Good morning, good afternoon, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the Unifique Telecomunicações webcast to discuss the earnings of the first quarter of 2022. Today we have Mr. José Wilson Júnior, the Financial Director in Investor Relations, and Mr. Guilherme Galvão Villani, the Investor Relations Manager. We would like to let you know that this event is being recorded and that all participants will only be listening to the earnings call during the presentation. Then we will begin our session for Q&A, where more instructions will be provided. If any of you need any support during the earnings call, please do select the help of an operator, selecting star zero. This event is also going to be transmitted simultaneously online through the webcast and can be accessed on the ri.unifique.com.br address, where you will find the following presentation. The selection of slides will be controlled by you.
The replay of this event is going to be available soon after its closure. We would like to remind you that all participants of the webcast may register through the website any of their questions for Unifique, which will be responded to as soon as the IR department can, as soon as possible. We would like to say that any future statements that are going to be submitted during the earnings call related to business prospects for Unifique, forecasts, operational and financial targets, are just beliefs and assumptions of the company's management, as well as the information currently available for Unifique. Any future statements are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as they refer to future events, and thus depend on circumstances that may or not occur.
Investors and analysts must understand that general conditions, sector conditions, and other operational factors may affect the financial future results at Unifique and may conduct to results that differ materially than those expressed in such future statements or conditions. Now, I would like to pass on the word to Mr. Guilherme Galvão Villani. He will begin the presentation. Please, Mr. Guilherme, you may proceed.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for participating in our earnings call as we talk about the first quarter of 2022. I would like to start this presentation on slide two as we talk about the evolution of revenue, homes connected, EBITDA, and homes passed, as well as the quarterly growth. We understand that the company evolved a lot in the last 12 months, and comparing the results of 2021 and 2022 really does not make sense because we had 11 acquisitions during this period.
We went public, and we had an important increment as well on homes connected, and have a geographic evolution as well, and the expansion throughout Rio Grande do Sul. We are going to focus on the quarterly comparison. We were able to evolve the gross revenue 9.3% from one quarter to another. That was actually a bit higher than the homes connected. This is due to the company's effort to migrate customers to higher plans and sell these higher plans and cable TV as well. Also Guaíba Telecom in this quarter, which is an operation from Rio Grande do Sul that also had a higher arch. When it comes to EBITDA, we were able to recover margins a lot compared to 2021. This was an evolution of 9.5 in the recurring EBITDA.
In regards to homes passed in this quarter, we decided to exclude this from our calculation. All of the ports that we had an overlap with in some city. Just to explain to you that when we acquire the networks, we bring in this entire network into our system, called ConnectMaster, for mapping this, and that's where we register all these ports. In some cities, such as Joinville, where we had the acquisition of Azaplon, and also in cities like Balneário Camboriú and Itapema, where we had the MKS acquisition. We had already built an organic network in these cities, and with the arrival of Azapte and MKS, we increased the amount of ports a lot, more towards the same location. We choose to not sell new plans using the acquired network.
We perform all of the new connections in the network, and we don't provide these ports commercially for sales. So the numbers were a little lower than the rate that we had before. But we built 65,000 ports this quarter. It was a little weaker when it comes to construction because you have holidays and the beach area is really full, so it's a little more complicated to build these ports during this period of the year. Santa Catarina receives a very strong amount of tourists during this period, but we're quite comfortable when it comes to the rhythm or the pace for construction of these organic ports. Now, moving on to the next slide. We are going to talk about operational performance. As I mentioned, the year-over-year growth was very significant.
The company evolved a lot in the last 12 months, and in the last quarter, we ended up having the beginning of Guaíba, with approximately 23,000 accesses now in January. It was an operation that in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre, which actually enters the city of Porto Alegre, with an underground cabling at Guaíba. We ended up having organic growth that was a little lower than what was done before. José Wilson will explain this a bit more on what happened in the last quarter in regards to the churn especially, and also mention that we continue to evolve in Santa Catarina with our market share. The company is a leader when it comes to fiber, and I think that this year we can also be a leader if we consider all of the available technology. Now I'll pass on the work to Mr. José Wilson, and he'll talk about this on the next slide with the economic financial performance and continue our call and then provide this for questions as well afterwards.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for your participation. Now we want to talk about our economic financial performance in the company in the first quarter of 2022. The gross revenue compared to the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2021, we had an increase in our revenue of 64%, and this is mainly due to the acquisitions we performed in the last 12 months. The company's EBITDA in the first quarter of 2022 versus the first quarter of 2021, we had an increase of 56%.
Another important point is that even with these acquisitions in the past 12 months, we've continued to have a recurring EBITDA margin that's above 50%. We continued to be having efficiency in our processes with acquisitions and searching for synergies in the acquired companies and our net margins grew by 76%. Soon after, we are demonstrating the evolution, as I was mentioning, with the operation in Rio Grande do Sul. If you take a look at this in the first quarter of 2022, we reached an EBITDA margin of 40.3% versus a margin of 44.1% in the fourth quarter of 2021. This reduction in the margin happened due to the acquisition with Guaíba. They really are a company where there are many synergies to be captured, and we haven't been able to work on this work in the first quarter.
We've been actually moving towards this direction in the second quarter of 2022. We will already have captured a big amount of synergies. The main points that we have there are really related to personnel. We have some metrics that we consider as guidance here at Unifique and in Guaíba. We've been searching for this metric so that our cost with personnel, which was one of our main expenses in the segment, could have a significant reduction. The necessary actions have already been implemented in the month of March to April. Other expenses such as consulting processes that we've already had, and we've been able to achieve through Unifique with these synergies, so we don't need to have these consulting services at Guaíba.
We understand that in the next quarter, the Rio Grande do Sul operation will already be really in line with what we've been practicing at Unifique. Another important point that we also need to consider in Rio Grande do Sul was the launch of our first store in Rio Grande do Sul, in the city of Taquari. Now we have our brand, our Unifique brand in Rio Grande do Sul. We had not made any brand turnarounds so far, but now in the first quarter, we did this brand turnaround process. We have our first store in Rio Grande do Sul in a region that used to be serviced by TKNET/Naja.
In this quarter, we also began the process to transfer revenue sales and employees as well with the TKNET and Naja to Unifique in order to capture more synergies and be more efficient when it comes to costs. During this exercise, we've been able to begin this process with the incorporation of this company. If we look at our schedule for the incorporation, we should be working on this incorporation in May 2022, which is very important. Once the companies are incorporated, we start having the goodwill fiscal benefits, and this represents lower fiscal costs. TKNET, we start working on in May 2022. Naja, and the incorporation starts in August 2022. Guaíba, we are going to be foreseeing in the beginning of 2023. Then in regards to other impact in our numbers, we have two topics.
One is related to the provision for provisions in regards to default that we had in the beginning of the extracts. Another point that we had also in regard to the churn. We also had an increase of our default rate. In our last earnings call, we've already mentioned that to the market. We had already started off with a process based on this topic so we could reach stabilization. Unfortunately, the default rate actually grew. We had been practicing in the period of 2021, a default of about 2%, at most 2.5%, but now we've already been reaching almost 4% default rate. Due to this, some initiatives were implemented, especially in collection processes.
Now when it comes to credit scores for customers, we're being a lot more effective and especially with issues related to the complete cutoff of non-paying customers that can occur in up to 65 days. Now we're already bringing this down to 30 days. If they're 30 days without payment, they lose their service. Based on these initiatives, we were able to stabilize this rate of default. Now in the effective process is really to start reverting the situation and how we can really work on this expectation through a process of being more careful when we perform the sale and bring the customer into our base. Consequently, this entire scenario with default rates impacts the company's churn as well. Because with the increase of default rates, we had an increase with this involuntary cancellation when the customer decides to cancel the contract.
Just as default increase, my churn also goes up due to this involuntary cancellation process. Of course, we're going to collect this, but we also need to be more careful and more restrictive when it comes to credit analysis for our customers and those that are entering our base. How have we been doing this? Through the analysis of the score for our customers. Our final objective with all of this is really to improve the profile of the subscribers that are entering our base. When I'm saying results, when I'm talking about results, these are the main points that we're bringing here and really what impacted the company's results. If I could summarize this into three points, Guaíba, which was a company we acquired where their results were not performing at the same level as Unifique and the other controlled companies.
Also PCLD, which increased considerably. The other point that we have here, which is more of an operational perspective related to the churn. These are the three points that we are bringing as important highlights for the first quarter of 2022. Moving on to the next slide. When it comes to the company's debt position, we had continued to have a net debt in a negative position with BRL 150.4 million of net debt. This is a position that still brings us a bit of comfort when it comes to the cash flow situation. One of the points that we have brought here is related to the issuance of debentures that we performed this week. We've been working on fundraising for BRL 150 million.
From these, we can have the necessary condition to fund our expansion into Rio Grande do Sul and also perform investments on 5G. Having done this with these resources available, I have some room so that we can, at this moment, really perform the prepayment of some of the debts that we have that are more expensive than the cost of the debenture. The debentures we are issuing considering IPCA + 5.57%, but we also have a swap connected to this, the debenture where this swap would have a cost of CDI + 1.30%. My debt position that I am going to prepay would have a higher cost of CDI + 1.30. Most of this part would be around BRL 100 million, and I would be performing the prepayment of it in the next days. What else in regards to the debt?
The company's cash position, and this variation is mainly due to the acquisitions and the CapEx that we had in the first quarter, and also issues related to the stock buyback program in the company. Today, we are starting off with a new buyback program, and the volume is, of course, a lot lower because we have to respect the free flow. We have this buyback program where we are just going to perform the acquisition of three million shares. Nothing very significant. But amidst the opportunities we look at when it comes to the price of the shares, we consider that this would be important. Generally speaking, that is it. On the last slide, we talk about the acquisitions of the companies in Rio Grande do Sul.
But in some way, we have already kind of detailed this previously, the main events that we have in Rio Grande do Sul. T hat, I will pass on the word now to our operator, so we can begin the Q&A session.
Ladies and gentlemen, now we will begin our Q&A session. If you have a question, please select star one. If you would like to remove this question from the queue, select star two. Our first question comes from Bernardo Guttmann from XP Investimentos.
Good afternoon, Guilherme, and thank you for this opportunity. My first question is about the increase in the churn rates, which is really significant. I think Ze explored this point quite well. I understood you guys had a shift in this disconnection rule. But I want to know if there is any other factor, maybe like cleaning out the customer base. Just understand if there is any other element that can help us in the comprehension of this delta. My second question is about the margins. I wanted to know if you have been able to know if there is any adjustment in the short term and what has been Unifique's approach towards this price policy. Thank you very much. Just these two questions, really.
Well, thank you for that, Bernardo. About the churn. The churn is, we did clean out our base, and now with the incorporation of these companies such as Naja, TKNET, we did have a clean-out process in our customer base and accesses when we incorporated the companies, and this also brought in an impact in our churn. But what is most important as an effect for the churn is really due to the involuntary cancellations, which really brought in an impact as we changed our criteria.
You can imagine that a customer was only disconnected from our base with 75 days, and we brought this down to 30 days. We have already felt that in the short term, the selection process was more efficient. We felt this from one month to another, and we also start adding this to the base, and we start removing customers that in some way harm our indicators. This is some work that we have been doing. It is quite necessary, and it is an economic moment that does not contribute too much to us. But we are working on this, and we have seen this as something positive because we do not extend this program we have had. We are going to clean out the base. We are going to cut out some of these involuntary cancellations, and this will also guarantee some predictability and better results in the next month.
This is how we are conducting this. Now, when it comes to price transfers, yes, we did perform an update of some of the plans and price transfers into some of our customers. But up until now, we have seen this as something positive. We have not had reflections of a possible churn due to the transfers and updates of the prices. The expectations we have within this scenario to equate the customer base cleaning process and transfers of prices, we expect to have better results in the next quarters.
Well, Bernardo, just to clarify here, the suspension is taking place reflecting the Anatel terms and timing. We are certainly shortening all of our timing for the partial suspension before we perform the full suspension, and this will end up forcing customers to, in some way, be paying up today. If not, we can already begin the process with the total suspension. But of course, we always respect the timing and deadlines in the law.
All right. That is very clear. Thank you very much for this question and answer.
I would like to remind you all that if you do have a question, please select star one. If you would like to remove your question from the queue, please select star two. Please wait while we collect new questions. Our next question comes from Lucca Brendim from Bank of America.
My question is about default rates and also the forced cancellations due to this. Could you give us some color on what the impacts were and what this default would be if it was normalized with the previous number? Also, if you could mention how this is considered in the second quarter. If we look at the first months in the year, we had a bit of a slowdown in February and March. In the second quarter, do you imagine it is going to be stronger than this, or is there still some impact in this to start the quarter off?
When it comes to the impacts we had in regard to default. The first quarter of 2022 really kind of went out of the curve. If we look at the provisions for losses, we registered in the first quarter of 2022, BRL 8.4 million, which is way above what we have historically. But we tried to register this impact in this first quarter of 2022. Our expectation is to have an improvement.
We've already started off with this process to clean out the base. Then we also went through this process to be a little more careful with how we add customers to our base. Our expectations are that for the next quarters, this provision for losses would be smaller than what was registered in the first quarter of 2022. We tried to already capture all of the effects and register them so that we can have better results in the second quarter of 2022. If we were in a normal scenario with a default rate of 2%-2.5%, then we could be saying that we'd be registering a provision of about BRL 3 million in the quarter. These would be the impacts that we have.
That's very clear. Thank you very much.
Once again, if you have a question, please select star one. If you'd like to remove your question from the queue, please select star two. Our next question comes from It's going to be in English, and it's going to come in from Emiliano Flores from Scotiabank.
Hi. Thanks for having my question. Could you provide some color or guidance on the expected CapEx for 2022 and 2023? Any absolute or relative reference would be extra helpful. Thank you very much, and congratulations on your results.
For 2022, what we have as a guidance is. Well, maybe one of the main points we have here for 2022 would be Sygo, a company we acquired in the first quarter. We signed for this, but we're still relying on approval from CADE, the antitrust body. Now we're waiting for approval from Anatel. It's a company that although we do not have the closing, we already are very close to it. We waited on all of the CADE, the antitrust body process, and we already started to implement many different measures, and we've also been capturing some synergies with the company. Our expectation is that in the next months after the approval from Anatel and the closing, we would already be able to bring this company into Unifique as a controlled company and also profitablize our operations at the same levels as Unifique.
This is some work we've been doing there. It's quite accelerating and very constant, very intense with this company. We have been having excellent expectations when it comes to the relationship with them. It's really good. The owners and former owners are really leading this, and they're very in line with the culture and procedures adopted by Unifique. Another important point that we must consider here are related to 5G. In the next days or months, we should already have defined what the core focus would be for 5G, and the company has been working on this. With 5G, there's already a team and structure set up that's been taking care of this process and really searching for opportunities when it comes to 5G. Here, we say that 5G is a whole another business, so there are many new opportunities involved, and in some way, the market hasn't even scratched the surface yet. We're starting to bring this into our structure, but if we highlight maybe the main points, I'd say these two.
To contribute, Emiliano, when it comes to guidance for the number of customers for 2022 and 2023, it's a little difficult to commit to a number because first of all, we rely on an expansion in the amount of ports in Rio Grande do Sul. Unifique is hiring a big construction company to be able to open up a very significant number of ports in Rio Grande do Sul. We have an expectation to increase organic sales a lot in Rio Grande do Sul from the second semester this year.
We've also been assessing different possibilities for acquisitions, and we've been expanding our acquisitions and scope because we understand that the funnel is a little shorter. We are being more careful with the purchase of companies because we understand that these purchases need to be really creating value and also respecting the multiples that have been negotiated in the stock exchange, which makes it a little more difficult to close deals. What we're doing is expanding the amount of companies that we assess to be able to close better deals during this year and in 2023. This quarter, we did not have any acquisitions really, but we didn't stop looking at the inorganic market. In Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, we've been assessing many different possibilities. Certainly this year, we will announce a few more acquisitions.
But as I mentioned, we rely a bit more on the sales reps really respecting a bit of the scenario that's more difficult and interest way, and we need to really have operations that can create value for the company. That's why we need to have prices that are a little different than what we had previously.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Bernardo Guttmann from XP Investimentos.
Well, thank you for my next question. Actually, I just have a follow-up based on this last question, this last answer, Guilherme. On the net debt expectations for the year, I think with inorganic, you mentioned it's very well. We have expectation about 200,000 inorganic and another 200,000 of organic growth. But what changes based on this guidance? What have you seen? Is it possible to re-accelerate in inorganic? Could you give us some color on this? That would really help us. Thank you.
Well, Bernardo, we had an expectation at the end of the year of really adding on a bigger amount of customers organically. Then it was a bit frustrating when it comes to this number in the first quarter due to the churn that was a little higher.
The sales pace that's also been monthly reaching about 15,000. We also rely on the opening of ports to be able to reach new markets, and we've been signing a deal now with a big construction company, a developer that's already worked with other big telcos, and we would like to have a significant amount of ports opened in Rio Grande do Sul. We do have an expectation that in the second semester, we'll be able to bring in more customers inorganically coming from Rio Grande do Sul. About inorganic, as I mentioned, the market changed very quickly. We are waiting a bit before we can close deals because we also want to bring these prices into a different reality that we can really create value for based on the multiples that Unifique has been negotiating with in the stock exchange.
This kind of gets in the way of the operations. The strategic acquisitions. We have re-acquisitions around the metropolitan region. We're also bringing in Sygo more towards the Midwest region. We have this work with integrating the networks and the possibility for opening up new ports. As we open up new ports and we start off bothering a bit of a few other markets, from our experience, this becomes a way to bring in companies to the trading desk. This is something that's been going on. Conversations continue to take place, and they've been intensified due to the need of analyzing more businesses or deals. But it's really difficult to commit to a number right now. If we can make these 200,000 in organic acquisitions, we will.
Thank you very much.
To submit a question, please select star one. If you'd like to remove your question from the queue, please select star two. We have officially ended the Q&A session. We would like to once again pass on the word to Mr. José Wilson for his final remarks. Please, Mr. José Wilson, you may proceed.
Once again, I want to thank you all for your participation during these questions. I would like to once again state that the company continues to work a lot to fulfill its commitments as signed during the IPO. I think we're on the right path. We've been able to deliver profitability. We've been able to be precise and in a very responsible way. We've also tried to implement the necessary actions so that we can keep going on. So I want to thank you all and have a great afternoon. The earnings call for Unifique is officially ended.