To date, HKL has sold assets at or above NAV. The plan is to retain 80% of the divestments for growth, and to use 20% for the share buyback programme. “Our focus is on doing everything we can to create new fee income streams with fund management, so that we continue to close that gap to NAV. We’re at +40% discount to NAV and our NAV has just ticked up,” Smith continues. As at Dec 31, 2025, HKL’s NAV rose 5% y-o-y to US$14.30.
Since Michael Smith became group CEO of Hongkong Land (HKL) in April 2024, its share price has nearly tripled from US$2.99 to US$8.38 ($10.73) as of March 6. In October 2024, Smith unveiled a new strategy for the Singapore-listed, Hong Kong-based developer. Hongkong Land planned to double underlying profit before tax, double dividends per share, grow assets under management (AUM) to US$100 billion and recycle US$10 billion of assets, all by 2035.
“When I joined, our focal point in October 2024 was total shareholder return (TSR). Over that period, we’ve had the strongest TSR of any real estate company in Asia Pacific, and one of the strongest in the world. When I joined, the discount to net asset value [NAV] was 80%. We were trading at about a US$6 billion market cap on US$32 billion of net asset value, 0.2 times book. By saying what we would do and doing what we say, with all of the events that have transpired since then, that gap has closed,” Smith notes.
