InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (NYSE:IHG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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If there was more as we went through the year, yes, we’ll continue to monitor it as we always do. But I think this will take us most of the year to get through based on the level of liquidity in the stock anyway. So I hope that helps, Richard.

Keith Barr: Great. Richard, good to talk with you. It’s hard to remember what’s happened over the last 5 years as the lot’s happened. But I remember, was sitting in a room with many of you and Paul talking about how we were going to transform IHG through launching some brands organically through acquiring some brands, strengthening our technology platform and our loyalty program and so forth. That was the strategy we were executing on and the team did a brilliant job on that. Had a little thing called COVID come in the middle of it but we came out of it even stronger. And that’s still our strategy effectively is leveraging our enterprise platform to organically launch brands and segments where we see, selectively do M&A if it’s appropriate where we think it’s the right way to access the customer segment and opportunity.

And now because of all the investments we’ve made in technology and in loyalty and distribution in the platform, we can now grow through exclusive partners as well, too. People want to join IHG because you’re seeing the scale and the strength we have a 77% enterprise contribution. We have a loyalty contribution over 50% of room nights and accelerating, bringing in 12 new million members a year. It’s things that smaller companies just can’t do and we can come up with some very creative solutions in an asset-light approach. Again, at Iberostar a bit of OpEx last year, a bit of OpEx this year. And by 2027, it’s going to be producing $40 million of fees to the P&L and a similar amount coming into the system fund to help support it too. And so it’s a great way to grow the business and leverage the investments that we’ve made.

But we’re going to look at all the different levers that we can do to continue to grow the business, too. And then in China, I think we’re in a really strong position in China. And right now, we have 650 open hotels, I think, 450 in development. I was on the talk with the team today. And I mean, they’ve come out of a really tough time but they’re quite confident. Just to give you a data point, we talked about Chinese New Year what it was last Wednesday for our Greater China business, we are running 70% occupancy. I mean, that just shows you how quickly this business can bounce back. That’s going to lead itself or lend itself to more investment in hotels. It will take time to get pipeline ramping back up again for the industry and projects under construction.

So — it’s not going to directly correlate to the demand recovery but it will come back and grow. We’re seeing some hotels that are unbranded, 1 coming into the IHG system now. We’ve got great relationships with the SOEs where we’re seeing some of the private hotel companies, real estate companies sell to the SOEs we work with, too. So we’re seeing our business continue to grow. Again, it was growing kind of 10%, 12% system size previously, 6% last year. It will ramp itself back up over time but — and it will take a bit of time but we’re very, very confident about it going forward.

Richard Clarke: And just to follow up on the last question there. So are you seeing lots of independent exits in the Chinese market, either converting to yourselves or just closing?

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