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Earnings Call Transcript 2018-Q1

[Operator]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome everyone to CCP's conference call to discuss results relative to the first quarter 2018. The audio and slides are being broadcast simultaneously over the Internet at www.ccpsa.com.br/ri. [Operator Instructions]

Before moving on, we would like to state that this conference call might have or include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, which may lead those statements not materialize or be materially different from those expected. Those statements are valid before the date when they're made, and CCP is not obliged to update it in the light of new information.

Here with us today, we have Mr. Pedro Daltro, CEO; Mr. Thiago Muramatsu, CFO. Please Mr. Daltro, you may proceed.

[Pedro Daltro Dos Santos, executive]

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for participating in our conference call to discuss the results of the first quarter. We are quite happy with this first quarter of 2018, where we culminate the accomplishment of a series of actions we started in the previous quarters, which are now maturing and show and reflect rather in the current results.

Again, we're very excited about the expectations going forward.

I'm going to start with the highlights of the period. We have concluded the refinancing of our debt that we had for 2018 and '19. So we are now at a very comfortable cash situation of BRL 500 million, one of the highest cash positions we've ever enjoyed in the company. We managed to do that at very attractive conditions and terms, and that leaves us -- leaves our capital structure quite close to what we consider an optimum level. We also had the sale of our participation of the Parque Shopping Belém and a sale of 8% stake at the Shopping Cidade São Paulo, which is also in line with the company's strategy of recycling capital. CCP for the past 2.5 years has so approximately BRL 1.7 billion, a part of it was to mitigate debt, a part of it was to give money back to the shareholders, which include our return on capital substantially. So we have been adopting that strategy of becoming a little lighter, if you will, in terms of assets, and we continue with this strategy, which has been proven to be quite successful.

We also closed a -- or signed a few contracts with the Miss Silvia building. We are now below 80% in terms of lease. We have improved our position in the office market. We've been doing this since last year, but a lot has happened in the first quarter alone. So that also makes us very comfortable and happy. I'm confident that vacancy rates will soon drop, given the existing demand and the new transactions now being carried out.

On Slide #7, we have a snapshot of what I mentioned. CCP was able to reduce its vacancy rates by 5%. This is the financial occupancy, but it's -- in practice, it's the same effect. We moved from 85% to 90.5%. When you compare to same period of last year, we were quite agile in this issue during 2017, which reflects both in the office segment and the mall segment.

For the office market for the coming 12 months, we have very positive expectations and based on the financial occupancy rates, we can safely say that number will tend to go up in the next quarters and vacancy will consequently drop.

Physical occupancy, in the bottom part of the slide, has increased even further. We reached a level of 90.7%, moving from 81.2% in the same period of last year -- first quarter of last year. So something close to 10% up from last year, which also reflects, what I just mentioned, reflects an important improvement in the markets where we operate.

On Slide #8, we have sales of malls. Sales went up 7.6%, considerably above inflation of the same period and parking flow at malls also went up 3.4%. And so it's quite important because we have restructured that segment for parking and we were able to reap very positive results. Not only do we see an increase in flow, but we also had a price increase and a drop in cost, which positively affected the results for our mall portfolio.

On the bottom left-hand side of the slide, we talk about same-store sales. Last year, we saw a benefit coming the FGTS. So sales went up at a pace above that of this year. But more importantly, it's to try and see in this slide, the real gain in terms of sales growth, which has been stable since the first quarter of last year, whereas in the last quarter of last year, same-store sales were growing 4.7% with inflation at 3%. Now we grew 4.4% with an inflation rate at 2.7%. So given a scenario like this, we're now able to maintain real gain that is very interesting, very promising and makes us all very happy.

Same-store rent on the right-hand side, the real gain was even larger than that in sales. We have a decrease in discounts, which is also affecting this number. We decreased some discounts and that's why we had a higher real gain in same-store rent as opposed to same-store sales. That's another positive point, which shows the start of a recovery. Because we were very fast in acting during the crisis back in 2015, 2016, we were quite pragmatic in terms of lease. Now -- we're now reaping the benefits, now that the recovery is starting. The same goes for the office industry. We're also very pragmatic and now we're ready to see much more attractive conditions when compared to a couple of years ago.

On Slide #9, you see the revenue growth for leasing. Offices grew something close to 7% quarter-on-quarter. The main gain here coming from [indiscernible], which allowed us to grow significantly. Class A, 70% down, but that's a single building and as the market improves, vacancy will drop and will drop very fast at that at a pace. I personally haven't seen that pace in São Paulo for, let's say, 5 or 6 years.

For shopping malls, our revenue went up 5.4%. Warehouses, we only have one in Brazil today. It's not significant in our portfolio.

So we'll -- we close our operating numbers. I give the floor over to Thiago for him to address the financial numbers for the quarter.

[Thiago Muramatsu, executive]

So moving on with the slide presentation. We're now on Slide #11. We have a growth of 6.6% in our net revenues on top of leasing and services. Our NOI grew twice as much, especially because of an improvement in margins, where we moved from 81.8% to 86.4% in margins. Due to this decrease in discounts, which Pedro mentioned before, and our EBITDA also moved up interestingly at 22.4%, also reflecting an improvement in margins moving from 52.2% to 59.9%, almost 60%.

Moving now to Slide #12. There was an improvement both in our net profit and in our FFO in absolute terms of something close to BRL 30 million on both metrics, as we said at the end of the last year, we moved from a net -- negative net profit spiral to a positive line as we can see. And in terms of financial expenses, we saw an important drop of something close to 40%, most of which driven by debt repayment in the previous quarter in the amount of some -- amount of BRL 730 million.

Our last slide, our debt analysis. As I just mentioned, we had a very strong reduction in our debt level in the third quarter of last year. So we closed the first quarter of '18 with a net debt of BRL 1,270,000 (sic) [ BRL 1,271,000 ], slight leverage when compared to fourth quarter of last year. We are now at very comfortable levels both for net debt over EBITDA and in terms of corporate net debt.

Our debt basket by indicators is broken down. It's a 50-50 split, TR and CDI TR today and showing a slightly higher cost plus the custom CDI. We managed to get a level of slightly below 8%. So on average debt of CDI plus 1.5.

Our amortization schedule on the top -- on the bottom left side, we are quite comfortable for the coming 2 years. As it was mentioned before, we have a volume, which is relatively low in terms of remaining amortizations for 2018, slightly higher for next year and then it'll slightly drop throughout the coming years, which also shows a reflex of the liability management work we've been doing for the past 3 or 4 quarters.

And our covenants on the right-hand side, on the bottom, way -- way below the covenants. We are today at 0.6x net debt over EBITDA. Our covenant is 3.5x. So since last year, the closest we've got is 2.5 early next -- last year. So we have room to continue with our liability management going forward.

We close the first part now and now we can move on to Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] [ Mr. Alexandru Conja ] has a question.

[Unknown Analyst]

My question is about investments in the state of Espírito Santo. The company -- does the company have a short-term view in terms of investments and logistics in the state of Espírito Santo, given the fact that they have idle warehouses, ports, oil exploration? So again, do you have any plans both in the mid-run and the short run for the state of Espírito Santo for investments, please?

[Pedro Daltro Dos Santos, executive]

Thank you for your question, [ Marcela ]. This is Pedro speaking. For now, we do believe that the real estate market is more of a local market. And that's where we have our expertise in the cities of Rio and São Paulo. So the priority now is to place capital in those 2 urban areas because those are places we know, we are familiar with the dynamics locally. We've been in the market for a long time in those 2 areas. So I do not anticipate, at least not in the short run, any investments in terms of geographical diversification outside of the state of São Paulo.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We now close the floor for Q&A and give the floor back to Mr. Daltro for his final remarks. Mr. Daltro, Please?

[Pedro Daltro Dos Santos, executive]

Well, I'd like to once again reaffirm CCP's commitment to the same strategy, a strategy we have been following for the past 3 years towards transforming the company into a lighter company in terms of assets. And also, in a company, which would be more nimble, more lean in terms of capital recycling. The sales and acquisitions we just made for the past 24 to 30 months are proof of that, results have been improving quickly. We've seen that the strategy we adopted, especially 2016, strategy of being more pragmatic in terms of leasing both for offices and shopping malls, that strategy has proven to be successful to date.

We managed to reduce vacancy rates very fast than for shopping malls. We have started to reduce discounts as well. So all of that has affected margins positively and we still believe that there is more -- there is room for improvement. We are in tune, in sync with all those markets, especially in the market of São Paulo where we see a stronger, more intense market. 80% of our portfolio is concentrated in São Paulo and this should remain like that. And we do believe we have reached a turning point, especially for offices and we are quite excited with the coming 12 months with, again, a drop in vacancy rates and an increase in the price levels. And all of that will reflect in our results. Both myself and Thiago remain available for questions you may have outside of the call. And once again, thank you all for participating.

[Operator]

CCP's conference call is now over. Thank you all for participating, and have a nice day.