Sats ASA (SATS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, and welcome to our Q2 Q&A. We will jump straight into the Q&A after a short introduction by Sondre.

Yes. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this Q&A after our second quarter presentation. As we stated in the presentation this morning, we will not do a presentation in this Q&A. We will focus on your questions. But just hopefully just take one minute and begin with on the highlights from the presentations, basically summarizing our messages today. We're looking at in the second quarter this year, it's a revenue growth of 12% and then 13% first half year, currency adjusted. This is the main, driven both by increased number of members and increased yield from the members. It's also been important for us to have tight cost control, mitigating the inflationary pressure. As some of you might remember, we addressed the cost base second half of last year, which has now relieved the effect on cost, and we have continued to have cost control then throughout '23. So these 2 factors have resulted in a strong profitability this quarter, a Q2 EBITDA of NOK 194 million, up from NOK 83 million in Q2 last year and a first half 2023 EBITDA to NOK 332 million, up from NOK 113 million. And then we also were highlighting that we are expecting to cancel the covenant waiver of the revolving credit facility ahead of the expiry, which is at the end of this year, and then we will be returning then back to our original covenant of 4x net debt compared to the adjusted EBITDA. And then we are also very happy to see that we have strong activity levels in our clubs. We sit in the second quarter around 16%. This has continued into the summer with very strong July and also now into August with high visitors levels. And as we are explaining in the presentation today, this is a key takeout for us, both because it's only visits that are making us fulfilling our vision on making people healthier and happier. But this is also strategically for our position and financially very important for us because active members are happy members and they continue as members, hence contributing to increasing our financial result. So that was the highlight from the quarter, and we are happy to answer your questions.

Eirik, please go ahead.

Eirik from Carnegie here. First and foremost, congrats on a solid quarter. Good to see both profitability and members returning. I got a couple of questions. I think we can kind of start off where you left off, Sondre. You seem pretty confident in general on the outlook statement. You're saying visits have been good through the summer, July, August. Is kind of the continued solid growth also maybe on the back of terrible weather in the Nordics some of the reason why you seem so confident? Can you give us some sort of current trading update now that we're 2/3 through the third quarter?

I don't think I should go more into detail on what we have been doing in the presentation, but I think for us, high visits is an indication of our ability to deliver a good product and as we have been showing in the presentation today, the visits growth was higher in July than what we saw in the second quarter. That is driven, I think you're right, I think that has been driven [indiscernible] driven by the [ rethinked wellness ] there has an impact, for sure. But I think many people stayed home during the summer, fewer people went on vacation from the Nordics compared to what we have seen previous years. More people also did their holiday in the Nordics or within their own country. That means that they are able to visit SATS clubs. We also have a strong communication to all members before the summer, where we opened all our club store members as, so to say, summer gifts. So they -- even though we are only a member in Stockholm City Club, if we run to the best [ frozen ] holiday, it could work out in our [indiscernible], et cetera. And we also opened all our classes for all members. So we saw basically a very strong demand for our products in July. And so far in August, we have seen that that has continued in terms of activity level.

Perfect. That's clear. I wanted to pick your brain as well on one of your statements in the slide that you state that deliberately reducing the club growth in the short term. Could you just talk a bit about what you're going to define as the short term? What kind of levels of run rate profitability you're kind of comfortable on being more forward leaning on club rollouts again? And also in that context, big-picture thinking about capital allocation, club rollouts, potential M&A versus dividend buybacks, just your thoughts there would be good.

I think what we said on the Capital Markets Day still stands. I think in the short term, we prioritize to reduce debt. So I guess it's fair to say when we get debt levels to undiluted the balance sheet that's not that stretch. I think it's -- I think we will start expanding again, but it will be opportunistic, making sure that it's AAA locations. And then when it comes to dividends, it's -- I don't think we should comment anymore on that. But we've said that in the long term, that's a possibility. But for now, we are prioritizing to reduce debt levels.

And I think we -- just also to comment. I know that there are many who have been criticizing us for opening a lot of clubs during COVID. And, of course, yes, maybe COVID was not the optimal time to open new clubs. But you cannot choose, right, and we will always do what is right, we believe is right for SATS in the long term. During COVID, we got access to a lot of very good locations that we had wanted to go for, for a while, that we couldn't get. Now we got them. And now our focus is to prove that we were right and basically making sure these clubs becomes profitable as the rest of the portfolio. And then we have 7 new greenfields signed, and we are clearly communicating, as we did on the Capital Markets Day, that our focus is now on optimizing the current portfolio, not searching a lot of new greenfields. But of course, if a perfect location becomes available or if we see a new development in population in an area of one of the big cities where we don't have a good offer to our members, for sure, we will open it then. So it will be optimistic. And then over time, we believe that this industry is growing. We will grow. We believe that more people in the Nordic population will start to work up their fitness clubs. So yes, then we need to also expand our network in order to deliver on that growth.

Okay. Perfect. I assume other people have questions, but just 1 last one for me. I guess, Cecilie, this is kind for you. The very kind of solid cost control in the quarter, you weren't too explicit that Q1 in terms of kind of the nominal impact of the cost cuts. You called them out again in [indiscernible] the initiatives you did in the second half of last year. But could you give kind of any indication this quarter on how much of the cost improvement is kind of structurally taken out, how much is easy comps on electricity cost, for instance, so we just kind of get a bit of a better understanding how we should think about the run rate cost level going forward as well?

Yes. I think we haven't -- you're right, we haven't given an absolute number on the reductions. And the reason for it is that we also have cost increases, and we might also change sort of part of the strategy going forward. So this is sort of a -- we're balancing out the initiatives. But I think what you see now in the first and second quarter is sort of relevant to sort of the big takeout of costs, which really will take -- continue going forward. At the same time, the quarter now is affected by somewhat lower marketing spend. We have lower of the revenues, which affects the cost of goods sold. So that means that a 1% increase in the quarter is not sort of relevant going forward. So the underlying is around 3% to 4% if you look at sort of the only the club base. But a lot of the downsizing we did in overhead has reduced that cost significantly, and that's something we expect to continue going forward.

Any other questions from the call? There is 1 from [ Petir ].

Yes. So 2 questions from me. Can you share some light on the competitive landscape when it comes to attracting new members? I'm thinking about the campaign activity? And how do you see that developing going into autumn?

Yes, it's quite competition. I think it's fair to say in all markets, we have seen competitors being quite aggressive on their new offers. Some bigger competitors, without calling names, have been giving away 4 months for free training for a long period of timeline without any binding. So we see quite high activity level, both in terms of tactical offers and in terms of marketing investments in all markets. And we -- as Cecilie commented on and as we've also seen in the numbers and as seen in our campaigns, we have decided to take down the activity level in terms of tactical offerings. So what we typically did after COVID, which was natural for us to do when we reopened to have some pretty strong tactical campaigns to regain the member base. We haven't seen -- you haven't seen 3 months for free at SATS. You haven't seen that lately, and you won't see it in big campaigns going forward either because we believe that we have a strong product. We will continue to invest in our product. And what we have seen so far at least and the growth this year has been mainly on quite soft campaigns in terms of tactical offering, and that's what we're also communicating in the presentation today. If you look at memberships sold, the new price, it's 15% higher than new memberships sold second quarter last year. And we also see that they start to pay it earlier, meaning that we don't give away so long free periods. So in that, I would say that the competitive landscape is more aggressive and we are less aggressive.

And then a question to Cecilie. I mean looking at the cash flow statement, how should we expect the working capital development going forward into the second half now?

So with the second quarter, we just moved into the phase of the year where we have a weaker working capital. So it sort of starts off in June with the vacation pay, meaning that we have a negative effect on working capital. Should expect that to be on the negative side for the remainder of the year, and then we'll start building the working capital again later on. So neutral to negative on the working capital also, yes.

Okay. And then a final question for me. At your Capital Markets Day, you highlighted a midterm EBITDA target of around NOK 800 million. Have you become more confident in these targets given the results you have seen now in the first half? Is it possible to give some flavor on when midterm is?

I think what we said on the Capital Markets Day still stands, and I think we've been -- we sort of wanted to repeat that both in the first and the second quarter. So we still believe in that target in the midterm. As we've said, we have progressed according to our expectations. So exactly when midterm is, I don't -- we won't give you any specifics on that. But we feel that we are following the plan that we set out almost 1 year ago.

Any other questions before we round off? Eirik?

Cecilie, I guess this one is for you as well. On the debt side of things, positive that you're kind of ahead of schedule on the waiver. But my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that a fairly sizable chunk of the debt today is on some sort of fixed rate agreement. I was just wondering if you can give us an update on a potential timeline of debt refinancing, when this would occur and what you believe would kind of be the run rate impact on interest costs given the kind of current nominal debt level?

Yes. So the current rolling credit facility lasts until September 2025. So we're 2 years down the road. So we will probably look at refinancing at some point during next year. Currently, when we now exit sort of the covenant agreement and go back to the 4x net-to-EBITDA leverage measure, then we will reduce our rent costs with about NOK 5 million per quarter, given sort of the current rent level, our current swaps. And yes, so it will improve financial costs.

Any other questions? No?

It doesn't seem to be so. So thank you all for participating. I think in some of the names here, we will also meet later today. So see you later where hopefully, we're meeting at SATS club. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye.