Hello, and welcome to Sunborn International's Capital Markets Day. We have got an exclusive event for you today on Sunborn International's strategy, financial targets, business updates, and invaluable insights into the future of floating real estate. The global floating hotel market is projected to reach over $8 billion by 2032, according to a January 2026 researchandmarkets.com industry report, growing at nearly eight percent a year, driven by experiential travel and the growing demand for waterfront accommodation. When you think about why, the answer is simple. Prime urban waterfront land is one of the scarcest real estate categories in the world, and Sunborn International is one of the few operators in the world that has found a way to build hotel-quality accommodation on it without buying the land. That is one of the extraordinary market niches that we are here to talk about today.
My name is Katja Pantzar, and I am your Moderator for today. I am a best-selling author and journalist based in Helsinki. I have been raised in Canada, which is the accent that you may pick up on, and I write about Finland for an international audience. My non-fiction books have been translated into 24 different languages, and one of my areas of focus is something called sisu, a unique form of resilience in the face of challenges. Resilience, as you will hear today, is something that Sunborn knows a great deal about. We have a top line of speakers in the studio for you today who will give you the intelligence that you need.
We have Andrew Shaw, Marketing Director, Hans Niemi, Chairman and CEO, Xavier Valero, Vice President and General Counsel, Jakob Eliasson from Nordic Credit Partners and SIB board member, Andrew Voysey, VP Development at Ledcor Canada, who will be joining us via video from Vancouver, Dale Hipsh, Executive VP of Development and Growth, and Jenni Saario, Sunborn International's Chief Financial Officer. Now we are going to start with Andrew Shaw, Marketing Director of Sunborn International. Andrew is going to give us an overview of what Sunborn International is, where it operates, how it has a unique market niche, and what the business model is and the value it delivers. Welcome, Andrew. Over to you.
Good afternoon. My role today is to introduce Sunborn International, explain what makes our business model unique, and also to outline the long-term vision behind our growth strategy. Sunborn is not just a hotel developer. We are a specialist in floating hotels and other floating real estate, with a model that combines premium locations, asset flexibility, and differentiated guest experience. Before we move into our specific growth plans, I will provide some background on why the company has the foundations to become a major international success. But first, some history. Sunborn has over two decades of experience in developing and operating floating hotels. The company launched its first floating hotel in Finland in 1998 in Naantali, which apparently was a major overnight success at the time.
In 2003, the company opened its first international floating hotel in London, which again was a major success and has continued there into this present day through new vessels. Further yacht openings followed. Today, Sunborn has a proven concept and operating platform with a global pipeline of new developments. Over the years, the company has developed expertise not only in identifying and securing new sites, but also in developing them. The company knows exactly how to design and build, also in operating them successfully, which is a key dynamic of the company. That operating track record is important because our business is not only about construction or development, it's about delivering a high-quality hospitality experience in a unique waterfront setting, which is one of the key platforms of the company.
This slide is just to give you, most of the people in this room might know about this already, but just to give some background of where the company is now internationally, we have two operating hotels in London and Gibraltar and three new developments in the company's immediate near-term future, which is in Vancouver, which will be a highly significant and valuable new development. I believe it will be groundbreaking for the company and will open the door to other new developments in North America and around the world. We also have a new London development, which is an example of how you can upgrade a building or a hotel asset from an existing property to bring in a significantly larger and more commercially uplifted development for the future. We also have Seville, which is located in one of Spain's leading tourist destinations.
Beyond those immediate destination developments, there are a number of pipeline developments as well. We've been, over the years, looking at many different sites around the world, whether that's in the Middle East, in Oceania, or in Southeast Asia, in North America, and also in Europe as well. Next, we'll look at why the Sunborn International model is different. What makes Sunborn International model distinctive is that it combines several structural advantages. First, it can be much more capital efficient than conventional land-based development. We'll look later in the presentations at how that impacts on the cost per key and the sort of other commercial advantages you have. We also offer a faster route to market. We're able to get planning permissions and sites secured much quicker than you would for comparable land-based hotels. It's an inherently flexible concept as well. Hotels can be upgraded.
Normally, you might have to demolish a building. We're able to move them to a new site and gain new revenue after refit from these new developments with the assets. A really key thing also is that the concept gives access to sites which would not be normally available to hotel developments. A good example of that is in Vancouver, where you couldn't build a new hotel right in front of the convention center as a land-based asset, but we have been able to secure that as a floating property, and that's a very key part of the Sunborn model, which can be leveraged in the future. Finally, we are offering a differentiated hotel concept.
Hotel clients aspire to be close to water, floating hotels offer a unique experience, it allows you to charge premium prices because of this additional value that hotel clients would give for the properties. That combination of real estate advantages and hospitality appeal is central to the investment case. Something which is very dear to my heart and I've been very involved in, is sustainability, it's a core business strategy for Sunborn International, increasingly will become a key element in how we access capital as well. The new Sunborn Evolution series will be low carbon in its construction, with the hotels operated or powered by renewable energy. Operational energy savings, we're predicting, of at least 70%, which has a very direct cost on the profitability of the properties.
We've also found as well in the new developments in both London and Vancouver, that sustainability was a key factor in the planning permission. That was a driver, certainly in Vancouver, very much so in London. We've also now been designated as a Nasdaq Green Equity, which opens the doors to green capital markets and sustainability-linked financing, which is increasingly relevant as we structure the funding for our new developments. The company has also engaged several different potential partners. We have, through Sunborn Energy, funding from Innovate U.K. for R&D projects. We have a recently established relationship with Carrier, but also with Mott MacDonald and universities of the level of Imperial College London. These are very substantive technical partnerships that give Sunborn International propriety capability that competitors cannot easily replicate, it's very key in how we go forward as a business as well.
One other very key aspect of the company, which is important in how we go forward, I think so far we've had certain types of developments, but as the map expands, you really need to focus on what is the best type of location for a Sunborn yacht hotel. Our primary target is leading world cities, prime urban real estate locations like Vancouver and London, where we have, they're ideally adjacent to a major convention center or a major demand driver. As I say, good examples in London and Vancouver. In Sevilla, we now have our first, what I would call our secondary sites, which are major tourist locations where there's very high year-round demand, this will be a key step forward because it will unlock many other potential locations.
The third locations where we believe we could have very certain commercial advantages and higher commercial potential would be in kind of island resorts, pristine natural locations where it would be very difficult to get planning permission for a normal hotel asset, where a floating property leaves no environmental footprint afterwards, you're able to take advantage of some of these very prime site locations. For example, like in the Maldives or Bali and so forth. I will now pass on now to Hans, who can now talk about the long-term vision for the next stage of growth and how we will deliver success on this platform. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I was actually going to ask you a few questions.
Sure
If that would be okay, Andrew.
That was an excellent introduction.
Thank you.
to Sunborn International for those who wanted some more background information. Andrew, the five structural advantages that you described, which one do you think is the most underappreciated by investors who haven't encountered a floating hotel before?
It's funny, we were discussing this before when I was talking about the access to new sites. Actually thinking about it, I think that this idea of moving assets is something which is kind of quite unusual. That it's quite difficult for people to get their heads around the idea that you can have a hotel which starts its life in Finland, and then is now operating in London, and soon will be operating in Sevilla. There's this kind of reusability of the asset, which I think is something that from a normal sort of financing perspective for land-based buildings, it's quite difficult to capture how that benefits the company. In the case of London, where normally you would've demolished the current hotel, we're able to get this secondary use from it each time. I think that's a key benefit, very much so.
Yeah, on many levels, predominantly sustainability if we think about repurposing.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I have one more question for you.
As well, you showed us a map with potential locations all around the world. How does Sunborn decide which sites to pursue, and what does the ideal location look like?
I think now as we're looking forward to the future, we are now starting to identify certain sites. I think in the past, it's very much been where people have come to us, and a good example of that is in the Vancouver development, originated from, actually Andrew Voysey, who's going to be doing a video, and Ken Cretney from PavCo in Vancouver visiting the ExCeL London and staying on board the London vessel. That has happened a lot in the past, where we've had certain opportunities that have come to us.
I think that will key in the dynamic going forward, but we're also able to identify sites based on experience, how to go forward in the future as well.
Wonderful.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thanks.
Now for the nitty-gritty. How does a company like Sunborn actually finance a global hotel expansion program, and what does success look like in financial terms? I am going to hand over to Hans Niemi, Chairman and CEO, who is going to answer both of those questions. Over to you.
Am I live? Am I live? Okay. Well, good afternoon. My name is Hans Niemi. I am the CEO and Chairman of Sunborn International. Thank you, Andrew, for the great introduction to the company and the background. We move over to the next slide from here. One back. Our history has started in this company as part of our family enterprise, which is the larger Sunborn Group, parent entities, and other family businesses that we have. Our history really dates back 55 years in global development of hotels and real estate operations in multiple different industries. Out of all of those companies over our history, I think this is one of the most, if not the most interesting company, with a global outreach and ability to scale this up. This company started around 25 years ago, so it is hardly a startup from that perspective.
We still think that this is still in its very infancy and has a great opportunity ahead of us as we go forward. We are currently operating 327 hotel rooms, and we are expecting that to scale up to over 800 rooms over the next few years as we keep on developing and implementing our already sort of announced projects in Seville, in Vancouver, and London. There is going to be a large focus on Gibraltar's future development, in terms of our JV processes going forward. It is a very transformative stage for the company where we are today. With the listing just behind us, we are now looking very much forward. The overall pipeline that we have said in the previous disclosures is quite sizable. We are looking at 3,500 hotel rooms that the company has identified, and has researched, and has engaged with multiple cities around the world.
The question is always that plans are plans, visions are visions. Can we deliver, and can we implement those plans? Part of the ability to become from a local Finland-based family business, coming up with an innovation, doing the piloting, and making a success out of it, is that how do you then take that into a global enterprise where you are operating in multiple countries, doing developments in multiple countries? That really is the team behind it. The team behind this company, we are a small and nimble organization, and that gives us a gorilla-like ability to seek those opportunities, have those discussions, adapt our way of doing business and accelerating the business in a very different way from a multibillion-dollar company. Our executive team is very international. We have nationalities stemming from, in our group, from Canada, from U.K., from Finland, from United States, from Spain.
That's a good depiction of the kind of background that these people have in various fields of expertise and decades of history and expertise in our company. And what we've done since the listing last year, which I think of as a platform that we needed to create. A private company operating in Finland but having a global outreach development program will be held back by those restraints. And by having the listing of the company in Helsinki, which is our home turf. We're creating that next stage of the company's capital raising. This is not the end of it. This is the beginning of our capital raising program, and the Helsinki listing is a very important part of that story.
It gives transparency to our investors, improves our reporting and the way that we run this business in terms of corporate governance and all the things that come with listing a company from a private enterprise. We have achieved our Green Equity certification with S&P and Nasdaq. This was something that we outlined in our prospectus that we wanted to do. We were driving for that. We have a very environmentally friendly and energy-efficient product that we're going to be focused on. So it's only very fitting that this forms part of our capital stack raising going forward. Not because we're seeking advantages in terms of cost of funding necessarily, but because there is a distinct market for the green investors, green bonds, Green Equity, and we're going to be focused on that. We have worked really hard over the last years in multiple locations.
These are the key locations that we've identified that makes the most sense, and that's London, where we've had an established business since the early 2000s. We've already grown that business once from 100-bedroom hotel to what is now a 138-bedroom hotel. It is one of the most successful hotels in East London by performance. So we are taking that to the next level, and that's what London is about. Vancouver is another flagship, and so it's taken years for us to get to the point where we are now. In April, we got finally the city council approval for the rezoning, and the rezoning allows us and the company and our partners in Vancouver to go forward with what is going to be our flagship operation and a sister vessel to London, both being a key development milestone for the company.
London's planning, because of the delays in the listing, which was originally supposed to happen already at the end of 2024, we have been reapplying for the London permission. This is now finally coming to a fruition with the local municipality, and we're expecting that to be now concluded during the summer holiday months. It looks like very much that Vancouver and London are going to be back-to-back, two assets being built, and then meaning also that two assets being opened up at a very similar timing. That's going to set the timeline for the company strategy going forward, and now we're entering into the closing phase of finance raising and construction agreements for both vessels at the same time.
While this has been going on, we're already been preparing for the growth stage, the idea that the company's going to be overtaking these development processes in multiple countries. While we're still concentrating very much on our existing properties and we think there's upside there, we're reinforcing our team, and we've recently appointed Dale Hipsh as one of our few new members for our executive team. Dale is going to be speaking a bit later on in the presentation. Gibraltar's financing has been concluded, one of the stop gaps and bottlenecks for our next stage fundraising, a very complicated multi-jurisdictional process and transaction that we successfully now completed in 28th of May. That will accelerate now our ability to go forward with the next stages of our growth cycle.
Finally, but not least at all, is the Gibraltar joint venture program that we've announced, that was around the time of the listing. We have since then aligned again the timelines for that project. That was one of the reasons that we actually did the Gibraltar longer term refinance to make sure that we have the ability to adapt to the new timelines and look at the rebuilding or construction of a new asset for Gibraltar, which is in the pipeline and in the plans. If we look at the case of Vancouver, it's a good example of how we're creating value with these projects. The total development cost we're expecting to be quite substantially lower than the average price of constructing a hotel in the Vancouver market.
I think the story plays out that if there's a EUR 100 million project, we're expecting that to come at a cost advantage that creates around EUR 65 million of market value in terms of repricing of that asset in that market with the long-term contracts that we have. That trickles down from the fact that the cost per key is quite a bit more reasonable than doing a land side similar development with land cost and different kinds of associated development costs for a land side project versus a floating asset. The performance of our hotels is also premium to land-based hotels, and we'll talk more about that and how this product sort of ticks in terms of operating experience for the client and how it works for the company.
Our average daily rate in Vancouver is expected to be around the same as our comp set in the five-star market. We're being pragmatic. Our numbers are going to be prudent in terms of our forecast. We're forecasting quite a bit lower than the actual average five-star market, just to be sure that we do meet those expectations of our investors and our stakeholders. That is going to come at a premium. If you look at the London ADRs, if you look at our ADRs in Gibraltar, there's a distinct premium. This is how we pick our locations. The world is our oyster. We can go just about anywhere where there's water. We could go anywhere where there's even land with our modular construction technology, but we're very focused on water.
We pick the sites very carefully, the cities where there's a premium to be had, where there's a difficulty or bottleneck in developing in prime waterside locations in the city. This is a fitting product. It's energy efficient, it's ESG compliant, it's movable, it's non-permanent, it has a deployment timeline that beats any land-side hotel. It comes with very interesting financial advantages in terms of financing, in terms of taxation, and many other things. It has a lot driving the rationale for why we're building these floating assets. The timeline of developing in key cities in the world can sometimes be quite lengthy. It's not unheard of for these processes to take up to 10 years. In Vancouver, the average time is around five to seven years.
We've gone through a lengthy, quite a complicated process with multiple attempts to find a way on how to do that in Vancouver, and it's taken us four years to get there. Obviously, there's been a pandemic as well impacting our timelines, but that's no excuse. We typically expect us to be around sort of half the time of a normal application process with the benefits that we have. The timeline that we are committed to, and you have to bear in mind that there are things that the company can control and there are things that are well out of our hands, and those are usually the municipal and government authorities, maritime authorities, environmental protection agencies. Every country, every jurisdiction, has a different set of rules.
What our expertise really is, and we'll talk more about that perhaps later in the presentation, is navigating through those challenges of permitting, of licensing, of cross-border financing, of taxation, of commercial agreements. The fact that we're a small team with around 30 years of history for each one of our members in our executive team, in our various sectors of the business, we have a great sight on how this works in different parts of the world. This is the key. We're a Finnish company. We're headquartered in Finland, but we do have a global development pipeline and operations. We've had that since the very beginnings of our family business in the 1970s. We've been focused on international development. The development timeline now is based on London's re-permitting of our already approved application.
Vancouver is going through now the next stages of the various, let's say, granular permitting processes that are typical to any development of this size. This is a sizable development. It's a very visible development both in London and in Vancouver. It gets, of course, scrutiny and normal process. There's no shortcuts with these processes. We're expecting to start construction on the side of this year. We're looking at delivery of these vessels, depending on how these moving parts of these permitting and financing raising and everything goes forward, but we're targeting at the end of 2028 and beginning of 2029 in different parallels. Probably aligning those opening processes and development processes so that we have enough resource available so that we're not working entirely back-to-back, with two hotel openings and constructions coming out. Seville plays an important part. It is an existing site.
We've been working on that diligently for years. We think Seville is a magnificent city. The numbers speak for itself. Every hotel company currently, if they're not already in Seville, they're interested in going into Seville. With the global macro situation, with the geopolitical crisis playing out, there seems to be even more of an influx of interest from both tourists and companies alike to go to Spain. Similarly, that's playing in the favor of Vancouver. Vancouver is benefiting from the current geopolitical tensions. It seems like quite a few Canadians are deciding to stay home, and that will play in the favor of Vancouver as well. We're expecting our first full financial year of all the hotel operations to deliver around sort of EUR 86 million of revenue.
That's what we have today on the table, that's what we understand today, and that's based on timelines that may shift. Take that with a pinch of salt as these things have parts that may not be in our control entirely. The current revenue of the hotel company on the operations is around EUR 26 million-EUR 27 million. We're generating an EBITDA margin just under 30%. This is kind of annually changes based on what's going on in the market, what the demand is in London, what the demand is in Gibraltar. It's based on the locations and their driving dynamics. We're expecting the existing operations to keep on improving and getting to close to sort of 32% to 34% EBITDA. That is going to come with investment into new facilities, some OpEx, some CapEx, and focusing on training our teams. What's the buzzword today is AI.
We're implementing a large AI program across the company. Not to do cost savings, but to find additional revenues and end products for the company. Where that's going to come in, if you look at the 2030s or a sort of five-year cycle from 2025 going forward, this keeps on being our target. As the prices have changed in Vancouver, London is performing really, really well, above our expectations at the moment. We're expecting there to be an uplift in our forecast, and that's kind of what we're communicating here. The new hotels are targeting 40% EBITDA to revenue. If you look at internationally, hotels of this size and this scale, that's a very good target. It's a realistic target based on what we're doing, existing hotels, and what the technological and experiential benefits are going to be in the new hotels.
Very interesting times for the company in terms of our sort of guidance for the future as well. Seville is a relocation project. That's what we're expecting to do. The current hotel is valued at roughly EUR 48 million. That's based on multiple parameters of multiples of EBITDA in terms of reconstruction price, of a similar type of asset and so forth. It is the smallest asset that we have currently. All the new vessels are going to be based on the same hull model that we have tried and tested what works and what doesn't, what's the most affordable, technically most durable, best for our operation. What we determined is the Evolution series is largely based on the hull technicals that we developed originally for the first two ships that we built, which is the London Hotel hull model. Slightly longer one.
The new Evolution series is going to be longer. As the smallest asset, this is a very fitting profile for Seville. It is a beautiful location in the Guadalquivir. Yes, there we go. It is right by the aquarium of Seville. It has ample parking. It has a beautiful park in front of it. We have a private space to operate our business in peace over there. Seville is very familiar to us. We started our first business in Spain in 1972 and have been having a business interest in that country ever since. We are very familiar with that market and have great partners and outlook for Seville. We are expecting Seville to perform at equal or better KPIs than London.
That comes with certain cost benefits in terms of mooring, in terms of staffing costs, and a very robust growing market that is looking for a differentiated hotel product. I think that is where we are going to really hit the market, is in between the existing corporate and leisure hotels with a very differentiated product. We have high hopes for Seville. We are going to do a refit on that product. A sizable refit, meaning that it is going to be almost a brand new asset when we launch that. It is going to be timed together so that we minimize the gap in London and work in conjunction with the development and construction plan for the new replacement vessel in London, which is going to be a five-star, much larger asset, and 225 keys. That is the relocation project for that.
Because we have worked diligently on the planning, the planning is there, the concession is being ratified, and we are expecting to be well in position to deliver this product to Seville based on these plans and these timelines. One of the key points on the financing and balance sheet acceleration. We are talking about building up to 3,500 keys over the next years. Based on our production cost currently, that would entail EUR 1.5 billion of development. The big question is, how does a company of this size, with a balance sheet of EUR 170 million and revenue currently at a very low end of our spectrum of EUR 27 million, how are we going to get there? One of the answers is looking at the capital stack.
These assets qualify for ECA financing, Export Credit Agency financing, which is typically provided by country organizations, import-export banks, to their construction entities that are exporting. This is a way of a framework through the OECD countries, how we can provide subsidies to meaningful industries in our countries, but on a set level of rules that apply to everybody. This particular financing method is one of the key blocks of how we are going to finance these vessels. That allows us to have a ECA-backed securities structure that is provided to our bankers. That basically reduces the cost to probably the lowest possible minimum that you could finance this. The durations of our financing can range from 12 to 17 years. That gives us ample time, depending on the cash flow profile of these companies, on how that fits for different projects.
This is one of the key backbones of that. It's very similar to aircraft financing and ship financing, but typically, these are reserved for much larger, multi-billion dollar companies. As a case in point, in Finland, Finnvera is funding the production of passenger vessels in our Finnish shipyards. The current guarantee structure are over EUR 20 billion a year, or not per year, but in outstanding liabilities. This is a sizable, very important mechanism on how ships are built in various countries in the OECD. I think it's good to frame this in a way that for every EUR of equity that we inject into this business, we can generate around five EUR of development, which generates around eight to EUR 10 of market value in terms of asset base. It's a leveraged business. It's a high capital-intensive business.
It needs a lot of financing and needs a lot of capital. That is the bottleneck that we are fighting. Obviously, over the last years and decades, this has become harder and harder with the regulations in the banks, in terms of banks looking more inwards than outwards. We've looked at bond markets. We're now going to tap into the green equity. We're going to tap into the green bonds. We're going to look at the ECA-backed financing with our global financing partners that we have outlined for these projects. On that framework that we're creating, we're going to be replicating that to accelerate the growth and keep on raising more funds to create a larger company. We're not interested in just the history, clearly.
We've listed this company on the back of the innovation in terms of our technical ability, the experiential hospitality, the scalability of this product globally. Fundraising is now a key element of that, and that's kind of the reason why we've gone public and why we're exploring other public markets in addition to Helsinki as well. We are entering a phase of accelerated growth to deliver these products. We are going to be launching a EUR 50 million fundraising. That's going to happen over the next months. Our target is closing everything and starting the construction definitely on the side of this year, in H2 of this year. This capital goes a long way to delivering all of our targets that we've currently announced. It will also go a long way to securing new pipeline targets as the company is seeking accelerated growth.
This is just the beginning of it. These products that we've now disclosed to the market in terms of London, Vancouver, and Seville, and the JV program for Gibraltar and the replacement vessel, is just the tip of the iceberg. The company has a very bullish view on what we're going to do. We have a great vision. We believe in the story. We believe in this company and our team's ability to deliver. This is why I think this company is such an interesting, after 25 years of building this, spending EUR 200 million in developing this concept and trials and errors, going through pandemics, going through financial recessions, we're a very resilient company and this is now our time to shine and grow the company. On that note, I will hand over to Katja.
Yes.
Who may have some questions to me.
Actually, I'm going to ask the questions later.
Perfect.
Yes.
We jump over to Andrew Voysey. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. That was excellent, Hans. Now we're going to go from Finland to Canada. Our next guest joins us via video from Vancouver, which is a city I know very well, because I grew up there. Andrew Voysey is VP of development at the Ledcor Group, which is one of Canada's leading property developers and Sunborn's partner on the Vancouver project. Now we're going to hear from Andrew. Over to you.
Hello from Vancouver, Canada. My name is Andrew Voysey, Executive Vice President with Ledcor Properties. Before I speak further about the Sunborn Vancouver project, I will start with some background. First, a bit about Ledcor. Ledcor is one of North America's largest and most diversified construction companies, and Ledcor Properties is an operating division within the Ledcor Group. Next year marks 80 years in business for Ledcor. One of our partners is Graham Clark, who has also been in business for decades in various marine, hospitality, and tourism ventures located along Vancouver's waterfront. In 2009, Ledcor and Graham partnered to establish the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, commonly referred to as VHFC. The flight centre began as a seaplane terminal and has recently expanded to include passenger ferry services. The opportunity for VHFC arose when the Vancouver Convention Centre expanded on the downtown waterfront, tripling its capacity.
The convention centre is situated right behind me. The VHFC partnership secured an 11-acre water lot in front of the convention centre under a long-term lease agreement with the BC Pavilion Corporation, or PavCo for short. PavCo is a British Columbia provincial government crown corporation that owns and operates the convention centre, as well as Vancouver's largest sports and concert stadium. Vancouver's appeal as a world-class destination for business, cultural, and sporting events has grown exponentially since hosting the World's Fair, Expo 86. In 2010, we hosted the Winter Olympics, and this year, Vancouver is a host city for the World Cup. Vancouver now welcomes more than 11 million overnight visitors each year. Hotel room supply has not kept pace with this demand, and a recently published study projects that the city will be short approximately 10,000 hotel rooms in the coming years.
The Sunborn Vancouver hotel will be situated on our water lot immediately adjacent to the convention centre, downtown Vancouver, and the cruise ship terminal, while overlooking Vancouver's magnificent water and mountain landscape. This is, without question, the best location in Vancouver for new hotel development. What has made this project possible is the strength of the partnership amongst Sunborn, Ledcor, Graham Clark, and a wide range of other stakeholders. Through close collaboration, alignment, and shared long-term vision, we have worked together to bring everyone on board and move this project forward in a thoughtful and coordinated way. We will continue filming down at the waterfront so you can see the site and the location for yourself. From this vantage point, you can see Vancouver's active waterfront and a section of the 28-kilometer waterfront walkway, which winds its way around the city, including Stanley Park, off in the distance.
Behind me is downtown Vancouver, and to my right is the Olympic Cauldron from 2010 and the Vancouver Convention Centre. Now, let's head down to the waterfront walkway and see where the Sunborn vessel will be situated. Where I am standing right now is the beginning of the 28-kilometer waterfront walkway, and behind me is the Vancouver Convention Centre, and off in the distance is the iconic blue water drop, and that marks the position of the new Sunborn Vancouver hotel. I am now standing at the location where the main entrance to the Sunborn Vancouver hotel will be. Immediately adjacent to the vessel will be the new public dock, which will be a tremendous addition to Vancouver's waterfront. The views from here will be nothing short of magnificent. The Sunborn project has been years in the making.
Because of its unique location on the water, numerous governmental agencies were involved in a very complex approval process. The most significant milestone came on April 14th, when Vancouver City Council voted overwhelmingly in favor of rezoning this portion of the water lot to allow for hotel use. As with many waterfront projects, the process requires patience and persistence. In this case, the perseverance of the Sunborn team and our local team ultimately paid off. As mentioned, PavCo is a key stakeholder. They are enthusiastic partners in working with Sunborn as they continue to attract conventions and global events. It's worth noting that the convention center hosts more than one million visitors across 400 events each year. Strong partnerships have always been a foundation of our business. The most successful ones are built on aligned interests, open communication, and a shared commitment to finding solutions.
The partnership between Sunborn and VHFC exemplifies those qualities. Sunborn Vancouver will be a remarkable addition to the city, arriving at an ideal time as Vancouver continues to strengthen its position as a world-class destination. We are thrilled to be working with Sunborn on this exciting project and look forward to the day when it becomes part of Vancouver's waterfront. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew Voysey. That was wonderful to hear directly from Vancouver. Now we're going to move to our panel discussion, Risk and Reward, International Growth and Financing. Joining Hans on the panel will be Xavier Valero, VP and general counsel for Sunborn International, and Jakob Eliasson from Nordic Credit Partners and the Sunborn International Board. I will be asking them some tough questions. Let's get on with it. Welcome.
Thank you.
Happy to have you all here today. Now we're going to talk about the numbers and a few other things. The way we thought that we would do this is I'm going to ask you direct questions and then give you an opportunity at the end if there's something that you'd like to add or you feel has not been clarified or discussed. We're going to start with Hans. When most people hear hotel developer, they picture the usual real estate playbook. Sunborn's assets float, and that quietly changes everything about how you fund them. Can you walk us through the financing framework that a floating asset has versus that of a land-based one and a land-based developer?
Thank you. It is a very different type of toolbox that we have available when you have movable assets. Just like aircraft and ships, they benefit from the Export Credit Agency type of arrangements, which is one of those elements that we're looking at and have secured support for. You have the typical sale and leaseback type of options. Not everything needs to be built on your own balance sheet. When you're looking at a billion and a half of development over a decade or so, it makes sense to look at also building in someone else's balance sheet, and then focusing on the operations and the development of those opportunities.
We mentioned earlier the Green Equity certification that we have for the company, not for the pricing difference, which is actually not that significant that that's worth striving for, but is auditioning for a different type of audience that is geared towards investing in environmentally friendly, energy efficient, or impactful investments, and that's what the Green Equity does for us. We have already done, I think, four bonds in the family group, listed bonds in Stockholm and in Helsinki. As the tides shift in the normal sort of bank financing for asset-backed financing, that is definitely still on the books. We are still engaged and want to pursue the bond markets as well, and that may also form part of our capital stack. In terms of financing, that's probably what we're dealing with.
There are very interesting import taxation and other taxation-related structures that are applied for these kind of maritime assets and aircraft that don't necessarily apply to land-based buildings, and those are also interesting things. A complex system when you're looking at movable hotels, financing them cross the border with the various legal issues and authority issues behind it. That, I think, really is one of our strengths and competitive advantages, that we know this, we've done this for decades, and it's a barrier for entry for quite a few other players to come into the market.
Thank you. Now I would like to ask Jakob a question. Jakob, you see a lot of capital structures. Sunborn is, by most measures, a small company, yet it combines equity, asset-backed debt, and export credit in a way that you'd more often associate with a larger player. Does that translate into a lower, more resilient cost of capital?
Well, I think it's fair to say, first of all, that you're right that Sunborn is a relatively small and niche player in the Nordics. Having that said, it's very clear also that it's kind of punching way above its weight in terms of sophistication of the capital structure, and obviously, that in turn leads to additional shareholder value creation. There's no doubt about that. I think, having said that, it's natural for a company of this type, which is, as Hans was saying, is an asset-heavy business, you need to be sophisticated and you need to optimize the capital structure. As we've seen here in the previous presentations, the combination of export credit, asset-backed financing, and equity, if you do it right, it becomes very efficient and it creates a lot of leverage. Without, I would say, too much leverage.
You need to optimize that because it's really important also, obviously, from a shareholder perspective, to make sure that the company and the management are fully focused on building the business, executing the strategy, and growing the company, and not fully focusing only on the balance sheet issues. You need to strike the right balance there. I think, if I look at Sunborn a little bit from the outside where I'm sitting, and we look across the Nordics and we look across other companies of similar type, it's clear that they have found a really good balance in that situation. I think it's important to keep that also going forward. My understanding from the outside is that it's a key priority for the management team.
Excellent. Thank you. Now, on market and operational risk, I'd like to ask Xavier. Did I pronounce your name correctly?
Close enough.
Ish. Good. I'd like to ask you the following question. Building floating hotels is a pioneering business, a highly specialized sector that Sunborn helped create. With 30 years in it, what does it actually take to develop these assets across planning, construction, structuring, and tax, and how much of that is simply a barrier that no competitor can quickly cross?
Thank you, Katja. I think that, well, as a simple example, I start working for Sunborn more than 25 years ago.
You just can imagine how much experience we have treasured over all these years. From how to approach the cities, how to handle the planning applications, the finance that Hans already has explained, but specifically, how to address the different Export Credit Agencies, the differences in each of the countries and jurisdictions. Quite interestingly also, how we have developed the design of those vessels to make them viable economically, and aligned with that, the negotiations with the shipyards, and more importantly, with the Classification Societies, to the point that at this moment, we have obtained our own classification for our vessels. Answering to your question, I think that this is a massive barrier for our competitors to catch up with all the work and all the experience that we've been treasuring over all these years.
It's fair to say that Sunborn is in a league of its own, truly.
It's been ongoing for quite many years already. We are interested to see also when the competition arise, how they're going to approach that and if they're going to bring different approaches to some of those ways of working that we've been having over all these years.
Excellent. Thank you. Now for Hans, I have another question, which is three hotels, three countries, three years. That's a serious delivery challenge. Tell us how you're building the team and the partnerships, bringing in new talent to lead growth, working with Ledcor in Canada and so on.
Thank you. Well, first of all, I cherish the relationships and the team that we have created over the years. Having worked with Xavier for 25 years, it's almost like a marriage.
I think it was illegal when we started working.
We have a great team, but we do acknowledge the fact that as the company is seeking growth and building multiple assets at the same time and opening of hotels in a short period of time, you need to reinforce your team. That's exactly what we've done with Dale Hipsh. He's joined the company with a great background, and he's going to talk about his abilities and experience in the next part of the presentation. Dale is a good example of how we're looking for the right talent, with the right frame set and experience points to help us do that. I can see the company operating multiple hotels. In five, six years' time, we will probably have doubled our fleet and amount of keys. That takes a very different type of onset.
What I take comfort in is, especially the work that we've done, imagine these cross-border transactions between different countries. We're operating in almost every continent currently in developing our plans, and every jurisdiction has the same realization moment that we haven't seen this asset class before. This is new. We don't know how to apply that to our regulations. As a pioneer of the floating hotel business, having done this for such a long time and having worked in multiple countries and jurisdictions successfully getting those plans through, we've become almost like a consultant for some of these jurisdictions. We're being consulted on other cases as well and have, as Xavier pointed out, we have developed our own classification for these vessels because there's nothing quite like what we're building technically or operationally. It's about the team, it's about reinforcing our team.
We're going to keep on growing our team. Then deploy that expertise to deliver to our stakeholders and investors.
Thank you. I'm going to try again, Xavier?
Yes. Getting better every time.
I apologize for the-
By the end of the session, it will be just perfect.
Yeah, exactly. As long as I get a few tries, I'll be there. I'm going to ask you a question about you're doing all of this in Vancouver, London, and Seville. You slightly touched on the answer to this question. I'm going to ask it again. Three legal systems, three planning regimes, three very different cultures and local governments. How do you manage that day to day without it becoming chaos?
That's a good question. Well, first of all, over all these years, when you think also with perspective, for instance, London and Seville, they are not even new jurisdictions for us. We have experience in both of them. In this case, it's only Vancouver, which is a new one. What we do in all the cases is, of course, there are certain parameters that they repeat in all of them, clearly. We of course, we always approach some local partner, some local firms who have the knowhow to complete the parts that we are not experts on and try to coordinate it and adapt our knowhow and our experience to the new case.
The fact of having the classification on the vessel side, or the Classification Society working with Lloyd's, that creates an umbrella that it helps a lot to cover the gaps in the local jurisdictions where there's no precedence of these kind of cases.
That's giving us a lot of advantage.
Thank you. For Jakob, I have a question about, from an investor's chair, is spreading across these jurisdictions a concentration of risk or a diversification that makes the company more resilient?
Well, I think particularly into today's environment, with everything going on in the world, it's definitely kind of a de-risking approach to spreading across. I think, as we know, some jurisdictions or some sites are working really well, while others may be more challenged at certain times and so on. Definitely from a credit perspective, spreading across while still being able to maintain the overall management from Finland, I think is a good combination. It works really well.
Excellent. Good. I think we have time for a few more questions. We're going to now move to the equity raise for Hans. Let's make this simple. An investor putting money in today, what are they actually buying and what does the planned EUR 50 million raise unlock?
Well, as we went through earlier, this is part of our capital stack raising that gets us the immediate delivery of those announced projects. We also need to keep on pursuing further growth capital because these development processes are time consuming. They're expensive. There's various advisors, legal consultants, and engineering companies involved. As we've seen, some of these processes for new developments can take up to four years. That's a lot of money being burned. In order to have no gap between the future production, we need to have parallel processes going on all the time. A part of that is going towards clearly Vancouver and London equity in terms of the capital stack for those projects. Part of it is going to the development and part of it is going to be for CapEx and OpEx in terms of Gibraltar and Seville.
What the investors are investing into is very much a startup in its infancy from our perspective. We've taken the company to this point with great investment and not everything has always gone to plan. We've learned a lot. That's part of being in any business and then learning from those mistakes. What the company is doing and what people are investing into is the scalable product that we can do around the world. There is really no gap in terms of the volume that we can build other than raising capital and the resource in terms of our team in opening up. I think that makes this a very interesting company. If you look at the market cap of the company today, it has a very consolidated ownership at the moment. We're looking at expanding that.
That's something that the capital stack is also going to do. I do believe that the company's value, once we are able to deliver and get to the run rate operations of these new developments and announcing the new, very exciting projects that we're working on, that I wish I could tell you, but I can't. That people will see and our investors will see that there's great upside in this company. I think of it as a tech company more than a property company or a hospitality company, because there's a great deal of technology in it. It's really how you apply the valuation and how the markets use this company. I think we're just getting started.
That sounds wonderfully tantalizing in terms-
of stay tuned, there's a lot to come. One more question for Hans. Let's talk about timing. You touched on this briefly, I'm going to ask a more specific question. Sunborn is still a growth company, some distance from a stabilized dividend paying profile. What return should investors expect over what horizon, and where is the value actually being created in the meantime?
Well, that's a good question. I think we've made it very clear when we listed the company that it is a company that's focused on growing our asset base. Over the next years, we're going to be 100% focused on that. We're not looking at a dividend policy until we get to stabilized operations with a larger fleet inside the company operating. That's probably going to be towards the sort of closer of 2029, 2030. That's not really why you should be investing into this company, but rather the fact that the value is going to be added on the balance sheet.
As we depicted on Vancouver, what the value added in terms of our product, the build cost and deploying that there, and then revaluation of the property, it really is built on the balance sheet of the company, and then the operating performance, which will be dictating what the valuation of the company in the future is going to be. We can see an accelerated path to a higher market cap. We're not looking to do a dividend policy in the near future because of the nature of the company's strategy. The balance sheet is going to balloon up quite quickly and sizably in multiples.
Thank you. We have one final question. Back to Jakob. Two for the markets view. As Sunborn scales, does raising capital get easier or harder? Analysts have been positive but still flag a leveraged balance sheet. How do you reconcile that with the growth plan?
Well, as I mentioned, I think a company like this should have a leveraged balance sheet in the sense that you need to optimize the capital structure. It's clear that as the company grows, there will be more opportunities and we can become probably even more sophisticated when it comes to building that balance sheet. I think as it grows also, that advantage that it has in terms of being sophisticated will grow over time. What I would add to that is also kind of from both probably from equity and a credit investor perspective, is that a company with a certain amount of leverage also kind of helps management to focus on the right things, to execute the strategy, and to be very disciplined in what they're doing.
I met this investor just the other day saying, "The company should have enough leverage that management can sleep at night, but they're pretty motivated to get up in the morning." I think that works pretty well.
Yeah.
Excellent. Before we close our panel discussion, I wanted to just open it up. Is there anything that any of the three of you would like to add or clarify?
I thought Jakob brought up an important point that we didn't really discuss, that's the de-risking of this product.
Just imagine for a second that you had just built a 100 million EUR hotel property in Dubai. You'd be not sleeping your nights well. Looking at how that market is going through a turbulent time, it's going to come back for sure. There's no doubt about that. In the hospitality business, every year counts. If you lose three years or two years or five years from your normal run rate, then you need to sort of bring it back up, this is a product that is a de-risking element. It also allows us to take these assets, these hotels and other floating structures that we're designing, to locations where you would not normally take the risk of building a landside building because of the potential geopolitical or risks otherwise that are associated with that.
In those locations, development is usually quite expensive and it's only for the very few brave-hearted entrepreneurs to go in there. We have a product that solves a lot of these problems. I would really focus on that de-risking part as well.
Thank you. Thank you to all of our panelists. Now we're going to take a 15-minute break, and we will be back here with more interesting information and speakers. Thank you.
Welcome back. Now we're going to shift to the operating side of the story. Hans has told you the plan, and now we're going to hear from the person responsible for making it happen on the ground. Dale Hipsh is Sunborn's Executive VP of Development and Growth. He brings more than 30 years of international hospitality experience across Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton, Atlantis, and Hard Rock, and has led hotel openings in Europe, Asia, and North America. Welcome, Dale.
That was younger me back before. Good afternoon, everyone. How are you? I'm the friendly American guy, but I do have the longest resume on the hotel opening side in the room, and I'm really honored to be here. It's very exciting opportunity that we're all talking about today. As the Executive Vice President of Growth and Development, I've found my sweet spot here with my friends in Finland. I couldn't be happier to be talking with you today. The question underneath all of this promise is, can Sunborn deliver? Can we open these projects? Can we actually do all that we're talking about in the financial sphere? My job and my background is delivering just that. I'm a hotel guy. I grew up in the business.
I've been working in hotels for the last 30 years, and my area of expertise is in opening and doing really complicated things in very intense environments through a lot of different cultures. What I love doing is things that have never been done before. When Hans and I met, and Päivi some 13 years ago, I was blown away by what Sunborn had to offer. When I had an opportunity to support the team, I jumped at it. I love to be here in Finland and love being in this great location these days, shall we say, without getting overly political. I want to talk about the three things that turn a pipeline into a portfolio, and having had a great deal of experience in building out hotel brands in my career, this is really what's compelling about Sunborn.
The track record of what's been going on inside of this company, as we've talked about this morning, for the last 25 years. The asset model. It's amazing. If you've been in the hotel business or know anything about brick and mortar, which I do, this asset is really exciting about how you can get it where it needs to be in a timely way. That really is an exciting opportunity for brick and mortar guys like myself, and the experience that you can have in a floating asset. I was teasing this morning, talking to one of my friends. We did a launch last evening at Logomo of our experiential, the immersive art experience. I was like, "Sunborn's been immersive," get it, water, before immersive was cool. We're still on the cutting edge since the very beginning.
I love the approach to discipline capital, distinctive assets, and the extraordinary experiences all on one slide. That's who we are as Sunborn. All right. Me. I've done a lot of things. I've had a really interesting, courageous, and some would say, crazy career, whether it's from Tampa in Florida with the gaming operations or Ibiza. We were the first Hard Rock Hotel in Europe when we opened Ibiza. Shenzhen was the first managed Hard Rock Hotel in the world. I loved how our company decided that the easiest place to learn to manage hotels was in China. They were wrong, but we did it anyway. We went to Shanghai. When I was with Ritz-Carlton, we were able to open this amazing project there. I have different countries, different cultures, and climates sort of in my sails that I know how to activate against.
Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton, Atlantis, Hard Rock, these are the schools that I trained in. I didn't go finance. I didn't learn the numbers. I learned the business, and I grew up inside of it. 30 years of learning what's transferable and what's noise, and I think that's the distinct that I bring. Floating is new to me, but openings are not, and this is what I get all excited about. My area of specialty is first of kind assets, whether it's the first hotel in Europe or the first managed asset in China. I got to work with Sol Kerzner at Atlantis in the Bahamas. What an amazing experience that was to learn truly about what experiential hospitality is when you deliver. Hans made a commitment on his presentation that we're going to open a couple of them at the same time. Okay, good luck with that.
I've done that before. We opened the two Hard Rock Hotel casinos in Florida, Tampa and Hollywood, at the same time, which is unheard of and insane, and we did it to great success, and I'm confident we'll be able to do the same with our team at Sunborn. We also sometimes have crises. I lived in Florida, grew up with hurricanes, and decided that I needed to leave Florida and get to the West Coast to avoid the hurricanes, and was promptly met with the Loma Prieta earthquake where I was the only guy in the hotel because everybody else was at Candlestick Park because they all love sports. I don't do sports. I do bed making and serving food. I was the guy there and found out what courage was really about in that crisis.
What you learn on a day like that is what someone's made of and what your team is made of. It's not on the good days that you figure out where your team is. It's during those crisis moments. My career has been unfortunately, I've had a lot of hurricanes and a lot of earthquakes in my career. I've got a team that's tried and true, so they know what it's like when that wave comes over the seawall. Those will be the type of talent that we tap to build out the infrastructure for Sunborn in the years to come. We've talked a lot about this. I think everyone's talked about the Sunborn model.
As a guy who developed hotels many years and had to wait forever to get these developments put together and have to endure the construction delays and some collapses, unfortunately, in my career, I get really happy about the prospect of how Sunborn does its development. The cost per key. Developed a new brand for Hard Rock when I was there, based purely upon the cost per key and building a better mouse trap so that investors would come to what was a very expensive product. Our cost per key is unusually affordable because of the way that we build our assets. That's a compelling product, a compelling process for us, and it's faster to market because we're not building them in the ground, and you don't have the weather and the crazy delays that you can have with a brick and mortar asset.
Having a shipyard build our assets is an extraordinary advantage to us and gives us a dependable exit from the construction phase that I've never had in my career up to date. We talked about portability. I get really excited about it. As someone who did have a project in Dubai, I have had projects in Marrakech, I have had hotels in hurricane zones. We've had to endure the kind of economic headwinds that brick and mortar does. Being able to be portable, to me, is such a compelling opportunity when you need to maximize your investment, or in the case of London, continue to improve and become more optimal for the market that you've chosen. Lower per key, faster cash flow, and you're movable if the market needs you to. That's a compelling investment proposition in my point of view.
That's not a hotel story, it's a capital story. Now we talk about what hotels have become. I was with Ritz-Carlton when Marriott acquired them, I had to leave my beloved Ritz-Carlton because our product became more of a commodity. What people are paying for these days is the experience. What we're building out in Sunborn is that experience that you talk about over the dinner table. That's marketing working for you. That's the brand premium and the stories you tell and the experiences that you deliver. An example I have is when we started working on Rock Spas, we needed to create something that differentiated us in that experiential model. We came up with Rhythm & Motion.
All of our program offerings had that rock and roll element, that musicality to them, and it really resonated with the spa press. It resonated with our guest, and we got a premium for that. We're doing the same very things inside of Sunborn now, and we'll continue to develop those immersive experiences that really echo our Nordic heritage and our wellness background as a relationship to the spas. A commodity competes on price, and a brand sets it. We're not building floating rooms. We're building a brand that happens to float. We also get to design it. In every touch point, we control the build experience.
We get to design it, not only the physicality of it, what comes out of the shipyard, but we're now in charge of building out what that brand experience is like and evolving it from where we are today and really embracing that spirit of being on the water from the Nordics and wellness-based. All of those things really are on trend and very valuable to the consumer today. It builds the brand equity, and it really helps people understand who we are. Those elements really create a great environment for us for the growth future. You talk about franchising opportunities and also partnerships. When you have that brand story and a tight set of brand standards, it allows you to take that experience and echo it out into the world without having to do it all yourself.
A strong brand, premium pricing, resilient unit economics, expansion optionality. This is the experience is the flywheel to our brand. This is a very exciting growth story for Sunborn. Today, Hans talked about it earlier, we're operating two hotels quite successfully in Sunborn International, Gibraltar and London. EBITDA is sitting at around 28% and on the rise. We believe there's a tremendous amount of efficiency inside of this model as we scale, the sequence of London expansion and Vancouver and the opportunity to open and reposition in Seville, all of those drive efficiencies, they drive brand story, and they drive our economics from where we are today to over 800 rooms. It's a very exciting story for us economically, operationally, for those of us who are gluttons for punishment and like to open new hotels, it's a very exciting story.
Hans showed you how each of the milestone is financed. I'm the one that's going to get them opened for the company. London and Vancouver are two of the best hotel markets in the world. They're amazing. The prime locations speak to the financial model that we have with our ability to scale, as we just talked about, taking the portfolio over 40% EBITDA on a combined basis at stabilization with 90% occupancies in markets like Vancouver and London. It's a really exciting opportunity. I talked about experiential hospitality. That gives us pricing power. That gives us the leverage we already experience in London and Gibraltar with that 10% RevPAR premium, which really helps drive the financial engine for us. It's extraordinary, but it isn't because we're lucky. It's because we are engineered.
We've learned the lessons, we know how to do it. We're going to only get better and stronger as we go forward into the future. I think that's it, right? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think so.
Is that it?
Yeah, I think that's it.
That was wonderful. I'm going to ask you to stay here.
Okay
that I can ask you a few questions.
All righty.
Yes. That was great. One of the things that you mentioned, Dale, was the cost per key advantage. With your experience across Hyatt and Ritz-Carlton, how do conventional hotel developers react when they hear what Sunborn spends per room?
Well, as I mentioned earlier, I think it's incredibly favorable because one of the biggest hurdles when you're looking to pencil a new development is what's the investment? What's it going to cost to the developer? This idea of creating a more efficient mousetrap, as it were, especially numbering the type of experience we're able to deliver per key, investors have been quite responsive. I know I certainly was when I first learned about it.
Excellent. Thank you. One more question for you, Dale. At this stage of your career, what do you find so compelling about Sunborn that it brought you here to Finland today?
Well, when you've done everything, and I have done everything, the next thing's got to be super sexy and exciting. When I heard about this and learned about it years ago and had the opportunity to join Hans on this journey, I was like, "Okay, I may be semi-retired. I may be looking for the next thing." I didn't really want to go this hard, but it's such an exciting opportunity. Finland's such a beautiful country, and right now this is a great place to be. I had to get out of South Florida.
Thank you. Thank you. That was wonderful.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
We're going to move to our next speaker, Jenni Saario. Yes, we had a long conversation about whether it was Jenny the English way or Jenni the Finnish way. Sunborn International's Chief Financial Officer, Jenni, is going to share the 2025 financial results and give us a clear, grounded picture of where the company stands financially today. Welcome, Jenni.
Thank you, Katja. My name is Jenni Saario, and I'm the CFO of Sunborn International Group. We have heard today about the future plans and development projects of the company. I will provide you an update or overview of the financial performance 2025. Sunborn International Group was listed in Nasdaq Helsinki in the end of April 2025. Therefore, the financial figures for 2025 also covers the group figures only for eight months, from May until December 2025. We have reported EUR 19.1 million revenues, and EBITDA was EUR 6.3 million, generating 33% EBITDA margin. Still, we want to provide you the full year figures as it represents the full year basis for the year-on-year comparison for the future. For the full year, the revenue would be EUR 26.7 million and the EBITDA EUR 7.4 million, generating EBITDA margin 28%.
Also, one important thing to remember when reading our figures are the translation rates or the euro GBP rate, because it has huge impact on the revenues year-on-year. For example, 2024 figures were much better because of the great exchange rate compared to 2025 figures, it has been even more, like EUR 28 million almost, if it had been the same rate than it was in the end of 2024. Then about the operating performance. We have the London Yacht Hotel next to the London Exhibition Center, ExCeL, and for that reason, the ExCeL calendar, the exhibition calendar, affects a lot to our revenue in London. 2025 there was a DSEI event, which is Defense and Security sector exhibition. It has materially impact, especially on September monthly revenue. 2024, there were quite a lot of major events as well.
In 2025, DSEI was the almost only major event there. It's highly affected by the ExCeL calendar variations year-on-year. Despite the four percent year-on-year growth in London, the EBITDA decreased from 33% to 31%, so two percentage points. Gibraltar performed extremely well in 2025. It was the fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth, both in revenue and in EBITDA. Still, the EBITDA margin grow only from 22% to 27%, so five percentage points. Well, we have a cost program in Gibraltar. Even that the EBITDA grew 33% year-on-year, we still have cost savings to do in Gibraltar to manage the good EBITDA level. On the balance sheet side, in 2025, the total assets were EUR 175.3 million. It's also affected by the euro-pound foreign exchange rate, as the huge assets in Gibraltar are in Gibraltar. Gibraltar has recorded them in pounds.
Total equity was EUR 80.3 million. Equity ratio, 45.8%, and maturing EUR 71.4 million from our bonds. The London bond is EUR 24.5 million, and the maturity of it has been extended from January 2026 until February 2027, so a one-year extension. The bond in Gibraltar has finally refinanced in, was it 18th May, this year? Now we have a bank financing, very competitive, EUR 62.5 million. It is for three years, and we have a two-year extension option. The mooring agreement is also extended until 2060. Well, here is the financial foundation. We have generated good EBITDA margin, 33% over the eight-month period, 2025. Equity ratio, almost 46%. The Gibraltar refinancing is completed. That is the important part. The London bond is extended. Yes. That is the platform for the development program, future plans.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jenni. That was wonderful. Now, we are going to move to actually starting the wrap-up for our Capital Markets Day for Sunborn International. To do that, I am going to invite CEO Hans Niemi back to the stage to ask him a few more questions. Back, Hans.
Thank you.
I'm going to ask you a few questions, and then I will open up the floor if you have any final comments that you want to make.
anything you feel we haven't covered. Hans, the hook, if you had 30 seconds with someone standing on a city waterfront and you wanted them to understand Sunborn, what would you point at and what would you say?
Don't time me. I would say that we have a company that is engaged in a pioneering product that has global scalability, has a lot of competitive advantages, in terms of cost of production, time to market, the wealth of locations that we can go with our products in the world, and an experiential hospitality product. It stacks up in so multiple fronts. It is a growth company. There's no end in sight to how much we can grow. It's really the bottlenecking of capital raising and resource for opening. I think we have those lined up. We have a great team in the company that has been doing this for a long time. We're reinforcing our team with new members that we are sure that will deliver the promise to our investors.
It is really the tip of the iceberg, as far as we're concerned. We're just getting started.
Thank you. The opportunity, speaking of icebergs, prime waterfront in major cities is structurally underutilized, and Sunborn has the unique model to unlock it. Just how big is this opportunity, and are we really only at the beginning?
As I sort of mentioned, the historical connotations of ports and marinas is stemming from the fact that it was sea trade that piped the world for centuries. Now these waterfront locations in multiple cities have moved their industrial ports further away from the city center. You have a lot of prime real estate available, but these are not suitable for permanent landside development. I think the opportunity is really humongous. We're only keying for the metropolitan cities, the most relevant prime real estate sites in the world. This concept doesn't necessarily make sense everywhere where you have water and a port, clearly. We're going to be very carefully analyzing where this product works and where it doesn't, what are the priority locations for the company. The world is a big opportunity, and I don't think we can ever fulfill those shoes.
Speaking of opportunity, let's move to why us, why now? You have high ambitions for Sunborn. You've brought in Dale to lead growth, and you're working with major partners like Ledcor in Canada. How are you building the team and the platform to deliver and to scale beyond the first three projects?
Well, it's about building our team. It's about finding the right partnerships in technical development, in construction. Potentially in the future, certain of our locations could be operated by operating partners as well. That allows us to focus our attention into new products and whatnot. There are multiple partnerships that we're already engaged in, that are very meaningful for the company's development process and future plans. Then it's the financing platform and the legal and commercial agreements platform that allows us to do that, the planning and development platform in the various countries. So it's really built on those building blocks, and I think we have all of that covered at this time.
Next we're going to go to conviction on the raise. You're raising EUR 50 million for development equity today. In one sentence, why is this the right company, the right moment, and the right opportunity?
I don't know about one sentence, but I can try. It is the right time for it. We have listed this company earlier last year with the aim of creating the platform for the future fundraising. That is, in particular, why we have done this. We've already gone to the New York OTC market with the view of based on the soundings and appetite that we found in our North American investors that we've spoken to in various investor meetings in New York, in Miami, in Stockholm. There's a great appetite for this fundraise on an international base and also in the Nordic base where we've been engaged with the fixed income markets and equity for the last 15, 20 years. I think this is an international fundraise. The company's in its starting point.
The valuation of the company, I think, is very reasonable considering what we are about to do and what we believe in. So that's a reason to explore the investment into this company.
For closing vision, looking 10 years ahead, how many hotels, in what kind of cities, and what kind of company is Sunborn by then? What does success look like for the people who back you today?
Well, not to nail myself to the wall, since this is recorded. I do believe that we will have a fleet of operations across the key cities. We're talking about multiple properties, multiplication of our operations and our team and our capabilities. I would be disappointed if we're not running at least six to eight hotels.
Excellent. For final words, is there anything that you want to add?
Well, I think the world is in a turmoil at the moment. We have a product that is very fitting, de-risking what normally is considered one of the hardest points of real estate development is that you can't move them. We've cracked how to finance them. We've explored the market and our investors to find the right framework for financing. We've convinced cutting-edge leading cities in the world and their leaders that this is a product that makes sense. There's a great interest in this company, and we are, as leaders and owners of this company, very committed to delivering this vision that we have for the company. We welcome you to join the ride.
Thanks, Hans. Thank you to all of our speakers today, Andrew Shaw, Dale Hipsh, Jenni Saario, Xavier Valero, Jakob Eliasson, and Andrew Voysey, who joined us remotely from Vancouver. Thank you to all of you, our audience, for your time and attention. This has been the first ever Sunborn International Capital Markets Day. We hope we've given you the inside track on one of the most interesting opportunities in floating real estate today. Take care, safe travels, and have a good afternoon. Thank you.
Thank you, Katja.