[Foreign language]
This is the key speed of change, the rhythm of technology. For many, this is the present; for us, the future. Getting to us, imposing today identity, transforming into data, innovation reaching unimaginable places. Technology becoming more and more intelligent, intuitive, communication connecting everyone and everybody. Safer connections coming from all the places, protecting people, contexts, and processes. Trust becoming more and more essential. Some keep up with the changes. We create changes. Valid is the largest trust provider in identification, connectivity, and payments means in Brazil.
[Foreign language]
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Result Calls for the first quarter of 2025 for Valid. My name is Lucas Miyazaka, manager of RI in corporate finance. This event is being recorded, and participants will be watching the teleconference during the broadcast. For those who are interested, this presentation has simultaneous interpretation into English. The support slide deck will be available in our RI website, and after this event, this will be on our website. As soon as we finish the presentation, we start our Q&A session. Questions can be submitted from now on and throughout the broadcast. Please access the chat in this platform. We are making available live questions option too. Please click on raise the button anytime during the presentation to join the queue. During the Q&A session, you can speak on the microphone.
As soon as your question is answered, you can lower your hand. It's important to say that this presentation includes forward-looking statements that reflect current beliefs and expectations regarding future and financial results and other aspects of the business. It's based on other information, too. These beliefs and outlooks are not a guarantee of future performance because they involve risks and uncertainties. They depend on circumstances that may or may not take place. Investors should understand that economic situation, operational events can affect and impact the future of the company and lead to results that materially differ from these beliefs and statements. Today, we'll have Mr. Bressan, CEO of Valid, and Olavo Vaz, our CFO and RI Director. Now, Mr. Olavo will start the presentation. Olavo, good morning.
Good morning, Lucas, and good morning, everyone here with us in this earnings call for the first quarter special, our shareholder-based.
On behalf of the board and all the employees and collaborators of Valid, I would like to thank you for your participation and interest. In this call, I will present some changes in the format. Initially, I will generally go through the figures of Valid this quarter. Then, Bressan will talk about more qualitative details for each of our verticals and also look into business perspectives. We will wrap up with our traditional Q&A session. Now, let's talk about revenue and EBITDA for this first quarter. We closed a revenue of BRL 501 million, a 4% increase compared to the first quarter of 2024, and a drop of 15% considering the first quarter of last year. Our highlight is in the vertical ID, overcoming these two quarters, growing 26% against the first quarter and 8% against the third quarter.
In mobile, 26% growth in the first, considering the first quarter, and 28% drop considering the third quarter. There is some size and ability in the contract in this business and also considering some of the contracts. Valid growth had a drop of 31% in pay year-on-year comparison. As we have reinforced since the closing of the third quarter of 2024, the vertical has suffered with a more pressured environment, both by clients and competitors alike. Now, moving on to EBITDA, we closed this quarter with BRL 104 million, 10% less against the first quarter of 2024 and 5% considering the fourth quarter last year. This reduction was also pushed by the pay vertical. Later, we'll talk about this vertical and the scenario we are going through. EBITDA growth of 25% in the ID segment softens the impacts generated by the pay vertical.
Valid's executive team has been focusing this year and last year on changing the revenue matrix of the company. This change comes especially from the growth of new businesses. Once again, the views that composed this group were the highlight of this quarter. We closed the quarter with BRL 77 million in revenue, with a growth of 141% against the first quarter of 2024 and 16% growth against the last quarter of 2024. This growth was pushed by the growth in the BU we work with and the recent buyout of VSoft, with consolidated numbers of VSoft in the first quarter of 2025. VSoft is an ID tech focused on identifying people and certifying processes. It has presence in 19 states, and the initial acquisition happened in 2022, contributing this year with BRL 16 million.
When you look at the revenue of new businesses in the past 12 months, we have a sum of BRL 261 million, representing a growth of 266% year-on-year. New business revenues account for 15% of the total Valid revenue, and it calls our attention when we look at EBITDA that sums up BRL 218 million, one-fourth of the whole Valid's EBITDA. In this quarter, we move from an EBITDA of BRL 104 million, and we reach an accountable revenue of BRL 73 million. We had BRL 23 million in depreciation, a stable level. The financial result was negative in BRL 22 million, impacted mainly due to currency variations that had no impact on the cash flow. In this quarter, we had taxes of BRL 3 million and other impacts of BRL 2 million, recurring income of BRL 44 million.
On top of this recurring amount, we add the net effect of the divestment of assets in Colombia, as we disclosed on April the 1st. Receiving these amounts from the divestment in Colombia may be in our account during this first quarter. We have an EPS of BRL 3.4 per share. When we look at the drop of the accountable net income year-on-year, this is due to the sale and the participation we had in Qubic in the first quarter of 2024. When we look at the recurring net revenue year-on-year, there's a growth of 23%. Now, let's move on to cash flow and variations in this quarter. We started 2025 with a super comfortable cash flow position, which helps the company to go through smoothly through challenging times and accelerated growth. We leave a cash flow by the end of 2024 of BRL 770 million or BRL 755 million.
We maintained the cash flow position when we compare quarter by quarter due to the strong cash generation Valid has presented every quarter. In this quarter, our operational cash generation was BRL 133 million, representing 127% of the EBITDA. This strong generation was due to a better working capital generation, important reduction in accounts receivable, influenced by the receiving of the mobile vertical abroad. Our CapEx in this quarter was above what we have seen. This is due to acquisitions in companies in Mitra and VSoft. Besides, we also had a JCP, interest on equity in January and in March, and also the share buyback programs I will discuss later. Other less significant variations were in financial results, debt, and currency effects. In the previous slide, I showed that the main highlight in working capital was the reduction of accounts receivable.
In this quarter, there was a drop of BRL 101 million and also improved the time to receive from 79 days- 72 days. We have seen a stabilization in this quarter. In our accounts receivable, we maintained the level of last year with a balance of BRL 175 million and 53 days on average. We remain focused on improving the working capital indicators with new advancements that may be considered, even if new advancements can be considered marginal. We have worked on leverage in the past few years, with a main highlight in the first quarter of last year when Valid has become, for the first time, a net income company since its IPO. As you can see on the graphs, we have a comfortable position in cash flow, nearly 20% of our debt in short-term due date and bankability with our main partner banks.
We still look for businesses and opportunities that improve the liabilities of Valid, just like the BNB acquisition made last year. With this, Valid has looked for sources to finance based on technology and regional development projects, both in the northeast region of Brazil and other regions in Brazil, too. Initiatives like this contribute to improve the profile and cost of debt, reinforcing our financial discipline and strengthening the ability to invest in expansion. We also advanced with a financial strategy with rolling our debt abroad, followed by the conversion of part of this debt into Brazilian reais. This movement reinforces the discipline of the company in terms of managing its debt profile, bringing important benefits to its capital structure, like the mitigation of current threat, better rates, and consequently, liquidity and capital structure that is stronger.
Just like in 2024, Valid's shares remain with a good performance, both in terms of profitability and liquidity in the first quarter of 2025. Let me highlight here negotiated volume in the first quarter of 2025 that increased 25% when we compared this with the first quarter of 2024. Even with this strong performance, we at the board still see the opportunities to value our share. This is why we just approved a new buyback resale of 2 million shares. Now, I reach the end of my slides, and I will call our CEO, Mr. Bressan, so he can detail more the results of our verticals and talk about perspectives for 2025 and the future. I'll be back soon for the quick Q&A session with you. Bressan, the floor is yours.
[Foreign language]
Good morning. I'm glad we're live.
Thank you, Olavo, for talking about our figures. Now, let me talk about some more political information about the verticals, starting with Valid ID. It's important to highlight that Valid ID grew 27% year-on-year compared to 2024. If you go back two years, it's 40%. EBITDA in this year also grew 25%. It is above 30% in margin, also because the representativeness of new business in this vertical has grown throughout this quarter. If we consider new businesses, everything that was created from 2022 on in Valid, in general, it's 15%, but in the ID, they already account for 23% of the revenue.
This is the way we would like to continue for the other verticals, this model of aggregating a new growth mix, aggregating the expertise we have with the onboarding, the offline of people, biometrics, and competencies of digital onboarding, identity proof, know your customer, or know your business, all of these competencies. We have a tangibility to our ID platform, resulting in strong growth, good profitability, and fueling new businesses and strengthening, fostering new businesses to scale up Valid in the future. When you look at volume, if we can show out the slide, one important Valid ID information is how is the issuance of documents like CNH or the driver's license and identification, the old RG versus the new RIC. We can see a significant change from now on.
We'll see more and more growth of SIM, this new ID, and a decrease in issuance of CNH, the old driver's license. The number of SIM, the national identity card, is over BRL 3.7 million in this quarter. Now, looking at mobile, here we have an important news that is a recovery on year-on-year in mobile, growing over 20% in net revenue and over 50% in EBITDA. Obviously, these are pretty significant figures, but we need to consider that the first quarter of last year was a hard one for the ID vertical and also for mobile vertical. This vertical has recovered and now moving on regarding its performance.
When we look at the SIM card volume, still significant in this business unit revenue, we have a stabilized standard of 50 million SIM cards, but in the digital revenue, especially regarding the number of licenses sold to OEM, the manufacturers of devices that carry eSIMs, this number has grown significantly. Considering these digital numbers in mobile, we also have a level of 15% in this vertical, nearly 15%. Now, moving on to the pay vertical, Olavo has already discussed the performance figures we achieved in this vertical, the pay vertical, and we have here nothing new, nothing to add. Just I'd like to tell you that we are back to normal in this vertical. In 2023, we used to have Argentina, but comparing the markets, we can never consider that it would be irregular to think that Argentina would have a superior revenue if compared to Brazil.
Valid pay, especially cards, they go through favorable than unfavorable cycles. The response of our executive team is to do the following. One, mobile is still profitable. This vertical is still profitable. To face this drop in results, we maintain our operational discipline, adjust capacities, adjust costs to preserve the generation of cash flow until favorable winds can blow again. Nothing worries us effectively regarding this vertical. We will keep on our discipline. We have served a positive wave, and we will expect for this element to come back to regularity. Now, moving on to the highlights of this quarter, I would like to quickly go through what Olavo talked about, EBITDA, cash flow, and so on. I would like to give a little bit of details regarding our new digital businesses. It's interesting to see a growth of 141% growth.
It's great to have annualized revenue of over BRL 308 million in this quarter in ARR. It's important to understand that over one quarter of the EBITDA we generate in Valid in the first quarter derived from new businesses at Valid. Having this source of revenue of over BRL 300 million with over BRL 28 million of EBITDA, therefore a new unit that is highly profitable, it's as if we are comparing this to a startup. Inside Valid, we have a new startup which has a BRL 380 million annualized revenue.
When we consider the size of the market we are entering in, we can say that it's great to have over one quarter of EBITDA generated by this new business, but it's especially better to see the size of this market, which is huge if compared to the markets we are used to operate in any of the ecosystems we work with, ID, payment banks, or telecoms. What we have ahead is a revenue that can be multiplied by 10. Considering the size of the market, we just scratched the surface of the size of this market that sums up over BRL 26 billion only in the Brazilian market.
We always talk about our short-term and long-term goals, but I would like to reinforce that the first quarter shows with the figures Olavo discussed a strong performance, especially in ID and mobile verticals with a strong free cash flow, very consistent growth in our new businesses. All of them will continue among the pillars we have defined. One of them becomes really, really important in the daily management of our business, which is investment in technology and innovation. We have more and more talent to generate the renewal of our portfolio as the market opens up for this new portfolio of providing Brazilian citizens with safe ID. We want to invest in the future organically and inorganically and also provide our shareholders with strong remuneration as we have disclosed in the beginning of this year.
With this, I finish, I close, I wrap up my presentation with the results of 2025, this first quarter. Let me ask you to wait for one minute till we can start our Q&A session. See you in a few moments.
This is the speed of change, the pace of technology. For many, this is the present. For us, this is the future. Reaching, getting to us today, identity transforming into data, getting to imaginable places, technology becoming more and more smart, intuitive communication connecting everything and everyone, faster and safer transactions, protecting people, contexts, and processes.
[Foreign language]
It's becoming more and more essential. Some keep up with the changes. We create the changes. Valid is the largest identification trust provider and also connectivity and payment means in Brazil.
[Foreign language]
So let's start our Q&A session.
Questions can be submitted through the platform chat, or you can click on the raise your hand button and use the microphone. The first question goes to Bressan from Luciana.
Good morning and congratulations on your results. How can digital onboarding, digital mobile, and digital government contribute to diversify Valid's offer?
Thank you, Luciana. Good morning, everyone. I believe that the figures we present to you regarding these three new businesses as new ventures we've been investing in, businesses that did not exist before and started existing from 2022 on, now they are very important in net revenue or profitability represented by our EBITDA. We have a long way of evolution in our portfolio since last year. We've been developing our results teams. The competencies of each of our acquired companies have reinforced our competencies. We have expertise in online onboarding, biometrics, and treatment of documents.
These competencies are now in a digital environment with our digital onboarding platform, with the acquirement of FlexTalk in 2023. We strengthened this year on with our option to control VSoft, which also has expertise in biometrics, digital and proctoring ID, and validation of ID processes in different systems. All of this composed with other core competencies at Valid. Digital government, digital services provide us with more data, more information regarding citizens' behavior, regarding their relationship with the state. These competencies mixed with our strong presence in the public environment with the proven competencies to increase our portfolio and move into banks and telecom and private sector. This mix has proved to be a matrix that can be added to our historic matrix and will help Valid to grow even more in the next quarters and years.
Thank you, Bressan. To Fabio from Olavo. Congratulations.
Does Valid pretend to use its liquid revenue for M&As, which would be the focus of these acquisitions?
Hello, Fabio. Thank you for your question once again, and thank you for your participation here. I think the first answer is that there's no doubt our revenue will be used for M&A activities. This has happened since 2022. M&As are part of Valid's DNA. In this first quarter alone, we had a higher volume of expenses in our CapEx because of this, because we have exercised the option we had concerning VSoft. We are consolidating this. We can see the VSoft component in our result release. We give more information about VSoft and the numbers, the figures, the growth we've had with them. We are advancing in this integration with companies we've had before, in-house companies, but we're still looking at the market.
Bressan just mentioned, and later I'll ask him to add something to my answer, but he talked about some of these segments where we start working with when we leave a world that we were known for our issuance, and now we are moving more into transaction. We need to look at validation, the daily routines. There are components in this chain. There are little developed in-house. Maybe we could look for a strong partner to roll this out, to leverage this growth. I'm not going to mention any names right now, but we are looking out. We are looking out at the market. We have market intelligence and M&A new businesses, teams here at the company always paying attention more reactively and more proactively. As these negotiations move forward in the next few quarters, we will provide you with this information.
Bressan, would you like to, if you have anything to add?
The main aspect here is that we want to be the main platform Brazilian society trusts for their digital journeys. As we evolve our portfolio, we are no longer working with the issuance of credit cards or issuance of identity cards or driver's license or SIM card. Moving from the issuance cycle and moving into the transaction cycle too. All of these businesses, all digital onboarding verticals, and the improvement of expertise is regarding know your customers, know your business, protecting the identity credential, the recall, cyber ID, the gov tax, and the business models we have that rely on information regarding the behavior, regarding the services we use, the expertise. We have biometrics and match biometric match, authentication, verification of biometrics, and proof of identity.
This all makes part of a universe that we have developed in-house. Obviously, we will keep on looking outside to improve our product capacity or more markets to become more and more relevant in this pathway of growth we have established for Valid.
Next question comes from Beatriz to Bressan.
Good morning. My question has to do with the mobile vertical performance. Can you explain the recovery of mobile? What can we expect for this year?
Thank you, Beatriz. Mobile for this quarter, against the first quarter of last year, the EBITDA had a growth of 50%, as we said, very strong growth in revenue too. Due to two factors.
One, return to regular dynamics for this vertical in general, but we need to consider that the first quarter of last year, and always the first quarter in mobile, is weaker, the weakest one, because this is the first month of the year. The first quarter is usually weaker due to the seasonality of this vertical. The numbers here represent that we are back to normal for this dynamic of mobile, especially in terms of the SIM cards. We have a stabilized size and also growth in our digital platform. We have gained due to the development of the eSIM product, and there is a market transition that has accelerated, and we have seen signs of acceleration from the physical SIM card to the electronic SIM card throughout this year. We want to have competence to generate connectivity between devices and MNO and operator or carrier.
Having good partners, especially in Asia, we have with tier one clients, we could sell more OEM licenses. Part of the recovery has to do with that, which means that this transition becomes a reality in the mobile vertical. We are pretty optimistic that in the next few quarters and in 2026 and 2027, the migration from the physical SIM card to digital safer modalities will help us grow.
A question to Fabio. Which will be the strategies concerning operations in Argentina?
Fabio, in Argentina, we have lived through several changes throughout the years. Bressan and I have been here at Valid for almost five years, and in the beginning, Argentina did not give us a lot of results. All of a sudden, there was a political and economic change in the country, and we have become almost the single player there.
We gained a lot of share there. We could work with higher prices, higher margins. Now, considering this better macro political environment for the country, it is natural that the prices are balanced and more competition arises. What was pretty interesting was that when you look at Argentina through the past few years, is that first, we could better integrate the Argentina operation with the Brazilian operation. Processes that were done more individually, we could start doing them in group, in purchases, in sales. We could explore new markets. I mean, Argentina serves as a basis for maybe Uruguay or Chile or Ecuador markets. We have looked at these markets with a lot of attention. Just like here in Brazil, we have looked more and more to move into the transactional movement in payments. We also explore this in the Argentinian market.
At the same time, this ability through these past few years to generate a higher result in Argentina helped us to balance some of the intra-group accounts that were open in the past, that were not so good in the past. Let me tell you that we still have good opportunities in Argentina. There are bids taking place all the time there, but we are considering a more expanded geography. We need to understand how these winds will change the scenario and how can we adapt to better work with them.
Olavo, still from Fabio, the higher interest rate has an impact on the pay vertical.
The high interest rate does impact the credit environment. However, yesterday, there was another increase at the SELIC interest rate. SELIC moving from 14.25- 14.75 will not change the credit market.
When we saw the LEX explosion in credits in 2021, we were working with a SELIC interest rate of 2%. We do not see this interest rate going back to that level. There is another component. The high interest rate has a negative impact on companies that have no balanced capital structure. That is why we have worked on this to strengthen this structure. To base your business on these interest rates is very good. It is not very good. It can be very challenging if you base your business on them. Certainly, this is a bad interest rate for credit and in general.
Next question from Douglas to Bressan. Good morning, everyone. Congratulations for your results. Regarding the TAM of new businesses, can you explore how you have seen the demand for digital government and how you see the competitive dynamics?
What about the contract in CRA, in the state of CRA? Any challenges in CRA?
Douglas, challenges to implement a new technology are faced every day. This is our routine. eDigital is a market under construction in Brazil. There is a lot of new technology, new developments. When we deliver this technology to the state, to the public entity for the digitalization of their journeys, there is always the challenge of this adoption of the digital mindset as far as how to treat the data. This happens in CRA, in the state of CRA. This happens in municipalities and also in the federal government. Maybe the federal government has advanced more because of more digital or digitalized journeys, and this can cascade down or trickle down to states and municipalities.
However, this is pretty good for Valid to explore our abilities and become an important player in this market. Because I believe that when you look at the budgets that data or technology companies in each state have, we can, and all of the relationships they have established with different departments of a given state or municipality, then we realize that we need to adapt our go-to-market so we could use not only our team to approach and offer solutions to our customer, but also we started counting on these companies as a partner to implement these solutions. Summing up, this is an expanding market, a market that demands a lot of services provided by different companies. This market has a mindset that needs to be accelerating in terms of accepting the digital mindset in the provision of public services, but this pathway has no way back.
We are, and we'll keep on being, an important player. We have a lot of work ahead, moving on state by state, municipality by municipality, also with a presence in the federal government with our solutions. There are some highlights we will update throughout the quarters, but there is this platform of interoperability. We have our benefit card, the journeys that are digitalized, our biometric matches that are done for your identity proof to get your driver's license or other activities. All of the biometrics matching systems, we have very clear roadmaps for their evolution and also have a good strategy regarding the conversion. In the pace of business closing, business contract, it's not always mature for a bid or for a call tender. These are the challenges we face in terms of the speed of penetration.
This acceleration is natural and will keep on happening in the next few years.
Marco question. Was there any relevant fact that explains the expressive increase in the Flex Doc result in this first quarter?
Good morning, Marco. What? I would say this would be the competencies Flex Doc already has because it is within a major Brazilian bank, Caixa Econômica Federal. Little by little, the solution scope increases for a client. Naturally, the topic of IF CVS and more and more processes now, more validations, IF RS within Caixa aligned to looking for customers. This has explained the great performance of Flex Doc.
I would like to add something to this question. I think Bressan mentioned a very important thing regarding the advance of Flex in Caixa, one of our main customers.
What we have seen in strengthening has this idea that we are not going to buy companies and leave them on the loose. We want to buy them, integrate them into our routine, put our team inside them, and bring that team to work with us so we can open more and more doors. When we look at the Flex Doc growth has achieved with other clients away or outside Caixa, this pace will increase as well. This is similar to Valid. I mean, to what happens in Valid, the new businesses inside Flex grow even more than Caixa itself, but it's still with a lower percentage. Maybe, and we are working towards this, maybe with time that balance that was a lot of Caixa unless other businesses get into a balance. This is happening with Valid.
More and more, we depend on the company legacy business and rely more on new businesses. So the technology products, commercial teams of FlexDoc, they have been reinforced and will keep being reinforced so we can look for more developments at FlexDoc, VSoft, and other companies that are part of our portfolio .
Now, next question from Mateus. Bressan and Olavo, congratulations. My question turns to Valid's capital allocation strategy. We have several negative examples on the stock market of companies that misuse their cash in the face of a comfortable capital structure. How can we not fall into this trap? Many companies have fallen into.
Thank you, Mateus, for your excellent question.
Here, one of the main points that plays in our favor is that when we start this history almost five years ago of transforming Valid and looking at a capital structure, we were not in this comfortable spot we are today. The allocation of the money, the money of the company, the money that belongs to shareholders, how to allocate this into new opportunities has to do with our strategy, our balances and checks. Everything is under check, everything is in place. CapEx committee analysis of results, there is a scenario that has been developed. When you look at our cash flow position, we could be much more aggressive. It could be much more aggressive in terms of some M&As that are there. If we cannot understand the valuation, we are not going into that business. We have a lot of diligence.
We work with due diligence to prevent that. We love M&As that when we announce them, nobody knows about them because they make sense to us, and then we can escalate. Just like Flex Doc, was there any relevant effect? No, it's their competence, their core competence. The caution the board has, the executive team has. This creates a barrier that prevents us from falling into this trap, as you said.
I agree with you, Olavo. However, I would also say that we have this responsibility to balance present with future. Above all, what guarantees the results will take place consistently, both in legacy businesses and new businesses, is our discipline and our execution capacity. We have our teams that are very mature, a well-established governance with a high level of maturity in the company.
There is a board that understands and provokes us to think in the long run as well. We keep on being disciplined to follow these steps in the short term too. There is a lot of discipline, a lot of rigor to bring into the revenue matrix new elements that are more scalable. Considering the society we live in that demands more and more trusted services in these digital platforms, this is how we plan to keep on working.
Thank you, Bressan, and thank you, Olavo. Now we wrap up our Q&A session. Once again, I would like to thank you all for your participation, and all of our investor relations channels are available to you. I wish you all have a wonderful day. Take care.