Bemobi Mobile Tech S.A. (BMOB3) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Foreign Language] For those who don't speak Portuguese, we have an English channel that can be used by pressing the button called interpretation on the bottom right corner of your screen and choose the option English. I would like to highlight that after the presentation, we will hold a question-and-answer session. Other operating factors could have an impact on our performance in the future, leading to significantly different results. Now let me hand it over to Pedro, who will talk about the results we had in this quarter. Pedro, please take it away.

Thank you, Nicholas. Good morning. Welcome. Once again, thank you for being here. Today, we're going to talk about our results for the second quarter, and we're going to be making comments on our forecasts for the third and fourth quarters. Let me quickly recap what we have here. Bemobi has had a consistent business model focused on B2B2C emerging countries in specific operations. We have telecommunications as one of our biggest industries. But recently, we've also focused on utilities and financial services. We've also worked -- been working with some technology trends. Regarding our revenues and solutions, we have 4 big areas. We have digital subscriptions, digital payments, macro finance and Platform as a Service. This split is in line with how we break our revenue down as well. Regarding the industries we work in, we have more information here. Our first industry was telecommunications. It's almost a 1:1 ratio here. However, more recently, we've been betting heavily on new segments. We can highlight utilities where we've grown a lot with digital payments and also digital channels. We've done both at the same time. We also have operations in the finance sector. Now let me give you a few highlights for the second quarter. As usual, one of our metrics is our geographies. We added one country to the 49 we used to have. We now have Bulgaria. This is our first experience in European community country. It's a new bet with customers who are a bit different from the ones we've had so far. It also goes to show that we're interested in adding new countries after Bulgaria in the next quarters. If we think about the B2B2C model, we added 2 partners in the second quarter. Through these partners, we're now reaching a very broad market with around 2.7 billion clients. More specifically regarding new partners, in the case of Bulgaria, more specifically, when it comes to digital subscriptions, we have a partnership with Yettel, one of their carriers. In practice, we still have the same number of partners for microfinance. For digital payments, we have a new client now. We had approached them a while before, and we had mentioned this, but now it's official. It's Neoenergia, especially for digital payments. Now for platforms, we didn't have any new partners. Regarding B2C metrics, one negative for this quarter is related to our digital subscription services base. We had a 19% reduction year-over-year. We also had a significant reduction compared to the previous quarter. I will be going into details over on the next slide, where we basically see the same information. Now when it comes to micro finance or micro credit, we had a healthy growth of 5% year-over-year and seasonal results quarter-over-quarter. For digital payments, even though we have minus 2% of TPV in this number of BRL 1.5 billion. When we look at this number normalized by the Oi migration, then this number changes slightly. And for subscriptions, let's go into details. We had 2 things that had an impact on us. #1, the Oi customer base migration. So we had an increase in the former Oi clients or customers. So we went from 29.5% to 33.2%. This growth was mainly boosted by the migration of 1 customers to other carriers. However, a significant amount of these customers were of a lower quality. When I say that they are lower quality clients, this means that they are not as active. So in the churning model, from 45 to 60 days, if we're unable to collect from them, then they are excluded from the customer base. So this churn basically comes from clients migrating from Oi. This was the biggest source of this change from 34% to 29.3%. If we look at the same business area from the perspective of revenue, we had a reduction that was half as much, which goes to show that the subscribers who were cancelled were not as profitable and we were not able to collect from them. So yes, this is a reduction, but it's not as big a reduction. Now not as a guidance, but only to set your expectations. I'd like to say that we are now mid-August, and we still see a decrease in our digital subscribers. However, this decrease is deaccelerating. So we are -- we believe that we are close to a point of balance. We are still going to see a reduction in subscribers in Q3, but we're also going to see a smaller reduction in revenue compared to the reduction in subscribers. So for transparency purposes, according to the information we have right now, in Q3, we're still going to see a decrease in this metric. We're also going to see a decrease in revenue for this line of business, but it's not going to be as much as in this quarter, and revenue is not going to be as impacted as the customer base. Now here, we have another 2 factors. The biggest one, 70% to 80% comes from the Oi migration with lower quality subscribers. And as I said, it's not going to be as impactful in Q3. We're noticing more stability. So in Q4, we shouldn't see another reduction quarter-over-quarter. This is a forecast, of course, we are still mid-Q3. However, in the second quarter, we had another phenomenon. A growth engine for this business is the international industry -- the international market, and we didn't have a good quarter for that because we have regular cleaning of the customer base. So when we're unable to activate customers with cleaner customer base because they are not leading through revenue and they end up contaminating our indicators. So we approached our customer base, but everything goes to show that we're going to reach stability. For micro finance, we had no impact from Oi because this is not a line of business, we worked with them. For digital payments, I'd like to highlight a few things. Yes, Oi had a negative impact here. And even though we had a slight decrease in TPV year-over-year, and for ex-Oi our former Oi customers, we had 1.1 and we went to 1.5 in TPV. And a significant part of this came from organic growth, not from migrated customers. You also have the impact of the regular business from carriers where we have top-ups and other services, but we also see a positive impact from utilities here. We announced a few contracts a few quarters back. We are rolling them out, and they are now helping us with their scale. Now when we exclude boy, then we have even better growth here. Now for the sake of transparency, again, what we see at the beginning of the third quarter is that we are doing really well in this segment. We have every indication that the third quarter is going to be our best yet for payments. Now with this combined effect, it's probably going to be similar to Q2, but payments is going to be a highlight. And digital subscriptions are going to lose a bit of space. I can comment more on this. But since this is the biggest discrepancy we've had so far, I thought it was worth it to go into details about it. Now let's talk about our revenue. In the last 2 quarters, we were trying to decouple our organic normalized business for more external effects. So we've been adjusting for 3 variables. But this quarter, we changed it to 2 variables. We usually have a year-over-year effect because of the war between Ukraine and Russia. For this quarter, of course, we are still affected significantly by this work. But in the year-over-year perspective, this impact is no longer significant because we were already at war a year ago. So we no longer adjust results because of that because this is our new baseline. This will be in effect until the world is over. Now historically speaking, we always compare the devaluation of our currency with the dollar or actually other currencies in the real. Year-over-year, we had a BRL 1.7 million impact when we normalize the foreign exchange devaluation. Something similar to last quarter is that our biggest negative impact was the Oi migration, as we said before compared to what we expected. We actually had BRL 1.2 billion to BRL 2 million more than our initial forecast. And if you were to compare it to Q1, where we had the same disclosure, the impact from Oi was a bit higher. So again, for the sake of transparency and expectation setting, for Q3, we should have a similar number year-over-year. For Q4, year-over-year, we can expect a slight decrease. For next year, we're probably going to get around 0. So year-over-year, Oi will no longer have an impact here as of next year. We're going to have clean results. So let me just be clear, this external impact from a historically important client for Bemobi who was sold who went through a migration will probably be over by the end of this year. We won't have significant impact as of next year, and we'll see no impact whatsoever as of the second quarter of next year. So when we look at all that, we had a 6.3% growth, which is positive. However, of course, in light of what I've said before, we also didn't have a good quarter because of our international market. So we are falling behind our expectations because in practice, this quarter was not as strong regardless of currency and regardless of Oi migration. Now without normalizing these results, as we showed in the previous slide, we had a minus 3.9% revenue growth or a decrease. Comparing halfs of the year, we still had minus 1.2%. So you're right, you see a breakdown per region and a breakdown per family of services. Regionally speaking, in spite of the Oi migration, the foreign exchange results and a slower international market, we still gained more international stake. Now with the breakdown per family of services, it is important to highlight 2 things that are happening. We see a reduction in subscriptions, and we see more relevance for payments. This shows that for the first time ever, payments are actually higher than subscription. So payments are our biggest business right now. With the forward-looking perspective, and we've had 1.5 months half of the third quarter, payments was already our biggest bet, and it's now standing out as our new business. We are working hard to make every line of business grow, but we believe that payments will have lower volatility in a very, very promising future. So of course, our goal here is to change our mix to grow every line of business to not reduce any of them. But on the positive note, our business is growing where we think it's more strategic to grow. If we think about trends for Q2 in terms of revenue, Andre has more remarks on other financial targets and to give us information on how we're doing this quarter with a bit of perspective regarding the next quarter.

Thank you, Pedro. Let's get started with this segment. At the top left, we see our gross margin. In spite of this drop of a little bit over BRL 5 million in revenue, we had efficiency gains. So we were able to marginally increase our gross margin in this quarter to BRL 97.5 million. We also had a 3% increase in our relative margin. With a semi-early or half yearly perspective, we also have around 3% and 3 percentage points as an increase. If we look at the OpEx, our variation or fluctuation here was 3%. This happened specifically because of expenditures with personnel. We also had collective bargaining increases. You may remember that we were improving our team in utilities. We hired 2 more senior executives, not only for utilities but also for products. In the 6-month perspective, we also see a 6% increase in OpEx. At the end of June, it's important to say that we had very, very strategic one-off cuts in our structure when it comes to our staff. This has to do with what we have been doing, and this is going to mitigate some of the impacts that we saw here. So this is around 5% of our staff. We also have the adjusted EBITDA. Even though we see a slight expansion of our margin, 32.7%, our EBITDA is down around BRL 1.5 million. This happens more specifically because of the OpEx fluctuation and the revenue fluctuation. For the 6-month perspective, we still had around BRL 87 million for this semester with a 0.3% expansion in our margin. This puts emphasis on the message that we have conveyed to this industry. We strongly believe in the trend of maintaining our gradual expansion but not linearly when it comes to our EBITDA margin. At the top left, we see our adjusted net income. Ex-swap, we see a BRL 6 million reduction. So in addition to our operating performance, the biggest factor here, both in the 3-month and 6-month perspective is fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. As Pedro was saying, we have headwinds right now in regions where we have significant impact for Bemobi internationally. That includes Nigeria, Pakistan, Myanmar, Russia, Ukraine. There was a lot of devaluation for these currencies over this period of time. This was also partially mitigated by the valuation of the Mexican peso and the Chilean peso, but this was not enough to offset the prior impact. At the top right, we see our operational cash flow. In the second quarter of 2023, we had a BRL 1.6 million expense to buy POS for our utility operation. If we take this into account, then we're basically generating the same cash for this period year-over-year. Our conversion rate for the EBITDA and cash is around 8%. If we think about the 6-month period in the first quarter of this year, our CapEx for setting up our offices in Rio and Sao Paulo go to justify our slightly smaller conversion rate. However, for the second half of the year, we expect to be over 70%. Finally, we can talk about our cash position. This ended in June of 2023. We had BRL 544 million. So we had a negative of minus BRL 30.9 million. However, this is fully explained by one-off payments that were necessary in the second quarter of this year. This quarter always brings more pressure to our cash flow. Right at the beginning of this quarter, in April, we had to pay dividends and profit sharing for everyone at the company. He also had payments related to our M&A and strategic initiatives regarding share buyback. So we finished at BRL 544 million. And usually, the second half of the year is way more solid and positive under this lens. This is why we expect a cash position improvement for the next quarters. Let me now hand it back over to Pedro. Thank you very much.

All right. Now let me spend a few more minutes talking about these because in this quarter, we had many, many impacts. Unfortunately, most of them are negative. So as we've been saying basically for 2 quarters, the Oi migration had a significant impact on us this quarter. As previously said, we still believe that we're going to feel impact from this throughout this year. We're going to have a similar impact on Q3 and a smaller impact on Q4. Basically, nothing in Q1 of next year and basically 0 in Q2. Of course, we can't say anything about foreign exchange rates because this could go both ways. But for digital subscriptions, we still believe, and I want to make this clear that we have a stable business. We've been around for 10 years. But Oi had the culture of monetizing its user base. It may have been the oldest partner we've had at Bemobi. So when we see a migration into 3 carriers with slightly different strategies, it is only expected for us to see a negative impact. It was a bit worse than what we expected. And in a way, this actually went together with a slower quarter -- in a slower quarter in the international market. So what we see here is that this time, we had 2 negative impacts adding to each other. Usually, things offset each other. And with FX, of course, this boosts everything. Again, we expect the same picture for Q3. Now on a positive note, our biggest bet is that out of the 3 acquisitions we had, 2 were focused on this business, which is Payment Solutions. This is how we've been growing organically. Our biggest hires were here for digital payment journeys. So even with the migration and Oi was our biggest client here, we still had a positive growth here. We grew our TPV quarter-over-quarter, and we were similar year-over-year even with very negative results from Oi. We are very optimistic. We believe that Q3 is going to be a good quarter here. Maybe we're going to get even a bit more traction with Payment Solutions. So that includes the telecommunications traditional business, which is going well, but mainly our new segment utilities. We went from ideas to contracts to deployment, and now we are reaping the fruit of this journey, and we are just getting started. This has already had an impact on our results for this quarter, and it will have a positive impact over the next quarters, which will change the face of our company. Gasping talk with -- we're going to talk about digital subscriptions, but we're also going to have a very robust pillar in payment solutions. Now when it comes to profitability, contribution margin and EBITDA margin, as Andre was saying, yes, we've made a number of adjustments between the end of last year and more recently last quarter. Some of these adjustments have not been added to the results of the second quarter, but we're going to add them to the results of the second half of the year. This is going to help us offset this shyer level of revenue coming from digital subscriptions. Also, we were trying to balance 2 things. We had synergies from acquisitions, and we haven't really enjoyed all of them. We still have some of them to enjoy. And as we become more comfortable, especially with Tayaxa because we've been having better integration with them, then we can enjoy optimization opportunities. Also with areas that do not grow as much, we don't need as much investment. But we were able to reduce our OpEx even though we increased our investments in higher growth areas. So as Andre was saying, we increased our investments in payments, either for systems, products or sales. We have 2 additional VPs who are basically focused either on payments or on utility solutions. So I just want to make this clear. We are optimizing this. We are rebalancing where we invest our money because we're going for everything that is more promising. When it comes to cash flow generation, we're very comfortable. We believe that our company is going to be a strong cash generator. The impacts we saw in the first half of the year are to be expected like dividends and profit sharing. So we should have a high cash conversion for the whole year, and we'll probably be able to continue investing in projects in the future. Well, we clearly believe that this was a slow quarter, a weak quarter. But what matters the most about this company is that we are still very comfortable with the medium- to long-term perspective. The impact of our new businesses show that we made the right bets in addition to our M&As, and we are still very committed to that very active. With the volume of capital that we have right now, we're able to have nonexcluding cash and locations. And we believe right now that, that means also working on some buybacks. So yesterday, in our material fact, we said that we are cancelling the stock that we have in our treasury, and we are opening up space for a more robust share buyback program. We'll be able to work on that for the next few months. Now net-net, when we put together a positive and negative impact from Oi, FX, digital subscriptions and payments, we believe that all in all, Q3 will be similar to Q2, maybe slightly better in profitability. And Q4 will still be heavily affected by a few systems. Digital subscriptions will lose its relative weight because of 2 consecutive decreases. And we're going to have more relevance for payments because we have 2 consecutive increases. When we think about 2024, even though our planning is not as perfect as possible, we have indications that 2024 will start a bit cleaner. We also have better forecasts for organic growth in 2024. Obviously, we expect it to be better than 2023. Down the line, we'll be able to give you more information on what we expect for 2024. So as previously said, 2023 is a transition year in many senses. We're migrating from what may have been our biggest line for Bemobi at least for many years. We're also migrating from a company that would be heavily focused and dependent on digital subscriptions and which is now way more focused on digital payments, which became our new business. All right. So now let's see some instructions on how we're going to have the Q&A session. Thank you.

Thank you, Pedro. We now have some time for Q&A [Operator Instructions] Some of our analysts have already raised their hands, Pedro. So let me unmute Bernardo.

Pedro, Andre, Stricker, Nicholas. First, I'd like to ask you about apps and games. This is a heavily comp -- this is a segment that has been through a lot of compression, a lot of reduction because of the Oi migration. Do you expect to reactivate any of this customer base, which migrated to the other 3 carriers? I also remember that at some point, we were talking about challenges and opportunities. Now with that in mind, is there still a positive angle when it comes to the migration of these customers to the other 3 carriers? I would like to talk about the drivers and levers that are available to us to accelerate into reorganize this customer base in Brazil. My second question is I'd like to understand the curve of revenue in the second quarter and what we could expect for 2024 vis-a-vis what we had. Pedro explained really well how Oi had an impact on the second quarter, but we also had other positive results, for example, payments in the beginning of utilities. So I'm still struggling to understand the ramp-up of revenue.

Thank you, Bernardo. I'm going to say something in the number on the let Joao talk about it. First, let me talk about downsides and upsides regarding digital subscriptions. As I was saying before, Bernardo Oi compared it to other carriers shows 2 specific points. Yes, for Oi, we had better channel penetration because it was an old customer. So that was useful for us to sell new services to subscribers. But this is not only about channels. Oi, with their business strategy would heavily focus on digital services as a tool to make their customer base profitable. So we were able to onboard these customers with higher volumes and higher recurrence compared to other carriers. So when we compare Oi to the other 3 carriers, yes, of course, with these carriers, we have good distribution channels, not as much as we had with OI, but it's good. But the biggest difference here is that these other carriers end up prioritizing other channels, they are not bad for us. They could be microfinance, they could be top-ups, they could be plan migrations. But I don't see a big upside. Of course, if we change our behavior or strategy, there could be an upside. But right now, with the current picture, at least for Brazil, when it comes to digital subscriptions in this world, after Oi, we end up having smaller results than before. Joao, before I say something about international operations, do you have any comments?

No, we are correct, Pedro, Oi would focus a lot on profitability by using digital services. But Tim, Claro and Vivo look at profitability through many different lenses, not only digital services. So as we see the migration of this customer base from Oi to the other carriers, of course, they change, and they end up adopting the strategy that the new carriers adopt. So in this sense, digital services become as big or as small as the new carriers. So your question was about reactivating this customer base. Of course, we continue working with the new carriers. We're working strongly because the Oi customer base is there, and it's a part of the strategy, but it doesn't compare to the size that was available to us with Oi. Also, Bernardo, we can talk about your other questions later, but in the international market we don't see any reasons for a lack of growth. However, it's important to make it clear that this is not a good quarter for that, specifically this line of business. Now what was unusual about this quarter is that we had many negative impacts at once. Things usually offset each other. But there is no structural or systemic factor that is going to lead to a growth problem, it's a cycle. Now we've talked before to you and to other groups. But with digital subscriptions, when we look at it as aggregated data, and we have almost 100 partners, there is a certain stability to it. However, when we have a more granular perspective, then we rely on cycles on carrier strategy on different cycles. It is cyclical. So what we see is the result of many impacts, both up and down. So in this quarter, since we had more negative effects, which clearly happened this quarter because we had the Oi effect and we had a regional effect. So even for regions where we have more foreseeability, we had more negative effects than before. But it doesn't change our medium- to long-term vision. We just took a step back, especially because of Oi, and we'll have to make up for it in other regions. So this was a bigger impact in Brazil. Now let me talk about the second and third parts of your questions. Meanwhile, I think Oi migration brings us some opportunities. When it comes to micro finance, our biggest partner in Brazil is Claro, even though we are present in many other countries. We now have a bigger customer base who migrated to Claro. So we can work with them in a better way, and we may have bigger growth because of that. So that's a positive. When it comes to payments in the short term, even if we have good performance with payments, we have negative results, for example, with Oi with the control plants, they had a very different strategy. Clients used credit cards, not payment slips. And even though that's the case, we see that all 3 carriers are now embracing this new payment method in new digital payments. So in the medium to long term, this is an upside. So in this case, we go back to the same level we expected. But in the medium term, we may go way beyond what we expected with Oi. So that's a glass half situation. Regarding your last question, I'm not going to be as specific as you'd like, but this is what I can tell you. For utilities, we are on track for getting to, I don't know, 1/3 of the telecommunications TPV next year. So we're going to go basically from 0 to getting near to around 1/3 or maybe a ¼ next year of the carrier business. With utilities, we have a different scheme. So the TPV is a good indicator, but it's not the best. Our average take rate ends up being a bit higher. So we have more revenue specificity with a lower TPV. And 2 things happened because of that. It seems that this was a good bet betting on this sector because it takes a long time to develop a new business, but we were able to do it relatively quickly. We already have significant results. And everything indicates that this is going to be very important in the coming years. And this is something that didn't even exist a short while ago. Also, our model could be multiplied to other industries, maybe even more quickly than what we anticipated. So we are analyzing which other industries we should go to replicate the success and to work with these vertical solutions. So if we're able to go into new industries and design a payment solutions journey for this industry, maybe this is not as explored areas dominated of a market. Even though the payment industry in Brazil is very sophisticated our performance in utilities goes to show that we have a lot of opportunity. So this is our comparison to telecommunications, and this is what we expect. Are you happy with the answer? Bernardo?

Yes, I am. Let me just follow up on something because I think your last comment is interesting regarding the possibility of going into other industries. Could you please give us a few examples? What would you look for? What would you assess strategically?

Of course, I can give you a few examples. But of course, I can't give you a spoiler and I can't let the competition know what we're thinking about. So let me explore it on a concept level. We see 2 opportunities here. First, opportunities in industries where we already operate in for which pain points we already understand, so we end up molding our solutions to the reality in the scenario of each customer, each client. This is what we do with carriers. We adapt our model to their top-up schemes, for example. So this model works really well for large companies. But if we work with smaller companies, where I'm taking the risk on. I'm making the investments, and I want to make money in the medium term or long term. This model is not as good. We just determined the acquisition of a company called [indiscernible]. It's a very small business, but it's strategic because they basically do what we do for large companies, but for small businesses in a very -- in a model that can be easily multiplied. So we're trying to do what we already do for the long tail market, which we've never prioritized before. We'll have a different approach, a lower touch approach, but a highly, highly reproducible approach. We closed this deal 5 weeks ago, but we're very engaged. We're investing in this company because we want to work the long tail in a better way. We're optimistic. We believe that we're going to have more stability. Of course, with smaller businesses, you can get some better profitability, and you can solve the problem. So this is not necessarily a vertical solution, but we're trying to use industries that we understand, but working what is fragmented. And when we put together hundreds of companies, they could need significant results. Now we also look into other industries, and of course, we're not going to mention any names. And in this case, each industry has specificities. Sometimes you have problems with delinquency or payments in instalments for utilities, and we see other pains in the payment journey for other industries. Usually, when something is standardized, you have the great ways for acquirers, and this is a very mature industry. However, as you make it vertical, you have very specific pain points. And historically, clients have not been optimized for the, for example, telecommunications, utilities and many other industries that have not properly digitalized their payments with very specific pain points related to the payment flow. So we're looking into that, and we should mention another industry by the end of this year. So we're going to have a mix of organic and inorganic growth again for 2024. Angeno Bernardo, you need to plant the seed for things that are going to lead to growth in our next waves. We're more confident now with utilities and the purchase or acquisition of 70. We want to accelerate this business because this has been shown to be promising.

We have a question from Christian, but I think he left.

Pedro, Andre, Nicolas, Stricker. I think most of our questions have been answered by what Bernardo asked, but I do have a question, especially because of something that Andre said regarding finances. You mentioned updating your team. So even with more pressure on your revenue yearly, your margins already growing or at least your margin is still growing actually. So what is your envision for your margin from now on? Because I believe you're making efforts to keep on improving, right?

Christian, I'm going to let you know what we think about the short term and then the medium term. So first, more objective than more subjective. Objectively speaking, and I don't want to repeat myself. We believe that we have opportunities to optimize things and opportunities to invest. And I think the net impact here is going to be positive for the second half of the year. As I said, we had acquisitions. We were not ripping the fruit of all of our acquisitions from the get-go because we have to adjust things as we become more mature and more confident in these investments. So we have waves of updates and changes. This is how we naturally look to optimize operations. And this is only natural when you have M&As. By the way, when you assess a company, one of the things we take into account is how we're going to rip the fruit when it comes to cost synergies. But of course, there is still a way to go even when we assess that. At the end of Q2, we had a few adjustments. It didn't have an impact on the adjusted EBITDA, but it did have an impact on the accounting EBITDA, and we're going to continue seeing the results of that. However, on the other hand, we have businesses at different levels of maturity. And businesses are live. They happen live, so you reassign your bets and your investments. As we have more solid growth, we're able to optimize things a bit more, and we're able to invest more in areas with better traction. For example, in this case, as we were saying its payments. In the short term, therefore, the net impact of this is slightly positive compared to the first quarter or the first half of the year. In the medium term, we need to be careful. I think in what we do right now, we want to improve margins even further. However, since we want to continue investing in new business lines, for example, we were talking about going into long tail going to other verticals. Whenever we go into new segments with no revenue whatsoever. Of course, we have a decoupling between OpEx and CapEx and also revenue from contribution margins. And that's okay. We're okay with that. So we're going to optimize whatever we believe needs to be optimized, but we don't want to maximize short-term results in spite of the things we believe in. So we need to be careful when we forecast big improvements in our margin because I think it is important to keep this cycle going of investing in new things because this is what actually leads to growth. This creates a good cycle. For example, with utilities let's say, we had an 80% leverage because of utilities in our macro structure at Bemobi. So structure platform, we were able to use many of these things that we already offered carriers to utilities. So you're able to create better profitability for the investments that you already made. But in the short term, you spend like a year investing so that you start getting any cash in. So we're going to have marginally better results in the second half of the year. We're going to keep on working on optimizing things that are here, so that we can open up space to invest in new things without having significant decreases in our margin.

We have a few questions in writing, Pedro. Let me read the first one. This question is related to the profit-sharing policies at our company. Could you please explain these, what are your policies for profit sharing with employees? What indicators you take into account when deciding whether or not to give them profits? And what are the percentages?

This is no secret. And I think this has to do with how we think about this. Of course, people have different philosophies when it comes to this. But something that we started using many years ago was that the team needed to be in line with results. So usually, we don't look for the first quartile of base wages were at the second or third where may even be lower than our peers. But on the other hand, our profit sharing historically has always been important for the total compensation for the whole company. And our profit sharing is available to 100% of our employees. So we don't have profit sharing only for our officers, directors, executives. It applies to the whole company. And this is important in a business focused on performance in meritocracy or merit. This is the philosophy we've chosen. We believe it works for us. Now having said that, without going into too much detail, sometimes you have top goals applicable to the whole company. Of course, we have a target regarding EBITDA minus CapEx because our CapEx is basically not tangible. We're talking about time allocation basically. So we believe that this captures how we're creating results. So this is a top variable. Of course, you break it down into other areas, and it becomes more granular according to different positions in different areas. Internationally, for example, of course, they are compensated according to the international performance, but everyone is connected to the top target. If you work in sales, of course, you're going to be more connected to revenue and contribution margin. Other areas are going to be more linked to EBITDA. This is our philosophy without going into too much detail. Now to motivate people, we also have targets where we pay 100% of the profit sharing when we get to 100%. And then we have challenges up or below that. For example, let's say, we need to get to 100. If they get to 130, they can have twice as much profit sharing. But if you have 50, then you actually get 0 bonuses. This creates productive tension. So we challenge people and people want to not only beat but surpass a target, but actually, they can't fall behind too much. So these targets are motivation, but they are also a detractor. We've been trying to optimize this model. We want to be led by merit. The whole company can enjoy that and every target is connected to different groups. So in years where we do better, our profit sharing is bigger. Last year was good. So we had acquisitions. We had variables changing. And the profit sharing you saw here is related to results from last year. We added 3 companies, so we had a significant profit-sharing material because our headcount basically was basically multiplied by 2 or 3. And we also had specific retention bonuses for the companies we acquired. This is a good market practice. If we don't know a business, we need to retain talents. So for all intents and purposes, this goes into profit sharing. But this is our philosophy. We're focused on performance, and we share risks and rewards with the whole company.

Okay. Last question. We have 2 questions together. This person is asking about gaming streaming, which was mentioned, and they ask if Vivo money could be an opportunity for Bemobi.

Okay, streaming, as we said at the time was something we were very cautious with when it comes to expectations. It's very seasonal, downloads, streaming. I don't think this significantly changes a business model. Things have been working well regarding usability. We need good connectivity, so either 5G or WiFi. So yes, even though there has been functional improvement here, this is not something that is used broadly. But the 5G Internet connection is going to be better and people are going to use that more often. So this is not going to change our business model. This is going to be an evolution of a service that gets updated as market conditions change. This is what I say. When it comes to Vivo Money, what Vivo has been doing is really core, and this is in line with what we've been doing. So the micro credits that we offer with, for example, top-ups in data is not the same thing, but it goes through the same rationale. By using the behavior of smartphone users were able to have a glimpse of who they are. So we use that to offer data credit top-up and to also create scoring for other business, usually, finances business so that they can offer these people credit in other formats. So what Vivo is doing is on the same page as what we're doing. So enabling other services of this nature could be a significant, a very interesting parallel opportunity. In practice, at the end of the day, this has to do with doing 3 things which we already do: scoring, understanding customers to know what we can offer as credit for each one of them, digital channels so that we can convert eligible clients and then collections being able to collect from them. Congratulations to Vivo for this very innovative initiative. We love it. And we'd love to see other carriers during the same. Bemobi has services that add to each other in which could, by the way, be beneficial for this kind of offering. Nicholas, I think we are already late.

Yes, we're running late, and I think this is the end of our presentation. Thank you very much to everyone, and let's now hear our final remarks from Pedro.

Thank you, Nicholas. I won't be long. Well, I'm not going to refrain from saying the truth. This was a weak quarter, but there are things that we can't control. Oi was our biggest partner for a long time, and it changed. And we focused on payments a while back, and it's going well. We had timed results compared to what we believe Bemobi can deliver. But at the same time, we're happy to see the medium-term forecasts that we have based on the things we've been investing on. A medium-term vision hasn't changed. Everything we believed in hasn't changed. But this is a bit different from what we expected in the short time, but nothing changes in our plans. Wonderful. Thank you very much, everyone. Enjoy your day. Thank you. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]