How much Virgin Active makes per gym member

Virgin Active makes around R871.28 per gym member, with the company reporting a 6% growth in active members in the first six months of its 2025 financial year.

Virgin Active-owner Brait released the results for the six months through September 2024, which revealed a strong performance driven largely by the gym company.

This comes after Brait embarked on a recapitalisation strategy that allowed the company to reverse its losses and strengthen its balance sheet.

At the start of this year, as of March 2024, Brait’s loss stood at R171 million. In these latest results, Brait reported a profit of R644 million.

One of the highlights from the company’s results was Virgin Active, which constitutes 61% of Brait’s total assets.

Virgin Active reported a strong operational performance, driven by active members increasing by 6% year-on-year, with yields increasing by 9%.

The gym company now has 1.02 million active members, up from the year prior but still below pre-pandemic levels.

Regardless, this membership growth resulted in a 16% increase in revenue excluding Kauai and a 23% increase in revenue, including the heat food restaurant.

Brait said this performance was largely driven by revenue growth in Italy (19%), South Africa (16%) and Singapore (34%), which all managed to offset lower growth in the UK (11%).

During the six-month period, Brait made significant investments in the existing Virgin Active estate and the company said new clubs and club refurbishments undertaken in the period drove higher membership engagement and yields.

This resulted in a significant increase in Virgin Active’s year-to-date EBITDA, with the segment reporting 339% growth in EBITDA excluding Kauai.

The segment also achieved a 72% revenue to EBITDA conversation ratio.

South Africa is Virgin Active’s largest market and saw strong sales growth over the six-month period. Its members increased by 5% while its yield – how much is made from each member – grew by 10%.

This saw revenue grow by 16% year-on-year, with Brait attributing this to a focus on membership retention and yield management on the back of club renovations.

Virgin Active’s South African division currently has 634,000 active members as of September 2024.

In previous results, Brait explained that Virgin Active was hit hard by Covid lockdowns across the globe, especially in its key market of South Africa. 

However, the company was slightly more upbeat about the impact of the pandemic in these results, saying it catalysed trends that have benefitted the business.

Some of these trends include an increased focus on personal well-being and fitness, a shift in spending on health and fitness, an increasingly health-conscious population, the use of wearable devices and technologies, and a demand for social interaction and engagement.

This gave Virgin Active a significantly larger addressable market, set it up with a strong growth trajectory and enhanced the business’ membership spend and retentiaion.

Virgin Active’s financial recovery since the pandemic can be seen in the graph below