is a risk-reward profile there. There is also the element that we want to be self-funding. So our capex spend comes from our FFO. Our FFO funds both the dividend and reinvestment into the portfolio in the capex. So we want to maintain A, we want to be picking off the highest returning CapEx opportunities year by year, and they do move around from year to year. It depends what the market environment is at each micro location, but also we want to be self-funding as well. But we are confident that we'll be able to achieve around the same returns. We target over 30% return on investment on our CapEx spend on the value add, and as you can see, that's what we've been achieving and more. As for the UK, so the UK historically, when we acquired this space, were smaller sites, which just from the simple physical reality of those spaces, there just was not a significant amount of surplus space or structural vacancy within those sites. It's a typically more flex model historically in the UK. You have to run with a certain amount of vacancy to make a flex model work to achieve the higher returns on rate. And so there hasn't been historically significant amounts of opportunities. That is starting to change. So you're seeing that the spend in the UK on value-add capex was around 8 million in the year just gone. That's been focused on the larger sites. So Vantage Point, for instance, we have been refurbishing halls at Vantage Point, which successfully let one of the halls we took back from the range to an existing tenant onsite, Big Doug, that capex spend allowed us to re-let that space and at a 50% higher rate and essentially replaced 50% of the rent that we lost from the range with only a third of the space being re-let. So essentially there's much more opportunity as well at Vantage Point, for instance, We've put capital into one of the sites in the North East, Bellin, an old bus garage, which we've refurbished that space, we've subdivided that space and let it at a significantly higher rate. We're starting to achieve similar kind of returns in the UK, but just from the size of the portfolio. it will continue to be a work in progress as well. But there is increasing amounts of opportunity in the UK, definitely. Got it. Thank you.

speaker
James Carswell
Analyst, Peel Hunt

Morning. It's James Carswell from PM Hunt. Another question on self-storage. I've been interested to hear a bit about, I guess, the synergies between your existing core business and And self-storage, I mean, will it require much investment or has it required to date much investment in terms of new systems, new people, or is it very much just the same operating platform and you almost kind of point it in a slightly different direction?

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

So we've been in the self-storage market for over 10 years. Since bringing Tom on board a year ago, we have changed the system that we run self-storage off, and we're 75% of the way through that integration. What's really important about that is that system gives us the ability to manage in excess of 25,000 customers. The previous system that we were on, hadn't topped out yet, but it would have topped out way before we got to 15 million. So that is essentially 75% of the way through, pretty close to being done. You do obviously have to invest to build a self-storage center. So that is where the investment is effectively coming. But what I would say to you is a lot of this is stuff we already have. So we already have the land. We already have the staff on site. We already now have Tom and the small team that he operates with. We now have the system that we need. Now that doesn't mean that we might not decide to buy some additional land, but this is not a standing start at all. You know, we are servicing over 4,000 customers, raising over 6 million in revenue at 30 different locations in Germany and four in the UK. And the change here is that we are saying, we are now building our own self-storage stores. The first one has already started at Berlin Gartenfeld. Now, what is different in terms of the approach that we're taking compared to other providers? Do we just want to be a me-too? Absolutely not. We want to be something different. What's different about us? We are looking to attract businesses and consumers, and where businesses are concerned, we're looking to attract them and take them all of the way through their storage journey not just into a box and then off to a container. We want the lifetime value of that B2B customer. That's what is different about our self-storage offering.

speaker
Unknown

Just a question on the investment market. You obviously walked away from one of your target assets due to price. fairly recently and you're looking to get up to 500 million in defence. Are you seeing more competition in that market and has that changed at all in the last couple of months?

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Sadly not. The reason that we walked away from the asset that you refer to as a defence-related asset is because the owner revised their appraisal of you know, what that defence asset is actually worth. It is amazing that given the fact that we, you know, draw that straight line between, you know, defence, industrialisation and the home for industry being industrial property, it is extraordinary that we are not seeing more providers start to move into the defence space. But the fact is we are not coming across it. And, you know, the word I would use at the end of that sentence is yet, because it's going to become unavoidable. And as and when it does come, we think the yields that you buy defence-related property on will, you know, contract quite considerably. Now, that is not the investment case that we're buying on. The investment case we're buying on is sticky government-based long-let income you know, into centres. That's why we're buying it. Valuation is merely just, you know, a benefit should and when it arrive. But if it does, then, you know, we're going to find probably the 200 million of property that we already bought is actually already worth half a billion. I don't suspect it will arrive any time soon. I suspect, just like the physical stimulus, it will be a long and slow, drawn-out journey. But what we're interested in is the direction of travel. And as we see governments spend more, and as we see demand from defence companies increase, it is logical that they will pay more for the properties they sit inside, and therefore the value of those properties will increase. If the yield they're valued at changes, that's just an extra slice on top. But we're not seeing it at the moment.

speaker
Unknown

questions from the internet the first sorry sorry the first one I think you've answered about the proportion of defence assets the second is do you think the 150 million FFO target you had is achievable for the current fiscal year already what do you think Chris

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

I think it's weird. I think yes.

speaker
Unknown

I think yes.

speaker
Chris Bowman
Group Chief Financial Officer

I don't want the analysts putting that in, but yes.

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Put it this way, we're not going to get to 149 point something and not find a way of getting all the way to the 150.

speaker
Unknown

Thanks, Andrew. Okay, what is the risk in the UK that the move out versus move in rent gap starts impacting like-to-like rental growth so that the net effect is negative?

speaker
Andrew Coombs
Group Chief Executive Officer

Look, I don't think we're going to allow it to become negative, but I think the risk is that it does, you know, continue to make the 5% that we look for as a minimum challenging, as it has done this year. But I think we are capable with the platform that we have of making sure that it doesn't go negative. What we're really focused on is that 5% benchmark.

Disclaimer

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