♦ Earnings for 2023 are expected to beat BVC estimates ♦ Shares have been minus 8% over the past year.
The real estate holding Meta Estate Trust, listed on the BVB under the symbol MET, will focus in the first three months of the year on closing projects that have reached the final phase, and will make new investments from H2/2024 onwards. In this respect, the AeRO company is targeting the use of instruments available on the Romanian capital market, says CEO Alexandru Bonea.
"In Q1/2024 we will focus on making exits for mature projects in our portfolio. We thus estimate that in Q2 and Q3 we will again be in a strong capitalization position to make new investments. This implies that from the second half of the year we will actually start making new investments", explains the Meta chief, invited to ZF Open Today. The group expects its financial results for 2023 to exceed the forecasts in its income and expenditure budget after profits increased by 90% to seven million lei in the first nine months of last year. Revenues reached 15 million lei, up 35% year-on-year, while investments totaled more than 50 million lei, with the portfolio reaching 93.6 million lei, according to data published at the BVB.
"We will have to start actively looking for new opportunities in the market from the beginning of the month in order to build a solid pipeline and have the freedom to choose where we want to place our funds. Importantly, depending on what we find in the market, if we find untapped opportunities that are larger than our current capital position, we are also considering a share capital increase or a corporate bond issue."
MET shares are trading down 8.3% over the last 12 months, on a turnover of 17.2 million lei and a market value of 71.5 million lei; the dynamic over the last month is plus 2.7%. The company plans to transfer its shares from the Multilateral Trading System to the main market of the BVB in 2025.
"As an investment strategy, we are sticking to partnerships with real estate developers, which we observe bring us very attractive returns on the line of assets with recurring income - apartments rented on a hotel basis, as well as on a long-term basis - and on our activity of apartment trading, acquisition and resales," adds Alexandru Bonea.
Other statements:
We managed to exceed our profitability target already in Q3 thanks to good cost and revenue management. What I think is very important is that Meta's investment strategy thus shows its resilience even in an unfavourable market context. We were prepared for this. From the outset, we have aimed at diversifying our sources of income as well as the consumer categories where we have exposure in the investment portfolio.
Moreover, we stayed close to our partners, we were careful to see what their capital needs were and, where needed, we made new investments to ultimately meet all our exit targets.
We also focused on identifying new investment opportunities even at the end of 2023, but we looked for timely, high, completed projects where the investment risk was much lower and our need for capital came only to complete the project in a relatively short time. Thus, our investment was much more predictable and was realized in less than 12 months.
Q3 we had a very high profitability than the other three quarters. Q3 is clearly not going to have the same absolute value. Instead, we are relatively confident that we will close significantly above what we budgeted in 2023.
