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spk06: Good morning. My name is Rob and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Membership Collective Group, Inc. Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again press the star 1. Thank you. Thomas Allen, Chief Financial Officer, you may begin your conference.
spk03: Thank you for joining us today to discuss the Membership Collective Group's second quarter 2022 financial results. Some of today's statements may be forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10Q filed on May 18, 2022. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today, and we assume no obligations to update any forward-looking statements if our views change. By now, you should have access to our second quarter 2022 earnings release, which can be found at membershipcollectivegroup.com in the news and events section. Additionally, we have posted our second quarter 2022 earnings presentation, which can also be found in the news and events section on our site. During the call, we also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. Reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release. With that, I'll remind everyone that during our last earnings call, we highlighted our six strategic priorities. They are, first, global expansion of Soho House. Second, enhancing the value of our Soho House membership. Third, House Foundations, our ESG platform. Fourth, operational excellence while delivering profits and free cash flow. Fifth, growing new membership brands and profit streams. And sixth, driving a great digital experience. I will now pass on to Nick Jones, our founder and CEO. to discuss how we progress against the first three pillars. Then Andrew Carney, our president, will discuss the next three before I get into results and guidance.
spk00: Good morning, and thank you very much for joining us today. I'd like to welcome Thomas to the team. Excited to have you on board, and we're very pleased to be reporting another good quarter of growth in a very complicated operating environment. But let's start with the expansion of the sewer houses. As you know, we talked about nine new sewer houses this year and we are on track to deliver that. So far, we have opened five. The first one we opened was Nashville in North America. Very strong membership demand, I'm really pleased to say. We've already got around 2,000 members. We then opened the Brighton Beach House. It's our first ever sewer house on the coast in Britain. Brighton is a very creative city, and already a lot of our members live there. We then opened Holloway House, which is in West Hollywood, California. It's our fourth site to... in la the reason why we opened it is that our members from all around the world kept saying they wanted rooms in west hollywood and we've been able to deliver them and there's been a great response to them back in july we open sewer house copenhagen which is our first house in scandinavia an incredibly exciting market for our Yeah, it's such a great city, Copenhagen, full of great people, and the membership applications are really flying in. Also in July, we opened Little House in Ballon. I can see you all going, where's Ballam? Well, Ballam is in South London, and the reason why we opened a little house in Ballam is a lot of our members live in the area, and this was in response to a lot of people sort of working from home more and us wanting to just do what our members wanted, and we expect to expand more into local neighbourhoods in the future. The four remaining houses to open this year are the Miami Pool House, We already have the Beach House in Miami, which is one of our top performing houses. We have a huge amount of demand as more and more people have moved down to Miami since the pandemic. It's located in a great creative neighborhood, but we're really excited about that opening. And also we have our second house in Scandinavia opening towards the end of the year in Stockholm. We already have a huge amount of Cities Without Houses members, and it's in a converted church towards the end of the year we're opening in mexico city a really exciting time for us because this is our first house in latin america it's in a great building an old general's house and it's going to be a big club with a swimming pool and pool house and we are very excited to be entering that market and then right at the end of the year we're opening bangkok this is further expansion for us into asia incredibly vibrant city and excited to keep making our membership global. CWH, Cities Without Houses, is really key for us to support our new pipeline of houses. We have added another ten new cities as part of our CWH programme this quarter, including Nairobi, Manila and San Diego. We're even more confident about our international growth in the future with this programme. Next, I want to talk about enhancing membership value, something I and the team wake up every morning and think, how can we make life better for our members? Because membership is at the heart of what we do. We know our members love new houses and they grow the value and demand of their memberships. are so pleased of all the new openings that we've done this year. And all our new houses have seen a very strong membership demand locally from the start. We also love putting on great experiences outside our houses for our members. For instance, this year we had the regular Soho House Festival in West London and also we did the Soho Desert House at Coachella and our members loved seeing the houses out on the road. All of this added 11,000 new Solar House members since the last quarter. And we now have 142,000 members. And we're on target to hit 160,000 to 165,000, which will be fantastic. And also the thing which I'm super proud of is our retention. And that remained at around 95%, despite obviously the concerns of a tougher economic environment and increases in our membership fees. Finally, I want to talk about house foundations. We published our first ESG report in May, and we're making good progress in line with our targets. With our environmental goals, we've committed to reducing impact on the planet. We're pleased with the progress we've made on waste reduction. The number of houses now separating food waste has increased by 20%, meeting our 2022 target. Our social programmes are at the heart of what Sewer House is all about. We saw continued growth in our mentorship and fellowship programmes, where we can make a real impact by helping people from less privileged backgrounds gain access to the creative industry through our brilliant members. And we have launched both programmes in 17 new cities this year. We now support 815 mentees and fellows, which is a 70% increase since the end of last year. I'd love to now pass to Andrew to discuss the other pillars.
spk01: Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to discuss how we've delivered operational excellence whilst delivering growth in Q2. I'm going to touch on our other membership brands and businesses, and I'm going to talk more about driving our digital experience before I hand over to Thomas. Starting with operational excellence, we were able to deliver improved results despite factors such as continued wage inflation, supply chain issues, COVID impacts and high energy prices, along with currency headwinds. We grew EBITDA to 15 million, up 28 million year-on-year, and 30 million quarter-on-quarter. That's with our in-house revenues growing 140% year-on-year, helped by a 40% year-on-year LightFlight RevPar increase, with LightFlight RevPar 16% above Q2 in 2019. Our house contribution margins improved by 260 basis points year-on-year, and our F&B margins again were up by 230 basis points versus Q2 2019, despite, you know, around 20% higher food costs by inflation. Next, an update on our other MCG brands outside Surhaus membership. We had a very strong quarter of revenue across our other businesses, increasing by about 100% year-on-year. Our total MCG members are now up 12% quarter-on-quarter and 51% year-on-year. As we've talked often about Soho Friends, it continued to grow and was our largest contributor of growth, up 8,000 members quarter-on-quarter, or 26%, and that's a 300% increase year-on-year. And as a reminder, our Soho House Friends are a predominantly guest of members that convert to be friends of Soho House and are allowed to stay in our bedrooms and get benefits within Soho Home. Our MCG waitlist is now at 8,000 to 2,000, which has grown again quarter on quarter and is its highest level ever, despite the record intakes that Nick mentioned earlier. And what that shows us is the health of our business and that we still have record demand for all our memberships as we grow. In June, we opened the Ned Nomad in New York, our first Ned site outside of London, and we successfully opened with 700 members and have a growing waitlist. and we remain on track to open the Ned Doha in Q4 of this year. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, Q2 is the season for Scorpius, and we're delighted to say that we opened two weeks earlier due to member demand, and so far have had a very strong season. In fact, last week we had our biggest week in Scorpius's history, which again just underlies the strength of our Scorpius brand and why we'll continue to grow it globally. Finally, Soho Home, we continue to deliver great performance and momentum throughout the quarter on our Soho Home business, with sales up again 105% year on year. What that tells us is we are delighting our members. This month, we are integrating our Home Plus membership into Friends membership. Our Home Plus members are high spenders and high value to us, and we wanted to give them more value whilst increasing our own share of wallet. Turning finally to digital, we continue to develop our products to give members the best experience when they arrive at our houses and to connect with them either in person or digitally. Our global website, SoHouse.com, is accountable for membership acquisition. In Q2, unique visitors to the site increased by 12% quarter-on-quarter and 69% year-on-year. And as I already mentioned, our wait list globally is at an all-time high. Our proprietary members at The Shout delivered 75% of all global bookings consistent with Q1. And that's significant when you consider occupancy across bedrooms rose to 81% in Q2, up from 60% in Q1. And these bookings are all organic, which I think we've stressed on a previous earnings call, with no marketing dollars spent or booking engine fees for our bedrooms. We've now launched Soho Connect to all our members. Last quarter, we saw 40% quarter-on-quarter growth of members using Connection features, and we're working to optimize it before launching our digital membership. With that, I'll hand over to Thomas, who will take you through the results in detail before we take your questions.
spk03: Thanks, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. This is my eighth week on the job. I joined MCG because I felt it was a great company with visionary leaders, a very attractive brand in SOAS, and loads of runway for profitable growth. I've been really impressed by the operational expertise I've seen so far. Here are some of the highlights of the second quarter. Total revenue grew almost 100 percent and would have grown over 100 percent and another $10 million had not been for FX headwinds. House-level contribution also increased over 100 percent with margins up almost 300 basis points. As we keep on stressing, SOAS membership growth was very strong with a couple of price increases growth 47% growth in recurring membership revenue. This is also helped by another reduction in frozen membership. Frozen members' percentage of total members is now below pre-COVID levels, highlighting the increased value for our members in having an active membership. In-house revenues grew 140% year-over-year, benefiting from stronger F&B trends, and as Andrew mentioned, 40% higher REV for year-over-year and 16% higher than 2Q19. Other revenues were up 104%, helped by strong Scorpius and home results, public restaurant and townhouse revenues, and increased management fees from the NED, the line, and SOAR. Our reported adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was $15 million, above consensus, which based on our analysis was $13 million, and consensus metrics says it's $12 million. Our beat would have been even more pronounced had it not been for headwinds from FX, which was a million-dollar headwind, Hong Kong still taking longer than hoped to recover, which was another million-dollar hit against budget, and the tough weight in food and beverage cost environment. That said, our improved profitability reflects continued focus on cost management as well as strong top-line performance. The capitalization table shows our position at the end of the second quarter. We ended the quarter with $266 million of cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash and the undrawn revolvers, $86 million, which provides us with sufficient flexibility to fund our operational needs as well as capacity to grow. Net debt was $444 million at quarter end. The company repurchased 2.3 million shares for $17 million during the second quarter. As you can see from our loan maturity profile, the vast majority of our debt currently runs out to 2027. We're currently looking at refinancing options for the debt coming due in 2024. Our priority remains to generate free cash flow in the short to medium term, and we expect to be cash flow positive in the fourth quarter this year. On to guidance. We continue to see strong momentum in all our metrics. However, FX has gone meaningfully against us, and we now expect Hong Kong to continue to be a drag on results for the year. Going into each guidance line in more detail. We are in track to deliver our total Soho House members target of 160,000 to 165,000 members by year end. At June 30th, we were halfway through the year and had added almost 20,000 net new members compared to our approximately 40,000 annual goal. Remember, new house openings are outsized contributions to this growth. We only opened three properties in the first half and have already opened two of the six houses we expect to open in the second half. So we're well on our way to hit our member growth target. On revenues, we are cutting guidance by $40 million. When the company says guidance, assume the pound-dollar exchange rate would be 1.34 for the year, what is now 1.2, and the euro-dollar exchange rate would be 1.16. It is now a parity. We had a $10 million FX hit to revenue in 2Q and expect another $40 million impact in the second half, assuming current rates remain. On Hong Kong, restrictions continue to limit our ability to ramp up that property. That property missed budget by $2 million in the second quarter, and assuming current trends remain, we'll miss budget by another $5 million for the remainder of the year. So if you add up the FX and Hong Kong headwinds, it would imply $57 million of downside when we're only cutting our guidance by $40 million. The offset is we have continued to have good traction in taking price and continue to see consistently strong demand trends despite concerns of a recession. On EBITDA, we're cutting our guidance from $80 to $90 million to $70 to $80. Luckily, a lot of the FX impact is translation. So as we noted, we had a $1 million FX hit in 2Q. We now expect to see another $4 million impact in the second half. Restrictions around Hong Kong hurt us $1 million in the second quarter and will likely be another $4 million impact in the second half. While we were able to offset some of our revenue headwinds with better core performance, our EBITDA guidance range was a lot tighter. The cost environment remains challenging, and so we felt it prudent to take the more conservative path on EBITDA. We're also mindful that we've done $18 million that we've done the first half of the year, so we have a lot to make up in the second half. That said, we have seen Europe recovering well and outperforming this summer, and our business seasonally typically ramps up through the quarters with 3Q benefiting from summer business and 4Q from holiday events. To end, I'd like to remind everyone that we are a unique membership platform with multiple revenue generators, high retention, We try to be as asset-light as possible, and we have other business lines that continue to scale. With that, we will now open up to questions. Operator, can we take the first question, please? As a reminder, you can either ask it over the phone or submit over the webcast. Thanks.
spk06: Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question over the phone, press star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Steven Zaccone from Citi. Your line is open.
spk05: Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. First question I had was just on the pricing power discussion. Maybe could you talk a bit more detail about the pricing increases you've done in the first part of the year? Do you see opportunity to take price up further in the back half? And from a member perspective, have you seen any sort of pushback to the increases in prices?
spk01: Great question. Good to hear from you, Stephen. So, as we've already mentioned on previous earnings calls, we have increased pricing across all our channels from F&B to our bedrooms and our membership. We feel good about pricing right now. We pretty much offset all of inflation, including the headwinds that Thomas talked about, energy prices. So we don't see any further movement on pricing for the second half. And what we are focused on is always delivering value for money for our members. So we're working really hard in our houses to continue to give them great events and great menu choices as we go through the second half.
spk05: Okay, great. And then I wanted to ask just on the house revenue, could you talk a bit more about maybe the cadence of the second quarter? And then just if you can give any color on how July and August is performing overall. You kind of gave some commentary on the last call that May was off to a good start relative to 19. So I'm wondering if that's still holding.
spk03: Thanks, Susan. So when we look at July, July trends continued what we saw in the second quarter. The second quarter, like-for-like revenue growth for our houses was up low double digits, and what we saw in July was up about 13%. We've seen real strength in Scorpius, as we talked about earlier. So that's really going to help the third quarter. And so we're seeing strong trends. I mean, FX has gone materially against us, and so that's a consideration that one has to think about. A little bit nuanced, we have seen, on a relative basis, our business in Europe gets stronger. While our North America business gets slightly weaker, we think that that's a function of our North American members going to Europe for the summer, and we expect that to revert, and we've already actually seen a bit of a reversion as we've gotten into middle of August, and likely people have gone back to school or returned from holiday.
spk05: That's very helpful. Thanks for the detail. Best of luck in the second half.
spk06: Your next question comes from a line of Sean Kelly from Bank of America. Your line is open.
spk04: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Welcome, Thomas. So I just wanted to maybe follow up because I think we were on a good path there. You talked about like-for-like spending at some of the houses being up. I think you said low double across the second quarter. I assume that's year-on-year. Can you give us a sense, and I know the house base has changed a whole lot, but give us a sense of where we maybe are in the stages of the recovery relative to 2019? I know it's maybe a, you know, a dated metric at this point, but it is a way that we kind of try to gauge, you know, how much recovery potential we may have relative to other categories of spending out there.
spk03: Thanks, Sean. Being my first earnings call, I probably should have been more specific. It was versus 2019, because that's really how we're thinking about our business. I mean, if we think about it versus the second quarter of last year, you know, we, given the rev farm metric, it was up 40% in the second quarter versus, you know, versus 2019, it was up 16%. So we're seeing even stronger growth versus the second quarter of last year. I mean, do you remember the second quarter of last year? We were seeing some pretty significant COVID restrictions still. And so, you know, I think that we all agree we should really be topping ourselves to the second quarter of 2019.
spk04: Super. Understand. And then sort of the logical next step would be just the contribution margins. I believe you're also up there versus 2019, which is encouraging. But can you give us a sense of how stable are these at this level? Where are we going to see continued operating leverage from here? And how should we balance that against some of the inflationary pressures that you and everyone has in this environment?
spk03: Steve, I think that – Sean, look, I think that we can still deliver this growth in contribution margins. We are – you know, we've been delivering on the price increases offsetting the cost inflation. Our houses are maturing quickly. There was, you know, it made it harder to, COVID made it harder to ramp up properties, but now that we're getting out of COVID, we're adding new members quickly and then that's driving scale. And so we're confident that we should continue to have improved margins versus 2019. Thank you for the color.
spk06: Your next question comes from the line of Ali Naqvi from HSBC. Your line is open.
spk02: Hi, thanks for taking the questions. Just to maybe get some color on how, you know, MCG has performed during previous recessions or periods of economic weakness. How has sort of member growth or member spend held up during those times? And just with respect to what you're seeing from your end customers and client bases, you know, the major industries, Are they showing signs of weakness or, for example, staffing starting to come down or anything of that nature that would give you any sort of forward indication as to how trading may eventually move? And then finally, Thomas, obviously you've joined. What are your sort of priorities as you sort of come out of the organisation and your sort of key learnings, please? Thank you.
spk00: Well, Elliot, Nick here. I will start that one because I've been around the longest and has seen quite a lot of recessions in our time, in our 27 years. We always go into it, obviously apprehensive and nervous in the times before, but what we've always seen is is that members love their home away from home. They don't like giving up their membership because there is a very long queue to join to get back in. And they also love the fact that there is a place that they can go to and get away from the day-to-day world of the recession which might be going on. As far as their spend is concerned in their houses, you know, even though there's been... big inflation generally on our prices like there have been globally everywhere. You know, we're very keen to keep on offering our members value for money, you know, like Club Bradford, Combo Lunch, 10 cocktails for £10 or at £10. So there's a lot of value going on in our houses, which also drive members to the houses and there's a lot of activities which go on in the houses, you know, movie nights, members events, you know, music, all sorts of things which are going on in the clubs. So we don't find during, we haven't found during a recession people dropping off their memberships or dropping off using the clubs.
spk01: Just to add a few stats onto what Nick has said, we're different than hotel businesses and hospitality, because if you remember, we've got 30% of our revenues that are recurring through our membership. So that really helps us through any lumps and bumps that we might have from a macro perspective. And as it stands, we've not seen any dramatic member spending shift or footfall shift. July tracked similar to the previous quarter on footfall and revenues. And as we look ahead to occupancy, We're actually improving our occupancy in our bedrooms globally from Q2, looking ahead at bookings from August, September, and October. But we're always cautious, as Nick says, and we're always focused on being proactive on our members' value.
spk03: And so then, Ali, answering your second question, which was kind of one of my first impressions and priorities. So, look, three things I feel I really underappreciated until I got to MCG. First was really the strength of the design team and really delivering on Nick's vision. I don't think people really can appreciate quite how important design is and the quality of the houses are to the members and to attracting new members. And so much time and effort, and I've been just really impressed by the design team. Second is the strength of the membership platform. Membership is really in the company's DNA, something that Nick stresses often. A lot of time and effort goes into making the memberships more and more attractive. It's the reason why we keep on growing the wait list despite record intakes. And then the third and final thing is just the operational expertise in-house. Every detail is looked at. There's a lot of value engineering to deliver great product for our members and their guests, but also to make sure that we really are profitable. And the team has a lot of experience and are very agile. I've been seeing changes all the time to drive greater profit. What are my strategic priorities? My strategic priorities are really to deliver the growth that's embedded in this company and to make sure that, you know, we are best positioned to do that and to make sure that, you know, we are focused on generating the highest profits and the highest ROI.
spk02: Got it. Thank you.
spk06: And there are no further phone questions. I turn the call back over to Thomas Allen for any web questions.
spk03: Yes, so this one's for Nick. Nick, how will you maintain membership quality given the rapid growth?
spk00: Well, we have never, ever seen such a high demand for applications at the moment globally. In the 27 years I've been doing this, really good quality applications are coming in. And then on top of that, all the new markets we're going into, like last year we went into Paris, we went into Rome, we went to Tel Aviv, this year it's in Nashville. And what you're looking for in these cities is the most interesting, relevant, nice, kind, creatively sold people. ends up in the 142,000 members that we have at the moment is a brilliant global group of people. And I see the quality of our membership as we expand in new and interesting cities only getting better.
spk03: A point that I've made to a lot of people internally is that if you think about the UK, which is our oldest market and likely our most penetrated market, you can see in the release we have 55,000 Solar House members, and I think the population in the UK is about 66 million. point zero eight or percent or eight basis points of the total uk population and so when they're concerned that you know are we tapped out on growth or are we are you know are could the membership quality uh deteriorate i think if people just have to think about you know how small a percentage we are of the overall population
spk00: Well, I mean, just to finish that, you know, there's a big population out there. We're just after a very small amount of it. And in all the white space and new cities we're going into, there's a really, through our CWH, there's a really fascinating, brilliant membership.
spk03: So that was the last of our web questions. So thank you, everyone, for joining, and we look forward to talking to you in the future.
spk06: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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