Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to apologize for the brief delay. We had a technical problem that we just solved, so we are now online, and we are very satisfied to be able to share the earnings from the first quarter of 2023. Even though the macroeconomic situation was difficult, we delivered solid economic results with the growth of our EBITDA margins when compared to the same period of the last year. We continue to be paying attention to the integration of operations and the improved improvements of our processes. In this sense, we tactically made signals of our investments, reducing CapEx with the comparison of the last semesters in line with the strategies of preserving an adequate of our business model. Taking into account the moment of high cost of capital.
In relation to the perspectives, we believe that the sector of environmental services has been growing with strong investments made over the last three years. Ambipar has positioned itself as a platform that is a leader in the market. With this, we are prepared to capture the opportunities and the synergies in this new cycle. Sustainability is an agenda, a long-term agenda for the potential and current clients, creating a favorable scenario for our path of growth, of profitability and governance. We would like to thank our clients, investors, partners for their trust and also for our employees who continue working very hard with determination so that we can reach our objective.
Here at the table with me, on the left side is Ricardo Garcia , Director of Investor Relations of Ambipar Holding, Demar Santos from the IR. We are all supporting in the environment division and Rafael Espírito Santo that is from Ambipar Response. I would also like to highlight in this quarter, we addressed more demands from our investors in relation to additional practices. I hope that you liked what we did. We worked very hard to address all of these demands and which we will be presenting here. If you have any questions, send them to us at the end of your call.
When we look at the gross revenue of Ambipar in the first quarter of 2023, we reached a net revenue of BRL 140 billion, 49% higher from our first quarter of 2023. The EBITDA of BRL 90 billion and a reduction of the net debt in relation to the fourth quarter of 2022 with an availability of BRL 3.3 billion, BRL 3.1 billion in organic growth, consolidated at the base of 12% in relation to the same period of the last year. You can go on to the next slide, please. Next. Our highlights of the first quarter of 2023 was in terms of revenue and EBITDA. It's important to highlight that our margin is higher than 25% and EBITDA of BRL 91 billion in net profit. When we exclude the effect, extraordinary effect that happened because of the expenses incorporated with the merge with HPX, which happened in the first quarter. We talked about this in the call during over the year in relation to this merger.
There is the KPO and the P&L in relation, is BRL 190 million. It's an expense that is 100% non-operational, non-cash. We had a few discussions of our auditing with our advisors in relation to this accounting number. We took all the precedents of the last projects that were done. We launched this as recommended by our advisors. We are here explaining more about this. Of course, it helps us. It has given us BRL 10 million of net profit in the first quarter, a little bit higher than the historical average. The CapEx, as I said initially, has come with a lower basis than the historical average in 2023, where we see that there's a higher cost on the capital premium.
We will present over this call the rationale of the CapEx and how we are going to start attending the demands of our investors. All of the investors will get to know the dynamic of our business even more and understand how we can bring in more value to our shareholders. I'm going to pass the floor to Pedro for him to talk about Ambipar Environment, about the operational status of Ambipar Environment. Thank you, Thiago. Can you go onto the next slide, please? It is a pleasure to see you. Let's start with the gross revenue. The company has been presenting over time a very healthy growth with net revenue. With gross revenue, as Thiago said, organic growth from the two divisions of the holding are growing, and I'd like to highlight that we have two high digits for Ambipar Environment in a recurrent way.
This is because of the work we have done in the market of cross-selling and improving the brand and strengthening the brand and adding more operational efficiencies, and it has given us organic growth as well as we will show in the end of the presentation. In this quarter, we had net revenue at the level of 21%. Describing a little bit how each business performed. First, I'm gonna talk about the valorization in Brazil, where we have highly stable contracts. We have good relationships, and the management of residue is much better. We are doing cross-selling well as well. In this business environment, we opened a line of services and contracts with extra services, where the extra services represent the services that we do when there's a contract.
Let's say if there's a maintenance that generated extra residues, we send that to the line of extra services, there's a line that goes from 10%-20% of the line of management in Brazil, as you will see according to the results. For circular savings, it grew much more than all the periods of comparison. We have demands by our clients of recycled goods, which is much higher than our services today. There's a repressed demand that we will continue to capture over time. It's a bit of the thesis that Thiago mentioned. If we look at the historical numbers of the circular numbers, then this is a short-term increase. For the business divisions, the GE Consulting, it went well in its context.
As we can see, over the quarters, we see that there has been a small reduction in the revenue stability and then a short loss. This happened because of a project with a contract in Peru, which reached its end. It had an ending date, and we will not be taking more contracts in Peru until the situation is stabilized there and until the market scenario starts improving and as Chile starts valuing our presence more. We suffered a bit in this context, because of this context. Besides that, over the quarters, there was a change in the extra services. As is natural, there is a variation of 10%-20% in the extra services and then a few contracts which we opted to not renew last year because of other reasons. This explains the quarter-over-quarter. Of course, the growth was very healthy.
Next slide, please. Going on to gross profit, we grew 24% year-over-year. We implemented a very strong margin of 34.11%, which is also the fruit of us maintaining good contracts. Once again, our profile of contracts with rationality and with the capital invested over contracts. Also, we've also been gaining space in different markets, capturing more sources of residue or waste and improvements in supply. We have been getting gains in scale, which allow us to present a gross margin that is very healthy.
Next slide, please. Going to EBITDA, it followed the same trend of gross profit. It even grew a bit more, growth of 29% year-over-year. Following, once again, the same trend of composed growth of 21%. We pay a lot of attention to our cost of sales and to be proactive so that we maintain operational efficiency, and we are very confident that we will continue growing over time given the structure that we have today.
With that, I conclude what I had to present in relation to environment, and now I pass the floor to Gabriela to talk about the other issues.
Thank you so much, Pedro, and good afternoon to everyone. Starting to talk about the response, the operational response area. We continue the growth in revenue at the level of 80% year-over-year and this quarter, fruit of the acquisitions which we made during this period. Also, it's very important to remember that this is a fruit of organic growth.
As Thiago mentioned, in the fourth quarter, as we will show on the end of the presentation, there has been a huge leap in organic growth in the same store stores in the area of retail. Even in the same operations that were at the base for more than 12 months, this has also grown, and it demonstrates that we've been able to improve our original operation, but also we've been incorporating more and more of this into our base. A lot of this growth that we show here is mostly in Brazil and Latin America, our two main markets. We've also been growing over the period. Organic growth in Brazil with the same concept of growing more than 40% to around 44% of organic growth in the first quarter versus the same quarter of last year.
Besides the organic growth, we, if you remember, we also carried out several acquisitions in the year of 2022 in order to complement our portfolio of services by opening new verticals of services for emergencies. For example, response, Air Response, elite response. Other services which are essential and specialized. Since once they enter the platform of response, we are able to make sure they have access to our base of clients, access to our corporate fund and grow a lot. We also, over the last year, we invested so that these divisions could also grow at good rates and very important rates higher than last year.
In North America and the other regions, we also have had organic growth that has been very healthy, higher than 30% or 32%, which is a fruit as well of the integrations which we had in the United States over the last few years, and also improvements over the quarter. As total net revenue in North America, we had a bit more volatility given the profile of one of the acquisitions which we carried out over last year. Is a natural characteristic of consultancy. In the last two geographies, LatAm and Europe, they represent less of our revenue if we look at the total. They were stable versus the first quarter of last year, mainly because of two main events. I think the first one is because we ended up having some relevant occurrences last year. We are still being able to maintain our growth.
This year, because of impact in reais, there was a devaluation or valuation of the real in comparison to the other currencies. In the local currency, we had a growth of more growth than we had expected in reais. That's a criterion of comparison. There was a growth against the real of 10% in the first quarter. This explains what happened in North America and LatAm. On the next slide, we show the evolution of the gross margin. We like to always remember at Ambipar Response, given the characteristic that we are a service company with specialized labor force, a good amount of our costs are in personnel, outsourced parties, and costs mainly related to equipment. That represents the four items I mentioned, costs 60% of our total costs.
The variation throughout the semester is very much in function of the mix between services which we have been incorporating in our base. Depending on the mix and the geographies and the services which we add in the consolidated results, we have a higher or lower conversion. In the same concept that we are working on in revenue, if we were to put a gross margin, even with the operations for the new operations, we would be very close to our margins in the score. Going on to the next slide, EBITDA has a trend very similar to the gross revenue, especially because we have a very controlled level of cost. Nothing that goes beyond what we showed in the previous slide.
We are very satisfied with this result once again, even though it represents a drop of a few points in our margin. This is a lot because of the incorporation of the growth of our plans and has to do with our plans.
Now I pass the floor back to Thiago so he can talk about the financial and corporate results.
Thank you. You can go to the next slide, please. In relation to the EBITDA calculation. You can go on to the next slide, please. A little on organic growth. The CapEx is something that people have been asking us about, so we prepared a very specific presentation on this growth. Talking about consolidation, we can talk about environmental response, but always over two digits. This growth over two digits is proved historically. We always grew organically over two digits.
Pedro is gonna tell us more about Environment, Rafael will talk more about Response.
Thank you, Thiago. Just a comment. It's very interesting that this happens inside of all of our business divisions. Environment has a platform for areas of business that are circular economy, management of waste in different geographies. This diversification of revenue in between geographies is observed. The level of the holding, it lowers the level of volatility of the result, and it maintains a constant growth over time. In relation to Environment, it continues to be what I talked about in the beginning. We had a growth, robust growth in all of the divisions. Especially considering the macroeconomic environment with Peru, which made our first quarter become below our average, historical average. This is contextual.
That's a brief comment that I want to make because our first quarter is a bit lower than our historical average. First of all, I would like to talk about how we are able to break this growth per harvest. From the original operation of Ambipar Response, it continues to grow in a very healthy way. When we look at the acquisitions from 2021 and 2020 acquisitions, we see that there is a huge improvements in all of the lines that are growing really well. In terms of geography, just to reinforce our two main markets, which is Brazil and North America, have expressive growth. In the quarter, we grew 27%. In Ambipar Response, these two geographies presented more than 40% because of North America. I think that's an important thing to highlight.
This number is probably the most important number for our quarter, which we would like to share with you, which is the organic growth that not only do we grow through acquisitions, but also because of our platform that we set up to help us to plug in the new company within our ecosystem. This number is very relevant, and this is due to the cross-selling and the integration that we've been doing. Yes, this nuance that Rafael passed on to you about the study that was with the services of the company, which is a demand that the market has had for a very long time. It's very important for us to have this. Although the organic growth and same-store sales has been growing, there are many harvests of acquisitions, and all of them have been presenting organic growth after.
This is something that should be highlighted, and we expect that in the next quarters we'll be able to have a better sample, longer sample, until we can also share that with you to be able to give more, provide more granularity over this data. In relation to the corporate results, before going to the question and answer session, we are now going to do the question and answer session. You can ask the questions on the web, for the conference call.
I'm going to pass the floor to Ricardo. He's going to guide the questions, and we are 100% available for you. We already have a few questions here, and there are a few others that are rising.
We're going to start with at the order in which they arrive and according to subject. The first question is from Emerson, and it's the following. Good afternoon. Could you explain the drop of the margins of the first quarter of 2023 in relation to the fourth, even with the closing of the contracts of more profitability, which happened in the previous contract, in the previous quarter?
Okay. Talking about the two verticals in environment, when we look at the previous quarter, we have the effect, which is what you can see in the opening of the increase of growth to term number of clients and contracts and locations. We opened extra services as well. In the fourth quarter, there was more demand in relation to the area of services. These services gave us a better margin, and that didn't happen in the first quarter yet. That's what affected our margins.
Within the historical series, this is mainly affecting environment. In response, we had a few operations, which the effect is mainly in the area of consultancy, which has a lower margin. That also affected our margins. The margins continue, as Thiago said, at the same levels and very close to historical levels, despite the extraordinary result of the first quarter. There was a peak in the previous semesters as well. Let's continue on to the next question.
This is the question Pedro Oliveira de Rize where he said, "Congratulations for the transparency and for the results you presented. We thank you for that, comment, Pedro." He says, "Could you comment on the expectations for organic growth of the company per business unit for the year of 2023?"
Okay, let's go. We are of course going to talk according to the qualitative results, but we are very excited about the organic growth because our history benefits us in a sense for us to understand that there is a huge market, and it gave us a lot of visibility about the size of the market and the penetration which we have addressed and improved even more our potential. We are looking about how we are the only player that really has an impact, and it's a huge level of growth as a multi-product player. We work with collecting metals, glass, and in this way, within our ecosystem, we are able to bring a lot of growth to this business unit. Here at Environment, the two largest units.
In response, as Rafael commented, the organic growth in the two main geographies, Brazil and North America, historically grew a lot and opened the market for the future. In the next quarters, we believe that they will give us satisfactory results.
Perfect. The next question here, or actually two questions from Gilberto, which is about the same subject. The company, what is the future for the paying the debts? One of the debts depend on the future follow-on.
That's an excellent question. Thank you for that. The company, before our participations today, which according to the valuation levels, we did not have any space for the follow-on yet. We do evaluate every opportunity to access the equities market as we have been doing in response, but we might be doing something in a sense.
Of course, there are levels that has to be levels that compense, that make sense for the valuation of our assets. We have been evaluating opportunities. Today, this would make sense and our cost of debt, as we said, at deleverage will have a natural reduction, the deleveraging will follow it.
In relation to the follow-on, there is no cause that demands this when there is a drop of the administrative cost that will also demand a capital capture, but this is not an option we're studying now.
Well, since you brought up this subject, I'm gonna give another question for Bruno Souza. He is asking exactly about how the debts are being organized. You already addressed that first question. He's asking about the currency exchanges, about the origin of the revenue and the debt of the company, if that has anything to do with the currencies, and if that has been generating any loss inside the company.
In relation to our quarterly, this is something we study every semester, but still we haven't had the study yet because we are still in the quarter. We are already prepared for this scenario. Everything has been going according to our plan. It's not something that concerns us. In relation to the mix of currencies, all of the operations or the lines of operational debt follow in its normal level. When we fund, make an operational financing in CapEx, it's already included in the cash flow, including all of the debt calculations and with the inorganic growth.
One of them was done in USD, for example, with the acquisition of [Europrime], this also affects our balance. This mix of currency is not something that concerns us or anything that can cause any depreciation of currencies in relation to the debt. Still complementing this issue on the currency, we have this concern when we have revenues in BRL and the debts, the nominal debts in USD or in some other kind of strong currency. In this sense, here it's the contrary. Most of our debts are nominated in BRL, it's a natural hedge because of the movement in the exchange market, it's kind of mitigated already.
In relation to this, there's a question from João Gervasio from Credit Suisse, who is asking about the operations. I think that was already explained by Thiago. The next question is, what's the expectation of deleveraging to be able to reach the criteria that are under than the multiple of 3x ? How do you see the plan for expansion of the debt and improvement in the Brazilian market?
Well, it's a fact that it's a very stressful moment in the Brazilian market. We know this. The company is okay in relation to the our EBITDA. As I said, we're not worried about it. We have, as I commented, a diligence, a very strong diligence in relation to how we are going to cover those debts and how they have been done in a very important axis. When we look, we see 80% of these debts are within the deadline, especially the last ones.
Once again, we are very confident and we know that we did the inorganic growth, we grew organically as well, and we were able to generate value and work with third-party capital in a natural way in relation to deleveraging. We also worked naturally with it since 2023 will be a year where we will prove through financial demonstrations how we can generate operational cash. Some more data which we can share helps us understand the capacity of deleveraging since now we have less CapEx of maintenance and more CapEx of growth. We can have more growth side, the organic growth is growth, operational growth. There are returns much higher than the net debt.
Perfect. That's very well said because with that we can answer Guilherme Palhares' question, which is about what will be done to reduce leveraging or the debt. You talked about the CapEx of maintenance and the operations that we would do for that was the reduction of the CapEx. Also talks about the liabilities, how we can improve the total amount.
I think this point is something that's important, where the cost of capital or the cost of our debt is a cost that isn't connected to the CDI. Comparatively, it's more the core of the cost than essentially the conditions. Changing the debts, I don't know if that would be an option, so maybe Chuck can comment on this. Our liabilities are all under control. Our debt is not something that concerns us. Everything is going according to the plan, and in the long-term debts, everything is under control as well.
Perfect. Here we have a question from Bernardo Guttmann from Neumann. He is asking if we could give more explanations about the non-cash effect, non-recurrent effect of the transaction with HPX. All of the provisions, if they can give, if you could give us more clarity on that.
We discussed this a lot, Rafael, with our advisors, both in the auditing and in the advisory, this is the effect. Maybe you can talk more about this 'cause you were more involved in this.
Great. Bernardo, I think there are two main impacts here, which is direct impact of the cost of the transaction, which are advisors and financial actions, et cetera. Also there is a cash effect, which is a combination of businesses between HPX and Ambipar Response. I don't want to get into too many details here. I think we can talk about that offline to give--
We also have an explanation on this in the explanatory notes, we can get that later in the call. Basically, it's an accounting effect. When you incorporate HPX, it brings other accounting effects into Response. That's just the effect of the incorporation of HPX.
Wonderful. Rafa, thank you so much. Along the same lines, there are some questions here that are also related to these expenses that were accounted for in relation to Ricardo Martinez's question, which we will address directly about the cash amount that entered through the transaction over the total value that was captured in the pipeline. This is also in relation to the capitalization of the debt, maybe we can break down that amount that was shown in the previous question.
When we announced the HPX merger, we had a total capitalization of $170 million, being that part of that $174 million would be capitalization through the conversion of what we had with, of what Ambipar had with Response to the HPX. The holding had an amount that we were able to capitalize directly. That was the equity of Response. The other $124 million came in from the trust and HPX that were there ever since the IPO, as well as the investors that joined us in the beginning of the transaction. Part of that went to pay the costs for the transaction. That's why when we look at the net capitalization, which was the money that came in from Result, Response, and then consequentially from the holding, the amount was lower at the level of $100 million.
Excellent, Rafa. Thank you. We have a combo of questions from Vitor Safra . It's a pleasure to speak to you, Ugur. This first question is why did the cost to a third party grew sequentially if the company has been allocating CapEx in diminishing costs?
Well, then we need to segment that in the two visions of the company. There was actually an increase with outsourcing in Response that has already been mentioned by Rafael, and it really depends on the mix of occurrences. When the occurrence is very large, we have to mobilize a larger number of people and equipment than they had available.
It also depends a lot on the region. This ends up changing the structure of cost. I think in terms of response, that can be well addressed in that way. I think Rafa already mentioned this at the first moment. Maybe in a more specific way, this also was because of the operations in North America. We had to reduce a lot of costs on third parties, but in North America it was a relevant amount during this period. In the case of Environment, the quarter finished with 9.6% of the costs allocated on the outsourced party. In the fourth quarter, that was a bit lower than 8.6%.
Historically, if we look at the quarters, the previous quarters, we can reach levels close to 13%, 15% and 16% in some cases, which have been reducing at the level of 9.5%. I believe this analysis is focused on Q4 against the first, historically the trends show are clearly show a reduction in the costs evidently because of the investments in CapEx.
Now the second question from Ugor is: What changed in relation to the demand? The company always said that there's a volume of CapEx justifiable because of the amount of CapEx added services, and in the last quarters there's been a cut down in this.
Environment actually wasn't It didn't have a contraction, it was the option of the company to not renew contracts where we had low profitability. It was a decision that the company made. The demand evidently exists. This has always existed. The dynamic of CapEx also changed in the last quarters of this year in the beginning of last year, mainly in relation to the delay time and the need to send CapEx to projects that were already in our pipeline. Thiago can also complement in this sense.
The non-renewal of contracts because of the not, the lack of financial balance, which was not giving us ideal return, when we look at this, we can reallocate the assets that were there, if possible, and depending on the execution, and reallocate them in a very easy way in the other operations of the group. This is not a big deal either.
Now the last two questions from this combo that Ugo sent us. One of them is if you can address leveraging. That was already answered. It went over the level 3x . What are the expectations for cash generation of 2023? Here we have one more question from Marcelo from Everest Capital. He says, congratulations on your results.
Thank you, Marcelo. He's saying, asking us to clarify a bit more the volatility/seasonality that was added into the results.
I can start. We've always commented ever since the acquisition last year, just to remember that Witt O'Brien's is a company to manage crises and emergency. As a consulting company, it connected to the corporate sector and mainly the public sector in the U.S. What do they do? They help the state governments and the municipal governments to direct their funds in the U.S., federal funds in the U.S.
Which given the increase of climatic events over the last few years, the United States has been putting a relevant amount of investment in the operations of climatic events. This helps the municipalities and the states to redirect these funds for prevention and responses and reconstruction. This is the thesis that we had in last year. Since it was a consulting company, it presented a bit more volatility that was natural to the business. However, most of this depended on us positioning ourselves well in the market, which is a huge market and a growing market in the United States. Secondly, of us being able to not only work with the consulting services specifically, but also the field services, which we render through the other operations that we have.
Of course, in the short-term, this presents some additional volatility, but we can already see benefits within our ecosystem. Because we are already being able to direct these services to the holding. We've already rented services to Florida and to several other umbrella contracts that we have. The thesis is for the long term and for the short term, it can vary like it's varying now, but we are very excited with this project.
Perfect. Here we have one more question from Guilherme Pavani, and he's asking if there is any perspective of when the company expects to launch a project to make a loan in dollars to pay off the debt or any other foreign currency.
Guilherme, the market, the debt market in Brazil, as Thiago commented on, is a market that, as everyone knows, is a bit more turbulent than in the external market. It's also closed because of the high level of volatility in the markets involved. There's high level and also because of the private market. There are few issuances over this year. There's not enough anchor for price terms and value and size. The external market is to access that market in dollar. There are a few nuances that are more guided to macro trends. I don't know if Thiago wants to complement. That's about it. We are always paying attention to these opportunities. In my day-to-day, we look at this a lot. We pay attention to the market. We are always paying attention.
If there is any kind of opportunity for reduction, we will carry out this operation with a lot of care for this kind of movement. Complementing the external market of debt opens and closes with a lot of volatility. We just need to be ready when it opens and all of the interest that we received. It's very gratifying to see this alignment for the investments in the debt market with, since our growth proposal really causes productive changes. It's very well seen. If there is a window, we will definitely tap into it because it's a very competitive market.
Perfect. Here we have a question from Heloisa Cruz. She is asking us to explain the seasonality, something that Rafa just mentioned about WP, but she's also asking for us to comment on the seasonality of other businesses of the company and how that ends up affecting the business.
I think there's a part, a part here that is related to the seasonality, especially of the extra services, which Pedro addressed in his presentation of the results from the environment division. There are other issues related to the business that are also connected with seasonalities of economic expansion and the economy itself, which ends up pushing a lot of sectors and the same thing happens to us. I don't know if Thiago or Pedro would like to make any other kind of comment in relation to the seasonalities.
As Rafa commented from WP and about residue management. Well, that's it. I think that since we increased our portfolio of services a lot, it's totally normal that there are some business units that suffer with seasonality, but also this is part of our strategy. It's also important to highlight about seasonality that when we start to reduce the rhythm of acquisitions and start reporting results in a more organic way, some seasonality will end up always being presented. The market, that's when the market will be able to actually analyze with that filter about the seasonal variations.
Here we have another question, which is about a question from Matheus Doria. How, if we have any estimate of the impact of the currency variations against the real from other markets and what do we expect in the future?
Yes, there is a variation. What we have in our standard of foundations when we open in USD. Well, I don't have the exact number here right now. I don't know if you have that number. I would say that in operational lines, we don't have any great impact. Wherever we operate, there's revenue and the costs are in the local currency. The expansion that or the variation of currency really depends on the market that we are in. We had an appreciation of the reais. If we look at the results in reais, which is the main currency of the company, in the local currency, it was better than what we presented.
Here we also have a question for Eduardo from Genial Investimentos. He's asking the following. The generation of organic cash generation, is it going to deliver the balance? Are there follow-on studies or are there any subsidies?
Yes, of course. What's being-- What we are showing is in the financial demonstrations or the financial statements. As time passes, this will become more clear. Once again, we did list Ambipar Response. We are prepared to eventually do an IPO for Environment, that's not something we see in the short term. We'll follow the strategy which was adopted in November 2021. We didn't get great timing, we continue to be paying attention here with lots of opportunities to grow locally. Of course, an injection of capital would be important to accelerate even more. We continue accelerated, we could accelerate even more if we had a capital injection, which we'll definitely be able to get in the next few quarters.
Jonathan Williams has a very interesting question, it's more qualitative. What are the criterion that we use to discontinue the contracts? We only discontinue the contracts that are to be renewed. Could you give us more details about the contracts that continue? Is that because of the initiatives of Ambipar or of the client? How does this happen? It would be interesting for us to understand this better.
Thank you, Jonathan. These contracts are discontinued because of initiative Ambipar. Evidently, because of the profitability, which is below the level that we expect, and they happen at the moment of renewal. If there is no commercial agreement or an adjustment to the value of these contracts, naturally Ambipar has the option of not renewing. Evidently, this is how. We only do this at the end of the current term. We will fulfill our contracts until the end. This is our initiative.
To talk about the profitability criteria, Thiago can give you that information. Exactly, of course, if there is any event, non-recurrent event as we had, for example, in the last year, such as inflation or another item, and the cost is higher than inflation, we have this prerogative where we can request a financial balance. We don't. When we believe that we're not reaching our expectations of profitability, we do have the option to deliver the contract, and that involves a negotiation, of course. The client is always very important to us. As I commented, they need to deliver enough results to us for us to be able to negotiate and reach interesting return rates. We are pricing the contracts when we look at them. Of course, they.
We have a robust plan for pricing that needs to be audited where we are always looking at the internal rate of return of these contracts. We always revisit this. We accompany every contract planned versus carried out or delivered. If there's any change, of course, we try to figure out why. If it's something that's outside of our control, which we should request any kind of rebalancing, then we do so. We always look at the internal rate of return.
Perfect. This is a question from Lorenzo from ILOG. Thank you for your participation. He has a few questions here. The first of them is about the perspective for growth of Environment in the next quarters, given that the Brazilian economy is weaker.
The company, we did not disclose any guidance or forecast for growth officially, but we understand that the scenario, economic scenario is weaker. This evidently, if it continues in this way, it will affect the growth, the amount of growth which we may have because of the external factors. We are very well-positioned to continue growing independent of the economic scenario because of the proposal value which we deliver to our clients. Perspectives for growth are connected to economic scenarios. We evidently have an advantage because we are not in this ecosystem with the proposal value, which we have built over the last few years, positions us in a very good place in order to cross this period and continue providing the services which generate growth and also increase cross-sell which is the thesis of investment which we have discussed with investors over the last few years.
The next question, if there are investments that are not recurrent. Rafa, Thiago, do you want to give us any information on this?
Not recurrent. In the fourth quarter, there were a few that were above average, but everything for us today is recurrent. Even in relation to health plans, you don't know when or who, but you know that it will happen because we have a huge base of clients and incidents. This happens constantly. At an average of 100 emergencies per day that are simultaneous and more than 100 services that are already scheduled in Brazil. Once again, this is a fruit of what we organize how to manage all of this through standardization. The occurrences naturally as they happen, they are recurrent.
Yes, it's also because of the platform that we set up. A diversified platform in terms of geographies and units of business units, which allows us to take advantage of opportunities wherever they may present themselves. We like to talk about how we always have occurrences happening that are more or less relevant in any of the geographies that we cover.
Additionally here, there's another question. What is the margins of our real price?
Well, we didn't comment on this individually, but in relation to levels of growth, revenue, or margins of some of our acquired companies. We understand that the proposal value and the strategy of the company is to build this ecosystem with several platforms that are co-complementary and synergetic, and that's where you extract the value of the acquisition.
This question, unfortunately, I won't be able to answer because we don't make this kind of comment individually about the companies that we invest in. In relation to the leveraging lower than 3x in the next quarter, I think Thiago already addressed that in the previous answers, which culminated in the Q&A session. If there's anything else?
No, I think that's it. Once again, about the leverage and the debt level and cash generation, it does not concern us. We are very confident about this, that everything's within our strategy. We are very careful in relation to this, and we are very aware that the strategy was very assertive. We used third-party capital to grow. It's a unique platform, as we have commented several times, with very strong potential. Now we want to capture the synergy, so we need to deliver these results that are very interesting.
Our proposal, our value proposal is very strong within a macro market that is growing more and more in relation to emergency response and environmental services. We're very confident about this. The strategy was very assertive. Everything has been going according to plan, and the returns are higher than the market averages. We are very happy and optimistic about the future with the results that we presented. The first quarter of 2023 was very interesting and very satisfactory for us to be able to deliver this kind of result.
Here we have a question from Israel from Value Easy. It's about the increase of indebtedness of the company which grew.
Yes. As we discussed, we had a cycle of a lot of investments and acquisitions in the last few years, which did eventually make the growth be financed through the debt. Evidently, he is concerned with the policies that we will implement so that in the next quarters, we can have more reasonable levels. I think we addressed that already, all of those issues about deleveraging. In this sense, we are also in a scenario where the cost of debt is more concerning to us than the indebtedness level, but it was already addressed in the questions that how we will reach this deleveraging level.
Okay. Here we have a question from Tais, which is the distribution of proceeds for the company for the year 2023.
This was already a subject of the last assembly. We approved the distribution of the minimum bylaws. We have several investments that are being made. We have the issue of leverage, several other issues which don't allow us to make a larger projection because of the distribution of our dividends.
The perspectives continue to be the same right now according to our bylaws.
The same question from Matthew. Therefore, we close our session of questions and answers. I'm going to pass the floor to Thiago so he can make his final considerations.
Thank you so much, Ricardo. Once again, we are very satisfied with the results that Ambipar has been delivering ever since our IPO. If we look at the perspectives that we had, how much we were able to accelerate this and make very interesting deliveries of results with inference, with a very assertive strategy and capital, becoming a public listed company. We're very optimistic in relation to the near future, but also the long-term future. We are available. We are all here.
The management is here. We are preparing a few more events so that we can show how we've been improving our business. We would like our investors to understand the potential that this company has more and more. We're going to make a few specific events to explain our business model better and every business unit that we created. We are very engaged so that this year we can help our investors understand our business more. In the future, in the near future, you will be receiving a few invites for a few events that we will be organizing together with our investor relations team. Thank you so much. See you soon, and a great afternoon. Goodbye.