Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks for waiting. Welcome to Oi's video conference to discuss 2021 third quarter results. The event will take place in English with simultaneous translation into Portuguese. Please be informed that this video conference is being recorded and it will be available later on the company's IR website. During the company's presentation, all participants will be with their microphones disabled. To get in line in order to ask questions, please click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and write your name and company. After the presentation, we will begin the Q&A session. Now, I would like to pass the floor to Mr. Rodrigo Abreu, Oi's CEO. Please, Rodrigo, you can proceed.
Thank you, Marcelo, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to our call, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. This call comes as one of the first calls after we have shifted our focus primarily from doing extraordinary operations to focusing on the execution of the several pillars of the plan we announced by the middle of the year. In particular, with a focus, in addition to completing the M&A operations, which will soon be behind us, in maintaining our fiber performance and then streamlining the New Oi to a new cost structure.
We believe that quarter after quarter from now on, it will be possible to see the operating results of our strategy in the metrics that we'll share, as well as we'll start to recognize the mid to long-term potential results on our financial plan as we make it happen. We know that we need to bring the consistency so all of you can understand what's going on and what is the future potential of the company. Let's start by taking a look at the key figures for Q3, starting with page two. If we can move on to page two. We see that again we believe our operational execution is on track. Fiber continues to keep a strong pace.
Residential has confirmed a very solid turnaround, and we also had declining costs and margin expansion. On the first figure there, you can see that it has been approximately two years since we started the fiber project, and the fiber results continue to deliver quarter after quarter. We have led HP additions, homes passed additions in eight of the last 10 quarters in Brazil. Actually, today, we have reached the 14 million homes passed. Literally today, we have reached 14 million homes passed, but we closed Q3 with 13.5 million homes passed and 1.4 million new homes passed. We also have been leading the net additions for homes connected in seven out of the last eight quarters.
We closed last quarter with 3.2 million homes connected at the clip of over 320 homes connected in third quarter. This is an average take-up of 24%, so pretty significant performance that continues unabated since the beginning of the project. Due to this, we can see that residential revenues continued on a growth trend. It confirms that fiber has now left copper behind, and we could present a 2.4% year-over-year increase on residential revenues, including both copper broadband and copper voice compared to fiber. Two of them going down, one going up, and this has helped us to post positive results on a year-over-year basis.
If you look at the segments that we expected to catch up, which was the small and medium enterprise segments, revenues have been going up as well on this segment for fiber, 6.5% up on a year-over-year basis. So a very good aspect from where we were. It had been presenting positive results, but now we confirm that the positives are here to stay. On the financial side, the positive highlight here is that EBITDA has again turned positive, both on a quarter-over-quarter as well as on a year-over-year metric. If we look at the cash levels, obviously we continue to manage cash very carefully.
We know that, there are several components to the cash equation here, including, significant consumption to maintain our expansion, but also, some, cash-ins for, all of the funding activity that we have in anticipation of the transition that we're gonna have with the closing of our two most important transactions. If we look at EBITDA, the other positive highlight is that in addition to having some EBITDA growth, both, quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, we also had, some margin expansion. For the plan milestones, finally, we had some very important milestones regarding the regulatory and competitive approvals of the company's two largest M&A operations. Those were the approval of the partial sale of, InfraCo by CADE. CADE has, completely approved this operation now, and, we're waiting for the Anatel approval.
We also had the Anatel technical report recommending the approval of the mobile UPI, as well as CADE's General Superintendence, which is akin to the technical group at CADE, recommending approval of the mobile UPI as well. Both approvals are now going to the respective boards. Now, turning to page three, let's start as usual by looking at the fiber performance in a little bit more detail. On fiber, in spite of coming from a very strong performance, we maintained the trends, and now we continue solid on the plan metrics. Probably the largest highlight here is that the annualized revenue is already above BRL 3 billion, BRL 3.2 billion to be more precise. We see that the homes passed continues to accelerate.
We are now, as I mentioned, above 14 million homes passed as of today. The homes passed per month has maintained pretty much the same level, almost 500,000 homes passed per month as we had in the last quarter. If we look at homes connected, we continue to be the leaders in homes connected, firmly on track to be at the 3.5 million homes connected milestone by year end, and keeping our long-term targets, actually unabated. We're looking at a 2024 targets, as we have mentioned already a few times, above eight million homes connected. Maintaining a pretty significant CAGR. Since the beginning of the project, the CAGR has been very, very consistent.
Obviously, now we're still showing very large CAGR numbers from last year, above 100%, but we expect to maintain an above 30% CAGR until 2024. This is happening with ARPU growing again. Up-selling continues to play a role in boosting ARPU. In the third quarter, over 10% of our fiber customer base had speeds above 400 Mbps. We said in the past that this would be a key factor in moving ARPU up. It would be selling more for more. Obviously, this is happening, and now 19% of our net additions are already above the 400 Mbps. This is three percentage points over the last quarter, so pretty significant performance over there.
When we look at the revenues again, we can see that it was a 100% increase from last year. The good news here is also that it grew both on residential as well as on the B2B side. As we speak about residential, let's move to the next page where we can see that fiber has now left copper behind for good. The solid residential turnaround in page four, as you can see, is confirmed. When we look at both the number of RGUs, the revenue generating units, as well as the revenue numbers, the revenue growth numbers, we see that fiber is now the dominant force for us in residential. On the RGUs, fiber already represent almost 60% of the mix, compared to 30% of the mix last year.
It's just phenomenal growth here. On the residential revenue, the same happened here, and we moved the fiber to be already significantly above the copper revenues. As we have mentioned in the last quarter, it was the quarter where the transition happened, where the crossover between the two curves happened. Not only it happened, but it continued to accelerate, and we see that this is a long-term trend now. With that, we see that the fiber now represents almost 60% in one year, even with a 36% decline in copper revenues again. We knew that this was expected. We knew that we had to plan around the erosion of the legacy customer base and legacy revenues. This is, as I mentioned many times, a structural segment issue.
It's not a performance issue. It's just structurally, people are moving away from fixed voice and legacy broadband, and obviously we have to do something to replace that, and fiber is the answer. With that, we are maintaining in a very positive growth trend, as you can see here on the left-hand side, at the bottom, in the residential revenue evolution, which has come in consistently from a negative double-digit territory, then stabilizing, and then now presenting positive growth, which we expect will be maintained. When we talk about the decline of legacy revenues, we know that this impacts not only the residential segment, but also B2B, as we can see in the next page.
In B2B, we know that we have been compensating this partially by fiber, but also partially by the growth in the ICT components. On the ICT components, we know that this is part of our long-term strategy. We need the ICT components to make up for the declining legacy, both voice and data revenue in point-to-point solutions. Those will be migrating to fiber and GPON solutions as well. While this happens, we have to maintain, sustain the revenue, and ICT is helping us do just that. Obviously, this represents a small sequential drop, but in reality, this is happening on the verge of ICT revenues growing and data and legacy revenues going down. We still maintain our long-term guidance of having Oi Solutions revenues stable with around BRL 2.6 billion.
We know that in order to do that, Oi Soluções has been winning and deploying very significant complete ICT projects, including both IT solutions as well as communication solutions, which can illustrate the strategy of becoming a full solutions provider. Here we present some examples of significant recent projects. We have mentioned one about the video police contracts with the government of Bahia. We have implemented a digital palace for the São Paulo government, including IoT security, video monitoring, energy efficiency, and automation solutions. We have done one of the largest switching resale projects with Banco do Brasil to complement all our communication services, and this has been expanded as we speak to multiple of our large B2B clients.
On the SME segment, fiber had another strong growth quarter, and this led the segment to grow both on a quarter-over-quarter as well as on a year-over-year basis. We see here that this is pretty significant, and it comes on the verge of expanding the homes passed coverage in synergy with the growth of residential homes passed. This has led then fiber to represent already 25% of the segment revenues. Next, let's see again the results on mobile. We know that mobile performance is important for us until we close the operation at the beginning of next year. Our mobile performance continues to maintain a good transition back.
This is, in reality back to sequential revenue growth, supported by a strong post-paid performance and also some sequential improvement on prepaid. When we look at mobile customer revenues, we see that sequentially our revenues were up quarter-over-quarter, in particular due to another very strong post-paid quarter. We can see that post-paid revenues start growing, almost 5% both on a quarter-over-quarter as well as on a year-over-year basis. This has led us to actually be on the forefronts of revenue growth, overall revenue growth for mobile service revenues on a sequential basis.
This is important not only because it maintains the value of our mobile operation, and it help us, do a good transition path in terms of, bringing cash into the company until we finally close, the mobile sale operation, on the first quarter of next year. When we look at the other revenue components on next page, and I'm talking here about new revenues, they also presented, positive results and growth. We know that, although the new revenues are still small on a grand scale, they not only are growing fast, but have the capacity to grow even faster. The new revenues are coming from more the connectivity, as we have highlighted, that is part of our plan.
If we look at the portfolio, our portfolio keeps expanding rapidly, both with offers that Oi develop itself, or in white labels, as well as in partnerships offers. This is both for offers that are active now and soon to be launched. This number of offers have been multiplying. We have not only the traditional offers that we have been putting a lot of effort and emphasis on, such as Oi Expert, which is the technical support service offer for home. Also the Oi Play, which is our marketplace, Oi Play, which is our content aggregation platform.
You can see that we have a host of other solutions, including the SMB space, the education and health space, the financial services space, and we are trying to bring some innovation here, in particular in some of the areas where we're just launching our solutions. We, in the financial services space, we have launched an initial solution with Oi Zap, where we're continuing bringing some innovative solutions here with partners soon to be announced. On the education and health space, the same thing is happening here. We are just launching a solution, for instance, with the help of some partners, including Accenture, and which we will guarantee to whomever is taking those educational solutions courses access to the labor marketplace as soon as those courses are completed. We're doing some innovative things here.
We know that there's still a lot to be done here, but when we look at the results, the results are coming. When we look at the new revenues from last year to this year, it was almost a 54% growth. In annualized terms, it means that we are already almost reaching BRL 180 million revenues every year with those new revenue streams. The growth for some of them has been phenomenal. In the case of Oi Play, we have a 4x growth. In the case of Oi Expert, we almost doubled the business. We maintain then the guidance of having new services reach the revenue target between BRL 1 billion and BRL 1.5 billion in 2024. This, contributing to the company becoming more than just a connectivity company.
Now let's look at the current revenue mix, considering all segments on page eight. We see here that the new revenue mix is improving not only fast but also consistently, sustained by obviously the solid fiber performance as we mentioned, which combined with ICT and new revenues already represents more than 40% of the New Oi total revenues. We know that we have still to do the turnaround on total revenues, considering that the legacy revenues are still a significant impact on the total. When we look at the sequential revenue growth, it is coming. When we look at the percentage of the core revenues that is represented by fiber plus ICT, this percentage has been increasing consistently as well, and we are now already above 40%.
This means a 73% year-over-year increase in core revenues, while we know that legacy revenues continue to go down. On the discontinued revenues, which include mobile and DTH, the good news here, obviously, we need to maximize those as much as possible until the close of the operations. We see that we went back to sequential growth, almost a 6% sequential growth on discontinued revenues. On the verge of that, if we move on to next page, on page nine, we also have good indicators on OpEx and EBITDA. As we know, as you know, we have been doubling down our efforts on addressing costs in the company, and results are coming in multiple areas, which led us to EBITDA growth on the verge of OpEx reduction.
On the OpEx front, we can see here that our OpEx had a 6% reduction, which is very significant, even in spite of very significant inflationary pressure. This is due to our DCO efforts, our drastic cost out efforts, which is producing results in pretty much all of the areas, inverting the cost curve from the previous quarter, even amidst a very difficult macro environment in Brazil. This led us to a significant growth in run-rate EBITDA and margin expansion from 29% last quarter to 32% this quarter, which is growth even considering the last year quarter, the third quarter of 2020, which was at the 31%. Our DCO cost reduction program is now covering pretty much all areas in the company, as we can see in page 10.
We have mapped over BRL 1 billion in cost reductions. We are executing this program on a daily basis and talking roughly about the three core fronts of focus. The first one is the streamlining the New Oi. It's moving in parallel with all of the structural changes, and this includes the changes to our organizational structure. We are redesigning the New Oi. We are increasing the relevance of our shared services structure to become leaner and lighter. We have been reducing the size of the organizations. In the third quarter, we had a reduction in 1,300 positions already performed. We know that we'll still do some reductions coming forward as we move on with the closing of the structural operations.
The cost outs will occur also at the mobile and InfraCo levels to be executed with the carve-outs during the very beginning of 2022. This includes the normal things you would expect from such operations, such as commercial footprint reduction, active resizing of our telesales and commercial performance, working capital reduction in terms of stocks and other cost outs that come with the exit of both the mobile and the control of InfraCo V.tal. On the second front, we are talking about really digitizing and increasing our efficiency in the New Oi operations.
It's focusing on the New Oi, including all the way from marketing and digital in terms of portfolio simplification, increasing our digital communications spending optimization on our marketing, having optimization of our channel mix, and also having reduced our content acquisition costs. This goes all the way to operations and IT and network efficiency. We are obviously focusing a lot on doing an optimization and automation of every possible function inside the company, including simplifying our IT stack. We have announced that we are building a new IT stack, which drastically simplifies our core IT going forward, and we have been focusing there, as well as on every other front, including, for instance, energy cost reductions through our distributed generation plants or GD plants in Brazil, as they are referred to, and looking at long-term energy contracts.
On the G&A, we have been also doing some very, very in-depth initiatives in terms of procurement, in terms of efficiency in general expenses, and the results are also coming. The third front addresses the legacy. We have mentioned the legacy turnaround many times here, and this addresses all of the concession issues and the concession sustainability, not only from an operational perspective, where we continue to reduce our legacy network and continue to migrate our technology to technologies that will allow us to have a lower operating cost. We have also been concentrating, consolidating central office switches in the expectation of the migration from concession to authorization and the results of our arbitration with Anatel, which will allow us again to turn the page around in terms of all of the heavy burden of the legacy that don't make sense anymore.
We are implementing this by actually bringing a very strong cost culture for the New Oi with all of these actions. It's a strong financial discipline which involves not only the operations on a daily basis, but also our planning, our budgeting performance, our zero-based initiatives for pretty much everything we've been doing in order to create a completely new company in terms of a financial discipline and cost discipline. The focus has been on increasing our efficiency, but also while allowing space for growth, as can be seen in the next slide. We can see this as our operating costs, which are directly linked to the efficiency programs, was reduced by almost 10% year-over-year, and our costs associated to revenue and to growth increased only 3%.
On the operating side, as you can see here, everything was reduced: personnel, network maintenance, telecom infrastructure, printing, post and billing, consulting, and all of the G&A costs. This was a minus 10% year-over-year. On the revenue side, some growth was there, and it was all associated with the building up and bringing our fiber operation from the ground and increasing our revenues associated with the long-term prospects of the company. Those included some revenue-linked costs, commercial expenses, and even some bad debt. We knew that we did have an increase in bad debt in the last quarter compared to last year.
This is because we are accelerating our sales, and we know that we are fine-tuning our credit scoring models, but this is just a regular effect and relatively small compared to obviously all of the benefit of bringing new revenue in. To illustrate that, we have some indicators, some metrics here to help us understand what we're doing. For instance, we have been increasing our e-collection metrics from 18% in January 2020 to almost 40% in September 2021. We have been increasing the percentage of our e-commerce sales from 8% to 13% as of September. In e-billing, we have gone up 20 points, and we are now above the 50% mark in September 2021.
Joice, which is our virtual assistant, has gone up six percentage points, almost tripling its participation as well in the total of customer communications. We have been focusing on what it's possible to do as well on the concession. I mentioned that we are trying to streamline the concession and the legacy infrastructure by doing some discussions with Anatel. In consolidation of requirements, we have enabled from January 2020 to the last quarter to reduce, for instance, the number of payphones out there by 15%. This is obviously a good indication for us since it's just pure costs are now on payphones are not generating any significant revenue. In addition to all of that, on the IT front, we have been investing significantly in simplifying our systems and our IT stack.
We had already more than 450 IT systems switched off. I mean, you probably think this is a big number, and it is a big number, but the complexity was much larger than this, so we still have some work to do, but we continue on a relentless pace to simplify the IT structure of the company. This is gonna be possible as well after the cutoff of both the infra operation as well as the mobile operation at the beginning of next year. As communicated in the middle of this year, this will help us achieve a new cost base, as can be seen in slide 12.
If we look at most of the mapped costs, we have already mapped what's gonna happen, both in terms of the cost that is going out with the key structural M&As, as well as what we can do moving forward. As soon as we close the structural M&As, we're gonna have a cost base for the company, which is roughly 50% of what we have today. Moving forward, we will have a new cost logic, and we'll disclose numbers next year in a very different way to reflect and provide all of the visibility into what we're doing going forward.
We can already say that out of this 50% cost base, we expect to reduce at least 20% of that with the continuation of our cost reduction programs. Next on page 13, let's look at CapEx and cash. We know that our cash needs to be managed very carefully. We know that this is the spot where obviously there is a lot of attention both because of the cash requirements to do the transition while we continue to focus on closing the operations and then having the cash from other divestment programs, in particular, those attached to the sale of the UPI Mobile and the UPI InfraCo expected for the first quarter 2022.
Also while we work during this period to streamline our debt, we know that we had to resort to some additional funding and financing operations during this period. This was expected because we need to fund our growth and our operation all the way to the close of the two largest structural M&A transactions and cash-ins. We've been doing that in order to maintain an adequate level of cash. You can see here that starting with CapEx, we had a small decline, but remained focused on fiber. With all of the additional cash flow and debt operations, we ended up the last quarter with over BRL 4.1 billion in cash.
We did have some consumption here, which was due to obviously the regular operations while we expect the closing of the two operations, as I mentioned. We had some cash-ins from some of the refinancing programs we had, and now we have this BRL 4.1 billion cash position. Obviously, this has increased a little bit our gross debt and net debt. We expect again to reduce those after we close the operations. As you can see, obviously we expect a very significant cash-in from the two operations at the beginning of next year. We will be able to reduce significantly the debt again to the level that we had announced before, which would be close to the BRL 10 billion in net debt.
It's also important, while we talk about the whole plan, to provide some brief updates on V.tal, on next page. V.tal, as we mentioned last quarter, is now being operated as a completely independent entity. We have been doing a 100% independent commercial activity. We can have a sense of the potential of the company for what is already happening out there. In Q3, we added already almost 40 new cities to the FTTH structure of V.tal.
Also we already have in V.tal a large number of contracts under management, not only the neutral and wholesale contracts that already existed and allows the company to have an EBITDA expected for this year, which is in excess of BRL 1.1 billion, but also an active base of new multi-tenant customers for FTTHs with over 13 million homes passed potential and a potential as well for over three million homes connected in the long term. With these plans, we know that V.tal has an aggressive growth plan. We had already over BRL 30 billion investments announced, and we're working to accelerate the HP deployment starting in 2022. We are discussing with V.tal the anticipated acceleration of the original plan.
Obviously, we want to occupy the opportunities as soon as possible, and so we are right now in discussion to do an accelerated version of this plan for the future already starting in 2022. Finally, we have to remember that V.tal is not only about the traditional wholesale and FTTH, but it's also about providing a backbone for 5G in Brazil. We just had last week, the 5G auction, and as we heard today, the world is going to 5G, Brazil is going to 5G, but we have to remember that 5G is going to fiber. 5G is gonna need a lot of fiber. V.tal is preparing to do just that. We believe V.tal can be a significant winner in this whole process by having a driver for more fiber consumption in the entire country.
V.tal, with that, will continue to be a critical part of our equity story going forward. As we have highlighted many times before, we expect that our equity value increase in V.tal will be an important component going forward to really help us completely redo the debt structure and the capital structure of the company a few years from now. Before we actually go to a wrap up, let's just have a look on our ESG initiatives on page 15. As we can see, we have been continuing to advance on all ESG pillars. We had some structuring actions in all of them, starting with the environmental pillar.
In the energy sector, we had 89 additional units migrate to the free market, totaling now an average of 73 MW, making Oi the number one telecom company in consumption from renewable sources in Brazil. We have a long-term plan of having 100% of our energy coming from renewable sources, and this is not only good for the greater predictability of costs, but it also help us offset all of the environmental impact that the company has with its very large consumption of energy. On the reverse logistics side, we continue to advance as well. We have been maintaining a reverse logistics program that has already reconditioned over 200,000 units of FTTH equipment by Q3 2021.
In the S pillar, we have been focusing on a number of actions, including workplace safety and we're glad that Oi was awarded the Brasil 2021 protection award for a safe work environment and a better quality of life. We have been focusing as well on advancing our diversity and inclusion initiatives, including several meetings for diversity, over 2,000 trained employees and third parties in this process already. We had a very significant project on women leadership, which was concluded and is now a great success and is gonna be replicated for future classes. Finally, we have been maintaining the activities of Oi Futuro, our social institute, in particular with a focus on social, educational and cultural impact. We, by doing that, are adapting our NAVE.
NAVE is our advanced education center initiative to 100% digital format, which will serve to include even more students enrolled in the schools, both in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, which are the original NAVE schools. Finally, in the G pillar, in the governance pillar, we had some very interesting awards for the Latin America Executive Team Award from Institutional Investor. We have launched our privacy program, which brings the company to be fully compliant with all of the LGPD requirements in Brazil, with an emphasis on the motto, "People come before data," to all of our employees and also to our customers.
We have advanced as well on our risk management and compliance policies, with an update of our corporate policies and a review of our code of expected conduct, not only internally, but from all of our third parties. As I have been mentioning many times before, Oi has been doing a number of initiatives in ESG for a long time now. What we're doing now is just giving more visibility to all of those initiatives as we believe they are a fundamental part of what we do and why we do it. In closing, on the next slide, we again highlight that this is a transition year. We know that 2021 milestones are still on track. We have been tracking execution on pretty much everything we said that we would do.
As of last quarter, we had a few new achievements and also at the beginning of this quarter, given that we're already in November. We had the approval of the arbitration commitment on our arbitration with Anatel on the concession. We had the CADE approval of InfraCo. We had the Anatel preliminary technical report recommending the approval of InfraCo and MobileCo. We also had the preliminary approvals for both CADE and Anatel on our Mobile deal. We now expect that those activities will continue, so we can have both the closing of V.tal and the closing of the UPI Mobile sale on the first quarter of next year.
With this, the cash-in that will help us again redo the financial structure of the company for the future, thus allowing in 2022 to start a completely new execution model. This comes again by focusing on the five core areas of execution that we have highlighted at the middle of the year. The first, the completion of our structuring and M&A operations. The second, the focus on our core business acceleration and the generation of new revenue sources. The third, the organizational transformation and cost structure readjustment of the company. The fourth, our concession resolution. Finally, the full development of V.tal as an independent company that will bring significant equity value increase for us and will help us address the long-term issues in terms of capital structure and debt.
In summary, this is what we had as our presentation for the quarter. We know that once again, we are in the middle of a transition. We know that we still need to provide many different indicators to you going forward so we can track what we're doing and how we're doing. We believe we're on the right path even with all of the challenges that we don't control, such as the macro environment, the exchange rate. We've been firmly working on being very careful with our management, and we continue focused on the long-term goals. The whole executive team and the board are fully committed to making it happen. Thank you. Marcelo, I believe we can now go straight to our Q&A session.
Sure, Rodrigo, thank you. We will now begin the Q&A session. Please remember that the questions should be asked in English. To get in line in order to ask questions, please click in the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen and write your name and company. After your name is being announced, a request to activate your microphone will appear on the screen, and you must activate it to ask your question. Our first question comes from Victor Ricchetti from UBS. We will now open your audio so that you can ask your question, Victor. Please, Victor.
Hi, Marcelo.
Thank you.
Hi, Marcelo. Hi, Rodrigo.
Great. You can proceed.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can. Thank you, Victor.
Okay, perfect. First of all, thank you very much for taking my question. I have just one question around margins. We saw legacy revenue reducing its relevance on consolidated revenue in the past quarters. At the same time, EBITDA margins have increased. How should we think about the 15% EBITDA margin 2022/2024 guidance you have provided?
Well, this is a long-term guidance that is actually composed of two different margin components, right, Victor? If we look at what's going on on the consolidated margin, we have the 15%. If we separate and disaggregate this component in two, we see that what we expect as final margin for our core business, fiber and all of the other components, we are closer to the 20%. Actually, we're 19% at the overall core business at 2024, and then going into 2025 with a 20% rate.
When we look at the whole legacy business, obviously we expect a significant margin decline there because not only the revenue continues to drop, but there is a gap in terms of timeline from the drop in revenue on the legacy side and the drop in costs on the legacy side. Because it's unfortunately not an immediate reduction in cost. You cannot simply disconnect the entire network the moment customers are going out of the legacy network. We do have one or two years to address that as we reduce the costs as well.
Obviously, the reduction of costs on the legacy side are also associated with all of the discussions we have been having in regulatory terms, both on the migration from a concession to an authorization, which we expect will produce results only starting in 2023. Unfortunately, there's still another year of discussion there. As well as the arbitration discussion, which will help us address this migration without any additional costs, and even with some excess, a positive surplus for us to address other costs associated with the legacy, including all of the fines that we still have with Anatel. That's how we're thinking about it. Obviously, there is a glide path for that.
As we know, initially, when we look at the EBITDA for core operations, including fiber, we have to remember that we are at a very accelerated pace of growth on the fiber space. As we continue to go forward, this EBITDA level is gonna be significantly increased.
The same thing, we know that, obviously, the other difference here is, we have always to remember is that, what's gonna make a huge difference for the company is the amount of CapEx that gets reduced with the exit of InfraCo, because in order to generate this 19% EBITDA, give or take, on the core, by 2024, we're gonna be at an approximately 7%-8% CapEx level, all included for the company, including the CapEx that we're gonna have to make for the legacy as well.
That's very helpful, Rodrigo. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rodrigo. Thank you. Our next question comes from Cadu Sequeira from BTG Pactual. Cadu, we will now open your audio, and you can proceed, please.
Thanks, Marcelo. Can you hear me?
Yes, Cadu. Thank you.
Yes, Cadu. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks. Hey, Rodrigo. How are you? Cris, how are you? I have a few questions. I will start with one on the arbitration process. When do you expect a final decision? Usually these processes, they don't, they're not supposed to take that long. I was wondering if you have any expectations on when you might have a final say or decision on that process. I don't know if you are releasing that information, but can you give us an idea of how big a reimbursement you're asking for in the process?
If you're on this line of thinking, I would guess that once you conclude the sale of the assets, you are also going to, you know, move to lift the bankruptcy protection. I was wondering when you expect to have the bankruptcy protection lifted, please. Thank you.
Sure, Cadu. Thank you. On the two questions, the arbitration procedure, as it is a large, very large arbitration requiring a lot of care in stating numbers here because it is a large discussion that is still subject to a number of technical diligences and confirmation from the technical teams that will be associated with the arbitration panel. Suffice to say that in reality what we're seeing is a number that would be enough not only to help us migrate without any cost from the concession to an authorization, but still have some surplus for us to address other pending items that we have as far as financial liabilities with the federal government.
Obviously, we believe several billion, but how big it is, we prefer to wait until the arbitration has moved a little bit further, and we have all of the panels in order for us to provide more precise numbers to you. But it's again, in the range of several billion. Obviously, in terms of the expectation of the timing, we know that any large arbitration such as this, which is a complex arbitration involving a public concession, it's not necessarily short. It's actually quite the opposite. It takes a while. It takes in the range of 18-24 months, depending on the process.
We know that, so far, pretty much all of the steps that we had to conclude were concluded with no delay, and that's good news. We already had the approval from Anatel in terms of the object of the whole discussion. We had the approval of the indications of judges of the arbitration on both sides. We already had a good indication of the president of the arbitration panel, which is also going through a good path with no delay.
With that, what we would expect is that, by the end of next year, we would be already at the condition of having some preliminary decisions and recommendations, so we can maybe in a matter of another six months or so come to a final you know not only decision, but the final conclusion and the producing effects of this result. The good thing here is that some of the components of the arbitration, Cadu, they actually are very directly linked to what we're doing in the concession, including some material and information and evidence that we're bringing to the table in terms of what happened with the concession and all of its components.
Without a question, by judging and analyzing that and ruling on that, and providing preliminary reports on that, the arbitration panel will be able to directly impact the cost of the proposed migration that we're gonna have to have by next year, and probably by the end of next year. As such, even though we probably should not expect the arbitration to be completely finalized by the end of next year, it will be close to that, and we believe we'll be able to help with the produced results as well on the migration to an authorization. As far as lifting the RJ question, obviously this is something that it's up to the judge to decide.
As you remember, in our RJ plan, the approval from creditors was to maintain the RJ until May of next year. What happened after that, when the plan was approved by the judge, initially the plan indicated that we should have the end of the RJ this year. As we expect the closing of the two operations only by the first quarter of next year, the judge then extended this period until March next year. This is to give us sufficient time to close the two large operations still with the company under the RJ supervision. The ruling also said that it could be extended to guarantee that the two closings of the operations could be done still under judicial supervision.
Judging by where we are today, we see March as a feasible date, and this would coincide with the end of Q1 and where we expect to have the two operations closed. In case there is any small delay, this could be considered as a factor by the judge in also providing an additional extension so we can have the close still under RJ.
Perfect, Rodrigo. Thank you. Just to confirm, the arbitration should not be completed before the end of the year, but you think that even though it might not be completed, you'll be able to migrate to authorization before the end of the year.
That's exactly right, Cadu, but also this depends on the rhythm of the whole migration process as well.
Yeah.
which is not going super fast at this point, right?
Yeah.
We're waiting for initial results of the Anatel work with the external consulting companies, but this is still being reviewed. We know that it's a very important step for all of the companies that will be potential migrators to analyze and to prepare plans and to discuss this with Anatel. This will still be subject, Cadu, to reviews in TCU. It can be a long process. It can be something that takes a while, and thus we expect that by the end of the next year is just something reasonable for this migration, even though obviously at the beginning of the process, everybody expected it to move faster.
At this point for us, this is something that is being matched in terms of speed and timing with our arbitration process. Let's not forget that all of the concessionaires, including us, including Tigo, including the smaller concessions, also have arbitrations with Anatel, and they are all occurring pretty much in parallel, and all of them should impact the migration numbers as well.
Perfect, Rodrigo. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Cadu. Rodrigo, I guess we don't have anyone else in the line to ask questions.
Marcel.
Okay, go ahead. Cadu?
Cadu here. Can I then ask another one?
Sure, sure. Go ahead, please.
Sure, Cadu.
Sure. One question that I was wondering here, you know, working capital consumed like BRL 460 million in cash this quarter, and it had consumed like BRL 300+ million in the last quarter. It's more than around BRL 770 million in cash consumption and working capital needs in the past two quarters. I was just looking for some more, you know, color on what is really causing that. I, you know, maybe there is something to do with the issue of the bankruptcy. I guess, you know, there are different like. If you can give me some color on what is happening with working capital and how we should think about it going forward.
Well, absolutely, and Cadu , we're looking at that as an absolutely routine and regular management of the cash flows of the company. When we look at all of the operations, we have some of them which are just ordinary operations on the regular cash management and some of them which also help us manage the cash flows, considering the funding and the cash-ins expected for the company. As such, it's something that if you look at the quarter before, it was a little bit less, and then the quarter after, it's a little bit more, and then the quarter before, it's gonna be a little bit less.
It's just part of the regular nature of cash management that the company has the ability to do, given that it has a large amount of CapEx to deal with. It's nothing out of the ordinary. It's just part of what we're doing on a quarterly basis. Obviously we should expect this to continue until the closing of the operations, which will then happen at the beginning of the next year, sorry.
Of course. Okay, thanks, Rodrigo. You think that working capital will continue to grow in the next quarters?
It will, I mean, obviously, continue to be managed with the care so we can maintain our cash levels. Obviously, we can have specific discussions with the IR team, Cadu, to give a little more color. Obviously, the numbers are public, and we're disclosing it in our PR, but we can have a lot more details in private discussions there just to provide an explanation of the details that we have been giving in all of the PRs. In addition to that, let me just highlight as well that this is the first call in which we have our new CFO with us, Cristiane. Cristiane is here on the line.
Obviously, it's been the first quarter where Cristiane has already started to work with us in looking at all the cost discipline and all of the debt operations of the company. She's doing a fantastic job, not only helping us already address the continuation of our cost efforts, but she will only help us streamline the way we're reporting, especially for the New Oi starting in the next quarters, in terms of reorganizing how we're presenting our cost numbers, including all of the numbers even on the working capital differences. Okay?
Perfect, Rodrigo. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Cadu. Rodrigo, as I was saying, we don't have anyone else now in the line to ask questions, so I think you can move on with your final considerations.
Thank you, Marcelo. Thank you, everybody. We know it's again highlighting a transition year, but we're focused. We remain committed on delivering what we promised. We're still gonna have many moving parts until the closing of all of the operations at the beginning of the year. Until then, we will continue to highlight and disclose as much information as possible, so we can track the progress on our operational execution as well as on our financial progress until the New Oi starts to fully operate. We expect that's the second quarter of next year. Thank you so much. Obviously, looking forward to talk to you again in our next earnings call next quarter.