SkiStar AB

Welcome to this conference call for Skistar's second quarter and the half-year report. My name is Stefan Sjöstan, I'm the CEO of the company and I'm sitting here together with my colleague Martin Almgren and I am CFO here at Skistar. So we will then take you through an agenda for this call and we will start to give you a sort of introduction and especially repetition from our CMD day in October 12th, where we presented both new financial targets, but also some updates about the company. So let us guide you through that part. Then we will go through some highlights from the second quarter. Then we will go through some numbers. And then we also will look at some outlook and Q&As from your side. So let's start with the introduction. This is numbers from last year. And I'm really glad to see that we continue to grow, but especially really glad that we continue to have eight out of 10 satisfied guests and eight out of 10 satisfied employees. And we continue also our digital journey with continuous purchase online with both ski passes as well as digital check-in. We stand on a very strong foundation with our people. We employ every year around 2,500 young people and we are the largest or one of the largest employer of young people in Scandinavia today, which makes us very proud. We have a very strong sustainability foundation and we will come through that later on in the presentation today. As well, very high focus on safe and secure at our ski destinations if we look into their strategic framework we have a strong focus on mountain operations and property development and supporting that we have all those free foundations as well of course our digitalization and business development And we are one of the largest players worldwide. We are the fourth largest player, and we have just recently seen Veil Resorts presenting their results, which could be an interesting comparison. We are also a market leader in Scandinavia, and we have strengthened our position. Today, we have 42% market share. And again, we are running the five largest winter destinations and also year-round destinations, as well with Stockholm Hammarbybacken as the sixth and the interesting jewel in the crown, as we used to say. If we then look into the number of ski days, we have an unmatchable position within Scandinavia with our five destinations and five resorts. And they are bringing in a lot of ski days, with the highest one in Sälen with 1.8 million ski days per year. We're also providing a lot of beds because without those warm beds, we will be not as attractive as we are today. So we have around 40,000 beds, which we are using every week. And we have them circulating in our system as warm beds. We also continue to develop our SkiStars destination and also work with attracting strong detailed plans with the municipalities and we will give an update later on into this presentation of how the development has been during this year so far. One of the more interesting slides we presented during the CMD day in October was this slide where we really presented how the different customers look like and how the average spend look like if you look at the customer coming from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or USA, for example, in this slide, and also the number of average products. And this was like an introduction of also showing how we are shifting focus in driving a much more international destination and also after more international guests. And you can also see in today's report, which we will guide you through later on, how we are now into a successful journey in how to make this transition possible. And during the Capital Market Day, we also presented new financial targets, Martin.

Yeah, just a few comments to these. If we look at the growth, the organic growth over the last 12 months, we are right now running at the pace of 5%, which is very close to the financial goal of 6%. And also the operating margin in the rolling 12 months is strengthening. We had 14% the last financial year, 22-23%, and now we have gone up to 16%. So we are moving closer and closer to the goal of 18%. And also a comment about our net debt to EBITDA. When we end this quarter, end of February, we have the lowest debt ratio to EBITDA, which amounted to 1.2 times at the moment. And the highest debt is during our end of the first quarter in November, December.

Thanks, Martin. And now we will start to look into the quarter. And I will give you a summary of the quarter here. So a lot of text on this slide, but we actually have a lot of things to be proud of. That's why there is so much text. And let's continue to say that the strong result is driven by a very high interest for skiing holidays. And we can see it at all destinations. And we also started off the season with very good snow conditions. We can also see that the digitalization continues and we continue to grow fast and we have an increase of online visits with nine percent. So we are coming from last year 33 million online visits and now we are increasing with nine. So very strong number. And then if we look into then that the consumer demand and during this last 12 months there's been a lot of discussions around how will consumer attractiveness continue when we have these tough market conditions and here we are really glad to see that we are now we can look into the market downturn in 2008 2011 and also now that we have a proven result even if it is a recession in the market. You can see it here. We increased now, as I said, the international guests. We increased Danish with 25%. We increased, if I bundle UK, Germany and Netherlands, we increased 41%. And during the same time, we can see that the Swedes, we have loss of 1.5%. And a lot of this is very much connected to the early bookings of the Danes and the British guests took actually a lot of bets out of the Swedes as well. So very interesting to see the importance of being early booking also for Swedes going forward. We are growing. We have an organic growth of 9% in the quarter, and we increased operating margin to 42% in the quarter. And that helps us also to have a margin now of 22% accumulated in the first six months. We also have a record high operating profit. We are passing one billion and The estimate from the analytics was 1 billion 18. We are delivering 5% above that on the profit. We have a record in skier days. We increased with 9% and we're ending up in 4.5 million skier days, which is a lot higher than we also have during the record season during the pandemic. And one of the reasons is very much connected to these international guests who are staying longer and they also are buying longer ski paths. So we can see that this transformation to six to eight days ski paths has helped us to increase from 40% share to 43% share this year. And as you have seen in the report, we are increasing all revenue streams and i'm really especially extra glad to see that the retail growth and we read and heard hear so much about that sports equipment sports clothing is down and we are actually showing this totally opposite pattern and increase both online and in physical stores with 34 which is actually growth and growth and growth now for the third third year in a row we are growing. And especially we are growing with our own brand, Equip, which pays with 48% online and 69% in physical stores. And a special extra fun fact is that this year we are actually selling 50,000 pairs of goggles, which is I think also very good for brand exposure at a lot of ski helmets in the slopes. And last but not least is that we can really glad to see our guest surveys showing much more satisfied guests and also that our co-workers doing a brilliant job saying hi to all guests, even if it's in the lifts or in the reception or where you meet the customers. Really proud. We decided to make a project and a trial to see if we could manage to try a pilot project with 100% fossil-free ski resorts. And we have managed. And we are the first in the world to manage to transform Skistad Hammarbybacken in Stockholm. It's a small ski resort but the idea with this pilot is to see if it works and then when we see that it works we can actually scale it and implement it at other of our destinations. And that's why I'm really glad and also proud to our co-workers who have really taken this into their hearts and really made it with a strong effort to make it possible if we just want to show you the digitalization and our movement and as you can see we have an increased use like i said at our digital platforms much more sessions much higher conversion rates and again we are increasing them the total of digital platforms from for example 20.3 million last year to 22 now nine percent or close to ten percent and also the users are up seven and a half percent so also increased conversion rate here just mention I think it's worth mentioning we We decided also a couple of years ago to complete our offer at our ski destinations or winter destinations. And we have completed now this year by making an acquisition of the ski school in Trysil. And that, of course, helped us to completing our offer, not only at the wintertime, also at the summertime since Trysil Guide and had a very strong summer offer as well. We have increased across country at all destinations as well. We have made an acquisition of a concept store also in... Opened up a concept store also in Frysild. Next slide is just to exemplify how we have had the retail growth year over year. And we have a very strong pattern in this, which makes us, of course, extra proud. So now, Martin, let's take a deeper guide throughout the numbers and what has happened through the quarter. Thank you, Stefan.