We're now starting our earnings release presentation. Good morning. Welcome to another earnings release presentation by Bemobi. Today, we'll be talking about the fourth quarter of 2023 and the whole year of 2023. My name is Nicholas. I am an IR, IR director or officer, and we have our CEO, Pedro Ripper, André Veloso, our CFO, and João Stricker, our VP for operations in Brazil and Latam. This session is being recorded, and everyone will be on listen-only mode during the conference, but they will also be able to see the speakers and see the presentation. We also have simultaneous interpreting available to everyone. Please go to the interpretation button at the bottom right of your screen, then choose your language. Let me now switch to English to help those who do not speak Portuguese.
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 will hold a question and answer session. Now I switch back to Portuguese.
Right after our initial presentation, we'll have a Q&A session only for analysts and investors. You'll see further instructions on how to be a part of it later in the session. Before we move forward, we'd like to clarify that any forward-looking statements regarding business perspectives, forecasts, operating targets, and financial targets are based on beliefs and assumptions by our business, as well as on the information that is currently available to us. Of course, this entails risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because it depends on future events which may or may not happen. Investors must understand that overall economic industry conditions and other operating factors could have a significant impact on our performance, which could lead to significantly different outcomes. Now, let me hand it over to Mr. Pedro Ripper, who will be talking about our results. Thank you.
Good morning, Pedro. Good morning. Thank you for this introduction.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here with Bemobi. As Nicholas was saying, today, we'll be focusing a bit more on the last quarter of the fiscal year of 2023. However, we will also give you an overview of 2023. Since we implemented big changes in the way we offer services and in our focus, I'm going to spend five-10 minutes talking about what we're betting on and what we've been betting on for the past year. We've grown in scale, and I'm going to give you a forward-looking perspective on where we've been investing our energy. We saw this slide last year. This is a bit of our history, but I would like to showcase the last step.
Based on an acquisition that we had right after the IPO, we started working with a payment solution in our biggest vertical, our most traditional vertical, which is telecommunications. We saw that this combination of software and engagement with end customers in digital channels and payments would bring us a lot of competitive advantages and would unlock a lot of value. So we started working on the idea that maybe we could apply this to other industries beyond telecommunications. So we expanded this to utilities, and then we went into another segment in telecommunications with access providers. In a way, our biggest change or our biggest evolution in 2023, which we want to double down in 2024, is precisely this focus, this current obsession on improving the payment journey using payment software.
So this is the highlight of how our stance has evolved in the last 1.5 years and also in the last three years. From a macro perspective, we are still a B to B to C business. We work with big corporations. We're gonna break it down, and we're gonna see a breakdown between large enterprises, which are partners and clients, over BRL 1 billion per year. Then we have average-sized businesses, but our business, our essence, is still B to B to C, even though we're getting ready to enjoy a long tail. We always offer software with digital channels, with some services. For example, payment solutions has been a highlight as our biggest solution. Secondly, we can see that we have a competitive edge in something else, and we see a big opportunity here. Namely, I'm talking about what we call basic recurring services.
This is a big segment. It is a bit under BRL 1 trillion per year in Brazil. This is a very analog industry, and it still relies on traditional payment methods, like the payment slip in Brazil or the boleto. We can think about education and healthcare, in addition to telecommunications and utilities here. We are also very focused on emerging markets because of how these countries work. We're now starting to see that some of the things we do could also be applied or transferred to more mature countries. When we think about our offerings, we still don't have healthcare here because we are just getting started, and we don't have clients in operation yet, even though we expect to do. But here we see four different tracks.
Some of these offerings are offered in basically every sector, for example, software as a service and telecommunications, and then we have education and finance, and soon we're gonna have healthcare. This is the thing that may have been the one that most accelerated in 2023, and we expect to see a lot of acceleration in the second half of 2024, too, which is going to put us on track for a very good acceleration in 2025. I'm talking about the combination of these two platforms. This has to do with added value for our customers and integrated payments. This applies to all these four segments. In a way, we combine two platforms, and I'm going to kind of zoom into these two platforms.
As I was saying, this was born for the telecommunications industry, but in the past year, we were able to see what we needed to change in these platforms to then multiply them to recurring services or parallel segments. But what these platforms share in common is the type of problem that we're trying to address for these large corporations. Overall, the value proposition here is the sum of three things that oftentimes go in different directions. Whenever we have recurring services, businesses struggle when reducing delinquency. They also want to reduce their need for working capital, and oftentimes they struggle with their churn. They don't struggle as much with some segments, for example, utilities, but it's very applicable to telecommunications or school, because for telecommunications and education, you have a lot of churning.
So another value proposition is to improve the payment journey and to make it easier for people to pay, then you can reduce churn. Also, we're able to do that without increasing payment costs for people. So you increase this leverage, and you offset it by improving your costs. We're trying to strike balance. We don't want to increase costs for businesses, but we want to improve their indicators. Finally, we want to do this without creating more friction between clients and their customers, so we can use the NPS score to measure that. This is how we've been approaching this market, and we've been measuring our success in a way through the mixture of these three variables. So we're using technology and managed services.
We offer our software, but especially for large customers, we work with them in a partnership with these clients to look for these three items in efficiency gains. We recently chose the name Omni Engage. If you've known Bemobi for a long time, this is what they call Loop in telecommunications. As we transfer this to other industries, we decided to use the name Omni Engage. We want to offer an omni-channel journey. We want clients to be able to have relationships with these big businesses through the channels that make sense to them. This is both physical and digital.
I say that it's physical because sometimes we may have a Smart POS with an embedded application, and in this case, maybe a clerk is gonna be using that, or maybe a clerk at a telecommunications shop is gonna be using that, or maybe at the point of sale or at a school. But we also have many digital channels, and in these channels we may have apps or relationship channels, which we have made vertical here. The acquisitions that we had at the end of last year and Nweb, for example, are helpful for that. For example, we have the Agenda Edu, which is a very good app for educational purposes. We also have another app, which is the one that most ISPs use in Brazil. And with bigger companies, we use these existing apps. So these are some of our solutions.
We're also able to segment the types of clients by geography, by type of plan, and we can offer slightly different offerings according to slightly different needs. This is what many businesses look for, and we thought that it would make sense to offer this for payment solutions. We also had rebranding for a platform that we've been developing for a long time. Initially, we focused a lot on phone carriers, but as we expanded to several industries, we noticed that two things were a highlight when it came to Bemobi, vis-à-vis other players in this industry.... We were able to create a model that is very focused on recurring services. There's certain flexibility in payment modes. There's also the possibility of smarter recurrence payments, especially based on a combination of credit card and the Pix electronic transfer.
As I was saying earlier, historically speaking, in this segment, people would use direct debit or payment slips, which would represent 95% of payments in this industry. However, we believe that as we have better penetration for credit cards in Brazil, which is close to 75% for the economically active population, and with the Pix electronic transfer in Brazil, then we have better formats when it comes to client experience, customer experience, and recurrence. We believe that by combining these two types of payments, we can replace payment slips and direct debit. Bemobi has been betting a lot on this transition, and the name of this platform is OmniPay. Now, based on these two things, we have two main bets. These are two hypotheses that we have already proven that are right, and now our challenge is executing it and then scaling it up.
In the second half of the year, we'll be able to have a session with investors to quantify these bets, but let me give you an overview. Two of them are not news. We have a very mature telecommunication business, where we work with digital top-ups and recurring plans. We're focusing on payment, too, and on delinquency. We're the main partner for the biggest carriers in Brazil, and as these services become digital, we can grow with our partners. Our second hypothesis, which is no longer a hypothesis, which has been proven, is that in the utilities segment, we have a lot of adherence to what we offer. We have two operational clients, Energisa and Equatorial, and we have expanded into every operating area for them, and we have two other big groups with which we already have contracts, and we're gonna go into operations with them literally this week.
We have a very strong pipeline and a very long pipeline to reach new distributors. We just need to figure out whether we have a good fit between our offerings and what they need. I believe so. So we need to fulfill our value proposition of working on the working capital, reducing delinquency, increasing customer satisfaction, and not increasing costs for our clients. Now, meanwhile, we're also working on other bets that we believe are gonna be really important for Bemobi's growth, especially to increase our target addressable market. We want to expand telecommunications to abroad, to outside of Brazil. In the first half of the year, we should start a project with Claro in Colombia. We've been working on it for over a year. It's gonna be our first telecommunication project outside of Brazil. We also have work with 7 AZ.
We spent the last months integrating our payment solution with their SaaS solution at 7AZ. Our first clients are starting to enjoy it now, this month. This is a long tail, but it's a very large market. We're excited. We're gonna have a better perspective on how much they enjoy this offering in the next five to six months. Now, in utilities, we want to figure out large utilities, and we want to understand whether or not these offerings would be interesting abroad. We're trying to tackle Chile and Colombia. We're testing the adherence of this offering in these countries. This would be a new route of growth for a sector that has already been vetted. Our third bet has to do- or actually, our fourth bet has to do with education. In education, we have three subgroups.
We have big educational groups for elementary school, and for these, we knew that by acquiring Agenda Edu, we would lead everything related to payments and the engagement software of the Salta group, which is a big group for private education in Brazil. We're also working with other groups, and we'll be able to mention their names soon. Then we have a long tail for medium and small schools. This has to do with our integrated solution for payment. And for this long tail, we're probably going to start operations at the end of the second quarter or beginning of the third quarter of 2024. And we're also working with large private universities in higher education. This is way more consolidated with many companies that have been through an IPO.
Finally, our last bet in healthcare is that we believe that in basic services, recurring healthcare services, meaning insurance, is a critical service, especially when it comes to delinquency. There's also the aspect of it being a recurring service. We're betting on this industry, and we want to change our platform to be able to cater to them. So these are our bets. As we have quarterly results meetings, we're gonna report back on how much progress we're making with each one of them. And as I was saying, towards the end of the year, we're gonna show numbers, and we're gonna have a better overview of how these markets are maturing. This is an overview of our active countries. We just added Serbia and Bulgaria. We're increasing the number of clients as we have a new segmentation or a new targeting of other partners.
As I was saying, enterprise clients have over BRL 1 billion in revenue, and SMBs are more small than medium in this case, but we work with more medium-sized companies. We have 197. When we talk about Q1, you're gonna see a number of schools, and this is a reflection of the new industry we've gone into. Now, as Neoenergia and Enel start going into operations with us, then we'll be working with seven of the top 10 largest recurring service or utility companies in Brazil. We have most of these as our partners out of the 30 biggest, and we're gonna see our leading indicators. And these indicators show us our indications for growth six-12 months ahead, including our TPV, because oftentimes we see results between four to six months, and then you have a ramp up.
So as we have these new clients, we're able to have better foreseeability of the waves of revenue that are going to be connected to the new clients joining our base. When we look at 2023 as a whole, and as we break it down by offering, in 2023, in the enterprise segment, we added two new partners, Enel and Neoenergia. However, they are actually going to generate revenue for us in Q2 and Q3. So we're gonna see growth here from organic customers. And we're gonna see some payment clients from the world of ISPs. This is where we expect a lot of acceleration in the number of clients in the next quarters. Now, hand in hand with this indicator, since we coupled the software solutions and the payment solutions, we have 245 new SaaS clients.
For medium-sized clients, usually, SaaS comes first, and then we upsell the payment solution. So we have another 48 SaaS clients for the enterprise segment, and this is for the whole of 2023, and 197 ISPs that came from the acquisition of 7AZ. For microfinance, we had another three, and for digital subscriptions, we had - we have another three. When we go from the B2B indicators, and we look at physical indicators, what we see in payments is acceleration. So we went from 1.5-1.8. I'm going to show you a slide, and Oi has always been a very big partner, and by excluding them, we had a 22% growth year-over-year for TPV. For SaaS, we had 6%. For microfinance, we had 8% of growth.
This may not be surprising to you, but in 2023, we had a very challenging year. The fourth quarter was not easy as well. But the good news is that we were able to reverse our trend. We had three consecutive quarters where we had a decrease in the number of user-paid subscriptions. We believe that Q3 was the valley, was the lowest point in this process. This was a mix of weak performance in our international operations because of a number of causes, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, among others, and also Oi, because Oi was one of our biggest partners in this segment. But for Q4, we see a slight recovery. On the same slide, we can reflect that Oi had a lot of impact on this. Our TPV without Oi would be BRL 1.3.
So we had very specific growth when we take a year-on-year perspective. And for subscriptions, Oi was major, both for Q4 and Q1. But as I was saying, we can't attribute all of this to Oi. We actually didn't have good performance in 2023 in our operations in this segment, especially for Latin America, or especially outside of Latin America. When it comes to our net income, we always try and look at these numbers as close to numbers, but we also try to normalize them. To your left, you see the fourth quarter. Once again, our basket had a BRL 1.2 million negative effect. We also had significant impact from Oi at BRL 7.1 million. For Q3, the very same impact was BRL 11.3 million or BRL 11.7 million, so we see that the impact coming from Oi is going down.
I don't wanna offer any guidance, but we should expect something below 4 for Q1. So we're close to turning this page. This is gonna be less significant than it was in 2023. So we are seeing the end of this road. When we look at consolidated numbers, we see significant impact from Oi. Oi was our biggest partner for many years, and then it became our second biggest partner. We also saw changes in the way we price revenue, but this was the biggest concentration we had with this client. So its sole effect was almost BRL 40 million in the year, and our margin was really concentrated here. So we still had a -3% quarter-over-quarter. For the whole year, we also had a 3% retraction year-over-year.
As we normalize this, as we absorb this, we see that we would have grown 7% if it wasn't for these effects. Now, here we see our net revenue with no adjustments whatsoever. We also have two traditional breakdowns that we usually share. In Brazil, we were reasonably stable. We had a little bit of growth in international operations. We had good performance for payments in Brazil, so this offset things. Brazil grew a little bit more than our international operation. And when we break it down by family of service, we see that payments is our biggest business area, especially when payments are connected to software solutions to engagement. There's a lot of synergy here, but we're getting to almost 60% of our revenue based on these two things. Digital subscription services is significant. It's 29%. We're still gonna dedicate a lot of energy to this.
However, as we were saying, even though we can have a lot of growth here, we believe that we have a bigger addressable market with more accelerated growth as we combine payment and software. This is why we have been investing more energy here, and our last acquisitions were very focused on enabling us to go into these sectors. Now, I will hand it over to André, and André will be talking about our margin and our cash generation. Please go ahead, André.
Hi, good morning, Pedro. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about our results. As Pedro was saying, 2023 was very challenging for us. It was an unusual year. For the first time in 15 years, we didn't have revenue growth. Of course, this had an impact on other P&L lines, especially when we look at the absolute numbers.
So our management had to work hard to try and mitigate the impact of the non-growth in revenue. We had to look for efficiency gains. We need to control expenditure overall. So in this quarter, we were able to expand relative margins across the board, basically. Our biggest highlight was the net income, as we're gonna see in a bit. This is gonna explain what I'm gonna show to you. With our gross margin, we had around 4%. This has to do with our acquisition cost, so -4%. We also had gains in licensing. When we look at yearly numbers, we had -1% because of the performance of our revenue. In this case, we were able to expand our relative margin at 1.2 or 2 percentage points. In OPEX, we worked on many different things.
We worked on employees, we reorganized our employees, we tried to mitigate the impact of collective bargaining agreements, and our expenditure is in line with our performance this year. In technology, we also promoted a number of renegotiations and consolidation of contracts, trying to look for efficiency... So in our results, in our quarterly results, we had 5% under 2022, year-over-year, and we were slightly under when we have a yearly perspective. And even though total numbers show a decrease in revenue, we have a slight expansion of the relative margin because of the initiatives that we deployed. Moving on to the next slide, where we see net income, and this is our biggest highlight for this quarter.
We see that as we exclude the impact from our swap operations, we were able to increase income by around 37% compared to the same time in 2022. This is the result of less taxes on income, and Interest on Equity, which we had to declare or we had to recognize at the end of last year. So much of it is in the previous year. Also, after the approval and confirmation during a meeting at the end of April, we're gonna see in the second quarter of 2024, a second wave of reduction of the tax rate because of the reduction of this expenditure. So not only for this quarter, but for the whole year. When it comes to income, the impact of the swap operations was positive.
For the yearly results, we see a 6% increase in income, and we get to BRL 102 million. To your right, you see our operational cash flow. In this quarter, we had another quarter of solid cash generation. So both for the quarter and for the year, we had an impact because of the procurement of POSs that have been used for our expansion in utilities. So for the quarter, this had an impact of BRL 1.3 million, and around twice as much in the yearly vision. Without this, we would have also improved the relative cash generation compared to 2022. Next, we see our cash position. In the fourth quarter of 2023, of course, we had the impact of non-recurring disbursements. Most of these come from the two acquisitions that we had at the end of that year.
This represents almost BRL 40 million. We also had adjustments in the rollout of our swap agreements, and also costs related to the buyback operations. But when we look at our operating cash, we see high levels. Our consolidated working capital is a negative figure, but this has been impacted by the use of our own capital for the utility, and I'll be talking about this later. This leads us to BRL 570 million for our recurrent cash position. But if we exclude the BRL 61 million one-off, then we have BRL 508 million in our cash position. Should we take into account the impact of the working capital that we used for the utility operation, then we'd have a different number.
It's also important to notice that here we pay our partners 30 days after completing a sale, and Bemobi has a flow of receivables with the acquirer of credit cards. So we have been prioritizing our capital allocation, we're and we're trying to improve our capital structure through better profitability of our cash compared to other applications that have no risk and that are available to us right now. But we also have financing options available to us, whether through banks or other tools like FIDC. So in the future, if we reach the conclusion that we need to stop this operation, then we can gradually rebuild this cash, and it would be our own cash position, our own cash flow. So this is what I wanted to share regarding financial results. Thank you, and I hand it back to you, Pedro.
Wonderful, André. All right.
Before we wrap it up and go to the Q&A, let me give you an overview of 2023. As André was saying, 2023 was unusual. Since I joined Bemobi, we had two years where we had a slight decrease, maybe 6% or 7%, but for every other year, we grew both in revenue and the bottom line. I just want to share this information. You know, past results are not necessarily an indicator of future results, but this goes to show that we have had consistency. So we do believe that 2023 was unusual. It was atypical, because many things happened during 2023.... This includes a war, and this includes losing a big client we've been working for many years. Now, having said that, having said that, we're doing our homework, and we're making our strategy more mature.
We've been working with payments and software for three years, but now we've taken a quantum leap. We're understanding a niche, we're understanding our competitive edge. This is a big segment, and if we're able to go abroad with this, then this is going to become a multi-billion market. So I believe this may have been the first big highlight. We had software, we have telecommunications, and we have other sectors. So we did a lot in 2023, and we have a very good position for 2024 onwards. In addition to telecommunications, we have something that is very important here because we're now having more variety. We usually worked a lot in telecommunications.
We had a lot of experience in this industry, but with new talents and by understanding this sector a bit better, we were able to figure out that what we did could be multiplied to other sector. This is very promising, 'cause this increases the size of our addressable market. Even though we're just getting started with other segments, by combining these things, we see a lot of potential. We see our TPV, which is an indicator of our transactions, but also the revenue that comes from this business. This is the first indicator that these two bets have good potential. These are the qualitative and quantitative highlights of 2023. I don't want to repeat myself, but we had external factors that made us take steps laterally and had an impact on our revenue.
As André was saying, we were working hard on investing on our energy, on what we needed, but more than cutting costs, we reallocated many of our resources. We would have been able to cut even more costs if we weren't betting as much on our payment and software solution, but we were preparing our platform and our systems to enable the growth that we want to find when we think about 2024, 2025, and later. As things work out, we need to increase costs to capture more market, and we're gonna do that. But in 2023, we thought that we had to try and minimize the impact of the bottom line, and we ended up having positive numbers. As André was saying, we are still looking at M&As. Of course, with M&As, there's a trend of being more and more connected to new systems.
So we have software businesses and vertical payments. Of course, there's more engagement here. Regardless of their size, whether they're small, medium-sized, or large, we still believe that a buyback and payment of interest on equity and other things are important for our cash flow, because we're gonna have a surplus of cash vis-à-vis our M&As, which is still our priority. And finally, I think this is the end of a cycle. As I was saying, we're nearing the end of the impacts from the end of Oi. The impact will be 40% smaller than what it was in the fourth quarter of 2023.
We see that with the new pipeline, with the new clients and the new bets we have, these are probably going to become our clients in Q1 and Q2, and we're gonna see TPV and revenue from them in a more relevant way in Q3 and Q4. By combining these things, we're probably gonna go back to a more sustainable growth cycle, a healthier growth cycle. We're probably going to leave 2024 with more acceleration, and we're gonna have a better 2025. We're still talking about the fourth quarter of 2023 regarding recurring businesses and a long life cycle, but we can still see a bit more ahead of us, and we can understand how positive or negative trends are going to have an impact on our business in the near future.
Now, let me stop sharing the presentation, and we're going to start our Q&A. Nicholas?
Yes. Should you have any questions, please raise your hand. There's a button called Raise Hand to your right. We're gonna enable you to start your mic, or you can send us written questions through the Q&A button. We have some people who have raised their hands, so let me enable Bernardo for his question.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Good morning, Pedro. Good morning, André and Nicholas.... Good morning, Bemobi team. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions, actually. Let me talk about the vertical of digital subscriptions. This segment faced a lot of compression throughout the year because you lost the customer base from Oi. And this business looks mature in Brazil, and internationally, the company has been struggling to grow.
When I look at this tougher context, I wonder if this is a legacy business for you, because right now it looks like you're pivoting Bemobi so that Bemobi becomes more of a solutions or a software solutions company for payments. So my question is: What's the outlook for this segment? What kind of growth rate should we expect from this business? And do you still see any relevant leverages of growth, maybe in the international operations? Now, my second question is regarding payments. You're now joining other industries, other verticals, education, healthcare in the future, and these are new markets for Bemobi, just like utilities was. So I would love to explore your lessons learned. What are the similarities with the traditional telecommunications market? And which are adjustments that you may need for products and for strategy in the go-to-market?
Would you like to share any adjustments that you still need to make to make sure that you grow in these new verticals? Thank you.
Wonderful, Bernardo. We could spend half an hour talking about each one of these items, but I promise that I'll be brief. Bernardo, regarding the first question, regarding digital subscriptions, we're not ready to call digital subscriptions a legacy operation. Let me tell you why. I think this is a mature operation, not a legacy operation, because we are still leaders in this segment. And in Brazil, we have big opportunities for growth. We have opportunities. You know, this product was born focused on prepaid plans, and we still haven't been able to sell this product to higher income segments, even though we did make progress. However, abroad, we had a very unusual year, as I was saying. Lots and lots of things were happening.
So I believe we still have a shot. We see indications that we are still going to bring a high single-digit growth here. I don't think it's a double-digit growth business consistently, but it's, I think it's a high single-digit growth business. And, you know, life was tougher in the last year, and I'm speaking specifically from the international standpoint. So since we're talking about a high single digit, as we talk about capital allocation in a broad sense, not only financial capital, but also human capital, it is only natural that a larger chunk of our energy goes to areas where we believe we can get high double-digit growth as we get it right. So we know how to do it really well. It's really profitable when we do it well.
We've been doing it for 9-10 years, and this is a business that is surprising to us. Sometimes it proves to be more resilient than what we'd expect. We've been through so many ups and downs. Let me give you an example. In Q4, we just shared numbers that we actually had a slightly better result than what we expected. So every once in a while, it's positively surprising to us. As I was saying, we already made an investment in our geographical footprint, so the maintenance cost is really low. So yes, we're going to start, or actually, we are going to continue betting on it. But I'm always careful. It's unlikely that in the medium term, this is going to increase its percentage too much compared to the other opportunities of growth. Would you like to say anything, João?
No, not necessarily.
I would just like to say that as Pedro was saying, Brazil is really mature, but in Latin America, which sometimes we look at separately from the other international operations, we still have more room for growth, especially because of the penetration that we've been seeing from our integration with Tiaxa. So there is relevance in Latin America. We enjoy a space there, and there's still opportunity. So I think we have room for growth in Latam in a significant way. As Pedro was saying, compared to other businesses, I don't think this is going to gain in the mix of offerings, but it's gonna grow. Was I able to answer your first question, Bernardo?
Yes, Pedro. So in this segment, when we think about Brazil and Latam, according to you, we could expect a mid or a low to mid-digit growth or a single-digit growth.
And maybe with Brazil and international, we can talk about a high single digit, right?
Well, with LATAM ex Brazil, low double digit or high single digit. And for Brazil, a high single digit. But the blend of it all is that we're gonna go from 5%-10%. I think we can still grow like that for a few years in this business with good profitability. Good, and this is even similar to what you had before the IPO, so your structure doesn't change a lot. And in this sense, I agree with you, it doesn't make sense to call it legacy. It's a mature business with lower growth, but with residual growth that you can capture. Exactly. If we saw a gradual reduction of 5%-10%, then we could call it legacy, but that's not the case.
And again, we've gotten our assessments wrong many times, and we are positively surprised to see that oftentimes we have a longer cycle for this. So it doesn't make sense to withdraw our attention from this business prematurely, because we can still have joys and we can still have growth from it. Regarding our second question, I think it's really interesting. And I'm gonna give you a short answer, but we could have a long conversation about it. We've had many learnings. If you think about telecommunications, telecommunications was very competitive. There's many plans. We have a reasonably sophisticated market. We had three big carriers, now you have three. We had four, now we have three, but it's very dynamic, and clients can compare offerings. We also have 100% recurring revenue, which is turning into flat rates.
This was a sector very focused on bills and payment slips, but as changes happen, we can see that we were able to forge our know-how, our knowledge on how to work with credit cards and the Pix electronic transfer, and how this has an impact on such and such. For telecommunications, we have knowledge on how to couple together payment methods, channels, and our knowledge about this industry to do it really well. Our question is, how much does this apply to sectors that have nothing to do with this sector? What we've seen is that for different reasons, each of these sectors is starting to evolve and mature and go beyond what telecommunications is. For example, with utilities, with energy, the weight of working capital and churn and bad debt is different for each one of them.
For example, churn in electricity is not a point of concern because you kind of have monopolies. We were able to work well with this in telecommunications, and we're now adjusting the weight of the pain points for each client. However, with education, things are different. In this case, dropouts or churn is really tough for them, especially at later years in their school life. Working capital is also critical, so if you have a family that is not paying for their tuition, you can't expel the student at the middle of the year. You have to wait until the end of the year, so this creates a lot of pressure for the working capital. And of course, delinquency is not as high at the end of this period, but you have to make up for a hole in your cash flow at the middle of the period.
So what I mean by this is that the essence of what we do is really similar, but the pain points change. So we have to adapt both our approach and our sales pitch. As we understand their pain points, then we can focus a bit more on them. So 70% of what we had was highly applicable to what we're doing now. Some of the M&As that we had were more related to digital engagement layers, and not payments. For example, see the list of 7AZ. They had a software layer with service for schools and for ISPs. And what we've seen is another specificity. I don't wanna get too technical, but when we talk about credit cards, sometimes the ticket is really high. So sometimes for a medical school, they pay 10,000 BRL, and you wanna use the credit card.
This is just a practical example, but as we dive into these industries, we understand that there are specific requirements and expectations. But the good news is that the essence of what we did for telecommunications is really applicable to these sectors. And as they become more competitive, they actually start struggling with the same things that our telecommunications partners had to solve. So it's almost as if we were already had been exposed to the realities that these new industries are now having to deal with. We also have sophisticated clients. We have highly consolidated, listed companies. In healthcare, they are two steps behind. So Bernardo, I would say that we are at a curve. We're learning a lot.
By the way, with the M&As we have, we had a bit of acqui-hire, and this really accelerated our curve to understand these players, to understand their language and their pain points and who decision makers are. So even though these were small deals, if we look at more traditional metrics for the top line, these were actually very important deals to help us accelerate our entrance into very big markets, either to understand them or to use other software features, because instead of, you know, taking a year to develop it, we can go with it, go with what they already had. We can think about other segments that go beyond the four segments that we mentioned here. Of course, these four segments are going to be the bulk of our efforts in 2024, but I wouldn't be surprised if throughout 2024, we announced other segments, too.
We're still gonna have the same essence as far as our value proposition goes, but we could expand. I just want to set this expectation correctly. We have many bets here. I think it is important to be on the same page regarding the fact that we still need to get it right with these new segments. As we have new clients, we're gonna tell the market this is gonna be a good first indicator, and as we go into operations, we're also gonna share figures regarding our first revenues and our performance. With this information, I think we'll be able to figure out how big these markets are and how much we're gonna be able to turn that into results, and this is going to lead to more ambition and optimism. What I could tell you in a more qualitative way is that we are excited.
Of course, our job is to be excited, but we've seen very good response from the first six months of conversations and commercial opportunities with these segments.
Wonderful, Pedro. Thank you.
Thank you, Stricker. Have a good day.
You, too.
I'm going to unmute Christian. Christian, please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hi, Christian. Hi, Pedro. How's it going? Hi, André. Hi, Nicholas. Thank you for taking my question. Very quickly, Pedro, you were talking about the new options in the utilities sector. You mentioned projects abroad. My question was actually similar to the one you answered, but I would love to hear more about your project and your pipeline. I think it's a very positive surprise that this project is running abroad, and I would love more information on your outlook for this business from now on.
I know this is one of the bets you have. So this is my first question. My second question is related to the revenue mix, which has been changing a lot. And this has to do with more investments to capture opportunities. You need to understand what your margin is gonna look like in the future. We need to understand it.
Perfect, Christian. Regarding what I answered to Bernardo, let me zoom in to a few things that you were highlighting here. I wanna be really careful here, but with international operations, the challenge that we face is basically the same challenges that we face in Brazil, so we're very comfortable with that. It's not that we have specific problems in Brazil. When you talk about churn or working capital, especially in utilities and telecommunications, where we've made more progress, we have the same challenges abroad.
Let me tell you why I'm being careful. In every country, you have a very unique payment ecosystem. Your tools are not the same, and your customer data is not the same. For instance, in Brazil, we have a very sophisticated country when it comes to payment methods. Brazil is a case study, which is great, because we know that we are equipped to be a global player. However, when you think about the penetration of credit card, Brazil has twice as much penetration compared to the second biggest in Latin America. In Colombia and Mexico, you have Nubank and other players trying to change this, but Brazil is far ahead compared to the countries in Latin America. Also, we had the Pix electronic transfer. Other countries are also looking for other projects for this.
But I'm saying this because even though we have problems in common, and even though the type of solution that we offer is agnostic, we have specificities in each country. So we can't just say that if we get a project there, it's going to perform as well as it did here. Now, having said that, we believe it's worth the effort to go to these countries and work with two or three clients, because it's a calculated cost to figure that country out. So yes, we have two big clients. One of them is going into deployment, a telecommunications in Colombia, and we have another one in Chile, Chile. So we decided to go for it. We're gonna be more operational in the second half of the year, and then we're gonna make a decision. It's gonna be like a poker play. Are we going to go all in?
Are we going to double our bet?... Or are we going to take things slow and decide to focus more in Brazil? Because the truth is that Brazil already has the ideal circumstances. It is going to happen abroad, for sure, but we don't wanna be too ahead of the curve. We don't wanna be too early there, and we don't wanna be too late as well, because then the competition could have won the industry over. This is gonna happen, but we wanna do it at the right time, because in Brazil, everything is ready for us. So yes, the international market looks promising. We just want to be cautious and responsible, so we wanna work with a couple of clients to figure things out.
Regarding our margin, I believe that we have the right conditions to have comparable margins, maybe slightly better than this year when it comes to the EBITDA. But I want you to understand our rationale as the managers of this company. If we believe that we're able to really speed up our growth, and then we're gonna increase our fixed cost and worsen our margin temporarily, then we're willing to do that, because we believe that in the medium run, we're gonna generate a lot more value. Right now, this is not what we're gonna do. I want to see one of these bets to turn out the numbers that we expect to see, and if this happens, then our level of confidence is gonna go up, and then this would be a good bet.
But I would say that the trend is not to improve our margin compared to what we have today. So yes, if we had to let go of one, two , or 3% in our EBITDA, percentage-wise, to accelerate more and get better results in the medium run, then I think it's smart to do it. We're gonna do it transparently if we do so, but we want to think about the long term, even if sometimes for that, we need to make more investments in the short term. In our business, we have a very good capital structure with high margins, so we can have the luxury of doing that without stressing our business too much. Christian, was I able to understand you and answer your question?
Yes, Pedro, very clearly. Thank you. Thank you. Nicholas, how are we doing on time?
Yes, I think we're actually over our time, but I think I can put together all the questions we have in the chat, and we can end there. Overall, Pedro, in the chat, we see questions regarding how we're gonna use our cash. Is it for M&As, or should we expect the results that we had this year? They're also asking about income and whether this is sustainable for next year. All right. I'm gonna repeat what André was saying. We still believe that M&As are a great tool to do things. You may have noticed that we broadened our repertoire. We had companies with a more traditional model of revenue and EBITDA, but we had M&As that were different, more related to acqui-hire. This is different from previous years. I think both possibilities are valid.
However, if we go into a vertical and we find a medium-sized player to skip some steps, then we're gonna do it. We're gonna consider this allocation of capital from our cash position. Now, if we don't have that option, then we believe that dividends or equity on interest are great. We went way beyond the minimum dividends that we had to distribute. So if we're still generating good cash and we don't have as many M&A opportunities, then we're gonna keep on doing that. We may have a good dividend yield. Regarding our third point, and this is kind of related to the question that Christian was asking. I don't see a significant swing in our margin. On the contrary, maybe we're gonna grow our income more than our revenue.
What matters the most here is that if we feel like one of those bets is becoming more concrete and that we need to accelerate growth, then we're gonna do that, and we're gonna be transparent. You're gonna know it for sure. You're not gonna be surprised regarding how our cash is allocated for our organic growth. And finally, in utility, we see a lateral benefit. We have good internal cash flow. We hadn't necessarily planned for it, but there was some pressure. So this takes the pressure off. I think we need to keep having foreseeability. M&A is our priorities, and of course, I skipped something important. While we have the number of EBITDA cash generation that we have now, we believe that share buyback is a good investment for us.
Now, if these new bets change and we have new prices, then we can reassess this stance in the future. But right now, we are very comfortable with the idea that share buyback is a great type of capital allocation. So we have a range of opportunities. M&As are still our priority, then share buyback, then dividend yield through equity on interest or not. Well, Nicholas, I think our time's over, right? Yes, I think you are able to answer it thoroughly, Pedro. So this is the end of this earnings release presentation. Thank you for being here, and have a great day. Wonderful. Enjoy the rest of your day.