Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Shui On Land's 2023 Annual Results Analyst Briefing. Thank you very much for joining us online this evening. We are pleased to have five members of the senior management team with us today: Mr. Vincent Lo, our chairman; Ms. Stephanie Lo, Executive Director of Shui On Land and Vice Chairman of Shui On Xintiandi; 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 first start with a presentation by the management, then 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 invite Mr.
Lo to start with some opening remarks. Mr. Lo, please.
Thank you, Luna, and good afternoon. I will not go into the details of our results. I think my colleagues will do that later. I just want to say a few words on the big picture. I think we all know that the operating environment has been extremely difficult for the property sector on the Chinese mainland. With the challenging macro environment, first of all, of course, geopolitics, the regional wars, Sino-US relations, and then with high interest rates and high inflation, the economic outlook has been extremely uncertain. Domestically, the Chinese economy has been very slow in its economic growth, and the market recovery has been very sluggish. Because of all the uncertainties, I think the demand has been weak, and also the oversupply situation.
Of course, in our industry, the liquidity crisis, the debt problems of a lot of the top companies in our industry, out of the top 100 property companies on the mainland, 48 have met with debt problems. Under these circumstances, I think we have been able to maintain our profitability, and then we have continued with our prudent capital management strategy. Last year, we repaid $11.5 billion debt out of our internal resources, and we have continued to uphold our stable balance sheet. Going forward, we will be very selective and cautious on new investments, and then we will continue with our asset-light strategy. On the market conditions, I think the economic challenges and correction will likely continue in the next couple of years, at least. The market recovery will be slow. I think there will be further consolidation and adjustment in the property sector.
Shanghai has remained attractive from our point of view, with very stable demand and market opportunities are plenty. Financing for the property developers is going to continue to be challenging and difficult in the foreseeable future. Maybe I will stop there and let my colleagues do more of the explanation.
Thank you, Chairman. Hello, everyone. This is Stephanie. Thanks for joining us this evening. Let me give a very brief summary of our results from 2023. Despite an extremely challenging industry downturn, our company results have shown resilience. Although the Chinese economy has rebounded to some degree in 2023, a lack of confidence has led to a continuing downturn in the property market, as you all know. Despite the difficult operating environment, the group has recorded a revenue of RMB 9.75 billion and a net profit of RMB 1.4 billion, with a profit attributable to shareholders amounting to RMB 810 million. We had two very successful openings of commercial projects that supported the rising rental income. The two projects are Shanghai Panlong Tiandi and Shanghai Hong Shou Fang.
The total rental and related income, including JV and associates, for the year increased to RMB 3.24 billion, representing a growth of 16% year-on-year. We have always embarked on a very prudent capital management, and the group has been maintaining a very stable balance sheet. As of December 31 last year, 2023, our net gearing ratio has increased slightly to 52%, while our cash and bank deposits totaled RMB 8.9 billion. The group is committed to continuing our prudent approach towards managing this balance sheet in the foreseeable future. We also had a very successful issuance of the largest-ever private green mortgage-backed onshore CMBS in April 2023. It was backed by The H ub in Hongqiao CBD District in Shanghai.
This is the first CMBS in China supported by a TOD development commercial complex, and the group has proactively adopted various means, including the CMBS issuance, asset disposals, as well as the repurchase of our USD senior bonds to enhance our liquidity. The board has recommended a final dividend for the year of $0.05 per share, together with an interim dividend of $0.03 per share. The full-year dividend for 2023 amounted to $0.09 per share. Just a few observations here about the market and our observations. From the residential side, there has been a slow recovery due to extremely weak market confidence. Despite a lot of the policy easing measures, the residential market downturn persists. I think you have all seen the January and February figures, with quite a sharp drop in residential sales area. The national housing inventory has reached a record high.
The liquidity issues and risks at many developers are persisting, and we do not foresee that this down sentiment will lift anytime soon. From a retail point of view, this is obviously affecting consumer sentiment as well. It is very clear from our projects that consumers are shifting towards more experience-led and value-driven spending. But from Shanghai's point of view, where most of our properties are located, prime retail property vacancy rates and rents are actually stable. In fact, vacancy rates have dropped in 2023. Rental rates, as I mentioned, only a very, very slight 0.2% drop year-on-year on prime rents. From office, it is still extremely challenging. It is very much a perfect storm where there is an oversupply in most markets, as well as contracting in demand.
Because of the current economic downturn, a lot of companies are very cautious about controlling operating costs, and therefore this gives a lot of pressure to rents, as well as vacancy rates. From Shanghai's point of view, the Grade A office net absorption is down 27%, resulting in higher vacancy rates and lower rents. With this no challenging market, we will continue in the near term to maintain extremely discipline in terms of our financial management. We will be prudent and extremely cautious. But in this downturn, we also believe that we have to focus on the consumer to deliver our best-in-class products and services. Often, in this time, we would be able to see greater differentiation in terms of our quality in our assets and our services.
We will continue our asset-light strategy to grow cautiously our footprint in Tier 1 cities in the Yangtze River Delta and the Greater Bay Area. We continue to strive for a leadership position in Shanghai and to build and maintain a top-tier management team. This integrated business model, where its development and commercial properties asset management integrated, combined, has actually given us stronger resilience in this market downturn. We are also able to, as a result, capture unique market opportunities in terms of urban regeneration, where the sites are not simple sites but rather complex mixed-use developments that require heritage preservation and master planning. This actually plays to our strengths. We will continue to maintain this integrated business model to develop and operate sustainable premium urban communities. Just a little bit here about our sustainability progress. We made very good progress last year.
As you can see, a lot of our ratings, ESG ratings, have improved. Our MSCI ESG rating improved to AA, CDP rating improved to A-, and a GRESB rating improved to 5-star. Over 96% of our existing assets by GFA have obtained either a green or healthy building certificate. We have also Shui On Plaza in Shanghai has received the ULI Asia Pacific Awards for Excellence, and our Deep Green Lease program launched a couple of years ago has won the RICS China Sustainability Award. We are making very decent progress and very happy to see the impact of such work. With that, I will hand it over to Douglas.
Thank you, Stephanie. Let me give everyone a quick highlight of our financials for 2023. You can see the key performance indicator here, some of which Stephanie has already introduced. In light of a very, very challenging 2023 for China property companies, we think that this is a decent set of results. We delivered revenue of about RMB 9.8 billion, property sales of about RMB 5.9 billion, net profit, total profit is about RMB 1.4 billion, and attributable to shareholders is RMB 810 million. Our rental income increased 16% year-over-year to about RMB 2.4 billion. Our board has recommended a full-year dividend of $0.09 per share, as Stephanie mentioned earlier. Next page on the property sales, just a breakdown of the various contributions. You can see the RMB 5.9 billion top-line property sales revenue, primarily coming from Panlong Tiandi, which we handed over the final phase last year.
This project has basically handed over all the units to buyers right now and recognized basically all the profits. The RMB 5.9 billion top-line of property sales revenue looks a bit low. This is mainly because in recent years we are doing a lot of new developments through JV and associate companies under our asset-light strategy. You can see that if we include all the JV and associate contributions, total property sales is about RMB 38 billion. That is quite a significant amount of residential, which we completed and handed over to buyers in the past year. These include the joint venture of KIC and Rainbow City Lot 7, Ocean One, and also Rainbow City Lot 167A, which we call Park Vera, both of which completed and handed over to buyers last year. On the income statement next page, I will just highlight a few key figures.
Revenue, I have already mentioned, comprising property sales, rental income, and other income. Then netting out cost of sales, gross profit is just over CNY 5 billion, with a gross profit margin of 52%. Compared to 2022, the GP margin is a bit higher, primarily because of different allocation of revenue. The prior year, of course, the top-line property sales contribution is a lot higher, and typically property sales GP margin is lower than rental income. Just for reference, the gross profit margin for Panlong Tiandi, which we recognized last year, is about 40%. It is still at a very reasonable profit margin level. Other income is primarily interest income, both at the headquarters level and also at some of the project companies. Most of these expenses are pretty straightforward. I will talk a little bit more about the change in fair value of our IP in the next page.
Other gains and losses are just various expenses and costs, etc. Our overall finance cost is just over RMB 2.1 billion, which is more or less in line with 2022's level. Next page, after netting out tax and minority interest, the profit attributable to shareholders is RMB 810 million. Next page is on our balance sheet and some of the capital figures. As Stephanie and the Chairman have mentioned, we have been adopting a very prudent capital management strategy in the past few years, particularly in 2022 and 2023. For example, we have been very, very selective on new investments. Essentially, we did not invest in any major new investments in 2023, and we have been quite disciplined in controlling our cash flow and expense. These are reflected in some of these figures on the right.
You can see our total assets, just over RMB 100 billion, and cash on hand, about RMB 9 billion. We have a net debt of about RMB 23 billion and net gearing of about 52%. All relatively stable in light of the property market condition we are facing right now. We have also been adopting multiple multi-pronged strategy or multiple channels to expand our financing. You know that we did a large CMBS issuance in 2023. We have divested some of our IPs last year, non-core IPs, and also increased some of our onshore financing as well. We will continue to do this this coming year to further expand our financing channel in light of the challenge in the funding market. Next page. For your reference, our total assets is just over RMB 100 billion, roughly 60%. Right now, it is IP, including both on a consolidated basis and JV associate projects.
Next page on the IP valuation. You can see at the bottom of the table, the grand total for the group, the value is almost RMB 100 billion, RMB 99.5 billion. Our share of that is about RMB 64 billion. If we exclude JV and associate companies, the grand total is RMB 52 billion. Our share is RMB 46.5 billion. This is a substantial and growing IP portfolio. You can see that the overall valuation is stable, basically flat if you look at the grand total excluding JV and associates, and then including is down slightly of 0.4%. I think some analysts, investors, may ask whether these valuations are too aggressive in light of the rental pressure on office and retail in China.
We have looked at some of the comparable benchmarks, comparables in terms of location and quality to our IP portfolio, such as the portfolio of Hang Lung Properties and Sun Hung Kai Properties in their annual announcements. We also noticed that their China portfolio's valuation has been relatively stable last year as well. I think this is in line with the market and is not particularly aggressive in our view. Next page. You can see that, just for your reference, the change in net gearing and net debt over the years is still at a relatively healthy level, again, in light of the market conditions right now we are facing. The next page is just the funding source from both onshore and offshore. Then lastly, the next page is the maturity of the senior notes for your reference. I will stop here.
I will pass it over to Jessica to talk about the development business.
Okay. Thanks, Douglas. Next, for the property sales and development, I would like to begin with an update on our property sales performance. In 2023, our contract sales amounted to CNY 11.4 billion. It comprises residential property sales of CNY 7.2 billion, commercial property sales of CNY 3 billion, and other asset disposal of CNY 1.2 billion. Our total subscriber sales of CNY 367 million were recorded, which will be converted to contract sales in the coming months. In addition, total lock-in sales is CNY 9 billion. These sales will be available for delivery and to be recognized in the group's financial results in 2024 and beyond. The national market is undergoing a downturn, and the Wuhan residential market also faced a strong headwind in 2023. However, the River Phase 3 of Wuhan Tiandi continued to perform well and recorded strong sales.
All the units were sold out on launching day and achieved the highest presale price ever in Wuhan, with an average selling price of RMB 64,000 per square meter. Two other projects we launched in Wuhan are Phase 1 of Wuhan Changjiang Tiandi and the Optic Valley Innovation Tiandi. The one I would like to highlight is the Optic Valley Innovation Tiandi. It received good recognition from high-tech companies and users for its office blocks and achieved RMB 2.83 billion in contract sales, making it the double champion in terms of transaction area and the contract sales amount in Wuhan's office market in 2023. The next page. Taking into account the pace of market recovery, the group has planned for more launches in 2024. There are approximately 252,000 square meters of residential GFA, including several premium projects in Shanghai available for sales and presales in 2024. Next.
This slide has summarized our existing residential development land bank and the sellable resources in the future. The total sellable amount is RMB 66.9 billion by the end of 2023, with attributable value at around RMB 35 billion. RMB 24.2 billion sellable resources are in Shanghai, while the rest of RMB 42.7 billion are in Wuhan and Chongqing. Next. Besides residential development land bank, we also have a considerable commercial development portfolio in Shanghai and other high-growth cities. They will drive our future rental growth and capital recycling in the future. The slide shows the list of commercial properties and the development and the major pipeline projects for future development. The total GFA of our commercial property portfolio was 2.43 million square meters, of which 59% were for office and 41% for retail. Next. Shanghai property market remains attractive with stable demand and resilient performance.
The group has deep-rooted in Shanghai for over 30 years, with quite a few high-quality projects under development. Here, I would like to highlight Lakeville Phase 6 and Riverville. They are the premium residential projects that we plan to launch in 2024. The Lakeville is now a well-known and a leading brand in the high-end residential market. Lakeville Phase 6 is the last residential plot facing the park and the lake in Taipingqiao site. It will be the highest residential building and landmark in Puxi. The first batch of super high-rise buildings with GFA of 56,600 square meters will be available for sale in 2024. Riverville is located on the south bank of Yangpu Binjiang. It is a heritage preservation and redevelopment project that features a high-end, low-density residential community. It extends our Lakeville brand to a new area.
This project is now under construction, and the sales launch is scheduled in the second half of this year. 21,400 sq m of GFA is available for sales in this year. With the stable performance and the solid fundamentals in Shanghai's high-end residential market, we hold a positive view in Shanghai premium market, and we have been keeping increasing our investment in this sector with our Lakeville brand. These two projects are expected to drive sales and provide consistent revenue to the group in the coming years. Next. Besides the residential, we also have a major landmark commercial project, CPIC Xintiandi Commercial Center, to be completed in Shanghai. It is right next to the Shanghai Xintiandi, and it features three premium Grade A office buildings and a street-style all-weather shopping and leisure entertainment area.
The project provides 192,000 square meters of leasable GFA of office and 84,000 square meters of leasable GFA of retail. Let me give you an update on its completion schedule. The 250-meter super high-rise Grade A office T1 building has been structurally completed. Office building T2 and the retail podium will be completed for operations in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Office building T3 is now named CPIC Tower, officially opened and handed over to CPIC in 2023. Upon completion, CXCC will further diversify the commercial offerings in the area and become a new office landmark in the core CBD of Shanghai. It will also bring additional recurring rental revenues and fee income to the group. Next. In addition to the previous introduction, I would like to share a bit more on market observation and our business focus going forward.
Despite a continuing downturn in the property sector, it's observed that the K-shaped character continues. We can see divergent performance among different cities, regions, and projects. Top-tier cities and quality products further outperformed, and the residential market in Shanghai is pretty resilient with solid demand for better living standards and quality of life. Secondly, the pace of urban renewal development is accelerated in top-tier cities, especially in Shanghai. With more policy support from central government, more opportunities in prime locations are emerging. Projects that enable technology innovation, industry upgrading, and high-quality development were preferred and supported by the local governments. Finally, it's worth to mention that the property industry ushered towards a new development model. A twin-track housing system is taking shape, and a market-driven private sector provides more business opportunities.
In addition, the leverage-driven development-focused business model can no longer work, and it's believed that those companies focused on quality and efficiency with diversified income streams, especially operations with recurring income, would excel in the competition. Here, I would like to share with you our development strategy and the business focus in the changing market. Firstly, we will further explore and seize the emerging urban regeneration opportunities, particularly in Shanghai. With our strong brands and the presence in the Shanghai market, we will further strive for a leadership position in the city. To drive growth of the group while maintaining a prudent financial position in such a challenging environment, we continue to be highly selective in our new investments. Secondly, we will further strengthen our brand by enhancing our products and improving our service in high-quality mixed-use communities.
With our robust premium residential pipeline in Shanghai, Lakeville brand is our key focus in the short term. Finally, we will continue to implement our asset-light strategy to build strategic partnerships with long-term investors to expand our portfolio of assets. At the same time, it can improve the company's management efficiency so as to drive sustainable growth in business and profits. That's all my part for today, and I would like to now hand over to Allan, please.
Thank you, Jessica. In this section, I will briefly introduce and update the performance of our team. We successfully launched two projects in 2023. The first one is the Panlong Tiandi, and the second one is the Hong Shou Fang. Because of the successful opening of this project, our total valuation of commercial assets increased to $84 billion, which actually strengthened our leadership role and positioning in Shanghai. Also, next slide, it's about our rising rental income. Despite the challenges, we increased the rental income from $2.8 billion by 16% to $3.2 billion. The growth comes from two sectors. The first one is the organic growth of our assets under management, and the second strong growth is from the successful opening of these two projects I just mentioned. Next slide, it's about our other two business segments, the property management and also the real estate asset management.
Our property management has been maintained at a quite stable and strong management scale. Our total management area already reached 9 million square meters. In terms of our asset management, due to the successful opening of these five projects, we have already curated a very long-term and sustainable relationship with our partners, including the insurance company and also the state-owned companies. The total valuation of projects under management already amounted to $29 billion, with a total management GFA of 710,000 square meters. Next slide, it's a bit more introduction about the retail operation. At the end of last year, we successfully maintained our average occupancy rate at 91%. Also, we did our best to achieve higher sales. Last year, basically, our sales and also our shopper traffic reached 106% and 110%, respectively, comparing to the 2021 level.
Last year was really challenging, so we tried our best to adopt very creative marketing events in our portfolios. Especially, we explored a very strategic relationship with the bigger brands and leveraged the bigger brands' resources to create this type of memorable and also iconic occasions in our portfolio, which also helped us to increase the member sales by 11.6%. We also believe that really adopting the customer-focused philosophy in our business and creating very innovative positioning products are very important because the markets are getting more and more homogeneous, and the competition is getting more and more intense. We believe that this philosophy is very helpful for us to achieve the successful opening of the Panlong Tiandi and also our Hong Shou Fang. The next one is to continue the innovation in almost the product and also the content and the experience area.
We have a very iconic, innovative product, which is Foodie S ocial, which already passed the POC period. Right now, we have opened three generations of this product. We are already at a stage of replicating the success of this product in almost every community we have. Next slide is about the operation for our office sectors. At the end of last year, we achieved an average occupancy rate of 90%. For the Shanghai portfolios, our occupancy rate was 93%. We have been trying to focus on our resources and also our attention on the big tenants, trying to acquire big tenants for the vacant spaces. Even in this year, we already achieved more than 26,000 sq m in the first two months. The last point about office, we believe that most of the competitors, they're trying to provide hardware spaces.
But we initiated this breakthrough in the software and the services. Right now, we have a very iconic service, which is called WORKX Ready. Basically, we aim to provide a very tailor-made office space for all of our office tenants. Next slide is a bit more introduction about the opening of the two new projects. Panlong Tiandi is basically positioned as a new urban retreat destination, combining the culture and the modern retreat lifestyle into this more than 600-year-old Asian town. Because of this unique positioning, we received more than 1 million visits in the first week of opening. Until now, we have already received more than 19 million visits. Besides the traffic and also the sales, we also received very good feedback from the public and from the government as well. Next slide is Hong Shou Fang, which is actually a very small-scale retail project plus two office towers.
The retail portion is only 15,000 square meters. In this small-scale property, we managed to invite more than 50% of our tenants who are the first time to open a shop in this district. We have received more than 700,000 visits in the first week. I will skip all of the numbers. I just want to highlight one. This project has been ranked at number one in Shanghai's popular shopping mall list for more than 100 consecutive days. My last slide is about our view on the market trend and also our actions to mitigate the risk and to achieve sustainable growth. It is foreseeable that the market will be growing and recovering at a very slow rate because the foundation is not solid enough now. Retail and office both have a lot of challenges. To mitigate all of these challenges, we will maintain and improve our occupancy rate.
Basically, all of the team members recognize that the occupancy rate is our first priority. We will continue to focus on adopting the customer focus in all of our teams and all of our decision-making processes in order to offer a holistic experience to meet our customers' expectations. Also, we will continue to focus on the quality of our trade mix in order to further increase our sales and shopper traffic. Innovation, we believe, is very important to really create a uniqueness that will allow us to differentiate ourselves in the market. My last strategy is about leveraging the aforementioned competitive advantage and also our agile asset management strategy to strive for a successful launch of every new product. I'll stop here.