Frasers Centrepoint Trust

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Fraser Centrepoint Business Update for the third quarter, ended the 24th of July 2024, 30th of June 2024. Today, we are very happy to have the management team here to give you an update of the progress that we have made in the last quarter. And with us, we have the CEO, Richard Ng, we have the CFO, Audrey Tan, and our head of investment and asset management, Ms. Tony Ng. I will be your host today and happy to hand this over to Richard to kick off the presentation. Richard, please.

Thanks, Fang Leng, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us bright and early today. Hopefully, you had the opportunity to look through our deck. So, as you know, this quarter is more on business update, looking at the operations and how have we fared so far this quarter. But before I go any further, I just wanted to note that Audrey, our CFO, will be joining us for the last analyst update session before she stepped down on the 8th of August. So coming back to our deck here, as you can see, we have done some changes. Fundlink has also created a little bit more of a dashboard look. and that is fundamentally to help in terms of visual aspects so that you guys could really see not just a number, but the trend in terms of where we are, how we have been performing so far. Okay, so in terms of the overall operational update, you can see that occupancy remains very healthy, 99.7% overall. And what's also more important is we have a couple of 100 pointers and all our mores achieve at least 99% in the book. Shopper traffic, tenant sales, we'll go into more detail later on where Pauline will share. But just a very quick snapshot, we are still ahead if you compare year on year in terms of sales, it fluctuates a little bit quarter to quarter. But nonetheless, I think it's still on a positive trend. Similarly for shopper traffic, we probably about 5% off pre-COVID. Some of our malls, the more dominant ones like Crossway Point or Point City has actually achieved pre-COVID level. So something we continue to focus, something we continue to work on. Financial position, our gearing is at 39.1%. Again, this is partly due to some drawdown as we pay off the key tax for our T1 AEI. Average cost of debt as of this quarter, it came in at 4.1%, but you can see that for year-to-date, it's actually at 4.2%. So it has been moving down marginally from 4.3, the peak of 4.3 in first Q2-4, came down to 4.1 for the last two quarters. We're going to be giving you an update of Tampines One AEI. We are very excited about this completion because it's going to be something new for Tampines area. We are able to bring in 68 new to mall and 46 new to SET retail concepts. For those of you who have the opportunity, I would like to invite you to take a look at some of the new brands that we have brought in for this mall. It's still very much on track to complete fully by September. Most of the work has already been completed, actually. It's now some of the tenants are doing a fit-out and so on, right? And happy to also share that the ROI is what we mentioned before. It's about 8% on the cost of the work, on the AI work. But we are likely to outperform that. In terms of our ESG front, we continue to do our best where we can, you know, focusing on the environment and also not forgetting the other element as well. Specifically in this particular update, we'll focus a little bit more on our social aspect of the ESG. All right, Ambe? Micro-economics, I'm not going to touch in greater details, probably you guys have all the same details as what you're saying here, but there's some key points. I wanted to highlight that the GDP actually grew 2.9% in the second quarter, and also this is very much in line with what NTIA has earlier maintained, the forecast of 1-3%. More importantly, also looking at core inflation has moderated to 2.9%. So I think we are seeing signs of this coming down, which votes well for both our consumers and also our retailers. So this is another space that we continue to watch and continue to focus on. For retail sales, from the RSI for May, there is actually a flat number, no change year-on-year, but actually for FCT, our portfolio has seen an increase. Similarly, for F&B sales for May 2024, for the broader market perspective, we saw a 2.9% increase year-on-year, but our own internal numbers actually surpassed that figure. rent, suburban prime retail, 0.3% Q2Q and 2.6% year-on-year. So in the last quarter, we actually shared that our reversion came in at 7.5. Again, happy to say that we are very much on track at that level. New supply, not much has changed since our last discussion. So very much again, very limited supply. We are expecting to come on stream for the next three to four years. So that again helps underpin the demand, which is why we are saying, you know, all our moors are at least 99% occupied. Audrey, I'll hand that to you now for the financial highlights.

Thank you, Richard. Good morning, everybody. I'll run through the financial metrics. Aggregate leverage is up to 39.1%. This is because of the loan that has been drawn down to finance the CAPEX requirement and for the ongoing AEI at Tampines One and also for working capital purposes. The ICR is stable at 3.26 times. And our cost of debt is about 4.2% average for the nine months ended 30th of June. So for the quarter itself, we registered 4.1%. This has come down as compared to the first Q, where we registered 4.3%. About 67.2% of debt is hedged to fixed rate interest and 68% of loans are actually green loans. We have underground facilities of about $546 million and rated by S&P and Moody's. So this shows you our debt maturity profile, well-spread debt maturity profile, and there's no refinancing in FY2024. Now we are looking at the refinancing in FY2025, and we are already in talks with the banks for the refinancing requirements. With this, I'll hand over to Pauline, who will share more on the portfolio updates.