-presentation. This presentation is available on the website. During my commentary, please ask questions in the question- and- answer section here in the Microsoft Teams application, and I will refer to them after I complete the commentary to the presentation. Let's start. The six months of 2026 meant PLN 555 million of net profit. A solid result. However, you see that there is no growth versus six months of last year. The growth we expect will come in the second half of this year. Cash EBITDA grew healthy by 8%. Our recoveries grew by 5%. Our assets grew by 12%, which means there will be more revenue growth from those assets in the future. The business is indebted at similar level like last year, 2.6, a healthy level for representing still a potential to increase if we need it.
Overall, this second quarter and six months, we believe was a solid result, although, we hoped for somewhat better results. One of the reasons why these results was not better was depreciation of Romanian currency versus euro. Another reason was that we planned somewhat higher recoveries, not significantly, about a small few percent higher recoveries. There's no one significant reasons why we didn't achieve it. But the fact is, we missed some of those recoveries. However, if you look at the recovery plan, it was healthy at above 5% of the active forecast, the so-called accounting forecast. So, no need to worry about the possible negative revaluation. The question is, what is the upside? How much more can we recover above the plan? If you look at investments, we secured about 860 million of new investments.
This is still not even a half of what we expect to invest this year. We sustained our expectation that we will be able to deploy about PLN 2.5 billion in portfolios this year. However, as our comment on the market slides, the market is competitive. This net results and the dividend payout of about PLN 20 per share meant that the business had a 19% return on equity. You'll see the revenue growth, which is relatively insignificant. But as I said, we hope second half of the year will be better. You see lower costs versus last year. Specifically, legal costs are lower, and this is a consequence of certain life cycle of legal costs, where we intensify sending cases to legal system at certain point of time of owning portfolio.
Later on, recoveries grow or are sustained at certain level, the cost drop, no more cases that are sent to the court and the margin, the growth, grows nicely. The financial cost decreased, and this is a result of the effect of the hedging instruments which played to our advantage. In these six months, we had a gain of about PLN 53 million, so relatively high impact. The business is well capitalized, the indebtedness is contained, and the business shows a healthy growth on assets as you see here on this slide. Just to remind you, apart from business as usual, the company is conducting two major transformational projects. One is the replacements of the IT system, which really is about process engineering and IT system replacements. We are advanced more or less as planned in this project.
An important milestone was achieved by the company in July when MVP, so minimum viable product for the new system in Poland was released. First batches of a few hundred cases went through the process, and now we are learning on this exercise and improving what needs to be improved. Things are going well, although this is a difficult and very complex product. The second initiative is our reorganization into becoming alternative investment fund sometime in 2027, possibly second half of the year, and this process is also going on plan. Let's take a look at the results per segment. This is a summary slide, which shows where we are. In terms of investments, this PLN 864 million is a growth versus last year, but this is somewhat below our expectations.
We hope we will be able to achieve much better results in the second half of this year. Therefore, we sustain this guideline of PLN 2.5 billion, but we want to tell you the market remains competitive, especially in Poland and Romania. The risk was rather on the downside. It is less likely that we will exceed this target, and it is somewhat more likely that we will have some shortage versus this target if we decide, as we did in first half of this year, not to compromise on the IRRs, on the expected returns on portfolios, which is the plan. Recoveries were strong, but we hope there would be a few dozens millions, more than the results you will see. The revenue was somewhat negatively affected by the depreciation of the Romanian lei. That cost us roughly PLN 59 million .
What I am very happy about is a significant improvement of recoveries and profitability of the Spanish business in second quarter. I think we have gone a long way from January 2026 to today. The legal process, how we manage it, the results of it, are much better today than they used to be, as expected, as we were communicating to you after first quarter of this year. Therefore, we are ready to come back to buying more portfolios in second half of this year. It is also good to see that all of our markets were profitable. If you look across the board here on EBITDA, Poland showed healthy growth. Romania showed good profitability, but depressed by the depreciation of the currency. Italy showed a very nice growth and doing very well after very successful amicable process. Now the legal process continues to be somewhat disappointed at this result.
But again, this is early stage. We are learning what to improve when we start to build our operational presence, possibly sometime next year in France. The cash flow generation has been very strong, as evidenced here by this almost PLN 4 billion of cash EBITDA. Let's look now at the market- by- market. In Poland, the volume of portfolios offered on the market was relatively small, this PLN 3 billion. However, these were portfolios of high value, so there were not many secondary markets, usually much cheaper transaction, but more bigger banking-type portfolios, which represent high recovery potential and command high prices, but also competition for these portfolios were high. This is evidenced by this price of 34%. In this quite competitive environment, we did not compromise on the returns, and we decided to give up some of the portfolios.
As a result, our market share is lower than we started. We hope the second half of the year will be better for us in Poland. The results were very good for the business. As you see here, recoveries revaluation, one of the highest in the past couple of quarters, and we are quite happy with the underlying profitability. It also shows you being a big business in Poland, but also in other markets, we can afford not to participate quarter- by- quarter with cyclical changing competitive environment. We can press the gas pedal in less competitive market and press the brake pedal in more competitive markets, and this is how we optimized deployment of our capital in Q2, as usual. In Romania, the supply was similar to what it was last year.
The market also offered usually the big banking portfolios. Again, as similar as in Poland, competition level was quite high, and this is evidenced by this high price versus normal 46%. We had about 40% share in that market in the first six months of 2026. The results were depressed by the depreciation of lei. That goes straight into P&L line, as you see here. Of course, despite that, the business was still quite highly profitable. But we hope this revaluation, this depreciation of the currency was a one-off event, and that happened exactly when the government lost the majority, backing from the majority of the parliament. The issue is not resolved yet. We do not know whether we will be heading towards early elections in Romania, or there will be a new majority forming a new government without the elections.
We do not expect Romanian lei to appreciate, but we also have no reasons to believe further depreciations will be coming anytime soon. Italy, a relatively, I would say, similar level of supply than the past years. As you see here, much lower price versus nominal, which is mostly driven by quality of this portfolio, it is lower potential for recoveries, but also to some degree, lower competition on that market. That is our relative assessment compared to Poland and Romania. You may see that on that market, we took advantage of the benign competitive environment and we commanded the majority of the market with 55% market share, and we are very happy with this resource. The results are solid, in terms of recoveries. You can see revaluation, which is relatively high for Italian markets compared to previous quarters, and also good profitability.
In Italy, apart from steady supply on the primary market, we may also look at some secondary market deals which may be interesting for us. So apart from this relatively stable supply on the primary market, there are also some opportunities for us to increase our deployments through participation in the secondary market. Spain, in terms of market, it was small. You can see about PLN 300 million deployed in that market in consumer unsecured, only. Very low prices, so also showing you that the portfolio that was sold was rather of low quality.
We started to buy some portfolios in Q2, investing there, not much, and having 80% market share. We know already we will be more active in the second half of this year after the results improve and we have more credibility now to see that our improvements in the process, and improvement it is there, it is visible. It is confirmed by two quarters of results. Also there is more stability in the legal system in Spain that we observe. You can see a nice improvement of results on EBITDA and the gross profit, and also steady growth of recoveries in the environment where we did not add much portfolios, and our value of the portfolios also did not grow. Hopefully, whatever problems we have had in Spain, the problems are already behind. If you ask me, can we still improve of the performance in Spain? I would say yes.
There is this potential, I do not know when it will come, whether in the next few months or the next few quarters, but we see potential there for further improvement, especially on the NPL trusts. In other markets, just to remind you, this is France, the market that we will be developing, and this is the remnants of our assets in Czech. As I mentioned, in France, after very good performance on amicable part, we continue to see relatively weak results on legal process. This is not significant for the results. It is a significant lesson, of course, for the future for what we can improve in the process and what data we collect.
But it is fair to say that we will be able to use much of that knowledge only when we start to build our operational presence in France, which likely will not happen this year, but hopefully will happen in the following year. Our lending business performed relatively well. We had PLN 27 million of EBITDA. Just to remind you, we have three lines of lending business, one in Poland, Novum Finance in Poland, and one in Romania, a startup that took over the lending assets, the little lending assets we had in Romania, and it is now starting on the open market for the past couple of months to lend. We are in the middle of a marketing campaign, and we have good ambitions to grow our business there in Romania, copying the good practices from Poland and also adapting to Romanian conditions. The business is profitable.
The Romanian business probably will be loss-making this year, as expected, as we incur startup costs and marketing costs. But hopefully in two years, it will be also profitable like the Polish business. So overall, good results with some pinch of salt that we did count on them being somewhat better. We expect a better second half than the first half in terms of profitability. But please bear in mind, the biggest sensitivity on whether we will grow by this or other percent for the full year will be whether our recoveries will be 2%, 3% smaller or higher versus our plans. We will put all the efforts to make the best results possible. The business is well-funded. We get good access to debt. Our dividend policy is in place.
We are changing our infrastructure again, our legal infrastructure, to allow the business to continue to grow for the next five years. Thank you for listening to this commentary. Now, I will be very happy to take your questions. Let's see, what are the questions? I see the first one. Can you help us understand if you are able to continue with near 20% IRRs for your first half 2026 debt purchases? 20% IRRs, I expect you refer to the gross IRR we have here in this presentation, and the answer would be, I would expect the IRR for the full 2026 to be at similar level than 2025, maybe at somewhat lower level, but not significant.
I do not know how we will invest exactly for the full year, but I would expect that this number is still 20-something, but maybe not close to 21, but more across to 20. Let's see what it is in six months. Another question. Please explain why recoveries are growing slower versus the carrying value of portfolio, which is growing double. This is because we are buying assets with recovery curves assumed at 20 years and with cash flow break-even of about six years. These recoveries are relatively spread flat for a long period of time. That is why the growth of asset is quicker than the growth of recoveries in the first years after acquisition.
This is something that is evolutionary, coming from, first, realization that we are in a business where recoveries are much longer and there is much more recoveries than we initially thought some years ago. Because competition is paying for these assets today a relatively high price. You saw the numbers for Romania and Poland for fresh banking portfolios, the market pays now 30-something or even 40-something percent. We can still make this 20% IRR and 2.3 times money, but over a really long period of time. This is today's economics, which is driven by competition. It is not surprising us. The difference between the reported EBITDA and cash EBITDA, where is the difference coming from? Well, this is a difference specific for the industry.
The EBITDA, the accounting EBITDA, is not a good measure for operating cash flow because it only incorporates the so-called interest revenue, not recoveries. By subtracting revenue with recoveries, we get cash EBITDA, which is a better representation of operating cash flow of the business. It should not as something, you say here, potential for future recognition. It is just a difference between recovery and revenue. Revenue in our accounting is the difference between recoveries from a given portfolio and the purchase price. It is a net revenue. Recoveries, if we buy a portfolio for 100 and we collect 220, the revenue is 120, but recoveries are 220. The difference is 100, which is a purchase price of the portfolio. Please refer, we have a revenue recognition slide in our deck, and contact the IR if this is not clear. I am checking if there are any other questions.
I don't see them at this point. I see no further questions. Therefore, I thank you very much for your interest in the company. If you have any follow-up queries, please contact the IR. Thank you. Have a good day.