Good morning and welcome to this presentation of our fourth quarter 2021. My name is Sondre Gravir, the CEO of SATS. Together with me here today is Cecilie Elde, our CFO. We will run a Q&A session in Teams at 10:30 A.M. today to allow some more time to look into the report and numbers. You will find the link to this Q&A session on our website under Investor Relations, and we hope to see many of you there. Let's start with a short summary of the quarter. We ended the quarter with 262 clubs and 669,000 members. Total revenues of NOK 1.002 million and adjusted EBITDA of NOK 26 million. Cecilie will, as always, come back to the financials later in the presentation.
Our key messages today are that we delivered a strong member growth in the quarter, but growth slowed down during the second half of the quarter due to heavy restrictions related to the Omicron uncertainty. Now restrictions are being lifted and we see sales accelerating again. The activity level among our members has remained high despite restrictions, proving the importance of health, activity, and fitness in people's lives, and the continued importance of physical gyms. Hence, we are ramping up our growth ambitions, both through an accelerated club expansion with greenfield and M&A, strengthening of our current club and product portfolio, and our digital offering in Mentra by SATS. Coming into the fourth quarter, all our clubs were open and restrictions were mostly lifted. Then came Omicron, and new restrictions were implemented in all countries.
In Norway, heavy capacity restrictions were introduced and all group training was closed for several weeks. In Sweden, the restriction with 10 sq m per person were again introduced, heavily reducing our capacity. In Denmark, we had capacity restrictions and COVID passport control. In Finland was the most extreme, all fitness clubs were forced to close and just recently opened. The club closure in Finland is very difficult for us to understand, and the government actually lost the legal case we raised in the Turku region, where the government closing was ruled to be illegal, and we opened the clubs after one and a half week of closing. Given all this, we are very relieved and happy now to see that restrictions across all countries are being lifted.
Denmark was first from beginning of February, then Norway, where most restrictions for fitness clubs were lifted last week, then came Sweden this Wednesday, and Finland from next week. Hence, finally, we are operating close to the situation we had in February 2020, two years ago, before the pandemic, with all clubs being open and we have close to full product offering and capacity for our members. That is a fantastic feeling the first time in two years. We saw a strong member growth during the quarter. Our member base grew by 16,000 compared to a decline of 34,000 in Q4 2020 and a pretty flattish Q4 in 2019. Hence, our member base reached 669,000 at the end of December, which is the same level as we had in December 2019.
The record growth in the start of the quarter was heavily slowed down in the second half following a drop in new membership sales as new restrictions and club closures came into force. This lasted also into January, but now sales is strongly improving again as restrictions are being lifted, giving a positive outlook for Q1 member growth. The development in sales have been very linked to the restriction level throughout the pandemic. The immediate pickup of sales now after restrictions are being lifted is hence as expected and planned for, supported by a strong sales and marketing push. The restrictions during the second half of the quarter and into January heavily affected our business. Group training is an important part of our business and was hit especially hard with closure or up to 70% reduction in capacity.
GX visits declined significantly in December after a strong October. Now we see that GX visits is also picking up immediately as restrictions are being lifted. In Q4, we continued to have multiple measures in place in our clubs in order to ensure safe training for everyone. Just to mention some examples, in our app, our members could see the real-time visit level in the club they wanted to visit and pre-book a slot for studio training. We have full digital tracking of all visits, and of course, we made sure that the clubs were cleaned properly and ensure social distancing between members in all our clubs. We will continue with several of these measures also now that restrictions are being lifted to ensure continued safe training at SATS.
When restrictions are limiting us, we find new ways to continue to deliver on our vision of making people healthier and happier. When indoor group training was closed, we quickly set up outdoor training, and in December, with snow and ice outside, in December alone, we had more than 2,500 outdoor classes. We also offered free access to the Mentra by SATS app for all SATS group training members during December and January. Despite restrictions, the activity level among our members remained high throughout Q4, proving the importance of health, activity, and fitness in people's life and the continued importance of physical gyms. With the reopening during fall, we saw a strong visit development. From July to September, we had higher visits per member in total than in 2019. Total visits came down, especially in December.
This was driven, as I said earlier, by the strict restrictions on especially group training. If you look at our studio visits, studio training actually developed positive with a higher level of visits per member throughout the whole Q4, also compared to Q4 2019. This development has continued and strengthened in January this year, clearly showing the interest and demand among our members to visit our clubs. With the strong visit development in mind, we are also very happy to see the member satisfaction is strong and very positive. One of our core values is members first. We want to ensure a positive member experience every time a member is visiting a SATS club, and we have tuned our operational routines to ensure this, and then it's rewarding to see that the result of this is proven by the strong member satisfaction.
We see a strong demand for our product, and coming out of the pandemic, we are even more positive than earlier on behalf of SATS and our industry, and there are several drivers supporting this. Consumers are even more focused on living a healthy lifestyle and staying active, and we see increased political focus on supporting this as well. We also see that younger generations are working out more than the older generations, and they keep their habits as they get older. Population growth and urbanization is also supporting SATS strong city clusters. Then lastly, digital fitness solutions will expand the market and drive higher customer penetration. With this background, we are ramping up our growth ambitions, both through an accelerated club expansion with Greenfield and M&A, a strengthening of our current club and product portfolio, and our digital offering through Mentra by SATS.
In our IPO, we guided at five to seven new club openings per year, and we have during the pandemic significantly ramped up our club expansion, both through Greenfield and selected infill acquisitions. In total, we have opened 29 new clubs during 2020 and 2021, five being relocations and 24 additions to our clusters. The latest club openings are Slemmestad in Norway, Vallila, Circus and Iso Omena in Finland, Gamlestaden, Saltsjöbaden, and Bromma Blocks in Sweden. These are fantastic clubs at key and very attractive locations for us, strengthening our clusters both for existing and new members. Looking ahead, we are definitively not slowing down. We see several interesting growth opportunities, both in white spots and due to increased demand in areas where we already have clubs.
We see opportunities materializing now in areas where we over time have been searching for attractive locations, and we experience that we are the preferred operator by real estate developers. Looking ahead, we have already confirmed 15 new club openings and more will come. In addition to these Greenfield openings, we expect to do selected acquisitions in the short to medium- term to further strengthen our position and support our growth. We can't wait to welcome all the new members to all of these new strong clubs. In addition to opening new clubs, we are continuously investing in our existing clubs, both to upgrade the clubs, but also to introduce new concepts. We see a very positive visit and member development as a result of these upgrades.
Illustrated here, among others, by pictures from SATS Stureplan, one of our key clubs in the Stockholm cluster, which we upgraded during 2021 and now developing stronger than ever. To continue to grow visits and members in our existing clubs is a key growth driver for us also going forward. We are also strengthening our product portfolio by introducing a new design for group training rooms in selected clubs. The new design caters to all our members, but we especially think it caters to our younger members and will help us to deliver an even better atmosphere and workout experience. The new concept is currently being tested in both Oslo and Stockholm, giving us important learnings from members before we will roll it out further. Lastly, we are also looking forward to opening our first high-intensity interval training zone in just a few days at SATS Colosseum.
We will run several HIIT concepts, and after a period of testing and learning, we will launch this concept in our key clubs to strengthen our HIIT offering for both existing and new members. Then in addition to investing in our physical offering, we will continue to invest in and grow our digital offering. We are firm believers of a hybrid future for fitness. Physical and digital training are complementary products, and we see that both markets are growing. The majority of us wants to do a little bit of both, or hopefully a lot of both. This is why we in Q4 launched Mentra by SATS. We see that Mentra by SATS is extending our vision of making people healthier and happier beyond our physical club footprint.
We can target the 80% of the population who is not a fitness club member or all of those people living in the areas where we don't have a physical club. The first product we launched is called Rflex. This is an interactive fitness mirror fitting in your living room. We're also planning to expand the product portfolio in Mentra by SATS by launching a connected fitness bike towards the end of the year. Through Mentra by SATS, we offer both live and on-demand classes across verticals such as cardio, strength, yoga, and dance. In their in-house studio allows us to be very flexible and agile to try out new concepts. Currently, we have 20 coaches on the platform and more than 350 on-demand classes in addition to the live classes.
It is still early days after the launch, but we have received a lot of positive user reviews and feedback. This is naturally very fun and motivating, and a boost for the team in their continuous effort to develop and improve the product. After we launched a MVP product last year, we launched the product fully commercially with live classes in November. So far, we have more than 6,000 registered users and more than 20,000 workouts have been completed. This is a good start for building a strong digital position in addition to our strong physical club footprint. As you understand, we are ready to leave the pandemic behind us and accelerate our growth, and I will now give the word to Cecilie for the financial review of the quarter.
Thank you, Sondre, and good morning, everyone. In the following financial presentation, we are showing both 2020 and 2019 comparators where relevant. We include 2019 to give a more relevant benchmark for the underlying scale and operating performance of the group when we are allowed to operate under normal conditions. We are leaving behind this fourth quarter, where the first half has been all about recovery and members returning to our clubs, and then the second half, yet another round of imposed restrictions affecting our business. Across the group, we closed the quarter with 669,000 members in total, which is up 6% compared to the same period last year. The member base grew with 16,000 members or 2% in the quarter, which in a normal year has a more flattish member development.
This is a clear sign that our targeted sales campaigns have proven successful and, coupled with stable churn levels, has resulted in a very strong quarter. However, the reimposed restrictions across the Nordics resulted in weaker sales development towards the end of the quarter, but we still end the year with a member base fully recovered compared to pre-COVID 2019, after adjusting for the nine sold clubs in Denmark. The fourth quarter revenues show strong recovery, up 18% compared to last year to just above NOK 1 billion, almost closing the gap towards 2019. Member revenues increased throughout the quarter, driven by both strong new membership sales in the previous quarter and unfreezing of memberships.
As for new member sales, restrictions on group training, visit capacity, and club closure in Finland, this temporarily softens revenue growth in the second half of the quarter. The member revenue bridge on the right-hand side illustrates where we stand end of year in terms of run rate revenues compared to 2019. Average number of members in the quarter was slightly behind 2019, but was fully neutralized after October, closing the volume gap towards 2019. The positive yield development that we've seen over recent years improves revenues further. The underlying revenues end of year are now fully recovered versus 2019. However, COVID-related freeze is still inflated compared to normal periods, and extraordinary campaign costs to recover member base impacts revenues short- term.
As we've seen in the previous quarters, restrictions on capacity and higher average levels of freeze affect the reported yield. Looking at the most relevant metric that we follow from membership yield is the development in the contractual membership price, and this shows a solid development over the last two years. Some flattening in the curve over the last six months due to tight restrictions for group training, members training at one club only, and delay in scheduled price adjustments. We now see that members are returning to similar behavior and habits as before the pandemic, and we see a significant increase in demand for group training and multi-club access memberships.
Our annual price optimization process to increase membership yield has historically proven very successful, and we are constantly working on optimizing price level in the member base to ensure fairness and that all members pay the same price for the same membership and access rights. There are three main levers which are utilized to increase prices. We have an annual list price adjustment for new members coming in, annual inflation adjustment for existing members, and in addition, an annual proactive significant price adjustment of members that for some historic reason, have a membership price far below current list price. Over several years, the experience is that there is a significant resilience in such price adjustments. Concretely, we see that the annual adjustment performed late last year has had a significant positive effect as of January.
As a result, we expect the positive yield development to pick up again in line with what we have seen historically. After the club closures in March 2020, significant efforts were made to reduce operating expenses, and variable and semi-fixed costs were taken down according to the reduction in activity level. With operations returning to normal, cost also returns to normal level, and total operating expenses increased by 9% compared to 2019, partly pure inflation-driven, but mainly due to adding net 14 clubs to the portfolio. In addition, we have spent extraordinary in cost in marketing and campaign cost to increase, which increase overall cost in the quarter. For like-for-like clubs, the increase is lower at 4.4%, mainly inflation-driven, adjustments on, lease cost, and significantly increased electricity prices.
This is partly offset by successful cost-saving efforts to compensate for the overall cost increase that we have seen in recent years. Looking at the right-hand side, around 85% of the cost base is fixed or semi-fixed, which means that incremental membership revenue has 90% drop through to EBITDA for existing clubs. Therefore, as like-for-like members return and new clubs fill up with new members, additional revenue growth flows directly to adjusted EBITDA. Since 2019, we have accelerated our rollout of new clubs, both through acquisitions and Greenfields. As you saw on the previous page, the new clubs obviously add cost, which negatively impacts profits in the short- term. As the cost base required to operate these new clubs is already established and largely fixed, additional revenues coming from new members to these new clubs flows directly to EBITDA.
On average, greenfields take around six-12 months to reach breakeven, resulting in a short-term drag in profits in the maturing phase of its lifetime. It takes an additional 12-24 months to reach full maturity, performing at portfolio average in terms of members and profitability. We have, and we will continue to invest in future growth through establishing new clubs at attractive white spots in the portfolio. As the right-hand side graph illustrates, the different cohorts of newly opened clubs will considerably contribute to the bottom line when they reach maturity, here estimated to around 150 for the newly opened and 1 million for the newly opened and signed clubs. Adjusted EBITDA of NOK 26 million in the quarter is significantly improved compared to last year and show that EBITDA is on track for recovery.
Reimposed restrictions across the Nordics resulted in weaker development in sales and increased freeze towards the end of the quarter. The result for the quarter is also impacted by increasing cost driven by lease costs, significantly higher electricity prices, and extra marketing and campaign cost to recover the member base. The results per segment are also negatively affected by the same factors as just discussed. Average member base is still somewhat lower than pre-pandemic, but is neutralized after October. Average freeze levels are higher than normal in the quarter, which we also expect to continue into the first quarter. Higher cost base driven by growing the club portfolio, which will continue somewhat forward. As the clubs mature, EBITDA drag will gradually decrease and improve future profits. The key message is that we are in the process of regaining our solid financial platform.
Members are returning, yield is increasing, operating expenses are well controlled, and we have a strong lineup of new clubs fueling future growth. On the topic of growth, despite the pandemic, we have prioritized to invest for the long- term, both in our technology team, systems and infrastructure, but also in club expansion. As we have shown, we have a very strong pipeline of new clubs opening, and we will continue to look for attractive acquisition opportunities in the time to come. Maintenance CapEx in 2021 is lower than normal due to focus on cash preservation, less wear and tear on equipment because of reduced visits, and a lower average age in the club portfolio. Going forward, we expect normalized annual maintenance CapEx to return to approximately 5% of group revenues. Moving on to liquidity.
The key message here is that we are in a well-controlled and satisfactory position. As we close the fourth quarter with NOK 280 million in cash in the balance sheet and NOK 289 million in undrawn revolving credit facility. In our view, we are sufficiently funded to handle our current operations, as well as facilitating our growth strategy with the planned expansion in both greenfields and digital offering, provided that we don't see any material change in the current regulatory environment. Free cash flow for the third quarter is positive at NOK 160 million, mainly due to working capital effects from receiving governmental compensation from previous periods. With a ramp-up in the member base and activity level, prepaid revenues from both memberships and personal training results in positive working capital effects, as can be seen also in the fourth quarter.
With member base recovering, we will again generate positive operating cash flow. Now finally, looking at the group's net debt position, slightly improving in the quarter following the positive cash flow development to just above NOK 1.8 billion. Operating under normal conditions, we have historically shown a strong deleveraging profile on the back of EBITDA growth and high cash conversion. We are confident that once we are through the remaining COVID restriction impacts, we will return to the same approach to responsibly deleveraging again, as we have done in the past. With that, I will hand the word back to Sondre for closing remarks.
Thank you, Cecilie. As you have seen today, we achieved strong member growth in Q4, slowed by new restrictions, but now visits and sales are accelerating as restrictions are lifted. We ended 2021 with the same member base as 2019, and we are now ready to grow after catching up. We experienced increased demand and growing visits per member, and we see a solid financial run rate as member base is recovering, positive cash flow and sufficient liquidity. Finally, we firmly believe in continued growth of the fitness market and that SATS is well-positioned to take advantage of this growth. With this, we wish you all a great day. Stay healthy and happy. Thank you.