Good morning and welcome to this SATS Q1 2025 presentation. I'm Sondre Gravir, the CEO of SATS, and I will present together with our CFO, Cecilie Elde. We will now present the operational and financial status for Q1, and we'll run a Q&A session in Teams at 9:30 A.M. Later today, at 10:30 A.M., we will host the second SATS Capital Markets Day. Here, we will present the future strategic direction for SATS and our financial ambitions. Both this Q1 presentation and the CMD presentation were published at 7:00 A.M. this morning. Cecilie will cover the financial results in her section, and I will summarize the quarter. We are very happy with the start of 2025 for SATS. In Q1, we have delivered the strongest membership growth in the first quarter in the history of SATS.
We have grown the member base with 24,000 members to 757,000 members in total, combined with an ARPM increase of 6%. The growth is driven by successful sales activities, effective marketing push, and healthy churn. We also see continued strong activity levels in our clubs, driven by successful product improvements and societal health focus. The total number of workouts increased by 7% to 14.1 million workouts in the quarter. The strong development for group training is continuing in all countries, with total group training visits increasing by 16% in the quarter, driving reduced churn and positive development in member lifetime value. These areas are all driving a continued solid financial delivery as a result of operational leverage, brand strength, and premium member experience, and EBIT increased by 38%. This financial delivery enables shareholder distribution.
We remain committed to the shareholder distribution policy of distributing at least 50% of annual net profit via a combination of dividends and share buybacks. For H1 2025, we expect to distribute a dividend of 50% of H1 2025 net profit, in addition to the executed and upcoming share buybacks, bringing us well above our stated minimum level of 50%. We will cover more operational areas in the upcoming Capital Markets Day presentation, so I now leave the word to Cecilie to present the financials for Q1.
Thank you, Sondre, and good morning, everyone. We are concluding another financially strong quarter, where revenue growth is driven by both volume and price, which translates into an even stronger growth in profits. This results in a healthy cash flow and leverage slightly below the communicated target range. Let's go through the key drivers for the first quarter results. We kicked off the year with strong momentum, closing Q1 with 757,000 members, which is an increase of 21,000 members, or 3% compared to last year. Net growth in the quarter was higher than usual at 24,000 members, up significantly from 5,000 in Q1 of 2024. This performance was driven by above-average sales, healthy churn, which again were achieved by targeted marketing and continued product improvements. Equally important, recent price increases have had a lower-than-expected impact on churn, demonstrating our brand strength while supporting revenue growth.
We have also improved space efficiency with members per square meter, up by 5% year-over-year, from 1.45- 1.52, reflecting better club utilization and efficiency. Please note, while Q1 member development has started off strong, we do not expect this level of growth to continue compared to last year throughout 2025. As previously communicated, we continue to optimize for revenue, with yield growth outpacing member growth. This reflects the success of our structured and gradual price adjustments. ARPM rose by 6%, driven by these price adjustments and ongoing improvements to the product offering. Membership yield alone increased by 8%. While pricing remains the primary driver, we also saw a meaningful contribution from volume in this quarter, following the strong member growth.
As a result, total revenues increased by 8% from NOK 1.3 billion to just below NOK 1.4 billion, with membership revenues up 9%, accounting for the majority of this growth. For other revenues, it is important to note that last year's numbers were positively impacted by a one-time delayed COVID compensation of NOK 18 million in Denmark, creating a higher base for comparison. This means that the underlying development for other revenues was up 9%, supported by improvements for both personal training and retail. Total operating costs increased by 8%, driven in part by higher direct costs linked to the same increase in other revenues from personal training and retail. Excluding direct costs, club OPEX rose by 6%, reflecting the additional spend on our anniversary celebrations, marketing efforts, and member engagement campaigns.
As in prior quarters, we expanded our group training offering, delivering 17,000 more classes year-over-year, an increase of 11% to meet the rising demand. Overhead costs rose by 9% in the quarter, slightly above normal due to expenses related to the employee share purchase program. However, overhead remained flat as a percentage of total revenues. As a risk management measure, we have hedged approximately half of our projected electricity consumption throughout 2026. Looking ahead, we anticipate that the cost base will rise in line with inflation, alongside the planned investments in product delivery to support long-term growth. Moving to EBITDA and EBIT, we are reporting an EBITDA before IFRS 16 of NOK 186 million, which, after excluding the NOK 18 million in COVID compensation last year, is a 19% improvement at a 13% margin.
This demonstrates the positive impact of operating leverage on profitability in our business, where an 8% growth in revenues translates into 19% growth in EBITDA. The corresponding improvement in EBIT at NOK 133 million is up 38%, resulting in a 10% margin for the quarter. After a period of moderate upgrades and maintenance CapEx, we have returned to normal investment levels, and maintenance CapEx in the quarter totals NOK 56 million, or 4% of revenues. This is temporarily below our long-term target at 5%, which we remain. For going forward, we will continue to invest in our clubs as they age and as lease agreements come up for renegotiation, making sure that we keep quality high and competitive advantage strong. Maintenance CapEx is no longer just about upkeep.
A growing share of our CapEx is now directed towards growth-enabling initiatives such as adding new equipment, expanding our group training concepts, and optimizing club layouts for better member flow and higher utilization. This shift supports further member growth within the existing portfolio and makes each square meter work harder for us. On the expansion side, we opened one new club in the quarter and currently have five more in the pipeline. We are actively working to expand the pipeline further, scouting locations in our key clusters and other larger cities in the Nordics, and targeting a run rate of 8-12 new clubs annually. Following a strong financial quarter, free cash flow ended at NOK 99 million, somewhat affected by negative working capital effects in the quarter.
The working capital effects are normally positive in the first quarter, but as we communicated last quarter, maintenance CapEx was skewed towards the end of the fourth quarter, which has resulted in some CapEx cash carryover to the first quarter. Operating cash flow over the last 12 months is at NOK 473 million, resulting in a strong cash conversion of 63%. Over the last 12 months, we have generated NOK 384 million in cash, illustrating our strong cash-generating capabilities with capacity to both continue expanding and distributing excess cash to our shareholders. Our liquidity position remains strong, closing the fourth quarter with NOK 383 million in cash and NOK 945 million available in an undrawn revolving credit facility. Net cash effect of share buybacks of NOK 67 million in the quarter, following the partial allocation to employee investment program and related payments.
We have continued the leveraging over the past year, stabilizing at a leverage ratio slightly below target range. At the end of the quarter, net debt stood just above NOK 1 billion, resulting in a leverage ratio of 1.4, which is slightly below the communicated target. To conclude this financial section, we remain firmly committed to our shareholder distribution policy. We intend to keep leverage in the lower end of 1.5x-2x net debt to EBITDA, while returning more than 50% of our annual net profit through a combination of dividends and periodic share buybacks. Strong cash flow generation supports attractive distributions in 2025. For dividends, we expect the first payment to occur in the third quarter, and to be even more specific, we expect a payout of 50% of net profit from the first half year of 2025.
On share buybacks, the first program of the year was completed in Q1, with a total amount of NOK 100 million and involving 3.2 million shares, of which 1 million shares will be redeemed. We also anticipate additional share buybacks later in 2025, resulting in a total shareholder distribution well above our stated minimum level of 50%. With that, I will leave the word back to Sondre for closing.
Thank you, Cecilie. Since we have the Capital Markets Day presentation coming up today, we will present more details on outlook and financial ambitions in that presentation. By that, we wish you all a healthy and happy.