Afternoon, everyone. On behalf of Ambipar, I would like to thank you all for your presence and time today. We have our full team, and we're really happy to be here today presenting our earnings for the first quarter. Thiago, as you all know, our CFO, and Yuri, our new business director, Dennys Spencer, COO at Response. We also have some special guests and faces here that you don't know yet, but we have Ricardo and Hugo from Ambipar in Northeast. They were the former ESG, and they're gonna share a bit of their growth journey, as well as João, our Ambify director. I'm gonna take advantage of this moment as we present an institutional video so that you can understand the different initiatives regarding carbon. We have an innovation, and this is our sign language interpreter as well.
As you can see, Ambipar being more inclusive in all of our events. Once again, I want to thank Ambipar and the presence for all of you. Ambify is the carbon offsetting platform for Ambipar. Offsetting carbon, why? To search for a balance in the planet and help regenerate it. Excessive carbon in the air compromises life, suffocates the planet and us. What do I have to do amidst all of this? Everyone issues carbon emissions all the time when you use transportation or breathe. This means that each one can do their own part, changing some habits to have less carbon emissions and offsetting with Ambify what you can't avoid. How does this work? You can offset the carbon emissions you have by buying and retiring carbon credits. Where do these carbon credits come from?
The carbon credits are generated by the Vida Amazonia project, which avoids a deforestation in the forest, keeping carbon stocked up in the trees. From where else? Through projects that incentivize the generation of clean energy and avoid the emissions of CO2 in the air. How do I know these credits really exist? Ambipar is a multinational in Brazil that's a leader in environmental management committed to the ESG agenda and a low carbon economy. It's a publicly held company that's in line with the Bovespa rules for transparency and governance. The carbon credits at Ambipar are certified by Verra, an institution that's international and validates over 70% of the carbon credits in the voluntary global market. Who will guarantee that the same credits won't be retired more than once?
Each of these carbon credits that are certified by Verra has a trackable serial number that's removed as soon as it's retired. Verra guarantees that each carbon credit is equivalent to about one ton of greenhouse gas emissions that was not issued or was removed from the air. The carbon credits from Ambify are digital assets that are registered in a blockchain, the safest place for transactions with crypto assets. Do I need to buy one ton of carbon? Well, Ambify is the first app that can fraction this in kilos. So you can offset a trip, a meal, even a sandwich if you want. The world is asking for a low carbon economy, and now you can be part of this movement in a really simple way. With Ambify, anyone can offset their carbon emissions directly on their cell phones.
Just download the app, calculate your footprint, and offset it immediately. You'll receive an Ambify certificate. When all of the tokens in the same serial number are offset, you'll receive a definite certificate from Verra guaranteeing that the offsetting process took place successfully, and that you took on a whole another step towards, a better planet. To keep up to date with this Ambify token, follow the link you'll receive by email. Your action just generated a chain reaction. Less carbon in the air and more forests, less climate change, more life in the planet. Ambify. This can offset.
Well, guys, this was just an illustrated video to talk about this initiative we have when it comes to carbon credits and, Ambipar's innovation that brings in access to carbon credits for individuals, as we mentioned in the video.
We have our website, and we have this initiative that Ambipar is working on once again as a pioneer in our initiatives. We could also begin the presentation here. We'll share some slides. As Chris has mentioned, we're really excited with the earnings in this quarter, one more quarter with significant growth. We have our teams here from Environment in the northeast of Brazil to talk about how this has been happening in practical terms and how the company has been adding value and a lot of cross-selling initiatives for the company as, the company has really been seen as a value adder and, guaranteeing our returns to shareholders as well. First, let's talk about some of the highlights in this quarter. We'll start talking about a bit of our growth.
When we look at this, towards the same period of the previous period, the previous year, the EBITDA has had a growth, and we tripled this EBITDA with a net revenue of 192%. A net income of 62%. We had four acquisitions in the quarter, and Yuri will talk about how these acquisitions are part of our portfolio in the quarter, which really complements the Ambipar Response portfolio. We've explored the synergies a lot, as I mentioned. We've been focusing a lot on integrations and how we can capture all of this. We always talk about this, and it's a real fact that there's so many opportunities coming around, that sometimes our concern is really to not lose any of these. We've always kept our eyes open and have had organized some regular meeting.
We of course don't want to forget our legacy, and our results have really been reflecting this growth. Once again, we had a revenue of BRL 667 million in this first quarter, an EBITDA of BRL 204 million with a 26.6% margin. We had a slight drop compared to the previous quarter. We're gonna explain and discuss this mix between Ambipar Environment and Ambipar Response and the net income with a margin of 6.4%. This involves some leverage efforts by the group to keep growth pace. Now, I'll pass on the word to Dennys, who's gonna talk about the M&A process with Ambipar Response and these two acquisitions in Brazil that we just performed and how they'll add on to our service portfolio. Thank you very much.
Actually, I just want to be a little more educational here and mention how these acquisitions are integrated into the Response process. We had two acquisitions, Dracare and FlyOne. Dracare really focus on ocean operations and marine operations, offering services for marine support as well. FlyOne, which is really specialized in firefighting and forests with the use of aircraft. In the last quarter, we presented this macro process to make it very clear how there was a beginning, middle, and end of this emergency response process and how these acquisitions fit in to each one of these phases.
As we talk about all of the operational synergies and Dracare and FlyOne really fit in to the emergency response initiatives, and they can really reinforce our performance in some port terminals as well as in the forestry areas with all of this emergency response, reducing the response time and improving our structures. We can move on to the next point. Here, we're gonna show you another highlight in the first quarter. With all of the acquisitions made in the North American region, our growth in this territory, we've always mentioned the winning platform for Ambipar to be able to provide these emergency responses in a standardized manner in the U.S., in Brazil, sorry, and in Latin America. This is also being replicated in North America.
One important highlight here is our integration that's occurring in a very accelerated manner with our emergency center as well, PERS, which is a company we acquired, and we are undergoing the final phase in the procedure design that is standardized. Brazil and the center in Chile and the U.S. will have the same standards. This will help with the operational integration of our bases, which are in North America. That's going to be managed by this emergency center. You can move on to the next one. Well, thank you everyone, and good afternoon. The first acquisition we wanna highlight today is the First Response acquisition. It's an acquisition of a company that's really relevant in Canada and the western region in British Columbia.
In Canada it's mandatory to have big construction projects and infrastructure projects having a fire department team on standby while the construction work is taking place. This company had an important role in the floods in British Columbia, and they're really well positioned with the efforts to rebuild these areas. It's a company with an EBITDA margin that's really attractive and a return on invested capital that's quite interesting. The second transaction we had in the quarter, we can move on to the next slide, was we also wanna call your attention to is FlyOne.
It's an acquisition that we performed here in Brazil, but it's a company that works in a very specific and complex niche with major entry barriers for third parties and a very attractive margin level with a return on equity that's also above average, offering a service that's super essential and synergetic with our portfolio, as Thiago mentioned. The third acquisition took place in Brazil.
Next slide, please. This is Dracare, as Dennys mentioned. In a similar strategy as FlyOne's, placing Ambipar in a modality we hadn't had a relevant presence in yet.
We start having this important highlight, as Dracare is a leader in the sector as well as an operation with good margins and good return on equity and a really good transaction condition for Ambipar, which represents a platform that Ambipar will be able to expand with in a very aggressive way. Finally, the fourth acquisition. In the next slide, which is Fox. Here in this environmental vertical, it's a company that has a strong highlight in the state of São Paulo, and it adds a lot of value as we improve and reinforce our strategy to integrate and revalue a waste repurposing processes due to its post-industrial performance and the sale of recycling material for repurposing purposes as well. Now, Chris will discuss some of our partnerships that we established in the first quarter.
It's important also to consider that Ambipar really needs to prepare the students in universities when it comes to waste and repurposing as well as circular economy topics. As we thought of this, we have also moved on to a segment that is what most involves this topic of waste in a production line, which is the production engineering bachelor's program, where we search for universities that have a good reputation. We started a partnership with Mackenzie so that our technicians and directors and overseers, as well as some of our operational areas, could really bring to these students all of the topics and training related to the generation and reinsertion into the circular economy.
Now we're receiving in the first quarter the results of this important partnership, and from then on, we'll probably start working in other universities as well around Brazil and the world even, who knows, bringing in this topic with waste repurposing and valorization. Another really important topic that made us really happy in this first quarter, and I was always mentioning that, we were waiting for the certification from Verra when it comes to our Ecosolo product, and now it was certified, and it's duly certified now, and we can perform any commercialization with it related to the mitigation, and offsetting of carbon emissions in all of the agribusiness area where we can really include Ecosolo.
Now we have a long path, especially in the southern region of the country, and now we can replicate this into all of the national territory, with some important initiatives in Chile and Peru. As we also mentioned BioFílica, we brought in two important projects, one with a cattle raising producer, with three phases when you have cattle on the pastures all the way to the slaughterhouses and commercialization and an important strategy as well. These are really important highlights for Environment in this quarter. Moving on. Here we have Project Jari.
When we talked about this style here in Brazil and that we would really take all of the technology we have here for repurposing and mitigation, we already started an important project in Chile close to Santiago. It's gonna be a multimodal project with waste. We'll have post-consumption, circular economy, co-processing, et cetera. We've already started our construction work there. Next year it's gonna be ready. This cross-selling process with companies in Brazil has already started. We had a team, and we can already identify which customers we should already attract for this important project in Chile. Before I move on to the financial results, we'll pass on the word to Ricardo and so that they can talk about how the group really added value to the former First Call, which is now Ambipar Environment in the Northeast.
All of the capital structure that was brought in, and most of the resources were primary investments and how they've been investing everything ever since January 2021. Thank you, Thiago.
First Call from 2020 to 2021 was able to grow about 90% after Ambipar entered its capital base. Now this year we plan to double this amount of sales. All of our operation was cash-in, so we really believe in the business and the evolution in the Northeast and north of Brazil. This went all the way to the company's cash position, so the company's really well-capitalized and leveraged in a leverage capacity that the group brought in. We've been growing a lot all over the Northeast. We have operation from Bahia to Ceará with a strong presence in Maranhão as well.
We used to have 300 employees, now we have 650. We have a fleet of 52 trucks. Now we have over 150 trucks and almost 2,200 stationary equipment. We have customers going from 1,300 to 2,500 and business units from 5 units to 11 business units. We've been investing a lot in different production plants for treatment and co-processing and reverse logistics for tires, where we're going to generate energy for the cement factories to reduce the submission of this waste to landfills and really in line with the company's zero landfill policy. I think this is what we had to mention. We have these co-processing plants with tires.
We plan to expand to all of Brazil. We have five plants with MOUs, and we are planning to open up 12 of these plants. More than the capital, with both of the companies together, there's a strong value construction because you have cross-selling opportunities, structure, fundability, visibility, and this adds on a lot to the business as a whole. Dennys can prove this. We've been working a lot with Response, with treating some of the contaminated waste and the accidents as well and disasters. We have an important footprint and we can work with most of the waste that was going to previously move on to the landfills. We can reduce this a lot and increase this capacity for services between the companies of the group.
This is one example of the acquisitions we work on. Normally the carbon. Now we have a stock of carbon and we'll have a gain that's very significant and in our results in the next months. Now we'll move on to our financials, and I'm going to try to address some of the questions that are already appearing here in the chat. Here we have our net revenue where we performed the LTM where we've been growing 195% in regards to the LTM when compared to QoQ. We continue with the capturing of synergies.
When we look at the EBITDA, once again, we added more margin, and we've been working on that initiative with Esau for scalability and really exploring all the synergies we brought in to present an example of how we can capture all of this. In Ambipar Response, we have the expansion of the North American market. We grew 24% in regards to the previous quarter. Significant growth. Almost 70% of our revenue comes from the external market in response. The internationalization of Response is really materializing everything we discussed in the IPO of 2020. We've been able to really bring in returns. Moving on to the next slide.
About the margins, we can address some of the questions that have already been sent by chat, where the margins were compressed a bit compared to the previous quarter, going down to 26.8%. This is mainly because Ambipar Environment had a small increase and Ambipar Response had a small reduction. In Response, a bit of the service mix and revenue generation coming more from the external market. The North American part of the market has a lot of industrial services and mechanic or automated cleaning processes that provide some stability to the base and has smaller margins than here in Brazil, where we mostly have emergency response and the field work done with margins that are a little greater.
As we grow a bit more there, and of course, what we're doing here is standardization of this work through PERS, and we'll be able to use our network of assets to be able to work on this initiative. We've had some strong work at Texas, where we used the structure of our companies abroad as well as the know-how with First, and this was through Allied. If we didn't have this structure, Allied prior to Ambipar would not have worked in this and they wouldn't have the capacity or know-how to do this.
We were able to do, to demonstrate this, creating this, footprint and a, group of assets that's really unique with know-how in every type of accident, we can really be more scalable and bring in more return. There's a mix as we're a work in progress when it comes to the standardization of this through PERS, and we'll be able to certainly deliver margins above 27% or 28%. Moving on. Here the net income with BRL 185 million LTM. It's a growth of BRL 114 million compared to the LTM of 2021. Even though we have the leverage strategy to not lose any opportunities when it comes to M&A, and our funding of this organic growth. M&A is used really as an accelerated growth tool.
We leverage this, and we've been using this cash position with some acquisitions that bring in immediate returns since we use a free cash flow with a discount rate that's quite interesting, and it brings these multiples that we've been acquiring with this value. We're gonna continue with this inorganic plan, but we don't wanna leave inorganic unattended to. We try to not lose any opportunities when it comes to organic growth. If we look at the growth of 11% of our revenue compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, it was pretty much half-half. We had a disclosure in our release about half and half between organic and inorganic. We are also growing organically and not only inorganically.
We've had strong initiatives and efforts to continue with this plan since organic growth is really in our agenda. Now about leverage, some questions that came in in the chat. When we look at the EBITDA from an annualized perspective of the first quarter of 2022, when we analyze this, we reach an EBITDA of BRL 814 million or almost BRL 815 million, right? The net debt of BRL 2.2 billion, so 2.8x leverage. It's nothing that's concerning us because we're in our covenant. It's up to 3x for 2022. We've been using the cash position we took on now in January to continue acquiring other companies.
It's in our agenda, and it's within our committee looking at the directions for these investments and everything that this brings as ROIC and value for the company. We're moving along with this plan and being very diligent in this process, so we don't have any problems when it comes to leverage. You can move on, please. Here's about the ROIC and the methodology. Here we use the average employed capital, where we consider the net debt plus the goodwill paid in the acquisitions. We think this is the best way to look at a company that's been growing a lot with acquisitions, and this benefit will come in the future. We're using this. We're gonna be excluding this effect, and we really believe what would be in ROIC in a normalized condition would be 20.
3.2% using a rate of average return on investments of 30%. Here we are also performing the pro forma exercise where we looked at Response. If we were to annualize the first quarter of 2022, we have a CAGR of 78%. 2019, if you remember, before the IPO, we were mostly in Brazil and a bit of LATAM. Now basically about 70% of our revenue comes from abroad with significant growth. The CAGR in four years is 78%, which is very attractive with the maintenance of our margins. EBITDA is growing 78% in the same period. We've been able to grow with the maintenance of our margins. Now in Environment, this is not different.
We had growth that's actually a little bit higher due to the transformational acquisition, which was the sales. We went from a net revenue of BRL 215 million before the IPO, and we grew 90% per year. This is a revenue pro forma in the first quarter of BRL 1.7 billion and an EBITDA of BRL 476 million, where you have the same rationale as Response. We can grow while keeping margins and keeping the returns and even adding more returns when we look at the calculations in regards to the ROIC. Please, moving on to the next one. Here you have a summary of our consolidated results pro forma. Our net revenue growing 85% on average, and EBITDA in line with this growth of 83% CAGR. We reach a level of...
If we weren't to grow anymore, organically, we would close the year with BRL 3 billion in net revenue. The level the company is taking on is really unique. We are super optimistic when it comes to the future, and not only the future, but also in the mid to long term. We're really moving. We have the firepower, we have cash, we have enthusiasm to be able to continue to grow and really deliver to our shareholders. Moving on to the next one. Well, now we're gonna go into the Q&A session. We have many questions coming in. I'm gonna go through each of them, and as necessary, we will also pass these on to the members on our team here with us today.
Anderson is an individual investor, and he's asking about the variation in the gross margin in the Response and Environment segments. Here when we look at Response, we tried to address these questions a bit during the earnings call. Certainly, as I mentioned in Response, you have a slight drop because of the service mix, going a bit more abroad. What we expect in the future is that as we add on the standardization of this process, we'll have a very similar level to what we have here in Brazil when it comes to our operations abroad.
In Environment, we've been getting margins, and this is the fruit of the synergies we've been capturing with the ecosystem that's retrofitted, and we can work on the integrations in the group, as you mentioned, and also taking on the scale to Disal with the dilution of the G&A. Anderson, who's also an individual investor, once again, he asked about the ROIC calculation, and I tried to address this as well. Now what we're trying to do is we try to exclude what's intangible because it's something required in the future and we're looking, we exclude this so we can have a normalized ROIC, and this is the methodology we consider to be the best for this purpose. Herbert Srougi from XP, he's an analyst. Thank you for the question.
He wanted to understand more about the CapEx in the quarter related to the Response segment, and it's a bit above average. Herbert Srougi, Response Brazil really had an important CapEx, and we're reinforcing some of our base. People that had the opportunity to go to Nova Odessa, and we're also organizing some more site visits, so that you can have more tangibility of everything we're discussing here. We've been really reinforcing our base so that we can service everything in our asset network, base and of course, in great speed and quality. We also had some outsourcing contracts, and we're really engaging this through this cross-selling partnership with ControlPar. This was an acquisition that really surprised us positively above average. We are involving some contracts.
I'm not gonna say that this is gonna be normalized in the future because as we have more CapEx, we have more contracts that we're getting in this outsourcing model. That's very similar to Environment. We have allocated resources. We also have some diligence in the pricing that guarantees an interesting tier for the group. Victor from Itaú is once again asking about the CapEx, and I explained this a bit as well with Response. He's asking if in Environment we include the $18 million of the GIRI project. Well, this doesn't all include this. We have the funding there, and it's going to be used throughout the operation and the construction process. What we did is we had...
We already bought the land, about $3 million, and now we're working on the previous use of these 18 throughout over time. Of course, we have some of the tranches, but we haven't captured the entire debt. We're gonna do this over time. When it comes to BioFílica, what's the average price of carbon credits being negotiated and what's the expectation over time for this? Well, Victor has also asked about this, and he's from Itaú BBA. Today, we're negotiating an average of about $18, and this went up a bit more. Now we've been operating already at prices that we modeled up in 2017, 2016.
If you compare the revenue from carbon credits, there was a slight drop compared to the fourth quarter, and this is because we're kind of holding on to this a bit because the market's really booming, and we see prices having a bit of a growing trend. We believe that this trend is gonna continue, and we've been able to work on some management processes for these credits, and we've been really able to bring in important margins for BioFílica. The next point here is from Max from TC. He's congratulating us on the results, and thank you, Max. He's asking about the drop in EBITDA compared to the previous quarter. We already addressed this. He also talks about the cost of fuels, if we look at the P&L for Environment.
Of course, there was an increase in the cost of fuel that's happening in the overall market. He's also asking about how we've been handling this transfer to customers, as we mentioned in the previous call. We should always reinforce this, that we've had some important daily conversations with our customers, and we've been negotiating this to be able to transfer this. All of our contracts are foreseeing this rebalancing from an economic financial perspective, and we're considered to be an essential supplier and are very sensitive in these customers. Throughout the years, we've already gone through different situations that are quite similar, and we're always able to transfer this. We have been very successful in these negotiations and certainly expect this to not be very different now with this commodity issue.
Well, Julia from Santander is asking about the CapEx, and we've already addressed this when it comes to Response. Julia, once again from Santander, is asking about the drop in the Response margins. We already mentioned that this was not an acquisition factor, but because of a mix of services. Of course, there's a trend for improvements in the future. João was also talking about the CapEx. We've already addressed this matter. Fabiano from Necton is congratulating us for the results. Thank you, Fabiano, and I want to provide some feedback on this release. He's also asking us to explain a bit more about the margins, which is something we've already addressed. Hugo from Safra, he's also been asking about CapEx. Andre from Santander, he's also asking about the CapEx. We've already addressed this.
This is something else that's very important, which is the anticipation of the CapEx and Environment. Yes, it continues. We continue to have the supply and demand issue in the market for equipment. Hugo and Ricardo are here, and they have the operations area, and they really feel this, and they have the skin in the game. The team has been able to really handle this very well with the anticipation of some of these acquisitions creating a buffer. Where we can, as we mobilize the different contracts, and Ambipar is really recognized for its speed in signing these contracts, which is a differential among our competitors as well. We keep the strategy when it comes to the anticipation of the CapEx. For the second quarter, this is the case.
For 2022, this is also going to be the case. I don't believe there'll be much of a difference. We'll continue with this. Andre also mentioned that the debt level went up again. Yes, there were some acquisitions. We had four acquisitions throughout the first quarter. Once again, we used our cash position and the funding that we had taken on in 2021 and 2022 to be able to continue this growth plan. Now, we've been using this carefully with a lot of diligence, looking at the ROIC and the TIR for each of our acquisitions. Our growth in Environment when it comes to the fourth quarter was 3%. Well, about 1% was organic, and the 2% was inorganic. Here we also have a bit of the currency variation as well.
If you were to exclude all of these factors, that'd be about 24% if you exclude the currency effect. We've been growing a lot. Of course, the contracts are under mobilization, and especially those that we gained now, that are going to be mobilized in the fourth quarter of 2022. This was Leonardo from TC, and then he was asking about the profits shared with controllers and what was the growth of this profit. As we respond, these next points will cover this as well. We're going to be posting these reports on our website throughout the day today. He's also asking about the revenue coming from Ambify and the expectation for this. While we have a restriction about this, Ambify is still a project that is still starting.
It's an embryo, and we're searching for ways to really generate a bit more traction in this project, which is why we've worked on some special campaigns and partnerships. Revenues are still not relevant, but we are really optimistic about how this is going to be a big project because this is what the world needs, and this is Ambipar's purpose. We're going to really invest in this project a lot, of course, in line with its returns. We're really certain that this will reinforce our brand, it will follow our purpose, and we're super conscious that it can generate a lot of important returns. Well, if we could also mention that Vagner could maybe discuss some of the new relevant contracts for 2022 and if we have any perspectives on this. Well, yes, we do.
We have some interesting proposals in the sector, in the energy sector, as well as, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage as well. Now during the first quarter, we also had some important initiatives, especially in steelwork, the sector, and this will continue for sure in the next quarter. Moving on to Danilo's question about the controllers. From the BRL 48 million in net income consolidated, BRL 45.6 million went to the controller and BRL 3.3 million went to the minority shareholders. Jurandir will be publishing these reports on our website. Fabiano here from Naxentia is going to ask about this, and I will pass this question on to Yuri Gualberto. Considering the robust cash position, what can we imagine when it comes to acquisitions from Environment and Response in Brazil and abroad?
Well, I think we continue to look at a responsive expansion out of Brazil in a very active way. There are some initiatives that are very interesting in this business unit abroad, out of Brazil. Obviously, we are looking at the expansion of Environment through the main verticals. As we talk about Brazil a bit more and a little less of abroad, from a future perspective, we shouldn't notice any modifications that are too relevant in regards to what the company's performed in the past 12-18 months. Well, this also addresses a bit of Vagner's next question. He's from Quantitas, and he mentioned that we captured resources and funding in the debentures, and what's our M&A expectations for this use of proceeds.
Well, we're being very diligent in this process, looking at returns, performing a lot of internal studies, and always looking at this from a strategic perspective with everything that this adds. We haven't gotten it wrong so far, and we don't want to, so we're being very careful with the use of resources as always. Now, Marília is also asking about the need to understand the annualized pro forma numbers and if there's any seasonality in the business. Well, we understand that this is a very important proxy. Anyways, we believe that this is a bit approximate. Of course, what we can see is the inorganic and organic growth. If we were to close the year now with what we already have, we would have a net revenue of BRL 3 billion in the group.
Ale is also asking about more visibility on the organic distribution of contracts in Environment, what the expectation for 2022, and how many were added in the first quarter of 2022. As we mentioned here, Ale, we have really good perspectives in regards to contracts, and we're really trying our best to separate this from our model, because as we perform many acquisitions and the teams at Ambipar Environment in the Northeast are really proof of this, we have many contracts, and Ambipar Environment had some contracts with an average of revenue, and this is our target tier, and we continue with this. But certainly the mix has changed a lot, and we're trying to separate this out of it, but the contracts continue, and we'll probably.
If we gained about 22% last year, we'll probably more than overcome this, and the optimism is still really great. Max is also asking if there's a limit for leverage that would make us take a break on some acquisitions for a bit. Well, what we're looking at here is an optimal leverage of up to 3x. The acquisitions we are performing bring in EBITDA, so we aren't buying companies that are bad to make them better. We buy good companies to make them even better. As we buy them, this is why we perform our pro forma exercise, and these are in our results and covenants. We have a company and EBITDA, and in most cases, we even reduce leverage. What we use as an internal limit is up to 3x.
Of course, we have a drop in our leverage position. Fabiano here from Necton, he also talks about some competitors such as Simpar and Aurizon entering the sector. This competition is of course something normal in the business. We have a purpose, and we're really focused on a lot of entry barriers. It doesn't concern us, and we're really aware and certain of our capacity in the business. Well, I think Fabiano is also talking about M&A, and I think we already covered this. Fabiano, I already covered that competition. We have Pedro, and he's congratulating us for our results. Thank you, Pedro. I wanted to talk...
He said, "I want to talk about the potential of these acquisitions, and we would like to know about the share of wallet, and where you're headed." Well, Pedro, each case is a case. We can generalize this when it comes to the acquisition of the stake of our shareholders. Most have this certain term. We actually talk about the extension of this term because the synergies are sometimes so good and perspectives are so positive that sometimes we have even discussed some very interesting conversations. When it comes to the share of wallet, we've also worked on some internal initiatives here with a study where normally an industry spend about 3% of their revenue with the total waste management.
Now we looked at our customers that have that are in our base, most of them are blue chips. This represents about 0.5% of it, their cost, so we could expand our base by 6x in our customers. It's really an opportunity and a big share of wallet. We're working on this. As we add onto our portfolio with these acquisitions that are coming around, we would be incorporating this and internalizing this in our customers. Gustavo from Compass asked us to provide some more details on the CapEx in Environment. What we can see, this migrating to about 15%.
Well, what's interesting is we could illustrate this, and the CapEx we report in our release is the accounting CapEx, where we add on this point, and then we have some non-financial effects with the capitalization of IFRS 16. We also have some of the CapEx that we acquire from a finance perspective. It's not a cash CapEx. If you look at the CapEx in the first quarter, about half would be cash, or the other half would be like non-accounting effect. This is not in our cash flow as an actual expense. It's really close to those 15% we've always mentioned in the net revenue for Environment. This is really an accounting effect at the end of the day.
This was the last question we've got, and I think we've been able to address all of our questions. Is that right? Yep, that's it. Well, we would like to thank everyone for their participation. I think there's one more question that came in. That's great. I'm gonna pass this one on to Yuri before we finish. This is Danilo also congratulating us on the results and thinking if we should reach. Well, we've already thought about entering Asia as a market. From a philosophical perspective, it's a really interesting question because China has a huge problem with soil decontamination. It's a very growing economy, and although they're going through a complex lockdown moment, it's really a booming economy and has a lot of growth. It's important to mention India as well in your question.
Ambipar's ambition is really global, and each geography will have a certain moment, but Asia still hasn't arrived. Great. I'll pass the word on to Chris for the closing remarks.
Well, once again, what Thiago mentioned in his presentation, I would like to reinforce his presentation and just say that we're being super enthusiastic and committed to all of the company's topics at Ambipar, in Response in Brazil, LatAm, Europe and, the United States. We've continued to keep a focus in all of the ESG topics and all of the carbon topics in the circular economy. I'm super proud of having this entire team and all of the other 12,000 employees that are all part of this reality and this culture that Ambipar is sharing with the world.
Another important comment Thiago mentioned that I wanna just highlight is that our doors are open, and the Nova Odessa plant is super important to help you guys understand how all of our operations work. Of course, you won't be able to see everything entirely, but you'll be able to have more tangibility and when it comes to our business. The entire team is available, and if you understand that it's important to get to know a bit more of the business, we are also available. Once again, we have a very important challenge with the cross-selling we've done in all the companies. Nowadays, we can clearly see more and more the synergies in Response and Environment and how our partners in the companies are really believing and focused on this growth.
This is what makes Ambipar this company that brings in so much returns and is so successful. We really believe in this, and this year really promises a lot. We have a lot going on together that's going to happen, and these contracts are also very important. This comment from Thiago was also very significant. Before, in the beginning of our IPO, we were mentioning, "Oh, we're gonna close 10 or 12," but nowadays it's quite a blessing that every day we can talk to different companies about how much they're impacting this. We can just really thank you all for your confidence and trust in our board and our chairman as well and how he's really focused on our growth. Once again, thank you so much, and we're available for any future questions.
Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.
Thanks. Take care.