SkiStar AB (publ) (SKISB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SkiStar Interim Report Q3 1st of September 2023 to 31st of May 2024 Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speakers today, Stefan Sjöstrand, CEO; and Martin Almgren, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and a warm welcome to everyone to this call, the day before Midsummer celebration in Sweden. And me and Martin, we will try to guide you through this presentation. So we have a short agenda. And we have decided to have a repetition of our Capital Market Day we had in last October, just as a start and flying in and giving -- setting the scene of our Q3 report, so -- and then we will go into the highlights. Martin will guide you through the highlights and some numbers, and then I will try to give you some outlook and how it looks forward. So let's begin on the short introduction of our position. We are really proud that we have a lot of satisfied guests. We have a lot of satisfied employees. And also, we have had quite strong growth the past couple of years. And if I look into our foundation, we're really glad to have a lot of, like I said, satisfied coworkers and employees and why our culture is extremely strong since we have been running this business since 1975. We also have one of -- we are also one of the largest employer for young people in Sweden, and we are really proud also by starting up an integration project to also make sure we attract even more people from areas where we normally don't attract people. We're really proud of our sustainability agenda, how we drive sustainability to get more active people and also how we would like to reduce our footprint for the environment going forward. Last but not least, we really want to make sure that our guests could visit us in a safe and secure environment, which become even more important going forward. And if I look into our main areas of focus, we mainly focus on 2 areas. One is around the mountain operations, where we're gathering all activities happening at the ski resorts like ski school, like our shops, like our hotels, et cetera. And the other one is around our property development, where we make sure that we're taking care of all our land we have within -- or at our resorts. And today, we have more than 5 million square meters of land, and we will, later on into this presentation, share a bit more of how we are developing that land. We are one of the largest players worldwide. We sometimes forget about the strong situation we have as a company. And we are the fourth largest player in this area of business, you can say. And we also are a market leader in Scandinavia. And what I think is important is the upcoming slide, Martin will [indiscernible], which I will talk about here is the unmatchable position we have in Scandinavia. And Sälen is the largest ski resort and today where we also launched our new number of skier days where we can say that we are increasing 7% versus last year, and we are now above 6 million ski days, which is, of course, also so much higher that we are even beating the record year we had '21, '22. And I also would like to highlight that Sälen, our largest destination, is as big as size of city called Västerås in Sweden with 100,000 people, which is coming in every week. So every Sunday -- Saturday, Sunday, we are exchanging 100,000 guests at our resort in Sälen, which is, of course, quite impressive, and just making sure that we have 3,000 beds which needs to be cleaned within 4 hours is actually quite impressive. And again, we are the leading holiday organizer for Scandinavia, and we really would like to highlight the number of beds we are taking care of within our system, but not really to forget about is the number of slope and the number of lifts we are taking care of. And sometimes, we get the question about our -- why do we need to increase our prices. And I mean to maintain 220 lifts and making sure that they have the highest standard and also that we keep our destinations in the best shape, of course, costs money. And since we are also buying all these spare parts from Europe, mainly Italy and Austria, of course, that impact our cost for repair and maintenance at all these lifts as well. Again, I think what's really important when we're talking about developing our land, and this is a picture of how we would like to develop our land by, for example, buying and installing a new lift. So if you look into these 4 pictures, the picture up to the left is showing an area in Sälen, where we 2 have round circles. One is showing one of the largest slopes in our destination is Gustavsbacken having more than 2 million races every year versus where we now invested in a ski lift called Söderåsen Express and how it looked last summer before we installed it down to the left. And up to the right is how it looked when we opened the lift. And that was actually one of our best investment this year, how we could move traffic from these busy areas into this area. And now we're also developing detailed plans on the picture down to the right. And really right, right on the right picture, you can see how we will develop new housing close to the slope ski in, ski out. And later this summer, we will get permission to start also construction and build down in the end of this slope as well. So really working on development of detailed plans, which is very -- which are very important for us. Transformation to international guests has become even more important. And that's why we're really glad that our focus to go -- even increase the number of guests will actually come from more international guests going forward. And the international guests, they are spending more, and they are spending more due to that they're also staying longer at our destinations. So our SkiPass -- weekly SkiPass has increased dramatically, and that is very much due to these international guests, which are staying longer, and they are also buying more products in average versus Scandinavian -- versus Swede and Norwegian guests. Last but not least, we updated our financial targets to 6% growth, 18% operating margin, net debt/EBITDA to maximum 2.5 and also a dividend up to 40% to 60%. And now we will guide you through our Q3 summary, but also how it looks accumulated and how we relate to these new financial goals. So Martin, give us some highlights on quarter 3.

Yes. To start with, as Stefan already said, we continue to grow organically. We grew 5% in the quarter, and this was mainly driven by our international guests from Denmark, U.K., Netherlands, Germany also. We saw a slowdown in the end of the winter season after our Easter session the last week in April. The growth in the quarter mainly comes from SkiPass and property development, and I will come back to that a little bit later. We have a stable operating profit amounting to SEK 418 million, which is SEK 65 million higher than last year. And those of you who remember, we had some one-off costs last year of SEK 48 million. So the growth in operating margin is 4%, in line with the organic growth. We managed to increase our operating margin with 3 percentage units, so now we are running the quarter at 28% operating margin. And this is a combination -- the increase is a combination of both sales but also a better cost control. We talk a little bit about our retail growth, which is one of our main drivers. And during the year, the retail has been growing really, really well. And in this quarter, we continued to grow 10%, equals to SEK 8 million. This quarter, the main part of the growth comes from our online sales. In previous quarters, it has been both physical store and online, but this quarter, it's mainly from the online sales. And our own brand EQPE, Equal People, grow with 22 -- or 32% this quarter, which is really, really positive because in this product, we have a little bit better margins than in our -- rest of our retail products. So continued growth in EQPE is really, really good. And as I said, we have had a good cost control. And what we are looking for also in this quarter, we are using new technologies. Maybe some what you heard about our test of new technology for spreading out our guests in the ski system that we use in Åre during the Easter. So that is one kind of product we are trying to -- or new technology we are trying to implement in our business. And we had some good positive feedback from our guests on this. Looking a little bit on our digital footprint this quarter. And if we look at the number of sessions, we were down 3.4% in this quarter, but what is really nice to see is the conversion rate that grow even more. It grew with 8%. So a conversion rate of 3.38%, which is really good, and we strengthen this conversion rate in this quarter compared to last year. And if we look at our accumulated numbers, we are very, very close to 31 million visits in our skistar.com platform and our apps. And in total, there are all -- very close to 9 million unique users using our platform. So there is a really good strength. And as you see also, we have a good conversion rate in the quarter, a little bit higher conversion rate in the quarter compared to our accumulated numbers, which is really glad to see. So Stefan?

And I just would like to give a summary of the winter and also give you a flavor of what really happened during the winter season. So we had probably one of the longest or most snowy winters. We had 100 days (sic) [ 180 days ] open actually. And personally, I jumped into the ski boots already November 4, actually, and then our skiing up to the last day in April, but we kept opening to May actually, which was amazing. So really strong winter season. Then also, I must say what Martin also spoke about is we really feel that we have a stable and proven customer demand even in these recessions. And we would like to highlight that we are a stable business even though that it could be ups and downs in the economy, and this will be balanced with both international but also domestic guests, of course. And now we have a strong increase of international guests, and we have plus 24% from Denmark. We have 68% if you bundle U.K., Netherlands and Germany. And as you can see, we are down with Swedish guests. And that's very much due to the economy, and we can be very specific on where we have dropped this guest and they are very much related to spots in Sweden where we have high cost for interest rate, et cetera. So we hope that -- I don't say, maybe say promises, but what the -- what will come with lowering debts -- or not debts but the interest rates will be positive for us going forward with the combination of international guests and also Swedish. We have a record in ski days. To increase 7.4% is very strong, meaning 6.1 million and plus compared to the pandemic year. And this is a 24% increase in this 6- to 8-day SkiPass. And of course, that is very much due to the international guests, which could be helpful for us also in the coming season where we see that the international guests drive this growth for us. Ski school record, 108,000 participants, 1 of the -- or the largest ski school in the world, amazing. Ski rental increased also, and guest survey shows that we have very strong satisfaction coming and visiting us, which is, of course, very important for us going forward. Just to give you a brief indication of how our season looked like, and this is extremely transparent for us to show you this pattern. And this is also showing how -- we say how strong we are even in this mid periods that we are, of course, dependent on the break seasons, spring -- sorry, Christmas break as well as this spring break for the -- winter break, sorry, for the schools. However, we managed to balance this out. And as you can see in the end of the season, first of all, the Easter where a little bit stronger booking from guest night, but we had a very bad weather situation during Easter, which could cost us a bit of, not as expected, SkiPass sales to be honest. We lost those daily SkiPass sales since it was actually raining over Easter. Then we had a bit -- I would say, we didn't push enough for the weeks 16 and 17 as we maybe should have done, but this is a very good learning for us and something we already have started to plan for the upcoming winter season. So we look forward for how we could balance this out to become even better in the end of the season. And really much important here is that we are actually the only ski resort having open as long as we have. So we have decided also that we will continue to talk to the customers that we will have open the full season versus many other ski resorts, which are closing very much related to earlier in the season. And I think this is an important message for us we will continue to drive. And now we have completed acquisitions of the ski school in Trysil. And now we also have a very nice map of how we have all services included in -- at our destinations. So something positive and something also help us to continue to drive growth and also for our guests to recognize that SkiStar are running all these operations at the resort. Martin, back to Q3 and accumulated results.

Yes. Thank you. So if we look at our 12-month rolling result, we have an operating profit of SEK 788 million, amounting to 16% EBIT. We are -- for operating margin. And you know that we have a goal of 18%. So we have taken half of the way from 14% to 18% at the moment. And what is really positive to see is that we are continuing to strengthen our part of the profit that comes from the operations side. And you know that we had a lot of property development sales in the fourth quarter last year. And we are in dialogues in the property development part as well, and we are aiming to close transactions during Q4 as well. So we continue with our guidelines, long term between SEK 70 million and SEK 100 million. And this year, we would be aiming around the lower number in this property development and profit that comes from that part. Moving on and we look at the sales in the quarter from our different categories. You see that the main driver this quarter was sales from SkiPass, and this was mainly driven by price increases. We also have growth in ski school, but as Stefan said, this is related to the acquisition of Trysilguidene, Trysil. So all the SEK 11 million in growth from ski school comes from acquisition. And then in the quarter, we had a property development project in Åre that was sold. We have also made some sales of our vacation club apartments. So there are still transactions going on in the quarter. And those of you who have gone into the details into the report, you see that we have a loss in the property development part this quarter related to those property sales, but you also see that we made a close in June of some more developments in Åre in this project with profits. So all in all, we are moving in the right direction in that. But the -- what I want to say is that we are in dialogues here, and we are aiming to close deals in the fourth quarter. So in all in all, stable sales, mainly driven by SkiPass and property development and ski school. Looking into our different segments. We see that if we start with operation of ski resorts, here, it's a quite stable development for -- we increased the profit with SEK 14 million, and this is mainly driven by the higher sales but also lower cost for marketing and energy, for example. And in the energy sector, we start to see the prices are coming down, and that gives effect on our energy prices in this quarter. Moving on to the property development. We increased the profit in this quarter with SEK 40 million, and most of that is related to the one-offs that we had last year. We had a write-down on Vacation Club, and we had a write-down in our assets in Skiab as well. So all in all, most of the result has to do with one-off costs in the last year's results. Moving on to operations on hotel. As you saw on the previous slide, the sales is more or less the same. So here, we are really, really working hard with our cost control, which is the main reason why we increased the operation profit in the hotel segment. So they are doing a really good job focusing on cost control and optimizing the organization to the sales that they have. If we move into the quarter, it's really positive and glad to see that we have increases in all categories, and this is driven by both volume. So as Stefan referred to, we had record in skier days, and that volume increase we also see here and also price. So it's a mixture of both volume and price when we look at the year-to-date numbers. And the driver behind the volume is, as we say, the international guests. Moving on to the operating profit. Most of the profit is generated in our operations of ski resorts. And we also see that we have made quite a big step in profit, what we said, better profits in the hotel operations, which has increased the profit with SEK 40 million compared to last year, the first 3 quarters. So same pattern here. The last slide I want to talk about is our -- when it comes to numbers, is our summary on the Q3, and I have mentioned, more or less, everything except cash flow from operations. And if we look at the cash flow for the first 3 quarters, we increased the operating profit with almost 400 -- or with SEK 400 million. So we have a strong cash flow year-to-date. If we look at the Q3, the cash flow is not so strong in this quarter, but that is due to -- that we paid off some debt in this quarter that we built up during the second quarter. So that's why, I think, when we look at the cash flow, look at the long-term trend for the whole 3 quarters because that show more the pace that we are running at. And it's mainly the sales that are coming down and the profits that are coming down to cash flow. So we have a good conversion there. But we have also been efficient in our working capital this year. And we continue to have a strong financial situation. The net debt-to-EBITDA, which is one of our financial goals, is, at the moment, 1.5, which is lower than at the same time last year. So a few comments around sustainability. As Stefan mentioned, we have had a good increase in our activities around ski school. And this is also driven by the international guests because they -- that category are using our ski school a little bit more than our Swedish and Norwegian guests. So that is really positive, and we are continuing that work. We also look into the ecosystem and impact. So we have this year as before, we always do the cleaning of the mountains, and we have -- we are collecting a lot of trash. This year, we have 8.6 tons of trash we have collected, which is a 6% increase. But this is a really important project that we run every year after the end of the season. And Stefan also mentioned in the beginning that we are looking into the diversity and inclusion, and we have had an event in Hammarbybacken, where we had almost 300 youth attendees with interviews and had also lead to new employees for the upcoming season, both summer and winter. So moving on to outlook, Stefan.

Thank you very much, Martin. And I think it is a transformation to -- going to a full -- an all-year-around business is continued. And we are now opening up this weekend, fully open with summer activities and events from this week onwards. And I've got questions from some media this morning about the booking situation for the summer. And we are slightly down versus last year, and that is mainly due to more -- some technicalities, I must say. We had some big events in Åre last year, and we had no ferry to Oslo, which is passing into Hemsedal, and that's technicalities, if I say like that. But if I look into the largest resort like Trysil, we have up 9% this summer, but it's very small number still. It's -- the summer is still less than a full week of the winter break, so say, in size. So we see this as a big potential. But we continue to work with attract more international guests. This is very important for us, and we have increased our marketing activities, especially in Denmark to go directly to Danish guests, and that has paid off, as you have seen in the booking. We also continued, as Martin has said, around the property development, and we're really focusing on development of projects and detailed plans and to really be ready when the market is there. But at the same time, we're also doing business all the time here. And we are not pushing to get result in the quarter. We are looking into this on a yearly basis, and we are keeping our promises, as we have said before, to guide you to this interval we have said before. And then we continue to invest. We have lowered our investment pace for the upcoming year, and we are doing that to really -- since we are more focusing on the core business now and making sure that we are investing on the right things, so to say. And we also continue, of course, to have a good maintenance on our properties and ski lifts, et cetera. What we are really proud of right now is the winter booking. The winter bookings for next winter looks extremely strong, plus 9%. It's really driven by international guests. That's what I said. It pays off, our focus. And already 30% versus 27% last year is now booked for the winter. So super good and something really inspirational. And also, what Martin mentioned about AI, we are also now implementing this queuing system to show a real-time queuing for the lift, et cetera, and that we will be implementing, et cetera, be more specific in marketing, et cetera. So AI is something we're also looking to, very interesting actually. So just a highlight on the property development. We have a way of how we use this value chain within our property. And it is very important to show you that we are not selling off land to gain short-term profit gains. And Martin, when he showed now that we had a slow start of this year and, of course, when we develop an area like we have done in Åre, we take a lot of costs in the beginning before when we make the deals. And when we make the deals, we can make the profit in the end of such big projects, et cetera. So this is how we also develop the land and also how we can increase our profit. And just to give you a highlight of how our situation looks like right now. We have increased the pace of developed land areas in to completed detailed plans. And this is a new picture we haven't shown you before. So I think this is very important. We are both showing the SkiStar completed detailed plans and also the ongoing detailed plans. So I think that's important. But we have also added what we have in Skiab plans. So you can see the full pipeline. And here, you can also see the number of units. And also, you can see the number of beds we are planning to expand going forward. And what's very important is that this is not something we are planning to do tomorrow. This is our road map, which is up to 2030, these ongoing detailed plans and where we have -- sorry, the completed the detailed plans, which we will continue to develop versus we will continue to develop these possible detailed plans going forward. And if we do the first 2 rows, we have still 77% land left in 2030 to continue to develop. So this is a quite interesting asset we have in our books. And then we never know how much we can get for square meters, but it could be an interval between SEK 2,000 up to SEK 20,000 per square meter. And then just to give you an indication of what this land bank could have for such a value in our books. And as I show you the booking situation for how this winter season ended, we would like to give you a highlight of how this upcoming winter season look like. And the blue graph here is showing the upcoming winter and the red one for how it was last winter. And if you look into how it looks like, the 9% is actually little bit stronger booking. The first week is weaker, and that's very natural because that's a calendar effect due to when Christmas come, et cetera. So if we look into the different periods, you can see that we have a stronger booking in the -- actually each week. If I just take out week 9 and 10, and we actually then have a stronger booking. And if you then the Easter comes later this year, 16 versus 14, and that's where you can see a change there as well. But in the end, we're extremely satisfied to see again this stable booking pattern that we don't have the deep downs, et cetera. We have a stable situation in booking, which we are very proud of and also make SkiStar very unique. And also, we have heard now that many ski resorts decides to close just after Easter, but we decided to keep open to make sure that all the people who have invested in housing at our resorts could come and visit us even though that many other ski resorts have closed. So we are very happy with this situation. So lastly but not least, we are really fighting for white winters, and we are doing that together within our teams, with our organizations and also now together with many other ski resorts worldwide since we have taken an initiative to come together to make sure we can keep the white winters, which is something also we are proud of to be leading position of. So by that, we end this presentation, and we open up for Q&As to the audience.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Fredrik Lithell from Handelsbanken.

I have 2. I hope that is okay. And congrats to a good report. The first question is really about the 9% growth in bookings. You described it well. You have a good picture on it and how it flows over the various seasons. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the base of beds that you have these metrics on. So is the base of beds increasing year-over-year as well, either from your own projects or hotel beds or from that you have recruited more private homeowners into your base? It would be interesting to hear. So that's the first question. And the second one is really on the summer activities. Can you describe more what actions you take to lure people up to the mountains? What have you done in terms of smaller investments in mountain bike trails or whatever it might be? It would be interesting to get some more color on your actions there.

Thank you, Fredrik, and thank you for taking the first 2 questions, and I will actually try to answer you on those ones. So if I take the first question, and we have really actually accelerated our work to get in -- get more beds into our own booking system. And we have a slight increase of that number of beds for next season so far. Still, we are not talking about a huge amount of more beds. But I think it is 100 new properties, which has come to our booking system. So quite slow increase, but we're working more active to getting more beds into our booking systems. Then we, of course, see that more and more guests are -- not guests but owners, private house owners are renting out the beds themselves. So we see an increase on platforms like Airbnb, like Facebook and also our Norwegian, which I now forgot the name of, FINN.no, which is increasing quite dramatically. So we believe that due to this economic situation, more and more will continue to rent out the private homes actually. So that's the first question Fredrik. And let's see if that was a good answer for you. Then the second one is that we have increased our marketing quite heavily this summer to drive traffic to our destinations. At the same time, we also have made investments in a little bit more trails, so to say, bike trails. And then we have -- but not so much, actually, but we are more focusing to getting the guests up and running. Then the investment in Trysilguidene. Trysil helped us to get this climbing park. It helped us to get biking guides. It helped us to also get this rafting experience and also some new activities, and we can quite clear see that Trysil is actually the one of our summer destination, which also is most booked this summer with plus 9% but still on -- again with -- on a low level, I must say.

Very good. So on the first one there, can I just come back to the base of beds sort of? Can you, in your statistics, see, in any way, the share of SkiPass that are coming from external sort of skiers that are not booked on your rooms or beds? Is that possible for you?

Yes. We can see that a total holiday booked within skistar.com versus another bed, you have a higher turnover. The customer buys more when they are into our systems. That is something we are seeing. But the difference -- but what we are really looking to is to get more properties into our system during peak periods like Christmas, when we are fully booked. And when there are these cold beds standing empty, those beds, we really would like to have in our systems or that those bed owners actually put them out into the market because when there is -- so these cold beds, I will not use the word problem, but we would like to get more out of these cold beds like your beds, Fredrik, in Sälen or Martin's beds in Sälen, when they are not there, I really would like to have them in our system. And Martin, you would like to add something into Fredrik's question as well?

Yes. The second question around the summer. We are also continuing to develop our activity passes in all destinations, putting more and more of our activities into one pass at all destinations. We started with that last year, and we are continuing to develop that product as well this year.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Karl-Johan Bonnevier from DNB Markets.

Just to continue on Fredrik's question on the mediated accommodation during this season, could you give us a feeling for how big increase you saw in the object nights that you mediated during the season to get the full number for it?

Yes, we increased last season with 5% versus the year before, so -- if I made a summary of that one. So -- which, of course, helped us. And that was one of our best-booked seasons actually. I think it was the second or third best-booked season from a number of properties or nights, so to say.

You showed the weekly pattern. What would the occupancy level be for the whole season?

What we see is that if we look at the different destinations, the pattern that we have is most of our destinations, Sälen, Trysil, they are really quite good booking all over the season. And then we see a more traditional booking pattern when we go to Vemdalen, for example. The highest period, the New Year, Christmas, February break and Easter break, we are more or less fully booked on all our destinations in those. And we give you a number that...

I don't have the number in -- we can come back to that maybe because I don't have the occupancy rate for -- in average. But I -- for example, Hemsedal has almost been 100% the whole season. Trysil has been close to 100% a lot of weeks. And Sälen, even those week 2 to 6 in Sälen is around 85%, 90%. The occupancy rates is -- were very strong. But compared to Vemdalen, and we have during week 2 to 6, for example, we are only around 50%, 60% booked, which means that, that is the one of the destinations we need to push a bit more, so to say, and that could be a bit of a destination question because if we look into Trysil and Sälen, they are closest to southern part and the one which has the highest rate of international guests, so to say. That's why Fredrik's and your questions are quite important to get even more beds going forward.

Exactly, exactly. And then maybe if you start to increase the granularity slightly more also on the hotel operation, what kind of occupancy level you have in your own operation and what kind of room rate achievement you have and so on, that would be a good number for the future if nothing else, if you don't have it now.

Yes, but I can give you a comment on the occupancy rate on the hotels and, more or less, all of them. I mean we have quite small ones in Vemdalen, but if we look at the other ones, they are more or less fully occupied. We are talking about 95% in average there. So we have really, really high occupancy rates in the hotels.

Very good. And when you look at the demand now, good growth in SkiPass sales during this year looking at the volume and, obviously, good price achieved as well. When you look at the mix there, how much is coming out of new customers that you haven't seen before? And how much is coming out of recurring clients?

If I just take the Danish customer, which I think is quite interesting, we had more than 50% of new Danish customers coming into us, which was super interesting to follow that number. And in general, also, the Danes increased with 24% last winter. So we can see that we have a lot of -- I must say, a lot of international guests which are coming to us. And they like to come to us, not only because the weak currency. They have decided to come and visit us due to the climate change that they doesn't dare to book in Europe because of snow conditions, and they book at our destinations because of -- that they want to make sure that they have snow on the winter holiday.

And do you see a bigger percentage coming through the airlines starting to fly more on your Scandinavian Mountain Airport and towards Åre or Oslo? Is that possible to follow in the statistics in some way?

Yes, we see an increase in number of flights and also number of passengers coming into Scandinavia Mountains Airport in Sälen. And most of the guests, the passengers that fly in chose to go to a SkiStar resort in Trysil, and here is the hotel apartments are really, really attractive for those kind of guests flying in. So we are increasing number of guests coming in with flights mainly driven by U.K. and Netherlands, but also a Danish customer is also flying in.

Do you have any idea how much more capacity is going to be put into the market next year? I've seen SAS being now talking about it and your Dutch airline also talking about it. Do you know how much more capacity they will have in next year?

No, not in numbers. We don't know. We know it will be an increase in capacity to next season. There are some new directions that have been announced. So the -- and I think that will continue, see if there will come out something more. But an increased capacity, but we don't know exactly the number.

And Stefan, you mentioned the Swedish customer being slightly more reluctant during the season also creating maybe a slower end of season than you had expected. How can you drive, say, the local customers more forceful going into the next season?

I think it is -- if I look into the booking pattern between week 51 and week 10, we are quite -- we're very comfortable with that booking. And then if I look into the period 11, 18 Easter is always -- not always, but it's normally a good booking. So for us, it is to make sure that the customer decides to come to us and doesn't go somewhere else, and we will secure that with different type of offers and making sure that we will have the customer visiting our destinations because there is a market out there and we want to make sure to using our strength to get in even more visitors to our destinations during this period of time. And not to forget maybe this is the best period in the mountains as well, to be honest. I mean we have long, bright days with a good climate normally and fantastic condition. So personally, I just think we need to push that and show pictures from these lovely places during that period of time.

I like your sales pitch. I like your sales pitch, Stefan. One final question from me. Looking at the CapEx, SEK 330 million that you're highlighting for the next fiscal year, is that a good new level, so to say, to reach your 2030 targets and what you'd want to do in strengthening the safety operations and also do what you look to do on the property development side?

What we -- we continue to say the SEK 330 million that we have had for this year and the upcoming winter. And what we have said and repeat what we said in the Capital Markets Day, we will finance our CapEx development with our own cash flow going forward. So depending on how the seasons go and what cash flow we have, we will adapt the CapEx to that. I think SEK 330 million is on the low side. We will probably average higher than SEK 330 million, but we will probably not be as high as the SEK 850 million we had the year before the last 2 years.

Something in between will be good, maybe. No, but I think it is a good ballpark from you, Martin. And I think this is very important that we had maybe -- not maybe, we had the debt we needed to take care of the last years and that we have taken care of. And now we are in a much better situation, and we have a very good road map of where we want to invest and how we want to invest then. Next year, we are preparing and not the upcoming winter, but we talked about the new lift in Trysil, and that is what we are preparing for, for example, and we need to do it in steps. So we are very clear on where we want to do it and how we want to do it. And that feels very good.

There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to yourselves, Stefan, Martin.

Thank you very much for the questions. And we will come back to be a little bit more clear about the rate, which was asked for next call. But we feel very good about this quarter, about this past season but also how the outlook looks like. And we are quite comfortable about very nice mix of how our bookings look like, how we have managed our price increases, how we also have managed our cost base and then also that the last question, how we will handle this CapEx situation. So very much looking forward for ending this fiscal year and then very much looking forward for a new upcoming fiscal year starting in September. So thank you very much for listening to us, and we wish you all a happy Midsummer.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.