Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Oi S.A. conference call to discuss the fourth quarter of 2018 results. This event is also being broadcast simultaneously on the internet via webcast, which can be accessed on the company's IR website, www.oi.com.br/ri, together with the respective presentation. We would like to inform that during the company's presentation, all parties will be only listening to the call. We will begin the Q&A section when further instructions will be given. Questions sent via webcast will be prioritized. In case you need any assistance during this conference, please request the operator's help by pressing star zero. We would like to inform that the conference will be conducted in English by the management of the company, and the conference call in Portuguese will be conducted via simultaneous translation.
This conference call may contain some forward-looking statements that are subjected to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause such expectations to not materialize or differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Such statements speak only as of the day they are made. The company is under no obligation to update them in light of new information or future developments. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Eurico Teles, CEO. Please, Mr. Eurico, you may proceed.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call for the fourth quarter of 2018. I have here with me Jose Claudio Goncalves, Chief Operating Officer, Bernardo Winik, Chief B2C Officer, Carlos Eduardo Medeiros, Chief Regulatory Officer, Silvio Almeida, Chief Administrative Officer, Carlos Brandão , Chief Financial and Investor Relations Officer, and Marcelo Ferreira and the IR team. I would like to begin our earnings conference call by presenting an overview of 2018. We began 2018 celebrating the approval of the judicial reorganization plan in the last days of 2017. We did know, however, that this was just the first step for our company's turnaround. As part of the execution of the judicial reorganization plan, we completed the conversion of bonds into shares and novated other debts, thus restructuring our balance sheet in 2018.
Supported by the new shareholder base, we held an extraordinary shareholders meeting to elect the new board of directors, composed exclusively of independent members, aligning the company with the highest global corporate governance standards. In the first days of 2019, we completed the capital increase set forth in the judicial reorganization plan, injecting BRL 4 billion into our cash, which is already funding the acceleration of our investment plan, which is the basis for our business to be restructured. As for operations, one of the highlights of 2018 was the approval of the judicial organization plan, which increased predictability and clarity. As a result, we began to focus investments on improving the mobile coverage, revisited the offers in our portfolio in order to adjust our plans to the customer's consumption profiles, and intensified sales efforts.
As a result, we reversed the trend and recorded a good performance in 2018 with a net addition of over one million new postpaid customers. In the third quarter of 2018, we began accelerating the CapEx plan focused on access with the deployment of fiber to the customer's home and refarming the 1.8 GHz frequency range for 4.5G in the mobile segment. We added over 600,000 homes passed in the last five months of 2018 and closed the year with 1.2 million homes passed. Our operating team is prepared to add over 200,000 homes passed per month, and our plan is to end 2018 with at least 3,600 homes passed. The fiber project is at the heart of our business strategy and will be the main driver of the company's repositioning towards a more sustainable growth based on our infrastructure advantage.
We will delve further into this topic during the presentation. What enabled this growth in homes passed was the acceleration of our investment in the fourth quarter. We closed 2018 with CapEx at BRL 6.1 billion and this figure is expected to be even higher in 2019 with investments of around BRL 7 billion so that we can keep installation at a space. I would also like to point out the exceptional work we did to reduce costs in 2018. Our digitalization operating efficiency and quality work streams made an important contribution to a cost reduction of BRL 1.4 billion, which represents a decline of 11.2% in real terms compared to 2017 considering inflation. Finally, in February 2019, we came first in the Netflix ranking of internet speed of ISPs. We were ranked first in the first time our product Oi Fibra participated in the index.
This result reinforces our strategy and reflects the quality that we have in our product, which has great value creation potential, and it brings financial results and strengthens our brand. I now give the floor to our CFO, Carlos Brandão, who will present the financial and operating results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2018.
Thank you, Eurico. Good morning, everyone. Let us begin on slide four, where I will summarize the good performance of the mobile segment in 2018. By analyzing mobile products separately, in postpaid, the investments we are making to reform the 1.8 GHz frequency has been increasing our network quality and capacity, generating a better usage experience for our customers and allowing us to launch new offers throughout the year, in line with customer demands for data and content. The market reacted very well to our offerings, making it possible to reverse our net add trends in the postpaid. As a result, we ended 2018 with more than one million net additions in this product. It should be noted that a significant portion of this growth in the postpaid is driven by migration of customers from our prepaid base.
However, analyzing the numbers of portability between operators, we also see an important trend reversal, which indicates that the market has been recognizing the value proposition of our offers. In the prepaid, the reduction of the interconnection rates and the traffic migration from voice to data in the last years have purported a process of consolidation in this market. Only in 2018, the prepaid market shrunk 13% compared to 2017. Even in this extremely challenging scenario, our prepaid presented some resilience, and we are able to grow our market share by almost one percentage point. As a result of this good performance of our client base, especially the postpaid, our total net mobility revenue increased by 0.9% sequentially, confirming an important trend reversal. Let's move to slide five, where I will present our B2B results.
We present revenue decline in B2B in line with the trend of this market, which is highly dependent on the macro environment and the economic activity levels in the country. Analyzing our corporate business, we have increased our commercial capillarity in 2018 to be closer to all our customers in order to retain our current customers and to create more sales opportunities for both existing and new clients. This strategy in 2018 resulted in good performance of some KPIs that we present in the slide graphs, such as sales and new revenue growth, as well as the expansion of our data service. For 2019, our focus is to continue the commercial acceleration and to work aiming to position Oi as a player of digital ICT solutions, thereby capturing opportunity in this growing market segment and reducing the exposure of our revenue to traditional service.
For the wholesale, the strategy has been to increase the share of unregulated revenues on the total. From the end of 2016 to the end of this year, we managed to improve the share of unregulated revenues in 20 percentage points, from 36% share- 56% share. The challenge in this segment is to optimize value creation with the existing infrastructure. In that sense, the focus is to create new business models in order to capturing the opportunities that will be created throughout the fiber expansion and the preparation of the transmission network for the 5G. Moving to slide six, let's discuss the residential segment.
As in B2B, the residential segment also has revenue exposure to customer service in a declining trend, mainly in the fixed voice, which has been replaced by data and mobile voice and the broadband by copper, which has been suffering from the competition, practicing more aggressive price and higher speed in their offerings in this market. Our Oi TV product continues to grow both in revenue and RGUs, contributing to attenuate the negative impacts of the two other products. The strategy to turn around the residential business is fiber, through the rapid expansion of our customer base with fiber to the home. In the second half of 2018, we started to accelerate the CapEx spend focus on FTTH through the reuse approach. By the end of December, we already had some results with important indicators.
Our customer base with Oi Fibra grew 257% compared to the last year, and 67% compared to the previous quarter. The fiber project is the main lever for repositioning the company towards sustainable growth based on our infrastructure differentiation. Moving to slide seven. Fiber is the center of the company's investment plan strategy by leveraging series of structural and competitive advantages with high value creation potential. All of these levers combined translate into a project with high expected rate of return over investments. The first structural advantage is our robust and extensive fiber network. More than 350,000 km of fiber, combining transport network all over the country with high quality and capacity, together with an extensive capillarity of metropolitan rings. With this unique and non-replicable infrastructure, we are able to reach more than 2,200 cities with fiber in Regions 1 and 2.
Our second point is the low broadband penetration in Regions 1 and 2, where Oi operates, demonstrating a huge opportunity in this market, especially with a potential future macroeconomic recovery and the acceleration of the digital agenda in the country. Additionally, as a result of the lower investment levels in the last years, Oi has been losing market share, mainly to regional providers, which mostly do not have the same quality of Oi Fibra broadband, putting us in an attacker position in this market with a huge win-back potential. Looking at the product itself, due to its high quality and differentiated user experience, fiber has a potentially higher ARPU and lower churn rates than the copper broadband. Additionally, the fiber potentialize the bundle penetration.
Considering the investment side of the equation, through the reuse approach, by taking advantage of our extensive infrastructure already deployed, our construction cost is on average 30% lower in the traditional approach, where the operator needs to deploy the whole fiber network to provide FTTH. In addition, fiber network has much lower maintenance costs, especially considering areas where the copper network present high degradation levels. Looking more broadly, the fiber product benefits are not just about residential products. Fiber infrastructure also has enormous benefits to the current upgrade process of our mobile network to 4.5G, and will be key for 5G in the future. In addition, especially as a data transmission network for 5G mobile network, this infrastructure will bring high potential of opportunity for B2B value creation. Moving to slide eight.
All the levers mentioned on the previous slide were used as assumptions for the construction of our fiber deployment model. With the pilot projects that we launched in 2018, we have been seeing encouraging confirmations of the value levers. I highlight on the slide the results of the fiber pilot in Cabo Frio, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. This is the city with reuse approach, with greater maturation within the company. Additionally, Cabo Frio is a city with socioeconomic profile very similar to that of several other municipalities in Regions 1 and 2. The results have been very positive, with significant sales growth and trend reversal in the evolution of customer base, not only in broadband but also in fixed voice.
In surveys conducted with customers, 76% pointed to Oi Fibra as a better internet provider than the previous one, resulting in a churn rate 50% lower when compared to the copper products, also both in broadband and fixed voice. These early results have been confirming our thesis regarding the potential of the fiber. Now we are expanding this project across the country to capture these market opportunities. On slide nine, we see the potential of fiber in our entire existing infrastructure. The potential for expanding the FTTH network in our existing infrastructure through the reuse approach is huge. Based on our assessment, out of the around 70 million households in Brazil, approximately 50% have positive NPV. We are assessing the existing infrastructure for those 35 million that generate positive return.
So far, we have finished the analysis over 15 million, and we concluded that for 9.4 million households, we have the immediate potential of FTTH deployment, requiring only the construction of the last path of fiber that passes through the client's home. For the remaining 5.6 million, we need the installation of electronics to support FTTH service. Now the challenge is to execute and scale up the project. Our operations team started to accelerate the process in the fourth quarter, and today is ready to deploy more than 200,000 homes passed per month. Moving on to slide 10. We engaged Oliver Wyman to support the company to manage and control with efficiency the scale-up of the fiber implementation for the whole country in order to reduce the execution risks.
In parallel, we are reviewing the business strategy, looking for more value-creating opportunity in the medium to long term and we brought Boston Consulting Group to support us in this exercise. In connection with the exercise, we expect to work on the sale of some assets that are non-core, considering the strategic review, and we brought Bank of America Merrill Lynch to support us in this process. Let us move on now to slide 11 to discuss in details our CapEx. As I said before, in the fourth quarter, considering the visibility about the conclusion of the capital raise, we accelerated the investments and the implementation of our CapEx plan. We invested BRL 2 billion in the quarter, representing 39% of the revenues and we ended 2018 with BRL 6.1 billion in CapEx.
With this acceleration, we ended 2018 with 1.2 million homes passes with FTTH, providing the service in 27 cities. We also ended 2018 with 2,300 sites refarmed in the 1.8 GHz frequency to offer 4G and 4.5G, multiplying this number by six in the year. In the next years, we will invest even more. For 2019, we expect to raise CapEx to a level of BRL 7 billion. With this, we expect to triple the roam paths deployed and in 2019 with 3.6 million HPs with FTTH arriving in 62 cities. In mobile, we estimate to end 2019 with 4,600 1.8 GHz sites refarmed for 4G and presence in 485 cities. Moving to slide 12. We are presenting another year of significant cost reduction. We ended 2018 with BRL 1.4 billion reduction in OPEX compared to 2017.
We have been working constantly in the last years on different fronts within the company to optimize our cost structure. As an example, in the last five years from end of 2013 until the end of 2018, we reduced costs in nominal terms more than BRL 5 billion. The cost chart for this slide clearly shows that all major cost lines have experienced significant reductions throughout this year. This is the result of our work on three main pillars, which we will go into details in the next slide. Greater efficiency and productivity on our field operations, quality improvements, and the digital transformation of our business. This performance in cost efficiency has helped the company to offset the major part of the revenue decline.
The EBITDA accumulated for the year-end accounted to BRL 5.9 billion, very close to what we expected in the judicial reorganization plan, despite the completely different context we have now compared to what was considered in the plan. We know that our challenge is to revert the revenue trend. The acceleration of our CapEx plan is exactly to address this challenge, and we are very confident that we are in the right way to restructure the business and to turn around the operations. This rigid cost reduction has also been driving the evolution of the EBITDA margin in the last few years. Moving to slide 13. As I said in the previous slide, the actions we have been taking in operational efficiency, digital transformation, and quality improvement have been playing a key role in controlling and reducing the company's expense.
These actions resulted in several operational improvements, some of them demonstrated in the left side of the slide. These improvements have been driving our cost savings, especially in the lines of third-party service, with considerable reductions in expense with call centers, sales and billing, network maintenance service, and provision for contingencies. Important to highlight that all these initiatives are structural and will continue to produce sustainable results. Let's go now to slide 14, where I will present the company's cash, debt, and new shareholding structure. Cash position at December was BRL 4.6 billion, a reduction of BRL 537 million compared to the previous quarter, which is justified by the acceleration of the CapEx in the last three months of the year. Our working capital was positive in BRL 649 million as part of this CapEx will only be paid in 2019, since the suppliers' payments curve is a bit longer.
Payments of financial operations refer to taxes and costs related to the debt restructuring and also to financial costs related to bank fees. The graph in bottom shows Oi's gross debt, which increased BRL 314 million from September figures, mainly due to interest accrual and amortization of the fair value adjustment, which were partially offset by exchange rate variation. In the chart to the right, we present ex treasury shareholding position of the company after all the events of the capital raise. Currently, 97% of the company's total stock is common stock, and we have approximately 5.9 billion shares outstanding. Now, moving to slide 15, I highlight some recent non-operating events disclosed to the market by the company. The first highlight is related to Unitel. We had two recent important positive events regarding Angolan operation.
The first was the decision of the Arbitral Tribunal in Paris, determining that other shareholders of Unitel to reimburse PT Ventures, our subsidiary, the equivalent of $658 million, plus interest for repeated breaches of the shareholders' agreement, and also for not receiving the dividends in foreign currency, which has been paid to another foreign shareholders of Unitel. The Arbitral Tribunal also ordered the other Unitel shareholders to pay a substantial portion of PT Ventures' legal and administrative fees and costs in the amount of over $13 million. The other event related to Unitel was the election of the board of directors in the shareholders meeting, where PT Ventures nominated two members of five, and one of them will also hold the position of managing director of Unitel. The second highlight is in relation to PIS/Cofins on ICMS.
This month, the company obtained favorable judgments in two of the three cases related to the discussions on the non-incidence of PIS and Cofins on ICMS. The third process is still ongoing. The total amount of these credits in 2018 was approximately BRL 3.05 billion. In relation to these two cases in which the final judicial decision was obtained, the amount is approximately BRL 2.05 billion. The company is now taking all necessary steps to qualify these credits so that we can begin to use them to offset future federal tax debt. I give now the floor back to Rico for his final remarks.
Thank you, Brandão. I would like to end today's conference call by reinforcing the company's strategy for the coming years. We restructured the company's balance sheet in 2018, and we're now beginning to restructure the business itself. As Brandão explained, our CapEx plan is focused on fiber as our competitive edge to reposition the company and resume sustainable growth. In the fourth quarter, we accelerated the execution of the project with relevant impacts on all of our business segments and high return potential. The first results are very encouraging, and we are intensifying our sales efforts in order to begin expanding our customer space, at the same time as we increase the number of homes passed.
We also continue to work on refarming of the 1.8 GHz frequency range in order to expand our 4.5G coverage and to further improve our performance in the mobile segment, where we have reversed the downward trend and resumed growth. We have a well-defined strategy, a highly qualified team, and the company is now 100% focused on executing this plan. I'm absolutely convinced that we are on the right track. Finally, I'd like to thank everyone, all of our shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the board of directors, the audit committee, and all other stakeholders for their commitment and dedication throughout this process of construction of a new Oi. We will now begin the question and answer session. Thank you.
I would like to turn the floor over to the company Q&A section.
Good morning to all again. Let's start with the questions in our webcast platform. The first one is regarding the revenues of the company. The question is, revenues have been declining in the last years. What are the company's plans to reverse the downward trend? What do you expect will be the trend in the next years? As we said during the last earnings calls, the results in the revenues are connected with the underinvestments we did in the last three to four years. To address that, we are now increasing substantially the investments. As you see in the fourth quarter, we reached almost 40% of the revenues. That will be the key to reverse this downward trend. We start to capture results on mobile. As we said, we reported one million net adds on the postpaid in 2018.
It's an important milestone that we reached in comparison with the last years. On the other hand, the main important pillar of our CapEx plan is the fiber. Fiber is our umbrella for a cross-segment strategy. With fiber, we expect to address an important piece of the demand and we are very positive with the results we had in our pilot in Cabo Frio. Cabo Frio played a key role in order to confirm the assumptions we had on our investment thesis here. We are now accelerating this CapEx. As we said, we expect to reach BRL 7 billion this year. That will be the key tool to address this top-line trend that we have. We expect to have a decrease on the base of the revenues decline this year and a stabilization in the next year and start to grow in 2021.
The second question we have here is regarding our EBITDA. The company ended the year of 2018 with BRL 5.8 billion EBITDA. What is the EBITDA expected for 2019? We are now working in several initiatives in order to impact our margin growth. The first one is connected with the first question we had regarding the revenues because one important milestone that we have to achieve is to start to report growth in revenues. That one important key for improved EBITDA margins will be to increase the revenues through our CapEx plan. That the first driver that we are working. We continue to work with the pillars of cost reduction that we are working through the last years. Digitalization of the process, improve on productivity on the field operations, and quality.
We continue to give room for important role in this agenda in our routine here at the company. We expect to have some pressure on cost this year due to the commercial acceleration we expect to start due to this CapEx plan. To offset that, we are working in this project with BCG, which is in the middle of the project right now, where we expect to communicate to the market all the outcomes of these discussions that we are having together with the board. We expect to do that around May, to communicate the revisited new strategy of the company, then provide some more clarity on the drivers that we will pursue in the next years. The third question we have here is regarding our cash position.
The question is: With the CapEx growth, since the return on telecom takes some time, it is natural to expect a cash burn in the coming years. What is the company doing to cover this funding gap? In that regard, we are working since we filed the judicial recovery plan in several alternatives to provide the funds we need to support the investment in the next years. We are here in this earnings call, showing the results we had on PIS/Cofins. That will be important to address part of this funding gap with almost BRL 2 billion already judged, and BRL 1 billion to be judged in the short term. That should address around BRL 3 billion on our funding necessities for the coming years. The other one we are also highlighting this earnings call is the developments we had in Angola with Unitel.
We are now very close to be able to manage the company. With this new scenario, certainly we will start to expatriate the dividends we had held in Angola in the last years. That will be an important, and also another important tool to address these funding necessities. We have also the initiatives that we have already discussed in the previous calls regarding some assets that we consider to monetize. Because we understand there is an important opportunity to create value through this monetization and to allocate this capital on our CapEx plan. We have several initiatives in parallel, and we are very positive that it will be more than enough to support this funding necessities we have to support our investment program in the next following years.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the Q&A section for investors and analysts. Remember that questions should be asked in English, and those questions sent via webcast will be prioritized. If you would like to ask a question by the telephone, please dial star one. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove your question from the queue by pressing pound key. Guilherme Haguiara from Bradesco would like to make a question.
Hi. Good morning. It is Guilherme from Bradesco here. I have a couple of questions. First one regarding the PIS/Cofins case. We appreciate the update on that. We understand you are assessing it. Do you have an initial expectation about the timeframe do you expect to capture the benefit? How long can we expect this to be phased into your cash flows? When do you expect the remaining BRL 1 billion judicial gain to be booked? My second question on Unitel. When do you expect to receive the cash related to the decision in the arbitration proceeding? If there has been any other progress in the negotiation of your stake and the timeline for getting the dividends out as you mentioned. Thank you.
Thank you, Guilherme for your questions. Starting with the PIS/Cofins. This part of the credits that had already been judged, we expect to start to get the benefits on our cash flows in the second half of this year and we expect that to last for around three years. The remaining BRL 1 billion is very hard to precise exactly when it is going to be judged. We expect that to be judged in the very short terms, probably in the first half of 2019. Regarding the Unitel, we have again, in the Unitel initiatives, we have several in parallel. One is to exercise the enforcement that we have now the rights to do since the decision on the arbitration. That should take some time because there are several steps in order to be achieved in order to effectively start to enforce the local partners assets.
We do not expect to have results on this specific item this year. In parallel, we will take the control again of the company on May 6th with our recently appointed CEO, Miguel Giraldes. When he will be there, we will have more clarity on the capacity to expatriate the dividends that we have there. I do not have this information right now. We have to wait for Miguel to reach Angola, and then understand the real capacity to export these dividends, to provide a more precise information to the market. Regarding the process of selling the stake, now we have refreshed the agenda on that, because once we have the control of the company again, we will have the ability to run a structured process to bring potentially international investors to understand and potentially buy the assets. It should take some time.
The good news is that now we have the ability to start to expatriate the dividends. Our actual question mark here is that the amount per month we can expatriate. We will have more clarity once we have the control of the management again.
Okay. That's clear. Thank you.
Miss Barbara Halberstadt from Bank of America would like to make a question.
Hi. Thanks for the call. Actually, one of the questions were answered about Unitel. I have two other questions. Regarding the postpaid additions, are you seeing the same pace in the first quarter of this year, do you expect us to see the same type of growth for this year in the mobile postpaid in terms of net additions? The second question regarding the PLC 79, do you have any updates on your expectations of approval of the bill in the first half of 2019? Thank you.
Hi, Barbara. Thank you for the question. I will ask Bernardo Winik to comment on the postpaid, and Cadu, our auditor Vice President to comment on PLC.
Hi, Barbara. It's Bernardo speaking. We expect the same path in the first quarter. For 2019, we expected to accelerate the results in this product and our expectation is to have better results than we had in 2018.
Hello, Barbara. It's Cadu speaking. About the PLC 79, what we can see is that the doubts or the discussions that were in place last year, they still remain in the new moment at the Senate right now. What we can see is that the doubts are surrounding the value, the methodology, how the balance will be found, and how this amount would be spent on broadband. As far as we can approach the PLC, we can come up with facts and decisions that were made in the past on the migration from the SMC, the mobile licensing we had in the past that was public, to the private license we have right now. It was the same thing. The decision was made at the time by ANATEL, TCU, and so on. We can bring this to clarify the doubts that they have right now.
The amount, how it will be spent, there are studies made by ANATEL and Ipea and others that would bring some more clarify how the money will be spent and how the broadband will be built in Brazil. I think that there is more understanding at the Senate, at the upper house, at the Science and Technology Committee about the PLC. We cannot assure that it would be approved on the first half of this year but we hope so. We are watching the movements and we think that it's feasible.
Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Mathieu Robilliard from Barclays would like to make a question.
Yes, hello. Thank you very much. I had a few questions. First, in terms of the drivers for cost reduction in 2019. We've had the PGMU being approved, and I was wondering if that can already have some benefits in 2019, or not, and what you embed in your internal planning on that point for 2019. Second, could you give us a little bit of color in terms of the price points you are charging for your FTTx products? Possibly it's different from city to city or region to region but a sense of where it stands compared to the kind of pricing plans you have on broadband. Lastly, with regards to Unitel, I just wanted to make sure I understood correctly the amount that is due to you.
That's due to PT Ventures in which you have 75%, and therefore you will get 75% of the amount we've been discussing, or am I getting this wrong? Thank you.
Hi, Mathieu. Starting with your cost question, specifically regarding on the PGMU. The total benefit of the PGMU is around BRL 150 million- BRL 200 million per year. We expect to capture something like half of this benefit this year because we have some decommissioning costs on the public force that we require in order to capture the full benefits and that we expect that to be in the next year. I think that if I understood correctly, that was your question on the costs. The second question regarding the pricing, can you please repeat for us the question regarding the broadband?
Yes. Basically, I wanted to understand what kind of price points consumers were paying for your FTTx product.
Okay.
How did that compare with broadband, the traditional ADSL products, for example, just to get a sense of the ARPU uplift it can lead to.
On a random basis, our fiber product costs typically BRL 100 from the initial plan. In comparison with the copper broadband, it's something like BRL 20- BRL 30 higher than the copper. The pricing point that we are now working is very competitive. As we reported, we are now proving the better experience that our product offer to the customers through the Netflix ranking. In terms of price point, we are close to the competitors but in terms of experience, we are very ahead. The third question regarding Unitel, again, can you please repeat the question?
Thank you for all the answers. I think PT Ventures is a 75% stake in. Well, or rather, you have a 75% stake in PT Ventures which has a 25% stake in Unitel, if I understand this correctly. I wanted to understand out of the $600 and something million that are due to be paid to you, how much actually goes to Oi and how much is lost to minorities along the way?
Okay. Just to address your view on the structure regarding Unitel. Actually, we have 100% of PT Ventures but we have 86% of Africatel. That is above PT Ventures. Regarding the minority stake, it is 14%, and that will be to consider in your calculations. We have, in this structure, a loan from PT Participações to Africatel. PT Participações is above Africatel, and we only have the minority impact after paying the loan to PT Participações. The total amount of the loan is around $650 million.
That is very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Mr. Soomit Datta from New Street would like to make a question.
Hi, it's Soomit at New Street. Just two or three questions, if that's okay, please. One, sorry, just to go back to Unitel again. Can I just clarify, is your expectation that there is no obstacle to repatriating the dividend other than foreign exchange limitations, so there's no further hurdles needed at any level in the Unitel business? Could you just confirm, secondly, can you also repatriate the lost interest on the dividend? Is that your expectation? Is it just the kind of circa BRL 700 million of nominal dividend which was not paid over the years concerned? That's the first question, please.
Regarding Unitel, we will have more clarity on the dynamics of Angola and the company itself after we take charge of the operations. That will happen on May 6th. We expect to expatriate the full amount of the dividends together with the interest, we have to understand the FX limitations to expatriate the dividends in Angola. That's something that we have to learn after we take the control again of the company.
Okay. Clear. Thank you. Just a couple of follow-ups, please. One, I'm not sure how much you can say about this, your advisors are talking through potential asset sales. One of the things being considered by the market is a potential sale of the wireless business. I don't know whether that's something you are considering, perhaps you could comment on whether that is something which is on the table for discussion with your advisors, so potential sale of the Oi wireless business. Secondly, just onto the fiber project. In terms of the run rate you're looking to pass homes, I think you said this before, the 9.4 million homes would take about four years to pass, which is a great change to the business, it would be good to accelerate that further.
Is there any opportunity, do you think, to up the run rate from the 200,000 homes passed per month at all? Thank you.
Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, please stay connected. Oi conference call will return in some minutes.
So again-
Please wait.
Returning from where we have stopped, correcting Soomit's question regarding the asset sales. We are in the middle of the project with BCG, we are, and of course, as is our duty, discussing all the potential alternatives to maximize value of the company. The exercise we are running considers all sort of scenarios, of course, when we reach the optimized outcome of these discussions, we will communicate to the market. At this point, it's in the middle of the project, there is no conclusions, we have no prejudice on the discussion that we are having together with BCG and the board of directors. Regarding the second question. Regarding the FTTH questions, we are aiming to achieve this year this 2.6 million homes passed. Today, we are deploying around 250,000 HPs per month.
We are about to achieve 350,000. We have the capacity to achieve 550,000 per month if we have the funds for that. We are working in different alternatives to fund that. We want and we are working to accelerate this pace of deployment.
Great. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Soomit.
I would like to turn the floor over to the company for the final remarks.
Thank you all for your participation in our earnings results call. Allow me to remind you that our IR team is available for any further questions. Good morning and good week for everyone.
This concludes Oi S.A. conference call. We would like to thank you for your participation. Have a good day.