Eurocommercial Pptys N V

Good morning and welcome to the EuroCommercial Half-Year 2025 Results Conference. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. And afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand to Ilaria Pitaloni, Investor Relations Officer of the company.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. I am Ilaria Vitaloni, Euro Commercial Investor Relations Officer. We are very pleased to have you with us today. This call will be hosted by our CEO, Evert-Jan van Garderen, and our CFO, Roberto Fraticelli. Together, they will present the half-year results covering our operational performance, financial position, and strategic progresses. After the presentation, we will open the floor to your questions. With that, I hand over to our CEO, Evert-Jan van Garderen.

Thank you, Ilaria. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to our half-year 2025 results presentation. It's a pleasure to share with you the progress we have made in the first six months of this year. At your commercial, our strategy is clear and consistent. Create vibrant shopping destinations, deliver resilient growth, and generate long-term value for our shareholders, tenants and communities. Today, I will walk you through our operational highlights, leasing activity, re-merchandising projects and sustainability achievements. And afterwards, my colleague Roberto Fraticelli, CFO, will talk about the financial results and the guidance. Let me begin with our operational highlights. In the first half of 2025, we achieved like-for-like rental growth of 3%, supported by healthy leasing demand and resilient retail sales. We signed 296 lease transactions in the first half with an average uplift of 2.9% on renewals and re-lettings. Notably, our new lettings, 110 in total, achieved a much higher uplift of 6.6%. This reflects the strong demand from leading retailers to join our centers and expand their formats. As the press release highlights, nearly 20% of lettable units were either renewed or re-lett during the period, a remarkable level of activity. Let me be clear, this is not just about numbers. It's about strengthening the tenant mix, securing the most attractive brands, and ensuring our centers remain dominant in their catchments. Occupancy across our portfolio remains extremely high at 98.8%, with a collection rate of 99%, which figure you will find on the next slide, evidence of the strong fundamentals of our assets and the affordability of our rents. Retail sales increased by 2.6%. with notable strength in health and beauty, services, supermarkets, and books and toys. In July, retail sales increased by around 5%, confirming the positive trend already observed in June, with growth of 4.7%, led by outstanding results in Italy and Belgium. In July, all countries recorded further improvements, with the sole exception of Italy, where sales remained broadly in line with June's strong performance. Our OCR, or our Occupancy Cost Ratio, stands at 10%, which is both sustainable and competitive. This ensures our retailers are profitable and committed to our centers for the long term. We continue to work closely with some of the world's most attractive retailers. Inditex, Primark, MediaWorld, Rituals, Normal and many others. These partnerships are visible in the 296 deals signed, which included first-time entrants and new formats across Belgium, France, Italy and Sweden. For example, Skin's first store in Brussels and Sandro's first store in a Belgian shopping center, Besson's new format in Les Atlantes in Tours, France, Bershkar's new store in Milan and Univ extensions in Sweden, like the store for Hemtex. Here you see some examples of new arrivals in our shopping centers in Belgium and France. And this confirms that your commercial assets are top priorities for retailers expansion strategies. Our success also rests on being relentlessly customer centric. We're not just filling units, we are curating the right mix of fashion, food, health and beauty and services to meet evolving consumer expectations. As the chart on this slide seven shows, the deal signs span a broad range of categories. 23% in fashion, 18% in health and beauty, 16% in gifts and jewelry, and strong contributions from restaurants, sports, and services. At the same time, we are modernizing our centers, introducing full-format stores, introducing new brands, and redesigning layouts. This keeps our assets fresh, relevant and resilient. Our leasing results highlight the strength of demand for space in our centres. In Italy, renewals and re-lettings delivered an average rental uplift of 8.2%. Belgium achieved 1.9% uplift, while Sweden and France were relatively stable. Overall, the 296 transactions produce an uplift of 2.9%, with particularly strong results in new lettings, where the uplift reached 6.6%. This confirms the ability of our portfolio to capture rental reversion, securing both current income and future growth. Now let's move to our re-merchandising pipeline, which is a critical engine of long-term value creation. In 2025, we launched three major re-merchandising projects in Italy, Colostrada, IGLI and Cremonapo. We are reducing the hypermarket here and reconfiguring units to bring in MediaWorld, Zara, H&M, Primark and Tenzinis. And this is happening in four phases. With this phased plan stretching to late 2026, this will cement Colostrada as Umbria's leading retail destination. Its unique merchandising mix makes it bulletproof. Tuscany's most visited shopping center is undergoing another wave of re-merchandising. The reduction of the Palm Harbour market will result in expanding Zara into a flagship concept store and adding Kool & Bear. This will strengthen Igili's dominance and widen its catchment. We see growing visits from more distant areas. A brand new Primark is replacing Unioro, which we have successfully relocated to the adjoining Rito Park. Primark's arrival at Cremona Po will broaden the offer, extend the catchment to neighboring provinces, and appeal strongly to a younger customer base. These three projects built on the outstanding results we saw from Carozello and Waterway completed in 2024. It is the evidence that value is created. As a result of the re-merchandising project at Carozello, the retail sales increased by 14.9%, rental uplift reached 14.5% and occupancy stands at 100%. Zara, Stradivarius and Bershka all expanded, reinforcing Carosella's dominance in the eastern Milan region. On top of that, Zara closed stores in competing centers. The re-merchandising project has increased its catchment area and has diminished competition. Its activity towards the city of Milan has grown. At Waterway in Brussels, Retail sales rose by 9.8%, footfall increased by 13.8%, and occupancy is virtually full at 99.3%. The re-merchandising in Walloway introduced premium brands, the latest concept of Zara, Massimo Dutti and C&A, a refurbished Inno department store and a new Carrefour market, making Walloway a leading premium shopping destination. And these are all powerful examples of how re-merchandising creates both short-term growth and long-term competitive advantage. No less important is our commitment to sustainability, which remains central to our strategy. 100% of our centres are now brilliant in use and certified, either excellent or very good. We achieved a 62% increase in green loans, secured a five-star Grasby rating and improved our carbon disclosure project rating to B. In operational terms, solar production is up 41% year on year. 87% of landlord controlled electricity comes from renewable resources and carbon emissions are down 12% compared to 2023. Importantly, Green lease clauses are now included in about 60% of our leases, aligning our tenants with our sustainability objectives. This is not just ESG reporting. In our mind, it's a competitive edge, and more and more retailers and consumers demand sustainable environments, and your commercial is delivering. Now is the moment to hand over to Roberto Fraticelli to discuss our financial results.