PureGym almost halves its losses as customer spending and gym branches surge

PureGym says its annual pre-tax losses have nearly halved to £77.6million, thanks a combination of new gym openings and increased spending from its existing members.

The low cost fitness group said that its revenues for the 12 months to the end of December had risen 15 percent to £549million, thanks to the 54 new gyms that it had opened, its membership growing 11.3 percent to 1.9million and higher average revenues per member.

It added that its efforts to reduce its losses benefited from lower administrative costs and tight cost control, with its energy costs in particular falling due to lower consumption across the group. It also secured fixed utilities prices for 2024 and 2025.

Humphrey Cobbold, PureGym chief executive, said it had made “outstanding” progress, despite facing a challenging business environment, in the form of high inflation and interest rates, high energy costs and political uncertainty.

He added: “We have started 2024 strongly, reaching the milestone of 2million members by the end of January, and have plans to open 60-70 new gyms this year across our markets.“

While the majority of the 581 sites PureGym owns are in the UK, it also has 164 in Denmark, 44 in Switzerland and 3 in the US. It also has 20 franchised gyms in the Middle East. Cobbold said it PureGym will look to expand in the US and in other countries.