Ultrapar Participações S.A. (UGPA3) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here with you once again for Ultra Day. Before starting, we would like to talk about safety, a very important pillar to us. There is no fire drill planned today. In a situation of event, all the exit routes are clearly marked, and the hotel is ready to support you. Today, we are going to hear from the presentation of our businesses, then Ultrapar, followed by a brief session of Q&A. [Operator Instructions]. Let me invite now Tabajara, the CEO of Ultragaz to kick off our event. Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you for being here. We are going to start our day speaking about Ultragaz, the first company of the group. I would like to start by referring back to what we had said in previous years. Just giving you an overview, which is how we see Ultragaz. It has celebrated 86 years of existence, the first GLP company in -- the first LPG company in the world. And Ultragaz has had a very positive evolution throughout the decades. It has reached a very interesting level, as you can see, with an innovative brand, highly reliable according to customers' perspective, modern, accessible with major distribution and available to the population in Brazil through its resellers and its own operations. Highly capitalized brand, which has also developed relationship with customers. This is something that we have addressed before. There are 3 main value levers that we rely on. This is something that we have been implementing for the past 2 years and doing it very specifically. These are the 3 pillars: operational excellence, our operation is a scale of service and scale. So it should reach high operational excellence. We always want to innovate and deliver different services and products to our customers. And in addition, we want to be perceived as a new energy solution, always considering our main assets in coordination with our LPG operation. We have already started operating with different types of energy sources, really expanding into what we call an energy platform. This is the strategy that we have been working on, and we want to expand capillarity and relationship into different areas to continuously participate in the energy transition, which is perceived a great opportunity to our company and, of course, adding value to the society as well. Let me start by making some highlights. There is the journey of energy transition, but we operate mainly in LPG right now. It's a very interesting market. We believe in it for our current operation and for the near future. I think that Brazil has a highly developed market in terms of regulation. The regulation is modern. It provides an opportunity of competition to all players, and that's better than in other countries. Our work throughout the years has shown that we have a very mature market. 91% of the population has -- uses LPG, probably 100% uses it directly or indirectly. And this is all the result of this very well regulated market. We can see LPG has been clean, accessible energy and can be used for the transition. The market has also been evolved. There is an increase in sourcing, more competition. And this is something that we believe can also result from future developments, which may also add more to the market. In our opinion, LPG market is mature, has good regulation and still has potential. And this is very much aligned with the strategy we have been putting in place. I would like to start by highlighting what we think is essential for all our operations. As Andre pointed out, Safety. Safety comes first. We have been making investments. And these are just the few indicators to show that. There are plenty of others that are closely monitored. We've been making relevant investments to increase safety in operations. We've also been working on the culture of safety. The company has reached a very good level of progress in the area of safety culture. And we are much more aware of our current status and what else is there to be done involving not only our own staff, but also third-party providers. This is something that really is being considered for the near future. There is a lot to be done, but this is one of our main commitments and something that we believe very much in doing and doing successfully. So let's go into our 3 main levers that I described to you when I started. The company has put in place projects to all the 3 levers. The first one, which is the main one because it provides improved results is operational excellence. And there are 2 sides to it. The obvious one, which is bringing efficiency and excellence to our operations, reducing costs, using fewer resources and also delivering more to our customers because operational excellence can really provide a different level of services to our customers. All our customer segments are monitored closely to observe their perceptions and level of satisfaction. And when we migrate into more profitable segments as we've been doing, we always want to maintain the same level of operational excellence because our operation is of scale. And even when we talk about new energy sources, we are always obsessed with operational excellence. This is something that we can do through bottling, distribution, supplies. And it's essential to make sure that we can deliver good results. Secondly, we've called this driver, innovation and expansion in the LPG market. It means being closer to our customers, offering what the customers want. We want to be closer. We want to have that kind of retail position, focusing on our end consumers through our resellers. Our operation has expanded into the countryside area of Brazil in more rural areas, we used to be operating more on the coast line, and now we are going inland, which is something that we intend to maintain in upcoming years. We've also been focusing on relationship digitalization, having more digital tools to interact with our customers. Different solutions are provided to our customers, and this is something positive that can also improve our financial risk. And thirdly, new energy solutions. This year, we've started operating with distributed generation, with electricity power through Stella and the operation of our CNG. These are not operated activities. Of course, they are integrated in our main operations, and they take place through all the different channels of the company. And we are very excited about our perspectives. So this is a summary of our strategy, and I would like to share with you some key highlights. Let me start with operational excellence. We want to bring together robust, sound operational architecture because there are 39 LPG bases of operation, and we are very well distributed geographically. We have over 6,000 resellers, we have 25 million bottles of gas with our brand, really robust infrastructure throughout the country. This can be combined with operational excellence. This year, we have already opened our new bases. They are fully operational, both in the North and Northeast with reduction of logistic costs. We also have an important project, which is called lean project to deal with a streamlining of our processes, offering also operational cost reductions. And we have evolved significantly in supply and logistics. With this robust structure that the company is delivering today, we can take a unique path towards the future, improving supply and logistics. Another very important topic, and I'm sure you are aware of that, is our sharing of assets, part of our operational assets for bottling. We have recently had some approved agreements with consortium. We want to speed up our level of operational excellence, really delivering specific products to our customers. In other words, we're going to be closer to our resellers and our consumers, delivering much better results. The map, you can see all the different bases. In white, we are going to have increased geographic distribution; green, our current production bases, and we have bases, and we are going to operate more efficiently through that. So this is what we want to have fully deployed in the next 2 or 3 years, emphasizing this avenue of activity towards operational excellence. Now in terms of innovation of LPG, here, we have 2 different areas of operation. We have a residential application. We want to be closer to our end consumers. There are the retail resellers. And you can see here the number of resellers, Ultragaz only operates with resellers that have our brand and operate within our standards of quality. If we increase a little bit the volume, we tend to have more resellers, and it means we are closer to our end consumers, offering special services and better deliverables, giving a different kind of profile. It results from our own internal processes, training of all those that work with us. And we are very glad with the level of services delivered by our partners to end consumers. This is something that we are going to maintain, maintaining the capillarity throughout Brazil, especially going inland in the country. Moreover, we've been improving our digital channels. And consumers are aware of our operations through our resellers. And this is something that tends to be really successful because we believe there are very important steps forward involving digitalization. We expect to have an increase in number of digital operations. Almost all resellers are really connected. We have map, which is an app that is used with our resellers. And we have recently launched one more solution, which is a vending machine fully automated, which operates 24/7. So the self-service position with the resellers. As you can see, a very successful initiative, and this is what we are going to do in our residential segment. Now speaking on the corporate strategy. It is our own direct operations with -- to serve the clients. There are no resellers in between. We focus on profitability. We went to operate in the segments which are more profitable. Thanks to our operational excellence, these segments can achieve good results, but only if you have appropriate commercial skills and appropriate strategies. It is -- the intention is to strike a balance with appropriate cost, appropriate solutions and deliverables to our clients. This is an area that is always open to innovation. Of the 60,000 customers, 10,000 of them came because of new solutions that add value, how can we be more efficient, reduce emissions. And we also add services. We don't sell only the molecule. We add services in the sales. We can give you some examples of industries that are normally served by us. Some of them, very traditional to Ultragaz and others, which are more promising. For example, agribusiness, a number of applications. This is an area that responds very positively, and we can see we can offer new solutions to them. For example, seed drying. This was an area where we had very little participation in the past, and now we are increasing our businesses in this area. So this is something that we want to do. We believe we can get good market position, operational excellence and also innovation. Moving forward, let's talk about the third driver of Ultragaz journey. We have relied on our rationale of energy solutions portfolio. We tended to be just focused on LPG, but now we know we have to diversify. There are possibilities of energy transition, but in sync with our operations. We are not focusing on completely new businesses that are going to run parallel. No, we want things to be in combination. We want to have complementarity for Ultragaz. For customers that use LPG, we want to expand into other offers. There are other kinds of energy, and we can start providing different products to them, and we can see those customers are very open to receive other solutions. Most of our customers also come to us, they ask for help to go into that energy transition. This is something that we've been discussing for a while. And the application so far has proved to be effective, it makes sense to us and to the whole operation of the company. Now I'd like to point out some of the most recent moves that we've done in the end of last year and early this year. We started operating in electric energy grid as we acquired Stella with distributed generation. When we acquired the company, this was a small operation. We were close to the company, and we knew their model really well. So this year, we are following the journey of what I described as integrating this operation with Ultragaz's operation. In July, we closed the contract with 30 new clients, including Ultragaz's operation. And the sales relationship there is operated by the company with over 250 resellers operating the electrical energy industry. These are Ultragaz resellers that also trade on the energy market via distributed energy. So we offer discounts to our customers and also benefits to the resellers themselves. This is a theory we still need to develop, and there's room to develop it very well, but both resellers and customers have received it really well. And we are seeing this path forward as a very promising one. Another recent move of ours was in compressed gas as we acquired NEOgás. This is another company that has been in the market for several years, a pioneer in this industry with over 150 trucks. It operates on fossil-based compressed gas. Our theory is to expand the biomethane distribution with a very similar work. We see a lot of projects for biomethane production going underway and also a strong demand from our existing customers to start developing a solution on the renewable energy space. We already have some contracts that we've signed to operate on biomethane and also customers on the other side. So a few clients expect to have their operations beginning partly this year and partly next year. So we're already starting operating CNG in combination -- in tandem with Ultragaz's operations. So with the same style of operations, the same level of supply, all of that operated by the company. We have already integrated NEOgás, and we plan to start now expanding our operation to prove our theory. So these are the latest acquisitions, but from what we've seen in terms of the reception in the market and by customers, we've been encouraged to continue looking into other avenues moving forward. So we're coming to the end of my presentation. I've given you the rundown of what we've done and what our strategy is for the future. And I believe that we have been able to implement in a satisfying way all of that strategy. Of course, we see a lot of room to continue seeking to grow moving forward. But we do see that this is the path we will continue to go along, learning new things that we can do moving forward. But we are doing that very confident based on the latest results of what we've done so far. So with that, I come to the end of my presentation. Now I'd like to introduce you to watch a video that sums up what I said. This is a video we use internally and give you a better sense of everything that I... [Presentation]

Thank you very much for your attention, everyone. And now I'd like to call Decio on to the stage, who'll be talking about Ultracargo.

Good morning, everyone. I think after Taba's presentation, we should go straight to Q&A. There's nothing else to add. Jokes aside and going back to our script, it's great to be here with you all again to talk a little bit about the continued growth of Ultracargo. In our last presentation, I talked a lot about our growth journey based on operational excellence and the growth of our footprint into new geographies. This is very important when we talk about our growth over the last few years. But I'd also like to talk just a little bit about interiorization, which is something we'll be exploring very much throughout the presentation and certainly during the Q&A. If you look at the map on the screen, you can see 2 new areas Paulinia, where we acquired 50% of the sugar and BP terminal. This is a very strategically located terminal to work on oil products. And also, we acquired the Ipiranga based in Rio Grande do Norte. I will be talking about how this fits into our strategy over the course of the presentation. We are still a leader in bulk liquids terminals. We are the leader on the private side of the market, and we'll continue to defend and increase our leadership on that side. But with these latest investments and a few other ones we plan to do, we will continue to grow the company from a port storage company into one that offers integrated solutions to its customers, building on its growth strategy. Now a little bit of our facts and figures. Our assets increased 1 million metric tons in installed capacity. And looking at the latest 12 months, we've handled over 7 million tons of material, over 14 million cubic meters sold with the help of our over 839 employees. Now going back to the 5 strategic guidelines, we have constantly mentioned here every year, this makes up the foundation of how we work. And they work in combination. If I could go for an analogy, the 2 first -- the 2 first ones, social environmental responsibility and people and high-performance culture that strengthens the culture of our team, we can't be scored against. We need people who are highly skilled and well trained. And at the end of the day, if you look at the bottom of it, what we sell is an experience. We are sold a product that has to be stored, and they want to receive that in the same amount that they handed it to you. So these are the pillars. And all the rest is what enables us to deliver that experience throughout our growth journey. The other ones are midfield. This is a company of high invested capital. We need to manage our assets really well. So being consistent. Six Sigma and Lean concepts are part of our operations and innovation, the different paths is very much connected to technology, and we'll be talking a little bit about that as well. And this is what allows us to score as well. So we want to offer a value proposition, which is strong to all of our customers. which is why developing new growth avenues is important in order to provide a more well-rounded solution. I think it's become clear what team I'm talking about here. We have very strong players in every position. And combined, we have a consistent team, which enables the company to grow in a sustainable and consistent way. A consistent growth in our revenue is where we're headed. Now going into our first pillar, which in addition to strategy, it's also a value to the company. The company is still and has been investing very strongly in the integrity of its assets, processes, technology, skills building, culture building. And we are very happy to be able to see the results of these investments. We are talking about the first 2 quarters, but I can tell you that until yesterday, we had reported no accident within Ultragaz's operations this year. We had only one low gravity accident this year, which is the result of everything we've done so far. And all of this is connected. You talked about safety -- you work on safety. It affects your productivity. I think very few of you have had the operation to visit our facilities, but what do you do with safety when there's no money. I'd like to invite you to watch a video that will touch a little bit on this topic. [Presentation]

Well, moving forward, as I said, everything is connected, safety, innovation and processes. And I just wanted to give you a few examples so that you can understand how they connect. Many of our terminals use nitrogen as a tank sensor. So you complete your tanks with nitrogen to avoid contamination or the risk of exposure. So we have kilometers of pipes throughout our terminals where there's hydrogen, but it was very challenging to find potential leaks across this network. So we found a piece of device that's already part of our operations. The first picture that you see on the left-hand side of the screen is an acoustic sensor, it emits a wave that we cannot feel. And with the feedback, it produces an image that we can assess. This is one of the highest costs in our operations. And with that, we tackle challenges and costs in our Santos terminal. For example, we have 147 tanks. So we have to inspect the ceiling of these tanks. And these are very tall tanks. We used to have an individual that go up and inspect for potential explosion risks. This is extraneous work in heights. So today, we use drone inspections. The drone will fly over the area. You have traceability. You may have more than one person looking into that annual gain in productivity. You reduce the potential accident risks, and this becomes more affordable. We also use sensors in our terminal pumps with vibration analysis and noise assessment, and this allows us to foresee any problem that could lead to an accident or a product leak, but also reduces our maintenance costs. And the last example I wanted to show you is we need to keep our tanks clean. And in traditional operations, you have workers that will be climbing these tanks. And this was a very expensive operation. Again, working in heights, consuming about 1,000 liquids (sic) [ liters ] of water to clean 60 square cubic meter tanks. So you have new equipment. This was an innovation in-house. This was a team that was specialized in cleaning the outside part of buildings. And this lowered the water consumption from 1,000 to about 20 liters. So again, safety, productivity and innovation walk hand-in-hand. And they account for much of our increased productivity over the last few years. Now trying to show you some facts and figures that show you the result of all the journey we've had so far with our new connected system, going back to a few of the last presentations. We have a few indicators that show the increase or improvement in our operations. We have Suape. I think that this was from 2020 to this year, there was a 32% decrease in average time. In Aratu, productivity in terms of tons handled per employee has increased by 28%. In Itaqui, our landfill waste management. You know that sustainability is part of our strategy, and that has decreased 42%. And our most recent project incentives with hydrogen with many management tools, we've reduced hydrogen consumption in Santos by 32%. So if we try to sum up all the gains from all the productivity initiatives we've had in the last few years, in the first half of 2020, when we had 832 cubic meters in capacity, we would spend BRL 24 per cubic meters sold. In 2022, operating 955,000 cubic meters, we spent BRL 22 per cubic meter. And I think this sums up all of our gains. So we start with an increase in our safety profile. And ultimately, we increase our cost efficiency and our results. Our operations and our growth is supported by a diversified client portfolio, which is also diversified in terms of time. We -- up to -- 50% of our contracts expiring in up to 5 years. So much of our revenue is very predictable, which puts in a very comfortable place when making decisions in a strategic way. The first half of this year, we saw a significant increase in our share of fuels, not importing so many crude oil products. You know that when we look at agribusiness, Brazil's deficit is growing, especially when talking about diesel. Ethanol is coming to 8%, and we expect to gain a market share in the next few years because of the strategy we will be talking about later on. And our share in clients Ipiranga being our flagship, but we also have a large client portfolio that's rather concentrated, which is an advantage when you want to become a logistics supplier because you can understand the opportunities and bottlenecks for each client and establish a win-win relationship between the 2 companies over the long term. Now going to the market of chemicals, with 8% increase after the pandemic just focused on methanol and caustic soda, but let me talk about the auto cycle. There's going to be a 10% increase since 2021 according to data. Now imports, there has been a 20.4% increase, but it has grown even more for us. The green portion of the chart is Petrobras import. And Petrobras imports through Transpetro. The gap has been closed, thanks to private players, the ones that use infrastructure, such as Ultracargo. And the growth in imports has amounted to 44%. This is why there is an increase in byproducts, especially going through the north and northeast. That's why we invested in Vila do Conde and also in Santos, where we have a very important operation. The new projects of Ultracargo have really helped us sustain this journey of improvement of our company. Now let's go deeper into our strategy. We want to be exposed and closer to agribusiness by the offer of diesel, and we want to offer infrastructure to new energy transition field chain, mainly ethanol -- corn-based ethanol going through Rondonópolis, and this is why we made an investment there. So from Rondonópolis to Paulinia. And we want to have that railway integration up to Santos with a very efficient logistic corridor. A second area is through Itaqui. Itaqui is an entry port for oil subproducts. And we are going into the construction of a terminal of Palmeirante. The fuel goes from Itaqui by truck to the other port. Now it's going to be through railway system, reducing CO2 emission and also providing much faster turnover of asset because it's easier to unload from train than from trucks. But let me show you that in video because... [Presentation]

Let us zoom in our new terminals. So Paulinia, highly strategic Opla. It is just next to the refining facility of Petrobras. There is a connection with a logo system, and we are making investments to expand the railway receiving dock. It's not really capable of getting all the ethanol through railway system. But now we are going to expand and connect that to Santos. We imagine that Brazil will be an exporter of ethanol and export really for energy transition. Rondonópolis is a terminal that we have acquired from Ipiranga. We are going to expand its capacity. That's where we are going to receive the corn-based ethanol to correlate Rondonópolis with Paulínia to connect them, sending back oil byproducts. Ipiranga bases are all the white tanks that you can see on the central area of the photo. As of September, it has become Ultracargo bases. Now Palmeirante, this is a scale model. We are going to start moving in a month, and that's going to be completed within 1 year, all connected through railway system with a shadow from Itaqui to Palmeirante. There is a great potential of having return of corn-based ethanol. So we expect it to be an area -- a central hub in the future. So that would be a second quarter in operation. But that's not all. Some other investments had been already made. We were the winners of an auction, and now we are expanding our Itaqui capacity, the main hub for oil byproducts, nearly 300,000 cubic meters. It has very high turnover there at Itaqui where there are 150,000 cubic meters, the turnover is 1.8x, very profitable. And the high turnover is a possibility because of the railway connection. This is going to be also improved in Santos once we have the full implementation. There is also an expansion of Aratu, Palmeirante and Rondonópolis. It means a potential capacity growth of 55% in new bidding processes and other bulk products. And we are constantly paying attention to new alternatives, new opportunities where Ultracargo can come and really add value. So we can also see the evolution of our installed capacity from 838,000 cubic meters to over 1 million. Well, we also have to take very good care of the community where we operate. And we've been investing significantly in social initiatives. We constantly focused on education. There are programs that train new workers in the areas where we are. We have already had 45 graduates from our own courses. We've hired 20 of them, and we are introducing more and more women into our staff. They already amount to 30% of the staff, and we want to expand that further. We have partnership with Institute Ayrton Senna to train teachers, to develop social emotional competence of our students. We've already impacted over 7,000 students. And there are also some after-school activities. We know that the pandemic has generated some educational gaps. So we are investing to really benefit those students. Here, we can see the growth of our company year-over-year. Our results are increasingly better. And I think this chart is really crystal clear. In 2020, '21, we've had all the significant victories of our team. And we can always make parallels with the soccer teams in Brazil. Well, thank you all very much. Linden, please come and talk to us about Ipiranga.

Good morning. Last year, I was here, and I was talking about the diagnosis of Ipiranga. There had been some difficult years with underperformed results. I shared with you my diagnosis, a plan to resume growth. And my intention today is to address a recurring question of all of you. How is Ipiranga doing? What -- is there room for further growth cal? How can we measure success? What are the results like? How much value have you added? And this is what I am going to address today. This is the plan I showed you last year, very to the point. We understood there were 4 pillars to be essential to the business. I'm not going to repeat that because you are all very familiar with that. But it involved pricing, logistics, a new trading for supplies; and finally, network management and engagement, improving the relationship with our resellers. In 2022, I have to say we have taken some significant strides starting from pricing. We have remodeled Ipiranga pricing. There is a new organization. We have new organizational tools. We've changed policies and processes. We are using regionalized strategies, which are much more responsive to market stimuli. There has been a growth in our recurring EBITDA of the company. And this is not only because of pricing. But if we look closely to NPS, price is no longer a retractor of the perception through NPS. It shows that we have really succeeded in our -- improving our first pillar. We have also progressed significantly in trading. The market of supplies, as Decio pointed out, has changed significantly. We had to create the area of trading. And that's what we did. A new area, it's about 1 year old now. It's very robust. It has generated products throughout the world, and it's been trading products outside Brazil as well. And it can sell to third party, always based on Ipiranga in short. Our trading generates businesses. And it is also a source of competitiveness to our own network. We have also progressed in our pillar of relationship, interacting with our resellers. I've been in the area for 33 years. I have always traveled a lot. But I have to say that I have never traveled as much as last year. Of the 26 states in Brazil, I visited 22, nearly 90 markets were visited by us, and we wanted to be there. We wanted to understand with our resellers, what the problems were, their points and how we could help them. It had a very unique experience to our resellers, and it meant a lot to us as well because we set the tone, we set how we want the company to move on. And closeness has always been a hallmark of our operations. And this is something that we could really regain throughout 2022. We also have some other indicators, of course. Ipiranga has gained market share last year in our branded network. There has been an increase in the NPS of resellers, and we've improved also the sales of premium product. How has it been done? By understanding more the dynamic there on site. We have also told you that we were making some disinvestments, which was important. We've done that. We've closed about 1,000 service stations that had fewer gallons, had low potential. They were not contributing to the productivity of the business. But we have also invested in businesses that had higher volume. As such, productivity increased and the total volume increased as well despite the fact that we closed some of the service stations. This process is coming to an end in the third quarter. And we are, after that, going to deal with the natural process of closing stations. But altogether, it has brought more stability. In 2022 -- 2023, some of the elements from '22 still had to be further developed. And our idea was really to maintain focus on the 4 elements, which are essential to our operation. We have adjusted somewhat our priorities. Now rather than talking about pricing, we talk about competitiveness. It requires a strong network, pricing evolution, optimization of SG&A and capital employed. In terms of logistics, we are talking about broader trading, generating additional businesses and continuous engagement by causing really that -- enchanting that really -- convincing and bringing people on board. Speaking of distribution and logistics, safety comes first. Taba, Decio pointed it out. This is ongoing, and it's never going to end. We've been creating that disciplined culture of safety. We have a vulnerable business. There are 14 -- 15,000 events of loading and unloading per day, 3,000 trucks all over Brazil every single day. Of course, it means risk. Despite all of that, we maintained very low frequency rates of accidents and incidents. And we really believe our rate of accidents can be 0, and this is what pursue. A number of initiatives have been put in place. The most important one is the restructuring of our portfolio of carriers. We used to have 120 contracted truck carriers providing services. Now there are about 60, and we want to reduce it further to 50 company -- cargo companies. Why? Because we can select the ones which are more qualified to work within our standards, and it adds efficiency. Just by reducing our cargo carriers, it has reduced 36% heavy fleet accidents, which is probably the main point of concern where the accidents tend to be more severe. I've also been emphasizing for the past 15 or 16 months of work to recover Ipiranga that the most important pillar to us which would take longer to get to the level we wanted was the pillar of logistics. It depends on process improvements, on improving service level, optimizing assets, especially for transportation. There is no problem of infrastructure, but we can see opportunities to improve processes. Based on our calculation, about 20% of logistic cost can still be improved, but part of that has been achieved. We've started implementing the project. The pilot center was Paulinia where we redefined our model of management and distribution of Paulinia. It has led to 35% reduction of loading time, which generates efficiency. We've improved productivity by 50%, loading more, circulating more product. We've reduced restriction of products in the base because if you are inefficient in your operation, inevitably, you have to have restricted bases so that you supply everyone. To some extent, you have to restrict product loading. So it meant we could really improve that. And we've also improved, significantly, our productivity of our fleet, leading to 35% in Paulinia alone. Paulinia is an example. We are reproducing the same in either of our hubs. And by June next year, we want everything to be completed, really producing very important results to us. Well, as you've seen recently as well, the last time we have worked on Ipiranga brand was in '96, and this year, we decided to revisit our brand and relaunch it. We made adjustments to its look and its positioning so that we became the station that fuel life on the go. And I would like to show you a video. [Presentation]

So this was very sensitive work. You can't really mess with a brand like Ipiranga, just for the sake of it. This is work that took 2 years to be completed. It involves a lot of tests and survey on the market. We are already seeing stations transitioning to the new brand. And I don't know if you know this, but VIP are new -- how we call our new salespeople, and we changed everything, including the uniforms that they wear. We have also been doing important work in AmPm just as we had with service stations. We are running a comp through low-potential stores. So stores with low sales volume might be problem to Ipiranga in the long run, but also to sellers in the medium term. So we closed about 380 stores, but on the other hand, we opened 140 stores over the course of last year along the same lines, closing those with lower potential to bring new stores with much higher potential. As President of AmPm, Leonardo has also been spearheading the process of bringing strategic partners to the business, which have also derived a lot of value to our franchise, which is something our sellers have been taking note of. We are also working on a few different store models going into market segments. We aren't serving that well currently. One example, as we recently reported, our stores devoted to high occupancy corporate buildings and even though we are at the early stages of rollout, we have seen very significant success so far. Also from the complete solution, which is how we've positioned ourselves lately, we are still working on Jet Oil as Brazil's largest automotive franchise, iconic as the greatest lubricant producer and seller in the country. We have our benefits and payment solutions. And we are also working on Ipimax, our new line of products, which is also available in all our stations. But none of this is possible unless you have the right people at the right time with the right set of skills and adjusted motivations. And Ipiranga has stood out for having a diverse, inclusive creative environment. We have made significant headway when it comes to how we deal with our people as well. We also continue to work with our work on the communities surrounding our stations. There are many of them, but I'd like to point out the well-being of our drivers. We have a network that serves about 50,000 people a year across over 100 cities. These are positioned in our highway stations, but they work not only with truck drivers, but also other citizens in the area. We've been working with local hospitals and the road, Federal Police, and I'd like you to watch. [Presentation]

I'm a bit biased because I am a huge fan of this program. Now going to the results side, as I said earlier, we came from a very challenging 2021 where we fell way behind the average for our peers, and that's the dotted line that you see on the chart. And in 2022, already working on the pragmatic 4-pillar step, we were able to close that gap with our recurring EBITDA. In 2023, we are already outpacing our peers. And of course, the 2023 result has been impacted by many of the elements you have already seen, we had a very challenging first half of the year with a loss of inventory and an oversupply, especially because of the elements that Decio addressed. But Ipiranga is definitely on the path to recover its profitability and growth rates of years past to enjoy much healthier operation. So this is our journey to fuel life on the go. I'd like to thank all of you for your attention and call Pizzinatto to move forward with his presentation.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's great to join all of you for another Ultra Day. And we will now take a look at Ultrapar's consolidated overview. Starting with our balance sheet. And in the last 3 years, I'd like to call your attention to our gross debt. which includes our debt profile, we see this significant decrease in the company's debt over the last 3 years. This was obviously supported by our investments much of our Oxiteno and Extrafarma sales revenues are already included here, but there's also a decrease in payments since March of last year, which have not made it to the decrease in indebtedness. And our debt -- net debt has only not decreased because of the draft discount. And this was period where oil prices were down and therefore, low working capital at Ipiranga. So the leverage decrease was also accompanied by the decreased debt cost. We had an issue of new issuance and more expensive debt, which allow us to have net debt below 100% of DI. And we also issued CRAs at 104.8% DI, the most interesting one in Brazil. And that, combined with the reduced cost debt also allowed us to have an improved rating outlook, both with Moody's and Standard & Poor. And in addition to reduced indebtedness, we're also seeing in improvement in our operation efficiency. As our colleagues have shown, this was driven by growth in Ultracargo and Ultragaz, and despite the more challenging first half of the year at Ipiranga, as my colleague just said, there's also good prospects in terms of improvement, which have also allowed us to improve our leverage rates as well. In parallel with that, we can see this value generation with reduced debt be consolidated by our ROIC rates. Here, we saw help from the LCV 2 in 2022 with a positive trend. There are additional levers here that come especially from Ipiranga's results. BRL 4 billion in our balance of tax credits that we may -- we have yet to use. BRL 1 billion from our receivables and divestments plus another BRL 1 billion from the sale of assets from Ipiranga that we plan to do over the next few years. So this sale of assets in addition to improve our results also reduces our employed capital. So it's a double benefit as we move forward with that. One good example of this improved use of assets is what Decio showed you, the transition from Ultracargo to Ipiranga of our terminal. This improves not only Ultra's consolidated results, but also reduces the import capital with Ipiranga, bringing better short-term results for Ipiranga and improves Ultracargo's results as the terminal opens its operations to work with third-party companies. We had a specific event in March of this year to launch our ESG targets. This was another breakthrough of ours. And this August, we made available in our IR website, the monitoring or how we're doing on those targets. And recently, we had improved ratings both from MSCI from A to AA and with CDP from C to B, in addition to joining or to becoming Great Place to Work certified. So we will also make this information available to all of you in our IR website. Another thing I'd like to point out to you is the new corporate structure we introduced in the last few months. We used to have an inefficient corporate structure, both from the operational side and management side as well. Ultragaz, for example, was a subsidiary of Ipiranga. So between closures, company transfers, and restructuring, we now have 3 company groups, which are separately Ultracargo, Ultragaz and Ipiranga. And this has allowed, for example, increased operational efficiency, our accounting closure has decreased by 40% with Ultracargo. This will allow us to use those BRL 4 billion in tax credits I just talked about. And for the first time, we had individual nation -- issued individual financial statements for each of our companies. This is something that we did not have before for Ultracargo, Ultragaz and Ipiranga. This paves the way very well for the next steps we want to take with Ultrapar. And now to conclude my presentation, I just wanted to show you where we've come from, both in the Brazilian Stock Exchange and UGPA3. And after a time of a lot of instability with the results in the last few years, we are moving back to the path of growth with value generation, which is what we highlighted between 2022 and 2023 and which set the tone -- which was actually the tone that was set by Ultrapar in its first year as a listed company. So I just wanted to show you that we are on the right path. And on that note, I'd like to invite Marcos to the stage to conclude our presentations for this morning. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. We've talked a lot about our business this morning. So I'd like to start by quickly going over our leaders talked about how important this is. But over the course of my career, I've always said that if I were an analyst, I would be looking at the company's safety indexes as a proxy for operational efficiency. That actually shows your ability to prevent things that you do not want to see in practice. And that's good management. So if you are able to prevent accidents to prevent waste or to prevent losses is on the same range of things that you must do to keep the company well running well. So our operational license, any company doing what we do needs to really be safe. Otherwise, it shouldn't even be able to operate. But in addition to that, you also have operational gains, which are critical for you, in every single operation of ours. So we have some of the numbers here, which are still rather inconsistent over time in a way, but I have to point out that until a few months ago, we weren't looking at third-party figures, especially when talking about Ultragaz. So starting in 2021, we will be looking at a different range of figures. So these are our consolidated safety figures. Now another thing I feel is important to point out is the transformation we're witnessing in the company's governance. Starting with the company's Board of Directors. We've had huge changes in our Board this year. We had 4 new members come in. Actually, 5 included myself, but 4 people who were with the Board before plus myself, which joined recently. George who is the new -- the new President who was with us before and these come in very strongly when it comes to portfolio management and people management aspects where, in a way, Ultrapar is significantly focused when it comes to increasing its capacity and its abilities. Interactions within the Board have been of the highest quality. Everyone is really engaged on this, which was a very radical change, but was also very successful. Our teams have also changed, why? Because we've had people from inside the company being promoted and some coming from outside. We have a very diverse team force as Linden showed for Ipiranga, Decio and Taba. And we have a highly qualified team. I would like to tell you that even though we are focused on diversity, our main focus is on meritocracy, quality, qualification of people, right people doing the right things building a group of people who can really make an important team. In this strategy, something makes sense to me, a successful strategy is having the best team. The best team is essential. The best since the Rome and Environs have also succeeded. So we need the best team. And this is what we've been doing, building that team. Considering Ultrapar as a business, our 4 businesses have done that with the right dedication. And I think that we've progressed significantly. Now speaking of opportunities there is one area that we have to recognize as being unbeatable, and this is agribusiness. It brings opportunities to Brazilian economy wherever we are. And being open to agribusiness is a very important strategy to our businesses. And we've been doing that. You probably have noticed in our presentations that everyone has tried to expose our businesses to agri business. This is a way of reducing risks and at the same time, increasing growth of our company. In the long run, at Ultrapar, we'll keep on really looking for opportunities that can bring us closer to the Brazilian agribusiness GDP there is this balance with dollar exchange rate and the increased peak of activity. There is another point that I would like to make concerning the energy transition. Inevitably, we are going to see a change in energy matrix, but this is not something that happens overnight. We are speaking about years and years of changes. And our businesses are going to move towards energy transition. And what matters is timing. We cannot try to do anything faster and put our companies at risk generating less cash because we have tried to move too fast and then we wouldn't be able to fund the energy transition, which is ultimately our main intention. Energy transition in Brazil, if we set apart the reality in the world. First, there is biofuel, agribusiness, which brings different alternatives to what we observe in Asia or even in Europe. We are very well positioned to analyze the situation. We have access to quality of information, but at the same time, we cannot expect that we would be able to simply switch our energy matrix in a little time. Yes, we are paying attention. We are moving towards that, using autocycle, thinking about hybrid cars, reduction in consumption of fuel with more efficient engines, et cetera. But there is still a peak of consumption of fossil fuels in upcoming years. We don't expect to see any reduction of volumes, which is different from what some of the European countries have noticed. Now in terms of regulatory aspects despite all the tax challenges and material issues and the need of important reforms, in our regulatory framework, there have been improvements. MONOPHASIA is an important victory of us, it has simplified the analysis of what's going on. The government can easily inspect tax payment and this is going to bring mid- and long-term benefits. The area of LPG, which has very modern regulation consolidated for the past 20 years. But in liquid fuels, things are still being adjusted for the past 24 years till the end of Bolsonaro's government and beginning of this government, there have been many regulatory changes, significant fluctuations. But this is a process that seems to be at its expected path moving towards a more simplified reality. This is a positive side of it. There are BRL 14 billion lost in Brazil in tax evasion, and this is something that I think will be reduced. We hope we can see macro things changing, for example, administrative reforms and others which would really make us all feel very happy. Let me show you our so-called 4 business units at Ultra Holding. Ultragaz, which is a brand of national reference, really a pioneer, brought LPG into Brazil, highly well distributed, close to its customer. There are 11 million homes that we visit every day. We get into the kitchens of these homes. We are very close to customers and as such, many opportunities are created. Ultracargo also has national presence, the only player of liquid storage distributed all over Brazil with very good knowledge of logistics, of cargo flow. Now it has an opportunity of offering smarter logistics solutions, bringing software and hardware. Ipiranga, a leading brand really dealing with trading. It's a huge platform of sales of biofuel, which would be good for the energy transition. Leonardo is here, if you want to have AmPm he's here to sell it to you. AmPm, our convenience store is very close to consumers, very well designed, really offering interesting products. And finally, at Ultrapar, we want to be active portfolio managers. We want to deal with capital allocation in a very active fashion, managing our portfolio with greater flexibility. There was a recent publication at newspaper Valor saying, is there no plan of IPO? No. But we don't have anything against it either. If there were a good business opportunity where we would have to have an IPO, we would consider it. We don't have anything against it. Likewise, we are also open to deal with publicly traded companies where we can see possibilities of interaction of bringing our robust operations, we've cost capital, people, systems, optimizing assets which are not part of our portfolio yet. Well, thank you all very much. Let me now ask Andre to come so that we can go into the Q&A session. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Marcos. Well, now we are going to go into our questions and answers. If you are watching us remotely, you have a box where you can submit your questions. If you are here with us, please raise your hand and just wait for the microphone to be taken to you, and please stand up to ask your question. Let me invite now Rodrigo, Tabajara, Leonardo everyone to come and join us.

I am Thiago Duarte with BTG. Let me build up on what Marcos has just said, really nice presentation because it sum up what each unit has been doing, the new movement of Ultrapar. And you see Marcos and what the newspaper that you've -- article that you've mentioned pointed out, because you are describing Ultrapar as capital allocation or an entity that allocates capital. And Ultra in the past, used to operate in different areas, petrochemical applications, then pharma products. Today, it's much more concise with much better focus. But speaking of opportunities, when you look to your business units, are you thinking about bringing maybe a fifth area of business? Or are you thinking about having these 4 units of yours just embracing some new lines of business or some activities. We've noticed that happening. I know you're not going to give us any specific answer. But please tell us what -- some general idea. I think everyone has talked about the agribusiness, but you have emphasized that. So how -- what's the role it plays in your units?

Thiago, first of all, businesses, and there is an area of seed drying, it is building bases in land through Saturno. With our competitor working on some bases, it's -- let's say, we are getting more exposure in these regions. Thus as well working on creating some railway systems to serve all these regions and bringing the port activities in land, so to speak. Ipiranga had also had it in place, but now we're expanding into the north, center, west of the country. These are organic experiences. Speaking of agribusiness, this is part of GDP. And it is the share that has grown the most and really in a stable fashion. All the other areas kind of have ups and downs. As a group, we want to be closer to that business, which is very resilient and growing continuously. I think that if we had to talk about an acquisition businesses that have exposure to agri will be well received by us. But of course, we are looking towards other opportunities. Because my main message is the following. I was talking to George, the other day, human beings tend to overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. So if we think about Ultra in the 10 year scenario, we would think about Ultrapar as being much more sophisticated in terms of capital allocation. Many more tools and possibilities and levels of freedom, right? Ultimately, this is my message. Is there a specific target? That's not the point. In the long run, after concluding a cycle of building value to our businesses I think we will be prepared in terms of balance sheet, reputation, structure, will be really prepared to do similar things or even better things.

Hello. I'm Vicente from Bradesco BBI. Thank you very much for your excellent presentations. Let me ask about Ultragaz. You've talked about maintaining that journey of operational excellence and efficiency, 900,000 cubic meters, how does the partnership with Super supports that? How much more operational efficiency could you have if working with Super?

As I've told you, the process of the consortium is part of our journey of operational excellence. I think it's difficult to just focus on the effect coming from that. There is an immediate result of BRL 50 million to BRL 60 million per year of that reduction, but also what matters is service improvement. This is going to be the main value level, being closer to markets provides different kind of expansions with our network of resellers, corporate area, this is not something separated from everything that we've been doing. But it is a catalyst of the process. It keeps on encouraging us to take this path.

I'm going to ask a question that we've got online about the draft discount. You've mentioned about the reduction of draft discount. Could you please tell us more about that in the future?

The line of draft discount. It's not a bad line. It has very short-term nature. And if you have appropriate purpose of using it, it makes sense. We've done that with the price increase of fuels in the need of working capital. So we increased the use of this line. But now considering that we are going to get the resources of -- from our disinvestment, we are going to reduce the line of the draft discount to be available, just to be active, and used if it makes sense, especially in terms of working capital. But the idea is to keep on reducing it until April next year when we are going to get most of the payment from the disinvestment of Oxiteno. If I may make a comment the financial community at large started to understand working capital in a combined fashion. How much are using of the customers' clients, suppliers and your own capital in terms of assets. And I think there are 3 different things actually. If you analyze like that, you can understand draft discount differently. The most important thing for a company is to what extent can you use fewer assets in your operation? What is the physical inventory level and the low, let's say, steel inventories you have, but generating the same production, transferring to your customer, working capital, reducing the days of outstanding pay and funding them at 200% of CDI doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. In terms of relationship, it's much better to set appropriate paying lines and end up capturing margin. If you have a spread and a good relationship with the supplier and very low credit risks. It all depends on cost, right? And this is where the draft discount is. We are speaking about a line, which is only the cost of long-term lines. If the only advantage is to have it excluded from the market, well, then it means I'm using less of my working capital. I think we have to be more pragmatic. We really have to understand what we create value as a company, this is not creating value. It's easy to get BRL 3 billion of draft discount from Petrobras, giving one day payment, but how am I adding value? From an accounting perspective, it does not show in our banking indebtedness level.

I am Monique from Itaú. My question is for Linden. First of all, a great job on the transformation with the Ipiranga, it shows. Now about the opportunity that's going to come from the optimization of processes you gave us some color of 20% in logistics costs to unlock all of that. And you've already run a pilot project that apparently was really successful. So could you share with us a time line of all of that. What's the plan of replicating these pilot projects? And how do you plan to reach those 20%? How long will it take? It will be very interesting to hear all of that.

So we project to be completing that project around midway through next year. This is a project that we will have to take in chunks, as I said earlier, it will involve some very critical processes within the company, which we are working from the ground up, and this shows at the end in our operations, but our initial view that we will be able to unlock value generation remains. And as we said earlier, it should take about 3 years to address all of our logistics issues, and that's still our forecast. So I'd say by the second half of next year, this should be behind us mostly.

Gabriel Barra with Citibank. Just wanted to go over 2 very quick points. And going back to the first question, within Ultracargo, it's very interesting how you focused on growth with Ultracargo and Ultragaz. With Ultragaz or Ultracargo when it comes to Agro, we see great opportunities, especially when it comes to handling grain. So going back to the first question, where would you see this type of opportunity? Can we expect the company to focus on grain storage in inland Brazil or with transportation and bottlenecks in highways and railways as we've seen so far. Now with Ultragaz, it's very interesting how you focused on transitioning within Ultragaz, both energy and biodiesel. So my question is, why not do that with Ipiranga as well? Isn't there an opportunity to focus more on that within Ipiranga as opposed to Ultragaz and could there be an interaction between the 2 businesses moving forward? That's what I'd like to understand. Thank you.

Thank you for your question. I think when it comes to exposure to Agro, what gives us the highest returns are investments in bulk liquids. We can use that, the same, for example, the same car that carries one type of material also carries the other. So the increased exposure comes with liquids when we mentioned the future of biodiesels, the increased mixtures when it comes to corn-based ethanol. That would be the first natural step. There will be a share of railroads in Brazil with new structures for bulk solids, which will be required in the future. So you have the Rondonopolis road. Now the partnership with Highways Rumo, LI and these projects could take us on a very interesting level and we could look into that moving forward. We'll have to run a risk return analysis, but we could move forward with bulk solids as well. So you have not only grains but also fertilizers. So we have to look on investment comes with bulk liquids, especially with the increased diesel demand in these areas. Well, Tabajara could add any comments if he has them. But the picture is this. We start the discussion looking at our client. Today, Ultragaz's clients, highway routes, including some points of charging. So this involves nearly 0 charges. Now with Ultragaz it is a different aspect. All 60 million customers, industrial customers have a demand for energy. So the decision was made based on the clients' demand. So this is energy, also have movement requirement. And in this situation, we come in with Ipiranga as well. So the business tends to grow in that sense moving forward. But as Marcos said, we are trying to look from the clients' perspective that already have that demand, whether on the corporate side or the individual side. So we have -- or household type. So we have that prospect in essence.

Yes, I just wanted to jump in as well. We have talked a lot about this, Taba and myself. Ipiranga has been a mobility brand for a long time because this is now involved, but it's always been a retailer and a mobility company. We never had very close ties with the oil industry. We've always been a very powerful mobility brand. So if Taba has a product that Ipiranga can use, his brand to sell that product, then great, let's work to upsell. But this is essentially our perspective, the ability to generate those types of business exists. And we -- whenever we have the possibility to bring that to market, that's what we'll do.

I'm Luiz Carvalho with UBS. First of all, great job again on the presentation. It was great to see your performance across the business. If I could start with you, so Lutz, you've talked about capital management since you've come in. And obviously, you have Patria, a managing partner that's part of the group. And you've recently worked on Brazil waterways. So what you've talked recently where this could be an important player on the agro side, great part of your career was connected to that. Is this an asset that makes sense to look at within that scope? Have you looked into that. And anything that you can talk to us about would be great. And also to Taba more on the regulatory side with Ultragaz, we are seeing the government try to look for ways to either raise its federal revenues or reduce prices to specific industries. And until some time ago, LGP was not allowed to be used for a few applications. What's the regulatory risk that you see for this industry? Is there anything in discussion right now as to how the company can hedge itself against that type of risk?

Well, to your first point, yes, waterways is an interesting asset. I have a few qualms about the barriers of entry that could be created unlike in railways where you have specific concessions. With waterways, it's more similar to highway transportation where you can buy equipment to get into it. But I think it's worth looking into that either way. We've looked into over 20 different businesses over the past few months. We -- because we are listed, we even buy and sell shares, of course. So within the possibilities, we have been more proactive in that sense. But we do not have our minds made up either pro or against anything. So the most positive aspect is that exposure to agro. But when it comes to the type of asset, we still do not have an opinion, a strong opinion about that.

Well, to your point about regulation, I quickly addressed that during my presentation. We do understand how sophisticated legislation is in Brazil. We are part of the global LGP Association, and we often host other companies from around the world to explain how our model works. We have a framework that allows a lot of freedom to customers. You can buy a bottle of gas and for the rest of your life, that company will be obligated to continue to supply services to that customer with a very -- at a very high level. So I think that this is what we have to recognize as the strong point. So this is very important for how the companies work as well. Another thing that you mentioned, and we have high expectations for the next few years in terms of restricted use without any logic that comes from the first goal for with restrictions that could be lifted now, and we have had a lot of interface with authorities to move forward in that sense. And this really dovetails with the supply, Petrobras being the main supplier in the country. But alongside major world players are already working in LGP supply in Brazil. And I think that we expect to move forward in terms of a release of these band applications until every agent, every player understands how the industry works. And our prospect right now is, if it adds a benefit to society and will encourage competition, then we are favorable to any change in regulation. Indeed, we have made a lot of headway, but there's still the question of restrictions that we expect things to change soon as well.

Bruno Montanari with Morgan Stanley here. The company has changed Linden -- has changed in very different ways, Linden. The company has nearly doubled its exposure in exports from 12% to 30%. If we look back further, it's probably been an even wider increase. Now within this 2.0 strategy, trading is probably going to be unified. How should we think about the balance between imports, Petrobras's supply. We have a government that could potentially boost prices a little bit higher and competition will be affected for a longer time. So how do you address these uncertainties with the local market versus expanding the share of exports or imports rather.

Thank you for your question. Let me just first clarify that data. It's not that we have 36% exposure to exports. What that data shows us that before, 20% of the product that we would import, we would sell to third parties. And now that's nearly 40%, which are the 36% that you saw which shows how we work our trading and Brazil supply market has changed drastically. September 2021 is a very clear milestone for me because this is when I joined the company, and it was when the market really opened up. Today, this is an open market to imports. Anyone can import the product and this brings a lot of competition and also added an important role to Petrobras because it regulates how much imported product will or won't come into the country as Petrobras adjusts its prices. So to me, we will be facing a more volatile market, both from a price perspective or cost perspective and from a supply perspective. And I think that what trading is allowing us is the ability to operate in this more volatile market, and do that in a very healthy way, even though I worked really strongly to have a very robust trading team to work. I believe that we were able to achieve a very sound result even before I expected, and the figures speak for themselves. So I think it's about making sure that we're ready and that we are able to generate positive product balance wherever we are and trade products and allow them to travel through Brazil and be ready for a more volatile environment in Brazil with a level of exposure, which is close to what we have right now. Of course, that will depend on the moment, but it's going to be 15% in diesel, maybe a little bit more in gasoline. And Petrobras, as I always say, is still our main partner when it comes to the distribution of fossil fuels. And it's important to have a trustworthy partner. After all, this is not in the business -- this is not the business of supply reliability. I mean, you need assurance that there will be supply. So we'll always be very close to Petrobras and have Petrobras as a main partner. And whenever there's volatility in the international market, we will make the most of that time as best as we can.

Yes, we have a last question.

I'm Leonardo Marcondes with Bank of America. My first question is about your avenues for growth. You talked about Agro and the energy transition. But when we look at the company right now, your portfolio is a lot more focused on logistics. So thinking about new investments and that we continue to think about an Ultrapar that's still focused on logistics and infrastructure or should we be thinking about other links in the chain. And I also wanted to ask Linden once that fine come operation end, should we expect the network to continue to grow with more stations? Or should we expect it to remain with the same number of stations in the branded network until the end of the year.

Thank you for your question. The way we see it when you expand your branches of operations, so to speak, you should start from a place that you know really well. So being more to the point, we could work on other links in the chain. The most natural for us would be to work on the next link as opposed to 10 links ahead. I think that the synergy that all of these companies find is in knowledge. I think that where we find synergy the most within the group is our ability to understand different perspectives for the same business and build a logic and information quality that will allow you to take steps such as acquiring a company in a different part of the business. If the company is small enough or has enough synergies, you can do what we had with CMC and Ultragaz. Their operations were so similar that it makes sense for that to be within -- that company to be within Ultragaz. Now if these are businesses with no synergy, then you will work outside of Ultrapar. So the answer is, obviously, energy and logistics are businesses that we know really well, but they are businesses that touch on several different industries and economic sectors, which would allow us to step outside of our business. So I think that would be the most objective answer. Concerning the branded network, in our disinvestments we have come close to our completion now in the third quarter. And we're going to have the natural closure of stations, about 2% of network. This is business as usual, depends on quality standards. In terms of investments, I'm usually more concerned about quality than quantity. I've always had very high -- raised the bar to identify business which are profitable and really of quality. We are going to keep on investing to have expanded businesses, maybe it won't be a lot, but maybe do more with enhanced productivity and always using our capital diligently. But in 2024, we are right now working on our budget. It's business as usual. It's excluding businesses, which are nonprofitable and as expected and invest with quality, fully focused on our individual number of businesses.

Well, our time's up, I would like to thank all of you who were here with us on site or online. Questions which were not answered will be answered to you by e-mail later. And I would like to hand it over to Marcos for the closing remarks.

Well, thank you all very much for being here with us. This is a session for exchanging information. We want to tell you about the level of knowledge of our team sharing, our perspectives. Of course, we cannot talk about future perspectives in events such as this. But the essence of our meeting is for you to have an opportunity to see how we are doing, our tone. And today, the afternoon, we are also going to have the opportunity of having some smaller talks. And this is the purpose of all of us here today. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Andre. Thank you for the team that has put together this Ultra Day. And now you are all invited to join us for lunch. Thank you all very much.