Good evening everyone. Welcome to Bemobi's results to announce the results of quarter one 2022. My name is Pedro Barreto , I'm the IR and Management Director of the company. Today with us, we have Mr. Pedro Ripper, our CEO, and André Veloso, our CFO, and João Stricker, our Brazil and Latin Operations CTO. This presentation is being recorded, and all participants will listen to us during the company remarks and also view the speakers and the company presentation. All participants can also use the simultaneous translation feature. For your convenience, on the bottom bar on the right side, there's a button called Interpretation. Click on the button Interpretation and choose your preferred language. Right after the presentation, we will open for questions. We will take questions from analysts and investors, and at that time, further instructions will be given.
Before proceeding, we would like to clarify that any forward-looking statements that are made during this conference call relative to the business perspective of Bemobi, specifically projections, operational and financial targets, are based on the beliefs and assumptions of the company's management as well as information currently available. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as well as future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operational factors can affect the future performance of Bemobi and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Now I'd like to hand it over to Mr. Pedro Ripper.
Thank you, Pedro. Welcome, everyone. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here once again to announce the results of quarter one 2022. First slide, please. I always like to recap the current situation of our business. Last year, we had a major transformation through our M&As and internal innovation effort. That's why I always like to start with this quick recap. We are a B2B2C company focused predominantly in emerging countries. We work with the largest carriers in the world, and we are gradually expanding this distribution model to fintech and the utility sector as well. We have different solutions that we are adding to our portfolio. Today, we have basically four services. We have digital services, we have microfinance solutions, payment solutions, and some platforms that are sold in the SaaS model, or platform as a service.
We reach 2.6 billion users in all these emerging markets where we operate. On slide number three, we have the levers that help us grow our business. Our commercial and product efforts can be broken down in three fronts. We can sell new solutions and digital services to partners that we already work with, such as carriers and banks, and we have only one offer. We're only selling one offer to them, and we can add more offers, increasing the share of wallet. We can also expand geographically or even in the same geography with new partners, reaching new customers, which is the middle lever here. Finally, even in a market or environment where we already have partners and we already sell a solution, using digital campaigns, we can increase the penetration of the solutions that we have in the addressed market.
Those are the three levers, and each of these levers will contribute to our organic growth. Having said this, now let's look into the results themselves. From the macro perspective, we had very good news this quarter. We expanded to two new countries, always focusing in rich countries where we know the pain points of our partners and our end consumers. We just launched Taiwan and Kazakhstan, two new geographies, and we also expanded the size of our addressable market in terms of potential users to 2.6 billion. We are also increasing our number of active partnerships. We had five new launches in quarter one. We had three new launches for our subscription services, one in Kazakhstan, one in Taiwan, and one in Pakistan.
Two new countries, and we just consolidated Pakistan because we were already working with the other carriers there. We launched two new platforms. GLOO is our digital campaign platform, which is fueling the sales of all our other services. In itself, it's not a revenue-generating platform, but it is an enabler that accelerates our sales. This was an important win for us. In Thailand itself and then in Tanzania, and this is a leading indicator. Once we launch the GLOO platform in those geographies, it helps us accelerate our sales and increase our penetration in these countries. Next slide. Here we have a brief recap of our current portfolio. Our portfolio is broken down into four pillars that I went over very briefly in my first slide, with some subdivisions.
For digital subscriptions, digital subscriptions are practically where the company started, the absent SIM subscription in a limited SKU model. The second pillar combines two reasonably distinct services. In this pillar, we have what we call Nano Credit, which is our ability to provide small packages of voice, data, or Airtime advances to users that run out of Airtime. This is changing the journey of the customer, whereas we are also monetizing the relationship between these customers and their carriers. A newer pillar that we have is credit scoring solutions, where we use telecom data to provide fintechs and companies in other industries with the data-
Our third pillar is digital payments, and we call it vertical payments. Why vertical? Because we are originally-
Originally, we worked for the telecom industry, specifically for the telecom industry and telecom users. In this year is to gradually incorporate other industries in this segment. Finally, we have the platform as a service vertical. Here we basically have two types of platforms. The first one is Loop. Loop is an enabler platform. It's an enabler of the other platforms. It's not a revenue generating platform itself, but it's a digital payment platform that allows you to sell other services. The other lines are platforms that are sold in the SaaS model. This is a summary of how our revenues are subdivided. Using the same breakdown, we have two groups of indicators. We have the B2B indicators and the B2C indicators, respecting our B2B and B2C. In B2B, we measure our developments in the number of partners and contracts.
They are enablers so that we can reach end users. This is another way of showing what we saw in that previous map. The highlights here are the three partners, the three new partners, Far EasTone, Tele2, and Macrokiosk, in Taiwan. We launched two Loops that you can see in the group of platform as a service. After all this time without traveling, the B2B sales now are more high touch, different than B2C, which is purely digital. Now travel restrictions have been lifted, you're going to see new partners and channels in quarter one, and we already have some in the first quarter itself. Now following the same model, here we can see the other side of the coin, the B2C network. On top of these partner platforms, this is how we reach our end users.
We are resuming our growth after a somewhat flat period in digital subscriptions, which is a good indicator, because the quarter one is usually not our strongest quarter, but we saw a good recovery. A lot of that came from the international market outside of Brazil, particularly Africa and Southeast Asia. We had some headwinds. We had some headwinds that month. The numbers we had before the period had some effects of that headwind. Russia and Ukraine stopped the effects of the war. In microfinance, we had very expressive growth year-over-year. This is the next year of organic growth and the acquisition of Tiaxa. Because this is one of their core businesses, and this slight drop in the quarter was a seasonal effect. Our quarters usually closely follow the results of carriers.
Now they're offering credit to prepaid users, and usually quarter four is our strongest quarter. When we compare year-over-year, we had good growth in quarter one, despite the slight reduction quarter-over-quarter. Finally, the last usage indicator is digital payment. Differently from microfinance that we quantify by the number of transactions, here the attribute we use is TPV, the total payment value. We saw a great leap year-over-year, and this was basically due to the M4U integration. In the previous quarter, we already had three months of React and only two months of M4U. This growth from BRL 1.1-BRL 1.5 is a mixture of two factors.
One side of the curve is the addition of an extra month, and regardless of that, even if quarter one is seasonally weaker, we had organic growth regardless of the extra months, which is a good indicator for the start of the year. Now when we go into these indicators, we're going to start talking about the revenues, and then we're going to go to the other financial indicators. From the revenue standpoint, year-over-year, we had a 116% increase. This is a mix of organic growth and, of course, the sum of the two new companies. It's worth noting that despite these very solid numbers we had in quarter one, we had some headwinds that we had to deal with. We had a negative effect of a little less than BRL 1 million coming from the impact of the war in Ukraine.
We also had the foreign exchange impact of about BRL 2 million - BRL 3 million. No trimestre anterior a gente passa através do câmbio um pouco maior. Digo isso lembrando que como a gente é listado em reais, sempre que você tem uma desvalorização do dólar em relação ao real, isso acaba impactando o nosso resultado ou negativamente, quando você tem uma valorização negativa em relação ao real, ou o oposto, o contrário. Quando a gente olha em terms of mix de receita, a gente sempre faz duas quebras, né? Uma pra comparar o nosso processo de internacionalização e uma pra comparar o nosso processo de diversificação.
Do ponto de vista de composição internacional, o Brasil cresce um pouquinho mais em relação ao mesmo trimestre do ano passado pela primeira vez, mas basicamente pelo efeito inorgânico. A gente tem aqui um mês a mais, na verdade aqui, de M4U. Na verdade, é mais que M4U. A gente tem o crescimento inteiro do M4U, que é 100%, no Brasil. Esse é introduzido no Tiaxa, que é internacional, e isso quase que não muda o seu mix. Pra quem acompanha a gente trimestralmente, a gente perde alguns pontinhos percentuais também no trimestre do trimestre, que não tá aqui, mas primordialmente por esses dois fatores. Aqui estamos um mês a mais de M4U e uma pequena variação cambial.
Fora isso, a tendência da gente crescer mais fora do Brasil vem se mantendo, que tende a ser natural dado que tem um mercado endereçável muito subpenetrado fora do Brasil. Quando a gente vai ao ponto de vista de quebra de receita pelas 4 linhas de serviço, a gente vê que teve uma transformação dramática quando a gente olha a janela ano contra ano. Mesmo quando eu vejo o trimestre contra trimestre, a gente também ficou bem mais balanceado. Uma empresa que há 1 ano para trás era primordialmente uma empresa de assinaturas nos jogos e aplicativos, praticamente 70%-80% da gente hoje tá na casa dos 30 e poucos%, seguido de meios de pagamento na ordem de outros 30%. Os outros 30% são divididos entre business plataforma e outros micro serviços.
Isso acaba trazendo uma resiliência bastante, tirando o micro negócio. A gente tem visto isso, a gente já passou por condições muito adversas, né, desde pandemia, juros altos, inflação. Então a gente vê que esse portfólio acaba se tornando um pouco mais acíclico no seu efeito combinado. Na outra história, assim, se a gente acabou crescendo nas quatro linhas de negócios, talvez a que tenha crescido menos em comparação ao primeiro trimestre seja business plataforma, especialmente pelo efeito de uma receita grande no Q4. Com isso, eu passo a bola agora pro André, que vai explicar um pouco mais sobre os números financeiros em mais detalhes. André, é com você.
Obrigado, Pedro. Muito bom dia a todos. Vou apresentar pra vocês os demais indicadores financeiros, dando início ali com a margem bruta ajustada. Esse foi mais um trimestre onde a gente apresentou resultados financeiros bastante sólidos. A partir da receita líquida, a gente desconta ali os custos de serviços prestados, que basicamente são compostos por gastos de marketing e aquisição de novos clientes, gastos com licenciamento de software, além de chargeback e MDR e outros gastos correntes. Então, nesse conceito, conforme a Sheila falou, o EBITDA serviu pra explicar o crescimento aí de 126% na margem bruta, a adição de mais um mês de M4U, que também tem uma margem bruta um pouco mais alta que as demais linhas de business.
De modo que no primeiro trimestre de 2022, a gente alcançou a marca de BRL 95 milhões de reais, um crescimento de 126% com relação ao mesmo período do ano anterior, fazendo com que a gente tivesse uma expansão de margem da ordem de quase 3 pontos percentuais. Avançando para as demais despesas administrativas ajustadas. Nesse trimestre, essa rubrica alcançou a monta de BRL 53 milhões de reais, uma variação de 192% frente ao mesmo período do ano anterior. Ela é basicamente explicada pela consolidação do maior gasto de pessoal nesse trimestre. Com a consolidação tanto de Tiaxa quanto M4U representaram cerca de mais de 450 colaboradores no nosso time. Tanto aqui de produtos e área de tecnologia.
Com isso, fechamos o trimestre com BRL 42 milhões de EBITDA ajustado, uma expansão da ordem de 76% em relação ao mesmo trimestre do ano anterior, uma margem de 31 pontos percentuais relativa à receita líquida. Aqui vale eu comentar que agora no final do primeiro trimestre a gente já deu início a uma série de iniciativas pra captura de sinergias, onde as três primeiras foram à frente basicamente de gente e pessoal, com o objetivo de se conhecer na estrutura organizacional que tá mantendo concentrada na geografia do Brasil, uma renegociação também do nosso contrato de hosting, bem como o aproveitamento ali também da antiga sede do M4U, onde a gente aproveitou o encerramento do contrato de aluguel da antiga sede da Bemobi, migrando agora a nossa sede pra M4U.
Essas três iniciativas vão começar a ter um efeito mais robusto a partir do segundo trimestre, de modo que a tendência é que daqui pra frente a gente consiga começar a recompor a margem líquida de modo a alcançar ali algo muito próximo da antiga Bemobi, esse ponto, onde nos encontramos agora no primeiro trimestre de 2022. Avançando pro próximo slide, a gente apresenta o lucro líquido ajustado. No primeiro trimestre de 2022, esse indicador cresceu 79%, alcançando o montante de BRL 22.6 million, e uma margem sobre a receita líquida da ordem de quase 17%.
Os principais fatores que explicam essa variação são basicamente, né, uma ordem de resultados em termos nominais, um maior resultado, né, financeiro na medida em que a gente teve um caixa médio superior nesse intervalo de tempo, recursos captados com a IPO e que ainda não foram disponibilizados, com todas as iniciativas de M&A que nós temos intenção de executar. De igual modo, a operação de swap pra recompra das nossas ações no fim do ano também pôs positivamente essa rubrica no trimestre, e ela foi parcialmente compensada por uma maior despesa financeira relacionada à atualização, tanto das contas, prestações e ao pagamento dos earnouts tanto de Tiaxa quanto de M4U.
O último vetor, né, nesse caso também, é atenuando esses, né, positivos sobre o lucro líquido, fazem referência à maior despesa com depreciação e amortização, bem como o início do processo de amortização do goodwill, né, do ágio. Lembrando que o impacto negativo é a incorporação dos ativos adquiridos para os efeitos que não são bons para fins fiscais. Avançando pro formato de fluxo de caixa operacional, né. Lembrando que internamente a gente utiliza esse conceito de modo a facilitar a comparação entre as diversas unidades de negócio, né, que nós temos dentro do grupo. Ele basicamente é composto pelo EBITDA ajustado menos Capex, tá. Esse indicador, ele cresceu 86%, né, nesse mesmo intervalo de 2020, ano contábil.
Com uma expansão ali de taxa, né, de conversão desse EBITDA em caixa da ordem de 72%. Isso é tanto explicado pela elevação do EBITDA em termos nominais, quanto também uma redução relativa do Capex incorrido no período. Com isso, a gente fechou o trimestre com BRL 527 million, que é a posição de caixa, uma posição bastante sólida, pra darmos, né, continuidade de maneira que a gente temos intenção de fazer. Com isso, eu devolvo a palavra pro Pedro, que vai fazer ali suas considerações finais. Muito obrigado a todos.
Para encerrarmos, eu acho que tem alguns pontos, né? Esse é o nosso sexto trimestre dominando aqui, desde que a gente abriu capital, e ele de certa forma mostra uma coisa que eu gosto muito, que é consistência, né? Apesar de, no final das contas, o negócio sempre tem variações imprevisíveis, a gente tem conseguido manter crescimento mesmo num cenário vendo bastante adversidade, né? Guerra, pandemia, outras coisas mais. A gente estamos felizes com o resultado bastante sólido, e eu acho que a gente está em um resultado além de sólido, ele está pela primeira vez com praticamente todas as linhas de negócio apontando para direção correta, e não necessariamente vai acontecer sempre.
O papel da diversificação, que eu falei que a gente tem num cenário bom, onde apesar dos ventos contrários que a gente teve ao longo do conflito, os negócios se comportaram bem. O fato da gente ter se diversificado tem um efeito colateral, além da resiliência bom, que abriu muitas avenidas de crescimento. A gente está com muitas frentes muito interessantes, praticamente todas as 24, né, linhas de negócio que a gente tem. Algumas já levando pra outros segmentos, outros segmentos menos diversificados, mas com ofertas um pouco diferentes. A gente vê ainda que muitos dos negócios tão fora de escala. À medida que a gente vem achando a escala, muito provavelmente a gente recompra margem, como o André já indicou, então esses são processos que a gente vai fazer.
Ao mesmo tempo a gente não vai otimizar custo na medida que a gente tem que abrir mão de muitas oportunidades de crescimento. Acho que esse trade-off a gente não pode ficar fazendo. Essas coisas não, às vezes não são possíveis, né? São negociáveis, né? A gente tá bastante entusiasmados de que aquilo que a gente aprendeu a fazer, os problemas que a gente aprendeu pra resolver do cliente final associado aos negócios de telecom, a gente viu que elas são muito aplicáveis a outras indústrias. A gente está muito empenhado em levar nossas soluções, obviamente adaptando elas pra cada indústria, pra clientes em outros famílias. Com fintechs, a gente continua empenhado em trabalhar com elas.
Como já é um segredo, que eu comentei já há muito tempo, a gente tá agora mais focado a trabalhar com a gente com utilities, que a gente enxerga eles em um momento que eles tão muito parecido com o que a gente viu no telecom alguns anos atrás, forte necessidade de digitalização, de redução de custo e de complexidade, de começar a ter uma relação direta com o cliente e não com o mediador. Muito parecido com os dilemas que a gente viu na outra indústria alguns anos atrás, e a gente acha que a gente tá muito posicionado pra resolver os problemas do cliente final e dessas grandes empresas de distribuição.
Por último, a gente em função de estar com uma posição de caixa bastante confortável, acima de meio bilhão BRL, a intenção de uso desse caixa é se manter muito semelhante ao que a gente tem falado até agora. A gente continua com nossa prioridade no M&A. Por mais que a gente tenha capacidade para 2 grandes aquisições, a gente continua na crença que ainda tem muitos componentes que de empresas muito complementares ao que a gente faz, um sistema de distribuição muito amplo, e a gente acha que dentro dele a alavancagem que a gente tá montando the puzzle that we are trying to build, there are some pieces. We have found some of these companies in the market already, some of them are still under negotiation, but we still have a lot of companies in our pipeline.
It will be the preferred use of all the cash that we have and our top priority for cash allocation. Since in addition to having cash, we are also generating cash. The two companies that we acquired are also cash generating companies. We believe that there's a lot of pressure now in the capital market due to the macroeconomic changes. We will expand our buyback program by adding 2 million more shares. We will gradually recover the value of the company by buying back our shares, at least while they are at this price level that is not threatening to our business. Now I think we can open for questions. Pedro, how will this work? Thank you, Pedro. We will now open for questions. We will take questions from investors and analysts.
If you have a question, you can send your question through the Q&A window, or you can click on Raise Hand if you want to ask your question verbally. The first question is from Bernardo Guttmann from XP. Pedro, can you please unshare your screen? Bernardo, can you hear us? Bernardo, your microphone is open. Good morning. Can you hear me? Not so well, Bernardo. Can you turn your volume up a little bit? Is it better now? Yes, better now. Hello, Pedro and André. Jean-Pierre and Alberto. We have a question about your payment solutions. How are you evolving in this front when it comes to solutions, and how can you scale this to other sectors? Is it a commercial challenge or you also have a challenge related with your product or platform? That's a very good question, Bernardo.
This is one of the areas that excites us the most. We've acquired M4U because even if we have the horizontal solutions, they are under a lot of pressure now for margin and for the price of commodities. When you have a solution that will add more value and a vertical solution, there's still a lot of value to be captured. Let me give you some examples of how we are evolving, and we are very excited in this sense. In the telecom market, we used to offer payment solutions for two sub-services. We offered payments for top-ups. Historically, it was a physical top-up. They had to go to a physical point of sale and pay in cash.
Now we're bringing all this to digital channels, and historically, we have been enabling all carriers to accept all payments made in all channels possible, which allows them to offer more personalized offers to their customers. Of course, this is limited, restricted to the size of the prepaid market. Digitization, it's fair to say, 70% of top-ups today are done digitally. Another segment where we historically work are recurring bills. The carriers are now moving towards more digital plans with purely digital sales, with no physical contact with the customer. Now that we have the Pix payment system, this has been a niche product so far. We see a huge opportunity for carriers in space and digital top-ups compared with other channels. Also, these digital plans are gaining traction now.
This used to be a niche product, but I think that in a few years it will become the carrier's main product. Because this type of digital recurring payments account for less than 10% of post-paid and recurring revenues. I think it's 5%-10%. When you're no longer a niche product and you're becoming a major product, there's a huge growth potential there. There are some new things coming up that are other industries, either within or outside telecom industry. Other segments that are not yet using payment solutions. One of them is fixed broadband services. Fixed broadband was typically a higher class product. Depending on the whole package you had, you would offer the service to your customers and then bill them in the end of the month. Now this is expanding to all socioeconomic levels.
You have more opportunities here and also a higher credit risk. Carriers are now very open to finding a way to transfer this risk to credit card issuers. As a perfect storm, we have seen Pix as the issuing card at a speed never seen before. You start to have a good potential for combining these two markets. This is an important prospect for us in the future. This is something new. It's not yet operating, at least not in scale. We have just one carrier that's doing a pilot right now, but we believe that most of the fixed broadband providers in the future will have a significant percentage of their business operating in this regional model. Along the same lines, Bernardo, and this has to do with what I said before.
Well, the examples I gave so far are in telecom because this is the industry that we know best. If we look elsewhere, we see that we have other sectors that are very similar. Here in Brazil, there's another perfect storm going on. You have high inflation, you have a reduction in people's income and higher energy costs. This puts a lot of pressure in terms of bad debt to the utilities companies. This is an industry that's still trying to create a digital channel to relate with its users. This is something that we can solve with Loop. We can create digital relationships and orchestrate that to create digital campaigns, so bringing analog customers and turning them into digital customers, and also create payment solutions to decrease bad debt. This is exactly in our comfort zone, right?
This new solution that we are developing now is for utilities, and it comprises two or three different fronts. Two that I call organic and one inorganic. Yes, we have a very strong commercial front, a new commercial front. We have new people that speaks the language of that industry and are very familiar with that industry, and came to add to our team so that we can develop this relationship with another industry with which we have not worked historically. They have products that have a lot of similarities. Utility companies are now focusing on bad debt, and telecom companies are doing the opposite, right? They are going for the customers that are good payers. There are some peculiarities that will require us to develop a new product if we're going to work with utilities companies.
The third front, we always look very, very diligently to the build versus buy thesis. We decided to concomitantly fire the two fronts. We are making good acquisitions, and we hope to have some very good news to share with you shortly in the future. In parallel, we are assessing some potential acquisitions in the segment that could give some steps for us. This is a dual track. The two things are moving in parallel. Both scenarios are working. This is a matter of finding the right price and the right company that would warrant an acquisition. I'm sorry for the long answer. Thank you very much, Pedro. Thank you, Bernardo. Okay. A próxima, Pedrão, é o Christian?
A próxima pergunta é o Christian, lá do Itaú. Vou liberar aqui o microfone dele.
Christian, your microphone is.
Tá liberado aqui.
Bom dia, pessoal. Bom dia, Pedro e Bernardo.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Pedro, Andre and Christian.
Eu tenho duas perguntas aqui. A primeira seria ali em relação à base de usuários do Apps e Games, da base de subscription. A gente viu um crescimento muito forte, né, ano a ano, acho que 8%, se não me engano. Aí eu queria entender um pouco mais o que que tá por trás desse movimento, né. Se tem alguma razão específica, se já é algum tipo de maturação a mais dos últimos parceiros anunciados e regiões já atendidas. O que que a gente pode esperar de impacto no longo prazo ainda, né, devido à nova expansão ali de mais três parceiros em duas regiões.
Aí a outra seria ali em relação ao que vocês comentaram recentemente sobre, tava olhando principalmente a oportunidade. Eu queria entender aqui se a gente estaria pensando em uma expansão que envolvesse outros segmentos além dos de tecnologia, de subscription base e microfinance, né? Ou se seria, na verdade, alavancar só o que vocês já têm nesse negócio hoje, né? Obrigado.
Thank you, Christian, for your question. For your first question, the growth this quarter is a sum of individual effects. There were some countries that we saw a lot of acceleration. These are not our new countries. The cause-effect ratio when you enter a new country doesn't mean that in the first day you're going to start growing. It's actually a combination of several factors that will bring about growth. The country and the carriers have to be willing to be more active in the offer of services. You also need to have the digital channels, and you need to have the Loop platform implemented so that you can gain scale. Sometimes we look at these new countries and we think they're going to start growing immediately, but that's not always the case.
What truly illustrates this is that we have some countries where we have been present for a while now, but now we are fine-tuning our work with the channels. Africa in general was really strong in quarter one, and this was driven mostly by Nigeria. You're going to hear very soon about what we're doing in Nigeria. Nigeria is one of the countries with the highest populations in Africa, so they can truly impact our results. We were also quite successful in Southeast Asia, particularly in Pakistan. Even before we closed the deal with the whole partnership with this new operator, all the carriers there are very active. These are the two main points. What we have not seen yet in these numbers, what we have not done yet is to find the right volume of postpaid customers in Brazil.
We are seeing good changes. Also the partnership with fintechs, we still see a lot of potential, but this has not materialized yet. Our model is still very much focused on prepaid customers and Loop sales. We are going to face some stronger headwinds in quarter two because the war will be going on for three months. Russia and Ukraine, I think I mentioned this in our previous call. These are two countries that are mostly focused on apps and games and accounted for 4%-5% of our revenue. We already saw an impact of about BRL 1 million this quarter, and it's going to be a little higher in quarter two. Of course, this goes down.
If you look at the curve, excepting this effect, the trend remains very solid. Probably in quarter two, we're going to give you more visibility about the underlying business regardless of this exogenous factor that shouldn't last much longer. About your second question regarding our M&A pipeline. We have been looking at all kinds of companies, but I think what we are at more advanced stages are companies that can complement the portfolio that we already have and add knowledge or products about other industries. As I said, we're looking at two players in this segment, but it wouldn't be a new offer. It would fall under one of those four pillars, which is payment solutions. We're also looking at international companies that already have the know-how of those segments.
This will provide us with a shorter learning curve, new contracts, and a good combination of products that could accelerate our business. We are also looking into other companies in digital services, in geographic areas where we have low penetration, and that would be a good fit with our business. Looking at the long-term pipeline, we also have other companies at other stages with completely new solutions. We always want to set the synergy. All these companies have to work on the B2B2C model. Our digital channels will have to be able to boost the sales of that asset. It's less of a roll-up logic. We want companies that can complement our business because that's where we will get the best organic growth.
I know I talked a lot without giving you any guidance because we can't really give any details, but I just want you to understand what is our mindset when we look for potential acquisitions. Thank you.
The next question, we have three questions from Carlos Herrera from Bank of America . He is asking, after gaining the synergies and merging the offices, what is the EBITDA margin that you expect to reach? The second question is about scoring. How is your scoring operation evolving, and how many customers are you covering currently? The last question is about M&A. What are the segments that we are looking at?
For your first question, I think Andre already talked about this, but I think in the midterm as we gain scale, because there are two dynamics here, two different dynamics, to see where the EBITDA recomposition will come from. One of them is cost optimization. We still have room to optimize our costs. We have contracts that we are unifying, and we have other optimizations that are being led by Andre and his team. That's not where the greatest gain will come from. We have some things that are no regrets, that is worth doing with low downsides. When we talk about the team, since we have many new fronts, we have to reallocate our staff to more promising areas. The impact will not be so strong because we will focus on the areas where we can grow faster.
How do you recompose the EBITDA? We still have room to grow materially. In our cost line, perhaps we'll have a one or one point five point increase. In order to recompose another two or three points, we're going to do that as we grow our volume, as we grow our TPV, our subscriptions. This is the formula that we're using right now, and we think that our current structure has some scalability without us having to materially grow. It's a non-linear growth of growing more in the volume and revenue than our cost structure. Andre, would you like to add anything?
I think you covered well.
No, I think you covered it really well, Pedro. All right. Thank you. Now in respect to our scoring operation, the answer is it depends, because there are two ways to look at this margin. We have to understand the dynamics of this business. Usually, the B2B2C business that we do with carriers, the revenue flow is the opposite. What is the usual revenue flow? Usually the carrier or the utility company or the fintech will charge an amount for a subscription or for microcredit from the end user. They keep their revenue share, and our share of the transaction is passed on to us later. We have a lower revenue entering our balance and a high margin because they already took their share in this transaction.
Now, when we do credit scoring, the revenue flow is the opposite because we are selling to fintechs. We are selling the scoring service to the fintechs, and we will pass on a share of this amount to the carriers who own the data. If you look at the EBITDA margin, it is a higher margin to the fintechs. The carrier's margin is lower. The gross margin is around 35%-40% for the carriers, so whereas our gross margin is closer to 70%. Here you have the opposite revenue flow. It is a good margin if you look at the part that concerns us. Which are our customers today? This is restricted to Mexico. We have about seven or eight different fintechs that we work with concomitantly.
Primarily, we have two scoring products. One is identity and security, which is much more focused on fraud. We have our credit scoring offer, which are usually for companies that are granting credit, either through a credit card or another means. This product accounts for more or less 90% of our revenue. What we expect from this business, even in Mexico, we still have a lot of room to grow. I think we still have room to grow four or five fold in Mexico, and we also chose two other countries that we are working towards launching this service. Of course, there's a delay because you have to work in the two fronts. You have to work with the operators to have access to the data lakes and create the scoring system. You also have to sign with the different fintechs.
Maybe some of the customers that we have in Mexico are also present in Brazil. The first country is Brazil, and another country is in Southeast Asia. It really makes sense to use this service for this purpose in that country. Neither Brazil nor this second country, we won't be seeing any material contributions this year. I think that our timeline is that we want to have this running and escalating in 2023 so that we can try to double business again. Finally, your last question is about the segments where we're looking at new M&A opportunities. As I said, we're looking at a mix. Considering solutions that we currently have, we're looking for players that have better penetration in geographies or industries than us, and also solutions that can complement our solutions.
It's a mix of these two strategies. I think I answered all your questions, right, Carlos?
Yes.
Yes. The next question is from Andre Santana, an individual investor. He's asking about the implementation of the Loop platform and the data monetization, which you were talking about just now, and if this dynamic can result in any JVs with the carriers. That's a great question. We created Loop to boost our digital subscription sales, but it is gaining relevance more and more. As we manage campaigns and we offer more services, this requires more intelligence. When you have one product, your intelligence is to always try to sell that product to your end customers. When you start having multiple options, when you start to have voice, data, airtime advance, microcredit, pop-ups, recurring plans, game services. When you have these multiple offers, Loop gains relevance, so that you can choose well what you want to show your customers, since now you have many options.
Loop is becoming a more and more critical part of our business. It is also evolving in intelligence. We're spending more energy and making the algorithms smarter. This will certainly push other businesses, drive other businesses, such as microfinance. I'm very positive that the lifting of the travel restrictions now and going back to traveling, particularly for the international market. In 2021, we launched fewer channels than we had launched in 2020. Now we're going to resume a level of activity that we have not seen in the past 12 months. This will continue to be a very strong investment area for us. Regarding the JVs, you know that we have partnership in our DNA.
When you have a B2B2C company, you have to be very sensitive about how to create value in the two, and how to create a nice solution for end consumers, and recognizing that you have a middle partner and having their profitability in mind. Also we have to do something that will be profitable and positive for us as well. Despite us having the know-how and partnership in the partnership where you truly share the value at the end of the day, we are a globalized player, and we have to always try to work with all carriers. We are open to JVs, but this would have to be a multi-party JV. It would make sense, for example, to be allies with an entire part of the market and not just one carrier.
When you start a JV with one carrier, what usually happens is that you alienate all others. We are not against it, but there's this caveat. We have to make an arrangement that is good for everyone. It has to be a virtual JV, right? Because we have to share the value with the carriers. This would work. But if you're talking about an equity-based JV, it would be an extra complication. It's not an issue necessarily because carriers are competing in the telecom market. In adjacent businesses, competition doesn't make much sense. The combination of three carriers with a specialized player may indeed make sense. We are totally open for possible JVs, but there's this caveat that these JVs have to be targeted at being a multi-carrier or multinational JV. I hope we have answered your question.
We have one last question from Alexandre Vieira. He would like to know how possible it is in all the Russia-Ukraine war could affect the results and what would be the strategies to attenuate this impact. My straightforward answer is yes. While this war is happening, there will be an impact on our business. I was surprised to see that our revenue was not zero. We were prepared for an even more adverse scenario than actually took place. We see that having their cell phones working and having access to entertainment is still relevant in these countries. But we also had challenges from the foreign exchange variation. We do believe that until the war is over, we will continue to see an impact on our revenues.
If we had the most extreme scenario, if we had zero revenues from these countries, this would account for about 4% of our results. We did not see that level of impact, and we will give you more information so that we can compare apples to apples. In order to mitigate this effect, something that we already did. Well, actually, it has less to do with the direct impact of the Ukraine war. We have an office in Ukraine, and we have a team in Odessa. To mitigate the impact of the war, we were focusing on maintaining the continuity of our business because we were not just working in Ukraine, we were working for other geographies from the Ukrainian office. First, we tried to do everything we could.
We tried to bring our team to a safer place. We got 60% of our team out of Ukraine. This was before the martial law, and we were also able to reallocate their roles to other geographies so that it wouldn't impact the rest of the business. When we look in the rearview mirror, we see that these negotiations were very well done despite the reallocations of different roles to different geographies. Even with the people that still remain in Ukraine, even with the very adverse conditions, they are keeping active and very productive. They're in the middle of a war, and they're still working. This is very admirable. This is how we mitigate it.
The mitigation of the impact, the direct impact from Ukraine, what we're doing is trying to stop the spending with media. Because now the billing is not working really well right now. We will continue to do what we have been doing so far, and we will continue to pray that this ends as soon as possible. We will continue to see an impact of about 2% or maybe a little over that while the war is going on. I think this was the last question. Thank you very much for attending this call. I think the final takeaway is that although this is a very complex year from the macroeconomic standpoint, we haven't been impacted by the headwinds.
This makes us very positive that 2022 will be a pretty good year for us, and we will probably share with you some positive surprises this year in addition to the ones we have already shared. This is the end of this call. I stop here, and I hope to see you soon. Thank you all for attending, and have a great day.