Full Year 2008 Sponda Plc Earnings Conference Call - Final.(Broadcast transcript)

OPERATOR: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Sponda Plc financial year 2008 conference call, hosted by Kari Inkinen, President and CEO. My name is [Ina] and I will be your coordinator for today's conference. For the duration of the call, you will be on listen-only. However, at the end of the call, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. (Operator Instructions). I'm now handing you over to Mr. Inkinen to begin today's conference.

KARI INKINEN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, SPONDA PLC: Okay. Good morning, everybody. This is Kari Inkinen from Sponda. Welcome to our financial year 2008 results presentation. With me here I have our CFO, Robert Ohman, who will go through the actual results and so we will be jointly presenting this material to you.

So, if we start on the first slide, actually that is page four, couple of comments of the actual events during 2008. As everybody knows, we have had a fairly challenging year of 2008. Actually, as we also know, the real estate sector being sort of lagging the overall economy to some extent. So, if you look at our results, the actual results are quite positive. But of course, for the major part of last year, we have been preparing for the weakening market conditions and frankly we feel that we have been quite successful in achieving the goals that we have set.

If you look at the overall numbers and what has happened here in Finland, so in Sponda's portfolio, actually what we have seen is that the standalone portfolio, so the old portfolio that we had, actually saw improvement in occupancy rate, especially in our office and retail portfolio. We have seen increasing rents throughout the year, so thanks to the inflation plus the overall market conditions, so the rents increased significantly.

We had a fairly challenging development program. So all the development projects that we carried on were finalized towards the end of the year and we are quite happy to say that that happened in planned time and on budget. And of course, we were able to book a fairly significant development profit from those, so we'll come back to that later.

As the market conditions weakened, so early last year already, we decided that we have to secure our financing by selling assets and we started that program. And during the second half of the year, we were able to sell more than EUR120m worth of assets and achieve the goals that we set ourselves -- to ourselves on that sector.

Also, the financing of course was extremely challenging throughout the year. We made several successful arrangements and were able to complete all the necessary financing needed.

So, in all, quite successful despite the challenging environment.

On the next pages we go through the actual numbers a little bit, what happened. So the increasing rents you can see in our net operating income, so that rose by a little bit more than 9%. The occupancy rate was down somewhat, to 88.5%. The main reason for this is the Vuosaari development project, which still only sees a 40% letting at this stage and that of course draws down the overall occupancy rate in the Company.

The development gains for our property developments, so all the projects that we finalized, there were several of them, the actual gain was EUR43m. So that is after the market valuation of the completed projects. Against that, we released a goodwill of minus EUR13m. Throughout the year, we sold properties for EUR120m and bought properties earlier 2008 for EUR2010m -- EUR210m. Altogether, EUR350m worth of new financing was signed during the first half of the year and that refinancing of a bond in October for EUR150m was completed.

After the end of the year, a couple of things that we completed here. We sold -- or finalized the deal for three logistics properties sold on -- those two are Sponda's Fund for EUR16m. And then, unfortunately, we received a decision on -- a court decision on the dispute with Sampo Bank, an old dispute from early 2000, and we were ordered to pay that EUR8.3m. That has no impact on our results, so all that was reserved in our books earlier.

On the next page, if we look at the Q4 figures on a broader scale, so a couple of things that are worth noting here. Earnings per share, after the write-downs of the assets, was positive EUR0.24. We'll come back to the actual valuation of the properties a little bit later on. The operating cash flow per share pretty much remained at the same level as previously, so EUR0.78 per share. The actual NAV per share at the end of December is EUR7.86 and the so-called EPRA NAV, which is calculated by subtracting the -- sorry, deferred taxes from the NAV, is EUR9.64.

So, this is the numbers in broader scale and now I'll hand over to Mr. Ohman to go through the actual financial result.

ROBERT OHMAN, CFO, SPONDA PLC: Thank you, Kari. Good morning. Robert Ohman here.

We move on to page eight in the presentation set, to look a bit more in detail at our profit and loss statement. As Mr. Inkinen said, despite the market conditions, a fairly healthy set of figures, in our opinion at least, for the P&L. Our revenue increased both on a quarterly basis and an annual basis compared to last year's figures. The same applies also for our net operating income.

Perhaps one point I'd like to make here also is that the development projects that were completed during the fourth quarter of 2008 did not have any effect on either revenue or cash flow for 2008. So they will start generating profits and cash flow from Q1 2009.

We were also quite successful in the fourth quarter in terms of disposing of assets, both of investment properties and trading properties. We were able to also post a profit of, in total, roughly EUR25m on these disposals, which brought the full year figure on disposal gains up to around EUR35m. The net valuation loss for the quarter was around EUR10m and on a full year basis EUR36m. I'll get back to a bit more detailed specification of that figure on the next slide.

As you've heard, we did release EUR13m of goodwill from our balance sheet. That goodwill stems back to the time of the Kapiteeli acquisition and the goodwill …