Conference Transcript - SBC 2026-08-19

Operator

Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have SBC Medical Group Holdings Incorporated. It trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol SBC. It's a medical services organization providing management support across a wide range of health care fields, including advanced aesthetic health care, dermatology, orthopedics, fertility treatment, gynecology, dentistry, alopecia treatment, and ophthalmology. Ophthalmology. Serving 676 million customers annually, the group is driving AI strategy to lead the future of healthcare. Today, we have with us Hikaru Fukui, head of IR. But first, let's start with the video.

Hikaru Fukui, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you very much for joining us today. Despite your busy schedules, I will now present SBC Medical Group's business overview. Additionally, financial results and and an update on our business strategies, capital, and AIA strategy for the second quarter of 2026. Let me begin by explaining how SBC actually operates, because our model is somewhat different from what many people initially expect. We are a medical services organization, or MSO, behind Japan's No.1 Estate Medical Group. Built over 26 years, we provide clinics with everything they need to operate efficiently, including marketing, procurement, technology, hiring, and training. Everything is managed centrally, which makes the model highly scalable. As Acquenix grow, our earnings grow alongside them. On that basis, it is strengthening its platform through AI and expanding into longevity and global markets backed by strong profitability and a solid balance sheet. As Acquenix highlights, as of the end of June 2026, Our number of locations reached 287, up 34 years on year, and the annual number of customer visits over the trading 12 months was 6.92 million, up 10%. Year-to-date clinic revenue rose 11%, same clinic revenue was up 6%, and average spend per visit in the quarter increased 9%, with both customer volume and unit price rising together. our clinic business is showing renewed strength. If I had to sum up this quarter in a single sentence, it is a quarter in which we completed the structural reforms we undertook in 2025, and SBC's growth entered a phase of re-acceleration. On the back of an expanding business space and more sophisticated support functions, including AI, we delivered profit growth that outpaced revenue growth. Our financial highlights, second quarter revenue was $49 million, up 13% year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $20 million, up 32%, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 41%. Profit growth outpaced revenue growth, with profitability improving. In the second quarter, we grew both revenue and profit despite a weaker yen. Because most of our business is conducted in yen, a weaker yen is a headwind for our reported results. Even so, we absorbed it and still delivered strong revenue and operating income. The main driver was higher management services revenue, reflecting the expansion of the points business following the change in our operating policy in June 2025. A revision of certain service fees also contributed. Now to our strategy update. We aim to be a healthcare platform that supports longevity, therefore living young and bigger lives from two sides, aesthetic medicine, an appearance-based approach, and non-aesthetic or general medicine, a function-based approach. Our goal is to become the name that comes to mind when people in Japan think of healthcare and AI. We believe four growth strategies will get us there, accelerating our multi-brand strategy in aesthetic dermatology, expanding our non-aesthetic business, expanding globally, and strengthening our competitiveness and reforming our cost structure through AI. I will briefly comment on each of these four growth strategies. We believe that AI is developing into a source of SBC's next competitive advantage. In aesthetic dermatology, we are accelerating our multi-planned strategy to capture increasingly diverse needs and raise lifetime value. First half transaction value grew a strong 19% year-on-year. To reach the customer segment that prefers basic dermatological treatment, which is driving market expansion, we are renaming Shonan Aesthetic Dermatology to SPC Skin Clinic. The Skin Clinic name lowers the barrier to aesthetic medicine and broadens our appeal, and we will open two additional clinics. Next, our high value brands for beauty-conscious customers to choose based on the expertise of doctors and equipment. We will add three Neoskin Clinic locations for a total of four, and one to IC Clinic for a total of seven. And to meet solid demand in men's aesthetics and hair removal, we are launching two new formats, the laser, a large scale hair removal clinic, and SBC Men's Flash, which specializes in men's bear removal with high-speed operations. Gorilla Clinic's first half transaction value was $62 million, up 19% year-on-year. Using hair removal and oral AHA treatments as entry points, we guide customers step-by-step toward dermatological and higher-value treatments, and this deeper penetration over existing customer base drove the growth. Aiming for Japan, where longevity means SPC, we positioned non-esthetic healthcare as our second growth engine. Our transaction value mix is still roughly 84% aesthetic and 16% non-aesthetic, which means the potential upside is significant. To drive this, we established a dedicated team in June 2026, led by Najwa Fujimoto, formerly an executive officer at a major healthcare and IT talent platform company. It will strengthen both customer acquisition and medical management, first sharpening the acquisition and operations of existing clinics to raise utilization and revenue per clinic, and in parallel, using M&A to expand the number of locations. The premise of our global expansion is a stable earning space in Japan. On that foundation, we grow overseas with discipline. In the United States, we are advancing our collaboration with Orange Twist, in which we took a minority state in December 2025. Orange to East has 24 locations across 6 states and a membership base where recurring revenue exceeds 40% of sales. We are currently sharing operating know-how and expanding the service menu. And over the medium to long term, we aim to export the model we establish in the United States to Japan and Asia. In Southeast Asia, we are exporting asset-light, the operating system honed in Japan, of affordable, reliable, and standardized. We are proving this out at our first Thai clinic, Blaze Clinic. Under our Powered by SBC model, the LOHO partner provides capital and operations, while SBC supplies procurement, standardization, training, and patient acquisition, earning recurring fees linked to revenue in return. This expands our footprint at a high return on invested capital, or ROAC. While holding down capital expenditure, starting from Thailand, we will expand the model across Asia. AI is a foundational strategy supporting both growth and efficiency. We are leveraging more than 26 years of accumulated management data to support AI development, building a barrier that is hard to replicate. Strengthening our MSO platform through AI lifts growth in three directions at once. The number of locations, the fee per clinic, and the range of service menus. A more attractive platform draws in new clinics, more active transactions raise service fee levels, and the service menu expands, a virtuous cycle that we believe drives recurring consolidated revenue and EPS growth. More sophisticated support functions. AI foremost among them, translate directly into greater value for clinics. And we are raising service fee levels in stages accordingly. Enhanced call center functions are expected to add roughly $11 million per year. And stronger support for the Galleria and Laos clinics is expected to add roughly $4 million, together about $15 million per year. On a full-year basis, on a win-win basis with the medical corporations, we aim to sustainably raise our average fee-per-clinic, or AFPC, at limited additional cost, which further supports profitability. Since our NASDAQ listing, we have reinforced our core platform and laid strategic groundwork overseas and in new domains. From here, we enter a phase of multifaceted acceleration, expanding and rebranding domestic aesthetic dermatology, launching new formats, strengthening non-aesthetic healthcare, moving the United States into phase 2, expanding B2B and joint ventures in Southeast Asia, applying AI, and planning a longevity center for 2027. Through disciplined investment, we will pursue differentiated earnings and sustained EPS growth. Finally, our capital and IR strategy. Our basic policy is to pursue EPS growth and anomalization of our valuation in parallel. Enhancing shareholder value over the medium to long. Backed by un-filed cash, we are investing in both organic growth and disciplined M&A. At the same time, we recognize as the SBC's recognition in the capital markets, particularly in the United States, is still limited. That said, our investor base is broadening rapidly. Our shareholder base has grown roughly 4.7 times year-on-year as of July 2026. Building on this momentum, in 2026, we have actively participated and will continue to participate in IR conferences in New York, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, and step up our year-round investor engagement, including NDR, one-on-ones, and outreach to retail investors. We will also keep working to expand unrest coverage through all of this with continuous EPS growth and the pursuit of an appropriate valuation in the capital markets as our two wheels. We expect to deliver even greater value to all our stakeholders, beginning with you, our shareholders. We hope you will look forward to what lies ahead for SBC. That concludes my remarks. Thank you very much for your attention.

Operator

All right.

Operator

Well, thank you so much for that video presentation. It explains everything perfectly. Let's jump into some questions. First of all, you describe this quarter as a reacceleration of growth. So tell us what has changed and do you expect this momentum to continue?

Speaker 1

Thank you very much for your question, Anna. Yes, we do. Over the last two years, the market became much more competitive, so we reviewed almost every part of our businesses. We looked again at our marketing, pricing, services, and how we communicate with customers. We also strengthened our multi-branding strategy so that we can offer the right service at the right price to each customer group. We also made our marketing much more data-driven. We now look closely at customer needs and behavior and use that data to improve our decisions. We are now seeing the results. At this moment, we confirm not only number of customers' visits, but also customer spending is growing. That is very different from the last two years. We believe this is not just a short-term recovery. It reflects a stronger business platform, and we are confident that this growth can continue.

Operator

Wonderful. And you call non-aesthetic healthcare your second growth engine. So how large can this business become?

Speaker 1

Yeah, we see a very large opportunity. Today, about 84% of our transaction value comes from aesthetic. and only about 16% comes from non-esthetic health care. So there is a lot of room to grow. More importantly, we don't have to build this business from zero. Over 26 years, we have built a strong operating model in aesthetics, including marketing, customer acquisition, clinic operations, data, and AI. we can use the same model in other area of healthcare. Our first step is to improve the performance of our existing clinics. We want to increase the number of patients and improve revenue per clinic. At the same time, we will expand our network through M&A. We are not setting a specific target for the mix today. aesthetic will remain very important but over time we expect non-aesthetic healthcare to become a much larger part of SBC and an important second growth engine.

Operator

And you talked a lot about AI so how does AI actually lead to revenue and EPS growth?

Speaker 1

Yeah for us AI is not only about cutting cost. It's also about growth. There are three areas where AI can help us. First, it can improve the customer experience. We already have an AI chatbot, and we are developing an AI tool for call centers, customer support, and more personalized services. This can help us serve more customers and increase revenue second ai can help us grow our clinic network for example we can use data and ai to choose new clinic locations and share our know-how across the group this helps us open and operate clinics more efficiently third ai helps us grow without adding the same level of cost as our support to clinic became more valuable we can also increase our service fees we have already announced about 15 million us dollar of annual service fee increase importantly these services require a very little additional cost So a large part of that additional revenue can flow directly to profit and EPS. That is why we see AI is both a gross driver and margin driver.

Operator

Wonderful. And how do you view overseas business today, especially the U.S. and Southeast Asia?

Speaker 1

Yeah, we are making good progress, but we want to grow with discipline. In the U.S., we have built a very strong relationship with the Orange Twist management team. We are learning a lot from them about how to learn and grow medical aesthetic business in the U.S. At the same time, they can use SBC's scale, purchasing power, marketing knowledge, and operating experience. So this is a relationship where both sides can run from each other. We are also working together on new areas, including longevity. And over time, we want to bring some of SBC's owned brand and services to the United States. In Southeast Asia, we are also seeing positive signs. Vietnam is a good example. More and more of our customers, there are local Vietnamese customers, not only Japanese customers. That tells us that the business is becoming more local. Our approach is simple. First, build a model that works in each market and then expand it step by step. We don't want to grow overseas too quickly. We want to build on the strong and scalable earning space we already have in Japan.

Operator

And so what does longevity mean for SBC? And why do you believe SBC can win in this market?

Speaker 1

Yeah, for us, longevity is very simple. We want to help people live longer, healthier, and more active lives, but the most important question is this. Can customers actually feel the benefit? This is where we believe SBC has a strong advantage. There are many companies that can measure health data or give advice, but we are a medical group. We can do more than just measure we can actually use a medicine to help improve customers and conditions and quality of life we can also approach longevity from both sides one side is appearance through aesthetic medicine looking good can help people feel more confident and active as they get older the other side is physical function through area such as orthopedics dental care and other health care services if people can move without pain eat well and stay active and that can have a real impact on their daily life so our goal is not just to offer a concept called zone longevity We want to provide real medical services that customers can actually feel are improving their lives. And this is already moving from an idea into action. In 2027, we plan to open a longevity center in Japan and also build an online platform.

Operator

How exciting. Now, let's talk about cash, $184 million of cash. So how do you plan to increase shareholder value, and why should investors look at SBC now?

Speaker 1

Yeah, our first priority is growth. We have a strong cash position, and we plan to use that cash carefully for both organic growth and M&A. We have a long track record of growing businesses after bringing them into SBC group. So we believe M&A can be an important part of future growth, especially as we expand into more areas of health care. At the same time, our goal is to grow EPS steadily. Our business has a high level of recurring revenue and strong margins. As we grow as a clinical network, increase service fees and use AI to make the platform more scalable, we believe we can continue to grow earnings. The other important point is market awareness. SBC is still not very well known in the United Capital Markets. That is why we are actively meeting investors and increasing our IR activities. Our beneficial and shareholder base has already grown significantly over the past year, but we believe there's still a lot of room to improve awareness. So fine now, our strengths, our foundation in 2025, domestic growth is now re-accelerating. AI is creating new revenue and profit opportunities. We are building a second growth engine in non-esthetic health care, and we are also starting to see progress overseas. We believe this is the beginning of the next stage of growth for SBC.

Operator

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for this presentation and some really positive updates. We love to follow along with your progress at SBC, and we certainly hope to see you again real soon. Thank you so much, Hikaru.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much.

Operator

All right, everyone. And we'll be right back with our next presenter.

Operator

Stay with us.