Good afternoon, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the earnings call for Unifique Telecomunicações to discuss the earnings in the third quarter of 2022. Today we have Mr. José Wilson Jr., the CFO and Investor Relations Officer, and Guilherme Galvão Villani, the 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. Soon after, we will begin the Q&A session, when more instructions will be provided. If any of you may need any support during the earnings call, please do request support from one of our operators by selecting star zero.
This event is also being transmitted and broadcasted online through the webcast, and it can be accessed on the following web link, unifique.com.br, where you can find the presentation. The slides will be controlled by [you] This event will be available also soon after its closing. We would like to remind you that the participants can register any of their questions through the website, and they will be answered after the completion of the conference. Before we proceed, we would like to mention that any possible statements regarding business perspectives, operational targets, represent assumptions and general beliefs of the company's management, as well as information that is currently available.
Future statements are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions as they refer to important future events that could or not occur. Investors and analysts should understand that general conditions and operational factors can affect the future results of Unifique, and can conduct to results that differ materially from those that are in these future statements. Now I would like to pass on the floor to Mr. José Wilson Jr. He will begin the presentation.
Good afternoon. Before we begin this call, I would like to mention that Mr. Fabiano Busnardo, our CEO, will not participate in this call because he is at a professional appointment out of the country. At this moment, he is participating and representing Unifique at an event that gathers mobile companies all over the world. The dynamic we have in this call was very similar as what will take place in the last quarter. We are not going to follow the presentation, but we are going to talk about the main events that were organized in the third quarter of 2022.
In this way, we will follow along with the main events that took place in the third quarter of 2022. One of them that I would like to highlight is regarding this third quarter of 2022, where we had the acquisition of Sygo, where on August 15th, 2022, we signed the closing for this deal, and we started controlling and consolidating this company in our financial income statements at Unifique. In the third quarter of 2022, Sygo had an operational net revenue of BRL 23.2 million, an EBITDA of BRL 10.8 million, with an EBITDA margin of 46.6%.
It is clear that we are improving the profitability of Sygo, considering that in the first quarter of 2022, the margins were 36%, and in the second quarter of 2022, they were 46.1%. The company is continuing its process to search for synergies and efficiencies operationally, to be able to reach the same EBITDA margins that Unifique have. By the end of the third quarter of 2022, Sygo had approximately 83,000 accesses and about BRL 113 million as of now. It is important to mention that only half of the earnings in the third quarter of 2022 at Sygo were considered at the financial income statements that were consolidated at Unifique.
It is important to highlight also that if we had considered 100% of the earnings at Sygo at the consolidated results for the third quarter of 2022 within the consolidated results of Unifique, we would have reached an EBITDA of BRL 95 million. In some way, generally speaking, within this scenario, we were still able to keep the EBITDA margin at healthy levels in line with those practices historically, even with the relevance of the operation in Rio Grande do Sul. Currently, Unifique has approximately 150,000 accesses in Rio Grande do Sul.
Sygo is now being consolidated in a very summarized way. Now we have significant participation in Rio Grande do Sul of 150,000 accesses. Even despite all of this work that has been done during this period at Sygo before we had the closing of the deal, we have been able to have excellent results with this acquisition of this controlled company. Another important point that we would like to highlight is related to the initial cash position of the company. In regards to the cash position, the company has been presenting ongoing cash generation that is very consistent, even keeping up this original investment plan for the period of 2022.
We were able to keep up with everything we had defined in our budget for 2022. In the fourth quarter, we plan to build about 5,000 ports per month. In this scenario right now, this really helped us reach a take-up rate of 26.2% in the third quarter of 2022, amidst 27.5% in the second quarter of 2022. In the third quarter of 2022, just to make this very clear, Unifique was able to build 109,116 ports organically.
In the third quarter of 2022, one important point is that we had a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 0.16x. This calculation here to be able to reach 0.16x considered the treasury actions that can be used to pay the debt taken on at the acquisition of Sygo. This involved these different prices of the shares and the EBITDA is in the third quarter of 2022 annualized. We continue to have a net debt to EBITDA ratio that is quite comfortable still. Very comfortable condition for growth organically and inorganically.
Unifique is keeping up with the scenario de-leveraged position, even upon consolidation of the debt coming from the acquisition of Sygo. I bring Sygo in and I still have a pretty good condition. This of course allows me to have financial expenses that are very controlled amidst a scenario of a high Selic rate. As I mentioned, there is a lot of room for new acquisitions and maintenance of the investments in the fiber networks and mobile phone services. This position that is quite comfortable allowed us to continue this process so that Unifique could renegotiate contracts for the acquisition of equipment, thus reducing the value of the network building CapEx and activation for customers.
As an example, I really like highlighting that we have had a reduction in the ONU cost compared to what we had practiced this in this process with a reduction in the costs of the ONU of about 15% upon the value in dollars. We have been able to have really good conditions. This payment form really allows us to perform payments up front, and this is providing us with really good conditions to really significantly reduce our cost for CapEx. Of course, we have other areas in the company that really help us with the prices, but also reduction in the consumption of ONUs.
This is this process that the company has been evolving with a lot when it comes to the recovery of the ONUs. This is helping us a lot in this process with the CapEx. We would like to remind you also that we have some projects underway with the objective of having the best backbone structure in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Our network is completely standardized with the XGSPON technology with another capacity. We have already reached 80% of our network with this technology, and this already considers Sygo .
Generally speaking, about 80% of this network gives pretty good conditions for the next years when it comes to the need for investment. We are going to talk about this a little bit more up ahead. Besides the performance, the standardization of this network will really help us with the automation and activation of these customers and the speed also with the installations. Another important point this is related to mobile phone as well that could also bring in 5G.
In regards to this, we are under the process of configuring our core business. This is already installed in our data center. There are many different suppliers working with this core at Unifique. We also have another team working on this, helping to develop the systems and operational support as well. It is super important, and so we have been working on this development within, done internally, which really helps us be able to be very efficient in this return on this investment in regards to the mobile phone systems.
We want to highlight also that Unifique's commitment towards 5G is to really build an antenna structure just from 2026 onwards. As such, up until this date, we can work in this way, really sharing the existing antennas, because this is a process that was already determined and approved by Anatel. Generally speaking, we have a CapEx forecast of about $5 million for mobile phones up until the end of 2023. This value is absolutely feasible with the cash position we have. We have low investments for 2023 in regards to mobile phones. Guilherme, I will pass the floor to him for his initial remarks. We have some other topics also that are important to highlight. I will pass the floor on to Guilherme so he can present some of his observations.
Okay, hi guys. Good afternoon. Thank you for being here and participating. I want to start off saying sorry for a problem we had on our website at the mobile version for the investor relations website. Some people mentioned that the date of our earnings call was wrong. It was right on the website, but wrong on the mobile version. We were able to check this and we hired a service provider also. I'm so sorry I didn't notice this mistake.
I'm sorry about that. But before we get into the aspects regarding the market and the churn, I want to go over this point with the CapEx once again of the company, because I noticed that there was some confusion in regards to these concepts of the homes passed, and how we've been evolving with this throughout this year. When we determine a city that's a potential with 100,000 homes, our engineering department normally opens about 70% ports in that city. It's a homes passed of 100,000 and 70,000 ports opened in that city.
When I talk about this in the release and I calculate this to be able to reach the homes passed in the company, I always consider the amount of ports that we have mapped out in our system. Our organic ports that the company builds, we normally highlight in the emails or releases in writing, and we consider the total amount of ports. In this quarter specifically, we had an important inclusion of ports coming from Sygo . The number approximately is 150,000 and I'm saying it's approximate number because Sygo doesn't have the system like Unifique has.
Sygo also has many other acquisitions that they performed, and we still need to notify these ports and map them out completely with everything we have there. We had relevant growth of homes passed due to the acquisition, and the construction of the ports in the construction market, taking advantage of our capacity for the engineering department. It's an agreement we had with our service provider also that could support us in these projects.
Eventually, we also have some ports that appear with a network mapping out. We perform many acquisitions, small companies, some bigger ones, but no one has the actual network treatment as Unifique has. Just to give you an idea, in this entire process to map out the networks, our technicians, they stand up on the ladder, they go up in the post, they open up the little box with the [CTO] turn on and off each customer, identify each customer so that this can be registered in our system so we can know exactly where each customer is plugged in.
It's a process that takes a while. We also have our human capacities, so the people we need to work on this in different months, it's a process that really is extended, just as the process to update all of the points where the company's present. Today, our capacity for updating this is about 20 points per month. If we hadn't included Sygo, we would have already been reaching a percentage of almost 100% till the end of the year of POPs that were refurbished and standardized. We have a standardization of the switches and electric network and building network as well.
Also, the OLTs and our supplier is ZTE, and we normally prefer to use the XGSPON OLT. When Sygo Internet came in, this percentage of POPs that were standardized dropped a bit. We're going to have to work on some initiatives to substitute the OLTs that are there. Also about 12% of the equipment that will be in the customer houses in the Sygo network. This work is all done to really improve the quality of the services and make it possible and enable us to add more services into the customer's home, which is the case with subscription TV and phone services.
We're really close to ending this process in Rio Grande do Sul, especially. We have two areas where we have to work with a third party phone structure. We're very close to reaching all of these interconnections and working on this so that in 2023, we can sell all of the products from our current point. Moving on to market conditions. I think the good news in this quarter is really the drop in the churn that started off really high, and there was already an improvement in the second quarter.
We really focused on this point here, where the reduction of the churn really went through many different factors. We had macro factors that were really impacting this with a quick non-payment moment, and then we were a lot more focused also on the customer profile that we were searching for. We also had a lot of strategies changing with the registration process, the collection process, and even the retention and the process of really identifying customers that are more critical and greater loyalty in this process with a greater potential also to migrate even to other operators.
Either because you have a marketing initiative with another operator or a customer that you've noticed has been facing technical issues with a high level of calls and tickets for the company. We're being more precise in these aspects so that over time, we can only allow customers that have a profile of risk that we consider to be acceptable, which are those customers that are going to fulfill the contract. We don't want those customers that are just going to be around for three or six months. We adopted mechanisms to block them.
All of this generates a bit of a difficulty for our commercial team. We're implementing other tools also. Commercial tools so that we can supply possible non-sale of a percentage that could reach 15% of these customers with a score or profile, credit score that's really bad. The expectations for the end of the year are that maybe we'll have growth that was close to what it was, but improving our customer base. I think that is the most important, really making sure we don't bring in customers that won't generate value to the company.
Our expectation is to get back to those extremely healthy levels of churn. We don't know exactly how many quarters this will require. Considering the curve we're looking at, you could probably notice that we've had improvements that are very significant. These were my initial remarks. We have the webcast also open here and available for questions if you'd like to submit them. I'll first pass the floor to the operator so that they can give you the instructions and so that we can begin the Q&A session. Thank you so much.
Ladies and gentlemen, now we are going to begin the Q&A session. If you want to submit a question, please type star one. If your answer is responded, you can leave the queue by selecting star two. Please wait while we select the questions. Our first question is from Bernardo Guttmann from XP.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for taking my question. I have two questions. First of all, I just want to follow up quickly on some information. I do not know if I got that very clearly. What is your expectation for the construction of the ports up ahead?
I noted about [inaudible] We ended building 40,000, and the number has already increased for October. We believe it should be between 120,000 and 140,000 ports. About 2023, I am going to leave this up to José Wilson.
Well, Bernardo, let us go. The company at this moment is in this process to establish the budget for 2023. In this process, we were really detailed in this process. How was that? We looked at what were the expectations for the revenue in the next exercise. We also looked at what were the needs for opening the ports according to the cities in which we have expectations for growth. We really analyzed the stock of the ports we have and what will be necessary to be able to reach these objectives.
In this scenario, once we have accelerated this a lot in 2023 with the construction of ports, we have an expectation to be able to have a smaller construction of these ports for the 2023 exercise. This is what Guilherme mentioned. Within this period of 2022 and in the conditions that are financial and economic conditions to accelerate this process and really have the labor to do so. From 2023 onwards, we can take our feet off the accelerator, basically.
Well, thanks, guys. I have two more points. The first one is about the competitive environment. Could you maybe explore this a little more with a vision per state, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul. From Rio Grande do Sul, I think it would be good to hear about the adjustments you are working on in the commercial level. I wanted to understand how you expect to accelerate this growth. That is my first question.
The second point is about 5G. It is a little less interested in the B2C part, but I want to understand the opportunities you see in B2B with wholesale, sharing networks, renting these networks, transportation, et c. If you have any other conversations underway and if we can expect any revenue in this direction in 2023. Thank you.
Well, first, the first question that you presented, which is related to the market dynamics. The market dynamics, when we talk about Santa Catarina, we continue presenting this as we presented in Unifique Day. Just as we have become the leader in Santa Catarina. Rio Grande do Sul is a state where we entered, and we are building our network there in some way. We are improving this. The work is being done there. In the company today, we also created a specific committee to handle the commercial aspects and different possibilities in Rio Grande do Sul.
This is a committee that is set up by the former owners of the companies acquired in Rio Grande do Sul, as they are completely interested in this, and they have pronounced to receive as well. That is why we are having their support. They are really conducting the business still. We also have support from the directors involved. So we are really keeping an eye open on everything that can be done with all of the strategies in Rio Grande do Sul. We did not feel, in the third quarter of 2022 yet, the answer we would like to have in Rio Grande do Sul.
But we are really going through different initiatives, and we are experimenting these different initiatives in Rio Grande do Sul to be able to reverse the situation. In Santa Catarina, as I mentioned, we are extremely comfortable with the results we have been seeing in the past few days. But in Rio Grande do Sul, it is extremely challenging situation, and this work is involving everyone. When it comes to 5G, the core is really underway. We have expectations to start commercializing mobile phone services in January 2023.
That is our expectation. We have a business plan to be able to deliver this. So we are going to work with this at this moment. But yes, we do have this desire to be with this working in January 2023. Fabiano has the numbers. He has a challenge also of the amount of chips that should be commercialized by January 2023. We are still in B2B. We are really working with different initiatives. Since we are in this core process still, we are experimenting this market.
For B2B, we still do not have anything structured yet for 2023. So we are looking at the different possibilities and products that could be offered, but nothing that has any effective actions in the company. We have always gotten into this scenario with low investment, really working on sustainable growth when it comes to 5G.
Conversations exist about sharing the infrastructure, but I want to remind you that here we have the frequency that is also shared. We also have another asset that is fiber, which is involved in all the transportation, and we also have the antenna assets. So they are also shared, and we can fit this in as well in the market. Certainly the assets are good. They have their value. Certainly in a negotiation desk or table, either compensating the infrastructure for the company or reducing their costs. We are still not at the moment to speak openly about this.
Well, thank you, guys.
Our next question is from Lucca Brendim from Bank of America.
Well, thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you, Lucca.
All right. Two important questions from my side. The first one is about the other business without internet, right? Like the data center and all that. We had important growth in this quarter. I wanted to know what are the perspectives of these lines in the future, and also if you could help me understand a bit of the margins and how they should behave, if they are bigger or smaller than the other businesses. My second question is, what has your strategy been about ICMS? Have you already transferred something to customers, or are you going to or not, et c? Thank you.
Well, answering your first question about new products. Unifique, in this exercise, we had the hiring of a Technology and Innovation Director, and then we already started noticing some positive results towards this. One example was that we already had a data center product, and the data center was under this Board. That's when we started to notice that this is bringing in good results.
So, the growth of the revenue in the data center was extremely significant, and that's where we had the structure and the procedures and methods to disclose this in the market, especially in Santa Catarina, about what is the data center, what it could be offering. This event was done in many different locations for different target audiences, and this brought in great results. So we were able to attract many customers to the data center.
Besides the data center, we have many different products that are being tested. This technology area and innovation area has its specificities because you're testing many products, and not all of them work out. But some of them will work out, of course. Certainly, the profitability or returns will offset all of these other points that maybe weren't evolving as much. So today we have products that are created and structured, and they're related to safety, security, banking services, et c. There are so many different products and opportunities, and who's taking care of this is Gabriel, which is our Technology and Innovation Director.
So it's an area that is already delivering results, and data center is an example about profitability. This investment is already done, and now the objective is really working on plugging in more customers and having more revenue since the CapEx is already done. We're seeing this very in the short term with some evolution in this segment.
The second issue, could you repeat your second question, please?
The second question is about the ICMS tax and how much you were able to transfer this to customers or not.
The ICMS, we have two scenarios. One in Santa Catarina and one in Rio Grande do Sul. If I tell you about the scenario in Santa Catarina. In Santa Catarina, we already had a tax benefit where we were already applying 17%. Consequently, there was not much to be done. What we did was we continued with the 17% due to the reductions defined by the government. But all of the necessary practices to be able to keep this program for fiscal incentives for Santa Catarina, we were able to keep. So nothing really changed in our life.
Whatever we had to do, we continued to do to place Unifique in a position where it's really taking advantage of this fiscal benefit. We didn't look at this reduction of the ICMS that was given by the government, but we kept all of this tax benefit line. We delivered all of our obligations to be able to say, "Look, I have this fiscal benefit, this tax benefit, and I'm If the law, by any chance, ends and the benefits and the government reductions move on to December, I'll continue to have 17% in Santa Catarina. So there, nothing would really change.
But when I move on to Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná, where we have revenue as well, what was done is, for these markets and states, we transferred the tax benefit with the reduction of those 17% to customers that were in this loyalty period. Because we could see that they really have these updated processes for customers that had plans that were outdated and that needed to have an update in this plan.
What we did was we ended up leaving them in the same situation. We did not perform any kind of action directly. You had an IGPM transfer to be done, then we were able to then offset this with the reduction of the rate. This was also zero-zero. This clearly what reduced our net revenue and this rate were the customers that had active new plans.
Okay. That is very clear. Thank you.
Before I move on to the last question here, I am just going to answer a few other questions that are also coming through the webcast. About the treatment of the monthly fees, it has already been answered. About the net organic activations in this quarter, we started the quarter with 509,000 accesses, and we added about 82,000 in August with Sygo, and we are ending with about 600,000.
We had an average of 3,000 accesses or adds per month with 9,000 per quarter. It is not about an ideal growth necessarily. The company has a DNA for growth that is quite aggressive. But it has been the possible growth following the rules of the customer profile that we imposed, and that really end up impacting the performance of our commercial departments. But this was also the same attitude that impacted our churn protection.
This is something where we saw major financial institutions in the market having problems with non-payment. We had this problem also there in the beginning of the year. We were able to really need to keep our eyes open to make sure that we are not selling just to sell, but, and the sale could maybe in a few months generate non-payment problems and retention problems and other issues with the removal also. With the customer that does not generate value to the company. This kind of customer, we are really making this effort to block and add new tools.
We hired, a few months ago, some of the TOTVS solution, the [playstation retail] and we are implementing and deploying these systems. We have a timing necessary, and we have also reorganized our teams. This is something that is going on, and we also have new products being developed. We are already in this almost final phase to be able to finally have this new mechanism, for a more precise sale, maybe better retention, better loyalty. It is not an easy scenario in the market. But, the company is still growing slowly but surely, and especially improving its churn.
We hope to get back to that scenario with the churn of close to 1.5%, which would be the ideal world for us. We are kind of waiting on the scenario, the Brazilian scenario also, which is, of course, a very uncertain situation post-election. We have really built a lot of ports, and we improved our potential demand. Next year, we are going to start off with another six months of some investments when it comes to the backbone networks and it is a project in Rio Grande do Sul that already started with Sygo.
Now we're going to really take on the baton and complete this process. I have another 60 points to reduce. Maybe in three quarters, I can already end all of this. Then my CapEx for expansion is just going to be focused on opening up ports. I think we can reach next year with a CapEx that is a lot lower than what we had over the last year and a half, where we had a lot of stress to redo all of these networks, not only the points, but sometimes you have to call the customer, schedule a visit, and all of this comes into our CapEx costs, right?
Update this. I'd say in another three quarters, we'll have a network that is completely updated unless there's no more new acquisitions, right? In the future, this generates very positive expectations about a cash generation situation that's going to be even more positive. About M&As, if I've asked this about this, I'll talk about this. I'll take this question, and what's the expectation to resume M&As? This expectation is pretty positive. We talked about this a lot during this exercise.
We've declined a few M&As that were very expensive. At that moment, we understood it wasn't really ideal to have that cash payment paying such a high price. Nowadays, we've gone back to looking at M&As. We're looking at some opportunities. We're already undergoing some due diligence processes, and we've started some others as well. We have good transactions coming around, and if the completion of these M&As are really positive and the returns are positive, then certainly we will move on with them.
The size of these companies generally is small companies, like 7,000, 8,000 accesses, but there's also some other assets that are more relevant. I can't get into the exact numbers of this level of relevance, but this would put us in a position that is a lot better and bigger for delivering results. I want to remind you all also that we're at a very healthy balance point. We're very de-leveraged. We were able to build this net debt now. Now we're in the situation of a high CDI rate. We still don't know how the situation will be, such as the high CDI rate.
We are looking at the overall market that people are taking on debt with a CDI plus the relevant spread. A lot of people are paying over 20% per year in interest. For those who are under debt, timing is kind of playing against you. If you're de-leveraged, things are going to be favorable, right? We have to be patient, work on the due diligence process in the most precise manner possible, and really bring in a business that can generate value to our shareholders and not lead to too much of a desperation in regards to this. Now we've been able to collect good fruits in regards to this. How do you understand the overall scenario for leveraging the company? Do you believe there's some indicative for debt?
If I were to say that in the company, of course, we are quite conservative. We know that there's also this guidance of really being very conservative, and we've been closely looking at these numbers. As a financial director, I would accept at most something around 2.5x or 3x t at most. That is the most I would work with here in the company. This is an interesting discussion because since we are a sector with utilities and we have a recurring revenue, which is different than a retailer where we always have to try to kill a lion per day.
Here we normally kill this lion, and we have another year with that customer, right? This leads to more predictability in our results, right? Our covenants indicate at most 3x net debt to EBITDA. In a scenario with such high interest, what we really need to do is find good business opportunities that can bring in greater perspective of expansion for the company, and of course, within multiples that really make sense with our numbers as well.
I think if we do not have more questions, we will pass on the floor to José Wilson.
I want to thank you all for your presence today. We are, of course, available to answer any other questions out of the telecom conference, but I wish you all a wonderful weekend as well. Thank you so much for your presence, everyone. Just one more important point we want to highlight is that non-payment rates in the company were somehow hurt during the period, but we have been able to recover the scenario in the past month.
We have already been able to have the receipt which is equivalent to what was billed, and we have always considered in some of the best scenarios in the company's history, we had a non-payment rate of 2%. We reached 4% for some percent, but we have already been able to get back to this scenario of about 2%. We have now searched for new improvements in regards to non-payment rates. We have had pretty good results.
We had a change in the way we performed collection, the right timing for this, and we have been able to balance this out very well. Even the cash position in some way contributed a lot to the scenario. We are searching for this possibility, and now in this scenario with really being more precise towards having customers in our base with the deployment of these cores, being more rigorous, and bringing customers to our base, which is all helping us a lot. We are having excellent results when it comes to collection processes. I just wanted to make this point clear. I want to thank you all for participating today, and I hope you have