...Welcome to another earnings release presentation from Bemobi regarding the first quarter of 2024. My name is Nicholas. I am an IR officer at our company, and we have our CEO, Pedro Ripper, André Veloso, our CFO, João Stricker, our VP for operations in Brazil and Latam. This presentation is being recorded, and you can not only listen to us during the conference, but also see the speakers and the slide deck. Everyone has access to simultaneous interpreting into English, should you prefer that. There's an interpretation button at the bottom of Zoom. So let me switch to English quickly.
That can be used by pressing the button called Interpretation on the bottom right corner of your screen, and then choosing the option English. I would like to highlight that after the presentation, we'll hold a question and answer session. Now I switch back to Portuguese.
Dear attendees, right after our presentation, we'll have a Q&A session only for analysts and investors. You will receive instructions on how to be a part of that. Before we proceed, we'd like to say that any forward-looking statements that may be made during this earnings release presentation regarding our forecasts, estimates, and financial goals are based on assumptions and beliefs by our management, as well as on information that is currently available to us. Of course, this entails risks and uncertainties because it depends on events that may or may not happen in the future. We must understand that overall economic conditions and other operating factors could have an impact on our future performance, leading to significantly different results than the ones we're gonna be talking about today. Now, let me hand it over to Mr. Pedro Ripper. Good morning, Pedro.
Good morning. Thank you, Nicholas. Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to our earnings release presentation for the first quarter of 2024. Let's quickly talk about financial and operating numbers. We still have an international approach. We are in 51 countries. We are above 1,400 active clients, and we now have a different breakdown. We have our enterprise clients, for which we have gross revenue above BRL 500 million per year, and we have the medium-sized clients, which are below this range. We've been acquiring companies with a long tail and with a different distribution model, so we believed that we should start sharing this metric, too, because one of our new areas of growth will be this new segment. Last quarter, we had another highlight. We are focusing increasingly more on software solutions integrated with payment, and we are focused on recurring services.
So we're working with the biggest service providers in Brazil, and we'll be sharing information on how we've been able to acquire new clients. We have 7 out of the top 10 largest recurring service companies in Brazil, and 2 of them are pre-operational at the moment. Regarding our offerings, we have the same breakdown. We have 4 business lines, or actually 4 industry segments. So let me go into them. I showed you consolidated information on the first slide, but here we see a breakdown of these segments. We can see that we are growing our number of segments in every sub-segment. To your left, we have digital payments, then we have SaaS, then microfinance, and then digital subscriptions. As you can see, we had significant growth in the past 2 quarters for small and medium-sized customers for SaaS.
In a way, this means that we have access to the payment market in a more fragmented environment, access which we did not enjoy before. So in the next few years or in the next few quarters, we're probably going to see a share of these 1,300 clients from SaaS becoming clients from the payments segment, too. When we look at the same four segments, when it comes to volume metrics, and this is more related to end consumers in our B2B dynamic, then one of our biggest highlights here is for payments. We had significant growth in the total volume of payments with our TPV. We have 38% growth year-on-year. We also have good growth quarter-on-quarter for this. We can also look at digital subscriptions. Year-on-year, we are at -10%.
However, even though we have a negative figure here, a positive is that this is our second consecutive quarter of recovery after a very challenging year of 2023, not only in our international operations, but also in Brazil because of the sale of Oi. So we went to BRL 27 million, then we went to around BRL 22 million, and now we're back at BRL 24 million, almost BRL 25 million, which is good recovery given last year. When we look at our revenue, just like what we saw in the last quarters, we have been adjusting our revenue to have a real perspective of our growth. Our net income, with no adjustments or normalizations, grew 3% year-on-year. However, when we adjust it according to the foreign exchange rate, because we did have fluctuations, and the real is going through devaluation or depreciation.
And then we see the impact of Oi as well, which was responsible for -3.8, and for the foreign exchange rate, we had -3.5. But when we normalize for all of that and adjust it to that, then we have 9% of growth instead of 3%. By the way, for the second quarter, we see that the impact coming from Oi is much smaller. You know that two quarters ago, this number was over BRL 10 million of negative impact. I think last quarter it was around BRL 7 million, and it should be BRL 1-2 million for the next quarter. And then this drop won't be significant in the near future. And then the only adjustment we'll need will be for a foreign exchange rate.
And then we'll have clarity of when foreign exchange rates are helping us or hindering us. So we see the behavior that we expected, and we see results in a more clear way without the impact of external factors. Now, as we focus increasingly more on our payments segment, in addition to software, we have almost 36% of our total revenue coming from payments. In addition to a 3.4% growth in our net revenue, we're also focusing now on our net revenue for payments, because we believe this is going to be a big source of growth in upcoming years. In addition to our TPV, which grew significantly, our net revenue for payments grew 17% during this time. And now we are breaking it down even more inside the net revenue for payments. We can see what comes from digital subscriptions or payments.
So this combination of software and payment is where most of it comes from. We also have a legacy business coming from M4U. This one has to do with top-ups. It is a mature business. There's a trend of decrease here. It's going to be less significant in the near future, but the rest of our business grows basically at 20% per year. So we're probably going to keep a good growth trend here. Let me now hand it over to our CFO, Mr. André Veloso, and he'll be talking about the other financial metrics.
Thank you, Pedro. Good morning, everyone. Let me continue our earnings release presentation. At the top left, we can see our gross margin. Or actually... Yes, our gross margin. We have a 2% growth, and we have minor retraction in our margin, especially because of more expenditures in subscriptions.
We had to spend more money to acquire new clients. However, when we look at OpEx, on our yearly perspective, we have a 1% decrease because of the many initiatives that we put in place throughout 2023 to control expenses. This bore fruit, so with our adjusted EBITDA, we see a 7% growth compared to the same quarter of 2023. Here we have 1.1 percentage point as a relative margin expansion. Now, here we can see our adjusted net income, including the swap impact. This is the result of our operating performance. We had 6% of growth for this metric, and we got to BRL 23.4 million in the first quarter of 2024. We also have a small expansion in our relative margin, which was almost 17% of our net revenue.
Now, for the operational cash flow generation at the top right, we see very good expansion, 16%. We got to BRL 34 million, and we had a cash conversion above 73%. In this case, it's important to say that these numbers from 2023 were a bit below what we expected because of the expenditure that we had to set up our offices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. So if we offset that impact, then we have something relatively similar to this quarter, and then our cash conversion is above 70%, but below 73%. Here we can see our cash balance. We ended this quarter at BRL 543 million, but we can focus on the cash generation that we have for our operations here. We had a BRL 43 million expansion here. This is the result, basically, of unlocking working capital.
We received funds from a client we've been working with for the past few months. They settled any outstanding amounts at the beginning of the year, so we were able to expand our operating cash flow. When we look at non-recurring factors, we had BRL 1 million for the buyback of shares. It's important to say that because of the prices, and because of the mismatch that we see on paper, we've been accelerating our share buyback program. We bought another 600,000 shares in April. We believe that this is a smart cash allocation at the moment, so we should accelerate this initiative in the next months. Next, we have an adjustment for the swap, which is a positive BRL 400,000. Even though this is not very significant, it draws our attention, because with a mark-to-market swap, this has had a negative impact on our income.
However, as we roll it out, because we have differences between the contracts executed in October of last year and March of this year, then we see a positive impact in our cash flow at around BRL 500,000. The last expense is related to our recent M&As. In the last quarter, we had a cash expansion of around BRL 35 million, and we got to BRL 543 million at the end of March 2024. Finally, as we have been saying in the past few quarters, we still have BRL 35 million that are dedicated to the operation of payments installments. Our company wants to compensate our own cash based on our cash structure, but in the future, should we decide to use other forms of funding, then we'd be able to rebuild our cash position. This is why we make this clear to you.
This is why we disclose this information. Let me now hand it back over to Pedro, and he'll be offering you our closing remarks.
Thank you, André. We do have a few highlights here. It's been 1 or 1.5 years that we have been heavily betting on focusing most of our energy, capital, and time on what we call a combination of vertical payments. Vertical payments represents the idea of using software in a given industry, but then packaging it with a payment solution so that we can unlock more value in this industry. This represents a good chunk of our business, and this has been working well. We also chose to work with recurring services. There's a segment of essential services with telecommunications, utilities, education, and in the near future, healthcare. The good news is that this strategy has been proven to be right.
We're at a good point, either with the clients that we were able to acquire recently, whether with our sales. These are prior indicators that should lead to more revenue and better results. So this is a highlight. This was a bit contaminated in 2024, or 2023, actually, because we had many ups and downs, but we do expect to get more traction in 2024, and better acceleration into the future. We can already see the impact of that on our results and payments. We had our best TPV since we started to work with payments a few years ago, and we expect this number to keep on growing. It is also important to highlight that our most mature business of digital subscriptions, which had a very tough year in 2023, is now showing signs of recovery, which is great.
We believe that we still have a reasonably long sales cycle in front of us for this business. We should still see another quarter where we see growth here. This is a good rebound. This is a good reversal of trend. As Andre was saying, we did something major here. On the one hand, we were looking for maximum optimization of more mature businesses, but we also continued investing on fields where we have better trends for growth. The minus 1% that we had is actually a compound effect, so that we can reinvest in areas where we have better potential of growth. We could have reduced it a bit more, but we didn't believe this would be optimal for the company. Even though we only had 3% in revenue growth, our EBITDA grew 7%.
So we believe that as our revenue grows in the next quarters, our EBITDA will be growing above our revenue. This is a bit connected to the nature of our business. We have operating leveraging, because even though we're growing in new segments, they have good leveraging with the same platforms and the same teams we already have. So even if our OpEx grows, it's not gonna grow as much compared to our top line. Finally, our take-home message before we go into a Q&A session, I would like to say that Bemobi has had results for 10 years. With a history, we've been listed for three years, and before we became listed, we were around for around nine years. We basically had only one year where we saw drops in revenue, in—which was 2023.
I think in these 10 years, we only had 2 years where we saw an EBITDA decrease. I'm saying this because we have a history of lots of consistency with the EBITDA margin, with the contribution margin, with cash generation. So we do believe that 2023 was an outlier. We felt the impact of 3 external events. One of them is not really an outlier, because we're gonna have effects, fluctuations, either in favor of us or against us. But we had a war in a region where we had 6% of our revenue, and our biggest historical partner was sold. So these two things happening at the same time had damaging impact on us in 2023. Now, the good news is that the war has now been incorporated into our expectations on a year-on-year basis.
It's been a few quarters since the sale of our biggest partner, so we see that these impacts are dissolving now, and we are getting good traction with other businesses. So we're cautious, but our good message here is that our strategy seems to make sense, and we do see ongoing improvement quarter-over-quarter. And we believe that we're gonna see the same soon on a year-on-year basis, because these things are connected. Let us now start the Q&A session. Nicholas, could you please help us?
Of course. So this is the beginning of the Q&A session. If you have any questions, please click the Q&A button and send us your question in writing or raise your hand, and we'll unmute you. We have Bernardo from XP, and I'm going to unmute him for his question. Please go ahead, Bernardo Guttmann.
Hi, good morning, everyone.
Good morning, Pedro, André, Stricker, Nicholas. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions, actually. The first one is related to the evolution of Bemobi in utilities. I want to understand your conversion cycle. In telecommunications, this cycle between selling a solution, getting a new client, implementing things, and getting revenue is slow. How does this work with the utility sector? Is it also a long cycle? You are able to get big contracts, so I do believe you have a robust backlog, but you may not have converted all of that into revenue, not in significant figures. So I would like to understand the evolution curve of your revenue in 2024 and 2025 for this segment. Now, if you'll allow me a second question, I have a question about cash allocation. You have a significant capital surplus.
We saw this in your last M&As with a lower ticket. So I would like to understand your analysis funnel. I'd like to understand how you think about verticals and size. Wonderful.
Thank you, Bernardo. These are excellent questions. First question: in utilities, this does not have a lot to do with this industry, but with the size of companies. We're talking about large companies with a delayed timing.
You need to understand that we go through four stages within their life cycles. The first stage is when they are not clients, and we need to get this contract. And this is a big, big milestone, because, quote, unquote, "You have guaranteed revenue. You have higher revenue." Of course, you have paid rates, but you get access to an addressable market. So this is a big milestone as we enter into a new agreement.
And as we do that, we're gonna highlight it here. Now, our second steps in their life cycle is to go from pre-operations to actually making revenue. What happens here is that we have big investments from Bemobi, because we have to set the whole operation up. We kind of absorb these costs, investing on volume over time. So we may spend multiple months integrating our software to every channel from these utilities. We have an omni-channel structure, so we're going to use a system, most likely their ERP or CRM. And oftentimes we have different systems because we have concessionaires in different regions, and we're focused on customers at the last point of the customer journey, at their website, their call center, their app, their bot, their POSs with their field agents.... So during this step, we have changes in timing.
Very fast clients take 3-4 months, but on the other end of the spectrum, we see clients taking 9-10 months to do this. It all depends on how prioritized we are in their IT department. But we usually have these delays. So at the low end, 3-4 months, at the higher end, 8-12 months in extreme cases. So we have a long stage 2. We start getting accounting and management revenue next, or at the end of this stage. And then we have another 2 stages. When we get new clients, we do not necessarily have a D0. Oftentimes, we have digital, and then we get the POS, or the opposite, or we start with the app, but we don't start the call center. So it's a process.
As we get a new client, we keep on growing to expand the channels. So this is phase three. So even for the clients that we already have in operations, we should expect steps up over time. With our two current utility customers, Energisa and Equatorial, we still have room for improvement with good practices, both in digital and other areas. And the last stage is organic and slow. So we enter into a contract, we go into operations, we expand it to every channel, accessing every client, and then we have the fourth stage, which is what we call gravity. Historically speaking, we've worked with segments that are very focused on payment slips or boletos in Brazil. They represent maybe 90% of payments. Now, we believe that a mix of credit cards and the Pix Brazilian transfer is going to absorb 60% of this market.
So as we improve the Pix transfer, and as people use credit cards, and they get used to using credit cards for other types of purchases, then we're going to increase that. So even after all three stages, in the fourth stage, very slowly, you reap the fruit of macro trends as we have changes in behavior. So this was a long answer, but with Enel and Energisa, we are between stages one, going to stage two. And we want to have many clients at different stages because this is what puts our revenue together. And this is not very different from other segments we're going into, but it does look like to me that other segments could be quicker. So we believe their life cycle or their cash cycle is shorter.
With big universities, this could be a bit slower because they are complex, but not with regular schools. Regarding our second question regarding our capital structure, we're feeling very comfortable. The deals we closed in the past, in addition to our original business, have been doing well when it comes to cash generation. This makes us comfortable because regardless of the money we raised, we have cash generation. So we believe that, yes, in a way, we have a surplus of cash vis-à-vis what we need for our short-term needs. So let me see what I can share with you. We still believe that we have good opportunities with M&As. Contrary to other quarters in the past, I think now we have narrower options, and we're more focused on software. Maybe payment services in industries that are more complex and where we see more value.
So we think the M&A track could be very interesting, but we don't need BRL 5 million or BRL 6 million for a new company to do that. Now, with the surplus, what we're doing more often, as André was saying, is the share buyback. We believe that at the current value, this is very smart cash allocation, and this won't damage us, and we'll have slightly higher dividends to shareholders. This year, we had dividends at around twice as much of what we had last year. So we're gonna keep it up. We're gonna have a bit of a higher dividend yield. And we know that this is a good problem, right? This is a good issue. We have a very comfortable cash structure or capital structure. It's not optimal, but it's comfortable.
We're going to do that and work on a combination of very specific M&As, higher dividends, and share buybacks so that we can restructure our cash position for a better capital structure. Bernardo, was I clear?
Yes, very thorough. Thank you. Thank you. We also have a question from buy-side investors in the chat. They are asking about your outlook on international operations and also foreign exchange rates and volatility abroad. Well, regarding the second half of your question, we have no idea, right? Should I have any ideas about exchange rates, I would be working with that. Now, of course, this is a joke, but it's the truth as well. We have no foreseeability of that. What we can do is to have broader geographical outreach, so that we're not too exposed to specific effects. Having said that, we have natural hedging.
Our expenses, but not only our expenses, but our COGS, our costs, and international expenditures are usually based on the same currency. So the client acquisition cost and the transfer cost, especially for a subscription business, is always a percentage of revenue, and it's, and it uses local currency. So whenever we have currency exchange fluctuations, of course, that this has an impact on our top line, but we don't get distortions in our margins. And it's, you know, it's the game that we're playing. It's what happens when you work in emerging markets. Now, if we're to talk about trends, we're slightly more optimistic. As I was saying, in 2023, we had the perfect storm of issues. 2024 is already slightly better than 2023.
This quarter was slightly better than the last quarter of last year, not only for Bemobi in Brazil, but also internationally, and we see even better results in Q2. Can we say that this is a medium to long-term trend?
No, I would be cautious before saying that. But abroad, in the medium run, we believe that we have an opportunity to take payments into some of these countries. We do not believe in rolling out payments to 40 countries. We're betting a lot more on deep integration of payment solutions in some countries. We want big countries and a low-touch strategies instead of being in 50 countries. And to be clear, we don't expect this to be a growth driver for 2024. We believe we have a huge market in Brazil, and we only bite a small part of it.
So this is a seed that we're planting so that in 2025 and 2026, we're able to use this as a growth engine. So we won't have international growth this year, given our design, given our focus.
Great, we have time for one more question. This one is related to the outlook of the EBITDA expansion and the behavior of our margin. All right. We probably won't have much fluctuation with our margin, but let me set expectations, too. In some of the payment markets that we're looking at, if you want to have a more thorough scope, and if you want to simplify your client's life, then it may be worth it to accept low-value business, because we're gonna be tackling problems end-to-end, as an end-to-end solution.
In the short term, this has impacts on our margin, but should we be successful in that, this will represent a more accelerated expansion of revenue in exchange for a slightly smaller margin. When we look at the EBITDA, which I believe is the line that matters the most, even though we have lower contribution margins, then we'll have the same operating leverage that we have right now. We believe that since we're doing similar things, meaning that we're basically expanding the business model that we're structuring, then we should have good operating scalability. In the medium term, we should see a growth in the percentage of our EBITDA. As I was saying earlier, we believe that our EBITDA will grow slightly more than our revenue. We won't go even further because to embrace the opportunities that we have ahead of us, we need to make investments.
We need to have everything in order. So we won't expand our EBITDA as much, but we believe that this is a very broad market, and I think this is a very appropriate trade-off. So within three years, we could have a very good growth in EBITDA. In the short term, we're gonna be cautious because we want to be prepared. We want to have everything in order to then preserve our operating scale, which we can only do through automation and platform. Otherwise, we'd have to hire more people to a much higher number than what we want to have. Nicholas?
Great. We've had 40 minutes, and I think we can finish this earnings release presentation. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for being with Bemobi, and let's go forward.
We have every sign that 2024 will be significantly better than 2023, and let's take it one step at a time. We have a lot of work to do. Thank you.
Thank you. Have a good day.