Go back in two just for the two little bits and say we're gonna open 15 new centers which will add about 20% to Servcorp size. That's a summary of the last 5 minutes. If I look at Servcorp and I look at what it's costing us to build a center with proper infrastructure, because everybody thinks there's no barrier to entry. Well, the barrier to entry is now the cost to build these, if you're going to do it correctly so that you can compete in the marketplace, in my view, is between $4 million and $5 million a center, and that's before you fill them. We've got 120, and we're gonna build another 15. Let's say we've got 140 to 150 centers.
140 will do. That's about my next target. 140 centers is at $5 million a center is $700 million. That's before you start to fill them. As everybody's going in this business is finding it costs a lot to fill them. I think that to effectively compete with Servcorp to set up a basic system, and to operate in some of the major cities would cost any competitor no less than $1 billion. If I reflect on where Servcorp's at, it's still profitable. It should make its AUD 60 million this year. The second half should be about the same as the first half, but a lot's happened that people can't see.
We for 20 years were running on an old veto system, which we tried to replace, and over the period of time, we wrote off around about AUD 20 million. That's over a 10-year period. We're now replacing it. We've got a new system that we built. We've written off about 50% of that capital cost, and that we call that unfortunately, it was developed by Japanese developers. Because we're an Aussie company, they call the bloody system the Wombat, and the name has never gone away. We've got a data system called Wombat. The managers globally love it, and it's gone out to about 60 floors. It's intuitive. It gives us real time access to what's happening within the Servcorp environment. Also, last year, we rolled out the new general ledger.
Those two systems have allowed us to commence retiring a lot of license expense that we've had. This year, and particularly in this second half, we'll be spending about AUD 1 million more than we spent last year on travel and training because we really believe that if you're going to be successful in this business, you've gotta have a trained team, and you've gotta have a template that people can follow. We have a management meeting with 120 managers coming from the international locations, it's next weekend. Not next week. Not this coming weekend, but the following weekend. We've changed our management structure, and we've addressed some of the problems we've got in Australia, New Zealand, China and Hong Kong. That's not to say we've solved China, Hong Kong or the United States.
The U.S. is about break square from a cash perspective. It's still badly run. General manager knows, it is badly run. She hasn't been able to travel. She was a new general manager, she still runs to the Regus system, which is built to I guess we shouldn't say that. Well, it's a great system. Just happens to lose money. She'll be here. It's very difficult to run the U.S. from Australia. We will change that. We'll run it from the Middle East. China and Hong Kong are problematic. I look at Hong Kong and say, well, the Chinese government doesn't seem to care much whether expats can operate in and around Hong Kong or not.
Unless we can negotiate reasonable rents that allow us to be profitable there, Hong Kong, we may move most of our operations from Hong Kong to Singapore. China, well, it was locked down for a long time, and it's a lot slower coming back than most people would think. They're the problem areas. They are far outweighed by the areas where we have great progress. Europe's improving. Middle East. Japan's okay. Southeast Asia is on the improve. That, that I look at Servcorp, and I don't think that I've been quite as excited about the coming calendar year. I think the first half we're gonna finish rolling out all of these systems. The second half we'll start opening new centers and which should be the first half of the new financial year. I'm pretty confident about it.
From there on, I think that we shall be successful and continue to grow it between 15% and 20% a year. If I have a look at the openings and closings, you know, we have over 600 competitors just in Tokyo. Every major brand. It doesn't matter whether it's The Executive Centre, Regus, all of the big operators out of the U.S. and everybody out of Europe, they're all there. They have been opening at 10-20 a week, and now they're closing at almost the same rate as they're opening. It's sort of stable. It's so hard to follow as they open and close. Nobody yet has worked out that small business needs exactly the same infrastructure as big business, and so everybody does it on the cheap. I walked into a,
I won't tell you the brand. I walked into a co-working area the other day. They had 100 offices plus their co-working areas. They had 3 incoming lines. We're a business half the size, we have 40, to give you some idea. They were running 2 people. For a business half the size, we run 6. For a business that size, we'd run 12. There is a cost to that, but clients are slowly realizing that they do need the infrastructure. I think Servcorp's got a great future. There we are. I'm finished. Anybody got any questions? Beer time? No. Good. I did have 1 question. I get that question all the time. I get 2 questions. I get, 1, why don't you retire? And the answer is no. 2, why don't you buy back some shares? No.
If I want some shares, I'll buy some and keep them because I think Servcorp's... Personally, I think it's a good buy. That doesn't mean I think market's often right. I don't know if it's under or overpriced. I don't care much. I do know that when I look at executives that, and boards that buy back shares, I think that they advocate the responsibility given to them by the shareholders. If you actually believe that you've got a product, the time will open up the market. I would hate to go out to try and raise money as I keep seeing these opportunities that get a little further down the track. Now we're there.
I mean, we're gonna spend AUD 60 million on expansion next year, and we're gonna spend if we do the AUD 0.10 a time and continue with the AUD 20 million in dividends. That's AUD 80 million. I might add that we've got more than AUD 115 million in cash. We're producing more than AUD 1 million a week in free cash. Doesn't alter the fact that if I wanna go to the market, I don't wanna raise money, if I had to go to the market, raise money at AUD 3. If I had to go to the market, the market wouldn't wanna give me any money anyway. No buybacks. Any other questions? Well, how good is that? They're the same 2 questions I get every year. Yes.
[audio distortion]
We're only opening new centers where we've got management depth. The majority of our new centers are in commodity-based environments or in Japan. So that when you open a new center, your coworking and virtual pays a reasonably substantial part of your rent. A new geographic location is better than expanding at the same location. I mean, we're doing a couple more, a few more in Saudi because we're pretty full there. There are some cities that we're not in that part of the world, which we're working on. We're probably doing another one in Doha. That's a very small town, but. Can somebody just play that, I had a video, the Epic, the new Epic video. Can somebody hit the button on that?
This just sort of gives you a little tiny. The guy's not little. The truck's just too big for him. I mean, Tokyo now, around Tokyo Station, we've got seven. A new one opened this week. One of the ones that I talk about that's new. It hasn't got any clients yet. That's called Yanmar. It cost about AUD 6 million to build. That's Doha. We've got a new one on the go there. That's a great location right in the middle of Doha. Dubai, of course. That's the right out the front of our building. That's the new museum of the future. Abu Dhabi. Wow. Interestingly enough there, we're in partnership, we were with the prince, but he's now become the ruler of the UAE, in Etihad Towers.
People have got no idea of the depth Servcorp has because it's a little Aussie company on the Aussie Stock Exchange. Nobody really understands it. I listen to even our own shareholders talk about it. They got no idea. We've never had proper management in Germany, that's still another one that's got some potential. If we ever get management, we'll build around it, we haven't succeeded yet. So if you skim that back a little and you have a look and say, you got AUD 115+ million in cash, you've got net assets of AUD 220 million on your balance sheet. You've got AUD 100 million theoretically employed in your business, and you're throwing AUD 60 million in free cash.
If you look at it another way, your market cap's AUD 300 million. You got about 40% of it in cash. You're gonna throw AUD 60 million, you got AUD 200 million in assets. That's this year. Next year, at the current growth rate, you should throw AUD 70 million. You're at 3x. I just look at it and go, "I don't think the shares are underpriced. I don't think they're overpriced 'cause the market sets the price." I just look at it and go, "I don't think we're gonna go broke." I can't see anybody out there that will send us broke, but I can see a lot of people slashing and burning, and we're surviving in this environment where people are going broke. I have a look at WeWork's numbers. They come out tonight.
I've looked at WeWork's business model, so if I was the WeWork chief executive, I'd be recording all this from Hawaii rather than anywhere near headquarters. I just look at it and go, "Hmm, it's okay. Servcorp's okay." It's got a lot of work still to do, but it's got a lot of potential. It's got more potential today than it had this day last year or this day 10 years ago. When we listed, we had 30 floors, and we were projecting AUD 14 million. We're projecting AUD 40 million. We had AUD 9 million in the bank. We've got AUD 100 million in the bank, and our market cap's about half what it was after we listed. It's. Go on. Got any more questions? Yeah. Come on, Mr. Broody
Yeah. I was gonna say six months ago, it was a case. You were as countercyclical. You would sort of look where everyone's sort of running. Maybe six months ago, you wouldn't necessarily have invested money.
Yeah.
To build yours. I like that. Lastly, w hat do you see? Is the fact that people can travel or is the fact that some lead indicators you're seeing which are really?
No. The fact is that we've got a general ledger that works. We've got a debtor system that works. We can control the business again, in a modern fashion, a digital fashion where we have real access to numbers, so that now I'm a lot more comfortable building it. Well, travel is another big part of it, but I don't want everybody to jump on a plane. I mean, we've our travel bills in the pandemic less than AUD 20,000 a month, mainly me. The budget for Servcorp travel is about AUD 100,000 a month without all the people that have to come to management meetings, plus my travel, which is normally about AUD 20,000.
Look, we have places where we're stable, we've got occupancy, and where we've got good management, and I think that that's where we'll build. The wonderful thing about Servcorp, it's not geographically tied, so that you can get a bit of a focus. I mean, I'm a bit focused on the Middle East, but if oil holds at above AUD 70 a barrel, those economies run along at a pretty rapid rate. We have a large team across that Middle Eastern area, and we're heading towards 10,000 clients. We're by far the biggest in the UAE, Saudi. If you take out the whole area, we're the only guys that have got all of these geographic locations, like Doha, Bahrain, and the core cities of Saudi. It makes a difference. Yeah.
I don't think he's got the mic on anyway. He's just trying to make you feel good, to give you something to hold.
Just in the areas where you're expanding, what's happening to rental rates in terms of where you are the client? Are they still coming down? Have they stabilized?
I'm sorry. I didn't hear that.
In terms of.
Yeah. Tell you, he didn't have it on for broody
He doesn't need it. He's louder than me. In terms of the available office space, are rents still coming down? Are they getting more attractive or have they stabilized now post the pandemic?
It depends where you are. The rents in Singapore have gone up. I really think that rents in Hong Kong have halved. Rents in China, the market central business district market is really soft. In Japan, they never tell you. No matter how hard you try, it's very difficult to assess what's happening in the market. In the Middle East, it's more a return on the capital invested rather than what the market will bear. It's what they've spent and the return they want. I mean, the world's split in half. You've got all the Middle East. Australia, I think, is very strong. I still think China is gonna struggle for a while getting international business people to come there because.
They, in the times of isolation, they would just lock you in your building for a period of time. In Hong Kong, they made it very, very difficult to travel into and out of, so you had to do some isolation. Even if you had a cold, you were sent to an island by the government. It was a bit draconian, but it scared a lot of the investors. While Singapore was quite strict, it's really encouraging business to come into Singapore right now. The prices there have gone through the roof. Prices in Hong Kong have gone through the floor. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but the opportunities are there simply because it comes back to. Well, there's a third leg.
There's the location, there's your management, and there's the competitive environment, of course, and of the economics in the marketplace. Well, the difference in the Middle East is a lot of the Middle Eastern countries, not just one, but a lot, are now investing in themselves. They used to all put it all into all of these funds in London and New York. Now they're investing in their own countries, and it's making a massive difference. I'm pretty confident about what. Obviously, I mean, I haven't been quite this confident for a long time because having three data systems sometimes meant you were fighting a fog. It's. Again, that's it. Well, I'll finish by saying that we're pretty well at 50,000 people paying us rent every month. Is Victory still listed? I don't look anymore.
Well, I don't know. It was just a question. Maybe you know it. It's okay. You'd know. Pepe? They're listed. Okay. Sorry? How much is the market?
Seven.
Seven. I thought it was AUD 0.07. It's AUD 7 million. It's still overpriced. Look, it's a bloodbath out there in this industry because everybody goes back to the same thing. All the building owners are doing it, and they're saying, "Well, we can get twice the rent, cap it up at 30 or 40 times and put a great value on our building." To do that, they've gotta have clients. They have no idea about churn. Mitsubishi just took over Regus in Japan, by the way, and they're the biggest real estate company in the world. They'll never listen to me anyway, but they Some of their staff, they're now charging, they now wanted to sign a two-year contract.
Servcorp was started in Japan because the landlords wanted 1 year's rent in advance, and we were taking a 1-year rental deposit. We were taking a 1-month rental deposit, which meant that the capital cost was minute, and you had to sign a minimum 3-year lease with a 1-year rent paid up front. Plus you had to pay your rent each month as well, so that they're always 13 months ahead. Our own people are reasonably hassled because Mitsubishi has taken over. I think Nomura's got about 100 centers now, and Mitsui's got similar number. I think it's good rather than bad for Servcorp in the long term. I think Servcorp's got a great future. Go on. I'm done. Anybody else got any questions?