Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Shui On Land's 2025 Interim Results Analyst Briefing. Thank you very much for joining us online this evening. We're pleased to have five members of the senior management team with us today: Mr. Vincent Lo, our Chairman; Ms. Stephanie Lo, our Vice Chairman; Mr. Douglas Sung, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Shui On Land; Ms. Jessica Wang, Chief Executive Officer of Shui On Land; and Mr. Allan Zhang, Chief Executive Officer of Shui On Xintiandi. We will start with a presentation by the management, followed by Q&A. During the course of the webcast, you may submit your questions via the webcast portal, and they will be conveyed to our management during the Q&A session. Without further ado, may I please invite Mr. Lo to start with some opening remarks? Mr. Lo, please.
Good evening, everybody. We all know the macro picture is not very attractive. And, you know, with geopolitical uncertainties, and then Donald Trump's trade war, tariffs, and then because of the uncertain economic outlook for the world and for China, consumer confidence has been affected. And for our industry, I think the liquidity concern is a major consideration for ourselves because basically the finance market is almost shut. And then also the undergoing property sector adjustment is not finished yet. And so in the first half, I think it's quite remarkable that we can maintain our profitability, and we have really committed ourselves to the strong capital management. And then we have fully met all our financial obligations in the past two, three years. And then our investment portfolio, both the office and the retail sector, have shown encouraging performance.
We have made good progress in our asset-light strategy, which my colleagues will share in more detail with you later on.
Thank you, Chairman, for the opening remarks. Thanks for joining, everyone. This is Stephanie. I can start with just giving you a highlight of the first half results in 2025. Despite a very turbulent market landscape, the group secured a profit of CNY 81 million in the first six months, with profit attributable to shareholders of CNY 51 million. Excluding the decrease in fair value of investment properties, the group's core earnings rose by 144% year on year to CNY 263 million, reflecting our strong operations and strong strategic focus. In terms of our commercial portfolio, our total rental and related income increased slightly to CNY 1.7 billion. Our retail portfolio showed very strong shopper traffic and retail sales growth, both at 10.5%, which, considering the market backdrop, is a real challenge and feat to our operational team.
In terms of our capital management, we continue to be very prudent in our capital management strategy. We fully repaid our $490 million senior notes in March earlier this year. Our net gearing ratio stands very stable at 51%. In terms of a new project acquisition, we partnered with Tian An to acquire a site that was owned by Yongye, right next to the Greater Xintiandi community, right next to Lakeville 6. This is a great new addition to our high-end residential land bank and will continue to allow us to further develop our Lakeville brand across Shanghai. In terms of sustainability, despite the market conditions, we continue to plow forward in our efforts there. We were named CDP's 2024 Climate Change A-list, one of the only real estate mainland companies on that list.
Panlong Tiandi won the 2025 ULI Asia Pacific Award for Excellence, honored for its outstanding innovation, community impact, and excellence in architecture planning and sustainability. Lastly, CXCC, which is actually a new commercial project that will open later this year within Shanghai Xintiandi's greater Xintiandi community. T1 and T2, which are our two large office buildings, achieved LEED core and shell platinum, and CA5 neighboring that achieved LEED operations and maintenance platinum. We continue to push forward in all of our sustainability efforts. A few points about the China property market. As the Chairman mentioned, the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment remains very turbulent. The property market continues to remain very challenging.
Despite weakened consumer confidence, national property sales volume and value both decreased by 3.5% and 5.5% year on year, respectively, showing quite a fundamental shift in the housing market's supply and demand dynamics. While this is worrying, there are still some bright spots. For instance, within Shanghai, the luxury property segment, residential property segment, remains strong. Demand remains extremely resilient, and this is an area where we think that we can continue to further develop and continue to land bank. The central government's meeting in July underscored the goal of high-quality housing with a focus on urban renewal, urban village redevelopment, as well as building green infrastructure and smart cities. Again, I think this is actually playing into our competitive advantage. We are very much known for our urban renewal expertise and the ability to develop, you know, sustainable premium urban communities.
So I hope that this will continue to be able to help us in terms of developing our future land bank and expanding within first-tier cities in China. From a retail market perspective, new supply within most key cities that we're in continued to create more challenges in terms of retail leasing. But having said that, especially in Shanghai, leasing activity showed signs of stronger recovery, especially in the second quarter, with net absorption of retail space increasing and reversing some of the contraction seen in the first quarter. So some of the observations that we're seeing is actually quite a fundamental shift in consumer spending behavior. So consumers now are no longer coming out just to shop. It's really about social gatherings. They want to have new experiences.
So whether it is in outdoor clothing, at leisure, more immersive retail and entertainment experiences, these are seeing strong areas of growth. And including, you know, collectibles such as what Pop Mart is doing, these are categories that are actually growing quite strongly. Again, these are areas that we're pushing forward with along our retail portfolio, which is why I think Allan will share more later. We're seeing strong sales and traffic growth. From an office perspective, it continues to be a very soft market, both from continuously increasing supply as well as contracting demand. So for our office portfolio, maintaining a very high occupancy in our portfolio remains our top priority. Going forward, liquidity management continues to be our first and foremost goal. The market continues to be extremely choppy. The offshore financing market remains closed.
But having said that, we will continue to leverage on our brands, both our community brand, Xintiandi, as well as our luxury residential brand, Lakeville. We will continue to use these brands to strengthen our leadership position in Shanghai and to continue to expand, hopefully into first-tier cities within the GBA. Lastly, just to give everyone a quick preview, on September 12th, we plan to do a brand refresh or a brand launch of our Xintiandi community brand. We hope that we will continue to be able to bring new experiences into the market, leveraging our experience in creating cultural and retail destinations. We hope that this will continue to help us continue our land bank in the future. So with that, I'll hand it over to Douglas.
Thank you, Stephanie. Let me give everyone a review of our financial performance in the first half. So on this page, you'll see the highlights. We recorded revenue of just over CNY 2 billion, total net profit of CNY 81 million, and profit attributable to shareholders RMB 51 million, of which our total rental income, including JV and associate investments, were CNY 1.78 billion. So it's a slight increase from the same period in 2024. So for the financial performance in the first half, maybe I can summarize in a couple of key points. One is that, as mentioned by the Chairman, we are still operating in a very challenging environment in the China property sector. So having the ability to record a profit in the first half, we think, is quite remarkable. And secondly, as I mentioned, our total rental income continues to grow overall.
This is beneficial to the company because it will provide a stable and solid recurring income base, particularly in the current business environments. Next page. On the P&L income statement, I'll just highlight a few key points. As mentioned, revenue is just over CNY 2 billion, of which you can see property sales level was relatively low. This actually was similar to the same period last year in 2024 because in both periods, we did not have new residential completion or handover. As a result, this is quite a low level. The sales are primarily on inventories and also car park space. Rental income in the period was about CNY 965 million. There is a more noticeable decline from same period 2024, primarily because of the reorganization of our KIC project completed at the beginning of this year.
From here on, KIC is no longer consolidated in our balance sheet. The revenue was not counted in the first half as compared to this first half of 2024. Property management income dropped a little bit as well. Again, a similar reason. We have property management income from KIC, which is no longer consolidated in the first half. Hotel construction income, et cetera, is pretty standard from prior years. Our gross profit is CNY 1.37 billion. GP margin is stable at about 66%. Other income is primarily interest income. There has been a more noticeable decline in interest rates in China. This category of income also dropped quite a bit for the group in the first half of the year. Expenses are pretty typical on selling, marketing, and general administrative. I'll talk a little bit more about the fair value of our IPs later on.
Other gains and losses are basically comprised of various different categories of one-off items. It's not a huge amount overall. Similar to our consolidated level, we do not have major residential completion within all our JV and associate companies. That's why you see the JV contribution is a slight loss of RMB 73 million. Overall, our finance costs continue to come down. If we look at just the net interest cost itself, it's down by almost 20% from same period last year. This is a combination resulting from a combination of a further reduction in our total debts and also our pivot towards onshore financing and repayment of our offshore financing in the past year. Next page. You can see that at the bottom, our bottom line after-tax profit for the period is RMB 81 million. As mentioned, attributable to shareholders is RMB 51 million. Next page.
Some of the balance sheet matrix, we currently have total assets of about CNY 83 billion with total debt of CNY 25.7 billion. As compared to the end of 2024, our total debt was just about CNY 30 billion. There's a decline of about 14% in total debt during the first half of this year. We continue to reduce our overall debt, including repayment of our USD bond earlier in March this year. Total cash on hand is about CNY 5.5 billion. Net debt also declined from end of last year by about 9% to just over CNY 20 billion. Gearing is stable at about 51% compared to the end of last year. If we look at our asset base, currently our book value is about, sorry, next page. Currently our total net asset, our book value is about CNY 40 billion.
So this is a slight decline from the last couple of years, but you can see it still remained at a fairly stable level compared to the last five years. And of all of our total net assets, about 65% IP related in both consolidated and also JV associate investments. Next page. So I mentioned about our IP valuation. Overall, if you look at the end of the table, you can see grand total value is at CNY 98 billion, of which the group share is about CNY 62 billion. We have about a 0.4% decline in the overall value of our investment properties. The decline is primarily on our office exposure. As you all know, the office market in China is still undergoing very severe pressure, which I'm sure Allan will mention a bit more later on.
So the decline in valuation is primarily relating to our office properties in the portfolio. Next page. So these two charts just give you reference to changes in our net gearing and net debt over the past 10 years. And you can see that currently our net debt at just over CNY 20 billion is at a relatively low level over the past 10 years and also a more noticeable decline from 2023 and 2024. So as I mentioned, we continue to try to reduce our overall debt in order to ensure that we have sufficient liquidity. Next page. So our maturity wall, we believe, has peaked. You can see graphically on the first chart compared to 2023 and 2024. In the coming two years, 2026 and 2027, we have relatively low level of debt maturity.
If we look at this year's maturity as of the end of August, we have basically repaid or refinanced about 87%, 88% of this year's maturity, so we can say that the maturity repayment for 2025 is pretty much done, and our focus will be on 2026. As you can see, the total is about just over 6 billion RMB. Next page, so you can also see the change in our capital structure over the last few years. As of August, since 2021 and as of August, we have repaid in gross amount 46 billion RMB of our offshore debt. In net amount, that's 26 billion, so clearly, because of the shutdown in the offshore market, we continue to use our internal resources to repay our offshore liabilities, and this is done through pivoting to groups financing from offshore to onshore.
So in the middle chart, you can see that from about 80% offshore financing, we have now reduced that reliance to just about 20%. So we think that the pivot towards onshore financing is pretty much done. We don't expect the offshore financing ratio will go to zero. So I think from here on, it's really just probably maintaining or slightly reducing further offshore exposure. And then the average cost of that also has come down to a more attractive level over the last five years. Current average cost of that, excluding fees and other one-off expenses, is just at 4.3%. And this is a combination of reducing our overall debt and also particularly reducing the offshore debt. Next page. So finally, just on our capital management strategy going forward, as Stephanie mentioned, ensuring liquidity continues to be our number one priority.
So that hasn't changed, and we will continue to focus on that. In terms of our business, which Jessica and Allan will talk a bit more, we will continue to launch new sales in Shanghai and Wuhan in the coming months. And also, we do have new commercial properties completing and contributing more rental income. So this hopefully will continue to give us a good solid recurrent income base going forward. So I'll stop here and pass over to Jessica.
Thanks, Douglas. So I'm glad to share our latest update on property sales and development. Let's start from our property sales performance. For the first half of 2025, our contract sales have increased by 457% to CNY 3,473 million. This includes residential property sales of CNY 3,219 million and commercial property sales of CNY 183 million. The substantial increase was mainly from the presale of townhouse with a GFA of 6,124 square meter in Shanghai, Taipingqiao, Lakeville 6. In addition to our contract sales, we've also secured CNY 699 million in subscribed sales, which will be converted into contract sales in the coming months. Overall, we've locked in total sales of CNY 17.521 billion, ready for delivery to customers and revenue booking in the second half of 2025 and beyond. Next.
Going forward, we have about 131,000 sq m of residential gross floor area available for sale and presale in the second half of 2025. This includes villas and townhouses in Lakeville 6 and Riverview and the other three residential projects in Wuhan. Next. So now let's have a look on our existing residential development land bank and major sellable resources in future. By June 2025, our total sellable resources stands at CNY 48.6 billion with an attributable value of CNY 24.9 billion. Notably, CNY 10.4 billion of these sellable resources are located in Shanghai, while the rest are primarily in Wuhan. Next. So besides the residential land bank, we've also maintained a considerable commercial development in major high-growth cities, which will drive further growth in the group's rental and related recurring income in the future.
The total GFA of this commercial development portfolio is 1.9 million sq m, with 55% of office use and the rest of 45% for retail. Next. So now let's move to the property market and the policy side, and I'd like to share some of our observations and the company business development strategy going forward. Let's look at the policy landscape first. Since early this year, the central and the local governments have been vigorously promoting urban renewal and the development of high-quality housing while facilitating the transformation and advancement of new development models for the real estate sector. In the first half of this year, especially since July, a series of meetings of the central government have continuously emphasized these two priorities. The State Council and the relevant ministries have also successively issued a range of implementation guidelines.
Moreover, the once a decade Central Urban Work Conference has further clarified the directions and priorities of urban development in the coming years. At the local level, various governments across the country have been stepping up efforts to advance urban renewal and to stabilize the property market. Shanghai is at the forefront and has announced a new three-year urban renewal plan while launching extensive initiatives to expedite urban village renewal starting in 2026, aiming to accelerate the high-quality development of the city. We believe that SOL's brand and expertise in urban regeneration and high-quality property development will enable us to continue seizing attractive business opportunities in the new development cycle. Now let's update you on our observation regarding Shanghai's residential market in this year. In terms of the economy, Shanghai's GDP still grew by 5.1% in the first half of the year, despite various external challenges.
Meanwhile, Shanghai's land market remained active, with land prices continuing to rise. In addition, it's also observed that Shanghai's high-end residential market continues to attract high-net-worth buyers, and the continuous inflow of returned overseas talents and high-end professionals has also provided strong support for the demand for high-quality housing. Most notably, Shanghai's luxury housing market continued to outperform. In the first half of 2025, 313,000 sq m of housing priced above CNY 13 million per unit were sold, which accounts for 58% of all luxury housing sales in China's top-tier cities. Against such a policy and a market backdrop, we will continue to steadily advance our key business strategies as follows. Firstly, we will continue to focus on top-tier cities with priority in Shanghai. With ongoing headwinds in the current market, the company will continue to capture suitable opportunities in a selective manner while maintaining financial prudence.
Secondly, we will continue to advance and implement our best-in-class product strategy anchored by the Lakeville brand. By leveraging the Xintiandi community and our differentiated competitive advantages, we will seize opportunities in the high-end market arising from the development of high-quality housing and continuously strengthen the company's brand influence in core markets. Thirdly, we will continue to explore external capital and expand strategic partnerships to grow the business through the SLI model until the market correction comes to an end. We believe this strategy will help drive the company's sustainable development and growth towards the market new normal. Next page. So among those major residential development pipeline projects, I'd like to highlight two scheduled for sales in the second half of this year.
The first one is Lakeville 6, the first launch, and its strong sales of those units in the SUP High Rise Tower in September 2024 reaffirmed the Lakeville brand's leadership position in the luxury housing market. The upcoming villas and townhouses blended traditional Chinese elegance with quieter courtyard living in a primary city core location. The first batch of these products has attracted significant interest from high-net-worth buyers. And within a week of obtaining the presale permit in Q2 this year, all the nine units have been sold. We will try to apply further presale application procedures for those rest units, and we aim to complete construction by Q2 2027, with handovers beginning in Q4 2027. The second one is the final phase of residential development in Wuhan Tiandi, which is a mature integrated community with high-end residential, high-quality commercial and office.
After two decades of development, it becomes a landmark in the city. The final phase remains attractive in the market and will be launched in Q4 this year. Project completion is expected by Q3 2027, with handovers in Q4 2027. So lastly, I'd like to update you on our latest SLI business development and major projects. The success of Lakeville development, along with recent well-known projects like Panlong Tiandi and Hong Shou Fang, have further demonstrated SOL's strength in urban regeneration and community building and operation, which has also attracted many potential partners to engage in discussion with us on various SLI cooperations. Currently, we have confirmed three major SLI development projects as presented here. Two of them are high-end residential projects located in Greater Xintiandi community, which will be developed and operated under the Lakeville brand.
The first one, Yongxingl i project, is a newly acquired high-quality project through partnerships with Yongye Group and our new partner, Tian An Group. This project has a total GFA of approximately 217,000 sq m, including 159,000 sq m of high-end residential space and 58,000 sq m of commercial properties. We hold a 15% interest in the project. With the relocation fully completed, the project construction is set to commence in Q1 2026, with completion expected by 2030. The second one is Yongye Land project, which is an SLI project where SOL provides management service to the owner Yongye Group, featuring an estimated 105,000 sq m of residential space and 57,000 sq m of commercial areas. The project is under preparation with completion by 2031.
These two projects will further enhance the attractiveness of Greater Xintiandi community, allowing us to strategically expand the Lakeville brand and products in the city core area while driving further growth of the business in Shanghai. The third project is an urban village renewal project in partnership with the Shanghai Fengxian District Government. This mixed-use community encompasses about 326,000 sq m of residential space and 95,000 sq m of commercial area. This project will start in January and acquire its first residential land parcel in April this year. SOL holds a 5% interest in this project and will provide management service across the project development, sales marketing, and asset management. We believe these pipeline projects are good examples on how SOL could best leverage our brand and expertise to grow the business in the current market.
We will continue to explore potential collaboration opportunities with more business partners while keeping evolving the models. We will share more on this in the future. That's all my sharing today, and thanks to you all. Now I will hand over to Allan.
Thank you, Jessica. Good evening, everyone. In this section, I will briefly review the performance of our commercial assets. So, as mentioned before, we have been strategically focused on the Shanghai market. Because of this strategic focus, our commercial assets located in prime locations have been growing. So the total valuation of the completed commercial assets already reached CNY 79 billion. And with the progress of the asset-light strategy, the new adding of the three strategic projects in Shanghai further increased our recurring income base. At the same time, it further strengthened our leading role in the Shanghai market.
My next slide is about the commercial property performances. So despite the very challenging market environment, the group's investment property, including the JVs and associates, demonstrated resilience, with total rental and related income modestly increased by 1% to RMB 1.781 billion in the first half of this year, among which our retail performance has been proven very resilient. The average occupancy rate remained at a very stable 94%, and besides the occupancy rate, the overall sales and the shopper traffic increased year on year by double-digit 10.5%, which is a very challenging and very outstanding performance in the first half of this year. At the same time, the recent open project, Panlong Tiandi and Hong Shou Fang, continued to demonstrate very strong performance. I will introduce a little bit more about this one.
For the office sectors, our mature Shanghai office portfolio maintained a very high average occupancy rate at 90% because of the differentiation of our refined office leasing strategy and also the quality services. As mentioned, we have two newly opened projects, which are the Panlong Tiandi and Hong Shou Fang. Both projects entered the second opening year. As you can see from these slides, next slide, please. The total retail sales increased by 16% last year for Panlong Tiandi. Besides the increase of the retail sales, we received a lot of recognition and also awards from third parties. Besides the ULI Asia-Pacific Award for Excellence, we also received an award. This project was named as the National Tourism Leisure Street Blocks by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. For Hong Shou Fang, retail sales also increased by more than 12%.
We also received a lot of good recognition in the media, especially for the social media. In the second half of this year, we have two PUD projects under preparation for open. The first one will be the CXCC retail. We plan to soft open this project in September this year. This project provides a very interesting and very unique open street style with all weather protected by the biggest skylight canopy in Shanghai. Hopefully, we will add awareness and city pulse and the cultural content to the greater Xintiandi area. Hopefully, we can activate both the east and the west side of the greater Xintiandi community, as mentioned before. So far, we have secured 60% of the GFA. We plan to soft open in September this year, and the grand open will be December this year.
The next PUD project is the KIC Park in Wuhan, located in the business district. We hope this project will bring the first park-themed open street style project in Wuhan. So far, we have already secured 70% of the retail areas. Among all of the secured tenants, we have more than 40% are F&B-themed stores in Wuhan or Optical Valley area. At the same time, we have close to 30% high-quality F&B stores. This year has been not easy, very challenging. Later on, in the second half of this year, we will continue to focus on the strategies in retail and office. For retail, we will keep stabilizing the healthy operations. All of the measures we initiated in the first half have been proven effective, and we have already seen very good results.
We will continue to drive shopper traffic and also to boost the retail sales through focus on retail-centered operation synergy and refined operation management, innovative marketing events, and own-branded IP, and also strengthen the customer perception of the Xintiandi style service and experience. Hopefully, like I mentioned before, the two new openings in the second half will further add to our new income stream. The office market has been proven very challenging. We will maintain occupancy rate as the top priority. Second half of this year, we will continue to push up the occupancy rate through a very flexible pricing strategy and also a very holistic offering strategy that offers sustainable work solutions by providing value-added service on top of the high-quality spaces. The number three strategy, we will be focusing on the anchor tenant renewal and the new leases.