Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CVC's first quarter 2019 results conference call. Today with us, we have Mr. Luiz Fernando Fogaça, Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Farias, who is also Investor Relations. Today's live webcast and earnings release can be accessed through www.cvc.com.br/ir. The company slides are available for download at this webcast platform. These presentations were presented in BRL based on interpretations issued by the Accounting Association. Before we begin, we would just like to say that forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of CVC management and information currently available to the company. They involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that conditions related to the macroeconomic scenario, industry, and other factors could also cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.
Now, I will turn the conference over to Mr. Luiz Fernando Fogaça, Chief Executive Officer, who will begin his conference. Please, Mr. Fernando, you may proceed.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to begin this conference call about our first quarter 2019 results at CVC Corp. Regarding today's agenda, we are going to be talking about the main topics for this quarter, and then we will talk about our financial results split by Brazil, Argentina, and consolidated results. Finally, we will begin our questions and answer session. Start off on slide four. Before we discuss our quarterly results, I would just like to reinforce some of the points in our strategy. CVC Corp is the only company in Latin America working in all segments of tourism. We are leaders in Brazil in the leisure segment, aerial consolidation, and hotels in the offline channel.
We have over 1,300 exclusive stores with the CVC brand, and we are present in over 7,000 independent travel agencies. For the last dozen consecutive quarters, we have had robust growth in the online channel with profitability. Since 2015, with the eight acquisitions we made, we have diversified the company's revenue sources, and now they are represented in balance between leisure and business, thus reducing result volatility. Right now, we are in transition process between multi-channel to omni-channel with the introduction of new technologies and platforms that will make our customers' experience more powerful. Another important pillar in our strategy is our expansion into Latin America, starting with Argentina, the third biggest market behind Brazil and Mexico, and the country with the highest number of passengers to Brazil, inbound and outbound. With the two acquisitions we made in Argentina, Bibam and Ola, we are already the second player in this market.
We believe that the Argentinian market will recover in the next two to three years, and we are going to consolidate our position in that market. Starting this quarter, we are going to begin reporting results of our operations in Argentina and in Brazil separately. One of the pillars of CVC's success was making tourism more democratic. We provided access to the middle class to travel and vacations. For this, paying in installments is an important factor, making it fit into our consumer's monthly budget. Currently, over 40% of trips are paid with credit card, and nearly 40% are paid with bills through partnerships that we have with financial institutions. We took the credit risk for a small share of our travels through our credit desk, which had an increased share from 5% to 11% in the last 12 months.
It is important to highlight that sales through the credit desk are 100% incremental, and they presented positive results in the first quarter of 2019, representing BRL 6 million . That takes into account all the inherent costs, including the fret cost. We have to highlight that we are now the third level of approval for a credit after our financial partners. We have already tested CVC as an alternative to be a first approver for a portfolio that has a lower level of risk and defaults. Even with this new movement, the internal credit desk will not go above 15% by the end of the year. Our goal is not to reach 15%.
We just want to have some visibility for you that now we are working only as a third approval instance and that we could reach 15%. That 4% would come from a portfolio that has much lower risk, and that would make us more visible in approving, understanding customers' profiles, and understanding the market. This is something that is done right now with our partner financial institutions. Moving on to slide number five. This describes Avianca's situation. As is generally known, they filed for court reorganization in 2018, when we had BRL 200 million in future flights booked. In March, they announced several flights being canceled, including international flights. We were able to rebook these flights in advance with no great impact. Until early April, they had been flying their domestic flights regularly.
From mid-April, the situation worsened with the repossession of part of its aircraft fleet authorized until Easter. Even with this adverse event, we were able to rebook our patients almost completely. After the Easter holiday, Avianca lost another 17 aircraft, reducing its fleet to only six planes. From that moment on, we decided to tell our clients to no longer go to the airport because the chance of having a rebooked flight would be very low because of that cut in aircraft and also because the market did not have enough time to readjust. Up to now, we have had reimbursements and costs with rebookings representing BRL 10.2 billion , which has already been reflected in our financial statements of this quarter, but they are being treated as extraordinary items. Our understanding is that with their auction on the 7th, many companies would take these canceled flights that Avianca had.
However, the auction was suspended on May 6th, and it is still suspended due to a legal ruling. We will continue following this closely to see what happens. It is worth highlighting that through daily management, we managed to reduce future flights from BRL 200 million in December to nearly BRL 100 million right now. In April, about BRL 50 million in flights were used. We will continue making all the efforts to minimize that impact to our clients and to the company's results. We also have to highlight that these flights are distributed until the end of the year, and over time, these flights canceled will be substituted by other airlines. Moving on to slide number five. This shows our first quarter results in a more general sense. We have double-digit growth in all of the main results measures in the company.
14% in bookings and in revenue, 15% with normalized EBITDA, and 17% with the adjusted net income. This is, of course, for the Brazilian operations. When we include Argentina, which is right now facing a major economic recession, we still continue growing by two digits. 12% in bookings, 11% in net revenue, 15% with normalized EBITDA, and 20% with the adjusted net income. The next slide discusses the structure we have implemented in our digital team. We are still in an ongoing digital journey. We are reinforcing our team, which already has 140 employees and should finish the year with 200 people. Here you can see we have digital marketing, planning areas, digital products, which includes all coders. These are cells and qualms that are completely autonomous to develop products. We also have a more recent cell for data science, CRM, and data analysis.
Slide number eight now shows our new digital products. The new teams are already delivering digital products. We already have Submarino Viagens for Android online, and it is being used for flights. It has a better conversion, and its checkout has improved by 1.7x . It already has the functionality and the speed that is equivalent to most well-known platforms in the tourism market. We are also developing it for the iOS platform, and it will be concluded and made available during the second quarter. Moving on to slide number nine. Here we see our digital products as well, and they are already beginning for the CVC platform. We already have a new page for cross-selling air and hotel, and the Android app, which has cross-selling right now for travel insurance.
For the next quarter, we will also have other products available at the destination. Looking at our hotel platform, which was developed for Submarino Viagens, and which is already 100% rolled out for all users. This is a platform that has a very good level of conversion. It is twice as much as the previous platform. With the measurements we made, we are using a Google software measuring speed, access, and so on. We already have a score of over 90% higher than many other platforms, even global ones. Our speed fell from eight seconds to two seconds, and we already have much better content, and the products are available, and geolocalization, maps, everything is available there at the same level as the best platforms for hotel bookings in the world. This, of course, will be launched into CVC.com in the second quarter.
Slide 10 shows how we made our stores, our physical stores, digital. As we mentioned before, we are already testing digital platforms that will be introduced in 2019 to our over 300 brick-and-mortar stores. Obviously, we are going to have different displays for different kinds of stores, depending on what kind of client visits our stores and depending on the region of the country. We are already opening two stores with this new format in the second quarter. I would now like to give the floor to our CFO, Leopoldo Saboya, who will talk about the company's financial results.
Thank you, Fogaça. Good afternoon, everyone. Let us continue the presentation showing our financial results at CVC. Starting with slide 12. First, to discuss the results in Brazil, our net revenue totaled BRL 440 million, a growth of 14.4%, or BRL 55 million in absolute terms. Our take rate was 11.75%.
A slight drop of 25 bps when compared to the previous year. This is basically due to a mix effect. We had a higher growth for some of the business units, Submarino and RexturAdvance, which have a smaller percentage take rates than the rest of the units. Also when we look at leisure, we had an increase in cruise ships more than other products, and it presented a growth of 35% in the first quarter. As most of you know, this is a segment with a smaller than average margin, about 4% smaller. Now, when we look at these different leisure products, national and international did not have any changes in their take rates in this one-year horizon. When we look at that individually, cruise ships, though, is important to highlight, and this is shown on the next slide.
Here we can understand what happened because of the new way in which we are doing our accounting. Margins were reduced, but this is temporary. This is already addressed for the next seasons because this took place at the end of last year. So most of the 2018-2019 season, from November to March, roughly, had already been sold. So this reduction in margin, which we can see in this table, is already addressed. In this case, I would just like to highlight something to make it very clear. We only did this for one specific contract, [Oner Travel]. The company is now working as a principal in this operation, recognizing the gross value of selling cabins and their costs in segregated DRE lines, which, of course, have a temporary effect in our net revenue as shown here in the slide.
Just to highlight, as we had already seen last year, booking is the same, BRL 83.5 million. Gross revenue are the difference between the cost and the revenue, and this is our revenue line. Now it becomes BRL 12 million, and we deduct taxes and costs until we come to our gross profits, which will be treated in this report in the same line as the net revenue, just for a comparison, both for the past and for this contract. It is also important to highlight that because of this new way of accounting and because of higher taxes, we had a reduction of 14% to 9%, which is what I mentioned previously when I compared 2018 to what we are accounting now. When you compare 2018 to 2018, it would be just 14% to 9%.
Now when you look at the normalized 14% to now, it would be a drop from 9% to 8%. This is what we have addressed in the next season. All right, so the next slide will talk about operating expenses. This has a lot of information, just to show some of the impact that came from different factors. First, we have to say that our operating expenses grew by 18%, recurring operating expenses grew by 18% in this quarter. We saw a reduction of operating expenses with bank slip fees of 14%, and that would have the same effect as normalized EBIT on this slide, because we believe that this is the best way of noting our operational performance. Regarding G&A, it grew by 7.5%. If you exclude statistical consultancies and G&A expenses, which were not listed in 2018, this grew by 4.5%, which is in line with inflation.
Our consultancies will conclude in the second quarter and one mapped base is zero opportunities. We have all of this process and the opportunities will start to be captured now during the second half of the year. We also had operations to see Visual and Trend synergies, especially because of systems and incorporations from companies. Expenses with sales are interesting. One of the first impacts was PDD, as we mentioned early last year. I will give more details on that in the next slide. Credit card expenses are also a consequence of a higher growth in RexturAdvance and Submarino because of the change with our business model with two airlines. Clients started adding transactions in these companies instead of using airlines themselves. So our credit card fees go up.
About this last point, it is important to highlight that first, our operation with these two airlines have better commercial conditions, and that created a positive impact for our net revenue after allocating all of the inherent costs, even working capital in these operations. Second, these two operations are no longer ongoing in April because of market conditions. Meaning that we are going back to the previous model where cards are used directly at the airline. It is also important to show that these impacts will be shown gradually, both in recognizing these expenses and their impacts in working capital, because this expense is only seen when patients apply. Other operational expenses had an impact from the civil contingency provisions. This grew by 27% in comparison to the first quarter of 2018, partly due to the growth in sales, but also partly because of fees increasing in airlines.
Also improvements in digitalization of the legal system, making these lawsuits faster. It is important to highlight that despite this increase, the number is becoming stable from now on, as we can see on this slide in the lower left corner. Moving on to slide 15. Let us drill down on our PDD. What is important to highlight here is that the growth in this internal credit desk, as Fogaça said, obviously brought this increase in our allowance for doubtful credit or what we call PDD. So it will increase less from this point on, and it will become more stable for these accounts. For the fourth quarter, we had additional impacts because of the allowance for doubtful accounts being delayed in payment. But part of it has been recovered now in this first quarter.
Regarding our internal credit desk results, we have to mention that this is a total incremental sale because we are the final approval system in the credit line. In this first quarter, we produced, that is, we had BRL 100 million in sales to individuals, and this generated a net financial result of variable expenses, cost of the desk itself and financial costs representing BRL 6 million . Meaning, this is an operation that when you run the numbers, everything it generated was positive for the group. The next slide consolidates our EBITDA margin. Excuse me, our EBITDA numbers. So we have reached BRL 203 million in the first quarter, a growth of 15.1% in comparison to the first quarter of 2018. It grew 30 BPS in comparison to last year.
As was mentioned by Fogaça earlier, in this quarter, the company recognized an extraordinary expense due to the cancellation of flights that would be done by Avianca, representing BRL 10.2 million . This refers to reimbursements and rebookings in April, including the period up to May 7, 2019, when the auction should have took place. For demonstration stakes, this item was treated as extraordinary and its effects were normalized in the result lines. That is expense, EBITDA, and net profit. In the next slide, showing net income, it grew by 17.5%, reaching BRL 108 million in this quarter. We now move on to slide 19, presenting figures for Argentina. Total bookings in Argentina, including Biblos and Ola Transatlántica, had a decrease of 31% in the first quarter in BRL when compared to the same period last year.
Obviously, this had a major impact from the macroeconomic situation in Argentina since mid last year. It is worth reminding you that despite this drop, we gained market share because both operations dropped less than the Argentinian tourism market, where we are already the second biggest player. Despite this reduction of 22.1% in the net revenue, the take rate grew by 90 bps and EBITDA is positive. Although we still haven't captured the synergies between both companies and from these two companies and Brazil, which have been combined, we've started to capture them. Although there was a reduction in sales, our losses in the last line had a slight improvement in comparison to last year. We believe the market will recover. We know that these are cycles that Argentina goes through, and we know that they have a high potential for the next two to three years.
That's why our strategy is to consolidate the local market, so that from this platform, we can expand in Latin America. We need to be ready to do this in the local market itself. The next slide has consolidated results for CVC Corp. This shows Brazil in light blue and Corp, that is consolidated with Argentina, in dark blue. Bookings in Brazil grew by nearly 14%, which is very similar to what we had in the fourth quarter of 2018. When we include Argentinian operations, we see that bookings grew by nearly 12%. It's still a double-digit growth. Net revenue grew by 14.4% up to BRL 440 million in the first quarter. If you include Argentina, then our net revenue was BRL 468 million with an 11.3% pro forma growth.
Normalized EBITDA, adjusted with the extraordinary effect from Avianca and removing bank slip costs, grew by 15.1% in the Brazilian operations and 15.2% when we include Argentina. Net income grew by nearly 20% when we consider Argentina. Finally, it's important to talk a bit about working capital, cash flow, and indebtedness. Here we have many details, and the idea is to share them with you to make it very clear to the entire market. I think the first information to highlight here is that we generated in the first quarter a cash net revenue of BRL 149 million , 10% higher than last year. As you know, the first quarter usually consumes cash because of the seasonality and the fluctuation in our working capital, because this includes payments that we have to make during the high season to our partners.
Even despite that, it was better than the first quarter of 2018 by BRL 88 million, as you can see in the table. The company's net working capital, and we have to highlight here that we are using this concept for assets and liabilities, circulating assets and liabilities, which I think is how the market does this calculation, had an improvement of BRL 74.5 million when compared to the results of the variation to the same quarter 2018. Meaning, in this quarter, we invested BRL 296 million in working capital, and last year it was BRL 371 million. This is even smaller than the 2016-2017 cycle. Two years ago, the company invested BRL 371 million. As a reminder, the company is now at least 50% larger than it was in the 2016-2017 cycle.
I think we have spoken to many of you, but it is important to highlight during this call that working capital became a goal for all of our business unit directors, as well as for the directors of CVC Corp. We already have several initiatives mapped which will have better captures starting in the second half of the year. Looking at the right-hand side, we have here a breakdown of our working capital into days. It is important to say that this growth of five days in the cash conversion cycle, which are the net working capital days in comparison to last year, is due to one thing, which are contracts that we call CAE, C-A-E. Because RexturAdvance and Submarino have had much higher sales than the other business units.
Although accounts receivable is stable, it did not come accompanied by a same reduction for these two business units, which have remained stable throughout this period. This is due to the change in the business model that these airlines started to have. They started prioritizing credit cards. As was mentioned with the interruption of this modality, with RexturAdvance and Submarino financings, our working capital will recover from this effect. The next slide already shows that it has been measured to be BRL 150 million. That is basically the balance we have today from these operations. When this capital returns, we will benefit from this four day phenomenon, which basically means that we will be at the same level we were in 2018 and close to the level we were in 2017.
It is also important to say that this operation, despite consuming working capital, had net results that is incremental net income of BRL 8 million in comparison to the first quarter of 2018, only in this quarter. To conclude this part of the call, we have to discuss indebtedness. Our net debt with M&A reached BRL 1.7 billion, a leverage of 2.23x , which is slightly higher than last year. As a reminder, this is a peak of the cycle. In the last 12 months, concluding in March 31st, our ROIC for Operations do Brasil were 20.1%. Finally, we finished a capture of BRL 708.7 million in debentures, which extended our debt duration from 1.3 years to 2.6 years. That is, we doubled it with a minimal increase in the average cost of debt from 108% to 109% of the CDI.
This will address all of our debts for 2019. Now we can start our Q&A session.
Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you have a question, please dial star one on your phone right now. Mr. Luiz Gonçalves from BTG Pactual has a question.
Good afternoon, Leopoldo and Fogaça. I have two questions. The first is about your working capital dynamic. I think you made it very clear how that is going to work in the first quarter. I know that this was also affected by the change in business model that CVC has gone into as you grow in other verticals. Do you already see the cash cycle becoming more stable or improving? My second question is regarding growth. We saw overall a reduction in retail in March and in April.
Economic indicators are also showing that there is a slowdown from this activity. What was that like for you at the end of March and starting April regarding sales for leisure and corporate trips? Thank you.
Thank you, Luiz. I think the dynamic has been exactly like that. For the second and third quarter, we already expect and we already see a gradual improvement, not only because of the effects I mentioned and the changes in the concluded negotiations model with airlines, but also because of our own business dynamics. The trend definitely is to return our invested capital and even to generate more cash in the next two quarters. Second question will be answered by Fogaça.
Hi, Luiz. Yes, regarding the market dynamics, we see something similar to what you said. In March, Carnival ended up being extended. That reflected in the economy.
Consumers are still regaining their trust. Dollar exchange rate is also creating an impact. This is just part of our daily work. We have been working with airlines and other travel operators with several promotions, and this has obviously helped to recover our sales in leisure. In corporate, of course, this is a bit different. With a reduction in offers for some destinations, for example, the U.S., which have a higher average ticket, and as prices for flights increase, then Explorer and other companies can capture these benefits directly. Obviously, our flexibility with prices in the business sector is much lower. On one side, on leisure, you have a short-term effect, and with corporate travel, this is different. With leisure, we see behavior of the exchange rate becoming more stable, and of course, that helps.
With corporate, that is the good side of being present in the corporate world. We are now a company, as we said, that works on tourism as a whole, not only in corporate or not only with personal trips. As you can see, we have different groups and different segments, but overall, we presented a very good level of growth for the entire company.
Great. Thank you for the answer, Leopoldo.
[Sergio Figueiredo] from Itaú has a question.
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. This is Marco, actually. I have two questions from our side here. First, regarding the Avianca issue, we would just like to understand if these BRL 10.2 million that you have this quarter are related to the cost in rebooking customers and also refunding them, and regarding the BRL 100 million that are still open with Avianca.
I know that it's difficult because there were some events that are not in your hands, but what's your predicted scenario? What do you think the company will do regarding those BRL 100 million? Finally, regarding the sale of international packages at brick-and-mortar stores or any products that are exposed to the exchange rate, how is that done in brick-and-mortar stores? For example, the growth we saw in brick-and-mortar stores, was that a consequence of the exchange rate?
Thank you. Hi, Marco. Starting with Avianca, those BRL 10 million were resolved in April and in the first eight days of May.
None of this took place in March because obviously we, as we highlighted in the release, up until the Easter holidays in mid-April, although some international flights had already been canceled, although some aircraft had been removed from the company, we worked very closely with our partners, with all of the tourism industry. Our service teams at airports were very helpful, and that's also the advantage that CVC has in comparison to the rest of the market. We have staff at all airports providing 24-hour assistance every day, seven days a week. So we had over 3,000 passengers embarking per day from Avianca, and we managed to do this in a very efficient way, I think. Obviously, there was a scenario that we knew until the start of this week, which would be the auctioning on March 7.
Obviously, after the auction, there was a written commitment to the passengers that would still embark or who had bought flight in Avianca. This had been put into the numbers with the rest of the industry. So now we're still waiting. We still need to have a final decision to understand if the auction will take place or not. In parallel, we're working here with the industry, with our partners to already have some conversations for next week so that we can begin a proactive process of rebooking these passengers into other flights. The big three airlines that always have some space available, and as they've done in April, and as they've done in other situations in the past when this happened with Varig or Transbrasil, the entire industry tries to minimize the impact to their consumers and to the industry as a whole.
Obviously, when we say there's a drastic reduction in a short amount of time Avianca lost nearly 17 flights on the Monday right after the holiday. So our ability to react to this big change in such a short amount of time is, of course, much smaller. If we were to look ahead in the next 12 months, we have BRL 100 million. So that's a more diluted volume. We are already working to have new flights and other destinations that are no longer receiving Avianca flights. So this will be a daily effort, and here we're focusing to minimize impact on our consumers and also to reduce any potential cost that we may have in this process. But right now, it's hard to say what the impact will be.
First, because there's still a pending decision regarding the auction, and secondly, because as I said, the entire industry needs to mobilize itself to reduce the impact. We also had to answer a final question. It's hard to say what is the impact of the exchange rate. We can obviously see a reduction in the growth of international travel in March and early April. For international travel to the U.S. as well, we also had a reduction of around 23% of the offer. As the offer is reduced, the average ticket is increased, and that becomes a bigger issue. But it's a dynamic market. Companies are already adjusting with promotions, repositioning their prices. For Europe, for example, we see it has been growing by 30%-40%, and to the U.S., there's a slight decrease because of this reduced offer and increased average ticket.
For leisure travel and domestic destinations, there is a short-term impact. If you had 200 flights a day in Brazil from Avianca, and that is removed, of course, the average ticket for short vacations will go up until the industry recomposes that offer, and that will, of course, have a higher impact on leisure travel. But again, this is something that has been seen, that has been dealt with by the market. Because, of course, people want to travel, and with personal travel, of course, passengers are a bit more sensitive to the average ticket.
We have a question from JP Morgan.
Good morning, everyone. I'd just like to hear a bit about the take rate in Brazil and Argentina. If you can tell us a bit about how that works in Brazil. In Argentina, we saw that the take rate improved.
What's your goal in that operation with regard to take rate? How far do you think it can get? Thank you.
Thank you for your question. The take rate dynamic in our business here in Brazil was absolutely stable in comparison to last year, except for Marita, as we mentioned. That's a change in how we account for things, and that has an impact that, as I said, was already addressed. Except for that, for international and domestic products in UN, we didn't have any changes. The 25 bps effect that you saw was exclusively because of the mix in units that have an intrinsical take rate that is lower than leisure. That's basically it. Argentina's take rate, when you look at the business, if you imagine that these two companies are a mix of Submarino Viagens with [Fisual], I think that's the best description.
That's how we can understand these businesses here in Brazil. As you know, the take rate is much lower than what we see here. You can't extrapolate and say that in Argentina, we can reach the same level we have in Brazil because the market dynamics are completely different. In fact, they price things and sell things in a completely different way. But we identified synergies, which were important in that market, and they will take place now throughout 2019. Just to add to what Leopoldo said. There are some systemic matters that don't allow us to recapture a business model that was already existing in Brazil and in Argentina itself. That has been mapped and addressed. In the future, we see some improvement in Argentinian margins in the two operations we have there today. First, we talked to our partners in Argentina.
Many of them are the same that we have in Brazil and rest of Latin America. There is a possibility to increase the number of passengers and the number of bookings. There is a commercial said, and that already is well aligned. We hope that this will happen until the end of the year.
Great. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you have a question, please dial star one. Mr. [Ruben Cozul] from Santander Bank has a question.
Good afternoon, everyone. Going back to that point you started the presentation with, you mentioned that there was an initiative in becoming the first approver of credit. Can you tell us a bit about how that happened in the first tests you made and how the portfolio is growing? We just want to know what we can expect from now on.
For example, what are your default levels now in comparison to the rest of your history? Can you just please give us some details on that?
Hi, Ruben. Thank you for your question. Unfortunately, we cannot give you details on the default levels, but when you compare it to similar portfolios, so how it has worked as the main approver and how it worked before, if you look now, the margins are a bit higher. But it is still insufficient to deteriorate our P&L for these incremental sales. So it is a bit higher, as was expected, because of our macroeconomic situation and the retail market overall, and we are monitoring, but it is true. If we were to compare it with 2018, the same portfolio with 2017, it was also slightly higher in defaults.
Of course, this portfolio test, so to say, what we call Água Limpa, as the first approver, is lower. We cannot disclose these numbers either, but they would be half of the losses that the last portfolio would have. So I think that is what I can tell you about defaults. Just to add to that, our goal is not to be a financial institution. It is not to provide that credit service or to have a relevant portfolio. But about five, four years ago, we also had that level of approval, and that is healthy in order to give us a better risk of defaults and so on. We lost that because in most stores, the first approver was the institution itself. But now our goal is only to have that visibility and have the information and to be able to have the feel of the market.
We want to be able to see this dynamically, just as we have in the last two years as third approvers. Of course, we have a higher risk, but we always try to be responsible, and we do a daily analysis of how the portfolio is performing.
Great. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you have a question, please dial star one. As a reminder, if you have a question, please dial star one. I will now turn over to Mr. Fogaça for his final remarks.
Well, thank you very much once again, everyone, for being a part of this call, for being interested in the company, and I wish you all a great Mother's Day this weekend. We will speak soon. This concludes today's CVC's first quarter 2019 results conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a great day.