Thank you everyone for joining us this morning and welcome to IWG's 2022 results. The world is transforming very rapidly in the way that people are working. We're benefiting from this as more and more companies move towards hybrid working. Our platform with more than 3,000 buildings in 120 countries is starting to become more and more relevant to a customer base that is growing with every month that passes. The only thing that stops it growing more quickly is the fact that all companies already had commitments. They already had leases, they already had commitments that they can't get out of all at the same time, therefore that slows down adoption. Adoption is happening rapidly.
I've been saying for some time that hybrid is a future way of working. We saw pre-pandemic our best quarter 2020, first quarter 2020, as more and more companies started to adopt then. You know, that's really picked up at the top as we came through COVID and into 2022. You know, we're absolutely in the right place at the right time. And we're quite excited about the future. Why is it going to happen? There's lots of commentary, and it's all very confused about, you know, is this about work from home, work from the office. People don't really get it yet. It's, you know, it's not just a way of working, it's a total change in the way companies manage and operate themselves and use their people. It's all.
In the end, it's about productivity from people. Most companies, sort of major investment after infrastructure is in people. The better you can support those people, the more productive you can make them, the more engaged you can make them, the more successful your company will be. Hybrid very much allows that to happen. Workers working in a hybrid way, which means work close to home, not having to commute vast distances to go and, you know, find a place to work or be asked to go to work in a location that's inconvenient, makes workers happier. They don't necessarily want to work from home, but they want to work close to home. You know, for companies that embrace hybrid, they become more efficient, and they lower cost. For companies, a very strong driver.
In particular, if you look at the backdrop of the economy, last year and into this year, very difficult economy, where resources become, you know, people start to look at what they can cut. CFOs, CEOs looking at this say it's. I hear more of them saying, "This is a fantastic way that we can both cut costs, get better productivity, and make our people happier. It's brilliant. you know, how quickly can we do it?" Well, they're doing it as quickly as they can get out of their commitments. On top of that, ESG, the environment, you know, it's not going away, it's just gonna get bigger and bigger.
By embracing hybrid working, by stopping people commuting, you know, get the commuting done over the Internet, you can have a very, very strong impact on your carbon footprint and your overall ESG rating by having happier people that are more engaged more locally, and less empty buildings, used inefficiently by people coming into offices in central business locations, but also locations across the country from time to time rather than them being occupied many all of the time. You know, the time is very much now. The drivers are very positive, and we expect to continue to grow the business this year. Not clicking. Go the old-fashioned way. I was on the wrong slide. Apologies for that, but here's the text that goes with it.
Just backing this up, you've got a vast amount now of research, lots of institutions, universities measuring productivity before, after, during. There's some very interesting reports that have come out over the last year and at the beginning of this year that are backing up this move and confirming all the things I just said. It's cheaper, it's what people want, and companies can be more productive. You've got lots of companies, you've got CEOs coming out and saying, "Yes, we're doing it. We're embracing it." An interesting one to pick out here is Cisco. They did it a long time ago because they sell all the tech that goes with this move. They did it about five- years ago. They've saved $500 million, their numbers so far, and people are more engaged and so on and so on.
There's lots of this. It's very interesting stuff. The one I'd recommend, if you do want some bedtime reading, is the one from Professor Bloom, Stanford University. It's probably the best. It pulls everything together, and really supporting this change. As I said, it's very often misunderstood. What's clear is that many people are more productive when they actually go to an office and work. It's actually the break between home and work. It's good for your mental wellbeing. I've said many times, I can never work from home. I'm just awful at it. I don't have to go very far, but I need to go somewhere else to actually be productive. That's the same for many.
We can see this across many countries, we can see that even in places where you would not expect this to be the case, places like India, where the homes that people are coming from aren't, you know, sometimes the best places to work. Here, the commuting is so bad that there's a high value put on the ability to work locally. Unfortunately, there's not the properties available, but people still are working in a hybrid way, even in India. I was in Japan three weeks ago, the most traditional country in the world in terms of workplace. Rapid change in Japan. We sold our franchise there to Mitsubishi. You'll see that deal actually in these results. You know, Mitsubishi, I met with them.
You know, they're doing it because they see that this is the future of real estate in Japan. They're the biggest landlord, the biggest investor in real estate in Japan, and they can see it coming. Why? Because the commutes are very long in Japan. It's a very traditional place, but when it changes, it changes fundamentally and rapidly. Japanese corporations are also practical. They also have a real challenge to get talent with the declining population. They're very focused on the wellbeing of their people, the productivity of their people. High adoption rates in places like Japan, which is, I think, a precursor for the rest of the world. Companies are changing. If you look at, in just where we are today, London or New York, but London.
Around you here, you've got companies reducing their space. Where they used to have 1,000 people in a building, if they can get out of the space, they're getting out of it, and they will reduce down to maybe 50, 100 people that actually need to be here, and some meeting space. Everyone else picks up an office near where they live. Some people work from home. That is, you know, universally happening here in London. If you look at our coworking offerings and our drop-in offerings, they're off the charts up, and that's as a result of, companies closing down space, but still having people coming in for meetings and so on.
They just don't have the space anymore, so they're taking subscriptions with us, and that's a very high-growth part of the business, which is very attractive. It gets the most efficient use. It's the highest margin products amongst the highest margin products that we do. It's a very good trend. You know, a lot of people ask me, they say, "Well, look, is this the end of the office?" I say, "Look, absolutely not." The office is very much here to stay. It's just that the geography of the office has changed and the use cases have changed. In a digital world, you know, bringing everyone together in one single location just doesn't make any sense because those people can collaborate and do collaborate much better over tech than they do, you know, sitting in proximity with each other.
You only have to have teenagers, by the way, to see this. They will communicate across a dinner table on phones rather than speak and so on. That's a digital world and, you know, it really is impacting, will continue to impact the workplace. Office is here to stay. Geography moves. Use cases move. We benefit. We provide a platform to link all the properties together so that companies and people can use space and facilities and get support wherever they want to be. I described it earlier this morning to a journalist. I said, "Look, it's. At the dawn of motor, you know, motor vehicles, you know, people started to build gas stations, petrol stations all over Britain. Today, there's gas stations everywhere.
You can drive anywhere because you can fill up your car with petrol. It's a sort of network of facilities that people use. Everyone knows how to use it. Phone boxes, you used to have them throughout the country. People knew how to use them. Workplace will be the same. It will be distributed throughout the country, and the whole population of workers will know how to use them and will access them over platforms. That will be the future for probably about half of white-collar workers. The other half need to be together because they're doing some kind of highly collaborative work, architects, marketing, things like that. They need to be together. It's a big change. It's definitely here to stay, and it's definitely something that we can benefit from in the years to come. You need three things.
You know, you need that physical platform, which we're fast adding to. You'll be pleased to hear as investors and our bankers present that we're not doing it with our own cash, we're partnering. Capital-light, ultra capital-light means that we can grow very quickly, albeit, we make less margin, we share the margin with our partners, but we can grow as fast as we can manage, as opposed to having to think about investment. It's a completely different setup. The physical platform is critical. Being ubiquitous, being everywhere trumps everything else. You could have the best building here in London, but if you don't have a national network, you will fail against someone that does have it. You need a digital platform. We continue to invest in this thing.
You know, a lot of money every year, improving it, improving the apps. We're very busy at the moment improving all the drop-in stuff so that we got more and more unmanned locations in convenient locations. We need the tech to work much, much better if there are no people present to help, and so on. The physical platform, digital, and then operationally, you've got to be super efficient with people because that's our second biggest cost. You've got to be good with people. You know, making sure that you're wreaking out your operational capability and making it work very well, also very important. Results. You know, a fantastic set of results in terms of revenue growth. That's, you know, we've got, this is after a lot of restructuring.
This is the result of lots of openings and quite a lot of closure as we've rationalized poor performing units. You know, when we were talking, preparing yesterday, Charlie and I, it's quite a different business to the business that we had in 2020. It's got a lot of attractive characteristics if you compare back. We're in at the lower cost. We've actually improved the margin much more than it looks. And we're growing very rapidly. Remember, the results here are after our investment. We're not doing bricks and mortar, but we do have about 350 people supporting this very rapid growth. Because we have to project manage these locations, get them open. We've got to get them filled up, and we've got to sell them, sell the partnerships in the first place.
That's quite a lot of investment that is discretionary investment that we did last year, that it's reaping rewards. We're very happy with it, but the results would have been even better had we not made that investment. Cost, I think, is an outstanding deliverable that we delivered on in the past year. We've always been focused on cost. Those who have followed us have always commented on our ability to lower overhead and become more efficient. And we did this in 2022, holding overhead flat or central cost flat, which, you know, took effort and focus and a lot of planning to get done, but actually we were successful with this. More important, I think at center level, there's a lot of inflation out there.
You know, it's certainly well-publicized, but we managed to hold costs down quite well during the year. We did not, our cost did not reach an inflation level because we were able to become more efficient during the year. That sets us up well for this year. We continue to focus on getting maximum efficiency at center level, so that we can keep moving the margin up. You know, much better cash flow last year. We're focused on cash, and we're happy with the improvement in cash. We focused this year as well. We expect to see a step up in cash flow from both EBITDA, but also other initiatives that will help us manage working capital better, and give us a good cash outcome in this year.
Obviously then profitability and so on coming back strongly and again into this year. You all have consensus. We expect to have a good year this year. We're set up well for that, with where we ended the year has set us up well for going into this year. Strategic focuses, we've talked about this in previous presentations. Super focused on margin, control the cost, move up the revenues. Grow as quickly as we can manage. It's not we could grow more quickly, but we couldn't manage it. We're growing to right at the edge of our ability to manage. You know, just to put this in perspective, we're opening up in a single year as many as we opened up in 10 years before.
It's, you know, you have to be well organized to get this to work well for us and for our partners. We have to perform for partners and get them their margin, and then they will do more with us. Many are doing this. You know, some of them are up to 30 buildings already, where they get good success, they do more with us. They expand locations and so on. That's, that's important. I'm sure we're gonna have some questions about Worka, the digital platform, but we're really happy with this investment. It, you know, again, going back to what we said, we'll move our digital assets in. We've done this. It's a high-growth business. It is growing very nicely.
We will, at some point, probably take an interim funding position from a third party. We will IPO this business separately. All of that, we set that all out when we invested, nothing's changed. We said at the time that it would give us a second horse in the race, and we've got IWG. Worka is a fantastic second horse that enables workers to approach the rest of the market. Remember, we're part of a big thing that's going on. We're the market leader, but the market itself is eight times our size. It's a much bigger market to go for, and that is what Worka are doing. We're happy for that. Laser focus on cash. ESG will be carbon neutral this year. We're doing that for all. You know, we've improved our rating, MSCI. What is it?
MSCI two?
AA.
AA. Okay. We want to try and get that AAA, whatever it is. I'm sure someone knows what we have to do. The most important thing for us is to become carbon neutral so that we can sell this to our customers and be carbon neutral ourselves. It's important for our people, for the company itself, for the planet, etc. , etc. , but our customers also want this. Our investment into carbon neutrality helps us in our ability to support customers at the same time. With that, I hand over to you, Charlie.
Good morning, everybody, and thank you, Mark. I'm delighted that this is the first time we take everybody through the numbers. We've seen significant revenue increases across the board, in particular with Worka. All segments have seen individually seen margin expansion through 2022. As mentioned before, we signed another 462 centers, of which 421 are capital- light. This will drive a further increase in capacity. We already have a 26.5% capacity across our open estate with occupancy at 73.5% during the year. Occupancy during December was the highest point during the year. Additionally, our ability to increase prices is highly correlated with inflation, and we've seen embedded pricing up 7% over 2022.
It's worth bearing in mind that this is embedded pricing, which continues to increase as contracts are renewed. The group returned to operating profitability during 2022. This is impacted somewhat by pandemic restrictions to 15 in Asia and China in particular, during the first half and some inflationary and interest rate pressure coming later during the year. As mentioned earlier by Mark, this is a record revenue year for IWG, both system-wide, and also a reported basis. We saw strong revenue recovery across occupancy, pricing, and services, with some revenue reduction from central rationalization, albeit that was positively with our perspectives, as you'll see on the next slide. Additionally, we saw just over GBP 200 million of additional income come through our investments in new centers, partnerships and franchise agreements, and our investments in Worka.
Moving forward to EBITDA, in order to simplify how we talk about our financials, we've largely presented numbers on an IFRS basis, basically as we report. The exception to this in EBITDA, where we focus on alternative performance measure in line with IAS 17. The primary difference between the two measures concerns the impact of operating leases vis-a-vis the rent. A reconciliation between the IFRS EBITDA and EBITDA before the application of IFRS, which you see here, is in the appendix, and we show a bridge from IFRS EBITDA to EBITDA before the application of IFRS to cash flow on the following slide, and also the full detail is also in the RNS. Basically, you can see how this all translates through from one to the other, but most importantly, Mark also mentioned to cash.
As a result of our revenue rising faster than costs, we have an increase in EBITDA from our existing business for the impact to our investments by GBP 140 million - GBP 220 million. You can see occupancy, pricing, and services revenue, the increase following through from the previous page. Basically, the first three green blocks are exactly the same as the first three on this page. Alongside this, we've seen some center cost increase, primarily due to property service charges and the cost of delivering our services that have also increased.
Center rationalization, as you saw on the previous page, a loss of GBP 81 million of revenue, the net impact to EBITDA was an increase of GBP 31 million, by which you can reduce the cost in these centers with a GBP 112 million saving. Regional overheads have increased as a result of additional marketing spend and our investments into our team signing capital-light centers. We're also seeing the benefits of our investments, including EBITDA from our new centers, also franchising partnerships fee income, which comes with a very high margin, also Worka. Including investments and FX impact, EBITDA was increased by GBP 228 million- GBP 308 million over the year.
Unadjusted EBITDA is slightly higher at GBP 317 million in 2022. We show the figures on an adjusted basis just for some comparability on a year-by-year basis. We now show our cash flow statement from IFRS no, profit, operating profit through to EBITDA before the application of IFRS 16 through to net cash flow for the year. It's important to note that accounting standards do not impact the net cash flows for the year in any way at all, and nothing below cash flows from business activities contains non-cash items.
Whilst gross CapEx has increased during 2022, this is a result of legacy center signings. We expect net growth CapEx during 2023 to be about half of 2022 levels, as Mark alluded to earlier. It's important to note how that some of the largest price increases globally, in particular energy costs, that's only a small amount to our overall cost base. In our case, electricity costs are only 2% of revenues, albeit an increase markedly from around 1% of revenues previously last year. Overall net debt would have fallen by about GBP 90 million during 2022, were it not for our discretionary investments in growth CapEx and the acquisition of The Instant Group. We have a strong cash generation profile, as Mark mentioned, we expect this to continue.
Our balance sheet continues to strengthen, albeit a lot of the numbers are impacted during 2022 by the acquisition of The Instant Group. As revenues have increased, so have customer deposits as well. I think as everybody here knows, we took out a non-recourse GBP 330 million bridge when we acquired The Instant Group, which was repaid all during September 2023. The gross balance of that was GBP 270 million on 31st of December of 2022, albeit the net debt is significantly lower than that, and we disclose that and the details of that within the RNS statement.
We also have a converter of GBP 350 million face value, on which we pay 0.5% interest, which matures in 2027, albeit there's a put and bondholder option during 2025 at par. I want to touch briefly on our network. We have a very unique profile from two perspectives. Not only do we have the largest network globally by far, but we also have a number of brands within it, and we continue that brand diversification under the capital-light model. At the end of 2022, 43% of our network was in some sort of variable rent scenario or variable revenue, sorry, profit share. We opened in total of 152 buildings during 2022, a slight increase in 2021.
We continued to focus strongly on individual center margins and as a last resort look to rationalize our center portfolio, as Mark discussed earlier. As well as having the largest network globally by far, we are also present in 120 countries, far more than any competitor. This is reflected by diverse geographical earnings as well. For the first time, we've also split out Worka with GBP 117 million pro forma EBITDA for 2022. We've also changed segmental reporting to include the U.K. within EMEA, given that the U.K. is not our largest country on either a revenue or center basis, but has similar characteristics to the rest of EMEA.
I can tell you how the ramifications that for 2022 U.K. revenues of GBP 386 million and operating profit has increased from a loss of GBP 34 million to a profit of GBP 13 million. Again, the detail of that is within the RNS statement. ESG is hugely important to IWG, but also for our clients. You've heard from Mark earlier how our core strategy of hybrid working is best for our clients, shareholders, employees and the planet. We're delighted to be expected to be carbon neutral during 2023, and we'll update the market accordingly when this is achieved. We've also been upgraded to AA by MSCI, as Mark mentioned earlier, from an A rating last year. We continue to strive to be outstanding in ESG and are targeting AAA rating, which is the highest possible rating in ESG.
Going forward to 2023 and the outlook. Underlying EBITDA for December was around GBP 30 million for the month. While 2022 was a fantastic year, we're seeing many economic headwinds outside of our control, in particular inflationary pressures. As a result, we remain cautiously optimistic for 2023 overall. With that, back to Mark.
You want to stay there Charlie? Right. Just to conclude, an excellent year in 2022. Record revenues, footprint growing, more and more companies moving to hybrid and huge market opportunities as we come into 2023. It's a year of also doubling down on the strategy, keep improving the margin, grow the Worka business, focus on cash, get the highest ESG rating, move to carbon neutral. All the things we've set out in past presentations, we double down this year. It's, I would say, a more difficult year economy-wise, a lot of volatility, but we've got off to a good start this year from an excellent end to 2022. You know, we're sort of, as Charlie said, cautiously optimistic as we come into the year. There are headwinds. It's certainly not a, you know, a free pass here.
A lot of hard work needs to be put in. I'll just end by, you know, thanking our outstanding team members around the world for all the work they put in last year, the support from our customers, and now an ever-growing group of partners that also have very much bought in to the strategy and to the use and the job we do for them. As I say, the more properties they put on the platform and they themselves become evangelists for this move to flexible and hybrid working. Thank you to them. With that, we'll open up for questions.
Michael?
Good morning. A couple from me, sir. Michael Tolley from Investec. One on Worka and one on the group. On Worka, first of all, I think on page 11 you talk about the contribution you expect over the next five- years of about 36%. Can I just check, are you talking about EBITDA margin on the Worka business? You speak about it in relation to the other businesses where you've got a five-years sort of expectation. Then the second question on the capacity in occupancy, you spoke about sort of 26.5%. If I go back sort of like a decade, I think the comparable highest number I saw was about mid-80s% or something like that. Is it realistic or is it meaningful to talk about that whole delta as capacity?
Don't you end up with sort of problems that you don't wanna have, where you push it up a bit too high towards the 100% level? Is it all? Could you fill this place completely and it wouldn't fall over? Thank you.
I think the first one, yeah, that's about capacity and then passing to Mark Dixon. I think overall on capacity, the way we think about it is it's all about margin. With that you've basically got the push-pull between capacity and pricing. Clearly, we don't want to have all of our centers empty where you've got one person paying GBP 1 million a year for one desk, but at the same time, you don't have all the centers full where no one's paying anything. I think the main thing that's important about capacity though, is you can see the fact that we have the capability to increase utilization of our centers. It's not that we're pushing up against the possibility right now.
I think with that 26.5% capacity, that gives a lot of opportunity to increase the number of people coming to our doors.
It's worth adding, Charlie, that that occupancy is only long-term occupancy. It's not the total revenue from, for example, office. It does not include coworking income, it does not include drop-in income. That, in addition to the occupancy coming up, you've also got the drop-in revenue moving up as well. It's quite an attractive situation. As Charlie said, it's all about margin. There's lots of levers that are being used and, you know, our data's good and improving all the time. There's a lot of focus on how do you plan all those things. The worst outcome for us is not having capacity actually, because that lets customers down. You have to plan in advance. We do have that problem. It's a quality problem, but we do have it in some places.
You know, we need to get more openings happening in those places. On the margin of Worka, do you wanna go for that?
Yes. Look, I think where the margin Worka is at the moment, we described that for the first time, and we showed that on a pro forma basis including The Instant Group as well. I don't think we see any change long term to that margin. That business overall as a Worka entity is a great business. It's managed independently, from IWG, and we'll update the market in due course with our stats on that.
I think the key on that one as well is it's a full-on platform business. You know, you have very little CapEx, very high cash conversion, good gross margin, you know, it benefits from scale. You know, the margin on the client can move up with scale. It really benefits from scale. Remember, it has huge opportunity just like we do. It's doing the rest of the market, the rest of the market's eight times bigger than we are.
That's all.
Morning. Sam from Stifel. two questions from me, please. Firstly on Worka, thank you for giving the EBITDA. Are you able to split it out into any sort of broad buckets into what's actually in there? Secondly, in terms of the growth this year and the potential to iterate the consensus, maybe 400, how much of that would be Worka and how much of that would be the rest of the business? Just trying to get a sense of momentum in Worka itself. Finally on leverage and net debt, what sort of leverage do you think this business should have going forward? Thank you.
I think on the first one with Worka, as everybody knows, that sort of consists of The Instant Group, our business with Davinci and then some other digital assets. We'll do an update sort of more on that through the course, but that's essentially where we are with that. On the EBITDA overall for the year, we basically see everything firing on all cylinders to sort of increase the hopefully EBITDA this year. It's not as though it's coming from one particular segment overall. It's brought me across the whole business.
When we think about leverage and net debt, we'll update the market in due course when we've finished doing what we've committed to do with Worka, which Mark alluded to earlier.
Hi. Good morning, James from Barclays. Just one follow-up on Worka. Can you comment on how complex it is to operate it independently from the non-Worka group? For example, does Worka utilize any of the non-Worka group locations for any of its services? Secondly, on capital-light, do you have any expectation for how many of those centers you signed in 22 will open in 23, and what contribution these could make? Lastly, on the pandemic network rationalization, what was the cash impact of that in 22, and any expectations for this year? Thank you.
Coming to how complex. They're quite separate. I mean, basically, the Davinci business has a lot of home workers, so they're not attached as such. You know, they're exclusively people that are working from home. That's, it's very attractive from a platform usage because you've got large numbers of people and so on. And they drop in to our centers, but to the whole network. That's a network-wide application. It's not limited to us. And it is completely separate. This, you know, basically, it's not complex, and it needs to be detachable in any case if we're gonna take investment and if we're gonna wipe the other. You know, for all of those reasons, it's been designed to be like that.
Our digital assets were quite easy to transfer because they were already independent. They're sort of not attached to real estate. The capital-light contribution chart, I mean, this is time, basically. Time and revenue and %.
Yes. Fundamentally, it takes around 18 months to kind of get to scale on the revenue and the openings. It's worth bearing in mind sort of we signed a very large bulk of those capital-light contracts in the back end of last year. When thinking about the impact financially in 2023, I'd say it's not huge. This will start to really sort of deliver that momentum going into the end back in 2023 and also into 2024.
It's a very helpful addition to EBITDA, but it's just not large, a large addition. It does probably get us to break even on our investment in the people, in the sense that we're covering the entire cost and a bit more in year two of operation. And that's the way we look at it. You're just continuing to build these centers. Signing centers means nothing. It's the ability to convert them into revenue. You know, we're paid on a percentage of revenue, and some on a percentage of revenue and profits. Therefore, it's important that we generate the revenue and returns for our partners in that. It's happening.
Some of the early ones that we've done, if you look at them track them over the course of last year, you know, very, very good outcomes for partners and for us because those same partners expand.
As in the last one on cash impacts during 2022 from closures. There are basically two costs when we have the closures. One is the cash impact concern, the other one is basically effectively writing off the future liability on the rent. The cash impact is relatively small. We do disclose the center closure costs provision release on slide 11. It's on page 11 of the IRF.
Andrew?
Good morning. Andrew Cheverton, Barclays here. A couple of questions, or maybe three if I may. One is just on Worka modeling question, really. What was Given the Q4 exit run rate on the rest of the business, can you tell us what it was within Worka? What Worka in its integrated form, some kind of growth metrics, pro forma basis, revenue, EBITDA, whatever? Then on the core business, the rest of the business. Can you talk about what the embedded price exit rate was compared to, actual current achieved prices, just to give some sense of momentum? Whether or not your rents, i.e., general costs, are now at market level, where do you think they stand? Is there more work to do? Thanks.
Starting with Worka and Q4 exits, I think it's from a modeling perspective, I think you've got the exit rate and the pro forma for 2022. You just kind of assume that continuing on a straight line basis, assume that strong revenue momentum continue. And that translates to a fairly good operational leverage, as Mark mentioned earlier. On the core business, again, sort of from an embedded price perspective, I think the way to think around that is, again, it comes to obviously, we can't adjust embedded pricing until people renew or we get new people coming through the door. Again, that's fairly well correlated to inflation. You can sort of see how that's developed during 2022 by going up 7% year-on-year.
Clearly, that's an average and we do see that continuing to go through with pricing momentum at the end of the year continuing to be strong. Then sort of when you think about rents and market levels of rent, I think, the most important thing here is that, rents are below peak levels from, on a price square foot basis, versus Q1 2020. I think what you are seeing is to your point around sort of market rents moving, there is a correlation between that happening. As long as those rents are staying very high and we're seeing that sort of expanding margin coming from that.
Just a couple of additional points that were made, Charlie, on that. You know, some rents are going up, some rents are going down. It's not, you know, some places are more attractive. This, you know, the rents also, some of them are index linked. A lot of them are now variable. As Charlie said earlier, 43%, 44% are variable and management contracts and so on. That takes a lot of them sort of out of contention. Of the rents that we're paying, you know, it's actually a good performance on rents. You know, overall to be neutral on rents, from 20 to now is quite good. It's a tale of two things going on.
Remember, in some high inflation countries, Turkey, 85%, whatever it is, you know, there's quite a lot of inflation also out there. I'll just add a bit more color. The actual prices we're achieving are higher than that embedded price. We've got, you know, we've got some, a safety cushion in there as we go through into this year. Also you've got inflationary headwinds that we have to consider as well.
Morning, guys. Callum Baty with Berenberg here. Just one question on occupancy. Would you mind updating us on where you ended the year versus the average position for 2022? Expectations for year ahead, do you believe there's still a post-pandemic catch-up to come in each of the main markets? Is there anywhere where you'd expect occupancy to move backwards in 2023? Thank you.
Yes. I think first of all I'd say, and I can't stress this point enough, it's all about margin, right? Occupancy is a very important factor into that margin calculation. No, it's all about occupancy and price. Look, what I can say is, and I think I mentioned this in the slides, that occupancy in December was the highest level during the year. Occupancy momentum continues to go in the right direction. We still do have a lot of room to go there, but we see that as an opportunity. I think what we're seeing from that is that EBITDA exit rates of around GBP 30 million, again, sort of provides some of that momentum into 2023. It is all about margin.
We're absolutely fine for what it's worth, if occupancy goes down a little bit if the pricing stays flat to increasing. Likewise, we're happy to see a little bit of movement in price and take that occupancy trade off. It's all about the margin. Is there anywhere we're sort of seeing this go down during the year? I don't think we've seen any trend anywhere on that, no.
You've got a following wind now with China opening. That had a quite a dramatic effect, China. Not just because of China. Our business in China is, you know, it's a medium-sized business for us. It's the effects of China being closed on the whole of Southeast Asia. You know, that sort of lack of travel and interaction had an effect. We can see that opening out this year. You know, we did okay in China, but so we didn't go down, but we didn't go up as much. That should pick up this year, and it should have an effect on the rest of Southeast Asia.
Dan McLean, Tusker Fund. Given the direction of travel is clearly capital-light, and the capital-light model inspires a better rating in the U.S. markets, I wonder what sort of consideration the board has given to the possibility of a U.S. listing?
We're both keen to answer this one. As you know, Charlie did a U.S. listing. You know, absolutely we're considering this and anything else that will improve value for any stakeholders this could do. More than half of our business is in the United States. We are something like 65% dollar already. You know, it's not high on the agenda, Dan. You know, the strategy: margin, cash flow, capital-light growth, they all come first. We, you know, we should be considering this in the interests of all investors. We've got time for one more for this one.
A follow-up in terms of the kind of representation of non-work and work. You previously presented some targets for contribution for the company-owned business. Do those change at all now, I guess, some assets are being presented as work, the kind of the GBP 900 million contribution targets and things like that?
Good question. Yes, they change. We're, you know, that contribution included everything. Now you're taking some of that contribution and you're moving it to what we hope and expect will be an easier to understand higher margin outcome with a higher multiple outcome. You know, it's a very clean, easier to understand company that's going into it. It's, yes, there is some downward pressure there.
Great.
Very much. Okay. Thanks very much, everybody.
Thanks very much indeed.
Thanks for coming.