To be at Vibra, at home, our office in Rio de Janeiro, to start this very important meeting, the Investor Day 2025. I want to say thank you for taking your time to be here. You take a precious time to be here with us. Thank you for the ones who are online. We have hundreds of people online in Portuguese or with simultaneous translation for our foreigner base. We want to say thank everybody for trusting us. About a year ago, we were here at this same place introducing our strategic plan for 2030. Not only our plan, but what we're going to do to get there with our five growth avenues that we introduced last year and the idea that we can talk about them a bit more. We understand that your trust in us is one of our highest assets.
We have to have a consistent work, and we want to show a bit of this consistent work for you today. We have set a day. We thought a lot about it, so we have the morning for a presentation that's going to start now about the Investor Day. We're going to have a short break for a Q&A session, and we're going to have some quality time to have Q&A, and the ones who will be here answering the questions will be our vice presidents. We're going to have a special time with them. You'll be able to make your question, and if you are here, you can ask, and if you're home, you can also use the chat to make the question. We will do that. We'll make it happen. Summing up, I hope this day today will reinforce your trust in us. To begin the Investor Day, I'm going to call our CEO, Ernesto Pousada, to start.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. On behalf of all Vibra team, I want to say thank you for being here. It's an honor to receive all of you here in our house. If you are online as well, watching us, it's a very important day. As Eduardo mentioned, what we will be doing today is basically a report, bringing back to you everything we said we would do a year ago. Back then, we introduced our strategy, a 2030 strategy. I have learned all over my career with the experience I have been gathering that to elaborate a great strategy is a relevant step. However, one of the most complex things is execution.
Vibra is more and more with rhythm and intensity, making sure we have an excellent execution. This is what we will be presenting today. Our execution capacity. We speak and we execute. We do what we promise with transparency, showing the difficulties, the obstacles, which are natural in business, but resilience to get over the obstacles in a company that sees the next years as something really doable, to be brilliant, not only to transform not only Vibra, but all the combustible sector. Before the presentation itself, we have the safety video, and I'm going to ask you to play it.
Welcome to the lab, Lubrax building. We have the fire brigade. Two exits on the upper part, one on the left of the stage, one way out on the left of the stage. In case there is a blackout, automatic lights in the ceiling and on the floor, and lights indicating the exit. We wish you a great event.
I'm going to start talking about safety. Here in the company, we always define safety as a non-negotiable value. What is this about? It's about creating a sustainable long-term business culture. For us, safety is a non-negotiable value. We can't talk about results without talking about human lives. And I want to show you our numbers about we have a transportation accident frequency rate. There was a reduction in the number of this kind of accidents. We have a very low 0.02, very low number. And in the accidents with people, although the number got a bit higher in the last two years, if you look at other industries, we see that our numbers are extremely low.
And I'm glad to say that we didn't have any casualty in the last years. Of course, the goal is zero accident. And that's how we work in our culture with sustainable results in the long run. And it goes through the first step of the company, which is safety. And now I want to mention something that you have been reaching us to discuss, a very relevant topic, which is about the irregularities in the market. So I'm going to call Henry, our Legal Vice President, and also he's going to be talking about these irregularities in the combustible market.
Good morning, people. Thanks, Ernesto. Thank you for your presence here. And I was very happy when he offered me this chance to talk about the advances about the irregular market since the last Investor Day until today.
Last year, about a year ago, we were here talking about this irregularity system, and we were talking about CBIO and the mixed oils and problem in taxation in São Paulo, and last year, we have been seeing great advances, so in São Paulo, they had this special regime with the solidarity tax liability, but it didn't scare people that would buy from illegal distributors, and now I want to take the chance to thank Ms. Inês Coimbra, our general attorney in São Paulo, because the government of São Paulo made a way to create a special regime, a fair one, where you put the companies that won't pay their taxes so they are none, and the government knows they can charge them, and if they don't pay, they will be charged, so lately, we have great networks receiving very large invoices because of this new policy.
So it makes us very happy. It is an effective measure in a state that has a very large number regarding the sales in the combustible. So now this is an advance that brought us a lot of joy, this effective execution. Last year, in the end of last year, we had a unique movement with UNICA and the biodiesel front. And we talked a lot about the CBIOs and the problem with CBIOs, how we could, through the legislation, have a better enforcement against the ones who won't pay. And we had a new law against this charge of taxes. And now they have heavy sanctions. First of all, now it's an environmental crime. And the importers will be forbidden to sell for people who don't follow this regulation. So we wanted to have this implemented since the beginning of the year.
And we have been discussing this with the government. And a condition for this distributor to exist now is not to be a tax debtor. So we were able to make the sanctions list to be published this year. There were some people against it. And we will have this. It will be working as of in 2026. And we're going to have, an image, a list of people who are tax debtors, of companies who are tax debtors. And I'm very happy with these advances. And because of that, we were able to approve the single-phase ethanol taxation. I'll be talking in the next slide about the plans for next slide. And not having the single-phase taxation was a pain for us. But now it has been approved. It is effective since May. And this is a very large, very important conquer for us.
As I mentioned, we were able to implement the list of sanctions. The crown of this year of all those conquers are the three operations. The three operations are so great. They involve different organizations. They have the power to change the market. It's a point of turn. No coming back. I'll be talking about that. First was the Hidden Carbon. It focuses on attacking organized crime. Was it an operation and then it just died? No, they are on the sixth phase. It has happened in São Paulo, in other states, in the north, in the northeast of Brazil. The goal is to suffocate the financial flux of the organized crime. After Hidden Carbon, there was this operation that for me, it was the most important because the MO of many companies to have this asymmetric advantage is importing combustible.
So the Carbon Supply Chain operation came through the IRS, and they apprehended four ships. And they had a false buyer. The product was undeclared. The four ships were apprehended. They are seized in Petrobras. And it disassembles this way to have this tax advantage in our market. And another operation that made us very happy was the one made by the agency closing this illegal market with illegal indicators. So in all this period, there is the cherry on top, which is the operation Lobato Well, which aims at fighting persistent tax debtors. All that shows that in the distributors' market that are considered illegal, according to they had a loss of 3.5 points. And then you see Vibra growing 1.3 basis points. But we want more. We have many challenges for 2026. We have the span in the distribution of ethanol distribution.
So we want to advance the single-phase ethanol taxation. And we know that in the future, all combustibles will be single-phase taxed. And we want to do for 2026 this happening regarding ethanol. And we know we must advance. We must advance in naphtha single-phase taxation. And people import from naphtha, but it ends up as fuel. And it's an unfair competition. And naphtha project is going on. And probably we hope to have it approved in the first quarter next year. We aim at having the solidary taxation for other states that we know they suffer with that too. Minas Gerais, for example, began that. And they have other ethanol sellers in the solidary taxation. And when we talk about CBIOs, we want the law to be effectively implemented. And we want the sanction list to come.
And we want this list to be released because we want to have this. We want to put this behind us as a problem that we used to have. The persistent tax debtor, I was present when they approved the law. And it may be approved today and go to presidential approval. I'm very pleased. The operations really helped this project to become urgent. I'm very excited about that. And I believe it's going to happen. And there is a project for biodiesel. And we hope that together with the we want to have we're going to know what are the distributors that are not following correctly this policy. And the ones that are using biodiesel correctly, we are releasing material to have this testing. And we want to fight these irregularities. Ernesto, thank you very much. I invite you to go back with people, talking to people.
Thank you, Henry. I think the advances are undeniable. Vibra has been doing great work with authorities in the country. And I remember when I started three years ago and people telling me, "This is the sector." But we are changing that this is not the sector. We don't accept it to be this way. And this is our culture to be challenging this quote unquote all the time. And I think that this is what we are doing along with the ICL. But this is a major transformation that only a few people believe that it was possible. But I like to say this because many of you ask me the whole time when I meet you. And the number one question is, "What about the markets? Will this be approved?" But it's not only about that. Vibra is not standing still.
We are doing a lot of things because solving the regular market certainly is a major part of the enhancements and improvement of the results of the company, but that alone is not going to guarantee the sustainability of our results, and for that, I wanted to go back to what we said last August, our five avenues of growth, and this is what's going to make viable an exponential result of the company in the next five years, and maybe transform the market, but Vibra in terms of value generation. I'm going to start talking about each one of them, remembering all of them. Indisputable leadership in gas stations, the enhancement of the offer to B2B clients, expansion of our logistics capacity, new ambition in lubricants, and return with renewables. That was the strategy that we shared with you last year.
And now I want to reveal them, each one of these pillars I'm going to reveal from the strategic perspective, the actions, what happened, the advancements that we had. I will talk about 2026 in each one of these avenues. And then I'm going to invite Augusto for him to show the numbers. Now let's talk about the first one, indisputable leadership in the gas stations. It was a very strong year for us in the retail and the gas stations led by Vanessa Gordilho, our Vice President. And she has brought results that I'm going to show in the next slides that are representative for the Vibra. What did we show last year? What was our strategy? And I want to reinforce with you, it is the best value proposition added to the fight against illegality, added to the logistic infrastructure.
And that is going to lead to the expansion in the gas stations. And all of that is done with a partnership with our resale department. Let's see what happened in 2025. And I'm going to focus on the right here, on your right. The unique value proposal, proposition. The Petrobras brand, we are the number one brand in the trust of the brand. And this is the value proposition. And we recovered this leadership, especially in a moment that the consumer sees everything in the news. And what they want the most is to trust their fuels. And we recovered this trust in the number one trustworthy brand. The resale NPS, for the first time in a lot of years since 2022, we recovered the position to be the first in the Net Promoter Score of our resale.
Our numbers had an exponential growth in these last 12 years, 12 months, actually, sorry. And we recovered an important pillar that is the partnership with the resale that is in our strategy that I said before. The fight against irregularity and illegality. And I want to highlight one point here that is the ethanol case. When the monophasic taxes of ethanol, we reached an improvement of 40% in our commercial margin, added to the recovery of our leadership of ethanol share. Vibra, in the last few years, were not leader only in ethanol due to many asymmetries in taxation. And we managed to recover this leadership in ethanol. And in the previous slides, the value proposition, the fights against illegality and the logistic infrastructure and expansion in these stations, this year was record-breaking. And I want to thank Vanessa and all the retail team that made an important work.
Until November, we flagged 57 new stations. You might not see the numbers, but we are exchanging gas stations with low gallons and with better stations, with better operators, with higher volumes, and there is a moment of maturation. Some of these stations are still in the entrance aspect, and more than that, our pipeline for the next year is more than ever, is higher than ever. In 2026, we are going to use more than what we did in 2025. All these leads to a result in the retail that I like to talk about the consolidation of the margin that we are reaching, a point of no return. What does that mean? I think the market is changing definitely.
We are seeing a lot more interest of resales to work with the Vibra brand, to have our value propositions, to have the trustworthiness of the consumer, to have access to our logistic capacity to deliver. With that, we have doubled our margin in 2025 here. This is a little bit affected by the accounting in the third quarter. Otherwise, we would be even higher than 2024. We had stable margins. That is double what we did in 2022. Now with the recovery of share that we're coming from 20.2% to 20.9%, we are not counting October here. Otherwise, the leap would be higher. We would be over 21% in the retail share. That demonstrates the execution of what we have said last year.
In the next slides, talking about 2026, we are going to continue working with this pipeline of using our brands in the stations. Our strategy is focused on the work with our chain. We work with this white flag. We are going to continue working with this white flag, but our main focus is to bring competitiveness to be close to our chain in partnership with the best value proposition, bringing more and more solutions to our partners in our resale that are with the end users working day and night to make the Petrobras brand successful. We are going to continue with the advancements in the regularity, and now, as soon as we approve this bill of habitual data, we will have more opportunities for improvement. Our logistic efficiency program, I'm going to talk about it later. We have a substantial program of reduction of logistic costs.
And this will bring important results not only to improve our margin without necessarily improving our cost. I can improve the margin. And working more and more with digital channels. From the digital channels, we can reduce the cost and access new customers. So our journey continues. We are very optimistic. We have a strong partnership in the engaged resale and the volume of using our brand with a robust pipeline. And in 2026, it's going to be even better. And our evolution is even better compared to 2025 in the results of the retail. Now, let's talk about B2B, the enhancement of our offer to B2B customers. We are increasing the number of channels and the number of clients. This is led by Juliano. And Juliano has joined us one year and a half ago. And we see important evolutions. This was the slide that we presented last year.
We talked about the enhancements of the offer for a better profitability. So the increase of cross-sell. We have a huge customer base, a B2B customer base. And we used to sell only diesel, basically. In the last few years, we were concentrating in the major customers. And we didn't pay attention to the medium customers. And we had to access the customers with more relevant margins. And we moved away from the growing, fastest growing market, the agribusiness. Last year, we said that we created a specific department focused on agribusiness with specialized people and focused on bringing results in the agribusiness. And we talked about natural gas as well. That is the enhancements of the product portfolio and seeking more customers. That was one of the big focuses to serve our customer. Now, let's move to the right here.
We managed to increase our customer base through new channels, new digital channels. We accessed 5% more recurrent customers, and these customers are really interesting because although they have lower volumes, they bring better margins. The upsell, and this is a collective work with the B2B team and the customer experience and product team led by Mariana, who is also here. That is the increase of our mix of product with high added value. We launched the Agritop project, and Agritop is a differentiated product, meaning that it brings a reduction of the fuel cost and it reduces the cost of maintenance, especially for agribusiness, and the agricultural equipment that consumes diesels and that brings a lot of cost in terms of maintenance. Agritop is the solution. It has unique additives that brings a solution for that.
And with that, the customer has a reduction of consumption and the cost of maintenance, and we have more margin. It is a win-win situation, and we managed to advance really well. We have big power plants showing that their 10% cost reduction in these products is advancing very quickly to other markets as well. So besides the increase of the mix of the Diesel Grid in this segment, the main advantage of this segment is that in the other side of the table, you have companies that you can make a more technical work. This is not happening by chance. The partnership with Juliano and Mariana in two different teams, one focused on the product and the other focused on the sales, a technical team that we strengthened our technical team to support the field.
And gradually, we are going to improve the margin of our B2B business and to stop being spot anymore. We increased 14% of the cross-selling lubricant sales in the B2B. This was one of the metrics how we were going to sell more and our sales team that was used to selling diesel, and we were having lower volumes, but the lubricants has 10 x more margin compared to diesel. And it is a business that we advanced, and then we have the lubricants chapter. I'm going to get into more details. In the aviation business, we have a consolidation position, but our aviation team had a strong work and excellent in the execution. And we won some of the international companies, some of them that we had never done business with before. So we traveled to the Middle East, to Europe.
We traveled to those places where the decisions are made in order to bring this business forward, and although we had a relevant position, we had 4% more in market share from 58% to 62% with an excellent level of service. This is what we see, and all of you who sell every week or every day, every time that you are replenishing the 60%, the plan 60% of the time is Vibra fuels, so with everything that we did, we managed to advance in our margin. We see a big advancement in the B2B margin and a certain stability of year. If you plotted October here, we would see some increase. We worked more with the margin. However, when we include October here, the B2B is over 24%, and we are seeing an advancement in B2B, and our focus is to continue gaining market share, accessing more customers.
The challenge of the B2B team is this granularity to reach further, to be in the last mile, to reach the end users and not accessing them from third parties, and to continue in the advancements of margins through products that generate this margin, as I said, the Agritop, the grids, and the lubricants. In 2026, I already mentioned here, but we are going to continue this journey with more customers, more profitability. B2B is making a pilot project this year. We had a centralization of all the pricing, but we are working on a tool with a third-party company, a startup that is really sophisticated to bring artificial intelligence to pricing. The first results are very encouraging.
B2B is a segment that has a spot customer base that is really big, and there is an opportunity, a good opportunity for us to capture additional value using artificial intelligence in the pricing. We are going to continue expanding the premium products, the products and services, and that brings value to our customers, and we can capture part of this margin, and finally, digital channels in order for us to access the customers with less cost to serve. We can go further without adding new costs of serving. Now, let's see our third avenue of growth that we called at a time expansion of our logistic capacity. At a time, I think Marcelo Bragança was leading, and now he is in the lubricants. So I'm going to mention Marcelo in the lubricants part, and welcome Daniel Drumond, who took over.
Daniel has more than 16 years of experience at Vibra. He went through many different operational departments, and recently, he took over the operations. This is the responsibility of Daniel. And this is the slide that we brought last year that we were talking about increasing the logistic footprint. And there were three pillars to increase the competitive advantage to enable the volume expansion because one of the beliefs that we have at Vibra is that many of our results, much of our results, the improvement of margin, the gaining of share, will depend on cost efficiency. We will depend on our efficiency. Once I have our ambition to expand our relative competitiveness in terms of costs to our competitors to be even more efficient than what we are today, this decision is in our hands if I'm going to capture as margin or as market share.
We are going to make the best decision from the business perspective at that moment. Our search is to continue being the most efficient company in the market. We can open even more advantages compared to our competitors. We want to look at new business opportunities and the construction, acquisition and optimization of bases and terminals, and always looking at the strategic corridors perspective. What happened throughout 2025? Looking right here, we have a huge work in our freights, and we managed in 2025 to reduce BRL 350 million in our freights. How did we do that with optimized flux? We started using artificial intelligence because our system is very complex, and using artificial intelligence is making us practically double the return of other things we do. We also use the tower, the control tower that we have in São Paulo, more specifically in Campinas.
In the past, it was more turned to having optimizing security, the safety of our transportation system, so now it focuses on safety, but also on efficiency, and these two aspects talk about this, the optimizing of efficiency. We are increasing the use of high-capacity transport mode. We have a 10% increase in cabotage, and we'll be still looking at that, and investments, we have invested over BRL 460 million in CapEx, so you can see on the left the enlarging of the Suape pool expansion, and now we can reduce the transportation cost, so this always comes associated with improvements in the system, and we also had over BRL 150 million in operational efficiency with over BRL 500 million in increase, and it transforms in competitiveness. The company gains share. We are able to fight in the market because the market is not stopped.
We have to work to stay ahead of the market, and all this data is very important, so I want to show you something that we added last night. As we saw the relevant fact yesterday, we finished the joint venture in Evolua, and it formally ends. It ends on March 31st, 2026. As of April 1st, Vibra will have the leading role to have access to different supply sources, and we understand this is an important value for the company. We had good years of partnership with Copersucar. We end in a very amicable way. We will still be their customers, for sure. We'll be Copersucar customers. It was an amicable parting, but we understand that this is the best way, and for us, this joint venture lost a bit of sense when ethanol grew so fast.
One of the theses of Evolua was the work they doing, the work that was done. And we lost this capacity. The capacity, the size of the opportunity diminished. So we take over the leading role in ethanol. We bring our trading capacity to the company in order to capture the opportunities that are available. And then we gain in our competitive aspect. In 2025, we saw we were a bit stuck in ethanol. We were a bit imprisoned due to this work with Evolua. So now we have additional value. And I can tell you that BRL 4-BRL 5 for cubic meter, now it's going to be in the EBITDA margin. It was on the balance, but we have these additional gains with this flexibility. And Vibra's size and capacity, now we are again the leader in ethanol. And this is our ambition to increase this leadership.
And we have this strategic moment to increase our leadership in ethanol. So now talking about 2026, keeping up results, boosting new opportunities. We want to expand the presence in strategic locations. We are looking at the center of the country. We want to improve our structure to work with the agribusiness. And we are looking at the opportunities we have to optimize our bases, asset monetization. We see the opportunity. Of course, we have to check what market we're going to be with, what the competition is offering. But we have this storage offering mainly in mature markets. It already exists, as I mentioned in the previous slides. New opportunities in ethanol acquisition. We have a shot back. So given our size and relevance, we are sure it's going to bring a lot of value in 2026. And finally, to keep the efficiency program evolution.
You're talking about 500 million, but there are other hundreds of millions that we can reach efficiency with technology, with new tools, new process. It's always on the table. We see relevant opportunities to bring in 2026 in our operations. Let's talk about our fourth avenue of growth. It's what we call the new ambition in lubricant. To start this chapter, in 2025, we changed that into a business opportunity that will be led by Marcelo Bragança as VP unit of lubricants and Lubrax CEO. Why did we do that? To accelerate our growth. I'm going to show you how much we have grown in this sector. We understand that a higher focus, a stronger focus, will have more agility, capacity to respond, and accelerate even more this growth. About a year ago, we mentioned the pillars to grow and reach Latin leadership.
We want to be leaders in Latin America until 2030: cross-sell B2B, unmatched resale capillarity, accelerated growth avenue, and very competitive cost, and finally, Lubrax, the top-of-mind brand. I want to point out two competitive advantages that we have in the market. Nobody has factories with capacity to grow as we do. The biggest one in the Southern Hemisphere, the fifth biggest one in the world. Nobody has a brand like ours to grow in Brazil. For eight years in a row, Lubrax is the top-of-mind brand in lubricants. That's an asset that we have, and we may get even more value from it. On the right, as I mentioned, our strength. I mentioned eight years because I hadn't shown you this, but it's for the ninth year in a row. We have reached this with Lubrax and rebranding, which is bringing a new vision.
The brand was a bit aged, and now we see the consumer associating it with technology, with modern times, so we are, in fact, advancing in our positioning of the brand. We have important movements. Vibra was zero. It was out of the automakers' market, but we are there now with new certifications and expansion of the portfolio, and it's an extremely relevant market, not only selling for the automaker, but you can get to the after-sale, the aftermarket, and we can really advance, and we see this in our numbers, the advance in the volume, so much so we had a record volume. We had historical records in Lubrax's history. It was record in July, in August, in September, a volume of 81,000 cubic meters in the third quarter of 2025. We have a period that is usually lower, but in the third quarter, we got record high volume.
Finally, the efficiency of our plant that operates with the lowest cost in the market. Then we see that our EBITDA was almost doubled. In 2021, it was very low, but from 2022, we have been growing 10% a year in the EBITDA of the lubricant. In 2026, you can see the bar is not really in right proportion, but our expectation is to keep growing. Our ambition is to grow even more. Our volume had expressive growth. In the nine months of this year, compared to the last nine months of the previous year, we have grown 11%, and we're going to finish this year growing. We are in the fourth quarter, so we are confident we will be growing even more. Of course, we don't have the final number, but we will finish with an important growth.
2025 was also an important year to prepare for 2026. We changed some of our authorized distributors. We enlarged the grid. Mainly in the countryside of São Paulo, we were a bit fragile there, so we looked for strong partners with a relevant presence, and we are confident we're going to start 2026 with an accelerated growth in a business that the margin is about 10% higher than in the fuel market, and now Marcelo is totally dedicated for this market, and we will keep working on the multi-channel expansion with our retail people, with our B2B people, making advances where we haven't yet, so 2026 will be important because now we have an operation in Argentina with local stock, and as of next year, we're going to have more expressive sales, even for the automakers there. We're going to sell for some automakers in America.
Gradually, we're going to enhance premium product offer, increasing margins, increasing in volume, and consolidating strategic position with a premium brand. We'll keep strengthening the presence in automakers and car dealers because it takes our brand further. It's not about the volume of sales, but about a positioning in the market, which is very relevant, and no doubt keep working our operations, capturing value, and boosting factory utilization. It's using about two-thirds of capacity. We have about 1/3 available, and we want to diminish our fixed costs, and this is our main goal for the next years.
Finally, in our last avenue, return with renewables. After ending a relationship with Evolua, and our main strategy here is Comerc, led by Clarissa. I'll be talking a little bit about Comerc. We're still focused on Comerc's strategy of capturing synergies. We presented this slide last year, leverage asset-light growth opportunities.
I want to point out, because I don't know if it's clear, but this year, working in the market, we see how much importance our competition gives to knowledge, commercial knowledge. This is an asset. Fuel companies, the energy generation companies are great assets. Comerc today is a combination of these two things, but there is a very strong DNA in serving the client and understanding the client. This has a lot of value because the market is being open. This is the quality of our asset, and this is what we define to keep leveraging. Expanding distributed generation and energy efficiency projects, and some advances in energetic efficiency, and optional growth in centralized generation and asset recycling. We talked about this last year. Obviously, this market has gone through restructuring. Our EBITDA at stake, we gave a number of about BRL 300 million, but it's about BRL 1 billion.
And we'll be between BRL 1.15 billion and BRL 1.5 billion. And the cash flow, operational cash flow, it's one of the important goals to be in a break-even. Today, we have a relation, a high relation of 76%, which is very relevant. So in the last 12 months, we have generated an operational cash flow of BRL 19 million. We're interested in capturing synergies. And exceptional work has been done. Nobody expected containment to be in the levels they got. Although we work to influence, it's not under our management, but what is under our management gave us BRL 70 million operational efficiencies in 2025, which mitigates the negative effect. We increased the consumer units, expanded the consumer units in distributed generation. And we had about BRL 100 million in energy efficiency projects, delivering returns above 20%.
So we're talking about some investments, and we're going to have more reduction, but there are still some investments that have significant return for us. In 2026, we'll keep our focus on creating value for our assets. We worried about that. Our team remains mostly intact. We have changed maybe one or other person, but the reality of the numbers is that 98%-99% of Comerc team is still with us. So this was something we worried about, but this team understands customers. We could attract talents, new people to work with us, to help us enlarge this leadership. We have good work to advance for 101 to continue in the expansion of the consumers of this distributed generation and to leverage the current expertise for this opening of the market. And we are going to continue working in the risk and return of the trader.
Comerc was always really strong. It's for more than 10 years with a robust portfolio, and this year of 2025, the energy market went through big challenges with a lot of volatility and strong changes in parameters. If we observe, Comerc practically was not affected. Many companies were in default and had problems with credits, and Comerc was exempt from these problems, and that demonstrates our capacity to manage the risk and return, so when the market is stable again, we will have the best team, the best processes in order to advance even further in the traders, and finally, seeking institutional ways in order to work with our institutions for solutions for containment, and this is something that is affecting the results of the company in 2025. Certainly, it's going to affect in 2026.
And we understand that this is not going to be in this level for a long time. We are going to find the new ways in the market through the associations and the peers. We are going to solve the situation in the long term. With that, I wrap up my part of my presentation. I'll pass the floor now to Augusto, who is going to talk about the numbers of Vibra that consolidates all of our strategy. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. How are you guys doing? Thank you, Ernesto. You saw that Ernesto was explaining to you to recover what we did and what we communicated last year, what we delivered in 2025, and expectation of what's coming in 2026. I'm going to share with you now the sum of all that in the Vibra perspective and some financial numbers.
This slide is a slide that every quarter we can share with you, and this is my favorite slide because to me, it's one of these slides that shows in summary all of the capacity of execution, the capacity of planning, and the capacity of the people from each team, and all of the effect of the strategy that we communicated previously. This is basically Vibra's result year after year. In the last five years, Vibra has delivered the adjusted EBITDA better than the previous year. We are in the ninth month of 2025 with BRL 178 per cubic meter. So we are going towards having a profitability over than 2024. If everything goes right, we are going to continue in 2026 with this growing profitability, with the challenge of growth that we have achieved in the last few years.
This growth in profitability that Ernesto mentioned covers very many different topics. When we sum all the company, what is behind that richest mix and what is the execution, for example, our delivery of lubricants in the last two or three years. And Saulo and his team in the structure of Vanessa and Juliano. Today, we have a CEO, a nominated CEO, Marcelo, and it is a richer product. And this mix is growing. There is a B2B with profitable products and a cross-sell and the growing of the number of customers and a retail with better and better crops in terms of volume. We increased our branding. And when we sum all of these actions, this is the results. We communicated, for example, Ernesto brought to you all the history and the challenge that we had in the fight against illegality.
He focused a lot on what we, along with the ICL, could change structurally in the company, but with that, we have a dedicated internal structure. We have an internal department, a dedicated department for state affairs and corporate state affairs. We have dedicated people to make this happen. We have a partnership with ICL and other companies in the industries to increase the pairing to qualify the data and information so the ICL can have all the power to execute this strategy, so every quarter, we share with you this history, and for now, we have the expectation to continue in this path every year, being better than the previous year, and we had excellent news, good internal work, and we made the global investment grade by the S&P, and this is a company that is exposed to the S&P Brazil.
We have a classification that's over the sovereign risk, and this is a reason to be proud. And that reflects the risk of credit of the company, but a relevant part of the trust of a rating agency when they put these investment grades to a company as Vibra, that is a totally Brazilian characteristic of 95% exposed to the Brazilian. That we are trying to show to you something that we didn't have so strong last year. This year, we have the first year after the Investor Day last year that we are going to trust in the execution of the company. From the growth perspective and capital allocation at Vibra in the last three years, we're really over than three previous years. We have an adjusted EBITDA, and that converts in cash.
So it's almost BRL 12 billion for the free cash flow generated in the last three years. 2023, we sold the ES Gás. It was almost BRL 1 billion, but these are extremely strong numbers. This is the general cash of the company. An important characteristic of CapEx, what is different in this investment? We have a growth. We saw the results on the growth of the stations, the branding, and we put more investment in 2025 in this specific part, and that is already contemplating the Comerc numbers in 2025. It might be something over than last year in investments, and one of the reasons of the execution, thinking about the capital allocation, we have a lot of discipline in the decision-making process when we invest every cent inside Vibra.
We reviewed a lot of processes internally, the processes of branding, the CapEx, and we reviewed the supply and demand as well. I already shared with you the supply and demand projects that characterize what Ernesto mentioned before. That is the rhythm and intensity. And it's a longer look and a long term. And we focused on the first month. We had the 8:30 A.M. meeting. And that brings to this industry an important response time. This is the characteristics of our industry, but it's very important to Vibra. That reflects in the financial number with the adjusted EBITDA as a cash generation and also reflects in the discipline of capital allocation individual in the perspective of the CapEx here. Expenses. Vibra had a strong focus since its beginning. If you have followed Vibra since the first years, we focused on the simplification of its structure.
Once we reached the specific number of structures, we are growing again. Its profitability is growing, but our expenses are also growing. In November, in the fourth quarter, Vibra was already anticipating our endless search for continuous improvements. Our focus was to keep the rhythm and intensity. At the end of the day, it's the capacity to execute quickly with more degree of autonomy, with less layers of decision-making processes in the company. We went through a small restructuring without quantifying the size of 13% of the leadership that left the company in the fourth quarter. Of course, this will have an impact in our expenses in 2026 and a financial impact, but the main objective is to improve even more and to support the velocity that we have in this decision-making. When I joined Vibra, we had 3,500 employees, and that impacted our profitability.
We saw the adjusted EBITDA. This is aligned with our strategy. We improved many project processes in the company. But in this movement, as any company that has an accelerated growth, again, that supports the accelerated growth, we can see more bureaucracy. We can generate time-consuming decision-making, and we adjusted that in the fourth quarter to give continuity. Thinking about 2026 now, we continued doing what we did in 2025, some numbers referring to the efficiency and the reduction of fleet volumes and the fleet price. This is relevant and efficient. The capacity for us to make decisions with data is much more value-generated rather than the decision-making itself. And we have been investing to have speed and traction. Continue with Daniel with a strong challenge in 2026 with mapped actions and already budgeted with the challenge to deliver that in 2026. How do I expand more stations?
How do I generate more growth? I need more partnership with the grid, more partnership with the chain and internal cost optimization to increase the profitability and/or generate more competitiveness with our sales team. When I joined here in July, I remember in the first month, we had just closed the third quarter. We have 3x the leverage. This company has a big leveraging capacity. It is a cash generator. It has important characteristics. If it is well-managed, this is what we try to do. We reduced the leverage in one year to one time in 2024. We prepared the company to acquire Comerc. We had out of the commitments at the time. And in the end of the second quarter of 2025, 2.9 x. In the end of the third quarter of 2025, we reached 2.7 x, and we are moving towards the continuous deleveraging journey.
We continue our around 2.5 or below 2.5 x in 2025. The cost of the debt, we are still working. All of these factors will contribute to the degree of investment, not only the shared forecast with the rating agency, but the history of execution, the trust in the management, and the trust in the capacity are the examples of real deliveries that bring safety to the rating company to issue this degree of investment. And our the CDI plus 0.7, the cost of the debt. In my last slide to share with you, last year, I ended my part with this chart here. It is a simple chart. Not every day, but almost always, we have this chart in the back of our heads to see what we can do. We continue with the best effort policies to reach 40% of the dividend policies.
In the past, we said that the company would have more focus on the core business. So the result of Evolua, there is a strategic result after the left of the exit of ZEG and the growth that we are using with the stations, and our core business has a lot of value to be extracted, and Aspen is going to tell you in a few minutes what we mean with this rhythm and intensity and this model of management that we implemented at Vibra, and this is bringing good results, especially in the delivery that we had so far.
Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, Augusto and Ernesto, for the company, for the opportunity to talk about our people who deliver the strategy that Ernesto mentioned. Everything that was presented so far, the team, the Vibra team. It is interesting that we have talked about our people and the look at our people and the company, the look at our team, and when we focused on the delivering the strategy and at the same time, the acceleration on the look on the AI agents because they help us to elevate the capacity of delivery of the company.
This is just a reminder of what we presented last year, our management model, the look on the culture that looks for the non-conformities and the culture and the problems that we have in our business and the discipline that Augusto mentioned, the daily reinforcements to say how we can improve everything we do, the weekly routine depending on the topic and the monthly routine, this consistency in the way to manage the company, always focusing on a better delivery to our customers, and this is something that in our culture, we have been working on and how we listen to our customers and how do we translate their business pains to results of our company and results to our business partners because we increase our results along with the customers in the end.
Just to give an example, we intensified in the last few years the participation of the customer experience and to listen to our customers to see how their journey and their experience can be evolved, and of course, that much of this journey has been helped by the application acceleration of technology of artificial intelligence. The predictive AI that increases our capacity to analyze data is present for a long time, but we can combine in an accelerated manner with the GenAI that had a boom in the last few years and the last few months, and it increases the capacity to analyze this data and to create solutions and to give back solutions to our customers. Ernesto talked about the elevation of the NPS, and this is getting us closer to our customers.
We can mention here the improvement of the results of the assessments of Reclame Aqui here, where the customers can assess the way that our services are being provided. This is a way to look at the business model, to management model and the perpetuity of the company and the pillar of the ESG through the actions that we have been following and we have supported to the market. We understand that there is a way to leave a legacy, a better legacy, an additional legacy of the financial results to the society as a whole. I think you had the opportunity to see outside the convenience store example that is the cause that Vibra understood that it should support. Since last year, we had the zero sexual exploitation. We had a movement that Vibra supported.
Now it's almost 200 companies that adhered to this movement, and 200 companies represent almost two million employees that are being qualified and trained to understand how they can fight this problem in our society, and this is a movement that is being accelerated in everything that we saw in the business because the consistency of the company is being applied in everything that we do, and the last point that I think it's worth sharing. In general, we were very close to the communities that are neighbors to our operations in the airports where we provide services. We were always very close to them. In the last few years, we intensified the approach with these communities. We have a group of entrepreneurs that through the education and through this network of help, we have strengthened this approximation with our surroundings.
Many of you might have the opportunity to see the walls outside, and this is an evidence of this proximity with the neighboring communities. And this is a reinforcement of Vibra. And thinking about 2026, looking at people and technology, this is an agenda that it was prepared to use the data that Augusto showed to deliver more results. And when we think of all this agenda of acceleration, thinking about Rio de Janeiro, there is a pool of talents. How we advanced in the last few years? But we are even stronger next year with an agenda to transform Vibra into the number one choice of the talents that are graduated here in the city of Rio that has a big profusion of good universities. And this is also part of our agenda to accelerate everything that we delivered. These are our values, consistency, and I'm very happy to share with you everything we have to deliver.
Thank you, Ernesto. Thank you, Aspen. Well, let's have our final messages. Then we'll have our short break, and we'll come back for Q&A.
We will keep growing. The great promise we did is that we had increased our margin, and the year of 2025 will be a year of growth. We are in the end of the year, and we delivered such growth. Company started to grow again, and we see room for more growing. We want to improve our margins with efficiency program, cost reduction actions, and a growth agenda closer and closer to our customers, our retail grid being close to the ones who move this country. Being with the customers, understanding their needs, we will keep growing in 2026.
In each of the growth, a short summary. In gas stations, proximity to resellers, drivers, sustainable growth, drive sustainable growth. We had this record sale, and we have a very positive energy, a robust pipeline of branded stations. In B2B, the enlarging of supply, we have more clients. We are closer to the clients. We understand each client so we can help them better, making upsell, cross-sell using digital channels so we can get further and have more clients. And our third avenue, it's fundamental to look at our efficiency. It's about costs. Every day, some of you ask me, "Are there still opportunities to reduce costs?" And my answer will be today, tomorrow, in five years, 10 years, yes, because cost is about that. There will always be room. And Vibra goes after each cent in these opportunities to be the most efficient of the market.
Augusto mentioned in our SG&A agenda goes right there. We will keep with it. It's going to be a continuous agenda. He talked about downsizing to reduce costs, I believe, in a less hierarchical structure, but also in our SG&A, we look at every line, every expense, and we're going to have a reduction of our SG&A, and this is what we look for: efficiency all the time. In the lubricant, with a bigger focus on a more independent, more autonomous unit and accelerate the growth. You saw the numbers. We have been growing. We've grown 11% in the first nine months of the year. We have opportunities to more growth, and we want to go further in our lubricant business, expanding to Latin America, and finally, return with renewables.
Working with Comerc and giving efficiency to the assets we have, maintaining, making maintenance in the capacity we have, sailing the turbulences, keeping what is under our control with a lot of efficiency and working with external agents so we can work with better. So these are our avenues. And I wanted to summarize. This is our one but last slide. I want to talk about management with rhythm and intensity. In the last three years, we have a significant change in our strategy, our focus, and our core business. We announced yesterday that we're leaving Evolua. We announced that we left ZEG. We understand that the most important value with most capacity of return is in our business, and we are in our core business, and we want to work more starting from there.
We have a strong cash flow generation, over BRL 14 billion, over BRL 14 billion in cash generation. Few companies in this country have this level of cash flow generation. We started growing again. Many doubted that, but we did it. We recovered market share, and we are advancing in a strong manner. The year of 2025 showed us a branded in-branding of gas stations. There was a record, I'm sure, in the year of 2026. Our ambition is to be even higher in terms of branding of stations. And we see a change in the process, a cultural change, a more agile company with more excellence in execution, more delivery capacity, more innovation capacity. We want gradually to become a reference, a national reference in the use of artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence, the one that brings results, the one who is connected to business.
In our team, we only talk about artificial intelligence if it is directly connected to our business, and it will really bring results to our business. And that's the cultural change we are engaged in. And then we see results. We left a 133 margin, and we haven't stopped growing. And I'm pretty sure we'll be in a higher position in the end of 2025. And the market share from January to October, we've grown 1.3 points. And that shows our great execution capacity. And all that, going to the last slide, with the announcement of BRL 4.4 billion dividends. We announced in the last three years, BRL 4.4 billion in dividends. And that's the last slide I leave to you because this is why we work for value generation for you, our shareholders.
The value of the share, a value of an increase of 119%, which brings 153% return for the shareholder in the end of November. In green, you see how much Vibra's shares have grown in relation to Bovespa and CDI. And for us, it makes us very proud. We know it's a result of hard work, a lot of effort. It's a result that can't stop because we have, we must go on. We want to be sure that the opportunities we have ahead will bring, will make us bring in the next years graphs that will have charts that will have better numbers similar to those you have seen. And all the management in the company is extremely aligned. And this is one of the highest numbers of profit for the company.
So we are aligned with you, and this is what we search so that this chart will keep like this or better for the next year. So I conclude, and I call Eduardo here.
So people, thank you. So with this, we finish our first part, which was a presentation. We're going to have a short break so we can organize the stage with our VPs, and we will come back at 11:00 A.M. Okay? Thank you. See you soon. [Foreign language]. Okay, let's go back to the second part of the meeting. We had one hour for a Q&A session with International and all the VPs. During this part, we're going to answer your questions here. For you who are live here, if you are online, you can ask your questions through the chat.
If we cannot answer all the questions here, I will go back to you with the answers as soon as possible. And I'm going to pass the floor to Ernesto so he can introduce the team and we can start the Q&A session. Okay, we have the girls here with the microphone. So if you have a question, please ask them to give you the microphone. I can see who the first ones will be already. But before going to the Q&A session, I just want to, I want to ask the vice president here to introduce themselves, just the name and position, and how long you have been here.
Augusto, CFO of Vibra. I've been here two years and a half.
I'm Vanessa Gordilho. I'm the VP responsible for retail. I've been here for three years.
I'm Juliano Prado, responsible for the B2B commercial navigation, and I've been here one year and a half.
I'm Henry, Vice President of Legal Compliance and Institutional Relations and 25 years of Vibra.
Aspen Andersen, Vice President of People and 22 years of the company.
Clarissa Sadock, CEO of Comerc, two years and a half in the company.
Marcelo Bragança, CEO of Lubricants, 27 years of the company.
And Mariana Santarém, Marketing and Customer Experience, almost four years at Vibra.
And Daniel Drumond, VP of Operations, almost 17 years in the company.
So this is our team that I'm proud of, that brings a lot of competence, knowledge, and diversity. And we can see here people with two years in the company, people with more than almost 30 years in the company, and we're working in the state-owned company and in different markets. So we have a big diversity, and that brings capacity of complementarity of this team.
I want to understand what is happening with the diversification in the long run and a question maybe in the opposite direction and investments. You commented on the diversity of biogas. You talked about leaving Evolua. And if you can comment on what you see as in result improvement, efficiency improvement as you leave these groups.
Thank you for the question. I think it's important to point out that our strategy, but it's a strategy for, we see it still a lot of value generation growth. So this is not an agenda only for 2026. We put a focus on the presentation on the short run, but it's still a long-run agenda for the next five years in the company. And fossil fuels, they will be products that will still be growing. So we haven't had a discussion in this market about that. So we understand that Vibra still has a lot of opportunities to capture in this market. They won't be concrete in two years. It's an agenda for the next five years, even the irregularity agenda. It's not only for 2025. We won't be able to solve it. Some doors will be open again. We'll be closing them again until we are able to solve the situation in the long run.
We generated more than $4 billion in cash, and we are going to generate more of that in the next few years of results. And obviously, we are going to analyze in the context in the best capital allocation. And we have the distribution in our policies, the best resources to distribute 40% and as dividends of the JCP. So the company has a strong focus and to have BRL 4.4 billion in our dividends. And we have no problem to distribute even more. We are going to be looking at the strategic opportunities. This is something that I didn't say in the presentation. We had a quick slide. We continue to understand that natural gas will be an interesting avenue of growth. But why didn't this happen in the last few months? Because it is a more complex market with few players.
But besides the opportunities that we saw, it is our discipline in capital allocation. If we don't have the return, and if it's not the best capital allocation, we are not going to do it. We understand that the best capital allocation for the company in the next few years was the reduction of leverage, the reduction of our debt. That demonstrates the decision process and the rigidity and the discipline that we have in this process is the growth to other avenues that might be natural gas. And it can only occur if that represents a capital allocation with good returns to Vibra and its shareholders. And this is the mindset. We don't have the mindset to grow to other avenues because it is strategic. We are going to grow as long as we have the right return.
Another important thing, there is something that in an underlying manner is in this strategy that we transformed in the last three years. We continue believing in the energy transition. We are not going to lead the energy transition. We are going to follow our customers in the energy transition because timing is everything here. And we want to be following the market. We are not going to lead the energy transition. We will be the first followers to be with our customers in order to deliver the energy that the customer requires. We are not going to be left behind, but we don't need to take the risk to be the pioneer. This is our mindset of where we are going to new potential investments, always looking at the best capital allocation, the best return, and the strategic fit of the company, aiming at the best risk with the best return.
Your second question was about ethanol. The acquisition of ZEG was a company that I believe in M&As and everything that are relevant for the company. That we need a minimum size. And ZEG was a marginal thing in our business. At the same time, that would demand an important CapEx.
It could demand an investment of BRL 300 million-BRL 400 million in the next few years to a segment that is still marginal, that is going to grow. And we practically work with a startup that has its merits, but in the Vibra portfolio, it didn't make sense. So that was a risk mitigation action to avoid the loss of focus of the management to an allocation of capital that wouldn't bring the returns that we were expecting. And that was focused on risk mitigation. And Evolua is a different story. We understand that while bringing more flexibility. So, one of the largest buyers of ethanol, we were losing market opportunities that are going to transform this into a business.
But we felt during 2025, we had a lot of opportunities in 2025 that some of the competitors had a competitive advantage because they were more agile at some point. And I was talking to a small group there that what we have is a big competitive advantage in the agility aspect. It is less related to the size of the volume, but it is the agility to insert specific movements to ethanol producers that has more capacity to give this volume. And this financial capacity, we can capture these opportunities quickly. And there is a relevant value, but it's difficult to measure. But certainly, it will be in our numbers of 2026. I don't know if Augusto wants to say something else.
But just to reinforce that we are talking about the long term, but the short term is the deleveraging to the cash injection and the distribution of dividends in our strategy in a relevant way and the reduction of the broad debt, the gross debt, with the interest rates that we have nowadays. So the focus on the short term is very clear. And this question gives me the chance to talk about this chance of capital.
Good morning. Vicente from Bradesco BBI. Congratulations on the event. I just wanted to talk about the hidden carbon. It is evident the impact that it had in the share of the formal distributors, but we don't talk about the price impact. When you get the data of ANP and the price at the pump, we get Vibra that is the leader in the markets and the premium that it has against the white flags. It is clear that these reduced to about 80 billion cubic meters. It makes sense to bring this volume inside the company, but I want you to understand if it makes sense for this premium to increase again. Because as you have said, the perceived value of the brand has increased. And my second question is about lubricants. Did we engage at some point with Cosan about move? Did they change the partner? So does that change anything?
I'm going to talk about both, and then I'll pass the floor to Vanessa and Marcelo. But about the retail, we have a position. I always say that we are going to maximize the result of the company.
The way that I see that is that the margins are always in our hands. It is a short-term action. Of course, that is the stand in the long term, but the market share is what you cannot trade in the long term. A company can never give up the growth in the long run. Otherwise, you are only managing the ends, and that's not Vibra. We are going to show our growth capacity. We have an opportunity. The opportunity is that in many different operations, we will bring new dynamics of the markets, and these opportunities are not going to be there forever. It is the moment to position ourselves. In fact, you are right. I think I heard this from other people.
But on the other hand, we are occupying a place that there will be a moment that we can try to find more margins, and in this moment, I think the whole market is reaccommodating to this situation, but I just want to hear Vanessa here to complement that.
Yes, there is something that I said outside that we always talked about hidden carbon, and we talked about São Paulo and Rio, but Brazil has many different peculiarities in the way that we work. It was mentioned here, the B2B. We implemented artificial intelligence in some cases, but our objective is to capture as many opportunities as we can. We also have the spots, and we have not focused only in these spot markets because we need to strengthen our main network. This is our main focus.
And in the beginning, we are looking at station by station, and we are not making regional price. We are doing station by station, bringing all the information that we have to capture everything that we have in terms of our capacity and to put the owners of stations to be more competitive. So this vision that you have in the hidden carbon really helped, but it helped in other businesses as well. For example, the tech solidarity for us, it worked as well as the other topics that we are mentioning here. So how do we capture the best opportunity possible in order to extract this margin in every single station? So this is the ideal answer. And certainly, we are vigilant about this because the station owners need to be competitive. And about your question about lubricants, we were making an organic growth work.
Throughout the years, we are going to analyze inorganic opportunities. This is our obligation. Right now, there is nothing ongoing, no inorganic work stream. I think Marcelo can talk more about this.
Especially our ambition in Latin America. Some types of partnership we always associate with a complex M&A, but there is some type of partnership that can make sense to accelerate this growth. The Lubrax brand in Brazil is designated introduction. In some countries in South America, we have a level of penetration and brand that is important, but in order to accelerate this movement, some partnership will make sense. We are always looking at that, but with a lot of discipline in this capital allocation. The main opportunity is in the organic growth.
We have a factory now that is enhanced, modern, with a competitive cost, and we have the capacity to grow with a low level of CapEx compared to our competitors. It is a strong brand with the adjustment that we did in the redistribution. We have a well-prepared network to accelerate this growth.
Hello, good morning. I'm Monique Greco from Itaú BBA. Thank you for having us. Thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. Vanessa, I have one more question about Evolua, and I'm going to ask you for help to put some quantities in the fact yesterday with the closing of the fee. How much counterpart we can expect in the results of the company. What is the piece of this margin that was at Evolua now that we will be able to see more clear? And the other companies to Henry . Henry, you said that there is a possible good news for the sector that is the consumption tax that will be approval. What is going to be approved today? There will be a presidential sanction. And what reflection can this bring to the refining sector? Th
ank you, Monique. Well, about Evolua, what is concrete nowadays is that we have around BRL 4 or BRL 5 per cubic meter that was in another line of the balance. And now it's going to add in our margin. And this will have a differential, of course. And it's very difficult, as I said, to calculate that. But what I can say is that we expect something significant. We are talking about dozens of millions or hundreds of millions to find gains with this flexibility and capacity of trading of Vibra. This can be translated to additional margins or into growth in the ethanol business.
What we want is to grow strongly in ethanol. Because we took the leadership, we are now, we want to be even more leader and to have more capacity of flexibility of growth. These benefits can be translated into additional margin and can be growth of volumes and share. And an actor showed that the ethanol was going through a revolution recently. It was the federal monophasic. Close to obtain the state monophasic, we had an internal growth in this repositioning of 40%, and the ethanol had an internal profitability. With the undoing of the joint venture of Evolua, if you have the sugarcane and corn, you have the possibility to have less flexibility to capture these margins in the equity share. It is a group of factors and actions that we just need the consumer to adhere more.
So 2026 is a year that we are going to do this market share.
Okay, thank you, Monique, for the question. We are really excited for this approval in the House of Representatives in the Congress. We hope that there is no modification in the wording of the bill, and I think it will be signed, and once it is approved, this bill of law has federal and state laws, and it provides that the states will have also to apply these consumption tax debtor laws to difficult these defaulters to refrain from paying. We are really excited for the federal government. It will be approved after the sanction of the President and the states that are going to anticipate we have stronger measures immediately.
The law is that if in one year the states do not approve their own legislation, as the example of this law, the federal law will be applied to the states in the same regulations. We are also excited with that. We are working with the states. In your specific question about the agents of Rio, there is a provision in this law that can address an existing problem. There is a legal lawsuit that is taking too long, and this law can make this transform into bankruptcy. We want this to be approved as it came from the Congress to be implemented so the company that is not indefinitely in judicial recovery. It's important to highlight because many times we are expecting a silver bullet, but there is no silver bullet.
This will be one more important movement that will depend on the different steps to advance, and I always say that there is no silver bullet, and we took 30 years to reach these regulated markets, and it's not going to take 30, but some years in order to regulate it again. We have this law of consumption tax debtor, and we are going to close all these doors that are used by the irregular agents.
Thank you. I'm Gabriel Barra from Citi. I have two questions. Last year, it was one of the first launch of Comerc, and I think August when Ernesto talked about organic growth, and I want to hear from you how Comerc is like in this portfolio. We wrote about this. We provoked if it is a possible spinoff, and how do you think about Comerc from now on?
We have higher interest rates and containment, but I want to hear from you how the market is going to be like for the middle and the long term. And the second point is as important as the margin and to capture this premium is the cost. That is a slide that you brought of G&A. When you think about the SG&A and putting the context in increase of volume and the ethanol that you can increase efficiency and the logistics, that impacts the SG&A and the operational leverage CapEx. So can you bring more context on what we can expect in the improvement of SG&A for next year and what would be the goal? And I don't know how much this is included. These are the two questions.
Thank you for the question about Comerc . So first, we are working. Clarissa has been leading in an exceptional way. We have talked about BRL 1.4 billion in synergy, and we have been working hard to do what is under our control. A level of containment is expected, but we understand it's in the market, but it's not going to be there forever. It's a moment. It's going to be solved. And in all our effort in Comerc is to cash relation break even. We want to get this post-interest paying. We are working hard. If we don't get it in 2026, we want to get very close depending on the containment level, but we want to focus on this cash generation break even. We have finished the cycle of investment, and there won't be any projects for greenfield distribution. Our focus is on operational to have more clients. We don't have any investment for solar power.
We are reducing the investment at the minimum in something with efficiency in energetic efficiency, something that's going to be a boost, but when we look at Comerc, when we acquire Comerc, we leverage Vibra, and we are reducing. We finished the trimester in 2.7, and our ambition, so to speak, is to take it under twice in 2026, and obviously, when we look at Comerc, we don't have any desperation. We are not in a hurry to solve any Comerc situation. What we look at, we look at it as an asset, a valuable platform for the market. There is something unique there, and in some way, it is desired by other players, which is the access to customers that very few generators have, so we have a solid, good value result generative asset. We hope to have this cash break even with a robust portfolio.
What we see is that it's potentially a future platform, very solid one, that not necessarily Vibra has to have 100% of this company. This is how we see it. So is it happening? No, no, there's nothing at the moment. We always discuss a strategy in many ways in the company. It is our duty to look at the opportunities that come. But in our minds, it has a solid strategic feature in Vibra portfolio. So not necessarily we need to have 100% of Comerc, but less and less it weighs in our balance. We are going to generate cash flow. We are very confident that this next 12, 24, 36 months, we're going to have Comerc is going to have a smaller relevance in our portfolio. We're going to see the opportunities that will come in the future.
SG&A is one of our goals, definitely. We have this good challenge in 2026. We started the execution, as I have commented. The objective is not the financial impact, but we want to keep the rhythm we have had so far. Our goal, if we think not in numbers but objectives, we're going to come back to the cubic meter we had some time ago. We want to have a margin with impact. It goes through SG&A, but also through aggressive management of cost and expenses. Daniel is working in this part that what makes the cost molecule by molecule trading. There is the part of shipping, delivering, return. Evolua enters there because we are going to work on this expenses front. Our goal is to bring profitability to the company.
If it's going to work 100% of profitability off, if some part goes back to maintenance of growth and support, we study that every day, so going straight to the point, yes, it is in our numbers. It's part of our goals. It's in our budget, and we have started doing a part of it, as I previously said, and since we have a very challenging goal as the SG&A, we have a specific goal to SG&A reduction. We aim at reducing the unitary cost in relation to 2025, be it in the volume growth or cost reduction.
Good morning, Gustavo Cunha for BTG Pactual. I'd like to make two questions maybe for Marcelo in lubricants. I'd like to understand better the strategy to start to enter in the market with new products, new formulas, to meet the new needs of the customers, mainly in B2B. And if I can have one more question, still in B2B, I'd like to understand a bit more. If you could give more details about the growth in small customers' experience.
Okay. Thank you for your question. As I said, we worked in the last two years to organize the house, the factory, the rebranding, which we had technological products, but we were able to pass this message better. So how can we advance in this market? Last year, we started with B2B, started to grow, and we have a cross-sell in B2B that has grown in two digits. This growth, the penetration with B2B customers, there is a lot of growth for lubricants. In B2B is what we call high aggregated B2B value. We not only increase the volume penetration, but we start with higher aggregated value volume. In the third quarter, our synthetic products sales grew 46%.
That goes through automakers, as Ernesto mentioned. We had zero participation, and we have gotten some important accounts. And some of them start in January, relevant accounts in diesel, in LV, in agro, and other automakers. We have steel that makes saw, and we have LV that has a great penetration in sales points. And another way to reach the small customer is to enlarge our authorized distributors' net. 50% goes through this network and 50% through B2B and direct channels. And in this distribution, we have over 1,000 selling points. So having a complete reading of the sellout, we can work in pricing, we can do price capturing and put the product in the selling space in a more competitive way. I would say we are more structured to continue the growth journey in two digits, as we have shown.
We really believe in that, as I mentioned, automakers, B2B distributor networks that are stronger.
If I can add regarding B2B, Ernesto mentioned that 14% growth in the customers' B2B. We have a very clear strategy, which is five P's or five products, which are lubricants, which is the most complementary order, and then automatically there is a high margin, eight, nine, 10 x higher. With the light customers, small-sized customers, we have the digital channels. We have a dedicated team for e-commerce, over-the-phone sales, and we have a group that is very dedicated, very close to the customers. They represent about 10% volume of B2B with a higher profitability.
We also, inside this partnership with all this segment, which represents 30% of B2B, get closer and closer to the end users, be it in the agro business or, I mean, be it small customers, but with a high capacity of profitability. That's as Marcelo mentioned.
Can I, Regis Cardoso, XP. I have two questions with a common idea of capital allocation. I'm talking about the core business. There was this migration from investment in the it changed from branding of stations, and I see that the contracts are shorter. The volume maybe is more concentrated in the big networks, focusing better on pricing. Maybe it's more difficult to profit branding, if you can talk about it. The second is the other side of the equation. In the past, Vibra had on the other side, we have this talked about fixed assets.
Vibra used to have more fixed assets, and I want to talk about the contract, the cost reduction, logistics. If you can comment on what are the investments on fixed assets and how do you plan to offer that?
I want to comment on that, the model, but definitely it's in your answer. We are going forward. The shorter contracts not necessarily were recent. Maybe it came from the state company when they were very long, and then when we renewed the contract, we renew it in a shorter measure, but in our measure, three to five years in the level of our contract, so it's not really a reduction. Yes, but it's comparing to 10 and 15-year-old contract that we don't believe in, so in the last years, that has been the average.
What happens is a change that we made to have we have the anticipated, and they pay in performance. We don't pay anticipated. We pay it afterwards. Once the volume is delivered, we pay it. So this dynamics has had an impact, the numbers, as you observed. And it's a positive change made by that we made in this direction. And the third aspect, the fact that we are growing, we are branding more. We are branding more stations due to this moment of the market. We aim this payment that comes after, and we want to take some lines from CapEx, and we want to give it to retail. And we have this strong action, as I showed the 11 first months of the year. We have a record branding of gas stations, and we want to keep growing.
So, with demand's dynamic, we have to take a little bit from that and send it to retail. So you really said it all, but we work gas station by gas station. What is the profit, the return for the company? In our team, we work closely with them. I think that was the great structural change we have brought. We enter, we want to help them. They have more products, and they can use the space better. And today, it goes further than in the past that we would just deliver the goods. Now we look at the space, and we want to use it and make it profitable as much as they can. And I have other partners, as I mentioned. We have Lubrax +, we have BR Mania. We want to help them to see how much they can profit from that.
Ernesto, and the moment is for us to say, how can we make it profit? How can we bring return from that? So we see, and they see. And you gave a good description of what we have done. Just to remember that the investment in gas station is the least risky because I know what to do. We have the assets available. We have the highest market share. And probably 100% of branding doesn't demand a lot of infrastructure changing. So we have to the premises. Thinking of branding has been improving a lot. The relationship with the network, we have been more assertive. So in our portfolio, the branding of the station really adds value because it doesn't demand so much investment. So we know we have some places that are still, and we always think if it's worthy to keep using some assets that are hibernation.
In terms of investment, we have done expansions, the swap, as we mentioned, but until 2023, 2024, we have had investments in Pará, in Santarém, Miritituba, Belém, which expanded our capacity in Belém, looking at agro business. We are always trying to optimize, and we think if it's a good idea to sell some asset, we check out what makes sense. There is nothing planned as we did in 2022 or 2023, 2024. We have nothing in the pipeline, as we said. Of course, we have more places and bases that were sized for other volumes or other kinds of fuels. From the strategic perspective, getting rid of part of the base, we do that very carefully because you can introduce new competitors in the markets, and it's not something interesting for us. We balance that, and we give more opportunities in the saturated markets.
Of course, we are going to look how to profit in these assets.
Bruno Montanari from Morgan Stanley, thank you for the event. If I can ask three questions here. First, it is really clear the cash generation capacity of the company, the capacity to sustain the dividends. Last year, the company had paid more. I want to understand in what moment we can see these discussions to revisit the policy, where Comerc is going to wait less, as you mentioned. The second question is about distribution. If it hadn't been the illegality, what type of ROI you would operate in? Do you perceive any level of return in the long term? The third question that as year goes by, we are close to 2029 when your contract with Petrobras will expire.
You have been more verbal to say with the company on the other side to say that they have no interest in renewing the contract. And I want to understand how this enters in the discussion with the boards and the strategy and that the brand is important and not having the brand might need recalculation of routes there.
I'll get the last question, and then I'll pass to Augusto. But about the last question, I think this issue of the brand is an extremely important topic and subject, and we have a lot of discussion in the boards, the strategic discussions. It's not an urgent issue. We don't need to make a decision this month or next month. It is something that we have in the next 18 or 24 months. We have to make a decision about what way we should follow.
That depends on conversations with Petrobras, and that will depend on the interest of them to renew this contract in what conditions they will propose their renewal of this contract. And of course, that we work with Plan B and Plan C, and many of these discussions we already had in the board and in the administration. And remember that this contract will expire in 2029. It is closed, but it's still 2029. And then we have six years of total rebranding of our network. And maybe it's one of the most important subjects, but it's not in the next quarter. That's going to be discussed in the next quarter. In the administration, in the management, and in the boards, it is being focused on with a lot of seriousness and profoundness, but it needs to be decided in the right time.
In the Petrobras brand, we are really proud and honored to take the Petrobras brand to all over the country, and this is a reason to be proud of. Obviously, we know the trust of the consumer, and we understand that this is our Plan A. We are going to develop in more details in the next few months or more detailed plan for options B and C that we might have in case if it's not possible to renew the contract.
The first question was about the future expectation of capital allocation, especially about the distribution when we consider the volumes that were distributed in the past in the history of Vibra. The first is the leverage. We have to take the leverage to below two times, and this is specifically important to the interest rate at 15%, and this is really relevant.
A company with the size of Vibra with the debt that we have are billions of real paid in interest. We are not going to wait for this to drop because there is an election that next year we have a lot of uncertainty. We have to leverage through the cash generation and reduction of the gross debt, and that fits with the distribution of dividend mechanisms in the short term in 2025. This is the strategy that we adopted. If we get lower than two times, we can generate much more cash in the future, in future opportunities for growth, but if these opportunities don't exist, and we discussed some examples here, gas was mentioned by Ernesto, if the returns are not present and we are not safe enough that that is the best movement, Vibra is not going to pile cash, to stockpile cash.
The idea of the distribution, if that's the case, there is no problem. And the other point that you mentioned, Bruno, about the ROIC, ROIC is our internal goal. If you ask me, regardless of this goal of over 15%, with an ambition, we already exceeded the EBITDA from the last years without extraordinary gains. An industry like us should operate close to 20%. This is the number that we expect to reach in the future.
Good morning, Leonardo Marcondes from Bank of America. I have two questions here from my side. One is about gas that you already mentioned about the sector. I think you were even more verbal last year, but the idea, it seems more mature nowadays. So I just want to understand from your end, what is the link of the change that makes sense in this gas market?
If currently, do you see the potential assets that it didn't have any impact in a potential M&A? My second question is to Clarissa. The reform in the electric sector in the long run. So what would be the struggles from now on taking to the renewable sector?
Now, talking about gas first, I believe the gas will be, will continue to be a sector that we understand as complementary to ours. It has synergies, especially in the distribution of gas. We have the same customers of B2B. They consume the natural gas. In some cases, there is a logistic competence to develop that. That depends on getting access to the molecule. We try to get a contract that, and those who hold the molecule have the strength, and we are squeezed, and it doesn't make sense to make the distribution of the gas.
I reinforce what I said before. We are going to look at, to continue looking at the opportunity in natural gas. But the allocation of capital will only be made if we understand as a risk-return ratio that is good and adequate with the allocation of capital. Otherwise, I go back to what Augusto mentioned. So we prefer to distribute more dividends when we reduce our debt and everything. And we will always look at improving the capital allocation to our shareholders. We continue interested in gas, but with discipline of capital allocation. Now, talking about the bill of law that was converted into law now in the beginning of November, it is a mini reform of the sector. There are many different aspects in the law.
You can talk about the openness of the low transition market and the hard-to-abate sectors, and it limits the opportunities to batteries and bringing areas of benefits, but the central points and the most discussed point was the reimbursement and compensation of curtailment, and it starts addressing the curtailment. The final language that is so far with the presidential veto was not what we preferred. We preferred the different language, but it starts addressing the reimbursement of the past of what was not from the energy. As long as you give up the legal lawsuits, we have to understand in order to use these benefits. We have to understand what comes in the regulation, and in the next few months, it will be very important for us to understand the language that will come from this new regulation and reimbursement, looking at the future.
That again, we need to see what comes from the ministry that has to issue a decree that is not going to happen in December or January. That was going to take some months, but it is an important step. It will start bringing some light to the sector that is relevant, but we have to follow during 2026, and we included that as our priorities for the company, and one of the main priorities of the company for the sector to understand how we are going to address curtailment. We have to look at the glass half full or half empty. This is the first step. The first step. There is a recognition by the authorities, the federal authorities, that there is a problem to be addressed.
We don't know how, if it's how much it's going to cost and how they are going to do that, but this is a first step, and from that point on, I see that it is a serious problem that we have in the sector as a whole, but it's not here forever. We are going to see this solved in the next few years.
Hello, I'm Milene from Morgan. I know that we are behind schedule here, but I'll be brief. Most of my questions were already answered, but I want to talk about efficiency. You showed many different initiatives. We saw the closing of JV as the big capture of margins, and I just want to understand from you the main initiatives, if there is any financial metric that we can think of for 2026 and what you are aiming for. We saw gains in Comerc and logistics, but I just want to bring this in a more tangible way. Thank you.
It's difficult to talk about expectations, but the main buckets that we have for efficiency is in logistics. We still see a potential to use artificial intelligence to increase the price and return to reduce the size of the truckers' truck fleets. Renegotiation of logistics contracts. We had five to seven-year contracts, and they are expiring now. We see relevant opportunities of renegotiating the contracts with the suppliers of logistics. You mentioned earlier the optimization of the basis. We are going to continue looking at these flows from the optimization of basis perspective.
We have these buckets and the SG&A that we already mentioned here with opportunities that we want to reduce our reais per cubic meter that will come from a reduction of the absolute value. And the lubricant factory, we have worked there. And what I can see is that here we are talking about hundreds of millions. And our ambition is always big. And you asked about 2026, but it will be for 2027 as well. And this is the rule of the game. You have to gain efficiency in order to be incorporated to our margin or incorporated in the market share. I don't know if Augusto has anything else to say.
It's difficult to give guidance of what we expect to 2026. The answer is silly, but the reals per cubic meter is expensive. It should be lower than this year, the investments of volumes and efficiency.
The more efficient we are, better the references. And this is the gap that we want to reduce. And the reals per cubic meter, this is an important logistic that is inside cost that we are going to work intensively. We are already doing that, but we're going to continue with that in the next few years.
Can we wrap up here? Okay. So here comes my final message. I want to thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to be here with you. And I think that what we showed here is the excellence in the execution of Vibra, everything that we said in 2024, we executed in 2025. This delivery of consistent results and what we envision for the future of the company is an optimism, a clear optimism and sweat, blood, and tears in this capacity of execution in 2026 and 2027 with growth with margin.
This is going to repeat certainly in the next few years, and always, always with a lot of discipline in the capital allocation. This is the number one mantra of this company. That's why we are paid here. This will always be our main driver, discipline in the capital allocation. Thank you very much, everyone. We have a brunch now that's going to be served.