Santiago Donato
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Santiago Donato, Investor Relations Officer of IRSA, and I welcome you to the third quarter of 2026 results conference call.
I would like to remind you that both audio and slideshow may be accessed through company's Investor Relations website at www.irsa.com.ar by clicking on the banner webcast link. The following presentation and the earnings release are also available for download on the company website.
After management remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session for analysts and investors. If you want to make a question, please use the chat.
Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call is being recorded and that information discussed today may include forward-looking statements regarding the company's financial and operating performance. All projections are subject to risk and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially.
Please refer to the detailed note in the company's earnings release regarding forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Mr.
Matías Gaivironsky, CFO.
Matías Gaivironsky
Thank you, Santi. Good afternoon, everybody.
We are glad to present our nine-month period results of the fiscal year 2026. We saw during the nine-month period a gain of 239 billion pesos, an increase in shopping mall revenues and EBITDA, good results also in the office portfolio with 100% occupancy and slight increase in rents and EBITDA, also an improvement in rents, occupancy, margins in hotels and EBITDA as well.
Regarding the expansion plan, we also announced a new building, an office building adjacent to our existing building, Zetta. We already signed an agreement with Mercado Libre to expand their offices.
Mercado Libre will rent most part of the new building. Also, there is a development and commercialization progress in Ramblas, our main project, with two additional lots that were swapped for $11.3 million.
Let me introduce Santiago again. He will continue with the presentation.
Santiago Donato
Thank you. We move to page number 3, to the shopping malls segment.
As you can see here, GLA increased to 373,000 square meters. This was mainly due to a small expansion in Alto Avellaneda mall.
Occupancy remained very high at levels of close to 98%. Regarding tenant sales and consumptions, over the last quarters we have seen a decline in our tenant sales in real terms, the last quarter by 10%.
Consumption is a little bit weak. We are seeing mainly a pressure on prices within a process of retail reconfiguration driven by the opening of the economy and the entry of new international brands that I will show you on the next page, while volumes and customer traffics continue to be strong, quite good.
Despite these lower sales, as we can see in the third graph, our revenues and our adjusted EBITDA grew by close to 2.5% the revenues, 2.2% the adjusted EBITDA of the segment. This is mainly explained by our fixed components: the base rent plus the key money, the nontraditional advertising, the parking, all the fixed components today accounts for almost 87% of our revenues.
This shows the resiliency of our business, of the shopping centers, even in a slowdown of consumption. We hope to be recovering in line with the economic activity in the next quarters.
Moving to the next page, here we can see the growing interest that I mentioned before of international brands across our malls looking to enter Argentina and expanding through our malls. These are some examples of brands already operating in our portfolio as well as others that are under development and expected to open in the coming quarters.
This is Dolce & Gabbana, Decathlon in some of our malls, Victoria's Secret, we have already set in Alto Palermo, in Abasto, and is planning to expand. We are also having conversations and negotiations with very important retailers from abroad that are willing to come to Argentina.
This is really positive news for IRSA, will diversify our tenant mix and bring very good proposals for our shopping malls. Here we have the performance of the office buildings.
This is more stable. Today, we have a small portfolio of 58,000.
It's going to be increased a little bit with this new development that Jorge will give you some color later. Rents of our premium portfolio, today almost all of our portfolio is A+ or A except for the Philips building that today is a workplace, it's like a coworking, that today we have a rent of around $26 per square meter and is fully occupied.
We are seeing a gradual—the office work is coming back, and we are seeing huge demand in our offices, in our premium offices. Finally, the hotel segment, which is our third rental segment, is performing very well.
We come from a year, a year and a half with some challenge due to the appreciation of the peso against the dollar, but we are seeing very good performance mainly in Buenos Aires. Tourism is coming to Buenos Aires.
Occupancy reached like 74%. It's a combination between tourism and corporate events that are doing very well in the city.
The Llao Llao resort, our exclusive hotel in Bariloche, occupancy was mainly affected this last to a year and a half because of renovation works in one section of the hotel. If we exclude those rooms that are under construction, the hotel and occupancy shows a positive and stable trend.
Very good numbers in the three segments, and the rental adjusted EBITDA increased in the three segments in real terms and in dollars as well. I will give the word now to Jorge Cruces, our CIO for the projects and developments.
Jorge Cruces
Thank you, Santiago. Good evening, everybody.
We're moving forward with a new office expansion project at our Zetta building. The property currently totals around 32,000 square meters of GLA, and it's mostly occupied by Mercado Libre.
In December, we signed an amendment to our lease with Mercado Libre agreeing to expand the lease space. Upon completion, the building will exceed 47,500 square meters of GLA.
Around 72% will be occupied by Mercado Libre. We've already kicked off the initial works, site preparation and earthworks, and are now in the process of tendering the concrete structure.
The Zetta building expansion is part of the Polo Dot mixed-use master development, which already features Dot Baires Shopping as a key anchor along with Dot Building offices and the existing Zetta building. The whole project is located within the city of Buenos Aires, in the northern part of the city, and stands at one of the most important highway intersections of Buenos Aires.
Polo Dot brings together a dynamic mix of businesses, offices, residential spaces, entertainment, dining, and top retail brands. In the near future, our plan is to move forward with the next phases of the development, including the Giga office building with close to 16,000 square meters of GLA and the Exa residential building, 19,000 sellable square meters.
Last but not least, the Philips building redevelopment will complete the master development. Ramblas del Plata is our most significant project to date.
It is strategically located along the riverfront in a natural setting. The master plan features an open metropolitan park and 36,000 square meters of retail spaces, all connected by a 2-kilometer pedestrian promenade.
The neighborhood also includes a 7-hectare central bay. Within it, there's a 1,600-square-meter covered space delivered in April, formerly a hangar used by the company that operated on the site, which we now plan to transform into Ramblas multipurpose event building.
Recently, we signed swaps for plots M1 and K3 for a total amount of $11.3 million. These two transactions represent over 13,000 sellable square meters.
That's around 3,700 sellable square meters for IRSA. To date, we've sold 2 lots and swapped another 15, and the combined value of these deals totals $105 million, covering over 137,000 sellable square meters to be developed.
Far, IRSA will receive almost 25,000 sellable square meters from the swaps agreements already executed. As happened in Phase 1, the environmental public hearing for Phase 2 will soon be taking place.
Overall construction progress is around 23%, with an average of 72 people currently working on site and around 12 units of heavy equipment in operation. To date, 52% of the works for Phase 1 has already been constructed.
All sheet piling works around the central bay have been completed. Tree buffer planting and bay remediation are now in the maintenance phase.
Last month, we kicked off work on water, sewer, electrical duct networks, and we also awarded the contract for the gas network. This week, we started paving works.
Now, I'll give the floor back to Mati, our CFO.
Matías Gaivironsky
Thank you, Jorge. To understand the figures during this period, also we have to understand what happened with inflation and the currency, since, as in Argentina we have to adjust our balance sheet by inflation.
During the nine-month period, there was an appreciation of the peso, no? The nominal devaluation of the exchange rate was 15%, while the inflation index in the same period was 25%.
That generates negative results when we have to value assets in dollar terms and post the results in pesos, as well as generates gain when we have to re-express our debt in pesos terms. That generated some volatility in the results.
Going to the next page, we can see first on the adjusted EBITDA that was positive numbers in the three main business lines: shopping centers growing at 2% in pesos terms, that number in dollars is around 6%; offices growing at 15%; and hotels at 37%; and keeping margins in line with the last year and a slight increase in hotels. About the change in the fair value of the investment properties, as I said, this generated volatility.
Last year, that was an important loss in the nine-month period. For this nine-month period, generated positive numbers.
When we have a breakdown between malls and land bank and offices, we see negative numbers in offices and land bank in pesos terms, because we maintain the same value in dollars. We value the properties once a year that we engage a third-party appraisal to do the work.
In shopping malls, we are adjusting in this quarter valuation in dollar terms from $1.2 billion during the quarter was almost $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion, that was result of using in the DCF the current exchange rate and the projected numbers. Also, as I said, in the net financial results that you can see in the table in the first line, that the valuation of our debt in pesos terms generated positive numbers, the net FX result is mainly conversion of our debt in pesos, so that generated 90.7 billion pesos gain.
In the net interest, we have a higher gross debt than the previous year, so that generated more interest to pay, and part was compensated in the line of fair value of financial assets and other financial results that is the result of investment of our cash. Also, it's important to mention that the income tax started to be representative again after many years that IRSA used to have a tax credit.
We already consumed all that tax credit, now we will see probably more stable numbers in this line that IRSA has to afford. With all these numbers, we are finishing the nine-month period with a net result of 239.7 billion pesos compared with the previous year that was 46.5 billion pesos.
If we go to the next page, the adjusted EBITDA, the rental adjusted EBITDA in dollar terms, we see the evolution. We finished this period with $151 million.
Probably when we finish this fiscal year, we will have a record-high rental EBITDA in dollar terms. We're happy for that.
About the debt, during the quarter there was no significant news. Remember that we tapped the international capital market in December last year, so that we raised $180 million additional notes of the existing 2035 notes.
During the quarter there was no news about that. The net debt to rental EBITDA remains at 1.4 times EBITDA with an LTV very low of 11.3%.
Probably we will see an increase in the net debt going forward, since we have plans of new developments and CapEx, we will start to use more our cash, so that will result in a higher debt, but with very conservative numbers anyway. With this, we finished the formal presentation.
Now, we open the line to receive your questions.
Santiago Donato
If you have a question, please use the chat. We will take the questions in the order we receive them.
Here we have some, the first ones, for Jorge: any plans to enter into logistics and into data center business?
Jorge Cruces
Data center business, we've been analyzing that, and in the near future, we don't think that's going to happen. We are analyzing the possibility of going into logistics.
We're very confident, and in the near future we should be starting a long road on logistics, and maybe someday we can be a strong local player in Argentina in logistics, hopefully. Yes, we are analyzing becoming in real estate logistics.
Santiago Donato
Good. Second question on the mall segment: how are you seeing consumption trends in shoppings for April and May?
There was someone else asking for this quarter, the one that we are entering now, or we entered in April. With this new pricing dynamic mentioned, at what point could you expect tenants to begin pushing for contract revisions, and which is IRSA's strategy for that scenario?
This is the fourth quarter that we have just April. We are seeing similar trend than on the first quarter of the calendar year, similar decline.
The second question, the strategy of pricing coming forward, probably Mati.
Matías Gaivironsky
Let me add something else, Santi. When we analyze consumption, the shape of our shopping malls, of course, we see weaker sales, no?
We have to do a deeper analysis on that. As we saw during the last years, the inflation of the clothing sector was much higher than the CPI of Argentina.
What happened last year, since there is an open in the economy and more international brands and more goods imported, we start to see lower evolution on prices in the clothing segment. That means that, first, when we have to compare last year numbers, we are adjusting by CPI, while the composition of the new sales during this year are in a lower pace than inflation.
When we do an analysis on tickets, sales, and traffic, we see a good evolution. Probably in tickets, we are similar than the previous year.
Probably more the push is on prices. Probably in terms of amount of sales, we are maintaining similar numbers.
Second, on shape of the industry, you have to analyze occupancy. Occupancy is very high in our malls.
Third is delinquency. If we have delayed in payments, we don't have delayed in payments at all.
That driver is normal, completely normal. Fourth is the renovation of new leases, no?
We keep collecting good numbers on key money. In fact, when we adjust base rent, although we are adjusting the base rent by inflation, every time that we have to renew agreements, we have some increase in value.
All that numbers are triggers that you saw during the nine-month period that we keep increasing EBITDA in real pesos compared with the previous year. We don't believe that we have to change our strategy.
Of course, if the trend on consumption is weak, of course that is not a good signal for us. As we can see for the recent trend in the market, mainly from the government, we start to see an increase in collection of taxes on VAT and also in the tax on movement of money, impuesto al cheque.
That's are positive numbers that the government start to show, and we hope to see that trend as well in our shopping malls.
Santiago Donato
Good. Next question: the Polo Dot launch is your first new office development in some time.
Is this a one-off driven specially by Mercado Libre high quality as tenant, or you are seeing something different, a potential in the office sector going forward?
Jorge Cruces
We are seeing something different in the office sector. The occupancy is doing better year by year.
There's not so many new developments. Then again, in the question you're right, because it's that we were very confident with Polo Dot as a master development.
Mercado Libre is a very important tenant for us also, but it's going to be very important for us to finish the Polo Dot, and it's one of the necessary steps to continue with our master development. I would say yes to all of above.
Yes, we're seeing that the office is doing better. It's very specific where, you have to be very careful.
Two, yes, Mercado Libre is a very important tenant for us, and it's very helpful to make this decision. Yes, Polo Dot is part of a master development that we were planning to do it anyway in some time.
We got to that point that it's a very good business for us to continue with office space in Polo Dot.
Matías Gaivironsky
Let me add something else, Jorge. As we always said, we don't have a specific target on weight on our portfolio regarding shopping malls, office, hotels, or even logistics that we want to enter.
We will analyze each project like a unique project, and if we believe there is a good return, we will move forward. We are not here trying to, I don't know, balance the portfolio or change the strategy.
We always said that IRSA is a diversified real estate company between rental real estate, but also with Ramblas and with all the projects that we have in residential. The residential part will be important for IRSA going forward.
Although IRSA is not developing directly, so far the strategy is doing swaps agreements with developers when IRSA is buying the land and then entering in agreements with developers. They develop and pay us with finished units.
IRSA has a tremendous portfolio of units to be received in the future. We calculate that between now until, I don't know, the next three, four years, IRSA will have more than $300 million of units to be sold.
If you calculate compare with our existing rental EBITDA, is much lower, but will be an important business line as well for IRSA in the future. A financial question here.
It's in Spanish, but we're going to translate. Due to the enough cash that IRSA has today and the recent drop in IRSA shares, do you expect to implement a new share repurchase program?
The formal answer is that we never anticipate what we're going to do. We will communicate when we do it, no?
If you analyze our behavior in the past, we launched many buyback plans in the past. It's part of what we like to do when we see an opportunity in our shares.
The analysis is, first of all, we need audited accumulated results. If we used most part of the results in the last dividend payment in October last year, we need to finish the fiscal year to have the audited financial statements.
After that, we can decide what to do with the results, if we distribute as dividends and any shareholder can buy shares, or if we will buy back shares, no? I can't anticipate what we're going to do.
Santiago Donato
I have one more here: any update on the progress of Alto Oeste development?
Matías Gaivironsky
The shopping mall that we...
Jorge Cruces
The refurbish of the shopping of Haedo, it's on schedule. That's regarding the construction, and we're doing great with the tenants.
There's a lot of expectations. What I would say, it's on schedule.
I can't say exactly the month it's going to be public, but we are on schedule as we thought so.
Matías Gaivironsky
It's a one-year development. By the end of the year is according to what we originally planned.
Jorge Cruces
We planned for the end of the year, and we can make it. We're still on schedule.
We're deciding finally it's going to be at the end of this year, beginning of the other. It should be at the end of this year, maybe.
Santiago Donato
Good. I don't see more questions, but I give you one minute more if you have any additional question, you can use the chat.
Also, you can raise your hand. I don't see more questions.
I will now give back to Matías Gaivironsky for his closing remarks.
Matías Gaivironsky
Thank you, Santi. Thank you everyone to participate in the call.
We are happy so far with the results. We are confident in this new trend for IRSA of new expansions.
We hope to communicate many of the negotiations that we are trying to close soon, that we are in different transactions acquiring more land or entering to logistics or new expansions that we hope to announce in the next quarter. The rest, we hope to see a recovery in the economy after what happened last year because of the elections and the constraint on the monetary side and the lack of credit in Argentina and the interest rate that were very, very high.
We hope to see that already touched the floor regarding consumption and start to see better numbers in the coming quarters. Thank you very much, and see you for our fiscal year end in September.
Thank you very much.
Santiago Donato
Have a nice afternoon. Bye-bye.
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