Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Multiplan's second quarter of 2019 earnings conference call. Today with us, we have Mr. José Isaac Peres, Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Armando d'Almeida Neto, Chief Financial Officer and Investor Relations Officer. Mr. Marcello Barnes, Vice President of Development. Mr. Hans Melchers, Investor Relations and Planning Director , and Mr. Franco Carrion, Investor Relations Manager. We would like to inform you that the presentation to be made today is available for download at ir.multiplan.com.br. We would also like to inform you that all participants will be in listen-only mode during the company's presentation. Afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session when further instructions will be given. Should you need assistance during the call, please press star zero two to reach the operator.
Before proceeding, we would like to mention that forward-looking statements that might be made during this call in relation to the company's business perspectives, operating and financial targets and projections, or beliefs and assumptions of Multiplan's management, as well as information currently available to the company. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks and uncertainties and assumptions as they relate to future events, and therefore, they depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operating factors may affect the future results of the company and may lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. This call will last 60 minutes. After that, the investor relations area will be available should you still have any doubts.
Now we would like to turn the conference over to Mr. José Isaac Peres, Chief Executive Officer, who will start the presentation. Mr. Peres, good morning, and you may proceed, please.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It's a great pleasure to be with you once again during this quarterly conference to present the results of this last quarter. I will be making brief remarks about our operating results, and the financial results will be mentioned by Armando. But I would like to mention those which I consider as the most relevant for the company, mainly when we look at the short-term, however, with our focus on the long-term. As I said during our last call, my expectation. We had an expectation about acceleration of our sales for this year, and now after the end of the quarter, this became a reality.
This materialized, and last quarter, we grew by 6.6% in our sales with an accelerator, which is very important in many other segments. It's important to say as well that the newer shopping malls that were delivered between 2012, 2013, are growing very quickly. In this quarter, the ParkShopping Canoas grew by 28.3%, VillageMall, 13.5%. Here, we're talking about the luxury shopping that we could not imagine that it would grow so fast in this crisis. JundiaíShopping growing by 13.4, Campo Grande in Rio de Janeiro, in spite of the problems of the city, growing by 10.3%. Also, I would like to say that in Ribeirão Preto, the ShoppingSantaÚrsula and the Shopping Vila Olímpia grew in Ribeirão Santa Úrsula 15.4% and Shopping Vila Olímpia, 13.2%.
During this quarter, it is important to highlight the ParkShopping Canoas growing by 28.3%. I would like to mention that more than sales, we also see an increase in traffic of vehicles, which is highly relevant as well. An increase in traffic was 6.8%, and this is a strong indicator. When we talk about Uber and the price of parking, you can see that the frequency is higher in spite of all that, and this confirms our estimates. Same-store rentals in the quarter, the highest in the last five years. A growth of 7.3%. The NOI, 7.3%. Same-store rent, the highest result achieved in the last five years. The result, as I said before, and I would like to make a parenthesis here and talk about the investment that we made during this quarter that reached BRL 429 million .
So far, we have already exceeded by 50% the whole amount invested during the whole of the last year. As I always repeat, I trust in the country, and we continue to invest even in moments of crisis. Evidence of that is the fact that Multiplan did not stop investing and started ParkShopping Jacarepaguá last year. To which there were high expectations regarding the political result of the elections, and we must make it very clear that Brazil has always lived crisis. If you just sit down and cross your arms, if you wait for the crisis to go away, nothing will happen. This is what we have been doing during the last 45 years. That is to say, going ahead and between 2008 and 2012, a period of strong crisis in the country when the GDP had an overall growth of 13.8%.
We invested 3.9 billion BRL during this period. Now from 2013 to now, a more critical period, and maybe the deepest recession ever lived in this country. In my 50 years of experience as an entrepreneur, I have never seen Brazil going down so deep. In spite of all that, we invested 3.6 billion BRL up to now. I would like to tell you a short story here. I think it's very important so that you may understand the dynamics of the business in which you are investing. I would like to start with the oldest shopping mall in the company, which was opened in 1979, the BH Shopping. At the time, the company had a capital of about $3 or $4 million. The total cost of this project at the time was $12 million.
Of course, we made this with loans that we raised because we didn't have enough capital. At the time, our stake was 50%. This was a joint venture with Suzano [inaudible]. Of course, after all the crisis that we had after 1979, culminating with the drop of the GDP of 3% in 1984 and many other stumbling blocks on our path and the exchange rate and so on and so forth, and changes and transitions. We were forced to sell our stake in order to reduce our borrowings, and then we kept 35%, and we sold the remainder to a pension fund. For the first time ever, pension funds were starting to invest in shopping center projects. I'm very proud to say that we were pioneers in this area as well. They helped us a lot to build what we have been able to build.
But this explains the trajectory of the company. I will tell you what happened after that. 40 years later, in 2019, we see that BH Shopping is celebrating 40 years of age on September 12. Now we have 100% stake in the shopping center. And what happened with the mall? It cost $12 million, as I said, and today it is $480 million. That is to say, it is 40x higher. And of course, it also comes from expansions. But I would like to say that what we have received in terms of income from the shopping center is much more than the investment that we made in expansions. And now celebrating 40 years, we are totally refurbishing the shopping center. It will be a new shopping center, so to say, with a higher potential.
And I would like to say that we confirmed this because we acquired the remaining 20% that were in the hands of Suzano, an excellent partner of ours for about 30 some years. So we acquired their stake in this mall and $480 million, that is to say, BRL 1.8 billion. I'm making this comparison in U.S. dollars because Brazil, during all these years, had so many different currencies. And if we do not stick to the dollar, then we will get lost in time. So 40x more than the cost of the shopping. It had an outstanding result. But due to the current policy, the pension funds were obliged to sell part of their stake. And these, of course, as you can understand, the first five shopping centers that we built, BH, RibeirãoShopping, BarraShopping, MorumbiShopping in São Paulo, and ParkShopping in Brasília, are valuated well.
I'm going to talk about our stake only in these five shopping centers. It represents BRL 11 billion, these first five shopping centers. So we have been basing our business in the long run, on the long run. This is what we have been doing, and we try to invest and innovate more and more. And this is very important information to convey to you because this happened in all the five shopping centers, I believe, that you do have an evaluation of around BRL 11 billion, BRL 12 billion, and our stake represents about 75% in these malls. We continue to invest in mainly preparing the company for the future. And I would like to mention to you something important because next year, we will be opening the ParkJacarepaguá next year.
And this mall, as we did in ParkShopping Canoas, in Rio Grande do Sul, this is an even more modern than that one, that one that was built one year ago, because we have to adapt to the need and the consumption habits on an ongoing basis. And this is rather interesting because ParkShopping Canoas and the ParkJacarepaguá will be even better. It won an award as the best project in Latin America by the International Council of Shopping Centers. And this shows that we are on the right track. We are including nature and a lot of entertainment and commerce. And this is a new perspective. And it's important to mention the ParkShoppingBarigüi with a fantastic growth rate. It is located in Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, and it will undergo the greatest expansion ever now.
When you join the BRL 1 billion club, that is to say, selling over BRL 1 billion, when it was opened, it showed BRL 200 million, BRL 150 million, then 10 years, 12 years later, it has already joined the over BRL 1 billion club. These are focuses of our attention, this is when we make investments because this shows a demand for services and for shopping, for leisure, for everything that we offer. The return is faster. Another important information, I consider of the utmost importance, is that we are innovating, always consistently innovating. I would like to mention one investment that we made bringing a lot of benefit to VillageMall. We invested in a photovoltaic plant that now produces 100% of all the energy consumed by VillageMall. Belonging to the same company, the cost of energy for us is much lower.
With that, we are able to reduce by 40% the cost of energy to all our tenants. We continue to invest, we expect to continue doing this for all the other malls in order to bring down our operating costs. Besides making our malls more environment-friendly, now with all the energy generated on a renewable basis. We continue to believe in the physical or traditional retail. People usually say, "Well, you continue to grow in spite of e-commerce, this is going to put an end to the brick-and-mortar retail." This is really a joke because our traffic is increasing, our sales are going up.
I would like to say that we are going to use technology as a driver to be more efficient for our clients, I will explain what we have been doing in this area in the last five years. Let us go back a little bit. Technology brought a lot of power into the. The power you give men, the more they isolate themselves. Right now, in the last few years, depression and anxiety are becoming prominent in the last few years because people just take to their mobile phones, they use their mobile phones 100% of the time. They drive while using their mobile phones, they talk to their friends via mobile phone. People become more and more isolated. On the other hand, society is getting older.
People are getting more lonely, youngsters are getting married later and later in life, this increases loneliness. But technology gives us the impression that we are powerful. However, while men are gregarious, I'm talking about Aristotle that said that 3,000 years ago, I'm repeating this. We are individuals. We are people. Our highest expectation or the big plus of our business is not the stores or the properties or the real estate. It is the people. The people are our biggest asset. Of course, it would be totally useless if we were not able to share all this with people, even if you are very wealthy. I usually say that loneliness is very bad because maybe you have billions and billions, but you don't share with anybody.
This is the way we are because the shopping malls are meeting points, and this is where families and friends get together. I am not going to talk about safety because this should not be a selling argument, but it is one. Since 1973, when I made the Ibirapuera Shopping Center, and the previous company was called Ripla. We made a survey in São Paulo, and Ibirapuera was our first experiment in this regard in 1973. I commissioned a survey on Augusta Street, that was a very big shopping street, to know the level of safety that the tenants had. I was flabbergasted with the results of the survey because all the stores had already been robbed in 1973, and some of these stores more than once.
In fact, the shopping malls are really oases in the towns, in the cities, where you find shopping, entertainment, service, leisure. The most important point is that people go there, and they talk, and they meet. We are investing quite a lot in technology, and undoubtedly, it is going to give the country, as we continue to invest in technology and looking abroad as well, we will be giving it a new degree of development, a more efficient one. I would like to add the following. Taking all this in consideration, recently, we made an acquisition, a stake in the Delivery Center that already starts to increase sales in BarraShopping, MorumbiShopping, and Shopping VillaLobos. We expect the service to be rolled out very soon to all our malls.
No less important is the Multi super app, an extremely new one, integrating shopping, several services, information, bringing convenience to our consumers, and expanding the showcase. Our objective here, when I started to talk about that about six years ago, was to put the shopping center in your home, and we will be able to do this as technology advantages. You will be able to go around the shopping center the same way you would be as if you would be there physically. But so far, our Multi app is limited to what the e-commerce has been doing. It is important to know that very soon in the Multi app, you will have 20 shopping centers in order for you to buy from the stores or make searches or buy from home and have the delivery guaranteed in one hour time.
It is an additional comfort that we will be giving our consumers. I remember when we opened BarraShopping, this was a region that had 40,000 inhabitants. Now I am going back to 1981. No, 1979. 1979, when we started, we had opened BH Shopping, but we made five new shoppings in five years. It was crazy at the time, and everybody said that I was totally bonkers because we bought regions around the malls, and people said, "Well, what are these guys doing?" Anyway, these shopping malls that were peripheral, so to say, they became urban centers since what has happened in Barra da Tijuca with 500,000 inhabitants. We have two moments. Before and BH Shopping building the old BR-3 highway, and that there is a song about the BR-3. Either you live or you die on BR-3. This is an odd song.
But it links Rio to Belo Horizonte with this region that was very empty. Around the shopping center, you see the biggest urban development in the whole of Belo Horizonte. I would like to say that we also generate urban development. We employ 80,000 people directly, and I am not talking about the indirect jobs. We create this in the malls and around the malls, and in Morumbi, in Ribeirão, in Brasília as well, the ParkShopping in Brasília, which is a major shopping center. What else? What I would like to say is that, for instance, in Jundiaí, we urbanized the whole region around it, 2 km of highway, and creating a new perspective in Jundiaí, such as we did in Canoas recently. Now around that, there are many real estate projects.
By that, I mean that today we receive about 200 million consumers, and the company has not yet tapped into the whole potential that these 200 million people bring to us. Our net income would have been higher if it were not for the non-cash effect. You will be able to see the adjustments. But anyway, this exceeded the same quarter last year in spite of everything. I would like to say that I am passionate about Brazil. My country has my confidence, and I have already built in the U.S. and Portugal. We built the first shopping center ever in Portugal, opened 30 years ago by Minister Mário Soares. He was president at the time, in fact. Many of our malls were opened by presidents. ParkShopping by President Figueiredo at the time.
I would like to say that the importance of this kind of equipment is vital to improve traffic for the cities and removing cars that before parked on the street. I am not going to mention figures. We made an evaluation considering the market discount rate, and our shoppings altogether mean BRL 28 billion. They are valuated at. If it were not the huge amount of taxes that we pay, our net income would be better. I believe that the Bolsonaro administration will be bringing down the size of the state, and it is going in the right direction, regardless of all the criticism about this administration. Because here we judge people by what they do and not by what they say. We had brilliant politicians saying wonderful words, but they were disastrous in their actions.
Brazil is going towards a new Brazil for the first time ever with a totally liberal trend, because freedom is the main element that we have on our lives. Without freedom, nothing can exist. Even if you are very wealthy, or even if you have everything that you wanted to have in your life, if you do not have freedom, this does not mean anything. In the business world, this is exactly the same. So in Brazil, in order to create a company, a small investor wastes five, six months sometimes to open a store at a shopping center.
The red tape, the bureaucracy at all the levels, municipal, state, federal. Sometimes it takes four or fve months, and this degree of inefficiency is going to go down with this new administration. Brazil opening itself up to the remainder of the world. Thank you very much. I apologize for my long presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Peres. Good morning. I would like to make a few remarks and then open for questions. First, giving you a higher degree of transparency regarding the R$7.5 billion that were mentioned by Mr. Peres. What differentiated from 2008, 2012, a higher investment in new projects, new shopping centers, and from 2013 on, in spite of the fact that we had new shopping centers, ParkJacarepaguá, ParkShopping Canoas, over BRL 1 billion, BRL1.1 billion invested in minority stakes, in expansions, and this was predominant, and this differentiates this period up to 2012 and from the period from 2013 on, and continued with the strategy of investing and growing. We were able to do this and paying interest on equity. For instance, in this quarter, we bought our stake at BH Shopping.
We paid 129.6% interest on equity and our leverage is 2.52x , very well-balanced, and leaving room for us to continue to invest and grow and tapping into all the opportunities that Mr. Peres has already mentioned. Another point that is important is the liquidity of MULT3, which is our share. It has an average financial volume of BRL 86 billion. Last year in July, we split our shares, and we tripled the number of trades practically. Which is relevant in this market. It is important to highlight the appreciation of our share, 8.7 million in this quarter. With this appreciation, there was an increase in the market cap of the company of about R$2.6 billion.
Of course, as Mr. Peres mentioned, vis-à-vis the mark to market and the investments and the stock options, the best way to see the quarter or look at the quarter was to look at the adjusted result excluding last year and this year, the stock-based compensation for comparison purposes only. My last point is the following, Multi-Multiplan is available in the Android iOS. I would like to make a short commercial here of our Super App. Thank you very much for your support. Well, it was launched yesterday.
Okay, now we would like to open for questions during which period you will be able to ask questions and clarify any doubt that you might have.
Now, we would like to open for questions only for investors and analysts. In case you have a question, please press star nine. In case your question has already been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star 9 again. Questions will be taken in the order that they are received. We would like you not to use the speakerphone so that we may provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we wait for questions. The first question is from Mr. Gustavo Cambauva from BTG Pactual. You may proceed.
Good morning. I have two questions. The first one, based on what Mr. Peres said, that sales grew more in the more recently opened shopping centers, many of them with two-digit growth in sales. My question is the following: We have been talking about the reduction in discounts for quite a while now, and I believe that most of the discounts were concentrated in these shopping centers that are delivering a better performance. I would like to hear from you, what is your outlook for the reduction of discounts in these shopping centers, that I believe had higher discounts and are performing better? Maybe during this year or next year, we will be seeing a real growth, a stronger real growth in your rental revenue because of your reduction in discounts.
My second question has to do with the initiative, the digital initiative, their Super App. I know it is too soon to talk about sales expectations. However, could you talk on the tenants end side, what is their acceptance of this initiative? Are many people coming on board with promotions and participating in the app one way or another, placing their inventory available in this platform? Could you talk about the rollout of this initiative to the other malls? Do you have a deadline for that? When will this be rolled out to your whole shopping portfolio? Thank you.
Gustavo, this is Armando. Good morning. What we have been seeing is that the shopping centers that were opened from 2012, 2013 on, and the ones delivered during this period, the difficult period, the ParkShopping Canoas in 2017, for instance, they took a while more to consolidate. This is the reason why they delivered a stronger sales performance. JundiaíShopping, Campo Grande have been delivering good results in some quarters already. You are correct because they concentrate most of the discounts, and these discounts still exist. Sometimes you can get one reduction here or there, but they still exist. With this good sales, we are very encouraged with the increase in the market and, of course, our sales. Then we will have a way to reduce our discount.
Our growth was 2.2% real, which is already very strong in this quarter, in spite of the discounts that you referred to, in this environment of coming prosperity. Regarding the Super App, I would like to take the advantage of the presence of Daniel here. He is in charge of our digital operation. It is very well accepted by tenants, the app as a whole. We established an architecture with the very light integration model and not a lot of effort needed on their part, the heavier integration chain and in which we have total visibility of inventories and other attributes. Regarding the architecture, we already offer dozens of tenants in the BarraShopping. At the same time, all the tenants in the click and collect model by chat, by WhatsApp.
You can say what you want from which store, and then somebody goes to the stores and picks up the product for you. This is an ongoing process. We only know when it starts, but we never know when it ends. It is an ongoing improvement method, because you have to do everything at the same time. You negotiate with the tenant and the product. This is a two-dimensional rollout because we open new malls and new features in the app, and then we overflow this from one shopping to the other. Some in BarraShopping, 100 tenants. With the natural overlapping of the stores in this mix from one to another, we have the same tenants sometimes. There is a lot of work, and this is the way we grow.
In relation to the rollout, we started in São Paulo with deliveries and the physical part of the operation with the Delivery Center. This is important for us in order to structure the operation. At the same time, we are starting the operation. By the end of next year, we expect most of our malls already working with the app and with the reverse logistics. That has a lot of value to tenants. The app, if you get it, the app already makes available all the Multiplan shopping centers, but not the marketplace. The marketplace is independent. At the same time, it is available to all shopping centers already. As it expands, we open the marketplace feature to the shopping centers by app.
Great answer. I still have one doubt. I know it is very recent, however, do you have the number of downloads that you expect? Are you going to have any stronger marketing initiatives so that people may mobilize themselves and be encouraged to download the app? Is it going to be more inside the stores?
We already have a campaign planned, and everything will be happening over time. It was launched yesterday, so we cannot say anything about numbers yet. We started long ago with six people in the team. Today, we have 40 people in the team. Gustavo, I am sure that some people would like to ask this. Our target audience is not somebody that is outside the places where we have shopping centers. Our targets are the clients that already come to the shopping centers.
We already have 200 million people coming into our shopping centers, and we want to increase convenience offered to them, increase interaction, increasing convenience, and giving a better service to our tenants as well. This is our target audience. So inside the shopping mall, it is even easier to communicate this.
Thank you very much. Perfect.
Mr. André Mazini, Citi.
Good morning, Mr. José Isaac Peres and the whole Multiplan team. I would like to know about the greenfields. Some previous greenfields, for example, that opened had a cost of 15% in an operation that in ParkShopping Canoas is 25%. Looking at ParkShopping Jacarepaguá, the economy is not as good as it was in 2010, 2011, but not as bad as late 2017, which was when ParkShopping Canoas opened. So your strategy for ParkShopping Jacarepaguá, is it lower in this regard to having a reasonable increase in your NOI as it matures, such as is happening in ParkShopping Canoas? A little bit higher, such as Shopping São Caetano. Maybe you could give us some figures regarding this.
André , here is José Isaac Peres. There is something I would like to explain to you. The crisis is not linear. It is not equal in all the places in Brazil. For instance, a region. Let us say a region. A region that is already very well-developed and even in a very well-developed country. If there is a surplus, so to say, of competition among shopping centers, I would say that in spite of the high development of the country, the shopping centers suffer a lot and you have cannibalization. Now, turning our eyes to Brazil, the per capita income of Brazil is low, okay.
But this is not quite so because when we consider an investment, be it in a country or in a city, in the location of that specific city, we take into account the fact that the population is consistent, it is expressive, it has a good purchasing power. If the services that we will be offering, there are lots of people competing with us. In Jacarepaguá, it has nothing to do with the crisis of Rio. It has about 600,000 inhabitants in Jacarepaguá. There is nothing whatsoever. It's like selling a glass of water in the desert. What is the value of that? Its value, it is worth a lot. The problem with Jacarepaguá is that it is one of the oldest areas or neighborhoods in Rio, and it was totally forgotten. People forgot about the population of Jacarepaguá.
However, the people who live in Jacarepaguá, they love to live there. So we have people with a very good purchasing power in Jacarepaguá, and we will be bringing to this region a new energy, so to say. It's like a transformation that we will be carrying out because the region was stagnant in its development for some time, and then it grew a lot in the last few years. However, it lacks services, and we are giving them the best shopping center for Jacarepaguá. Those who live in Jacarepaguá come a lot to BarraShopping. You may ask, are you going to cannibalize your own shopping center? No, it's not going to happen, such as happened in other cities. When you compete with yourself, it is easier to do something about it than doing something about your competitors. So we can coordinate everything here.
What is important is that Multiplan with the package of Jacarepaguá, well, it becomes dominant in the whole west region of Rio, the most populated region in Rio and with the fastest growth rate. The product is extremely good, and this is why we are so sure about it. Our expectation is to have a new cost higher than Canoas. Canoas is totally different in terms of interest rates, was 13% and now it's half, and maybe even lower. So 3.6% GDP in 2016. This is very different. It does not have the same offerings that Rio de Janeiro has, for instance. So our expectation is higher.
This is Tapia from Bradesco BBI. Good morning, everybody. The first point that I would like to mention regarding greenfield is the following. We saw that the shopping malls that were opened as of 2012 had a higher acceleration. When we look at the figures with the consolidated companies, we don't really see these improvements already reflected. Maybe the catch up is slower.
So I would like to know the trade-off between greenfield vis-a-vis stake acquisitions or expansions of already existing shopping centers, such as what you mentioned. Another point that I would like to understand, if you can tell us the level of investment in your solar panels and the savings of BRL 5 million, almost BRL 6 million in the first year. What about the payback of that? This investment was for VillageMall, 100% supply of energy to VillageMall. There is a reduction in the cost of at least 40%, or a potential increase in the cost of rent. Maybe Multiplan could tap into this investment.
Victor, good morning. Let me answer. The only shopping center where we had problems was not really ours. Ribeirão Preto, ShoppingSantaÚrsula. In Ribeirão Preto, ShoppingSantaÚrsula, it was really down the drain, and we decided to acquire this. It was very tough work. It is improving quite a lot consistently. It was not a major investment. It was a relatively small investment, but we ended up with two shopping centers in Ribeirão. The RibeirãoShopping is dominant in this region, and it is not only Ribeirão Preto. We are talking about the neighboring towns and cities because 2.6 million inhabitants in a radius of approximately 100 km. The other shopping centers of the company, they all developed quite well, but they were modeled by the company. They were made by the company from scratch, and we believe more in what we create than in acquisitions.
The company is not a big buyer of shopping centers. We are big makers of shopping centers. We have the expertise that dates back from our real estate activities when we made commercial centers or office centers many years ago, and we want to deliver to society what they expect. Please understand that the first shopping center that we created, if you look at the growth of the NOI that comes from them, is not exactly what you think, but Armando can offer you the figures because I do not have them by heart. I do not know whether I have answered your question.
As we live the situation since the inception, we know how difficult it was to bring to fruition shopping centers such as MorumbiShopping and RibeirãoShopping, and they are very well-consolidated. I see many of your analysis and about acquisitions vis-a-vis development. When you shift the focus to the longer term, the gains opportunity is very good. Fede just told you some examples.
A shopping center that cost BRL 12 billion, and we bought a stake, and the evaluation is BRL 480 million. You may ask, wasn't it too expensive? No, it was not too expensive. It was very good because it is going to sell much more because we always keep a long-term view. If you think about the short-term, you do not do anything. We want to have a dominant shopping center in all the regions where we have a footprint. This makes a very big difference, whether your focus is on one year, five years, 30 years, 40 years, such as is our case, and regarding value creation. Of course, you have to tap into the opportunity of acquisitions if they are good because they are very simple.
They do not involve major costs. You already have the structure. You have the physical structure. You asked about the investment in energy, if this is inbuilt in the condominium cost, and I would like to answer this, saying that this represented already a 25% decrease in the cost of energy. For the total cost of condominium, it was not only this action. There were many actions put in place, and we were able to reduce by 25% overall. Our investment was BRL 32 million, and we are not talking about the return. This will depend on the policy that we want to put in place, whether we want to keep our discount, because our focus is to make the shopping center have a better and better performance and the tenant having a better performance, which is a very tough job in this period of transition.
Something that you said about the performance of new shopping centers. First things first. First, you have to consolidate, and how do you consolidate yourself? Then the rent is a consequence, and this comes with time, Victor. Have I answered your question, Victor?
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Let us to Luiz Stacchini from Credit Suisse. Good morning.
Good morning, Mr. Peres and Armando. I have two questions. How do you see the appetite on the part of tenants with this change in the Brazilian macroeconomic scenario? Do you have more franchisees? Are they still getting better rental conditions? How do you see the issue of bargaining power on the part of operators? How do you see this shift?
The second question, I believe Mari talked about that even with the same-store rent growing more than same-store sales, the occupancy rate went down. Could you explain the dynamics involved in that, in promotion budgets? Because in my opinion, this initiative on the part of VillageMall isn't really bearing fruit yet, but have you had any other initiatives that have already had a relevant impact?
Luiz. With the advancement of the Social Security reform, while not concluded yet, we see a better environment, and very clearly you see more people. We see a higher flow of people, growth in sales. They are feeling more secure, mainly with the focus of income that we have in our shopping centers. The bargaining power, I am not going to answer it directly, but we have 97.6% rate, and the ceiling is very short or low.
When you get to an additional half point, you no longer have space because you will always have vacancies, and then you have pressure on rents and also bringing new areas. But bringing new areas is not something that you can do overnight. It takes time in order to plan, to build, to change. So I believe that with the improvement in the climate, so to say, or the environment, you have a positive change in terms of the rent and the occupancy cost that you asked about. For many years, we have been seeking efficiency in our condominium cost and revising the structure and automating whatever is possible and infrastructure improvement in the shopping centers. Because of that, over time, we have been able to reduce expenses in these areas, allowing us to charge a higher rent. So this is the answer.
Because of a higher same-store rent than same-store sales in this quarter, and in spite of that, having a drop of 20 basis points in occupancy. I would like to add to that, still about BH Shopping. When we opened BH Shopping, our expectation was a return in four years. Inflation at the time was gigantic. I do not remember, but it was something like 200%. For the first time ever, I have never matched assets and liabilities. But there was a lot of financing in Brazil and the Caixa. Nobody had money. Brazil was going through a very deep crisis, and we had to take a loan from Citibank. This was the first time ever Citi made a loan to a shopping center, and many U.S. consultants came to Brazil, and we were able to convince them based on many factors.
If we were to rent over 60% of the shopping center, then it would pay for the financing, and ultimately, it was 100% leased. But the crisis on the BRL was very big because on that year, we had two maxi devaluations. One was 30% under Delfim, and the other was 30% six months later. So our financial cost went up to 60%. With this kind of scenario, it was a very adverse scenario in the economy, and it had an impact on sales. It was a peripheral shopping center. It was located on a highway and not inside the city. So our expectation that was to have 25% return, BRL 3 million on top of BRL 12 million, dropped to less than half of that. But it went up consistently with adaptations and expansions.
Today, and for many years, it has been a highly profitable shopping center in Luziminas. Shopping centers stayed with us for over 30 years, and foundations have a very important role to play in the development of shopping centers. But debt was very expensive at the time, so we preferred to sell part of our stake in order to bring down our debt, in order to survive. So I want to give you an example. Our focus at the time was that. As time went by, we started to understand how to play this game in this business, and it was fundamental to make tenants sell and bring satisfaction to customers. So this policy made the shoppings grow, although there were some disadvantages vis-à-vis the regions in the city, and we ultimately transformed those shopping centers as generators of new cities around them.
This is a business in which if you think about retiring and with the change in the Social Security reform and where private received one-tenth, and we pay the taxes, and we received one-tenth of what the public sector received. So it seems that this privilege will come to an end, we hope, and the forms and the combinations of long-term investment. Of course, the safest thing is for you to invest your savings in a shopping center because in 30 years' time or 40 years' time, it will be 100x more. But this is gradual because there are good managers and improving and adapting and improving. The age today is much bigger than it was at the inception, and we are reinvesting from the income generating by the shopping center itself. Today, it's a big payer of rents.
Please understand that our focus is not on income. What is important is for the tenants to sell, like I mentioned in ParkJacarepaguá, because income is a consequence of sales. If they sell a lot, we are going to be very profitable. We are partners. We have a partnership with tenants. If they are successful, we are successful, and the opposite is true as well. I don't know if I have answered your question, but I want to say that I have total confidence on the ParkJacarepaguá shopping centers, and we are making urban interventions as well in order. Because traffic in ParkJacarepaguá is chaos, and we are going to improve the traffic of ParkJacarepaguá. Not the city administration. This is not our obligation. We are doing much more than we need to do. We know that one of the main issues regarding shopping centers is access.
And we are located at 1 kilometer of Freguesia, which is the biggest neighborhood in Jacarepaguá. 100,000 inhabitants, so you can walk to the shopping center, okay? This is why we are so confident about the place where there is nothing.
Thank you very much for your answers.
Thank you. Mr. Alex Ferraz from Itaú. Alex, good morning.
Good morning. I have two questions. The first one has to do what you think about leverage. For quite some time, the strategy of the company has been very comfortable and always lower than 3x in spite of covenants. So structural changes with the Social Security reform and lower interest rates, would the company be more willing to increase your leverage in the new cycle of invest, maybe acquiring stakes in shopping centers and financing? And you have Golden Lake coming on board, coming on stream.
And what could change in this new scenario with this outlook of lower interest rates? And the second question has to do when you look at the EBITDA margin of the company, there was some pressure from shopping center costs and due to an increase in delinquency because of the exit of bookstores. Of course, we knew about it. But we see this growth that is linked to this reinforcement, and mainly in IT. So looking to the next couple of years, do you believe it's going to be 8%-10% a year rolling out Multi? Or are you going to reach a stability level?
Good morning. This is José Peres . Of course, we are going to take Interest rates are quite inviting, so to say, and as they are already, and we are going to be very happy if they go further down. Of course, we are not just going to buy for the sake of buying a stake. If you take a third-party shopping center and you transform it and make it profitable, et cetera, of course, this requires time. But there are opportunities of shopping centers that already give us a very good income, and they are already mature, and they are on our radar screen.
We have the first month of the new administration, and we see that this administration is on the right track and doing what must be done, regardless of what is said about the president. You have to judge people by what they do and not by what they say. But we are 100% aligned with what Minister Paulo Guedes has been saying. And it's really music to our ears.
And we are very happy about it, and we will be even happier and more encouraged in the future. And tenants are already returning. We already see renewals, and we already have demands from abroad, and the market is already better, and it's going to be even better. Regarding the EBITDA margin, you are correct. We had some one-off effects that we already expected, that we already knew about, as you said. And we also had expenses with greenfield product. For instance, Jacarepaguá. We had a very big TV campaign being aired and many other costs regarding projects and other expansions and other ventures. So we have already talked about that in our fourth quarter call. We said that we were going to accelerate our investment, therefore having higher investment, higher expenses. And of course, there is a bigger impact when you have a greenfield.
The more projects we have, the worse the margin becomes, of course, because there are expenses that are not associated to current revenues. I would say that you have recurrent and non-recurrent expenses. In terms of recurrent expenses, we already have a scale regarding this digital renovation, so to say. We do not know how much the Super App will be representing in terms of sales. Maybe we will have a big surprise and maybe sales will be much higher, and we then would need more people. Maybe this is one case. Today the projects are. The Super App is one of the projects, and we have numberless of others, innumerous others. I cannot really see a big change.
I cannot do the math regarding non-recurrent, because when you look at some deals, I always say, "Well, there is no silver bullet here." You spend money here and there, and sometimes nothing comes. You only have expenses impacting, and I cannot really foresee anything regarding this.
Alex Ferraz, we could have a much higher income whenever we wanted because we have assets that we have never sold. Only in land, we have billions, and we have millions of sq meters around our shopping centers, and that are worth 10x what we paid for them. What I mean is that we will reach a moment when we will have additional income, because in the past, we were developers of real estate projects. When inflation rate was very high, we were exchanging six by half a dozen in terms of our restructuring of real estate or development.
Real estate companies went into debt, and at a certain point in time, we decided to invest in income because the asset continues to appreciate, so there is no depreciation in shopping centers and hotels with extremely good locations. Out of that, all the other real estate depreciates. They have a depreciation rate. However, they appreciate as well. If we consider about 5% of what we have, and if we sell them, it is going to be a huge income stream. We have to look at the fiscal side of that, as there is no restatement of the assets, and the government is now considering the possibility of enacting a law that may allow you to pay something additional and restating the value of your assets. Then able to sell an asset for a much higher amount than is in your book.
Today, we have about, let us say, BRL 6 billion. It should be BRL 16 billion, BRL 17 billion. The shopping is much more than the company because it does not have the charges or the burdens. We have room. We have leeway to increase our income anytime. We do not want to do that when the difference between the book value and the selling price is much bigger, because otherwise we will pay a lot of taxes, and this would not be convenient.
However, the company has a strategy in place, that is to say, to have more and more income, and therefore selling more than the growth of our income. In the last few years, we have not sold anything. We invested in the crisis, and of course, this has an impact. The crisis has a good side to it, because in crisis, your competitors will just come to a halt.
Crisis is good because the others are just paralyzed by the crisis, and then you are all by yourself in the market. There is no competition in Rio. Nobody is launching anything. Nobody is doing anything, as well as in many other cities, and this is how things happen. Nevertheless, we are continuing to do. I would say that this company will grow much more than we could ever imagine. The confidence in the economy, which is fundamental, and also confidence in the administration. I think all the entrepreneurs are thinking in the same way, and we are going to have a very big leap, and our leap at Multiplan will be even bigger than the leap in Brazil.
Thank you very much for the answer.
Marcelo. Marcelo from JP Morgan. Marcelo, good morning.
Good morning. A very quick question. Taking advantage of Daniel present. How do you see conflict of interest between the Delivery Center and the Multi as both have a marketplace? How are you thinking about this? How do you see this in the company? Because now you have two assets that play the role of a marketplace. Is that all? Yes, just this question.
You have done a lot by the non-physical shopping centers. If you talk about the Barra, you have VillageMall in New York and in the Jacarepaguá, there will be one. In fact, they are very similar because they are shopping centers. Because the audiences are different. Jacarepaguá is different from Barra and so on and so forth. Multi will have its audience around the shopping center, and the focus is on the location and around the shopping center. The client that already comes to the shopping center, they interact, and the Delivery Center app has a focus on its marketplace. It is more encompassing. It is more multi-regional. So it is very valuable for us to have two different channels selling and distributing products from our shopping centers.
This is an open platform, and it facilitates the integrator, which is a Delivery Center. The fact that it is the open platform and the integrator, it has a take rate based on different slices of the pie. It does the logistic, the payment, the generation of the order, and the take rate is based on its participation on the online buying process. The take rate is different according to where it is generated, but the model was conceived so that you can have your revenue share based on your participation in the shopping process, in the buying process.
Thank you. Very clear.
This is Jorel from Morgan Stanley. Good morning. I have two quick questions. The leasing spreads for new contract and the renovations in the quarter. 9.6% growth in same-store rents. Is it similar to that? In the report, you talk about renewals. No, renovations in BarraShopping, BarraShoppingSul. Which are the shopping centers you see ready for being refurbished, and what would be your timeline for investments?
This is Armando. You know that the leasing spread is one of the indicators that we do not adopt in the company because of the diversity that exists in the industry. So each one calculates this differently, and we would be talking about very different things at the end of the day. So we do not publish this. What we see is a recovery environment, but not the same-store rent as high as we had in this quarter. To answer your question, we do not see new contracts with this growth, such as the same-store rent, no. In relation to refurbishing, our list is long. Right now and looking ahead, looking ahead and not this moment, as Mr. Peres said, investment will happen in the brick-and-mortar and the digital areas.
We have to adapt our shopping centers to new realities and consumption and all these things regarding open areas, et cetera. So this is all being changed and the list of priorities. Brasília, for instance, already has a more modern project than ParkShoppingBarigüi, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte. I could mention each one of them. If you take back a shopping after 30 years with the same facade, we are changing this and giving it a modern facade and bringing more visibility. There is a very positive indirect impact. And we have to please and also surprise our consumers. In our first five shopping centers, the five best, in each one of the cities, in each one of the states. MorumbiShopping, many times recognized as the best shopping center in São Paulo, even this year. BH Shopping, the best in Belo Horizonte.
RibeirãoShopping as the best, and the ParkShopping the best in Brasília. So you must understand that our maintenance policy and the refurbishing of shopping centers, you cannot think about it like a cow, and you just milk the cow and that's it. No, you have to feed the cow, and you have to treat it well. And it's the same, making this analogy, and this is life. If you don't treat things or people well, they will not treat you well. So if you don't treat well your equipment, so you're not going to have a good return. It's not all about money. You have the subjective side, and sometimes the subjective side is much bigger than the money. We look at people, their feelings, their behaviors, and how to please them. And very often, this doesn't bring us income or profit. We made an Inca mall.
We knew that integration with the green, the park, means expenses. They are not profit. This is a new product because this is what society wanted. They do not want just concrete. They want to have the interaction and integration with nature.
Thank you.
As there are no more questions, we would like to turn the floor over back to Mr. José Isaac Peres, Chief Executive Officer, for his closing remarks. Mr. Peres, you may proceed.
Once again, I would like to thank you for your attention. We spent more time during this talk than usual. We tried to summarize, but we would have a lot more to convey to you. We have to turn our eyes to the future, always keeping in mind the past. This retrospective, so to say, you have to look at the past, but you have to look to the future. This is a very good exercise. We were worth BRL 100 million, and now it is BRL 500 million. Thank you very much, and let us go ahead.
Thank you very much. Multiplan's conference call about the results of the second quarter of 2019 is closed. Please disconnect your lines.