Guilherme Galvão Villani, the Investor Relations Manager. We would like to let you know that this event is being recorded, and all the participants will only be listening to the earnings call during the presentation. Soon after, we will begin the Q&A session, when more information will be provided. If you need any kind of assistance during the earnings call, please do request support from an operator selecting star zero. This event is also being transmitted simultaneously online through the webcast and can be accessed on the address unifique.com.br. Today, we have also provided the presentation on the website. The slides will be passed on by you. The replay of this event will be available soon after the ending.
We'd like to remind you that all participants in the webcast can sign up through the website for any of the Unifique questions that will be answered after the earnings call is complete. Before we proceed, I would like to clarify that any possible statements that could be made during this earnings call regarding business perspectives at Unifique, forecasts, operational targets, and financial goals are just beliefs and assumptions of the company's management, as well as information that's basic, that is currently available . Future statements are not a guarantee of success and performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as they refer to future events and thus depend on certain circumstances that may or not occur.
Investors and analysts must understand that general conditions in the sector as well as other operational factors can affect the future results of the company, and they could lead to results that differ materially than those expressed in future statements. Now, I would like to pass on the word to Mr. José Wilson Junior. He will begin the presentation. Please, Mr. José, you may proceed.
Well, good afternoon. First of all, I want to thank you all for your participation. Let us start as we begin discussing our results and earnings in the second quarter of 2022. If we take a look at this from an overview in a general manner, the first semester of 2022 was very challenging for the company because generally speaking, the market has really been going through an adverse moment considering the inflation scenario and the drop in purchase power.
However, I want to highlight in the beginning that even despite all of this adverse scenario, there is an important point that should be considered, which is related to the fact that the company generated cash during the period, even though we kept the expansion investments in the network and the technological advances in Rio Grande do Sul as well, with the objective of offering the same technological levels of quality at Unifique, and what it provides in Santa Catarina. But I want to reinforce that we kept our original plan for investments. We kept opening up doors, and we continued to offer a growth in the network, and we were thus able to keep up with the same cash generation. When it comes to inorganic growth, we went into this process of a waiting scenario where we really want to understand what is going on a little better.
And also, at this moment, we took advantage of the opportunity to reorganize the company. Of course, we had made 12 acquisitions. Along with all of this, we also began the work with Sygo, which was the biggest acquisition we had made at Unifique up until now. Soon after the approval from the antitrust body, because up until then, we wouldn't be able to have any kind of interaction, but after their approval, we began some alignment work for procedures and processes. Then certainly, this will allow the company to capture the synergies in a more agile manner. We also believe a lot in this acquisition and the work that's already been done. We believe that Sygo will be a very important means for the growth in Rio Grande do Sul.
Just to give you an idea, this is in the presentation, but considering the scenario that we've already performed, we already have a pro forma result for Sygo, applying all of the procedures and processes at Unifique. The second quarter of 2022, we already had an EBITDA of about BRL 10.5 million with a margin of about 46% approximately. This is of course, providing some signs that this was a very precise success case in all aspects. About new products and services, we would like to let you know and reinforce this now that we had the arrival of an innovation director. This is of course, allowing us to develop new products and services. And of course, some of them are also from the second semester that are going to start being commercialized.
The main point here is that, due to a market scenario, we actually prefer to not mention these products and services because of a positioning issue. About the 5G, we would like to let you know that the core 5G equipment will already arrive in the end of the month of August. We do plan to operationalize them by the end of 2022. This structure initially, which is the core in the company, is going to have the capacity for up to 2 million chips. This will lead to a capacity of up to 10% of the market in mobile phone services in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Thus, we'll begin very soon with our mobile phone market with the objective of having the best technology in telecom, also offering the best equipment and experience to users.
Also, this issue with the operationalization of 5G depends on spectrum cleaning. Some of the big telcos already started operation. In other aspects that are related to regulatory matters that we'll have to respect, but the company is already undergoing a process to operationalize this even more within 2022. Especially in regards to commercial activities, I want to mention that, as we can see, we had some difficulties in the sales in the first semester, especially due to the fact that we have a premium product. And in sales were impacted by the scenario with the drop in income. Consumers became more sensitive to prices. There's other points besides this difficulty, and we try to have sales with more quality.
This is something I want to highlight because the company started adopting some policies for credit analysis that were tougher in this sales process. At this moment, with this scenario of a waiting scenario, it is also very important to have sales with quality, and we were very concerned with this. As an example, what we can mention, even in the last call, last quarter, we had some issues related to score analysis. We started being more rigid when it comes to the analysis of the profile of our customers. Generally speaking, when it comes to this, we had in the second quarter of 2022, the main points that we would like to highlight are these. Of course, there are other operational points as well, that we had scenarios that were maybe even more difficult before, such as the management of stock in the company.
But as you saw, we never stopped, and we are managing to keep this planning process and relationship with our suppliers that we can really maintain our expansion organically and for the construction of networks. What I can say is that we are very confident in our strategy. We are in a situation that is very comfortable. We are really well capitalized. If we look at this year by year, we were able to have sustainable growth. We are very optimistic as well with the strategy we adopted and with the future of the company and what is up ahead. I am going to pass on the word to Guilherme Villani. He is our IR manager, where we already highlighted some questions from some of the participants on the call. As a matter of organization, we are going to provide some more details on this.
I would like to pass on the floor to Guilherme so he can continue with the call.
Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for some of the questions. I am going to try to address some of them, and one of them is about accesses. Just to give you an idea of how we register these accesses in the company, we have a proprietary software called BemTV, and through it, we can identify all of the customers that are being billed, and we can then calculate the amount of accesses they have. We had some operations that were still not in the BemTV system. When we performed this migration in this quarter, we identified that people were doing things differently, and there was an accounting process that was wrong, especially for customers that were using radio technology and had already been migrated to fiber.
Because of this, they were maybe not accounted for twice. This doubled about 5,000 accesses, and they were then deleted from our base. We are now very comfortable with the number we are presenting. This is one of the reasons why revenue was even bigger than what we considered as the evolution of the accesses. About the churn, this first semester was above what the company was used to. Default and non-payment went up, and of course, this impacted the involuntary churn when the company decides to terminate the contract. Even with the bigger rates in March and April, this number was more stabilized. In July, it then reached that level that we believe to be acceptable, which would be 3,500 contracts terminated. We will expect that from the third quarter on, we will be delivering a churn below 2%.
This is our expectation. This is about our commercial area. We have new managers and leaders that are bringing some new oxygen in the area, changing processes and tools that are very confident that in the next month till the end of the year, we will be able to continue to sell more with a customer base that is more solid and a lower churn. This is one of the reasons why we do not want to stop with our engineering area.
An d we want to expand our network because this is really where we can increase our potential demand, which is the homes passed. I want to remind you also that during these 12 months, that were very intense for acquisitions, we did have some investments that are very important in network updating. We had 52 PoPs, and 42 of them were built in Rio Grande do Sul.
We were able to actually end up harming the day-to-day of the customer. This is really because we wanted to deliver the best quality at the end of the day in the network. We actually kind of join up some of these Po P. We were able to eliminate 11 PoPs that were being used, and we were also able to restructure a few things. We have a standard that has a good reputation in the market, and we even have people that joke about it, and they say, look, they have this market standard that is the Unifique standard, really, because it became a benchmark. We really improved our technical capacity, reliability, and autonomy. I think these were the main questions that were sent by everyone here.
We will now open up for Q&A and try to address some of the questions that are also being sent by the webcast. I am going to pass the floor on to Priscilla.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin our Q&A session. To be able to submit a question, please do select star one. To remove the question from queue, select star two. Our first question is from Bernardo Guttmann from XP Investments. You may proceed, please. Bernardo, you may proceed.
Hello.
Yes. You may proceed. We can hear you.
Well, I have a question here for Unifique.
Yes, we can hear you. We can hear you well.
Okay. Hi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for this opportunity. I actually have two questions. The first one, Guilherme was already able to address in the presentation, explaining a bit more about the organic growth.
It is a little more clear that besides the macroeconomic component, you also had some non-recurring adjustments in cleaning up the bases of the companies that you acquired. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to also get a bit of your vision on the competitive scenario per state. If you could explore this with the environment in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. My second question is about the reduction of the ICMS rate. In Santa Catarina, if I am not mistaken, this reduction actually happened before. If you could explain that the second quarter had a positive impact in this reduction, and if we should expect any additional impacts for revenue coming from this drop in the rate now in the third quarter. Thank you very much, everyone.
Well, let us start by talking about a bit of how sales have been behaving.
Generally speaking, we're actually kind of stable when it comes to the process of sales if we take a look at the last 12 months. But of course, we did have other aspects, especially those related to the churn, that ended up harming us. So, of course, we had an evolution in the churn in the last month, and that's why we start being a little more rigorous in this process for the capturing of new customers and attracting new customers. But in exchange of this, due to the fact that we want to make this environment be a little more challenging for the—s ince this is becoming a little more challenging in the company, we start having a scenario where you have other activities and other initiatives to really be able to potentialize the sales in the company.
So we have different initiatives related to the digital environment, digital sales, and so we're really moving along in regards to this. We also have other strategies for sales that are being put into practice that are really specific and regional, to be able to handle each location within its customization. So, in Rio Grande do Sul, for example, we're following a direction where we're handling things in one way, and this is kind of separating itself from Santa Catarina. So we're going to have some specific actions there. And the expectation really that we have up ahead is that we're really focused on the sales process, and we can sell the same quantities we were selling before. But now what we have is that we need to make these actions so we can improve our sales.
We're already feeling some of these results that are quite positive, and for July and August in this scenario of what we've been working on, especially in Rio Grande do Sul. Another thing also, Bernardo, and you asked about the competitive landscape. We are in a context where each city has a different dynamic. So this is also one of the points that our commercial area is working on so that we can have action plans with localized or regionalized initiatives. Because even in cities that are close by, there are different scenarios from a competitive perspective. Any other question, Bernardo?
The second question was just about the reduction in the ICMS rate, and if you guys are expecting some additional impact in this reduction in the rate now in the third quarter?
Well, we don't have an expectation about this. Why? Because in Santa Catarina, ever since November 2021, we already had this fiscal benefit with the reduction of the rate to 17%. So this is already considered, and we continue to have this process now with this fiscal benefit. So all of the events that we had with the modifications in the legislation in the exercise for 2022, for Santa Catarina, didn't really bring an impact. But we continue to have the fiscal benefits and tax benefits. So when it comes to Rio Grande do Sul, then we do have this scenario now where we had a reduction, and we were able to then transfer this to our customers. And this benefit of this reduction in the rate, we've transferred this to our customers, specifically to those customers that were still undergoing this period of loyalty.
For those customers that were not in this loyalty period anymore, and they still had this plan that was outdated, we did not transfer this yet. We believe that this scenario should continue from now on. The impact we are expecting in the next month is really minimal.
All right. That is clear. Thank you. Thank you, José. Thank you, Guilherme.
Thank you, Bernardo.
Now we are going to address.
If you would like to submit a question, yes, you may proceed, Mr. Guilherme.
We will address some of the questions that are being sent through the webcast. About 5G, we are keeping our eyes open for everything that is going on in the regulatory front.
Our journey here is really defining the core and now establishing this core with all of the interconnections that are necessary with the other operators, and really building all of the BSS. We are keeping up with what is going on in the roaming front. We are not very concerned with what is going to happen or not happen at this moment. We are more concerned with developing our technologies and really getting into this market with some differentials that will allow us to scale up on this and quickly develop this with all of our revenue for mobile. There is another aspect also that we are going to have to get into, which is the test for the antennas. We need to test all of these antennas. There are different suppliers, and we need to understand what is the best configuration in those cities.
We have this expectation that we will be operational by 2023, but we have to take on a lot of traction really just from 2024 onwards. Just to add on about the question, that is on the same question also related to Sygo and what made them improve results so well, which is an issue of really starting to have more of a lean structure and define some strategies for processes related to labor consulting services.
Then we are managing to have a really good synergy in the last month. We have already worked a lot on this, and we have been able to really search for these synergies and this reduction in the cost, especially from an administrative perspective and some things related to operational aspects that really made us bring in these improvements. One thing that is also important to mention is Sygo did not have a 36% margin.
We have already performed some integrations with links, and we had to have the payment of some fines as well in that first quarter. This, of course, harmed Sygo's results. They are already coming into Unifique's structure with these synergy captures. This timing of the waiting period with the regulation in ANATEL was actually positive for us in some way.
Our next question will be from Lucca Brendim from Bank of America. You may proceed.
Well, hi, good afternoon, everyone. First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on the results. I have two questions. The first one is about the price dynamics, and I wanted to understand how you are looking at this up ahead, and if there is any perspective of having the transfer of inflation, and how you are looking at more sales for TV plans and cross-selling.
If you imagine that the reduction of the ICMS would have some kind of an impact on this, also about M&As. Now, with the closing of Sygo, are you noticing other possibilities to become active in the M&A front, or if there is still some more integration work to be done and what's going on with already in-house?
Well, Lucca, let us start. First of all, I am going to answer the M&A issue. I am going to tell you that we were not stopped in this period when we analyzed inorganic growth. But the thing is, there were not really good products to be acquired at this moment. We actually had three M&As, three due diligence processes in the last month, but at the end of the day, they did not really work out. Why? Because the prices were not in line with what we wanted to pay. The quality of the assets was not that good.
And so, it is kind of what I mentioned in the beginning. It is really a moment or pause for waiting. It is a moment that is completely different right now. However, we are already noticing that there are some assets that seem to be interesting for the company. At the moment, we are undergoing the due diligence processes. There are some companies we are analyzing right now, in fact, and we believe that there could be major chances for transactions being made. But the moment is really a moment of if we are going to perform any kind of payments for acquisitions, they need to be really good. There has to be good returns, and it needs to meet all of the requirements that are basic for Unifique. M&A is not stopped. We're looking at this very calmly, and possibly after Sygo, we will have some other acquisitions.
But this needs to be real quality assets with good prices. About the price dynamics, we're already in this process, an inflationary process, and we actually ended up having some updates on plans within this exercise. Historically, it wasn't the company standards to work on these kind of movements. But from a tax perspective also, where we have our biggest base in Santa Catarina, we have a fiscal benefit.
In 2024, we will already have this scenario with approvals from the STF, the Supreme Court, and with the reduction of this rate. Then we are not going to rely on fiscal benefits or any other approvals. It is going to be something that is already going to be a defined process for 17%. In the short term, and then of course, we are talking about the short term then, which is basically the end of this year in 2023.
We are not really mentioning anything regarding transferring prices to consumers. The movement that needed to be done, we already worked on, and the numbers are demonstrating that in some way we were precise in this process. We were able to generate cash in the company in this period that is so challenging. But to be honest about the price dynamic in the short term, at the moment, we are not transferring the inflation because actually we are already operating with an average ticket that is above sector level. So it would be difficult for us to increase our prices once we are already like 15% or 20% above the market overall. Any other questions, Lucca?
No, that is clear. Thank you very much.
We would like to remind you that if you have a question, please select star one. At this moment, we are ending our session for Q&A.
We would like to pass on the floor once again to Mr. José Wilson for his final remarks. Please, Mr. José Wilson, you may proceed.
Well, I want to thank you all for your participation in our earnings call. Once again, we are super confident about the future of the company. We have been working strongly to be able to guarantee growth. The arrival of Sygo now is a very important process. The closing and the signing process should take place in the next days. Once we have the closing, if it does take place now in this month, we will be able to consolidate the earnings for this company within the month of August, proportionally, considering the days that we have in the post-acquisition phase. These are 80,000 customers.
In some way, we are going to improve in a considerable manner with the company's earnings. This will give us an important up or peak in our company numbers for the closing of the third quarter. Anyways, I just want to thank you all for your participation, and have a great afternoon.
The earnings call for Unifique has officially ended. We want to thank you once again for your participation. Have a great afternoon.