Good afternoon, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the teleconference earnings call to discuss the results regarding the first quarter of 2023. We have Mr. José Wilson Júnior, the Financial Director and Investor Relations. Then we have Guilherme Galvão also with the earnings. He is our Investor Relations Manager. We would like to let you know that this event is being recorded, and all participants will only be listening to the earnings call during the presentation by Unifique. Soon after, we are going to start the Q&A session where more information will be provided. If any of you need assistance during this earnings call, please request support from an operator by selecting star zero.
This event is also being simultaneously broadcasted on the internet through the webcast and can be accessed on our address, unifique.com.br, where you will also find the presentation. The selection of the slides will be controlled by each of you. This event will be replayed soon after it is finished. We would like to let you know that the webcast participants can sign up through the website, and these questions will be answered after the completion of the call by our investor relations department. Before we proceed, I would like to mention that any possible statements that could be made during this earnings call related to business perspectives at Unifique forecasts, operational targets, and financial targets represent beliefs and assumptions of the company's management as well as are based on information that is currently available at Unifique.
Future statements are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they refer to future events and thus rely on circumstances that could or not occur. Investors and analysts must understand that general conditions in the sector and other factors operationally can affect the future results at Unifique and could lead to results that differ materially from those in such future statements. Now I would like to pass the floor to Mr. José Wilson Júnior. He will be starting this presentation. Please, Mr. Wilson, you may proceed.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for your participation in our teleconference. I will start off with the growth of the amount of accesses in the first quarter of 2023. This first period, we reached 48,000 accesses more and 34 of inorganics. These were acquisitions we had right at the beginning of our period, and they came through ViaWebRS, with about 26,000 accesses, and Alfa with about 8,000. Both of them were in Rio Grande do Sul, so this really placed us in a more significant condition in the overall market in Rio Grande do Sul. Another important point I would like to highlight in the first quarter of 2023 is related to the churn in the company. The company had been going through, in 2022, a peak in the churn, which made the management make some initiatives.
Now we are already starting to notice this improvement. The expectations are that we will get back to a scenario in 2021. But we are moving in this direction. As an example, we have adopted some initiatives to reduce the churn, and one is related to the involuntary churn. Today, we already adopted some initiatives. We have some active initiatives where we contact customers that are in a position of non-payment. We create this proposal so that they can continue in our base and can keep this payment flow with the company. This is an initiative we are starting now, and one of the initiatives we expect will improve this profile even more of our churn. Another point that would help us improve the churn was the deployment of the score.
The score analysis really made the quality of the customers in our base improve significantly. We started off having an improvement in the voluntary churn. We understand the voluntary churn as something that we have some action over, and we are working in this way. We already start having improvements in our performance. Another point we have as a highlight is the growth and the building of the ports. If we compare with the last period, we can already see that there was a slowdown. But the slowdown in the construction of these ports tends to increase. We are going to be building a lot less ports within this period, and it is something that we had already talked about. We had discussed this in the last event, and we are really focused on this.
We already see a CapEx reduction. The trend is that this should remain in the rest of the period. In some way, this improves our indicators a lot. This should improve significantly due to the fact that the company is also improving its processes for commercialization. We were able to increase this. We had organic growth of about 14,000 accesses in the first quarter. Our expectation is that the take-up rate for the company will really improve, and so there is going to be a slowdown in the CapEx for building the ports, and we will start having some greater growth when it comes to the organic assets. We are going to talk about this, but it is clear that we are performing some acquisitions.
We also said we would get back to this process of inorganic growth as well as part of our exercise for 2023. Getting back on the take-up rate, it could be that there could be some worsening, but that would be really due to the amount of ports that we are acquiring versus the amount of customers that are in our base. This is a point that we should observe. I would like to go back to slide four in this presentation, and here I want to mention that you have this variation in the net income. We will reach 12.8%. Why did we have this reduction in the margin? Well, it is mainly because of the impact of the income tax and social contributions.
But if anyone else has availability, I would ask you to please access this explanatory note number 20, and that is where you have some reconciliation in the actual tax rate. Then you will see it moved on to 36%. Why is that? Well, because there is this combo of events that went on in the first quarter. One of them is the change in the value of the depreciation of these assets. You would imagine that we performed this acquisition of Sygo, and for tax purposes exclusively, we had some depreciation that we had worked on at a certain rate. Then during the first quarter, we identified we had some lack of consistencies in this depreciation, and so we performed the corrections, and then this was reflected in the taxation base as we looked at the taxes.
We also want to highlight that we had the provisions for the income tax and social contributions approved upon tax losses with a negative base of subsidiaries. This generated a deferred income tax. We have the expectation that in the future, we will be able to recover this loss and this negative base. But another point that also impacted us a lot that we had in the past and we do not have now is the incentives for investments. What is this? Well, basically, you have this fiscal benefit with ICMS and a reduction of the rate. Then when you have this kind of benefit, you do not have the income taxation upon the earnings you have from this benefit.
Then, of course, with this reduction of the rate from 25% to 17%, we stopped performing this adjustment in the base for income tax. Basically, if you look at note 20, you will identify these three events, and these three events made us have this change in the effective tax rate. This is something that is very occasional, especially this depreciation issue. But the expectation is that we will get back to an actual effective rate at the same levels as we had in previous periods. So up ahead, we will also have the fiscal or tax benefit of the goodwill at Guaíba. We had the incorporation of Guaíba now in February for 2023. For the next quarters, we will have 100% of the fiscal benefit of the goodwill for Guaíba.
And that will, of course, bring us a significant cash effect when we look at the payment of taxes. Then moving on to slide 5. As we talk about our debt position in the company, we remain in an extremely comfortable position. The highlight I want to show you is the fact that the acquisitions we have been working on at this moment really being indexed according to IPCA as a rate. And so this makes us have really good financial performance in the company, and even compared with other market players, it is a result that brings us a bit of comfort in our cash position and our earnings. The fact that we are performing these acquisitions, and they are all indexed according to IPCA really helps us a lot in the financial aspects.
Then moving on to slide 6, we have the acquisition of Brick. Brick is an acquisition we performed at the end of March, and approximately 7,000 accesses. It is an operation that is located in a city very close to Timbó, where our headquarters are. And so this operation is in Gaspar, and Brick was a leader in that city, offering these kind of broadband services. So, some positive points. We start this process we had already discussed, and this is a process where we can start acquiring the customer portfolios, and then after this, we can also perform the allocation, the rental of this network that sells their customer portfolio to Unifique. It is a five-year contract for rental, five-year rental, and after these five years, depending on certain market conditions, Unifique can perform.
They can adjust this income asset. It is an operation that the company understands to be very good. We performed all of the analysis in the recovery of the scenario, and we feel super comfortable to perform this operation, especially in the profitability aspect. We performed this first operation with Brick, and that is where we are searching for assets that are really consolidated and that have an amount of customers that is really centralized. This helps us a lot with the operation because when we perform this kind of operation, we are buying a legal entity that comes along without any liabilities, and we become responsible for the operation. We rent it, but we are responsible for the operation.
Some of the expenses that are significant in our segment, such as the rental of these posts, expenses with electric power, all of these remain with the InfraCo company, so we can really optimize this process, and we can capture synergies because in these cities, we already operate like this. We have this kind of structure. My costs of operation for employees really do not get that impacted, and it is a kind of purchase that gives us some profitability guarantees that are very significant. Moving on to the next slide. This is an acquisition we are going to discuss. Superline is an acquisition we performed, and we had the signing and closing yesterday. We had the process yesterday, but we are going to have the closing at the end of the month.
This is an operation that took place in Concórdia. We are buying the customers, so it is approximately 22,000 customers that we are acquiring, and most of these are in the city of Concórdia. A city where we are really a leader with over 80% share in the city. And, sorry, 42.7% market share in the city. It is a city that we continue to have a significant share within this profile of acquiring assets that are super strong in the region where they operate. This acquisition of Superline is in line with an acquisition method. It is an operation that we are also acquiring the customer portfolio, we are renting the network, and then we have a future purchase option. It basically follows the same standards.
Another thing that I think is really important, this kind of operation, is related to the overlap of this network. We have networks in these cities, and the cost to rent these posts is under the responsibility of a company called InfraCo. So in the future, if we can eliminate one of the positions, then, of course, this could provide some gains for InfraCo and the fact that they would not have to pay for the rent of these posts. If this occurs, then when it comes to Superline, specifically about 50% of these gains will be covered by InfraCo and 50% will be with Unifique. It is really a method we have designed here, and we understand that the efficiency of this operation really becomes a lot better.
Generally, this is what we had to share today. We also have 5G, of course, and from what we saw in the last meetings, we really want to highlight that we continue to have this kind of expectation that we will be able to start operation till the end of June, and we are working towards this. It is a new business for the company and, along with what we know about, this is under our control, so we are going to be achieving this. If we have some other event that does not allow us to operate until the end of June, then we are going to definitely bring this to the awareness of the overall market. Generally, core is operating. The interconnections are also at a really advanced stage, and the main issue now is.
Actually the customer's journey also is already at a very advanced stage. These are details so that we can really start cooperating with this process at the end of June. Amidst all of this, these are the main points we would like to share. Now I will pass the floor to the operators so that we can begin our Q&A session.
Ladies and gentlemen, now we are going to begin our Q&A session. If you have a question, just type star 1. If you want to remove your question from the queue, select star 2. Our first question is from Marco Nardini from XP Investments.
Hi, good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I actually have two points. The first one is if you could maybe talk about the competitive environment for FTTH in Santa Catarina and also in Rio Grande do Sul in the beginning of the year. We have seen some important acceleration in Anatel's numbers in March. Do you think this pace is going to remain in the next few months? The second is about M&A. Could you explore the rationale for the acquisition of ClientCo? Also, what are the trends up ahead? If you could talk about the pipeline also, about M&As and if we can consider this. Thank you.
Well, thanks, Marco. Well, about the competitive environment. What we consider as an exercise in 2023, and what we place in the market considering the competitive environment, is that we have this expectation for organic growth of about 60,000 accesses in this period of 2023. In the beginning of this period, we had a lot more challenges, because in April, for example, we had about 4,000 accesses, then we reached the month of February with about 1,500. March had. It was out of the curve with 8,300 accesses. Of course, it is also clear that we will add some plans as a welcome in the market where you provide a welcoming discount in the first three months. We noticed an improvement in this process to attract customers.
We had never used this before. Now we started using it, and we noticed an improvement. We are really careful about this, of course, but this issue with welcome customer, that we provide an initial discount. We follow all the procedures defined so that we can guarantee the best quality of customers entering our base. What I am trying to say is that it is an assumption of about 60,000 organic customers during the period of 2023. We are working on this number. It could be more, but 60,000 is a number that we consider to be adequate. When you look at April and this growth, we think that we should be doing about 5,000 net, but let's see.
We are waiting to confirm this number, but if we are able to keep it and this pace till the end of the year, we will be able to reach our target. As we talk about the methodology for acquisitions. What ends up happe ning is that when we are going to work on these purchases before the M&As, and we felt this especially in 2022, that the assets were really expensive. We mentioned this to the market. We kind of noticed that M&As were not really being worth it and it did not make sense for the pricing and the profitability was not making sense. Really low returns, it did not make sense. This also provoked us in the company to think about ways and things that could take place to be able to perform these acquisitions.
We have two acquisitions that are being made within this model, Brick and Superline, and two in Santa Catarina, and the se are all excellent assets. The main point here is that when we look at these difficulties, is that in this kind of acquisition, the other side also has to structure itself, and you have to have this kind of split in the company to create this new legal entity. Once you create this legal entity, you can perform the portfolio allocation in this new legal entity. With this customer portfolio in this entity, then the legal entity, we define a multiple for this portfolio. We perform the acquisition. Do you agree that an acquisition like this will normally generate some kind of goodwill as it would in an acquisition of any other entity?
But it is a lot quicker and easier to incorporate. The cash flow in the company, when you look at all of the aspects, really gets a lot better, and this helps with the profitability. When we look at InfraCo and we perform this allocation, we understand that a lot of this, including Unifique and InfraCo, are gathering these strengths, right? There is the rental of these posts under the responsibility of InfraCo, but there are major possibilities because we have synergies at this moment in the networks to really be able to reach this, right? We can do this easily. These are assets that are really centralized and you have gains with InfraCo and Unifique, and we can really keep these kind of synergies.
The price, of course, will be in our liability, and since it is rental, we are handling this as a leasing kind of, and this is going to be registered in the company's liabilities. But in exchange, we are going to have an asset the same proportion of a right of use. This is all registered in our balance sheet. And what we will take to the market, when you see an operation like this, you're going to say, "Hey, well, if this second part is leasing where you have a liability and you look at the results, some kind of a rent like this won't impact the EBITDA." However, we will take this to the market and perform this adjustment of the adjusted EBITDA with the leasing effect of these acquisitions.
The EBITDA margin should get better, but we're going to demonstrate this adjusted EBITDA with cost at this level. Of course, the company will have the intention to perform the acquisition of these assets that remain after five years. And in some way, at the moment we're in, when we sign this agreement, we define this future price and the indexation of this future acquisition if it makes sense for the company to do so.
Okay, perfect. Thank you so much.
I want to remind you that if you have questions, just select star one. Once again, if you have any questions, please select star one.
Well, guys, since we don't have more questions on this call, we will start answering some other questions that are appearing also through the webcast. And basically, the first question here from Gildo about the permanence rate of the customers of the companies acquired and level of satisfaction of the same customers in regards to the services provided when it comes to Brick and also now with Superline. They're companies that are really old. They started off in the beginning of 2000, and they started very prematurely with optic fibers. And in the past, who started up ahead, obviously drank a little more clean water. These are the reasons why they're leaders in the cities they operate in, and they have this position of leadership because they're in the business for quite a while.
And this brings us a customer base that we consider to be excellent, and these are customers that are already older. They're older customers. These are companies that really understand the different areas and departments. For us, it's super important because we also can absorb the knowledge about the city. And our idea is that we'll always reinforce the network. When we talk about this, I'm going to try to give an example with the case of Concórdia. Why don't we look at Brick in Gaspar? It's going to be really easy because it's all in a region where we have strong presence. So it's going to be kind of like plug and play. Of course, we're not in all of Gaspar, and so they're in a part of the city we were already in before.
And so some regions that have this overlap, and we eliminate the rental of this post, and then we share the gains. But in Concórdia, this is a city that's really on the border of our network, so it's really robust until Asa, more to the east of Concórdia, very few kilometers. And then there's also a connection between Joaçaba and Concórdia, and since we did not have such strong performance, we had about 4,500 customers, and we didn't have such strong investments in the network. So in regards to the redundancy, alternative routes, et cetera. Now with the acquisition, we see that we're the biggest player in the city, and what we're going to do is invest in this backbone between Concórdia until Passo Fundo in Rio Grande do Sul.
If you see this on the map, we're probably going to go down a line. Possibly you'll have another line going to the north of Concórdia, affecting Videira, Caçador, and in that way, we'll be able to create greater redundancy. It's an inv estment that represents about BRL 1 million. This investment will benefit Concórdia. It'll also benefit Rio Grande do Sul, and will make the network prepared for organic expansion or future acquisitions that we work on in the western region. In regards to this network in Concórdia, we have other investments that represent about BRL 1 million. But they are all related to improving our equipment to be able to have this kind of interconnection with our link. We stop using the company's link, and we plug into our own.
This also gives us some important operational gains, and this also impacts our pumps, and we can restructure them so that we can possibly absorb part of the customers that are plugged into the InfraCo network. In regards to Gildo's question, these would be the main points I'd like to approach. First question from Eduardo Rosman about the margins currently and the margins in the next quarters. Then you have the network occupation issue. Do we think it's feasible to expect that the margins will go back to about 50%? I can answer that one. About margins, the company is still really diligent in its cost processes and expenses. Of course, the acquisitions we've been working on, considering the profile of the companies, they've been allowing us to have a revenue that are better in line with the synergies.
Our expectation is that we'll improve these margins. In the month of April, we are already demonstrating a reaction for the margins going back to over 50%. This is something we have in the company. We've always been searching for this and this target, right? To be very straightforward, yes, we do expect to get back to levels of about 50% or more. When we talk about the network occupation, as I mentioned in the beginning of our call, when we talk about the take-up rate, today we have 22.8% in the take-up rate, and we reached this level. You can imagine that way back in the first quarter of 2022, we had maybe 29.5% of the take-up rate. The expectation is that we'll get this better.
We did have growth because we built a lot of networks in the exercise of 2023. Now we're really going to take our feet off the accelerator with this construction project, and we'll start adding customers into our base. We're working strongly within the commercial aspect. We have leadership and other organizational structures. We have a commercial head that's specifically caring for Rio Grande do Sul. Our expectation is that this will start being reflected with other issues regarding the occupation of the company's network.
Another question here also about the scenario in Rio Grande do Sul. I think part of this was already answered by José Wilson, but along with another question also in regards to Rio Grande do Sul. We had this expansion in the amount of ports, and now we have a lot of commercial work that needs to be done. It is a region where the company is not that well known, and we need to create this reputation still. Most of our reputation in Santa Catarina is really due to the safety of the network, which is why Unifique is so strong where we will be, and we really reinforce these issues regarding routes and our capacity for the network. Legal entities can't have any sort of problems in regards to this.
I think, a last question here that came along is about the possibility that Unifique could maybe provide a neutral network model that could be provided to other players. Well, it's not a priority for the company. We have a high capacity network, but of course it would be better if we use it than provide it to other players. Fabiano talked about this through an interesting analogy, and he says that he understands that the neutral network and the ClientCo as things that are kind of like a cup on top of a plate. The plate would be InfraCo and the cup would be ClientCo. Basically, that's the analogy. When you split this, of course you got some benefits, but you also have some risks.
InfraCo is going to be super reliant on the performance of ClientCo, and then the model we have would be the cup and the plate instead of one or the other. Whether we like it or not, this InfraCo is real high capacity, so we don't see at this moment that this would be, in some way, an advantage to use our network and provide it to other players. Guys, I think on our side here with the questions from the webcast, we've already covered everything. We're almost finishing. We have a few other questions about 5G still, I see here. We're super focused still on all of the efforts for integration in our core to the cores of the incumbent operators, because we're going to rely on this existing network.
Y ou have different nuances and different settings. Ever since emergency calls, some bank lines, et cetera, it all needs to be really well set up and functional first on the existing network before we start thinking about our own network. We don't have a forecast for intense investments in our radio base stations. Our expectations would be that we would perform some tests and use these suppliers, different suppliers, especially when it comes to the antennas, so that we can integrate them in our network for fiber, and understand their behavior, study the behavior of these antennas and their capacities. We don't see much of a need to anticipate this investment, so we're estimating that 80% or 90% of the cell phones are still following the 4G technology.
We think that 5G is advancing a lot, very quickly, actually. So maybe, from 2024, 2025 onwards, we would already have better share, and it would make more sense to anticipate this investment in the antennas. But anyways, this is something that we don't have to rush towards now at this moment. We should just have our systems operating well, and then just develop our network of suppliers and set up this administrative team as well, especially when it comes to operations, infrastructure. And in the core front, we need to be confident that once we start with mobile, our services will really be of excellence. So I'll pass this on to our operator.
I think we have another question coming from the call. Excuse me. To submit a question, please type star one. To remove this from the queue, select star two. Our next question is from Lucca Brendim from Bank of America.
Well, hi guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. The first is about the ticket dynamic, and I wanted to know if you guys have noticed any room for accelerating this in the rest of the year. You've seen the other players maybe taking on a more aggressive approach when it comes to the telcos and the ISPs. And then there's another issue, which is about how recently we've noticed Claro expand their growth a bit in fiber. And then you also have this in the state of Santa Catarina. So I wanted to know if this also affected you guys, if you guys noticed greater competition from Claro, and if there's any major changes in the competitive environment or market.
Well, let's go. The competitive market for Santa Catarina generally. In 2022, we already had growth that was really good in Santa Catarina. So we've been having a lot of growth. And in one of the slides, we even demonstrate what our share is in that state. And so we have this high ticket if we were to compare with third parties, but our services provided here in Santa Catarina are really strong. So this still allows us to have this positioning in our market share. At this point in time, it's not concerning us that much, so we continue in Santa Catarina in a very privileged position, really. So what we consider in this scenario is not an increase in pricing, but we're mentioning a bigger discount upon entry. We've been able to bring these customers into our base.
This is reflected. So generally, it's not disturbing us that much to have this kind of approach that Claro has here in Santa Catarina. So maybe I'd also add on saying that Claro really depends on the substitution of HFC to keep their own customers. So I think it's a matter of survival and maintenance of the revenue. And most of the Claro customers are from Florianópolis, where they have over 120,000 customers, and we have a very timid share there on the island. So, we understand that their efforts remain in the main markets where they already operate. So, any other questions?
No, that's it. Thanks, guys.
Great.
I want to remind you, if you have any other questions, please select star one. We have officially ended our Q&A session at this moment. I'll pass the floor back to Mr. José Wilson for his final remarks. Please, José Wilson, you may proceed.
So I want to thank you all for participating, and we remain available. If you have any questions, you can contact us directly. The message here is that we remain searching for the best performance and results, and we really want to be the ISP that really stands out. Thank you so much, and have a great afternoon.
The earnings call for Unifique is officially ended. We want to thank you all for your participation, and we wish you a wonderful afternoon.