Hello, everyone. Welcome to Ser Educacional's conference call for the company's fourth quarterly report of 2021. With me, we have Jânyo Diniz as the CEO, João Aguiar, CFO, Rodrigo Alves our IRO. Let's start our conference call. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded and all participants will be in the listening only mode during the company's presentation. If you need simultaneous interpretation, we have this tool available on the bottom of your screen in the globe.
When you select it, choose the language you would like to hear the session, Portuguese or English. In English, if you are going to listen in English, you can mute original audio if you prefer. After presentation, we will start the Q&A session for analysts and shareholders. Please click on the Q&A button to send us questions, and we will call your names and you will ask your questions live.
There will be a pop-up with a microphone, so that will enable it. Statements done about our looking forward statement, operating financial forecasts and targets are assumptions of the company's board as well as available information. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performances. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions because they are related to future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that economic conditions in the industry and other operating factors may also affect the performance of Ser Educacional, including the different results of the ones in these statements. I will now hand over to in the call, Jânyo Diniz, CEO of Ser Educacional. Please go ahead, Mr. Jânyo.
Good morning, and thank you for attending our webinar on the Q4 2021 results. Let's go directly to slide four, where we present the highlights of the quarter, a period that reflected the main goals we seek to achieve here. Consistently increasing our student base, combining organic growth with acquisitions, allowing net revenue to grow with resilient results to this challenging period we went through with the pandemic. At the same time, we create avenues for growth to feed our continuing education ecosystem, innovating and building new competitive advantages.
The growth of the student base demonstrates the success of the implementation of our digital teaching model as the main driver of this growth, and became relevant in our business, which we will consolidate FAEL from January, which will double this current student base. The performance of digital education with our medical course, consolidating UNESC and UNIFASB, the acquisition made during the year allowed us to grow our student base and operating results in general.
To complete it, in this fourth quarter, we made three relevant moves to our ecosystem. [inaudible], one of the largest independent content producers in Brazil. Plantão Veterinário, a hospital for pets in Recife, and the creation of b.Uni, our fintech focused on serving the education market, are very important for our strategy. On slide five, we detail the developments of our ecosystem that grow acceleratedly and create new sources of revenue generate and use for our educational assets. For us, a successful continuing education ecosystem should go beyond offering courses to students. It needs to be present in their lives. This is why we have Ubíqua, our academic model, super important in the market. Students tend to work to study more for a longer time in their lives.
For this, we have to prepare ourselves to offer courses and be present in their lives when they are not studying. This is why we are gradually becoming a company that offers B2C, B2B, and B2B2C continuing education in an omnichannel offer. This seeks to be increasingly Ubíqua in the lives of our students. In this concept, we are accelerating medicine, veterinary medicine and dentistry. This helps to transform the campuses into real centers of service to the public and university education, allowing us to offer post-graduate and extension courses. This year, this concept will become a reality, and we are creating the CDM vertical, the CDM course, myriad of courses, which will bring differentiated service to the public in our selected campuses for multi-health clinics. CDM dentistry, CDO and veterinary medicine, CDMV that will allow us to offer courses in the medical residency, postgraduate, and extension courses.
We also have investments in edtech last year through the acquisitions not only of Delinea, but also of Prova Fácil, both specialized in the B2B market. This year, we will launch Peixe 30, an innovative careers app that allows companies and professionals to find each other through a search system. We are also having technical possibilities. Also one solution that the professional will be able to be followed up in their careers, and also with courses that will be with their lives in the market. We will help all the market participants through the financial services that we will offer in this fintech. Adding the regulated and unregulated markets, we continue to invest in GoKursos, our continuing education marketplace that is developing a source of revenue generation, very important pillar for our company in the medium long term.
That year, GoKursos opened its operations in the B2B market and opened its platform to offer courses from info producers of open courses and other educational institutions. We are very happy with the evolution of GoKursos, and we are convinced that this platform will be an important generator of value for Ser Educacional and will become one of the most important in its segment. On slide seven, we celebrate the beginning of operations in December of b.Uni, which has more than 15,000 current accounts open, but still operating in a soft open regime and in the BaaS, a BaaS model, while we wait approval from the central bank to operate as this fintech. On slide eight, we have FAEL, which had its transaction announced last year and which was concluded in January of this year.
With FAEL, our digital learning operation will be boosted, and Ser Educacional will become a relevant player in this segment. Our plan is not only have synergies and also to leverage revenues by introducing our health and engineering courses on its full network. To do so, we are also opening omnichannel units in at least 10 new cities this year, enabling the network and support with complete laboratories leveraging sales. On slide nine, I show acquisitions and new companies that we are opening our continuing education ecosystem, and we are expanding the addressable market. It is important that positions us to benefit from the transformation that Brazilian higher education is undergoing. Now I give the floor to João Aguiar, who will present the results for the quarter. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jânyo, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let's go to slide 11, where we present the operating results of funding. We have a solid growth, especially in hybrid learning. This growth shows that the company was able to take advantage of the recovery demand and success of Ubíqua. Digital education, on the other hand, continued to grow, but on a smaller scale. This enrollment result, better speaking, associated with the reduction of student dropout to pre-pandemic levels. Digital learning was the highlight of the semester, and hybrid teaching had an important development. Challenging summer from 2021, we could stop the decline in the hybrid learning student, and we could resume the growth in this segment in 2022, having a stable student base compared to last year. On slide 13, our hybrid learning student base, including health and engineering course, is close to 70% of the total base.
The total student base, including digital education, is reaching almost 60%. This explains the resilience of our average ticket over these years, as shown on slide 14. We reduced the discounts in order to attract new students. We had a mix of courses in addition to the entry of two new faculties of medicine that collaborated with the improvement of this mix. In digital education, the average flat ticket is also explained by the change in the mix. We focused on increasing the volume of students by offering technology courses that jumped from 33% of the student base to 40%.
We had a positive quarter in terms of our student base and average. As we can see on slide 16, we present a 19% of growth, which mean an organic growth of our digital education, the growth of our medical course through acquisitions, and that the teaching hybrid, which had a very challenging years. Adjusted EBITDA, on the other hand, grew by almost 11% compared to last year. We could have the cost of acquiring customers.
We saw a high of our cost because in-person activities happened, and we could resume our on-site activities that led us to spend more third parties. The profit had a slightly bigger drop in the margin due to the increase. We will detail more. In this sense, we believe that despite a challenging 2021, we had a very positive year that positions Ser Educacional to resume its growth with levels in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We see here the participation of this system and its participation on the educational medicine courses. We can see the consolidation of digital education here has a bigger participation, which explains our financial resilience in this very challenging period for hybrid education, in which fortunately, from the second half of 2021, begun the second recovery and resumption of growth that we are seeing for 2022. Today, we have a more solid company resuming, retaking top-line growth and with better distributed results than in previous years, with hybrid education representing 39% of EBITDA and 23% in medicine. On slide 18, we can compare the results with more easier way. See here the importance of EBITDA in the results of the company, which is 8% of points of our margin.
Another important point is the impact of the non-cash impact of the IFRS 16, which is 16% of the net income, which is quite significant and important for us to better understand our results. On slide 20, we show now our accounts receivable, which shows a very important solution, sustainability operational system. We have to take care of the students and also focus on our objectives in the income system. This trimester, we have the result of the pandemic, that the numbers of losing students are going back, and we are having better payment with a growth of student base. We can see that PMR is now a little bit of growth in comparing to last year. So we have here a better perspective of this medium receiving accounts to receive.
On slide 21, we show our income before and after caps, when we call about the impact in our ecosystem in this flow. We have, in 2020, some fees to pay, which have a big impact on our cost. But in other way, we paid BRL 28 million in taxes, which accounted to what we didn't receive in the end of 2021. We had only the better results in 2021. We could like gather and better these numbers. We have the EBITDA adjusted this year was more than 70%, which indicates very health economical result. Finally, we have on slide 22, we keep investing on our ecosystem and expanding of the number of entities, have a bigger number of rent.
Finally, we have our gross net indebtedness, which as I mentioned earlier, is increased due to the strategic acquisitions that will help our growth in the coming years, and which are still in the initial phase of consolidation in our results as they generate synergies. We went from practically zero net debt to around 1.2x in this quarter. After the FAEL acquisition, we will have leverage below 20x , which we believe is comfortable for our operational profile, giving our objectives in 2022 to reduce this leverage through generating synergies from these acquisitions. These were my comments, and now I give the floor back to Jânyo. Closing comments.
Thank you, Aguiar. Let's go to slide 25, where we talk about the gathering of students in 2022. As you guys can see, 2022 will be a key year developing our hybrid teaching system, where we focus on gathering more than 20% of our student base. We should say here that we are working our margin ticket comparing to the courses and bettering the mix of course we have. We have in 2022, the payment, the cost of the course. We are looking for a better partnership with the commercial sites and giving better discounts for some students.
In digital teaching, we have the scenery a little bit different. We are now in a better position with the acquisition of FAEL, and we have a little bit of lowering of accounts in 2020. This, we have the hybrid teaching system that is going to be a very important part of our base and income, going over 22% and being a possible of growing our student base here.
Closing our presentation, we have on slide 25 the summary of our intentions. First, we want to integrate FAEL, which combined with the organic growth of our digital education, makes us one of the biggest players in this segment in Brazil, and has important opportunities to generate synergies and the new revenues of income generating to be working from now on. Second, we are taking a better focus on the hybrid education system, which is going to better our income as itself. We want to continue development of our education. Third, education ecosystem, which after the phase of elaborating and creation of the fronts in which we are operating, we enter the phase of development and expansion, increasing the use of educational assets, creating new sources of revenue to allow us to increase the addressable market and gaining more and more operational scale.
Finally, we have to maintain this focus and this culture of being an innovative, creative company, which has a very advanced education technology base. This only makes sense we have support by solid cash generation and good profitability indicates and controlled financial leverage. We want to generate value in this transformational moment in the landscape, in the education in Brazil. Now we are open for question and answers. Thank you.
Now, we start the session of Q&A. Please, ask us at once and then we are going to answer them one by one. Please use the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen, so your name is going to be announced, and then you can open your mic and make your question alive. So then you will have the opportunity to open your mic on your screen. First question is from Lucca Marquezini. Lucca, we are going to habilitate your audio. You can start.
[Non-English content]
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for this presentation. What you guys are hoping for the captation in EAD, remote teaching and presential teaching. I would like to know about that. The second question is- The second question is if you show an improvement in the mix with a greater participation of health courses. In-person, it makes sense for us to think that this representation of health will continue to increase participation in 2022. These are our questions, everyone. Thanks. If you see a better in the mix of teaching, like the presential teaching in the health field, how important is this for you guys?
Rodrigo here answering. When we talk about the ticket, we made a strategic decision trying to give our internal inflation. We understand that the demand on the hybrid teaching system is, in a way, perennius. In other ways, as we saw in the first semester, that the volume of gathering new students, we can see there a lot of clarity that we are going to have a growth in the gathering new students and rematriculation of students on the presential teaching system. When the students are back on site, then we see the work trying to support the prices and the ticket because we see the exchange of 9% going to the base of the students.
When we talk about old students and new students on the presential education system, we try to see that we can give enough discount, but not bigger than the last semesters. Because the level of discount we give is very big in the sector, what we give, but we have to give this back to the captation of new students. In digital field, we see the consolidation of FAEL, which today is using the structure of Ser Educacional. FAEL by itself grew 10% in captation of new students because we see here the results of the prices. The prices of FAEL related to Ser Educacional. So we concentrated on these new brands. When we talk about the price, we don't give the pricing back to the new students because we are in a moment of growth, and we want to grow the student base.
This is going to be very important as we see for the incoming year. Without this intake of new students, this development of the student base is not going to give us, in a way, these days to keep growing.
[Non-English content]
I have to talk about health mix. Yes, the health field is going to be one. We have the migration of courses, where the human science courses are going to the presential to the digital system. At Ser Educacional, we have a big expertise in the health field, and we are one of the enterprises in the market with the biggest participation of the health portfolio. So 45% we are based on health field, and it's the biggest margin we have in the market and talking about the student base.
They see. We can talk about here that we have to concentrate having a better service for the population and give this continued education system to better the service in the units. I would like to complement this answer here. The edtech medium, as our colleagues here said, and talking about the mix of health, we are talking about units that are growing, and we are having a growth of new courses and with that, a new gathering.
[Non-English content]
Thank you.
Our next question is from Leandro Bastos, sell-side analyst. Go ahead, Leandro.
Everyone, good morning. I have two questions. First, if you could mention your renewal process. I know Rodrigo talked a bit about it, and there is the margin, the increase of inflation. So this is a first question. The second one about FAEL. What are your first impressions now that integration is going on, and you had 10% higher student intake in this cycle? This is a little better to what you expected. These are my two questions.
Okay. Things are within the expected. Inflation had not played a role, it is the opposite. We are on the expected. With FAEL, we started the integration process. This integration is going smoothly. We are improving our courses portfolio, and with these units open, we will enhance our offer, especially in the health courses, which is an area that FAEL is on.
With the support of this super campus, we will support the campus that do not have laboratories, for example. This is the growth we expected. As we only saw our results in January, and this integration happened smoothly. We started in the middle of the intake of the students. We migrated to commercial systems of Ser Educacional. We are improving both Ser Educacional and FAEL systems, but we still do not do it for a long time to see the results. Let me complement the blended learning margins. The current profit show for the margins. We had a process that reduced the occupation in the buildings. But we needed to transfer the price, and we needed to work hard to have re-enrollment. These blended learning are the ones that suffered the most in our company.
Thank you, Rodrigo.
Our next question is from Yan Cesquim . He is a sell-side analyst from BTG Pactual. Go ahead. Go ahead, Yan.
Good morning, everyone. I have three questions, and they are short ones. First of them is a follow-up of our colleague's questions. It is about the first cycle student intake in 2022. Having this online teaching, it has been growing a lot. There is the integration with FAEL. I am sure you need to pay more attention in this student intake, but I would like to know why we have a drop in this acquisition. Second question is about FAEL integration process. I would like to know where we stand, and what are the challenges and the opportunities that you see in this integration. Finally, third one is about the pipeline. I would like to know what is the appetite. It is a robust pipeline, and where do you see the opportunities in this pipeline? This is it.
Let me try to answer all of them. If I forget something, please let me know. Student intake dropping in online learning, we are not worried because of it, because we made some decisions and we have the expected numbers for the digital online learning. 2022 is the year that we are going back to the level we had before. When we have a higher inflation, there is a competition between online Ser Educacional is stronger. We always need to that when the education market has a pricing in the tickets, enrollment students. Maybe we have a student taking volume when we have lower prices, but in adding plans will be higher. So we need to prepare first so that FAEL Ser Educacional structure, our mix of courses should be dedicated to more resilient segments, which is the health one.
We should avoid discuss pricing, avoid discuss tickets in the market so that we do not have evasion, we do not have dropouts later of our students. In digital learning, we have 200,000 students, so our company has a nice participation of students. Now we need to have a good integration and make our offer quality improving with good margins. Our digital learning has margins over than 30%. It is better than had lower prices and after that having a higher dropout of students. With regards to FAEL integration, it is going very nicely. We would like to have integrated FAEL at the end of last year, and then we did that in middle of January. This was a negative. It ended up to being a good thing. We could have a student intake process supporting the existing structure.
Today, they have a curricular matrix of Ser Educacional, and they use their structure. Now we need to have a higher commercial integration, and we need to sell courses of Ser Educacional and be able to use laboratories and other structures that now we cannot use because we integrated in a short time. M&A pipeline, we analyze acquisitions always. Today the priority is to integrate the acquisitions we have done. We need to combine these acquisitions organically so that we have a return of those acquisitions that is higher. There is the shopping spree that we have been doing the last 18 months.
Thank you, Rodrigo. Thank you so much for your answer.
Our next question is Vitor Tomita , sell-side analyst of Goldman Sachs. Vitor, I will enable your audio so that you can proceed.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for answering our questions. We have two of them. The first one is about student intake. Could you discuss more the competition dynamics in the first Q? There are aggressive things on the online learning. The competition is more aggressive now at the end of this cycle. I would like to have a follow-up on M&A. There is the evaluation of this sector. There are some rumors being made about integration of big companies in some states. Are we having a higher consolidation about the current situation of the market, about regulation, or we are going to have buy-ins more focused on integrations?
Regarding student intake, Ser Educacional decided that as we adjusted the average ticket for new students and old ones, we decided to keep some sales, some discounts that we did in every part of Brazil. So depending on the areas, they analyze the student intake in every place, and we adjusted on it. We do not have a single discount for the whole Brazil, but we need to consider the courses and the different states in Brazil. When we are working in a new area, we have more discounts, and then we adjust the discounts when people are more used to our brand.
By the end of the student intake, there were some aggressive proposals. Sometimes we offered discounts for a whole semester, but in the long run, this can be dangerous because if we had a great student intake because of prices, we can have a dropout of students, a massive dropout of students in the long run. Because the poor students suffered a lot in this period of uncertainty. When schools cannot offer good discounts, their prices end up being affected.
We are maintaining our average ticket growing. Some players had some unique discounts, reducing the average ticket, and afterwards they had to adjust the prices. We had that problem in the offer, doing the offers as the competitions, the big players did. If we do that, the smaller players do so. Now, regarding M&A, from the beginning of the year, we changed our strategy. What I can say is Ser Educacional has a rebuy problem that is on now. We are trusting our project, but the cheapest M&A to do so is to rebuy shares.
Our shares are with a certain price, and the best path is to have the integrations done, to develop these integrations well, to work the rebuying shares in a good way, and this is the priority of the company. We didn't discard transactions in the market with a higher volume. Now, according to our project development, there are some results that we deliver even with bigger players, and this seems to be the best deal to be done.
Perfect. Very clear. Thank you so much.
The next question is Marcelo Santos, a sell-side analyst. Marcelo, go ahead. I will enable your audio. Go ahead, Marcelo.
Good morning, everybody. [inaudible] , Rodrigo, Jânyo. I have two questions. First, if you guys could focus a little bit in medicine and how you guys see the price competition with your concurrence. Then I would like to know a little bit about marketing and how this evolution, digital evolution, how this affects the price in the marketing field. These are the questions.
Marcelo, the medicine market is doing really well. We have a reduction In the numbers of students, and it's historic, and it's happening, and we didn't have any problem in the intake of students in medicine this year. What we have in the medicine market, we have more the number of student place, and because also some enterprises, they have the right to teach gained in the justice, and then they can open the student places, which in the marketing field, we see this growing of the ticket price is part of this digital development here. We have lots of assets being created here. We have the acquisition of edtech, and it's going to bring the market to a better level.
We have to see as a natural system that in market, we have some costs that grow in the digital field, but then we have, in the other side, the fixed costs of renting and units. These are changing moment. We are changing from enterprise that there is 90% of the income came from presential education to be now a business that have the digital system and new initiatives that we have to talk about new branches we are opening here as a change in natural development in our system.
Thank you, Rodrigo. Just a little follow-up. When you talk about growing, we can talk about the growing of the income?
Yes, I think the income is going to be growing.
Thank you very much.
The next question is from Vinicius Figueiredo. Vinicius, we are going to activate your audio. Please, you can start.
Good morning, everybody. When I talk about students intake, we have a different angle. I would like to know a little bit, how is the difference in the hybrid system, how is the role of the digital student and the presential? How you see the competition there? How do you think the rentability of the hybrid system when you guys are focusing on occupying the campus that been empty the last years? I would like to know about the rentability of every individual field and if this decision was important to focus more on the inside system.
You are right on point. The digital system has a big margin, has a very nice result, but the hybrid system has a PMR superior, which make these courses to suffer a lot the last years. The business itself might not look as a good business. What we did then was to prioritize the hybrid system, where you have this capacity of leverage the operational system. It is easier to better the margin in the hybrid system than trying to better the margin on the digital system when you already have a very good margin.
Our digital teaching system here is the more rentable in the market today. It looks for me that it is a very important position we are taking here to try to leverage the business that have a bigger chance to jump forward with better results. As we started in 2021, the second half, a better intake for the hybrid system. When we talk about nutrition, where we have the competition based on choosing between the digital system or the hybrid system, we prefer that this. It is better to use our asset when we have the hybrid system. This is important for us. It is important to use our units to prepare those sites for omnichannel offering. The more we have the use of those assets, presential assets, we will be better prepared for the future.
When we talk about what happened during the pandemic, Vinicius, on the practice, it make us a lot lighter. We can benefit from this system, having a bigger volume of students. In 2022, we are going back to a moment where the pandemic goes back. We want to have a lighter enterprise that can be ready for the future, as our colleague here said.
Thank you very much. Very clear.
The next question is from Carlos Herrera, analyst sell-side from Condor Insider. As Carlos is not here, I am going to read his question, and I have two questions. First, when we talk about acquisition in 2022, you guys have a fall of 70% on the digital system. You guys have any problem transferring this? I would like to know if there is still a fight on the digital field for intake of students.
Thank you, Rodrigo and Carlos for the question. I think we answered already the first, very clear. The second is, when we talk about the costs, we are transferring the medium ticket of the market, and we are trying not to go in this price competition fight on the hybrid system, but in the digital system, we see that it's going well the way we are, and it's working for us.
T he next question is from Mauricio Cepeda, analyst sell-side from. Mauricio, I'm going to habilitate your audio. You can start, Mauricio.
Thank you. Thank you, Jânyo, Rodrigo. Thanks for the space here. I would like to ask about the diversification. When we talk about acquisitions in medicine, you guys should work, as other enterprise are doing, to treat it as not connect business. When we talk about veterinary, should you guys divide those courses and distinguish the strategies in the business? My other question is, when we talk about remote education system, what we call digital system, do you guys see the possibility of saturation of the demand?
We understand, as you guys said already, there was a big interest during the pandemic, and now we went back to a more normal pattern. As specialists have been saying, there is already a big offering of remote courses, and this is already going to a saturation of the market. The third question is, when we talk about the third parties courses, you guys are overtaking the on-site practices. How this is done? Do you guys have some partnerships with third parties? If this should change now the level of engineering is going to a better level? Do you guys see a development on those courses, or should you guys internalize? Thank you.
Hi, Mauricio. There was lots of questions here. We're going to answer by expertise here. The health education market, as we get in now in medicine and veterinary and dentistry, are markets that very interesting, and we are going on the first trimester. We're going to focus on the evolution of those business and as well as the digital courses. When we look at the results of this trimester, we open already on the segregation of the results, what we call the new results. So we can see the income of these new acquisitions and how this participate on our general income. So we're going to focus on the segregation on this operational system so we can distinguish between them.
We understand this health education market can be treated, segregated, separated, and they can be offered separated and as other segments. But they are, in a way, very small in our internal results, and some things in here can emerge on separating those assets. I see a problem here that doesn't make sense. I'm going to give now to Jânyo to talk about the digital assets.
Mauricio, talking about the possibility of get the saturation point on the Digital courses, I don't see it like that. What I see is that after a period of big growth, what we have started in 2020, we see the level of offering is still growing and new institutions are growing this market, but this is a market, this is a product of scale. At the end, there will be very few competitors.
What we have to focus here is the model of those courses are going to change as we have recurring on the formation. We have students coming back to us to adequate themselves to the market or what they are having as challenges in their fields to keep growing. This is a big tendency in the digital education system. Maybe this growing is not going to be so fast as it was in the last two years, but this growing is going to be on place. We have some changes in the market itself. In the end, some people can talk about now some older people that are trying to use the system, and now we are having a new public. This is the people who are going to give a second or third or fourth education, a year extension course.
Some courses focusing on some specific necessity they have. We have here extension of the period of the client, the students stay with us, and this is the strategy that we are going to implement this system. We stay connected to those students along their professional career. That's the idea. I think Aguiar now is going to talk about [inaudible].
We have three pillars. We have the monitoring and intake. When we talk about the health mix, it's a bigger part of our portfolio. The second pillar are the access to the digital platforms. When we talk about digital students, when we say about this participation, we have a bigger access to those platforms. The third point, when you talk about the third parties partnerships, when we see this volume, as this happens in a way in the last times, when I have [inaudible] , these third parties partners, where we're working with those brands on campus of third parties.
We are seeing how this partnership is working. We have a bigger transfer to those sites with the bigger volume of students and a bigger revenue we gain on scale in the volume. We not looking for a reduction of that. We're going to see a growing of the intake, but we have to see how the internalization of those systems is not going to be possible for us. That's the way we're going to be working forward.
Perfect. Crystal clear.
Let me remind you, in order to ask questions, you need to send them in the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Your names will be announced, and you will ask the questions live. Our next question is Tito, Buy-side Analyst, LIS Capital. Go ahead, Tito. Tito, go ahead. I think we have a problem with Tito, so I will read your question, okay? They say, Good morning, everyone. Was the digital student intake ex-FAEL below the company's internal expectations? If so, what do you intend to do to improve the next digital student intake cycles?
Well, I do not see this way. We need to pay attention in the combined student intake with FAEL's student intake that improved to 10%. Our positioning in the market, we do not believe that our digital learning should be a segment that reduce prices to be successful. We could have a good student base improvement in the last years, and we believe that our positioning by integrating with FAEL and the repositional of Ser Educacional in the digital learning, we will have profit by doing so. We have a company that does not depend of only one market. We need to see the opportunities ahead of us. When one market has the pricing more aggressive, we can reduce our position and transfer it for other markets with a better possibility of growth.
There are no more questions, so we close the Q&A session. Now I hand it over to Mr. Jânyo Diniz for the last considerations.
I would like to thank you all for joining our results. We are here to help you with other further clarifications. Thank you, everyone. Have a nice afternoon. The results video conference regarding 2021 Q4 is closed.
The Investor Relations Department is available to answer any more questions. Thank you so much. Have a nice day.