MARCH 5, 2025 | Fellow Shareholders:
With the news yesterday that we’d locked in an exclusive distributor for CLMBR in the UK, we thought everyone might want more color on the addressable market in that country.
Outside the US, the UK is the 2nd largest fitness market in the world – after Germany, where as you all know we are building both operations and organic sales & distribution.
So, the UK is a region in which a lot of people go to a lot of gyms, and where gym membership and fitness-app downloads are on the rise.
- Recent estimates put the UK gym-member population at 10.7 million, or just under 30% of the total population over age 16 – a share that’s bigger than Germany’s despite being a slightly smaller market.
- Leisure DB and Statista – leading sources for fitness and economic data – estimate this represents 4% YOY growth from 2023.
- There are ~7,000 gymns in the UK – and all of them need equipment, trainers and training routines to keep consumers fit and happy.
- 83% of the UK population lives within two miles of a private health club – one benefit of a geographically small country with some very large cities.
The top three gym operators in 2024 represent less than 20% of the market – so the region’s facilities and businesses are fragmented.
This is a big opportunity for an equipment and connected fitness provider with the right connections and distribution, like TRNR.
TRNR is building exactly that type of network – through partners like Cranlea, which has served the UK market for decades, and serves many of the top operators.
This includes our customer David Lloyd Clubs, which as of the end of 2024 was the #5 largest club operator in the region, with 102 facilities.
David Lloyd’s is a great example of a perfect fitness-business buyer for TRNR products – because although it’s not the largest gym operator, it has just about the highest membership fee to number of members per club.
To us, this means they run high-traffic, high-engagement gyms with demanding customers – perfect for our unique equipment – and they also have market prestige.
This means our distribution there has prestige, and that in turn should help us grow.
Entering this market, this way, helps us deliver our strategy by growing organically as well as accelerating scale and improving our balance sheet through acquisitions:
- We are building a risk-managed portfolio of fitness-related brands, content and equipment that has major upside.
- We’re acquiring and scaling businesses in growings market like the UK with a lot of demand from both consumers and companies.
These are exciting times for TRNR – so stay tuned and stay bullish.