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1H 2026 Interim Results Presentation
1H 2026 Interim Financial Results Webcast Presentation & Analyst Briefing · · ~13,719 words
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A warm welcome to those of you who are here with us at Centricity, as well as those of you joining online. I'm Michael Smith, the Group Chief Executive of Hong Kong Land, and with me is Craig Beatty, our CFO. Over the past six months, our focus was very much on sustaining the execution momentum we've built in the previous year. From delivering exciting openings from tomorrow central to launching our inaugural private real estate fund in Singapore, to aligning our organizational structure to the goal set out in our strategic vision 2035. We've all had a very busy first six months of 2026. Now let me talk you through some of the details of what I just outlined, as well as taking you through our interim financial results for 2026. We will have plenty of time for questions following the presentation. For those of you watching via the webcast, please send us your questions with the website and we will include them in the Q and A session. Here's the structure for today's presentation, unless otherwise stated, all numbers quoted will be in US dollars, so let's get started. Turning to an overview of our 2026
interim results, the group's underlying earnings per share reached over 12 cents, up 14% from the prior period. Absolute underlying profit was $259 million, up 11%. This was driven primarily by lower net financing charges and stable operating results from our portfolios. Profit attributable to shareholders was $1.3 billion, up from $221 million in the first half of 2025, primarily due to an increase in the independent valuations of our portfolios. This increase in valuations, combined with our Share Buy Back program, resulted in an NAV per share of $14.71, as at the end of June, up 3% compared to the end of 2025. under management reached $51.8 billion at the end of June, up 12% since the launch of our new strategy. On capital management, consolidated net debt declined by $200 million to $3.4
billion as the group had meaningful cash inflows from capital recycling activities during the period. Finally, the board declared an interim dividend of $0.08 per share, reflecting a rebalancing of our annual dividend profile between interim and final dividend. For the last 15 years, our interim dividend has remained flat at 6 cents per share. Given our commitment to double dividends from 22 cents per share in 2023 to 44 cents per share in 2035, it was necessary to rebalance our dividend payments such that approximately 30 to 40 percent will be paid as an interim with the remainder in our final. The shift reflects the confidence we have in our underlying earnings. Turning over to key developments for the first half of the year, as many of you in Hong Kong will have seen, we welcomed a number of exciting new flagship openings. While the primary focus for tomorrow's Central is to deliver a new shopping experience for our retail customers, we have not neglected our office tenants.
Their needs to connect with their clients and their business partners. At Landmark, we have refreshed the office lobbies of Edinburgh Tower and Gloucester Tower, so we've moved those lobbies from the third to the fourth floor, whilst also delivering new F&B offerings and office tenant amenities. The Landmark Mandarin has also been reopened to customers on the 1st of June, with a new arrival experienced and refreshed guest rooms. In Singapore, we successfully launched our first private fund, SC-Pref, in February alongside our founding investors, Qatar Investment Authority, and APG. At Westbund in Shanghai, the group unveiled the Terrace, a 27,000 square meter retail quarter with over 70 designer lifestyle brands and F&B outlets. We also launched an additional 337 rental apartment units, increasing the scale of our service department operations to now close to 700 units. At the China Integrated Properties Portfolio, Much of our efforts in the first half were devoted to building operational momentum
on the projects we launched in 2025. Our ongoing work on asset optimization is beginning to deliver real positive results. Finally, many of you may recall from our 2025 Annual Results presentation that we've been working on an organizational redesign to implement a portfolio-led operating model, which I will provide an update on later. Overall, we are aiming to deliver annualized cost savings on existing operations of at least $25 million from 2027 onwards. Turning to an update of our strategic vision, 2035. Back in 2024, we set a new direction for Hong Kong land, focus on what we would need to do to consistently deliver top quartile TSR over a sustained period. The simple answers were to deliver earnings growth and make more efficient use of our capital. While we may not achieve these ambitions overnight, we wanted to reposition the business towards achieving these targets over the mid to long term.
On our desire to grow underlying P-bit, we believe earnings bottomed in 2025. We're now clearly focused on capturing growth across existing portfolios, delivering on pipeline projects, as well as active pursuit of opportunities to deploy our capital. On doubling dividends per share to 44 cents by 2035, the group has delivered a 14% increase in full year DPS to 25 cents in 2025. Asset under management has grown by 12% compared to when our new strategy was first announced, reaching $51.8 billion. We intend to further grow AUM via asset enhancements at existing portfolios over time and leveraging third party capital to pursue growth investments. And finally, on capital recycling, cumulative net proceeds generated a amount of $3.7 billion at the end of June. We're now at 93% of our 2027 minimum target. The group continues to work on a number of opportunities in recycled capital and are confident
of exceeding the $4 billion minimum target. We originally set ourselves by N27, but I think we, hopefully we can achieve that by end of this year. Turning now to provide more color, literally, as you can see, on the latest happenings in the first half of the year across the group. Hong Kong land's philosophy has always been about curating and strengthening our ecosystems. This goes back to our belief that experience to be truly central, the entire ecosystem, is more valuable if it's experiential than the sum of the parts. While the Tomorrow's Central Initiative is focused primarily on creating retail spaces for the future, we have not forgot about elevating the experience about office tenant community. In the first half of the year, we launched the transformed office lobbies of both Edinburgh and Gloucester Tower. The refreshed spaces also feature an expanded array of F&B outlets and amenities catering to the needs of our office tenants. As the transformation continues, we expect more refreshed new offerings to be introduced.
Turning to our luxury retail operations, since kicking off in the second half of 2024, the tomorrow's central transformation continues to exceed expectations. Initial phases of work are now beginning to bear fruit, with exciting openings in the first half of the year. A great example is Van Cleef opened its global fag ship in June. This is one of only five global masons for this brand. Three other longstanding tenants, Patiga Veneta, Burberry, and Belluti, we opened with all new interiors. For many of you who may be loyal customers of the landmark, you may have noticed that we launched the long awaited Bespoke the VIC lounge at Gloucester House over the past week. The new space spans more than 8,000 square feet and reimagines the old world elegance of Hong Kong's historic high society through a contemporary lens. Further elevating experiential retail for our VICs is critical to delivering on our strategy of not just retaining, but increasing our share of the ultra high net worth spend in the city.
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Automated speech recognition of Hongkong Land Holdings Limited public webcast recording; not divided by speaker. Prepared 6 September 2026 by SMID Research.
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