Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the live webcast of the Swire Pacific 2021 Final Results Analyst Briefing. Joining us at the briefing today we have Mr. Guy Bradley, Chairman of Swire Pacific, Mr. Martin Murray, Finance Director of Swire Pacific, and Ms. Karen So, Managing Director of Swire Coca-Cola. Before we go through a detailed look at our results for 2021, we'd like to show you a short video highlighting Swire Pacific's key developments and achievements in 2021. Meanwhile, you're welcome to submit your questions by clicking the Q&A box at the bottom of the window. Please provide your questions in English with no more than two questions at a time. Hope you enjoy the video. May I now invite Guy, Martin, and Karen to take us through a detailed look at our results for 2021. Over to you, Guy, please.
Thank you, Donna. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on a Thursday evening as we try to put a bit more color here on the annual results that came out today and the media and press announcements. Let me dive straight into the presentation. Hopefully we'll share the workload here between myself, Martin, and Karen. We'll get through the charts and then we'll look forward to some questions and answers at the end in the usual format. The highlights of 2021 are here. I will touch on all of them as we go through, essentially focusing on three core businesses of property, beverages and aviation, exiting marine services, and starting to invest in healthcare in the Chinese mainland. The key thing here is focus for us.
In terms of the profit, you can see the turnaround versus the prior year, both on the underlying profit basis and the recurring underlying profit. The numbers, the swing, versus 2020 has been quite good, just demonstrating the resilience, I think, of the businesses that we're in. The highlights between the three core divisions here. You can see property holding its own, year -on -year. Beverages had a remarkable year in 2021, growing their profits by 23% to HKD 2.5 billion, an all-time record for beverages. Aviation had a very good second half, as you can see here, which meant that the overall year result was 70% better than the prior year. All three core divisions, delivering for us in 2021.
Balance sheet is very strong. Martin will cover that in a few minutes time. I would just like to point out a couple of things here. The gearing ratio at 11.9% is pretty low. If we were to gear up to a level at 30%, that would free up about HKD 59 billion worth of capital for us to deploy in some of these growth areas. I think there's plenty of room on the balance sheet for increased investment. The dividends there, again, HKD 2.60 a share, versus HKD 1.70 the year before. It's a 53% increase, and I think Martin will get into a bit more detail there with the new policy.
Turning to the actual strategy here. Of course, you heard when we spoke to the media that the corporate strategy that we've been on now for a while is to drive investment in the three core divisions. In the property division, we aim to invest HKD 100 billion over the next 10 years, which is a large amount of commitment towards property. Swire Coca-Cola will continue to invest and will seek to expand territories to increase the growth rate there in what's been a really successful business for us. HAECO investing HKD 5.5 billion in relocating their facility in Xiamen to somewhere near the new airport.
As you probably know by now, in healthcare, we've allocated HKD 20 billion to invest in this new sector in the Chinese mainland over the next 10 years. I just thought you'd be interested at the bottom there to see what we've already committed to in terms of capital. You can see the number there, HKD 55 billion is not a small number. In terms of major projects that are underway, there's quite a lot going on, not just in property, but also in the beverage business, in aviation, and in the new businesses that we're trying to target to go after consumer spending in the Chinese mainland.
In order to do a lot of this new investment, of course, we a lso, the other part of the strategy is to divest our non-core businesses and to recycle some of that capital through to fund some of the growth that we want to do in areas that we wanna be in. You can see here the list of divestments for 2021. It's a pretty good list. Continuing on the previous year or two where we've been doing larger office building divestments, where they were non-core. What we've done in 2021, we've disposed the equity interest in Cadeler, our renewable energy business. We sold our interest in Hongkong United Dockyards. SPO down at the bottom there, meaning that we're now out of marine.
In the property side, we've continued to dispose of non-core assets like the Tai Kwun car parks, the EAST Miami hotel, and some land that we've been sitting on in Fort Lauderdale. In terms of sustainability and ESG, the key message here is that we want you to know that we take this subject very seriously. Our biggest imprint on the world is on climate. We set a target, which is quite aggressive, of 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The baseline being 2018, we're already 12% decreased in terms of Scope 1 and Scope 2. We're on the way to that target, and we're pushing it very hard. Some of the other targets are on there, involving waste water.
I'd like to also flag the people target in terms of diversity. We want to have 30% of our senior managers as women by 2024, and we're already a quarter female in that cadre. I think we're nearly there. It'd be nice to push that a bit harder, and I think we will. In terms of the communities, you know, it's a big part of what we do as a responsible member of the community is support that community.
You can see with the launch of Trust Tomorrow, in the last couple of years, we've put HKD 150 million behind the campaign to support in the form of 50 grants and 1.6 million beneficiaries, mostly in Hong Kong. Tremendous support there, and this campaign is ongoing. I'm now going to do what I said I'd do, which is hand over to Martin Murray for some detailed financial performance slides, and then I'll come back with Karen and talk about the business review. Martin?
Thank you, Chairman. Swire Pacific performed well during 2021 despite the continuing impact of COVID-19. An improved performance for most of the divisions ended up with the recurring underlying profit showing there at HKD 4.9 billion against a loss last year of HKD 609 million. The consolidated profit attributable to shareholders was HKD 3.4 billion versus last year's loss of HKD 11 billion. The underlying profit, which principally adjusts for the value of the investment properties, was HKD 5.3 billion versus a loss of HKD 4 billion. There'll be more on those slides in a later slide. Just wanna highlight the 15% increase in revenue driven by the strong Swire Properties and Swire Coca-Cola performance.
The strong cash from operations of HKD 15 billion and a 53% increase in the dividend to HKD 2.6 per share. Next slide, please. Our stated aim is to deliver sustainable growth through sound return on equity over time. You can see the graph on the left there, we're still given COVID, we've still got a way to go to get back to where we want to be. The slide on the right, the step graph, shows the change in equity over the year. Solid results from Swire Properties. The record profit from Swire Coca-Cola. Reduced losses from SPO and Cathay Pacific. The remeasurement loss of HKD 1.6 billion on the sale of SPO.
The gain on the investment property sales, the Hong Kong investment valuation, and then we have, various others and translation in terms of the movement. Next slide, please. On the right-hand side there, that shows you the recurring underlying profit. Again, to just repeat the resilient performance there, you can see of Swire Properties, the record HKD 2.5 billion compared to the HKD 2 billion from Swire Beverages. The reduction you can see there from Cathay Pacific and Marine Services. The differences between the recurring and the underlying is in the non-recurring items, and you can see there the big one at the top is Swire Properties. The chairman mentioned the recycling of the Taikoo Shing car parks and the sale of EAST Miami, and also the smaller impairment charges in both Cathay Pacific and SPO. Next slide, please.
This again just repeats the step change, again, pointing out the substantial reduction in losses from Cathay Pacific, and also the big reduction in impairments from SPO and Cathay Pacific, partially offset by the decrease in gain 'cause we sold Cityplaza in 2020. Next slide, please. Again, just to emphasize the strong financial position, I mentioned the strong cash from operations of HKD 15 billion. The net debt remains at HKD 38 billion. Gearing is low at 11.9%. Our weighted average cost of debt at 3.2%, and 84% of our borrowing is fixed. Thank you. Next slide. We also have a very healthy liquidity position, which will enable us to execute on those pipeline projects.
We built up our liquidity in 2020, given the uncertainty of COVID-19, because our financing was actually cheap to HKD 70 billion, and we've now reduced it to HKD 55 billion. We have a very prudent maturity profile. Next slide. The chairman mentioned we did revise our dividend policy at the interims, so our new policy is to deliver sustainable growth in dividends and to pay out not less than half of our recurring underlying profit, excluding the results of Cathay Pacific, but including all dividends received from that company as part of the ordinary dividend over time. On the next slide, you can see that again has raised our dividend to HKD 2.6, a 52% increase, and something that we want to continue to increase over time. Thank you. That's that.
Thank you, Martin. Yeah. Thank you very much. Now the business review, starting with property. Apologies for any of you on the call who sat through the properties presentation. I'll try to make the duplication as little as possible, but there are some things here that are really important. So I don't really apologize for saying them again. So look, stable performance year -on -year, but I think the key highlights here in terms of Swire Properties and what they've got doing going on in the Chinese mainland, two successful openings in 2021, Taikoo Li Qiantan in the picture there on the top left, and the extension to Taikoo Li Sanlitun in Beijing. Those openings have set the company off in good stead.
Taikoo Li Qiantan was probably a record-breaking opening for us. Really interesting strategic investments. We told you about the second phase of INDIGO in Beijing, which is about an RMB 8 billion commitment from Swire Properties, up in Beijing there to build a decentralized office location to add on to the retail mall that is ONE INDIGO, and that's now underway. Ground is being broken, and we're very excited about the potential that has for being a decentralized office location, as you've seen us do down here in Hong Kong. The recent news, of course, which is tremendous, is the next fourth Taikoo Li project, which is gonna be in Xi'an.
The team are very excited about having another project where we can work with some heritage design and a really collaborative district government to help us to bring something really special to a very special city. Great news there for Swire Properties. Also exciting is actually the ability to revitalize the Zhangyuan compound right across from HKRI Taikoo Hui in Shanghai. When that gets finished and it be developed in phases, that's gonna be a superb complement to Taikoo Hui across the road and make for a really really powerful retail district in that part of Jing'an. Not to forget that we're actually trying to now promote the excellent Swire residential trading brand.
We've probably not done enough of that in the last few years, but we now currently have about 10 projects in our core markets underway, and the picture there shows the Chai Wan residential project that's already broken ground. Some exciting things going on the property side. I will skip this slide with the numbers because I think they've all been seen. The points on here for mainland China, I'd just like to flag again that if you look at the charts on the right, our biggest business as Swire Properties is Hong Kong office, and that's a 42% contributor to gross rental income.
If you go to the left of that, you can see the next biggest contributor in terms of gross rental income is the Chinese mainland retail, which is 30% now of our total. Our two biggest, you know, contributors are Hong Kong office and Chinese mainland retail, both of which have performed really well in difficult situations in the last year or two, and we think will continue to perform well going forward. This is some pictures, some images of some of the developments that I've mentioned. I'd just like to finish on property by showing you this. We talked about the $100 billion of capital that we're gonna allocate over the next 10 years.
This gives you a breakdown of the rough allocation split, by geography, and by sector. Half of the HKD 100 billion we want to put towards the Chinese Mainland, primarily to develop the exciting retail-led mixed-use projects that we've become famous for, under the two brand names, Taikoo Li and Taikoo Hui. On the right-hand side, for Hong Kong, we want to allocate about 30% of that money to continuing the expansion and reinvestment of our core asset locations, which are obviously in Taikoo Place and in Pacific Place, and there's a lot more work that we can do to make sure those centers become best in the world financial hubs.
Interestingly, the last bit here is the residential brand that I mentioned, where we think we can command a premium in many cases through our design and through our reputation for quality. We want to allocate about 20% of our future 10-year capital allocation to doing more of that. We want to do more of it not just in our home base of Hong Kong, but also in the Chinese Mainland and increasingly in Southeast Asia. At this point I'd like to invite Karen So to talk about the beverage story. Thank you.
Thank you, Guy. I would like to share with you the story in Swire Coca-Cola. We are very pleased to see the strong growth of our business in Swire Coca-Cola. In 2021, we hit a record profit of HKD 2.5 billion in 2021, which is an increase of 23% over last year. The growth was built on a strong foundation of continuous profit growth over the last four years. Our profit growth over the last four years was CAGR of 28%. In 2021, China's Mainland profit growth increased by 36%. The revenue in local currency increased by 15%, which is mainly driven by the relentless effort of our team in building distribution infrastructure, executing capability, and also our effective revenue management initiative.
Over to the U.S. side, which is our second-largest market, our profit in the U.S. increased by 24%. The revenue increased, reflecting our effort in price increase and also our strengthening of execution capability and also improvement of our product mix. Taiwan increased by 15%, and Hong Kong reduced slightly by 1%. Our overall revenue growth and operational efficiency is fueled by our digital innovation, and we continue to leverage on the successful integration of our franchise in the Chinese Mainland and the U.S.A. . Next slide, please. The total attributable profit in 2021 was HKD 2.549 billion, mainly contributed by our two largest markets, the Chinese Mainland and the U.S.A., which have respectively grown their profit by 36% and 24%.
You could look at the circle chart on the right-hand side, which shows you our split, a split of revenue by category. We have a full portfolio spreading across sparkling, juice, energy, water, tea, and a few others category which is relevant to our market. In terms of our market mix, Chinese Mainland and U.S.A . contribute majority of our revenue. Chinese Mainland contribute 57% and the U.S.A contribute 35%. Down at the bottom of the slide, you can see our financial data, and they are all very healthy. Revenue grew by 20% in Hong Kong dollar term, attributable profit by 23%, and our margin has improved. Next slide, please. We're seeing strong revenue growth and volume growth across all our key market. If you look at Chinese Mainland, our revenue grew by 15% in local currency term.
Hong Kong did a very good turnaround last year over the big hit in 2020 by COVID-19. Hong Kong grew revenue by 9%. Taiwan was slightly impacted by COVID-19 attack in the second half of the year, so our revenue growth was 2%. U.S. has really, really good, strong consumer demand, and the revenue grew by 15%. Our margin improved in all our key market, Chinese Mainland, Taiwan, and U.S.A.. Next slide, please. We remain very optimistic on the business outlook. Our revenue is expected to grow strongly in Chinese Mainland and the U.S. Taiwan is expected to continue to improve. However, we expect Hong Kong will continue to be challenged by the current COVID-19 outbreak. We will continue to invest for the future with significant investment in our digital tools capability, infrastructure, manufacturing facility, and capability of our team.
We will work closely with The Coca-Cola Company to continue to drive our portfolio and product innovation. We will drive profit growth with our focus on our margin management and also balancing the cost pressure with our revenue growth initiative. With that, I would like to hand over to Guy to continue to talk about our aviation business.
Right. Aviation. I'm not going to, again, spend long on this, specifically relating to Cathay, as you'll have heard all this yesterday. There you can see on the chart the numbers show what a great second half Cathay had, and the improvements of 74% year-on-year in terms of their profitability. What I would like to single out on there actually is the HAECO performance, where if you can see, in terms of attributable profit, they grew 310% versus prior year, which I think is a, you know, is a very laudable performance given the fact that the aviation industry here has been in such a difficult situation for that time. Well done. Well done, HAECO.
On this chart here, I think we really just wanted to show you the impact on flying and aviation here of the COVID situation. You can just see for yourselves that the difference of pre-pandemic, during pandemic is absolutely staggering, and it's been very difficult to keep the numbers going under these sorts of conditions. We expect those to not be for too much longer. In terms of Cathay Pacific, you heard that the capacity remains quite limited for various COVID-related restrictions imposed on the ability to fly cargo and passengers. In terms of the outlook, we expect an increase in monthly cash burn versus what we saw in the last half of 2021.
The good news is the liquidity remains at a healthy level to keep us going. I think the start of 2022 has been extremely challenging. Our capacity was constrained when quarantine requirements got tighter and travel restrictions are still pretty much endemic here. We're looking forward to those being lifted at some point this year. On the HAECO front, you can see that we've mentioned that HAECO has remained profitable despite the impact of COVID. The Hong Kong business did incur a loss given the fact that the demand for line maintenance had dropped and that's all linked with the ability to fly in and out of Hong Kong.
In the Americas, they managed to record an increase in profit and the profit of HAECO Xiamen increased when the demand for its base maintenance recovered gradually in the second half as some of the global travel started to pick up. Overall, HAECO has had a profitable year in 2021. Just quickly on healthcare, it's the new business that we want to do more of. I mentioned that we want to allocate about $20 billion by 2030 into this. This just reminds everybody what the strategy is. We're focused on premium and private healthcare services in the three big clusters of Jing-Jin-Ji, Yangtze River Delta, and the GBA. That's our, you know, core geography target.
We're looking at asset-based businesses which fit property development, but they also fit our management expertise in terms of services and service management. We are very, very keen on finding strong strategic partnerships with local expertise. That's the strategy. We've got off to a reasonable start. We own shares in five hospitals. We have six clinics and six elderly care homes. That's not too bad for, you know, the first 12 months or so of getting into this. We fully expect to do a lot more in this sector as it continues to grow. I'll just finish now in terms of the outlook, and I'll cut that both in terms of short-term and medium term.
In the short term, for Swire Properties, we think there's still good growth prospects coming out of the Chinese mainland, driven by retail. Hong Kong will continue to be impacted here, as we know, by the fifth wave of the pandemic. We hope that impact is not too many more months, but it's currently a difficult place to be in retail at the moment. Swire Coca-Cola, as Karen just said, strong growth is expected to continue from the Chinese mainland and the U.S.A.. However, we do want to point to rising commodity prices which may impact performance.
On the aviation side, Cathay Pacific remains impacted by COVID-19 restrictions, but we do expect a recovery from the second half of 2022, and HAECO ought to recover at some rate that's very similar with that, given that there's a link there with the line maintenance. Lastly, medium term-wise, we're confident that our future and our firm is good, and that we're firmly committed to both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. We've talked about the exciting investment opportunity pipeline in Greater China for properties, further leveraging the two brands, Taikoo Li and Taikoo Hui. We also want to increase the investment in Pacific Place and Taikoo Place. Swire Coca-Cola expects continued strong growth over the long, medium to long term in the Chinese mainland and the U.S.A..
In aviation, we are confident of the industry recovery and the return of Hong Kong Airport as a leading international aviation hub. Finally, with healthcare, we will continue to tap into this sector, which we see good growth in the Chinese mainland, and as I say, we're focusing on premium specialty hospitals, clinics and elderly care homes in those major cities. At that point, I think we'll pause and take some questions and answers please.
Thank you, Guy, Martin, and Karen. We'll now proceed to the Q&A session. Analysts are welcome to submit questions anytime by clicking the Q&A box at the bottom of the window. Please provide your questions in English with no more than two questions at a time. The first question is from Simon Zhang of Goldman Sachs. There are two parts to the questions. Firstly, the group has been very active in recycling capital by divesting non-core assets over the last two years. Where else do you see opportunities for further divestment? And are you feeling comfortable with the overall portfolio mix? Thank you.
Martin, do you want to take that?
Sure. Yeah. Well, we have been very active. I mean, Swire Properties has recycled HKD 43 billion, and we have, as we just mentioned, exited the marine services division, which does give us very low gearing. It's good to be seeing us investing in Xi'an and other big projects. There won't be significantly lower recycling of non-core assets. There's not much left in the portfolio that is at all material. It'll be more an investment outlook going forward.
Thank you, Guy and Martin. The follow-up question is for beverage business. We noticed quite a bit of a margin squeeze in the second half of 2021, perhaps due to higher raw material costs. Can you comment about the margin trends and your expectation in 2021 or 2022, given the course of inflationary pressure? Thank you.
Karen, please.
Sure. Thank you for the question. We are seeing a rising trend on our raw material. We have established a procurement policy and a steering committee to manage our fluctuation in our raw material costs, and we do use our pre-buy and hedging policy to minimize the risk as much as possible. We will continue to balance the impact of the raw material with our revenue growth initiative, and which including price increase whenever appropriate.
Thank you, Karen. One more follow-up question from Simon. About the HKD 20 billion investment budgeted for China healthcare industry, what would be roughly the speed to which the HKD 20 billion be deployed? And when would you anticipate these businesses to gain more meaningful scale? Thank you.
Well, the answer goes hand in hand, I think, to the two questions there. I mean, in terms of speed, we don't know at this point. What I can say is that we're trying to build a scale platform for the healthcare business, which argues for sooner rather than later. We need to find the right kind of platform, and as and when we do, we will allocate the amount of capital that we need to get into that platform, if not to buy it completely. You know, it's difficult to say at this point. We started off with some fairly small investments. I think we've ended up putting just under HKD 2 billion into the sector so far. The aim is to scale that up as fast as we possibly can.
Thank you, Guy. The next question is from Kyle Choi of Bank of America. There are two parts to the question. Firstly, Swire Properties is targeting a mid-single-digit percentage for year growth and dividend per share. Does management have any target for annual DPS growth for Swire Pacific? Or how long would it take to return DPS to peak level of over HKD 3 per share? Thank you.
Martin.
I think you mentioned the target of HKD 3 per share, and hopefully we'll get there as soon as possible. You know, we've taken out the volatility of the aviation business of Cathay Pacific into that dividend, and we no longer have the marine services division, which has been very volatile. We do hope that our core businesses with the strong outlook that Guy mentioned will get us to that very quickly.
Thank you, Martin. A quick addition from Kyle. What's the expected impact of a raw material cost increase on beverage division in 2020?
In 20?
2022, sorry.
2022. Karen.
Yes. Thank you. I guess the question is similar to the first one. Well, currently we're seeing the increasing trend of the raw material, in particular the key raw material that we're using, which is the PET aluminum can and also corn. We have established our procurement policy, and we do have a designated committee to manage the fluctuation of the raw material. We have quite a mature system to manage that, and we use pre-buy financial hedges to minimize the fluctuation. We continue in our system to use revenue growth management initiative, which is through a better product mix, better packaging mix to manage our revenue and margin to balance out the cost increase, which is also including price rises where appropriate.
Thank you, Karen. The next question is from Evan Lui of DBS Bank. Can we expect parental support to Cathay in case of further business decline? Thank you.
Well, as we said, at the press briefing, we are a long-term committed shareholder for Cathay Pacific. At the moment, their liquidity levels look pretty good. But our commitment is long-term. We like the business. We like the brands, the dual brand strategy that they've got. We think that Hong Kong International Airport as a hub for Southern China, you know, has some great future prospects ahead.
Thank you, Guy. The next question is from Thomas Naughton from Prusik. What do you think the impact on profits would be from the planned HKD 54 billion in investments that you've outlined? Thank you.
Martin.
Well, we obviously have our hurdle rates. As you say, the targets that we've set for properties is over 10 years and for the healthcare business is over five. As we continue to recycle, we expect our return on equity to improve back to historical levels, and we expect to hit our target dividend rates.
Thank you, Martin. The next question is from Tom Tang from Greenwood. The Swire Beverages division performs very well. Do you consider taking it to IPO and allow division with greater independence financing for the long-term expansion? Thank you.
Karen, do you want to have a go at that?
Martin, want to go for that?
Well, when we look at, obviously, everything's open book when we talk strategically, but there's absolutely no plans to list any of our businesses currently. There's a difficult time in Hong Kong and so, you know, we'll continue to explore on an annual basis or continually look at the structure of the business. There's absolutely no plans at the moment for listing beverages.
We continue to think that there's a lot of growth, good growth to be had in all our key markets for beverages. We'd like to try and realize some of that growth before we were thinking of things like that. We're interested in exploring, you know, new territories if the Coca-Cola Company brought those to us as well. There's two ways to grow. We'll grow our existing territories and business, and we're happy to look at expansive growth.
Thank you, all. The next question is from Thomas Naughton again from Prusik. Given that your share price is trading at HKD 45 compared to your book value of around HKD 175, you can buy your current investment portfolio at around a 75% discount to their value with no cost or due diligence required. Why would you not buy back shares at these levels? Thank you.
Martin.
Well, we do have a general mandate to buy back shares. We do consider it at various points in time. Obviously, at the current share price, it is something that we can consider. At the moment, there's a lot of investment opportunities, a lot of projects on the table. Again, it's part of the capital allocation strategy, and we will consider it.
Thank you, Martin. Another question from Chi-Hin Chang from Citigroup. Can you tell us the expected timeline for the completion of SPO's disposal? Thank you.
Martin, do you have a handle on that?
Well, the agreement was signed last night, and to completion, it'll be done over the next two, three months.
Okay. Thank you, Martin. Next question is from Ayi Yu from Citibank. From a three-year perspective, is the company's growth still mainly from real estate, and what is the biggest challenge? Thank you.
What is the biggest challenge in real estate? Is it?
Yes. Mainly from real estate.
Well, I think from a three-year forward-looking perspective, there's good growth coming out of Swire Coca-Cola as well as Swire Properties. Inasmuch as we can get the pandemic behind us, I think you're gonna see some very good growth coming out of aviation. It isn't all gonna be a Swire Properties growth story over the next three years. I'm hopeful that our three core divisions will benefit from that growth. One of the biggest challenges in growing Swire Properties, well, some of these projects are extremely big. They're big lump sum investments, and there's a lot of moving parts in terms of pulling them all together and making them world-class. Sometimes that takes time.
The biggest challenge is to try and take less time than they might. You know, we have a great team on the ground in the Chinese mainland. We've got a great team here in Hong Kong, and they've got lots of experience. We're getting better at that all the time.
Thank you, Guy. A follow-up question from Ayi Yu. The capital expenditure plan is to invest RMB 120 billion in Mainland China in 10 years. Is it difficult to increase the dividend ratio in the future? Thank you.
Well, I'll let Martin talk about the dividend ratio, but that HKD 120 billion isn't all in the Chinese mainland. I think if you refer back to some of the charts, you'll see that at least 30% of the HKD 100 billion will be allocating towards Hong Kong and about 20% to a range of markets across our residential trading brand. Martin?
To answer the question, no, we say we have a very low gearing, just over 10% at the moment. We can keep gearing, you know, up to, as the slide we mentioned, it was 30%. At the 30%, that gives us immediate cash ability of over HKD 50 billion. We've got plenty headroom in terms of our ongoing result. The cash we generate is very healthy. No, we think we can, we can make all those investments. We'll continue over that period to recycle some of the non-core assets, and that is an ongoing part of the strategy too. We see no impact on our target dividend outlook, if because of that, those investment targets.
Thank you, Guy and Martin. In the interest of time, we will take one more question before we wrap up. The last question is from Praveen of MS. What kind of return would you be looking for from the healthcare business? Say, in five years, if you have spent HKD 10 billion, would you be making 10% return or net profit of HKD 1 billion of net income or lower? Thank you.
This looks like Martin again.
Well, yes. We have our hurdle rates. We would be expecting those returns over time. The investment in healthcare is going to be staggered. As Guy mentioned, it takes five to eight years to build it from scratch, or we invest in a mature business already. That strategy is still to be determined. It will meet all our hurdle rates there that we currently have.
Thank you, Martin, Guy, and Karen. That concludes our analyst briefing. Thank you once again for joining us. Hope you have a good day. Thank you.