Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the SATS Q1 2024 presentation. My name is Sondre Gravir. I'm the CEO of SATS, and together with me here today is our CFO, Cecilie Elde. We will run a Q&A session in Teams at 10 A.M. today. This will be a pure Q&A session without any further presentation, and you will find the link to this Q&A session in the stock market announcement we published this morning, both at NewsWeb and satsgroup.com. Then moving into Q1. Cecilie will cover the financials later in her section, but I have to say, I like the shape of the graph. But to summarize, we see continued strong financial performance. Number one, we are continuing the positive trend from the past year. We are reporting all-time high first quarter revenue and profit.
Revenues increased by 8% to NOK 1,294 million, while EBITDA before IFRS 16 ended at NOK 174 million, up 27% from Q1 2023.Number two , we have made significant investments in strengthening the product offering to drive member engagement. The activity level at our clubs is one of our most important KPIs, as active members are happy members who continue with us. We are pleased to see that the number of visits in our clubs increased by 3% in Q1 2024, compared to record high comparables in Q1 last year. Our members worked out 13 million times in the first quarter, making a significant contribution to the public health in the Nordics. Number three, our improved product offering has allowed us to increase the membership yield.
These product offering initiatives include the launch of new group training concepts, improved and increased scheduling of our classes, equipment optimization, and remodeling of our clubs to increase capacity. As a result, the average membership yield increased by 8% to NOK 475 in this quarter. Number four, we have improved the cash generation, and free cash flow in the quarter was NOK 131 million, up from NOK 57 million in Q1 2023. SATS' financial position was considerably improved throughout 2023, and we have continued that trend in the first quarter of this year. The leverage ratio, measured as net debt to EBITDA, has declined significantly from a ratio of 6.7 at Q1 2023 to 2.0 at the end of this quarter.
This implies that we have already reached our communicated target from the Q4 2023 presentation, where we said that our short-term target was to reach leverage at 2.0, and that our long-term target is to maintain a leverage ratio of between 1.5 and 2.0. I want to spend some time on this slide because I believe it's really important, and it really shows a positive long-term growth approach. Our vision that drives every single one of our 10,000 employees every day is to make people healthier and happier. In order to do so, we need to heavily invest in our product offering. Our key priority is to have the best and most inspiring staff, the best and most competitive product offering in volume, breadth, and quality, market-leading clubs in top-notch locations.
These efforts are driving the member engagement and makes it easier for our members to succeed with their training and maintain a sustainable activity level, proven by the increased activity levels we are witnessing at our clubs today. An improved product offering increases the member loyalty, the strength of the brand, and the members' willingness to pay for memberships. Thus, we have now strengthened our competitive position. These initiatives are closely linked to our financial performance. They go hand in hand. By attracting new and loyal members who successfully achieve their fitness objectives and continue as members for a long time, we improve our financial performance and capacity to further invest in an even better product offering. And while doing so, we are also fulfilling the vision of making people healthier and happier, and this is a positive cycle, and we're just in the middle of it.
Speaking of member engagement, I want to highlight the activity level and enthusiasm in our clubs these days. As mentioned, we continue to see increased activity levels at all our clubs, even compared to all-time high comparables from last year, driven by an increase in the number of members, but mostly due to higher activity levels per member. The increasing number of visits at our clubs is a continued positive trend. The total number of workouts at SATS clubs is up 24% compared to the pre-pandemic first quarter of 2019, indicating a positive shift in loyalty in our member base. The continued increase in activity levels per member is a strong lead indicator for improving member loyalty and willingness to pay for gym memberships at SATS.
We are very pleased to see that our members are even more active than before, and the current energy level in our clubs is a big motivation boost for all of us, and we have capacity for even more members to joining us going forward. A key priority of our strategy is to have a club portfolio consisting of clubs within large Nordic cities. These strong clusters enable the strong market leader position with classes, or group training, as we call it. We are the clear market leader in the Nordics here, and members have a unique menu to choose from in our clusters, and let me explain some of the drivers behind this. Our tight club footprint in large cities enables optimization of product types and class schedules between clubs.
Our members can have access to several clubs within short distance, allowing them to join one type of group training at one club and another type of group training in another club nearby. We optimize the distribution of classes within a cluster based on data and insights from member behavior, enabling the best member offering, but also enabling operational scale, having a high utilization of our group training areas. We can move around quickly. We follow fitness trends and swiftly introduce new classes and concepts at limited costs. We have in-house development and production of concepts and do not rely on external, non-differentiating concepts and licenses. Hence, we are leveraging the clusters to offer a large variation of products and acting as a one-stop shop for fun and inspiring training.
Additionally, our robust cluster of clubs positions us in the pole position for attracting top-tier instructors in the industry, and this pool of great instructors provide us with the flexibility to optimize schedules across clubs. This, combined with the market-leading education with the SATS Academy, results in having a highly motivated and performing instructor group. And it yields results, because group training is really developing strong. We held 147,000 group training sessions at our clubs during the first quarter, an increase of 10% compared to Q1 last year. That is equivalent to more than 1,600 group training classes every single day in our clubs, and our members are participating in the group training classes more than ever. And we grow across the whole portfolio. In new, newly released concepts, we see a very strong growth for, for example, high-intensity interval training and Pilates classes.
The number of these classes are more than doubled compared to last year, and this is a result of hard work and continued product development and launches, improving scheduling and recruitment, as well as education of great instructors. The increased number of group training activity is not only pretty numbers. This is also of high importance for our financial development, because group training members, they stay longer than non-group training members, and therefore, it is important for us to continue to improve our offering within this area. We are the market leader within group training today, and we will be even stronger and better in this area going forward. The result of these product improvements and high member engagement is a continued progression in membership yield. The total membership yield was 8% higher this quarter than Q1 2023, reaching NOK 475.
This is a result of our improved product offering, as well as adjustments in pricing to ensure a fair membership price. The average price that new members are paying for their membership is 10% higher than in Q1 2024 than compared to the same quarter last year. This is partly driven by higher conversion of group training memberships, which is up six percentage points in the first quarter compared to last year. During the pandemic, many, including ourselves, thought that we would live our lives significantly different after the pandemic than before. We believed that the trend around living a healthy and active life would be strengthened, but we've also thought that the main growth would come from people working out even more in their homes or outdoor. This did not happen.
Quickly after the pandemic, we saw that people and society moved back to living their lives as before. Restaurants were fully booked, traveling increased, and visits to SATS clubs increased rapidly. In the 2024 European Health and Fitness Market Report provided by Deloitte, we see that this trend is continuing. The share of the active population working at home or outdoor is actually going down, but fitness clubs are growing, and this is where people are active. This demonstrate that fitness club-based exercise is key to address the massive public health challenges we have in our society due to inactivity. As the Nordic market leader, SATS plays a significant role for developing the Nordic public health in a positive direction. As said earlier, we had 13 million training sessions in our clubs during Q1.
All these workouts are significantly impacting the lives and health of our members, and with healthier members, comes healthier society. SATS members have, in the past twelve months, contributed to around 17,000 quality adjusted life years. That's 17,000 extra years of living with good quality for the Nordic population, representing a total socioeconomic welfare gain of NOK 23.1 billion. This is something we are very proud of and a great contribution to sustainable society. And with that, I'm now giving the word to Cecilie for the financial section.
Thank you, Sondre, and, good morning, everyone. We are concluding another financially strong quarter, marked by continued positive trend in all financial KPIs. The growth in revenues translates into even stronger growth in EBIT, resulting in a healthy cash flow and repayment of debt. Furthermore, the leverage level has now reached the target range that we communicated the last quarter. The member base has proven to be resilient through several price increases, and we are closing the quarter with 736,000 members. We have a positive net member growth in the quarter, but somewhat lower than we usually see in the first quarter as a result of a planned price volume trade-off following the recent price adjustments.
Because we continue to observe decent new membership sales, even with less tactical campaign activity than in previous quarters, but with slightly elevated falloff in line with our expectations. In addition, net growth has been affected by closing eight clubs over the past year, five of which was located outside the strategic clusters, and this resulted in a loss of about 3,000 members in the quarter and 7,000 members over the last year. However, we continue to improve square meter utilization with 4% more members per square meter than last year. This is a result of closing underperforming clubs, downsizing clubs with spare capacity, and opening slightly smaller clubs than the average in the portfolio due to smarter club configuration and equipment mix, all resulting in higher square meter utilization.
There is still significant unleashed potential in improving members per square meter, which I will get back to later in the presentation. Sondre emphasized the value of investing in a product offering, which boosts member loyalty and their willingness to pay. Despite the tough market and challenging macroeconomic conditions, we have successfully maintained a robust member base and implemented higher prices for both new and existing members, demonstrating our growing brand strength.
Our pricing strategy has led us to significant increase in membership prices over time, and in the past year alone, we have seen a notable rise in membership prices compared to previous years by, one, increasing the list prices for memberships by an average of 8%, adjusting the prices for existing members based on the country-specific consumer price index, and finally, a price adjustment for the memberships that have a price far below the current list price. These changes has led to a 6% improvement in membership yield compared to last quarter and 8% increase compared to last year. Total revenues in the quarter of just below NOK 1.3 billion is an improvement of 8% compared to last year.
The combination of volume growth and price increases has led to significant lift in membership revenues in the quarter, with an increase of 9%. Other revenues show a weaker development in both yield and revenues when we exclude the extraordinary revenue received from delayed COVID compensation in Denmark, amounting to NOK 18 million. Because the personal training business is somewhat slower, as we've seen over the last year, due to fewer personal trainers. We do, however, see an improvement in margins after both lifting prices and running fewer campaigns that increases the margin. Retail sales is also a bit slower than last year, but we have also here improved margins substantially over the past year through tight inventory control, price management, and a reduction in number of campaigns.
That said, we are pleased to see that our core business, our member base, and corresponding membership revenues, constituting 80% of our total revenues, is performing very well. The cost base continues to be well controlled, up 4.7% compared to last year, and mainly affected by inflation-driven increases. The direct costs are lower than last year, following slower additional sales for personal training and retail sales. But we also have temporarily higher personnel cost in the quarter due to an extraordinary internal gathering for all staff, and also slightly higher marketing spend compared to last year. Looking ahead, the cost base is expected to increase in line with last year's inflation.
But since we now know that member activity drives member loyalty, we will increase spending in our product offering on top of inflation, and this increase will mainly be related to adding more group training classes to the schedule and continue developing new products. However, over time, we are aiming to continue counteract inflation with cost discipline and price adjustments. Moving to EBITDA and EBIT, we are reporting an EBITDA before IFRS 16 of NOK 174 million, up 27% compared to last year, with a 13% margin. This illustrates the impact of operating leverage on our profitability in our business, where an 8% growth in revenues translates into 27% growth in EBITDA. EBIT shows an even stronger improvement of 61% to NOK 114 million and a 9% margin in the quarter.
The combination of strong member development over time, an increase in average revenue per member, and cost discipline is driving the positive development and forming the foundation for our long-term value creation. To do a brief deep dive, at the Capital Markets Day in 2022, we outlined our financial ambition for the coming period and provided an indication of the EBITDA capacity of NOK 800 million for the current club portfolio. Since then, we have made significant progress according to the outlined plan, improving EBITDA with NOK 500 million. With LTM EBITDA at NOK 660 million by the end of this quarter, we are getting closer to delivering on the communicated midterm ambition of NOK 800 million.
Beyond that, we believe that there is room for further improvement in earnings through club optimization initiatives, and we still believe there are attractive M&A opportunities and white spots for greenfields in existing and new markets to further grow this business. Let's look at an illustration of how we can close the gap towards the mentioned NOK 8 million in the short term. Because the 250 mature clubs in the portfolio perform 9% above the portfolio average in terms of club EBITDA, indicating untapped potential as the newest clubs mature. Because new clubs result in short-term profit drag in the maturing phase, as the cost base required to operate these clubs is largely fixed. Therefore, as the new clubs attract more members, additional revenue growth primarily translates directly to EBITDA, representing a significant untapped potential.
But we also believe there is ample room for further improvement in earnings, and we have a structured five-step approach for additional value creation by optimizing the utilization of our assets. Firstly, as Sondre mentioned, we continuously work with the product offering to make our clusters, as well as single clubs, more attractive for existing and potential members. We upgrade or relocate clubs to improve club quality and micro location of clubs, and we're optimizing club layout and the equipment mix to facilitate more members per square meter at our fullest clubs. This approach is an important source of member-based growth. By downsizing or relocating clubs with excessive space relative to the member base, we optimize club layout and space utilization and improve club economics. Lastly, we leverage lease agreement expiries to negotiate improved terms through rent reductions or investment contributions.
Because having the right club quality, location, and size, product offering, and distribution is essential in differentiating us from the low-cost players and being able to realize a higher yield. The level of upgrades and maintenance CapEx has been more moderate over the past year, partly due to a precautionary spending approach, but also delay in some of our major upgrade projects, which is expected to be implemented in the coming months. We have a structured approach to assess our club portfolio in order to optimize the prioritization of investments based on club quality, competitive situation, and cluster strategy. We maintain capital discipline to ensure high return investments and maximize equipment and space utilization. Going forward, we will increase investments in our existing clubs, growing the club capacity and improving our product offering for our members.
We aim to return to normal levels of investment at, in maintenance and upgrades, averaging around 5% of our annual revenues. And on top of that, we expect to continue to receive investment contributions from our landlords when doing major club upgrades. So in terms of expansion, we opened two new clubs in the quarter and closed two clubs outside our strategic areas, and we have a pipeline of an additional two clubs opening in 2024. Following a strong financial quarter, operating cash flow ended at NOK 154 million and cash conversion of 88%.... We had positive working capital effects in the quarter, which is normal for a first quarter and aligns with the seasonality, and the growing business with prepayment of memberships.
With an operating cash flow of NOK 524 million over the last twelve months and a cash conversion rate of 79%, our cash-generating ability has recovered and returned to strong pre-COVID levels. The free cash flow development over the last twelve months at NOK 363 million indicates that the business generated a healthy cash flow to more than cover all operating costs, maintenance, and growth CapEx, as well as financial cost. This leaves room for debt reduction and deleveraging. Finally, our liquidity position is well controlled and satisfactory as we close the fourth quarter with NOK 310 million in cash at hand and NOK 726 million in an undrawn revolving credit facility. We repaid NOK 100 million on the revolving credit facility during the quarter, confirming our stated intention of reducing debt also in absolute terms.
The liquidity position is improved by NOK 98 million after negative currency effects, mainly from currency translation in the cash pool and in the revolving credit facility. The improved earnings and cash generation have led to continued deleveraging from 6.7- 2.0 net debt to EBITDA in Q1 2024. This means that we now have reached the target for leverage that we communicated last quarter to maintain a stable leverage ratio within the range of 1.5x - 2.0x net debt to EBITDA and returning excess capital to shareholders via dividends or share buybacks. With that, I will leave the word back to Sondre for outlook.
Thank you, Cecilie. So, before we conclude this presentation, let's take a minute to look into the period to come. We expect that our strengthened member product offering enables volume and ARPM growth, fueling revenue growth going forward. We still see an unleashed potential in the existing club portfolio, driven by square meter and equipment optimization and increased operational efficiency. And this will be a key driver for improved financial performance, accelerated by operating leverage and high drop-through to EBIT. And the accelerated financial momentum will further strengthen our balance sheet, enabling us to execute on our ambitions of a balanced and profitable expansion. And with that, I thank you all for following this presentation and wish you all a healthy and happy Tuesday!