I'm Scott Callon, Chairman of Ichigo. Thank you very much for joining today. I'm joined on my right, Tet Fujita, who is our Lead Independent Director, and on my left by Dan Morisaku, who is a Senior Member of the Finance Team and the Head of our Global IR. We're going to be going through the FY26 to the February 2026 first half corporate presentation that's in front of you. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining. We're really grateful for your time. So let's start on page six. One of the things you should know, we changed a name of one of our earnings classifications. We were calling it All-In Operating Profit. We've changed it to Business Profit. There's no change in the definition itself.
The reason we changed it is because we started doing this disclosure, and I'll go into some more details, a couple of years ago. And since then, a number of big Japanese real estate firms have started using an equivalent disclosure, and they're calling it business profit. It just felt like it was easier for investors to use a similar naming scheme for it. It was also a little bit of, by calling it all in, people thought it was possibly all in everything but the kitchen sink, and it isn't. So we made a name change. So going forward, it's going to be business profit, BP, as opposed to all in OP. I hope that's okay. All right. So on to the summary for the first half. Business profit, we think these are the two major KPIs you should be focusing on.
Business Profit, which is a broad definition that encompasses our core operating earnings and Cash EPS, are the two major earnings measures for the firm. So one of them is up 60% year on year, and the other one is up 52%. So it was a very strong quarter. The business environment is superb, and we run forward. Stock Earnings up 14% year on year. Flow Earnings up 91%. As you know, we have a business where we have very strong sustainable recurrent profitability coming off of just kind of stock, meaning kind of recurrent, kind of contractual earnings. And then on top of that, we have Flow Earnings. We are forecasting record earnings for the year that we're bringing in EPS at JPY 38. So EPS growth higher than net income growth because of the effect of the share buyback.
But it's an ROE of 14% and cash ROE of about 18. In the first half, we completed a JPY 5 billion share buyback. We acquired on the acquisition side. The main thing that we did is we acquired three hotels with value add upside. The hotel market is very strong. It's also inefficient, and there are opportunities for us to deploy our capabilities there that we think are very powerful and will drive forward earnings for us. So just to show you how OP plus extraordinary gains feeds into business profit. One of the things that we do, we exist to serve shareholders in the world. We use the tax shield of declaring assets to be fixed assets. So if you carry your assets as current assets, you don't get depreciation. If you put it in the fixed asset category, you do.
And so you get a tax shelter result. It means you generate more cash flow. And we serve, as I said, shareholders in the world. By having stronger cash flow, we can deploy that cash against forward investments or buybacks. And so that's really, really positive. That's why we have cash earnings that are 1.3x our accounting earnings. But the impact of that is when you put assets, and this is an accounting definition, it has real-world impact because it gives us a tax shield and generates higher cash flow for us. It means that when you record the gains, and they are gains, on the value add, it shows up as extraordinary gains as opposed to part of operating profit.
So because we are literally taking similar assets and the ones that we can get away with putting in the fixed asset categories, and we get the tax shield, we put into a fixed asset category. But they are equivalent assets to what we're having current assets. You want to be able to have a broader look at what our total profitability is from our value add activity, and that's what Business Profit does for you. So Business Profit is up 6% year on year. And as I say, it's been very robust. To look at the breakdown of this, and in fact, we have a little bit of a logistics issue because the camera is right in front of me and is blocking my view of the screen. So I'm going to have to look down on occasion. But that's fine. We're going to go forward anyway.
The year-on-year activity is up 60%. If you look off to the right, you can see that on the full year at the forecast, we're expecting asset management down 31%, sustainable real estate to be up 67%, hotel down 33%, so we have an adjustment, and I can see the screen. That's good. Thank you very much. Ichigo Owners is up 68%, clean energy down 13%, and the total is we've got year-on-year we're forecasting to up 14%, and so we, of course, always expect to beat our forecast, and you should expect us to also, but what I'm pointing to here is we have a portfolio of businesses. They all deploy our capabilities and value add in real estate.
Clean energy is an example of that, of us taking undeveloped and kind of unused land in many cases, former factories, schools, dumps, and turning that into solar and wind energy. But there's going to be some volatility among the segments. But there's a portfolio effect and diversification effect that's very, very powerful. What we do at the beginning of every year is we don't forecast, in the case of the REITs, any performance fees. And yet there is significant activity within the REITs. They do generate value add gains, and we do result in performance fees. So just as an explanation, we end up with, and go to page 10, the previous page, we end up with generally a year-on-year forecast that's down. So as you can see, asset management forecast down for the year.
We'll find out together whether or not there is activity in the REITs that results in performance fees. But you should not be surprised if we end up beating that by a lot because we will if we have performance activity related activity out of the REITs. So I will go quickly through, we just jumped past 11 asset management. I will go quickly through all these slides, but only very quickly, and just kind of highlight things. So I think I've said my bit on asset management and turning to SRE, so sustainable real estate. What's worth pointing out here, and just to kind of go to some kind of more unusual activity, because as you know, we want to have ongoing disclosure that's consistent, and so you see a lot of the same information, and it's updated in the current period.
And so I'm not going to go into a lot of details about why we're presenting the information, and hopefully it's self-explanatory. But we had in Flow Earnings, we had a significant contribution from a gain on sale on a data center investment that we were involved in. We have. Data centers are really interesting. We're constantly looking for opportunities for us to create value in new asset classes. And we have been involved in data centers and took a JPY 2 billion gain on that. We also exited as part of a cleanup. We did some things that were kind of small scale and didn't work out, for example, in coin laundries. And we have things that we experiment as a firm. Similar to Amazon, we're happy to have things go wrong, only if they go wrong at small scale. But there are opportunities to learn.
As you know, we entered the storage business that went phenomenally well. We exited at a massive gain. There was some idea that maybe coin laundry would be interesting. No, it hasn't proved to be interesting. So we entered, and we exited, and we took some gains of sale on the exit in this quarter. Hotel, what's worth pointing out is that we have two branded hotel chains. One of them is The Knot, which is kind of a higher-end lifestyle or boutique hotel. Another one is The OneFive. These are both Ichigo proprietary brands. The OneFive is kind of a lower cost point, but very good food. Japan people really care about good food. I think people visiting Japan do also. And so it's kind of a point that's interesting to our guests.
They come and they stay in Japan, and they stay at the hotel, and they have really good food. Anyway, so three of those hotels, one in Tokyo, one in Hiroshima, and OneFive, Osaka and Namba, have been key to driving the hotel earnings. Ichigo Owners, you'll have kind of volatility from quarter to quarter based on whether or not we have a transaction in terms of selling a portfolio we did, and therefore you had flow earnings up doubled year on year. We expect to have security token activity and portfolio sales in the second half of the year, is looking quite strong. Clean energy is pretty much kind of flat year on year. I've said this before, we want to grow this business more.
I'll talk a little bit about it later, but at the moment, it's just a solid contributor with a significant contribution from cash contribution, earnings contribution from large depreciation attached to it, in addition to the earnings that we generate on an accounting basis. So again, we were forecasting record Business Profit, I mean, record everything, operating profit, Stock Earnings, Flow Earnings, net income across the board. But this shows kind of how this all ties together by segment on Business Profit. It is an important element of our business that we're structurally profitable. Our Stock Earnings, so again, these are kind of fixed, relatively fixed earnings, contractual, ongoing, they're not capital gains, things like that, that are going to show up at Flow Earnings, are generally about twice our fixed expenses.
And so even we do nothing on the Flow side, and we always do things on the Flow side, we are profitable. And Stock and Flow earnings both are expected to be record this year. Again, there are going to be some pages where I barely say anything. This is going to be one of them. This shows how Stock earnings break up across the segments, again, quite diversified. We have a strong financial base. We're careful about how we borrow and diversification of our borrowing, and most importantly, by the tenor long-term borrowing. So 85% of our borrowing right now is long-term. We've actually did a certain amount of bridge activity that we're going to lengthen out this year. So we'll probably be banging it up more above 90%. But the point of the matter is that we borrow very long-term.
It's important to have that solid, structural, and durable underpinning for the liability side of our balance sheet. So dividing across our businesses, we borrow primarily for the sustainable real estate business and hotels. Generally, these are 10-year borrowings. Ichigo Owners has got a one-year turnover. And to show how conservative we are with about kind of the length of our borrowing, even though it has one-year turnover, we generally borrow for seven years. So as we've been growing our owners' business, since that's a seven-year borrow versus a 10, it means the average length of our borrowing has gone down a little bit. But this is very, very durable coverage over kind of in terms of our asset liability management. So the one thing that's worth pointing out on the page, of course, is that interest rates have gone up.
So, 36 basis points increase in interest rates over the last kind of 18 months. It is more than covered by the extraordinary increase in replacement cost, meaning construction cost, giving us much more value in terms of our existing assets. People classically describe Japan as an open supply market, right. There are very few restrictions on building, but the problem is not that there are very few restrictions on building in terms of owning existing assets. The problem has always been there's been no inflation, and so someone can put up a new building next door to yours built at the same price as yours 20 years ago. That is not the case anymore. There's been an absolute surge in inflation, construction inflation. It's running probably 3x or so.
The data of more general inflation, the data that you see coming out on the construction industry, implies it's only running about double. I can tell you that's not accurate. What's going on is, in order to get anything done, you need to pay more to accelerate the build itself. So you're seeing inflation running, construction inflation running up something like 10% per annum, and that's pushing up replacement costs, and what it means is when you put up a new building, you're putting up at a massive premium to what an existing building is. Similar to what's the case historically been in, for example, the U.S. and Europe, and it means that we're able to raise rents, so that's one thing that's powerful for us in terms of our balance sheet, is suddenly we have the ability to raise rents across our balance sheet.
But more fundamentally, as Ichigo, we have always been long construction cost. We are not guys who build from scratch. We're guys who take existing assets and improve them. So it's been a punch in the face for those with more classic development models. It is an enormous wind at our back for us to take our capabilities in a high construction cost environment and deploy them against a bunch of assets which are not being torn down anymore and not competing with new assets because you can't build new assets at levels of competitive what we can do with our value add activity. So it is, without question, the single best operating environment we've ever had in the context of, and so I've just told you the plus and the minuses, we're all aware of the extraordinary uncertainty in the global operating environment right now.
We have to manage it both. One, a fantastic operating environment where we can deliver capabilities that we built over years that are matched to that environment. And two, we should all be very careful about what the future looks like. In terms of our acquisition and sale activity, as you can see, net sales, just a small amount of net sales in the first half. We expect to be net sellers over the full year and probably going forward. We built the balance sheet a bit over the last couple of years. We saw the visibility and got there sooner on kind of how construction inflation was going to drive up kind of the value of assets because replacement costs are going up so high. In Japan, none of us has experienced this kind of construction inflation.
So the Japanese participants were, I mean, we are a Japanese firm, but as you probably can tell from my accent, I'm American. This is something that we were able to kind of bring some insights from what's happening in the rest of the world and has happened in the rest of the world, so we saw how construction inflation would play through in terms of asset valuations earlier than most and accumulate assets at very good prices. It is a seller's market because what I've just told you is emphatically true, that at the end of the day, we think that real estate needs to be underpinned by fundamentals to be worth owning. The fundamentals of the assets that we own are rising. Rising costs have meant the ability to push through rent increases, and it's a very powerful position to be in.
So we've been minor net sellers in the first half. We expect to be net sellers over the full year and possibly going forward. This kind of breaks out how we've done things across the three major acquirers and sellers in terms of segments, which is Ichigo Owners overwhelmingly, since that's a high turnover model of generally, as I say, less than a one-year hold hotel or hotel segment in our sustainable real estate segment. You can see we have executed contracts on the far right-hand side. We don't have them seem to be offset by executed contracts on the sell side, but this is true because we're going through processes that are generally auction processes. Well, they are auction processes, but we understand we're well along the way with the sales of our assets, and we'll complete them during this year. Tradepia Odaiba was a problem asset.
It was a great asset. It was 98% occupied at peak, then corona punched it in the face, COVID and the coronavirus punched it in the face, and we've spent multiple years kind of repositioning the asset, primarily by focusing on delivering kind of a community experience in the asset. I've said this before. One of the insights that was powerful about WeWork is that better quality assets in a better environment is valuable. Some degree of kind of trying to build community can be valuable. Our kind of perspective on this is yes, and not everybody wants to be in the shared office, so delivering kind of higher quality in the asset itself, delivering a stronger community experience in the asset can be also associated with people having private offices, companies having their own offices, and that's what we've delivered at Tradepia Odaiba.
And so we have had a multi-year process of building out a community and building out the aesthetics and the functionality of the asset. And we're back up to 95%. And we think we'll be at 97% again very, very soon. So this has gone very well. The result of that is we think it's ready to be sold, and we'll begin a process over the next year of putting this up for sale. And we think we will generate significant gains on sale as part of that process. Hotels are doing well. The significant inbound, the Japanese economy is doing fine. One has to be careful with hotels. So on the downside, because they reprice daily, unlike kind of you have longer leases with kind of every other asset category. And on the other hand, there's significant growth here.
We're very good at this, both as an owner and operator. We have delivered, despite the crushing experience of COVID, which turned everything off, through the cycle. We have delivered extraordinary returns through our hotel business. We built out new brands. We built out new capabilities, and we expect this to continue to be a very productive asset for our shareholders. Ichigo Owners is in its, I think it's ninth year at this point. That continues to be a business that goes very well. We like it a lot. I mean, it's a high turnover business. We want more turnover on our balance sheet. We're delivering kind of a much lower margin in terms of gross margin, 10% on the business, which means we're a much better value-add value provided for our customers, the buyers of those assets.
As Jeff Bezos famously said, "Your margin is my opportunity over at Amazon." So this is a market that has been classically occupied by people taking 20%-30% gross margins. We can run this business very, very well at 10% and generate kind of 30%, 40%, 50% ROEs off the business. And that's what we're doing. So we are the single best, we believe, value provider in the space. This is a business focused on Tokyo, overwhelmingly Tokyo, prime location, brand new residential assets. We get them designed to our specs. So this is a fabulous model. We're not building this. We're having developers build them to what we need. We use our leasing capability. We use our design capability and understand what the market needs are and the functionality in the assets.
And then we use our leasing capability, lease them up, and we lease them up very quickly, and we on-sell them. And it's an extraordinarily powerful business. That's what Owners looks like over time. It bounces around because things move between periods, but it is on a growth trend, and we'll continue to grow. One of the things that we're doing with some of the owners' assets, we're putting them into security tokens. And so these are kind of real estate-backed securities, so not crypto, but backed by hard assets. That's a business that has grown very well. It tends to have a little bit more of a capital market cycle associated with it. So when things get dicey in the markets, people back away from it. Nonetheless, it's frankly, we're taking kind of our asset management capability similar to our REITs and putting them on the blockchain.
We did the very first Ichigo token. We actually completed the sale activity on that. We actually told the investors that they should expect a 4% annualized return on it. We sold it on that basis. We actually delivered about a 9% return. As always, we want to underpromise and overdeliver. So it is an example of us deploying our asset management capabilities and surprising people on the upside. So this is a good business. It's a good product. We're taking really good assets and serving the needs of investors, and we will continue to grow this. And so AMAs will grow on these easy verse drivers.
One of the things that's powerful about kind of what we've done is we build out not only our value-add capabilities over the last five years, but we've developed a diverse kind of set of outlets, including, for example, security tokens in the last couple of years that give us multiple options for where we should place our assets that allows us to kind of optimize profitability for the firm. Clean energy. We should have grown more, and we have needs and desire to continue to do so. We think the most interesting new opportunity is battery storage, which is now kind of because of the drop in battery prices has meant kind of, if you want to call it grid parity, that's fine, means you have the ability to do very compelling economics in Japan, and so we expect to grow that.
We've got some activity right now going on in green room biomass. We'll see how much we can scale that. What's interesting about battery storage is it is very scalable and can provide kind of some significant materiality to our clean energy business over time. We've been consistent in buying back the shares. And we did JPY 5 billion year to date to the extent that we're open to do so. We would expect to do more. And so stay tuned. We continue to think the shares are undervalued, and buying them back is good use of shareholders' capital. And because we're so cash generative, we can still do things in terms of growth activity. But I told you we grew the balance sheet, deliberately recognizing how we thought replacement cost. And so we weren't predicting things.
We're just kind of watching how replacement cost is going up so much and not seeing that fully reflected in asset prices, so we bought ahead of that. We don't expect to grow our balance sheet. We expect to shrink our balance sheet. There's going to be more capital available for share buybacks going forward, and we've been increasing our dividend, and we'll continue to do so, and the final slide is we have an Ichigo J.League program. We're a top sponsor of the J.League, so Japan's soccer or football, if you want to call it, using a non-standard term for American, and one of the things that we've done is we give our tickets away to all of our shareholders, not only of this company, but of our REIT and infrastructure fund shareholders because these tickets belong to them, not to us.
On the renewable energy side, we're now 100% renewable. We have always been climate positive. We have eight times CO2 reduction relative to emissions. And that's delivered both on the production side in terms of substituting via our clean energy activity, our production via wind and solar power for fossil fuels, and also pushing down really hard our fossil fuel link consumption activity. So that's what I have in terms of the presentation. Thank you so much for your patient listening.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yep. Thank you for doing this.
Yeah, thanks, Scott. Thanks for the explanation. Pretty good results. I guess in light of what you're talking about, construction costs, inflation, and it being a seller's market, let's just theoretically say that you sold Tradepia Odaiba and it had a great return from that. Big chunk of cash comes back.
Where do you see the opportunities right now? I mean, in terms of this business model, you still have to spend on refurbishment and construction, even in a value-add setting. Where do you see the opportunities for growing specifically the SRE business, the value-add business?
So one of the things I suspect we're going to have excess capital. We're going to want to do more buybacks. But one of the things that a rising construction cost implies are your returns to CapEx are higher. So the good news is there is the highest has ever been ability to deploy capital against CapEx, meaning kind of what we do to improve existing assets. And so there is ongoing and systematically will be ongoing the search for assets that we can improve. But this is going to show up.
This is a very positive thing that our CapEx budget is going up because we're doing refurbishments at a scale bigger than we've done before because the opportunity set is so big. I would describe those as the two likely kind of outcomes, buybacks plus kind of more CapEx activity. It is the case that the battery business, for example, that I just described could take a fair amount of CapEx. That's slightly different from so it's not in the real estate value-add out of the business. The clean energy part of the business is another place where we can deploy capital. Those are the kind of would be initial thoughts on that. Did I answer your question?
Yeah, I guess in terms of just the old, which asset class do you prefer at this point in the cycle question?
I mean, did you have any thoughts on that? Office, retail, data? The data center sale was a surprise. And that's not a refurbishment, is it? That's Greenfield, right?
No.
But anyway, yeah, just kind of comments on some of the where we think you are on some of these different asset class cycles.
So just to be clear, when I'm asked internally, can we do development? And I say only if we don't take development risk. So the data center, it actually was a data center conversion. We were involved in a way of kind of putting the entire project together. We took a significant gain on it without having any equity risk. So it was an extraordinarily positive outcome and very much kind of the kind of thing we want to do. We have begun more work in the data center space.
And it's possible that could become a brand new and important asset class to us. So we'll see where we can take that. Against the existing asset classes, look, hotels are super productive, but we don't really want to own more than 25, on the max, 30% of our total assets of hotels because of their repricing, because they're the most economic sensitive asset class. And so it's interesting, actually. And retail has kind of more volatility also. And so the answer is that office is actually the most productive. And we're going to build out, I told you we've done this kind of community activity. We haven't kind of put together a full disclosure on this, and we will sometime, I think, this year. But we've been building out a set of capabilities for kind of, and it's really kind of software, I can put it that way.
I mean, how we approach the assets and what we're doing with the tenants there and what we're putting into the assets on behalf of tenants. But this kind of community element that we're putting into our buildings is very powerful. The setup office, so it's something I didn't touch on today, where we, as you know, moving costs are extremely expensive. And setup costs are extremely expensive in Japan. So us kind of doing all this on behalf of the tenant, setting up, ready to move in our offices is very valuable for them. It means that you can charge 20, 30, 40% more if you have the right asset and the right kind of aesthetics and functionality. That's been very productive for us.
So the answer is kind of offices, ironically and hopefully not terrifying for those of you who are sitting in the United States of America, because offices are very challenged in the U.S., and our situation is different. It is. I mean, as you know, vacancy rates in Tokyo offices are shrinking every month. There's a shortage. The construction costs haven't gone up so much means that you don't see a lot of incoming flow into it, and so we think it's just a really interesting area, along with hotels, but we're going to restrict ourselves on hotels because it's very productive, and we're only willing to do up to a certain amount, and the thing about offices, you can have two-year leases and five-year leases, and so they're much more durable in terms of economics to our shareholders.
Thank you. I have another, I guess.
Go for it. You've got the mic. Go for it.
Well, so this might not be the fairest question of all, but I guess in a way it is, because I get asked from the fund manager who I have to report to. It's like, "Why is the share price down? Why is the share price down?" I say, "Well, I think that their fundamentals are still really strong. I think their earnings are probably going to be really good, but the share price has been really volatile this past month." And then sure enough, your fundamentals are outstanding, and you have great results. So I feel, thank you very much for delivering great results. But I guess the question is, do you know what drives some of this short-term volatility?
Are there any measures, maybe you can, other than having phenomenal results and buying back stock, is there anything that you can do to help prevent that or help ease that volatility a bit? And any comment on why it occurred would be helpful.
Yeah. I mean, last week, the shares dropped 7% one day when there was no news, no information, and nothing particularly happened in the market. And as far as, I mean, we didn't know. I mean.
Yeah, same here.
Someone decided to sell in a hurry.
Exactly.
Were they taking a view on earnings? On geopolitics? Were they taking a view on earnings? If they took a view on earnings, they were wrong. So yeah, I mean, our job is to take the shares up, not down. And so the only silver lining in a low share price is you can buy it.
Buy it and back shares buybacks. So yeah, we think that the shares are significantly undervalued and are good value and will demonstrate that through our earnings and will deploy capital via buybacks to put our money where our mouth is.
Yeah, I think your disclosure keeps them getting better, improving. The earnings are great. And buying back loads of stock and being willing to do that regularly and in good size is very helpful. So if you hear from investors why this kind of share price volatility occurs, it'd be great to hear back from you. But honestly, I think you guys are doing a great job. So I want to say.
Thanks.
All right. All right. Thanks, Scott.
Yeah. And from a share price perspective, I thought we were never going to see the JPY 300 handle again. And then last week was like, "Boom.
Okay. All right. Yeah, and I mean, the rest of the developers and the rest of the market are all sort of on fire, and you're like, "What's going on here?" but I think just some temporary factors, and you guys continue to generate great results, so it's all we can ask for. Appreciate that. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, look, I do have a hypothesis, we grew the balance sheet, and people may not have liked that, and we grew it intentionally and with good assets and with a plan to kind of monetize it for shareholders, so look, we will work harder and hopefully smarter and deliver kind of the share returns that you need from us, so thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks. All right. Am I still the only one out there?
I don't know. Let's see. No, no. Okay, Greg, so thank you, Will.
Okay. Cheers. Thank you.
We're going to give you the opportunity to de-mute. Are you able to talk?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Hi, it's Greg at 2022. So thanks, Scott. So William did all the compliments, so I don't have to. So that's good. So we can skip that part. So my question was on the token part of the business. Obviously, you're doing very well there. I'm struck by the fact that there are not many players in that business in Japan. Obviously, there've been kind of a couple of large transactions announced, as you know, the MUFG Group with one building. But in terms of kind of consistent players in the market, you're probably the only one that gives us some transparency. I guess my question is, why aren't you bigger?
Because Ichigo could make a name for themselves, and that's probably being kind of a real-world asset player in the world of token in Japan probably wouldn't be bad for your valuation either. So why not step that business up more would be my question.
I like your thinking. I mean, I do think that one of the things we can, and so I'm just talking with investors and shareholders, and we're kind of thinking about how to grow value for everybody. I do think there is an element of we should choose an area that we want to dominate. And it's just a lot easier. I mean, I think people understand us to be a very good real estate value-add kind of asset manager. But if there's like, and what one thing are we number one in Japan in? I think people struggle with that.
I mean, it may well be that we're good capital allocators, but it'd be nice to have a space, and security tokens could be one of them where we become number one, and so we are spending some time, Greg, thinking about, so we certainly expect to be bigger, and we're spending some time thinking about this space and some other spaces where we could seek to dominate, and so people would say, "I'm invested in Ichigo, and they are number one in this and this and this," so again, I like your thinking.
I mean, certainly it seems to me that it's much better to be in that business than in data centers where the CapEx level, the upgrade, etc., the cycle is totally different. It's very crowded, even for the small-scale near-city center type data centers.
But this one, I mean, you guys have described how instantly this offering gets sold out. And again, I think that would be probably quite good for valuation because and also that would help educate people because I think in Japan, people don't realize people tend to confuse crypto, blockchain, those kind of things. And so I mean, having a higher profile with SBI, I think, would be very beneficial to the company. Yeah. Yeah.
No, and this is why we wanted to close the first token quickly. It could have been longer, but to just give people, it's real. I mean, we had investors who were hoping to get a secure 4% return, and instead, we gave them a 9% return.
With the same degree of security, just kind of our usual relentless focus on making sure we have good assets and provide them to investors in the right way. Yes, again, I like your thinking. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Great. Thank you, everybody. We're grateful for the opportunity to work for you. We will run forward. Have a great morning, afternoon, and evening. Take care.