International Workplace Group plc (IWG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and thank you for joining us this morning as we present our first half results for 2025. At the Investor Day we hosted in New York in December 2023, we announced a very straightforward tagline to our investment case and that was that we will generate $1 billion in EBITDA in the medium term. What I can tell you 18 months later, we're absolutely on track to deliver on this expectation. And we've also completed many of the steps we need to do to get there and to make the story clearer, which we'll talk about a bit more today. Our strategy is working in a very high level here. Group-wide revenue has grown to a record $2.2 billion in the first half. Cash flow guidance for the year, up 40% in '25. And we're buying back stock. Charlie is going to talk more to this, $130 million of stock we expect to buy back this year. And with that, returning $59 million overall to investors just in the first half, a combination of buybacks and dividend. We've made the business easy to understand. We've implemented U.S. GAAP and switched to U.S. dollar. Both of those have now completed. Quite a little bit of cost here. Again, these are sort of one-off costs to actually get this done, but we think it's a worthwhile investment and Charlie will talk more to that in the future. So just a bit more detail on the plan. We talked about growing the network, and we've very much done that with really a record growth in the business, 27% growth and getting to over 1 million rooms open now with 200,000 in the pipeline. System revenue is growing on Managed and Franchised, and we're very optimistic as we look forward to this becoming a much bigger business more quickly as we go through this year and into '26. Margin expansion on Company-owned 116 basis points underlying improvement in the first half to 24%, and we expect that to improve further in the second half. We set out a target here to get to 30% margin on Company-owned, and we're very much on track to get there. What we've also managed to achieve is to get core overheads falling. So that is the base cost of running the business. That's quite an achievement with a growing business to see those costs falling. And at the same time, we've taken some of the savings and invested more into growing our partnership sales team and the support in construction and marketing as we start to get even higher levels of new center growth in Managed & Franchised and that's going to become an important theme as we go through the rest of this year and into '26 and beyond, much higher growth in the Managed and Franchised group. CapEx coming down. Charlie will talk to you a bit more, but really marginal CapEx now in new locations of $25 million, and that's sort of go down a little bit further next year. It's what we said, and we've absolutely delivered on that. EBITDA coming through 6% more to $262 million in the first half, strengthened the balance sheet. Charlie again will go into this, but we're very pleased to be now fully financed up until '29 and beyond on an investment-grade bond financing. We made the business easy to understand, getting cash back to shareholders. All of these, we think, very much us delivering on that promise we set out back in New York in '23. Size very important in our business. This is all about coverage, and we absolutely have the coverage, and we're building it all the time. You can see here that we're way ahead of the market with 5,500 locations either open or signed. We're in 121 countries, over 1 million open rooms and the momentum of signings and openings is really starting to pick up this year, and we expect it to be significantly higher in 2026. Now market size is important. We've shown this slide quite a few times since our Investor Day presentation. You can see here Uber and Uber Eats, that's a well-known business, obviously, huge market cap, $195 billion in a huge market, Airbnb the same. You've all -- you all know it. Many of you have used it, $83 billion. We are in an equally attractive marketplace, which is workspace. It's a massive industry around the world. It's a $2 trillion opportunity. We're here with a very small $3 billion market cap. We expect that to be much vigorous. We keep on delivering and building up our own business and scaling it around the world. So we think we can be right up here with companies like these 2 and others like it in the years to come, and that's what we're working towards. Look, what's growing it is our ability to really give customers what they want. And we've got a few other things here. I'm not going to go through them one by one. But essentially, what companies and customers are looking for is really cutting down CapEx to 0, that's what they want CapEx moving to OpEx. They want flexibility. We deliver that, and they want a platform that's available for their people to work from wherever they are and a range of products that sort of allows them to do what they need to do at the time supporting workers to do more productive work. That's really resonating with large and small companies, and we are really having some significant wins as we go through this year. We -- what we are doing is becoming more and more the norm for corporations who are looking for something new, and we're providing that. So the other flip side of that is for property partners and landlord partners, why are they choosing us? Well, we're very much the best-in-class. Lots of experience. We've got the most efficiency. We've got 18 brands that can support them depending on their buildings and so on. We have more customers than anyone else, now 9 million equipment connections to our system, some massive number of customers. So we can provide both revenue and the ability to convert that revenue into bottom line for our partners. And we're doing so. And we're doing this successfully, so successfully that many partners are coming back and doing more buildings with us and that's supercharging the growth as we head into 2026. So just quickly looking at the 3 divisions here, fees up on Managed and Franchised, very good year in terms of signatures and openings, building up momentum as we go through the second half of the year, and we expect '2026 will be a very, very important year for growth, building on the great year that we're going to have this year. So we were quite optimistic in this area, and we think we -- this will be a key cornerstone part of the delivery of the $1 billion in EBITDA midterm coming from here. And that's -- it takes time. The fees are small, but they're basically getting bigger every half year, every quarter, and they compound up relatively quickly. Again, Charlie will talk a bit more to that. But again, great momentum in this area and very good outlook. We're very confident in this. Company-owned. Also good performance. We set out that we get the margins to 30%. We're at 24%. We added 116 basis points of underlying margin in the first half. We expect more in the second half between now and the end of the year. And we are very much on track here to get to 30% in the midterm outlook. And so happy with this one as well and confident that we will deliver on this. We are delivering every quarter. Digital and Professional services. Well, here, this has been an area where we are very clear that we need to give better explanation to investors, and we'll do so on our next New York Investor Day, which Charlie will talk about a little bit later. But what we are seeing is good underlying revenue growth here. We've reorganized parts of this business. We have it much better performing as we head into the second half of '25. And we have strong expectations for this division as we go through '26. So this one, again, small part of the delivery today will be a bigger part of delivery tomorrow. And again, we're confident this is taking a bit longer than we thought, but it's starting to come through now and into '26. So the core overheads, I mentioned before, core overheads, you can see here coming down, discretionary overheads, and that's really investment into more salespeople, more property people to enlarge the network and more marketing and construction and logistics to support the growth. So very much the right thing to be doing, investing in the future fees. It is working out. You are seeing and will see further outperformance in the growth as a result of these investments in the first half and in the second half of this year and beyond. So again, important thing is we're investing correctly, and we are doing so for -- to get us closer to the $1 billion in the midterm. And then cash, the most important thing is the cash conversion. And cash conversion, Charlie will go into more in the detail, but the cash conversion, good, better, going to be much better in the second half of 2025. And we've got a few one-offs and movements in the first half. But overall, we'll be about 40% better on cash flow than last year, and we will be converting that into $130 million of buybacks and obviously, the dividend on top of this. So quite a bit of this coming back to shareholders. Lots more to come as we have less CapEx and better performance on all of the margin areas that more and more cash conversion as we go through '25 and into '26. So in summary, absolutely delivering on what we set out in our plan in '23. Very happy with the performance in H1 of '25, but very optimistic about the second half. And we're very focused today on the outcome in 2026. For us, 2025, it's not done, but it's largely done. It's all about '26 and what can we do to accelerate the performance in '26. We're hitting every one of our internal targets here, and we're upping the targets as a result. And overall, we're confident and we have a good half. Cash coming back to shareholders, again on here, you can see of $59 million in the first half, a combination of buybacks and dividend. But overall, a very good half year. Charlie, can you go into more details. I'll hand over to you.

Many thanks, Mark. As you've heard from Mark, we're delivering what we said we'd do. IWG is delivering both growth and cash flow. Network expansion is driving revenue. The first 6 months of 2025 saw us deliver our highest-ever system-wide revenue of $2.2 billion, up 2% year-on-year and nearly $400 million of that was from Managed and Franchised segment alone. All 3 of our divisions are performing. Managed and Franchised saw fee income growth of 42%. Company-owned underlying gross margins expanded 104 (sic) [ 116 ] basis points. Digital and Professional services underlying revenue was up 6%. This operational performance is driving cash flow and shareholder returns. In just over 3 months post the FY 2024 results, we have returned $59 million to shareholders. That is 3.5x more than an aggregate over the past half decade. There's lots more cash coming back to shareholders in the second half of 2025 and beyond. And today, we've announced a $30 million extra capital return to shareholders in H2 2025. And despite the capital returns, net debt to EBITDA is flat since the end of 2024. As you've heard me say before, we've been determined to further simplify the business foundations, and we've done a lot of this journey by now. Operationally, the finance team have had a busy couple of years carrying out the following: the implementation of U.S. dollar reporting in January 2024, transitioning our accounting standards to U.S. GAAP in June 2025 and a multimillion dollar finance transformation program, including a new ERP system, giving us one accounting system globally, continued investment in automation that has led simplification of internal and external reporting and overlaying AI tools to reduce workload and create further cost efficiencies. On the financial side, we've issued a EUR 300 million bond in May at a significantly lower marginal cost of debt than the bond that we issued in June 2024. And that has removed any financing requirements until 2029 when we renewed the RCF. Our debt is also fully hedged into U.S. dollars to reduce FX volatility, and we also maintain our commitment to a BBB flat credit rating and continued delevering coming from EBITDA growth. Our Managed and Franchised segment has been a resounding success since inception, and we continue to gain even greater conviction in this division. This segment has seen a total fee income up 43% to $50 million with recurring management fees being that 2.6x higher in H1 2025 than H1 2024. Importantly, and I've shown this chart a few times before now, the RevPAR continues to evolve exactly as we expected, and the cohort is pretty much mirroring each other. Managed and Franchised is generating almost $400 million of system revenue from 220,000 open rooms, accounting for 17% of group system-wide revenue. One of the big benefits of the Managed and Franchised business model is we have great visibility into the segment. And this is what gives us so much confidence in this business going forward. At the full year results in March, we stated we delivered $19 million in recurring management fee income for the first half, and that is exactly what we have delivered. For the full year, we expect to deliver $45 million of recurring management fee from our managed partnerships, and we expect this to double again in 2026. We've had ambitious targets for growth, but as you can see, we're delivering on those targets. 2023 was about talking about signings, '24 about openings and '25 is going to be when you start seeing the fee income really coming through. As you've heard from Mark, one of our core strategies has been to expand our margins in Company-owned. We have delivered another 116 basis points of underlying margin expansion in H1 year-on-year. Our recent focus has been to use the price lever to drive further occupancy. Long-term occupancy has increased by 240 basis points in the last 12 months alone. This is expected to drive revenue growth and deposit cash flow from mid-Q4 2025 and also support service revenues, which is a significant portion of Company-owned revenues. The Digital and Professional Services segment saw an underlying revenue growth of 6%. As mentioned earlier, the new divisional management structure allows for better alignment with the wider enterprise strategy and starting to result in new customer wins. Net-net, the refocusing of this division should allow us to be a third strong cash flow driver in 2026. Putting the cash flow numbers from the divisions together, the business is well positioned into the second half of 2025 and beyond, and it allows us to resume shareholder returns at pace, and we continue to do that. As you can see, our EBITDA has grown 6% despite investing a lot more in discretionary overheads to accelerate growth. This has been driven by our underlying revenue growth in open centers and fee income as our Managed and Franchised business grows system-wide revenue. Record system-wide revenue of $2.2 billion has been driven by a 26% growth in Managed and Franchised revenue. Cost of sales have been reduced through cost discipline and ongoing focus on expanding Company-owned margins, which have led to growth in gross profit. Strong underlying revenues combined with margin expansion and decreasing core overheads has delivered EBITDA growth of 6% year-on-year to $262 million. It is worth noting the financing costs increased following the implementation of our long-term financing structure. And it's also worth noting that we have no refinancing needs until 2029, which as I mentioned earlier, is only the RCF. We continue to have the bonds in place after that time, all resulting in earnings growth of 25%. In line with our stated strategy, we continue to grow in a capital-light manner, resulting in net growth CapEx continuing to decline. We still expect new center CapEx to be less than $25 million in 2025, and we now expect maintenance CapEx to be low -- be below $100 million in 2025. As I'll show shortly, we expect cash flow before corporate activities to grow 40% for the full year 2025 versus 2024. And is the visibility in our business, coupled with our strong balance sheet, that gives the confidence to be to return more capital to shareholders today. Over the first half, despite returning $59 million to shareholders, net debt-to-EBITDA has been held flat. And that is also despite the OpEx investment of $48 million that we've made that was outlined earlier. We are committed to our investment-grade credit rating and expect net debt for December 2025 to be in line with where it was at the end of 2024. It is worth noting that our FX exposure overall is around 0 despite the weakening U.S. dollar. Our geographical exposure means our currency exposure is mitigated by natural hedges. So overall FX volatility is minimized. We see a bit of an uptick in gross profit, but then at the same time, that is offset by overhead cost changes. All our debt has been hedged into U.S. dollars. We have previously said that we generate more cash flow in 2025 than in 2024. Today, we quantify that, and we say that we'll generate at least $140 million of cash flow pre corporate activities. This slide shows how we do it. The H1 reported cash flow before corporate activities is $48 million. We have some timing impact and then also we do not pay the annual bonus in the second half of the year. Those 2 combined means that the underlying cash flow before corporate activities is $57 million. If you translate that forward and say that we'll do the first half again in the second half with some overlays, we then can add on that $15 million of the cash flow timing impact that comes back to us. We then get the $7 million more of recurring fee revenue that I outlined in the earlier slide that's highly predictive. We've got $4 million more of interest costs as a result of issuing the bond slightly earlier than we expected. And then $17 million of further operational cash flow gives us that $140 million. What I'd like to also emphasize though is that this is an at least number. We also have the opportunity from various ways to generate incremental EBITDA and also other incremental cash flow, which has further upside this $140 million number. In conclusion, we expect to deliver more growth, more cash flow and more share buybacks. For the full year 2025, EBITDA, cash flow and net debt are expected to be as follows: adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the already guided range of $525 million to $565 million, but likely to be towards the lower end of the range due to further investment in growth on the successful managed partnerships program. Cash flow pre corporate activities expected to be at least $140 million, which is a 40% increase to the guidance that we gave in March. And net debt is expected to be roughly unchanged by the end of December versus 31st of December 2024. We are also announcing additional returns to shareholders. So an additional 30% for the buyback program to $130 million to 2025. The buyback program is expected to continue into 2026, and we'll announce details of that later on this year. This is also coupled with an interim dividend of [ $0.0045 ] per share. As previously announced, we intend to do an Investor Day in New York City on the fourth of December 2025. And the plan here is to give an update following the Investor Day that we did in New York City in December 2023 in much further detail, and we look forward to seeing you all then. And with that, I'll hand over to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Michael Donnelly.

Just a couple from me then. Firstly, can you give us a little bit more color on your thinking around reducing prices in Company-owned that drove the 240 bps in occupancy. So how should we think about how you intend to balance those 2 metrics over the next couple of years? Is it very sort of short term and opportunistic? Or is it more of a sort of strategy that we could plan around? And then secondly, can you please talk about demand and pricing in the U.S. since the last update? When I think the lead indicators like inquiries and such like we're running at very encouraging levels.

So thank you, Michael. So we haven't changed the pricing. We've changed promotions, so just to make that clear. So this is -- it lowers the price or the income, let's say, first period of the contract and you're gaining it back on renewal. Now what's happened, what we can see in the second half, you're getting the benefit of improved pricing as those contracts come -- start renewing. The renewal period is -- would be anything in the next 12 months. So that is giving us a revenue uplift in the second half. The key thing here is that we -- our occupancy was flatting -- flat lining and we decided to promote, lift the occupancy. We have achieved that 240 basis points up. And the pricing benefit will come through in the second half and in '26. But it's a deliberate policy, no change to the pricing. It's just promotions winning more share.

Our next question is from Paul May.

Okay. Just let me finish. Sorry, Michael. Second question on the U.S. U.S. is overall performing very well, but it's the same policy in the U.S., Michael, there's no difference. But what we have is the U.S. business now reaching very close to -- second half we'll get very close to the 30% target that we set out in margin. So overall policy working in the U.S., we're fuller than we've been for a long, long time and pricing coming through in the second half. So that will get us pretty much there on the 30% in the U.S.

Our next question is from Paul May.

Just -- I mean obviously everything in the presentation sounds very positive, but shares have obviously reacted very, very negatively on the back of the lowered guidance and lower than expected free cash flow. Just wonder what comfort can you provide investors that this is a blip on the growth trajectory and that it will resume from next year? I think you mentioned FY '26 will be a year of strong growth in EBITDA and free cash flow. Are you able to quantify that at all? And I think on the $1 billion medium-term guidance, I think you've upped that to at least $1 billion. What gives you the confidence that, that will come through over a reasonable time frame, as I say, given this year appears to be a bit of a blip on that growth trajectory? That's the first question.

So Paul, Charlie here. First of all, we're just tightened the guidance a little bit. And as noted, that's on the back of further investments in particular, into the Managed and Franchised business. In terms of the share price reaction, I guess, we're just buying back shares at a cheaper price today. So that will benefit shareholders as well in the long run. In terms of how we've got confidence in going through to next year, I think when we look at the Managed business in particular, all the indicators are going in the right direction, in fact, going better than we expected. And that's the reason why we've got that confidence in putting more money behind it. I actually did mention, we're looking through the transcripts at the full year that we'd like to spend more money in that area, and that's what we're doing. We're opening a lot more centers. We're now opening 2 centers every single day, and that's opening, that's not signing. That also means we're getting the revenue through. You're seeing that the fee revenue is coming through in the way that we projected. And that's been very consistent over the last 12 months in the sense that we're seeing that fee revenue come through as expected, and that's what gives us the confidence to increase the expenditure on both further partnership, salespeople, more marketing and also more people to be able to do all the fit-outs and everything else to get these sites open. We have a great opportunity to do that, and we think we should be putting more money behind it. And this is just a staging point to that $1 billion target. By definition, assuming that we deliver more revenues coming out of that investments, and we've got every bit of competency that it is happening. That helps us exceed the numbers that we originally put forward. And we'll give an update at the Investor Day in December to sort of show what the revised fee income is over the medium term. I think also though as Mark just outlined on the Company-owned side as those promotions come off in the renewals, you'll see the benefits come through on the Company-owned side as well, which delivered incremental EBITDA growth on top of that.

Yes. So just to answer that, the key question here. When we look at it and we would suggest you would look at it in the same way, are we going to get to the 30% margin on Company-owned? And what will the revenues be on that Company-owned block? Now we're confident that we're going to get to 30%. As just mentioned, the U.S. is there already and a few other countries as well. We just got to get -- the U.S. has got more to go, so we can get over 30% and we get more countries up to that level. So we will get to the 30%. So we're confident on that, and we're doing the right things in there. So number one. Number -- and it's not just revenue, it's we're getting better and better cost control, which applies to the whole business. And in particular, part of the investment, both on Company-owned and the Managed and Franchised units is more investment in technology, in this case, AI, which will transform the business on a cost basis next year, we expect and give us more opportunity to trim costs and support margin improvement. So -- but it's investment again this year to get there. So Company-owned 30% confident. In terms of growth, Managed and Franchised, this will beat expectations. We will set out in more detail in December, but we've got really quite important momentum here, which we are investing behind. You can't open and sign 1,000 centers a year plus without having to invest behind that. So overall, they're performing well. We've put a bit more money in to ramp up the growth rate to get more market, and we're confident that's the right thing. And again, the measurement of it is every year, but it's where we get to on that midterm number. So that's the upgradable area right there. And then finally, Professional and Digital, that business, again, will start to -- it's done okay. It will deliver more next year. We got it better organized. We've restructured it, and that will start to contribute more. So all of those things when you put them together and then overhead heading in the right direction, core overhead going down this year. We don't expect that every year, but just holding it flat is a good outcome because you've got a much bigger business on top of it. Overall, we keep going through it, so to make sure that we are confident in delivery, and we are confident. Otherwise we wouldn't be saying it.

Just a quick follow-up on that. The -- so to summarize it all, this investment this year that's probably coming higher than people were expecting and maybe slightly higher given the lower end of the range on the guidance than you were targeting, but that's driven by opportunity that you're grasping. So we shouldn't expect further cost or investment surprises next year, but we will reap the benefits of the investment this year. And will you be providing '26 guidance for cash flow and EBITDA at the Capital Markets Day? Or will we have to wait for the full year results?

Charlie is sitting here nodding. So yes, on both counts. So overall, the business even this year is still in transition. You've got some one-off costs. It's just all the history being every single month we rectify decisions made in '17, '18, '19 coming up to date. But that clears up. There's very little of that next year. So you start to get this year is much cleaner, next year almost clean. And that's -- so that update will be important. You're going to have more centers, you're going to have -- and all the drag sort of falls away, the CapEx drag, everything falls away to a much purer cash flow. But very much, we're about investing for that future outcome. And we thought it was the right thing to do. We got a lot more people here. And it's mainly people investment, by the way. There is marketing as well to support all the new markets we're doing, but it's mainly a people investment. We've just doubled down on that.

Perfect. And sorry, last and final clarification. The Capital Markets Day that will be live streamed, right? I had a few questions from investors in Europe, just clarify.

Of course, yes.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Alex Smith.

Just a quick question on the $15 million investment on -- in the Managed and Franchised division and kind of where that's going towards? And is this potential largely U.S.-focused? Or will this help kind of potential global expansion of this division? And then second one, just on the kind of incremental EBITDA and cash flow that you said that could come from 2025. Is that from acceleration in M&F? Or what could the drivers be in that kind of incremental growth would be helpful.

I think that -- so first of all, what are the investments, mainly people, Alex. So it's more salespeople, more management of salespeople, more marketing that supports the -- both getting partners and supporting openings. So that's where the investments. So you're getting more centers open and what you would expect that we'll be looking to upgrade will be the number of centers that we expect to be doing both this year and next year and in that foreseeable future. So the business starts to sort of transform in its shape and gets a lot more balanced by the time you get to that midyear out -- midterm outlook, we've been talking about all the way through where you get a business that is sort of Company-owned and has then a Managed division that is of equal size, Charlie, or slightly bigger and that sort of gives you more balance. But -- so a lot more openings is what you should expect from that. And -- but the money is going out in mainly people and marketing. But we also have construction, supply chain, a lot of logistics. As Charlie said, opening up 2 buildings a day is not a small number logistically. And we've opened in the first half more centers than I did in the first 10 years of the company's history. Next year, we'll do the equivalent of 25 years in a single year. That's the difference. It's really moving fast. And we -- so we need to invest behind that. It will support the outcome, the $1 billion outcome we're working towards, at least we've said today, we need to get there safely and with spare. So it's to manage that we'll do that.

And then Alex, just to follow up on sort of the incremental upside in '25. I'd say that mainly comes on the back of the Company-owned price rises towards the back end of the year, we've taken quite a cautious approach to our assumptions into the EBITDA guidance that sits around that. I think we're pretty confident that they'll come through well, but we've assumed that a fairly conservative approach on that at this stage.

Yes. So we're now in mid-August and we've -- so far, so good. So we're getting a very good pick up here. We can see forward a couple of months as well. So good pick up into both this August, September and just the beginning of October now that we're working on is pretty good. So overall, we expect to have a strong end to the year in that sort of last quarter. Lots of things then come through. And essentially, the 2% to 3% more occupancy and then get the price back yet that's where we need to be and that's where we expect to be.

Our next question is from Allen Wells.

Just one from me, please. You obviously flagged in general, the KPIs are moving in the right direction, but I noticed that the sequential pipeline of rooms was down slightly on Q1, 186,000, I think, from memory. Is there anything we need to just read into that? Is that timing? Is there any kind of slight hesitancy or anything on that pipeline? And would we expect that to continue to expand as you move forward? Any comments there really appreciated.

Yes. Allen, it's Charlie here. Part of the reason for that is that any rooms that are not open after 2 years, we now take out of that pipeline number. And whilst those rooms could still open, we just want to make sure that we don't sort of end up with the pipeline building up the stuff that might not open in the end, and that's the reason for that. We're adding rooms faster into that pipeline than we were previously, but then we've got some dropping out. Our view is that given we started the program in 2022, it makes sense to have some of those dropping out if they're not opening. So that pipeline is also a very robust number that we're giving to the market.

Thank you. That brings us to the end of our question-and-answer session. Any further questions may be sent directly to the Investor Relations team. I will now hand back to Mark Dixon for closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you very much, and thank you all for joining. We're very optimistic as we sit here reporting to you today about the second half of this year, which we have pretty good visibility over. As Charlie said, we hope to be able to report better than expectations. But our real focus is on '26, and that will be really where we start to make significant steps towards the finish line and you start to see a much clearer path to the $1 billion in EBITDA that we're after or at least. So we're well positioned. We have great momentum and that is really the sentiment you should take away. We're happy to answer any questions that go into that, but underlying business is doing very well. Thank you, everyone.