Mapletree Pan Asia Commercial Trust

Good morning, analysts, investors, and members of the public. Welcome to Maple Tree Pan Asia Commercial Trust, our MPAC analyst briefing and live broadcast for our results for the fourth quarter and the full year, FY2024-05. I'm Liying, and today for our results briefing, we have the following speakers. They are Ms. Sharon Lin, Chief Executive Officer of MPAC, Ms. Janika Tan, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Koui Leong, our Head of Investments and Asset Management They'll be presenting our financial results, providing business development updates, and sharing some market insights. Following the presentation, we'll open the floor for a Q&A session, where we invite you to ask questions and seek further clarification. Without further ado, I will hand the floor over to our CFO, Janika.

Thank you, Lien. A very good morning to everybody. We have just announced our results this morning, so maybe we'll just go to flex and quickly go through the financials. Fourth quarter FY24-25 gross revenue was $222.9 million and MPI $169.5 million. These were lower by 6.8% and 7.4% year-on-year respectively, and this largely reflects the absence of Maple Tree Inc.'s contribution following its divestment on 31 July 2024 and lower overseas contributions. As you may recall, we have divested Maple Tree Anson, our non-core asset, on 31st July 2024 and we have applied the entire proceeds to the reduction of borrowings. Moving on to the OPEX, OPEX improved by 4.9% year-on-year during the quarter and this was largely due to the Maple Tree Anson divestment and lower utility costs, in particular the Singapore portfolio. Net finance expense for the quarter 9.4% lower at $51.1 million as compared to fourth quarter last year and this was mainly due to the repayment of borrowings using the net proceeds from the divestment of Liberty Ensign but this was partly offset by the higher rates on the SingDollar Hong Kong Island Japanese Yen borrowing as our legacy interest rate swap continued to roll off progressively so consequently the amount available for distribution was $103.6 million and DPU 1.95 cents, down 14.8% year-on-year for fourth quarter. Okay, moving on to next slide. This shows the contribution by different markets. Singapore properties contribution increased by 1.4% year-on-year, excluding method tree and incense. And this accounted for about 53% to both fourth quarter's portfolio gross revenue and MPI. On a full year basis, MPAC reported gross revenue and MPI of $908.8 million and $683.5 million respectively, lower by 5.1% and 6.1% year-on-year. The higher contribution by Singapore portfolio on a comparable basis, which is without Mabry Jensen, as well as lower OPEX and net finance costs, provided partial offset to the overseas and headwinds, Florex headwinds. So consequently, DI amounted to $423 million and DPU $8.02. Okay, the next few slides are on our portfolio valuation. MPAC's portfolio valuation is approximately $16 billion as of 31st March 2025. Excluding the effect from Maple Tree Inc.'s divestment, the portfolio valuation rose $339.4 million or 2.2% from their respective last available independent valuation either as of 31st March 2024 or in the case of the three Makuhari assets in Japan as of September 2024. On a year-on-year basis and excluding Maple Tree and Sun, the valuation increased by $225.5 million or 1.4%. The overseas properties recorded lower valuation, largely seeming from the revised market expectation in Greater China. and cap rate and discount rate expansion applied to festival work. Moving on to the next slide, this is the valuation for Singapore property. There's an uplift of $660 million or 7.9% and this more than offset the decline in the valuation of the overseas properties. Singapore's growth was led by VivoCity's better performance and tighter cap rate applied by devaluers to VivoCity and the business card segment of MVC. For Japan, the year-on-year valuation decline was largely due to the three properties located in Makuhari in Japan and has been captured in the September results. The current six months change in valuation was largely due to Forex impact, while MBP shows some gain due to successful backfilling. Moving on to balance sheet, With the uplift of the portfolio valuation, NAV per unit is now at $1.78 at September 2025, and this was higher as compared to March 2024 by 1.7%. On capital management, the deployment of Maple Tree Ensign's divestment proceeds reduced outstanding borrowings to $6.1 billion, and together with the higher overall valuation, aggregate leverage ratio improved from 40.5% a year ago to 37.7% as of 31 March 2025. With an average all-in cost of debt maintenance level at around mid-three, ICR kept at 2.8 times on a 12-month trailing basis. During the quarter, MPAC issued a seven-year green bond in March 2025 and this extended the average term to maturity of debt to 3.3 years as of March 2025. and by the close of the reporting period, NPAC has a financial flex of $1.2 billion in cash and undrawn committed facilities. So this is sufficient for working capital and financial obligations. We will continue to ensure a natural balance sheet hedge by closely aligning the debt mix with the geographical distribution of NPAC's AUM where feasible. MPAC's debt profile remained balanced with no single financial year facing more than 23% of debt for refinancing. Moving on to risk management, the fixed rate debt portion was lowered from 81.5% to 79.9% during the quarter. We found the 7-year fixed rate bonds issued in March 2025 the percentage of fixed rate debt would be at 76.6%. So at about 80% of our debt on fixed rate, every 50 days change in benchmark rates estimated to impact the DPU by 0.1 cents per annum. And lastly, at the close of the quarter, approximately 90% of MPAC's expected distributable income was derived from or hashed into SingDollar. The next slide is on the total return. So for this year, the total return from capital and dividend payout is 3.9%. And last but not least, on the distribution detail, VCD is 25th April 2025 and the payout date is on 6th June 2025. With that, I will now hand over to William. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Maybe let's move on to the occupancy performance. So you can see that the portfolio occupancy has declined very slightly since December 2024. that's largely driven by the that's largely driven by the Japan properties where there were a number of non-renewals particularly in the Makuhari area but then moving on to the smoker assets so for MBC occupancy now stands at 91.2% There have been a number of non-renewals in the current year in the financial that just passed and most of those pieces are still in the process of being leased out. The experience over the last three to six months has been tenants have been taking a far longer time to make decisions and commitments are typically a lot further into the future. We remain hopeful that we can bring up the occupancy in the coming financial year, largely due to the fact that the cost pressures for tenants in Singapore are driving them from CBD assets into lower cost locations like MBC. For the UOCD occupancy remains strong and a small amount of vacant space largely due to AEIs which are currently ongoing. mTower is the main beneficiary of the increase in occupancy for the other SG properties. Again, we have been the beneficiary of the movement of tenants out from CBD, looking for slightly lower cost locations. M Tower also benefited because we were able to offer smaller spaces. The building has been multi-tenanted for a long time. Smaller spaces of 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 square feet are easily available. We have also managed to retain a lot of the fit-outs from tenants that recently departed and this allowed incoming tenants to reduce their moving costs making the building a lot more attractive. For Festival Walk, that little bit of vacancy is largely due to the office component of the building. We had one tenant move out earlier in the year. We had backfilled about 40-50% of the space and we are working to fill up the rest of the spaces. China remains one of our more challenging markets. If you look on a year-on-year basis, Gateway Plaza actually lost a little bit of occupancy against March last year, whereas Sand Hill Plaza has actually improved occupancy slightly. but while both assets performed better than most of the market comparables, leasing demand still remains fairly weak both in Shanghai and Beijing. In particular for Shanghai, we will likely see a little bit of headwinds going forward as the Changjiang area being a business part. does face a little bit more pressure due to the trade tensions, which have mainly been focused on manufacturing as well as specifically on semiconductors and microelectronics-related industries. For the Japan properties, this is largely due to the termination of leases from the single-tenanted property, Seiko, as well as the non-renewal of the master leases at MBP. For Pinnacle Gangnam, still one of the bright spots in the portfolio, all of the vacant spaces in the building have been currently taken up except for a small retail unit in Basement 2 and we expect Pinnacle Gangnam to continue performing well over the next one year or so. Moving on to Central Reversion. So MBC, the Singapore properties in general have performed a lot better MBC, VivoCity and Empower in particular have seen healthy rental reversions Festival Hall continues to see negative rental reversions that's also been pressured because of the current trade tensions and the potential impact on the economy of both Hong Kong and China The China assets mentioned in previous quarters, there has been negative rental reversions, market rentals have been falling. While we have managed to contain this to a negative 9%, the reality is market rentals are quite a bit below our passing rentals in the past. just to give a sense, St. Hugh Plaza in the past used to sign visas in the $5 to $6.50 per day, RMB per day. Most of the rentals we are concluding now are actually in the $3.50 to $4 range. So for Japan, that's again largely due to the Seiko Building and the master leases at MBP. Whereas Penang and Gangnam continues to perform well. This improvement in rental reversion is largely due to office leases, where due to the run-up in office leases, office rentals in the Gangnam area. We still have quite a component of the building where the current rentals are below the market. So we can probably expect to see a positive rental reverse for Penang and Gangnam going forward. Just a quick note on lease expiry profile, so our portfolio is 2.2 years, retail is that same number, whereas office and business part is at 2.3. You will see that we actually have quite a large chunk of spaces coming up for renewal in the current FY25-26, and we are in negotiations with all of these tenants. The current indications are that most of these tenants will be renewing their leases, although one or two of them might have some reduction in spaces. Moving forward on the performance of the office and BP assets. Singapore continues to perform well with a slightly increased vacancy at MBC which we hope to close up throughout this financial year. China continues to be challenging. Retention rates are fairly low. We do have tenants who have been moving out to newer buildings, in particular in Shanghai. Whereas for Japan, while we have signed up a good number of leases, some of this is actually some of the underlying leases in the master tenant, which have continued in the building. And rental reversions continue to be weak, especially in Macquarie. Korea, I mentioned earlier, continues to be one of the better performers in the portfolio. Moving on to reviews of this performance. Shopper traffic is down very marginally against the year-on-year, whereas tenant sales have been down about 2.1% against year-on-year. Part of the impact on tenant sales has been that if you have been to the mall recently, you have seen that we have had quite a lot of asset enhancement works ongoing and that's contributed to significantly more downtime this current financial year than against the previous financial year. Looking at the asset enhancement works, so for Basement 2, we had two phases of works ongoing. One phase is the upgrade of the food kiosks as well as increase the number. That's largely complete, just a few more kiosks which will be done by the end of this quarter. For Phase 2, which we have started a few months ago, we'll be expanding the retail footprint into the carpark area. That's currently ongoing and will largely be complete by the third quarter of the year. Most of the spaces have already been committed out, just a few more leases left to finish up. So this slide just gives you a few of the tenants that we have signed up over the current quarter. as well as some of the A&P activities that are ongoing. Moving on to Festival Walk. The shopper traffic has been up over 5.6%. I think this has largely been contributed by firstly increased increased travel from China into Hong Kong, although that hasn't really translated into tenant sales. If you look at the Hong Kong tourist statistics, while the number of arrivals have increased, the spend by tourists, either those who have stayed overnight or are there only on a day trip, have decreased quite significantly from what they were doing pre-COVID and even against the previous year. tenant sales continues to remain weak. We do think that it's likely that this is starting to flatten out. If you look at the outbound statistics for Hong Kong, that number actually is starting to flatten out. In the previous months over the past financial year, that could have been easily a 30, 40 to 50% increase, whereas over the last one month or so, that increase has been fairly muted. So the mall continues to improve the tenant mix, a number of new tenants that we brought in as well as a number of pop-up stores that we have put through to the mall. The mall continues to be very strong in running marketing activities to drive footfall and it remains very popular with social media related events as well as with the stars in Hong Kong. Okay, so we can come to the end of the presentation. I'll hand it over back to Lynn.