Hi, everybody. I'm Scott Callon, Chairman of Ichigo. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm speaking off of the presentation that's in front of you. It's also on our website, FY 25/2, so the February 2025 current fiscal year Q1 corporate presentation. I'll go through this relatively quickly. Thanks to so many of you, you're veterans. You understand our company well. We're kind of—we try to be consistent in the way we describe ourselves and provide disclosures to you. This will be very familiar. That's the point. We should be transparent about what we're doing and allow you to track our activities. Very strong quarter. More to the point, this is not a quarter-by-quarter battle. Of course, you know, years are built on quarters and decades are built on years. It's great and important to have strong quarters.
But more fundamentally, the underlying business model is very powerful. The activity we're doing right now is going to generate significant forward earnings growth. And so this quarter just kind of reflects that. I wouldn't say that we over-earned. We had a relatively light quarter in the first quarter of last year. This quarter was more normal. And so we have really big year-on-year uplift, but it was a strong quarter. So all in, OP up 119%, somewhere in the doubles year-on-year, Cash Net Income up 30%. That's probably a stronger reflection or better reflection of what kind of actual activity looks like, what we're doing very, very well. I'll touch on many of the points on this page going forward, but we're growing the Asset Management business. We bought a private REIT business in order to do more activity there. We're expanding our Clean Energy business.
We actually have a set of capabilities and technology that I think may surprise you that we're involved in generative AI, but we are. We've had our first customer launch there, and we're doing more in sports. The sports business has primarily been a branding business up to this point, and the branding impact is really, really powerful. We've been a top sponsor of the J. League, so Japan's soccer league, or as we say with a more British pronunciation, football league, for many, many years. That's been great. We bought a J3 soccer club of our own. But, you know, we actually want to develop an earnings stream out of it. It's a non-asset business. So we're doing more activity in that area also. Q1 summary, we are structurally profitable. That's really, really important. Our stock earnings, so those are contractual earnings.
We run ourselves to be above twice our fixed expenses, and that'll continue to be the case. Earnings were particularly, stock earnings were particularly driven by our sustainable real estate business. We had a little bit of drop-off in Asset Management. We'll get that back. That business is growing. The Clean Energy business had kind of had rough weather. That weather is a little bit volatile, but that's already come back. So that's off a little bit. But anyway, so we're growing stock earnings. And so what you can tell from this, though, is we had a huge uplift in the quarter, and that's what I was speaking to earlier. We are a stock plus flow earnings business model. The flow earnings were much more normalized, much bigger during the quarter. And that's what generated the really big numbers. The really big numbers you can see here.
So all in, again, all in OP up 119%, Cash EPS up 34%. You can see Cash EPS is up 34%, and Cash Net Income is up only 30%. That's because we're buying back our stock. And consistently. At this share price, we are trading at below 10x Cash EPS for a business that is a really good business and is growing. So we think the shares are very cheap. And as the subtitle points out, our cash earnings are 1.3x our accounting earnings because we focus on maximizing long-term cash flows for shareholders. We focus on economic profit rather than accounting profit. You know, those are slightly different statements, but we work for shareholders. And it's generating long-term cash flows, which we think is an ultimate source of shareholder value.
In terms of the segment earnings details, you can see explosive activity in sustainable real estate. That's on the back of just very strong sales activity. I'll speak to this later, but we try to be transparent about what's going well and what's not going well. Across the board, things are going well, and that creates the high-class problem. We are constrained on talent right now, particularly our residence token business, which I'll describe again some more later, is exploding. We really need the talent. We need more activity around our value add because we are at this point not demand constrained, but supply constrained. We have more demand for high-quality value add assets. At this point, the ability to produce them, that is a problem. It's something we have to work on, and we are working on.
We will have—we expect record cash earnings this year. For the second consecutive year, we expect to have record stock earnings. It's worth looking a little bit at what's happening here on the page to reflect some activity in the volatility of the hotel business. We think the hotel business that we have is a very good business. And it was devastatingly bad in COVID. We also understand that. And we understand that, you know, we didn't predict COVID, but one has to be very, very careful about hotels because they are the only asset class we own that reprices daily. Which is to say, you know, this is a daily rate for a hotel. It changes all the time. And unlike a residential contract or an office contract, which is run over years, people generally stay at hotels for a day or three days or five days.
So, you know, as a result, it has more volatility in its earnings, which is why we manage this particular asset class so that's no more than 25% of our total assets. Having said that, we think it's a really good business, a really good asset class. Hotels are hard, and hard is good. Meaning, if you want to add value, be in a place where adding value is harder to do, and therefore you can actually add value. And so Japan is absolutely world-class in its restaurants. It is not world-class in its hotels. We have found an opportunity to deliver value there. And what I'm speaking to is that we're having kind of an absolute growing back in hotel revenues. I'll touch upon that. But you can see it on this page in the hotel operator and PROPERA revenues. And PROPERA is our dynamic pricing system for hotels.
But you can see one negative, one seriously negative during COVID. And now, if you look on the right, you can see it's JPY 567 million. It used to be easy when it was JPY 100 to a dollar. You can see that was $5.7 million. It stays somewhere below four, I think. It's growing back. This is in the first quarter, right? So this is a business which is doing very well. I told you that we like the hotel business because it's harder to do. The fundamentals of the business, of course, are also very strong. This is a GDP plus business, meaning you get Japan as a preferred destination for Asian tourists. As those economies continue to grow and there's more income there, there is additional spend that goes into tourism. Of course, the yen is very, very cheap right now.
So that's an additional kind of window to back on this. But there is significant demand for Japanese hotels, significant opportunity to deliver greater value than what other operators are doing. And this is something that we will continue to do. And so watch the space. The hotel earnings are going to be robust. We continue to finance very well. You can see there's been a jump in our financing costs. That's because Japanese financing costs have gone up. So three-month TIBOR, which is the base rate for most of our loans, has gone from 7 basis points to 30 basis points. It's still only 30 basis points. It's still like extremely cheap. But that's a 23 basis point uptick. You can see that increasing in our financing costs. To be very clear, this is not interest rates going up during stagflation.
This is interest rates going up in a very strong economic period. So we will earn overwhelmingly more in terms of, you know, the plus that this delivers to us in terms of our business from the strong economic environment, interest and interest costs. But interest and costs are going up. And we, of course, understand that and need to deliver to you and will deliver to you greater uptick in earnings as a result. We are selective and acquisition sales. We've used a slide title for probably seven years at this point because it's true. In the first quarter, we were net sellers, as you can see, JPY 9.1 billion. We sold to Ichigo Office. We sold to the Ichigo Residence. Our fourth Ichigo Residence Token was a securitized token. I'll talk about later. And, you know, we sell externally too.
It is a case that we, and I hope it's okay for me to say this, we're actually very good asset managers. We want to grow our Asset Management business. We like to serve the world. Investing to defend people's life savings is something really, really meaningful. This is a business we think is a good business. And so we are putting assets into these businesses. To be very clear, we could sell these assets at a higher price elsewhere. We could. It means we would lose the forward asset management fees. And so when we take a total look at this and the valuation attached to an Asset Management business, we think it does make sense to sell the assets at a slight discount into our Asset Management business. But it is only a slight discount.
We're not going to do it for, you know, more than like, I don't know, 2%, 3%. But on that basis, we're doing so. So to be clear, we do have opportunities to sell under asset management, but those are opportunities that exist elsewhere too. I mean, there's this overwhelming demand for the value-add assets that we're generating. As I said earlier, our stock earnings are growing very substantially. You can see RevPAR is substantially up higher than pre-COVID. Our hotel operator, OneFive Hotels, revenue is up 75% year-on-year. This business is going very, very well. There's more upside to come. Ichigo Owners is growing very well. It's a little bit harder to see. Their economies of scale in this business.
And so probably the most important part of the description on this page is the one that's a little bit harder to see, which is the growth in OP, which is literally up 50x over the initial from 70 years ago. So this is a really good business. We buy assets. We work with developers. We work primarily with mid-sized developers. So in terms of understanding the value that we create, we are very, very experienced. And this is a business where we buy Tokyo Prime residential assets, brand new. We specify with the developers what we want. So we have a much richer data set, which is moving from kind of like mid-data to this big data.
We've been doing this for so long as to what different markets need, what customers may need tenants, what are they looking for, what sort of sizes, what sort of features, and what set of locations. We work with a developer to build to our spec, and then we lease out very, very rapidly. So our holding period is generally, and we'll get leased up to 85%-90%, and then we'll sell the asset on. Holding period tends to run for like seven to eight months. We're running at 85% LTV. We have gross margin. It looks like 10%-15%. You run the math on it. We've got ROEs that look like 59%. It's a fantastic business.
We're generating real value by helping developers design product that fits tenant needs, therefore creating robust assets that have ongoing demand, which are good for the new owners of those assets, which in many cases is proving to be these Ichigo Residence Tokens. So our customers, our investor clients. So this is a business that is growing and will continue to grow. The fourth Ichigo Residence Token sold out immediately. To be clear, all four have sold out immediately. This is what we were saying earlier. We cannot produce enough of this product. And to be clear, we will not compromise on delivering really, really good value for our investors. And so that means we need to continue to build out our capabilities in terms of value add activity. And that is, as I said earlier, we're working with developers.
We need to be able to. We're involved in design stage. We're involved in engineering checks on all the assets. We're involved in leasing up the assets. So across the firm, we need to continue to add these capabilities that we are. And as we add those capabilities, this business will grow. So but anyway, this is the same sort of asset we would put into a REIT. The particular wrapper on this or product profile is it's on the blockchain. It's bought through a securities firm. It's completely securitized. You get this return. It feels like a REIT investment, except for whatever reason, there is a broad customer set that prefers to buy it this way as opposed to a REIT. Our REIT investors, our REIT shareholders tend to be skew older, 50s, 60s, and 70s because that's where assets are in Japan and across the world.
Our residence tokens investors tend to be younger, in their 20s and 30s. So it's a completely different customer set. They have a voracious demand for high-quality assets in Japan now that has inflation. And we offer not only an ongoing dividend yield, which, all right, so the 10-year JGB has gone up to 1%. This gives you 300 basis points above it, plus an opportunity for capital gain. So again, this is an asset category we expect to grow. To give you some sense of that, we were at JPY 5 billion two years ago. We nearly 4x it last year. This year, we expect to increase it again, 50% next year by another 50%. We're really at this point constrained primarily by our ability to generate these assets. So this will grow and grow very rapidly.
We continue to work for all of our investors, including, of course, our public REITs, which are really important to us. We also did value add activity on six assets, which we delivered to our investors. We're also moving kind of more of our activity within the REITs themselves. The REITs share prices have performed great over time, but we're certainly not commanding the premium that we expected we would command because arguably we are in terms of the results we've generated, Japan's best REIT manager. We continue to work on how we're going to grow value within the REITs and just generate really high returns for the investors. That is an ongoing task, which we find really meaningful and we'll continue to deliver value on. As I said earlier, we bought a private REIT asset manager.
It's just adding kind of another tool or another vehicle for us to deliver high-quality value-added real estate across multiple products and channels. We do not think this is in conflict with our other channels. As I said earlier, the buyers for the security tokens are a completely different customer set. It turns out that private REITs buyers tend to be different from public REIT buyers. So it's just another opportunity for us to work for customers and deliver value. It does add to the requirement, as I said earlier. This is, you know, this is good news, but we are talent constrained. I say it's good news because the talent relative to the value you can create on our platform is low cost. And so if we have the talent, we're going to drive earnings a lot.
But there's a major, major, it's a multi-year initiative, but it's really accelerating at this point. We have such demand for our product. We are a major initiative to grow our talent and develop our infrastructure so that we can deliver more earnings for you going forward. Clean Energy continues to grow. We'd like to grow it a lot more. And therefore, we have begun a global expansion. We agreed to invest in GIGA.GREEN, a company we think is absolutely fantastic, an extraordinarily talented, great values, great mission. It's just really an honor and privilege to work with them. This is a business very similar to our Clean Energy business in Japan. So it's one that we think we understand reasonably well. We expect to learn from GIGA.GREEN. We expect, I mean, it's our job to add value in any sort of way.
This is a business that we know really well to do GIGA.GREEN, if at all possible. But fundamentally, this is an alliance to work on climate change, which is real and requires a response on a global scale. So again, it's an honor and privilege to work with the wonderful folks at GIGA.GREEN. We are working also on Generative AI. We'll see how far we can take this. We have some capabilities in the area, have our first customer, and we'll see where we can run forward. We do believe this is a fundamental technology breakthrough that is very important. It will change how all of us live, how all of us work, including Ichigo. And we're taking our capability. We're not only deploying within the firm, but we're deploying on behalf of customers. And as I said earlier, we're growing a sports business.
We've been very involved in soccer. We're now getting involved in basketball. And so it's a non-asset business. It's good for the brand to be involved. There's a halo effect from being involved in sports. But we would like to turn it into a pretty robust earnings stream. The IRR will be high because it's non-asset. So stay tuned. We'll continue to do more in this area. In terms of shareholder returns, this is what it looks like. The JPY 1.2 billion for this year was we did JPY 6 billion last year. Couldn't complete the buyback last year. So we completed it once we entered this year. So a total of JPY 6 billion was done last year. We would expect to continue to do buybacks going forward because, again, we think the shares are cheap. We have been raising our dividend.
I mean, there's a version of, you know, we think our shares are very cheap. We could use all of our cash flow. I mean, look, we're able to invest for growth and we're able to return, you know, to shareholders. Given that the shares are cheap, we could do kind of, we could do 100% share buybacks. We do have investors who care about dividends and we care about serving our investors. So we have a shareholder return KPI of at least 4%. And we have committed to that. It gives a durable and certain and growing dividend, giving our earnings growth. And we'll continue to do that. And we'll have buybacks in tandem with that. We do have a J.League shareholder program.
I think you all know this, but most Japanese companies that sponsor the J.League take the tickets that they receive and give them to management or employees. We work for shareholders. We give them to our shareholders, which makes us unique in Japan. We continue to be very, very active. We are climate positive and seeking to address the devastating impact of climate change. You can see this is both not only growing our activity in terms of CO2 reduction from production growth, meaning kind of switching out of fossil fuels and providing clean renewable energy, but also in terms of decreasing and making our own renewable energy transition in terms of what we do on the consumption side. We expect to get 100% to renewable energy on the consumption side this year. We have recently been certified for SBT.
So just to go back where I started, and I will go back quickly where I started, very strong quarter, but it's really not about the quarter. We all understand that. Very strong platform, very strong business model is our requirement to deliver very strong execution, which I think we're doing. And so we look forward to deliver on that execution and earnings growth for all going forward. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining this call. We're really grateful to you. Have a nice morning, afternoon, and evening. Take care.