Welcome to the SkiStar Q4 2022/2023 Presentation. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. Now, I will hand the conference over to the speaker, CEO Stefan Sjöstrand, and CFO Martin Almgren. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and warm welcome to the SkiStar Q4 and full year, year presentation. This is Stefan Sjöstrand talking, and next to me, our CFO.
Martin Almgren here.
So, we will try to guide you through this presentation. We have an agenda. If we're looking to that, we will give you a short introduction, then we will take you through the Q4 result, and then we will give you an outlook and a summary and some Q&As from you guys. So, short introduction again, we are operating the five largest ski resorts in Scandinavia, and not only ski resorts, they're actually full year resorts. And then on top of that, we're also running SkiStar Stockholm, which is also full year around destination. And we're really proud of having the five largest destinations, which we will come back to later on as well.
Shortly, then, we are the leading organizer for ski holidays, and our vision is to create more memorable mountain experience, and doing that all year round. Last year we managed to deliver SEK 4.3 billion in revenues. We are really proud of the guests who give us eight out of 10, and also our employees, who gave us eight out of ten to work within SkiStar. We're also very glad that our digital transformation works well, and previous year, we have 95% of our guests who made digital check-ins, and also 76% of all transactions were made digitally, which is, of course, really important in those times. Three years ago, we decided to make a transformation out of this company.
We decided to go from European focus into Scandinavia. We decided to go from alpine skiing into an all-year-round business, and we decided to go from a lift and technical focus into really focus on the customer and the guest. We decided to go from hotel and, when I grew up, small cabin in the forest, to really stay better way than you are doing at home. We also decided to take a really frog leap within sustainability in going from sustainability or sustainable snow production into a more sustainable and memorable alpine experiences. This was then into four areas of transformation.
We will try to guide you through these four areas of transformation today, as well also try to help you to understand our result in a better way than maybe you can read throughout the report. So a short summary of the quarter then, from my perspective as a CEO, then. We can really clearly see that the pricing strategy pays off, even if the Q4 is a very small quarter for us. From a financial part, you can really see that this is an important part, that the pricing strategy works well. If you compare to many other companies in this industry, we can see that we have had a lot of visitors during the summer period and also increased the number of activity days by 16%.
So a very strong indicator that the transformation from a winter company to a year-round company works well. And, we have worked with winter in 48 years, and we know quite well how to operate winter season. However, we have, now just managed the third year, in the summer season, and we learn, and we manage to do better and better, and we believe that we now have found, the key how to operate summer as well by introducing this summer pass in, Sälen and Trysil, and that works very well. We also can see that, in Q3, there was a lot of questions regarding the property development, if it has stopped or, what happens regarding property development.
We have been quite transparent to you guys and really told that we have lowered the expectations on our property development side from the historical levels, 2017, 2018, 2019, to a more modest deliveries around SEK 70 million-SEK 100 million per year. Last quarter, we didn't get any property development. This quarter, we got it instead. I think it's important to look not quarter by quarter, to really look this from a holistic perspective, from a yearly perspective. We are really focused on development of our cost.
Since we could see a rise in costs during the three quarters, we decided to take grip on this, and you can see this in the Q4 indication, which is quite strong, and Martin will help you through that later on as well. And I'm also really glad that we, in the last quarter, we didn't say any number in our savings program, but now we are really glad to say that we have, if I use the word first batch here, proud to announce that we will make the SEK 50 million identified and in process for this year. And then if I just switch over to the full year, I must then say, of course, we are not satisfied.
We are not satisfied, since it's not live up to our expectations. And we are glad that we continue to show growth. If we just looking into areas like, retail side, where many companies in this sector are struggling, we are really gaining, market shares and take market shares here, and we increase by 18%, which is a very strong number, and we grow both online as well, in store. So we continue to grow on top line. However, our cost side, which I was, into, was far too high, mainly in maintenance, marketing and staff. And, I must say that's why I'm really glad that we introduced this, program. We, managed to take it through the whole organization in the beginning of the year, presented it in week eight for the organization.
We managed to come through a lot in week 14, and then from September 1st, now we have a new organization in place, which will of course be much more effective and also in a more structured way how we will operate the business going forward. We had, of course, a very strong year in number of activity days, so that, of course, supported the top-line growth. So it was the second-best year in number of activity days, and you could see that we dropped in the end of the winter season, why we lost a bit of skiing days. And, of course, we had a calendar effect. We lost some skiing days during the Christmas week 51 to week 1 last year.
I must say that the media focus regarding consumer confidence didn't help us. It was a lot of talks around inflation, interest rates, electricity prices, and of course, that did not support our business. It created a lot of worries for a lot of consumers. However, even though a lot of those costs remain, we can see that consumers nowadays know a little bit more about the expectations for what is my interest rate? What is the cost for my groceries? And also, the electricity prices are in a much more stable situation than they were a year ago. So we are really happy to continue to invest in our business, to strengthen our position, and also now start to look forward, which I will come back to.
But Martin, can you please take us through the EBIT and also the numbers, figures in a better way than I have done?
Yes, of course, I will. I will do my best, Stefan. As you can see here in this slide, the operating result amounted to SEK 529 million, which is the second best or the second best operating result in the company's history. So we are really proud of that. But as you also know, we had had the same problem the whole year, that we don't get the sales increase down to the EBIT, EBIT growth. So even if we grow sales with 5%, almost SEK 190 million, we didn't get it down to the EBIT effect, and that's also one of the reasons why we went with a Fuel for Growth project to save SEK 50 million in cost for next year.
The main reason for the cost increase is, of course, inflation, and also currency effects with the weaker Swedish and Norwegian crown, and also that we, during COVID, really, really held back on our maintenance cost. So we had a debt to take care of this year. And that we have talked about a lot, but it's also important that you understand that most of the maintenance cost to our ski resorts are paid in euros. So there is a double effect here on the cost side. If we move to the personal cost, which is still continuing to increase, we have a yearly salary increase of about a little bit more than 3%, which is SEK 26 million on a full year level.
But also the transformation from a winter company to an all year round company has an effect here with number of employees that has increased due to that. And last year, we had also a positive effect of SEK 16 million related to repayments from Fora and also reduction of employee contribution for young people. So there are several reasons for the increase in personnel. Another cost that has increased during the year is our rental leasing costs, and part of that is related to the hotels and the kind of contracts we have with Skiab. And as you know, Skiab is our JV, and we are a 50% owner there. So part of those increased rental costs will also be delivered back to SkiStar.
During the year, we spent an increased cost for marketing, and that was, of course, the plan to market our all-year-round business. But we also, in the last quarter, we took it to a tough grip around the cost development on the marketing cost, and we reduced that in the last quarter. And finally, we have result or profit from our associated companies, and here is the main change here is the result from Skiab. And there, we have had a negative effect from currency effects and also revaluation of investment properties in Skiab. Although I want to highlight, like, that the operative result in Skiab is improving compared to last year, and that is also, as I said before, about the rent and leasing cost, that's one of the drivers in Skiab.
So we get part of that result back. In the beginning of this year, there was a lot of discussions around electricity and the cost development there. And now when we summarize the whole year, we can see that the total cost for electricity is at the same level as the year before. And we have been able to compensate the cost increases with reduction of electricity consumption. So we reduced our electricity consumption with 10%. And in total, the cost for electricity is on the same level. And the last thing I want to comment on is related to depreciation, and you can see that the depreciation is increasing with around SEK 45 million on a yearly basis, and this is due to the investments that we have done over the last years.
So that part is, I hope will explain to you a little bit why we have a lower EBIT margin this year compared to last year. If we move in and look at the sales or the revenue per category, if we start on the left side and look at the SkiPass sales, and now we are looking into the fourth quarter, we made a strategy overview of the SkiPass prices and also the rental prices in this year. So we reduced the price on SkiPass for the summer period with about 40%-45%, and also on the rental side with about 25%. As you can see, we have been able to, with increase in volume, to almost compensate fully with those price effects.
This is one way of learning. This is the third year we are selling the summer product on all our destinations. We are learning and, and how to price this product. Also, we see that in the quarter, most of the sales growth comes from property development, and that's the project that we have had over the year in Fjellnest-Hemsedal, and also now in August, we had the sales in Sälen, Josmyren, which is a part of a new project around the new lift in Söderåsen. Hotel and Lodge has had a really tough quarter.
The conference call will resume shortly. This call is being recorded.
Hello. Due to technical failure, we have a short break here. We will now continue with the presentation. So I hand the word over to the speakers. Please go ahead.
Dear all, it looks like we have had some technical issues, so let's continue or repeat a little bit of the Q4 summary. And what I tried to explain earlier was that the Q4 is a relatively small quarter for us, but it is very important from two perspectives. The first importance is that we are summarizing the summer season, and here we can see that we have a very strong summer season, where we are increasing the number of Activity Days by 16%, and that's, of course, very strong. The other important number we are presenting at this time is the booking figures for the winter, and we will come back to that later on. But those two are two very important indicators for this quarter.
However, we have got a strong property development, and Martin will help you to go through that later on. We also have had a better development of cost within the period. I'm also glad to say that in Q3, we reported about our cost-saving program. We didn't talk so much about that in specific at that time. Now we are launching the first batch of that, and that's SEK 50 million, and that number is in process. If I then go into the highlights for the full year, I must say we are not satisfied with the full year result. We all continue to show growth, which is good. It's 5% on top line.
However, we are unfortunately growing our cost base in a too high level, and that's why we also introduced the, the cost-saving program. And Martin will take you through and guide you through the cost savings later on. However, we do the second best year in number of Activity Days, and that is a very strong number since we are growing both in the summer period, and we are losing a bit of the winter skiing days, and that we do in the end of the season because we are still going very well the first 12, 10, 12 weeks, and then in the end of the season. And, and very much related to that is what we believe was the, the situation regarding consumer confidence.
Even though that the consumer confidence still is low in the market, we believe that the consumer have now a more grip on the cost situation. They know more about what will the interest level look like? What is the cost for my groceries? And what is the cost for my electricity prices? And last year it was not so clear, but nowadays we can see that the consumer have got a much better understanding, and that also explained why we have a stronger situation in bookings for the winter. I'm also glad to say that we have continued to do investment, and we do that to strengthening our position in the market. This winter, we have invested in a new ski lift in Hemsedal, in Sälen, also in Åre. We also invested in snowmaking systems.
We're investing in our hotels, in, new restaurants, in concepts, et cetera, and that will, of course, give our visitor a much higher and better, experience. So Martin, give us some flavor around the results and, so we can get a grip on what has happened last year.
Yes, I will try to do it. If we look, if we start with the sales, and we can see that we had, as Stefan already said, this last twelve months was a record year in sales. We grew the sales with 5%, but we have been struggling the whole year to get the result down to EBIT and the effect down to EBIT. We can see here that on the full year, we reached an EBIT number of 604, which is in line with the years before the COVID. If we look at the operative results, which ended at SEK 529 million, it's really the second-best operative result in the history. From that perspective, it's a good result.
And I will try to talk a little bit about the cost and explain what we have seen during the year. One of the increases in cost is, of course, the inflation, but also the currency effect, because a lot of the costs are mainly related to maintenance and repair is both in euros. So we have had both an inflation and a currency effect on that cost. If we move into the personnel costs, that also continue to increase over the years, we see that the salary effect amounted to a little bit more than 26-27 million SEK, which is an increase of slightly more than 3% on personnel costs.
But we also have an increase in number of employees due to the movement or the transition to all year-round company, with more activities on the summer, which also need more employees. And last year, we had a positive effect of 16 million SEK on the personnel cost, and that was related to the repayments from Fora and reduced employee contribution for younger people. So that is part of the or the main part of the increase in personnel. If we then look into another cost that has increased is the rent and leasing cost for the hotels, and that is paid to our associated company, Skiab, which we own with 50%, and that is part of that will come back as a profit from the associated companies.
Marketing cost has also increased over the first three quarters, but in the last quarter, we took a tighter grip around our marketing cost and managed to lower that cost compared to the same fourth quarter last year. Also, a comment on the profit from associated companies, and mainly of this comes from Skiab. This year, we have a negative effect from Skiab, and that part is related to currency effects, revaluation of the properties there, and also revaluation on the investment properties. So there are two things that have negative impact, but important to understand is that the underlying operative result in Skiab is continued to grow, and we have this year a stronger operative result in Skiab than the last year.
In the beginning of the 2022-2023 financial year, there was a lot of discussions around the electricity cost and increasing electricity prices. And now when we summarize the 12-month period, we can see that we have been able to decrease the consumption of electricity with 10%. And if we look at the total energy cost, we have been able to keep the same electricity cost this year as the last year, which is really, really positive in this environment. And also the last thing that has increased is our depreciation, and that's due to the investments that we have done in the last years. If we move into revenue per category, we can see that the SkiPass is more or less on the same level here.
We grow the SkiPass sales with SEK 2 million, but underlying, we should also know that the volume increased with 26%, that we had a decrease on the prices of around 40%-45%. So we have been able to compensate the price changes on the SkiPass product on the summer season with an increase of volume, which is really, really positive to see. And that is one of the strategies that we have to really grow the number of activity days in the winter season or summer season, sorry. Rental shop is still continued to grow even on the summer period. And then we see that in this quarter, we had the sales from the property development, and that's mainly two projects. It's Fjellnest in Hemsedal and Josmyren in Sälen.
Josmyren in Sälen is related to the new area around the new lift in Söderåsen that we announced earlier this before the summer that we will build. Finally, the last comment is around the hotel, and there we have had a really tough summer season. We have had a drop in in volume, both on accommodation and also on the restaurant side. Looking at the category, the revenue per category for the full year, we see that the SkiPass and accommodation sales, the drop that we had in the third quarter that will be effective also for the full year.
And then the rental shop or retail shop is continuing to grow, and the growth is 18%, and we are growing both the web shop, +39%, but also the physical stores are growing their sales, which is really positive. And just to give a little bit flavor on our own brand, EQPE, we grew that with 63% this year, and we are growing also the gross margin with three percentage units, and the total sales on EQPE is now up to 47 million SEK. So that is positive. Property development, the same two projects, Fjellnest and Josmyren. And then we see hotel and lodge, we had positive growth in Q1 to Q3.
Moving on to the EBIT, we see that the sales increase in operation of mountain resorts more or less could compensate for the higher costs in the quarter. So we ended up with a EUR 2 million lower result than last year. And in the quarter, we had the property sales of Josmyren, which had a positive effect, and that's the reason behind the increase in property development. And in the hotel segment, we couldn't adjust the cost component to the lower sales volume that we had, and that's why we had a SEK 12 million lower result from the hotel division this year compared to last year.
Looking at the EBIT per segment for the whole year, we have a lower, most of the result is related to operations of ski resorts, and here you see the effect of the lower sales of SkiPass and accommodation that fall through, and also the increased cost side has an effect here, of course. Moving to the property development side, most of the result is the lower result of SEK 72 million is related to the lower result from Skiab in this year, so from associated companies. And operational hotels, the 12 out of 20 million SEK comes from the last quarter that I just explained. So to summarize, I think we have touched on all the points here, but the second one from the bottom, I want to highlight a little bit.
After the year end, we have made two acquisitions. We bought Trysilguidene , which is the ski school, ski guides in Trysil, first of September, and we also bought a property in Klövsjö, which is today hosting a sport shop. On the balance sheet, the financial debt has increased, and the net debt to EBITDA is amounted to 2.0 if we exclude the IFRS debt, the IFRS 16 debt. We are still having an okay balance sheet, not as strong as the previous year, but still quite okay. If we move on to the sustainability part, there are three main areas we are focusing on, and the activity and recreation days, we have already touched on this one, that we had a positive effect in this summer.
Looking at the second one, the ecosystem and the impact from there, during this quarter, our climate goals were approved by Science Based Targets, so this is really, really positive for us. And we are working on this over the coming years. And we continue our dialogue with different organizations and the municipalities, et cetera. And during the summer or the Q4, we have been able to clean our mountains, and we have gathered more than SEK 600,000 as a contribution to Håll Sverige Rent. So that's part of the project that we do on the sustainability area. Now, Stefan.
Thank you very much, Martin, for that explanation. Now I will try to give you some outlook of how we look forward for this year. Then I will also make a short announcement that I really welcome all of you October twelfth for our Capital Market Day, where we will try to also show more about the future, so to say. But if we then start to just give a brief overview of our five destinations. We are really proud to have an unmatchable position in Scandinavia, and when a lot of organizations or media compare our situation and prices on SkiPass , et cetera, we really would like to highlight the size of our five destinations.
We are in a situation where we actually have a strong position in Scandinavia, where Sälen is one of the largest destinations in the world. Also, if we compare our number 5 destination, Hemsedal, with 54 groomed slopes compared to number 6, which is almost a half size. So we are really proud of this, and we're also super glad that we continue to grow our destinations. Like Martin just explained around the acquisitions now we have made in Trysil and in Klövsjö, also shows with this picture that our strategies continues to be in the right direction. The idea is that we will take a stronger and stronger grip around services at our destinations.
And as you can see on this picture, the five large ski destination, we now are running all the activities we have planned to do, and that means also that we can expect growth the next coming years from all areas, A lot of things happens around the climate right now. And for us, it's so important to be in the leadership around setting up goals which are relevant and also supporting the climate. And that's why I'm really proud that we have signed the Science Based Targets, and they have also got approval. And we want to continue the growth within sustainability.
That's why also we are really glad that when we are talking to climate experts, when we are reading different surveys about what's going on in the climate, we can proudly see that our efforts make change, of course. However, we're also glad that our five destinations, winter destinations, are in areas where we also have an advantage compared to, for example, the Alps, but also some ski resorts in Scandinavia. We will soon come up to the booking numbers, and for us, a support for our booking numbers is that we a couple of quarters back started to show you our digital performance. And, we're actually really proud that we are increasing the number of visits to our digital platforms by 20%.
So we are going from 28 million visits to more than 33 million visits online or on our SkiStar app, and that's really strength in this digital era. The positive thing with that is that since we also make all distribution by skistar.com, of course, this is extremely strong, and also that we can continue to grow within the digital bookings. And as you can see, revenue has increased with close to SEK 400 million based on online sales. When we have so much visits, it's of course important that you convert the visit into a sales number. And as you can see, we are managed to convert our visits into sales as well.
So we have an increased conversion rate of 7%, which also, of course, help our booking numbers now going forward. I've been in the media this morning and spoken about our booking numbers, and we have never shown you this graph before, but we really want to be more and more transparent of how our booking numbers looks like. And just to explain this graph is to see the booking numbers we are showing right now with +7%. They are very close to our record season we had during the pandemic, and they are, as you can see, in a different situation than we have had historical. So this is a very strong number and also shows that the guests looking forward to come and visit us during the winter period.
When you look into competition, many competitors start to talk about the Christmas situation and the breaks for families around week 7 to week 10. However, I would like to show you this graph, which is also a graph showing our booking pattern, where we will then have a very stable booking during our weeks. Normally at this period of time, we have around 60% booked, but now we have a little bit more, and this is that we are then the 7% ahead. As you can see on this line, we are 10% up during Christmas period, and that is mainly due to a calendar effect compared to last year. The interest for celebrating Christmas, New Year in the Scandinavian Mountains is really high.
If you look into the winter holidays period, weeks 7-10, which is normally, I must say, almost always fully booked, we are 3% up, which is also a very strong number on high levels. And there you can see that the week 7 is the highest week booked, and that is what we call the Danish week, so to say, because that is when Danes have their spring break, their winter holidays. What I'm really proud of is weeks 2-6. Here you can see that we have a very stable development. We have an increase of actually 9%, and that's also showing that the families are back.
Here we also see that we have an increase of ski school with 30% up, and that is a very strong indicator that the children, families are back and back in bookings compared to last year. And that means also that last year, we can see a later booking pattern, but we must say that the booking pattern are back to normal again, that we are not seeing the late booking pattern, not at least right now for the moment. It's actually the opposite. The people are back to early bookings. Lastly, but not least, you can see the period between week 11 and 18, that include now the period of time where we had difficulties previous year with Easter, and now we can say that we have actually up 14% that period of time.
So all in all, we are showing 7% up in bookings, which of course is a very strong number nowadays when we hear about the tough economic situation. I also will give you a flavor of average spend, and this is a picture we have never shown before, but that's actually giving you a flavor of how much each nationality are spending. So in average, a booking at SkiStar spend around 17,000 SEK, and the average is 2.3 products in average if you book in the skistar.com system. And then if you look into the growth we have right now of +35% of Danish guests, they are then spending almost the double amount of money as a Swedish or a Norwegian guest.
So of course, the increase of Danish and also international guests in general will help us with the higher spending, since those guests are booking in average almost 3 products compared to the average 2. So we are really satisfied with this spending and also the number of articles the customers are using. Lastly, but not least, then a summary. We really believe that we have a strong position, and we have actually strengthening our position during this period of time. Really proud of the sustainability sale, Science Based Targets has been approved, and also that they continue to be in focus. We have also took a grip on our cost situation, like Martin explained. I'm really glad to see that we now have a new organization in place in September first.
We're also showing that we are taking the first SEK 50 million out of cost, which is important. I've just talked about the fantastic booking situation and the increased demand from our international guests. And also the strength we have in our brand, showing that we have increased application from 6,300 applicants last year, up to over 8,000 applicants for seasonal work at SkiStar destinations, showing the strength at the brand and also for us as a employer. And that actually mainly young people really love to work in our company, and also really proud that eight out of ten says that they really like to work at SkiStar. Again, warm welcome for the Capital Market Day, October twelfth in Stockholm.
We will also have it online, but in physical, always nice to meet up and see your faces. And we are all now looking forward for the upcoming winter season, where we are proud with all our investment made. We have made a record investment with almost more than SEK 750 million, and that's in new lifts, in new snowmaking system and infrastructure. So again, thank you for listening, and apologies for the technical problems. So we open up for questions. Bye then.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Karl-Johan Bonnevier from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, Stefan and Martin, and thank you for all those many good slides. Lots of information there, and I think a lot of things that will make it easier to follow you if you continue to use those also going forward. A couple of smaller questions and a couple of more broad questions for me, if it's possible. And just first looking at the new booking pattern that you alluded to, maybe back to more normal kind of things after the late booking pattern you saw last year. I remember last year you pushed, say, higher marketing costs in season to, I guess, try to fill the gap. Is that? Do you believe that your marketing costs this year will, say, be balanced back towards more normal levels again as well?
Thank you, KG, and, and, and thank you also for the feedback. Yeah, we believe that, we are in a more stable situation, than we were a year ago. And, and, I must say, the, the situation we have had the last, I must say, 6-8 weeks has been extremely strong with the booking pattern. And of course, when you see that the bookings are coming in, then you can be more, can say, reductant, reductant, and, and, more, more in a, safe mood, if I can use that word, that the bookings actually are coming into our system. So, and we, we, feel that, it continues to increase, actually. So, it's, right now, we are in a good mood.
And when you look at the SEK 50 million cost savings that you are now, say, quantifying, do you see that as a net saving coming through, or do you see other areas where you can spend that kind of saving wisely and then maybe do some additional investments instead?
Should we share that answer, Martin? I can just start to broadening it a bit. And like we have explained, that was that we took help from an external consultant to not only look over our staff cost, also to see if we could make some structural changes. So when you do this, we looked into how can we make a structural change of how to operate the company? And then we started with the staff cost in the first, can I use the first batch then? And that is now check more or less in that part. And now we will see those costs supporting us during the year. Everything will not come into October, November, or December. They will come month by month.
So when we end this year, we will see that we have managed to accomplish this. Then we also, at the same time, look into a more structural change, and that is related to Martin, more purchasing structure, how we will do purchase, more combined purchase. We will do where do we have our storage from our retail shops, et cetera. Martin, I don't know, would you like to also broaden it a bit more?
Yes, and we are also looking into how we follow up internally in the new areas, and how we are following up cost development and start to measure those in a different way than we have done before. So there are several things that we are working with. And the main reason here is to, of course, part of that we will use to be able to keep our investment, but also to just continue to grow, and also, if we don't find the right investments, then lower the debt.
Excellent. I interpret the answer that you see the SEK 50 million more or less as a net cost saving in this respect, that everything else equal, it should be, say-
Yeah
SEK 50 million lower cost next year.
Yes, yes, correct. That's correct.
Good. Looking at the strong exploration development operation in Q4, I know you've alluded to that this year was going to be back-end loaded, but obviously strong development. When you look at the pipeline you now have, what do you see for this year, the year starting, so to say? Is this a level that you can continue at for on a full year basis, or should we expect, say, a more modest number there, given how the consumer outlook looks?
But we aim to. If we look at the income from the exploration part, the level that we are having this year around SEK 75 million, that's what we are aiming for, as we have been saying in the last quarters. And then if we will be able to have the sales of SEK 75 million this year that we are now into, that is, I think it's a little bit too early, but there are projects in our pipeline that we are working with, yes, and that support that kind of continued growth and income from exploration. And we are aiming at around SEK 75 million on a yearly basis going forward.
Martin, you mentioned that you have been doing some additional revaluation of investment projects and properties in Skiab. Could you allude to the size of those?
Just can you clarify that so I understand?
Yeah, no, you said that you I guess with the property cycle turning over in so many places, you have also done revaluation on investment properties in Skiab.
Yeah.
Could you allude to the size of those?
Yeah, we have if we look at the development of the properties in Skiab, in the first two years, we had revaluations. We do yearly revaluations in Skiab, and in year one and two, we had a positive effect from those revaluations, and this year we have a negative effect. And if we look at the value of the properties now, it's more or less back to the same amount that we had when we started Skiab. So that's the-
If I remember the number in Skiab, right, that should be about SEK 20-30 million backward revaluations during this year. Is that about correct?
No, no, it's, it's slightly higher than that, I would say, the part that comes to, to, into our books. So we had, I would say, around SEK 20-30 million positive effect, SEK 20 million positive effect, year one and two, and then we had, SEK 40 million negative effect this year.
Excellent. Looking at, you also mentioned, Martin, that obviously the maintenance that you saw in the operation coming out of COVID and so on, and the pick up on maintenance costs during this year. Are we up to, say, more of a running level now, or would you expect that to come down as well during this year, or is this the new running level we see now?
No, I would say we are aiming to, I mean, we are growing our number of lifts and facilities and things like that. So, the maintenance cost, if you look at the long-term trend, will of course go up. I would say that hopefully we are aiming to lower the maintenance cost for the next year. That's one part of the decreased cost that we are looking into. So I would say you, but then also this year, depending on how much is bought in Euro, because there we have a quite big effect from just the valuation of currency on the cost side.
That makes it a little bit. But if we take project-wise, I would say part of the debt we have handled this year, so we are aiming to lower the, if we say-
The number of projects and the size.
Number of projects.
The size, yes.
Yeah. Then hopefully we can get the effect also on the cost. That's our goal.
Excellent. Excellent. Stefan, I remember you, you said that you were slightly disappointed by the financial performance of the hotel operation, and now you obviously got a new managing director for that operation. Do you see that you can quick fix it so that get back to maybe break even during this year, or is that too ambitious?
I think Lina is doing a fantastic job, and also together with her team. And of course, we have seen high rental cost, which from the owner of the hotels, Skiab, in this case, and that is, of course, connected to contracts we have. And of course, with an increased rent of 10%-11%, connected to the inflation, of course, that was a hard hit for Lina and her team. So, if I look into the group result, the operating result, Lina and her team doing an excellent job. And I must say, we are really into doing better and better in our hotels operation, and we have also managed to increase prices in our hotels this year.
Here, we must also decide going forward, because if you look into our best accommodations are already fully booked, not fully, but almost fully booked. That means that there is some price elasticity of possibilities going forward, also how we price the best products next to the slopes, et cetera. That's also something we're looking into. We have already made price increases this year in that cases, but we will also look into a more dynamic price model into that as well.
Sounds very logical. Looking at CapEx for this year, is still a good assumption that you will reach around SEK 600 million, or have you updated that?
We haven't updated it, but I believe that we will take it down a little bit. We have been extremely heavy in CapEx the last years, and then we had planned, for example, the Söderåsen lift in Sälen , and we had planned for this year. Now it happened in the previous year instead. Six hundred is a high number, so let's say between SEK 500-600 million.
And then I think also we will be a little bit more cautious than if we don't need to make an investment, for example, since some of the prices are on the way up, but we can see that if prices are on the way down, we will maybe then take a year with a little bit slower than investment, just to wait for prices to come down, since we see that a lot of prices like steel has gone the way down, et cetera. And we will then maybe take a year of a little bit more slow down process.
But at the same time, our long-term view is there, just to keep that clear for everyone, that we would like to continue our investment level, but maybe this year to be a little bit more cautious, to secure we don't pay too much for a lift, for example.
Sounds very logical. And Stefan, one final for me, a little more long term, maybe. When you launched the mountain strategy, you talked about getting the number of ski and activity days up to, I think it was 6.6 million. This year, it fell back to, was it 5.9, something like that. With the investment you do and how you develop the resort, when do you think 6.6 will be a logical number?
Actually, we put up 7 million KG. So, 7 million -
Even better.
is the number of activity days, and we have said that will be our goal for 2030. And we believe that we had the dip last year during the off the season, so to say, where Easter, where we got the drop. But we, since we now see back again with an increased level of interest and also the priorities among families to invest in a ski holidays at our resorts, we believe that we will come back on track again to growth in number of ski days, actually.
So, and we see that just take the, these children, families who are booking now, ski school up 30% is a very strong number to show that this important customers are back again into our booking systems, supported also, of course, by international guests, with the Danes in the top. So we believe that we are soon back on track with the growth pattern on activity days, KG.
Excellent. Well, thank you very much for all the extra color and all the best out there.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Let's see if there is any other questions in the pipeline.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Okay, warm thank you, and once again, excuse all of us for the technical issues, and maybe some of you needed to drop out earlier than expected, but we're really happy that you listened to us. And we again more welcome to the Capital Market Day, October 12th. So hope to see you there, and wish you all a good day.