Cls Holdings Usa Inc

Good morning and welcome to this presentation of CLS Holdings PLC Fully Results 2023. I am Fredrik Vedlund, Chief Executive, and I'm here with Andrew Kirkman, our CFO. To comment upfront on the future need for office space, it is very encouraging that more and more companies are calling for their employees to return to the office. And we've seen a clear trend of companies thinking strategically about return to the office as a value driver for their businesses. Today, we will present you with the full year results and give you an update on our priorities and on the portfolio. But let me first start with an overview of the year. We had a good year on the operations side in all our three countries. We had strong leasing momentum, especially in the second half of the year, and signed 89% more leasing transactions by value than in 2022. We also saw very healthy rental growth, with the new leases 6.9% above ERV. Our net rental income was up 4.8%, 113 million, and our underlying vacancy was steady at 7.6%. On the valuation side, as expected, we saw a full year reduction of 12.5% in local currency, which was driven by yield expansion. One of our priorities last year was on the financing side, and I'm very pleased to report that we completed all of the 2023 refinancings. And as per today, 70% of the 2024 refinancings have also been completed. The investment markets were more challenging, and we sold 25 million of property, but we are targeting over 270 million this year. I'll come back later on this, but it certainly appears that this year has started in a more positive spirit. The Board is proposing to keep the full-year dividend flat at 7.95 pence, which is reflecting its confidence in the business and in our assets, and that there is significant rental upside in the portfolio. Now, let's move to the next slide to give more details on the leasing activities. We had a busy year on the leasing side and our asset management team did a great job in converting inquiries into signed leases. On the left-hand side, you can see that we signed 130 leases at 6.9% ahead of ERV, which is up significantly compared to last year, both in the number of leases, value, and ERV uplift. Encouragingly, the average lease size was also up, even if small to medium-sized floorplates are most sought after in the current market. Like-for-like contracted rent and ERV in the portfolio both grew during the year, as highlighted in the middle of the slide. Our underlying vacancy was steady at 7.6%, and when adding the completed developments, our reported vacancy increased to 11%. This was due to the completion of the Code in London and Park Avenue in Lyon in the first half of the year and part completion of the Artesian in London in the second half. I will give you a separate update on these projects later. Underlying vacancy was stable across the board and the largest overall increase was in the UK from the developments, which also represents our greatest opportunity to drive rental income. The beginning of 2024 has also started in similar fashion to Q4 last year, with a higher level of deal activity continuing. On this slide, I will walk you through the valuation movement. A reduction was expected, and the portfolio was down 12.5% in local currency for the full year. With 5.5% in the first half, we saw a large decrease of around 7% in the second half. This is, however, better for the markets we operate in compared to market statistics. The valuation decline was all driven by yield expansion on the back of rising interest rates, as we saw ERV increases in all countries. In the UK, valuations declined 16.7% and equivalent yields were up 79 bps, while ERV was up 1.1%. It is worth noting that Spring Gardens, which has a shortening lease with NCA, is valued as an office investment and not a development opportunity. And that contributed 2.7% to the UK decline. So the rest of the UK was down 14%. In Germany, valuations were down 9.1% from equivalent yields increasing 36 basis points due to the stronger ERV growth of 2.4%. The reductions were evenly spread across most cities and properties, although we did have a good uplift in Essen due to the new 30-year lease. In France, valuations were also down 9.1% from yields moving out 82 bps, while ERVs were up 1.3%. Our Paris properties reduced in value by 6.9%, while Lyon was down 12.3%. It's always hard to predict the future, but with market expectations of lower interest rates and the adjustments we have seen so far, it is starting to feel like we are nearing the bottom of the cycle. Next, I would like to talk about our sales program on slide seven. So the property investments markets were difficult in 2023 with reductions in volume of between 40 to 60% in all markets. And this was down from the low numbers we saw in 2022. During the year, we sold five properties for a total value of just over 25 million. They were all relatively small, which was one part of the market that still had some traction. Many were repositioning opportunities, and in total the sales closed at 10% above the latest valuation. We are looking to reduce our LTV, and for 2024 we have a larger sales programme, which includes the remarketing of Westminster Tower, where the buyer unfortunately failed to complete, and also our spring new student property, which we have now owned for 10 years. During this period, the performance of our student property has steadily improved, but we believe we have done what we can to optimize this property, and now is a good time to look for an exit. In total, we're looking to sell for over 270 million of property, and we have already made good progress with two properties sales agreed in principle. I will now hand you over to Andrew for more details on the numbers and occupiers.

Thank you, Frederick, and good morning to those in the room and to everyone dialling in. In May, it will have been 30 years since CLS floated on the London Stock Exchange, and we'll be back here then to celebrate the anniversary. Consequently, it seems apt today to present our results from the Stock Exchange. This morning, I'm going to run you through our 2023 financial results, the successful refinancing activity that we executed in 2023, and the further progress we've made this year with planned 2024 refinancings. And finally, I will talk about our occupiers and our index-linked leases. The picture on this slide is one of the offices of Spring News Development in Vauxhall, which highlights the increasing quality of our portfolio. Slide 9 sets out several of the key financial metrics for the business, which I'll run you through in more detail over the following slides. In summary, CLS continues to perform well in a challenging market. This challenging market has led to a reduction in valuations, a strengthening of sterling against the euro, and an expected increase in finance costs. As a result, EPRA EPS was down 11.2% and EPRA NTA was down 23.2%. But reflecting confidence in our business and assets, the proposed total dividend is maintained at 7.95 pence per share. Overall, these resulted in a total accounting return of negative 20.8%. The balance sheet remains strong with almost 80% of debt fixed or capped and an interest cost of 3.61%. And now for more details around these numbers and the drivers behind them. Turning to the next slide, I've set up some more detail on our positive rental income performance, which was outweighed by higher finance costs resulting in lower EPRA earnings. As Frederick has already touched on, the occupational market remains healthy, which has helped CLS to drive a 4.8% increase in net rental income. The principal movements, which are highlighted in the graph on the left, are as follows. Firstly, over 55% of the portfolio is subject to indexation, which resulted in a £2.8 million increase. There was a £2.3 million increase from the full-year impact of the last two acquisitions that were made in 2022. Our student and hotel operations had another excellent year, with the student accommodation being fully occupied and bookings already well ahead for the next academic year, whilst the hotels saw significant increases in average daily room rates. The 0.9 million increase in other is a mixture of dilapidations offset by some refurbishments and higher net service charge. And finally, a small decline from the disposals that were made in 2022 and 2023. On the right-hand side, this £5.2 million increase in net rental income translates into a £1.3 per share increase in earnings. However, this was more than offset by higher finance costs, with our interest costs increasing by 92 basis points and slightly higher expenses from inflation increases. The waterfall chart on slide 11 sets out the main components of the movement in EPRA net tangible assets, with NTA increasing by 23.2% or 77.6 pence per share. Going through the components of the movement from opening to closing NTA in order, we have EPRA earnings of 10.3 pence, which I've just walked through. The dividends paid in 2023 of 7.95 pence per share, which were 1.3 times covered by EPRA earnings. In the middle bar, effectively the whole story of the NTA movement, with a valuation decrease of 75.6 pence, or 12.5%, with decreases in all countries, albeit these were lower than respective markets. And finally, sterling strengthened by 2.1% against the Euro in the period, resulting in a 3.6 pence decrease. Slide 12 sets out the movement in CLS's liquid resources in 2023. Rather than going through the graph bar by bar, I'll just pick out the main points. Despite ongoing investment into our portfolio, our cash position remains strong with over 70 million of cash and 50 million pounds of undrawn facilities. The 50 million pounds comprises two committed RCFs, which we secured in the second half of 2023 for three to five years. Overall cash went down by 43.3 million, which is similar to the 47.2 million cash that we spent on capital expenditure. The two-year period of elevated capital expenditure has now finished, and we are forecasting that spend will drop to around 30 million pounds per annum going forwards. We would expect cash to increase in 2024 as we make further disposals, as highlighted by Frederick earlier. Lastly, cash flow operations remain strong. and was used to cover the payments of dividends, interest, tax and other cost. Interest cover at 2.2 times remained healthy. Financing is a key part of CLS's business model and therefore I've included two slides in the presentation. The first slide, slide 13, summarises CLS's financing strategy and the progress we made in 2023. The main points of our strategy are CLS differs from most of our competitors as we use secured non-recourse lending with currently 43 loans from 24 different lenders. In addition, we aim to have at least £100 million in cash and undrawn facilities, currently over £120 million. And our LTV target is between 35% and 45%, given that we borrow in the UK as well as in Germany and France. Whilst net debt was unchanged in 2023, LTV increased to 48.5% as a result of property valuation declines. We are targeting to reduce gearing to below 45% in the short term and below 40% in the medium term. To achieve this, we have identified over 270 million disposals, including spring new student accommodation. On the right hand side, I've highlighted the progress made in 2023. As you can imagine, with over 40 loans, with a debt maturity of three and a half years, our Treasury Department is always going to be busy. 2023 was no different and we refinanced all the loans which were expiring in 2023. In addition, we refinanced over 50% of the loans maturing in 2024. The chart in the bottom right shows the debt maturity at the start and end of the year. Slide 14 summarizes the further financing progress made in 2024 and our focus for the rest of the year. The chart in the left-hand corner shows the position at the start of the year and the current position. We have already extended two loans this year, so that compared to the start of 2023, over 70% of 2024 refinancings are now complete. For the remainder of the year, we only have six loans in Germany and France for 98.3 million left to refinance. We also believe that our finance costs are starting to peak based upon the current swap curves with only a 10 to 20 basis point increase in our debt costs expected this year. The other focus for 2024 is to tackle the refining things that we have coming up in 2025 early. Our strategy has been to extend loans over the last two years as some loans are associated with expected sales and so we wanted to avoid break costs on long-term fixed rate loans. Some loans are for buildings for which we are trying to improve the letting situation first before securing a long-term loan. Finally, we expected finance costs to reduce and did not want to take out longer-term loans at the higher rates. For 2023, we have 12 loans for £399 million to refinance with the greatest percentage being in the UK as it includes one portfolio loan across 12 portfolios. We are already progressing with refinancing some of the 2025 loans early and others will be paid down through sales or the usual debt amortization. My penultimate slide, slide 15, is a familiar one which illustrates our high quality and diversified tenant base across our three markets. The three key points to highlight on, our properties remain strongly multi-let with 744 tenants equating to an average of over eight per building. A couple of changes in our hit parade of our top 15 tenants, with Kantar in at number 4 and Frank Hurth at number 13. Both of these changes are the result of us negotiating the surrender of the Headleys at New Printing House Square from the Secretary of State. This means we are now directly contracting with the tenants as well as receiving increased rental income. As a consequence of this, our proportion of government tenants has dropped by 4% to 22%. These plus major corporations represent well over half of our tenant base, which is reflected in our rent collection of over 99%. The strong rent collection of over 99% is the same as before during and after the pandemic. My final slide summarizes the resilience of our income with over 55% of our rent being index linked. As noticed, this indexation was one of the key drivers of the increase in net rental income. The amount of indexation and how it works varies by country. Most UK leases are not index-linked, but benefit from upward-only rent reviews. However, Spring Gardens, CLSC's most valuable property, had an 11.1 rent increase mid-year 2023 due to the rent being linked to RPIX. In Germany, 66% of our leases are CPI-linked, which rose by 7.1%. In addition, a further 20% of our German leases had contractual stepped increases, which rose by 5.7%. And lastly, in France, all leases are index-linked. In 2023, we had an inflation increase of 5.6%. And with that, I'll hand back to Frederick.

Thank you, Andrew. And as I said earlier, we would like to go into more details about our recently completed projects. So moving on to page 80. So during 2023, we finished our enhanced CAPEX program with the completion of three larger projects. At the Code in Vauxhall, we have completed our nine-floor office development. The development was completed in May, with launch in June, and we have now let ground floor a ninth. The rented sheet for the ninth floor is starting at 59 pounds a square foot and will rise to over 70 pounds a square foot over time. At Park Avenue in Lyon, we have refurbished five out of nine floors and the facade, with a marketing launch in September. Existing tenants for five floors are back and we have let three floors at ERV, with two floors left that we are confident will go shortly. At the Artesian in Prescott Street in Aldgate, we have completed the renovation of the entire 96,000 square feet building. The marketing launch was in November and so far we've had 25 viewings. Interestingly, we have now had six inquiries from universities and we have therefore submitted a planning application for dual use. All of these properties now meet the highest environmental standards. If we now move to the next slide on page 19. Part of our active asset management is to modernize and renovate our buildings when we have the opportunity. We always have a few smaller refurbishments in the portfolio. Why do we do this? Because it drives rental growth and below are a few recent examples that we have been working on. The first one is Flexion in Berlin. We acquired the property in 2020 when it was 70% vacant. We have refurbished about half the building and it is now 85% let. The new space is achieving roughly 30% higher rent compared to the existing space. The second one, Flathaus in Hamburg, is an old water house or warehouse building in the waterfront area where we have carefully renovated a listed facade and windows to improve noise and energy efficiency, in addition to contributing to the cultural heritage. The building is now 80% let, and we are on the final negotiations for the last remaining space with rents circa 20% above ERV. And the third one on this slide is Apex Tower in New Malden, where we have refurbished several floors, including the addition of a business lounge on the top floor. We've let circa 60% of the refurbished space with strong interest for the remainder, and we will continue with phase two once this space is let. Turning to the next slide, I will now give you an update on our sustainability program. We're making good progress on our net zero carbon pathway, and I am very pleased with how things are progressing. We spent over 15 million pounds by year end 2023, out of a total program cost of 65 million until 2030, with great results. This has also been recognised by the EPRA Gold Best Practice, as well as Grespi 4 out of 5 Green Stars. And we will also publish a separate sustainability report, which will be available on our website together with the annual report. We completed 73 projects in 2023, including installation of EV charging points and the completion of our photovoltaic programme in the UK. This has also resulted in a 20% reduction in our D-rated buildings in the UK, and we are fully compliant with UK EPC legislation and on track to meet our long-term targets. Let's now move to the summary and outlook section, starting from page 22. As an overall direction, the leasing markets are performing well, while the investment markets have literally collapsed in the last few years with extremely low transaction volumes. Starting with the UK, we're seeing good leasing demand, and as you heard earlier, especially the second half of the year was strong with small to medium sized floor plates, particularly in demand. There's also been much more clarity from larger corporates in the UK about future space requirements, with most companies now calling for employees to return to the office. The trend is also clear for fully fitted Cat B offices. In Germany, lettings to government and Mittelstand companies are performing well, while the larger German companies, whose main markets are overseas, are still grappling with uncertainty, which is mainly driven by general growth concerns. New EU regulations around sustainability are also coming into effect, and both tenants and banks are ramping up their requirements. Rental growth is evident across the board, and we are seeing growth rates in Germany that are twice the UK and France for the right quality buildings. In France, we're also seeing good demand for small to medium-sized floorplates, which plays well to our French properties. Office supply in Paris will increase in 2024, which will dampen rental growth. But we're also seeing more conversions of office building to residential due to more local planning system that favors residential conversions. In Lyon, we expect the lower market vacancy rate to be maintained due to more restrictive planning policies for new developments by the Green Party in charge of the city, and that in combination with a strong local economy. Our main operational focus is on letting our refurbishment and developments to drive rental growth in our existing properties. We have updated the walk that we have shown before, and we believe there are good opportunities to drive rental income over the next few years. So starting on the left-hand side, you can see that our contracted rents are 112.6 million as at year-end 2023. The vacancies we have in the portfolio, which includes some of the recent developments, represents close to 14 million pounds of opportunity. That gives a total of roughly £126 million. In addition to that, we are on site working on refurbishments. It's the second phase of the artesian, which completed in the early part of this year. We have Apex Tower Phase 2 that you heard about earlier on. And we also have Bismarckstrasse in Berlin that we are on site working on. These opportunities represent another £11.6 million of rental opportunity. and that would take the total opportunity from the 130 million up to 138 million of rental income. In addition to that, we also have some longer-term development opportunities. We have Atlas Offer Tour and we have Lichthof in Germany, and we also have the larger opportunities with Spring Garden and New Printing House Square in Zone 1 in London, but that is after 2025. In addition to these opportunities, and as you heard from Andrew, we also have over 55% of the portfolio on index-linked lease contracts, which will drive growth going forward. On slide 24, the last slide, I would like to leave you with a few key takeaways. So, strong leasing momentum, and last year we increased net rental income close to 5%, while new leases were nearly 7% above ERV. full-year dividend maintained at 7.95 pence, reflecting the Board's confidence in our business and in our assets. For 2024, we will target more disposals to reduce LTV and increase flexibility, and over 70% of our 2024 financings have already been completed. We will continue to invest in the portfolio with the going forward at a more normal level of circa 30 million pounds per year. The operational focus is on reducing vacancy, and we do expect rental growth to continue. There is significant portfolio upside from reducing vacancy, indexation, and from letting developments. We believe the outlook for high-quality offices is bright as more and more companies favor the return to the office. Companies are again looking at their occupancy needs strategically as the pandemic legacy fades away with more realistic, flexible working policies emerging. That is the end of today's presentation. Thank you all for attending and listening in. We will now open up for questions.