Good morning, everyone, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the fourth quarter and year of 2021 results conference call of Blau Farmacêutica. Today, we have with us Marcelo Hahn, CEO, Rogério Ferreira, CFO and IRO, and Renato Santos, IR. I'd like to remind you that we will have a Q&A session at the end of the call, and everyone is welcome to ask questions through the chat at the webcasts. Also, the webcast is being recorded and will be available on our IR website. Now, I would like to turn the floor to our CEO, Marcelo Hahn, to begin his presentation. Marcelo, please go ahead.
Thank you, Renato. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and 2021 results call. First of all, I would like to introduce Rogério Ferreira, our new CFO, who joined the company early this month. We are very happy with his arrival. He came to strengthen our team and bringing with him many years of valuable experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He has worked in several important pharma multinationals in Brazil and abroad, including in the biotechnology segment and area in which Blau has intensified its investments. Welcome, Rogério. As you all know, we have a new C-level structure from now on, and we are more prepared than ever for another growth cycle. Now, going back to the results on slide three, I would like to say that I am very happy and proud of the year we delivered.
2021 was the company's best historical result, making the seventh consecutive year of double-digit growth in both revenue and profit, and also marked Blau's first year as listed in the B3 Brazilian Stock Exchange, where it was also the company with the best stock post-IPO stock performance in the health sector in 2021. The company has invested like never before and is starting to reap the rewards of its investments. The results shows that even during a difficult year, the company is performing better than at any other time in its history. We continue with consistent growth, with a 16% increase in net sales for the year, 18% growth in EBITDA, and a 27% growth in the net income when compared to 2020.
In addition to expanding margins in all lines, we ended the year with an EBITDA margin of 35% and a net income of 24%, an outstanding result. Our strong performance comes at a challenge moment as the global health crisis continues. Supply chain is tight and significant inflationary pressure persists. We continue with our growth trend and are focused on improving performance, increasing production capacity, and supply the market, and we remain well-positioned, working closely with the market to meet its specific needs and capture opportunities in line with our strategy of operational flexibility and high capacity. As we always say and reiterate, Blau has a long-term business cycle, and a single quarter may not always reflect the performance of the company.
Our quarters will always be volatile, so the best way to understand the trends is to always look at performance over a long period on a 12-month basis. Due to the dynamics of COVID-19, 2021 was a really challenging year for the pharmaceutical industry, as healthcare institutions has constant change related to the forecast of their drugs needs. Even during a challenging year, and with the drop in the drug acquisitions by the public sector, Blau grew as never in its history. We had a 39% growth in the net revenue in the private channel in comparison to 2020, and a 22% of growth in private channel revenue when comparing to the fourth quarters.
The revenue from the public sector have never been so low during the company's history, reaching only 12% of the net revenue in 2021, and 10% in the fourth quarter. Even so, it showed the company's ability to increase its customer base and expand its market share in the channel despite the challenging situation. We closed the year with a market share of 27% of the addressable market in 2021. When we look at the growth for the whole year regarding immunoglobulin and alfaepoetina, about 90% of our growth came from the increase in sales volume. According to data from IQVIA, in the manufacturer ranking in the non-retail segment, we are in the 10th position, top 10 of the entire market, and we are the second-largest national pharmaceutical industry.
2021 also marked the year in which we invested the largest amount in research, development, and innovation, investing 6% of our net revenue, an increase of 93% in comparison to 2020. We are very pleased with the result of our efforts on developing sustainable growth for the company's future. In 2021, we had 12 new products registered in Latin America and four in Brazil. Moving on to slide four, you may see that we have a robust pipeline with an important addressable market of products launched to maintain our recurrent sustainable growth that are under various stages of development. Only considering Brazil, we have a pipeline with a growing addressable market currently at BRL 8 billion, with BRL 5.4 billion coming from projects and partnerships that are negotiating and BRL 2.7 billion from projects under internal development.
We started 2022 with four new drugs approved by Anvisa, with an addressable market of around BRL 460 million, which represents 14% of the total estimated for 2022. Now moving over to slide five, you may see our operational initiatives. The first one I would like to comment on is about the new expansion of Blau Inventta, which will be an important step to increase the number of projects under development. As we mentioned in the last result call, to accelerate the construction of this new facility, we took a strategic decision to transform the space currently used by administrative area into this expansion of Blau Inventta. Our expectation is to complete the expansions by the end of 2022. As for the new administrative office in São Paulo, we are following the main ESG guidelines and the organization's growth projection.
We expect to move to the new administrative office in April of this year. Here in Cotia, we are focused on the conclusion at the start of operations of the two lines in the specialties area in the building P210. The works are on track, and their main manufacturing activities will start in the second half of 2022, which will allow us to increase our specialties capacity by around 20% in units. We also continue making improvements in all our production lines, in line with our operational excellence and increasing production capacity in units at all the company's units, investing in operational efficiency using new equipment, systems, automation, robotics and more.
Regarding the P1000 project, which is our project of a new manufacturing site in Pernambuco, we have allocated the necessary resources for this project, and all necessary activities and license submissions are underway. We aim to begin the construction of the plant this year. Moving on to slide six about Hemarus. The first plasma collection center in the U.S. at Lauderhill is now fully operational and generating revenue. The volume of donors is growing day by day. In the last few days of this first quarter, we reached approximately 30% utilization of the total daily donations capacity of the center. We have recently expanded the work hours to 8 A.M. - 6 P.M. and on Saturdays from 10 A.M. - 4 P.M. We have already started the construction of the second Hemarus plasma collection center.
The chosen location was the Northside Mall in Miami, and this unit is expected to be operational by the end of 2022. Additionally, we have already found the locations for the third and fourth centers, which we intend to start constructions still this year. A very important achievement was the FDA authorization, which is basically the authorization for the use of plasma collected at our first collection center for the production of injectable and non-injectable drugs. We are very excited about the results and accelerating the development of the new units in order to achieve the necessary collection volume to support our future demands. On slide seven, you may see that Blau has invested a lot in innovation and has implemented several initiatives, such as offering internal seminars to disseminate the culture of innovation through the company.
We hired an innovation hub to be closer to the digital world, health techs, and startups, bringing more knowledge of big data and artificial intelligence in order to improve process and expand our presence with stakeholders in the health ecosystem. Moving to slide eight, you may see the information regarding the ESG, which is extremely important for us. In 2021, we took several initiatives, such as we increased the number of directors in our board with two new directors who has vast experience in subject in order to enrich the company's ESG culture. We have instituted a new dedicated ESG committee with independent members. We started a new materiality metrics mapping with the participation of a large percentage of our stakeholders in order to update and better assess our points for improvements and create metrics to share the results.
We have incorporated into our logistics fleet electric trucks to carry out the intercompany and micro-distribution logistics in the metropolitan region of São Paulo City. We carry out the carbon offset of our fleet in the commercial area and our industrial plant supply. We closed the year with 1,400 employees, 55% of whom are women, the greatest diversification percentage ever in the company history. We won the Women on Board certification with two women representing 28% of our board. In the first semester of 2022, we will be releasing our new ESG and sustainable report. Now I would like to return the floor to Rogério Ferreira, CFO, to comment on our financial performance. Rogério, please.
Thank you, Marcelo. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you on my first earnings release presentation at Blau. As Marcelo commented earlier, I have 22 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, having worked in the United States, Venezuela, and here in Brazil during the last eight years, mostly focused in biotechnology. I'm very happy to join Blau, and I'm really looking forward to contributing to the growth projects that we have planned for the coming years. Going to slide number nine. We have the evolution of net revenue. As Marcelo mentioned, net revenue for the year grew 16% with an average compound growth rate of 25% in the last seven years. As you can see, we delivered consecutive growth over the years. It's important to point out that if we look only at the quarter, we always have volatility.
It's not a linear segment. When we analyze a longer period, such as 12 months, we see a continuous evolution. The fourth quarter followed the same trend as we have seen in the third, which was precisely the moment of transition within hospitals. Hospitals have not returned to the pre-COVID levels. The occupancy of beds for other procedures has remained practically stable since February 2021, and COVID hospitalizations have dropped significantly. In addition, we continued facing price pressures while health institutions are still making very targeted purchases to maintain their inventory KPIs. Now, moving to slide 10, we show a breakdown of revenues by business unit. In 2021, we had growth in all units. Biologicals line grew by 6% in the year, impacted by the phasing of alfaepoetina bidding and also the lower availability of immunoglobulin sales.
The specialties line grew 22.5% year-over-year, positively impacted by the line of cephalosporins, gastric protectors, and anesthetics in general. The oncology line grew 42.8% and represents 6% of total revenue. We continue to develop this operation and all of our products are performing, especially due to the volume sold in the injectables line. The others line also had a positive performance. We started to see a gradual improvement of Botuline, our botulinum toxin sales, higher sales of our preserve line of condoms and the retail segment, and also we increased exports to Latin America. Moving forward to slide 11, we have the gross profit and gross margin. In the quarter, COGS was occasionally impacted by a favorable mix of our products sold. In addition, we had some price pressure as we mentioned earlier.
With all these effects, gross margin was 42% in the quarter and 49% in the year. It's important to emphasize that as we have always commented on other calls, the margin expansion that we have presented in recent quarters was not necessarily recurring, and it was always dependent on the sales mix of each quarter. In 2021, we had 169 basis points of margin expansion versus 2020. Moving on, let's go to slide 12 and talk about operating expenses. The main driver is our investment in R&D. We had a record investment this year. As you can see, for the year 2021, it was responsible for about 55% of the total growth of the company's operating expenses.
Of course, this has a short-term impact on results, but it's necessary in order to address and accelerate the company's future revenue. Regarding this effect on the evolution of our operating expenses and also the recurring expense of our IPO we had, the company continues to dilute SG&A with a dilution of around 50 basis points. In other words, we continue to focus on operational leverage, showing the efficiency of our business model and accelerating investments in R&D to increase our addressable market. As you can see in the graph on the bottom of slide 12, the company has reached a new level of R&D, total BRL 80 million reais between OpEx and additions to intangible assets, which represents in total 6% of our net revenue in 2021. Going to the next slide 13, we have EBITDA.
The 2021 EBITDA grew 18% to BRL 478 million, representing 35% of sales and an improvement of 57 basis points against prior year as a result of dilution in SG&A expenses at a dilution of 30 basis points. These results demonstrate our ability and resilience to continue delivering results and expanding profitability. As already highlighted, the effects of gross profit and the higher investment in R&D in the quarter-over-quarter comparison, we have a quarter with lower performance when compared to the previous years. Going to slide 14, to highlight the effect of financial expenses and net income in both quarters in the year, we had a positive impact from recognition of gains from our hedge contracts. The company ended December with a position of $23 million in hedge contracts, and this has a positive effect on our financial results.
In addition to the return on invested cash that we have. With regards to income tax, the company now has a higher capacity of payment of interest on equity as the equity has increased, and the high investment in R&D allow us to explore the benefits of Lei do Bem. The effect of those benefits was neutralized by the non-recurring constitution of a deferred tax liability in Q4 related to Lei do Bem. We have a net income of BRL 324 million in 2021, which grew 27% versus prior year, with a net margin of 24% or 220 basis points better than 2020. In the quarter, we recorded a profit of BRL 44 million, which was impacted by the accounting adjustment mentioned before.
If you normalize the net income by this adjustment, the normalized net income would be BRL 70 million. Once again, it's worth highlighting the company's ability to continue delivering results, growing and increasing profitability. That's our focus. Well, to conclude the comments on results, let's now look at the company's balance sheet on slide 15. The company has always demonstrated that we're starting a new cycle of investments and expansion. We have a new level to deliver results in the future. You can clearly see this evolution over the last few quarters. The company doubled the level of total investments in CapEx, relevant increases in both PP&E and intangible CapEx. In 2021, the amount of CapEx was BRL 178 million compared to the BRL 96 million in the previous year.
PP&E CapEx related to the construction of our P210 to increase capacity, the construction of the second plasma collection center in the U.S., the acquisition of equipment to modernize the facilities, improve process in our Cotia plant in São Paulo, in addition to adjustment in production lines at Blau Goiás. The intangible, as mentioned before, reflects the expansion of the addressable market of our pipeline. It's our focus to make short-term investments to ensure sustainability of the business in the future. In terms of working capital, we had a reduction compared to the second and third quarters of 2021. We had a reduction of around BRL 27 million compared to the third quarter. We ended December with 46% of working capital in relation to net sales.
We had a reduction in inventories and an improvement in the balance of suppliers. The company's idea is to reduce even further, reaching around 120 and 190 days of inventory. Basically, we have a larger inventory mainly in the biological products part due to the phasing of alfaepoetina contract. Now, going to the last slide, number 16, we see the company's cash position, which is very strong to face this new level of investment that will be made. We have a net cash position of more than BRL 550 million, and our gross debt includes the first and third debentures issued. Regarding the debt timeline, we have maturities until 2027 at a very attractive cost of CDI plus 1.3%.
In fact, the company's very well positioned to execute the new cycle of investments and continue delivering results according to our business plan. Now we may start our Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you. With that, it appears we do not have any more questions, so I will pass it over to Marcelo for final considerations.
I would like to thank you for your time. The company's IPO provided a new horizon and a new perspective for the future. The creation of a new financial lever provided an increase and accelerating of all the company's investments, not to mention the possibilities of MNAs. I would like to thank everyone who trusted our business and became our shareholder. The 2021 results shows that our business is resilient and that we are on the right direction. I couldn't be happier and prouder of the results the company has achieved. Blau's sustainable growth has solid and well-defined pillars in its strategy based on the production capacity, expansion, new products development, APIs, active pharmaceutical ingredients, verticalization, pharmaceutical market recurring growth, new business partnership, geographic expansion and M&A opportunities.
Despite 2022, the challenging outlook from political and economic perspective due to the presidential elections in Brazil and the COVID-19 pandemic, Blau will bring results on par with the company recurrent historical growth. The company has never been so well-structured for this new growth cycle, and I have no doubt that we will continue to grow and bring positive results like those we have historically presented in such adverse moments as those expected for 2022. All Blauers are focused on the execution to run our business. I would like also to thank all our stakeholders who somehow helped the company to deliver these results. Thank you all for your time, and have a very nice day.