Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to BOC Aviation Limited's 2025 Interim Results Conference call. I will now hand the session to Mr. Timothy Ross to begin today's presentation. Mr. Ross, please begin.
Thank you, Ray, and welcome everybody.
BOC Aviation call to discuss our interim results for six months ended 30 June 2025. With me today are our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Steven Townend, our Chief Operating Officer Thomas Chandler, and our Chief Financial Officer Wen Lan.
Please note that some of the information.
You'll hear during our discussion today may consist of forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from any statements made. You should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking statements and you should review our results announcements for full details. Please also note that all currency references to today's call are in U.S. Dollars. A copy of our earnings announcement is available both by Hong Kong Stock Exchange and in the Investors section of our website at bocaviation.com and a conference call presentation is also available in the Investors section of our website. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay from our website within the next 24 hours as is the transcript of today's discussion. I'll now turn the call over to Steven Townend for his comments.
Thanks Tim, and thank you to everyone for joining us for our 2025 interim results earnings call. We are pleased to report net profit after tax of $342 million for the six months ended 30th June 2025, equivalent to earnings per share of $0.49. This compared with net profit after tax of $460 million in first half 2024. Although adjusted for last year's one-off write back of previous impairments, this is the highest interim profit in our history. Our Board has declared an interim dividend of $0.1476 per share payable to shareholders of record on 26 September 2025. This represents 30% of reported net profit after tax for the first half and a payout ratio consistent with prior years. Our total revenues and other income rose 6% to $1.2 billion in the first half of 2025.
As at 30 June, we had total assets of $25.6 billion and net assets per share of $9.37. In March 2025, we placed the largest aircraft order in our history. This is an important step as we build our company towards the $40 billion in assets by 2030 that we shared as our goal at a recent investor day. To put this in perspective, this target only requires us to grow on average at 8% each year with a committed pipeline of aircraft already in place. On a macro level, our addressable market is the total value of new aircraft delivering each year from the OEMs. Some of these will be our own orders and those of other lessors, and the remainder provide financing opportunities as they deliver to airline customers.
The value of these deliveries each year is expected to double between 2024 and 2028 as increasing manufacturer production rates deliver well over $150 billion in new aircraft per annum from 2028 onwards. The first seven months of this year have seen a marked improvement for the commercial aerospace industry, with much more stable and predictable deliveries from the manufacturers, 12% more aircraft delivered in total than in the same period in 2024. Boeing's deliveries have rebounded significantly, ahead by 53% compared with 2024 and offsetting the 7% decline at Airbus, which reflects an engine shortage that should be rectified by the end of the year. The total value of new aircraft deliveries for 2025 should hit $100 billion, which will be the highest amount since 2019.
Global passenger traffic continues to expand and was ahead by 5% for the first six months of the year, buoyed by particularly strong growth in large Asian markets. This is broadly in line with the 6% growth that IATA anticipates for the full year and has been achieved despite geopolitical unrest in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe and concern regarding the impact of tariffs. While the effects of tariffs are yet to become fully visible on demand for travel or inflation, their impact on the aerospace sector is becoming clearer. Aircraft and engines manufactured in the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom are expected to be subject to a zero for zero tariff regime, meaning limited impacts for manufacturers and airlines in any of these geographies. Other macroeconomic developments have also been largely benign so far in 2025.
Interest rates, which drive our largest cash cost, have largely eased since the start of the year, with the average yield on the U.S. five-year Treasury down around 20 basis points compared to the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, the average investment grade spread is down about 17 points from this time last year, while the Federal Reserve continues to hold short-term interest rates steady. Any reduction would cycle rapidly through the 32% of our debt that is currently on floating rate terms. As a reminder, every annualized 10 basis point reduction in our cost of funds positively affects our after-tax profit by $2.5 million. While we have no direct exposure to jet fuel prices or to exchange rates, they are major drivers of our customers' earnings and cash flows.
Jet fuel is expected to account for 28% of IATA member airline costs in 2025 and so far this year its price has fallen on average by around 14%. The strength of the U.S. dollar also affects non-U.S. airlines significantly with a large proportion of their operating costs denominated in this currency. The U.S. dollar has fallen by over 8% against a basket of international currencies since the start of the year. Taken together with ongoing demand growth, this is positive for our airline customers and IATA expects its members to earn profits of $36 billion this year, the second highest figure the industry has ever achieved. On the back of this robust earnings environment, our collection rate has remained above 100% and accounts receivable has continued to decline as airline customers repay deferred amounts.
This helped us generate a record first half cash flow of $1 billion and we ended June with cash and undrawn committed liquidity of $6.1 billion. I'll now hand the call over to Tom to speak to our operations and business development, and then Wen Lan will present a more detailed review of our P&L and balance sheet.
Thank you, Steven. Our operational and business development report is as follows. We delivered 24 aircraft and one engine to nine different airline customers during first half 2025, of which 19 were operating lease and five were finance lease. We also signed lease commitments for 43 aircraft. As at the end of June, our total portfolio stood at 834 aircraft and engines, comprising 441 owned and 32 managed aircraft, 10 owned engines, and an order book of 351 aircraft, representing a record committed capital expenditure of almost $20 billion. Our order book increased more than 50% from 2024 levels, primarily due to orders placed with Airbus and Boeing for 70 Airbus A320neo family and 50 Boeing 737-8 aircraft, respectively. This enlarged pipeline of deliveries underpins our growth targets as we build towards the $40 billion in assets that Steven outlined earlier.
The additions to our portfolio this year continue to be fuel-efficient, latest technology aircraft, including 6 A320neo family, 14 Boeing 737-8, and 4 Boeing 787-9. Aircraft manufacturer delivery delays have stabilized, and as a result, aircraft delivered largely as expected. In fact, we've seen some deliveries brought forward from the delivery months previously advised during this first half. Our industry remains capacity constrained and still faces the effects of lower than planned aircraft deliveries for the past five years, creating a cumulative effect for the shortage of supply versus demand that isn't expected to be resolved until the end of the decade. Airbus and Boeing are both planning to increase production over the next few years, which will increase pressure on the supply chain, and we will be monitoring carefully the signs of any further delays. In first half 2025, we transitioned two used aircraft to airline customers.
The low number of transitions is due to the high demand for lease extensions, including 21 leases that were previously scheduled to expire during this period. We continued through first half 2025 as we ended 2024 with 100% of our aircraft and engines on lease. The weighted average age of our owned portfolio was five years at the end of June and continues to be one of the youngest in the aircraft leasing industry. We have amongst the highest proportion of latest technology, most fuel-efficient aircraft in our fleet of any operating lessor at 83% as at 30th June 2025. We also continue to have one of the industry's longest weighted average remaining lease terms for our owned portfolio at 7.9 years.
The aggregate appraised value of our operating lease fleet, which excludes the value of committed lease revenue, also continues to rise and represented a 15% premium of $2.8 billion to that fleet net book value. We sold 18 aircraft from the own fleet in first half 2025, an increase from last year's 15 aircraft sales as we capitalized on the prevailing strong demand for used aircraft. These aircraft had an average age of 10.4 years, more than a year older on average than those sold last year and more than twice the average fleet age. Our sales focus on lower yielding leases and older aircraft with shorter remaining lease term, which led to a slight reduction of the average gain on sale to 8.7% compared with 2024 but remaining similar to our 9% long run average.
This targeted portfolio management contributed to an increase in our lease rate factor by 50 basis points to 10.3% compared to first half 2024, though the main driver of the improvement was the higher rentals attached to the 19 aircraft that delivered on operating lease during the first half. Net lease yield also improved 50 basis points to 7.5% from 7% in first half 2024, reflecting the higher lease rate factor and our strong cash flow generation. Reviewing our ESG targets, we continue to exceed both the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's current and future target with levels of female board participation which are 21% and 30% by 2030 respectively, with four female directors including our Chairman. 29% of our management team are female, an increase from 20% at the end of 2024, and around half of our more than 200 employees are females.
We sustained our engagement with our local communities in first half 2025 with over 130 employees, or nearly two thirds of our total workforce, participating in a total of nine CSR events in Singapore. These included food packing and preparation and completion of the JP Morgan Corporate Chase, also completed by our New York colleagues. Meanwhile, employees in London, Dublin, and Tianjin dedicated time to charities supporting unemployed women, special needs children, and community bicycle schemes, respectively. That concludes the overview of our operations and business development performance for six months ended June 2025, and with that, I'll now turn it to Wen Lan for a deeper review of our financial performance.
Thank you, Tom. As Dylan mentioned earlier, we reported a net profit after tax of $342 million for the first half 2025, equivalent to earnings of $0.49 per share. Total revenue rose 6% to $1.2 billion compared with first half 2024, increasing for all business lines with contribution improvements most obvious from financing activities. This follows the step up in deliveries that Steven discussed earlier. Operating lease rental income increased to $937 million, reflecting an improvement in lease refactor to 10.3%. Finance lease revenue again contributed strongly, up 36% to $130 million as finance lease receivables approach $4 billion and transactions completed in 2024 contributed for a full period. Our gains on aircraft sales rose by over 8% to $60 million compared with the first half 2024 as we sold 18 aircraft compared with 15 in the same period last year.
Other interest and fee income was ahead by 80% to $65 million in first half 2025, driven primarily by our focus on assisting our customers with pre-delivery payment financing. Other income of $49 million fell 16% compared with the first half 2024, mainly due to lower manufacturer compensation as aircraft deliveries have stabilized. Switching to costs, our two largest expenses continue to account for around 90% of the total when adjusted for the $175 million writeback of aircraft impairments recorded in the first half 2024. Depreciation, our largest expense, fell $9 million - $390 million as we sold operating leased aircraft from the owned fleet. Finance expenses, our second largest item, rose 2% to $366 million, while our cost of debt was unchanged on first half 2024 at 4.6% per annum. Our gross debt increased by 2% to $16.9 billion.
Use of internally generated cash flow accounted for the stable funding costs.
For the.
First earnings period since 2019. There was no impairment of aircraft values in first half 2025. Elsewhere, our effective tax rate rose to 15.8% in first half 2025 as the global minimum tax rate was implemented in most of the jurisdictions in which we are based. This was up from last year's 9.7% where the REIT benefited from the writeback of impairment losses. Moving to the balance sheet, we ended 30th of June 2025 with total assets of $25.6 billion funded by total debt of $16.9 billion. Total equity rose another $137 million - $6.5 billion as at 30th of June. This was mainly attributable to retained profit for the period, which was partially offset by $185 million in dividend payments.
We raised $2.4 billion in new financing comprising $500 million from the debt capital markets with a further $1.9 billion from facilities with our banking group of over 50 banks. This, combined with the record first half operating cash flow net of interest of $1.0 billion, saw us fund our $1.9 billion of CapEx and repaid $2.3 billion in maturing bonds and loans. Our total debt was little changed from the end of last year and our gross debt-to-equity ratio remained 2.6x as retained earnings continued to rise. Rating agency S&P raised our outlook to stable in March and both S&P and Fitch reconfirmed our A debt rating during the second quarter 2025. We have only $300 million of debt obligations scheduled for repayment over the balance of 2025 which together with our anticipated CapEx can be funded from our cash flow as well as our committed liquidity.
I'll now hand the call back to Steven for his closing remarks.
Thanks Wen. During the first half of 2025, we grew our revenues, our core earnings, and our balance sheet. We've achieved this growth with the support of our Board, our employees, our investors, and our business partners, and we thank all of you for your support. With strong demand for aircraft from both airlines and investors, we've been able to optimize our portfolio yield through increased aircraft deliveries and aircraft sales. We've also been able to place aircraft at increasing monthly lease rentals, which is now becoming evident both in our rising yields and expanding lease margins. While supply side challenges do still exist and we expect them to prevail for a number of years, these are showing signs of diminishing. This is allowing us to deliver aircraft as scheduled and to generate lease revenue as expected.
Today, our record order book totaling almost $20 billion of future committed capital expenditure will provide the core of our company's growth. The sizable increase in our addressable market creates the pathway for additional growth to meet our longer term targets. With that, I conclude our review of the industry, our company's financials, and our outlook, and I'll pass the call back to Tim.
Thanks, Steve. This wraps up management for the commentary. We now have time for Q and A, and as a defense to others, request that each participant restricts themselves to one question and a follow-up unless time permits traditional periods. I'll hand the call back now to the operator for the Q and A session.
Thank you. We're now beginning a question and answer session. In the interest of time, participants are limited to one question each. If you have any follow up questions, please join the queue. Again, participants with questions to pose, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad and you will be placed in the queue. To cancel the queue, please press star 2. Once again, star 1 on your telephone keypad.
Now.
Our first question is from Parash Jain from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hi Steven and Wen Lan, good to.
Hear from you and great to see the U.S. moving in the right direction.
My question is more towards the optimal gearing. Do you think that 2.6 brought that?
Yeah, Ross, is that something that you are comfortable with or if you have intention to deliver it up further?
If that's the case, then what would be the avenue? Is there an opportunity for accelerated CapEx?
Are there opportunities in the NRA market or capital return would be the path, and if there is any timeline?
For achieving that magic saving number.
Thank you.
Hi Brash, it's Steven. I think that 2.6x , as we discussed before, we do feel slightly underlevered. I think it gives us capacity to grow and to grow faster. If we look at now that the deliveries in the industry are starting to increase once again, the last three or four years we've been running at levels well below those we saw at the end of the last decade. It's really only this year now that we're starting to see those step up. That's why you're starting to see the higher CapEx come through as that continues through the next three or four years. As I said in my remarks, I think from 2024 - 2028 we go from about $75 billion of aircraft delivering globally to about $150 billion.
That should create a lot more opportunity for us to grow into that and to start to take the leverage back up. That, as ever, will be our primary aim in terms of the growth. Clearly any M&A will always be opportunistic. If we saw the right opportunity, yes, we'd be open to taking a look at it. That isn't the core of our strategy as we look forward over the next couple of years.
That's very helpful.
Thank you so much, and have a great evening.
Thanks. Brush.
Our next question. Perry Yeung from UBS, please go ahead.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking my question and congratulations with the first solid core profit growth. My question is related to pre-delivery payment. I think Steven, you mentioned in the past that pre-delivery payment could be a very substantial opportunity facing BOC Aviation. Obviously, this time around we see the income has tripled or maybe it has almost tripled on a year-on-year basis. My question is looking ahead, what sort of growth should we expect in this domain? Especially given that the supply chain bottleneck has shown some sign of improvement. That's my question.
Thank you.
Thanks, Perry. The way to think about the pre-delivery payment financing is that really it runs 12 to 18 months ahead of actual deliveries because that's when you start to see the volume of payments coming through. When we talk about those increasing volume of deliveries each year going from that $75 billion - $150 billion, really what you're seeing on the pre-delivery payments is that you run effectively a year ahead of that as that's the funding that people need to look at. You're seeing the effect of that step up already coming through in this year. As the manufacturers now ramp up production and people have more certainty about when deliveries are starting to come in, that will ramp up their requirement to make pre-delivery payments and therefore the requirement for financing.
I think what we're already seeing there gives us good certainty around the opportunity for delivery financing in a year's time. As we're going to see that continued growth in the market over a three or four year period on the deliveries, you should also see that on the pre-delivery payment side as well. I see.
Thank you, that's very helpful. May I have another follow up question related to the CapEx? Since we are also seeing some improvement in terms of supply chain, especially for Boeing this year, are we comfortable with the current CapEx which is around $4 billion as I recall, and do we see room for exceeding that target, especially given that on a long run basis we are targeting to spend $5 billion per annum.
Thank you.
I think if we look at this year, we've achieved just about $2 billion of CapEx already in the first half. We've got over $3 billion already committed. I think we are in a much stronger position than we have been the last two or three years at this halfway point. To have some certainty around achieving the target that we can achieve beyond that really depends now on the manufacturers being able to maintain that further ramp up. If we look at Boeing, for example, they're now up to their FAA-mandated cap of 38 737s a month. They're hoping to be able to achieve a step up in the fourth quarter from 38 a month to 42 a month.
If they and also Airbus can achieve those step ups in deliveries, it does create opportunity, but we need to see that happen before we can start talking with certainty about going beyond that. I see.
Thank you for the insight.
Thank you so much.
Our next question. Amy from Citi, please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for this opportunity. This is Amy Citi Research . My question is regarding finance lease. We're happy to see that the revenue from the interest income from finance lease saw a notable increase in the first half this year. I also see that the geographic mix of the aircraft network value in the Americas also was listed. Is this a coincidence, or are most financially sustained or nearly signed to America airliners? Meanwhile, do we see this growth for finance lease income to be sustainable going forward? Thank you.
Thanks, Amy. I think with the finance lease there's a number of things happening. The way we look at this is it's one of the tools that we have when we provide financing to airlines. For airlines we really offer two things. We can either give them aircraft so we can give them capacity, or we can give them capital to fund their own deliveries in different forms. That's either the pre-delivery payment financing that we talked about earlier, it's the purchase and leaseback financing by way of operating lease, which has been the traditional core of our business and will continue to be the core of our business. Finance lease then has been what we've seen really as an opportunity in this cycle to grow that business because the capital markets broadly have not come back to aviation since the downturn in the way that we've seen previously.
I think today we're running at about 18% of our portfolio is finance leases that may take up a little bit further to around that sort of 20% level. I think we'll stabilize around there because at some point as the airlines make more money and are showing that constant consistent profitability, the capital market will return to the industry and there will be more players come back into that. The way we think about it is it's one of the tools that we have to provide financing, but we don't see it becoming a dramatically larger proportion of what we do. In terms of your question about geography, I think it's actually a little bit unrelated. What we're seeing is that if you go back to which area of the world recovered first from COVID and where traffic recovered first, that was in the Americas.
Two or three years ago that was the area that was placing large orders for aircraft and those aircraft are now delivering. As we start to move through the rest of the cycle as we went down into 2023, 2024, we were seeing bigger orders coming in Europe, in the Middle East and then into Asia. Those will start to deliver now as we move through the forthcoming years.
Thank you. May I have a quick follow up on job at next? Since APEC is the last to recover from pandemic, should we expect further growth engine from the APEC region?
Yes, I think we will. I think if we look forward from here, I think we see that the fastest growing part of the market is going to be Asia Pacific. You don't grow instantaneously in our business because typically what you're doing, we're placing our own aircraft on lease, we're placing aircraft that don't deliver for probably two years. If we're providing financing for airlines, that's typically a year ahead of delivery. It takes time to feed through. I do think that is the region where we're going to see the strongest growth in aviation globally in the next two or three years.
Thank you for your insight.
Our next question, Jason Sum from DBS Bank, please go ahead.
Hi, greeting. Just have a question on your placement. I noticed that this time around you seem to have placed your order book further out all the way into the second quarter of 2027. I wanted to get a bit more color on how do you weigh the benefits of locking in placement early against, you know, the potential upside from waiting for these rates to move higher, and maybe if you can share if airlines are maybe pushing harder for early commitments. Is this just a choice to prioritize visibility over optionality?
Hi Jason, this is something that we typically see at this point in the cycle. What tends to happen is as you recover from any slowdown, lease rates initially recover very, very quickly and there's a sharp run up. You're correct, at that point you hold back from placing too far out. You start to see the increment slow down as you start to reach more traditional levels for rentals and for returns. At that point in time, what you have to make the decision around, as you say, is how far out do you place? That's driven by probably three things, I would say. Firstly, when is there availability direct from the manufacturers? In this cycle I think we're reasonably unique because if you started a discussion today with Boeing or Airbus for an aircraft, they probably would not offer you one this decade.
The availability direct from the manufacturers is incredibly limited. Airlines of all types need to come and talk to the leasing companies. The second thing to always bear in mind, and this is one of the ongoing challenges we still have with the supply chain, is that if you are going to be delivering an aircraft with perhaps business class seats in it, first class seats in it, some of the supply chain around these items is still constrained. You don't want to be trying to place that aircraft only 12 months ahead of delivery because you'll find challenges to be able to deliver it in the specification that the airline wants. You're probably placing out a little further because of that.
The third element you do need to bear in mind is if you're going to start placing two, three, maybe even four years further out as you move through the cycle, you have to be sure that the airline that you're placing those with is going to be somebody who is a strong airline and that will be around to take delivery at that point in time. Our experience in risk management and the fact that we've been in the industry now for over 30 years helps us to be able to make that judgment as to which airlines we're going to place those deliveries with.
Got it. That's really clear. Maybe just one very quick follow-up on extensions. Maybe if you could briefly comment on current extension trends for narrow bodies and widebodies, and how far in advance are airlines approaching you to secure these extensions?
Yeah, there's been a big change in the market in the last two years for the narrow bodies and I think in the last 12 months for the wide bodies now as well. When airlines can see that they can't easily get replacement capacity or get new deliveries direct from the manufacturers, what they're very keen to do is to hold on to the aircraft that they've got. I think when Tom talked in his comments, he said that of the 21 aircraft that we originally have with lease expiry this year, we're only actually moving two of them. The rest are remaining with the airlines. We're seeing airlines much keener to do it. We're seeing airlines committed to do it further out as well. We're already extending leases that might expire in 2027, for example, because they can see that they need to address that.
That is driving that behavior from our airline customers, which obviously we're keen to work with them on. The final element is that because they can see this shortfall lasting for a number of years, they aren't just extending for one or two years, they're actually extending for four, five, six years because they want to make sure they retain that capacity.
Okay, understood.
That's really helpful.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Jesse.
There are currently no questions in the queue. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on the telephone keypad now. Again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.
Okay, operator, I think we'll close the call if there are no more questions. Thank you everyone for joining. We appreciate your interest. If you do have any follow ups for the cursium, please approach me TimothyJohnRossCaoInitiation.com or just give me a call. We look forward to speaking to you all on the next call in the next six months. Bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.