Welcome, everyone, at Basic-Fit's fourth Capital Markets Day. I welcome all of you here in Hoofddorp, in our GXR recording studio, but also people at the offices or at home watching this live stream. We have a very interesting set of presentations prepared for you today. Before I tell you more about that, I want to point out that safe harbor applies. As usual, you know the text. The text is also visible on the handouts, which will be available online after the event. So who are the presenters today? It's our senior leadership team. You know these faces probably, but it's René Moos, our founder and Chief Executive Officer, Erica van Vonderen-Hahn, our Chief Commercial Officer, Hans van der Aar, Chief Financial Officer, and Redouane Zekkri, our Chief Operating Officer.
This is also the order in which they will give their presentations. After the presentations of René and Erica, there will be a short break, and after the break, we will have Hans and Redouane doing their presentations. Then René will come back on stage for concluding remarks, and then we will have time for a Q&A. We have 40 minutes for that. We don't wanna really overrun that time, because we also have some closing drinks and some bites, and there's time then for the people here to have an informal discussion with all of us afterwards. The presentation can later on be viewed online, and also the slides will be available online. This is the address where they will be made available.
For the people online, you can watch this in live stream, but you can also choose to watch the slides or a combination of the two. Just hover with the cursor on the screen, and you can select that option. So but now, we've.., w ith, without further ado, I want to give the stage to René Moos for his presentation.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Today, I would like to discuss the following topics. To start, we want to start with we are Basic-Fit. We wanna look back a bit, what we have done in the last two years since the last CMD, and explain a bit more our business model, especially also for the newer people to the story. But I would like to start with a short video that we have made. So let's start with that.
Europe's largest and fastest-growing fitness chain. 250 million club visits a year and market leader in five of our six countries. We keep growing, expanding, leading, because we keep innovating. At Basic-Fit, technology is at the core of our business model, from picking the ideal locations for our clubs to personalizing and optimizing the experiences for every member. Monitoring is supported by AI. This way, we can operate more clubs with less personnel, while still guaranteeing the safety of our members. With our improved self-service, members get answers to their questions easily and can manage their own subscriptions. Our technology makes our business model scalable, it keeps our costs low, it makes our members happy, and it fuels our ambition to have more than 3,000 clubs in 2030. We are ready for it. We are Basic-Fit.
Yeah, that was a little film made by our head of staff, so we didn't hire any actors. But as you can expect from a low-cost company, we did it with our own people. But this gave a short impression of Basic-Fit. So what are we? We are a low-cost operator. We have more than 1,400 clubs open. End of this year, we expect to be around with 3.8 million members and over EUR 1 billion revenue. We offer the affordable value fitness, and it is really our purpose to make fitness accessible to as many people as possible, so they can live a more active and fitter and happier life.
To achieve this, we make use of state-of-the-art technology, which you also saw in the film, and this allows us to be scalable and personalize our offering. It enables us to have this strong, collectively controlled growth and keep our cost low. This is a slide where we show that the focus point for Basic-Fit is to be the logical choice. A logical choice to join a gym is when it's close by. That is the main driver of people to join a gym, if it is close by. Growing the fitness penetration, it only is possible by opening new locations. And we do that in a cluster strategy. For instance, if we have a city of 50,000 inhabitants, we open two clubs at the same time, preferably, to always have a club close to where you live.
Again, the main driver, a club close by. We can only grow a fitness business this fast when you have a clearly defined, simple and scalable business model. With simply highly centralized, straightforward processes, resulting in efficiencies. And that is only possible by a lot of automation. So we are able to run a gym with only three FTEs, only three people, but we can also run a club without staff. And that is crucially important to be able to open a lot of clubs close to each other. I think for us, it is also important to be cash flow breakeven on a low number. So if you compare Basic-Fit to the other fitness companies, a lot of our competitors need 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 members, some even 7,000 or 8,000, to be cash flow breakeven.
Basic-Fit is currently cashflow breakeven on 1,500 members. Before our price index, it was 1,700 members. We are now currently cashflow breakeven on 1,500 members. To be able to run the club without staff, you have to have Smart Cameras. This is a system we have been investing in for many, many years now, and it's a crucial part of our success. Having these software possibilities and camera possibilities, we can save tens of millions EUR in salary cost, and that is also what we're doing. But Redouane will tell some more about this. Another strong point, I think, for Basic-Fit, is that we really want to be entrepreneurial. To do that, we are working with outsourced services like personal trainers and physiotherapists, so they run their own business in our facility.
So you have the entrepreneurial spirit in the gyms when you enter. And all of that gives us unmatched results. So when you look at this slide, I explain a bit what happened after our last CMD. We had some difficult market conditions. So again, we got confronted with the COVID-19. In the end of 2021, we had to close down our clubs in the Netherlands again. But also, if you look at. And we opened it again the end of January 2022. But for instance, if you look at Spain, till the Q2 of 2022, it was a must to wear a mouth cap. I don't know if you've ever worked out in a fitness club with a mouth cap, but that is far from ideal.
You had to have reservations, only little people allowed at the same times. It was complicated. So if you look at that COVID period, for us, it was not only 2022 and 2021, but it was also the clubs that we opened in 2019. Because if you open a club in July, August, or October of 2019, and you close the business in four or five months later, it is a very rough start. And during the 2021 and 2020 years, it was open and close, open and close. So it was not an ideal period for us. Also, in France, we were confronted with a lot of social unrest. Started with pension reform plans, that was a difficult time, put it that way, and that really didn't help our joiners in the first half of 2023.
Second half, it went more, went better. But also, we had lockdowns in, China, Blockade Suez Canal, Ukraine and Russia, of course, the energy crisis, inflation, higher interest, currently Israel, Hamas. There's a lot of things happening. It is a challenging environment. But the resilience of our business, I think, and the ability to adapt to change have helped us through this. We adjusted our membership and pricing structure for new members only to increase the yield and to absorb the impact of cost inflation, the coming years. We are a company that find ways to adapt to changes in the market, so even in these markets, we continue to increase the profitability of our business. Well, you're probably familiar with this slide. This is what we have showed you during the Capital Markets Day in 2021.
So despite the headwinds I've just mentioned, we have achieved or remained on track to deliver most of them. To start with, the home bike this was not a success. We started it, just doing it ourselves, buying the bikes, storing them, delivering them. It was complicated, so we have decided to, in the future, do that with partners. While we will continue to help customers in the at-home part, but we will do that with partners, and we will supply the software to how to work with it. Another thing that we are still working on is the overhead cost.
So excluding the marketing and currently still a little bit higher than targeted, we insourced a lot of critical technologies and invested heavily in our IT systems. We spent around EUR 17 million on IT this year, but this should result in future efficiencies. We will be focusing on operating leverage the coming years, so we do expect to make progress in 2024 and 2025. We managed to open more than 200 clubs this year, but could have opened more, but choose not to. And that is because the context of the macroeconomic and geopolitical situation, and prefer to have more cash or a better balance sheet, however you call it, and fewer clubs. We are therefore not on track to be at the 2,000 clubs by 2025, and that is a management decision.
But we are on track, however, to reach more than 3,000 clubs by 2030. We also started the new country. Well, you all know probably now that is Germany. And we said something about the yield per member. It increased fast, and that was due to the price increase this year, of course, and also the higher uptake of the Premium membership. We reported a leverage ratio of just over 2.5 times with the half year results, and we are on our way to reach this between 2x and 2.5 x target next year. Our midterm goal is to be below two, and our long-term target's even further than below two. Maintenance costs continue to be stable at club for 55,000 EUR a year on average.
We did report the 3,300 memberships with our half year results, which shows the recovery of our membership base, and we also expect to end this year with 3,300 members on the mature clubs. The underlying EBITDA per mature club last year was strong, and after the price increase resulting from the strong cost inflation this year, the profitability of clubs is improving. Also this year, the second half significantly higher than the first half, resulting in a targeted 30% return on invested capital. Hans will talk some more about this. Well, in this section, I want to share with you our growth plans. But first, what we have achieved so far. On this slide, we show the development of the club network over the years.
This clearly shows that we are the largest and fastest growing fitness chain in Europe. In 2022 and 2023 combined, we grew our network with 387 clubs. This is an unprecedented achievement. Nobody has ever done that with own clubs, and that is despite all the things that happened in the world. The coming years, we will continue to grow, and with the flexibility in numbers of clubs we open, we will end up at a targeted 3,000 to 3,500 clubs in 2030. If you look at the European fitness market, you've probably seen this slide in the past. It shows that there's a lot of room available to grow our markets, particularly when you compare it to the US market with 22% fitness penetration. Now, if you look at our members.
On this slide, we show that, the development, since, 2016, when we had a magical change of growing to over 1 million, customers. That was 2016, and, in Q1 next year, we will quadruple that amount, and we expect to have more than 4 million membership in Q1 next year. Memberships are, of course, crucial, but ultimately, we focus on return on invested capital as we can steer revenue and EBITDA. The thing is, we can reduce membership prices, resulting in more members, or increase membership prices, resulting in fewer members. With the price increase this year, we expected 6% to 7% fewer joiners, and we think this also happened. But more importantly, that decision led to our increased revenue and EBITDA result.
The cannibalization impact of freemium is a bit harder to assess, as we do not know yet the increase of length of stay of these members and the lead generation impact. We do see that it resulted in significant higher visits numbers of up to 20%. So we currently have 20% more visits than, let's say, two or three years ago. So we'll have to see in the coming quarters if current price structure and focus need to be tweaked. If you look at the potential in our current countries, the growth potential in our current countries remains unchanged, big. In the Benelux, we believe we have the opportunity to increase the club count to 700. France, we can open another 400 new clubs and get to 1,200.
In Spain, the total potential is up to 700, while Germany, we think we can open a total of 900 locations. So we clearly believe that we can grow our network to between 3,000 and 3,500 in our current countries in 2030, so in the next seven years. And it's important to understand that this is not the end of our growth story. If you look at acquisitions, the past couple of years, we see more peers coming to the market looking for a strategic partner. Also, a lot of peers are owned by private equity and are looking for an exit, and there are currently not a lot of buyer with a high interest, et cetera, so pricing is coming down. Consolidation in the market is going to happen, and we want to be part of that.
We have always been opportunistic and done acquisitions in the past, like Fitness First transaction. So when the price is right and the returns are right, we do want to do an acquisition. But to be clear, we only do an acquisition with 20, 50, 100, or 150 clubs if we can get it in a healthy finance way. We will not give out shares unless it is an extreme sweetheart deal, but we should be able to do it with our own cash flow or with bank loans. Or we rather postpone, the acquisition and grow, on our own balance sheet with new openings. We do have EUR 150 million Accordion Facility available, which we can request at time and which has no specific earmark. But of course, we will continue to focus on organic growth. That is the company we are.
We want to look opportunistic to the market, but this is really our focus. We have a strong track record of successful club openings, as we are in control of our cluster strategy and know in advance what to expect in terms of memberships and returns. Goal is to grow our network to more than 3,000 clubs in 2030. I don't want to give specific yearly country opening goals anymore because of competition, but also because we need to be able to adapt to macro developments and manage our balance sheet. We get a lot of calls, "aren't you going a bit slow in Germany, for instance," so we will not get those calls anymore. But we do give guidance for 2030. Again, we want to be between 3,000 to 3,500 clubs.
But I think I said that already. So we aim to be the clear market leader. The past 10 years, we have conquered these four countries step by step. In countries like Belgium and France, we were the main driver for growth in fitness penetration in the past decade. Spain is on its way. And based on our strong market position and our systematic approach, Redouane will talk more about that. We are well positioned for further growth. From this strong position, growth will even be easier to realize than in the past. Now let's look at our French club network. And to show you what we have done in France. As you can see, in 2013, we only had 9 clubs in France. It took us a few years before we start opening on a high pace.
In the first three years, we opened 25 clubs in total in France, including an acquisition of nine Health City clubs. We kept opening clubs at a higher pace since then. In Germany, we will open around 30 clubs in the first two years. The speed of growth, what happened in France, is also what we will do in Germany. Talking some more about Germany. Germany has a huge growth potential, a country with 83 million to 84 million inhabitants and a fitness penetration of only 12%. There are many similarities to France, but also a highly fragmented market. In Germany, a lot of people live outside in the city, not as many as in France, but still much more than in Spain or the Netherlands. We will accelerate openings in Germany in the coming years, and Redouane will talk about this some more in his presentation.
Well, this is exciting news, we think. We are currently exploring the opportunity to also adapt the franchise model. We believe we have the scale now and the advantages with our own technology and knowledge, which we can leverage in a franchise model. We have always preferred growing organically for all the reasons I just mentioned before. But we have now reached a size with a proven model that we believe franchise can help us in the next phase of our growth. It requires limited CapEx and opens up possibilities to go to other countries and continents. There are three possible outcomes. We can start our own franchise business, we could acquire a franchise operator, or collaborate with an existing franchise chain. Within the next 12 months, we will take a clear view on our strategy towards adopting a franchise model going forward.
As I said, we believe we have the knowledge and technology that could really benefit the franchisees. We have a strong package we can offer. We have the technology that will help the franchise to work with limited number of staff, automated sales funnel, QR codes access, virtual solution, and much, much more. But especially all the software. Everything you need to run a fitness club, we have insourced; we've built ourselves. So membership, an app, direct debits, we do everything on our own software. So here are just a few examples of what we have to offer, and we have it, it's available, and we're not planning to go to three continents at the same time.
So it is just putting it to work while we have it, and we think we can really grow fitness also in other continents. That's why we believe we can be successful with it. But more to now and today, so the driving of the profitability. In the next part, I will tell more about how we will drive profitability. If you look at the slide, you can see the pricing perspective from us with the number two in that country. We are and will stay a value for money chain, and we continue to offer a highly affordable fitness service, and we want to make fitness accessible to all. As we show here, we continue to be significantly cheaper than our main peers when compared to our Comfort membership, but the actual difference is much bigger.
This is not a fair comparison because memberships includes more elements than that of our peers, ranging from 24/7 openings in the Benelux to much more club locations in all countries, and digital and live group classes that are included in our price. And then we are still between 14% to 17% lower in price, despite the €5 price increase earlier this year. And while we are the lowest price option, we are cash flow break-even again with 1,500 members, when looking at the last few vintages. Another important development, the yield. The past years, we have seen an increase in average revenue per member. Started with the change in payment plans from once a month to every four weeks at the end of 2018.
The introduction and focus on higher uptake of the Premium membership, the next phase, and this year we had the room to increase the price of the basic membership. The basic membership is using one club for €19.99 to €24.99 in February and March this year for the Comfort membership, and then you're able, as a member, to use all clubs in a country. All these changes resulted in a yield per member a month from less than €20 in 2018 to more than €23.50 this year. But as I said before, higher prices do have an impact on joining numbers, and this is for new joiners only, as we only increase the price for new joiners. This is also the reason of increase of yield, the coming years.
Old members with a lower yield leaving and new high-yield members joining. If I go to the next topic, I want to start again with a short film.
We are at Basic-Fit Aalsmeer, and in the next two weeks, we are refurbishing all the fitness equipment, and we're adding some pieces, and we're making sure that everything is fully on brand again. In this club, we work together with several partners. This allows us to revamp the club and make it look fresh and new in only two weeks' time. There are a couple of advantages. Firstly, it helps us to keep the maintenance CapEx for the company at a current low level for many years to come. Secondly, it has sustainability benefits. By increasing the lifetime of the fitness equipment, we have less waste, less carbon emission, and less use of resources. In the last two weeks, we have refurbished all the fitness equipment, we added several devices, and we gave the whole club a new and fresh look.
We have started with Smart Refurbishing, a new agreement with Matrix to extend the economic lifestyle of our equipment. After six years, we do no longer replace all the equipment, but refurbish it and just partly renew it. In two weeks' time, a club will have a complete new look and feel, and clubs will look as new as you put in the new equipment. Also, the guarantees for the next six years are back in place. With that, our maintenance CapEx will remain on EUR 55,000 a club a year until the end of 2030. Some refurbishing is good for Basic-Fit, but also good for the planet.
And it's also good for our customers, because in this new contract, what we have changed is that instead of the six year contract, where Matrix is coming once or twice a year, they're now coming in this new country-contract every month. So they visit all clubs every month, 12 years in a row. So that means it will take less time, if something is broken or doesn't look nice, to be replaced. So it is good for also definitely our customers. Now we go to the final section. I always say this is just the beginning, because that's also how it feels. We have a long track record of growth and adapting to changing environment.
So we started with only tennis facilities and adapted to the increasing demand of fitness and started first with high-end fitness, so tennis, restaurant, kids daycare, swimming pool, wellness, et cetera. We then saw that the fitness was growing faster, and we changed to Health City, mid-market fitness, EUR 50 to EUR 60. We grew there to 250 locations in seven countries and saw that the value for money was the better player, the better game to play, and also the model that was more easy to roll out. So we moved from Health City. We did a successful transformation to the Basic-Fit model. With fitness becoming the core of our offering, we start to really improve the business, the model, the services, and follow the fitness trend. So we adapted to macro conditions, like the recent higher interest, energy, inflation, et cetera.
But also services to members, like the virtual at-home services during Corona, and we will continue to adapt and make sure the organization is set up for change and a bright and successful future. If you go to my last slide, I think what we have built is a unique business model, break even on 1,500 members, and we can run a club without staff, and a fully automated customer journey. Good at what we do and getting better every year. I think we keep the focus on innovation and cost control, despite the current challenging external environments. I said a few times before, we will grow to 3,000 to 3,500 clubs by 2030, and we're exploring additional growth opportunities through franchising. Well, that was my presentation. I would like now to hand over to Erica.
Thank you, René, for the introduction, and welcome everyone. Great to see a lot of familiar faces again. Today I will be talking you through our leading commercial strategy. For me, today will not be about a lot of new things, but really about keep getting better at what we do. Before I start presenting, let's start with a video about my favorite topic, happy members.
Happy members, not just a goal, but the central part of our strategy. How? We do everything to know our members through and through. We know how to make them feel comfortable. We know where they are in their journey, what kind of guidance they like, and whether they might need an extra push. We make it easier, balanced, and make them love their fitness habits. Happy members attract more members. They don't just join, they stay. More happy members, millions of them, and that's just the beginning. Basic-Fit, go for it!
So more happy members. Today, I will be talking you through how we do that. Most importantly, it's our unique positioning that really differs us from the competition. Secondly, we have very data-driven insights, and we use all of that data to fully utilize our members. Then, we use that data to make a tailored offering for our members, so we really make the best experience. And all of that we use to drive success. And of course, I'll close off with a few takeaways. So let's start with our unique positioning. What gets us up every day is making fitness accessible to everyone and get people to love their fitness habits. This has not changed since two years ago because we firmly believe that this is still relevant for our consumers.
We have a lot of tactics to bring this positioning across to our members, and one of them is our new campaign. Let me show you our new campaign.
Move it left to right, put your eyes into focus. In it for the ride, and don't mind what your road is. Feeling fresh, let me get into motion. Oh, oh, you gotta, gotta go for it. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Basic-Fit, go for it!
So our campaign is really made to be there for everyone, but also to lift the key category drivers of the markets, to get people off the couch and experience the energetic afterglow. Of course, this is just a small video that you've seen, but this is translated into all of our countries, into all different assets, all different media types, to really get our messaging across. And for the ones that really paid attention, we've also launched a new sonic logo and a sonic anthem. So the song you've just heard is really something to lift our brand. It's shown that a good sonic logo will increase the buying intention, but it will also increase the brand perception. We've launched it together with these dancers that you see on screen, and the video went viral.
So across all of our countries, everyone was really doing the dance on our music, and we had over six million impressions on social. And the campaign is, of course, not the only thing we do to lift our brand equity. We have many activations throughout our countries to really be distinctive, to really make people interested in our brand. I'll share a few examples with you. The first one is the spoken word artist. This was a word artist in the Netherlands, and we asked her to write a poem about making fitness your basic. She did an amazing job in really lowering barriers of fitness, and we had over three million views in the Netherlands only. Then we have the Tramhalte experience.
We really did an activation outdoors, where people at the tram could really lift weights, and by that, we are actually really making people engage with our brand. So this was actually two weeks ago, also in Belgium, and we already have two million views on that as well. And then we have our Fit Box, which is a box, that we place throughout our countries, everywhere, to really make fitness accessible to all at any time. And we place that festivals, et cetera, and it's really an engaging way for our brand as well. And lastly, our bag. So our bag is, with a distance, the most iconic brand asset that we have, and we blew it up in the center of Madrid, and we asked an artist to really paint it and really engage with the bag, live.
That was also a great way to lift our brand equity. Another initiative we launched this year is to boost the in-growth of our clubs, founding members. There's really an automated process now that starts a few weeks before the club opening, with pre-sales to really boost the in-growth. And we're already seeing great results, but we're really testing and optimizing, and Hans will dive into the results in his presentation. And all of these initiatives, of course, they cost money, of which we are fully aware. We're always busy optimizing our marketing spend, and I think in 2015, we started to really reduce our cost per acquisition to really make sure that we are most efficient. But by being too efficient, we also saw that we were missing out on market opportunities, and that's also costing money.
So in 2022 and 2023, we're increasing our spend slightly again, as long as we stay below the effective cost per acquisition. The total marketing spend stays around 5.5% to 6% of our revenue. That is still relatively low. A study by Gartner showed that the average across all industries is around 9.5%, so this is still relatively low. So how do we spend that marketing? Around 20% of our marketing is spent behind the scenes, so for technology developments, for creatives, everything that's behind the scenes. But we really try to get as much as possible across to our members or our potentials. So here you can see a snapshot of our really dynamic landscape. Like, for example, Instagram, YouTube, we use all different media channels. And it's all very data-driven.
We have Media Mix Modeling in place to really optimize our different media tactics and really understand what would be the best result for our brand or our sales, or a combination of both. What I've already shown you is that the marketing is very data-driven, but we don't only do the marketing very data-driven, but we also use it to really be data-driven with our members. Understanding our members is at the core of everything we do. We know our members. Because we have so many members, we can really extrapolate all the data that we have across all the members and utilize the data to do predictive modeling, to really understand what their needs are and really drive on that as well. We help our members. AI is a great tool to really optimize the experience of our members.
Some things that we are working on right now is, for example, the personalized workout schedules. With AI, we can really make them personalized for every different target group that we have. Secondly, we can predict which equipment they would use and also how they scan it, and then make a personalized training schedule based on that. And lastly, we use it to improve our chatbot. So this is already live since a few months now, and it's really optimizing how customers are helped by using the chatbot. And our members rate us after every visit. So after every visit, we ask them how their experience was and how we can optimize our clubs. So based on that feedback, it is directly sent to all of our regionals and our clusters, and they know exactly how to improve their clubs.
So it also creates this sort of positive competition between our regionals, right? So that is really helping us to understand how our clubs are performing locally. And it goes way beyond that, because we have a 24/7 interaction with our members through the app. We are in their daily lives because they also use the app at home, they use our services at home, so it extends way beyond that. And because we are 24/7 part of their life, we can also really predict what their behavior will be. So when we see a member is falling out of habit or when they are losing one of their visits, we try to nudge them, we try to reactivate them, sending them a message via email, sending them a gift, actually, also. And then we can see that they're actually coming back to our clubs.
So of course, that's delivering more active members, and we really do A/B testing, and we can see what the impact is of the activations that we do. And it's not just about our members, but also about growing the market, right? Like Rene already said, we really want to increase that fitness penetration. And to be able to do that, we have to understand the full market. So we do a lot of neuro research, so we really dive into people's brains to get an understanding what actually really drives them. But we also do panel discussions, we do quarterly research, so we do a lot to get as many insights as possible that we can really act on. And of course, we don't know everything, but we really try to do as much as possible to get an understanding of our consumers.
And then all of that we use for tailored offering. Because we understand what our members' needs are, we can really tailor the offering specifically to each customer. And the positioning is also translated into our clubs. So a few examples of what we have launched this year, what we invested in is, for example, the relax and recover area, the workout hubs, the body analyzer, and something that we're launching the coming months is Be Comfortable, because we saw the biggest barrier not to join a gym is actually that people don't feel comfortable. So we really want to activate that and make people feel comfortable in our gyms. So we have a few activations that really boost feeling comfortable in the gym. And also, we're continuously testing with innovation. So for example, you can see the box outside with a 3D player.
So once you go for, for the break, you will see it, in the hallway. And our members' needs actually go way beyond that physical club. They want to be a part of the community. They want to be helped so much. So we have a lot of, programs that we develop, personal support that we develop, inspiration, information. We really develop a lot of things to help our members. And the great thing is that we are not developing it for one club, but we're directly develop- developing it for all of our members. And most of that, we create in our own studio. So of course, we are here in our studio, and this gives us the agility to make anything today or tomorrow and really create an offering that our members are looking for.
So one example of what we've produced here, but of course, it's a limitless, limitless list of what we produce here. Now, go for it! So because of everything that we produce, the offering goes way beyond even what people expect from premium clubs, right? So, it's not just about our product offering, but it's also about happy members and, making sure that everything they do is as easy as possible so they can focus on their workout. So we created a department that is continuously working on preventing cases. So they're continuously trying to remove friction with our members. And we can already see a great result because we went from seven cases per 100 members to now we're around four on average. So creating less cases, it also means that members are more happy, which is, of course, also good for retention.
Investing in that self-service department, investing in the chatbot, et cetera, also really delivers great results for our customer care. Having less cases per hundred members, we were able to achieve that, but also the cost per case went down. We're being more efficient in our cost for customer service. We did that by having more efficient staffing, having better staffing, doing something outsourced. We did a few things to really optimize cost. Also, what we're very proud of, our resolve duration time went down by 2.4 days, being now at an average of 1.2 days, a bit over one day, which is really great because our members are being helped quicker, our costs have gone down, and we have less cases. That's really a win on all aspects.
A way to measure how happy our members are is, of course, by our Trustpilot scores. Because we know so well what the feedback of our members is, we are able to continuously optimize the clubs, and we can directly see a result. So we also saw that this year we were again at the 3.8 score, which we're very happy with. And I've just shown how satisfaction is going up again, but actually it's all about driving success. So it's not just about happy members. Of course, it needs to also deliver success for Basic-Fit. And like Rene already said, we are increasing the yield per member year-over-year. Apart from the price increase, this can also be explained by our higher uptake of premium. And premium is something that our members were really looking for.
Being able to sport together and being able to train everywhere is something they really value. This graph shows how we are continuously optimizing, testing, and improving our offering. So you can see that we were around 25%, 26% of premium, and we're now around 55% uptake of premium. By continuously doing small improvements, showing that it works, and then working on another improvement, showing that it works, and now we're around 55% of joiners that are taking premium. And of course, we also focus on upsell. It's not just about upsell, but also if members spend more with us, they are more engaged, and because of that, they will stay longer. So we really try to upsell to premium or younger or our other products as much as possible and get a better yield.
Another way to boost the revenue is, of course, by secondary revenue. We launched our Next Level Sports Nutrition brand a few years back, and this year, we're very proud to tell you that we're passing the EUR 10 million mark in revenue for the first time. So we can really see that if we invest in something that is really resonating with the market, it's also delivering results. At the break, you will be able to try out some of the products, and I hope you like them as much as we do. Secondly, it's advertising and partnerships. So brands like Samsung, Gymshark, H&M, they all advertise on our screens. So they also really see the value of the members that are in our gyms. We can see further growth the coming years in that pillar.
So it's of course, not just about increasing yield, but also really growing the market. One way to measure success is by measuring our gym intention within the market. We can see that over 50% of our mature markets, over 50% of the members are really wanting to go to Basic-Fit. So we have a brand preference in the gym intention of over 50%, and we can see great growth there. And this is already one of my last slides, but we are finally the strongest brand in Europe, and we're still showing double-digit growth in all of our brand metrics. So that means people think of us first when they think of gyms. That means they prefer us when they think of a gym, and that even means that they prefer us compared to more premium propositions.
Having these extremely high brand preference numbers really helps us for future growth as well. With that, I already get to the conclusion of my presentation. What I think is really important is to conclude, to recognize what truly sets Basic-Fit apart in this dynamic world. Our influence reaches beyond the gym walls into the daily lives of our members, grounded in a culture that thrives on data and innovation. Every scan into our clubs, every weight that's lifted, it's all contributing to our goal to make fitness accessible to everyone and sharing success stories with happy members. We don't just follow trends, we set the trend. We don't just gather data, we empower transformations. We don't just open a lot of gyms, we are opening the doors to a healthier and fitter Europe.
We're not just Europe's leading fitness brand, but we are the architects of a fitness revolution. Thank you very much, and see you after the break.
Yeah, I want to the attention one thing. We have a very interesting NXT Level stand outside this room. So we would like to invite you to take a healthy protein shake. They're really nice to drink, so enjoy and see you in 30 minutes.
Is it on? Can you hear me? Okay. There's some, still some people at the toilet, I think, or the restroom, 'cause I see some empty chairs. Or is that has to do with me? Okay, thank everyone. Unfortunately, I don't have a video, so you have to do it with me. But I'll bring you to all the numbers, that you're waiting for. So I hope you will enjoy my presentation, and I also hope that you enjoyed the first part of our CMD, with Erica and Renee telling great stories about our achievements. And it's also good to see so many familiar faces. So welcome to Hoofddorp. And I'll show you the agenda. In my presentation, I will give you an update on recent events, followed by an update on finance and club economics.
I will end with some ESG matters and, of course, the key takeaways. First, the recent events. As highlighted, and I'll show the slide, as highlighted on the slide, well before the end of the year, we have reached a milestone of 1,402 clubs. This signifies a growth, a net growth of 202 clubs. And for the record, I expect to end the year also with 1,402 clubs. Throughout this year, we continue to strengthen our market dominance in Europe. In five of the six countries, we're a clear market leader. Rene will tell you more about our growth pace compared to our competitors in the several countries. In France, we added 133 clubs, bringing our network to 780 clubs in total.
This is an impressive growth of 21% compared to last year. In Spain, we actually achieved a remarkable milestone last year by adding 34 clubs, establishing our market leadership in that country. In 2023, we grew even faster, opening 50 clubs to our network, now totaling 140 clubs. An important element of our Spanish strategy is opening cluster clubs, as to build and strengthen those clusters, aiming to become the logical choice for members and people to work out in. In Seville, for instance, we currently operate eight clubs or 10, if you include the nearby cities. In Valencia, we have grown our cluster to 13 clubs, and we have plans to add more in 2024. In Malaga, where we relocated our headquarters, we now operate five clubs.
In the mature countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, we expanded our network by seven and three clubs respectively. In our new market, Germany, we opened nine clubs. For more insight inside our plans for Germany, I invite you to listen to Redouane's presentation. Let's move on to the next slide on membership growth. As illustrated on the chart, since our previous Capital Markets Day two years ago, we have observed a robust recovery in membership, surpassing 3.7 million by the end of September this year. In France, we experienced some headwinds in the first half year, as explained by René. In the Q3, the joiner development was more normal. Before the break, Erica shared her insight about our Founding Member campaigns when we opened new clubs. We are currently in the process of analyzing their long-term impacts.
Preliminary findings indicate that these campaigns are hugely effective in non-cluster locations and result in lower initial losses due to the higher volume of membership upon launch. Unclear yet is the longer-term impact on length of stay and membership counts at mature clubs. We do expect, however, that Founding Members will stay a member longer because of the low membership fee. We will continue to monitor the developments closely. Our churn rates have normalized to a rate of around 4% on average per month since Q2 this year. Later in my presentation, I will also explain more about churn trends. And again, we expect, expect to end 2023 with 3.8 million memberships. Let's move on to the next slide on Premium memberships. As demonstrated by our data, our penetration rate surged from 23% in 2021 to an impressive 44%.
This substantial increase is driven by an ongoing Premium membership uptake of more than 55%. The key driver behind the higher uptake percentage is the high value of the Premium membership, which allows members to bring a friend anytime they visit the club. Due to the high take-up rate, we anticipate a further increase of the Premium membership penetration rate to more than 50% in the end of next year. We do see a cannibalization effect on overall joiner numbers due to the higher Premium membership uptake. The number of visits of Premium members with their friends are significantly higher than Comfort members, but it's difficult to assess what the actual cannibalization impact is. At the same time, we can also not yet determine what the positive impact of the Premium membership on length of stay and the effect as a lead generator.
However, the effect on our yield is clearly positive. Well, that being said, we go to the next slide on our yield development. You already saw this slide with the presentation of René. So as he said, our yield development is promising for the coming years. I would like to mention a few key elements that contribute to this expected increase. A significant impact on our yield comes from changes in our membership structure since the beginning of this year, with the reintroduction of the Comfort membership for EUR 24.99 per four weeks for new members. This is a EUR 5 increase compared to the Basic membership it replaced. Also, the increase in the Premium membership penetration rate has been contributing to the higher yield per member.
With a high take-up rate, the Premium memberships in the base increased from the low 20s in 2021 to close to 44% today, and it will continue to increase in the next couple of years. When calculating the yield, one has to take into account the promotional offers that members get when joining. These promotions are factored into the yield calculation over the duration of their contract, typically one year. So that means that the yield per month in the first year per member is lower than after the first year. Because of the recovery after COVID, we had a relatively large percentage of members that was in contract. The normalization of that percentage this year is positive for the yield going forward. Of course, a negative effect on yield are the Founding Member campaigns.
Founding Members get a significant, significant lifetime discount when they become a member before the club has opened. When comparing our conservative guidance for 2024 and for at least EUR 24.50 with the yield achieved in the pre-COVID year 2019, our yield will be up at, with at least 20%. Let's move on to the next slide on revenue. Well, you know, these numbers, in the first nine months of this year, our group revenue increased by 36% to EUR 765 million. What I really want to emphasize is that thanks to the combination of a strong membership growth and yield growth, our annual revenue has doubled in just four years, despite the challenges posed by two years of COVID measures. Well, actually, the next slide is one of my favorites. It shows our track record since our IPO.
Those of you who have been following our journey will recognize this slide. We have extended the period including 2023, based on our guidance for number of clubs, memberships, revenue, and underlying EBITDA. Even amid the challenging times brought by COVID, we have managed to maintain a compound annual growth rate of around 20% for these key indicators. I must say, not a bad achievement. I will now proceed to the next section of my presentation, focusing on finance. Finance. On this slide, you can see the amount of free cash flow we generate before investing in the expansion of our club network. We define free cash flow as underlying EBITDA, minus maintenance and other CapEx, cash interest and cash taxes.
Our business model, with clubs being mature in year three, with a 30% plus return on invested capital, results in a fast-growing network of cash-generating clubs. In our recovery year, 2022, before capital expenditure on new clubs, we generated well over EUR 100 million in free cash flow before expansion, and we have been reinvesting the free cash flow in our expansion. But we always have the flexibility to adjust the pace of club openings. For example, specific macroeconomic condition could be a reason to temporarily reduce the number of club openings. Throughout this year, we have concentrated on mitigating the impact of cost inflation on our results, such as rising wages and a one-off surge in energy costs of more than EUR 40 million. The gradual increase in our yield during this year has been instrumental.
As a result, we expect to generate more free cash flow before club expansion than we did in 2022. Looking ahead to 2024 through 2026, we should continue to benefit from a further increase in yield, growing membership base, and significantly lower energy cost per club. Although, beware, we do not provide any guidance for EBITDA for these years, we do want to highlight the strong increase we foresee in our cash-generating ability before new club expansion. In the slide, we show you a high-low range in millions of Euros that we think we can realize in these years. From a level of around EUR 2 per share in 2023, we think it can, we can more than double in the next three years to a range of between EUR 4.30 and EUR 5 per share. Well, the next slide is about our maintenance CapEx.
As René mentioned earlier in his presentation, and you also saw, showed a video about that, we anticipate maintenance CapEx to remain at EUR 50,000 per club until 2030, thanks to the smart refurbishing. Furthermore, within our financial framework, minor maintenance expenses aimed at maintaining the club fresh look, we are categorized under club operating costs. We project these costs to be around 15,000 per club per year. And these costs include items such as minor painting, dent repairs, maintenance of cooling and heating systems, and consumables, such as lighting and sanitary supplies. And to help you with your DCF model, this is for the analyst in this room, also, thanks to our smart refurbishment, we expect the average annual maintenance CapEx of mature clubs in their full replacement cycle to drop from around EUR 75,000 to around EUR 62,000.
What I mean with full replacement cycle is when all clubs are all mature and have started to replace fitness equipment, and there's no dilution for newly opened clubs of maintenance costs. For us, this smart, smart refurbishing is a real game changer. If you just multiply the 30,000 difference by 3,000 clubs in 2030, that means CapEx savings of, of almost EUR 40 million per year. So let's move on to the next slide on club CapEx. We have seen this slide before. So this slide provides insight into the average building cost per new club. For this year, we anticipate these costs to be EUR 1.2 million, with a modest increase to EUR 1.25 million projected for 2024. Our clubs vary in size and locations.
Some are larger or situated in more expensive city centers, while others are in more budget-friendly regional areas. Despite these differences, our guiding principle remains the same: achieving a 30% return on invested capital, ROIC. The limited increase expected in 2024 and 2025 compared to this year is due to cost inflation, as well as fewer regional club openings and a higher number of clubs in city centers in Germany. Thanks to our scale and technology, we continue to have the best prices and terms in the industry. During René presentation, you'll get a glimpse of our latest cutting-edge technology developments, showcasing our commitment to innovation and excellence in the industry. The next slide shows our club openings pipeline. While this overview should look familiar to most of you, I want to emphasize again our flexibility with the timing of openings.
We can adjust our club openings as needed, especially in case of potential M&A transactions and/or macro developments. I will now say a few things on corporate overhead. Corporate overhead costs consist of marketing spend, which Erica explained, and the expenses incurred by both company and regional headquarters. It is worth noting that customer service costs are included in the headquarters expenses. In the medium term, we anticipate maintaining marketing spend with a range of 5.5% to 6% of group revenue. Additionally, we expect headquarters costs to decrease to a range of between 6% to 7%, compared to around 8% in 2022 and in the first half of this year. Since our previous CMD, we have made big investments in the further professionalization of our head office.
Because of the growing reporting requirements from Brussels, particularly in areas such as CSRD and taxonomy, we have been and will continue to invest in additional resources and tooling. Significant investments were also made in upgrading our IT system to manage the increased scale and complexity of our operations. Examples here are the implementation of SAP and Workday. The upgraded IT landscape will result in future efficiency gains. Furthermore, we anticipate achieving greater efficiency in customer care services. You might recall Erica's slide illustrating the positive trend in cases per 100 members. Well, the next slide is about our new energy department. Well, the war between Russia and Ukraine, which started in February 2020, led to a surge in energy prices in Europe. You all know that.
While we had already been working on plans to reduce our carbon footprint, as we explained during our previous CMD, there was now an even greater need to focus more on our energy costs. So we established an energy department to reduce our energy consumption and to fix our unit energy prices at favorable levels. In 2023, our energy department became fully operational. I will now walk you through some of the department's initiatives. We are in the process of expanding the installation of our remote facility system in all our clubs. This will allow us to monitor and reduce energy consumption more effectively in our clubs. We have been fine-tuning our energy purchasing strategy, aiming to fix prices or adapt as the markets keep rapidly changing. We're also sourcing renewable electricity from the grid, as this helps lowering our carbon footprint.
Another project which helps our carbon footprint, as well as our energy costs, is the transformation of all natural gas installations into electrical installations in our Benelux clubs that still use natural gas for heating. Lastly, we are investigating the installation options for solar panels on our head clubs and headquarters, as this will help us reduce emissions and costs. These initiatives, together with several other initiatives, will result in lower energy consumption and less cost volatility going forward. Previously, we have guided to the market that we expect annual energy costs per club of EUR 35,000 for both 2024 and 2025. This is a strong decrease from the EUR 55,000 we have this year. For 2024, we have now fixed 80% of our expected consumption.
For 2025, we've also hedged 100% of the French consumption and of the group, more than 60%. In this year, we have made good start in reaching the targeted 20% reduction in energy consumption. Due to the external influences of weather on our consumption, it's difficult to assess the actual savings, but we have seen positive results coming through in the past few months. I will now take you to a slide on our financing structure. Well, we have a solid financing structure. In the short term, we have limited debt repayments. Early this year, we repaid the last installments of the government-backed facility, and in 2024, we will repay the last EUR 80 million of our German bond loan, the Schuldschein. In June of this year, we announced that the successful completion of an amendment extent of our existing term and revolving facilities agreement.
The new agreement comprises a EUR 215 million term loan and a EUR 400 million revolving facility, totaling EUR 650 million. Additionally, and this is important, the agreement includes a new uncommitted revolving facility accordion, up to EUR 150 million. There's no specific earmark for the accordion, and we can request for the accordion at any time. So we believe we have sufficient available liquidity to finance our growth plans. The maturities of the facilities were extended from June 2025 to June 2027. We have the option to request further extensions by one year in each of the coming two years, to ultimately 2029. The average interest rate we pay on our loans are a mixture of our drawn bank debt, for which we pay Euribor Plus a margin.
The margin is around 2%, and the Euribor is for EUR 100 million, EUR 150 million hedged. Our convertible bond loan has a 1.5% coupon. Of our total debt, 50% has a fixed interest rate of 2.2%. The average rate on all our interest-bearing debt at the moment is 4%. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio with the half year results, which was 2.6x adjusted EBITDA, and our midterm leverage ratio target is below 2x. I will now talk you through my slides on our club economics. We consider a club mature. It has been open at least 24 months at the start of a calendar year. That means that, roughly speaking, clubs are accounted for as mature in our reporting after approximately 30 months.
During this period, these clubs enjoy at least four to five periods in which people massively join fitness clubs. These are the start of the year campaign and post-summer vacation periods. New clubs need this in-growth period to expand their membership base to a level at which they can achieve a 30% or higher return on invested capital. This slide illustrates the trend in average membership per mature club over time, alongside the actual number of mature clubs reported in their respective periods. To remind everyone, during the COVID period, we temporarily adjusted our definition of a mature club and only included clubs that had already reached maturity at the start of the first lockdown in March 2020. This is why you observe a significant increase in the number of mature clubs in 2023, when we returned to our original definition.
At the end of September this year, mature clubs accounted for 64% of our club network. In the first nine months of this year, these mature clubs generated almost 80% of group revenue and an even higher percentage of underlying club EBITDA. The average number of memberships at our mature clubs is around 3,300 in this year. Short term, we expect some impact from club mix and a high uptake of the premium membership, as I explained a few slides ago. Medium term, so in two to three years from now, we expect the average number of memberships of a mature club to be around 3,250. In the next slide, I will explain more detail our in-growth trends and what this imply for our club unit economics going forward. I will now start with the slide dealing with regional club openings.
Now, before you wonder, does he not actually mean rural clubs? Because that's the term I used in the talks with you. Well, yeah, it's the same. But for the sake of uniformity with Rene's presentation, I will use the term regional, because actually, it's the wording that Rene already used at our first CMD in November 2017. As part of our plan at that time to grow to more than 600 clubs in France, Rene told you that after first focusing on the bigger cities, the larger Paris region and Paris itself, step four would be to open clubs in the smaller cities in France. With this, Rene meant the regions. You know that by now we already operate close to 800 clubs in France, with plans to add more than hundreds more.
Slide 20, and this is this slide, shows you the percentage of Regional club-wide openings since 2019. As you can see, there has been a steady increase in Regional club openings over the past few years. If you consider that the bulk of these openings are in France and only a handful in Belgium, it implies that in France, these percentages are much higher. In this year, roughly half of the opening in France is a Regional club, compared to a third in 2022. As a reminder, a Regional club is only opened if we expect it to achieve a 30%+ Return on Invested Capital at maturity. The main differences with a non-Regional club in terms of club-unit economics are: the slightly lower initial investment to build a club, and in OpEx, the much lower average rent compared to the group average.
The last element means that we can open very profitable clubs in regions where we need fewer than the usual mentioned 3,300 members to reach our ROIC target. I'll now take you to two slides on club in-growth trends. There are a lot of lines there. The first slide shows the membership in-growth trends during the first 24 months of the three COVID vintages combined and the 2022 and 2023 club vintages. The COVID club vintages include 2019, 2020 and 2021. These vintages were significantly impacted by two years of COVID restrictions. As a result, they did not show the normal in-growth pattern. The 2019 vintage, at least for the bulk of the clubs, had a good start, but were also impacted by the COVID measures in their first important two years.
So for all three vintages, it will take longer to reach their maturity targets. How long? I can't say, but it will take longer. But we believe that they will get there eventually. This belief is supported by the fact that these clubs continue to add membership. We also did not change our site selection criteria for these vintages, and the high demand for fitness is unchanged as well. When we look beyond COVID, the 2022 vintage had a good start, but does feel the impact from a combination of the price increase we did in 2023, the jump in the Premium membership uptake, and the headwinds in France in the first half of this year. The 2023 vintage is dealing with the same elements as the 2022 vintage.
In addition, the fact that we have opened more regional clubs this year translates in a lower mature membership count for this vintage. The stronger start of the 2023 vintage is thanks to the founding member campaigns that we did in a large number of our new clubs. But if you look at this slide, you only see a part of the story. So let's go to my next slide with the monthly underlying club EBITDA for these same vintages during the first year of in-growth. In this slide, you see the same vintages as in the previous slide. I will zoom in on the performance of our two most recent vintages. In spite of some lower membership ramp-up trends than historically, for the reason I just explained, they do tend to grow to become cash flow break even, even in month seven.
The 2022 clubs benefited from a strong post-COVID catch-up. The performance of our 2023 clubs is actually quite remarkable as they had to deal with much higher operating costs right from the start. However, the startup losses in these clubs are significantly less, and they are cash flow break even in month seven. This is the result of the price increase and a stronger start in memberships at the time of the opening, due to the Founding Member campaigns, and regardless of the lower membership fees of these Founding Members. It's worth noticing that our new clubs reach cash flow break even around month seven, with an average number of membership at 1,500. I'll go back to the previous slide.
You see there that in month seven, we only have less than 1,500 members, and we are already break even on that level. So it means with the price increase that we had, we are already break even at 1,500 members. And in 2023, it's even lower, thanks to the large number of the regional openings that we did. I will now take you to two slides that deal with our churn trends. There's someone checking the slides, so I'll wait till I go to the next slide. Yeah. This slide shows the trend of the members that are out of contract. I will try to keep my story here as simple as possible. Members who are no longer in their contract period are able to leave. In our industry, a meaningful part of members leave when their contracts end.
Those who wish to do so don't do that all immediately after it ends, but a large proportion of these members does it right away, and that means that if you trail a period of large joiner numbers, a year later, you can expect relatively, relatively high churn levels. Since 2022, the year in which COVID restrictions were lifted, the percentage of members that are out of contract have been growing. What this chart shows is that we're now back to an average level of members that are out of contract compared to the situation before COVID, which we consider our benchmark. If we go to the next slide, here you see that the churn rate has also been growing since 2022, but the average churn rate in 2022 was still well below the 4% we experienced before COVID.
While the rate we see with this year as a whole is now in line with the 4% rate before COVID. The increase over the past year is the result, of course, of the relative high number of joiners in 2022, who could start to cancel their subscription in this year. Apart from a small shift in the timing of churn, we expect a churn rate of around 4% for 2024. We expect a bit more churn than usual in Q1 and a bit less than usual in Q2 next year, for the simple reason that we have become less promotional in this year compared to 2022, when we gave away more weeks for free when members joined. As a result, joiners in this year will go out of contract a bit sooner.
After all my previous remarks about yield, in-growth, and churn trends, I will now elaborate on what this means for club unit returns. In 2022, our 500 mature clubs enjoyed a strong recovery following two years of COVID measures. With an average revenue of EUR 870,000, these clubs achieved underlying club EBITDA of EUR 431,000 and a 50% margin. We already reported on these numbers, so you're well aware of these numbers. Return on invested capital stood in the mid-30s. For this year, we provided guidance that the expanded group of mature clubs should achieve a 30%+ return on invested capital. Right from the start of the year, our mature club profitability was impacted by high cost inflation, including a more than doubling of energy costs.
We also explained that the expanded mature club we report on includes club vintages from 2018 and 2019, which reached their required membership levels by March of this year. We also explained that the 2020 vintage requires more time to reach its membership goal due to the absence of a normal in-growth pattern during two years of COVID measures. The good news is that going forward, cost inflation should be lower and that energy costs will come down substantially as from 2024, and that our yield continues to grow. And to help you all with your modeling process, I provided an overview of the expected unit numbers for an average mature club in the midterm, meaning two to three years. And now let's go through a few of the line items.
The initial investment I already talked about in my presentation, the EUR 1.25. In the medium term, and that's in the next two or three years, we expect the average mature club to have around 3,250 members. In 2024, the still underperforming 2021 vintage will be added to the group of mature clubs. But in the midterm, there will also be an effect from the larger number of regional clubs that we're opening. And lastly, the cannibalization effect from the high premium membership uptake is also taken into account. This last element, as I explained, helps us to grow the yield. And in midterm, we expect the average mature club to achieve annual revenue for EUR 1 million.
Club operating costs increased by around 100,000 EUR compared to 2022, mainly as a result of cost inflation, higher energy costs, but partly mitigated by the lower club costs of regional clubs. We expect an underlying club EBITDA of 460,000 EUR and an EBITDA margin of 46%. On a return on invested capital basis, we expect to achieve a similar mid-30s percentage. I have decided not to split this midterm club unit economics between city and cluster clubs and the regional clubs for competitive reasons. But rest assured, regional clubs enjoy similar margins and returns on invested capital. I have one more comment to make about this slide, and that's about the significant embedded earnings power as clubs become mature.
If you do not open a single new club, our underlying club EBITDA, based on 1,402 clubs, could potentially increase to EUR 644 million, based on the average mature club midterm underlying EBITDA. As explained, midterm means two to three years. To conclude this slide, going forward, we expect for a mature club more revenue, but slightly lower memberships and a 30%+ returns. Still, I want to highlight a high, significant embedded earnings power in those clubs. Now we go to the sustainability. Two years ago, we launched the Go for a Fitter World program. In this program, we articulated our main sustainability ambitions linked to three focus areas: Healthy People, Healthy Planet, and Healthy Community. With a healthy people, we aim to reach 50 million people by 2030, to help them improve their health and well-being.
With Healthy Planet, we aim to have reduced our environmental footprint and be carbon neutral by 2030. And with Healthy Community, we aim to have invested more than EUR 5 million in our communities through impactful partnership, also by 2030. Since then, we made steps in achieving these goals and further developed our sustainability strategy. The main material topics that we focus on as a company, and which are also deemed most important by our stakeholders, are now also part of the three pillars. They are shown on this slide and include health and safety, environmental footprint, diversity, and awareness and accessibility. In the meantime, more sustainability-related European regulation came our way, which brings me to the next slide. Well, in this overview, we show the regulatory landscape that we operate in, in which the top two are the most relevant and pressing for Basic-Fit.
The EU Taxonomy is a cornerstone of the EU sustainable finance framework and an important market transparency tool that helps direct investments to the economic activities most needed for the transition, in line with the European Green Deal objectives. It's a classification system that defines criteria for economic activities that are aligned with a net zero trajectory by 2050, and the broader environmental goals other than climate. Of the six objectives, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation are relevant for us. Most notably, our investment in the transition to gasless clubs and the installation of solar panels are aligned with these objectives. But the real challenge that we have is to comply with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the CSRD. The CSRD contains of a list of disclosure requirements to European Sustainability Reporting Standards, or ESRS, that listed companies need to report on.
For us, this means that in our annual report 2025, we will report on the ESRS for the first time. We will not report on all our ESRS, but only those that are material to Basic-Fit. We came to the assessment of the material topics after doing extensive double materiality exercise. The topics that we are preparing to report on are: climate change, water and marine resources, own workforce, workers in the value chain, consumers, and end users. In total, including all subtopics, this will add up to well over 120 data points. This is a significant project that we're working on, and in which we have made great progress, but this is requiring additional investments in resources and tooling. As we have been making progress in disclosing more sustainability-related information, we have always also seen our ratings with ESG rating agencies have been improved.
We focus our efforts on the ratings from MSCI and Sustainalytics, as communicated at our prior CMD. In the past couple of years, we improved our rating with MSCI to a triple A rating. With Sustainalytics, we improved to medium risk rating. As our disclosures will continue to improve with the reporting of the ESRS, our ratings are expected to improve further. Our disclosure of scope three emissions, for example, will contribute to this. This brings me to the last slide with the key takeaways. We're on track. Key takeaways. We're on track to reach our medium- and long-term targets. We have seen strong club and revenue growth, and we'll continue to focus on return on invested capital, while optimizing membership growth and yield development. Our smart refurbishing will keep the average maintenance CapEx at EUR 55,000 per club at least until 2030.
And lastly, we are highly cash generative before new club openings, and if you assume that all our clubs can grow to an underlying club EBITDA of EUR 460,000, there's an enormous embedded value in our network of 1,402 clubs of more than EUR 644 million. And I wanna add to that, that we are the architects of the fitness revolution. That's what Erica asked me to say at the end of my presentation. Well, this is the end of my presentation. I give the floor to Redouane.
Thank you, Hans, and good afternoon, everyone. So what I would like to share with you, in my part of the presentation is our 2023, 2030, Basic-Fit journey. I will start by explaining what we have achieved in 2023, and also I will give you a clear view on our expansion planning towards 2030. But I will tell you more about the reason behind the speed of our growth, why we do it, and most importantly, how we do it. It's not just about expansion and growth. As you all know, our business model can be impacted by fit cost, and I would like also to tell you in my presentation, all initiatives we have been launching to better control our CapEx and the fit cost.
And also what we will do directly and on midterm and long term to better control the 30% return on investment. For sure, I have to update you about our Germany, in the number country number six, Germany. I will tell you more about our growth before reaching my conclusion. If you now take a look to 2023, I'm proud to tell you that we have reached an historical target within Basic-Fit. Proud of our team, because for the first time, we have reached our expansion targets two months before the end of the year. And as we speak today, we can enjoy the 1,402 clubs milestone. If you now take a look to the two coming years, 2024 and 2025.
As already explained by René and Hans, we do have, in our expansion process, the ability to control our growth, depending on the market conditions. What I can tell you is that in the next two coming years, we have more than 610 projects in negotiation, more than enough to guarantee the target we would like to achieve. The main focus of our expansion team will remain on France and Spain to further reinforce our market-leading position we have in those countries. If you now take a look to 2026, 2030. We will further expand in the established markets, Benelux, France, and Spain, and we will start accelerating our expansion in Germany to come, to become for sure market leader before 2030.
So we will keep scaling up to reach at least, as already stated by Rene, the 3,000 clubs milestone by 2030. If you now take a look back to the seven previous years, Basic-Fit has been opening 983 clubs, and in the next seven years, we will be opening at least 1,600 clubs to reach the 3,000 club milestone. On this graph, you can see the current situation by country, how many clubs we have as of today. You can see how many clubs, an estimation of the clubs we would like to open in the next seven years.
The good thing is that you can see on this graph right now that by 2030, our goal will be reached in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Luxembourg, in France, and our first goal for France and, and Germany and Spain will also be reached. Which mean that we are sure we can achieve the 3,000 clubs by 2030, with a gap to 3,500 if we add 250 clubs in Spain and 250 clubs in Germany. But as I told you in my intro slide, it's not only about growth. So I would like now to take a few minutes to explain you that we have a growth plan under control, but other KPIs are also important, and we also focus on those KPIs to guarantee the long-term return on investment from Basic-Fit. Speed: why and how?
Fixed cost: What are we doing right now to be better in control? And how can you, can we say number one with a 30% return on investment is also something I will explain you in this part of my presentation. Growth speed is crucial for our model to guarantee the long-term 30% investment. Why? As you all know, fitness is a first-mover business advantage. Opening many clubs in a cluster strategy is key, and it's a great entry barrier. By doing that, we become for sure in all countries, all regions, all cities, the logical choice for consumers. Because sometimes you hear, we hear that it's easy to open a fitness club. Just rent a box, put some equipment in it, and start selling memberships. Right.
But what we do within Basic-Fit cannot be easily copied, because you open club at high speed in Cluster Strategy with a low breakeven point to become the logical choice and to guarantee the return on the long term. How we do it? For sure, opening more than 200 clubs a year, we have to do it thanks to automation. And you will see later in my presentation that year after year, next to the fact that we increase the number of clubs we will be able to open, we also focus on trying to keep the cost as low as possible and to get more control about the cost, but also the concept we are executing in the different countries. And as already explained by Rene, our growth speed will be guaranteed by new clubs and possible acquisitions.
We are not looking for acquisitions, but we are open for good acquisitions. Availability of locations in our countries. I would like to tell you that in all our countries, we have no issues to find the right locations at the right price. Also, I have a slide on that in the coming slides. Why? Because the more clubs we open in a country and becoming the market leader, we also become the preferred partner of all landlords, because they know we are there to pay the rent for decades. And next to that, we organize in all countries, multiple, multiple times per year, broker events and landlord events just to stay top of mind. Let's now take a look to the evolution of rent levels in our countries.
So on this graph, you will see the development of rent levels from 2019, including the clubs that we are supposed to open next year. We made the split between the city clubs, clubs in big cities, and the regional clubs, clubs in cities with less than 30,000 inhabitants. You see that the rent price, as already explained by Hans, in the city clubs, in the regional clubs, is lower than the city clubs, and you can see that the rent is remaining really stable. The next question could be: what about the size of the clubs then? On this slide, also happy to tell you that the average size of the clubs also remains stable at around 1,200 square meters. You see exactly the same thing year after year for the 5 previous years.
If we now take a look to the CapEx. We have been in place till 2023 to guarantee the construction of a Basic-Fit club for EUR 1.2 million, despite inflation, despite all the issues you guys know about COVID and the supply of technical installations, et cetera. Thanks to our scale and thanks to some specific initiatives that we have been launching with our team, and I would like to give you three examples. First one, we were able to continue building clubs for EUR 1.2 million because of the favorable position we have in negotiating with the landlords. When we decide to enter a city, and if you have the chance to open 10 clubs, we negotiate with 30, 40 landlords so that we can put them in competition.
We can then select the best rent, the less CapEx needed to reach a 30% return on investment. We are the strong market leader. So for a landlord, in any country we are operating, it's much better to sign with Basic-Fit than sign with a self-employed fitness entrepreneur. And we also have standardized contracts, and they know that we have a really data-driven, efficient expansion process that will guarantee that we can move faster and that we will be able to pay the rent also within 20 years. The second reason behind the fact that we were able to control CapEx was the great partnership and relationship we had with the building partners. And let's go back to beginning of COVID situation, beginning 2020. At that time, I can guarantee you that all building partners we were working with were concerned and afraid.
They were afraid about losing some business with Basic-Fit. At that time, together with my board colleagues and my property team, we talked with them, and we told them, "Okay, guys, we will continue opening clubs. And you know what? We're gonna prepare a plan to no more open 100 clubs a year, but to scale up and to open at least 200 clubs per year. What we then expect for you is that you will not increase the prices, which mean the game is the rules of the game are easy: you will get more volume and less margin." And this was the main reason why, despite inflation sometimes of, and some prices going up with 10%, 20%, 30%, that we were still able to build clubs for EUR 1.2 million.
Taking a look now to the 2024 project, they are estimated to €1.250, so a gradual and small increase, way below the increase of inflation and prices that we have seen since 2020. A third reason why we kept also this cost under control, our CapEx cost, is the fact that we signed Europe-wide contracts for technical installations, and this was really important at two levels. On the one hand, we were able, thanks to our skill, to negotiate the best prices when opening 200 clubs a year. But even more importantly, for sure, in post-COVID situation, signing those contracts was a great guarantee that we'll have no issue with the supply of technical installations. We don't want it to be confronted with 40 clubs ready to be opened, but not having an air conditioning, for example.
Another fixed cost that could impact our business are the staff cost. Inflation, crisis, government decided to increase the salaries of some of our employees in order to pass through the crisis, and we also did that to support our employees in difficult times, because at the end, we cannot be successful without our employees. We can define the best strategies. We need the people on the clubs to deliver the great service. What have we done for that? On this graph, you can see the deployment of a remote operations capability, the smart cameras. In 2019, we had 70 clubs in the Benelux, open by night, with external staffing, security companies, and we had two full-time external employees per club.
When the clubs had to close in 2020, we knew we will have to fight against cost, less members, so we decided to scale up our efficient 24/7 remote operations. When we were able to reopen the clubs, we started opening the clubs by night in the Benelux, unstaffed. We stopped working with the external company. Right now, as we speak, we have 330 clubs in the Benelux, open 24/7 and completely unstaffed by night. To manage that, we do it with 50 full-time employees working in our remote surveillance team here in Hoofddorp. If we didn't invest it in the Smart Cameras technology, years before the COVID, we would have needed 660 full-time employees to open 330 clubs by night.
So we are now running, operating the clubs with 7.5% of the full-time employees, thanks to our efficient remote operation capability. To a new initiative we also launched in 2023 in the Benelux, we started working with morning shifts at 8:30. Till 2022, we used to have staff in the clubs starting at 7:00 A.M. in the morning. Now, from 7:00 A.M. to 8:30 A.M., we control the clubs remotely. This bring us to a saving of 1,170,000 hours annually.
We are also, as we speak right now, testing the unstaffed, unplanned project in our Benelux clubs, which mean if someone calls us and say, "I'm ill, I'm not feeling good, I will not open the club," we then just call the remote surveillance team, and they will take over the management of the club. Conclusion: Thanks to the investment we made way before COVID, and thanks to the commitment we had when COVID started to find a solution to compensate the high cost we will have to face, we were able to decrease the cost, to guarantee more safety, because having 50 Smart Cameras, 25, 50 cameras in a club, it's much more efficient than having one or two employees in a 2,000 square meter box. We have the flexibility to adapt.
It's more service for the members, more than 200 clubs open by night right now, and the 24/7 concept will be tested in the near future in Spain. You will hear about it in the coming months. So we are market leader with favorable competitive landscape. Let's now take a look to our competitive position in the market where we are, because it's also something that will guarantee us the long-term profitability of our clubs. On this slide, you can see as we speak today, the number of clubs we have in France, 780 clubs. And you can see those are all the other clubs reported in the yearly Deloitte and Europe Active report. Much bigger than number two, number three, et cetera.
If you take a look to the Netherlands, we see exactly the same situation, more than twice as big, around twice as big as number two. If you take a look to Belgium, by far, number one, and much bigger than all other competitors reported in Deloitte and Europe Active reports. In Spain, as we promised you during the 2021 Capital Markets Day, we became, beginning of 2023, market leader, and we are scaling up our expansion with 140 clubs and more to come in the coming years. If you now take a look to the net growth, 2022 net growth, what happened last year? You can see that in France, we grew with 119 clubs, where all other competitors supported by Deloitte in Europe Active altogether grew with 55 clubs.
If you take a look to the Netherlands, we had a net growth of 15 clubs, and all other competitors in the Netherlands reporting in this report decreased with four clubs because some had to close some clubs. If you take a look to Belgium, 14 clubs for Basic-Fit, only three clubs for the eight competitors combined. Taking a look to Spain, 34 clubs for Basic-Fit Spain, and 49 for the seven competitors. But as you know, last year was the first year we started expanding fast in Spain. And just to give you an idea, this year, we are not opening 35 clubs, we already opened, as we speak today, 50 club in Spain. To conclude, in 2022, Basic-Fit opened 182 clubs, and the 29 competitors together, reported in Deloitte and Europe Active report, opened altogether only 103.
Just to show you the difference we are creating towards our competitors year after year. To better visualize this, it's also important to take a look at what we have been doing the previous five years. Here you see that starting from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2022, we have been opening more clubs, which mean that the gap we are creating compared to our competitor is becoming bigger and bigger year after year. So I think you understand that we are on track to reach the 3,000 clubs, at least 3,000 club milestone by 2030. But we also have a plan to optimize the profitability of the clubs. It's not just about opening clubs, making sure that the clubs that we opened continue to deliver the expected profitability.
Just in 2015, 2016, before the listing of the company, we used to have 250 clubs, and today we are at 1,402, and we promise you that we will end up at least with 3,000 clubs in the next seven years. How we did it? We did it by rolling out our clusters. Our Cluster Strategy was the main driver to become successful and become market leader. To grow from 1,402 to 3,000, we will continue creating cluster in each city, each region, and each country. The world is changing fast, and we need also to develop the ability to adapt to market circumstances.
So what we will also do at the same time that focusing on growing towards 3,000 clubs, we will also think about how we will manage the existing clusters we have, the 1,402 clubs we already opened. And I will explain you what I mean with this in the coming slides. Cluster creation of cluster management, same approach, but completely different decision-making process. On this slide, you can see a typical Basic-Fit cluster, the orange points. Clubs in the north, south, west, east, and more clubs than competitors combined.
To create such a cluster, we mix local intelligence, people living in the area or employees, with business intelligence, people working here at our business control department, calculating how many people are living there, the purchase power of the people, how far are we from the competitors, what sort of product is the competition offering, and what will be the return with if we have to pay X rent and EUR 1.2 million CapEx? So this is what we do to create a cluster. Now, to manage a cluster, the good thing is that we don't have to base our management on expectations of assumptions. We can base them on track records, because we know how many members we had, what type of members, what type of machines they were using in the club.
Maybe in some regions or in some cities in a specific club, people will be much more fan of free weights than cardio, or much more fan of Jake's room than free weight, for example. And definitely in a city as Brussels, where we have 48 clubs, we have a huge opportunity to optimize, to optimize our profitability by better responding to what the people want in the clubs. And this will be based not on assumptions, but on track records, because we have those, those information, as Erica explained you. So we have a lot of data collected from our members. Improving the long-term cluster profitability, also key to define what we should do before renewing a lease contract, and also the amount of CapEx we should invest when rebranding a club. Do we need to have all the clubs exactly the same?
Does it make sense to have in a cluster one club with much more free weight, for example? Because we know most of the people coming to this club are really crazy about free weights. Now, if you take a look back, cluster strategy, to be honest, is not something we invented. It's just something we discovered thanks to the acquisitions we made in the past. Indeed, 12 years ago, when we made the acquisitions of Fitness First, and Health City Clubs, and Conversions, and Just Fit, we ended up sometimes with three, four, five clubs in a square of one kilometer. We said, "Okay, right, this was part of the deal. We can't do anything. We have a lease contract. Let's take a look to the results of the clubs.
The best one we will keep, and the bad ones, we will then not renew the lease contract." And you know what? What happened after one year, two years, all the clubs were profitable and playing an important job. And then we said, "Okay, actually, we discovered through acquisitions, and now let's use it as the main driver of our long-term profitability." So for the 1,402 clubs we have already right now, we'll be focusing on cluster profitability in addition to club results. Optimization of this profitability will be based on track records and not on a business case or assumptions of how many members could we expect. We have the figures of the previous five, 10 years.
We will focus on improving this profitability with the local knowledge we have in the club, feedback from the people working in the club, and also what the figures and departments are telling us about the performance of the club. Last but not least, managing our cluster more efficiently will definitely help us boost the fitness penetration by better responding to the prospect, to the people's habits, behaviors, and wishes. This brings me now to the next topic, country number six. We're gonna tell you more about our plan and strategy for Germany. In Germany, we are really building great foundations for long-term success, and we do see a huge opportunity in Germany. Huge opportunity because Germany, with 84 million inhabitants, is the biggest European fitness market.
Taking a look to the fitness penetration, 12%, much higher than the 8% to 9% we have in France or in Belgium and Luxembourg. One specificity now that you can see on the screen from the German market, they have, according to the Deloitte and EuropeActive reports, 9,149 clubs. And if you take a look to the biggest fitness player in Germany, altogether, the eight biggest players, they just own 15% of the market. What does that mean? It means that Germany is a highly fragmented market with no clear market leader. And I will come back on this point later in my presentation to show you why we see an opportunity and how we will grab this opportunity on the short term.
Another positive point about Germany, around 10 million fitness members, paying today, as we speak, 45 EUR on average per month. We are requesting right now in Germany 19.99 EUR for four weeks, 50% of the average membership fee paid now by 10 million German people. I will also show you in my presentation that non-franchise and franchise players are really not growing fast in Germany. They are not growing fast in 2023, but they were also not growing fast in the previous five years. Our expansion will be based on new club openings because it's a proven capability we have shown now in the Benelux, in France, in Spain, and we are also open for acquisitions. Just to remind you, the official launch of our expansion strategy in Germany was September 2022. Why?
Because we communicated officially with our shareholders, community, and with the world in April 2022. Before that, we had been working a lot on Germany, but low profile, with Belgian colleagues, Dutch colleagues, and starting from April, we started looking for building partners, for German colleagues, and the official launch was in September 2022, so thirteen months ago. Before entering Germany, we had been working a lot for more than one year and a half, collecting theoretical insights. We listed all 398 German cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants. Knowing this is a theoretical approach we have applied in all our countries, we could open one club per 30,000 inhabitants.
In each city, we identified also on paper, theoretical approach, how many clubs we should open to create the ideal cluster to become the logical choice for the consumers. What we also did with a full team of some German students for weeks, even months, we listed for all identified 30,000 inhabitant city, all real estate brokers working in the city. Why we did that? Because now, today, when I request a field expansion manager to enter Berlin, he received a list with how many clubs we should open in Berlin.
He gets the list of all real estate brokers working in Berlin, and the first thing he has to do the two to three coming weeks is just to call as many brokers as he can, do a visit of the city without even visiting locations with him, collecting information, sharing information about the rent prices, the place to be in a city, where is the train station, where the university. And thanks to this preparation, we are able, with our expansion team, to become specialists of a city that we were that was completely unknown for us after two to three weeks' time. We analyze for sure all of our German competitors, because also specifically in Germany, if you take a look to the Deloitte and EuropeActive report, you will see the main players.
But this, this is the only country in Europe with that many small, local, regional players. We identified all players in Germany with at least five clubs, a lot of clubs. And we also called all regions in Germany, authorities, to ask them, "Okay, let's suppose we have to request a permit to build a fitness club. What is the delay to obtain the request?" Important fact in Germany, and big difference compared to France. In France, by law, all regions are obliged to give you an answer on a permit within five months. Positive answer, negative answer, additional questions. In Germany, it's depending on the region. In some regions, you can open a club after three. You can get a permit after three months, and in some regions or cities, it can take up to 18 months. But in the beginning, it's not important.
But when we need to scale up and to start opening 75 or 100 clubs a year in Germany, we need for sure to take this information into consideration to know that we can control our expansion in Germany. But this was just a theoretical approach, just having someone on the call, giving us information, not able to, to confirm if the information given was the real one. So Germany can be divided in 16 regions. What we did, and this is a copy-paste of our French strategy that helped us to. become really quickly number one and have clubs in all cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants. We then identified by regions, here an example for Baden-Württemberg, all cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants, and then we classified them from the biggest one, in number of inhabitants, to the smallest one.
We considered if you open one club per 30,000 inhabitants, how many clubs we should be opening in this city? As you can see on this slide, this analysis has been made for all regions in France. Each orange point you see on the map is a city with at least 30,000 inhabitants. So this is a future Basic-Fit map of Germany. All white points are cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants, and this is what we will be reaching the latest by 2030. But as you can see, between all those white points, huge space.
So we said, "Okay, let's take a look how many people are living in big cities in Germany and how many people are living in small cities." Remember my, the Capital Markets Day I made in 2021, I was talking about Spain, and in Spain, 85% of the population is living in 19% of the territory. Germany is completely different. So what we did, we took a look again back to the 16 regions, and we calculated by region how many people are living in cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants and how many people are living in the regional clubs, regional cities.
If we come back to Baden-Württemberg, the example I showed you in the previous slide, only 40% of the German people living in are living in big cities, which means if we only focus in big cities in Germany, we are not open to all. We are not reaching 84 million inhabitants in Germany; we are only reaching 40%. If you take a look nation-wise, 42 million are living in big cities and 41 million living in smaller cities, which means 50% of the German inhabitants are living in regional cities. The regional clubs are a big opportunity with attractive figures.
We identify them by crossing local intelligence and technology, because a regional city is a city with less than 30,000 inhabitants, where we realized that people were ready to ride 10, 15 kilometers to go to the cinema, to go to the supermarket, and we realized they were able to do exactly the same to join a fitness club. The good thing, as already explained by Hans, we have lower rents because there are not that many retailers willing to rent big boxes in a small city, and we have a good negotiation position. We don't have to fight with other big retailers or other fitness chains. Other fitness chains cannot so easily enter the regional clubs because they don't have the cash flow, low break-even points we have, and the lean staffing modeling we have, and the cameras we have, et cetera.
It reinforced our national coverage and improved the value of our memberships. Yes, we increased the pricing to EUR 24.99, beginning of January, but you open more than 500 clubs every five years. Year after year, the value of the product we are offering to our members is also becoming higher. We have less competition in city clubs today, but also long term. If you open a 2,100 to 1,200 square meters box in a city with 10,000 inhabitants, the risk that the competitor will open another club is really small. We benefit from the national marketing prepared by Erica and her team, and then we are really open to all, reaching the 84 million inhabitants long term in Germany. Competitive landscape in Germany. Interesting slide.
It's a highly competitive market, the German market, with only a short-term impact on Basic-Fit and our clubs, our first clubs. It's an established market with many national and regional fitness players. That's a fact. And you also get a warm welcome from our competitors when you open a club in Germany. We have seen some competitors offering the 6 first months for EUR 1 when you open a club. As you may understand, this is not a sustainable strategy for them on the long term, maybe they thought we would be afraid and we will stop. It was just motivating us because we know exactly what we do in Germany, and we know that we will replicate what we have been doing in all other markets.
It's only a short-term impact on the clubs, because we know the strong clusters we will create will make us the logical choice, and our existing capabilities, already proven in other markets, will lead us to the market-leading position we have in the established markets we have today. How we monitor the competition. I'll give you an example of Hamburg right now. This map of Hamburg, first thing we do, we take a look to how many people are living in the city, how big is the city, what's the density of population in this city, and based on one club, theoretical approach, per 30,000 inhabitants, how many club we should ensure we have to become the logical choice for consumers. Then what we do, we add on the map all high-value, low-price fitness players that can be compared to Basic-Fit in their offering.
Same size or even bigger than Basic-Fit, and moreover, the same price. This is the situation for Hamburg. Next to that, we also identify all of the competitors and how many clubs they have: boutique clubs, all-in clubs, mid-market, premium clubs. As you may understand, the first club we would open in Hamburg, people will have to choose between one Basic-Fit and 40, 50 different clubs. The question now may be: "Okay, but why Germany then, if it's so competitive?" This is something I would like to explain you in the next coming five slides. So why Germany? Why Germany? Because it's a highly fragmented market, and you will see it on this slide. On this slide, you can see the six biggest cities in number of inhabitants in Germany, and then the last line is Brussels.
Take a look, please, one more time, for consistency, to second line, Hamburg. Around 1.9 million inhabitants. If you take a look to the major high-value, low-price chains, McFit, FitX, Clever Fit, and Easy Fitness. The biggest player in Hamburg, with 1.9 million inhabitants, is McFit with eight clubs. And then next to the big players, there are also some smaller regional chains, Fit One and XtraFit, and all together, they do have 26 low-cost clubs. In Brussels, last line, 700,000 less inhabitants than Hamburg. 9% fitness penetration rate, 3% lower than Germany. And as we speak today, Basic-Fit has 48 clubs. So I think you guys know when Basic-Fit will have opened all and applied our cluster strategy, I think you know people living in Hamburg, which fitness chain they will join on the long term.
Now it's a highly fragmented market. Why Germany? Second reason, limited competitor growth. On this graph, you will see the development of all fitness chains reporting in a Deloitte and Europe Active report from 2018 to 2022. Flatline. The only one growing a little bit is Clever Fit, but franchise organizations not creating clusters and also focusing in smaller cities with smaller clubs. If you now compare that with the growth we had with Basic-Fit France and Basic-Fit Spain, you can directly see the difference in capability in opening new clubs. One other specific on the German market, on this slide, you can see all acquisitions that were made the previous four years in Germany, only country in Europe where we see that.
This has to be linked to what I was telling you in my intro slide about Germany, 9,149 clubs, fragmented markets, the big players only own 15% of the market. Also, an opportunity for us. Not looking for acquisitions, but we could, we could buy standalone clubs if we have good opportunities. We have a unique low break-even point with 1,500 members point, thanks to the strong operational excellence focus we have, already presented by Rene. And this makes also a big difference. We have good competitors in Germany, but it's a fragmented market. The market is not full of fitness clubs, but they do need 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, and sometimes 6,000 members to break even. What will happen when Basic-Fit will be applying the one club per 30,000 inhabitants?
Many competitors will see the difference between being profitable to going before the cash break-even points. And that's why even if we increase our expansion tempo year after year, and you will see it also in my presentation later, we always keep a good discipline on decreasing the cost to make sure we lower the cash flow break-even points. If you take a look to the competitive landscape, 12 clubs just started in Germany. Biggest player, Clever Fit, franchise organization with 450, and you see now that RSG Group, Easy Fitness, there's no chain in Germany growing with more than 5 or 10 clubs per year. Nobody's opening clubs, just some acquisitions or fusions.
If you take a look at the pricing, we are still charging €19.99 for four weeks in Germany, and we are then less expensive than all other offers from other competitors, knowing that on this price, many competitors are also charging some recurring fee, €20, €30, which we do not do within Basic-Fit. Interesting slide. Map of Germany. And now you see many points appearing on this slide. I know how many points it is. It is 980.. This is not a white spot map of Germany. This is the number of clubs we already visited commercially and technically in Germany the previous two years, 980 locations. So maybe the question now is, 980 locations and only 12 clubs? What's the challenge? What's the issue? I'm going to answer this question in the next slide.
We have a rigorous site selection discipline. Of every 11 locations analyzed in Germany, only one reached the board approval stage. And here you have a breakdown. We opened 12 clubs, we still have 43 active clubs, two on hold, and we canceled and rejected the other clubs that we already approved. This is a crucial step to build market knowledge, and we did exactly the same thing back in 2013 in France, and also back in 2018, 2019 in Spain, because we need to better understand the markets. When we want to open the first club in Düsseldorf, we visit 85 locations. I don't know about the rental prices there in Düsseldorf, and because I know on term, I will be opening 100 club, maybe even more per year, I cannot make the mistake starting paying not the right price.
So gathering all this information and building the knowledge is something that takes time. We become, as explained in my intro, expert of an unknown city in two to three weeks time. Because of the list of brokers we have, we know exactly how many clubs we should open and how many clubs we should open to have the perfect cluster. It improves our negotiation position. Negotiating on 980 locations, we know till what point we can push to get three months or to lower the rent in a city. It also helps us to bring a strong knowledge of German permit process. I told you, in the preparation phase, we called all authorities, but nothing beats practice.
We will only know exactly how many times it takes and how easy or difficult it is when you're really filling a permit in a city and you know how many times after how many times you get an answer. Needed steps for future accelerated rollout in Germany. What I can tell you is that we will build strong clusters in five to eight cities in the next 24 months. Together with our expansion team, we identified fiv to eight cities, and we said, "Okay, in those cities, we should apply the Basic-Fit concept. We should apply the cluster strategy to see directly the benefits." Next to that, we will continue focusing on other cities simultaneously. 2024, 2025, we will continue building knowledge and competencies on the German market, and starting from 2026, we will further accelerate at least 75 openings per year.
Quite comparable with the slide Rene presented, the slide with our expansion track in France. We are copy-pasting the strategy applied in 2015, in 2013 and 2015 in France. Our unique execution capabilities will lead us to the strong market leader position we already have in other countries. No doubt about that, in Germany, we have a huge opportunity. Let's now take a look to what we improved in our expansion process the previous two years. So 983 clubs built the previous seven years, and we have now to increase the ramp-up of clubs to at least 1,598 clubs the coming seven years. The system we have today in place makes it easy and possible to open up to 300 clubs per year. No challenge with that.
As we speak today, we are managing more than 51,000 different tasks with all projects we have in our pipeline. As you may understand, it's not possible to do that with an Excel list or with a whiteboard, so we have an automated system, developed in Salesforce to do that, so that we can sleep by night and guarantee we can reach our target. Let's now take a look to innovations we had in the past in Basic-Fit. In 2015, we had no real technological developments. We had great expansion rooms with whiteboards and physical cards. We had to adapt daily, and at that time, we were really proud about that, because to be honest, twelve years ago, we were working day and night to open five clubs per year. Really, day and night.
And then we said, "Okay, let's try to open 25 clubs per year. What do we need? Okay, we need to better track all the steps." So we created the whiteboards and the cards, and we said, "Okay, I need more clubs, otherwise I will not be opening 25 clubs." When we listed the company, we said, "Okay, we need automation now, because it's crazy that I had to call in all countries and tell them, 'Please send me a picture of the board with the letter of intent.'" And I was taking a look in my BlackBerry to the how many clubs we signed, et cetera. So we developed a process in 2016 with our listing, with 15 expansion steps.
In the previous two Capital Markets Days, in 2019 and 2021, I presented the fact that we automated and further developed our expansion process, and we went from 15 steps to 72 steps and 82 steps in 2021. Fully automated. We don't have to think about it. Step one is when the first expansion manager is visiting a location. He visit a location, he put it in the system, the system will calculate automatically what is supposed to be done by who and when. And if the task is not performed, the system will send a reminder. If it's not performed, he will escalate to the manager of the person. The system we have right now in place, more than enough to open up to 300 clubs.
It was not needed to innovate, but as I told you, we constantly look to improve things. And to be honest, we also had a challenge in 2022. As most of you can remember, we promised you that we will be ending 2022 with 1,250 clubs. And in September, October, we told you it will be 1,200. The 50 additional clubs will be opened in January or February. Not dramatic for us. We felt it in the share. We saw it was definitely not a good news for you guys. And then we said, "Okay, we don't want to be confronted with that," so we have to improve things. So today, am I going to present you a new expansion process with 122 steps or 200 steps? No.
We said, "Okay, let's stick to the 82 steps for a few years, and let's try to make the 82 steps more efficient." The goal is to shorten the expansion process timeline. So the question, the main question is, how can we move faster with the existing tools we have and be more in control also of the concept we have? So we said, "Okay, from the 82 steps, there are several steps we cannot do anything about that." How many time does it take for an architect from a city to answer a permit request? How sure are we that it will be positive or negative or additional questions? We agreed with the landlord to get the keys the first of March. He's not ready with his work. We get the keys two months after.
We cannot do anything about that, so we forgot about those steps. We focused on the steps, and we say, "Okay, on those steps, we could act. We could think about improving things to be more in control." The goal was to reduce the 18 to 24 months timeline we need to open a club by stopping or improving the step that we're making us lose time, by giving our building partners more support to build easier and quicker the clubs. We also wanted to be better in control of our CapEx budget. And we also wanted to improve our negotiation position with landlords. Knowing more, as soon as possible, is also a great tool to reassure a landlord and be able to negotiate better conditions with him. And I'll explain you that in the coming slides.
Actually, I must say, the launch in Germany two years ago, the, not the launch, the launch was September, but the preparation, the start of the preparation two years ago, was a great laboratory for improving our process. Why? September 2022, we were really happy. We said, "Okay, we know we will copy-paste the strategy in France, so let's find enough building partners." We contacted more than 25 building partners in Germany, and we ended up signing a contract with seven partners. So we say, "Okay, first thing done, we have seven BOP building partners, but they have no experience with Basic-Fit. They don't know about our DNA, what they have to do to open that many clubs." So we said, "Okay, we have a solution.
Let's write down everything," and we ended up with more than 800 pages of Basic-Fit guidelines: branding catalog, product catalog, what type of showers we have to use, the colors on the walls, and everything. We thought at that time that having seven building partners and 800 pages was the solution. It was not, because we ended up receiving, after six weeks, eight weeks, some crazy layout plans from the building partners, and my property team called me and said, "Redouane, we have an issue because this is really not a Basic-Fit club." This was the biggest learning for us in 2022 and 2023, because we all have a dictionary at home. It doesn't mean that we know all the definitions of the words in the dictionary. Just exactly the same.
I was thinking that just providing them the 800 pages was enough. It was not. And this was. So we decided two years ago to focus on, okay, what we have to improve to make it easy to build those clubs. So what we did? I'm gonna tell you three things. Now, this is my expansion German team, expansion German team. We now scan all clubs in 3D directly during the first commercial visit. Directly. four days after the first commercial visit, we are no more wasting time requesting, sometimes for weeks, the correct plans from the landlord, and sometimes they even don't have correct plans. The technical constraints can be immediately identified: the height, the ceiling, the doors, exits.
The construction partner, who is supposed to perform a technical visit maximum 10 days after the commercial visit, can do that with the right measurements, with the right height, with everything in hand. Also easier for him to send a site development forecast. What is the cost that we should expect? What should we negotiate with the landlord? Is it worth continuing negotiating on this location, and will we get the 30% return on investment, yes or not? Next to that, we invested a lot of time and energy in developing a powerful AI tool in the previous two years. What we did, we say, "Okay, we created a tool," and we incorporate the 800 pages of guidelines and branding book and product and pricing catalog, and we also incorporate more than 500 layouts of existing clubs in this tool.
Here is the magic right now. From a blank or 3D, we put it now in this AI software. Each time we have to click on a button, we receive five different layouts, respecting all the 800 pages guidelines from Basic-Fit. And it also classifies which one is the most cost efficient. Great difference. We are in control. In the past, without this tool, I was 100% depending, we were depending on the building partners and their architect, a German architect with no experience about Basic-Fit, and expecting he will take a look to the 800 pages guidelines. It was taking weeks, months before getting a plan. And when we had to change something in the layout, it has to go back to the architect, not only working for Basic-Fit, it has to come back to us, back and forward.
Easy to adjust the plans in case of technical constraints. And what we also developed, so we have a 3D scan of the club, we have an AI tool that provides us unlimited number of plans. We also developed a pre-calculated detailed price offer. You have to know, when a building partner, before starting building a club, they have to send us what you call a DPO. More than 444 lines. Everything is written: how many square meters flooring, painting, everything that we have to pay, everything in the CapEx of a new club. From the AI software and the 3D created by the AI software, this tool calculates automatically, with the click of a button, up to 75% of the cost directly.
Which means that the building partners, also the new ones in Germany, not experienced with Basic-Fit, have to check if the 75% are correct instead of starting from scratch. For us, as Basic-Fit, and for our finance department and property department, we are fully in control of the cost. I would like now to show you this in a short video, will be maybe more clear than my explanation, even I think my explanation was clear enough, but I think the video is great.
We have opened more than 200 clubs this year. This is pretty exceptional for a non-franchise business. Proud? Sure. But our goal is to make our expansion even faster, more controlled, and even more cost-effective. So we analyzed our process from start to end and optimized several steps by using technological innovations. For example, now we scan potential new club locations directly with a 3D camera to speed up our assessment. Within just four days of our visit, we receive a 3D map that details every centimeter of the space. We also found a way to accelerate the club design process. Our building partners used to study more than 800 pages of Basic-Fit guidelines and regulations before they could start their designs. This slowed us down, especially when working with new building partners. So we developed a powerful AI tool and programmed it with those guidelines and regulations.
Now, here's the magic. We enter our 3D maps of the potential new club, we click one button, and the AI tool gives us not just one, but as many possible layouts as we want, all in a matter of seconds. Plus, it immediately shows us which ones are the most cost-efficient. We are extensively testing this tool, and it will be fully operational in 2024. We have also introduced our automated calculation tool, which is already up and running. Based on the 3D plan, this tool automatically calculates up to 75% of the building costs.
The biggest advantage for us as building partner is that we speed up the design and calculation phase. We are working with the same data as a client, Basic-Fit. In this way, we speed up the process, and we can build more Basic-Fits.
With these new tools and more to come, we will open hundreds of new clubs, faster and more controlled than ever, while still guaranteeing our 30% ROIC. At Basic-Fit, we're pioneers of progress, driven by innovation.
Okay, so as you have seen in the video, in my explanations, we are using innovations are real game changers for the future. Thanks to those three innovations, and many more to come, we'll be able to have more speed, more concepts, and cost control. It also means less training needed for building partners. We provide them with the layout. They just have to do what they can do anywhere in the world: build clubs. We are more in control of club concept from anywhere in the world. Faster negotiation with landlords and more professional approach. Let's imagine if after one week of a commercial visit, we organize a technical visit, and then after two weeks, we have to negotiate a rent with the landlord, and you tell him, "Okay, this is the layout.
This will transform your location into this club. We can travel with them in a 3D, showing them exactly after only two weeks what it is. Quick cost-saving decisions with less dependency on partners. Sometimes, we do work one year on a project, and at the end, authorities ask us to change something. Then we go back to the acoustical specialist, and he says, "No, if you do that, you will have to invest EUR 100,000 extra because of acoustic issues." Thanks to this system, we can work in advance on those things, and if you have to adapt something, we can do it without having to go to an architect and the building partner.
It will shorten, definitely, the 18 to 24 months timeline we have to build a club, which will be easier for our teams and partners to remember what was happening on all the projects we are managing. And on top of our existing expansion capabilities. That makes it already possible to open up to 300 clubs. Important to say, because never done anywhere in the world than any fitness player. These improvements will be game changer for our future, also franchise plans. We can be in control in any country we open clubs. We can be in control of the cost of the concept and help our partners to build the right Basic-Fit clubs. This brings me to my conclusion. We are on track to achieve what we promised. 2030, our historical growth will be achieved.
As we speak today, we are offering in our countries around 1.8 million square meters of fitness playground, and by 2030, we will be offering at least around 4 million square meters fitness playground. The market leading position we have in all our markets will be reinforced, including in Germany, and we will for sure benefit from the rising fitness penetration rates by making fitness affordable everywhere, also in regional clubs and for everyone, by optimizing the clusters in the clubs you already created. Remember the slide from René? 22% in the U.S., 8%, 9%, 12% or 17% in the Netherlands. No reason if we create the right base for all the inhabitants in our countries to reach that level on term. 3,000 clubs will provide us great scale opportunities to keep concerns, to keep our costs under control.
It was already helping us with the COVID to keep the CapEx under control at EUR 1.2, and it will definitely even help us even more in the future. We will not stop at 3,000, 3,500 clubs. As already explained by René, we will add new countries and continents with franchise. More news to come in the coming 12 months. Our teams, systems, and partners are perfectly aligned to make it happen. 30% return on invested capital, important KPI for us and for you. By optimizing our cluster strategy, by using innovations and technology to take the best decisions, because we are the unbeatable value for money player in our countries. We are here, and we stand for long-term results. We are number one, but we are also working hard daily to keep the number one position.
Thank you very much, and I will hand over now to René for his conclusion. Thank you.
Thank you, Redouane. It's always fun listening to you, how enthusiastic and data-driven you can present. Great. But you took a little long. So my conclusion is I'm gonna do this, instead of in 10 minutes, in three. Pay attention. These are all said before. I think it is clear we're gonna grow to 3,000, 3,500 clubs by 2030. But in the pause, what is pause in English?
In the break, I was talking to some people and they, and they said, "Well, how many clubs are you gonna open next year or the year after?" What I was trying to say in my presentation, that we will not communicate the amount of clubs we open per year anymore, or where they are being built. So what we are communicating is that we will build between 3,000 and 3,500 clubs in total in 2030. And depending on the macroeconomics, what is happening in the world, we will speed up or slow down. We look at our balance sheet, and we want to do it with the cash that we make and the bank loans that we can get. I think this is really important to as a key takeaway.
Another question that came by, so I think my presentation was terrible, because what I tried to explain in my presentation is that we also don't want to give numbers about members anymore. The reason for that is it is not just about members. It is about a return on invested capital. It is about a total turnover we're looking for, and we will tweak. That means if for whatever reason in some area, something will happen, maybe we will start again in that region on a lower price for just one club. We will continue to think and change. If at the end, it shows that the premium membership costs us a lot, maybe we will raise the price, or maybe we will change that to, you can take only one person a week instead of bringing unlimited people.
So we will continue to tweak this, so it is not the KPI, how many members, because if we take the yield per member half, yes, we will have more members, but we will not be happy with that number. So the number of member is not what we're gonna focus on. So these are the things, what we have, what we have said during our presentation, and this is what we are going for the coming period. So it's about the 3,250 memberships on a mature club in time, the average revenue per membership, the head office cost between 6% to 7%, the marketing cost between 5.5% to 6%, the maintenance CapEx of EUR 55,000.
I think it was also good how Hans explained it, what the difference is for us when we have 3,000 clubs with a new contract, the new Matrix contracts, where they visit our clubs every month and then we use the equipment, not all, but not for six, but for 12 months. The thing is, a dumbbell of 20 kilos is after six years, still a dumbbell of 20 kilos. So we can use that. Of course, when there's a computer in it, in a treadmill, yeah, we need to change that. So partly it is it's being refreshed, partly it's being renewed, and it's a fixed set price. We are very happy with us. Why? In 2030, it will save us EUR 40 million a year.
So the 13,000 times between 3,000 and 3,500 clubs is a real game changer in our model. And this way, we will make a return of 30%. This is a slide I really quickly wanna discuss. Hans discussed it already. If you look at 2024, 2025, and 2026, the average positive cash flow that we make is over EUR 250 million. So if you build 200 clubs, that is also EUR 250 million. So we expect the coming three years to be able to fund with the money we make ourself, around 200 clubs a year. Again, I'm not gonna say we're doing 200 clubs a year. I'm just saying we can fund it ourself.
We also still have cash on the bank, and we still have EUR 150 million bank loan available that we can draw. So overall, we are in good shape. We will not go to the market if we do an acquisition for 50, 100, or 150 clubs. And again, in 2027, 2028, 2029, you can do the math yourself, probably better than me. We get more clubs that are mature. So more clubs are mature, so that line will grow. So if we go to the next slide, I made this overview. If we build another 1,600 clubs × 1.25, we will spend around EUR 2 billion, and the coming 7 years, we will for sure make more than that. So we can build 3,000 to 3,500 with money we make ourselves.
I think this is a group, very important slide because we get a lot of questions about, yeah, how you're gonna fund the growth. Well, we're gonna fund it by the money we make and the credit lines that we have. So we will not come to the market to give out, to get shares for money to grow with 200, 250, or 300 clubs. We will fund the growth to 3,000 and 3,500 clubs in those six countries ourselves. Did you get it now? I'm just checking in if everybody's still awake. Okay, and then if you, yeah, look, this is our last slide. And Richard wrote everything down for me because he always says I'm going all over the place, and I should stay in the flow.
So I'm staying in this flow, and I'm gonna read it up to you. On my final slide, I show you the conclusion from today. You can read it yourself. We asked Hans, Erica, and Redouane to come to the floor, and we will do some questions. This is something we've said during the presentation, and of course, you can look it up again.
While everyone gets their chairs, I think that's the easiest way to sit down. John David and I will be your microphone host this afternoon. We are a little bit attached to our microphone, so if you can just ask your questions, maybe two, max three, and then return the microphone, and we appreciate it. So first is Hans.
Oh, yeah. Yes, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Three questions from my side. My name is Hans Pluijgers, but first of all, on the franchisee plans, and I know we had some discussions also a few years ago, Rene. You were not in favor of franchise operations. So first of all, could you maybe a little bit explain what has changed your mind in this field? And secondly, you were completely referring to new countries. Does that only mean that in new countries, you will only go with franchisees, or will it also be his own clubs, or could it be a mix? Because I think also, yeah, could you maybe elaborate a little bit on that. Then the second question on,
Oh, Hans, that was already two questions, yeah? So if you have too many questions, then it becomes difficult.
Okay, let
Let me first answer this, and then I come back to you. Is that okay?
Okay.
Good. I think when you look at the current countries, the current countries will stay with our own clubs. We will not do franchise in our current countries. So that's first. The beginning of the question, why franchise? I think we rather do something smaller but really good than do it all over the place, mediocre. So, we think that in those six countries where we are now, we can build 3,500 clubs, and that will be a busy job to keep those 3,350 members in, do it good, make sure the clubs are clean, that the employees are positive. To do that really well, that is a big job. I think that is it.
That the 3,500 in those six countries, that is something we should be fully focused on. But we have all these systems in place. We have all the software to run a club perfectly. We have better software, I think, than anybody in the industry, and we don't do anything with it, only in those six countries. We've been asked many times by people from India, China, Dubai area, if we want to give out the franchise rights, and we actually, we have been also in those countries to talk about it even years ago, and every time we go, we went back, we said, "No." We have to focus. We're not gonna do everything. We have to focus what we're doing. But now, we have such a good head office.
We have a top 20 that is really actually running the business. Hans is not doing anything anymore. I do very limited. So we have a very good team. So it is really time to also use the systems we have in place and really drive the fitness penetration also in other countries. But not by us, but by the franchisee. And we have a very good network already because so many people came to us who have very successful businesses with big hotels, restaurant, big retail names, so they know how to run a franchise business. So we are enthusiastic, but still a bit hesitant because I rather do one thing really good than two things. It will also not be part of our current team.
It will be, it will be a different company, daughter of Basic-Fit, of course, but different people, put it that way. Different people running the franchise department if we go that direction.
Okay. The second question on the 2019 to 2022 vintage and the growth there, that's a little bit. Let's say, the in-growth is less than than was the older vintages. Yeah, you already indicated that about 6% to 7% is coming from the price increases. Then, of course, you have, let's say, the smaller clubs you opened, the regional clubs. And of course, also from the premium membership. But if I add everything together, then it really looks, let's say, that still the growth is somewhat lower than you should have expected. Are you not afraid that you may be cannibalized in that area, let's say, those vintages that are cannibalizing in existing members?
Are there any difference, let's say, per cluster, or you can really see differences per country or per cluster? You could see really, explain also a little bit more on that field?
What, this is working? Yeah. And what I said is that the 2019, 2020, and 2021 vintages, and especially the 2020 and 2021 vintages, are highly impacted by the COVID. So they now see a growth, but we see a growth in memberships, but definitely, they were impacted by COVID, and they will get to maturity because we did make the same decision to select those clubs as we do for all other clubs. The growth will be there and come there, but it will take more time. Normally, it takes 30 months to become mature, two years, starting in calendar year, but now it will take more time. And the other thing is, what I said, that the 2022 and 2023 vintages were impacted more by the price increase at one end.
That's positive, but the high costs. Obviously, those high costs were also there in the 2019 to 2021 vintages. So that impacted that growth, but those clubs are still growing. Those vintages are still showing a growth, and still, we're very confident that they can reach the required levels to get to the 30% return. So now, we selected every club, also in 2019, 2020, and 2021, based on the same calculations as Redouane explained. Every club in itself should reach that 30% return. So we're very confident that they will get there. It only takes longer.
Maybe also good that we always talked about 2020 and 2021 as COVID clubs. But of course, if you open a club in June 2019 and six months later you're closed, or October 2019, three months later it's closed, they're also hit very hard by COVID. So there's actually 3 years lost or not lost, but that are behind. And we had that before because we did one really big acquisition in the past with around 85 or 90 Fitness First clubs. And those Fitness First clubs that we bought, as an example, one in the Netherlands, Fitness First bought it from somebody else. They changed it to Fitness First. We changed it to Health City, and a year later, we changed it to Basic-Fit.
So in four years, there were four different labels. That club went terrible, so because everything changed all the time. So at first, they had saunas, then they had free drinks, then they pay for drinks. It was going all over the place, so the experience for that member was terrible. That club, that particular club, is now in our top 10 most profitable clubs in all of Europe. So it, b ut it was terrible. So we, after the four years, we were thinking about canceling the contract. We talked to the landlord, "Can we get rid of this club?" And we couldn't get rid of it, and now it's one of our most successful clubs. So if you open, close, open, close, mouth cap, reservation, only in the evening, not in the evening, and you have that in your membership, that is a terrible experience.
So that takes time to grow over that and have new members joining who don't have that experience. So it's just gonna take some more time. But we are convinced it is not that in 2018, 2017, 2016, we knew to pick the right clubs. Then three years, we're completely blind, 2019, 2020, 2020, the worst club ever. And then in 2022, we picked the right ones again, and 2023, again, the right ones. No, it didn't went, didn't go like that. It just went COVID, close, open, close, open, mouth cap, no mouth cap. It was terrible. It takes more time. We don't know exactly how much more time, but we are convinced that they are the right clubs and the right location, so we are convinced they will reach the 3,300 members.
We just don't know if it's gonna take one, two, or three more years.
Good. afternoon, Kris Kippers of Degroof Petercam . Good news, I only have two questions. First one, you started your presentation on the number of openings limited only to 200 this year because it was a management decision, not a balance sheet decision. To what extent is this true in the sense that do you have some, yeah, comments from the banks or, like, on the cash position on H1, which was quite close to a low level, of course? Is that something which is taken into account? If you look at your long-term guidance, also there, you've given some flexibility. So what is equilibrium? Is it balance sheet, or is it cash flow generation? What is what you're searching for?
It's a combination of things. Hans, maybe you want to answer this?
Just like you said, it's a combination of things. So we look at the balance sheet, we look at the cash flow generation that we do, we look at the macroeconomic developments, what's happening in that country, then we decide how many clubs we wanna open that year. And it can differ in a quarter because then there's something, some change. We had the surge of energy cost after the Ukraine war. Yeah, then we have to decide that we didn't want to open 300 clubs, we minimized that to 200. So we lower the expectation, lower the targets. That's why I'm also very happy that we say we don't give any guidance anymore per year.
We wanna grow to the 3,000 to 3,500, which I totally align with, but we don't give any guidance per year because it can differ. If the situation improves, and economic situation improves, and we are better performing, then we can open more clubs.
Okay, thank you. Second one, it's good that you indeed indicate that the average yield per member also takes into account of the commercial efforts that you're doing. We're seeing quite some aggressive commercial activity right now, for example, but you're not providing that number in the future, you wanna say. But could you share with us today what the impact is of the Premium membership on the average yield if you take it on a entrance level? Is that possible, or you don't have the information?
Yeah, it's possible, but I, but I don't wanna get into too much detail. I think you can do the math. If you look at the 55%+ uptake of the joiners, and the, and the base will grow to 44%, and the part of legacy members, of course, and the remaining part is the comfort members. So you can, I think you can calculate much better than I then can do, the impact of the premium membership on the yield. But it has a positive impact, definitely.
Yeah. Okay, thank you.
Negative is the cannibalization, positive is the plus in you.
Okay, who else wants to ask a question this side? Anybody? Or else we go to
Yes.
Thank you. Great, great presentation. So for the regional clubs that require a higher fitness penetration than other regions, so what's the pace of scaling those areas? Because I guess you need to convince a higher percentage of the people in that catchment area to go to the gym.
Yeah. Well, what we do is actually calculate the amount of people living in a catchment area. So it's like when I started to say, and also later on very elaborately explained, the proximity, being close to the club is the most crucial part of joining a club. So if we make a decision, if we can open a club there, we in detail look at the population in that area, the catchment area, and that's just two kilometers around the club. So we look at that density of people and also the competition that's there, and then we calculate how many members we can get. And based on those members, we calculate if we can get to the 30% return.
By time to maturity, how much does it differ versus a regular gym?
Yeah, that also depends on, on the competition that is there. So let's say we need, with a fitness penetration of 10%, we need around 30,000 people in that catchment area to make a really profitable club. But it, it varies per city. Are there young people living there, old people?
Demographics, yeah.
It's a real variety of decisions that we look at before we open the club.
For Germany, operationally, ramping up the gyms, so what are the challenges? Because, we've seen that the lower tier of pricing is EUR 20 versus EUR 45 with. And therefore, the gap is way bigger than the other countries. So what's there?
Yeah, I think due to our position now in Germany, we only have 12 clubs. We are using now the lowered price of EUR 90 or EUR 99 for four weeks to try to attract more members. But now, actually, the results in Germany are not important for us at this stage. We are now building confidence in Germany and knowledge, and once we will start creating clusters, then we will think about the strategy. But now, having to face competitors offering six months for EUR 1, we have to offer something to attract a little bit members to Basic-Fit clubs.
Yeah.
Marc.
Marc Zwartsenburg, ING. Hans, you showed us a slide with the, the average, mature members per club of 30 to 50 per gym. Can you maybe give a bit of color on how you get to the 3,250 per gym? And is that only the effect of the temporary effect of the rural area mix, and or should we see that back to 3,300 after some period when you rolled out in Germany to the larger cities again?
Well, it's, it's a mixed effect, Marc. It's the regional clubs, don't call it, I'm not allowed to call it rural anymore from day one, so we have to talk about regional clubs. That impact, of course, for the new openings, but also in the openings before, is the impact of the cannibalization of the premium membership. It's including the 21 vintage now in a mature club mixture. So it's a combination of all those developments.
Higher price.
High pricing, high price if we charge. So all combined, it makes up to those 3,250, a bit lower than we had before. You can also remember that at first, we thought that we could go above the 3,300, but now with all the impacts that we see, also the price increase, yeah, we think we're very happy with the results we can make with a Mature Club of 3,250 members. Because it's more important to get a high yield and high revenue than just members, just like Rene explained.
That is the number we should use towards 2030, then?
What's that?
That's the number then we should be using for
Yes
towards 2030.
I'm not gonna give any guidance how that will evolve, because as you said, we'll open less regional clubs. We have to look at how the development in Germany will go. So I'm not gonna say we will have that forever, but for the midterm, like I said, this is the what we expect to have. Okay, the other question is, I think, Rene, you mentioned it's getting busier in the clubs because of the premium uptake, and those, those are
Yeah
more frequent gym goers. How do you deal then with the comfort level still in the gyms? How do you see that? How, how do you deal with that? Because it might lead to higher churn if people have to wait for the free weight section or what have you.
Yeah. So, on the red one slide, you could see that the average size of a club is 1,300 square meters. So we have 1,300 square meters, average size. So if you compare that to Pure Gym, The Gym Group, chains like that, they are similar, and they on average have, like, 5,000 members in it. So it is not an issue. In our clubs, you don't have to wait for, for equipment. So, we think, 3,000 or 4,000 members, the box is big enough, and the amount of equipment is also big enough. But what we do see, which is something we have to think about, is that with the same amount of, people, members, we have 20%, 20% more visits, and that comes out of the premium. Maybe it's even good.
So maybe a big group of those people who came for free becomes a member. Maybe it's good because the Premium members stay a member longer, because it's more fun to work out with two. So what we've tried to say here is, we're gonna look at it, and it is easy to tweak because if we only do one thing, saying, "Okay, you can bring only one friend a week," then the problem is already solved. So it is a problem, but it's not a problem.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
Yeah, two questions. First, could you talk about the deal with Matrix and like, obviously, it seems like a home run for you guys and what that might involve on your part for them?
Yeah. Yes, I cannot talk about how the deal looks like, but it's a long-term contract. It is, we really happy with the Matrix as a partner. They give us great service, and they're also willing to invest in a factory in the area where we are. So not to make the whole machine, but to put them- put the machine together so they can more quickly react if something is broke, and we also changed the level of visits. But because we made a long-term commitment, on those clubs that we are buying, or the equipment on, for, on the clubs that we're buying, they also, for them, it's also more easy that they have all our clubs and that they can make the planning for their staff much better.
But no, we cannot exactly elaborate how it is. We did give you the numbers, so you can you know that the length of the equipment that we buy will be 12 years. Meaning, if we buy 100 clubs today, we will be in business with Matrix for the next 12 years.
Okay, thank you. Next question. So we can model, like, the puts and takes of ARPU moving forward. Like, could you remind us, for the founding members, how much, like, what percentage of clubs you are sort of?
Can you start?
The family members, you mean?
Yeah, the founding discount, like the Founding Member discount. Like, what?
Oh, the Founding Member discount.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
That also varies. We started with the founding members, but maybe, Erica, you can explain that better.
The question?
The price point of the founding members.
Yeah. We started with EUR 14.99. That's how we started it, to really see, like, is it boosting enough sales? And now, for January, we're testing with EUR 19.99 to have a bit of a less promo, but still for life. Still, was that your question?
What percentage of, like, new club openings on average would you say are you're sort of testing this out on?
Ah.
Well, we do it for. We did firstly the test to look at all new openings start with the Founding Member. And what we see is that for non-cluster clubs or standalone clubs, it makes more sense to do it there than for all clubs. If you do it in a cluster, yeah, then you more or less cannibalize the other clubs because everybody then becomes a Founding Member in that other club. So we do it now in non-cluster clubs, so not every new opening, we do the Founding Members. And especially in Spain, we have really good results there for Founding Member campaigns. We were tweaking that. We're constantly monitoring what the results are. What happens after that first month is also something that we look at.
It's constantly changed, and we're very flexible with that.
What you also see is that people who started with the EUR 14.99 Founding ember price is trading up to a Premium Membership or to a Comfort Membership because they wanna visit more clubs. So it is work in progress. It is too early to say exactly where is it going. We do know that it works, so we will definitely continue with it. And we will A/B test the EUR 14.99 and the EUR 19.99, and we will see, but it's something you have to take over time.
Okay. Thank you.
Yes, hi, Robert Jan Vos, ABN AMRO. A few questions. You will no longer comment on club openings and memberships. So that's pretty clear. But I remember earlier this year, you hinted that also for next year, the number will be around 200. Should we ignore that now, or is that still a valid assumption?
Well, Robert Jan, you should not ignore it, but, it's, I don't want to give guidance on the 200, and I can promise you it won't be 10. So, if you look at the Q1, we'll plan to open already around 80 clubs in the Q1, so it's still be really a significant number but, we don't wanna give guidance anymore on 200, because then we get punished when it's 198.
Mm-hmm.
So it's around those numbers, but we don't wanna give a yearly number.
I think what we will show is that list that we have shown today. So you see on that list, 83 clubs under construction. Well, they will be opened within 12 months, 12 weeks after construction. So they will open in January and February.
Mm.
That's 83 clubs. That is clear.
Mm.
Then you see what is signed, that, well, those clubs also will be opened because the contract is signed. Doesn't mean they're gonna be open next year, because sometimes we sign a contract that's for locations going open in two, open in two, three, or four years with a new building that still has to be built. But on that list, you can, you can, for yourself, make a good saying, "Okay, so many are in construction, so many is already signed." So you can have a good feeling where that is going. But the good thing for us is that, like, if what is happening, the terrible thing that's happening in Israel and Hamas, if that gets even worse, yeah, it's hard to believe it can get worse, but let's say it even gets worse, yeah, then we will slow down for sure.
Or other things get worse, yeah, then we will slow down.
Mm.
And that is good. That's a good thing for us, that we are able to slow down. So we will not give guidance on clubs anymore in the coming years, unless the world is becoming totally normal again, which, yeah, that would-- which would be nice.
Okay, thank you. That's very clear. Then I have a question on CapEx. You provided a pretty reassuring and longer-term guidance on maintenance CapEx. However, for the expansion CapEx, you are only apparently confident to say that it will be EUR 1.25 million in 2024 and 2025. What do you assume for the years thereafter? A normal level of inflation on that, or can you comment on that, please?
Yeah, I think so for the next two years, it's sure because we signed the contracts. Equipment is even signed a contract for three years, so there it's also sure the amount in a year later. But yeah, we, It's hard to say. So what is the inflation gonna do the next two, three years? So, I think taking the inflation number into account could make sense.
It also depends on where we wanna open the clubs, right? So if we speed up in Germany and select the clubs in city centers, maybe the building cost will be a bit higher.
Mm-hmm.
If we then go to the smaller cities in Germany, the building costs could be lower.
Yeah.
It's too far ahead to say something about 2026, 2027 for those estimations. But for 2024, 2025, as René said, we're very confident that we can keep it on
Yeah
1.25.
I think for the spreadsheet, if you take it longer, that would make sense.
Again, very clear. Thank you. And then my last question. It seems to me that you talk a little bit more about M&A, about the potential of doing M&A.
Yeah.
I assume, but maybe you can confirm that it is still highly unlikely that you will be interested in a second brand.
Mm.
And related to that, would you consider acquiring, let's say, a small chain for a per-club cost that is higher than your greenfield cost of building a new club yourselves?
Yeah, I think, to have a second brand is highly unlikely. It's, like, not gonna happen. But if.
That's all, that's all likely, yeah? That's likely. It's not gonna happen.
No, but yeah, if you can buy a small chain, which is more expensive than building our own clubs, that could be interesting if they have good rent contracts. So if the rent contracts they're having are better than what we can get, we are willing to pay a premium for that. So yes, that could be interesting to pay more than building a new club for EUR 1.25 million.
Yeah, but you have to also take into account if you, It's hypothetical, right? But if you pay more for that club, we also don't have opening losses. We have that when we build our own club; we have to, we have the in growth. And if you buy a club with already with existing members, you're immediately cash flow positive. So that could also be a reason why we pay slightly more for a target.
All right. Thank you.
Yeah, I think maybe to the acquisition, again, we will only do an acquisition if it really makes sense, if we can make return. If we cannot make the return, we will not buy to have more clubs. That is... We're not interested in that.
I see someone in the back,
Yes. Yeah, that's right.
Hans Bijna
Yeah, but obviously Hans.
Thanks. Ed, Ed Young from Morgan Stanley. On the f irst question's on the franchise. I appreciate you said you're doing work, you haven't made a decision, so there's obviously lots of unknowns. But just in terms of your thought process around doing it, is it that you have the software, you could put it to use, you could make some incremental profit, and therefore, any amount is a good amount in that sense, minus the distraction
Mm
kind of cost, perhaps? Or is it something where you'd only really do it if you could get to a significant scale? Because obviously, the profit per franchise is gonna be very low. Do you have to get to a big scale to think it's worth it in the context of what you also spoke about, which was focus?
Yeah, for sure, the second part. So if we do it, if we spend time, and money, and focus on it, then we think it can be very big.
Okay. And then the second one was on the cluster management. You spoke a little bit about a sort of shift to looking at cluster management, but you were very light on what the options were. You spoke about rebranding to a club of free weights or something like that. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you see as the potential options within that? And perhaps within that, could you talk about churn of clubs? You sort of suggested that the mindset originally is, you know, maybe you close some, and in the end, they're all profitable. But are, Is there perhaps a stage where you'll be looking at-
higher closures or churn of sites to sort of factor into your net, net new openings, if you like?
Yeah. So I think actually, after 10 years, when we have to renew a lease contract, we have to take a look back to the club we signed. Are we happy with the return we had? And is the place that we signed 10 years ago still the place to be? Or maybe there's another retail center 2 kilometers further from there, where a competitor is gonna come. So many different things to take a look at. I think the most important thing by managing the clusters is collecting insights from the members and better responding to their wishes in the clubs. Right now, we built all the clubs, we create clusters, and we built all the clubs with the seven areas we have in the club. Okay?
But now, we know, for example, now in Amsterdam, we have some clubs really much more visited for the free weight area. So maybe it makes sense to have three clubs in Amsterdam when we renew the lease contract and we rebrand the club, where we will double the size of the free weight area and put less cardio, because we also measure the use of cardio machines, for example. So it's about better responding to the wishes of the people living and visiting the club to improve the profitability of the clubs. And maybe, yes, but it will be a limited amount.
Sometimes you will have to close a club and open a club 500 meters further from there because this is the new place to be, or maybe because we don't have a good agreement after 10 years or 15 years, so we renew the lease contract, and we get a good opportunity from another landlord to rent a comparable size location for EUR 100,000 less per year, for example. So those are things that we will have to study based on track records, but we have all those figures, which is much more easier for us to improve the return than basing our return on, yeah, expectations and business cases, what we now do with a lot of success, but it will be much better in the future by managing the clusters.
Yeah, I have no mic, so just- Oh, there's
Sean David.
Hi there. I'm Jeremy Kahan with North Peak. Can you comment a little bit more on rolling out the Smart Cameras in Spain and also in France? If you can possibly accelerate that and take more cost out of the clubs. Thank you.
Use of Smart Cameras in Spain and France.
Yeah, so the smart camera system is at this moment not allowed in France. That's why it is not operational. We use the camera set because for safety reasons, and we use it for fraud reasons, for example. In Spain, it is allowed. Germany, it's also allowed. So the next country we will roll it out will be Spain, and the country after that, where we roll it out, it will be Germany. We are working on it with the French government. We are explaining that the fact that we work with the camera system that it is actually much safer than with one or two people. If you have two people working together, they will have lunch together, and they will smoke outside together.
So it's better to have one person in a club because then they will always focus on talking to the members. Of course, if you have 2,000 square meters and you have one person, it is good to have those cameras that you can push a button and you get help. So, for that, it is good to have it in France, but we cannot use it yet to be unstaffed. But in all the other countries where we are, it is allowed. So the first step is, we have now 330 clubs in the Benelux, to bring it to, say, 500. Then we go to Spain, then we focus on Germany, and eventually, hopefully, we will get agreement with the French government.
But what we've shown, I think, on the slide, that it saves a huge amount of money, right? So, with the opening at night and with staffless, instead of staff starting at 6:30 A.M. or 7:00 A.M. in the morning, now starting at 8:30 A.M., you can also get more people who are willing, bring the kids to school and start at 8:30 A.M. But also not working till 11:00 P.M. in the evening, but now till, depending, big city, till 10:00 P.M. or 10:30 P.M., smaller cities, 9:30 P.M. So, so you save a lot of hours, and also when, let's say, an employee overslept or is in a traffic jam, the club couldn't open. Now, we can just open it from our head office. So there's a lot of advantages in building the system.
It is not only that it's staffless. We have a lot of young people as customers, so they come in to our turnstile with two friends as a penguin, so they, so they can go all on one pass. But with the cameras, we see, hey, three people are coming in. So then we automatically, software built, send them an invoice of two extra friends that they bring for EUR 10. And we tell them: "Great, you brought your friends. Next time, please register, because we really want to be to see who the members are who are in the club." Of course, that helps us. If you don't do that, yeah, then they all. Then we have, I think the, the biggest number was seven people. I, I don't know if you know our turnstile.
Yeah.
They were hanging in there, like, going, going like this.
Very small people were in our turnstile.
We were happy. We had six day passes.
Yeah.
Yeah, the thing is, it has a lot of advantages, and we're getting better at it, so we keep improving that software system.
Mr. Stevens.
Yeah, I kept it here last night in English for a bite. Right, it is in Netherlands, but what I see a [Foreign language] is the 55% premium [Foreign language] .
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language] . Oh, shit, Engels! So if you now look at the premium membership, it is 55%. So 55% of the joiners take the premium membership. The difference is EUR 5. But what is happening is that a lot of people using it with two people in the family. So we have now not getting EUR 30, but we're actually getting EUR 15. So we think that is a driver of that 20% more people that are actually visiting us. So the premium membership, in the beginning, we thought it's great, EUR 5 extra. Now we're thinking, well, maybe it is not that great, because more people are taking advantage of that one membership.
So that's something we have to look into. Another thing is, because the difference is EUR 5, right? So it's times 13, because we have 13 periods of four weeks. So that is what we get extra. But they don't pay an entry fee. They get a discount on joining of EUR 2.50 a month. So the difference, no entry fee and a discount on joining. The difference between Comfort and Premium is not that big, so we are not convinced that this is the right price. So maybe in the near future, we will tweak it. So for us, it's not a problem when more people will buy Comfort. Long story short.
[Foreign language]
Fitness
[Foreign language]
After we build them, 100%.
Yeah, I think when you look at, for us, an ideal location is if the ceiling is high. So in that way, the ventilation is better and, so high ceiling is for us better. So sitting in office centers is less, good because then it's normally 2.8 meters or 3 meters. That's a bit crap. So preferably we sit, not with people on top, sleeping on top of us. So we'd rather have a standalone building, because somebody drops a dumbbell, and when you sleep on top of it, it is not so nice. Not always so nice. So there's a lot of, different reasons why we would prefer to pick this building over that building. But, yeah, I would say less than 1% of our building is built as a gym.
99%+ is built as a garage or as a storage or as a whatever.
I just heard from our.
Last question
Chief operator that we have time for one more question.
Yeah, when I, when I look at the, the time, I'm not sure if people want to, want to leave. And after
Yeah.
Yeah, she's been. Yeah.
After this meeting here, we have, of course, time to just chat informally, but then we can get at least close this official part of today.
Hi, I've got three questions, but,
We only do two.
You can try and ask them quickly.
No, you're one, you're one person, so,
We have a limited. Only do two.
Okay, I'll do two.
The third one we do at the bar.
So a problem from investors' perspective is, has been that, you know, financial numbers are missed, but openings generally has been achieved, and raised. In the medium term, given the lack of openings, guidance or profit guidance, this means consensus could be quite wide in the nearer term. So how will you manage your message to the market to get on that journey of hitting and beating numbers that public markets like so much?
Well, we, if you look at the slide where I, presented about the free cash flow, we of course, give guidance in a certain range about our free cash flow that we expect in the coming years. So if you do the math, you can also, calculate the range that we use for, adjusted EBITDA. So we give some guidance, but we don't want to give very detailed guidance, and I think the market understands that, because there are a lot of circumstances by which we can't, reach that guidance out of our control. And then we're very happy, but the market isn't. So we don't want to give, too much guidance, but if you look at the slides that I presented about free cash flow, you can do your calculations. So that's part of the guidance.
About the amount of clubs, we said we want to open, end with the 3,000 to 3,500, at 2030. Then you can also calculate how many clubs we still have to open in the coming seven years. I think that's also a reasonable guidance, and it's not going to be 200 , 200 or something. We don't want to give those numbers, but you can rest assured that we will open at least 1,600 clubs in the coming seven years.
Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And then your leverage guidance is less than 2x in the medium term. In which year do you think you can get there?
Well, we at the half year numbers, we're around 2.6, and I think next year will be around 2. And so in 2025, so it would be below. But then I give guidance, right? So I have to be careful. It's a tricky question that you just asked.
Yeah.
It's around. It's around.
In the midterm, we'll be around two.
It's all around.
She tricked me, huh? Smart girl. Smart girl.
Does that mean I'm allowed a third question?
No.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
You're too difficult.
Thank you very much, all for joining. I think we can continue the conversation in the bar when we go out to the right. People who have been here before know where it is. Then we can have some further questions and answers, but then with some drinks. Thank you.