Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, we would like to welcome everyone to Positivo Tecnologia's 3Q 2019 earnings conference call. Today we have with us Paulo Junqueira , Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. We would like to inform you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the company's presentation. If any participant needs assistance during the conference, you may press star and zero to reach an operator. We have simultaneous webcasts that may be accessed through the company's website, ir.positivotecnologia.com.br and MZiQ platform. The slide presentation may be downloaded from this website.
Please feel free to flip through the slides during the conference call. Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements are being made under the safe harbor of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1996. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Positivo Tecnologia's management and on information currently available to the company. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they relate to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future.
Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operating factors could also affect the future results of Positivo Tecnologia and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Now I will turn the conference call over to Mr. Paulo Junqueira, Positivo Tecnologia's Financial and Investor Relations Officer. Mr. Junqueira, you may begin your conference.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here today. We had a good quarter. We have presented a net income of BRL 9.1 million in the third quarter, a growth in 3.8% on our sales margin, and also a growth on our EBITDA margin that reached 8.6%, BRL 40.7 million. Maintaining the consistency with the previous quarters and demonstrating that our strategy is being implemented. Our new business also have performed very well, namely the Positivo- as- a- Service, our lease operation, which increased nearly 100% in the nine months accumulated of 2019.
The Positivo Casa Inteligente, our first movement towards the IoT market, was launched in July, August recently, and it had very good acceptance by the market. Our servers unit, the Accept, the name of the company, that we bought last year, has been performing very well, which I will demonstrate in the following slides. On slide number three, the PC market in Brazil registered a 6.5% growth in the third quarter, mostly due to retail and public markets.
The company market share registered 13.9%, slightly lower than in the previous quarters, mainly due to the company's minimum margins policy and some supply limitations from our major worldwide processor supplier. It is important to emphasize that in the entry-level notebooks up to BRL 1,200, Positivo maintains its leadership position and strengthens its position. We have recently launched our new Motion series with a lot of new features addressing our customer needs.
On slide number four, this is not related to the quarter, but some analysis that we did on the PC market in Brazil comparing to the global market. On the right, you see that the global market between 2011 and 2016 had a decrease of 29%. This is mainly due to the replacement of PCs by mobiles, mobile devices. But since we need computers and PCs to produce content, this reduction has globally stabilized after 2016, and we have been seeing levels of sales of PC in the 260 million units stabilized since 2016.
In Brazil, the decrease in the same period between 2011 and 2016 were significantly higher, mostly affected by the same aspect that affected the decrease globally, but also by the economic downturn that Brazil experienced, especially in 2015 and 2016. The decrease in Brazil between the same period reached 72% between 2011 and 2016. With economic recovery, we believe that Brazil is already ramping up its participation in the global sales.
We were in the past 4.4%. We reached 1.7%, and as the economy in Brazil has been recovering, our participation in the global market has been increasing, and we strongly believe that there's room for more improvement in the upcoming quarters. On the next slide, we can see that the cell phone market registered little decrease in the third quarter 2019. The company had a good performance in cell phones, registering a market share gain of 0.3%, mainly due to its portfolio strategy in entry-level devices, mostly on feature phones.
On the next slide, we have a summary of our three new initiatives. Positivo- as- a- Service, our lease unit. IoT, which we made our first move in this market after assembling the product for quite a few quarters. And our servers unit, Accept, that we bought last year. On Positivo- as- a- Service, all the three products we have better margins than our core business. On slide number seven, we see that the revenues from Positivo- as- a- Service has been consistently growing. In 2017, we had BRL 6.3 million.
In 2018, we reached BRL 17 million. And the nine months accumulated on the 2019, we have already reached BRL 22.9 million. It's part of our strategy to keep a continuous growth on this business unit. On the next slide, we have launched the Positivo Casa Inteligente brand, that has been widely accepted by the market. We launched it in July 25. It's already available in the major retailers in Brazil. It has been launched together with Amazon product. We were in the main page of Amazon for quite a while.
It's compatible with both Amazon and Google devices. The global market was, in 2019, of $23 billion, and in Brazil, $208 million. So it's a largely growing market, and we were very assertive on our first move on this. The selling was good. We are still experiencing the sell-out. On the next slide number nine, we see the servers performance. We have been growing consistently. We nearly doubled the revenues from the nine months of 2018. We have a very good perspective, very good customers.
We strongly believe that the movement we made on late 2018 of buying Accept, the servers company, was a very good move. And this is a market that has an exponential, has been growing very highly in the previous quarters. Before we move into the financial highlights, I would like to comment on the material fact that we published on September 13 this year, informing that we were analyzing, we were studying a primary offering of shares at the time. We understand that such movement is in line with our medium and long-term strategy. It really makes sense.
But we have decided that for now, we will not move forward with the launch of the offer. However, we will remain vigilant to reassume the offer as we see fit, as we understand it's feasible, and this could be both with market conditions and our understanding. Moving to the financial highlights. On slide 11, we see a reduction in volume sold in all of our sales channels, largely due to the company's Minimum Margin Policy that affected sales, and to a lesser extent this quarter, due to the shortage of our main processor supplier.
With this Minimum Margin Policy, we prioritize price and margin over volume. We noticed a significant increase in sales margin of 2 percentage points, which is basically due to three factors: the aforementioned Minimum Margin Policy, the good performance of server sales, and also the good performance of the leases, Positivo- as- a- Service. The corporate segment grew in net revenue, largely due also to the performance of servers and the leasing unit, which are part of this channel. On the next slide 12, we notice the growth in the share of servers in the corporate channel revenue mix shown in the chart under other.
The average price was influenced by desktops due to the lower participation in public tenders, which historically have a higher average price due to considering desk plus monitor and mobile phones with a higher proportion of feature phones than smartphones. On the next slide, we see a gross margin of 28.7%. This represents a growth of 8% compared to the third quarter of 2018 gross margin, and a 2.5% growth compared to the second quarter of 2019, due to the combination of Minimum Margin Policy growth in server and rental business, which have better margins.
Added to the fixed cost reduction promoted by the company in the fourth quarter of 2018. This reflects directly in the COGS. In G&A, we have the variation of depreciation and amortization, which especially compared to the third quarter 2018, is mainly due to the adoption of CPC-06 leasing operations, in which we now recognize our leasing contracts. In our case, only the leasing contracts of our production plants. As a result, we no longer have rental expenses and amortized assets and interest on financial expenses.
More details on this change can be found in the financial statements on the Note 14A, and also on our press release. Finally, on slide 14, we see an adjusted EBITDA of BRL 40.7 million in the third quarter. An EBITDA margin of 8.6% returning to the fourth quarter 2018 levels. As a result of what we have explained in the previous slide, we presented a net income of BRL 9.1 million, a net debt EBITDA ratio equal to second quarter 2019 of 1.7x .
In the opening of the financial results, we present figures in line with the third quarter 2018, except for the recognition of finance lease expenses that I explained when we talked about G&A, also on the CPC-06. Finally, we have net debt at practically the same levels as in the second quarter 2019, which is positive, especially considering the peak of capital demand that precedes the seasonal events that lead to higher sales volume in the fourth quarter 2019. That will be all for today. We are open for questions. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for joining today's conference. This concludes today's Positivo Tecnologia earnings conference call. You may now disconnect your line.