Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Q&A session for the first quarter presentation from SATS. I'm Sondre Gravir, the CEO, and together with me here in the room from the service office in SATS, we have Cecilie Elde, our CFO, and we have Stine and Martin from IR. We did not plan as last time. We planned this as just a Q&A session. I hope we have all been able to read the report and seen the presentation from earlier this morning. We have set aside 30 minutes for Q&A. With that, we leave the floor open. Eirik, please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, a couple. On slide 6 in the deck, you showed some pretty encouraging numbers in terms of activity levels. Could you just give a bit flavor on that in April? Has the trend from February and March continued?
Yes, we can comment a little bit on the activity level overall. The trend continues. I think to be fair I think this is you know an overall trend we see in the society. We see that you know after the pandemic those who are working out and used to work out before they work out even more than ever. Then there's an even bigger group that is not getting active and where the threshold to get active is pretty high. It's a big job for us as an operator to also welcome those new members. Yes, among those active members that we have, the activity level is very high and we expect this trend to continue.
What we also see as we are commenting here on the slide is that participation in classes and joining, you know, group classes has been somewhat slower in the recovery. That is gradually improving, but it's still below the normal level we saw from pre-pandemic. This increase is also driven by, you know, very active fitness floor population. We are happy with the development, and this is a key area for us to activate members because we know that those who are active, they don't churn.
Perfect. Thank you. Also a bit of a step change on the focus on M&A. You added some slides there this quarter. If you could just give some color there on the ongoing discussions. I appreciate that, you know, these processes are what they are. But anything you could give would be helpful. Also if you could talk a bit about the margin levels for the targets that you're looking at, and also maybe potentially some scope for synergies, for instance, in the percent of sales or something like that. You gave the kind of target multiple and everything, but some more financial KPIs would be good as well.
Sure. I can start with just in general the processes, and then Cecilie can comment on the margin picture and our assessment. Basically our ambition is to grow. We see that, you know, a big share of the population, as we commented before, nearly 80% of the Nordic population is not a member of a fitness club. We see increased demand. We have still available capacity in our existing clubs, and that is priority number one, of course, to fill those clubs. That gives a high margin contribution, but we also want to add more capacity. We have been opening 35 new clubs for the last two years, 22 new clubs confirmed in the pipeline, including the seven clubs from the acquisition of Bare Trening Sør.
When we look into our existing clusters and potential new clusters, there's always, as we are indicating in the presentation today, there's always a balance between, you know, should we go with an acquisition or go greenfield. We don't have, so to speak, a clear preference. This is case-by-case consideration, depending on if there are any, to be frank, good enough acquisition candidates in the market. There are some clear positive things about going greenfield because then you really get an optimal club. We have, you know, several ongoing dialogue, as we are also showing in the presentation today, that the market is still quite fragmented. A big share of the market is made up by small independent clubs or very small chains.
There's quite few, so to say, very transformative M&A opportunities in the market. We want to expand going forward, and then it will be in a balance with infill acquisitions and greenfields. Depending on, of course, on the ongoing dialogue, and the price consideration, we'll, you know, consider from case to case what is the best approach. If you want to comment a little bit on the margin picture and what you see, Cecilie.
Yeah. We see that we are able to take out synergies when we acquire new clubs. We can take out all overhead. We see often cost efficiency coming from implementing the SATS model and implementing it to our network. We're also able to increase the yield because we put in our broader product offering. In general, we see a margin improvement 6-12 months after sort of acquiring and taking over the operations in the clubs. The aim is, of course, to get it to the same margin level as the rest of the club portfolio.
Perfect. Thank you. I'll jump back in line.
Thank you.
Petter.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. Only one, for now. In the outlook statement, you highlight that Q2 is seasonally weak. Can you shed some light on this one, both on the revenue side and also on the cost side? Thank you.
Yes, thanks for asking. You know, when we put that on the slide, we discussed, you know, is this taken as a, you know, a clear guidance or what? The intention is not to give a clear guidance on softer development in Q2 than expected. Q2 is developing as expected. In general, we just wanted to highlight, since we have now delivered quite strong member growth in several quarters in a row, we just wanted to highlight that, you know, seasonally, in general, Q2 is a somewhat softer quarter than Q1. We have no indication so far in the quarter that, you know, it will be abnormally soft, put it that way. So it's just to highlight the fact that, you know, Q2 is somewhat softer. It's not that we are.
It's not like a warning that we are seeing a very slow development so far this quarter.
Okay. It more relates to the membership recovery than that.
Yeah.
The revenue trends versus Q1 or the cost levels? Is that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can comment, Cecilie.
Yeah. It's just reminding everybody about the seasonality because, I mean, we haven't really reported on a normal second quarter yet without the pandemic. Normally, if you look at the 2019 figures, the growth in the second quarter is, of course, weaker than it is in the strongest quarter that we have in the first quarter. Looking at just the member development, it will be softer, as we said. Financially, it should not develop any different. It's sort of a mixed picture of what you can expect on the member development versus the financial results. When we talk about the seasonality here, it's the member development.
Perfect. Understood. Thank you.
I think we have, Marcus.
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions here, so we can take it one at a time. The first one is, how should we relate these price increases to OpEx increases? When you say sort of full recovery by, say, 2023, is this meaning that you have the sort of same price increase as you have in like-for-like OpEx increase per club, say, holding the member base constant? Or how should we sort of relate these price increases to OpEx increases? When you say sort of full recovery, what does this imply? That's the first question.
We as everybody else see increasing inflation pressure. We did a price adjustment in January, and we will do another price adjustment during the summer. It will not be enough this year to compensate for the cost increases that we see, both through increased electricity prices and how it affects us going forward, and sort of the indication right now on what the inflation will look like for 2022. Our expectations to inflation, if that doesn't change, then when we come to 2023, we will fully have neutralized the cost increases that we see for 2022 on a like-for-like basis. Because in 2023 is where we get the full year impact of the two price adjustments that we do, and we plan to do another inflation adjustment, as we always do, in January 2023.
Okay.
We're sort of lagging a bit behind in sort of getting back to the inflation level that we see right now.
Okay. If you have sort of operational leverage or more members compared with 2019, that would be a positive to that guidance, or?
Of course.
Yeah.
Of course.
Okay.
Just talking about our price level versus the cost increase that we see.
Okay.
You're right, that will come on top.
Okay. Thank you. My final question here is on consumer behavior. If you see any sort of differences in demand for Fresh Fitness, low cost versus full service SATS, and do you see evidence that consumers are holding back on spending, say, trading down, less services, et cetera? Some flavor on consumer behavior, because I think that's a general concern among a lot of consumers and investors that you see trading down and that may impact growth.
Yeah. No, we don't see any shifts on this. I think it's two things that is important to keep in mind there. Number one is that in general, if you look at consumer research, the willingness to invest in personal health and you know, living a healthy lifestyle, staying active, training, et cetera, the willingness to invest in that has increased after the pandemic. Secondly, the price point for SATS is still you know, pretty low compared to if you look at you know, many other European markets, as we have commented on earlier in earlier presentations. Typically for the higher end membership product offering that we have, you would typically see EUR 100+ per month in the European market.
Compared to the purchasing power in the population in the Nordics, even if we see, you know, inflation increases, et cetera, we still believe we have a value for money and competitive price point with SATS. But it's good. I think, you know, it's a very relevant question, and I think, you know, it's. We are very happy that we also have a strong position with Fresh, so we can follow, you know, that part of the market closely as well and see early indications if we should see any of these trends as you are indicating. We don't see any signs of that so far.
That's helpful. Thank you.
I think just a last comment there. I think it's also worth mentioning that, the price adjustment we just recently did, we saw even lower effect on additional churn than we have seen, when we have done similar type of price adjustments pre-pandemic. That is actually indicating the opposite.
Thank you.
Thank you. That's so far the ones we have on the list. Do we have one more?
Barbara Smith, go ahead.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you.
Yes. Hi. I just had a couple of questions. First of all, on the acquisition of Bare Trening Sør. You outlined a couple of, you know, metrics for financials that you're looking at in acquisitions. Can you provide some of the details on, you know, on what was realized on this particular acquisition and also the number of members that they currently have? Secondly, you pointed out in the presentation that the recovery in Denmark was progressing a bit more slowly than in other countries. What are the reasons for that?
For Bare Trening Sør, it's closing in June, by the way, so we haven't taken over those seven clubs yet, and we haven't provided any financials on that acquisition yet, nor members. It's a good target for our Fresh Fitness brand, and fits into that concept well. It's unmanned, a bit smaller clubs than the rest of the portfolio, and fills out the southern part of Norway in a good way. We expect to sort of gain the same synergies as we did from the last Bare Trening acquisition that we did a couple of years ago in the Oslo area. Same type of concept.
That was a great acquisition, and we expect this one to be equally good.
When it comes to Denmark, I think, you know, in general, the market in Denmark is recovering somewhat slower than we've seen in some of the other markets. Especially if you compare, for example, to Norway. Norway and Denmark has been pretty, you know, similar during the pandemic, with the same type of restrictions at the same points in time. We basically saw a quicker recovery in the market, not only for us, but in the market in general in Norway compared to Denmark. This was also clear if you look into numbers reporting from other operators in the Danish market that are reporting numbers publicly. That is also clear from their statements.
Comparing to that, we are pretty happy with our development in Denmark, even though the total market is recovering somewhat slower.
Right. Well, exactly. I know the numbers that you're referring to from your Danish competitor there, and I was wondering, you know, why? I mean, what are the factors you think that, you know, make that recovery slower in Denmark than in Norway or in Sweden?
We have done some member service surveys indicating, you know. There's no clear indications because we have done member survey now across all our countries on training routines to understand, you know, both from those members who are, you know, have become active and those who are not, you know, getting active again. There are no clear indications. We expect the market to recover in the same way. We don't see any, you know, big changing trends or anything that is very different in the Danish market. We expect the market to recover just slower, but it will recover. We expect throughout the fall the market to be back where we saw pre-pandemic and then continue to grow after that.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Barbara.
Have any more questions?
Doesn't seem to be so. We thank you all for participating in this Q&A session, and wish you all a healthy and happy day. Thank you.
Thank you.