Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us, welcome to one more video conference from Positivo Tecnologia, to discuss Q2 2023 earnings. I'm here today with Hélio Bruck Rotenberg, Caio Gonçalves de Moraes, CFO, Norberto, VP of Consumer Business and Mobility. We will have a brief presentation, then open the floor for Q&A. Hélio?
Good morning, everyone. We have results for the previous quarter that are very aligned with what we've said last quarter. The first semester was a little bit weaker, and the second, a little stronger. The major highlight of this quarter, that makes us very happy and excited about the future, was the launch of Positivo SEG. This crowns our strategic plan. We had defined nine avenues for growth. This was the ninth, and so we complete the first phase of our planning that was defined five years ago, which is our entrance into the security market. We began with smart home and moved on to security. Smart home is much more strongly linked to the do-it-yourself market. This will allow us to explore the major group of sales that can be tapped in Brazil.
This includes household alarms, cameras, access control, not only for personal homes, but also for closed, gated communities. We also crowned this launch with the acquisition of one of the main security product distributors in Brazil, SecuriCenter, which is headquartered in São Paulo and Brazil, and Recife, and has 13,000 integrators. This accelerates our entrance. We could accomplish this with our channels, we could accomplish this with everything that we have made our competitive advantages. Acquiring SecuriCenter gives us 13,000 clients. I met, I met some of these clients in São Paulo, and let me tell you, the market is absolutely sensational. It is an BRL 11 million market, and it grows constantly. I think we don't need to explain why security is important in Brazil. This makes us very happy.
Our strategy involves doing what we've always done, but adding more markets, more products, that gives us bigger margins and makes us more competitive. This was our major highlight of the quarter. Other than that, everything else is aligned. Our revenue was much weaker than the Q2 of 2022, because we had a few important one-timers last year, like the Petrobras project, a major HaaS service project, and the electronic voting booths that we delivered in mass in the Q2 of last year. We grew a little bit this year, this quarter. Our EBITDA is BRL 97 million , which is a solid landmark. Although it is below the company's balance point, it is still solid, because we were able to increase our margin. Our profit came out to BRL 21 million , which is also strongly linked to the company's financial costs.
Our interest rates are still dropping, and we hope that we will continue to see them go down. This will bring our profit closer to our EBITDA. Our cash generation was BRL 320 million in the first semester. This reduces our net debt. We are down to 1.7 now in this quarter, compared to 2.1x in last year. Our net debt dropped to BRL 925 million. We are very excited about the future and about completing our initial implementation of the avenues for growth. Of course, there is a lot of work ahead of us, but we are very well aligned. As you can see in this graph that we've been showing, to understand a little bit about the division, consumer markets have grown a little bit in highlight.
There is a bit of a tail end of the electronic voting booth, and 62% for the corporate market. That includes PCs, Hardware as a Service, payment solution, tech services. These items will be gone into more detail in a bit when we talk about tech service, but we're very excited about that, too. Service and solutions and tablets, too. As for retail, we have a tablet, smartphone, accessories, and PCs for the smart home. Now, talking about the consumer market, this is flowing along pretty smoothly. We had a peak of retail sales last year. The market was still pretty large after the pandemic. It plummeted, because everyone had an excess of stock that actually made sales in the consumer market for computers and smartphones drop in the second semester of 2022 and in the Q1 of 2023.
In this quarter. These numbers are already positive. They're not yet at an appropriate level, but they are rising. We see improvement month after month. Because of inventory levels, everyone was very inventoried because retailers started compressing their stock levels. That made the manufacturers acquire and accumulate more stock. As we see the margin start to drop now, we gain a bit more market share in computer, specifically in Vaio computer. In the Infinix brand, we have broken a few boundaries there. We set a new record in July with 9,000 activations in one week. This was an absolute record. We've been seeing lots of growth there, and that makes us very happy. Even though the smartphone market is dropping this year, our smartphone market is growing.
We think that this gradual recovery of the margin is set to continue now into the Q3 and Q4 . Especially especially now in the Q3 .
We launched an absolutely sensational product line. The media is going to start right now. First computer, enrolled right from every level that happened. Facial illuminator called Lumina Bar. This lights up the user's face during a video conference. It's automatic. You do not need any outside or third-party lights. We did lots of research. We thought that everyone here in Reveal is using these lights in the hopes of getting a better, better transmission of their face. [audio distortion]
[audio distortion]
[audio distortion]
Last year, we invested heavily in one single business in the Q1 . When we look at the Q1 and Q2 of 2023, you'll see that revenue is pretty much equal. This is common in our business, this type of shift between quarters, but we are trying to build a solid foundation while bringing more focus in long, medium and long terms, while dividing our business into more, more, to make it more stable, to make it more stable over time. Because of macroeconomic reasons that we all know have to do with high interest and a scarcity of credit as well, this is an industry that has suffered, even though we have been recovering in the second semester, and we've been seeing more, more heat, more business.
Whilst looking at sales to new customers, 40% of our sales were for this customer group. This is totally in line with our goal of being more profitable. This is added value that we are bringing to our clients, and this shows that our intentions, our energy, has been successfully winning over new clients who see the value of Positivo products and the offers that we bring to the market. With also within large accounts, I'd like to highlight a project that was highly publicized, the Connected Learning Project, which is a consortium from the 5G network auction. This is a complete solution that includes hardware, software, and various services, a whole fleet of fully outsourced services, where we become the IT department for these major companies. We're going to see lots of results for the Q3 .
This involves connecting every school in the most remote reaches of the country, and we've, we're only at the baby steps of this very large project. There is a huge pipeline involving this particular project, and we've been breaking ground in many in this segment, as we have been in many others. Now, looking at tech services, I'd like to highlight that over the course of the 1st year, client base. Of course, it's not limited to the financial sector. We have many clients from many different industries. We have two of the major brands here in the country as clients, and we continue to grow, continue to expand not just our core offering, what we can offer to these clients, which may or may not be linked to our hardware. This is a business that does not depend solely on hardware sales.
We have many different businesses that are many different deals that are often signed regardless of hardware. Under HaaS, we've been very happy to see a very diversified customer base. We launched a contact control portal that can, in real time, manage our customer relations, this will bring more automation for these recurring processes. This will make us more agile, it'll improve our NPS ratings. Lastly, I'd also like to highlight something that's not on the slide, is we're starting to see many clients adopt our HaaS with a zero carbon footprint option. This, this makes our hope of bringing to fruition our ESG proposal very realistically. In servers and solutions, we had a very successful launch of the PSS Connect project, which is a program to connect many different value chains, including retailer, resellers, pardon.
We are really starting to see growing adoption of channels in this ecosystem that have not, historically speaking, been working with us. These are new channels, and they are fruit of the recruiting process that we've been organically using to increase our sales capacity. This involves more capillarity as well. Now, as we mentioned, there is a variance in revenue because we had a very large one-time deal in the Q2 of 2022. If you look at our pipeline, it is very robust for this quarter. It's approximately BRL 1.5 billion, which allows us to, of course, surf this wave and capture part of this revenue that is still in the pipeline. Last but not least, payment solution. It's critical to highlight that six of the top eight acquirers in the country are Positivo clients.
We have been, over the year and over the second semester, seeing more revenue and a better margin by offering a bigger suite of services along with these sales. Now I'd like to pass the floor back to Caio.
Thank you. Thank you, Guercio. Now, as for financial highlights, I'd like to highlight that our Q2 revenue is in line with our expectations as set forth in the beginning of the year. The Q1 was lower, the H2 of the year is going to accelerate as expected. In the consumer segment, we are still recovering. It's a challenging macro environment that we see, now that interest rates are dropping, things should look up. We have BRL 561 million in this quarter, which is 16% better than the Q1 of 2023. We do see accelerate.
Now, compared to Q2 2022, we have seen a drop, as we mentioned, that quarter was much higher than average. We have been selling more personal computers and Infinix devices. In the corporate environment, in the corporate segment, we've seen a significant drop in sales, in revenue, pardon, 61%, as Guercio mentioned. We provided services to compose a supercomputer for Petrobras at the time, that's why we see such a drop. Today, our dynamic is less favorable for small and medium enterprises due to the still high interest rates. We have been recovering our revenue. We see 6% growth compared to the Q1 , especially in the HaaS segment, which was better than the Q2 of 2022, and the growth of services as well.
We are very confident that, when we see our results, especially for small and medium enterprises, things will look even better in the H2 of the year. Looking now at the public sector, as Helio mentioned, we are seeing impacts, on the one hand, from delays in payment and in appointing leaders here for this government. There is also a New Bid Law that came into effect, and in the corporate sector, we expect to see resumed growth as the different positions in the government are filled. There is a need for the government to resubscribe to certain technology packs that it has made in the past, and that it has promised in for the future.
Now, looking at gross income and gross margin, we see a very strong development and record margins, 30.5% in Q2 2023. This is due to a mix of our product mix. Our margins have been recovering, and in the public and corporate segments, a more complete portfolio, which involves more services, more HaaS, and in addition, lower costs in raw materials, for instance, RAM, motherboards, monitors, and other materials that we purchase for our products. We've already discussed our EBITDA. We have a better EBITDA. This reflects the same dynamic as our gross income, which has an impact and results in less fixed income. Sorry, less fixed expenses. We have billed much more from Manaus and Ilhéus, this means that we have practically no revenue from the electronic ballot boxes, as is natural.
We've started billing the last phase of the electronic ballot boxes, and this should have an impact on the H2 of this year. Our EBITDA improved by 0.8% in this semester compared to the same period in 2022. This shows that our dynamic is very good. We're very resilient in our business model. We have better margins and a more diversified revenue stream. Now, looking at net income, we have a lower net income, which is due to the EBITDA, as we mentioned, and we have a better trajectory now. This revenue is already 140% higher than what we saw in the Q1 , which had a similar revenue. So we can see that our business, structurally speaking, is doing much better than in the Q1 .
This means we will produce more profit over the course of the year. Now, this is a new slide that we haven't shown before. It's important to look at our cash generation, our cash dynamic. We are turning around a cash consumption trend that we saw in the previous year, and our cash flow dynamic, our operating cash dynamic. In the Q1 , we had a significant drop in accounts receivable. This contributed to a drop in our indebtedness, and in the Q2 of this year, we also have a very similar, very positive dynamic for inventory level. Our inventory remains constant compared to the Q1 , but if we look at what composes this number, we were able to reduce over this quarter our stock of finished products in BRL 160 million. That means older inventory that cost more.
This is balanced in comparing the Q1 and Q2 , because we were able to increase our inventory of raw materials to present a better situation when we look at consumption of electronic products. Once again, looking at cash flow generation, we've generated BRL 79 million in cash for this quarter and a BRL 320 million total for the year. This is due to operating cash flow. This turns around the trend that we saw in the first two quarters of 2022, when we consumed BRL 405 million in cash flow. This has allowed us to reduce the company's net debt. Thank you, Rafa. We are leveraged by 1.7x . This has been highlighted already.
This means that our leveraging is very controlled, the Q2 is usually, historically speaking, the quarter with the highest net debt. This allowed us to improve the profile of our debt. Our debt is now much more healthy, much easier to deal with, and this allows us to capture more opportunities. So I'd like to highlight some of the conversations that we are having with investment banks, that will allow us to extend even more our net debt and reduce their costs. Back to Hélio to speak a little bit about our guidance.
Our guidance will remain at between BRL 5.5 billion and BRL 6.5 billion. We are looking at, we are going to be closer to the bottom end of this window because of some of our impact from public projects. Our revenue remains very high in the H2 of the year, as we've seen in July and August. We've got contracts, public sector contracts that are very strong and some, corporate sector contracts as well.
[audio distortion]
We've been doing very well overall. Our corporate dynamic is very interesting, and we may be perhaps at the peak levels of the company. I don't think we've ever done so well, and we're very excited about this new heading that the company is looking toward.
Thank you for joining us, and we're now opening the floor to Q&A. Remember that to send in your question, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We do have a few in the queue already. The first question comes from Andre Salles from UBS. He's going to ask his question live.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Helio. Good morning, Caio. Thanks for giving me the space to ask questions. I have two questions. The first, I'd like to see a little bit more texture in the public sector project. If we look at the ballot boxes, we're looking at something around BRL 200 billion. In this, this is going to be somewhere between 2023 and 2024, right? How could we see this division? Where does it stand? My second question is about Positivo SEG. What is the penetration like in the market, specifically for the companies you've acquired recently?
Good morning, Andre. Thank you for the great question. Well, for the public sector, yes, you are right in combining the ballot boxes with other projects. That's approximately BRL 2.8 billion here for us. We're looking at, our estimates are probably going to be kept. Now, the computer market as a whole is smaller, so every competitor is fighting tooth and nail. We've seen now a very tight bid for Econômica and Banco do Brasil.
We got, we, we sold very good, we did very good in sales for those two sectors in public sector companies. Now, as for the dynamics for the SecuriCenter acquisition, it's still too early to give you objective data. We actually closed on July 31st, last Monday. On August 2nd, I went to welcome our recently acquired employees. I was very happy to see how excited everyone was that they now belong to Positivo, and I went with the SecuriCenter folks, with Tobias as well, and to visit our main client, the main SecuriCenter client, and the response was sensational. Everyone was very excited that they can now lean on a company such as Positivo, with a full portfolio of products.
We were talking about how we can create links and servers, how we can have better electronic reception center. Everyone is very excited about this project, but I don't yet have any numbers because it's still too soon. Positivo sales started a week ago, on the 1st. We are now starting to penetrate many of the SecuriCenter clients and other clients that weren't yet clients of theirs. We're also working with the SecuriCenter sales team, but we're very excited, even though we don't have numbers.
Thank you, Hélio. That was super clear and totally understandable. Still, it's important for us to get a little bit more texture. Thank you.
Thank you, André. We have another question that was sent in in writing from Mateus Gula. Can we consider that the margins that were posted for this quarter are the company's new level, the new baseline?
Well, thanks for your question. Well, let me tell you, structurally speaking, we are doing better. This is the key takeaway for this quarter. Our revenue wasn't as high. Of course, it was a, a tough quarter to compare with Q2 2022. In terms of gross margin, we are seeing great numbers, much better because the cost of inputs has dropped. Structurally speaking, this is still a very relevant contributor, and it's also due to our product mix. We have more services, more HaaS, Hardware as a Service.
This is definitely here to stay. Certainly, we are likely to be seeing the company's new baseline. We are not likely to go back to the 20% level. We're probably going to be somewhere around 24%, 25%-30% in growth margin, as we've been doing in the past two semesters, both for the product mix and for the input dynamic.
Mateus has another question with regard to cash flow, which is lower than the short-term debt. Is the company likely to do a new round to lengthen its indebtedness?
Well, we always run these bidding processes to normalize our debt. This is, this is standard for treasury. This year, 2023, is the year of amortizing our debt. [audio distortion] don't know exactly how it's going to be persisted, but the bill does set forth that the Manaus law will remain. We're not losing any sleep over this. We're very confident.
Just to explain a bit more for those who are not yet familiar, the difference between Manaus and Ilhéus or any other location outside of the Manaus Free Trade Zone, is that the IT Law gives you federal credit, and in the free trade zone, you have a drop in IPI tax. They are two different mechanisms. That means that some products should be produced inside Manaus and some should not. This also gives us a cash flow balance because the credit takes a while to be consumed, but it creates more of a margin compared to a lower margin in Manaus, but one that gives you more cash flow instead. This is what our day-to-day business is about.
The next question comes from Jorge Santos, from Banco do Brasil, and it goes to Guercio. Could you speak a little bit about sales to corporations? What are the opportunities that you see for expansion over the next few years?
Well, I'd like to answer in aggregate. First, we have a huge green field in the corporate sector. If we look at our timeline. [audio distortion] This ranges from public and private and hybrid cloud to services where we will support clients in their digital transformation and full outsourcing services, where we go all the way to the endpoint. Margin on the edges of this digital transformation. We are immersed in the entire ecosystem, and we have been successfully and increasingly winning more and more market share, more and more space. We are becoming competitive compared to the other players more and more. It's a very interesting dynamic that is becoming more and more established.
Thank you, Guercio. The next question comes from João Martins, from Constância Investimentos.
Could you tell us a little bit more in detail, what is the makeup of the of your inventory in different products and segments? What should this look like for the rest of the year?
Well, I won't go into so much detail per segment, but it's important to speak overall. The graph we posted on the presentation shows our inventory, history. This has been dropping inventory because over the past few years, we financed strong growth for the company, and of course, inventory is part of it. We had to buy inputs. We have a production system, that means we need to buy inputs four or five months before we use them for each segment. I need to bring those inputs from Asia, which is very far away from Brazil. We need to ship this overseas, we need to build and sell.
This means we need to have adequate inventory to supply the company's operating cash. This graph shows the results from the Q1 of 2022, the trajectory, the trend line, has been dropping. I think it's important to mention that near the end of the pandemic, companies were experiencing higher stock. This was a bit of a problem. It needed to be managed, specifically in consumer markets. We were able to reduce these numbers, and as I mentioned, between the Q1 and Q2 , we reduced our inventory in almost BRL 200 million. Today, 74% of our inventory is input, raw material. We've got the, the, the sale already in, the sales have already been made for these products that we're going to produce. This dynamic is trending downward.
We always anticipate these purchases so that we can deliver the product when we sell. So over the remainder of the year, these inventory numbers are likely to drop. Of course, there is a balance point, but they are likely to drop slightly, at least. We do expect the company to remain at the same level in revenue or even to improve revenues. Now, that includes the corporate market and the public market as well. It's very important to highlight that there is a drop in Infinix product inventories. This is turning around very well, and what we have on hand really is input. The major excessive inventory that we had was in consumer products. This has basically normalized. All of our different lines are very balanced, so today, I would say that our in-inventory is very healthy.
Excellent. Thank you.
We have another one from Felipe Cavalheiro, from Wisesa Research. He has three questions: "First, I'd like to learn more about the options for entering the security market after this latest acquisition. Are there any other sectors where the company has its eye? About the invested companies, any news about Hilab?
Well, as I mentioned before, we have some segments where we've been investing, where we've been diving in, and this was the ninth segment. This means we've completed our project. Of course, we are always open to new opportunities. The technology segment is, is in constant change, and we're not likely to move to different sectors. At least for the next two to three years, our plan is now to consolidate and establish our position in these segments where we have already entered. Hilab is doing well. Hilab has recently launched a blood test product. This is a very difficult market, and we're very excited to be working in this new and challenging field.
All right. Well, this completes our Q&A session. There are no more questions. Helio, please?
Well, as we mentioned at the beginning, this semester is highly aligned with our expectations and forecasts. We really expected exactly what happened. We now expect a very strong H2 of the year. Our guidance remains within the forecast window, probably closer to the bottom end, but still within the window. This entrance for Positivo SEG has brought the company new perspectives. The launch of notebooks with Lumina Bars has been sensational. Infinix has been posting good results. The services segment is also making us very excited. We have two of the four major Brazilian banks as clients.
The payment machine is very strong. The public sector contracts are also very healthy. We've been winning many very large bids and even sophisticated bidding processes. This means very robust technology solutions. It's a very interesting time for the company. We're very happy. Thank you very much for joining us.