Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to the Philippine Stock Exchange for having us at the PSE STAR investor. I am Kerwin Tan, Chief Financial, Risk and Compliance Officer of Robinsons Land Corporation, and it's a pleasure to be with you virtually today. Before we proceed, please take a moment to read the disclaimer carefully. This slide provides an overview of the broader JG Summit Group and where Robinsons Land fits within its portfolio. As of June 30, 2026, JG Summit had a market capitalization of approximately $3.17 billion. The group's portfolio is organized into three main areas: strategic business units, ecosystem plays, and core investments. The strategic business units represent JG Summit's principal operating businesses across food and beverage, air transportation, real estate, and petrochemicals. Robinsons Land serves as the group's real estate platform, with JG Summit holding a 66% stake in the company.
RLC, in turn, is the majority shareholder of RL Commercial REIT Inc., or RCR, with a 56% stake. The ecosystem plays complement the group's core businesses and create opportunities for collaboration across infrastructure, logistics, technology, and digital banks. This includes Leopard Connectivity Business Solutions, DHL Summit Solutions Inc., JG Digital Equity Ventures, Data Analytics Ventures, Inc., and GoTyme Bank. Finally, the core investments provide the group with a steady stream of cash flows and opportunities for long-term capital appreciation. This includes strategic interests in Meralco, Singapore Land Group, PLDT Inc., and Bank of the Philippine Islands. Overall, RLC benefits from being part of a diversified and well-established conglomerate with access to a broad ecosystem that supports collaboration, customer reach, and long-term growth. Robinsons Land has continued to strengthen its position as one of the country's most diversified real estate developers. Since our incorporation in 1980, we have steadily expanded across malls, offices, residential hotels, logistics, and Robinsons Destination Estates while maintaining disciplined growth.
Over the past 46 years, RLC has built a broad footprint across key real estate segments. These milestones reflect our consistent focus on growing the business, pursuing new opportunities, and creating long-term value for our shareholders and stakeholders. Today, our portfolio includes 57 lifestyle centers or malls, with 10 in Metro Manila and 47 in key provincial locations, 34 office developments, many of which are green and LEED certified. During the quarter, we added one new work.able center, bringing our total to 17 centers. work.able is RLC's flexible workspace offering. 27 hotels and resorts across 10 hotel brands and 15 industrial and logistics facilities or warehouses. On the development side, RLC has delivered 134 residential developments across horizontal and vertical formats, as well as 33 Robinsons Destination Estates. This slide highlights Robinsons Land's strong nationwide presence, with operations spanning Metro Manila, Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
Today, our portfolio extends across 31 provinces, 53 cities, 14 municipalities, making RLC one of the most geographically diversified property developers in the Philippines. This extensive footprint enables us to serve a broad and diverse customer base, capture growth opportunities across key markets, and bring the Robinsons Land brand closer to more Filipinos nationwide. As shown in this slide, RLC is predominantly an investment portfolio-driven business, supported by a strong base of recurring income assets. In the first half of 2026, the investment portfolio accounted for 72% of consolidated revenues, 82% of EBITDA, 77% of EBT, and 69% of net income. These contributions are generated primarily by our malls, offices, hotels, and logistics business. Meanwhile, our diverse development portfolio, comprised of our residential business and joint ventures, provide an additional source of earnings and growth.
This business mix gives RLC a stable and resilient recurring income base while allowing us to capture further growth opportunities through our development portfolio. During the first half of 2026, RLC delivered solid financial results. Revenues grew by 10% to PHP 25.42 billion, while EBITDA increased by 8% to PHP 13.48 billion, despite higher utility and commission expenses. Net income rose by 12% to PHP 9.02 billion, supported by lower financing costs and taxes. Net income attributable to parent increased by 5% to PHP 7.21 billion. Reflecting the higher minority ownership in RCR. Our balance sheet remains strong with interest-bearing debt declining to PHP 33.57 billion and net debt to equity ratio improving to 10.95%. Cash reached PHP 13.44 billion, supported by operating cash flows and the PHP 7 billion RCR block placement.
Despite deploying PHP 7.53 billion in CapEx, we generated positive free cash flow of PHP 8.02 billion. Overall, our strong earnings, healthy cash flow, and low debt give RLC the financial capacity to fund future growth and create long-term value for our shareholders. Let me briefly revisit Vision 5-25-50, the strategic program we launched in 2025 with the goal of reaching PHP 25 billion in net income by our 50th anniversary in 2030. We remain on track with our strategy and continue to make progress across its five key priorities: expanding and diversifying our recurring income portfolio, unlocking asset value through RCR, elevating our offerings, building high-impact partnerships, and enhancing the customer experience. As shown here, we have a clear expansion pipeline through 2030. We expect our mall portfolio to reach 2.4 million square meters of GLA.
Offices to grow by over 50% to 1.27 million square meters of GLA, and logistics to more than double to 600,000 sq m of GLA. Our hotel portfolio will also expand by 35% to 5,681 room keys. This expansion will further strengthen our recurring income base and support our long-term earnings growth. Turning to RCR, RLC continues to maintain a substantial asset base that may support RCR's long-term growth and diversification. RLC retains a substantial portfolio of its malls, offices, logistics facilities, and hotels that may support future infusions into RCR. Beyond the existing portfolio, its development pipeline of over 1.5 million square meters of GLA and more than 1,000 hotel room keys provide additional long-term growth opportunities subject to asset completion, stabilization, and RCR's investment criteria. For this year, RLC is also evaluating a potential asset infusion into RCR from its existing portfolio.
The timing, asset composition, and transaction size remain subject to final evaluation, regulatory approvals, and the requirement that any transaction be yield and dividend accretive to RCR shareholders. We look forward to building on this momentum and delivering continued growth across RLC and RCR. This slide highlights the strength and continuity of RLC's management team. Our leadership is anchored by our Chairman Emeritus, Mr. James L. Go, our Chairman, Mr. Lance Y. Gokongwei, who bring 45 and 36 years of experience with RLC respectively. Our President and CEO, Ms. Mybelle V. Aragon-GoBio, has 32 years of experience across RLC's business. She is supported by our Executive Vice President, Mr. Faraday Go, who leads Robinsons Malls and Robinsons Destination Estates and serves also as Chairman of RCR. I have been with RLC for 22 years and currently serve as its Chief Financial, Risk and Compliance Officer, as well as Director and Treasurer of RCR.
Together, our leadership team brings nearly 150 years of experience with RLC, providing strong continuity, deep institutional knowledge, and proven execution capabilities. To conclude, RLC declared its highest-ever dividend of PHP 1 per share for 2025, representing a payout ratio of 36%, also the highest on record and well above our minimum policy of 20% of recurring net income. This reflects our strong earnings, healthy cash generation, and continued commitment to delivering sustainable returns to our shareholders. With that, we thank you for your time, and this concludes our presentation, and I am now happy to take your questions. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Sir Kerwin, for the comprehensive overview of RLC's performance and outlook. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Denise Laceta from Sun Life Investment Management and Trust Corporation, and I will be moderating today's Q&A portion of today's session. I think joining us as well is the investor relations team of RLC. We would like to open the floor for any questions from our investors and analysts in the call. Please feel free to type in your questions in the Q&A box, and I guess mention your name as well and the company you are affiliated with so we may address them properly. We do have two questions already in the queue. Maybe we can start off, sir, with the mall segment. We have a question here on expansion. Does RLC have plans expanding their malls in Cavite?
In Cavite, as of now, we have a mall in Cavite. General Trias Mall is doing very well there. In other parts of Cavite, as in all our investment decisions, we have set forth an investment criteria, things we- metrics that we look on whether to invest in a particular area.
Right. I guess a bit of an offshoot as well with the mall segment, since we already started on this once, and this is also the largest revenue contributor of RLC, right? With the spike in oil prices and I do recall there was a reduction in mall operating hours as well, although this has resumed already to normal operating hours. How has this affected consumer activity in second quarter and first half of this year?
Okay. As part of our participation in the government's mandate for energy consumption, I think sometime in April and May, mall hours were reduced by one hour. The reduction in mall hours resulted to a slight moderation in our foot traffic during the period. However, this impact is temporary. As we know, we Filipinos are mall goers, so foot traffic immediately normalized. In fact, during that time, we had a clamor for our tenants to request us to quickly revert back to the regular mall hours as many consumers or mall goers were clamoring for us to revert back because of the Filipino culture of going to the malls. Despite these headwinds, mall revenues still continue to grow, despite the higher base last year. We still have healthy occupancy, stable tenant sales, and this was reflected by our first half performance.
Also note that in our malls, about 15%-20% of our energy are sourced from the sun, solar power energy. I guess in a way, we have our own way to develop operational efficiencies to be less dependent on securing power from the regular grid.
Yes. Understood. Jumping a bit on the office segment, we do have a question here on office space. Let me just read through it. Are you seeing slow take-up of office space as global companies turn to AI rather than outsourcing office functions to BPO operators, which have been key to office demand in the Philippines? I know BPOs are your main source of tenants for the office segment.
That is correct. I think more than 70% of our tenants in the office are BPOs. We believe the office sector will continue to evolve rather than be displaced. I think for the net, we view AI as not our competitor, but we view ourselves as AI enablers.
Yeah.
I think for the next five to 10 years, more routine and repetitive functions may be automated, but we also expect growth in higher value roles involving analytics, judgment, creativity, client management. I guess from what we view it right now, as mentioned also by our tenants, we continue to, instead of the regular cubicles and call centers, the repetitive tasks definitely will be taken over by AI. But from what we hear from our tenants, in the future, they would want to require more spaces per BPO employee. Currently it is about 6 sq m - 7 sq m per employee. They would expect this to grow in size because of number one, I think the monitors are huge or larger, and then there is more collaborative activity with the BPO workers and their customers. Also as of now, we see new roles that are evolving.
They are data annotators. AI-focused data analysts, content moderators, AI coaches and trainers. I guess we have to take advantage of that. Aside from that, we have prompt engineers, AI quality assurance specialists, and AI governance professionals. I guess what I am saying is that we have to take advantage of our youth. Philippines is about 110 million people, average age of 25 years, right? We have to take advantage of this. Our capacity to learn is so much more. I guess we have to take advantage, and we together with government also are in line with upskilling our current BPO workers. I guess as I said earlier, gone are the days where you just pick up the phone and be a customer service
Right
Representative and answer, right? You should upskill more than that or skill set.
You are seeing that there will be resilience in the office segment, notwithstanding.
Definitely
AI functions.
Yeah. So definitely, I think we would expand more rather than fear that there are replacement, there's contraction. But you are correct. We Filipinos are very, there's resiliency and the capacity to, the ability to learn is in us. It's just up to us on how to take advantage of it. So I guess we will have more demand. Just to quickly add, across the world, you see populations are aging, gender ratio. I guess we have to take advantage of our youth, our zest to be able to adapt new things. That's why in RLC, we keep building offices similar to I think we can look forward to The Jewel. There's more office buildings that are slated to come up there. So I guess we're bullish about this project.
Okay. Jumping a bit to residential. We do have a question here on outlook for residential sales and bookings for the next few years. Can they move the needle in overall earnings?
I guess what we see in residential is, what we see is the residential market, I think has bottomed out. Everything, I believe, is a function of supply and demand. I guess as more developers have cut down new launches, or there are very few new launches right now. I guess it's up to the demand, which we believe is more than enough to take up all the supply that is in the market right now. We just suffered. In real estate, especially in residential, we're in a boom and bust cycle, right?
Right.
It's really a cycle of up and down cycle. We're probably in a down cycle, but I think there's nowhere to go but go up the curve. Filipinos used to believe. Just to give a concrete example, we Filipinos live with extended families. As I mentioned earlier, we have a young population. Young people like to live. Housing is a form of financial independency, that people want to live. I guess that we should ride that curve. It's a function that we had a bit of the supply outweigh the demand in the past couple of years. But right now, I think we have reached an equilibrium state, and we're on the way to as the people launch, as developers launch less, we will be able to take more people, bigger take up and affordability.
Right. That's for the near term, sir. But what about for the next three years? How do you see the residential market?
I think we would go back to, in the next three years, I think we would go back to where we were during its peak. We even surpass its peak. That's right. As at the end of the day, if everybody says there's so much supply right now, et cetera. But if you look at property prices, property prices are not, in general, land prices are not going down. Land prices are increasingly single-digit increase on it every year. It's really interesting. Just one more thing to add, I think in the residential, we are not, I guess as compared to the other companies which have experienced a challenging residential environment, most of our buyers that we have right now are not speculative buyers. Most of our buyers are end users.
End users. Correct.
Because immediately, if you can look at it, the friction cost of buying and selling a condo is already, I think, more than 12% already. The friction cost is huge for someone to flip a property.
I'm looking at that chat box. We do have some interest on RCR.
Yes.
Let me just breeze through some of them. Hold on. What is the future asset infusion of RCR? I think now it is a split between offices and malls. Am I correct?
That is correct. Currently, we started with offices. Now, I think in terms of size, we are almost 50/50.
Malls and offices. We still have a lot of malls that can be infused in the company. If you look at RLC's investment in the average, projected to be about PHP 21 billion for the year. Only 55% is from RCR. Technically, we have 45% still. What is the mix? We still have logistics and our hotels portfolio, but there are still more malls, still more malls, many malls. Also, if I rewind a bit, if you look at our Vision 5-25-50, if you look at our pipeline. Whatever the intent of the team of the company is, whatever assets that RLC has sold to RCR, RLC will replenish these assets. It is really a cycle we feel that could be sustained over a long period of time.
In terms of the asset mixer, just going back still to RCR, will we be seeing hotels, industrial warehouses in the portfolio?
Right now, we're still focused on, I think malls because we still have a huge number. I think we only infused about, currently its about 50% of our malls. Yeah, 44%. We're still within not even half of our mall sizes we infused into RCR.
Of our offices, we still have 40% of our portfolio still to be infused into RCR. I think the next phase should be logistics, but it will depend on a lot of things because logistics, it's in its infancy stage right now. What we see promised in logistics is what? It's how offices were about 10 years ago. Even the margins of logistics about 90%, so it's a very profitable business. You typically get paid back in what? Less than 10 years. So it's a very profitable business. Hotels, well, hotels would be a challenge. Hopefully, if tourism improves, if our tourist arrivals will at least equal the pre-pandemic levels, then we could open hotels in general. Although there are some office hotels already in RCR.
There's just a minuscule amount, 88% of our portfolio just RCR. These are hotels which are embedded in our office buildings.
Understood. Jumping a bit on, we have a question on NUSTAR. So what is the contribution of NUSTAR IR to RLC in Cebu? Are there plans to expand either in Cebu or in other areas like Clark or NCR for NUSTAR?
Yeah. NUSTAR, So if you look at the integrated resort in Cebu, RLC owns two components there, the hotel component and the mall component. The hotel component is our first Filipino five-star branded hotel. We have a Fili Hotel and a NUSTAR hotel, and in terms of NUSTAR and NUSTAR Mall. Well, in the scheme of things, we have NUSTAR Mall is just one of our 57 malls. So I think in terms of ranking, I think there are more malls which contribute more than The Mall at NUSTAR. In terms of hotels, although we still have the other branded hotels. It's creeping up, but majority of it's still within our non-NUSTAR hotels.
Hotels. Understood. Jumping a bit on dividend payout ratio. We have a question from Andrew Williamson from HALO. Thanks, Andrew, for your question. Your dividend payout ratio is currently 36%, and the debt to equity is falling. With your CapEx forecast over the next few years known, will you increase the payout ratio further as your debt will continue to fall or as you sell more assets to RCR?
That is correct. That is the intention of the company, well, subject to performance, number one. Number two, subject to the board's evaluation. Of course, what we do as a group, we do a capital allocation. Of course, we allocate the cash according to the most profitable business, not to mention, of course, a certain portion of it will be allocated as a return to shareholders. Andrew's correct, that as we pay down debt and our interest expense continue to go down, our net income will, of course, increase, assuming all our businesses increase accordingly. That is correct. That is the intention. It is our intention also to. Well, the intention of RLC is to sell as much of its asset to RCR, because I think we are one of the few companies which really maximizes the capital recycling play.
When REIT was envisioned, I think that was the intent. Aside from democratization of real estate and when you could sell a piece of real estate. The intention is to capitalize everything, because remember, every time we do a placement per REIT rules, we are required to reinvest that into, in our case, real estate.
Yes. That perfectly answers, I think we have a cue here, actually asking about how capital recycling works, and I guess you've already answered that, sir. I think you mentioned about debts, right? So there's a question here on, are there plans to issue securities this year or next year?
As of the moment, there's none. If you look at, I think our presentation earlier, we still have an ample amount of cash that we have to deploy. That is the intention of deploying the cash. I think our free cash flow period is at PHP 8 billion. So I think we can manage to, that is without counting the block placement that we received. PHP 8 billion free cash flow with free cash flows after CapEx. So that will enable us to pay out dividends. Debt servicing was also covered in this case.
Okay. Going back a bit on operating metrics. We have a question here. How does the effective net rental yield on hotel developments compare to retail and office? Is the yield premium enough to justify the higher risk/volatility?
That is why we are cautious on injecting hotels into the REIT company. The REIT has to be a stable stream of dividends, right? It is really a function if ever we choose the hotel. Remember that our hotels are just 65% occupied. In order to maximize this, I think, the REIT company has to have approximately 90% occupancy.
That is why, in general, if you rank all our assets, the one with the lowest cap rate is, well, the lowest cap rate is about logistics, then offices, because logistics, that is why they have lower cap rates, is because everything there is paid for by the tenants. In malls, next is malls, because malls have open spaces that is technically not really covered by the existing tenants. For hotels, the problem with hotels is everything should be up and running even if there are no guests. I think there is some recovery that should happen.
Okay. We have a very interesting question. Is RLC going into agriculture or renewable REITs? For its traditional property rental mix, will RLC be doing a 50/50 commercial-resi mix?
Well, I think we have a lot of other things right now. I think the intention of the group is to co-focus on our recurring income assets, so our investment portfolio. That is why it is already represented: by 2030, our mall footprint will be about 2.4 million square meters of GLA. Offices will be about 600,000 sq m of GLA more, and we will double the logistics in about 5,000.
We believe that recurring is the way to go. Of course, we are not discounting that, we are not eliminating the residential portion because each asset complements each other. What is more prevalent right now is we built on huge chunks of property from which all our assets are there, and we call it the Robinsons Destination Estates. We also need the residential portion to complement our malls, our offices, things like that. I think the 80/20 mix is 80% investment portfolio w ould be our target.
That target, sir, that 80/20, how are we looking at it? Is it a near-term target, mid-term target?
I think we're now 70/20. That means we're not far. I think maybe the next two years, we'll be about 80/20.
Okay. I guess that's just jumping into my next question on capital allocation over the next five years. I believe for the first half of 2026, we're seeing a heavy tilt towards malls and resi.
Resi is because of the units that we had sold before, we have to complete it. So that's a given. That's why you see a skew towards residential. I mentioned earlier, we're keen on capital allocation. We allocate capital to the most profitable business, and right now, the more profitable business is. Well, all are profitable, but I guess in terms of potential for growth is our malls, offices, logistics, and well, to some extent.
Okay. I'm looking through the chat box. I think we've addressed all of them, I think. Let me just go through. "I have plans on calling any of our fixed-rate bonds." I think Sir Kerwin mentioned that there won't be any new ones in 2026 and 2027. No new issuances in the next two years. I guess that's it. So, maybe just to wrap things up, we all know that there has been quite a lot of macroeconomic headwinds, right, with the ongoing Middle East conflict. So, my question is, what gives you optimism about the future of the Philippine property market with everything happening right now?
I guess Philippine property market, and especially Robinsons Land, we're a reflection of the Philippine consumer growth story. I guess if you don't believe in the Philippine consumer growth story, there's no business in investing, in our case, RLC general. I guess that our strong first-half performance reflects the resilience of our diversified portfolio. Despite the challenging environment, we continue to deliver double-digit growth. In general, I'd like to say that, in the Philippines, we should take advantage. The whole world is underpopulated. We have 110 million people at an average age of 25 years. I think we have a lot of productive people. Filipinos are known to be very resilient. We've gone through a lot of crises already, the Asian financial crisis, the global financial crisis, COVID crisis. As a company, we've been in existence for about 46 years already, so we have gone through several leadership changes already.
And yet, in each challenge, we have grown to be stronger than ever right now. As for the residential market, if you look at it, as I mentioned earlier, I think there are so many young people, we're so underhoused. I guess as a company, we continue to see strong demand on all our assets on a recurring income base, and also as well as our development portfolio. We remain focused on creating long-term return value for our stakeholders and shareholders through prudent investments and operational excellence. Thank you for providing us this time to showcase our company. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you as well, Kerwin and the RLC team for their insight shared today. With that, we're formally closing the session for RLC. We appreciate everyone's time and continued support, and we hope to engage with you again in the next briefing.