Earnings Call: Q3 2021

Oct 21, 2021

Quarterly report

Good morning, and welcome to Grupo Rotoplast Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded and all participants are currently in listen only mode to prevent background noise. The host will open the floor for questions later. Today's discussion contains forward looking statements. These statements are based on the environment as we currently see it and as such there may be certain risk and uncertainty associated with such statements. Please refer to our press release for more information on the specific risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. The company disclaims an intention or obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements whether as a result of new information, further events or otherwise. Please allow me to remind you that the company issued its earnings press release yesterday after market closed. It can be found in the Investors section of its website. Also, the presentation for the call and the webcast link are in the Investors section. Today's call will be hosted by Mr. Carlos Rojas Abumrad, Chief Executive Officer and Mr. Mario Romero, Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Carlos Rojas. Good morning. Thank you all for being here with us today. We really appreciate the opportunity to discuss our latest results with you. I'm really pleased with the work of our team and the results we have achieved this quarter considering the adverse conditions we have faced, including some significant challenges that will nevertheless allow us to continue building our vision for the future, ensuring our sustainable growth story. We again registered record sales for the quarter, with double digit growth, driven by external factors that continue to increase the demand for our solutions and most importantly, by the work done within the company. As we have discussed in previous calls, we have been able to leverage the demand created by the scarcity of water across our markets. Some of this scarcity is due to natural phenomena such as hurricanes, droughts, some in due to the lack of adequate infrastructure in the region, but also due to the new normal in our societies. Relocation due to prevalence of remote work increased the need for water efficiency in agricultural production and, of course, changes in hygiene and consumption habits that are here to stay. In this context, the demand for domestic industrial and agricultural decentralized water solutions that we have identified continues unabated. These are all positive trends for our sector in general, but we think our company has been able to leverage them with greater efficiency than the competition due to the improved capabilities of our team. In fact, in the 1st 9 months, we have grown much faster than the markets, therefore significantly increasing our market share. For example, we estimate that the overall volume of storage solutions in Mexico grew close to 8% in the 1st 3 quarters, whereas our sales of these kinds of solutions grew twice as much. And our piping sales grew 3 times as fast as the total market, also in terms of volume. We have been able to achieve this growth by continuing to rely on our internal growth drivers. Our transformation process flow is ongoing and we continue to generate and implement new initiatives that enable us to provide the most innovative solutions for our clients. As a matter of fact, 227 out of more than 1,000 initiatives pertaining to flow have reached operational maturity level and their impact is reflected in the P and L. We continuously rethink our process in order to design new initiatives and keep the ongoing cycle of flow. This quarter, it is worth highlighting the development of new and optimized sales channels that reduce friction and improve the overall experience, the strengthening of our value proposition in different regions by bringing 11 new solutions to market and the improvement in our sales efficiency, cross selling amongst regions, Roadtoplast aims to have an innovative top quality solutions for each and every need, helping our customers make the most efficient use of water. We are, in other words, continuing to invest in building the Rotoplast of the future, ensuring that we strengthen our leadership position by responding with agility to our customer needs, now and in the future while continuing to improve our operational efficiency. In fact, as Mario will discuss in further detail, we have directed our CapEx to introducing technological improvements in our manufacturing plants and the digitalization projects in some of our business units, increasing our production capacity and our customer outreach. This internal evolution has enabled us to make the most of our sectors growth drivers, allowing us to increase our market share and cement our leadership position. And most importantly, we continue to do so while pursuing our sustainable growth story and as Sai outlined in our previous call, developing a path not just for growth, but for sustainable growth. As a key component of our sustainable growth story is, as we have discussed, trading value for our investors. In this vein, it is worth noting that we continue to a return on invested capital greater than our cost of capital, in line with our 2020 one-twenty 25 strategy. Now, it is necessary to discuss the challenges we faced as well. Supply chain disruptions remain a significant issue across all industries, including ours. We continue to face increased cost in raw materials and logistics, even though we were able to offset some of them to some extent through the use of our working capital, increased efficiencies and our pricing strategy. In fact, we increased the use of recycled resins by 20% in the 1st 9 months of the year compared to the same period in 2020, furthering both our production efficiency and our ESG objectives. Also in terms of circular economy in Mexico, we have managed to increase the percentage of recycled resin that is incorporated in storage products such as tanks and cisterns. In 2020, we had a content of 17% recycled materials in our most popular products and that figure has increased to 26% this year. Moreover, I think it's worth noting that as we mentioned in our last call, we were able to leverage our commercial and financial strength to take the opportunity to increase our market share and are now implementing more aggressive pricing strategy in the 3rd Q4, as Mario will discuss in further detail. We will adjust our approach as necessary. Nevertheless, we believe the strategy we implemented will have significant benefits in the medium and long term, both in terms of our growth and our profitability. We remain committed to the overarching objectives of our sustainable growth strategy for 2021 2025 and to our triple focus on people, planet and projects. And particularly, in the very short term, we are focused in achieving the annual EBITDA target, that is to say, ARS1800,000,000, which is in line with our initial EBITDA guidance in absolute terms. Our true focus on people, planet and profits means that we remain committed to the best ESG practices and to provide best leading solutions across our markets, ensuring that we create value for our investors as well as to other shareholders stakeholders. And we do so by boosting our team's talents, capabilities to increase the quality of life of our customers. And last but not least, we aim to have a positive impact on the environment, both by reducing our own footprint and by empowering our clients to use water in efficient and sustainable ways, thus reducing their own footprint. This triple focus at the core of sustainability strategy ensures that our results are not only beneficial to our investors and our customers, but ultimately, for our societies and the environment as well. That is our way forward and our reason for being. I will now turn the call to Mario so that he can discuss our results in further detail. We look forward to your questions and thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Charlie, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for being with us here today. We certainly had a strong but challenging quarter. We believe it highlights our ability to leverage the trends across our markets. But most importantly, it demonstrates the capabilities created by our team and our transformation program to harness internal growth drivers to ensure that we continue to create value for our investors by having a positive impact on our communities. Our quarterly sales registered a historical record growth for the company, as was the case of the previous quarters. The boost in sales was predominantly driven by the creation of internal capabilities as well as differentiated strategies by country. This compromises the launch of new products and services and new sales channels, cross selling among regions, as well as changes in our sales teams' compensation schemes. On the other hand, this growth was also driven by the demand for our solutions in the context of the trends Charlie highlighted before, water stress, natural phenomena and the new consumption habits brought about by the pandemic. This means we have been successfully in addressing our customer needs and continue to grow in a sustainable fashion. It is worth mentioning that 100% fill rates in products and services were experienced by all of our clients and distributors for the 1st 9 months, speaking well to the company's ability to secure raw materials in such a volatile environment. About Covid and our operational status, this quarter we carried on operating without interruption. We continue to comply the strictest safety and hygiene protocols in our manufacturing operations and in the field. Furthermore, our administrative staff continues to work remotely. As to our financial, net sales increased 21% in the quarter, reflecting our increased market share and also driven by the launch of new solutions and our pricing strategy. As mentioned in the previous call, keeping competitive prices in order to further strengthen our market share during the 1st semester of the year, we started to increase prices in the 3rd quarter in order to offset heights in raw materials. Our price management office is continuously balancing prices with the price elasticity demand model. Sales also grew 31% year over year during the 1st 3 quarters. Sales of products grew 24% during the quarter and 35% during the 1st 9 months of the year. The sales of solutions launched during the last 12 months accounted for 1.6% of year to date product sales. The continuing strength of products compensated for the effects of the pandemic on service sales. As we mentioned in July's call, the contraction in services is mostly attributable to the fact that school closures affected the drinking water fountain business. On the other hand, our treatment and recycling plant business continues to recover, albeit still slowly. And our drinking water platform, Varia, continues to grow at a rapid pace, reaching record sales and expanding its subscriber base as a result of the investments we have made in marketing and towards improving the user experience. As a matter of fact, if we were to exclude the drinking water fountain business, sales of services would have grown 4% this quarter. Overall, even though we have expanded our workforce, our group wide productivity has continued to rise throughout the year. The number of employees increased 5% in the last 12 months, and sales per employee increased 21 percent in the same period, so 4 times productivity level. Our gross margin decreased by 6.60 basis points during the quarter and 4.10 basis points in the 1st 9 months of the year and stood at 13% 15%, respectively. As we continue to see price increases in raw materials and logistics about what we have forecasted in the previous call. Even though we adjusted our pricing strategy across our markets to account for these increases, compensating only for about 30% of increased expenditures. The operating margin and EBITDA were still affected. We estimate that the volatility in raw materials and logistic prices impacted our EBITDA by about MXN 340,000,000 year to date. Nevertheless, we have continued to adjust our pricing strategy and are closely monitoring the developments in our supply chain, while leveraging the efficiencies and improved execution discipline brought about by Flow, which enable us to increase our sales faster than our expenses, even in the context of the supply chain disruptions we experienced. As to our net profit, it is worth remembering that we recognized a one time gain when we closed our FX coverage position at a significant profit in the Q1 of 2020. Excluding this factor, net profit would have increased 82% in the 1st 9 months of the year. Now let's move forward to our geographic breakdown. Sales in Mexico grew 13% during the quarter and 18% year to date due to the strong demand for our storage, water flow and improvement solutions, including the new products we have introduced in the previous months. During the 1st semester, we maintained competitive prices nonetheless in July we started to make generalized price increases. In previous years, we have usually made one price increase during the year. However, due to materials availability and cost hikes in 2021, we have made additional 3 to 4 increases throughout the year. Price adjustments made during the Q3 did not cover input increase completely, but we will see a full effect in the Q4 and we will keep adjusting prices as needed in the coming months. Products growth compensated for the relative weakness in the sales of services that I mentioned earlier, but the gross margin and the EBITDA were affected by the cost volatility. Net quarterly sales in Argentina grew 54% 69% year to date, driven by double digit growth across all three categories: storage, water flow and water heaters, as well as pricing strategy that offset the effects of the supply chain disruptions we experienced, driving both growth and profitability in Mexichemes. It is worth mentioning that Argentina is showing a positive trend of accelerated growth and increased profitability, besides being self sustainable. Sales for the United States grew 39% quarterly and 20% year to date. We continue to strengthen our septic tank business and our e commerce operation, improving the user experience and expanding our reach. We were also able to use our purchasing power to acquire inventory before our suppliers increase the prices. And we adjusted prices in an agile fashion, ensuring that our margins remained stable during the quarter. Sales in Central America grew during the quarter and the 1st 9 months of the year, with double digit growth in most of the region's markets. However, EBITDA was affected by the volatility of raw materials and logistic prices, as well as some currency depreciation effects. Sales in Peru grew as a result of our pricing strategy and the opening of the new retail channels. However, the depreciation of the Peruvian sold led to a contraction in Mexican pesos. As in Mexico, in Central America and Peru, we had additional price increases during the Q3 and the full impact will be seen in the Q4. Finally, we continue to focus on strengthening the presence of our water accessories platform in Brazil as our pipeline there grows and we improve our execution and quality of our potential flying base as we see signs of increased demand due to the reopening of the economy. In terms of our portfolio mix, sales of products during the quarter and the 1st 9 months of the year accounted for 96% 95% of total sales, respectively, growing 24% quarterly and 35% year to date. Sales of services, on the other hand, decreased 18% in the quarter and 14% in the 1st 9 months due to the scope closures I mentioned before. However, as I mentioned, our drinking water platform, Bevia, continued to register record sales and continues to gain subscribers. Our treatment and recycling business is recovering, and we're starting to see some traction in Riego, which is our portfolio venture. All of which points to be a very good outlook for our water as a service platform. As for the cash, we optimize our cash conversion cycle by 26 days, and we continue reviewing our terms with related parties through the weekly cash control tower. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio is 1.2 times, even as we continue to take advantage of the opportunities that are arising. It is worth noting that our debt position considers a sustainable bond, Agua 172x, which as we have discussed in the previous quarter, net MXN4 1,000,000,000 as a maturity date of June 2027 and was issued at 8.65 percent fixed rate. It also considers the bridge loan in Argentina pesos for working capital, which as we have said strengthened our balance sheet due to the favorable FX effects. In the quarter, we paid off the loan we had in Peru. As for capital allocation, CapEx was 5% of total sales year to date, amounting to ARS 378,000,000. This is in line with our guidance, but it is worth noting that increasing CapEx was directed towards improving our production and customer outreach, that is investing in RotoPlas' future. In Mexico, we have invested in new technology to produce water storage solutions and in machinery to increase production capacity in both storage and flow. In Argentina, investments have been made in the automation of the water heater spend and improvement in the storage and water flow plants. In the United States, resources have been allocated to the digitalization of operations and the development of the StepT business under the Apantia brand. It is also worth noting that we leverage our cash position to ensure that we have an adequate level of working capital to sustain our growth and warranty the availability of raw materials in the context of scarcity and price volatility. In terms of ROIC, as Charlie pointed out, we reached 15.7% as of September 2021, 4 percentage points higher than our cost of capital. As he also mentioned, we achieved this result by pursuing a range of initiatives and actions within the FLOW framework, and we will continue to pursue new opportunities as efficiencies to ensure we create value for our investors. We still have more than 800 initiatives at different stages of development, but which have not reached yet the stage of maturity where the impact is reflected in the income statement. Charlie has already explained about our triple focus, People, Planet and Profits, and the key aspects of our sustainability strategy 2020 onetwenty 25, which is included in our Annual Report 2020. I would like to invite you to take a look and learn more about the actions we are taking, if you have not done so already. Additionally, during the quarter, we undertook a number of actions and initiatives in the ESG space, of which I would like to highlight the following. After receiving over 300 proposals for Aflouir, an open call to partner with NGOs to provide and install rainwater collection system in underserved communities, we announced the 5 initiatives that were selected to be implemented. RotoPlas donated approximately 120 rainwater collection systems in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Estado de Mexico, Queretaro and Veracruz that will provide close to 730,000 liters of water per day. We initiated with diversity and inclusion trainings at group level and we also participated in the Global Compact's Target Gender Equality Accelerator, which will optimize the establishment of gender balance goals and will help align the Company's policies and processes to exceed best practices at industry level. As part of continuous improvement measures, we have developed internal auditors specialized in ISO management systems in the areas of quality, environment, occupational health and safety. These will facilitate the achievement of internal certifications and the identification of deviations. And finally, we also obtained the Social Responsible Enterprise Badge in Peru and our Grupo Rotoplast MSCI ESG rating improved from BB to BBB. We are committed to achieving a sustainable growth story, creating value for all of our stakeholders with improving the life of our customers and communities and helping them to make the most efficient use of increasing scarce water resources. As we have mentioned in other occasions, we create value for our investors by upholding the best ESG standards and practices, and crucially becoming an ally for those who work towards a common good. Now, I would like to mention that we remain aligned with the updated guidance we provided in our last call. And while our EBITDA margin goals have become more challenging in the context of the volatility I mentioned, the management team and every team member of the company are still focused on the total value of EBITDA as we say back in February, meaning MXN1.8 billion for the full year. Our ROIC and WACC remain in line as well. It's also interesting to note that the analysts that cover our stock have current average target price of our 4 0.1 pesos for this year. And finally, before we turn to your questions, in the session held yesterday, the Board of Directors agreed to call an extraordinary shareholders meeting in November to propose a capital reimbursement in kind. The Company will distribute shares that it already has in treasury. For payment in kind, the following will be proposed: Deliver to each holder of 15 shares of the Company one share as a payment in kind for the reimbursement. If in any case a payment in kind with share results in a fraction of a share, said fraction will be paid in cash to the corresponding shareholder. Estimated date of payment, November 19, 2021. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Now we can open the floor for Q and A. Okay. The first question is from anonymous attendee. When we should see a normalization in the supply chain? Thank you. Mario, would you like to take this one? Yes, sure. Thanks for your question. What we've been seeing in the markets and some experts are predicting, we think that at least the next this quarter and the first half of twenty twenty two, some volatility will prevail in logistics and raw material costs. However, we've been seeing in the last 2 months more stability at these raw material price levels flow into our P and L. Thank you, Mario. The next question comes from Martin Lara from Miranda Research. Good morning, Carlos and Mario. I have various questions. What was the total price increase that you implemented in the quarter? And what can we expect in the Q4? We can stop there and then we can go back to the second question. Yes. I think that's a good idea going question by question. Mario, again, would you like to? Yes. The additional price increase that we implemented in the quarter, well, first of all, Martin, thanks for joining us this morning. This quarter, we implemented give you the exact number, 4.85 percent net price increase during the quarter. And we expect to increase another 5% going into the 4th quarter. I think that's related to the next question. Do you expect a higher EBITDA margin in the Q4 compared to the Q3? Yes. We are expecting to be in the neighborhood of 18% of EBITDA margin for the 4th quarter. And the next one. What was the sales contribution of the Flow program in the quarter? Just a quick comment there and then I'll let Mario answer more detail. But in terms of flow, on the first round of flow, which is the round of flow that's benefiting most today's numbers, really optimized cost and expenditures. So they didn't those initiatives didn't drive as much on revenues. And the revenue initiatives that we did implement such as new products that are being launched, they have a ramp up all the way up to 2024. And so in terms of revenues, we're not seeing a tremendous impact from flow. In the initiatives we're implementing today from the 2nd round of Flow, we have much higher level of content in terms of revenue driving initiatives. But again, all revenue driving initiatives will have a ramp up. It takes a little bit of time for new products to be adopted by customers in our industry. Mario, I don't know if you can share more color on this and maybe in particular explaining the impact of flow in EBITDA. Sure. Let me circle back to I was just making the math in terms of revenue impacting Flow in terms of revenue explains around 8% of growth for the 1st 9 months. Thank you. And the question, how do you see the performance of the service business going forward? In terms of services, the beverages, the drinking water fountain since schools got a big contraction as a consequence of all schools being closed since the pandemic started up till now. So that was service business and that one had tremendous reduction in terms of size, which generated big impact. There was another big impact in waste water treatment plants and water treatment plants in general during the pandemic. These kind of projects were postponed during the pandemic. And we did have a big gap in terms of new booking during this period. In terms of the what we see for water treatment plants, we have already started to gain tremendous traction in terms of new booking. We see a very strong 4th quarter booking of new water treatment that we will report in the next meeting. And we see going forward that our business thesis and our capabilities to service in a decentralized way customers with water treatment plants has tremendous potential. Lastly, Bevia has been performing in terms of sales and new customers very well, growing at a very accelerated pace. But Bevia is a much newer business and it's of a smaller scale. So Vega was not able to make up for the impact of these 2 other businesses that I just discussed. Mario, anything else that you'd like to comment? No, I think you got it all. I was just making the numbers around EBIT flow EBITDA contribution year to date. 23% of the EBITDA reported comes from flow initiatives. Thank you, Marcio. Thank you, both. Next question in line is from Liliana de Leon from GBM. Good morning. Could you share any other strategies to mitigate higher resins prices? So I did comment on the use of recycled materials. I think that will help in a relevant way. We're doing this not only for optimizing costs. We're doing it because it offers, in my opinion, a better product in terms of the sustainability strategy. It's a product that performed just as well, but it's a product and it's a product that offers the reuse of onetime use plastics for a purpose of a product that will last for a lifetime. So in this way, we're taking product plastics that were just used once and really using the attributes of plastics for producing products that will last a lifetime. So for this reason, we're being very aggressive in the strategy to develop much better capabilities in reducing plastics. Now as a consequence, we'll also see a much more stable and more resilient model in terms of costs for rotoplasm. As one of our big raw materials are plastics. Mario, anything else that you'd like to comment? Yes. We are now very focused, Lilian, and thanks for joining us this morning on price management. As you know and mentioned during the last calls, our best strategy for a compensate or offset prices, increases in our raw materials are our leading brands. We are certain that the increasing market share has been very good. Charlie was mentioning how fast we are growing when compared to the rest of the market. We're consolidating that market share gain from the Q2 and Q3. And now the focus is going to be on bringing back profitability into the business. Because it's not only resting, we're having effects in everything from cardboard, resting, metals, freights. A year ago for a 40 foot container, we were paying roughly $1200 Now we're paying $14,000 It's more than 10 times. So we are being really affected with general inflation phenomena all across the board in all the countries. But we feel confident that we have the tools and the skills to bring back profitability. And the leading brand position, as mentioned, gives us a good advantage to make that happen and bring back profitability to the levels that the company is well aware of are the targets. Now also to complement, There's obviously lessons learned from the experience. And one of them is that the agility that a business has today really contributes in a tremendous way to the resilience of that the business in today's highly volatile situation. We were able to be very agile in Argentina, for instance, and also in the United States. The results in both of these operations were really outstanding. We're very, very happy with the results we were able to generate in these two countries. Argentina, one of the cases is we're very used to these kind of scenarios. And we have great practices that we've learned from and which we're adopting to improve this margin recovery and the pace for that. But in general terms, I think that with flow starting 2019, partly to strengthen Rotoplast's resilience, really gives us this ability to be identifying opportunities and through initiatives, design initiatives that we design for a particular purpose, making changes in the company in profound and quick ways. So we have very clear on what are the opportunities to be satisfied and serviced. And we are very clear on the initiatives to be executed to make the most of it. So in that sense, I think that flow and the different practices we have throughout the company show us the way forward to have a much better performance in terms of margins. Thank you, Lidlena. Thank you, Charlie. Next in line is Rodrigo Salazar from AM Advisors. Thank you for the call, and congratulations on the results. I have some questions that are all related. Could you expand on your pricing strategy? When do you expect margins to normalize? And how are clients absorbing these price increases? And lastly, of the market share you have gained, how much do you expect to remain? Thank you. Mario, I think you've covered. Rodrigo, maybe you can. Good morning, Rodrigo, and thanks for your question. I think we've been answering in different forms what you've been asking. But if everyone is okay, I'll repeat myself. For the first one, we already explained about what's the thinking around pricing. We've been we're going to be implementing a couple of price increases in the Q4 And we are targeting to have a EBITDA margin in the neighborhood of 18% for the 4th quarter. Getting back the company to the 2018, 2019 EBITDA margin that we are targeting for the long term. As for market share, we believe that we have a good chance to secure all the gain market share. One of the priorities and we discussed this in the last call was securing raw materials and being, I would say, very good at fulfilling deliveries to our clients. As mentioned on my script, we delivered 100% of all the purchase orders and service requirements from our clients. It's that says a lot on how good the company has been to secure materials and to deliver that. That has translated into market share as well. So we want to follow that path going forward. Price increases are in place. And we've been seeing a very interesting phenomena in all the value chain. Because as Charlie was mentioning, the whole value chain was not used to such a volatile and inflationary environment. So we've been seeing some of our distributors cut on their margins as well. And that speaks to a little bit of uncertainty in all the different steps of the distribution chain. So we are assessing that. We are seeing and being cautious through the office of price management. But the target now is to consolidate that market share gain and to bring our margins back to the 19% target. And thanks for your question. It's we've been thinking a lot around these for the last 6 months. We have another question. Do you expect product sales to continue with strong growth in 2022? [SPEAKER IGNACIO CUENCA ARAMBARRI:] We do expect very strong growth in revenues going forward all the way to 2025, 2022 being also part of that. Part of it because as mentioned, the water stress situation continues to worsen and to be more critical. And for that reason, rotoplasm solutions are needed more. Additional to that, we have focused very much on our customers. We have customer centricity at the center of our culture. And so with this purpose of servicing customers and the environment, we're very aggressively continuing to develop initiatives to satisfy these needs in a better way. So a lot of it is already in the pipeline, a lot of it has already been executed and will continue to generate also revenue growth going forward. And if may I add up something, Charlie. On top of that, as it is in the press release, 20% of the more than 1,000 initiatives that we have on the happen in the next 3, 4 years. So and part as Charlie was explaining, most of those initiatives are revenue linked, because really the very first initiative that we execute are more cost related, because our like to put itself the low hanging fruit that you have secured up immediately. So now we're going to be seeing the revenue type initiative. So we really expect very good performance, not only in products, but also in services in the next 4 years. We have another question. Hi, Mario, Charlie. Thank you for the call and congratulations on the results. You have mentioned synergies between your operations before. Can you give us more color on these synergies? [SPEAKER CARLOS GOMES DA SILVA:] Mario, you mentioned the great data point earlier this morning. You can share that one. But I think also to what also Mario shared, being able to service all purchase orders in these times is, I think, an example of how we make the most of these operational synergies. So please go ahead, Mario. We and this is internal data, but happy to share. We have the way we count, we have, as you know, a lot of factories in different parts of America. And so far, year to date, we have 5,120 days of factory available days. Out of those, we have only stopped operations in 39 days in different factories, not at the same time, but one factory shutdown counts for one day. So that's 39 days. So that gives you an internal field rate of 99.23 percent on manufacturing and servicing. Obviously, we have inventory and that inventory has helped to buffer to the clients. So the clients haven't seen any interruption of products or services deliveries in the 1st 9 months. So it's easy to say, but it's been a lot of work to make it happen. Furthermore, on synergies, we are taking our product portfolio in Mexico, which is the most mature into the different marketplaces. We are launching, as explained, the Water Flow business in Central America, the same in Peru. In Peru, we're starting to gain more market share in that business that we launched last year. So those are like the synergies that we are materializing with different footprint that the company has and different product portfolios that we have. And finally, as you know, you don't need 2 CFOs to run the whole operation. So we're leveraging all of the platform and shared service centers to serve and help all the different countries and business units to perform at their best level. On additional maybe just an additional comment. We mentioned that we'll continue to find ways to do business in Brazil. And I mentioned that we had seen a lot of traction in the new bookings of wastewater treatment plants. But half of the booking for water treatment plants are coming from Brazil. So we're really being able to leverage tremendous engineering capabilities we have developed in Mexico to be able to service this water needs in Brazil with water treatment plants. That's just another example of what Mario was saying. Last question. What are the next specific milestones for flow in 2021 and 2022. Could you talk a bit more about the initiatives you have derived from this transformation process? So in terms of the initiatives, again, I mentioned that in 2020 the first run of flow in 2020, we were focusing very much on the ECS initiatives to materialize, which were cost and expense related. And we started looking for revenue driving initiatives. 2021 was much more focused on revenue driving initiatives. And that will continue to be the case moving forward. So we will continue to find opportunities to optimize our cost and expenses, but those have a much closer limit. When we think about revenues, that has sky is the limit, right? So we continue to focus on our customers understanding their needs. And we continue to focus mainly in the American continent. And so we feel that we will find revenue driving initiatives with new products and better commercial practices to penetrate markets with these new products and services. And one of the things that we've been working on very aggressively is in capability building. And the 2 capabilities we've been focusing on is the adoption of Agile in terms of development and operations, which will drive the initiatives to be executed in a quicker way with higher levels of aspirations and with lower levels of cost of learning. The other one is in promoting very much digital and analytics. So when we're doing business through decentralized solutions and to really be massive, you need to replicate this in millions of times. Digital analytics play a very relevant role. So now these capabilities being available to companies like rotoplasm, that is another very relevant topic for Rotoplast. Mario, anything else that you'd like to share? No. I would just probably add up that now flow on the transformation has become a way of life. And as Charlie mentioned, we are adopting these tools to accelerate initiatives and to execute better at them. We still have 800 to go. But in 2022, February is the time of the year when we do ideation to refill the pipeline. So it's an ongoing thing that we keep on filling up the pipeline with new initiative business cases and ways to either grow the business or create more profitability within the business. So it's an ongoing program. Now it's been 2 years. People feel very engaged with the program. And I don't know, Charlie, I think it's maybe worth to mention the OHI, the Organizational Health Index results that they just launched? Because it's not only about performance, but it's also about how the people is feeling towards this new transformation and the culture we're promoting. So we do an evaluation of how our employees feel about the company, our culture and how we're embracing the culture we've designed. We've designed a culture of market shapers. And we identified a few practices, 5 practices that we really wanted to focus on to really drive this market shape or culture. And so we did an evaluation 2 years ago of how our staff felt around these practices and how they feel about them today. And so we had a very relevant improvement in the last 2 years, improving 4 points, which is very good progress in the benchmarks that we make. Where we had the biggest impact, the biggest improvement was in customer centricity, operational discipline, consequence management, talent development and I'm missing a faith one, right? And leadership, no? And a supportive leadership style, particularly a leadership style that supports all of our staff that we can leverage all of their capabilities to really transform the business. And what this means is that even though we were working somewhat remotely during the last 2 years because of the pandemic, we were able to engage our talent with our culture, which was one of the biggest challenges. It was very easy to improve productivity when working from home. It was very feasible to improve some aspects of quality of life without having people to be commuting to work. But having a high level of engagement with the culture is very challenging during these pandemic times. And fortunately, we didn't only just manage to maintain it, we managed to improve it in a very relevant way in the direction that we want to move forward. Thank you, Georgios. And I'm sorry putting you in the spot with something just come to my mind, but I think connecting people to performance within a culture, I think it's key within the transformation process. We have one final question for the 2 minutes that we have left. One more question. What are you expecting on working capital going forward? Do you expect inventories to remain this high? Well, Rodrigo, yes, the answer is, I think, at least for the next well, let me just rephrase it. As long as we need to secure raw materials to deliver on the promise of service to our clients, yes, we will keep inventories high. Once supply chains all around the globe normalized, we'll do the adjustments to bring it back to our to a more normal rate. Thank you, Rodrigo. Thank you, guys. We have no more questions. So I think that's pretty much all for today. Thank you for joining us and see you next quarter. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for joining us today.