Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the APIMEC São Paulo meeting of Marcopolo S.A. to announce the results of the second quarter of 2022, as well as the outlook for the rest of the year. The audio of this meeting is being transmitted through Marcopolo investor relations website, ir.marcopolo.com.br, simultaneously in Portuguese and English, where the presentation is available for the download. You're listening to the simultaneous translation. Before continuing, statements made during this conference call about Marcopolo's business prospects, operational and financial projections and goals about its growth potential. They are forecasts based on the management's expectations regarding the future of the company. Forward-looking statements are highly dependent on the conditions of the internal and external market, the overall economic performance of the country and international markets, and therefore they are subject to change.
Today at APIMEC São Paulo meeting, we have Mr. José Antonio Valiati, CFO and IRO, and Eduardo Willrich, Planning and Investor Relations Manager. As a reminder, your participation is in listen-only mode, and it's not possible for you to ask questions and answers. If you want to ask a question to be answered later on by the investor relations department, please kindly send an email to ir@marcopolo.com.br.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I am Lucy Sousa. I am the Executive CEO of APIMEC Brasil. It's the result of the regions. We are here in São Paulo, and we are very happy to be back to in-person events and at the same time connected to the Internet so that everyone can join us. We have introduced our panel.
I would just like to mention Valiati and to thank the presence of investors, analysts and other professionals present in person here, and those of you who are seeing us over the Internet. Now, I would like to give the floor to Valiati to open our session. I hope we have a good morning here.
Good morning everyone. First of all, I would like to welcome everyone who's here in person and also those who are listening to us over the Internet. I would like to thank APIMEC Brasil, here represented by its CEO, Lucy Souza, who always welcomes us. It's a great pleasure for us to be here right now. We are going to divide our presentation in three parts.
I'm going to deliver the first part of the presentation, then Eduardo Willrich will talk about the outlook or prospects, and we'll talk about the performance and what expects us, especially in the second half of the year. We will be available for questions and answers. I would also like to. Unfortunately, our CEO Mr. James Bellini, was supposed to be here, but due to other reasons could not be here with us. We'll try to make the presentation in the best way possible, and at the end, we'll be available to answer any questions you may have to ask us. Starting our presentation about our performance.
As you all know, Marcopolo is a leader in the global market of buses and a reference in technology in bodies and a leader in the Brazilian market. The main highlights in terms of the company's competitiveness are, and the wide scope of its product line, encompassing all segments from most sophisticated and complex buses to minibuses, and especially in the segment of Volare. Marcopolo was founded in 1949, and next Friday, it will be 73 years old, dedicated to the manufacturing of buses for the global market. Nowhere else in the world. We have partners and manufacturers all over the world, and everywhere they know Marcopolo.
Because of our history and quality of our products, we are a well-known and renowned company at global level. The number of employees that we currently have are 11,000 that produce 10,000 buses per year, taking mobility and economic and environmental sustainability to millions of users of our products. Now talking a little bit about the highlights of the second quarter of 2022. We had a growth in manufacturing of units of 14.2%, and this starts to demonstrate the recovery of the bus market. Effectively, we think that the worst of the pandemic and the slowdown in the market is behind us, and we are starting a new cycle. The growth in revenue was 39.8%, almost 40%. Our net revenue for our international operations grew 57.7%.
The growth in the gross margin as compared to the same quarter last year was 4 percentage points, and this is significant. Our EBITDA compared to the previous quarter EBITDA ex non-recurring events, especially with regards to our tax recoveries due to lawsuits, our growth was 4.5%. It was 4.5% positive as compared to an EBITDA adjusted for the same period the year before of -5%. In investments, we had 18 million BRL, an amount which is lower than the depreciation in the same period. I really like this chart, and I think it's very enlightening because it demonstrates, and it shows what happened and what has been going on in the market. There is what happens in the Brazilian bus market.
If we look at the dark line below, it shows the Brazilian manufacturing of buses. The dark part shows the Brazilian manufacturing of buses, the number of units that were exported. If you note, there is about 4,000 or 4,500 to 5,000 units, but it's between 4,500 and 5,000 units. In 2021, because of the pandemic, which had a global effect, exports also slowed down. The important is to see the behavior of the Brazilian market of bus bodies. Now, going back in the chart to previous years. You can see that the regular Brazilian bus market is about 25,000 buses more or less.
In 2010- 2014, practically, this market had an increase that was artificial, so, incentivized sales due to a lower cost of financing. You must remember the famous PSI, when many customers bought sometimes even what they didn't need. This created an artificial market demand that was really great. If we were to regulate or to calculate the excess demand over the period, and then 2011, 2013, 2014. 2014 would be at the normal level to 25,000 units. The surplus in this period was missing in the following years. There was a mismatch that ended up compensating, and this generated the difficulty in the Brazilian bus market where we got to 13,000 in 2015, 9,000 in 2016 and 2017.
In 2018, we were almost at 15,000 and almost eighteen. In 2019, we would go back to regular levels. In 2020 and 2021, we had the pandemic. I would say that if it weren't for the pandemic, the demand would offset the lower demand, the higher demand of previous years. In 2020, well, needless to say, we had the pandemic that had a profound impact in our industry. Transportation of people, both in terms of operators and manufacturers, had a deep impact. We spent two years going back to very, very low demand. In 2020, the Brazilian market was 13,000. In 2021, 12,000 units rather.
If we compare it to the first half of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, you can already see a growth, both of the domestic market and also exports. It is important to emphasize that this volume could have been even higher if it weren't for the shortage of parts, especially frames. Builders suffered from the shortage of electronic items, and this is now being regularized after the second half. June was better, August too, and we are expecting, just like OEMs, that the shortage of supply of electronic parts that caused the shortage of frames will be normalized. Here we have a chart showing Marcopolo's production in the second half. As compared to the same quarter last year, in Brazil we had a growth of 13.6%.
In exports, the growth was 11.5%. In our international units, we had 19% of growth. In South Africa, we had a reduction of 41% cost, especially because of the shortage of frames. Our South Africa unit operates with ready to deliver units. Currently we have no inventory, and we had severe problems in availability. We have sales, but we are short of frames. This is going to regularize in the second half. In Australia, Eduardo is going to talk after, but it's selling already for 2023, also suffered from the shortage in frames. China strategic unit is the Marcopolo's division in China, especially for electric buses segment. The leading manufacturers of electric vehicles, especially in terms of buses, they are all in China.
For this reason and others, Marcopolo keeps this operation as a strategic operation. The Mexican market is also recovering, resuming its usual operation. It suffered greatly with the pandemic, especially the segment of road buses. In Argentina, we had operational problems resulting from the impossibility of Brazilian employees going for the ramp-up of the unit. We consolidated two units in Buenos Aires and Rosario. We merged them into a single unit, and we had ramp-up problems, especially for the manufacturing of urbans, where there was a high demand in the market. Because of lack of experience in urbans in our Rosario, we had performance problems, and we are correcting this. We'll be correcting this in the second half of the year. The distribution of net revenue.
We have road buses growing from 25%-28.8%. And the important thing to say here is that in the second quarter and also in the second half of this year, we are having very high demand of heavy road buses, which is the product where Marcopolo stands out, really stands out in the bus market. Urban buses account for 36.4% of our revenue. Volare accounts for 25.3%. Microbus is 2.3%. Frame, 0.8%. Revenues from Banco Moneo, parts, and others, 6.5%. In terms of results, we had a growth of total net revenue of 39.8%, as previously announced. In Brazil, that growth was 39%. The revenue from exports was 15.9%.
The revenue from foreign units, from international units was BRL 341 million, with a growth of 67.7%. This growth was partly due to higher volumes and partly due especially to the transfer of costs that we had in prices. This was very important fact to assure and prospect the future profitability of the unit. Gross profit grew 4 percentage points as compared to the same quarter in the year before with 11.4%. It's still far away from our objective and our historical goals. We believe that we are and will recover little by little this profitability starting on the first quarter of 2022. We have positive prospects here. EBITDA was 4.5%, very low.
When we compare to the adjusted EBITDA of the same quarter in the year before, we would go from a negative EBITDA of 5% to 4.5%. Obviously, we're not happy with this EBITDA, and we are working to make it better, and we are going to have better numbers, we believe in this. We cannot say for sure, but very much likely we are going to have much better numbers, starting in the third quarter this year. The net income for the quarter was BRL 26.8 million. It is important to emphasize that in the first quarter of this year was favored by gains in FX rate as compared to losses in FX rate related to export orders.
As Marcopolo locks the FX rate at the moment of sale for the order portfolio, when the FX rate goes down, as it happened in the first quarter, we had significant gains related to FX variation. Once the foreign exchange rate went back to its levels in the second quarter, part of the gains that were booked in the first quarter were returned in the second quarter. The best analysis would be for us to analyze year-to-date numbers and adjusting this discrepancy between quarter one and two. Also in terms of net income and operational income too, it's important for us to analyze or to consider in the analysis extraordinary effects that impacted last year's performance. We had significantly positive results that were necessary, and they were related to the recovery of taxes.
Demonstrate that the company is paying attention and very careful in terms of seeking its rights. The main effect that we had last year was the recovery or the booking of the exclusion of ICMS from the calculation basis of PIS and COFINS, and many Brazilian companies had the same effect, and our effect was booked last year. That's why when we compare this year's performance to last year, we need to bear this in mind, because otherwise we would be looking at a worse performance this year, when actually the year before was very much favored, due to extraordinary effects. These were my comments to make, and afterwards, I will be available for questions and answers. Now I will give the floor to Eduardo Willrich for the second part of the presentation.
Good morning everyone. I'm going to go back a little bit in Valiati's presentation to this chart to illustrate the year of 2021. If you don't understand how difficult the pandemic, you know, was for us, you don't have the perspective of Marcopolo. We had a drastic drop in volume from a very high period in 2015 to 2017, and buses were still going down in volume. There was a strong adjustment in structure in 2014. We were prepared for very high volumes. We had just opened a new manufacturing plant in São Mateus, and we were working with a volume growth logic. After 2015, we started adjusting the company, and as of 2018, we were growing again to try and go back to normal manufacturing levels.
Once that was supposed to happen, we were frustrated because of the pandemic. Well, 2021 was very difficult historically. I went through the trouble to try and find when we made so few buses in Brazil, and we go back to 1998 and 1997 and 1996, 1995, 1994. Brazil had never manufactured so few buses. 1998 had been a bad year. The last year when we had seen such a poor production of buses in Brazil was a very bad year, 1998. Historically, go back to the 1980s to find such a bad year. Just for you to understand how difficult the pandemic was for us and how much a strong recovery is lying ahead of us, and this is the vision that I would like to share with you.
We need to recover to go back to usual production. We are not thinking of going back to the 33,000, 28,000 of 2020 in the first just overnight. There is still strong recovery to come, and it has started with its 28% that we saw in the first quarter or in the first half of the year, more specifically. How is recovery happening, and how is this going to happen? In road buses, which was the most affected by the pandemic, and this is kind of hidden in the numbers because when you see volumes of road buses, it looks like it did very well. Actually, the road buses we call chartering people transportation from home to work and from work to home.
This segment grew because we needed two buses for the transportation of the same number of people because of social distancing. There was a higher volume in chartering, but heavy road buses that are used in regular long distance lines and tourism coming back. One thing is not yet offsetting the other. There's a higher volume of chartering, but in terms of revenue, this is already equivalent. Why is it so? The average price, added values in heavy buses is higher than chartering. This recovery is already going on. This is reflected in the quarter's revenue, and this is going to accelerate from now on. Chartering is going to grow, but heavy road buses continues to grow. Today, our production of double-deckers is at levels that we haven't seen since 2018.
That was a very special year for us in terms of production of buses. G8 was a success in its launch during the pandemic in June. It was very well decided. We had an easy ramp up with a new generation of products, more modern buses available in the market today, and it's a highlight, even international trade shows where we participated. If you had the chance, there was an exhibit, and there was a Marcopolo Day on June seventh in a G8 meeting. Those of you that could visit our plant using G8, this is a great bus, and we are launching all models in terms of road buses. We also have a specific factor that you've been following. As road transportation gains in competitiveness as compared to air tickets.
Those who had migrated to airplanes now can go back to road transportation. We hear our customers talking about this very frequently. As prices keep on going up, the alternative for road buses gets even stronger. For urban buses, we have a problem that is previous to the crisis of 2015-2019. Fares of urban buses have been adjusted below what they should or needed to be. This problem, believe it or not, started to be solved during the pandemic. Why? Because then, because of high inflation and people going back to public transportation, it was necessary to find an equation that would work in terms of cost transfer.
What's happening is that more and more cities are granting subsidies to bus fares as what we saw in Rio de Janeiro, where the city bought buses directly. This is because the mode of buses are going back because Uber stole many of our customers over the years, and sometimes it's more difficult. This is going back to public transportation, and this creates demand for carriers and the city that needs to renew the fleet. There are many urban buses in the segment of urbans, and the recovery of urbans takes place because of that. For Micro and Volare, we have delivered another 1,000 units this quarter. You're still bidding for 2021. We have another 1,600 buses to deliver. Probably not all of them are going to be delivered.
Something like 1,400 will be delivered. The new phase XI bid, we started to work to manufacture those vehicles, 3,000 units. We think that about 1,500 will be delivered this year with another 1,500 to be delivered next year. This is our market share evolution. Historically, if you go back on the chart with 2007, 2006, 2005, Marcopolo has always been the Brazilian leader in the bus market. In three years we kept the leadership in all segments, either micros, urban buses and road buses. Marcopolo in 2021 was the market leader, and we keep the leadership in all market segments also in 2022. This is something which is different, and it shows how strong Marcopolo is in segments that are not so traditional, and we would be more leaders in urban buses too.
This chart is representing historical levels, including Volare. As we saw, this accounts for a large share of the company's revenue. We wanted to show market share with Volare with a highlight of 53%. I'm not going to talk again about what Valiati said about each one of the operations, but all of them have gone through deep restructuring during the pandemic when we took advantage of the drop in volume. Many of them suffered quite intense adjustments. You know, one of the main highlights is Argentina, with significant volumes, and the factory is still going through significant changes. This is already going on, and you will be seeing much better results as of the second half of the year. Same thing with very high volumes, already in portfolio in Australia.
We are struggling to bring this ramp up to usual levels, to the expected efficiency. This will happen in the second half of the year. We are going to see a significant change in all operations. All of them have suffered from the shortage of frames. Marcopolo produces the bodies and we get the frames from our customers. Right now in the market, because of the shortage of electronic parts, we didn't get all frames. We have a portfolio to deliver and we are waiting for the frames, but without the frames, we can't deliver the buses. Everything that we failed to deliver in the first half of the year, we are going to offset in the second half of the year in some way.
We also had the launch, not just in Mexico, but in many countries in Latin America. Of G8, we didn't have so we needed a new model in Brazil. In Brazil, we were already fostering sales. Now, with the launch, we are seeing exports of the new generation. For Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, we are starting to see sales of this model that had not yet been launched in the segment. Here, to show you this, for you to have an idea of the distribution of the international market, so that you understand how big each one of our operations are. Here we can see Australia, Mexico, South Africa, China and Argentina. What are the highlights for the future? We still have a kind of shortage of components.
We are still suffering from the shortage of frames. We are going to definitely suffer at some point in the third quarter. In July, the impact was not so significant. What we said in the first half of the year, that we are failing to manufacture something like 20-25% in volumes. It was 5%-10% in Q2. We imagine that the impact is not going to be so relevant in the second half of the year. We are regularizing the performance. We cannot yet say with 100% certainty, because there were things that we expected to be solved. We are going to still see some impact in June, and we're really looking forward to that in terms of volume recovery and manufacturing going back to normal levels.
Practically from the half of 2021 onwards, we're still increasing our prices on a monthly basis, and we always transfer costs to translate the margins that Marcopolo needs in seeking levels that will be healthy and sustainable for the company. It's difficult to do this all at once because obviously customers are suffering the impact when they get a new price every time they come to buy something. There are some customers that are just not buying since the beginning of the pandemic. When they come back here, the amounts are much higher than what they were used to. This is something that we have been doing with great discipline. The impact of that is quite obvious in terms of average prices.
In terms of the recomposition, you will see that this recovery is usually a transfer from the inflation rather than from significant margin gains. We are likely to accelerate this or to have a stronger margin recovery as of the second half of the year. As to restructuring, we talked a lot about this on Marcopolo Day, dilution of fixed costs. In trying to leverage the costs through operational leverage. This will be clearer in the second half of the year when we can make the most of the growth in volumes, something that we haven't been seeing since the beginning. If we annualize those levels, you can hardly see that there was a very modest growth in the first half.
Believe it or not, in the first half of 2022 was still very difficult in terms of volume because of shortage of semiconductors in the second half of the year because of Omicron. That really affected our customers until February in a very intense way. When we talk about the pandemic, it feels that it's so far behind. In February, we're still very much worried about Omicron, and customers are still very careful in terms of purchasing. The second half of 2022 was the first quarter when we didn't have any surprises. It was the first quarter since March 2020 when we didn't see any reactions to the pandemic, like customers canceling orders. It didn't happen. We have portfolio. Today we have a long portfolio.
When I mentioned the challenge of delivery times, this is very true. We're contracting volumes. Those who came to see us, you saw that our factories are really full, and we have the intention of delivering everything as soon as possible within the deadlines that customers are expecting. This is a problem that we really like to have. I am available for questions and answers. There's a slide that is not in the printed materials that we have included here for the Marcopolo Day. To show a little bit about the historical progression of the segment that we have been producing since 2017. We relaunched Prosper in the road segment, and we closed the first business for 2022 for the People Mover for the Guarulhos Airport terminal.
We expect it to grow as a new product of Marcopolo. This sale is especially relevant because of its size of how much it accounts in terms of revenue. It marks Marcopolo's entry in the market, and it's very important to demonstrate the company's technical ability. It's not enough to have the products, but we need to have products to show to customers and to prove that we can manufacture. We are working on many projects related not just to the Brazilian market, but especially to the Latin American market, where there are opportunities in this segment, and we can use our base, our plants, the people, our engineering sources to manufacture these products. This is complementary to Marcopolo.
In 2022, we are not going to see a significant impact specifically in terms of results, but we are expecting to see good results with this once we sign the first contract. Back to Lucy.
Congratulations on your presentation, especially that you are going to the rail segment. Before moving to the Q&A session, I would like to greet Marcopolo for such a long-standing partnership that we have had. It's been 21 years where the company was with APIMEC, now APIMEC Brasil, with all our regional offices. I give it to Valiati, the CFO and IRO, to celebrate 21 years.
Thank you very much for the partnership. I would also like to take the chance to give all associate analysts our 50th anniversary book, where our histories are combined together 50 years now, 52. We celebrated 50.
Yeah, our fiftieth anniversary was in 2020. We started operating even before the CVM. Without further ado, congratulations, and let's move to our Q&A session.
I would just like to thank you all for being here. Our members of Marcopolo's audit committee. Just raise your hand and ask two questions at a time.
Good morning. I am Victor from Bradesco BBI. I have two questions. Number one, could you talk about your backlog? To show the slide with about 16,000 buses in the Caminho da Escola, were orders placed. The second question in regards to the results of Q2. You booked labor provisions. Can we expect any recovery?
As to backlog, we are different in different segments, so it depends a lot on the model you're talking about.
Now the segment is the urban and micro. Micro, the Volare. Also considering the Caminho da Escola Phase Eleven. We are getting contracts regarding the Phase Eleven, and it's a quite long vision, almost for the whole year in the segment of buses and microbuses. As you are well aware. We also manufacture Volare for inventory and to make ready delivery, so we have Volares. For the segment of Volares until the end of the year, for urbans until November, and road until the end of November. Today we are trying to fit orders, ramping up manufacturing to try and have as much as we can during this year. We want to increase production so that we have a shorter time to meet the demands of customers. We want times to be shortened.
For the Caminho da Escola, there will be contracts according to our projections to deliver the 1,400 cars that we projected. We are going to have contracts to deliver, and we are going to alternate Phases 10 and 11. We have already started with Phase 11. We are manufacturing Phase 11 already, and probably we are going to change to swap them. Thank you very much for the questions, Victor. In answering the second part of the questions about labor contingencies that have been booked not just this year, but in previous years too. This is something that has affected us badly in the first half of the year. We had the approximate number of BRL 24 million that were booked as provisions for those contingencies.
This reflects demand and people who were let go during the pandemic, and most of them. We have almost two years, the two years that we have to wait to be over. We still have some impacts, but we expect to have less and less impact, and we are hiring labor with fewer terminations. Also because our manufacturing has been growing. All the causes that have led to higher demand, we are addressing them in a very responsible way so that in the future we may suffer less if we need to let go of our employees. In trying to be objective in the answer, we expect to see a downward behavior in terms of provisions for two reasons.
One, because of what we are doing, and the other, because we have a lower volume of terminations.
Good morning, Gabriel Rezende from Itaú BBA. I had a question about margins. In the second half of the year, according to your costs, we saw that margins are below Marcopolo's. It has been a quarter where we saw an improvement in some numbers as related to the first quarter of the year. Interesting volumes, interesting mix. Some factors that would indicate that margins could have been slightly better. To understand the behavior from now on into the future, what is the main driver for margin expansion? Is it going to come from volume or more predictability in terms of shortage of frames, control of raw materials, raw prices? Just so you can see a little bit into the future and what's going to happen in the second half of the year.
Well, thank you very much. Well, the behavior of margins, we expect growing margins. We are not happy with our current margins. This is a result of a bigger context in terms of production volume and in terms of problems and difficulties of shortage of the frames, and also because of price increases when we buy raw materials. We need to consider that right now Demand is higher than supply. In this scenario, the recomposition of prices is not so difficult, becomes easier. We are managing to transfer prices, as Eduardo mentioned in his presentation.
The impact level and the level of adjustments that we need to implement, we can always do it all at once, and we are doing it gradually and sometimes even abruptly. Transferring prices and impacts of cost increases, obviously with a higher production volume. With more noble prices, specifically talking about heavy road buses, we can use better our operational and manufacturing resources. We expect to have growing margins, and we want and will manage. We can't promise that it's going to be in the third quarter, but maybe in the fourth quarter or even in the future. We are trying to recover our gross margin, our historical EBITDA margins, and we will manage to do that as much as possible. As time passes and in next quarter, we will be able to show better margins.
If you look separately, there have been a few impacts in the consolidated context considering everything that happened in Argentina, manufacturing difficulties in South Africa, also in the coligadas in Mexico that were not consolidated, affecting our consolidated margins. We are addressing each one of those operations individually, case by case, and working so that in a consolidated we have better results. Another factor which really adversely affected our results in the quarter was the performance of our coligada, New Flyer, which also had difficulties with electronic parts in Canada and in the U.S., and had negative equity method results, which affected our EBITDA and our overall performance.
In summary, if we see an improvement in mix, better volumes, better results of our international operations, and each one will show a recovery and better organization for each one of those operations, continuous price transfers, which we continue to do, and then we can balance and overcome additional costs. Predictability also makes it possible for us to gain margin. An additional factor that has impacted the quarter. As the road to school goes on and evolves, the margins are compressed because prices are frozen, and as time goes by, costs go up. At the beginning, we had good prices, good margins, and at the end, margins are not so good. This is all going within expected. This was supposed to be like that. The time for that to happen is Q3. This set of factors will lead to better margins.
There are many factors leading to that.
Good morning everyone. I am André [uncertain]. I represent that participation. Congratulations on your presentation, and I have one question to José Antonio Valiati and another one to Eduardo Willrich. Eduardo Willrich, can you explain the international restructuring for participation in the United States and Canada, and also for China, although numbers are still low in absolute terms, what do you expect for the Chinese market? The second question to Valiati is related to new investments in the long term. How is the company preparing itself and seeing new investments looking into the future?
Thank you André . As to the New Flyer, today we have no discussions on the table about divestment or anything and what to change in the operation.
Now, New Flyer operation went through difficult problems, and the pandemic was a global problem, and New Flyer markets will have better results, and we have a positive outlook looking into the future. As we have better results, this is going to be reflected in our results. With Marcopolo, we are going to have stronger recovery looking into the future. As to the China operation, this operation is very strategic, as Valiati mentioned, considering electric buses. We are going to manufacture both in Brazil. Considering exports to cater to Chile and Mexico, the markets, in terms of body building, that are sold in the Brazilian market. Want to demonstrate local engineering capabilities and quality in China, and a manufacturing ramp-up is also going on.
We are focusing on West African, where we sell with a Chinese frame and then build the bus in China and then export to East Africa. This is a prospect in a post-pandemic, which was nonexistent before the pandemic, and now we are discovering it and adding volume. China is also very good to cater to the Australian market. We can manufacture in China and export from China to Australia. This operation is strategic for many markets. Unfortunately, due to lockdown policies, there's still a major difficulty in markets that are close to China. Are still suffering in terms of local operations, and we really believe in that. In terms of overall restructuring, I think that a good example are our investments in India. It was a problematic operation.
It had been very problematic for a long time. We decided to leave a market that in theory was supposed to be very good and we had a very good exit. You just need to see the performance of our Indian operation since December 2020 onwards, and then you can see that we made the right decision.
Thank you, André, for the question. In talking about new investments, considering the history and the market behavior of the company of the last six or seven years, you can note that these have not been easy years. Very complicated, difficult years, and even so, the company was able to to present good results in all years. We had cash preservation. In terms of waiting, the best timing that we are going to start to reap the fruits, the market is going back.
Even so, over such a difficult period that the company has gone through, we did not stop investing and being concerned with the future of the company. The main highlights are the investments in G8 bus generation, where we have invested significant funds, and now we have started to reap the fruits of those projects. Also the development in the segment of electric buses. Our electric product has been approved and can compete and go into this market that looks very promising. We have also invested and are about to have our own bodies for the Volare segment, something that we really want. Also, we were part and we'll probably make it through until next year.
We are in the operation to consolidate our operations in Argentina, where we are going to have 100% of our operations, which demonstrates to be strategic and important. Argentina is an important market for us. Especially considering the restrictions that market imposes for the import of products that are supplied from overseas. Strategically, to have local production for that market is very important for us. About the strategic positioning of the company and our market vision. You can watch the video in our investor relations website, where our strategic officer makes a broad presentation of our positioning and the company for the next few years. All the investments are the most relevant and obviously, considering cash generation and income generation and cash generation, we will have the conditions for us to think of different initiatives.
Being cautious, we are going to very carefully let this happen. In spite of all the difficulties, the company has not stopped paying interest and dividends, which is also important for our investors.
Good morning. This is João Neves from Ativa Research. Now, thinking of the next few years, once production volumes go back to normal, what would be the main bottlenecks that you would need to deal with to reach new levels?
Today, the main bottleneck is hiring people to increase production with specialized labor. As we had to let go many people during the pandemic, now we need to hire lots of people back. When we see volumes growing 14%, this is not representative of what is going to happen in the second half of the year. We are challenged by this bottleneck.
This is already happening in reality, which is to hire people, train them, and to have the best efficiency. Marcopolo had been increasing its efficiency until 2020 during the pandemic because we needed to review our volumes. We had to let go many people, and now we need to hire some of those people back. We have plants, we have factories. We can deal with the drop in volume. The drop in capacity was not so significant because we had efficiency gains in the remaining plants to meet the demand. We can meet the needs of the market that Valiati mentioned using our existing base. We don't need to increase investments so much. Our main bottleneck today is related to labor, hiring labor.
Good morning. My name is Santiago. I am an investor.
As an individual, I would like to talk about competition. There is even a chart of the competition, and we can see some that almost left the market and some are coming back. What is this process like? Because Marcopolo also had premium products with prices that were above the competition. How is this going on? Could you give us an update about foreign competition too? Competition as a whole and people that leave the market come back.
Well, thank you, Santiago. The main exit was in 2009, when Busscar left, and they are coming back under Caio after 2019. Their participation is in the market of road buses. They are our competitors. They are at the same level of Comil in terms of the market share. During the pandemic, the market was very much centered on chartering.
Companies that manufacture lighter cars had the benefit in terms of type of market. As the volume of heavy road buses grows, we have the benefit of having an installed capacity that is ready, to cater to those needs of heavy road buses. During the pandemic, we had 0.3, 0.5 DD per day. This is very, very low. Now we are ramping up to get to 6 per day. Just for you to have an idea of how this impacts our market share so that you know how we can go from half a car per day to 6 cars a day with the reference to Marcopolo. Price positioning, this is related to the cost transfer. This is related to market costs.
We are more demanded at first so that, sometimes they need to practice prices that are much lower than what the company has but are different prices. The G8 is way different from G7. G7 was already the market leader, and G8 is still above G7. You can see that these are different products in the same market segment. When we look at urban buses and micro buses, Volare along the years consolidates this leadership. We can see here the market share when we combine road buses and Volare. In the urban buses, Marcopolo has consolidated Torino S product, which was launched in 2017, as a quite reliable product in terms of urban buses, and we gain share as we move to heavier urban buses, such as bi-articulated, which almost disappeared during the pandemic.
Once the pandemic is over, as we have higher demand, we see these heavier cars of the urban segment coming back. All of this is going to bring even higher market share recovery. Historically, if we look 20, 30 years, we are better than ever, and we are likely to grow even more, and our prospects are very good. If you look at heavy buses, our prospects are of increasing our market share even further. In 2016, we had a consolidation. Another market segment is Comil that has been under reorganization since 2016. They have a small share in the niche of road buses.
Well, if we don't have any more questions, we are now going to wrap up. Thank you all very much for your presence here today.
Once again, we have in-person events, but rather we are in a hybrid model. I would also like to greet those of you who are online, and APIMEC is recovering, going back to all its activities. Please join us, take part in APIMEC's Northeast meeting that starts tomorrow with renewable energy and with publicly traded companies. You got the invitations, right? This is available in our website. Now, I give it back over to Valiati to wrap up. Once again, thank you very much for the excellent presentation and for very long-standing partnership.
Thank you Lucy. I would like to thank Lucy once again and APIMEC Brasil for always welcoming us. We are very happy to be here after two years of the pandemic. We were here in person and also remotely.
Those of you who were here with our presentation, and we are available to you, and we trust that the worst is past. We believe that in future quarters, we are going to have better results, which is what we all want and deserve. Thank you all very much. There is a questionnaire in print that you're going to receive. Have a good day, and see you soon.