Eastnine AB (publ)

Hello and very warm welcome to our first quarter results. My name is Kestuti Sosnauskas, I'm CEO of Ease9 and with me I have

Britmarie Nyman, CEO at Ease9.

And today we go through the highlights, the markets and the financial situation of our company. First of all, we are very happy to show that our business continues growing. Our profitability is continuously strengthening. We have profit from property management at all-time high. That also includes certain one-offs, so it's really, really strong results. We have slightly positive value changes in our portfolio, which means that probably we are flattening out on the curve of the yield curve. Net letting, somewhat weaker, but that's a very common situation for us in Q1. Q1 is always a bit weaker, but we can go into that a bit later in the presentation. We're also happy to announce that all of our portfolio now is sustainability certified. And it's not only sustainability certified, it's actually at the highest brackets of every single either leas or platinum level. So it's either outstanding or lead platinum. We have one building that is in gold and we will in the future improve that as well. We have refinanced part of our loans and we've extended lease agreement, one of our key lease agreements with Danske Bank. So all in all, very positive news in the quarter. Before we go into more details on our financials, I would like to speak more about the markets, about the potential that we see and basically how it looks. And most of you who have been in Eastern Europe, you probably refer to beautiful old towns, some of them medieval, some of them a bit more younger. But overall, it's a beauty. But it also comes in combination with a very gray Soviet blocks and a great parts of city are just in this gray color. But what many people miss and what we actually want you to look at is this new economy that is evolving. The new businesses, the new cities and the new parts of the cities actually that are evolving that are very modern. They are much more modern than most of the stock today in the western part of the world. And it's actually the fastest growing part of Europe that we are acting in. If we look 25 years back, you see our markets in the darker columns. Actually, they have been growing faster than most of the developed parts. If you look on Poland, it's actually one of the very few big markets, huge markets and actually performed extremely well over the last 25 years. But if you look also on the forecast and the forecast represents the dots, it's actually you can see that expected growth is there to continue. And that's a very, very strong convergence trend in this part of the world that is going on. And that's what we are up to capture. So it's also very important to see that actually there's a huge transformation and change in the cities that we operate. You can see on the graph example of Vilnius, the workforce in the kind of office environment, its employment in IT, financial, scientific and administrative sectors actually tripled over the last 20 years, but still is among is not over saturated. It's still there is a potential to grow. If you compare to Stockholm, Gothenburg and other health centers, especially for capital cities, you see that Vilnius is at 19 percent and actually those cities are at 30. So in general, there is a lot, a lot of potential actually for the cities to continue growing, especially in these segments. There's also a huge gap in terms of valuation. The part of the world that we invest in has in general lower rental levels combined with high yields. But we work in the environment of the same financing cost. So we are earning more money on our investments. We have lower downside risk rather the upside potential in terms of increased trends. So those graphs will somehow in the future, at least I believe, will converge over a period of time. So yields should probably will be coming down and and rents will be coming up to reflect the overall European market. We are in the EU, we are in NATO and so on. So this is the common market that we are in. And this is a truly remarkable opportunity as we see. So that's why we're so excited and continue growing and investing in this region and development of our business. So if you look at our operations, we are actually situated in today in three cities, but we will add other cities like Warsaw in the future. We are along this new big infrastructure project called the Rail Baltica that will connect Helsinki with Berlin and basically create a huge transportation hub and infrastructureally integrated part of the eastern flank of the Baltic Sea. Our properties are in the major places like Riga, Vilnius, now Poznan in the future. We will add even Warsaw. Property value is around closer to 600 million euros. We have 14 properties. All of them are relatively chunky. As you see, it's 182,000 square meters, 92 percent occupancy and very, very modern stock as the average age is only 10 years. Here you can see some pictures of our portfolio. So 66 percent of the floor space and the value is in Vilnius. 13 in Riga and 21 is in Poznan. So if you look on development of our kind of key ratios, rent level have actually gradually been picking up. And now is at around 200 euros per square meter in year. And we are now talking about prime rents in our portfolio. Our vault is actually 4.1 years. It's improved since the last quarter. Occupancy is somewhat down, but we have these fluctuations. We still have relatively big tenant relationships and we have a some of them, of course, there are some changes over time. So the occupancy is somewhat lower during this quarter. Surplus ratio still very, very strong at 92 percent. And this is probably still among the top in the industry. If you look to the exposure of our tenants, actually it is very even if we have a relatively concentrated portfolio of tenants, we have a diversified businesses and actually businesses that are there future proof. It's a big ICT segment. It's a big finance segment. And it's a big Ecom segment. And of course, other segments are a bit more widespread. Some of the relationships is also in the manufacturing and so on. But it's kind of office works for the manufacturing businesses. So if we look on our sustainability today, portfolio is actually 100 percent certified. Sixty nine percent of our leases are green leases or 68 percent of green leases. The financing is 69 percent of our financing is actually green financing. We are leading in sustainability in our region. We target to be climate neutral from our property operations by 2030. And we are working actually very hard on this target. And we target to be at the five star ranking in Gresp. We have four last year. We lost one star in increased energy consumption post covid return to the work. So this is mainly explanation of that. And we believe that we will be managed to improve it going forward. So with this, I will leave over now to Ritmari. But before I leave over, I just remind you, please post your questions while we speak so we can answer them directly after.

Thank you, Kirstutis. Yet another strong quarter with a new record high. Profit from property management increased by 17 percent during the quarter compared to the same quarter last year. And what are the main differences? In Q1 this year, we had one of items related to personnel of around 300,000 euros. Affecting negatively. We also saw an increase in the interest expenses, which also affected negatively. But on the other hand, we had interest income after the sale of MFG. And that, of course, affected the results very positive during the first quarter. We had slightly positive value changes for properties. If we compare with the last quarter, 2023, we can see that the profit from property management even increased more, plus 19 percent. And the main differences were the same one of items related to personnel of 300,000 euros. We also saw a slightly negative effect from interest income. It's still very positive, of course, but a little bit lower than in Q4 since the average cash was slightly lower during Q1 this year. On the other hand, we had quite a lot lower financial expenses during Q1 this year since we had a lot of one-off costs related to the early redemption of the bond in Q4. That was one million euros. Since the sale of MFG, East9 is a pure real estate company, we don't have any other investments left. Total assets, cash and investment properties, they are on the same level as at year end last year. After the refinancing during the first quarter, short-term interest bearing liabilities decreased and long-terms increased. The earning capacity is not a prognosis. It's a theoretical assessment based on current agreements, certain assumptions and also some 12-month figures. The rental value increased compared to the end of the last quarter. That's because of the yearly indexation by the 1st of January of around 3.5%. The vacancy value increased due to a lower occupancy. The central administration cost increased, and this is a 12-month figure. The extra cost of 300,000 euros during the first quarter has affected also the earning capacity. The interest expenses also increased due to the refinancing during the quarter and a higher interest rate level. On the bottom line, profit from property management in the earning capacity is slightly lower than during the end of the previous quarter. Property values have developed negatively for quite a while now, but during the last two quarters we have seen stable or even slightly positive unrealized value changes. If you look at the average yield requirements in our evaluations, they continued to increase during the quarter. They were up from 6.4 to 6.5, and if you look at the second decimal, the increase was even a little bit high, close to 0.2. If you look at the five-year interest rate swap, we have seen a slight decrease since during the autumn. But as you know, it's quite volatile and we've seen after the end of the quarter an increase once again. So let's see what's happening going forward. We have a very strong finance position. The interest rate level increased to 4.7 after the refinancing during the quarter. Of course, affected by high interest rate levels on the market. It's good to know then that the margins actually came down in this refinancing. So the margins are quite good out there. It might have been a peak for ES9. Let's see what's happened with the market interest rates going forward, but it's close to the peak, I think we can say. Cash position, still very good after the sale of MFT last year. ICR improved quite a lot during the quarter, and it was low in Q4 related to the bond of costs during the quarter. LCV and net debt EBITDA on the same level, very low, good. And maturities, both loan maturities and interest maturities increased during the quarter after the refinancing. Kostutis, can you please continue?

Thank you very much. So some of the concluding words in terms of the future and where we are. So I mean, we are a growing company with a growing portfolio in a unique growing market with a very, very strong underlying convergence story taking place. And I talked about that in the very beginning. It's actually very, very exciting to see that, you know, our biggest market and our biggest potential market, Poland, is actually developing extremely strong, continues to do that even in this kind of more difficult environment for most of the European markets. We have been delivering a sustainable, attractive total return. We are committed to continue working on that. And profit from property management is something that we focus and build higher profitability in our portfolio, as long as retaining very stable and good relationships with very strong tenants. So there is an underlying stability in our business. And we are we believe that we are in exposure, exposed to the tenants that are also have a very strong future potential going forward. If you look at our portfolio build up, basically since 2013, we've been started. We started investing in real estate. And you can see a gradual transformation. We took off much faster since 2016. And by now, portfolio has grown significantly. We haven't done acquisitions in the last year and a quarter, but we have actually a very strong potential to further increase our portfolio. And having this sound position in this market opens up quite exciting opportunities for us. So with this, we open for questions.

So that was silent. So please post questions. There are certain delaying questions, so we are waiting. Now, OK. In the report, Poland is mentioned as a focus area for new property investments. Looking at the International Railway Project connecting Prague to Warsaw, is it fair to assume that Wroclaw is a city of great interest for East9, except Poznań and Warsaw?

We are looking at regional cities, but I think for now we will limit ourselves with Poznań and Warsaw in the next coming quarters and months. But maybe in the future it will be definitely something that we will look into.

OK, do we have any more questions? There is a certain delay, so we will wait for a little while. I guess everything was crystal clear, Stotis.

I guess if there are no more questions, let us thank you for today and we will respond to them. We have one more.

OK, we have one more. Can you say anything about rent level trends in Vilnius?

Yeah, I think we see a general upward-going trend. We have seen it for a while now, especially in prime locations. We have seen that contracts being signed at top levels, not maybe historic top levels, but definitely top levels compared to the last five years. And in general, even though there is maybe a certain slowdown in the market right now, we don't see any significant pressure downwards. It's rather people are maybe reducing some of their space, but at the same time they are looking for much better office or much better location to bring their employees together. So in general, rental levels are not decreasing.

And the activity on the rental market is normally quite low in Q1 and also in Q2 and more active in the second half of the year. OK, no more questions. We will continue and have the AGM this afternoon. Thank

you very much for listening.

Thank you very much.