Good morning. [Non-English content ] My name is Thais Haberli. I'm the IR at Azul. IR Manager at Azul. Sorry, guys. It's my first online [Non-English content ] event, so I'm sorry about that. It's a pleasure to have you all here with us today in our Azul Day. We have some guests here, but I would like to thank you all for this time today. We hope that today will be informative and helpful as you continue to make your investment decisions on Azul. Today's slide, audio, and video will be available on our IR website. Presenting today will be John Rodgerson, our CEO, Alex Malfitani, our CFO, and Abhi Shah, our Chief Revenue Officer. Before I turn the presentation over to John, I would like to show you a video that summarize 2020 year.
Also, we will have a Q&A session after the presentation, so please send all the questions you have through our website platform. Thank you.
In February 2020, 2 million people flew with Azul to over 120 destinations. Over 80,000 people crossed Brazil skies with us every day to close a business deal, visit a friend or a doctor, or relax on one of Brazil's beautiful beaches. All of a sudden, 122 aircraft were grounded. From 1,000 daily takeoffs, we went to 70. Thousands of crew members were locked at home. To face this crisis, we quickly developed a management plan. We adjusted our network to the new demand, reduced fixed costs, and engaged all stakeholders to protect our liquidity. With this plan, we were able to preserve over BRL 8 billion in cash. Azul was one of the few airlines in the world to maintain its cash position in the toughest year in the history of aviation.
With this, we were able to access the capital markets to increase our liquidity with a successful offer of BRL 1.7 billion in convertible debentures. In the middle of these challenges, great news, Azul was chosen best airline in the world by TripAdvisor. We implemented several initiatives to protect the health of our customers and crew members. We reinvented boarding with our Tapete Azul and intensified the cleaning of our aircraft with the use of UV ray disinfectant equipment. In November, we recovered 85% of our domestic demand in a more efficient way. Safety and health remain our first priority. To preserve aircraft during the crisis and prepare them to fly again, we accelerated the insourcing of several maintenance activities in our new hangar. We continue to grow our logistics business, even with the reduction of our network.
In response to the record demand from cargo, we converted our Embraer 195 into freighters. We remained true to our strategy by being the only carrier in more than 70% of our routes. Our diversified fleet gives us unique flexibility to adapt capacity to demand. With Azul Conecta, our newest business unit, we will reach more than 200 cities in the coming years. We signed a historical domestic code share, bringing even more connectivity to our customers. We are connecting Brazil with more than 700 daily flights, from Manaus to Lisbon, from Foz do Iguaçu to Fort Lauderdale. Brazilians want to fly, and Azul will always be there to offer the best experience in the world. We are proud of what we've built and are even more excited about the future.
We want to show to our customers, partners, and investors what it really means to be the best airline in the world. Azul, we carry Brazil in our soul.
It's pretty emotional to watch that video and think about everything we went through in 2020. I like how it ends. We're ready to show the world what it means to be the best airline in the world. With that, we carry a huge responsibility. I welcome everybody today. We're excited about what we've accomplished, and we're excited about what we're going to accomplish in the coming years. Want to walk through quickly some slides with you. First thing, this is a company that's led by founders. Yesterday was our 12th anniversary, and I had a call with David Neeleman, and he said it's very rare, and he's absolutely right, to have a company 12 years later being led by its founders. Every single person on this page is a founder of the company, was here before our first flight, and that makes a difference.
As we walk through what we did in 2020, we walk through what we're going to do going forward, it makes a huge difference to have a company led by founders. We're not executives. This is our baby. We built this, and we're going to continue to grow this business going forward. Every single person here had the opportunity to do something else, but we've chosen to be here because we believe in the upside of Azul is so great. We want to walk through kind of a couple of highlights of what happened in 2020. Obviously, we're very excited that we have new shareholders that came in through the BRL 1.7 billion convertible debt that we just raised.
challenge that we faced through April, May, and June. We preserved over BRL 8 billion in cash, and we will walk you through how we did that. We actually helped Brazil. We had an essential air service in Brazil, where we connected Brazil when nobody was wanting to fly. We connected doctors, and we just announced this last week, that we will be carrying the vaccine for free all throughout Brazil. We are very excited about what we have done to contribute to help Brazil. More importantly, we did humanitarian flights. We have made our company a stronger company. I was speaking this morning to our head of FP&A inside the company that had arrived just two years ago, and when you go through a very tough crisis like we did, you become an owner of the company.
You have your fingerprints on the company, and the entire team that helped us get through 2020 is passionate and owners of this company going forward. Our entire management team thinks like owners, and that's pretty exciting as we move forward. I want to talk you through the management plan. This is the BRL 8 billion that we did, and so we prepared for the worst, and we absolutely hoped for the best, and what we're seeing now is much better than we had previously envisioned. We created the management plan, and we're going to talk just briefly about the management plan and why this is a superior plan to what you may have seen elsewhere in the market. We sat down with every single one of our stakeholders, and we designed a plan to create BRL 8 billion in working capital to save ourselves through the crisis.
We projected that we'd be flying 40% of the network by the end of this year. We're now flying 70%, and Abhi will give you the details on that. We prepared for the worst, but we maintained the flexibility to be able to return very quickly, and that's absolutely what we did. Every stakeholder participated, and the team worked tirelessly over the first six months of this crisis to preserve capital, and we are the only airline that I know of in the world that did not burn cash in the second quarter or the third quarter, and will have minimal cash burn in the fourth quarter. Pretty remarkable, and it's a testament to the work of all of our crew members and everything that we did to build this great company.
All of our great partners that we have in our OEMs, like Embraer, Airbus, our leasing companies, all that have stepped up, but principally to our crew members, and I'm going to talk a lot about our crew members today. Our number one priority is the health and safety of our customers and our crew members, and so we've done a lot of things. Obviously, flying today, you can see that Brazilians feel safe traveling. With the HEPA filters on board our aircraft or the new cleaning procedures that we have, or the Tapete Azul to board the aircraft, the health and safety of our crew members is number one. You'll see that in that there's confidence that's returned to the market, and our flights are full, and that's a great thing. Our customers know that it's safe to fly again, and we're very excited about that.
I want to talk about keeping our crew members engaged. I think I'm most proud of, through this crisis, that we had 11,716 of our crew members, out of 13,500, that came and voluntarily took a leave of absence. Think about it. It's pretty remarkable to be in a country like Brazil, where there wasn't government assistance given like there was in the U.S. or Europe, to have 11,716 crew members come to us and say, "I want to take a month, two months, three months off unpaid leave of absence to help Azul be stronger." 2019 was our most profitable year on record. We were also elected the best airline in the world. Our executives earned a bonus.
In late March, before the day that we would pay the bonus in April, our entire executive team came to me and said they would not accept their bonus for 2019. Pretty remarkable and emotional when you think about it. That shows the dedication that our crew members have from the very top of the organization all the way down throughout the organization. We have crew members that are dedicated, passionate about what we've built. I don't think you'll find another company in the world that has more passionate crew members than we have at Azul, and so I'm very, very proud of that. What that drives is it drives the best company in the world. It drives unbelievable customer service. If you see that we were rated, once again, in the top in the world in terms of customer service.
This year, we were rated the best airline in the world. We're very, very proud of that accomplishment. Every year, we consistently do that. It's because of our people. The people make a difference, and I think that we really were tested when we went from 1,000 flights a day to 70 flights a day, and we had a lot of our people were not flying. It's the people that make a difference. It's our people that decide to take unpaid leave of absence, our people that went above and beyond to care for our customers that really made a difference at Azul. I think that we tell our crew members every day that the responsibility only goes up. The responsibility, now that we're rated the best airline in the world, we need to continue to deliver.
I think the best example of this is the other day, last month, we had a pilot of ours had closed the door and started taxiing, and he got a call from the airport because we had a client that missed the flight, and the client that missed the flight's mother was in the ICU, and this was probably the last opportunity she was going to see her mother. The gate agent called the pilot on the phone and said, "Will you please come back?" The pilot made the difficult decision to come back and was applauded by the rest of our customers on board that aircraft. That shows you the culture that Azul has, and it's down to the airport agent, down to the pilots, all the way up through our top executives inside the company.
As we look forward, I like to show Brazil serves all of Brazil. This is really, really important. When you talk about the network that Abhi has designed, we serve 113 destinations in Brazil. We are truly the only company that serves all of Brazil. For us, Brazil is much bigger than it is for our competitors. I've often talked about the triangle in Brazil, which is what our competitors use, which is Rio, São Paulo, Brasília. They have 90-plus percent of their ASKs dedicated on that triangle. Unfortunately, that triangle is probably the most impacted in this crisis, but Azul serves all of Brazil, and I think that's a big difference. The opportunity to grow Brazil exists because there's pockets of demand all throughout Brazil, and we've seen that.
One of the reasons why we've been able to bring our network back online much faster than others in the world is because of the diversified network that we have, that we have hubs in the North, we have hubs in the Northeast, we have in the Central West of the country. It's really phenomenal, the network that we've built, and it's our people and the network that drive the strategy of Azul. I want to quickly walk through something. When we took this company public three years ago, we told you we were going to do a lot of things. What I'm here to say is that we over-delivered on every single one of those. We grew revenue, we grew ASKs, we doubled EBITDA, and we did that at a much faster pace than we had originally projected.
This is a company that has founders that is delivering upon its promise at the IPO, and the things that we're going to tell you today, we will deliver upon. Mark my words, we will deliver. Nobody thought we would double EBITDA since we went public when the real was at BRL 3 and the real went to BRL 4, but we delivered on that. Nobody thought that Abhi would increase unit revenue as we increased ASKs, but we did that, and we will continue to deliver. This is a team that when we told you in April that we would embark upon a management plan that would save this company, many doubted that we would be able to pull it off, but look at what we've accomplished with over BRL 8 billion.
It's important just to highlight what we've accomplished in the past, but now we're going to look forward. What I'm most excited about in Brazil is this, Brazilians don't travel enough. You may say that Americans may travel less now, you may say that Europeans may travel less now, but Brazilians need to get to the same levels of their other Latin American peers. Take a look at this chart. It's very remarkable. If Brazil gets to the same level that Mexico is, you need 2.3 more Azuls. That's a company that has 150 aircraft and flies almost 1,000 flights a day. You need 2.3 more Azuls just to get to where Mexico is. Look at what you need to get to where Colombia is. You need three additional Azuls in the market. Look at what you need to get to where Chile is.
You need almost seven Azuls to get to where Chile is. The market will continue to grow. This is unlike any other place in the world. You can knock Brazil for a lot of things, but you can't knock Brazil for its potential. Brazil has an enormous amount of potential, and we will tap into that. What we've done over the last decade is we've connected all of Brazil, but what we are going to do now is we're going to stimulate Brazil, and we're going to create a much bigger market. With that much bigger market, you will see that Azul could be much stronger, much bigger, and return way more money to our shareholders. With that, I'll pass the word over to Abhi.
Thanks, John. Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for all our guests here, as well as everybody online. I have some crew members here as well, so I want to thank them for all their work this year. Can I have the clicker? I want to talk a lot about the network recovery. I'm sure you have a lot of questions about that. We're going to talk about our progression this year from the 70 flights a day to where we are now, which is back to 700. First, I'm going to start with the business units because we've talked a lot about Azul Cargo, our loyalty program, Azul Conecta, our regional aviation program, and then I'll finish with the network.
Some of the stuff you've seen before. As Alex will explain to you, we're in transition mode as we exit the recovery and go back to a more normal Azul. We want to start thinking back about Azul's competitive advantages and all the things that we've built. It's important to remind everybody of what were these trends and what are these trends as we go forward. I'll start with Azul Cargo. We've talked a lot about this. We've talked with you one-on-one, a lot of investors about this. We're very excited about this opportunity. It's leveraging on our network strengths, which is 113 destinations around Brazil. It's using the fact that we already fly to all these places. We have belly space.
We have the broadest network in Brazil, and so we're really able to bring e-commerce and logistics solutions to a large and diverse country in a reliable and world-class way, and that's exactly what we've done. I'll talk a little bit more about the growth, but you can see that our market share from October last year to October this year, 22%- 32%. Remarkable growth in the business, even though the airline itself is smaller. We've thrown a lot of tools at logistics. We fly wide-bodies domestically. We have two 737 freighters. What I'm most excited about is the four 195s that we've converted. It really reminds me of what we did at Azul 12 years ago when we first started passenger service. We wanted to access demand at the lowest possible trip cost, and we did that in Campinas, in Belo Horizonte, in Recife.
We're going to access logistics demand at the lowest possible trip cost with the Embraers. We're going to create new markets. We actually have a route with Azul Cargo that we fly a couple times a week, which is our hub in Campinas to Rio Branco. We don't even fly that route with passengers. It's only for cargo. Nobody else has that route, and it's creating new markets at very efficient trip costs, and I'm very excited. I think that going forward, this is going to be a key way for us to grow this business and give us fleet flexibility. One of the reasons that we are unique is that many airlines have cargo, right? Many airlines around the world have cargo.
You have a freight forwarder, hands them a pallet of stuff, they throw it in the airplane, they fly, and it gets taken out again. What we've done over the last couple of years is really invested in this end-to-end solution, and that's what gives us the value add that other players don't have. In the middle, of course, is the 113, 700, 800, 900 a day flight network. We have our partners all around the country that give us access to 3,700 cities and communities. What we can do is with our partners from the first mile, the middle mile, and the last mile, we are able to deliver packages from the seller's apartment or house to the buyer's apartment integrated with our system, and we beep all along the way. That's really a unique offering.
Of course, in the middle we have our core passenger network. In November, in December, we will handle 1.3 million individual packages. Of course, we have the heavy freight, we have industrial customers, but we also handle individual packages like cell phones and tennis shoes, and we're able to deliver those to places like Belém, like Rio Branco, like São Luís, like Teresina, much faster than ever before, and that's going to continue to grow the market. That's a very, very unique opportunity, and that's allowed us to really capture this cultural shift that's happened when it comes to e-commerce. If you look at our market share as just the top three players, we've gained 10 points over the last years.
It's been through big industrial customers, but it's also been through e-commerce customers like Mercado Livre, like Lojas Americanas, like Natura and the rest. We are really able to offer something very, very unique that many airlines in the world simply don't have, and that gives us a unique advantage as we continue to look to grow this business over the next couple of years. Azul Cargo has done amazingly well for us. It's consistently outgrown the airline overall, and this year, when the passenger business was down and is in the phase of recovery, Azul Cargo is leading the recovery. For the year overall, we're up significantly more than the airline. November is up 50%.
If you look at now at December, it's December 16th today, we've hit to date the revenue for Azul Cargo that we had the entire month of December last year, and it's only 16 days in. We really are seeing that our unique tools, our unique advantages are important in this market and customers want to take advantage. We're very, very excited about the Azul Cargo opportunity. Our loyalty program, TudoAzul, has been very resilient in this crisis. Our customer engagement has been very solid. Our recurring club program has been steady in the revenue.
We just launched a new credit card. Actually, we were told by the bank that on Black Friday, our credit card was the third most used co-branded credit card in Brazil for all purchases, which really shows the level of engagement that the program is delivering and the loyalty that it continues to create over the long term. It's been a very, very resilient program. We're excited about that. We also have our vacations business, Azul Viagens, which is capturing into this new trend of leisure demand. We had a very, very strong November and we have 100 flights a week dedicated just for our vacations business, which is capturing this growing leisure segment. We're very excited, and so I really want to thank our teams that have done a great job in keeping these businesses so resilient this year.
This is an oldie but a goodie. You've seen this slide before, but it's important to start here when we talk about network and why is it that our recovery has come back so fast? Why are we already at 85% and we're going to keep that going? It's because of our network. It's because we have the broadest network in Brazil. We simply have access to more pockets of demand, as John said. We have a very, very connected network in our hubs, in Campinas, in Belo Horizonte, in Recife, and that demand comes in and then gets distributed out. I was talking to my planning guys right now, and we have a city in the north called Macapá. We reentered that city with a Caravan, nine seats. We flew a Caravan there for one month, and now we fly an A321 on that route.
Alex will talk about fleet flexibility, but our network breadth, our fleet flexibility, and all the options that we have really is what allows us to recover our network so quickly, and it is going to power our growth going forward. Talking about the Caravans. We are very, very happy with Azul Conecta, our regional aviation program. We launched a bunch of new cities right now for the summer, leisure cities, beach vacation cities, and the customer reaction has been very, very positive. We are going to more than double this regional operation, and this is how we get to our goal of 200 cities in Brazil. We explore demand into these cities with a Caravan. If it goes well, we go to an ATR, and then we grow from there.
It's another unique competitive advantage that, again, as John talked about growing the market and growing Brazil, this is how we're going to access and grow the market. It's a critical way for us to enter and bring new service to cities that simply have never had service. We know that once you bring service to cities, those customers, they keep coming back. With the connected network that we have, we bring them an absolute incredible range of options. This is our network this year. Obviously, we had going very, very fast, 1,000 flights a day. We went down to the essential end network, and now we're coming back. We'll finish the year at 113 destinations which is, again, remarkable, adding 88 cities in one year.
I need to thank our operation teams for doing an incredible job of keeping up with the volatility, keeping up with the changing scenarios. As John said, our initial plan was to have 400 flights a day by December. Yesterday, we had 670, just Azul mainline, not counting the Caravans, not counting the cargo operation. We're already over 700 flights a day, and we thought we'd have 400. As we look ahead to December, we expect to be above 90% of our 2019 domestic capacity in December. November was around 85%. We expect to be over 90% in December, which is one of the fastest recoveries in the world. I'm looking everywhere for airlines that are recovering. Volaris in Mexico is, I think, already 100%.
We should be the second fastest or definitely in the top of the airlines coming back, and this speaks to our fleet flexibility, this speaks to our connected network, and this speaks to the fact that we fly alone in more than 70% of our routes. We've really been able to bring back our network. We're positively surprised with the recovery, and the teams have rallied around, get the airplanes back online, and we're now able to fly more than 90% of our domestic capacity in December, which we're very, very happy about. Looking ahead, so December is going to be 90% domestic, around 70%, 72% overall because international is still reduced compared to last year. We're going to share with you right now what we think for the first quarter of next year.
I'm happy to say that we will be over 100% of our 2019 capacity in the first quarter in domestic. It's important to remember that as we get into next year, the 2020 comparisons don't make a lot of sense anymore, especially as we get to the second half of March. We will reset and do all the comparison to 2019, which is our full year pre-crisis. We will be over 100% domestic capacity in the first quarter 2021, and on an overall basis, including international, over 85%. That's our guidance for the first quarter of 2021. We shared this chart with you on the earnings call. We've seen a nice progression of revenue recovery.
My commercial team just shared with me yesterday that the last week in December that we just finished, our corporate revenue had recovered to 53% of last year, and that certainly is a number better than what we thought three months ago. It's certainly better than the U.S., than in Europe, and as you can see on this pie chart, we've recovered roughly half of our corporate demand. I think it's a good place to end this year. We have summer vacations now, we have Carnival, and then we can start late February, March at this starting point of around 50%. I think it sets us up really, really well to continue this evolution as we get into March, April, May, June, and July. We're certainly pleased with how well It's certainly better than I thought.
If you had told me three months ago corporate would be back to 53%, I certainly would have been surprised. It speaks to what John said, which is our demand is spread out. We're not dependent on big cities like São Paulo. Our corporate demand is fragmented. It's small and medium businesses. It's agro, it's independent lawyers and constructors and consultants. They're traveling because they need to travel, and we're seeing that in the booking and the revenue. Based on this data, we're confident in our recovery trajectory, and as nothing has changed, and we're going to keep going into the first part of next year. Our network strength really is the key. What's really good to see is that all of the investments we made over the last 12 years are helping us in this crisis. We've only become stronger in our network.
It also speaks to the discipline in the industry. Airlines are focusing where they are strong, as they should. I think the industry is being disciplined. I think that airlines are focusing in their hubs. They're focusing in what makes them strong and focusing on what gives them the best results, and I think that's good for everybody. I truly believe that the industry is going to be disciplined, it's going to stay disciplined because we all want to get back to the results that we had and even better. Of course, I think that Azul has unique advantages, and I think these advantages only amplify as the recovery continues. We're pleased with our network position, and I think that this bodes very well for the recovery next year. Talking about some of our hubs.
I talk a lot about this, that connectivity is really, really key, and we have the largest hubs in Brazil for sure, and in the region as well. Our primary hub in Campinas is almost back to 100%. Recife, the largest hub by far in the northeast, is well over 70 flights a day and is back over to 100%. Our downtown Rio operation, Santos Dumont, where we fly A320s now with the Sharklet package, is over 100%. That really gives us the unique tools. Our hubs are spread out. They're geographically diverse, and so that allows us to access different types of demand and allows us to continue on this recovery trajectory. This is an interesting table because it shows further to our strengths. Where we fly, we like to be strong, right?
We like to be strong not by a little bit, we like to be strong by a lot. It sort of talks to our network advantage. It talks to the fact that we have a different network than our competitors. We always did, and we always will, and it's worked well for us the last 12 years, and it's going to be even more important. You look at some of the overlap between our competitors, what's interesting is that the competitor that's not as big overall is actually bigger in some of these highly overlapped airports. For us, we focus on where we are strong, we focus on our hubs, and we continue to be in a very strong position where we fly, which is how we like it. Our average fares have been very resilient.
This is a key result of our network advantage. We've been able to be more resilient in how we're protecting our average fares, and that's shown through in the corporate average fares that we've seen and also in the overall ANAC average fares. I think we've been able to recover the network faster than anybody else. We've done it in a responsible way, and Alex will talk about how the operation is generating the cash. We've also been able to do it in a way that protects our revenue base, which is going to be very important. Many of you have asked about the unit revenue recovery.
I'm sure that'll be a question today. That's a key milestone that we need to continue our unit revenue recovery as we exit the recovery phase and get into a more normal phase, which happens towards the end of next year. With that, I'll hand it over to my buddy, Alex. Thanks.
Thanks, Abhi. All right. I'm going to show you some of the slides, first for cash, just to get it out of the way, right? I think everybody's very aware of what we've done with cash, right? The fact that now we have the liquidity position to continue facing this crisis. It's not over yet. We're very excited. We're looking forward to the future. We're planning for full recovery, but there is still uncertainty out there, right? I think the fact that we were prudent and that we went to the market after we had implemented the management plan, after we had stabilized our cash position, and did a very successful capital raise, shows how we manage the company, right? We're not white-knuckling it. We're not hoping for the best. We are preparing for the worst, and that's why we took all this additional cash, right?
This is a capital-intensive business. Having too much cash, especially in a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, will never be a bad thing, right? It was a very well-thought-out sequencing. Like John said, we reduced capacity, reduced variable costs, then reduced fixed costs, then negotiated deferrals, stabilized the cash burn, and then there were plenty of people that wanted to give us cash, right? You can see here just how our bond has traded. We issued the bond at about 6%. When we actually kicked off the roadshow for the bond, we were probably shooting for something around 7%, which is where the bond is trading today, right? We're actually around the yields that we had when we kicked off the roadshow for the bond back in 2017.
When we started talking to market players about doing a capital raise, we were still considering potentially doing a follow-on or doing a pure debt deal, ultimately we converged on doing a convertible debt, there were plenty of people. We were able to run a competitive process to decide who was going to anchor the convertible deal, right? That shows that there is capital out there to be offered to Azul in case we need it, right? That's something that I think we can get out of the way and kind of just focus on the recovery. The thing that we're excited about now is that we can already see in 2021, right? We can kind of see here what our EBITDA can look like, right? What it's going to do with our cash.
We are going to generate cash after we pay for all of our operating costs and our rent. We're going to have almost BRL 1 billion of cash left over. We're going to use some of that cash to delever and invest in the future, right? That's good capital use, right? It's not cash burn, right? We're not talking about cash burn anymore. We're talking about generating cash from operations and then applying that cash in a way that slowly kind of pays for the impact of the pandemic, right? Gradually over time, we're going to pay for that cost, we're going to delever, and we're going to continue investing into the future. Continue investing, for example, in Azul Conecta, continue investing in Azul Cargo. That's all very healthy use of cash, right?
Just get out of the way here so I can point to what I'm talking about here. We believe very clearly that our 2022 EBITDA will be higher than our 2019 EBITDA. That's even assuming, which I think is conservative because not every airline in the world is assuming this, that corporate demand will be smaller. We are assuming that corporate demand will be smaller, but it's going to be partially offset by leisure demand. It's important to note that the same technology that allows you to take a meeting from home allows you to take a meeting from anywhere in the world. You don't need to be home. You can be at a resort. You can be at a beach house. You can be wherever you want to be.
That same technology that allows you to avoid that face-to-face meeting allows you to take that meeting from everywhere else. That's a big part of why leisure demand is so strong. Obviously, it's not going to offset completely the corporate demand, but there are some additional drivers that will allow us to get to an EBITDA in 2022 higher than 2019. First, we're going to be a more efficient airline, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we're going to do that and give you a little bit of backup on that. Also, we're seeing that competitive dynamics are going to be more constructive. They already are. Abi already showed that our route presence increased during the pandemic. Our competitors are exiting markets where we're strong because everybody's focused on profitability. Everybody's focused on generating cash.
Everybody will have to pay a big tab for the pandemic, for the impact that we all took in the pandemic. That's naturally going to make everybody focus on where they can generate the most amount of cash, the most amount of profitability. It's what we saw in the 2015, 2016 recession. Everybody kind of exited that recession with bumps and bruises. Everybody focused on being rational, being constructive, and making sure that we focus on profitability. Where is the efficiency going to come from? First, as we rebuild the company, we are rebuilding it with more productivity, with higher productivity. We unfortunately had to say goodbye to a lot of crew members here, unlike some other companies that kind of kept all of their payroll.
With that, we were able to see, for example, in corporate overhead, in the administrative functions, that we're able to do without some of the positions that we had before. For the size company that we are today, we are already a more efficient, a leaner organization than we were before the pandemic. The same thing is happening with operations because there has been a shift in the customer behavior. The pandemic has accelerated some of the changes that were happening over the years, and it happened over a period of a few months. For example, not using a live agent to check in at the airport. The customer was gradually using self-check-in, mobile check-in more often, but the pandemic accelerated that, and that allows us to be more efficient on the airport side. Same thing with the call center.
The customers have learned how to buy online. A lot of customers already did before, but there has been an acceleration of online shopping, online purchases during the pandemic, and that allows us also to focus more on online sales channels. Same thing with maintenance. We're going to talk a bit about our hangar. This was great timing also. Obviously, we didn't predict the pandemic, but the fact that we had this hangar right when the pandemic was started was great timing because we needed a lot of maintenance capability. We needed capacity, and the whole world was trying to park aircraft and preserve aircraft. There was actually a bottleneck, and the whole industry for maintenance and repairs operations are not set up for you to try to park the whole global fleet over a period of a few days.
We were able to accelerate the insourcing of a lot of maintenance checks, a lot of shops, a lot of activities that normally we would farm out. We would send the aircraft to Mexico, to the U.S., and now we don't have to. We can service those aircraft right here. It's obviously a lot more cost efficient, and it preserves a lot of aircraft time also. We don't have to spend all that time sending the aircraft there and back. Like I said, the competitive dynamics have also improved. Our competitors are much smaller. We're also a little bit smaller, and that naturally reduces network overlap. You add the LATAM codeshare on top of that. That only leads to more rationality, to more constructive behavior. We didn't overlap a lot with LATAM before, but this creates even less of an incentive for anyone to overlap.
The best value from the codeshare is the fact that you're creating hundreds of new itineraries that didn't exist before. The fact that our networks are so complementary creates a lot of additional demand by you being able to plug in a LATAM flight and an Azul flight in a way that wasn't possible before, and with that, increase our product offering. Essentially, every combination of an origin and a destination for us is an SKU, is a product. By combining the networks for Azul and for LATAM and offering them in an integrated way online, the number of SKUs increases dramatically. You are able to reach a lot more customers because you're offering for them exactly what they need. This is a huge asset that I think everybody that studied aviation or did an MBA probably heard about single fleet.
Single fleet is a model. It's certainly a simpler model. It's an easier model to execute, and being an easier model to execute, it's less costly. Our fleet is more diverse, and that brings complexity, but we know how to do it. We have more than a decade of experience doing this, running the airline, and like we've always said, we've been one of the most on-time airlines in the world with a diversified fleet. We were voted the best airline in the world by TripAdvisor with a diversified fleet. Does this add complexity? Of course, but we can do it. We know how to do it.
Maybe not everybody knows how to do this, but we do, and the great advantage is that, sure, if you have a big aircraft, it's great because big aircraft have low cost per seat. If you can't fill that aircraft, and that's especially true in Brazil, and it's even more true during the pandemic, there are very few markets that have enough demand to fill an aircraft as big as an A320 or a 737. With our diversified fleet, we're also able to have aircraft with nine seats, which the great advantage of having a small aircraft is that it has very low costs per trip. You don't need 150 or 180 customers for the flight to become viable. Right? With maybe five customers, we're able to make money on a Caravan. With 45 or 50 customers, we're able to make money on an ATR. Right?
That is an asset and a strategic advantage that we have, which our competitors don't. It's a lot of reasons why our fares are higher than our competitors. Why our fare premium, as Abhi showed to you, actually increased during the pandemic. Right? That means that our competitors' fares, both according to ANAC and according to Abracorp, went down more than Azul's fares. Why? Because we have a strong network, we have a diversified fleet. We're able to match capacity to demand more efficiently, more accurately than our competitors. Right? That's the fleet as it is today. As you look forward, as those of you that know us and that have followed us, we have this huge upside from the fleet transformation. We're about halfway done.
We had to kind of put it on pause during this year because of the pandemic. It's still a big strategic target, a big mission for us to transform our fleet as quickly as possible, obviously with discipline, with responsibility. As soon as an old generation aircraft leaves the fleet, we're going to replace it with a new generation aircraft. Right? When we presented our fleet transformation plan to you maybe a year ago, we talked about finishing the fleet transformation and generating 100% of our ASKs from next generation aircraft, maybe four years ahead of the competition. The great thing that happened during the pandemic that we were also able to accomplish is the following. We were able to not extend the leases on the majority of our old generation aircraft. Right? Which is not the case for our competitors.
We could have done that and taken sort of a short-term benefit, but it would have a very high long-term cost because it would keep us burdened with this old generation aircraft, which has high fuel burn, a lot of big carbon footprint. It would keep us burdened with the old generation aircraft for longer. Right. We were able to keep the majority of the original delivery dates on our old generation aircraft, and our competitors weren't. That means that instead of being four years ahead of the competition, we're probably going to be five or six years ahead of the competition in terms of getting to 100% next generation capacity, which is great for fuel burn, and obviously, you guys remember this, but it's important to highlight, Brazil fuel is very expensive.
We pay 40% or 50% more per gallon of jet fuel than airlines in the U.S., for example. Right? Especially in Brazil, having next generation capacity is extremely important, and we're going to do that years ahead of the competition. That's all upside that's in the future, that we still have to deliver. As I said, we're going to have 2022 EBITDA higher than 2019. Right? I think that's easy to assume and to justify. That doesn't include the fleet transformation. That doesn't include all of the cargo potential because by 2022, we won't be done with cargo. There will still be a lot of upside. Brazil has a huge need for cargo. Cargo, I think, is worth highlighting, and Abhi talked about this, but we punch way above our weight in cargo. Right?
We are the third largest carrier in Brazil in terms of passengers, in terms of ASKs, and we're a close second in cargo. Right? That shows the power of the network. If anybody's skeptical or everybody has difficulty kind of explaining the value of Azul network, this is a great example. How can we be the third largest in ASKs and being almost the first in terms of cargo? Right? It's not all about our management skills. Right? A lot of it is the network. Right? This is a huge value. On top of that is what John talked about, and we believe very strongly in this, and even the market in Brazil is still going to grow a lot, and it has grown a lot. Right?
We have to recognize that in terms of GDP growth, in terms of macro, Brazil hasn't done really well over the last 10 years. GDP growth was less than 1% a year over the last 10 years. Aviation has doubled in size over the last 10 years, and Azul took half of that growth. Right? We took the lion's share of the growth, and we believe we will continue taking the lion's share of the growth because we fly in the growing markets. São Paulo is not a growing market. Right? Rio is not a growing market. The Midwest of Brazil is a growing market. The Northeast is a growing market. Campinas is still a growing market. Recife.
All of these destinations that we fly are a lot more exposed, have a lot more growth potential than the big markets in Brazil, because the big markets in Brazil already are closer to their full potential. In spite of the fact that we're very excited about our 2022 EBITDA, we're even more excited about our 2025 EBITDA, because once you layer on fleet transformation, once you layer on everything that we still need to do on cargo, and once Brazil really unlocks all of its potential, we can be generating a lot more EBITDA, there's still a lot more room to grow. What does that mean in terms of the investment thesis? You guys know what we were before the pandemic. We had an equity value of over BRL 20 billion, an enterprise value of BRL 34. Our enterprise value went down, but it's already recovered, right?
The market's already looking at 2022 EBITDA and seeing that 2022 EBITDA can be higher than 2019, which leads to higher enterprise value. Obviously, our net debt has increased, right? With the pandemic, with all of the negotiations we did, right? This is what success during the pandemic looks like, right? Is being able to tap all of your stakeholders, all of your supporters, all of your investors, and get the necessary capital to get through to the other side, right? All of those stakeholders, together with us, believe in the potential, believe in what this company can be in 2025. We're going to be generating operational cash flow every year from now on, right? 2020 was an exception. Our operational cash flow generation has always been strong, we're going to be using that money to pay down our net debt.
Over time, we're going to be able to increase EBITDA, which is going to increase enterprise value, and we're going to be able to reduce net debt. You guys know what that means to equity value, right? That's why we're so excited about this. As John mentioned, this is a big reason why you still have all of the founders here, right? Because everybody wants to surf this wave. We all want to be here to deliver on this and share this upside. Right? In overall, obviously you guys know how proud we are of Azul, but I think we have a lot of arguments to back us up, right? We're very proud to have been elected the best airline in the world by TripAdvisor readers in the middle of the pandemic. All right?
I think, obviously that is a source of pride, but if we went with NPS, we could show you that customers love to fly us. If we went with consumer information here in Brazil, Reclame Aqui, Consumidor.gov.br, we get a lot of awards. We measure this, we track this. It's a big focus of ours, right? It's intentional, it's deliberate. It's a big part of our strategy and our business model. We are consistently delivering great customer experience. Our management of the pandemic demonstrated how well we can manage cash, how well we can manage liquidity. When crises hit and we're in Brazil, so there is going to be volatility, there are going to be surprises, but we are tested, right? We are battle-worn, and we know what to do. We have a playbook.
We can pull it out off the shelf, and if we don't have that specific play, we can create it, right? A lot of the strategies and initiatives that we did this year, we had to create from scratch, but I think it shows our capacity to adapt. Brazil is one of the fastest recovering countries in the world, and we are the fastest recovering airline in Brazil, right? Again, that shows the value of the network, the value of the diversified fleet. We will be a more productive airline. There's no two ways about it. This is a big area of focus for us, and we already know that even if we continue doing things the way we are, we are already a more productive airline, but there is still more opportunity here. We have increased market presence from the LATAM codeshare, from the increased network dominance.
All the upside from cargo, all the upside from fleet transformation, all the upside from Brazil. That's why we are here, because David Neeleman, 12 years ago, saw the huge potential in this country. A lot of it has materialized, but it's only a fraction of it that has materialized so far. There's still a lot. Right? We're very excited about this, and this all means that Azul is a sustainable company, right? We have a big focus on this. As co-founders, we want to make sure that Azul is a company that can last forever. A lot of what we did during the pandemic was to make sure that we could get to the other side of this crisis and guarantee that Azul will last forever.
Our focus on ESG, the way we treat our minority shareholders, the focus that we have on fleet transformation to improve our environmental footprint. All of the initiatives, the fact that we were the first airline to volunteer to fly the vaccine in Brazil for free. We have a big focus. We believe in ESG. I think it's a big part of the investment thesis, and it's a big part of why you should invest in Azul as well. I think with that, we can turn it over to questions.
Thais is going to get on that.
All right. I think Thaís is going to read off some questions for us, and obviously there's people in the room here that may have questions as well.
You hear me, John?
Yes.
Okay. Let's start our Q&A session. The first question comes from Bruno Amorim from Goldman Sachs. The postponement of lease payments will imply on a greater leasing-related cash outflow in the medium long term. Will Azul be able to generate free cash flow while paying those leases in the future? Can the company handle those without raising capital?
Alex, you want to take that?
Sure. Yes, but like anything related to capital, we're going to look at it, and if we can get capital efficiently, if we can raise capital at the right moment, we'll do so. I think that's what we wanted to show with the fact that our bonds are already trading around 7%. Even in the pandemic, even though we don't have a vaccine yet, there's no treatment, and the number of cases in Brazil have stopped going down. There's plenty of ability for Azul to raise cash. We don't need to raise cash, but we will be strategic about it. Remember that the fact that we're going to pay all of this rent back is consistent with everybody else that didn't file for Chapter 11. Nobody's getting a free ride from the lessors. If you didn't file for Chapter 11, you are going to pay your lessors back.
Either you pay them now, when the cost of capital is high, or you can pay them in the future when the cost of capital will probably be lower. That's a no-brainer. When would you rather pay them? Now, when you don't have a lot of cash and cost of capital is high, or later, when the cost of capital is most likely to be lower? For example, I'd much rather raise capital when I'm generating BRL 4 billion, BRL 5 billion of EBITDA than in the middle of a pandemic. We're very proud of what we've negotiated. As we've said multiple times, it's a lot better than power by the hour, because with power by the hour, we would be shelling out a lot more cash today than we are.
Everybody's going to need to pay their lessors back unless they file for Chapter 11, which wasn't the case for us.
I also think it's important, Bruno, to highlight that in 2021, we're not even paying full rent. 2022 will be the first year from a cash flow perspective that we pay full rent. The repayments start in 2023, 2024, 2025, and beyond. We've got great relationships with our lessors. They want to do more business with us, and so this is not something that's keeping us up at night. We're actually excited about what we've negotiated, and we're very confident that any cash that we burn going forward is to deleverage this business and to invest in our future.
Still regarding the negotiation with lessors, Victor Mizusaki from Bradesco and Fernando Abdalla from JP Morgan, they are asking why did you prefer to use this alternative and not the power by the hour? Can you say that with lower operational expenses, you can be more aggressive on prices to rebuild the network faster?
Look, we're built to fly, that's what we want to do. We set forth a more conservative plan, and so for example, only paying 40% of our aircraft rent in the fourth quarter, yet Abhi's going to fly 90% of the network. What does that do? It helps us generate cash on operating the network. That's why we set it apart that way. Look, we knew that we have a good relationship with our lessors. If there was a second wave or something were to happen, we always have the ability to sit down with the leasing companies again. We've proven that not burning cash in the second quarter, not burning cash in the third quarter, minimal of any in the fourth quarter, shows that this is a superior plan.
As we look forward, why does Abhi want to fly 100% of the network in the first quarter? Because the variable cost to do so is much less than the revenue he's going to bring in. That's good for our equity holders. That's good for our debt holders. The plan was well thought out, and we're executing upon that. We have a lot of cushion in the plan. Anytime Abhi wants to have an additional flight, he doesn't have to go to Alex and say, "Hey, jeez, can we pay more in ownership this month if I fly another 100 flights?" No. Alex has paid what he needs to pay, and Abhi can leverage that and fly more. That's allowing us to bring the network back online a lot quicker, and it's allowing us to connect more passengers.
The more dots we connect on the map, the more demand we bring in, and that's better for us overall.
It's again, the concept of paying now versus paying later. If you take an illustrative aircraft where you pay normally $300,000 a month. With our plan, we're now paying $120,000 a month. We're deferring $180,000, but that's a free interest loan, a zero interest loan. If we were doing power by the hour with the amount of flying that Abi is doing, we would probably be close to paying $300,000 a month, maybe $250,000. I would only be deferring $50,000. Again, it's a bit of a no-brainer. If somebody's going to give you an interest-free loan, do you want it to be big or you want it to be small? You want it to be big, especially if you need the cash and if you're in the middle of a pandemic. Again, everybody's going to need to pay those lessors back or file for Chapter 11.
No one knows what's going to happen with the exchange rate, but look, the exchange rate was almost six two months ago. It's almost five right now. We've already benefited from the exchange rate strengthening from where it was at the peak of the crisis with these deferrals.
Okay, Fernando Abdalla from JP Morgan is also questioning you, Alex. If we move for more severe lockdown restrictions and demand is impacted, how would you see the airline positioned in terms of liquidity?
Yeah, that was a big part of the rationale of why we raised cash when the window was available. I think we all feel a lot more secure, a lot more confident, a lot more comfortable with the risk of a second wave now that we have BRL 4 billion in cash. We discussed for a very long time on whether we should raise that additional capital or not. It was a big part of our management plan. It was always our intention, but things improved so quickly. Demand recovery was so fast, and our cash management worked out so well that when we were deciding whether we're going to kick off the public offer, it wasn't clear whether there was going to be a second wave, but we decided to buy that insurance.
We'd much rather have the cash and not need it, than need the cash and not have it. Could be the situation if we hadn't raised that BRL 1.7 billion. On top of that, we already have a guarantee for another BRL 500 million under the same conditions. That's a nice standby line of credit that we have, which is a luxury. I don't think a lot of airlines have a standby line of credit for BRL 500 million in the pandemic. We all sleep a lot sounder. There's all the initiatives and the strategies that John talked about. If it gets so dire, if it gets so intense that we need to go back to our lessors, that's fine. We know we can count on their support. If we need to go back to our unions, we know we can count on their support.
The beauty of the management plan is that it aligned interests. We didn't force it on anybody. We built something that it was in our lessor's best interest to give us the deferral. It was in our union's best interest to reduce their fixed salaries. When you have a sound business plan, it's in every stakeholder's best interest to get to the other side.
Okay. We have another question from Bruno Amorim from Goldman Sachs. Cost of capital seems to be much lower versus the peak of the crisis. Should we expect a new marked market of leasing liabilities accordingly?
No. I think IFRS rules require you to recognize the operating leases as an asset and a liability on the balance sheet at the inception of the lease, and also when there is a lease modification. We don't expect to have any more lease modifications going forward. You'll see something between Q3 and Q4, just because there were some leases that we signed after September 30th, but those have all been negotiated. Assuming that there will be no more lease modifications into the future, there will be no change to the discount rate used in capitalizing the assets and the liabilities on the balance sheet.
Okay, regarding the code share with LATAM, Victor Mizusaki from Bradesco is asking if it's possible to maintain the domestic code share after the COVID-19 pandemic, given the strong results achieved so far, what would you do if CADE or ANAC ask you to terminate this agreement?
Yeah. Hi, Victor. We have 178 nonstop routes on the code share. Every step of the way, we have submitted the list to CADE, every step of the way, they've just looked at it and said, "Okay, go ahead." First, it was non-overlapping routes, it was overlapping routes, it wasn't Congonhas, now it's Congonhas. We have no indications that that would change. Right now, we have no plans or no indications that we will need to end the code share for any reason. Actually, we keep looking forward to expanding it and growing it. The idea is to envelop as much of the domestic market as we can. Both airlines are still coming back in their capacity, the volumes are only going to go up. There's nothing that we've heard of, nothing that's been indicated to us that that would change.
Actually, just to clarify, we don't need CADE's approval or antitrust approval for a domestic code share in Brazil. We went to them for their blessing, shared with them all of the information because we wanted to be 100% transparent. There's more people traveling today in Brazil because of that code share than they had not. There's more jobs that have been preserved because of that code share. We're reaching 90% of our capacity in December because of that code share. I think it's actually very beneficial for the consumer, and certainly for the airlines.
Great. Talking about corporate travel, Pablo Monsivais from Deutsche Bank is asking, what is your best estimate on the potential reduction of corporate travel? How that reduction should be seen among domestic corporate and international corporate?
Hi, Pablo. Look, as I said on my slides, we're back up to 53% now, which is much stronger than what we had imagined six months ago, even three months ago. I think that Brazil is one of the fastest to recover. I don't know at the end if it's going to be 90%, 95%, 100%. What's important is that, as John said, the market is growing. The truth is, it's actually going to be over 100%. It might take a little bit longer to get there because the market is going to be bigger in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 than it was before. That's the benefit that we have here in Brazil that we don't have in a mature market like the U.S. or like Europe.
The answer is actually going to be over 100% because the market, in absolute basis, is going to keep growing. As Alex said, it doubled over 10 years. 50 million passengers growth per year over 10 years. Of that 50 million growth, Azul was almost 28 million. As the market keeps growing, corporate's going to come back as well. In the short term, in the medium term, it's going to take some time. I expect maybe by July, 75%-80%, something like that. As we've shown, as Brazil air travel penetration keeps increasing, the answer is, it's actually going to go over 100%.
Okay, perfect. The next question comes from Daniel McKenzie, Seaport. What are the key macro assumptions underlying the outlook for 2021 GDP effects interest rates?
You want to take that, Alex? We just finished up our budget, so we can give you a kind of an idea of the macro assumptions we use in our budget.
Yeah, normally, the big assumptions are mainly foreign exchange and oil. We normally use the forward curve for oil, and we use sort of a mix between the Focus Survey and currency prices for the budget. Right now, compared to where it is, our dollar expectation, what we assume for the budget, is a weaker Real than where the Real is trading today, and heating oil around where it is. GDP, I think, is not that relevant for 2021 because it'll be a transition year. Even for 2022, we're only targeting to get back to what we were in 2019. In terms of GDP assumption, that's less of a driver this year.
It's more about the bottom-up reconstruction of the demand and how much we should fly accordingly, and how much we can charge for tickets accordingly, and what that will generate in terms of revenue.
Dan, I do want to highlight that the risk-free rate in Brazil today is at 2%. That's weakened the real, but that's actually brought a ton of new businesses in Brazil. Brazilians are putting capital to work. I've been in Brazil for 12 years, I've never seen this previously, where Brazilians that used to just earn money, earning interest on money that's in the bank from their father, their grandfather, they are now applying that money and starting new business. You're seeing startups happening. You're seeing that all throughout Brazil. You're seeing people actively engaged in the capital markets. I think it's an exciting time to be in Brazil. Interest rates this low is requiring people to actually get off the couch and work, and I think that that's a good thing. I think you're seeing a lot of innovation happen in Brazil.
That gives me a lot of excitement. It used to be that Brazilians would sit back, earn money on interest, or they would leave the country. Brazil is an exciting time to be in Brazil for sure. We're pretty excited about the years ahead of us.
We are receiving a lot of questions regarding cargo business. Abhi, can you give us more color on that? Also, explain us if we will convert more E1s into cargo, and if so, where we will get the equivalent.
Okay. I think I got the question. The answer to the What's overall cargo? We're seeing growth in logistics across all the segments. Obviously, Mercado Livre is a big customer of ours. E-commerce is growing very significantly. As I mentioned, December right now, it's only 16 days in, but we've already achieved last year's revenue. We're also seeing a strong demand from some of our industrial customers, like Samsung, for example, like Fiat. The other day, Alex was marveling because we had four airplanes in the air at the same time going to Manaus, A330, then 737s. E-commerce is leading the growth, I would say, but we're also seeing a strong demand from some of the sort of heavier industrial customers as well. As I mentioned, we crossed 1.3 million packages individually handled.
We did almost 4 million beeps, as I call it, and we beep every package along the way. We had over 4 million beeps as we track the package from the seller to the buyer. We're really getting good at handling that volume of individual packages as well. I absolutely would like to convert more Embraers. I think that it's a very unique product. The product is not even two months old in the market, so we are exploring it, we're developing it. I talked about the route to Rio Branco, and I really see strong parallels from what we did on the passenger side 12 years ago to what we can do on the cargo side, on the logistics. I'll give you an example.
Our current delivery times from anywhere in Brazil to a destination in the city of Belém or the region is around two and a half days. Seller to buyer, door to door, not just cargo terminal to cargo terminal. Definitely, it's a good number. It's certainly much faster than truck or anything else. Using our existing air network, that package travels at very low variable cost. We want to keep driving that down. I think that with the Embraers, we can have same-day products. We can have very strong next-day products to cities.
That did not have that type of logistics before. Cities where you take seven days, 10 days to go by truck, are now you're going to get your tennis shoes the next day. Absolutely would like to do more Embraers. That's in our plan for next year. We're going to keep developing that and see where it goes. The growth has been very, very positive. I think that the more we can explore this market, I think that we are taking advantage of this cultural shift. Our e-commerce friends are benefiting, of course, they are, because if you can sell tennis shoes to Teresina and get it there in two days, more people in Teresina are going to go online and buy stuff. Of course, we as well, really see. Finally, pre-crisis, Azul Cargo was 4%, roughly of our total revenue.
It shot up in the crisis. Now it's coming back down again. I think that structurally, that number should grow, post-crisis, long term, eight, nine, 10% of our overall revenue. There's definitely been a structural shift in what logistics means for Azul.
Abhi, I didn't realize that we had a KPI of beeps.
Yeah. We do have a KPI of NPS.
We have a KPI of beeps now. I just want to add one thing here, is that we know that the ownership cost of the E195s is going down dramatically, right? As we look forward to operating six, 10 cargo E1s, we know the ownership cost will be next to nothing at the time we do that. It's a tremendous fleet flexibility that comes with the fact that we can transition more and more aircraft to cargo if need be, and that can help us accelerate back E2s or bringing back A320s. It gives us more fleet flexibility. This is something that previously wasn't even on our radar. We never would have thought of converting an E1 into a cargo plane prior to 2020.
We invent a lot of new things in 2020, so we've seen this as a great opportunity.
Kalil, from Reach Capital, is asking another question regarding the E1s. Looking forward, it is possible to imagine that Azul will have E1s dedicated straight to cargo? We can see that customers are getting used to have fast deliveries and that can address that plus you have better economics, right?
Yeah. Let me just highlight a couple of things. If you take a look at the market cap of the e-commerce players in Brazil today, they're healthy market caps, let's just say that. It comes from future growth. Let's take a look at what happened in the U.S. when Amazon started delivering next day and same day, right? It grew tremendously. To justify those market caps, they need a logistics solution to deliver stuff all throughout Brazil. The southeast of Brazil is very connected today. You can order something on Amazon today in Brazil. Give the example. My wife ordered Christmas cards, right, and to deliver here in Brazil. We still haven't received them. It's been 10 days, right? We ordered from the U.S., got here, and the logistics just it hasn't been figured out yet in Brazil.
That is something that we can offer that service all throughout Brazil. Remember, we serve 113 destinations. Abhi talks a lot about the E1 cargo aircraft, but we have dedicated ATRs, we have dedicated Caravans. We serve all of Brazil with our cargo capacity, and that's really important. Again, to justify the market capitalization of the e-commerce players, they need to grow their business. The way they're going to grow their business is through better connectivity throughout Brazil, and the only way to get it there is through Azul. I go back to 90% of the ASKs of our competitors is in the triangle. Guess what? The triangle doesn't use air service for cargo, right? You use air service for cargo to get to Sana, Piso, Sorriso, Cascavel, Alta Floresta, all of those destinations that Azul serves.
That's the strategic advantage that we have in Brazil today, and it comes from our diversified fleet.
Yeah, from a fleet perspective, think about how transformational it is to have an Embraer. The E1 pilot can fly the E2, the E2 pilot can fly the E1. I fought very hard when we wanted to buy a freighter. I didn't want a Boeing, right? We already had Embraers and Airbuses and ATRs, there's no option. There is no alternative. There's no viable A320 freighter yet, right? Someday there will be. We developed a viable E1 freighter, right? We created it. That's great from an operational standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, because we can have the same people that maintain our fleet that know how to maintain the aircraft. They're already in-house. The same people that fly it, they're already in-house, right? These leases are going to expire.
If Abhi wants to keep them, I'm going to get a great lease rate on these aircraft, right? Where else is the E1 going to fly? If it's already here in Brazil, we don't have to return it. It's going to be a great tool to continue developing our cargo business and very efficient from a cost and operational perspective.
We don't need all of them for cargo, and so it gives us leverage with the lessors, right?
Sure.
For every three that we would return, we're going to keep one. Gives us leverage. Okay, it's going to go to the desert, or Abhi's going to use it for cargo. What do you want to do? Do you want to make a little money on this aircraft, or do you want it to sit in the desert? Those are the conversations, the levers that we're going to have with the lessors as we make this decision.
Okay. Khalil from Reach Capital is also saying that this week, we saw you, John, and Juliano from ANAC talking about the possibilities of eliminating ICMS from fuel charges, and withholding tax from leasing. How you guys are feeling about that? He wants to know if it is included in the projections, and if you can give us some color on how much will help us all this tax savings.
Tax avoidance or not new taxes is what I'm really rooting for at this point. But I think if you saw that live with Juliano Noman and you saw the Saki with Honi, and it's important to show that the government is engaged and the government wants to change things. They realize that Brazil can be much bigger. Brazil could be three times the size it is today if it gets to the Chilean levels. Think about that. That's seven Azuls that we can bring into Brazil. That's very powerful. Think of how many jobs, think of how much tax revenue that the government gets as a result of that. They're actively attacking it. I'm very happy with this administration's approach to aviation. They've made significant changes. Whereas the U.S. has been given money, just straight out money given to the airlines, we didn't get that.
If we can get change going forward, that's huge. If we can get down lawsuits in Brazil to get down to a more normal level, if we can reduce tax on leasing, if we can eliminate all these other bureaucratic taxes that they have, that's a big thing. As for our forecast, we do not put anything in our forecast that depends on the government, okay? Our business plan depends on our ability to execute. I don't believe there's such a business plan that depends on somebody else that executes. Again, we're going to work with them, we're going to do everything we can to help the government make aviation more efficient, because that's good for Brazil. I often say, and I said it on that live, that there's somebody selling cheese on the beach in the northeast of Brazil that depends on my flight.
There's also an engineer in São Paulo that's working on the next Embraer aircraft that depends on Azul. We create an enormous amount of jobs. We create an enormous amount for this country, and we're doing our part, and this administration is also doing their part. That's exciting. We just signed this week with Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil. We're going to serve 15 destinations because of the Caravans in that state. It's pretty remarkable, and it's going to take fuel taxes from 18% down to 4%. That's a competitive advantage that only Azul has. Our ability to connect 15 different cities. Think about our co-chair with LATAM now. LATAM can now fly into Rio Grande do Sul, into Porto Alegre, and Azul could take them to another 14 destinations.
Think about Abhi's ability to grow the network in that state because he's got so much more connectivity. I think we're big believers in reducing taxes actually will grow the pie for everybody. Again, nothing's in our forecast. We'll continue to work with the administration to find ways to make aviation more efficient. One of the reasons why we're not at Chilean levels or Colombian levels or Mexican levels, because the costs are high. We need to attack that cost. As an industry, we're doing that in bringing in the next generation aircraft. Abhi has the highest fares in the country. The number one criticism of our customers is Abhi's fares. Right? It's probably one thing that all of you love. It's one of the number one criticism of our customers is Abhi's high fares.
As we bring in next-generation aircraft, think of the seat cost of an A320neo versus an E1. Think of a seat cost of an E2 versus an E1. We can actually stimulate this market with fares as we go forward into 2022, 2023, and beyond. That's what's pretty remarkable.
Thank you, John. The next question comes from Mike Linenberg from Deutsche Bank. He wants some color regarding TAP restructuring, if you have any news on that creditors should expect further haircuts, and if our TAP convertible note at risk of seeing its value demonstrated.
I think TAP has a comprehensive plan. We've met with them. Remember that our bond has security, we're above the unsecured bondholders there. We actually received an offer this week for somebody that wanted to buy our bond, we feel very confident with the plan. TAP is being heavily capitalized by the Portuguese government. We think that's a good thing. We think the collateral that we have and the partnership that we have with TAP is good for the long run.
Okay. Abhi, what should we expect 2021 capacity to look like?
Yeah, thanks. Look, we just talked about the first quarter so far, which is going to be back to 2019 levels. Our plan is absolutely to continue that trajectory. We have Carnival in February, the March will give us the first indications of how corporate is going to continue the recovery after 50%. Everything that I can see tells me that the recovery is going to continue. We don't have a full year guidance that we're giving out yet, but we are giving out a first quarter guidance, which is back to 2019 levels or above. Honestly, I think that the trend is going to continue. On the domestic side especially, I absolutely see that the recovery trajectory continue as we have been October, November, December, January.
On the domestic side, the recovery trajectory is going to continue, and it's going to keep at 2019 or above levels through the year. International is a little bit more difficult to predict. Of course, a lot of it depends on the vaccines, on the borders, so that we kind of have a guess really for 2021. Orlando is the next city that we want to bring back. We're waiting for the U.S. borders to open up. My guess right now is April. We'll see what happens. We're only selling tickets for Orlando April and beyond. We'll sort of take it as it comes for internationally, and so it's a little bit more difficult to predict, but it's also a much smaller piece. I would say domestically, 2019 and above. Internationally, going to be a little bit more difficult. The next gate really is Orlando starting in April.
That's kind of where we are right now.
Thanks, Abhi. Guilherme Mendes from JP Morgan is asking about LATAM codeshare, and if it could move forward to a JV in the future.
Yeah, thanks for the question. I don't know. I think that we didn't even think we'd have a codeshare in January, right? As John said, unique circumstances bring unique solutions. I think we're happy with the codeshare. I want to thank my partners at LATAM for being such good partners in getting this so far. I don't know, is the answer. There's nothing to announce. I think that we should evaluate all opportunities. We are evaluating all opportunities. Things are changing very quickly. We're here today, that we didn't think we'd be at this 700 flights a day three months ago. I would just say that we're exploring everything. We should explore everything. Unique solutions can come up, but there really is nothing more than that at this time.
Okay. Thanks, Abhi. The next question comes from Rogerio Araujo from UBS. In the active value exercise, what is the implied EBITDA growth considered for 2025 versus 2019, and why does the net debt reduce in 2025 versus 2022? How we are considering operating leases in this calculation?
Yeah, obviously we have all those numbers, but it's our own internal model, right? We're not ready to give guidance on 2021 EBITDA yet, let alone 2025. You can do your math, right? You can do your calculation. Abhi already talked about cargo, you already have some guidelines, some numbers as to how big cargo could be. We already gave you the numbers on fleet transformation, we already gave you numbers on how big this market could be, right? It's so levered that, if you just add a little bit of growth there, a little bit of increased penetration, and you add the cargo and you add the fleet transformation, and you're going to see that our EBITDA can go from the BRL 4 billion, BRL 4.5 billion that we would have had in 2020 to something much bigger than that, right?
We wanted to kind of highlight a couple of things. First, we promised you we would double EBITDA, and we delivered, right? now we're-
We never promised we'd double it.
Yeah, Sorry. Yeah. We promised we would grow it. Yeah.
We said we would grow it, and we would do it in five years, and we did it in three years.
Right. We promised we would grow it in five years, and we doubled it in three, right? Now we're seeing that there is still a lot more upside. It hasn't ended yet, right? We've created other additional upsides. A lot of it is just a way that we can see the value of the Azul network, right? This is a huge asset that needs to be taken into consideration in the investment decision, because we would never be sort of a close second in cargo in Brazil without the network, right? That is a way for you to materially see how valuable the network can be, how much upside the network can bring. The network allowed us to have a codeshare with LATAM. We could have done a codeshare with LATAM, or we could have done a codeshare with Gol.
Gol and LATAM could not have done a codeshare with each other, right? That was a unique asset enabled exclusively by Azul's network, right? The fleet transformation, we're going to be years ahead of schedule. The cargo growth, there's still a ton of upside. Brazil, I think, is going to benefit everybody. Again, we took half of the incremental capacity that appeared in Brazil over the last 10 years. We don't have half the market, but we have half the growth. If we capture half the growth again in the future upside, this is going to be huge for us, right? The EBITDA is going to grow significantly. You can just see, we're going to be generating cash from operations just in 2021 alone. We're not flying to full capacity, right? We're only flying the aircraft about eight hours a day.
Before the pandemic, we were flying it close to 12 hours a day, right? 2021 is an eight-hour-a-day average, right? We can increase it up to 12 hours a day. There's a ton of operational leverage, which is naturally going to increase EBITDA generation, and a lot of that cash is going to be left over, which we're going to use to pay down debt. Are we going to pay down every single piece of debt that comes due? No. We're going to be strategic, and we're going to be rational about this. If there's cheap capital to be had, there's good financial transactions to be had, we'll access the capital market as any prudent company should do, right? Just the fact that we're going to be generating all this cash from operations allows us to project a reduction in net debt going forward.
Just to be clear, Rogerio, we're the only airline in Latin America that was free cash flow positive in 2019, pre-pandemic, okay? Obviously we're generating cash after all of our obligations. We will be back to those levels in 2022, 2023, and we will be deleveraging that way. As Alex said, we're highly levered to this business, and we're going to grow it. Bringing in E2s and NEOs, growing the cargo business, the LATAM codeshare, geez, we're very excited about the future. It's really exciting. Even just swapping out our fleet for E2s and 320NEOs, we're going to generate a ton more cash. Now growing the market as well, and getting this market to the same level that Colombia, Mexico, and maybe Chile is, that's very exciting for us.
Thank you, Alex and John. Alexandre Torrano from Rio Verde Investimentos. He's asking if there is any possibility of anticipating the delivery of E2 planes.
Yeah, let me take that. This was a big debate we had yesterday because, guys, we're negotiating, right? As good business people do. Obviously, Embraer has every incentive in the world to bring aircraft to us earlier. Does Airbus. We recognize that situation. A delivery in 2021 or 2022 has got to be worth five deliveries in 2024 or 2025. We're going to do everything we can to, if it makes sense for us to take deliveries next year and we get an enormous amount of value out of it, why not, right? We're not yet here to say that because we want Airbus to fight for it, we want Embraer to fight for it, and we want internally to fight for it. We're still utilizing the aircraft eight hours a day.
Alex is saying, "No," which is good, until somebody gives us a deal that we can't resist, right? We know that metal is going to be cheaper going forward, and so we need to use that to our advantage. Again, we're open to all possibilities to help us accelerate our fleet transformation, and we'll do that. Somebody wants to help us convert cargo planes, somebody wants to help us take out E1s, yeah, we're all ears. I think that the OEMs will be at a position that they're going to want to make deals. Having an airline as strong as Azul is, doing what we're doing, I think we're a perfect candidate to do a deal with.
Thanks, John. Abhi, Thais Cascello from Itaú BBA are saying that you already provided some colors on yields, particularly related to corporate fares. Could you please elaborate more on the evolution and projections going forward? How do you see them versus 2019 going forward? The second question is she wants some overview about competitive dynamics going forward in Brazil.
Hey, Thais. Yeah, as Alex has talked about, 2021 is going to be a transition year from crisis recovery to more normal. As I talked about the earnings call, it's going to take some quarters for the flown data to reflect the improvements that we are seeing in the bookings. We're going to be building a bridge every single quarter from the yields and what I really care about in the end is unit revenue. The unit revenues to what we have today to what we had in 2019. That bridge is going to take some time. It's going to take us until fourth quarter, end of 3Q, more like 4Q next year before you see the normalized unit revenues compared to 2019. One reason is that is the capacity, right?
We're bringing back the network in a responsible way, in a cash positive way. As you grow capacity from what you have today to what we had before, you need some time for the booking curve to catch up. You also need continued improvement in the mix between leisure and corporate. The fares that the industry was selling back in July were way lower than the fares that we're selling today. The fares are up 62% from July to what we're selling now. That improvements take some time to show up in the flown data, especially as we bring back the recovery. The unit revenues are going to keep progressing, and they're going to get to normalized 2019 levels by the fourth quarter of 2021, and then we transition to 2022, which is going to be our first full normal post-COVID year.
Industry dynamics, as I said, I think they're very disciplined, and I think they will continue to be disciplined. I think the industry is reacting well in terms of capacity. I think every airline is doing what makes sense for them, focusing on where they are strong. I think each one has sort of pockets of strength. For us, it's the fragmented corporate, it's the diverse markets that we are, which is helping us recover faster, our fleet flexibility as well. I expect the industry to continue to be disciplined on the capacity and the fare side. You always have small battles here and there, but overall, I truly believe that everybody wants to get back to the earnings that we had before and even better. I don't see any major changes in the competitive dynamics. It's going to be disciplined.
I think when it comes to the fares, I think the industry is going to keep trying fare increases as we have been, as we've seen the recovery in average fares from sort of the depths of the crisis to where we are now. It's going to take some time for all of this recovery to show up in the flown data, which is what you see in the earnings, which is what you see in our flown unit revenue. That's going to happen towards the end of next year. Overall, I'm bullish, as I have been for a while, on the continued discipline in industry.
Yeah. I just want to highlight, Alex highlighted this, when you get close to death, everybody gets religion, right? I think if you take a look at, we're still working on Alex's religion, that's something that we'll take over time. Everybody has a debt to pay back. Everybody wants to get back to these levels. If you take a look at the last, call it five or six years, the best time to invest in equities for airlines has been post-crisis, post the Dilma crisis, post the Temer crisis. It's a fantastic time to enter because you'll see great discipline in the market. You're going to see everybody chasing profitability. Take a look at what Abhi's done from a competitive dynamic perspective in the Guarulhos Airport. Pre-COVID, he had 65 flights a day in that airport. I think he has 15 today, right? Why?
Because it's not his battleground, right? What he's done is he's got VCP at 100%, he's got Recife at 100%, he's got Belém at 100%, he's got Confins, I think, at 85%. Why is he not going in there? Because it's not his fight. That is showing rational behavior. We're bringing our network back online faster, but not necessarily just bringing capacity back into the market.
Thanks, John and Abhi. What about the plans for the international capacity? Victor Mizusaki from Bradesco is asking what are our plans and if is there any negotiation with LATAM for international code-share agreement? What is your view for business Europe market, given that Azul sold its stake in TAP?
Yeah, thanks. International is going to take longer to come back, right? That's not really a secret. In Brazil, it's not a secret. In the U.S., you're seeing load factors to London are 25%, right? It's going to take longer to come back. Of course, you have the effect of the borders and you have the effect of the currency. For us, we've always been very disciplined. We only fly from our hubs to our partners' hubs, whether it's Fort Lauderdale, Orlando with JetBlue or Lisbon, with TAP. Our airplanes are flying today. We're flying Fort Lauderdale, we're flying Lisbon a couple times a week. What's not flying internationally is flying domestic, and it's helping our connectivity from Campinas to Recife. It's helping cargo to Manaus, to Belém. The airplanes are actually fully utilized. We have seven wide-body airplanes flying.
Ones that are not flying are in maintenance. We will adapt as needed. We're not going to force international. Like I said, my next gate is to restart Orlando in April, assuming the borders are open by then. We're going to be very disciplined about it, and we'll take it as it comes. If international takes longer, we'll fly them domestically because we know we have the strength, and we know we have the network that can support that capacity. When it comes to international code share with LATAM, right now the scope of the code share is domestic. International is in our plans sometime in the future, but because the networks are so small at this point, it doesn't really bring a lot of benefit. Really the upside right now is domestically, where we are focused on. Internationally, we'll think about later.
Finally, when it comes to TAP, there's been no change in the commercial relationship that we have with TAP. Our code share continues, our joint venture work continues, and TAP still has an amazing European network out of Lisbon that we can plug into with our flights from Brazil. No change in the commercial relationship that we have with TAP.
I just want to highlight something here. We're aggressive, but we're not stupid. Okay. I was born and raised in the Tri-State area. Abhi's lived in New York. David's from Connecticut. We didn't launch that New York flight early on, and we stopped it because we want to make money, and we want to do what's best for our network. We will always be very aggressive domestically, but we're not going to make stupid decisions. We do not have this dream to be flying 50 wide bodies around the world. That's not in our plans. We want to focus on where Brazilians want to fly to, and so again, we'll continue to be aggressive, but we're not going to be stupid.
Thank you, John. I have one question here for you from Fernando Abdalla from JP Morgan. He is saying that COVID-19 cases are increasing fast in U.S. and Europe, and that we cannot disregard this risk in Brazil as well. If Brazil moves to a second curve, how do you see Azul and the overall airline industry positioned?
Look, we raised capital for insurance, okay? We can talk about the second wave, we can talk about all that increasing, but you can't talk about that without talking about that millions of people in the United States of America are getting vaccinated this week. There's millions of people in England that are getting vaccinated this week. I believe vaccinations will start in Brazil inside of 30 days. Right? There's enormous hope for the future. You can't just focus on the business in the next 30 days, 60 days. Now that we've capitalized ourselves, Azul's looking forward to 2021, 2022, 2023, and beyond. We need to focus on the future. We have the insurance that we need. We can adjust the network. We can adjust what we need to if there's a second wave in Brazil, but let's look forward, right?
What a blessing it is to have three, four, five different vaccines that are approved above 90%. That's pretty remarkable. Again, we saw the worst of it in April. If there's a second wave, we'll be prepared for it. We raised cash. We know what we need to do. We just pull out the management plan playbook. We know exactly what we could do. Again, I prefer to look forward with hope and optimism because I see a much greater opportunity in 2021 and beyond, and that's what we're focused on. We'll adjust as needed. A lot of people, we don't manage the business based on tomorrow anymore. Six months ago, we were managing cash on an hourly basis. "Hey, we're going to pay, not going to pay." No, we're not focused on that anymore.
We're focused on looking forward, what are the strategic opportunities that we need to do to invest in to make this company much stronger and to deliver those numbers that Alex talked about in 2025?
Thank you, John. Abhi, Mike Linenberg from Deutsche Bank is asking, what are our corporates saying about travel intentions in 2021, and what do they need to see to get on the road more?
Yeah. Hey, Mike. We're seeing quite a difference actually between corporations and even within industry segments, we're seeing different behavior. For sure, small, medium businesses, independent consultants, engineers, lawyers, they're traveling. That's what's really bringing up our corporate revenue right now. Even you look at the banking sector, we have some multinationals banks that are traveling a lot, and we have a large local bank that's not traveling at all yet. The federal government has not really come back up again. We know that that's going to start coming back online in January, and the federal government is probably the largest customer for everybody, one of the largest customers for everybody. We're seeing strong travel, for example, Fiat is one of our largest customers on the passenger and on the cargo side. It kind of varies by industry.
We don't hear any more about customers not wanting to get on airplanes. Early on, we had customers saying they weren't comfortable. We don't hear that anymore. We'll have almost 2 million passengers in December and January. We don't hear at all about customers not feeling safe and confident about flying. We've never talked about middle seat. Our NPS score for cleaning is over 70. The only reason our overall NPS score is down is because we don't serve snacks, so we don't incentivize people to take off the mask and eat. That's the only reason. All other NPS scores are same as last year or even above.
I also think it's funny, Abhi, that all of the people that are not traveling for corporate are actually traveling for leisure. They're the same people, right? It's the bankers and lawyers. It's the same people, it's just that the bank's not paying for the ticket they're paying for, and they've rented houses in the northeast of Brazil. I think it's less about fear and it's more about corporate policy, and I think that corporate policy will be re-looked at once the vaccine starts to get rolled out in the beginning of 2021. We're really talking about a post-Carnival. There's plenty of leisure demand for December and January and into Carnival. You're really talking about what happens post-Carnival and how many people get vaccinated, and if we've taken care of the risk area.
I think that's the moment that we'll really see when large corporate comes back.
Okay. Thanks, guys. The next questions comes from Peter Singh from Attica Capital. He's asking about the additional convertible debentures. He is asking, who has the options, is the Azul or the investors?
Let me talk about two options. On the BRL 1.7 billion that we issued, we have a soft call to call the bond back after three years, after the share price has stayed at a certain level. It certainly would trigger that where it's trading today, but we also have the three-year limit. At least three years need to have gone by for us to call that bond back. As soon as we call that bond back, the investors that bought the convertible debenture have the option to convert. They have the option to convert any time between the issuance date and the expiration date. As we call the bond back, if the share price is trading 30% above the exercise price, a rational investor would convert. Those are two options that are embedded in the original BRL 1.7 billion.
We have an option with the anchor investors to issue another BRL 500 million. Technically, it's another $100 million, so it's a little bit above BRL 500 million under the same conditions with the existing share price.
They've been fantastic investors. They have a board advisory seat now. We talk to them on a daily basis. They're very engaged in the region, and the people that set up those funds are fantastic people that have invested in the long term in Air Canada and other places. We've had a very good working relationship with them.
Thanks, Alex and John. The next question comes from Dan McKenzie, from Seaport. For purpose of the outlook, what do the cost initiatives mean in 2021 for CASK ex-fuel? 2021 CASK ex-fuel less than 2019? The efficiency story, can you put more numbers around it?
Yeah, I can talk about it conceptually. We don't like CASK ex-fuel, when you look at Azul, you shouldn't look at CASK ex-fuel because a big part of the upside comes from reduced fuel burn. If you're looking at Brazilian companies, you should really care about your fuel CASK because it's the biggest part of your CASK. Like I said, we pay 50% more per liter or per gallon of jet fuel than airlines in the U.S. or Europe. We prefer to look at CASK, or CASK controlled for fuel and effects. Obviously, fuel and effects are out of our control, and they create a lot of noise. When you look at CASK controlled for fuel and effects, we will have lower CASK in 2022 than we had in 2019 because of these initiatives.
These initiatives put together can give us something in the low single digit in terms of CASK reduction. When you look at the reduction in corporate overhead, the reduction in airport staffing and call center staffing, and the improved efficiency with insourcing maintenance. That alone should give you a CASK reduction in the low single digits.
Yeah, I think it's pretty phenomenal if you look at our FTEs per aircraft. The improvement that we're going to do in 2021 versus 2020 and where we were in 2019, it's a significant step change in terms of efficiency. The insourcing of all the maintenance work that we're doing. We were flying empty aircraft up to Orlando to put Wi-Fi on board our aircraft. We're actually going to do that now locally in Brazil with no ferrying of any aircraft. Our hangar has the capability of doing that. There's an enormous amount of potential that we have now with the new maintenance hangar and everything that we've done. We're hungry, right? I think you'll find a management team that's hungry, that's going to deliver, and we're excited to execute upon it.
There's a ton of opportunities. When you bring an airline down to its knees and you build it back up again, you're looking at absolutely everything, and we've done that. We will be a much more efficient airline. We will be a better airline because of 2020. We're ending this year on a very high note. We've gotten through the crisis, now we're looking forward. We need to be strategic, grow this business, execute on our fleet transformation, execute on our cargo business, and this airline has a lot more to deliver. Alex mentioned it, but this airline is being run by a bunch of founders that are in Brazil for over 12 years, and with no end in sight, because the best years of Azul are in front of us. I promise you that.
The best years in terms of profitability, what we expect to deliver. We're talking about getting to 200 cities served in Brazil. It's pretty remarkable. We will grow this market. There's plenty of room to grow this market. There's plenty of room to make money here. We're going to continue to deliver an unbelievable experience for our crew members and for our customers.
Thanks, John. The last question for Alex comes from Victor Sequeira. In your business plan, in which year does your final cash flow turns positive?
It depends, right? It depends on what you define as cash flow, right? We're going to be cash flowing next year, after you calculate EBITDA, you pay all of the operating expenses, you pay down rent, there's still BRL 1 billion left. What do you do with that cash? Everybody has debt, right? Every airline in the world has debt, I don't think there's any airline that assumes that it's going to pay down 100% of every debt that comes due 100% of the time, right? There's a saying in Brazil that you never pay back a debt, right? You always roll it, right? We're not going to roll 100% of our debt, we will pay down to delever. Again, it's good investment. It's good use of proceeds, right? I think it depends on your exercise.
After we pay back for CapEx and loans. There's a big assumption there of how much you need to roll forward. We don't need to roll forward 100% of our debt, right? Which is not the case for every airline in the region, right? We have plenty of cash and very little debt maturing in the next 12 months. There are the pandemic costs to be paid back. It just depends on how quickly we want to pay those back. A lot of that is within our control, right? A lot of that is good working capital. It's good capital at competitive costs, and a lot of that is within our control on how quickly we pay them back.
I think if you're deleveraging and investing in your future, that's a good use of capital, right. That's what we'll continue to do as we go forward. This is a company that intends to invest in its future, look for strategic opportunities. I want to thank everybody for 2020. Investors that stuck with us, investors that are coming on board now, you will not find a more passionate, harder-working management team in the world that's working hard for you, both on the debt side and on the equity side. We appreciate your time today. It's a little different. We look forward to welcome you next year in a actual Azul Day, when we can actually shake hands with you, show you everything that we've built in Campinas and around Brazil. We look forward to seeing you in person in the not-too-distant future.
I want to wish everybody happy holidays. Let's all look forward to 2021. It's going to be a great year.