Good afternoon. Welcome everyone to CVC's third quarter 2018 results conference call. Today with us, we have Mr. Luiz Eduardo Falco, Chief Executive Officer, and Leopoldo Saboya, Chief Financial Officer and Investor Relations Officer. Today's live webcast and earnings release may be accessed through CVC website at www.cvc.com.br/ir. We would like to inform you that this event is recorded and all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the company's presentation. After CVC remarks, there will be a question- and- answer session at a time further instructions will be given. Should any participant need assistance during this call, please press star zero to reach the operator. We have simultaneous webcasts that may be accessed through the company's website. The slide presentation may be downloaded from this website. Please feel free to flip through the slides during the conference call.
Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements are based on beliefs and assumptions of CVC management and on 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 Eduardo Falco, Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Falco, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, Flora. Good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to begin our conference call to discuss the CVC Corp results of the third quarter 2018. Regarding today's agenda, as always, we'll talk about the main events on the third quarter 2018, then we'll present the financial results, and lastly, we begin the Q&A, as Flora told to us. To begin, I would like to talk about the highlights of the third quarter 2018 on CVC Corp. We are on slide number four, a quarter that continued to show resilience and robust financial results. In this quarter, when we add Bibam Group figures, Bibam is a company that we acquired in Argentina, we grew 10.4% in bookings.
It's important to emphasize that these growths already occurred in a robust base present on the third quarter 2017 and confirm our expectations that the impacts of the second quarter caused by the truck driver strike, currency devaluation, and World Cup effect were temporary and did not represent a change on the trend. The online channel, as already reported in the operating release, had a significantly growth, reaching 86.5% on this quarter, driven by a good performance of Submarino Viagens as well as CVC.com on this quarter. It's very important to highlight that this growth occurred in a solid growth base present in the third quarter of 2017, and according to the chart on the left side of the slide, the channel has been presenting consistent growth for the last five quarters.
Regarding the financial results of CVC Corp, we posted great resilience and robust financial results, growing 10.8% in net revenues, 13.4% in adjusted EBITDA, and 27% in net profit when compared with the third quarter 2017, at this time including Bibam Group figures. The numbers are not very representative yet due to the size of the business, and we will have only one month to consolidate. In the third quarter, CVC stores introduced a new digital CRM tool with Minha Agenda, called Notify, which will inform sellers in real time of the best available rates in all gateways. The purchase of this new tool or the proposal of this new tool is to increase the conversion of budgets in the CVC store, increasing the conversion rate on sales.
Since the end of August, CVC Corp online business unit and digital strategies executive area has been led by Fabio Jesus Augusto. Fabio headed the development strategies for Google Travel segment and brings with him his solid experience in digital and marketing sectors and related areas to CVC Corp. Through his career, he has led digital projects in multinational companies such as Whirlpool, which include strategic plan, brand building, communication, digital transformation, e-commerce, and selling techniques based on the shopping experience of omni-channel clients. Still in the third quarter, the company announced three acquisitions. Sferatur, whose approval is pending at CADE, the antitrust agency in Brazil. It comes to the group to strengthen the airline consolidation segment and the first two operators outside of Brazil that we also bought in Argentina. One is Biblos, the other is Avantrip. Biblos and Avantrip, they are the first ones.
They are part of the Bibam Group and is one of the largest e-commerce groups in terms of numbers of transactions in Argentina with annual bookings for approximately BRL 200 million in 2017. The second one, the other acquisition we will probably conclude on the fourth quarter, refers to Ola Transamerica Turismo, which operates the tourism and travel segments through three main business units: Ola Mayorista de Turismo, Quieroviajes, and Transamerica Viagens e Turismo, which is a retail business. The annual bookings for this second company is about BRL 2,805 million. On slide number five, we will talk about the main financials indicator of CVC Corp that showed growth in the main metrics. As I mentioned before, CVC Corp posted again robust financial results growing 10.8% in net revenues, 13.4% in adjusted EBITDA, and 27% in net profit when compared with third quarter 2017.
In the first nine months of 2018, we posted the following growth: net revenue accumulate 10.7%, adjusted EBITDA 14.5%, and adjusted net income about 34.8%. Regarding the working capital on the last two quarters, we used this working capital as a lever for the company. We had in our business plan the company delevering through the year, and we decided to stay the leverage stable and use this as a working capital tool to finance better our customers. We have some finance coming from the market. First, the market was so soft on the second quarter as you have been noticed due to all the problems that Brazil had.
Also we note that the payment cash or the parts of the payment cash of our customers decreased from 21% to 17%, showing that the market is soft and without money. Then we use this lever to compensate this to the market. On the end of the day, what we have, we could keep stable the company in terms of leverage, and we could capture a lot of the market, which we think increased quite a lot of our market share. We still don't have the numbers, how much we capture, but definitely we increased very fast our speed to capture market share with this strategy. This strategy is not a life strategy. It is a one-time strategy, and we use it when we see these things on the market happen.
We hope that Brazil now coming back to the track and economy is starting to coming back to good numbers as we could see initial signs here. We can slowly get out of this lever and coming to the normal worlds. As you know, most of the things on this industry are in a pendulum behavior. Now I will pass to our CFO, Leopoldo Saboya, who is going to talk about the financial results of the company.
Thank you very much. Not consider the Bibam Group bookings. In addition to that, I will always refer to a pro forma basis comparisons, and when not, I will inform. As Falco mentioned before, the highlight here is, of course, the quarter is the online channel performance that posted very strong performance, 86.5% growth, driven by the excellent performance of Submarino Viagens and the resumption of cvc.com growth. It is important to highlight that the online channel growth came with an improvement in the Submarino Viagens product mix and a significant increase in the site conversion rate, posting something above 50% increase of this ratio. Reinforcing our speech that all this growth has been done with a positive EBITDA and net income. On the next slide, number eight, I will detail our revenue and take rate performance.
The net revenues of boarding-based business units that include CVC, Experimento, Trend, and Visual reached BRL 326 million in the quarter, representing a growth of 5.6%. The percentage of net revenues over boardings, the so-called take rate, was 14.8% in Q3, 30 basis points down from Q3 last year, mainly due to the international mix in the quarter's boarding and somehow the requirement of a slightly higher level of tactical promotions on the CVC leisure as the consumer confidence was still unstable and poor. The net revenues of booking-based business units, RexturAdvance, Submarino Viagens, and Bibam Group totaled BRL 89 million in the quarter, 35% higher than Q3 last year. The take rate was 7.1% in Q3 as a result of the greater weight of the online that has a higher take rate than the airline consolidator business as a pattern.
The CVC Corp net revenues reached BRL 415 million in the quarter, and more than BRL 1.1 billion in the first nine months of the year, representing 10.8% growth or BRL 40 million above last year, and 10.7% growth when compared to Q3 and the year- to- date last year performer respectively. The take rate consolidated was 12% in the Q3, in line with last year performance. On the next slide, I will detail our operational expenses. First of all, the recurring operating expenses grew 7.9% in the quarter, mainly due to the increase in marketing expenses in the online business units, in line with the very strong growth of the unit, and M&A expenses. General and administrative expenses fell by 5.5% in the quarter due to synergies captured in the business units acquired in the ending of 2017.
In the year- to- date, 2018, general and administrative expenses declined 4.3% when compared to last year. Slide number 10, we see the performance of our EBITDA and EBITDA margin. As a result of the combinations that I just mentioned to you, CVC Corp adjusted EBITDA was BRL 205 million and BRL 524 million in the year- to- date, representing a growth of 13.4% and 14.5% respectively when we compare to last year figures. The EBITDA margin increased by 110 basis points in the period, reaching almost 50% margin. In the year-to-date performance, the margin increased by 106 basis points, reaching 46.9%. Slide number 11, we have the performance of net income that reached in the quarter, BRL 92.8 million in Q3. This is the adjusted net income, though, an increase of 27%. The year-to-date, the net income grew almost 35%, reaching BRL 220 million.
The net income is a combination of the EBITDA growth with a reduction of our financial expenses that dropped 21% as a reflection of reduction of the cost of net debt and a higher revenue from anticipation to suppliers. Now on these following slides, the following three ones, I will detail what Falco mentioned on the beginning of our presentation, regarding the working capital. He gave a more strategic view on why and how we did it, and now we'll give some more color, some more details on that, walking you through the working capital towards the net debt of the company. The very first message here is that the company continues to generate solid cash net income growth.
First of all, on the quarter, it was BRL 219 million, and in the year-to-date was BRL 517 million, almost the double when we compare to last year figures, both quarter and year-to-date. As we all know, we came from a very tough second quarter and a pretty stable Q3 as well, where the consumer showed a weaker capacity for payments in cash at site for leisure especially, and a pretty stuck, pretty soft corporate segment. In that context, it was a strategic move for us to keep the strong growth of our businesses and kept gaining market share through working capital investments that I will detail on the following slide. On sliding number 13, before we enter in the business, it's important, first of all, a clarification or a kind of a disclaimer about the working capital change.
Within the variation of BRL 617 million that you see on the chart on your left-hand side in the nine months of 2018, we had BRL 113 million that are reclassifications of the line. Adjustment of non-cash items. In the case, more specifically, income tax paid to the line of others that you can see on the next chart within the accounting cash flow that was only made in 2018. This is just a change between lines, and obviously it does not change the cash consumed of BRL 178 million, which reasons are as following. I will now give you more color on this change of roughly BRL 500 million of working capital in the year-to-date. First of all, it's a reflection of a organic bookings growth. This we estimate as approximately BRL 120 million- BRL 140 million of increase only due to that thing.
Also, we had, throughout the year, it was not something specifically to the quarter, an effect from the adequacy of collection and payment processes from the 2017 acquired companies. Another reason why was the centralized negotiations with some airline companies that, in one hand impacted the working capital, but in the other hand, the business units were beneficiated by only one single condition. We also had some other, let's say, conjuncture and one-off effects as following. We had, as you know, since the beginning of the year, the judicial depositors related to the stock option plan claim of BRL 50 million. The reduction in the share of payments in cash that Falco mentioned at the beginning of the presentation of approximately BRL 120 million of impact.
This last item was a result from the economic turmoil in the period, which changed the mix from 21% in Q3 to 17% in Q3 2018 for the CVC Leisure business. The share of cash and site payments to the share of, let's say, payment installments. That didn't change the number of installments per se, but only the mix between these two categories of payments installments and payments as cash.
Finally, on slide 14, we see that even with these working capital changes, we kept our financial leverage at around 2x net debt to EBITDA is stable from Q2 to Q1 and higher than last year. But in this case, it's mostly due to our acquisitions that was made on Q4 last year. Also important to mention that we raised BRL 400 million with first-tier banks in the quarter, and the average cost of that was close to 108% of CDI variation. Having said that, I would like to thank you for participating with us so far. Now we are going to start the Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you have a question, please press star one on your touch tone phone at this or any time. If at any point your question is answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. Questions will be taken in the order they are received. We do ask that when you pose your question that you pick up your headset to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Remembering, if you have a question, please press star one. If you have a question, please press star one. Remembering, if you have a question, please press star one. I will turn over to Mr. Luiz Falco for final considerations. Mr. Falco, you may give your final considerations now.
Thank you, Flora. Okay, thank you very much to join us. As you know, I will go to the board on the 1st of January. The next conference call will be led by our next CEO, which is Luiz Fogaça. Fogaça is very well-trained to take this team ahead. I will stay with part of you as a shareholder, trying to help those guys to make results even better that we could do ourselves with our team of today.
Always saying to you, thank you very much for your confidence and for your patience, for the sell side, for the shareholders, and even for all the people from the industry, including our competition, which is always nearing us, which improve our perspective to working harder here and make us to wake up earlier. If you need any assistance, you know that you have our related investment teams here 24/ 7 waiting to your calls and try to solve all kinds of doubts. Thank you very much, gentlemen, and have a very nice evening.
Thank you. This concludes today's CVC's third quarter 2018 results conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time.