Viva Leisure Limited (VVA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Viva Leisure Limited FY 2026 Financial Results. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Harry Konstantinou, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us for Viva Leisure's FY '26 Full Year Results Presentation. I'm joined today by our CFO, Mr. Kym Gallagher. This morning, we released our results announcement and investor presentation to the ASX. We are webcasting live, and this recording will also be available on our investor website later today. The agenda follows our usual structure. I will take you through the results and the operating performance, hand to Kym for the detailed financial review, then come back to cover outlook and strategy before we open for questions. Before we start, let me frame the year. FY '26 was the year we told the market we would slow the rollout and prove the operating model. We did both. We exceeded guidance on all 5 metrics, including the NPAT guidance we upgraded in May. We funded the entire growth program from operating cash flow for the first time in our history. We reduced leverage. And on the strength of that, the Board has declared the first dividend in Viva's history. We have also made the most significant structural decision since listing, which is to give our payments and technology business its own structure and its own name. That business is Meridium Global, and we'll come back to that later in this presentation. This is my seventh results presentation to shareholders and my 22nd year leading this amazing business. 18 months ago, we told the market that the priority was shifting. We had built the network. The job from that point was to make it work harder. FY '26 is that year that the thesis proved itself. Revenue grew 12.2%, while operating costs grew 10.2%. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 50 basis points to 47.4%. Underlying NPAT of $18.9 million is up 46.4%. Statutory NPAT of $12.8 million is up 144.5% and adjusted free cash flow reached $35.1 million. Net leverage fell from 2.04x to 1.77x, and it fell without diverting a single dollar away from growth. We did all that while adding just 3 new corporate clubs. In that same year, we added more than 17,000 corporate members and lifted average membership per club to 1,351, the highest in our history. This is what the business looks like with the growth lever switched off. On the right of the slide is the second story of the day. Viva today operates 2 distinct businesses. One is an international fitness network. The other is a technology and payments platform that supports it and increasingly supports operators beyond it. Meridium Global gives the second of those its own structure and strategic direction and a strategy review is underway to determine how that value is best realized for shareholders. Moving to Slide 4. This slide is about credibility, and it is the one I would ask new shareholders to look at first. 5 metrics were guided, 5 metrics were exceeded. Revenue guidance of above $237 million, delivered $237.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA guidance of above $111 million, delivered $112.3 million. Underlying EBITDA guidance of above $53 million, delivered $53.7 million. On earnings, we went further. In May, we upgraded statutory NPAT guidance to above $12 million and underlying NPAT guidance to above $17 million. We then delivered $12.8 million and $18.9 million, respectively. We upgraded the target late in the year and then beat the upgrade. Guidance at Viva is not a marketing exercise. We forecast off run rate, we commit publicly and we deliver. 7 years of that record now sits behind us. Moving to Slide 5. The headline for shareholders is at the top of the slide. The Board has declared a made and fully franked dividend of $0.03 per share. I want to be precise about why that matters. This is not a dividend funded by slowing down. Adjusted free cash flow of $35.1 million covered $31.3 million of growth reinvestment and the on-market buyback and leverage still fell. The dividend represents 15% of underlying NPAT and 8% of adjusted free cash flow. So reinvestment capacity is entirely intact. Kym will take you through the policy in his section. Around that sit the 4 things that define the year: growth with operating leverage with revenue up 12.2% and adjusted EBITDA up 13.3%. Margin expansion rather than growth alone with costs growing slower than revenue for the second consecutive year. Self-funding for the first time and a payments and technology business that earned $13.4 million of stand-alone EBITDA before intersegment eliminations. Membership grew by 73,000 across the network and 17,000 in corporate clubs. Segment revenue in Payments and Technology grew 39.8%. Net leverage came down 2.04x to 1.77x. Moving to Slide 6. The numbers on this page are the year in 8 boxes. Revenue of $237.1 million, up 12.2%, our seventh consecutive year of revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA of $112.3 million, up 13.3%. EBITDA margin of 47.4%, up 50 basis points. Underlying NPAT of $18.9 million, up 46.4%; statutory NPAT of $12.8 million, up 144.5%. Statutory earnings per share of $0.131, up 150.6%. Adjusted free cash flow of $35.1 million, up 7.7% and the maiden dividend of $0.03 per share fully franked. I would draw your attention to the shape of those percentages rather than the individual boxes. Revenue up 12% has produced NPAT up 145% and earnings per share up 151%. That is operating leverage arriving in the accounts, and I will come back to the mechanics of it on Slide 8. Just moving forward to Slide 7. This is the investment case on one page, 4 pillars, all of them growing. Pillar 1 is Health Clubs, Club Lime, Plus Fitness, World Gym and our boutique brands, which delivered $208.2 million of revenue, up 11% across 204 corporate locations and 275,000 members. The line at the bottom of that box is the important one. We added 17,000 members in the network optimization year with only 3 net new locations. Pillar 2 is the franchise network. Plus Fitness, World Gym, Boutique Fitness Studios delivered $9 million of franchisor and investment income, up 13.5% across 330 locations and 418,000 franchise members. There are a further 170 locations already sold and in the pipeline opening over the next 12 to 24 months across Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Pillar 3 is Payments and Technology. Viva Pay and Viva Labs delivered $7.1 million of external revenue, up 39.8% on a like-for-like basis. On a gross basis, before intersegment eliminations, that segment generated $20.2 million, which is 8.5% of group revenue. Pillar 4 is Supplements and Other, covering personal training licensing, subsociety and vending at $12.8 million, up 18.5%. Pillars 3 and 4...

Ladies and gentlemen, the line for the management has got disconnected. Please stay connected while I get them reconnected. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the management has been reconnected. Please go ahead, Harry.

Apologies for that. Okay. I'll just continue from where I believe it went quiet. Pillars 3 and 4 are our highest margin, most scalable earnings. They are capital-light and recurring, and they grow without a new lease or a new fit-out. In total, 534 open locations, 694,000 members, $237.1 million of revenue. Previously, Pillars 3 and 4 were referred to as TPLR or technology payments licensing and retail. We've now split them into the 2 pillars as we start to separate the Payments and Technology into the new Meridium Global vehicle. Moving to Slide 8. This slide explains the mechanics behind the earnings growth. Revenue grew $25.8 million. Of that, $13.2 million became EBITDA. In other words, $0.51 in every incremental revenue dollar converted to EBITDA against a portfolio average margin of 47.4%. Incremental revenue is landing at a better margin than the average of the business it is joining. Following it down the profit and loss, revenue up 12.2%, adjusted EBITDA up 13.3%, EBIT up 32%, NPAT up 144.5%, earnings per share up 150.6%, operating costs grew 10.2% and margin expanded 50 basis points. Why it matters is simple. The same mechanics apply to every member we add and every site we open from here. The cost base has already been built to carry them. Moving to Slide 9. A short slide, but a useful one for perspective. Revenue has grown from $40.9 million in FY '20, our first full year being listed to $237 million in FY '26, a compound annual growth rate of 34%. EBITDA has grown from $15.7 million to $112.3 million over the same period, a compound annual growth rate of 38.8%. Earnings have compounded faster than revenue for 6 years straight. You can also see the half-on-half split. The second half of FY '26 delivered $120.6 million of revenue and $58.2 million of EBITDA, both ahead of the first half in a year deliberately spent on optimization rather than expansion. That period includes 2 years of in-force closures and 3 years of commentary suggesting cost of living pressure would take our members away. It did not. Fitness membership has proven one of the most defensible categories of household spending, particularly at the value end of the market where the majority of our members sit. Moving to Slide 10. This is the slide I would like shareholders to take away from the first session because it is the proof of the strategy we announced 18 months ago. Average membership per club rose from $1,286 at 30 June 2025 to $1,351 at 30 June 2026. That is 65 additional members per club across 204 locations, and it is the highest average in our history. Corporate locations moved from 201 to 204, so almost none of it came from new sites. At an average revenue per member of approximately $750 of health club revenue, that is incremental represents around $10 million of annualized revenue, and it flows through at a high marginal rate because the clubs, the leases and the teams are already in place. Portfolio utilization passed 80% for the first time in the company's history and margin expansion followed it. Utilization is the number we manage internally because it is the one that tells us how much earnings capacity is still sitting inside the estate we already own. With that, I will hand over to Kym, who will take you through the financial results.

Thank you, Harry, and good morning all. I'm on Slide 11, and I'm pleased to be taking you through such a strong set of numbers. Every number from top line revenue reaching a record $237.1 million, up 12.2% through the bottom line underlying net profit growing 46% to $18.9 million. Not only that, this year, the business funded every dollar of its growth from its own cash flow, brought net leverage down from 2.04x to 1.77x, continued the share buyback and finally declared Viva's first ever dividend. And we beat every one of the 5 metrics we guided the market to. What makes that stand out is how we did it. FY '26 was a deliberate year of network optimization, as Harry said, we right off the new club rollout and instead grew by filling clubs we already own and scaling the higher-margin payments, technology and franchise businesses alongside them. So this was organic, high-quality growth, and it has set the platform we can reaccelerate from. Moving on to Slide 12. One quick note as we go. Where I say adjusted, I mean before one-off items and underlying is on a pre-AASB 16 basis, which is how we've previously guided the market. The table on the left of the statutory numbers straight from the financials and the bridge on the right takes out the impacts of AASB 16 and normalizations to show the underlying NPAT number. Revenue came in at a record $237.1 million, up 12.2%, our seventh year of growth in a row, as Harry said. And as stated, this was organic out of the existing base and our adjacencies, not brought in through acquisitions or a stack of new greenfield sites. Costs grew at 10.2%, slower rate than revenue, which has led to margin expansion through that operating leverage. EBITDA margin has lifted by 50 basis points to 47.4% against the statutory EBITDA number of $110 million. And while not shown here, pre-AASB 16 EBITDA margin improved 90 basis points to 22.6%. You can find the AASB reconciliation at the back of the slide deck. On a statutory basis, depreciation and amortization and finance costs carry the AASB 16 lease costs. But as we only had a handful of new leases and our senior debt actually reduced, increases in these lines have remained compressed, leading to expanding growth rates down the entire profit and loss to statutory NPAT growing at 144.5%. It's worth noting that this number is coming off a low base. So looking at the right-hand side bridge chart, you can actually see that the underlying NPAT that is excluding the impacts of AASB 16 reached $18.9 million, up 46% and to summarize what this means on the bottom line, earnings per share of $0.1313 statutory, which you'll note is at a higher growth rate than the NPAT as we continued the share buyback and $0.1943 underlying. In addition, we've declared a maiden fully franked dividend of $0.03 and net leverage is now down to 1.77x. I'm on Slide 13. This best describes where the revenue sits today versus where the momentum is. On the dollars, Health Clubs are still the growth or the big engine of the network, $208.2 million in revenue or nearly 88% of the group. But note, this is down from nearly 89% last year as our other revenue pillars expand with Supplements and Other at $12.8 million, Franchise at $9 million and Payments and Technology at $7.1 million. But importantly, the growth rates on the right demonstrate the story we've been building for a few years now. The fastest-growing parts of the business are smaller capital-light ones. Payments and Technology up 39.8%, Supplements and Other up 18.5%, Franchise up 13.5%, all ahead of 11% in Health Clubs alone. These areas will continue to grow as we roll out supplements across our network. Our franchise network continues to expand, which will enhance not only the franchise part of the business, but also and more importantly, the payment side of the business. These grow without us signing a single new lease or fitting out a single new club. So far, more of each dollar drops through to earnings. But then as we also roll out new greenfield sites, this will accelerate as every member we add to the network also runs through all of these pillars. I'm on Slide 14. This bridges the revenue of $211 million last year to $237 million this year. The core being Health Clubs did the heavy lifting, $20.6 million of the $25.8 million of growth came from the Health Clubs, up 11%. And again, that was off just 3 net new corporate clubs across the year. So we grew our biggest business by double digits, mainly by filling up the clubs that we already own. So underneath the Health Club number, average membership per club rose 65 to a record 1,351 members per club. And when you consider that's across a 200-plus club network, it's significant. And portfolio utilization went through 80% for the first time in our history. That's more revenue from the same footprint, the highest margin growth there is. The rest came from the capital-light streams, Franchise added $1.1 million, Supplements and Other $2 million, Payments and Technology $2 million. All revenue lines, all increasing and with some pretty good diversification rather than simply relying on membership fees. I'm on Slide 15. Firstly, it's worth noting that cash at bank includes funds held in Viva Pay at balance date. So in net terms, we actually only declined by around $2.8 million across the year, not $7 million displayed here. We'll get into the cash flows next. But what is a standout here is that our net leverage actually reduced down from 2.04x to 1.77x. So we had a modest amount of CapEx, completed around $4.5 million in acquisition, achieved margin expansion, ran a share buyback and still managed to reduce our level of senior debt. So the balance sheet got stronger on the back of performance, and we did it while we funded the entire growth program, not instead of it. I'm on Slide 16. The good news here is that the growth in operating cash flows up nearly 10%, $76.4 million, up from $70 million, allowed us to execute on our initiatives this year. As mentioned on the previous slide, it funded every dollar of growth being $26.9 million into clubs and technology, $4.4 million of acquisitions and $1.8 million in buyback, and we still paid down debt. As mentioned also, the total reduction in closing cash also includes a reduction of around $4.4 million of funds held for Viva Pay settlement money that we hold on behalf of merchants at year-end. Moving on to Slide 17. The great thing to note here is that our capital growth expenditure and investment in tech rose marginally over 2025, adding to the base for additional earnings growth. In addition, there are a couple of small acquisitions. Maintenance CapEx remains consistent and within our target of 3% of revenue at 2.6% or $6.1 million. And again, our growth investment of $31.3 million was funded from our adjusted free cash flow of $35.1 million. I'm on Slide 18. As Harry mentioned, the Board has declared Viva's first ever dividend of fully franked $0.03 per share, which equates to a total distribution of around $2.9 million less any DRP participation. This equates to around 15% of underlying NPAT. The ex-dividend date is on 28th September, record date on the 29th and payment on the 20th of October. The table on the right-hand side once again summarizes our capital allocation and capital management, which we are very proud of. With that, I'll hand back to Harry for the outlook and our strategic priorities. Thank you.

Thank you, Kym. Let me now turn to where the business is today and where it is heading and what 3 things in this section, current trading, the path to 1 million members and Meridium Global. So moving to Slide 20. Membership growth has continued since 30th of June. Whilst cost of living pressures have affected many industries, and don't get me wrong, we have also seen a shift in habits by members, the resilience of this business and the industry as a whole should not and cannot be underestimated. I have said this every year since listing and whether it was COVID, interest rates or other tax reforms, our members keep coming back and our membership keeps growing. Health clubs are more than just a place to sweat and pump weights. They are new -- are the new social environment, the new meeting place and where Gen Z and other generations prefer to be. Network membership has now passed 700,000 and corporate membership has passed 278,000, both are new records for the company. It is worth pausing on the quality of that revenue. It is recurring and direct debit build across 534 locations, multiple brands and multiple price points. No single site, region or member segment is material to the result. This is a genuinely diversified membership base, and it behaves like one. Moving to Slide 21. We are today setting a clear target, 1 million network members by FY '29. I want to explain how we get there because this is not an aspirational number. We are currently adding more than 6,000 net new members a month. If we change nothing at all and simply continue exactly as we are, the network reaches beyond 900,000 members. Reaccelerating greenfield openings closes the balance, which is around 87,000 members. Three things underpin it. First, the funnel. We already have 170 locations sold and contracted across Corporate, Plus Fitness, World Gym and Boutique Fitness Studio brands, and we expect more than 30 new locations will open across these per year. Second, retention. We can now see churn before it happens and every point of retention lifts the entire curve. Third, and this is the part that I think is least understood by the market, every member counts twice. Each new member grows the Health Club business and grows the Technology and Payments division at the same time. Moving to Slide 22. FY '26 delivered more than 6,000 network members a month and approximately 1,500 corporate members per month with only 3 net new corporate locations. That lever is now being switched back on. FY '27 onward, we are planning more than 20 net new corporate locations a year against 3 in FY '26. Larger format, Club Lime, Zoo Fit and World Gym corporate sites are already secured. The franchise network runs in parallel. More than 150 franchise locations are sold and in the pipeline across Plus Fitness, World Gym and Boutique Fitness Studios fully franchisee funded. That is a network breadth without Viva capital expenditure, and each of those sites generates recurring revenue for Viva from the date it opens. There is further upside on top of that. Our refurbishment and rebrand program to Zoo Fit is underway across 20 locations, and we expect approximately 30% to 40% average revenue uplift per location within 3 months of completion. No new lease is required. None of that uplift is in the FY '26 base. Yes, you heard me right, 30% to 40% average uplift per location within 3 months. We've seen more than that in the first month of our first Zoo Fit location opening, and our second is just around the corner. All of it is funded from existing cash flows and available facilities. We finished the year at 1.77x, as we've mentioned, against our covenant of 2.5x with undrawn facility capacity available. Moving to Slide 23. Viva 360 is the platform that makes retention a discipline rather than a report. It's an internally developed AI machine learning model that we believe is industry-leading and with a significant amount of data. Data is key to building any sort of machine learning and AI models and having a background in tech myself, I've ensured that we have kept all of our data, and we have 20 years of membership behavioral data. Whether it comes to joining, billing, declines, arrears, visitations, suspensions, the data we have is creating learning models we never thought possible just 6 months ago. Every member action now maps to a single golden record, and the entire member estate is queryable in plain English against certified data. We pay no third-party dashboard license fees for it because we built it. Three models are in production today. We have a churn model with an 89.1% accuracy built on 72 engineered features and scored on every member. A suspension model giving us 7 to 30 days of warning on silent revenue leakage and lookalike targeting on our own data, so acquisition sharpen before $1 of media is spent. The models are tuned on a profit curve, which means intervention spend only lands where it gets payback. They have already identified approximately 46,000 cross-selling opportunities inside the existing membership base. This is a model that if you see it, just blows your mind on what it can predict. So in summary, FY '26 and the Viva 360 project has delivered the ability to see churn before it happens. During FY '27, we are deploying automated intervention agents against the predictive and other data. And because every member response retrains the models, the platform compounds with use. The foundation of all of this is more than 20 years of member data that we own and control. This is not something a competitor can license or buy. The benefit of Viva 360 should not be underestimated. Moving to Slide 24. This brings me to the most significant structural decision Viva has taken since listing. Viva today operates 2 distinct businesses, an international fitness network and a technology and payments platform that supports it. Meridium Global gives the second of those its structure and strategic direction. When we listed in 2019, we described ourselves as a technology-focused health club group. At the time, that took some explaining. It should require less explaining today. Moving to Slide 25. Meridium is not a billing engine. It is a vertically integrated payments and technology platform built entirely in-house, and it stands on 2 pillars. The first is payments, direct debit, activation, failed payment and administration fees, processing today total transaction volume in excess of $400 million. The second is technology, the hub, our modular member management system, and our digital products that generate real revenue. Separation removes 2 constraints that have limited this business inside Viva. The first is the peer group. As a stand-alone business, Meridium sits alongside Payments and Technology companies rather than valued as part of a fitness group. Viva is looked at as a gym business. The gyms and the members are absolutely real. We build some of the best health and wellness communities in the country and around them. In fact, we welcome more than 100,000 member visits to our facilities each and every day. And on top of that, we continue through growth to introduce more people to our healthy lifestyle every year. And this year, the health clubs did all the heavy lifting in the result, as we've previously mentioned. But the gyms were never the whole thesis. From day 1, we were answering a different question. What can you build on top of a network this size? Once you have several hundred thousand members transacting with you every fortnight, Meridium is the answer to that question. You've already seen that thesis come through in the numbers. Supplements, retail, licensing and vending delivered $12.8 million this year, up 18.5%. And Payments and Technology delivered $20.2 million on a gross basis, up from $7.3 million. That is close to $33 million of revenue that does not come from gym memberships, but built on the back of a large and growing network of members. The second aspect Meridium will be able to unlock is access to customers. That constraint on this platform has never been capacity. It has been ownership. I'm not talking about more members as customers. I'm talking about more gym operators and more brands, both nationally and internationally as customers. These operators are understandably reluctant to run their member data and they're billing through a business that competes with them. Separation removes that objection and opens a materially large addressable market. Moving to Slide 26. This is a real business with real earnings and real products. On a stand-alone basis and pre-intersegment eliminations, Meridium earned $13.4 million of EBITDA in FY '26, up from $3.7 million in FY '25. Both figures are per the financial accounts at Note 7. This is not a projection and it is not a carve-out estimate. It is in the audited numbers we released this morning. Viva's Payments and Technology assets will transfer into Meridium Global, which will own and operate them as a stand-alone business. A strategic review is underway to determine the optimal path to realizing that value for shareholders, and we will update the market as that review progresses. I want to close on Meridium by saying that this story is only just getting started. I see the growth ahead of it as being every bit as significant as the path to 1 million members on the fitness side of the business. The products and services we have planned under a structure that can finally reach customers beyond our own networks and things that are not things that this industry has ever seen before. What sits behind them is a tech stack very few operators anywhere have assembled, ideas, member management, billing, access control, all built in-house, all under one roof and able to be turned around at a speed that a licensed software stack simply cannot match. Add to that more than 20 years of usable identifiable member data that we own and control, and you have a combination that is generally aware. This is what the strategic review is there to realize. Let me finish where I started. FY '26 was the proof year. We said we would slow the rollout and improve the operating model, and the numbers now say we did. Guidance exceeded on every metric, margin expansion. The entire growth program funded from our own cash flows, leverage down and the first dividend in the company's history paid alongside reinvestment rather than instead of it. From here, we reaccelerate more than 20 corporate openings a year, a franchise pipeline funded by our franchisees, a refurbishment program with 30% to 40% uplift not yet in the base and a retention layer that lifts the whole curve, 1 million network members by FY '29. And alongside all of that, we now have a Payments and Technology business with $13.4 million of stand-alone EBITDA, its own structure and a strategic review underway to realize its value properly. Thank you for your time. Kym and I would now like to open for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from James Bisinella with Unified Capital Partners.

Congrats on the results and a big milestone in the company history, I guess, across many fronts. Just a few questions for me. Just -- I know you sort of touched on it a bit during the presentation, but care to maybe a bit more detail on the rationale for just splitting out the tech and payments business in terms of Meridium. I guess, do you go out and partner? Do you sign external businesses? Like do you sell part of that business? Or I guess, what sort of options really exist in terms of unlocking some of the strategic value there?

Thanks, James. Yes, that's the review that we're currently undertaking, as we said, all of those options that you mentioned are possible. One thing that we do want to do is continue to hold the majority stake in that business. But we think that bringing in potentially a strategic investor into this business as one of the options will really open it up to new markets, as mentioned. We're able to sell our products, obviously, to our own network being Plus Fitness, World Gym, BFS, it's very difficult for this business to expand beyond that whilst we're one of the competitors. But if we're able to split this business out, we think that the opportunity is endless in this business. And it's a real business. And this is why we had the auditors go through the numbers and verify them and they're in the financial statements.

Okay. Great. That all makes sense. And you mentioned kind of a review is ongoing and you will provide an update to market. But do you have an idea on potential timing? And are there any early discussions taking place? Or is it all really just kicking off at the moment?

There's always discussions going on.

Got it. Okay. Very good. And just moving on from that, maybe in terms of Zoo Fit, I suppose great to hear that 30% to 40% uplift in terms of revenue per site. Just in terms of the incremental CapEx required on the rollout there, I think some of them are on sort of existing locations. So yes, just CapEx first part of that. And second part, just in terms of the payback period you're expecting on those locations.