Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Citycon's First Quarter 2025 Results audiocast. My name is Anni Torkko, and I work as the Investor Relations Manager here at Citycon. Last night, we published our First Quarter 2025 Interim Report, and in this audiocast, our new CEO, Mr. Oleg Zaslavsky, and our CFO, Mr. Eero Sihvonen, will present the results. We will start by Oleg going through our business and operational highlights. After that, Eero will go through our financial results. After the presentations, we will be opening the line for questions from the audience. Please, Oleg, go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. This is my first quarterly call as the CEO of Citycon, and I look forward to a productive and transparent cooperation with this forum and all of Citycon's stakeholders. Let me take you through key developments and results of the first quarter. Operation-wise, it was a solid quarter for Citycon. Our footfall, like-for-like footfall, increased by 2.4%, while tenant sales grew by 1.2%. Retail occupancy stood at 94.8%, which is a slight decrease from the year-end numbers. Our like-for-like net rental income, on the same comparable FX basis, increased by 3.5%, driven by rent increases, indexation, improved recovery rates, and lower operating cost. Direct operating profit increased by 8.2%, the same comparable FX basis, reaching EUR 42.7 million. A main contributing factor here was a reduction in SG&A cost.
Throughout the first quarter, we took several important steps to improve our debt portfolio and manage upcoming maturities. During the quarter, we paid EUR 215 million of debt and an additional EUR 200 million after the quarter end. In April, we raised EUR 450 million of new bonds with six and a quarter years of maturity. The offer was more than 6x oversubscribed during the day, and we see it as a vote of confidence from the capital market. As a result of our debt management effort, our closest maturity 2026 Bond, now is at a very manageable EUR 150 million. To further improve our balance sheet, we will continue to dispose of our non-core assets. However, due to our debt management effort, we are in a position in which we are not pressed and not under pressure to accelerate disposals.
We will continue disposals, but we will prioritize making the right deals over fast deals, even if the meaning is a slower pace of asset sales. We would like to commit ourselves to asset creation, not just transaction volumes. Guidance for 2025. Our operational performance for 2025 is in line with our expectations. However, as a result of our refinancing exercises, we anticipate an increase in our financial cost, and therefore we decided to tighten up the upper end of our 2025 guidance. We guide now EPRA EPS between EUR 0.41- EUR 0.50 per share and EPRA EPS, excluding hybrid interest, between EUR 0.60- EUR 0.69. Looking ahead, we will continue to concentrate on our core necessity-based assets, improving the performance of those assets, and continue to improve our balance sheet, so strategic divestment and debt management.
We also, yesterday, Citycon announced that it will consider repurchase of its own shares. We believe that the current price of the share is low and does not fully reflect the underlying value of the company assets, and we believe this is the best deal we can do for the company and stakeholders. Before I conclude and transfer the stage to Eero, I would like to thank our teams across Nordic for their dedication and execution. Thank you. Eero?
Thank you, Oleg, and good morning, everybody, and welcome also on my behalf. I will start by giving you a quick snapshot of the Q1 results. First of all, our net rental income was approximately EUR 900,000 below last year's first quarter level, which is a good achievement taking into account that we disposed quite substantially of our centers. I will be going through the net rental income bridge in a while to go through all the details. As Oleg mentioned, our direct operating profit actually was higher than last year at EUR 42.7 million, like EUR 3 million higher than last year, mostly driven by the lower SG&A costs following our quite extensive cost-saving actions. EPRA earnings ended up at EUR 19.4 million, which was like EUR 3 million below last year's level, quite a lot due to the hybrid capital exchange that we did last year.
Also, the EPRA earnings I will be showing in a minute in a complete bridge. Our EPRA EPS ended at EUR 0.105, which was 16.8% below last year. You will notice that EPRA earnings reduced by 13.4%, and so the discrepancy or the difference between the EPRA earnings and per share number percentage change is due to the increased share count. Turning over to the detailed net rental income and earnings bridges, first of all, net rental income. The components of net rental income change include Kista. We now fully consolidate Kista since the acquisition of the remaining 50% last year. We had a positive like-for-like during first quarter, EUR 1.4 million.
Of course, the impact of divestments, particularly Kristiine Keskus and a couple of other centers in Norway, was an impact of a total of EUR 5.2 million, and resulted in total net rental income of EUR 50.1 million after the FX changes. The EPRA earnings bridge [share] can be seen here that the impact of G&A savings or difference between SG&A was EUR 4 million. Financial income and expenses, we had higher financial cost by EUR 1.6 million. Maybe turning over to the property valuation and EPRA per share, we had a very stable fair value picture during Q1. Q1 is a quarter when we do an internal valuation and update all of the rents, costs, and everything related to that, and have an opinion of the cap rates from our appraisers. The outcome of the valuation for Q1 was a small EUR 700,000 positive.
The NAV that we use currently is mostly the EPRA net replacement value, EPRA NRV, and that improved from EUR 787 per share to EUR 813, driven mostly by the stronger SEK and NOK compared to the year-end. We have had a quite active balance sheet improvement program going on and debt improvement program going on. As Oleg already mentioned, we have continued to de-risk the debt portfolio by reducing and repaying short-term maturing debt. This is the situation as of the end of Q1, and since then we have already reduced the nearest maturing bond, 2026 Bond, by an additional EUR 100 million, and we have totally prepaid the EUR 100 million term loan maturing in 2027. We have today actually also prepaid the EUR 186 million loan that matures here in 2029, and the newly issued bond that we issued, EUR 450 million in April, there is a new maturity in 2031.
These are mainly the main changes. I listed all of the transactions and actions which we have been completing. The RCF term loan has been completely prepaid, i.e., first EUR 150 million and then EUR 100 million, and we have had also two tenders 2026 Bond, first eur 100 million and then another EUR 100 million after the quarter in April. We issued a very successful EUR 450 million bond in April that was 6x oversubscribed. Exactly today we are going to prepay the EUR 186 million maturing in 2029. This completes my part. Back to you, Anni.
Thank you, Oleg and Eero, for the presentations. We will now open the line for questions from the audience. Please, moderator, over to you.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Othman El Iraqi from Fidelity International. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi guys. Thank you for the call. Just a question in terms of looking at your share buyback announcement. This would put you kind of closer to the S&P downgrade threshold. My question is, how committed are you to the investment grade rating as of today? Thank you.
Yes, we are. This is Eero. Yes, we are committed to the investment grade rating, but of course, going forward, we would like to increase and improve the ratings, and that cannot be secured probably anytime very soon. A short answer is yes, we are committed. Of course, all the transactions will be done very mindfully, this in mind.
Okay, okay. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Thank you all for joining the Q1 results audiocast today, and have a good Wednesday.