Good afternoon to all, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the video conference and earnings call of the results of the first quarter of 2025 from Unifique Telecomunicações S.A. I'd like to highlight for those that need translation, simultaneous translation. We have this tool available on our platform. To access it, please click on the interpretation button at the bottom part of your screen and select your preferred language, Portuguese or English. For those of you listening to the video call in English, you can mute the original audio in Portuguese by clicking Mute Original Audio. We'd like to inform you that this video conference is being recorded and will be made available at our IR website section of the company where all the complete material will be available for our earnings call.
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We'd like to highlight that the information contained in this presentation and any declarations or statements that may be made during the video conference related to business perspectives, projections, and operational goals and financial goals of Unifique Telecomunicações S.A. are based on beliefs and premises from the administration of the company, as well as currently available information. Future considerations are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and other premises as they refer to future events. Therefore, it depends on circumstances that may or may not happen, so investors must understand the market conditions and other operational factors that may affect the future development of Unifique Telecomunicações S.A. and the results may differ from those stated here.
Today, we have the presence of the executives of the company, Fabiano Busnardo, CEO, and Luiz Bogo Junior, Director, Financial Director, and Investor Relations Director. I pass the floor to Luiz Bogo. Luiz, please go ahead.
Good afternoon to all. I would like to thank everyone for their participation in our earnings call for the first quarter of 2025 from Unifique Telecomunicações. As was already mentioned, my name is Luiz Bogo, and I currently took on the responsibility of being Financial Director and RI. I used to be at the company in another section, but I've been with the company for a long time, and I'm available to answer any questions when needed. I would like to apologize for my voice. I caught a cold, and my voice is not 100% back, but let's try to continue anyhow. Thank you.
Let's go on to the first slide. Talking about the highlights of first quarter of 2025, we started with strong, solid revenue. We reached almost BRL 335.9 million, a growth of 2.4% in relation to the fourth quarter of 2024. This advance reinforces the sustainability of our business, demonstrates the resilience of our growth strategy, even in a challenging macroeconomic environment that we are undergoing. This shows that we continue to be committed to the efficient long-term management and generating consistent value. As a highlight as well in terms of profitability, our recurring EBITDA totaled BRL 133.6 million, with a growth of 5.4% in the comparison of the last quarter. The recurring EBITDA reached 49.6% margin, and these numbers demonstrate our capacity to scale up the business with profitability.
Another highlight is in mobile cell phones, we grew as well. We were able to add 131,000 new accesses, which represents an expressive growth of 38.4% in relation to the previous quarter. This movement is aligned to our strategy of increasing coverage and relevance of the brand Unifique in the states that we operate in. Finalizing these highlights on the first block, we had an improvement in our churn index, which reached 1.58%, showing a reduction of 0.23 percentage points compared with the same quarter in 2024. The first quarters usually register higher levels of non-payment. It's a usual thing. We already expect it in the beginning of the year.
With our improvement scores and improving our base of clients, the first quarter of 2025 had lower impacts in this sense of delinquency if we compare it to the same period of last year, showing that we have a more consistent and solid base with a healthier risk profile. On the next slide, we have the operational performance of broadband. We closed the quarter with 3.7 million home passes and more than 193,000 homes connected. As you can observe in this slide, ever since 2020, Unifique has a growth of 193% in homes connected in the states that we operate in.
The organic net growth of accesses in the first quarter was 15,000 homes passed with an increase of 5.1% in relation to 500,000 net adds that we had in the beginning of last year. Compared to the beginning of last year, we continued to strengthen our leadership in Santa Catarina, the state where Unifique has a market share of almost 21% of participation according to data from Anatel coming from March 2025. We had a growth of 0.6 percentage points in relation to the same period of the previous year. Here, I would like to comment that this is a result that is fruit of continuous work to increase our presence and strengthen our relationship with the clients in these states that we operate in.
At the same time, we are directing significant efforts to grow in Rio Grande do Sul, where we currently have almost 5% only of market share. We have worked intensely and in a structured way with the team in order to increase this participation and consolidate our presence of Unifique in the state, showing to the clients of Rio Grande do Sul the same quality and reliability of the products that we have in Santa Catarina. Let's go to the next slide. Now we will talk about the mobile segment, where Unifique closed its first quarter with a highlight of almost 132,000 new accesses. We maintain the expectation of reaching 300,000 more accesses until the end of the year, what we had commented on in the last call. That is driven by our expansion and our future infrastructure.
At the end of the year, on the 13th of December 2024, our own coverage of the mobile operation of Unifique was present in 11 cities. In March 2025, this number reached 37 cities, where 27 are in Santa Catarina and 10 in Rio Grande do Sul. This expansion we consider to be relevant because it allows us to reach a population with more than 900,000 people with our own network. Just to add the final piece of information, at the end of April in the second quarter, Unifique's mobile coverage was added to 45 more cities, from which 11 have more than 30,000 inhabitants. These 11 cities have more expressive sales because they have larger populations, and they are the ones that will help us bring the returns over the investment in a faster way.
Another highlight is from the 131.9 new mobile accesses registered in the first quarter of 2025. Almost 57% of them correspond to lines that were taken from other operators. This is data that gives evidence of the confidence of the clients in the quality of the service that we render, especially in a market that is as competitive as mobile, which is dominated by large operators. On the bottom part of the slide, there's one more piece of information where 87% of the sales for mobile was done in combos. That shows how attractive our portfolio is with a commercial strategy that is multi-segmented.
I would also like to add here that in the second quarter of 2025, Unifique will take an important step in the mobile market, where it will launch an offering of prepaid mobile coverage, where we will increase the accesses to service and strengthen our model in this service. Because the post-paid model is only half of consumers in Brazil, where most of them have more control of their expenses and more financial flexibility. We want to show the other layer of clients that we haven't reached yet that they can have a service with the same quality, which today we already present in the post-paid mobile segment. Next slide, please. This is on our financial performance. You all saw this in our release today.
In this quarter, Unifique reached a gross revenue of BRL 335.9 million, representing a growth of around 8.5% in relation to the same period of 2024. This performance was driven mainly by organic growth and activation of new clients, and offered them with varied offers that were more and more adequate to the clients' tastes. The company also registered a growth, expressive growth in gross profit. We reached BRL 100.2 million in the first quarter, an advance of 8.6% in comparison with the first quarter of 2024. Our EBITDA was almost BRL 134 million. We had an increase of 5.4% in relation to the same period of last year, and the margin was at 49.6%. This demonstrates our capacity of maintaining the profitability.
It continues to be the same even with the expansion of our operations, and it's one of the best EBITDAs per quarter ever since the first quarter of 2022. This margin level was only possible thanks to the rigorous control of operational expenses that we are carrying out here, with the highlight to the reduction of 8.4% in SG&A in relation to the last quarter of 2024. Still with a strong strategic control of a budget which directed funds to operational projects, which is expansion of the mobile operation. This data is all disclosed in further detail and open in our earnings release that was disclosed earlier today. Let's talk about the revenue per segment beyond connectivity. Here we have the revenue from our products that go beyond those generated by sales to broadband clients.
This revenue, one by one, we can say that comes from 3.2 in fixed telephone lines that still grows in market share in the states that we operate in. We have the revenue from mobile clients, which represents 4.2% of that slice. Besides the traditional services of telecom, Unifique continues to advance its portfolio with solutions that represent 14.7% of the revenue, adding evidence to our strategy and as its main base, delivering internet as quality internet, which is the main bestseller of the company, also through fiber optics and also through 5G. Next slide, please. This slide shows our cash position and our leverage level.
We had a variation of almost 13% in relation to the same period of the previous year, reaching a little bit more than BRL 372 million at the end of March 2025. We maintained a solid base in our cash, totaling BRL 147 million at the end of March 2025. This reinforces our health in finances and also the capacities for investment. I would also like to report an attention point is that 76%, a little more than 76% of our gross debt is indexed to IPCA in the first quarter of 2025. That demands financial management done with prudence. We have a macroeconomic scenario, as I already said before, that is very challenging. We have inflationary pressures, so we need to be aware of that. Besides that, we understand that we maintain a comfortable position.
As you can see in our debt aging level, more than 50% of our financial commitments will be paid off in the deadline of 2 years. This allows us to have more balanced administration of the asset and lets us be more resilient against any market volatilities. Here, what we would like to enforce is what we discussed in the last call, because we were capturing funds with BNDES, and at the end of this quarter, we were able to conclude that. It was a total of BRL 40 million with a TR+ 2.76% per year, with a grace period of 40 months and with amortization in 4 years. These resources will be destined to the expansion of our company as a whole and will allow us to modernize our current network.
As another important point, we'd like to highlight our commitment with the generation of value to our shareholders. In February, we were able to pay BRL 20 million on interest rates over our own equity. We also, of course, have the intention of over the year releasing more distributions. That's basically what I would like to share with you. I pass the floor now to Fabiano. Let's get into the other important highlights that he has to share with you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Well, I would like to highlight that our company continues investing highly in technology. We concluded the re-implementation of ERP last year. Last year was a little difficult to work on ERP. We had a few delays in information which ended up harming the decision-making processes and management.
Now finally, we have all of the information agilely coming to us, so we're able to manage the costs and expenses properly in a much more refined way. If you compare us to the last quarters of last year, we were able to recover our margin. Although at this moment, which we already mentioned in terms of the challenges for 5G and investments, we should not expect any return so early. We've still tried to balance these investments, so it would not corrode too much our results. We are doing this in a very balanced way with parsimony because we believe we have time, everything is well planned, and we are very confident on how this work is going to continue over this year.
We are also working strongly in exchanging our system to manage the entire operation, where we expect to have gains in productivity that are significant. We have a forecast of finishing this project until August of this year. It has already began a few months ago, so it's already in the works and it will definitely bring fruits. In our obsession for having a company with very well-controlled costs and expenses so that we can be very competitive in the market. Even being competitive since the market is highly discussed, we can still present interesting results there. Other issues that I can talk about later, but it's more about organic growth. We are very satisfied with the organic growth. The company has not increased its network any more for now. Whatever we do with organic growth we have is within the already set structure.
This helps us to optimize our resources better, and we are able to maintain our churn rate as one of the best in the market. This is work where we have quite rigorous criteria with ever since the sale and great monitoring, and it's something we've been able to advance in the last quarter, and we've been able to maintain it. We still do not see that we are benefiting from the mobile combos. We know that the clients with the combo of fixed, mobile, and fiber would give us more benefits, but our operations are still very young, so we are still not seeing all of the benefits. As you can see from the sales, 87% of the sales from the first quarter are related to combos.
At this moment, we still are not able to see the benefits of the reduction of the cost because of this event. We are absolutely sure that in the future, those benefits will appear. We continue to be firm in our 5G investments. We increase the number of cities. We should close the year with something around 100 cities with our own coverage. As you can see in the evolution, everything is still very young and everything is just starting. We still have the limitation of not having prepaid, where Luiz mentioned that almost half of the cities do prepaid, have prepaid services.
Even though it's an average of lower tickets, the prepaid is important to have, and we still have a systematic deficiency which we are overcoming in this sense, and we hope to finish it at the second quarter so that in the third quarter, we have prepaid ready so that we can reach a whole another segment of this market, increasing our sales there. In parallel, we are learning more and more to work better with mobile. It's still something that's new to us but I am sure that in the third quarter the sales will be much better than in the first quarter in terms of this issue. We already demonstrated that we continue with our team very controlled on a healthy level. Sometimes we are even criticized for this because it's much lower than the market average.
We believe that it is a moment. Since we did not make any acquisition in 2024, but we just finished making the incorporation, so from the acquisitions that we made previously. Now we have reached the point zero on that subject, and maybe now we can say we are very well prepared for several opportunities which eventually may come up inorganically. Unifique already demonstrates that we know how to do this and make things grow very well in this manner. Although we took a little break from that in 2024 because of the macroeconomic situation, of course, we are a bit apprehensive. At the end of the day, I think we are much more comfortable, more prepared and confident that we can open our eyes again to the market with more appetite.
Even then, we made the distribution of dividends and JCP at the beginning of the year, and we have a forecast of until the end of the year, taking another step in terms of this distribution. I believe that we are very satisfied with the result. The recovery of our margin was worked on thoroughly and we will continue to be making more efforts in this second quarter. Since we are obsessed with 50% EBITDA, we are almost there again. Let's see if we'll make it soon, but we'll try to balance between 5G investments because we put a lot on sites which brings us costs or expenses that are more accelerated because you put the site and then you have to rent the tower, the network, and the electrical lines.
For us to recover that money with our clients, there is a time, a period, but we hope that we can do it at a faster speed than we had planned initially which may perhaps as soon as the rate of our base of clients increase, we'll be able to accelerate this implementation even more since we are a bit even advanced in the program that we delivered as a timeline. If things start going better we can move it faster. I'd like to highlight that the services are working exceptionally well. There are cities where we implemented there in almost for a very short period of time ago and we already have 20% market share. Our personnel is very good, and the services, the technology is new.
Of course, the network is still emptier, so there's a higher performance because of that. But we are very well prepared for growth and for the opportunities of every quarter that we have, more certainty. There was the news that we had the revenue of BRL 400 million in the first quarter of 2024, and we have the revenue of BRL 10 million this semester, this quarter of 2025. Now, let's go to questions and answers. If anyone has any points where we can be more precise in our explanations.
Now, we will begin our questions and answers session. Remembering that to ask questions, you should click on the Q&A icon on the bottom of your screen and write down your question to come into the queue. When your name is announced, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen.
You should unmute in order to ask questions. We would like to ask for the questions to be made all at the same time. Let's go to our first question from Leonardo Cintra from Itaú BBA. Itaú, you may ask your question. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, Fabiano. Good afternoon, Luiz. Thank you for the call. Congratulations on the results. I have two questions here. Could you comment a little bit more about the organic expansions since it seems that you've reached the same level as last year? Do you think that this is a sustainable level? If you could comment on what has been the combo plan and the design for the clients. I would like to go back to the churn, which you already mentioned about the in the beginning when we talked about fiber, just to understand the level of 1.85%.
Do you think that there's any space to improve? Should we expect the same level for the next quarters? About the initiatives of the combo of fiber with mobile, what are other initiatives that you have implemented to keep this churn level healthy? Thank you.
About the churn level, our goal is to have 170,000 net accesses. Our idea is to keep that as a goal for next year. I mean, it's a great challenge. We'll have to work very hard to work commercially, and we were able to in the first quarters of last year. We hope that in the next three quarters of this year, we'll be able to conclude that deadline to reach the 60,000. 1.50%, historically, with what we have here, pre-pandemic, pandemic, post-pandemic.
The pre-pandemic number is a churn number that's very high. Makes me very concerned. It's something that's very dear to the company, so we have a special dedication for this item. What do we do in that sense? We work very hard. We give support. We have a whole framework of solutions so that we can. For example, we implemented a system where we have been able to detect that clients will have problems, and we beforehand can call the client to ask them to see if we can visit them or give them an intervention because there are a lot of drops of connection. Sometimes his internet is working, but it's not working perfectly, so we can detect it first for him, and that's been worthwhile.
It's important to remember that after the pandemic, we were 2.2, which is 40%. Maybe we could even sell more and increase our net growth. We would have to accept having worse payers in our client base, and we've decided to reach a balance point where we didn't want to have so much defaulters. Given the reality of the market, if we loosen up our credit, let's say, our credit analysis, maybe we could increase our number of clients considerably. We deny between 3,000-4,000 sales per month, which we could easily sell, but because the level of losses and default with those clients would be, it wouldn't compensate in the short term.
Maybe in the short term it would compensate and make us happy even for those who are looking at us from outside. It would be good news because it's a sale. In the medium and longer term it's not sustainable and it's not healthy for the company. There's the quality of the services as well, but there's also the fact that we are very rigorous in credit concessions, so in that factor. For the combos, the benchmark that we had and the surveys that we've done, this is where we expect to reduce that level that's around 1.6% of churn levels. We expect that in our combo clients, once we're able to complete one year, we can measure that, and the percentage can go down 30%. We could reach 1.2%-1.5%.
I think a first step based on what we have researched, it seems to be very possible because the mobile services are very satisfactory in terms of quality, and the price is competitive. I think that we can improve, but right now at this moment I can't give you a precise number. There will be improvements with the combo. That's a fact. Right now, 187% of the sales are with mobile because we are selling post-paid now. There are new sales that already come with the combo and there are renewals of contracts which Unifique does, that when we renew the service, we can include a new package of mobile services. I'd like to register that we are selling or with new markets, we have competitive plans.
The only offer that we have that's promotional, that is a fiber client where we give them 3 months of free mobile, and then it goes back to the normal price. We are not distributing chips or doing anything crazy to increase our sales because we are still improving things in our system, polishing our network. We are going to increase our mobile sales very soon, but we will take this step-by-step, and after the end of the third quarter when we have prepaid, we'll reach another vertical that will help us to sell even more. That was very clear.
If I could ask just one more question on your expenses with personnel. You said that you increased your headcount and some salary readjustments to sustain your growth. Just to understand if these levels of expenses have already stabilized or if we should expect more increases over the year.
We've already done some rigorous control with the control of these expenses. There will be a readjustment, a salary readjustment and those numbers will depend on negotiations with the unions. We do expect some readjustments from inflation, which is more than fair for our employees since there is a loss caused by inflation. That is something that we have done now with a lot of effort in the first few months to try to reduce as much as possible the numbers so that in May, when the readjustment from the Dissídio comes, that will be a cost that we will have.
On the other hand, we have a few other expenses and contracts that are being reviewed and we expect there to be a reduction so that the weight that we carry today that comes from our payroll, which is the main expense that is burdening us right now, can be more amortized. Our payroll budget over the months we've been able to save in. In other words, we haven't needed to spend it in its totality, so we've been able to control the extra hours better. There have been some measures to improve that. Will there be impacts? Yes, there will be impacts, but it's minimized by all of the other actions that we have practiced.
Perfect. That was very clear. Thank you.
Well, please go ahead. I apologize. There is a question here from Luis Sanchez at the from XP on competition. Could you give us a general overview of what you see in terms of competition for mobile and broadband? Given that you have 87% of the growth in base of clients, and does the percentage grow sequentially? What have you done, and what is the churn and the LTV of this, of these clients?
Well, about competition, it's what we've been telling you quarter over quarter. Whatever happens in the market, we can't increase the churn. We are at the highest level of competition. Sorry, not churn. I believe that Unifique, for some periods, we did have some difficulties in facing the market competition, but we were able to reorganize, re-manage, and we believe that we've been able to, at least in the region, present numbers that are relatively interesting. 87% of our base are included to the combo.
Well, good part of these chips are related to sales to Unifique clients in contracts. This shows the good reputation that we have with our clients. We have the condition of having contacts with them and selling them new services. In the beginning, people were a little bit, they were doubting Unifique. We still pay a price. People think that changing to Unifique is the same as being in any other provider and I insist that it is not. We are giving them better coverage with infinitely larger capacity than you would typically see in cities around them. People use our services. The ones who use our services notice and see this difference.
Of course, we need to make it clear, another important thing, that this client needs to have a 5G cell phone so they could take advantage of the full technology that we are bringing. If he has a 4G phone, it will work. It will work even better because Unifique has a huge capacity of data. We have the largest network of fiber in all of the markets. We're able to reach them with the very advanced level of optical fiber in the fastest way possible, so this even creates a movement. We believed in Joinville, for example, they started selling there in February of last year, and I believe that in the next 60-90 days, we will already have 20% of the market share there, reaching 10,000 users in that city. At that level, Luis, we gain.
We make more money in mobile than with fiber. Of course, if we were to look at the city in isolation, there are costs of operation as a whole, but we will need a lot of cities at that level to compensate it. It already shows that the business will work. There are difficulties in the beginning. There are difficulties with the 5G phones, but people go renewing their cell phones every year. Every Christmas, people renew their cell phones, so maybe that will help us as well with our sales. That's the effort that we have learned to do in selling these services. There is a question here about prepaid, which will also help us to reach our goals.
The Q&A session is closed, and we'd like to pass the floor to the final considerations of the company.
Well, thank you so much, everyone. We are very satisfied with the results of the first quarter, but there is a firm expectation that we can grow a little more, we can improve margin. We will be more aware to the inorganic opportunities. As I already mentioned, we are comfortable with our house in order. Our margins are coming back to their normal levels. We will be looking back again to the inorganic growth to see if we can improve the consolidation of fixed communication in Brazil so everything is more organized. We have a feeling of having fulfilled our duty in the quarter but with that desire of like, of course, we can still do more. Thank you so much to everyone. Thank you, everyone, for their participation.
Our earnings call referring to the first quarter of Unifique Telecomunicações S.A. has closed. The Department of Investor Relations is available to answer any further questions and issues. Thank you so much to the participants, and have a great afternoon.