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 Hongkong Land, and with me is Craig Beattie, our CFO.

Over the past 6 months, our focus was very much on sustaining the execution momentum we've built in the previous year. From delivering exciting openings from Tomorrow's 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 6 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 via the website, and we will include them in the Q&A session. Here's the structure for today's presentation.

Unless otherwise stated, all numbers quoted will be in US dollars, 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 buyback program, resulted in an NAV per share of $14.71 as at the end of June, up 3% compared to the end of 2025. Assets 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 8 cents 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% will be paid as an interim, with the remainder in our final.

This 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 need to connect with their clients and their business partners.

At LANDMARK, we have refreshed the office lobbies of Edinburgh Tower and Gloucester Tower, move 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 experience and refreshed guest rooms.

In Singapore, we successfully launched our first private fund, SCREF, in February alongside our founding investors, Qatar Investment Authority and APG. At West Bund in Shanghai, the group unveiled The Terraces, 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 serviced apartment 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 Hongkong Land, focused 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 PBUT, we believe earnings bottomed in 2025.

We are 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 of existing portfolios over time and leveraging third-party capital to pursue growth investments.

Finally, on capital recycling, cumulative net proceeds generated amounted to $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 to recycle capital, and are confident of exceeding the $4 billion minimum target we originally set ourselves by end 2027, but I think 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.

Hongkong Land's philosophy has always been about curating and strengthening our ecosystems. This goes back to our belief that, 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 forgotten about elevating the experience of our 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 and 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 flagship in June.

This is one of only five global Maisons for this brand. Three other long-standing tenants, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, and Berluti, reopened 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 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. In Singapore, the group officially established SCREF, a core open-ended commercial real estate fund, in February this year.

AUM increased to 8.3 billion Singapore dollars at the end of the mid-year as a result of higher property valuations. Our ambition is to grow this scalable platform alongside like-minded third-party capital to an AUM of at least 15 billion Singapore dollars over the next 5 years, and we hope to have some exciting announcements around that, hopefully by the end of the year.

SCREF has an investment mandate to acquire additional high-quality, income-producing commercial assets in Singapore's Central Business District and Orchard Road, reinforcing Hongkong Land's commitment to both Singapore and long-term value creation. Moving on to an update on West Bund Central, our flagship project under development in Shanghai.

The Terraces, a new retail cluster of 27,000 square meters, was launched in May this year. This retail cluster will bring together a diverse and unique mix of brands, including a number of first-in-Asia stores, such as the House of Laseract, as well as several first-in-China stores, such as Phoebe Philo, Recto, Issey Miyake full collection flagship store, and the Leica Gallery, Academy and Cafe.

The offering will have over 70 designer and lifestyle brands when fully occupied by the fourth quarter of this year. Next on to organizational redesign.

This is something the management team and I have spent a significant amount of our time on in recent months. While the launch of the Strategic Vision 2035 was endorsed by many of you in the room, as well as our board and our colleagues, we found some of the legacy organizational structures and culture did not optimally position the group in reaching our long-term ambitions.

We felt that a transformation was required to allow for clearer accountability, faster decision-making, as well as a stronger governance and collaboration across our operations. During the first half of the year, we undertook an extensive exercise to benchmark our organizational structure to best-in-class peers, not just across the region, but across the world.

This resulted in a new structure, which provides for dedicated leadership teams in each of our four portfolios. These teams are in turn given the strategic mandate and autonomy to execute on specific KPIs and business plans.

We're confident that this will evolve our culture to prioritize a performance mindset with greater accountability for commercial outcomes. As part of this exercise, we've identified a number of opportunities to realize recurring operational efficiencies of at least $25 million in annualized run-rate savings from 2027 onwards.

Throughout the rest of the year, we will diligently work towards fully transitioning to the new organizational structure ahead of the 2027 financial year. Let me now pass on to Craig to go through our results and financials in a bit more detail.

Thanks, Michael, and a pleasure to be here this morning. Let's take a look at the key drivers for the movement of underlying profit in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year.

Hong Kong Central performance was broadly stable compared to the same period last year, with higher contributions from retail, offset by lower office contributions, including the effects of the handover of some floors within One Exchange Square to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Singapore Central performance was strong, although on an absolute basis contributions were reduced by the disposal of Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 3 upon the SCREF fund formation at the end of last year.

Contributions from CIP increased substantially, driven by a number of new openings over the past 12 months, as well as further tenant mix optimization for assets that we've launched over the past few years. Net financing charges were lower on reduced net debt from the active capital recycling.

Turning to an overview of the group's rental income and operational updates on our key segments. As you can see, rental income was up 3% year-on-year, driven primarily by significant growth in the CIP portfolio and Hong Kong retail.

Total rental income from Singapore reduced by 9% for our share due to the change in effective holdings of the underlying assets post the SCREF formation. In the Chinese mainland, where contributions have grown significantly, CIP in particular has been one of the key drivers in rental income growth, with contributions coming from the new retail mall openings that I previously mentioned.

In line with the group Strategic Vision 2035, the return of capital from the build-to-sell segment continues to be a key priority. While profit contributions from this segment will continue to decline, the active recycling of capital continues to benefit the group's free cash flow.

The adjusted free cash flow for the group, which includes the strong cash flows from the group's prime properties investment business, maintenance capital expenditure, and the net cash flows from the build-to-sell segment, amounted to $253 million in the first half of 2026. This metric excludes net proceeds from major capital recycling initiatives, for example, the disposal of parts of One Exchange Square to the stock exchange and the sale of MCL Land last year.

Net revaluation gain of $916 million in the first half of the year was primarily driven by three things. Lower cap rates for the LANDMARK retail in Hong Kong, which really reflects the advancement of Tomorrow's CENTRAL.

As Michael showed earlier, now that we're starting to open a number of the retail stores and rents are going up, the valuers are attributing a higher valuation to that part of the portfolio. Two, there were higher open-market rents for Hong Kong office, as the recovery for high-quality buildings in Central district continues to take hold.

Three, finally, there were higher open-market rents for West Bund Central, as we look to build out that project over the coming years. The build-to-sell business generated $11 million of profit in the first half of the year.

As I just mentioned, for this segment, we are focused on recycling capital and returning cash to the group overall. Other non-trading items, including $84 million of net non-cash gains on disposal of our Singapore assets to SCREF when it was established in February earlier this year.

This is primarily an accounting adjustment. Net asset value per share at 30th of June was $14.71, which was up 41 cents, or 3%, compared to the end of 2025, driven primarily by the total valuation gains across the group's portfolio.

We invested $150 million in share buybacks in the first half of the year, resulting in an accretive impact to net asset value per share, as well as our EPS, which you will have noticed went up by 14% compared to 11% growth for profits overall. We also paid $407 million in dividends relating to the 2025 final dividend declared of 19 cents per share.

Now let's turn to an update on dividends themselves, as well as the share buyback. As Michael mentioned, the group has declared an interim dividend of 8 cents per share, an increase of 2 cents per share.

This reflects our intention to provide shareholders with a more rebalanced dividend profile throughout the year, which is reflective of the group's focus on growing our recurring, high-quality income. This increase in interim does not change the group's intention to deliver mid-single-digit percentage growth in annual dividends per share.

Just to remind you, our aim is to take our dividends all the way up to 44 cents per share by 2035. During the first half of 2026, the group returned over $560 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks, which was an increase of 19% compared to the first half of 2025.

In terms of the share buyback program itself, a total of $650 million has been allocated to buybacks so far, with around $490 million deployed to date. Future buybacks continue to be subject to the returns that we generate from buybacks, which need to exceed our cost of equity and will depend on the availability of other investment opportunities, as well as market conditions overall.

As we've demonstrated, we've consistently deployed into share buybacks in the past 12-plus months. The maturity profile of the group's debt is shown on the left-hand side of the slide.

As you can see, the debt maturities are staggered over a number of years, and are well diversified between both banks and debt capital markets. The group remains really well-financed with strong liquidity and no significant financing needs throughout the rest of this year.

The average tenor of our drawn debt at the end of June was healthy at 5.3 years, and the average interest cost declined slightly to 3.2%, down from 3.3% at the end of 2025. And 59% of average gross debt was fixed, and, in fact, 70% of our Hong Kong borrowings was fixed overall, too.

At the end of June, the group had available liquidity of $3.2 billion compared to $3.5 billion at the end of 2025. Our credit ratings by S&P and Moody's remain unchanged at A and A3 respectively.

Let me now pass back to Michael, who will give us a bit more color on the latest updates on our key business segments.

Thanks, Craig. Turning to a leasing and operational update for our Hong Kong office portfolio.

Average net rents were HK$91 per square foot per month. Vacancy on a committed basis declined to 5.8% compared to 6% at the end of 2025.

This is a strong performance, as our portfolio continues to outperform the core Central Grade A office market, which itself has seen significant improvement over the past 6 to 12 months. For reference, the market vacancy for the core Central Grade A office market is 9.2% versus our 5.8%.

Our overall WAULT stood at 3.3 years, whilst the WAULT for our top 30 tenants, who together occupy close to half of our office space, was at 4.3 years. As at the end of June, 4% of the portfolio was subject to expiration in 2026, the team's done a great job over the first half to ensure that all that leasing risk is mitigated, with the vast majority of tenants staying within the portfolio.

In 2027, 30% of the portfolio is either expiring or subject to rent reviews. With market rents on a clear growth trend, the portfolio is well-positioned to return to growth.

When we take a look at the Hong Kong office market overall, this chart shows that the rental change by district over the last 3-year period, clearly the recent recovery in office rents has been led almost entirely by core Central. In addition to rents, Central has accounted for over 50% of leasing activity in 2025.

In line with other financial hubs globally, flight to quality has resulted in a bifurcated office market. In our view, this trend will continue.

The backbone of the core Central office market has long been driven by demand from capital market participants. On this front, one of the key leading indicators is the health of the asset and wealth management sectors, which has been on a clear upward trajectory.

Total AUM for these sectors grew by 20% from 2024 to 2025 to over HK$42 trillion, with over 50% of funds originating from outside China mainland and Hong Kong, new funds coming into Hong Kong. The number of Type 9, or asset managed license firms, grew by 7% year-on-year.

While new SFC institution license applications overall are up 18%, individual licenses, and many of these individuals sit in offices in Central, show a similar positive trend, with Type 9 licenses up 6% and overall new applications up 15%. In conclusion, we feel very, very comfortable about where both demand and supply are trending for prime core commercial office, which both indicate the start of a new trough-to-peak growth cycle.

Turning to some of the numbers for LANDMARK. Average retail rents increased by 2% to HK$240 per square foot, which is an all-time historic high for us.

The last previous peak was pre-COVID. Excluding the 40% of lettable area that was out of action, the mall remained effectively fully let.

Our WAULT at the end of June was 5.1 years, up significantly from the 1.8 years from a year ago. This is reflective of the long-term commitments from our Maison tenants we had secured as part of Tomorrow's CENTRAL, the implication being that the significant capex incurred by the brands to fit out their Maisons need to be amortized over long-term leases, which is why our WAULT has extended.

Total tenant sales of LANDMARK were up 11% compared to the first half of 2025, this is on a total amount of retail spend. Considering the amount of lettable space under renovation is similar to last year, it's an incredibly remarkable performance in our mind when we see these statistics.

It's just quite mind-blowing. Further evidence of the strength of the ultra-high-net-worth segment and our ability to attract their spend at LANDMARK.

A few other observations worth noting on luxury retail spend. Absolute tenant sales, as I mentioned, grew by 11% year-on-year, while spending from our bespoke VIC members increased by 17% year-on-year.

Also, the number of qualifying bespoke VIC members increased 16% year-on-year, we are getting more bespoke members who are all together spending more and more money, demonstrating our ability to capture an even greater proportion of this high-value customer segment with exceptional spending power and loyalty. LANDMARK continues to maintain strength in high-value transactions, with sales of single transactions over HK$100,000 up 21% year-on-year.

Just little sound bites of how incredibly compelling the ultra-high-net-worth sector is, and how loyal and attractive they are to LANDMARK. Another data point worth mentioning, which bodes well for Hong Kong over the medium term, is the growth in the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals in this city has been unabated.

For those with a net worth of $30 million or more, Hong Kong continues to rank second globally, only behind New York City. In terms of growth of that population, Hong Kong was the top performer amongst the top 10 cities in 2025, growing by an incredible 26% year-on-year, 26% more ultra-high-net-worth people living in Hong Kong than there was last year.

Cross-border fund inflows and a robust equity market have contributed to this, as Hong Kong continues to serve as one of the key global hubs for private banking, family offices, and offshore wealth management. Turning now to our Singapore office portfolio.

Delivered steady growth driven by the same fundamentals as here, flight to quality and no new Grade A office supply in the Marina Bay CBD. Average gross rents across our Singapore portfolio in the first half of 2026 was S$11.9 per square foot per month, representing a 3% increase from the second half of 2025.

Positive rental reversions were achieved during the period, and committed occupancy was over 96% at the end of June. In terms of the Singapore office market as a whole, we continue to expect limited new supply in Singapore CBD, and this scarcity has led to higher absorption rates in the first half compared to prior periods, meaning that available space is being taken up more quickly by prospective tenants.

A good example, in Asia Square Tower 1, Amazon relocated out of our building and was backfilled instantly by Shell. It's quite a broad-based tenant demand there of finance and business, technology, oil services.

It's a very broad-based demand. As a result, vacancies across the market have decreased and are likely remain low for the foreseeable future.

We see a continuation of the strong demand for office space in the CBD, which is reflected in rental yields and the resilience of our Singapore office assets. Moving on to West Bund.

To date, approximately 18% of the project's total GFA is operational, which means there's still 82% to come, which is quite amazing. What is there at the moment is split between Waterside Square, which is our original Phase 1, and what we've now named The Terraces Quarter, which is Phase 2.

First, providing an overview of the multi-family offerings on site, this is the 700 units which we now have in operation. Excluding the most recently launched, residential occupancy reached 90%, achieving rents in line with the high end of the market.

Secondly, total retail committed occupancy across Waterside Square and the newly launched The Terraces reached 86%. For offices, three of four towers are now fully occupied.

Both Lululemon and Sinopec have moved in, while the new 32,000 square meter Adidas Greater China headquarters is currently being fitted out ahead of formal opening in the fourth quarter of this year. Separately, we expect to announce further details and commitments for the final tower in the second half of this year.

Then finally, on our China integrated properties portfolio, it really has seen significant progress over the past 12 months. As part of the previously mentioned organizational redesign exercise, the group's commercial assets and pipeline across the Chinese mainland, excluding West Bund Central, have been categorized as this CIP.

Gross rental income from this portfolio increased 22% year-on-year, supported by a number of new openings over the past 12 months, such as JLC Nanjing, The Ring, Garden City Chongqing, and The Ring, Live Galaxy Midtown Shanghai. As a result of these new openings, our attributable net lettable area increased by over 25% compared to the end of June last year.

In addition, a number of properties launched over the past few years, such as The Ring Chongqing, have yielded strong operating results from tenant repositioning and asset stabilization efforts. Progress on other retail-led mixed-use projects in Suzhou and Chongqing remain on track, with openings scheduled for 2027.

These developments will further enhance the group's luxury retail presence in key Chinese mainland markets. Turning now to our outlook for the remainder of 2026.

Let me take a moment to go through our thoughts across our key markets. For Hong Kong office, rental reversions will trend towards neutral.

I think people need to remember that the leases that are being renewed or extended right now were negotiated 8 to 12 months ago, because our team doesn't wait until a lease expires. It will 8 to 12 months prior start those negotiations.

When those negotiations were made for leases today, 12 months ago, the market was not as strong as it is today. The lease discussions we're having now gives us the strong view that will at least neutralize the reversions, if not move into a positive territory.

We're seeing a number of quality occupiers in the market evaluating expansion opportunities and upgrading opportunities. For luxury retail in Hong Kong, the healthy sentiment is likely to continue through the remainder of the year.

The ultra-high-net-worth segment is expected to outperform the broader luxury market. The opening of the new bespoke VIC Lounge just last week is an excellent example of our conviction around this.

In Singapore, the positive outlook resulting from robust demand and very tight supply in core CBD is unchanged. In Shanghai, our outlook on rental residences and lifestyle retail offering are constructive, performing very well.

The office market, however, is clearly oversupplied, but similar to occupier trends globally, state-of-the-art stock with a unique positioning tend to benefit most from the flight to quality. For CIP, our remainder of China portfolio, trading conditions are likely to remain mixed and largely dependent on specific submarkets and also submarket factors, such as competitive dynamics within a certain catchment.

Based on pre-leasing progress and discussions to date, we are seeing encouraging momentum for our luxury retail pipeline, which is principally Suzhou and Chongqing, to be delivered next year. Going into the second half of the year, the executive team and I are firmly focused on driving growth.

Growth, growth, growth. I think a year or so ago, it was all about recycle capital, recycle capital, recycle capital, which is still incredibly important, but really now it's really focused on taking advantage of the market opportunities that we have to really drive growth, as well as positioning Hongkong Land to deliver attractive compounding profits into 2027 and beyond.

On organic growth, we now have an organizational structure that can leverage the strong supply-demand fundamentals to deliver rental growth across Hong Kong and Singapore. On the Chinese mainland, where trading conditions diverge significantly between submarkets, the focus remains on tenant relationships and asset optimization to drive performance.

Another significant component will be the execution of our committed pipeline of projects, most notably approximately 80% of the GFA of West Bund Central as yet to be launched, while we continue to work hard to deliver on the opening of two more luxury flagships in Suzhou and Chongqing respectively in 2027. In terms of capital deployment, the focus areas are: accretive acquisitions via SCREF.

Myself, Michelle, the team are spending a lot of time focused on how we can continue to grow SCREF. The Singapore office market for a fund is a very good market, positive carry in terms of interest rates versus cap rates, and definitely, definitely growth in the underlying.

Having a mix of positive carry and growth makes that a very attractive market in its own right, and to have a funding vehicle with third-party capital and opportunities presenting themselves in the marketplace, it really is a focus of our attention is growing SCREF. Other potential opportunities in existing core markets and other gateway cities, and continued reinvestment in our existing portfolios.

We want to continue to ensure that we build the moat around particularly this portfolio, and we reinvest in this portfolio to reinforce our core and drive growth. On capital management, we continue to focus on recycling capital from our build-to-sell, and also our non-core assets.

Our strategy is gateway cities. We've been very clear.

If it's not in a gateway city, it's not going to be a long-term asset of ours. If you look through our balance sheet, we have lots of different assets across South Asia, across different markets that we can continue to monetize.

As we have a $10 billion capital recycling ambition by 2035. We're only 3.7 through that, we're very focused on recycling the build-to-sell, but there are, in our view, quite a few other opportunities for us to recycle capital.

Secondly, our ambition to leverage third-party capital to fund growth and augment returns remains unchanged. Subject to market conditions, we will continue exploring opportunities to further optimize the use of Hongkong Land-managed platforms, either in private or potentially public REIT form.

Finally, our work on organizational redesign is expected to continue through to the end of 2026, which will see us fully transition to a portfolio-led model, which I think is quite unique amongst our peers. We have dedicated teams just focusing on ensuring that the assets are performing at their absolute peak, that will realize operational efficiencies and help us build scale.

The execution of our Strategic Vision 2035 has become the executive team's North Star. We all think about all of those bold ambitions that we set ourselves.

That is our absolute focus of attention, reminding us that everything we do should contribute towards creating shareholder value and total shareholder return. When our discount to NAV was close to 80% back in April '24, the light at the end of the NAV tunnel seemed very, very distant.

Our work over the past 2 years and your strong support has resulted in our discount to NAV narrowing to 46%. I'm confident that as we continue to execute on our Strategic Vision 2035, we will further close this gap to NAV.

I'm really, really proud and I'm really quite humbled by the fact that the market has supported us. I'm really glad that we have told you what we're going to do, and then we've gone ahead and done it.

It's great to see our China portfolio really growing its earnings as we said it would. It's great to see the Hong Kong office market and our Tomorrow's CENTRAL transformation.

It's great to have the fund in Singapore with growth opportunities. Many of the things that we've laid out to you over recent years, it's very rewarding and very humbling to see all of these things now coming into play.

Thank you very much for your time. I'd now like to open the floor to any questions you may have.

Thanks. We'll stand up.

We've been sitting for long enough.

Karl? Karl, do you want to?

Karl? I think he put his hand up quick, so.

Sorry, Cindy, on you go.

Thank you. This is Cindy from Citi.

Three questions from me. The first is on your capital deployment.

How aggressive will you be on pursuing the investment opportunities? Is it on the top of your priority now?

What is your latest order of preference among the target markets, and is there a preference among acquiring mature projects, pursuing new builds, or investing into existing assets? What is your expected pace of capital deployment?

The second question is on your Tomorrow's CENTRAL. It's definitely a bright spot in the first half.

How should we think about the timeline and the potential pace of reopening towards 2027? What is your outlook into the retail sales momentum?

Apart from jewelry, what other categories are driving the growth? You mentioned the retail cap rate compression, shall we expect more valuation upside towards the completion of the project?

The third question is on your portfolio-based leadership—

Cindy, we're not going to remember all this. Why don't we do one at a time?

I think the first question, Cindy, was around our capital deployment, if I picked that up properly. Your questions were around the size of deployment, which markets are we prioritizing, and maybe a little bit about how we intend to fund it.

I don't know, Michael, if you want to— Look,

I think, as I mentioned at the end, SCREF, we think, is a really interesting opportunity right now. It plays to our core competencies.

We've had a business in Singapore for over 30 years. We have a big team established there.

We now have great LPs. I think we've got incredibly good assets.

I think we've got incredibly good LPs who, even though there is a lot of geopolitical uncertainty at the moment and it's not as easy to raise new third-party capital, we've got still great conversations with great investors who I think will come into this fund over time. Given that backdrop, I think that's probably been the team's main focus is how we can continue to look at SCREF.

We've also been quite fortuitous that opportunities have come to market, there are opportunities that we're pursuing off-market, but there are opportunities that fortuitously are just coming to market that we can explore. We're in no rush.

We have to be measured, we have to be thoughtful. We have return requirements that we need to achieve for our LPs.

This is very much of an institutional-grade fund, we're not going to just be reckless and do silly things. It's going to be thoughtful.

I think that is really where our focus is. Then the second point is our core assets, making sure that our core portfolio, the core business of Hongkong Land continues to thrive.

All of the work that we have already factored into Tomorrow's CENTRAL will continue to deploy the capital around other opportunities that we can see. There's a lot of interesting things that you'll see over the next 6 months that will be opening and exploring, different hoardings and different activities, different sort of ways of ensuring that Hong Kong Central really is the center of Hong Kong.

That will continue, looking at our office portfolio and seeing if there are ways to ensure that the office portfolio continues to be as fully occupied and generating the rentals that we wanted to generate. To do that, we have to continue to deploy capital to make sure that the experience is elevated.

That's probably the two main areas. The new markets we're still looking at, since we announced our intention of looking at Sydney, Seoul, and Tokyo, we've had quite a flood of opportunities presented to us, but we're in no rush.

We don't have a presence in those markets. I think that's going to be a lot more measured and thoughtful rather than just rushing in and taking the first opportunity that we see.

I think we're much better to think about what we have in Hong Kong, what we have in Singapore, what we're doing in Shanghai to make sure the money that we're spending in these markets comes to fruition properly. We're busy in our core markets.

The new markets are definitely opportunities. We have people on the ground now exploring them for us, but there's no rush in those markets.

It would have to be a pretty interesting opportunity really for us to go in there. Then

on the capacity side, you were asking about that. Obviously, the reason that we've focused on recycling capital, recycling capital, recycling capital was to bring down the group's debt, not that there was anything wrong with it, but we just wanted to create investment headroom.

We've recycled $3.7 billion to date. Our net debt, as you saw, was $3.4 billion, gearing below 11%.

Hongkong Land has actually quite a lot of capacity to expand. We've done a lot of work to get ourselves into where we are today.

Now it's a case of selectively looking to deploy where we see opportunities. I think you were also asking about, is it just income-producing assets or is it development assets?

I think the answer is both. Hongkong Land still wants to be a developer.

That's who we've always been. As we work with third-party capital and we have platforms like SCREF, there are opportunities to buy existing income-producing assets.

From our perspective, we're trying to build a portfolio of assets that generate immediate income, that benefits earnings and dividends, but also lays the foundation for future growth in earnings through development, as well as growth in AUM. You should expect us to look at both things.

Development opportunities are harder to come by, I would say, just given the scarcity of land and other construction cost factors depending on the markets overall. I think on the retail point, you were asking about Tomorrow's CENTRAL.

As Michael said, it's been a huge success story overall. The way that the valuers have thought about this is that, when we announced the project, they obviously formed their own views on the forward rental profile from the project.

At the time, they made quite conservative assumptions about the rents they thought that we would get. Since the project's been launched, we've consistently signed leases with quite significant fixed rental increases.

At the end of 2025, we saw an increase in the value of the retail portfolio, which was on the back of higher rental income coming through. In June, just now, what they've done is they've tightened the cap rate because they see the covenant strength, and we've signed 10-year leases with some of the world's biggest luxury brands, the strength of those businesses, the resilience of their income and the rents that we're generating.

It's effectively continuing to reinforce the value and the scarcity premium of LANDMARK, and that's what you've seen coming through in the half-year results. Rents came through, rental growth came through last year, this year cap rate.

In terms of further growth coming through, obviously we've still got some investment dollars to spend to finish the project, about $150 million to $200 million still to invest of our $400. Once we invest that, that will naturally flow through into the uplift in the valuation.

I am expecting continual growth in the value of the retail because we are also expecting good rental growth coming through in the years ahead.

Just on the capital deployment, just as a reminder of everyone, we made it very clear that we will do this with financial guardrails in place. We're not going to lose our investment grade, and we're not going to go out and raise equity.

No matter how good the opportunity, those financial guardrails are sacrosanct. You had a third question, right, Cindy?

Okay.

I was going to ask about your portfolio-based restructuring. What has been done basically, and what to be done in the second half?

What will be the KPIs for the portfolio CEOs? Are they going to taking, say, own profit and AUM targets, and what are you going to assess them?

There were four portfolios, and they're all very different. There is a bit of a North Star with the SCREF group and the SCREF assets.

That's a fund in formation. It's not in any development.

That's just a fund. Then you've got Hong Kong, which is similar, but it's not in a fund format, with Graham sitting here now, who is running that business.

I wanted to make sure that he thinks and we both think that he's the GP and I'm with his LP. He really thinks now of Hong Kong Central in a fund-type format, in terms of operational design, in terms of reporting, in terms of everything that's done.

Graham's had a long, rich history of doing this type of stuff for 30 years. He knows what good is.

Running Hong Kong Central like a fund, even if we do not do anything, and there's no clear path that we do anything at all, I think we're going to get a lot more operational efficiencies out of running it as though it is a fund. In West Bund, that is halfway through its development phase.

It won't be fully stabilized till the early 2030s, but there's an opportunity there one day with a $10 billion sort of asset to do something with that potentially. Then there's the rest of the China business, which is very, very different.

Some of it sort of build-to-sell, there's some office, there's three luxury malls, including Beijing. That may have different opportunities to consider.

We could do a China REIT, we could do a China fund. There's all sorts of different pockets in there.

Some of it will just be divested. Obviously, the build-to-sell will just be divested.

They are all very different, but each of the portfolio CEOs have KPIs around their particular business, and all they focus on is their business, and they're accountable for the performance of their business. It depends on what particular business.

The KPIs for SCREF for Pei Ting is going to be different to Alvin, but they're all driven on performance. It's really bringing in that performance-based culture that you're now operating this group of assets, this is your KPIs, this is what you're going to get compensated on is your ability to achieve these budget projections or KPIs or things like that, which we haven't operated long in the past.

I generally think that owning real estate in fund format is the most efficient way to own and operate real estate. Putting ourselves like that, whether it's in a fund or not, I do believe we're going to have a much more efficient organization, which is why we've identified the $25 million at least sort of efficiency savings that we think we're going to generate from this.

Whilst each KPI is slightly different, there are some common ones: rental growth, occupancy, AUM growth, efficiency. That's sort of standard operating practice, and that is embedded in each of the portfolio KPIs.

The other thing that's very important is, as a group, we've got a 10-year vision to double our earnings. The portfolios have a huge role to play in that growth because a large part of the doubling is coming from what we already have today: recovery in Hong Kong office, the completion of Tomorrow's CENTRAL, the expansion of SCREF platform, the opening of West Bund in China, and the continued opening and growth in CIP portfolio.

One of the key reasons for creating the portfolio model is to drive the execution of the operational initiatives that we have in place. There's a team and a big focus on deals and acquisitions and fund management, but we shouldn't forget that we're here to run businesses, and so that's why we have dedicated chief executives and leadership teams in each of the four portfolios.

Karl?

Karl, you've waited very patiently.

Thank you. This is Karl Chan from JPMorgan.

I think, Michael, you give us some very exciting slogan every year, right? Last year is capital recycling,

recycling, recycling, and

this year is growth,

growth, growth, right?

Which is exciting. I think the market is also excited about the earnings growth guidance for the full year of this year, which will be broadly in line with what we're seeing in the first half, we assume it will be roughly around 11%, right?

Then just curious, say for next year, 2027, should we expect that the growth momentum to be roughly similar to what we are seeing this year, especially we are going to have quite a bit of cost savings from the optimization, right? This is my first question about the earnings growth.

Then the second question is on Hong Kong office rental reversion. I think it's also exciting that next year we're likely see a neutral reversion, right?

Should we expect that we can see positive reversion in 2028? Yep, that would be my second question.

Thank you.

Sure. I think in terms of the reason Michael talks about growth, growth, growth is that we feel that we are now very much entering a growth phase.

I say that, it's a bit riding on what I was saying to Cindy earlier, when you look at each of the four portfolios: Hong Kong office coming from a cyclical low starting to trend up; the completion of Tomorrow's CENTRAL, there's growth, good compound growth just in that story by itself; Singapore, we've got steady returns coming through from growing rental market, which we hope to augment by acquisition; and then the China businesses, again, coming out, more of a completion story, and then rental income coming through. As I look forward today into 2027, I am expecting further growth to kick through.

That's needed, right, because obviously we've made a commitment to grow our dividend, and so if we can grow our earnings, then we'll continue to grow our dividend going through next year. In terms of the office reversions for Hong Kong, you'll have seen a narrowing of our negative reversions in the first half of the year.

Of course, most of our renewals for the second half have already been negotiated. We've got pretty good visibility as to where the negative rental reversion size will be by the end of this year, and it is trending down.

We are expecting, given where spot rents are in the market, we are expecting to trend towards a neutral rental reversion in 2027. If that can be achieved, then '28 will show growth.

The organizational sort of redesign that we put in place now, with Graham having a whole $20 billion-plus portfolio, everything within that is now going to be focused on driving growth. Not even just in the office, but the retail, what are we doing outside of activating the public spaces, just really working as one holistic sort of ecosystem to drive growth across the board, which I think will then all feed into each other.

If the Tomorrow's CENTRAL keeps opening and people are coming in and all these new F&B outlets and everything that we're doing, office tenants also get attracted to that as well. It's all of that, creating that ecosystem, Tomorrow's CENTRAL is a real good example of that.

Thank you. This is Raymond Liu from HSBC.

I got three simple questions. The first question actually is something similar to the earnings guidance.

Because back to March, the management guide investors about the earnings growth is going to be mild growth, which is also stated in the first quarter operation statements in the sharings. Now, we actually mentioned that the earnings growth is expected to maintain a similar momentum, low-teens figures.

What are the biggest surprise that actually make us to change the earnings guidance within 3 to 4 months' time? Or are you guiding the investors very prudently?

That's why there's such a fair big jump in the earnings guidance? That's the first question.

The second question is actually about the LANDMARK retail portfolio, which is amazing with 40% of the lettable area closed for and still deliver tenant sales growth.

That is amazing, seriously. It surprised me when I saw it.

How do we see the current situation in term of tenant sales performance? Because we also heard about the concern about the capital flow regulations, which could potential impact the high-end sales spending.

Do you feel something similar, or actually you see the tenant sales having fairly resilient for your high-end shopping mall portfolios? This is the second questions.

I'll go on the second one. Look, I think some of the statistics we showed on the ultra-high-net-worth, now we're very much focused on that sort of segment.

The LANDMARK mall, 85% of our customers are Hong Kong. They've got an 852 number.

We spent a lot of money on this lounge. I'd welcome any of you to come and have a look at it.

It's amazing. That's just available for bespoke customers,

and

you have to spend quite a lot of money in the mall to be able to be using that. Everything we're doing is to try and curate and foster relationships with that group of customers so that they don't go anywhere else.

They just come here. That provides the very high end, whether it's fashion or jewelry or watches, a lot of resilience, because a lot of these people are not affected by sort of global politics or geopolitics or anything else or what's happening with capital flows.

They have sufficient capital. They will either go and shop or they won't, and if they do go and shop, we want them to shop with us.

That's sort of the real focus of why we're doing what we're doing to make sure Tomorrow's CENTRAL, that there's nothing like that in Hong Kong.

On the earnings guidance, always trying to manage the optimism with the reality. I think what we've seen in the last few months is probably three things: The resilience of the retail in Hong Kong.

That has performed better than we expected despite the temporary disruption from the renovation work, right? We are exceeding our own forecast in terms of rental income.

That's part of it. Two, some of the cost optimization that we've referred to in the presentation is already started to take hold.

This is primarily in our China business, where the top-line market conditions remain challenging depending on which city you're in, right? We've been responding to that by managing our cost base, and we've seen some growth in profits.

The third thing I would say is interest rates. Because we've recycled a lot of capital, we've got over $2 billion of cash on deposit, and deposit interest rates have been stronger than we anticipated, and I expect them to remain strong for the rest of the year.

That was lucky timing, I think, to do what we did and then put on deposit worked really well.

I think there's a number of factors there. As we look forward beyond this year, I think it's going to be coming really from what we see in Hong Kong office, and then the sort of ongoing growth potentially through expansion of SCREF.

Thank you. For my last question, actually, it's about the Suntec REIT investment.

We actually back to their parent group investor dates, one of the investment philosophy actually is preferring less public market equity investment. Can management share with us more about the idea or strategic goals about the investment in the Suntec REIT?

What should investor anticipate down the road, and what's going to the transformation on those equity stake? Look,

I think when we announced the acquisition of that stake, I think we were clear with the reasons why. We do believe in Singapore.

We recycled a lot of capital out of Singapore. We believe in the change of management, which has taken in place.

There was a genuine belief that we wanted to continue to get exposure to the Singapore high-quality office market. We are not building treasury positions.

That's not an intention of the firm is to sort of go out and buy 5% or 10% of companies. There is also a strategic element to it, which we continue to think about, but this is not a long-term investment for Hongkong Land.

It's a good investment. It's a very reliable earner.

The change of management, I think the unit price has gone up quite a lot over recent months, all of that has been positive, but it's not a long-term hold for Hongkong Land.

Yeah. Agree.

Thank you. Thank you for the great presentation.

Praveen from Morgan Stanley. I have just one question.

I'm not sure we can go to page 20 of the presentation, by any chance?

Something with wheels?

No. Okay.

We can't. Yeah.

I'm just looking at the adjusted free cash flow and the dividend number. Two parts to the question.

The first one is, why is the first half lower year-over-year basis? What drove it?

If I were to multiply that by two, and one should not do it, but if you do it, then you won't cover the dividend. Just help us understand that.

Thank you.

Sure. Good question.

The adjusted free cash flow comprises the income we get from our prime property portfolio that we own 100% of, it's mainly Hong Kong. Then we deduct from that maintenance capex to run the Hong Kong portfolio.

Then the third thing that we include is the cash that we receive from the unwinding of our build-to-sell business, which, as we said, is a key focus, right? The key reason that there's been a fall is that there's been less capital recycling from the build-to-sell business.

Broadly, the cash flows from the Hong Kong business were stable overall. Some of that build-to-sell reduction is a timing point, because obviously we're selling residential inventory, and so we can't perfectly manage that overall.

What I would say, Praveen, though, is that obviously the fact that we've increased the interim by 2 cents and the fact that we remain committed to growing our full-year dividend gives you some insight as to what we're expecting for the second half of the year, because as we guided last year, we are looking for our adjusted free cash flow per share to cover our dividend. Based on what I'm seeing right now, I expect the free cash flow in the second half to go up.

Karl?

Karl.

Thanks. Two questions.

First, just want to ask about how do you think about the longer-term redevelopment potential for some of your Central office buildings, and how do you balance that versus injection of some of these assets into a fund, and if you introduce third-party capital, third-party capital may expect steady recurring income? How do you balance the need between redevelopment versus steady income?

Second is just housekeeping question. For the $25 million of savings that you expect, could you give us some sense how much was already realized in the first-half numbers?

Look, the second question, and I know where the direction of travel this is, look, there has been a lot of speculation and things that we may be doing certain things with different buildings. We continually look at our portfolio.

We have a portfolio that has an average age, I think, of over 40 years, right? It would, as stewards of Central, which is what we think ourselves, it's incumbent on us to really continually look at our office portfolio, whether that means should we be doing something with the Exchange Square lobby, it's a 40-year-old lobby.

Should we be doing what the exchange is now going through a massive sort of refurbishment of what they're doing? Now they've bought their nine floors at the top of One Exchange Square.

There's going to be a continual rejuvenation and reinvention of the portfolio. If it's a material change, and we think the market conditions allow it, then we'll definitely consider it.

There's no reason why we would not think about taking the opportunity. Given the supply-demand conditions that you've just seen, given the fact that we do sit on a lot of land as a company, we should be considering every opportunity that we have.

There is nothing firm, there's nothing absolutely confirmed. As soon as there is, and if there is, then we will announce it.

There's a lot of work that's been going on and looking at all of our assets and where we see the best opportunity to deploy capital and create value.

It's our responsibility to grow the AUM of the estate in Hong Kong. We will continue to invest.

Right now, we're very focused on Tomorrow's CENTRAL and the retail, but the ecosystem needs continual investment. There are always things that we're looking at, but multiple things need to line up around timing and funding and capacity to do things.

We're aware of the rumors in the market at various points, but I think there's nothing confirmed at this stage, and it's just under watching brief.

Hello. Yeah.

Thank you for taking my question. This is Mark from UBS.

I have a questions more on the strategic wise. I recalled that in our strategic review, we mentioned that maybe around 37% in 2035 will be coming from new investments and then the fund management fee.

That's the projected earnings breakdown. Given that the organic existing business recovery seems quite well, do you see that actually we have a less needs to acquire new investments to fulfilling this target in maybe a few years of time?

I think that's the first question.

Okay. That's

a good question. In fact, at our board meeting yesterday, we went through something very similar in terms of just chatting around how we see the group doubling its earnings in the next 10 years.

I think there's two key points to make: One, I've already made it, which is we have strong growth coming through from the existing four portfolios, and so that by itself would deliver pretty attractive growth. That by itself is not enough for us to double our profit over 10 years, nor double our dividends over 10 years.

There is an earnings gap that we will need to look to fill through deployment of capital and investment into new opportunities. We remain committed to doing both.

I think we've got the benefit of time in terms of finding the right opportunities. I think the lower-hanging fruit, as Michael said, is to try and expand our SCREF platform, which is newly established and raring to go.

Over time, we do need to continue to invest in other things. It's a bit of both.

Maybe my second question will be seems both of our core market, like Hong Kong and Singapore, are still having a pretty good recovering trend, right? Seems our strategy, we are still talking about acquisition in Singapore.

Just want to ask, why don't we maybe refocusing back in Hong Kong? How do you view on these two market from the office recovery perspective?

I think, I mean Hong Kong from trough to peak moves, as we all know, unfortunately peak to trough over the last 6 years have been quite painful, but from trough to peak, I don't think there's another office market in the world that can move so rapidly between two points. As I said, I think we're on that journey now.

I'm not sure exactly where we are, but we all collectively feel that we're moving from trough to peak. That has in previous cycles been very exciting.

From that regard, the Hong Kong office market is a, potentially a much as as we've had negative reversions for the last few years. When they turn positive, they turn really positive because they're coming off really low basis.

The opportunity to really get strong earning growth out of here versus Singapore, which is a just it's a more steady market. The the confusion that I've had as a Singaporean is that normally the URA or the government would release more land in Marina Bay, and that's the real question mark, that they haven't, and it doesn't appear up until the end of 2030 at least that they have any intention, and from what we understand, even beyond that.

That is unusual for Singapore not to release land given the high occupancy. I think we're in two sweet spots.

We're here from the the trough to a peak, which could be pretty exciting, no visible new supply, particularly in Hong Kong Central, and with the same type of conditions in Singapore. This one is probably more exciting because we're coming from a lower base up, but Singapore definitely gives us that upward trajectory stability.

We probably won't get the deltas that we'll get here in Singapore, but we'll just get that consistent growth.

I think there's a fundamental difference also in the ownership of buildings in Singapore versus Hong Kong. In Singapore, there's opportunities to acquire existing buildings because they're held by institutions or financial capital and they want to recycle.

In Hong Kong, it tends to be family-controlled groups that own the buildings adjacent to our portfolio, so—

There is no price.

Basically it's a scarcity of opportunity point rather than any lack of desire to do more in Hong Kong.

Interesting observation when we've been looking at all these markets: Sydney, you can buy anything. It's a very purely institutional, as long as you want to pay whatever the price is, you can buy something.

In Singapore, it's sort of half institutional, half family. It's probably more institutional with the REIT market and thing.

Whereas here, it's very, very tightly held, sort of family type, and it's very, very difficult to grow. Singapore, the opportunity, I think, as Craig is saying, we have the vehicle in place, we have the LP capital behind us, and we have opportunities to acquire.

We also have positive carry and growth, there's a whole bunch of positives down there.

My last question will be more on the cost saving. I look at the last year results.

I think we were guiding about $50 million cost saving, but seems now we have lower down the target a bit. Just want to check what's the rationale for the change?

Thank you. Okay.

Last year, the cost reduction initiatives were solely focused on our build-to-sell business. In mainland China, we had a big business that we'd built up over many, many years.

As we're unwinding that and selling the inventory, we are managing our overhead costs by reducing that down. There's a lot of work was done last year to do that, which is a continual process in the years ahead.

The reason that we're not talking about that so much right now is because we decided last year to restate our build-to-sell business into non-trading. We did that because it's no longer a strategic part of our business, and we wanted to provide better insight to you, the investor, around the sort of quality of our earnings.

Those cost-saving initiatives, Mark, are still ongoing. They're just in the non-trading line.

What we're talking about today is in our prime properties business, and this is important because it really manages our cost base more efficiently. Clearly, there are savings that can be carried forward.

I think to the question that was posed earlier, there's probably about $10 million of the 25 that came through in the first half, and so we're expecting that delta of 15 at least to come through in 2027 onwards.

This is quite broad-based in terms of savings. It's contractual.

Should we be a bit more tough on our contract negotiations? Not just a sort of headcount.

We are investing in people. Graham's joined us, Michelle, there's a whole bunch of people that we're investing in.

It's really just ensuring that our whole business is just operated a lot more efficiently.

Can I take a few questions from online? Rachel Town, Macquarie, a couple of questions.

Close to 90% of the share buyback has been invested. Should we expect more divestments, and as such, a continuation of the share buyback program?

In short, yes, because as we recycle more capital, up to 20% of that will be allocated to buybacks. Clearly, the pace of the buyback is driven by our share price performance, market conditions, and also investment opportunities.

We remain committed to growing the buyback over time because we think it's an attractive use of our capital and creating long-term value for shareholders. Then Rachel also had a question about future investments and where those could be, but I think, Michael, you've already covered those already.

Question from Ziquan Wang from CICC: Any bond issuance plan in the second half of this year? Sounds like he's a credit investor.

There are no imminent plans to issue a bond. I think, as I presented earlier, we remain in a very strong financial position from a treasury point of view.

We are sitting on quite a lot of cash, which we recycled, but the intention for that is to deploy into new investments. We do monitor the tenor of our debt and the mix between bonds and bank and debt capital markets, and so we do try and strike a balance.

At some point, we will do an issuance, but that's not in our thinking at this time.

Sarah got some questions.

Sarah's got a few questions. Sarah Cooper, Bank of America.

About the dividend. She's saying, one, if the first-half dividend is to be 30% to 40% of the full-year dividend, that would imply as much as 26.7%, it's very precise, Sarah, for the full year.

Can you comment further on what the deliverables in the second half would need to be to hit this level? We wouldn't pay 26.7.

We'd pay either 26 or 27. I think you're right, Sarah, in that if we are to meet our expectations of growing dividends by at least 5%, then there needs to be at least a 1 cent dividend.

We paid 25 last year, needs to grow up to at least 26. Given the sort of strong growth that we're seeing coming through, there's every chance that we may look to do a little bit more than 26 cents, but that's a matter for the board to review at the year-end.

We are striving to try and maintain our final dividend.

I think the concept, we've added two to the interim, it's unlikely we add two to the final. It is a rebalancing,

so. True.

There's a question here about Jardine House, but I think we've answered that already. Then follow-on question from Sarah: How much capex remains for West Bund project?

There's about $1.8 billion still to invest in total. Hongkong Land share is 43% of that, which is our equity ownership.

None of that comes from our balance sheet, though, because all of it's funded by construction loans at the joint venture level. Just to remind everybody, when we bought the land in 2020, we wrote the check with equity from Hongkong Land, we've already invested everything we need to in that project.

There's no impact on our balance sheet overall. Finally, from Sarah: Can you quantify the accretion from the share buyback to NAV per share and EPS?

On EPS, our underlying earnings were up by 11%. Earnings per share were up by 14%, the delta of 3 percentage points was all due to the buyback.

Since we launched the buyback, we've invested close to half a billion US dollars. We've canceled about 4.5% of our equity in issuance.

The NAV impact is more modest because of the size of the balance sheet, but there's still some 20, 30 basis points there as well.

EPS and DPS, it's quite—

It helps the dividend per share as well. Thank you, Michael.

It's good. I've got some more questions here if no one else.

Patrick, Bloomberg. This is a slightly different question: AI.

In terms of AI adoption, Hongkong Land launched the AI-powered intelligent facility management platform last year. He's talking about what we've been doing in our Hong Kong business.

Where has AI-related return on investment surprised you positively, such as driving new revenue opportunity or increasing cost efficiency? How much of your IT budget is going on AI tokens?

Quite a specific question. I think on AI, like many companies, we are experimenting.

We focused initially on the data that we have with our buildings in Central. So 12 buildings all connected.

We've been operating these for decades and decades, and we've got data going back 10, 15 years on how we run the buildings. I'm talking about the flow of people through the buildings, the energy consumption, the maintenance scheduling and everything.

We put that together into a big AI-driven platform. The objectives from that are to improve customer service by things like controlling the air con when it comes off, when it goes on, manage our cost to be more efficient, and also to manage our maintenance and downtime, which again has a cost benefit to it.

These are some of the things that we've been trialing. I think it's too early to say what's been the sort of hard dollar benefits coming through, but I think it's something that we will continue to invest in, not just in Hong Kong, but elsewhere overall.

Right now, for AI in terms of internally for colleagues, we're really trying to experiment and use platforms like many of you are to try and just be more efficient in how we operate, but we're doing it in a way that tries to manage risk for the company. That's it on AI.

Simon from Goldman Sachs. I just have one quick question.

Just you mentioned that capital recycling you already achieved $3.7 billion out of $4 billion. After that reaching $4 billion, where else would you be seeing capital recycling coming from, and

the

time line?

The overarching objective is 10 billion. What we announced back in October '24 was a $10 billion capital recycling that would be front-ended.

We made it very clear that we could see we had visibility over some things that we knew we could work quicker on, and that's why at three-point we said 10 billion by 2035 and a minimum of 4 billion by 2027. We think that we will meet that minimum 4 billion through '26, it'll be 1 year earlier, and we will just continue to recycle.

We have our build-to-sell inventory, which Craig, it's quite significant, not just in China, but in other markets. That will naturally liquidate.

In the case of Singapore, we managed to sell the whole business. Across the rest of our build-to-sell, that will just liquidate.

There may be some problems in certain markets in China and things that we had to provision last year and the year before, but the intention is just to get that cash back into the business so that we can deploy it into our Vision 2035, into our gateway cities. It really is not a business that we want to continue, but we definitely want the cash back as quickly as we can, and that will form a big chunk of that 10 residual 6.3 that we still need to sell.

We've still got close to $3 billion of build-to-sell inventory across our entire business that we're trying to unwind. That in itself is quite a lot of capital to come back, which will be phased over the coming years as we wind down the business.

In addition, we've got about $3.5 billion of equity invested in commercial retail malls in mainland China, which as we said before, not all of those malls are core for us for the long term, and therefore there's opportunities potentially to recycle capital. Then we've got other bits and pieces of things around the group.

When we announced our intention to recycle capital 10, we're kind of blessed that we've got $36 billion of a balance sheet to kind of play with. I think the opportunities to recycle capital remain, and it's still very important because as we look to deploy, we will be looking to manage the deployment impacts by recycling capital and helping to reduce net debt.

Do you have some timeline that you think about? Because, so far, you're running ahead of yourself, right?

After, let's say, reaching 4 billion by the end of this year, where else or how quickly do you think the pace, because you feels like to me that your balance sheet improvement or that reduction has been much faster than you anticipated. Would you slow down that pace?

I think we've done a lot of recycling, we haven't done a lot of investing. Just to demonstrate how measured we are, we have the SCREF fund now, but that's a vehicle that we can grow in, but we haven't gone off and just sort of recklessly bought things.

I think the deleveraging has been a consequence of us doing a lot of recycling and deleveraging and not reinvesting. I think, as Craig says, we've got a couple of billion dollars US of cash, there's a real sort of war chest now that, come the right opportunities, we are in that position to reinvest now.

In terms of the pace of further divestments, that's—

I think because we've done a number of large disposals, clearly it's been more front-end loaded. I think it's fair to say that the pace in the next year or two will not be quite the same as what it's been in the first 18 months.

Just to remind you, we did guide that we were trying to recycle at least 4 up to 6 billion by the end of 2027. Clearly, we're almost at the $4 billion number, but we're still striving to get towards the 6 by the end of 2027.

We may not get as much as that, but just to give you a sense as to the range or magnitude that we're targeting, still quite significant. Then

don't forget that 20% of that will be used for buybacks, so that's the capital source that will be used to continue to fund buybacks.

Thank you.

Another question online from Joe Joe Ho, Rondall Investments: Hongkong Land previously mentioned that there was a target for a city or region not to contribute more than 40% of earnings. Based on the latest situation with a strong performance in Hong Kong, does this diversification target still exist?

It does exist, but look, we can't help the market outperforming here, and as it does, as market rents go up, the valuations are going to go up as well, which will make that more challenging. Then we have this opportunity in Singapore.

We've said we've started with 8 billion, we have a strong intention to go to 15 and beyond. It's an open-ended core fund.

15 is an aspiration, but we can go beyond that. The more that we deploy in Singapore and grow that vehicle and do other things, the more the scale we have there, the proxy reduction here.

The question is right. Hong Kong, as I said, I think it's on a trough-to-peak type growth cycle.

Values will go up, and therefore the concentration that we have in Hong Kong may be maintained simply because of that fact, no matter how much we invest elsewhere.

Just to remind everybody, the reason that we came out with that statement was nothing to do with our views on Hong Kong. It was really more to close our NAV gap, because we recognized that Hongkong Land, the share price of Hongkong Land has been so heavily correlated to prime Central Hong Kong office rents, and we're looking to break that correlation.

We really want our business to be valued on sum of the parts. When we looked and did a lot of analysis about the business, we felt that we needed to get the Hong Kong contribution down on a weighted basis to encourage many of you in the room to start to value us in a slightly different way.

The 40% is not so much a specific target that needs to be achieved as more about trying to get more balance in the portfolio, and then for you to see the value in us and to close that NAV gap. This is really a share price point rather than an earnings point, if that kind of makes sense.

Also, the organizational design of the four portfolios, ideally we're going to be able to think about it Even internally now, we think about those four portfolios, how they report, what they're doing, ideally that's how the market starts thinking about Hongkong Land rather than just a proxy for Hong Kong office, that we actually have four big portfolios of assets that's what you should be looking at, the individual performance and the valuation of those standalone portfolios.

Okay. Rachel Town, Macquarie, some more questions coming through: What's the cap rate for LANDMARK and Hong Kong office portfolio?

We do disclose the cap rate ranges in our annual accounts, I don't think it's any particular secret. Hong Kong office portfolio is generally low 3s, LANDMARK retail is trending towards 4%, which is tightened.

Secondly, she's asking, quite specifically, what was the office rental reversion for the backfilling of the Amazon space, Asia Square Tower 1? We don't talk about individual tenancies, but I think it was something like double digits.

The speed in which that re-leased was a great illustration of that marketplace.

The quality of the portfolio.

There was no downtime at all for 100,000 square feet between Amazon and Shell, and Shell came outside of the core CBD to come into Marina Bay, it was just more signaling than just the reversion, but just the signaling was positive. Then

a final question for Rachel around LANDMARK. Has the peak disruption passed on the upgrade?

If not, when would that be? I think currently close to 40% of the retail area is currently out of action for renovation.

This is probably about the peak, though. Although there's still quite a lot of work to be done throughout the course of 2027, but as we get through next year, probably by the midpoint of next year, I would say we've kind of passed the peak, and so you should start to see incremental rental growth coming through from Hong Kong retail.

We still have a number of our Maisons to open, through next year there'll be Cartier, there'll be Tiffany, and then basically the last ones will be Chanel and Hermès. I think we've got three or four open now, there's still five or six to come.

In terms of rental revenues and the turnover rents and things that are attributed to that, we're quite optimistic about how that will look. Very good.

We've answered all your questions. Thank you all for being here.

Much appreciated, and we'll see you in 6 months. Thank you.