Yes. It's 10:30. Good morning and welcome everyone to this live Q&A session following our second quarter presentation. Thank you for joining. Great to see many known names in the call. This is a 30-minute session, we will not go through the presentation in detail. We assume that you have been able to have some time to both read the report and also look at the parts or the full presentation. I just thought we could give you a few minutes in the beginning with the highlights, and then we will open for questions. We will use the normal raise -hand function in Teams for the question.
In the room here we have Stine, who is our IR responsible; we have Martin, who will step into Stine's role when she's leaving now for maternity leave, we have Cecilie, the CFO, and we have Sondre and me, the CEO. Just to give you a brief update of the quarter. It's been, of course, a mixed quarter. We started the quarter with most of our clubs in Norway and Denmark closed, which, of course, heavily affected the financials also this quarter. We ended the quarter with all clubs open and with a very positive recovery after the reopening. We see that we are on a solid way back when it comes to getting the member base back on track. We see that the reopening this year has been, if anything, stronger than the reopening last year. A higher share of the member base has been activated.
We see visits are growing, and we also see that the frequency of visits from the active members is growing, including the member satisfaction. Overall, a 7% increase in the paying member base in the quarter. Taken a hit with a lot of inactivity during the pandemic, we expect the demand to increase going forward, and that's also, so to say, the backdrop on why we are investing quite heavily in growth going forward. We have opened 18 new clubs in 2020, and so far in the first half of 2021. We have already signed and confirmed 19 new club openings until the end of 2022, with 13 coming already in the second half of this year. We have seen a very good development in new sales in clubs that we have opened so far this year.
In addition to investing in our physical growth, we are also continuing to invest in our digital growth, both on the SATS platform and with the new home training platform that we mentioned last quarter that we will launch now in Q3 and [inaudible] SATS. The first product there will be Rflex Mirror, which is an interactive fitness mirror. Overall, we are very satisfied with the reopening, and of course the financial result for the quarter is weak as a result of the long also affecting our numbers in this quarter. With that introduction, I think we just give you a Q&A and hopefully there are a lot of questions. Who is first up?
Hi, good morning, all. Three questions from me, please. Given the very encouraging initial response, when do you expect like-for-like membership at your existing clubs to return to pre-COVID levels? Secondly, is there any permanent change to your cost structure? In other words, when membership levels return to pre-COVID, will the margins be the same as before or even better? Lastly, pardon my ignorance, but how long can members freeze their membership at the moment, given our clubs are already open?
Yes, I can answer one and three, and then Cecilie will answer for the markets. We're not guiding completely on a date on when we expect the member base to be back at pre-COVID levels. We entered it probably with around 700,000 members. As we have reported now, we are leaving out the second quarter with 612,000 members. We have had a loss in the member base or a reduction in the member base throughout the 12-month period, not because of increased churn, but because of the lacking sales. Actually, churn has been quite stable throughout COVID, as we saw before COVID. We expect a quite rapid recovery, as indicated already now in Q2. Remember, the growth in the member base of 7% in paying members is mainly coming from one month of reopening, not the third quarter with reopening.
We expect a pretty rapid recovery throughout autumn, but we're not setting a complete date for when the like-for-like member base will be back at pre-COVID levels. When it comes to freeze, just a general comment. We have had very open folks to say freeze. It's been very easy to freeze your membership. You can do it through your self-deployment, but just by stating corona or COVID-19 as a reason; hence, our freeze levels have been very high. For example, in Sweden, even though we have had over 50% open, freeze levels have been very high compared to a normal situation, which is affecting revenues. The freeze levels are now coming down quite significantly, still eight out of 10. 80% of the current freeze has cited corona as a reason. We will gradually activate those memberships after the summer.
Currently, you can only freeze until the end of August with corona as a reason. After the summer, we will not continue as such to have the general freeze rule that you can easily just freeze your membership yourself with corona as a reason. The opportunity will change towards the end of August. We will expect freeze levels quite quickly throughout the fall to come to a normalized level in all countries. Cecilie?
When it comes to the cost base, I guess the short answer is that it has not been long -term materially affected by the pandemic. Of course, we initiated several initiatives just to make sure that we reduced the cost base when the first lockdown came. There are some additional costs related to stricter infection control routines. Overall, we always work with optimizing our cost base. We've been able through this pandemic to keep the cost base in line with what we had before the pandemic, and we expect that going forward as well. Margins will be at the same level as soon as we get the membership back to the same levels that we had before.
Okay. [inaudible]
Thank you
Y es, Tom is next.
Yes, thanks, guys. Eirik from Carnegie here. A couple of questions from me as well, and I think one is a housekeeping question. On slide 29, just to confirm and understand that from the contractual pricing freeze of 4.7%, just to be clear, that's a pure price hike and not any kind of positive mix effects of more people opting, for instance, for GX. I also noted in the presentation that you stated that you're doing selective campaigning but not discounting running price or contractual price and that you're less aggressive on the campaigning after the reopening last year. Could you just please remind us what kind of extraordinary marketing cost there was in Q2 and Q3 last year and how much lower this will be this year? My final question is on Sweden. I think that's been kind of generally very impressive on the whole through the pandemic.
Could you just please give some more color on the kind of collapse that you did see in Q2? I think the top line was down about 10% in Q1, but EBITDA was still decent. I understand that freeze rates are coming up. Anything else but the freeze in Sweden? Thank you.
Sure. When it comes to the price and the yield development, we report on contractual price because that better shows what the underlying development is in our members are actually paying because the yield is, as you know, affected by freeze campaigns we do. We simply refer to the contractual price, and since we haven't discounted, we haven't had any campaign discounting the price permanently. We have had campaigns where we give away one or two months for free, and then from month three, they pay the full price. Discounts that we give away have to be for over 12 months, and that's why the yield is affected hard, while the contractual price that we take, when we talk about year-over-year, going forward, has been increasing. It has been sort of stabilizing over the last month because we've had tight restrictions on GX as an example.
When the restrictions are lifted, we expect the sale of GX or regional memberships to increase as before the pandemic. When it comes to Sweden, you're right, we even had selective hopes for a long time in Sweden. Over the last six months, restrictions have really been tightening in Sweden as well. They're starting even to have open clubs. It is actually freezing levels in Sweden that are the main reason for the drop that we saw compared to last year. Last year, which was in the beginning of the pandemic, there were no real restrictions at all, and we see that we have a limited number of participants in GX as an example, meaning that a huge part of the product offering has been limited significantly, and that is why more members on average put their memberships on hold.
That's the last part about Sweden. These restrictions are announced long -term by the government. Don't open until tomorrow. We will be back to the market with normal capacity. With the point you said earlier on when we are changing the freeze regime over the summer, we expect the situation to normalize fairly quickly in Sweden. Your part on marketing investments—I think the marketing cost campaigning is twofold, right? One thing is the direct marketing investment. That will not be lower than after the first reopening. We are quite aggressive and comfortable saying so in direct paid marketing. Where we are now, let's say that last year , a lot of volume we saw in Q3 after the reopening was with two months free. Basically starting to pay for the membership right after the first month.
Now we are doing more selective marketing and differentiating the marketing more in different markets based on the situation. Quite a lot of the sales are not on the two months free campaigning and more like one month free on average. There are different campaign mechanisms we are using. Overall the implied cost of the marketing campaigning will be somewhat lower this reopening compared to the previous reopening.
That's very clear. Thank you.
Thanks very much. Christian is next.
Yeah. Thank you. I think one thing we learned from the pandemic is that businesses and also people are very unpredictable, and you have to open, close, open, and close for other periods. I guess you've also been surprised on the negative side. Definitely surprised to hear that you, with the leverage you have on your balance sheet, are quite aggressive in terms of reopening or opening up new clubs. Are you not concerned that we might have more unpredictable restrictions going forward that would, you could say, put your business model on the line or on the edge from that kind of strategy?
Yeah, thank you for raising that topic. Yes, it is unpredictable, and we have learned that. What we see now is that we are operating with tighter restrictions still in all our countries. What we see is that the visit development is, if anything, stronger than after the reopening last year, as I said we expect. We also see that with our strong club clusters, both in Copenhagen and in Oslo and in Stockholm and in Helsinki and so on, we see that we are able, due to the distribution of visits, even with quite strict restrictions, because we have scattered behavioral capacity before the pandemic in our network. Visits are distributed more equally throughout through clusters, throughout the week, and throughout the day.
We see that we are able to still operate with actually higher visit levels than we had in 2019, so pre-COVID, even with restrictions in place. That combined with the fact that we see an expected increased demand for fitness in general going forward, and we expect that the penetration of, so to say, paid membership and the willingness to pay for staying healthy are increasing. That's why we are expanding. So far, we see, as I said, that the new openings have performed very well. What we are doing, we are being quite selective, so to say, in the spots where we open clubs. Either it's clear white spots where we have not been searching for real estate and good real estate opportunities for a long time, pre -pandemic; we didn't find it, so to say.
Now what we see is that we get a much larger incoming flow of real estate opportunities in the wake of the pandemic, so to say. That opens up opportunities that we have been longing for to grow. It's a combination of that and also where we basically expand our capacity where we have quite good clubs. We are still quite, so to say, selective in the club openings.
Okay. I'm only stressing that you think the leverage on your balance sheet is very high and you think that you should pay attention to the leverage because if something goes wrong, it would be quite devastating for your business model. Certainly, we have had a very excellent summer so far in the Scandinavian countries. To what extent is that affecting the business?
Well, of course, summer is not the high season for us in general. I think that it's fair to say that so far the last couple of days or the first two weeks of July have been different than a normal summer. More people are staying home and having their holiday back home, and this, of course, is making visits at higher levels. We see quite the normal July, but we see quite a big difference in the different cities and countries. In some countries, for example, in Norway, we still see that there are quite a lot of people traveling. When travel increases, of course, fewer people are staying home, and that is affecting also the July visits. So far, in the period after the second quarter ending so far into July, we are happy with the development of the systems.
Thank you.
Thank you. Over to you, [inaudible]
Yes. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify this composition from the normal visits and the [inaudible] . Are those lost forever, or is there any chance that you can recover some of those in the next quarter, or, say, with regard to this potential NOK 70 million?
Well, we haven't included them in the years as of the second quarter, meaning that at least the way it is in the current description of the fixed -cost compensation, we will not be able to apply for it. I'm not sure that was the intention when they made the clarification on how companies should be treated. We will of course look into it, but we haven't taken it into account in our numbers or our plans going forward.
It's unlikely that you will qualify for those NOK 70 million that you were saying?
Based on the description of how the compensation scheme is right now, it's not likely, but we will have to see if that is the intention when they set up the new regulations.
Are there risks with regard to compensation that has already been received or booked in previous quarters?
No, this was a tightening of restrictions as of March. We have already applied and received compensation for November to February.
This is an actual change?
Yeah, this is a change in the.
That was communicated for eight weeks.
Yeah.
Okay, one question for me. I think you mentioned on the call earlier that you expect the net debt to rise a bit also in Q3. I'm not sure about Q4. Does that mean that we're going to see some cash burn also in Q3? You don't expect to return to a positive cash flow in Q3?
In Q3, we will still have some deferral effects on working capital. At the same time, Q3 will be a quarter where we invest heavily in marketing and getting all of our members active who are in our clubs. Normally, Q3 is a weak quarter. Based on that, there will be some cash burn in the quarter.
Okay.
Yes, [inaudible]
Yes. Hi, hopefully you can hear me. I just wondered, can you talk a bit about the sort of how you see the club costs pre- and post-COVID? Should we sort of expect the same level after COVID as well, or are you seeing a difference there? Secondly, related to that, I guess all clubs means that this is not only a play on getting the members back, but it's actually a play on attracting new members that have not historically been active in your clubs. What can you say about the activity that you see so far about actually new members coming into the club that have not historically been active in your clubs? I'm not sure if you have communicated it, but what is actually the current increase level, if you can say that?
On the last question, we have the working capital. If you could give the history of historically, given some insight into how we think about that for the coming quarter? If you can give some color on that, it would be very helpful. Thank you.
Can you start commenting on the club cost and working capital, Cecilie? I take the second bit.
Overall, we're not seeing a material change in club cost. A third of the cost is related to rent, a third is related to staffing. The other third is all the other cost aspects. When it comes to the third that's related to staffing, we make sure that it varies according to the number of visits. In a period now where we have lower visits and low members, so we are able to reduce that cost somewhat. Of course, in the build -up number of visits, club cost will be slightly lower, as it is in a normal year during the normal seasonality. No real change in the club costs on average per club.
We are adding some clubs. That means that temporarily we will have higher club costs before we are able to really fill those clubs with new members who also ask for that. Overall, no material change in club cost in that regard. When it comes to working capital, we have a member base where you prepay your membership. When we closed down in November last year, a lot of our members had already paid their membership through December, and since we had opening and closing in the months by the end of the year, some of them even paid for an additional month. That means that's the main reason that we see negative cash and working capital in this quarter, and we will continue to see that slightly spilling over into the third quarter as well.
It will be around NOK 20 million in negative working capital. In addition to that, we have a component of taxes that will come in later periods. As of the fourth quarter, working capital will be more back to sort of normal levels. We haven't. For a question of if we haven't really communicated the actual freeze level, we still see, especially as we [restore] Sweden, that the freeze levels are still higher than normal, even into the summer. Eight out of 10 of our frozen members say that COVID is the reason for why they have frozen the membership. That means that there's still a lot of potential in unfreezing. Doesn't mean we expect to see a record increase after this summer.
When it comes to your question on members, new versus old members are for them. In a normal situation, most of our sales are not to old members. Actually, it's not that we expect a lot of the sales now to be with old members. The reason for that is exactly what we have said many times, that actually the churn has not increased significantly. There haven't been many more members leaving their membership than in a normal situation throughout COVID. We expect , actually, most of our sales when we reopen now to be with new members who have not at all just recently quit their membership with us.
The membership mix, so to say, in terms of the history with us, is not very different from existing clubs versus the new clubs we are opening because these clubs are not in totally new geographies, which they are not. They are usually , sort of say, expanding in the already existing countries. We don't see any, sort of say, challenges in terms of the new sales in these new openings. The pre-sales are looking very good. That's the reason and, sort of , the logic behind the membership sales. Typically we have around 25% of our new sales with members who haven't been members before. We cannot track this data in detail. We also have to delete member data after six months due to GDPR. Based on more qualitative research, that's the sales.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Just one follow-up to say that on public fees and the government, because as you stated, looking at your balance sheet going back pretty far, that was around NOK 100 million in public fees and charges payable. Is that the same level that we should revert back to? Is that representative of what we can calculate?
Yes.
Yes. Perfect. Thank you.
Rick, go on.
Yes, hello. Just a couple of questions from my side. First of all, on the pre- sales we just talked about, what would be the realistic share of the frozen current members that you would reactivate into paying members? I guess they will need to decide whether they will quit or they will start becoming paying members again. Will it be 50% or 80% or what do you think that you will reactivate based on your previous experience? Second, I have a question regarding digital training opening, specifically this Mentra mirror that you are going for, and what will be the pricing benefit of it? Also, if you could comment generally on how it will affect the ARPM and the margins going forward when you start to introduce more digital training tools and offerings. Thank you.
Good questions. I can answer those. First, when it comes to reactivation of frozen members, we see that absolutely the vast majority of the frozen members are reactivated into paying memberships. Also, now after the reopening after COVID-19. As Cecilie said, 80% of the frozen memberships are due to corona, we see that when they reactivate, they start to pay, and then they become active members, and they continue to stay active members. Of course, we will see some not get some higher or lower reactivation into paying memberships now than before COVID. Still, the vast majority now, after the reopening , have been activated into paying members. When it comes to the digital area, we are expanding both our existing digital offering, which is quite extensive already, and Mentra, as Cecilie said.
When it comes to the interactive mirror, the pricing will be two-fold. It will be a one-time purchase cost per mirror around NOK 13,000 . It will be a monthly subscription on top of that, which will be discounted for SATS members. We expect a similar pricing structure that you will see from similar offerings, for example, in the U.S. if you look at Mirror or other players in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. Actually, the one-time cost for the mirror is actually much higher than that. Of course, you will have top payment schemes that are making it like a monthly bundled cost. When it comes to the margin, we will have a slight positive margin on the hardware, not very high. Of course, the margin in detail is on the subscription price.
When it comes to, so to say, the SATS digital offering, the investments and the change we are doing now there and the expansion we are doing there are not significantly, so to say, changing the SATS margins overall, as we have been investing in our digital side for the last couple of years already and quite extensively. I don't know if i have answered your questions.
Average Revenue Per Member, is that still challenging, do you think?
What we see is that the monthly yield for our SATS members, as Cecilie was commenting on in the beginning, is actually increasing, both because the contractual membership price is increasing and we see very good growth in our retail business, which is also adding up to the total ARPM on members. When it comes to the new digital offering, what we will see there is an increase in ARPM for those members who decide also to take part in this offering. Of course, the ARPM for those who are only membership SATS members will be somewhat lower than for the SATS general ARPM because the membership price is or the monthly subscription price is lower for membership SATS than it is for the physical access to SATS.
Thank you.
We are two minutes over time. We still have a few more minutes if there are any more questions. We of course respect that those who need to rush to join other meetings are doing that or continuing their holiday. Thank you. If we are going off, are there any last questions? No raised hands?
No raised hands.
Okay. Thanks a lot for joining the call. We are looking forward to not only the summer but also the period after the summer and growing the member base and delivering a strong third quarter. Thank you for joining, we wish you all the best and have a great summer.
Thank you.
Thank you.