Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Itauza's Conference Call to discuss 2019 Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
The file will be available at the company's website at ww.itauza.com. Bren at the Investor Relations section. This conference call and the slide presentation are being transmitted via Internet as well. You can access the webcast by logging on to the company's website at ww.itauza.com. Bren.
Before proceeding, let me mention that forward looking statements are being made under the Safe Harbor of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1996. Actual performance could differ materially from that anticipated in any forward looking comments as a result of macroeconomic conditions, market risks and other factors. I inform that during the presentation, the questions can be sent by webcast, and it will be answered at the section of question and answers. With us today, we have Mr. Alfredo Ejigio Setubo, CEO and Investor Relations Officer at Itauza Mr.
Henri Panchas, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Itauza Mrs. Priscilla Greco Toledo, CFO at Itauza Mr. Bruno Salim Brasil, Investor Relations Manager at Itauza Mr. Gerardo Suarez, Head of Investor Relations at Itau Unibanco Mr. Guilherme Se Tubos Sosa y Silva, Investor Relations and New Business Manager at Duetekz Mr.
Carlos Biel, Investor Relations Manager at Alparagatas. It is my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Alfredo. Sir, you may now begin.
Thank you. Thank you for those who are participating in our annual results conference. First of all, I'd like to mention that we changed some of our financial statements. We think it's more modern, more transparent with more information relevant information for the shareholders. So for those who want to look at that and also give some suggestions for that improvement that we made in our financial statements.
We will be glad to receive and improve even better for the coming quarters. Starting our conference, teleconference on Page four, the business environment that we see, we put here what we saw in 2019 one year ago exactly. Most of that was confirmed by the scenario. What we expected for 2020? We expect interest rates to keep it and inflation low.
Interest rate can even reduce a little bit more. Let's see how all these coronavirus and inflation in Brazil goes on, but there is some room in our view to a little bit more reduction, not in the short term, but for the medium term. We think consumption job and income levels will continue to grow for because we expect the economy to grow growth around 2% for this year. It's still low compared to the Brazilian potential, but it's better than in the last two or three years that the growth was around 1%. We expect lower global growth because of the reduction in the growth of China especially.
And now we have to see what will happens also with these corona prices in China, how these will affect the China production and so on. Probably the global economy will suffer some reduction in terms of growth for this year. We continue to expect the capital allocation from local investors to the stock market and to real estate market and to some more hedge funds. So this movement, we expect it to continue what will, of course, affect the capital markets. We expect the government, the federal and state governments to go on, on the privatization and conceptions projects for this year.
So, this will give some opportunities for investments. What do you see under this 2020 environment? What do you see for our companies that we have investments? In the case of the bank, we see the lower portfolio growth. We continue to expect the growth of the portfolio, especially in individuals and middle markets.
Big companies will continue in our view to use the capital markets locally and internationally. We see the mutual funds industry equity and hedge funds growing. We see companies using more the capital markets for issuing debt and equity. So the investment banking will continue to grow in terms of revenues. So we think for the wholesale products for the bank, will get the benefit because we are very well positioned in terms of asset management, investment banking and private banking also.
In the case of consumer goods, we continue to expect growth because we see the total income growing because of reduction in employment. These probably will benefit the local markets for Hawaiianas here in Brazil. We see civil construction, especially residential and commercial buildings going on, not only the Sao Paulo state, but going on to other states also in Brazil. We are still we are already seeing that happening in the case of DeCA products, in the case of Duratex. And we expect the new gas legislation that can offer some new opportunities to NTS.
That is our the company that we have a participation of distribution of natural gas. Going on Page five, we see the results of the allocation of capital that we did in the last two point five years. NGS that we made equity investments of BRL926 million. We made the calculation for these financial statements of the fourth quarter and the fair value of the equity is billion. So we have a gain in that investment.
And also we received in this period almost BRL600 million in earnings, in dividends and interest over capital. So these investments has been very good and very accretive for Itau. In the case of Alparagatas, we bought that by the end of last quarter of twenty seventeen. And using the metric of the share value in the stock market, Apargata shares almost double the total return of the Evofestra Index. So also a very good investment for Itau.
By the end of the year, we announced our new investment, an investment in CopaGas. CopaGas is one of the players of G and P distribution here in Brazil. We were the winners our consortium CopaGas, Itauza and National Gas were the winners of the privatization of this company from Petrobras in November of last year. We are now waiting for the antitrust authorities. They are already analyzing this deal.
Itauza will invest BRL1.4 billion in the capital of Copagas that we will use that money to buy to pay Petrobras for the stake that CopaGas will remain in the Gigas. And also, Itauza will increase the corporate governance of Copagas that is a family owned company and we have to improve a lot to put in the better standards of all the companies that Itauza has in their investments. Going to Page eight, some highlights of the companies that compound our portfolio. First one is the bank. We saw the loan portfolio growing 10.8% with a very good performance, especially in middle markets where our portfolio grew by 25% and also in the segment of individuals where we grew 13%.
Permissions from investment banking and fees in general, insurance operations were up 7%. Investment bank, the wholesale bank in general, it was the main sector that this growth appeared, especially related to asset management, private banking and investment banking fees for debt and equity issues. We improved our efficiency ratio by 2.5 points. We achieved by the end of the year 45.5% and we will continue to improve these efficiency ratio in the coming years. That is very important to face the new competition, the new environment of competition here in Brazil.
We continue to invest a lot in the digital transformation of the company with high investments in products and systems and apps and so on. And also in the evolution of the customer experience to and we improved our NPS by 900 basis points in the last sixteen months, showing that the customers are reacting to our new position in terms of products and experience provided to that. With all that, the net income increased 5% last year and the ROE of recurring ROE 21% almost 21%. Going to Page nine, talking a little bit about operators. I think our operators grew almost 10% of revenues, mainly driven by the volume of avianas in Brazil and also internationally.
We continue to move the company on. We changed the management last year. Roberto Funari was elected the new CEO and started the first January of twenty nineteen and is doing a quite good job improving the company and changing the management, the strategy, people, culture, and we are getting the benefit from that. We are also doing a lot of investments in the digital. Forgotas is very behind in our view in terms of e commerce user experience.
So we're investing a lot since last year and the coming years to really reduce the gap that we have here, especially in e commerce, not only in Brazil, but also internationally in the markets that we want to be like China, Indonesia, India, we think the e commerce will be the main channel to improve sales in these countries. We continue to keep our eyes in the capital management. We sold all the textile operation of Paragatas in Argentina and also sold the all the assets related to the topper, that is shoes, sportive shoes in Argentina also. So we are going on in the strategy that focus the company, especially in Havana's brands, not only in flip flops, but also in accessories and clothes and things like that. With all that, the net income increased almost 30% last year, ROE recurring ROE 30.5 and EBITDA also increased by 18% reaching BRL620 million.
So the company is showing a good trend in terms of results and cash generation. On Page 10, we have the highlights for Duluthex EBITDA went up 7%. We saw very good improvement in terms of efficiency operations and also the acquisition of Sekriza and the DeCA division outperformance especially in the last quarter of twenty nineteen and we expect the DeCA also to have a good year in 2020. We reduced a lot our financial leverage because of the strong cash generation recurrent and through the sales of farms and forests that we did last year. We acquired Sikris, that is a porcinari brand with that and Siuza.
We are very well positioned in the high end ceramic tiles markets. That is where we want to be. We don't want to go down in the channel to lower value products. So with these two acquisitions in the last two years, we think we are very well positioned. We finished the investment in the second line of Segundo and we use the second line as the most digital line of ceramics in Brazil to also produce a Cortinari product.
So this line will be probably full in this year, next year with capacity in terms of capacity for the high income products that we want to sell. We finished the total approval of the new JV with Lenzing related to the cellulose to the pulp investments that we are making. The total investments projected is in BRL5.2 billion and we already started the construction of this factory in the state of Minas Gerais. And also, we continue to rationalize our investments in terms of farms and forests and we sold the excess that we have in the State Of Sao Paulo because we are not planning any panel investments in The Cayman in the future. So we decided to sell and use this money to generate cash for acquisition of Secriza, pay dividends and rationalize our assets.
The DuraTax increased still with low results. We expect every coming years to improve more. We still have our recurring ROE much lower than we expected, but we are very confident with all these measures that we are taking a new business. This ROE will increase in the coming years. We finished with 5.8% last year.
And the recurring EBITDA increased by 7% achieving BRL900 million. On Page 11, MTS, the gas distribution revenues increased 9%. Company continues to over perform the investments the projections that we did when we made these investments. Revenues increased by almost 15% last year and we received BRL211 million in terms of dividends and interest on capital, an increase of 9% over 2018. Going to Page 13, we see some numbers that we released.
Net income increased by 9.3%, achieving BRL10.3 billion, recurrent net income, BRL9.7 billion with an increase of 3.6%, ROE of 19.4%. Total assets, BRL58 billion under holding. Stock equity stockholders' equity, BRL55 billion in a market value of BRL118 billion. The payout for this year, the dividend yield was 8.5. On Page 14, we can see all the dividends interest on capital that we paid.
We continue distributing all the dividends that we received from the bank and use the non financial sector dividends, interest on capital to pay the accounts that we have as a holding company, especially taxes. You know that we have not the best structure in terms of fiscal as a holding. We pay more taxes on the interest on capital. So we use the dividends from DuraTech, MTS and Aupargatas to serve the expenses that we have at the holding level that is around BRL400 million per year. In the last two years, we are able to do that.
We expect this year also to pay all the expenses and taxes using the non financial sector dividends. So probably this year, we are going to continue to distribute the whole dividends that we received from the bank. And we don't see any necessity for capital increase for this year of 2020, because we have a cash position of more than BRL1 billion. On Page 15, we see the market value of Itauza portfolio that the total is BRL145.7 billion and the market value of Itau is BRL118 million. That means that the holding has a discount in the market of almost 19% by the end of the year.
Our daily traded volume in the Baumezpa and P3 is increased 24% and achieved BRL282 million per day. That is a good liquidity for the share. And we end 2019 with three sixty four individuals in the base of shareholders of the company. And the last slide on Page 16 is the return of the company in the last ten years, five years and twelve months compared to the Interbank, to the BoveSpa Index and U. S.
Dollars. And in long term, we have been showing a good performance for the shareholders. That's our presentation and now we are open for questions that we probably have for the management and for all the people that are here at this conference today.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Our first question comes from Adriana de los Dada, Scotiabank.
Hi, everybody, and congratulations on your results. I would like to ask you if you can give us an update on your M and A outlook. I know you'd said in a previous call that you have several NDA signed and a big pipeline of offers. So if you can give us some details about the industries that you're looking into, that would be great. And then a second question would be on your outlook of dividend payout.
If you can give us a range and what you see there as well. Thank you.
Thank you, Adriana. The M and A outlook, we've just announced this investment on CopaGas. We are expecting the antitrust authorities during this first semester to approve that investment. So we will start to work with Copagas in this new investment and we are very confident that you will be a very accretive also like NGS and Au Pargatas that we did in the other years. In terms of new investments, we continue to analyze the what are being offered to us by the investment banks, private equity companies and so on.
We have many NDAs signed, but we at this moment, we don't have anything really advanced in terms of studies and for new investments. So we want to see the changes in the natural gas law in the Regulation. The regulation of the don't remember the wording Sewers and Sanitation. Sanitation and sewers. Mark laws that will change.
We want to follow the concessions and privatization. So we are very cautious because we have limited capital to use in these investments in the coming years. So we have to be very we have to analyze very well and deeply the opportunities that we have to see if it makes sense or not to make a new investments. For the moment, we have nothing real concrete in the pipeline for the coming quarters. In terms of payout, the payout of this year reduced because the bank reduced the payouts in the bank because the bank will need more capital this year according to our guidance in terms of credit growth.
So the bank distributed less than last year in terms of payout. And by consequence, it also distributed less than the previous year. It's difficult to say how much capital the bank will generate and need for this year, a need for 2021. So but anyway, we will continue to the practice of distributing the whole dividends and interest on capital that we received from the bank to the shareholders. So but today is very difficult to say what will be the payout of the bank because you depend a lot on the needs for growth of the bank in the coming years, especially in the next year.
Got it. Thank you very much.
This concludes today's question and answer session. Mr. Alfredo, at this time, you may proceed with your closing statements.
Thank you for those who participated with us. I think we released a good result for the year. All the companies are I think we think are performing very well. The bank, of course, had their challenges, but I think we are facing them and improving efficiency and improving digital products, competing with the fintechs and so on. And Duratex or Pagate is also improving results, improving revenues.
So, we think the results are very good and all the investments that we made have been very accretive. And as I said, we expected Copagas also to be very accretive for our shareholders. Thank you for your time and we will be back in the mid of the year with the results of the second quarter. Thank you.
That does conclude our Itauza's twenty nineteen results conference call for today. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.