Hello, and welcome to the thirtieth Deutsche Bank Depositary Receipts and Virtual Investor Conference, DBVIC. My name is Zafar Aziz from the DR Investor Relations Advisory Team at Deutsche Bank. I'm pleased to announce that our next presentation will be from First Pacific. Before handing over to our presenter, some points to note. Please submit your questions at any time throughout the presentation. Finally, all of today's presentations will be recorded and can be accessed via the Deutsche Bank website, adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome our speaker from First Pacific.
Thank you very much, Zaf, and Deutsche Bank for hosting us, and Violex Digital for giving us the technical capacity to connect to all of you. I'm going to walk through a very long presentation. We've got about half an hour for this whole show, this means we can only touch upon a few slides that I regard as the most relevant. You will always be able to find the most up-to-date version of this presentation on our website, I urge you, if you would like to learn more about First Pacific, to study it fairly closely because I reckon inside those 58 or so pages, there is the answer to every question that I have ever heard in my 16 years over at First Pacific. Okay. Let's begin.
When you download that document, anything that looks underlined and in blue, that's a link that you can click on. Sometimes it's to external websites for further information. To remind us all what is First Pacific, we're a holding company, stock code 142 HK, listed again in Hong Kong. These are the logos of some of our most important assets that we're invested in. We generally stick to four areas of the economy, and we color-code them throughout this presentation: consumer food products, infrastructure, telecommunications, and natural resources. Under consumer food products, we own a majority of Indofood, the world's biggest maker of wheat-based instant noodles, personally, one of my own very favorite companies. Under infrastructure, we own 49.9% of Metro Pacific Investments.
That's a company we delisted from the Philippine Stock Exchange about two and a half years ago, and it is a big or controlling investor in many of the most important companies in the Philippines, such as Meralco, the biggest electricity distributor, and its 100% owned subsidiary, MGen, which is fast rolling out natural gas powered and solar generation capacity, which will be going forward a big driver of earnings growth there. PacificLight Power is an LNG-fueled power plant company in Singapore, and they've already got a second fast start reactor, and they're building another natural gas plant to go online in 2029. That's a company that performs very well and has a bright future.
Under telecommunications, PLDT's got largest market share in fixed line, little under half of wireless and maybe 70% or so in the data center space. Its 100% owned subsidiary Smart is its mobile telecommunications brand, and Maya is its 38% owned digital bank. The talk in Manila is that sometime in the next year and a half, they will IPO this digital bank, which has been growing very, very fast, and I will touch upon it a little later on.
Under natural resources, our 46% owned Philex Mining Corporation is in the next few weeks or couple months going to open a brand-new gold and copper mine down in the south of the Philippines in Mindanao, while continuing to extract copper and gold from its 60-year-old mine called Padcal up in the north in Luzon. IndoAgri is the plantations holding company underneath Indofood, which supplies palm oil for the instant noodles business and for selling in wholesale and retail market to folks as cooking oil. At the end of 2025, what we owned looked a bit like this, $5.3 billion. The biggest asset, as you can see, is Indofood, followed by looks like MPIC, then PLDT, then the Philex Group, and then PLP.
We've had a pretty good decent run, as you can see. Since the end of 2003, we've had CAGR of 7% in our gross asset value, and we've had a CAGR of 15% in the dividend income that we get. Perhaps the most important bullet point in this entire presentation is the last one on this page. We are confident of continuing earnings growth over the short to medium term in our companies. I'm going to jump ahead to a particular little slide to explain our confidence. Here we go. This is page seven of the presentation. On the left-hand side, you can see our profit and exchange rates of our two main currencies, the Philippine peso and the Indonesia rupiah, set to 100 in 2018.
This line chart displays how they've changed over the following seven or eight years to the end of 2025. As you can see, the peso's down 14% over that period, and the rupee is down 11%. This really is the illustration of the concern people have about investing into emerging markets, FX risk. As you can see, they are down over those several years, but look at our profit. This is a U.S. dollar figure over the same period. It's up more than 2.5 x. If you ask yourself, "What's going on here?" The International Monetary Fund has kind of an answer for you, and that's illustrated in the chart on the bottom right. We've taken the data from their World Economic Outlook of last October.
They've updated it earlier this month. We haven't had a chance to put those numbers into our presentation. As you can see, the IMF is forecasting that these economies of Indonesia and the Philippines will double in size in the 10 years from 2020. Let's go back to our regular programming. Over the full year of 2025, we established for the nth year in a row some very good strong records. We've got a 7th year in a row of earnings growth. The past five have been successive record highs. Our dividend policy, very important to shareholders, is a progressive one, which means every year we commit to giving you more money than we gave you last year. The distribution for 2025 was at a record high on a per share basis.
Given that our policy is every year it will be bigger, you can expect that every year is going to be a successive record high. If we look at the middle graphic here, what was responsible for the big jump in our recurring profit? 10% in 2025. Very well done. From $673 million to $740 million. As you can see in that middle chart, PLP's contribution declined a bit. That's our power plant in Singapore, and so did the phone company. Very interesting. We'll drill into that number. Then a little bit more from Philex, our mining company. Thank you, high gold prices. Lower spending at head office, mostly because of interest, I believe, off the top of my head.
Indofood and WOW, MPIC is responsible for the lion's share of the increase in our profit in 2025. We'll drill into those companies as time goes by. Our cash flow is displayed in a column chart at the bottom of this page. You can see we began the year with $121 million, about $311 million of dividend and fee income. Look, the biggest outgoing, of course, is money handed straight back to our shareholders. Of course, our interest bill, which up until recent events in the Middle East, we expected would be declining. If interest rates are going up, that interest bill is not gonna go down. Details on the next page. We invested some new money into our Singapore power plant.
That's the 46.4 you see there. That's to take care of our portion of the equity contribution to the construction cost of that power plant. Then we got some overheads and stuff like that. Now, we have got two investment-grade credit ratings from Moody's and S&P, and we've had those investment-grade ratings for three, maybe four years or so now. The column chart at the top left of this page shows our maturity profile. As you can see, we have nothing falling due until September 2027, when our only outstanding bond matures. It is our preference, in the year and a half until then, to refinance it with a new bond offering.
If you look down at the pie charts at the bottom of this page, you can see that bank loans make up about three-quarters or more of all of our borrowings, and the bond is a little less than a quarter. We generally have a preference for a 50-50 split, and it looks like this today because that's what the market has been dictating in recent years. It's just been cheaper to go with the bank loans. In any case, as you can see in that other pie chart, the fixed and floating ratio is pretty close to 50-50. Now, bottom right, we've got our dividend income. Over the past few years, 2023 was a record high, thanks to a maiden contribution from PLP in Singapore.
For 2024, 2025, comfortably over $300 million, and that's kind of a level that we're getting used to. Our interest coverage ratio is the first measure we look to when we consider how comfortable we are with our cash flows and balance sheet. At 4.5 x, we feel pretty well set. Our gross debt is a bit under $1.5 billion, as you see described on the right-hand side. Net debt, about $1.3 billion. Average maturity is quite short, 3.2 years. If we come back and speak to each other in a year and a half, and we've issued a new bond, then that 3.2 years is going to be a much greater number.
Very important to understand, of all the companies that we're invested in, we guarantee none of their borrowings. None of them have any recourse whatsoever to First Pacific. No guarantees, nothing like that. In the many pages of this booklet, you will see described some borrowing figures for all of these companies, and you can take it on faith that all of these numbers are what you get. We don't mess around with anything off balance sheet or troublesome like that. Let's go on to the companies very quickly because we're already 12 minutes into this presentation. Indofood saw record high sales, record high core profit, it was an increase of only 1%. The consumer-branded products business, which is inside separately listed ICBP, also had record high sales.
Frankly, that small growth in profit was driven by the agribusiness and to a lesser extent, by the flour business. That is hinted at in the EBIT margins that you see in the bottom right here. The noodles margin fell a little bit. Bogasari is our wheat and flour business. Their margins increased by about 0.7 percentage point. Agribusiness stayed strong. Those were the guys driving most of the earnings at Indofood. Very quickly, ICBP, that is 80% owned by Indofood, separately listed in Jakarta. As you can see, record high sales. Core profit was down a bit because they had a big increase in cost of goods sold.
Looking ahead for Indofood and ICBP, over the medium term we expect demand for instant noodles to have steady upward pressure and we're confident that we'll return to a path of, generally speaking, earnings growth over the medium term. We're gonna skip over to MPIC, which is itself a little bit of a complicated company. In the pie chart that we showed you on earlier in this presentation, we value our 49.9% of MPIC at $1.3 billion and that is because it's the valuation it had when it was privatized, delisted in October 2023. Many of the assets it owns are listed such as Meralco, that's listed in Manila. MPIC has about 48% of that. I described it earlier. MPTC, which we own about 93% of, is the biggest privately owned toll road operator in all of Southeast Asia.
There are some toll road operators which are bigger, but they're government owned or controlled. Maynilad is the biggest water company in the Philippines if you're going by number of customers. They've got about 1.6 million customers there. The hospitals business which we began building up I think in 2008 with one hospital is now up to 29. Several years ago we sold down to 20%, selling 80% to KKR, some big investors, and to GIC of Singapore. We've got some other investments in MPIC, but they are negligible contributors as we can see here on this, on a subsequent slide, pardon me. MPIC, as you can see, we own 49.9% and it's about a quarter of our gross asset value as measured at that price of $1.3 billion.
Now later on in this presentation you can see that analysts at CLSA and Citi have much higher numbers for the valuation of MPIC and we will get to that. Let's have a quick look at their earnings. As you can see in the pie chart, Meralco, the power company, generates the lion's share of the contribution to profit growth and as you can see the change in the contribution in 2025, the increase was driven by Meralco followed by the water business, others. Toll roads was a very tiny increase, and that's to a great extent because we reduced our stake in it from 100% to I think it's 93.3% or 93.6%.
Because these are utilities we feel that MPIC is a very defensive company to be invested in and as you can see in the earnings column chart on the bottom right that it's had steady increase in earnings since a low point owing to the pandemic crisis several years ago. And we expect over the medium term good continuing strong growth from MPIC. Now that's all we're gonna say about MPIC earnings and those of its companies because we've got a very condensed timeline here. I do invite you please to look over this presentation in some detail and then come back to me with any questions that you might have.
Now over to PLDT, which we regard as the biggest telco in the Philippines with its big market shares in fixed and data centers and also in the mobile space. Service revenues every year keep going up to a record high and as you can see in the breakdown there, data is an important part of those revenues. Data consumption grows ever higher every single year. I suppose that's true about most telco markets, and it's definitely true about the Philippines. But it's competitive and people on a unit basis are paying, generally speaking, less for data every year as time goes by. Wonderful if you're a consumer, bit tough if you're a telco. EBITDA itself was up at a record high, up 3%. Core profit was up by 1%, so that's similar to the Indofood performance, isn't it?
That is because of a big contribution from Maya. What is Maya? Maya is a digital bank. It has a banking license from the BSP, the Central Bank of the Philippines, and it is the only telco-owned fintech to have a banking license and I regard it as an extremely exciting company. PLDT is in many ways a typical telco offering you an excellent dividend yield year in, year out, and generally not having the kind of fast growth that you would expect from other kinds of investments. For example, Maya. Let's have a look at what's going on there. Maya shareholdings are down in the fine print at the bottom and they're a very, very good list to have if you're talking about a fintech. Tencent of China owns 15% and KKR previously mentioned, they own 30%.
The management team that we've had at Maya for the past few years has really done a quite impressive job. I mean, look at the number of bank depositors we've got. We're up to more than 10 million depositors rising very fast over the past few years. Deposit balance showing a similar rate of increase. Loans outstanding, very high growth to maybe 40%-45% proportion of all the deposits that we have outstanding. Now, you know instantly that this is an emerging market business because the net interest margin, and that's the difference between the cost of money when we lend it out and the price of money when we pay our depositors to put their money into Maya. It's 20% net interest margin.
If I'm giving you 10% on your deposit, the implication is I'm charging someone 30% on their loan. When you think that's quite a scary-looking number, you have to consider that this is a market where half, maybe 70% of all the adults don't have a bank account. Borrowing is, has been in the informal economy, which can be rather less pleasant, shall we say, than borrowing from a bank. Maya seems to be performing pretty well on that score because the gross non-performing loan percentage, as you can see, is at a healthy 6.1%, and I believe that is lower or very comparable to the long-established brick-and-mortar banks that we have in the Philippines.
I think I may have mentioned Maya is expected by many to have an IPO in the next year or year and a half. I believe it's CLSA who recently issued a research report on fintech in the Philippines, and they put a valuation of $2 billion on Maya, which compares quite curiously with the market capitalization of its 38% owned parent PLDT, which is about $4.6 billion. Let's go to PLP , which is our power plant in Singapore. They had a terrific year in 2023, then the market tightened up a little bit and it's more competitive, more power plants coming online, and it is a little bit less profitable than that record-setting year of 2023.
It is a strong payer of dividends to us, and we're very pleased, and we're very happy to be contributing some of our cash flow towards construction of that new 670 MW power project, which will come online in a few years' time. I confess I'm a little bit of a gold bug. Philex Mining, we've got an economic interest of about 46% in this copper and gold mining company. If you look at the statistics here, it's not terribly impressive. You can see, the operating cost to produce 1 ounce of gold was two and a half thousand dollars last year. That's pretty doggone expensive until you understand declined from much better levels of decades past. Gold price has been healthily above two and a half thousand dollars an ounce.
It will open into commercial production over the next few weeks or months. That's called Silangan. The grades, you can compare them on these two pages, of gold and copper are much higher at Silangan. It's a very exciting project. I can't wait for them to open commercial operations. Once things get matched, looking forward to taking a handful of fund managers, if they're interested, down deep into that mine to see how it's all working. Initial production is set to be 2,000 tons of ore being processed every single day. Now we're 22 minutes into this presentation. Let's talk about some valuation thoughts. Now NAV per share over the past few years has increased, as you can see, on this column chart. We've got data from the end of 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
That's one, two, three, four years of data of the value of First Pacific. These numbers for Indofood, PLDT, MPIC, et cetera, these are valuations of the stakes we own in those companies. At the closing stock market price of December 31, 2022, our 50.05% of Indofood was worth about $1.9 billion. That's how these numbers are working for those assets of ours which are listed. FPM Power, you can see it was $150 million, then up to $370, $370, and then $400. We generally value our stake in PLP, 42% interest, at the money that we've put into it. Certainly in the past three years, we've done that. We put in a little more this year.
That's why it went from 374 to 400. MPIC, we value again at that privatization price around $1.3 million. With the improvement in our share price, you can see our NAV discount, the very bottom number here, has tumbled from 60% to 17%. Let's have a look at who covers us. We've got three analysts in mainland China covering us, and if you read Putonghua, send me a note, and I'll forward you their research. In the English language, it's Citi and CLSA. Citi and CLSA, as you can see in these blued-out numbers, they value MPIC at a much higher level than we do. Ours is $1.3. That is because the assets under MPIC, well, Meralco is listed separately, and its market cap is around $12 billion.
First Pacific has an economic interest there of about a quarter. Our stake in Meralco, HKD 3 billion, is already more than two times how we value our stake in MPIC. You can see that these analysts they've got some pretty solid grounds for their higher valuations of MPIC, and these feed down into their price targets of HKD 7.30 at Citi and HKD 7.20 at CLSA. These are Hong Kong dollar numbers. Now we've hit the 25-minute mark, and I need to give you folks an opportunity to ask some questions. Please go ahead and type those in, and I'm going to move to a very important page, which is a page that shows our economic interest in all of the assets underneath us. Please send your questions to me.
Okay, sorry, I needed to click on a button to see what's going on. Someone's asking me to recommend a broker for First Pacific shares. I can't. I'm so sorry. I have no idea. Our gold mine was scheduled to open in the first quarter. That has ended, it's still not open. My understanding is there are some deliveries and construction running a little bit late. I think it's only gonna be a couple of months or so, not something at all that I worry about. Another correspondent asks what I think the market is missing about First Pacific. Well, I think a lot of the market isn't as understanding of what we are as we would prefer, hence our very strong efforts at investor outreach.
For many people, our liquidity isn't what they would like. Our market cap is smaller than they would want to have. For still others, they would rather not get a basket of emerging Asia stocks when they buy First Pacific, but to pick and choose their own. You know, if they don't want a food company, they would go in and buy PLDT direct or Meralco direct. I think that's what's going on. With a big increase in equity analyst coverage from mainland China, we expect that group of shareholders to increase beyond where they are now. This page in our book we update from time to time.
As you can see, China Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation, a lot more fund managers based in mainland China, own First Pacific now than they did a few years ago. I think that number's gonna keep growing over time. Another question asks about the balance between new deals, debt reduction, dividends, and buybacks. Let's go backwards from that. Buybacks. In an environment of rising share price, I don't even dare bring up buybacks to the board of directors because why make new shareholders compete for our shares and then pay a higher number? Our dividend policy was, back in the day, linked to our recurring profit, but our profit was going through much faster growth in our cash income, hence the change to a progressive dividend policy where it's a flat commitment to higher every year.
Regarding debt reduction, we've had the same level of debt pretty much unchanged for the past several years. Simply we're comfortable with where it is. We're not looking currently either to increase debt or reduce debt. The last item, new deals. You'll have seen in recent history that those have been done mostly at the operating company level, not at First Pacific level, and that's likely to continue to be true going forward. With several years of record profit, record dividends, and investment grade ratings reaffirmed, do you feel First Pacific is now in position to step up capital returns even more? Well, frankly, yeah. Every single year we're committed to giving you a higher dividend than in the previous year. That pretty much is where we sit on that.
For those of you who want to ask a question offline, please send me an email. You can WhatsApp me. My WhatsApp number is at the very back of this presentation. Keep checking back from time to time because we do update this. Next update we'll probably have an end-March shareholder breakdown. I'm very grateful to all of you for attending this presentation and again to the folks behind it who've allowed us to present to all of you. I urge you all to reach out, keep your eye on First Pacific. In my 16 years at this company, I've never been so happy or excited to be doing the job that I have. Thank you very much, investor community, for making this a very fun experience. Have a great day, everybody.