The Gym Group plc (GYM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Gym Group's half year results. I'm Richard Darwin, the CEO. With me today is Ann-Marie Murphy, our Chief Operating Officer. Obviously, we're in a bit of an interim period at the moment before Luke Tait joins us as CFO in October, but Ann-Marie and I will do a bit of a double act on these results. As you know, we very recently did the Capital Markets Day where we did a pretty extensive analysis of the -- what we see is very strong medium-term prospects for our business, and those slides are clearly on the website along with the webcast. So today, we're going to concentrate on current year trading and the progress that we are making against our plan. So the headline is that we are continuing to see very good levels of recovery in our core membership. We're seeing real momentum in our financial performance, and our growth plans are on track and our operating metrics are very strong. So if we just start with the recovery. Our membership is up 10% since the beginning of the year, so 790,000. We're seeing, obviously, the usual seasonal patterns with students leaving and some people choosing to workout outside. But overall, worth noting that we're up 44% -- over 44% since the last closure period of February '21, so over a 16-month period. And that's a very good level of recovery that we're seeing. The measure of like-for-like that we choose to show is like-for-like revenue against the sites that were opened at the end of 2018 and for June, that's up to 90%. And as we'll see later in the presentation, a little bit stronger in the north, a little bit less in the South and London. But overall confidence that we'll see a widespread recovery overall. And importantly, this is all translating into EBITDA recovery as well. So GBP 17 million in H1. And we'll show later that based on our Q2 performance, we're operating at an annualized run rate of GBP 46 million in Q2. And that's really important because it gives us momentum for delivering the full year results. Our site rollout is on plan. Opened 7 in the first half, also acquired the 3 Fitness First sites, bring us up to 212. We've opened more in July. So we're now up to 215 sites. And our pipeline is very strong, fairly uniquely, we've exchanged on everything that we have in the pipeline and the rollout for the second half. And that means that our guidance of 28 for the year is very secure. And as I said at the beginning, our operating metrics are all looking very strong. Our member satisfaction at an all-time high. Our tech platform launched very well in the half, and we're already beginning to see some of the benefits on traffic and conversion from that. And our brand project is set to deliver in quarter 3. In fact, watch out for our digital switchover later on this month on our website and app to the new brand. And we're already deploying the visual identity in our new sites. So we've just opened, for instance, 21,000 square feet in Paddington, in the Paddington Basin, an absolute fabulous site and the new branding looks great there. So as I said in the statement this morning, this is a business that is in very good health, operating very effectively. There's clearly parts of the market that are still coming back post COVID, particularly those that are reliant on office workers. But we are, as a business, very well positioned to recover further and deliver our outturn for the full year. And the actions that we've taken in quarter 2 gives us a lot of confidence, therefore, about our full year performance. And clearly we've got the opportunity also to expand very rapidly in the future. So just covering the financial measures, and these will show a substantial uplift versus H1 of last year, clearly when we had the 3 months of closure. So revenue up 187%, GBP 84.2 million. And overall, what I think that shows is not just the scale of recovery we've seen in H1, but actually how impacted we were in H1 of 2021, when we couldn't charge our members. EBITDA of GBP 17 million. Interestingly by quarter 2, our margin is at 26.5% overall. Now you'll know that we were around 30% pre-COVID, but I think the Q2 performance shows the progress that we're making. And clearly this is an operationally geared model. So revenue increases translate pretty quickly to EBITDA increases. Still showing a loss, an adjusted loss pretax of GBP 4.7 million, but clearly greatly improved on last year, and we expect to be profitable in 2023. And as we said in the Capital Markets Day, our target on PBT is GBP 40 million to GBP 50 million in 2025. And encouragingly back to free cash generation. So we're covering part of the expansion that we've done in H1. And our leverage ratio is falling based on LTM EBITDA to 1.9x. So a strong financial position. We expect continued membership and EBITDA growth, but also a strong balance sheet. And I think that's really important because there are a number of landlords who really still care about the strength of the covenant in deciding who they choose to be the tenants for their best sites. Just on to revenue. And we spoke quite a lot about price increases, clearly at the Capital Markets Day, and we put a substantial number through GBP 1.62 headline price increase in April. And there was lots of work that backed up our rationale for doing this. It's landed well. And clearly the nature of our model means that that leads to yield increases over time. But we're also seeing strong levels of LIVE IT. So the price increase that I referred to equates to just 8.4% in the half, no impact on acquisition volumes. And the reason for that is that this is very much analytically based in our decision about which sites to put up, and that gives us the ability to do that in the future as well and selectively do further price increases based on our analysis of the data. Importantly we still remain the lowest price operator in local markets. That's what the table on the bottom right shows you. So the gap has narrowed from GBP 4 to GBP 2.72 to GBP 3.33, but we think there is still the capacity to close that gap further. And as I mentioned, LIVE IT has been strong, so up to 28.7% from 27.1% at the beginning of the year. And that's really the growth in our footprint, giving more scope for multi-site memberships, whether that be in London, Leeds, Manchester, the big cities or as we've done, where we've opened clusters of sites together, so we opened Abingdon and Oxford at the same time. We opened [indiscernible] at the first time. And all those sort of decisions help the LIVE IT percentage overall. So we think as a business, we are very well positioned with our value proposition, and that gives us the ability to withstand the cost of living issues that are out there and in time, benefit from further trading down or even as other operators fail. Our income statement reflects a period of continuous opening clearly in H1, but also the fact that we've got 22 more sites at the end of the period than we had in 2021. We're actually now in a position where our revenue in this half is greater than the revenue was in H1 of 2019, which was the last clean pre-COVID period. So we're up 13.5%. And I think it's just worth reiterating, again, we did this at the Capital Markets Day in the last results. Just how well positioned we are in terms of our cost base to withstand some of the high inflation that we are seeing. And that's because the majority of our rents are on fixed rental uplifts, about 70% of our leases. We've got a labor-light model with our PT model. We have no cost of sale effectively and marketing, cleaning, repairs and maintenance, they're all under our control. So it's just utilities where we've seen the impact, and we guided to that impact in the full year results earlier this year. So we're now in a position where we've fixed our utilities, effectively fixed 100% until the end of 2022, and we are 70% fixed in 2023, and we are selectively, on an opportunistic basis, taking some fixes as we see them through '24 and even into early '25. So I think we got the benefit as a business of having a very high margin business, but still with a real low-cost mentality, and that's critical. But as we said at the CMD, we're also one of the only scale operators that have made significant investments in our tech platform, our brand and clearly are rolling out very strongly in terms of the number of sites. So we think we are very well positioned to trade very well into the future. And just now on to cash. So as I said at the outset, we're now beginning to see free cash generation. And because we start from a relatively unleveraged position, it means that we're able to operate at pretty sensible levels of leverage even as we expand rapidly. So we've seen some working capital outflows in the half. And part of that is the rent deferments where we agreed with landlords to not pay some rent during the periods of closure. So about GBP 1.6 million of that working capital outflow. But we're nearly there on that actually. So we've only got GBP 0.8 million, GBP 800,000, left on the rent deferments to come, and that will be spread across '22 and '23. And then a bit of a normalization of our net current liabilities position. We've restarted our maintenance CapEx program. Well, look, we've always said maintenance CapEx is really important to make sure that we have a high-quality offer for our members. And in H2, we will spend some more on kit replacement, particularly on the easyGym and Lifestyle site, which was something that we were planning to do pre-COVID, but obviously we postponed when the crisis hit. And then just on expansionary CapEx, 2 components there. The 7 sites that we've opened in the half. We've also had a number of sites that are under construction at the period end and then also a net GBP 3 million spent on our tech platform. And then final component of the cash flow is the Fitness First consideration. And there, the assignments are going very well, and we expect to be on site in H2 to convert those to our branding. So the debt level of GBP 57.6 million, very much in line with our expectations. And then just moving on to our leverage position. We're now at a point where our leverage levels are within the target range that we set out at the Capital Markets Day, and that's on the back of a good and improving LTM EBITDA position. So that LTM is GBP 30.8 million at the end of June, just to be kind of crystal clear, that's EBITDA in old money. So it's after normalized rent. And our leverage was 2.2x at March and now 1.9x at June. And again, just to be completely clear, that's against kind of external debt or non-property net debt, as we call it. It's not including the capitalization of the leases. So I think it's really encouraging that we're within that 1.5x to 2x leverage range that we set out at the CMD. We don't expect significant improvement on that in the second half, and that's because of the second half weighted capital program associated with the rollout. But I think the other very encouraging piece in the statement this morning was on the annualized run rate of EBITDA. And if we take that off the quarter 2 performance of GBP 11.5 million, that gives us an annualized run rate in quarter 2 of GBP 46 million of EBITDA. And I think what that gives us is some very clear building blocks as to the full year performance that we expect. So we get the benefit of the yield increases that we've already put through coming through into H2. We get membership growth from the autumn. We do expect a good student recruitment season, and we get the new sites that we're opening. And added to that is an ongoing level of very strong cost control. So as we said at the Capital Markets Day, ours is a very disciplined approach to capital allocation. We've set up a very clear framework that we'll operate under. And we continue to see a very significant market opportunity for organic site rollout and a property market where we can secure those quality sites and then the 30% target returns. And as we generate excess capital, we will determine at that time how we deploy it. So that's what I want to say by way of introduction. I'm going to hand over to Anne-Marie, who's going to give us the operational update.

Thank you, Richard, and Good morning, everybody. So as Richard said, I'm going to talk about our current trading and operational performance following on from the update that I gave last at Capital Markets Day. So our business is stronger than ever. We're on track with our trading recovery plan, and we're in line with our expectations. We're seeing our normal seasonal lull that we would expect to see in July and August. And this is down to factors such as students fixed terms coming to an end before the new one start in September and people are more likely to workout outside at this time of year. You can see here on the slide that we're at 90% overall of the 2019 like-for-like revenue for June '22. Our next peak trading period is in September and October. And I have to say that we have never been in better operational shape to maximize our performance in this important peak trade period. The points on the slide and our operational metrics demonstrate this. So for example, our members are more engaged than ever with an uplift in the percentage of members exceeding the 4 visits per month. Our re-joiner rate is strong at 45%, and we reached an all-time high of 58.5% of our members rating us 5 out of 5. Retaining our inclusive, high-performing culture remains critical to our continued success and future growth. So I'm really delighted that we've also had our Investors in People Gold reaffirmed recently. Our new sites are performing really well for us, and we have the largest opening plan ever. As Richard said, so far this year, we've already opened 10 sites, 7 organic 3 acquisitions, and our pipeline is developing nicely, ready for 2023 and beyond. Our ability to expand rapidly is further supported by our capability to optimize our formats of anything from 7,000 to 21,000 square feet. But critically, the new sites we're opening are performing really well, and they're hitting 82% of the appraised revenue by the 6-month period. So you can see that we're on track to deliver our 2022 target, and we're building strong momentum in our pipeline for 2023 and beyond. As Richard mentioned, our new platform has been delivered since we last updated, and it's been successfully deployed. It's delivering all of its post-launch goals. It's maintaining strong levels of traffic conversion and Google rankings. And we've also seen improvements in speed and the ability that we have to remove some of the areas of friction in the joint journey and drive up the SEO benefits. We expect to continue to see the benefits of this investment in the coming months and as we go into this next critical trade period. We're particularly excited about the brand transformation work that we talked about at Capital Markets Day, and this is well underway with really great response from our members wherever they come into contact with the new brand. As Richard mentioned, all our new sites are being opened in the new branding, and we've commenced the rebranding of the existing estate, which we're all incredibly excited about. Our new creative platform will be ready to launch for our September marketing campaign, and this will be the first campaign on a national basis across multi-channels using our new brand, [ VI ], delivering increased customer awareness, and this is a really big step forward for us. On sustainability, we continue to drive momentum on achieving our sustainability goals, all around breaking down barriers to fitness for all. We're really proud to be the first carbon-neutral gym in the U.K., and we're well on our way to delivering our net zero commitment. Since Capital Markets Day, we've also made a submission to the carbon disclosure project, showing our ongoing commitment to reducing our carbon footprint. We continue to be dedicated to increasing our social value, but also helping our members to get the greatest value they can from their membership now more than ever. So in close for me, operationally, we're in the best shape, delivering to our members every single day. We're really ready for the next trade period. I'm very excited about our future growth and scale. I'm going to hand back to you, Richard.

Thank you, Ann-Marie. Let me just summarize before we hand over to Q&A. Overall, we know this is a challenging economic environment, but we think the Gym Group is very well placed to prosper. Our recovery is progressing well, so the 44% growth that I mentioned since February '21. And as we said in the statement, July trading is also in line with our expectations. Our yield increases have landed well. We're seeing strong LIVE IT and that will feed through into yield increases in H2. The tech platform is going to be a really strong enabler, and we can't stress this enough for future performance, both in terms of enhanced levels of traffic, but also our conversion rates. And we'll continue to invest into our app. And as Ann-Marie said, the rebranding is on track and is rolling out as we speak. And we continue to see good new site opportunities. We'll grow the estate by 13% this year and do it in a disciplined way in terms of our ability to generate our target levels of return. And as we look ahead to the second half, we do expect a strong student period. All the macro indicators tell us that in person teaching university, the number of students going to university will be very strong, and that will be a benefit for us because we've got a number of very strong student sites. And there will be some further normalization of the working environment. So this will be the biggest second half ever for us in terms of the number of new sites, so 18 new openings, but if you include the conversions of the 3 that we acquired, 21 in total. So my confidence and that of my team remains very strong, both about the scale of the opportunity, but also about the way that we are executing against it. And all of that is giving us real momentum in our performance as we go into the second half. So thank you for listening, and Ann-Marie and I will now take any questions.

James Wheatcroft from Jefferies. 3 if I may. Firstly, when do you think you'll be back to sort of 2019 levels this year? Secondly, maybe give us a bit more color around sort of yield in the second half of the year. It's obviously been a strong performance in the first half. How do we think that's going to shape up in the second half? And thirdly, at the Capital Markets Day, you're talking about a third price point. Perhaps you could give us some updates on that, please.

So in terms of 2019 levels, what we've said is that we think we'll be at 100% like-for-like on the measure that we show by the end of 2022. And that will be obviously the back end of 2022. And there's 2 real strong drivers behind that. One is we're expecting, as I said, a good September, October campaign, that's when a lot of our marketing lands, particularly associated with the new brand. But then we've also just got the impact of the yield increases that are already kind of effectively baked into the system, and that's because price increases are for new members, there is some selective repricing of the base as well. And so as you can see, that takes a little bit of time to build. I think the best indicator was a number that we put into the statement, which was yield of GBP 18.09 in quarter 2. So you can see how that is kind of building well compared to the overall yield that we had in H1 as a total. So that's average revenue per member per month. And then just in terms of the third price point, we're effectively in what we call discovery at the moment, which is kind of looking at the kind of the technical elements associated with that. And then we'll work out just exactly how long that process is before we launch it. I mean the reality is, are we going to launch a significant new price point ahead of our key trading period in January and February probably unlikely. So it's more likely to be something that gets launched as we go into 2023.

Will from Peel Hunt. Could you talk a little bit more about how you are using data to decide your price rises and where they go through, interested to know the breakdown of what sites are being cited and what they are allocated to?

Ann-Marie, do you want to take that one?

Yes. So we use a mixture of, obviously, data that we have from the capability that we've got in the team that we've been developing. We've got some really talented individuals that are able to really look at impacts on a slight level of price rises and churn and local market. But what we're also able to do is combine that with the local knowledge of the team on the ground and local competition. So it's really -- we've got a really good process in place that really enables us to get proper dynamic local pricing, which is why, as Richard said, we're able to really be quite tactical about when and how we make price rises on a site-by-site basis, which has meant that we haven't seen any impact in acquisition as a result of it, and it's something we can monitor through the data.

There's so many data points that clearly go into that, but I think the kind of the key message is that we're able to systemize that whole process through the quality of the data team that we've got and also our ability to gather that data and monitor it. And what that does, it really kind of flags the sites that we think can take price increase. And then the other thing I'd just add, which we spoke about at the Capital Markets Day, there was also the kind of the call-based piece associated with this, which was talking to our members and talking to our potential members about how they saw the value perception of our products. And what that showed was that we didn't need to have the sort of price gap that we had because actually, our product was as good as anybody's. And I'll say, I would encourage anybody to go to Paddington see the quality of that product and see just exactly what a proper kind of a low-cost operator can produce. And you can see -- I'd say it stands against kind of mid-market and even some premium gyms as well.

Owen Shirley from Berenberg. Most of my questions actually ended up being asked. But so perhaps as a sort of follow-on one around like-for-like revenue. You obviously have said you think it can get back to 100% by the end of this year. I just wondered if you could kind of follow up to give you -- to get a sense of what gives you confidence or conviction in that. So I don't know if perhaps you could talk about how like-for-like revenues have trended over time, maybe any differences you see between the north and the south where they seems to be quite big. The north is back to 99% and sort of anything else you think is important that we should be thinking about that gives you confidence you can get to that 100%?

So I mean, we've built nicely clearly to get to the 90%. I think partly already answered this, which is we've obviously got some yield benefits that are effectively already in the system, and it just kind of takes time as new members join some of the other ones kind of churn off, and that leads to higher prices overall and chose to kind of yield benefit. And that will continue. And then I think in terms of getting back to the volumes, which is the other kind of key component part of it, we don't expect to get back to kind of 100% of volumes. In fact, there is some sites where strategic -- we decided that we won't fill them up as much as possible. And I think you see the benefit of that in the member satisfaction scores that we've got. But the period when we land our marketing, we see students come back, and we see a bit more normalization of working patterns is September and October, and it's at that point that we expect a further uplift in that like-for-like measure. So I think there's a couple of components. Why are we seeing differences between the North and the South. To our mind, I think it's that workers, perhaps in the North are a little bit more mobile. There's probably a little bit more working from home that's taken place in the South. And obviously, in the first half, as we know, there's still been a couple of waves of COVID, which then kind of just reinforces that working from home. But what we expect is that as we get into the autumn, that I think a number of companies will just established a pattern by which their people are working from the office. And we think we're very well positioned on that clearly because with a nationwide footprint often with a gym close to the home as well as close to the office, then we think that, that will give a bit of a boost. I mean, I think it's worth again saying, actually, we're not really that exposed to city center sites that are purely dependent on workforce. It's probably only about kind of 10 in our estate that you would put in that category -- where we've got other city center sites, it's because they're strong student sites, and those are the ones, again, that we expect to have a strong September and October.

The only thing that I would add to that is that we've got this year is the brand work. It's a big step for us, as I said, and really will have an impact on improving customer awareness as well.

And then another question on LIVE IT. I think I recall when you first launched that you sort of hope you could get to 30%, and you've done really well. It's pretty much there now. So is there anything you're seeing in other international markets that makes you think it could get higher than that or any additional products you could add into it to try and drive penetration, I suppose, broad question, how are you thinking about that?

So kind of part of the whole work on 3 price product architecture is to kind of think about what are the different products that we have in the different price points. So I think it's got a very good question. We've deliberately, as you know, we've never given targets on LIVE IT because in many ways, it would be partly speculation on our part. What we know is that as we extend the footprint and we grow with more and more sites. So we've got 67 sites inside the M25. All that helps LIVE IT. We've got a substantial number of sites in Birmingham more to come. All that kind of helps the overall LIVE IT take up. So I think that we're encouraged by the performance, but we think there is more to come.

Sorry, something Ann-Marie said, you on your brand awareness and your new branding, how are you tracking extra membership numbers or a growth in membership just above and beyond membership growth from new sites? How are you doing that? It would be interesting.

Just as a result of the brand work itself, you mean? So I think there's a range and you need -- Emily would give you the technical answer to this because it's going to be far more complicated than I would be able to give. But we are able to look at the search terms, we're able to see what the level of awareness is where we're launching the brand locally and as Richard said in August, we're going to be doing the digital switchover. So that happens first. So we'll be able to see what impact that has on its own. And as I said, as we open each new gym, they're on the new brand awareness. So it's not a big bang. We are able to start to see how the new brand has the impact. And anecdotally, out in the gyms that have got the new branding that there is a lot of excitement. It looks really impactful on high streets and shopping centers. So it's a whole range of things as we go live with it. I don't know if you've got any more.

I mean I think we went into quite a lot of detail at this on the Capital Markets Day. So it's kind of worth looking back on some of those slides. We were pretty honest that our brand awareness is not where we want it to be. And we think there is opportunity if we can improve that brand awareness. And one of the ways that you do that is by having a more distinctive VI, a unique brand name as opposed to the generic name and memorable marketing. And we're planning all 3, and that is the brand project in its entirety. And we think over time, that will lead to improved brand awareness. And importantly, that will lead to better SEO in particular, which will generate more traffic and therefore, generate more membership. Putting an exact number on it is a little bit difficult in that respect, but that's the theory behind it. I think sorry, one more in the front here, and then we'll go to questions from the webcast.

Just a quick question around what percentage of the membership base we can expect being for students in H2? And maybe touch upon some of the promotional activities, discounting that you might do to attract that audience?

Students come in 2 ways. One is that they can buy a fixed-term contract from us. So typically, we try to sell them a 9-month contract when they get to university in September and October, so they can use the gym through the entirety of their student year or obviously, they can just take the monthly membership as they do, and then sometimes they may stay with us for 3 months or they may cancel perhaps at Christmas and then start again when they come back in January. So that's how we deal with students. There's a number of different channels by which we can attract students. So as a result of that, it's actually quite hard to kind of put an exact number in terms of what is the proportion. We probably think it's somewhere between kind of 20% of that sort of order would be students. But that don't take that as an exact measure. But as I say, I think we're encouraged by some of the macro indicators that we're seeing around September and October, and therefore, the number of students that will be going back to university and our ability to tap into them. And even since 2019, for instance, when we had a number of strong sites, we've opened some more very good student sites. So Leeds Headingley, for instance, is absolutely kind of fabulous site anybody kind of knows Leeds and it's very close to both the University of Leeds and also where all the students come back and live, I think we've opened one in the West End of Glasgow, which is very strong. We've got another one coming in Selly Oak, very close to the University of Birmingham. So strongly located student sites has always been part of what we do. We know that they can be very successful and they will build on some of the established student sites that we've got in the portfolio already.

The first question on the webcast is from Tim Barrett at Numis. He would like to know more about the GBP 1.62 headline price rise and what number of sites have had an increase compared to those where you've chosen to wait for now? And his second question is on the 87% revenue recovery in the South as not all of those sites will be in big cities. So how are smaller market town is doing?

So in terms of the GBP 1.62, it's not completely across the board, but probably about 180 sites in total. So there's a limited number that didn't have the price increase. And as I say, that would be analytically based. And in terms of some of the smaller towns, so we're really pleased with the performance that we've seen in some of the smaller towns. I mentioned this at the CMD, these are places such as Abingdon, Paddington, Perth in Scotland, building on some of the original kind of small box that we did, such as Newark and Lowestoft and then also Beverley. And actually, we're seeing really good levels of take up, good levels of penetration. And that's behind our confidence that we spoke about a lot of the Capital Markets Day of our ability to do anything from 7,000 square feet to 21,000 square feet and actually go into so many more communities. And that's been the big change for us actually over the last 4 years. I mean, 4 years ago, we would have been very much kind of geared around just doing 15,000, 16,000 square feet boxes in fairly large catchments. And it's our ability to have a range of formats that goes into a number of different types of location that is behind how we're able to grow so rapidly and grow faster than we've ever done previously.

The next question is from Richard Taylor at Barclays. From your EBITDA run rate, this implies GBP 14 million EBITDA required per quarter in H2 to consensus EBITDA. Can you help us with the bridge there versus the GBP 11.5 million in Q2 -- some of this will be pricing and how that's working through the business and some depends on sign-ups in the autumn. Given that you know your pricing, the variable element is members. So what's the member uplift required to hit the required H2 EBITDA performance?

So firstly, Rich is correct. So we need GBP 28 million to hit the consensus of GBP 45 million in total. There is obviously a substantial amount of pricing, pricing comes in 2 ways, both the pricing increases that are baked in. And obviously, as more new members join a subject to those higher prices, but also the repricing of the base and also the LIVE IT percentage. So all those kind of contribute to the price increase. As we look into September and October, without kind of getting into the minutia because it really depends on what's an individual kind of analyst models. What we would say is that we look to September and October, and we would think that we would see a fairly typical September and October of what we've experienced before. And so I think that is probably kind of the key assumption now. It then goes back to our confidence about our ability to deliver that. And where we see that confidence is for all the operational pieces that Ann-Marie spoke about, the fact that we've got our marketing will land, obviously using the new brand and the new visual identity and then kind of boosted by some of the new sites that we've already got opened. So obviously, we've got kind of 10 open in the first half and some of the ones that are still maturing, importantly from 2021 where we opened 19 sites. So all those over time as they mature begin to throw off kind of more cash, more EBITDA and contribute to that overall performance. So we've got a number of building blocks and that's behind our confidence. And I think that annualized run rate in quarter 2 was really important because it demonstrates actually our ability to generate those sort of levels of EBITDA, but also importantly, that it's a trajectory and a growth that we're on in terms of increasing that overall.

The next question is from Mark Irvine-Fortescue at Stifel. You said you don't expect like-for-like volumes to recover to 2019 levels in 2022. And in some cases, you're seeing positive feedback from less busy sites. Do you expect volumes to fully recover at some point? And if so, when?

Again, we've spoken about what we expect for '22. We're not kind of baking in to get 10% of like-for-like volumes. And so I said some sites, we just don't think will ever take there effectively. Other sites may be able to go through that 100% barrier. Perhaps if they still had a little element of immaturity in them when they were kind of in the numbers in 2019, but I think we're very comfortable overall that for us, this is about optimizing revenue as opposed to optimizing volume. And that's kind of a really important kind of part of that is embedded throughout our business and throughout the ops teams. This is about how do we actually get to the optimal revenue for each site. As we said, it's very data-driven in determining how we do that and therefore, what is the right level of price increase and how does that impact on the volumes overall. And ultimately, our market positioning still puts us is in a fantastic position as the lowest price, low-cost operator. And so therefore, we have got that scope to be able to take some price.

The next questions are from Sahill Shan at Singer Capital Markets. He would like more detail on how the sector fared during the recession and more color on the site pipeline since the Capital Markets Day. He would also like to know the current covenant ratios.

Ann-Marie, do you want to talk a little bit about sector in terms of different parts of the market, kind of mid-market premium, local authority.

I think what we've seen as we've come out of the COVID crisis is that the low sector market has done exceptionally well, and that's why we've continued to grow. That's why we were really, really ambitious in restarting our opening program as early as we did. I think that you can -- we've seen in previous recessions that in times of difficulty financially, people will invariably see that their mental and physical health is really important, and we'll look to see where they can maybe downgrade, and that's where I think we can really win in that environment. But something that I've -- we've seen from research from our members, and you can see it all over media and journalists reports that people really saw that the outcomes if you got COVID was so much better the fitter and healthy that you were and also the mental health impacts are really much more known about of being physically fit. So I think actually, it's put the sector and particularly the low-cost part of the sector in a really good place. And that's what you're seeing in terms of our level of ambition around our growth.

And just for Sahill's benefit, there's a chart in the back of the pack, which sets out the LDC data, which came out slightly after the Capital Markets Day, so were able to include it. in there, and that talks about the level of recovery overall across different sectors, whether that be premium local authority or mid-market. So worth having a look at that. I mean, the headline is it's not back up to kind of pre-CVD levels yet, but actually the impact relatively limited. Sahill, you asked about the site pipeline. As I said in our comments, we are -- have all our sites exchanged for H2, so complete visibility on the 28 that we're opening in the second half. And then we look forward to our guidance, which is at least 25 to 30. We've got confidence that at least that number, we've either got exchanged or in legals. Now clearly, our experience is when you get to a site that's in legals, actually, we're quite a long way down the line. We wouldn't see -- expect to see too many kind of dropouts there. So again, kind of confidence in '23. And we're still building obviously more in '23 because we've got a long way to go, and then also building into '24. So again, confident about the opportunities that are coming up and our ability to hit the sort of target levels of return that we'd expect.

The next question is from Brett [ Rogers ] at Middleton Enterprises. A question about membership growth of 10% compared to basic fits 31% across Europe in the last 6 months and why this is lower?

I can't speak for basic. What I do know is that there were different timings of lockdown, and that's one of the reasons why I referred to the 44% that we've seen since our low point, which is when we were closed in February '21, which I think corresponds extremely well against other kind of European operators, actually, again, we can see it in the Capital Markets Day. At the end of '21, The Gym Group almost had the highest membership growth of any operator in the market. Clearly, these things then extend over a period of time, which is why now we're talking about a 16-month period from that February '21, but I think 44% is a very strong level of recovery.

And the next question is from Juan Herrero at BlueBay Asset Management. He asks if the plan is to raise additional debt to cover 2022 expansionary CapEx requirements and what options or plans do you have?

So we're able to cover our 2022 expansionary CapEx from our existing debt facilities.

Last questions are from Nick [ Stratas ]. What are you seeing in the market? Are you gaining share and are weaker operators quitting or not yet? And finally, the second question is about [ Peddy ] retiring and if you expect any effect from John becoming Chairman, for example, accelerated or deaccelerated rollout or any other types of initiatives?

So we put this in the statement just in terms of the share overall based on what is defined as a low-cost gym by LDC, our market share on a number of gyms is up to 28%. That's the highest in our history, and I think we would expect to continue to gain share as we open gym. Some low-cost gym operators interestingly have raised their prices so much that actually by LDCs terms, they're no longer defined as low-cost gyms. And again, that is just feels like opportunity for us when we compete against them, in particular, local markets. The weak operators' piece is something I spoke a little bit about at the Capital Markets Day. What we're beginning to see is a bit of a trend where individual operators fail and that gives us an opportunity to work directly with the landlord and taking particular sites. It's not a huge trend yet. But I think as we go through the autumn, that may accelerate. And some of that comes from a fall out from COVID where they weren't -- just weren't paying their rents. And so therefore, don't have the ability to catch up in the way that we have done. And then obviously, [ Peddy ] retiring, clearly, she'd done 7 years. We know the kind of corporate governance rules in terms of how long you can do, but we think John kind of taking over with such knowledge of the industry and knowledge of this business will be a real positive for our business overall. Very good. So thank you to everyone for joining, both those that are in person and also on the webcast. We've done these half year results a little bit earlier than we've done previously, and we're keen to get back to business. So that's what we're going to do from now. And we will kind of clearly look to do another update later in the year once we've had the fairly important September and October trading period, but thank you for joining today.