Good morning, everyone. Hello, thank you very much for coming to Maringá. It's not that easy to get to this city, we wanted to do something different. In fact, it will be a very different day. Welcome to the first Vitru day. It's a great honor to be here with you today. It's our first Vitru day since the IPO. Today's morning agenda includes two sessions that will show what Vitru is and what Vitru isn't, and also to provide more details to make our product more tangible. We say that our products, UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar are different, but why, and how are they sustainable over time?
Our VPs will describe or provide more details about these two products. UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar, that will be for about one hour, and then we'll have a coffee break. At 11:30, at tops at midday, we will have our on-campus visit. That's why we came to Maringá. We wanted to show you UniCesumar inside. This is our new brand, our sister, UNIASSELVI . I now invite our co-CEOs, Pedro Graça and William Mattos. I want more music.
Come on. We're just invited on stage. We need so much emotion. First of all, on behalf of Vitru Education, a very warm welcome, everyone. For us, it's a great pleasure, a great honor to have you here in our city, in this institution, in this school. Thank you very much for coming. I mean, you came from your cities and towns. You left yesterday. You're here today with us. That's great. Thank you for those that are attending online who couldn't come. Again, you're invited to come here at some point in the future so that we can exchange experiences, and so that you can learn more about this campus, the UniCesumar campus, and also enjoy some very good wine that we had yesterday.
That's very good and important for us. A great pleasure, as Carlos said, to have you here. Today, our goal is for everyone to leave this school with much more knowledge about Vitru Education. Everything that was prepared was carefully prepared for your experiences here in your 24 hours in Maringá to be unforgettable. Thank you very much for coming. We're ready to start. Again, a very warm welcome, everyone. I think people were hungry after dinner yesterday. There were some complaints about this. I don't think they could have as much food as they wanted. Well, okay. That was a joke.
Let's start discussing our mission, which is to make access to education more democratic in Brazil with a digital ecosystem and also to train our students to create their own success stories. We have a huge impact on our students' lives. It's so satisfying to be part of this process of participating in the evolution of our students. I have some provocation for our next Vitru Day. We should also have a graduation ceremony for our distance education students. You see how moving they are, these ceremonies. I think everyone has participated in similar ceremonies.
When we are graduating our students, when it's usually the first person in the family to have a higher education degree, it's so moving, it's so touching to be able to participate in not only the ceremony, not only the graduation, but the entire process. It's so good. We will start by introducing our team to you. Some of them you already know. As Michael Jordan says, "Talent wins matches, but teamwork wins a championship." Pedro and I, we're working together In our business combination strategy, we had great professionals that belong to both companies.
Now, at the beginning of our integration process, when we were planning with main company, the first decision we made was to use the professionals we already had working for both institutions, for both companies. When we look at our new structure, it was clear that we had two very relevant areas, two very relevant departments, and we wanted also to seek professionals that could belong to this great team to keep building this great story. We will be showing you these new team. Let's start with Carlos, who is widely known. That's our finance and our IR VP. The one that talks to you all the time.
He has a lot of experience in finance, in many different economic segments. He has wide experience. He built his career in the energy sector. He has lived abroad, South America, Europe. I'm really impressed. I met Carlos a year ago. I was impressed by his capacity. Although he has a lot of responsibility in finance, he's also passionate about education, and he is one of our finance and IR VPs that contributes the most for the quality of our operations, the entire organization. Your turn.
Oh, my turn. Well, I'll talk about Ana Paula Rodriguez. She is in charge of our corporate operations. It's a great honor to work with her. For a long time, we worked together in another company for another company, and she knows, you know, the processes of our institutions. She was leading our integration, and she will talk about that, the integration project to us later on. Ricardo Grima. He supports his education at UNIASSELVI. We have four business units that we will describe later on. Anyway, Ricardo Grima is responsible for UNIASSELVI distance education. We wanted the two distance education operations to remain separate because we have different delivery models.
He will be describing this in detail later on. Grima has experience working for education companies before, he is responsible for the entire UNIASSELVI operation. Let's move on to Érico Ribeiro.
Érico, I think I've been working together, what, for 16 or 14 years, he has a lot of experience. He has his white hair, as you can see. He wasn't like that when I met him. I remember that well. He's responsible for on-campus operations. In these two brands, they're under the same Vice President. He is responsible for both UniCesumar and UNIASSELVI's on-campus operations because that's how we are doing this. There's also our medical school is under him. Our continuing education president, that's Tiago Stachon. He has experience in advertising and marketing agencies. Five, no, six years ago, he joined us. He was with us with UniCesumar.
He's responsible for market operations. Now he accepted to lead our Continuing Education Vice President initiative. Unlike Helio, he's responsible for both brands. They'll still be operating separately, but they're under the same direction. James. James used to be UniCesumar Academic Vice President. There's one more thing about him. His story was built at UNIASSELVI. He worked for UNIASSELVI for 14 years. James was American. James, he then joined UniCesumar and all. As he knows both methodologies, education methodologies, this has sped up the entire quality enhancement process and also our synergy process.
There's James Prestes. James has, again, a large, long history in education, basic education, higher education. James Prestes was responsible in this education at UniCesumar. He was responsible for the entire education. He would continue. He would replace me if I died. He's been doing a great job. We're really happy that I was working. He is still taking care of the whole company. He worked with Pedro Graça in another for another company I won't mention anyway. There are many coincidences that have helped us considerably in our integration process and also in the delivery of our great results. Let's save the best people last.
Guilherme. Guilherme Franco. He joined the company a while ago. Well, a while ago means it's like a long time. We've done so much. Guilherme has huge experience. He is playing the game. He has been acting fast. We've been together for just a few months, but we've been working very hard. Our vice president for people and management since the beginning of this business combination. Pedro and I agreed or understood how important it was to keep this position separate from the market. Although we had people that were prepared to take this position in the company, but the two companies had very well-established cultures.
When you combine two businesses, it's both culture. Our company is managed by people, and our work depends on people. We are over 10,000 employees. For this reason, we decided to invite a professional from the market, Valesca. As Pedro said Valesca and Guilherme started this and they've been playing hard and really well, and they've been helping us to, you know, think the culture of this new company that is now forming, developing. People are crucial when it comes to delivering results, especially in education. Everyone, you should know that they'll be helping us out, and they'll be talking here.
You see, this is such a strong team. Things seem to be so fine. Well, things are not exactly easy, but we do a great job. Let's talk about our history now, Pedro.
Yeah. We have a timeline showing the story of both institutions. Although we have two different education companies, they have a very similar story. It's right? University professors who are also entrepreneurs, who found an opportunity to join the education sector, and changing education. They were both educators, and they wanted to do something different in education and achieved a huge success. Both institutions started distance education in 2006, and they had the same purpose, the same goal. In other words, to make education democratic, but again, quality education. This was a great deliver this education, but also quality education.
At the time, these two companies were a trailblazers, and they had this concern of providing educational services with a focus on students and providing quality education. This is why they were successful. These were two different companies, but they were very similar in their goals and ideals. Yes. All these foundations that were built throughout this time for this purpose, I mean, this was crucial for this moment. Since 2016 and 2017, the two companies did this. Of course, we had also changes in regulation, so we could open new education hubs in many parts of the country. As a result, both brands at the time, they were still separate.
They started to expand, and this expansion was fast. Again, there were some premises that were crucial in this process. When we look back today, we are sure we took the right track, the right course. Like, we had, what, 50 or 48 hubs, and now they have over 350 and 500 respectively. You know the size, the magnitude of this challenge. At the time, as the two companies were separate, the, well, hubs were very important. There was a very special link with all the entire methodology that was created to be able to achieve this.
When you look at how much these two companies grew in the last five years, these were the schools that grew the most, and they grew sustainably with a priority on education hubs, as we will describe later. In 2020, the two important brands were formed. UniCesumar becomes a university. It was granted university status. That was the dream of its founders. 30 years later, it shows how committed it was to transforming UniCesumar.
For Vitru, creating Vitru and also the IPO at Nasdaq. Then Pedro, what happened?
I don't know if the market expected, if the market talked about. We had our business combination in 2021. We announced our business combination, which happened before we had a lot of negotiation. It wasn't easy for us to win them over. As we talked in our conversations, it was clear how similar our companies were, the culture, the objectives, the concern with the excellence. Every time that we talked, every conversation we had in over four years, it was clear and clear that it was the best business combination in town. That's why it's not about acquisition, it's not about someone taking something from someone else or taking over control. These are two companies adding up their experiences.
That's why we are both standing in front of you because we're expecting the best of both companies to build a new one. We create a single institution. Of course, our focus was on digital education, but we wanted to have more students to focus more on digital education concerned about quality. Here we are today. This is our victory today to say yes, Vitru is a different company when it comes to education. It is a different company from the education industry. We have three very well-defined pillars that make us say that we are different. With focus on digital education, the only one.
It is the company that has clear competitive edges that are sustainable. Of course, the combination of these businesses gave us synergy and scale that are important for us to continue delivering our results. You're probably thinking, William, it's easy to say, but it's not that easy to do. Show us how you are different. This is what we're gonna do now. I'm gonna give you some information, some figures about our company. Is it the last slide?
Yes, it is.
Okay, let me see. I think it's clear when you look at our income, 76% comes from digital education, but even more than that, 97% of our student base comes from digital education. We don't have any distractions. This is a company that's always focused on delivering with a focus on students. This is our competitive edge that gives us the opportunity to keep growing in this segment. When you look at university education, I mean, we know that digital education and DE went from 1.6 million students in 2017, and we are at 3.5 million students at 2021. 51% of the base is in prior to undergraduate education.
This is a base that keeps growing, actually. We are part of this market with a focus on digital education that we're gonna be showing to you along this presentation. The pillars call, scale and synergies. According to the data that have been reported in the third quarter 2022, is the largest company in DE Undergraduate Coursess with 632,000 students. What we should highlight here for sure is the chart on the right that shows the consistent market share gains in recent years, in the past five years. These two institutions together went from 3% or 13% up to 23% of market share.
We still have a long way to go in terms of growing. We wanna keep growing and delivering even more results. Well, let me tell you about the difference between the models and why we differentiate from the market. T our models and how we deliver, let me talk about what we have available for digital education. On the right, we have video conference with the beginning of undergraduate education in Brazil, in studios and classes by broadcasting these images to hubs through satellite. I mean, we did have internet, but the quality was really low at the beginning of the internet years, so we didn't have the possibility of broadcasting over internet.
We would use a satellite broadcasting, and this was the first model that we used to gain scale, to scale it up, using new technologies. Then we have internet, then we have more bandwidth That's why we don't have as much video conferencing anymore, although some universities will use it. What we call to traditional 100% online. This is a model where as institutions in a centralized way put together the content and the curriculum. They have tutors to support the students. It is easier for you to operate. It is easier for you to enter the market.
The new institutions, the newcomers, they have actually started with this methodology, which is easy. It's cheaper actually for you to operate, but it's more difficult for you to engage students and to make them feel they belong. They have a hard time retaining students. With our two brands, UniCesumar and UNIASSELVI. I should say something before I explain. We have made a business combination. The assumption that we actually worked on is focus on students. That's how we came up with these two brands. That's what brought us here. We're gonna keep our focus on students. It doesn't sound like a lot, but what does it mean to focus on students?
It's, but it's look at our delivery, to look at the student. We don't have any distraction. We don't create any problems in delivering to the students. We want to focus on students. When we have to make a decision, when we have to make an investment, we know this has an impact on students. If there's no positive impact, we don't do it. Because this is not our priority. The other assumption is that both brands will operate because they cater to different student profiles. I'm gonna talk about the profiles later, and they're gonna coexist. Today we have 1,000 hubs with each of the banks. We're gonna keep growing them. They coexist in both in the same city.
They're gonna keep coexisting in the following years. In itself we have a model that has a tutor with weekly meetings. When we started it was in-person meetings, so we would have the in-person meetings at the hub. Now we also have a modality where we do weekly meetings, but we can do it online. Who's the tutor? It's someone that follows the course during the student's journey and is responsible for supporting these students. It's a local tutor from the region, from the city who knows local reality, students' reality. They can provide what we do centralized in terms of curriculum to the reality of the student and be closer to the students so that this experience can engage students.
This is UniCesumar. Of course, it is a model that because we have face-to-face meetings, this depends a lot on the hub. The hub has a great participation in this education model. What's different in UniCesumar? UniCesumar is different because we also have a hub. You see that they have the hubs not only for UNIASSELVI but also UniCesumar. They're gonna say that these hubs have labs, have classrooms, libraries. Of course, we know that there are some hubs from other institutions that have only 40 sq m or 50 sq m. We do not have this kind of hubs.
Because most of our hubs are structured. just have to look at how many students we have on average per hub. It's a lot of students. UniCesumar has created— I mean, even though we have a digital model, it's more online model. They have created a model where the student is more engaged than the other models, and we have KPIs that show this if you compare to other models. Is it difficult to operate? It is. It is difficult to manage? It is. It would be easier, I mean, quicker if it were centralized and not having hubs. Of course, the two brands have 1,000 hubs and not 2,500 hubs. Both brands could have expanded more the hubs because...
We didn't do it because otherwise we would lose the focus on students. That's why we don't have so many hubs. That does not mean that we're not doing it anymore. We're gonna do it, always with the assumption that we have to focus on the students.
Okay, great. Okay, next slide, Pedro. I mean, I don't wanna be repetitive. I mean, the VPs from the UniCesumar will be with us. Pedro, we don't have any time anymore. Do we have time? Can we have, like, 10 more minutes? You know, I wanna highlight something, and I'm gonna talk about one point for each institution. First, we have to see this is a proprietary methodology modeling. It has been tested and validated. It's over 10 years that we are operating with great educational quality KPIs. Everybody says that they have a proprietary modeling, they don't have the modeling as tested as ours with great KPIs.
I mean, institutional KPIs, Ministério da Educação KPIs. I mean, we do have it. As Pedro said, we have UNIASSELVI, many of our tutors are former students, that's why they have so much empathy with the students because the tutor was a student before, then they can deliver more value and more quality. That's why both institutions, because of what we have built together, we have a competitive edge on our delivery to drive our growth. This was done in hubs, right, Pedro? Next one.
Let me just say something. This is the slide actually that's gonna be more problematic for me and William, because some hubs have been chosen. They are across the country. I'm gonna say that those who chose these was the design team because they got only a couple of hubs. I'm pretty sure that when I finish my presentation, I'll have people writing to me and asking me why I didn't include the pictures of my hub, which. Have you participated in selecting the hub pictures?
No, I haven't.
Anyway. By the way, these are the hubs. They have infrastructure, they have classrooms, they have labs. They have a lot of activities. People say, "What's the edge of UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar?" Our edge is that we have activities. We have the concern of being connected to the community and the municipality. There's one more thing that we want to stress.
As Pedro has said, we are a company with a focus on our students. We try to understand and make our customers happy. You probably know that NPS is one of the indices to measure this. We can show our NPS. Here what you see is a relevant information, a relevant piece of information. McKinsey conducted a study around the world, and they presented to us like late November, early December. As you can see, McKinsey did this study and told us that UniCesumar and UNIASSELVI was number two in NPS as recorded by McKinsey's studies. I mean, we knew about it already because we do it internally.
Having McKinsey do it to present to you on our Investor Day, this actually shows that we are a company that is really concerned about our students. I mean, it's actually to say, I don't know, when you see NPS, who's number one? You know. The information that's not official that we cannot disclose for the fourth quarter. I mean, we do have information, and number one is a niche institution. It's not like us. We have 800 students, and it's not easy to do for you to work with 800 students and have such a high NPS. It's not overnight.
It's a lot of commitment with a focus on delivering all that we promised to. We do this with people, right? This is an education institution. Of course, it needs to have a purpose and a mission and make have an impact on people's lives. It's about aligning people in the same path. We do have a lot of actions for us to create the culture that we have constructed with the, with the two brands.
Then we have one program called SOMA for where we focus on diversity, and that's of course, so important in such a large school, right? With almost 800,000 students. This is very necessary. We have a course in the science of happiness. If you're interested, you can learn more about it. It's so interesting. There's one about awareness raising in autism. We train professors, not only for our schools, but also our tutors, but also throughout Brazil. We prepare these teachers and professors to teach people with autism spectrum disorder. We have many other brands. Social responsibility, for instance, and that's also very important. Vitru also has, well, their differentials are translated into acknowledgment.
We've been certified in Great Place To Work for four years in a row. WOB, W-O-B, that's supported by United Nations, that is, that we have two women in our Board of Directors, this is the major concern of the WOB. It's great to have two amazing women as directors and their contribute. People might say, well, they're really, these two ladies, they make things work. They organize our community, our board. More recently, we were awarded two prizes, the Blackboard Catalyst Award, that was a world recognition award that were over 200 institutions, the category was community engagement, which shows that our commitment to our communities and the way we deal our communities and all stakeholders, it was great, of course. We are among the top 100 IT innovators. For us, technology is our driving force, really.
This is Vitru, right, Pedro?
This is Vitru today. With two brands that will continue, that are still there, very active in business. With a common platform that is developing, and we'll be showing you what we have been building. We are also ready to get new brands in higher education or other education fronts. We have experience, we have data, we have distribution capacity. We are expecting to annex or have new brands, not very soon, but in the next few years, we're expecting to have new players. In fact, it wouldn't be really responsible to have such a great platform, such a great structure and experience not to have to join other education segments or fronts. It would be important. That's very important.
That's the spoiler, right? Pedro, who's much more experienced. I mean, we might add other brands. We are finishing a huge integration process, but we are also considering new brands. We've built so much together, the entire technology structure, our academic structure, our people structure, and also our footprint of hubs and partner hubs that are so committed with our huge student base. When we look at the market, it's clear that we will keep growing, developing, and taking on new challenges. Last but not least, one minute and 40 seconds. We are doing great. Yes, we've trained, we've practiced, right?
Yes, that's right. We have a transformative business combination that was made very clear, I think, right? A lot of value was created. We'll be presenting this to you. It'll become clear. academic excellence. We have two widely known, highly reputable brands, and then we will continue the legacy of our founders. That's why we focus on our students. Corporate governance, as you know, those that are sitting at a Board of Directors, you know, and we have a lot of knowledge being added, so with our current directors. Now, one more thing. When we made this, when we did this, right, and combined the two companies, we have the best of both worlds. UNIASSELVI, who has recognized leadership. The same thing applies to UniCesumar, right?
Very special education services that started a long time ago and have learned so much in the last 15 years. We wouldn't be what we are today without having had that experience. When you see a new entrant, okay, there's this new player, it will change everything. Well, without a lot of experience, you can't make it. The two brands, they had different, kind of had different trajectories, two different journeys, slightly different models. Every, or each of the two companies were highly successful, they had two different ways of doing things. Now we will adding these two experiences together. This is why we're talking about a business combination.
We had very good finished products, very special products delivered to students. Now these two products and deliveries are added together. You see that a lot has been learned, and we don't need to go through the pains that were needed. We needed to go through because now we are where we are. When we talk about synergy and having improved so much, this is what we're delivering to our students. We have a great product. We have the two brands or companies together. We'll see a quantum leap in quality. We see now the experience of both companies combined together and delivered to our students.
That will be a quantum leap in quality. When we talk about quality, it means we are standing out and we are still at the front. We are still leading, and that's the value of our combination. This is translated into numbers in quarter three is the first full quarter in which both institutions can present their results and earnings together. As you know, we have a total of 744,000 students. That's a total of students in this quarter three. We had 100 operating education hubs, a net revenue of BRL 400 million, and combined adjusted EBITDA of BRL 143 million.
That's not just the result of hard work or a single night of work, right? As Pedro said, this is the result of people who dreamed . Who dreamed and worked really hard. People who understand education and how education works. We, at the helm of this company, we have this commitment of continuing our business together. We're here to keep working through the support of governance and also with your support too, and this is why you were invited to attend this Vitru Day today, for you to learn more and get to know our campus at UniCesumar.
I don't know if you will understand it a bit more, but I think you'll be aware of what we can do, that Vitru is a different, a special company. Thank you again very much. This is the end of the first session. We'll be back soon, and Carlos will continue now. We'll just take the leave now. Thank you.
Thank you, William. Right. With this combination, we have synergy levers. We have CapEx and OpEx and commercial synergies. When you look at our commercial side, we have these three levers. We will give you more details, of course, about each of these levers. Mostly, important thing is accelerating or speeding up our hub expansion and then practices for student retention and also student re-engagement. These are in the market at UniCesumar, and that's also been taken to UNIASSELVI. We have a complementary portfolio. We had some courses in one institution that were not in other institutions. Now with some changes, we can add to our portfolios, we can add to both brands.
They're now offering all these, and we'll be talking about this later. CapEx, our focus is on content production. Invest and capitalize on content. We'll have a single content factory, if you will, right? Content maker. Not only, it's the same material, but it's different too at the same time. We have eight different groups of people, different processes that are now unified, and that means the production of two slightly different products for UniCesumar and UNIASSELVI. The major lever is, of course, our people force. That's easier when you grow, as both companies are growing and generating synergy between people.
It's much better when you're growing than when you're not, when you're decreasing, right? We are, in practice, hiring fewer people over time. There's also gains in up scale, in contracts, in hiring. There's also greater lead intelligence. We're maximizing on the conversion of leads of different products, as I mentioned, and also collection and default practices. UniCesumar is a little more assertive than UNIASSELVI, and this is also being addressed. We have general synergy levers, and I can give you some examples. Let's invite Paula. Paula, who will explain the planning of our integration process between UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar.
Thank you, Carlos. Good morning, everyone. Again, I'd like to thank you, thank everyone for attending our first Vitru day. This, I'll talk about integration process and how it was structured since the beginning up until the present. We hired a consultancy to contribute their experience in within the education sector. The planning content, the content of the projects are, of course, a result of the knowledge we have in both brands. The first thing we did was to write our integration thesis, as both our CEOs mentioned. For us, students are at the core of our integration thesis. The conduction of our integration process involves this question: What is the impact on our students?
If we have new projects systems, if this process has any negative impact on us, we go back to the draft board and we start and redesign it. We have four dimensions to our First, people. We are a people company. We work every day to make our students' dreams come true. For us, it's important to understand the culture of both companies. We have many similar points, on the other hand, different cultures that have significant structural differences. We need to MAPA out both cultures and design a common, desirable culture. Companies, as they grow, they preserved this, and that's what we'll be doing from now on to all inputting our talents, our people, our leaders, our premium. We and respecting this focus on student.
We knew that we needed strong governance for a project that would take two to three years in this process. We involved major leaders that would work in this integration process. We also defined the phases of integration, the right timing or timeline for each phase of the process. All integration projects, we needed to respect the timeline to make sure that we would meet our intake goals. We are expanding our hubs. As you will see, we pretty capture many students. I'll talk about change management and also the creation of a center to manage change, to mitigate and follow up any risks that might be posed by our integration.
Technology. We are a digital education company, so technology is our foundation, and this is part of our integration thesis. Technology is our foundation. Mapping our major systems and also our satellite systems that underpin both brands. We have over 100 systems operating in both brands, UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar. Searching efficiency, integrating these two systems, this would be also crucial in our integration process, especially with a technology architecture that could support the integration of these two businesses. Number four, our values. Delivering values, our values to our students, especially, when it comes to content, but also value generation in our operating model.
Vitru is a different company, as we mentioned. We want to stress, to highlight this difference. I participated in some integration processes before, the governance of integration was just defined by one side. This time, Vitru wanted to be different. Vitru wanted to run this integration project as a true combination. We want to define this integration, and the leaders would be both brands. Both brands would conduct the process of integration. After this integration thesis was written, we could then structure the phases, the planning phase and the other phases. Between August 2021 and May, we defined the integration structure, and that was the pre-closing phase.
This was a small group that was operating in isolation. We mapped the people, the major problems that might arise, and that's when we had evaluation from the Brazil's economy committee. That's a very tense period, and we identified where every part should be in the new structure. We also mapped our major processes. We had three weeks for planning to compare the two processes of the two brands. We were seeking, again, levers for the best practices of both. We involved everything. We had a visit by the Ministério da Educação, too. We identified our levers and our strengths.
We designed the major synergy levers from that point on. Financial synergy and organizational structure. At the typical 100-day plan, the 365-day plan, too, and then we refined our planning, and we got closer to the owners of each process. We talked to them, we understood their needs, and we refined this in about 15 days to 30 days. We further refined our integration plan. I think the one that we expected more in the period was to stretch what you saw of our organization. We actually disclosed to the company the company structure with all the areas. We created a synergy plan.
We expanded governance by having other leaders participating. We also defined all the initial projects of the integration. I'm gonna show you down the line that what we have in our integration portfolio. We have 104 projects that are in progress. In 2022, we started working on all the projects based on priorities from 30 to 3. In terms of synergy, size of project, and also the need of a transition plan for each project. We have put together work plan for each of these projects with a product, a PO for each of these plans. We also created a synergy capture metric to measure synergies and people.
We have a focus on people, so we conduct a lot of surveys to see how our employees saw the integration. Trying to be transparent not only with the corporate office but across the company. The workers we provide information all the time about the integration. We have refined our workflows. Three months after the integration, new opportunities came up for projects and they were added to our portfolio. We have consolidated our integration office, which is here in Maringá. We have created dashboards and controls for each of the projects. I remember that since we were planning with Pedro and William, was the equilibrium between integration and the operation, because we have a lean leadership.
For daily activities, we have the same leaders leading the operations. We started, like, following up on this equilibrium, especially when we talk about expansion to see if there was any negative impact on the integration. We are in a process that's gonna last until 2024. Because we have this growth and DNA and focus on results, we have to focus on discipline when we do the integration. VPs will report weekly to CEOs on the status of their projects, on their synergies. We have a lot of project meetings every week. Steering committee is with Pedro and William. Melissa is our VP for people.
This is a spoiler. This is gonna change the name, right? She has to map People and Culture besides planning the continuity of our growth. We have created the synergy committee led by Carlos Freitas, so that monthly we can measure the synergy to see if it's gaps or OpEx, and also keep track of the costs of the synergies. We started also integrating systems. We can look at our achievements. We have 104 projects. Most of them have priorities 0 or 1. 24 of these projects have to do with our strategy and also the sustainability of the company.
We have implemented 3 0 priorities projects. More than half of these projects they have support from IT. When I say development, I'm talking about technology development. I have the team here, and we have the VPs. As you can see, the VP with more projects is academic. Jones will talk more about this VP. I'm trying to speed up 'cause I don't have any more time anymore, but thinking about an integration projects with the best practices and operational efficiency to be delivered to our students, especially because we have defined that the brands would be separate and the student would keep using the same brands.
We started finding operation efficiency in our transactional project. One that we're doing now, we're gonna end in April. It's the implementation consolidation of our Shared Service Center, and you guys are going to pay a visit to one of these center in Maringá. Our main major premises is to serve the students according to the brand. Have to find that all the projects will try to mitigate the impact on the students. The other thing is also to standardize. We thought that we don't wanna provide the same service regardless of the both the brand.
The idea is that we grow, and we expand, and one of the objectives of the center is to make it easier. We have to find progressive synergies so that we don't have any negative impact on students. We have to have perfect timing in doing things and also change management. It's always about change management and taking care of people. Let me give you a like concrete numbers. We have 131 process that have been integrated in our value chain. Our focus is on development training and performance and continuous improvement and also automation. UNIASSELVI already had an RPA cell.
Automation is going to be implemented in both brands besides development and training. This is how they are divided from planning. UniCesumar has a strength in serving the students, although UNIASSELVI also has great KPIs. It's clear that transactional process related to students, contact with students would be in the city of Maringá to value the people that we already had working for us. In Maringá, we concentrate all the process related to students, as I said, from when they sign up, when they finish the course. The center, the administrative center is with UNIASSELVI, especially after the IPO, to consolidate control metrics, standardization, compliance.
All back office, receivables, payables, documents for the hubs, all these processes are under the team of Indaial in Santa Catarina. As I told, over 130 processes. This goes through until April. Talking about 104 projects will be concluded until the end of 2023, except for those related to technology that will run until 2024. Like to thank you again and turn it over to Carlos to talk about our expansion. Thank you.
Thank you, Paulo. This was just an example, right? Number two is how the hubs complement themselves in terms of geography. This table. I mean, today in Brazil, by September, we had over 1,000 hubs for each brand. You can see that in the south is more UniCesumar, if you go to the south, you have more UNIASSELVI. In the Southeast is more than 40% of UniCesumar. UNIASSELVI has only 25%. This is important because that means that we have stakeholders who know the local reality. They know the students. They're part of that community, and they now can provide a second product.
As we said earlier, we're different and we cater to different audiences. It's really important for you to have a local partner to leverage who's been working and operating in the region to offer a second brand. This speeds up our growth. This is happening already. We have like opened hubs with partners in different cities. Today we have around... In September, we had, like, 2,008 hubs. As Pedro said, we have a different audience in terms of income and autonomy in the way they educate themselves. The average income is a little bit higher for UniCesumar.
The UNIASSELVI student actually likes and prefers to have a local tutor, and they like a feeling they belong, that they have classmates and that they belong to a home, to a group. They wanna go to the classroom because they wanna have classmates. For UniCesumar, this is different because it's more of autonomous students. Looking forward. We have a presence in the two largest region of the country, the Northeast and the Southeast. These are the regions that have less than 50% of the students doing distance learning. Distance learning market in Brazil is 41% in Southeast, 17% in Northeast.
In the Southeast, 50% of students are still taking in-person classes. We have a growth opportunity in the Southeast. UniCesumar can grow more and more in the Northeast and the North and the other band in the South and Southeast. We have mapped the opportunity. We have a lot of hubs that are gonna open to date. I mean, this year we're gonna be open 500 hubs, which is twice as much as we did in 2022. It's much more than the average that we would do since 2017. 2023, we're gonna actually do more. This is a synergy lab that we started in 2022.
This is what we did in IPO like back in the day. What we said, we have a competitive edge that we'll make sure that we can grow with more market share. Something that people asked during when we did the IPO was, "Okay, you guys have so far, but the market's more competitive today. It's very difficult today, right? The market is going to be harder on you." We kept getting market share. The management of the average ticket is now like We apply this to talk later on. We have grown a lot. Something else that was said, the South was not the growth frontier, right?
We had grown a lot in the South and in the center of the country, then the Northeast. Our strategic focus was not South. That was natural growth frontier for us. Today we went from what we did to up to 2020 200– 705 with Spark. We have 5% in the South. If we add UniCesumar, I have over 90,000 students in the Southeast. We were told that we have a lot of premium hybrid courses. We launched the nursing course in 2021, August 2021. This actually increased the market share. Today we have a lot of cities where we have nursing courses or even other course.
In the past you couldn't do really a new nursing course in a small city, today you have this possibility. We did this organically, little by little, providing technical courses. We have a lot of growth potential, not only organic but also non-organically. We have distance learning potential, not only this, we have other potential of growth to complement our portfolio, so that we can provide the same students with more products, more portfolio, and to have more products with these with the student from 16– 90 years old. Our great promise, and that was inorganic growth, as we mentioned before. We will now focus on M&A, but M&A that generated value.
It's not just growing for the sake of growing. We wanted to have an M&A agenda that would generate value to everyone. We were fortunate enough to talk again to our team, we closed our agreement in August 2021. It was great, not only for us but for Brazil, because we now have a single company in Brazil and worldwide, I think, that has a real focus on distance education and with all this quality being provided. It's now time to break for coffee, we'll be back very soon. In about 20 minutes, we will be back. Sorry? We're having our coffee break now, aren't we? I'm hungry. Come on. I skipped breakfast to be here. You wanna do this later?
Oh, all right. Okay. I'm very obedient and resilient. Let's move on. We're not having our break now. We have another 20 minutes, and we will now discuss academic integration.
Oh, wonderful. I'm between you and the coffee break. That was wonderful.
Okay. We will now discuss methodologies, and I'll be showing you the reasons why our robust figures that are so consistent and reliable. Because we have this background, we have a whole educational engineering that explains UNIASSELVI : and UniCesumar success. The academic vice president was UNIASSELVI first professor. The great history was passionate about education and then other challenging experiences and the whole years working for UniCesumar, the opportunity of seeing the two companies combined. When we talk about academic integration to discuss this topic, that's a great pleasure for me. You might have seen the 80 projects, right?
22 projects for being on our academic challenge. It really shows we understand the heart of our business. Again, when we talk about educ integration, I chose four mailers to discuss pillars of this process of integration and business combination. It starts with methodologies. We will discuss our curricula, our technology strategies, and our evaluation. This will include all these elements. I'll be talking to you, and then you will hear my colleagues, and at the end of the day, everyone will feel the need and the wish and the desire to learn. That's why we talk about a focus on students. It's not just about education or teaching engineering or knowledge transfer.
This is also about learning methodology or methodologies. We are a company that studies how learning takes place, and this changes our relationship with our students. This is the virtual combination. This is our methodology or methodologies. There's something here that is crucial. This is our educational intent or identity. How has this been structured? We don't want this to be a random process. Students realize that every teacher and professor had their own methodology, and they did it their own way. How can you make a company as large and great as ours to orchestrate that which is the architecture of learning?
How can this company convey and pass on a strategy that works with proven results and learning outcomes. This is why we have adaptive and personalized learning. When you talk about educational intent in 2010 at UNIASSELVI, we wanted to do different things differently, not what the market usually does. Before we had this model of content repository. What we did was we conceived and designed a learning trail. That's not just a hyperlink in going to the hypertext. In other words, making or helping students to find different ways rather than a single linear way of learning with a logic that adapts to their profiles with the support of multimedia.
That's what we did and went deep into, in fact, at UNIASSELVI. At UniCesumar, we had educational practices that were really good. We did great in our strategy, we started to study what we were doing to find out what was right. We found out that we really understood about learning cycles. This was a great investigation journey. We had a proprietary cycle that gave us an identity. Let me explain this. Many companies, many institutions, in fact, they outsource materials. We make these materials. We hire professors, but we also train them with this educational design. It's not just that they're writing content at random.
Everything will be orchestrated in this combination between their education trails and everything we've learned in our learning cycle. UNIASSELVI and UniCesumar working together in Vitru's learning cycle with seven phases. You have a QR code that provides access to our materials, to our coordinators and researchers, and this will be the base of our theory. The first stage, as you know, and this might have happened to you before, right? There's no powerful... There's no trigger that's more powerful when you wanna learn than a good problem when you feel curious about something. If a student is curious, you cannot hold them. You know why gamification is so good?
Gamification brought voluntary engagement. In other words, students wanted to, you know, do... When you plant the seed of curiosity, when teachers start by writing their materials, providing or proposing a problem, challenging students' minds, leading to cognitive conflict, this makes them curious. They're not learning because that will be part of their test, but because that makes a lot of sense to them, and they wanna learn. They're very curious about it. In a video class, a on-campus class, wherever, teachers always, professors are always starting with these triggers. If you read our book, you will see, William mentioned this.
Many professors say they have a pedagogical educational identity because they work in problem-based learning or Bloom's taxonomy. Well, we studied all these theories, then we defined and designed our educational strategy based on all of them. There was additional learning. At UNIASSELVI, we have a lot of maturity. We have mapped all our content, everything has been tagged for our IT systems to work better also with adaptive feedback. At UniCesumar, we started mapping professional skills. In other words, skills that are expected of graduates when students join the job market from a particular course, they need a skill set, professional skill set, this is why we learned about personalized feedback too.
Then we have our educational or education methodology identity. That's Vitru's methodology. We have professional skills, we have structuring skills in our learning content, our learning goals. When all of these added together, they mean integrating methodologies and the IT system underpinning it all. One part was really great at UNIASSELVI, the other part was great at UniCesumar. We're now, by working together, by bringing these two together, we can provide the best learning process for our students, and then technology. Our greatest foundation is methodology, education methodologies. We are not bimodal. In other words, we don't have distance education and on-campus or face-to-face education. We have the two, but they're hybrid.
We have fully distance education courses. We have on-campus or face-to-face courses, and we have hybrid courses. We are multi-modal. We have flexible modeling. Graduate Coursess, we have also different modes. In other words, we can see different or meet the needs of different student profiles in different areas. For example, Healthcare is or well-being is different from engineering, and that's different to business, and this was very much what was needed to suit these different needs. Our first combination challenge was with EdTech. With UNIASSELVI, we had a digital notebook. At the time, I was working for UniCesumar, but UNIASSELVI, they had a e-book builder.
With this e-book builder, you could edit material fast with a focus on review. We had audiobooks and also printed and HTML material. At UniCesumar or EdTech had simulators, virtual simulators, and I'll explain more about this later. We have virtual simulators. We also have virtual laboratories. At EdTech, at UniCesumar, we have 11 recording studios to broadcast our content. We'll be visiting one of them. We have 11. They have a TV broadcast structure with live programs. UniCesumar broadcasts more hours live a year than Rede Globo, the major TV station in Brazil. They have stable transmission, and you have students talking to professors and mediators in real time.
Binaural podcasts and also educational material, printed and PDF. We wanted more productivity. We wanted greater quality. As I said, we're multimodal and we will respect all aspects. How can you provide that's synergistic and different at the same time? We have developed an educational model that we call White Label, and I'll be discussing this later. You'll also hear me talking about a digitally native discipline or courses. We'll have the best HTML experience. Our course materials are not only printed, we also have HTML versions, PDF versions. In other words, we have a whole multiverse, right? We may have different brands, A, B, C, D, E, F.
We may have different brands, and we can export that with graphic identity and educational identity. That's what we will provide to our students. This is why we now have a multimedia ecosystem for learning. As you will see, we have a greater demand. You see, they're doing more. We're doing more. We have greater sizes. We're now providing technical courses, vocational education, postGraduate Coursess, business courses. We have a greater demand with new processes, with better technology, so we can optimize our headcount. As you can also see, our production capacity was made possible by... For instance, one course that will be delivered at the beginning of this year, it was hired.
Everything started in January 2022, it took a whole year. This is the time you need to put up a course. We didn't want teachers writing things in 30 days, something at random, copying from other sources, from their theses. They need guidance. We need curatorship. We need educational design. Now, this year. In a year, we can optimize the whole process. 44% , as you can see, there's some synergy. 13% are already White Label. What does that mean? That means courses that are graphically plastic natively, and they can meet any needs. Then synergy courses, mean that they are adapted and adjusted.
In other words, we don't need to hire a second author for the similar course. This is our EdTech, which was converted into a Bibliotech or a technical library. All this innovation is great, but it will be just okay if you have a single technical team. This is why we created Bibliotech. Bibliotech provides access to all professors, including on-campus professors, including everything that we had at UniCesumar. Can we adapt this material? We want tutors to show this to the UNIASSELVI students. That means great. Just take a look at this.
Bibliotech digital collection. Professional environment knowledge. Knowledge builders agility.
A scenario with augmented reality. MetaLAB immersion. Digital microscopy. Over 250 slides. Simulators. Games. Augmented reality experience. Digital book. Creative innovation. Videos. Apps. Vitru App, where you study your way. App Vitru App. Education that transforms.
Education that transforms based on proprietary technology, respecting methodology, right? It's not technology defining what the institution, the school should do. It's rather methodology that defines what technology should do and create and design for our students.
I'm very proud of this. We have a unique collection of materials. Look at these figures. They just reinforce. We have over 2,400 courses, course books. We have over 45,000 video classes to be complementary material to help students. This is material that goes beyond face-to-face classes. Augmented reality and simulators. As you may have seen in the video, we have MetaLAB. You may have wondered, what does that have to do with metaverse? Well, that's our what we've been doing. We've been investigating augmented reality goggles and 360 also videos. We know that it is not exactly very affordable at the moment, but we already know about these solutions.
We're adding this, and that's what we call our MetaLab because it's already structured in such a way that we bring together all our experience in this great lab. It's like you go to this virtual lab learning space. As a result, we have new courses, and we're talking about new learning experiences. Again, let me show you about natively digital courses. That's why we changed the rules of the game. That's how a White Label course will add a new dimension to our student experience. Let's take a look at the video.
We are a benchmark in producing course materials. Transformation, innovation. We graduate new professionals every year. Our materials are key to their success as professionals.
We currently have a teaching structure including trails, educational kits, printed books, and also classes that reach students. This is part of our teaching strategy. We want, and we will, and we do g o beyond this. Interactivity. Just-in-time placement. Digital art. Graphic plasticity. Educational identity. Adaptive feedback. Interactive videos. Professional perspectives. Audiobooks. Playfulness. IA broadcasts. Responsivity. Accessibility. 3D interactive animation. Frequently asked questions every day. We want a whole myriad teaching possibilities. This is technology being a player in education.
Every day we wanna do better. You saw the just-in-time leveling. What is it? It's a technical term, right? From the academia.
Every student do leveling because you have to level the students to try and update the student on the knowledge. It's kinda boring because you have to review all the mathematics that you studied in high school, and then you try to level them, but they don't wanna go back to study math from high school 'cause it's too boring. That's why we said, "Okay, our professors already know where the bottleneck is and what the knowledge that the students need. They need previous knowledge." That's why you have a like just-in-time QR code to review, I don't know, some rules, some mathematical rule.
You don't have to review all mathematics. You just review what you need. We know where the pain points are. That's why we give, like, a knowledge pill so that the student can keep doing his or underGraduate Courses without having to go back and reviewing all the content from mathematics, for example. This is modeling. You saw we have digital native disciplines. We have HTML, but you saw there's responsiveness, accessibility, but behind the scenes you see that you can highlight text, you can take notes, you can share it, you can ask questions, and you can get your answers through the platform. You need an interface or an app to deliver this to the students.
For both brand, we used to have, I mean, apps, like little apps to Studeo app for UniCesumar. These are resources for the students to use on their cell phone. That's why so many students have their app on their cell phone with an omni-channel educational delivery. We also have courses 100% available in mobile mode, academic and administrative support. We need to have actions where students will interact with other tutors and have a seamless communication with the students through omni-channel for them to know. All the information for them to know what's the latest updates. As I said before, this is 100% available in mobile mode. For support, but also for academic, administrative support, academic support.
It's all on the palm of your hand. We also have simulators, tests, and learning object in the app, in the cell phone app. Okay, let us talk now about curriculum restructuring at Vitru. Let's look at the challenge first. We have over 140 academic leaders. Most will implement their curriculum, right? What we did is we got all of the leaders involved from all the institutions, from all the courses, all modalities, and then together, we discussed how to update all the curricula. Vitru was reviewed from end to end. All the course have been reviewed with our academic team to gain synergies and quality too, in terms of updating, topics that had to change the name and all that.
That's why we have a full portfolio. As you can see here in the middle, we're talking about a total of underGraduate Coursess. It's just a lot. To review them all, we can do this only with an excellent team, the excellent team that we have. Let me just highlight one thing. It's 34 new courses. The Ministério da Educação has a catalog of courses. The classic courses, Business Adminisration, Economics, it's all there. Since we are a university, we have the university autonomy, and we can create new courses. We have created 34 new courses that were not available before, and there was a demand in the market.
That's why we have more and more students now. Let me give you two examples of the census for 2021. We created a course. We have competition now, but it's just check out how many people signed up with us and signed up with the competition. It's UniCesumar of almost 6,000 and UNIASSELVI almost 15,000. For Pathology and for Forensic Science and Investigation. That's why we could rethink our portfolio and offer experimental courses that are now part of the new catalog of the Ministério da Educação, such as Pathology. It's not a problem if this is not recognized by the Ministério da Educação because you have the autonomy as a university. We talk about standardization.
We have more synergies. We have reduced the number of subjects that had different names. Now we have standardized the names for the subjects. We are hiring the best authors to deliver the best experience. It's not gonna be spending a lot of money with the, with no objective. We're gonna spend it with objective to improve the learning process. Now let's talk about assessment. Our students can take a diagnostic test to know if they have the basic knowledge. They can be approved or not approved. After that, what do we do? We looked at analytics. Now we're looking at the main skill to learn, which is interpretation. We need the students to have logical thinking and interpretation.
The structuring learning skills we do with the diagnostic test or entrance test. We have, we can track them all through the journey until they finish the course with the capacity of learning throughout their lives. I mean, our students, they come to university, and they don't know how to learn. They think that they need to memorize all the content to take the test, this is wrong. That is just mechanical learning, and this is not about experience. We have lowered all the. We know where we have the best outcome.
Like UniCesumar, if our grade is the best, we have to see what's the differential that we could apply in UNIASSELVI. It helps us back our educational process. It's not empiric. It's not guessing. We do a lot of data analysis. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I turn it over to Carlos.
Thank you. Okay, now it's our break for 15 minutes, okay? We'll be back at a quarter to okay for us to talk about structure and to talk about structure. Thank you.
Muito bem, muito bem, muito bem. Hi, everyone! Welcome back, everyone. We will now go in a deep dive in our four BUs. We have four business units, Graduate Courses, yourself, UniCesumar, Undergraduate, right? Graduate Courses and then Continuing Education. We have Academic Support, Corporate Operations, Finance and IR, People and Management and Market. I now invite our friend Ricardo Grima on stage of the UNIASSELVI Distance Education, Undergraduate Courses.
Hello, everyone. I'm Ricardo Grima. Just my mom and my wife call me Ricardo. Everyone else calls me Grima. Let me tell you about my experience. I have 16 years experience in higher education, and I joined UNIASSELVI at the beginning of the year. I worked for them for five years before. I'm VP for UNIASSELVI, and that's the distance education operation and the amazing team that is here with us today. Those are the figures. 388,000 students, 1,025 hubs throughout Brazil. Net revenue of $179 million. On the right-hand side, we can see our portfolio, in other words, the different areas where we provide courses.
Our focus, of course, was on education, but then we expanded our portfolio, especially in Healthcare, Accounting for 25% of our student base. In Healthcare, our Healthcare courses help increase our ticket because they usually have a higher ticket, and they're ready to work in this area because we need on-campus face-to-face classes. A hybrid model, in fact, we can do a lot on this front. Pedro has already mentioned this part, he does a better job than I do because he's been there for longer, about our tutors. As Janes explained, tutors are crucial. They're a key element to our operation.
They ensure quality content. Our tutors are responsible. They're really the pillar of delivering that quality content to our students. It will be pointless to have excellent content without delivering it properly to our students. We can also be assured that students receive this. We will now show you how our class meetings take place. We have a hybrid model and a mainstream model. We have, you know, traditional classes and then what we call the flexible courses, flex courses. That's a weekly meeting with a tutor, an online meeting with a tutor. They have also weekly face-to-face meetings.
After the pandemic, Of course, before the pandemic, we had an online meeting model, but now after the pandemic, we have many more students preferring this online meeting model. Today, most students choose to go to the online model rather than going to the on-campus hubs or courses. This is why we needed to be better at controlling attendance. We have our partners, of course. They are our eyes and ears. They ensure that classes start on time, that tutors be there, and students also be there. This, of course, when it started happening online, we lost these eyes and ears, so we needed to develop tools to be able to ensure that, first, we had quality education, and number two, that everyone was there on time, that attendance was recorded and monitored and recorded.
We have a team now following this every day. We now have technology to monitor everything. The apps that Janes presented, they have some features. These features were designed for students to access course materials, for them to hold their meetings, class meetings, and then, and also for, enrollment purposes. In addition to getting access to content, tutors also gain because now tutors no longer spend time with a, you know, a roster or roll call. Now tutors just start the class, they press a button, students that are in the online or even in the on-campus meeting or class, they get that number, they enter that number, and their attendance is confirmed or recorded.
There's also geolocation to make sure those that are there are physically at the hub. Our management team is in the background, making sure that everything is taking place in the right place. With online meetings, for instance, we have better monitoring tools. This is the Gioconda platform. That's our proprietary system to follow our courses, we can go in real time, everything that we see taking place. With this menu, they can have access to the information. This is a brief example to show you everything we can control. I mean, there's a huge amount of information, this huge number of students.
We have right on the left-hand side. We can see, like in red, that each of these squares are a course taking place somewhere in Brazil. We have information from the hub, time zone, and the student information. The green ones are the ones that haven't started yet. It's three or four that haven't started. That's the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, green courses have already started. We have a little balloon. The point of this is for the hub team to say if there was a problem or to record any problems or anything that needs support. We also have a substitute tutor team.
If anyone has any problems, these can stand in for whoever is missing. Everything is recorded and monitored and recorded to make sure everything takes place at the right time. We can also audit this. Before it was impossible to audit in a education meaning. Usually in education companies, we can audit everything. When a teacher closes the door, what you see there is between courses. We have teams doing quality assurance. They can go to classes, participate in the online meetings, making sure that everything was presented. All the learning trail is being delivered the way it was designed.
We now can rest assured that everything is taking place the way we expected, the way we planned, and that makes us stand out. This change in behavior in our meetings and class meetings also led to a change in the role of our tutors. All our tutors are trained to be close to student, developing a report, to have a focus on career, to be a reference in academic success, in professional success. We know that online experiences are more demanding. They demand a different type of behavior because people, of course, are separate from each other. It's different, right? Like the interaction we had here, that's so different from, you know, being just online.
When you have a well-defined event, of course, that's totally online. It's not that easy. Tutors are trained to make sure that we develop a good relationship with students in addition to class time, also out of class relations. UniCesumar has what they call the permanence or relationship project. We are learning from this, and we're bringing this to UNIASSELVI. All these behaviors are now standardized. They're now part of the system and recorded. We have tutors as the crucial pillar, the main pillar for our relationship with students. The role of tutors has been redesigned and now being called mentors. This is the Student Success Center.
We changed the role of tutors. They're now mentors. We have a new hiring model. They no longer earn by the hour. They have a monthly salary. Before they could have one or two or three classes a week. Now they're employees, and they are there for us the whole week without any salary difference. A tutor's or mentor's salary that used to work just for a day, now they will provide hours to us, like, throughout the week. They now may hold class meetings in the evening. Before that, they have one part of their time dedicated to student relationship, not only classes.
You have classes and meetings, and then you have other time to relate to students. We have someone working there so that we can better understand student needs, and we want tutors to be much closer to students in a structured, predefined, planned way. Mentors are now closer to students, and they can receive students before classes take place. They can also improve engagement levels and also enrollment and new enrollments. They have a whole portfolio of clients, if you will, they need to take care of. If student were absent, for instance, they can talk to them, and that was totally planned. Like they say, "We missed you.
Did you have any problems? Do you need any help? Can we help you at all?" This mentor does this now, and they have all information on policies that are available to help students. If students are lost, if they lose their job, if they have any financial difficulty, if they don't, they don't know who they can talk to, this mentor or tutor is there. They also work in learning gaps. Some students, for example, have problems in questions one, three, and four, others five, eight, and nine. This mentor now can talk to these students and put up groups with personalized content to do remedial work and make, of course, that content more attractive.
Again, take care of everything students need to do. They are closer to students. They're making sure that students deliver what they need to deliver, that they get all the content they need, comply with their deadlines. In an education company like ours, human relations are crucial for our success, and we're expecting to leverage the company's results and consolidate our market differentials. This type of closer relationship with students is so important, and it will make us so much greater. We now have some examples of what we're expecting to improve on. We now have, of course, mandatory on-campus meetings for flexible courses. Students will wanna be there, of course.
The more present they are mentally, emotionally, the more engaged they are, the lower the likelihood of them, you know, dropping out. With better engaged students, they're closer to us. You have problems like the payments. Many people choose sometimes not to pay. We know that real life is complicated, it is hard, but as we're very close to these students, we can help them out. If we're very close to them, they might choose us rather than other expenses. We want to have a very good relationship, a very close relationship with students.
If you take that very seriously, everything we learn from this in a very structured way and also a personalized education delivered to students, that leads to state-of-the-art student-company relationship. We have so many people working together, creating content, generating great experiences to other students. This will make us stand out in all about Brazil, throughout Brazil. That's UNIASSELVI. I'll now invite my peer, James, who's in charge of UniCesumar. He has a very similar role to mine at UNIASSELVI.
Hello, everyone. Let's now discuss UniCesumar and the figures that you're probably familiar with. We have almost 23,000 students with 1,088 open hubs throughout Brazil with a quarter net revenue of—with over 100 courses on offer. One highlight is, of course, Healthcare courses, which accounts for about 25% of our student base. In also in distance education. What does UniCesumar have? Pedro and William and Janes talked about this. What makes us stand out? What puts us on such a student journey that's very important. We, UniCesumar, started as distance education. It was born as a distance education with no adaptation. That makes us stand out.
We have been working really hard at the hub. We were born with hubs. This is so important because this means local entrepreneurs, people who know their audience, their students, they know how this routine, this student life works in our company, in our school. That's why they're at the right places. They talk to the community the right way. This is why they have been expanding so much in their regions. These are the people that live in all these towns. They understand their surroundings. I mean, if they work in Campinas, they can go to neighboring towns.
That's a partner that has this entrepreneurial perspective. If you were a franchisee, would you like to open a new franchise? Of course. That's why this is so important. Our partners also work on student retention. They have this crucial role in our students' journey, their academic performance. They look at students, you know, they're really close to them. The entire ecosystem is also important. UniCesumar has a particular, a special department to manage our education hubs. We created something that can provide a support to these activities, ensuring that partners, hub owners can grow and have sustainable conditions in their business.
Of course, with the student at the core, you know, having rapport, communication. Being really close to students and looking at their realities. Now, when you look at education, which is our core, that our methodology underpins it all. Janes, I love when Janes speaks, right? There's the whole construction behind it, and that means greater responsibility, making sure that everything is executed. How does this take place in real life? How do students experience this? What is part of their journey, their academic journey? This shows the entire process, all the phases.
We'll be discussing these in particular, right? We're talking about classes. How to have classes take place, and what are these maps? Then the General Knowledge weeks. This was very common in on-campus meetings. These were, you know, wide-ranging meetings. We do those in distance education, too. Then the labs. Then scientific knowledge, with course journals, with course materials as well, and everything that it means, also technical visits. Reality in our [Ampliar] initiative. Let me show you our model, our structured model. Number one, live classes. Everyone has live classes, of course. All institutions provide, deliver live classes.
In addition to this, we want a special interactive weekly live class that is very close to students. Suppose the teacher at the top on slide one is teaching, at some point, we invite a group of students on screen to interact with that professor, to ask questions with them, to clarify all their problems. They need to feel really safe there, and that's not that easy. That's impossible, of course, in a face-to-face class. We also invite, you know, business professionals, not only from our studios, but from any place in the world. We have professionals working in any of our environments.
Janes said that we broadcast more live classes than a TV station, and sometimes we are in the prime time. It's hands-on classes. We can show, like it's a dance class, so they're dancing, and then you're watching it, and then you have to do it at home because you have to learn how to dance. This is the dynamics of learning right there and then. We have a lot of engagement. We have, like, very well-equipped studios. We can actually have, uh, physical education activities. There are many things we could do, actually. We can show everybody that we have this edge.
We have, uh, real-time feedback that we are rated by the student live during the class for us to have the automatic feedback for the class. Okay. This is our MAP. What's MAP, James? This is a manual of practical activities. This is where you have hands-on experience, where the student has a problem, and they have to solve that problem through the concepts that they have learned. Cooking is a great example because they have to make food, and then they have the family taste, the new, the new dish. There are other courses where you can also have, like, hands-on activities.
This is a use case for how we do this in different cities. If you talk about, like, fashion, and if you do shopping and you working with shop windows, you can have the student go to a store in a mall, in a market to have hands-on experience in terms of shop windows. They do practice in their reality, and then they have to take pictures, they have to record it, they have to put this into context and hand it in for evaluation. The idea is that we can evaluate the student. We have a national challenge that we do every year. This year we had 25 people sign up for it to win this award.
This shows that this is really important, and this is real. My wife did fashion design. Imagine I never thought that my wife would take this course, and then she started making, like, shoes and all that. She told me, "This is an assignment." This is why we know that they are learning. What else can we show in terms of reality? We have, like, immersive experience that we can do in the hubs so that we can have students go to companies, to plants, and through the hub, they can go to the plant, for instance. Even though they are studying or they're taking distant education. They do
Immersed in a professional environment, they have contact with the companies, they have learning in practice. At the point that we should highlight, it's about realities. Like, because we do Big Brother reality again. We have reality shows like fashion, cooking reality shows that we do live in our office or online. We have like challenges, things that they like the accident that we present at midnight for them to present the next day. The idea is to develop capabilities. We have competitiveness, or collectiveness too. We have some personalities that participate in our reality shows to give us some.
Janes talked about how boring leveling classes are. Besides Balbi education fields that we have, we have another program called Ampliar. For students who are pairs. Students, like senior students will manage these classes to help other students learn collectively. This is so cool that avatars. They create an avatar for the class. They take the class together. This is a real class. Because we all learn from our classmates, right? For the lead student, this is an opportunity for them to become a great professional. Some courses are hybrid. They have physical labs. We talked about the quality of engineering.
Can we do engineering without having labs? We can't. That's why we need the labs. In most of our hubs, we have a physical lab in place. They have technology. They have very well equipped. Even though it's in the small space, we can have an 80 sq m room to have all the equipment. Besides practice, all the scores and results are available on their app, on their cell phone. We also have field classes. Besides that, we have virtual labs. I love augmented reality they have in the books, actually, because you can see 3D images for you to understand a building, for instance, the architecture of a building.
This is a technology that you can zoom in and zoom out for you to understand better things. We also have greater geographical reach. There's one class where you can go to the Louvre in Paris to the museum virtually. This is the book to all of our students. These are resources that make the difference. We still need mediators. We still need our professors, our mediators that are based here in the main office that contribute to this proximity, understanding the learning process. This is where the mediator comes into play. Not only during the class, but after the class and before the class. They have a mediator to provide support to those students.
Tools are now more sophisticated. We can send text, we can send audio to students. I remember that my wife said, "Danilo." I said, "Who's Danilo?" Danilo was her mediator who was helping her in her learning journey. It is extremely important to create this tie with the student and make sure that we can deliver to student a differentiated experience to develop skills with discipline, with self-knowledge to create something better. Now looking at the opportunities. This combination have provided us with a great growth opportunity with best practices. we are sharing best practice between the two brands. I mean, you guys saw the Studeo.
You have the learning journey that we had with UniCesumar. now we have the intake of students. in the Vitru App, we're gonna have the possibility of expanding the number of students that we reach. have expertise to find students in the Graduate Courses of the year. when it says March, we did a lot in the first-half of the year, and we didn't have the same level for the Graduate Courses of the year. now with the new strategies, we had a great outcome, showing the potential to find new students throughout the year. we're also asked about ticket.
The average ticket. The average ticket is one of the metrics that we are using for management. As you can see, for 2023, UniCesumar, before we had only three tables and we had the hub autonomy before. We conducted a study considering all the strategies. I mean, we looked at the different states, different regions and put together a new pricing formula. We have come up with 10 price list. By doing this we can have a better hub control. Our pricing is defined according to the hub, considering all the reality and challenges that they have locally so that we can grow our average ticket.
The other thing that we have is transversal subjects to add more knowledge to our students. These subjects are gonna be introduced from the fourth semester onwards, so that we can have another opportunity to improve our average ticket. This is about distance learning at UniCesumar. If you never did any distance learning, you can enroll with us first to live a great experience with us. Thank you for your time.
Good morning. My name is Sérgio Ribeiro. I'm the VP for face-to-face classes. This is very important because this is the campus of our university, which is a different one. I say this because we have. I mean, you're gonna have the opportunity to see it when you do the tour. Because it is important for you to realize that we have like, a sports center, a recreational area, and that's what we call focus on students. Let me ask you this, how many of you today came to this campus and remembered the best times of your life in university? I'm sure that those who couldn't remember, after you tour the campus, you probably more members will come back to you.
I think the elements that you will see when you tour the campus, you will see that this is something we have in the different campus in the world, but we have adapted to our value proposition. We have 21,300 students. You can look at our sales in the third quarter of 2022 was almost BRL 100 million, which is 24% of the income for Vitru. We have 19 venues. We have one university, 13 colleges. Which gives us a lot of autonomy to create new courses. I have here the number of courses we have in these different 19 educational institutions.
If you take our 2,060 courses, this gives us the possibility to make it three times bigger. Today in our university we have 40 offers. If you think of 40 offers times 19, you get to the number. Which means that we can apply this in the other venues, too. This is what we're doing now. I like this chart because you can see that today our in-person courses are For Healthcare courses is 47%. The vocation of UniCesumar is for Healthcare courses. UNIASSELVI is for Law courses. That's how we're trying to cross our courses between the two brands. Because of all the things you have to expand the health courses in UNIASSELVI too.
Okay, four pictures of the campaign. The first picture is the one in Brusque, Blumenau. This is UNIASSELVI. At the bottom is UniCesumar for this one here in Maringá and the one in Curitiba. Medical education. In Maringá, we have the largest course in the South region and one of the largest medical schools in Brazil. Into 2022, we had almost 1,800 students. These numbers are from the third quarter of 2022, and we're really proud to have to be number five in terms of medical school quality. This is good because this is the grade that our students could get in this test. We are number five in Brazil. 348 medical student slots.
50 in Corumbá and the rest here. It is a high demand with a high number of student application per slot. It's impressive actually. For each two enrollments, we have at least 1 that will do the course. Usually when they enroll in a private university, they also try public university, so it's really important for us to see. For us to be able to provide them with the same experience they would have in Corumbá.
This is a big challenge for us because it's a big scale. I think the challenge is for it to have like residencies, to have like all the partnerships and hospitals. This region is really promising because it can have great popularity for you to find the slots for our students. Just for you guys have an idea, next week we're gonna have the residency test. It has over 10 slots for residency for our students. For quality, this is our score. Now our student slots. This will be the first year in Maringá that we will use our 298 student slots. That's year three. After the second-half of this year or semester, we'll start the fourth year of our c-course in Corumbá.
That's our baby, right? That's been in development. Then we will have 1,988 slots, then we can go to 2,088 student slots in 2025. We'll also. Of course we can also add to the number of student slots. Our cash flow is really resilient because we're getting really lots of students, and our average ticket is higher than BRL 10,000 . I really want you to enjoy this visit. I want to make it clear that our students, from semester one, they use all our structure, including our simulators and labs. Thank you
Good morning, everyone. These are our final slides this morning before we start our tour. I'm VP in Continuing Education. I'm Tiago Stachon, I wanna be absolutely sure that I feel great after, you know, after these three VPs, because we're kind of drinking from the same source, if you will. They all, that Janes and James and Inga and Érico. What does that mean? It means that a technical course, someone doing a technical course has the same experience. They can enjoy the same thing as an Undergraduate Engineering lab. This is unprecedented. That's a great differential for all types of laboratories, virtual, minor laboratories or Continuing Education courses.
At Vitru with the two companies I manage, students may have a very special difference. What is Continuing Education in each of these companies and what is Continuing Education at Vitru? What is Continuing Eeucation? Everything that is underGraduate Coursess. After you finish your graduation, after you can have a post college MBA or even vocational courses and technical courses. Even during graduation, you may have also free courses. Like, for example, Thiago Nigro or Natalia Arcuri, who other coaches you find. This is a culture that is called lifelong learning or even upskilling. That means reinventing yourself on your journey in this life.
We have 51,000 students. That's over 200 Graduate Courses, 60 Technical or even Vocational courses. Why is this a great opportunity? Well, we have two huge markets we address. Two very nutritious pockets, if you will. On the left-hand side, 1.4 million graduates each year in underGraduate Coursess. That means 1.4 million opportunities at graduate postGraduate Coursess and MBA courses. We have three types of students, those that finish underGraduate Courses, and they want to do, you know, a graduate school later. Those that will work for two years and then do some additional continuing education. Those that have 20 years experience, and they need to go back to recycle.
When you look at this market, we can at least consider a 10-year window of, you know, stock, we can work on. There are these three when you consider these three profiles. The other market we are addressing, and that's about vocational training, technical courses that graduate in high school. That's 7.7 high school graduates who are prepared to join the job market. Again, that's a huge market. We look at the, you know, high-scale players. I don't see many other player that is as mature as our undergraduate structure. That's a great road for growth for future. That's why we have a VP that focuses on this alone. I also wanted to show you some action conducted by the Ministério da Educação that will change the way we see continuing education.
We have, of course, a market penetration strategy and then increased LTV, better CACs, student-based loyalty. That's all Undergraduate Coursess. a three-year technical course means three years, right? If you consider also vocational training and then technical courses and then upselling Undergraduate Coursess, that might involve at least five years in the school. If they do a Graduate Degree, that's an additional at least 1.5 Years. That's when you go, like, linearly. As the Ministry of Education knows, we need qualified or skilled laborers. The Ministry of Education decided to verticalize it, and we belong to the Committee of Verticalization.
This pencil you can see on screen, rather than being continuous, as you can see, it may be concurrent. In other words, as you do ome course, you have a curriculum that started here when they were young people doing vocational education, but they're already seeing doing a graduate degree. Those that finished vocational or technical courses. For example, in Accounting, and you want to study Accounting , Sciences, do you want a half-year course? Might, right? They continue in the school as our part of our student base. The Ministry of Education understands the importance of this, and we're also wanting to tap into this great opportunity.
Finally, among many novelties, we have two very important things we are already working on. Number one, launching the so-called hybrid technical courses. Again, we have physical and virtual labs and simulators. These are technical courses that are also take place on campus. They take at least one month on-campus course or meaning. We're just waiting for the Ministry of Education to approve this. That's a huge market that's waiting for us. Number two, another core strategy of ours. That means adding value to our products. You may have seen, there are other players that have Graduate Courses or an MBA that have just one class with a great exponent, like Karnal or Cortella.
They just teach one class, and they say, "This is the KarnalPost Graduate Courses. That's not just that. Maybe it's just two lectures or just one, the keynote lecture, and that's all. This is different. This is a so-called Graduate Courses, which is signed, if you will, a signature course of by these highly reputable professionals, like, for example, our post Graduate Courses in Leadership and Management of Tomorrow. It should cost in about BRL 2,000 a month, but this can be now provided for BRL 450 only because it's online.
Not in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro in the great centers, but it is provided everywhere. That's how we add value to do this, and at the same time, have a much better price. These are the major actions we've been taking in continuing education I wanted to share with you. I hope we can talk about this as we walk around campus. Carlos, please come back on stage.
Thank you, Mr. Stachon. Now, in closing, let's have our takeaway messages, our reminders, takeaway reminders. Vitru is the leader in distance education in Brazil. We have pillars that make us stand out. One, a focus on digital education. Two, recognized quality that was made clear and proven. A culture gravitating around students. But, yeah, this is not created overnight. Vitru was designed, it was born, it was nursed with this culture. The integration of both brands, tapping into opportunities, significant opportunities for growth, for synergy. We're ready and prepared to surf this wave of growth throughout Brazil and to continue disrupting the higher education market in Brazil.
Now, let's have our Q&A session. Everyone is invited on stage. Everyone, you can ask your questions. Well, I know we talked yesterday informally. No tough questions, please. Tough questions just for William, right? When we finish our Q&A session, we will have our tour on campus.
Hello, good morning. Good morning. We know that UniCesumar has a student profile that's complementary to UNIASSELVI's. How do you think UniCesumar changes your sales and marketing strategy in the long run? How does UniCesumar changes your default line from now on?
Okay, I can start. Pedro and Carlos can add to this. Our major strategy in the long run is maybe not changing. This is important to stress. In other words, our idea is to keep both models the way they are. They will remain complementary and different. Of course, there's lots of room for synergies, especially competitive intelligence in the market. We have real information from all our units. Initially, in addition to everything we can gain from this business combination, both models will be kept different. We will have competitive intelligence as we have two companies working separately in a way, we can learn a lot from this.
As James mentioned, this already happened in the second semester of this year. We're learning a lot from this. UniCesumar didn't have any strategy of speeding up. As we learned about UNIASSELVI's intake strategy, without changing much, we could change our strategy and improve our results. Well, as you were saying, we have pillars and experiences that UNIASSELVI can contribute to UniCesumar and vice versa. For instance, student retention and engagement, for instance. For example, for a freshman, UNIASSELVI's experience, commercial experience is with a resilient ticket that this has been taken to UniCesumar has an onboarding process that charms students, as James mentioned before.
These are being tested out and taken to UNIASSELVI. It's one feeding the other and vice versa. That knows onboarding processes, everything that is done to engage students faster. It's very easy for students to drop out. They drop out in a couple of months. If you break this dropout cycle and bring students in with more efficient, faster engagement, then you have these great results. As default, less dropouts. Okay? Thank you.
I have three questions. We're here to talk about practice here, right? Number one reputation. You've mentioned the NPS, but that's student satisfaction. It's your reputation and that we know this is long-term. How have you been working on this? How have you also been trying to ensure graduate and undergraduate quality to make sure reputation remains strong? How about student attention? As your indicators show, you've been doing great, but how about this model when you try to go to larger cities like in Brazil, Southeast? Do you think your model will change? Number three, that's about economic pressure. As Brazil is expected to, you know, go harder, tougher patches, how are you planning to proceed if you have, for example, public funding? Do you think you could direct this to distance education rather than face-to-face education?
Let me start. Our delivery is really of quality education, our graduates are ready for the market. What we do today, we follow the evolution of our students as they go, you know, through the courses, along the courses. Every semester, we do surveys with our students, and we ask them where they're working, how much they're earning, if they changed areas. This is something we do at the beginning, during the course and after they leave the course, but that's harder and that's different from, of course, when they're studying with us, it's not that easy. When they're studying with us, they do it.
They get these surveys, and they answer them all. When we do all these surveys, all this searching, we see an evolution. The salary increases throughout the course. When they join the course, they start with a salary, but when they leave, their salaries are much higher. It's important to understand the profile of our students. When they join the school, when they enroll, they already have a job, but they're trying to, you know, develop. If they work at the till, for instance, they will become a manager. If they're a office clerk, they will become or be promoted to the manager of the store, for instance. That's why we see this increase in salaries.
When students leave, they have difficulty? Not at all. As they do the course, as they move along, they will be promoted and get better jobs. As you have seen on our slides, we provide feedback on our students' skills, and we are also keep an eye on market needs. We know what our students need, and we try to communicate this. Even in our, in our software, we provide employability. The curriculum also shows that they can see if there are skills for specific job vacancies. No matter what courses they do, they might have the skills that are needed for particular jobs. Like engineer that's starting their professional career, but in studying with us, they have all the analytic skills or market skills that are needed.
They may do other jobs. Although they're not necessarily doing engineering, they might do other things too. These are the great things that are taking place here. We have over 20,000 agreements with companies, so they may have great professional experiences, not only commercial partnership with these companies, but also in professional environments. This is something that the law allows. We can have practices, activities, evaluation, internship in companies. What we wanna do, we wanna bring the university to companies, so students can experience life in these companies. They will get closer to their professional dreams. That's what we do.
Well, the second question about bigger cities. I mean, first I'm gonna say that in the past, I mean, we had to understand the behavior of bigger cities. We knew how we operated in smaller cities in the south of the country. We also were concerned about, like, starting our business in bigger cities such as São Paulo, Belo Horizonte. This hasn't changed actually. For us, this is actually pastry because we already have hubs in big capitals where we have more students actually. The strategy doesn't change at all. We still keep our focus on students, and this works for smaller towns and for bigger cities, too. Cesar, I think the last question about the change in the administration.
I mean, let me talk about oscillation first in the market, saying that the market's more difficult because you have more unemployment. I mean, if you think about education, we've always been protected whenever we have a more Unemployment, because those who are working, they try to reskill themselves, to upskill themselves. It's actually a protection. If there's more recession, we have more unemployment. We see people who have a job, they try to learn to upskill so that they can have a competitive edge in the market. If everybody is employed, then they have more people actually working that can pay for education.
With the information that we have, we understand that CS is gonna be available again, but today it would be for distance learning. I mean, it's not possible to do it without considering the distance learning. This would be a mistake, actually, and I don't think this would happen. All the information that we have about this administration that we're gonna have, student loans also for distance learning.
What's good about Hub is that we can have questions from people online. We have a question from Javier. Javier is asking about Hub expansion, if it could have an impact on the current margins, and what's the potential of margin growth once we have more hubs. I mean, Hub expansion that we're gonna have now will actually speed up our growth. Whenever you open a new Hub, you dilute your margin. I mean, we saw this happen in the past. Because of the size we have today, it's not such a big impact. 'Cause usually when you open a new Hub, you actually get to the break-even point only in the second year. The first year is more of investment.
Because of our involved volume today and how important the hubs are, 500 hubs this year is not that many if you think of all the hubs that we already have. The impact on margin is not gonna be big today. Okay? In the long run, we can have a great return on investment. We have a return on investment of over 30%. For Vitru, we also have a good return on investment. Sometimes we have to change partners to solve a problem, but if we don't solve a problem, we can just stop working with a partner. This doesn't happen because the partner will make money, we make money, so it's pretty much a win-win situation.
Let me just add something to it. That's why it's good to have two different models, because for Sistema MAR, we don't wanna do this quickly. We keep our margins, of course. We have a return on investment anyway.
Good morning. I'm from BTG Pactual. I have two questions. First question is about the distance learning growth, because what we have seen in the past years, especially during the pandemic, this has grown a lot. We've grown with the interest, but also had gains in market share. After 2021, after 2021, the growth wasn't as great. Growth is marginal.
What I want to understand is, do you think you'll keep the same level of growth or pace of growth, considering not only what you can provide in terms of implicit growth for distance learning, but also. I don't know, maybe you could also invest in market share. Do you think you're gonna keep growing? The second question is about pricing. I mean, you guys talked about it actually, that one of the positive points is that UNIASSELVI already has better pricing dynamics and there's a better resilience when it comes to the average ticket.
We expect this to be applied as well to MAPA down the line. I just want to understand how this process has played out. Can you talk about, like, time, a timetable, like, the time frame? When you think this will even out to be both at the same level?
I'm gonna start with the second question, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. You know when we give you spoilers. Basically I'm still building, but what I can tell you is according to the first-half of this year, I mean the for the projections, you're gonna see some gain in the average ticket. Of course, we have a strategy from UNIASSELVI, but this, I mean, this has to do with the UniCesumar growth policy before we had our business combination. In 2022, which is the latest data where we see a small drop.
The growth is beyond what the market had, you know. In 2022, we had a different and our growth was that. This is something we created in 2021, but the growth was much greater than what the drop in our average ticket. The idea now, especially with of our VPs and James too, who's doing the IT, we're looking for results in 2021 in growth, but also in average ticket. Okay. Those brands have only, I don't know, 1,000 hubs. This is what we have to get to increase each brand number of hubs. We have a lot of potential to grow.
Now we're gonna start in a region where we don't have that many students yet. I mean, enrolled students, but we're going to the place where we have more potential. Carlos has shown that we have already expanded in these regions. Yes, we see there will be a growth because we're gonna increase our geographical presence. Of course, digital learning is gonna grow, even though it's not gonna grow as much as it did during the pandemic. If you compare it to Latin America, we have a lot of potential. We will extend geographically, we're gonna have more distant distance learning opportunities, that's right.
That's for sure. The pandemic, I mean, this is the first year that we're gonna do, we've been doing without pandemic. The pandemic. In-person classes will increase in 2023, that's for sure. The baseline is different. As for distance education, distance classes have grown a lot during the pandemic, but now it's gonna be less because of the baseline. The trend, the macro trends are that we're gonna have more digital options, and this will increase demand. Today, we have seven million enrolled students, and this is not the market for university students in Brazil. If we have more penetration, I'm gonna have lower cost, I'm gonna have more options.
The age group that's growing more when it comes to our enrolled students is between 17– 21 years of age. It's not the greatest number, it's the one that has more growth. They are the audience for distance learning. Because this is what we think those entering courses. We are gaining market space. Basically, if our market would grow only 10% a year, which is now the reality, in 10 years, the 3.5 million students that we have in distance learning will become nine million students. This is our dream market. This is the answer for our long-term goal. Mateus, you wanna ask another question? We can just... Just one more question then we'll do tour the campus.
My name is Lucas. I have to ask two questions. One is about the competitive scenario. Some of your peers said that now we have a consensus when it comes to structural changes in the market. Maybe we can't talk about it yet because it's too early in the process. The second question is about leveraging.
The financial situation is a little bit better as we put off some of the payments. If you think of financial leverage, what you say about it? Even though it doesn't make sense for us to have these conversations again, how do you see the medicine business in your strategy in the medium and long term?
I'm gonna start with the competitive scenario. The market has always been competitive. It's still competitive. We've never started this... We've never started a price war. We know up to a price point, the student does not value the course anymore. This is what we understand. What we have seen is that the other institutions are more careful. We are also more careful. But we have seen that. I think that the worst year was 2018.
That was the worst year when it comes to competitiveness and aggressiveness. Well, price aggressiveness, 'cause we had the new governments that they thought that with the low price, they could gain market share. These institutions are not operating anymore, or they're not our competition anymore. We're making a little bit more comfortable. The competition is out there, but they're more rational. This is really, really interesting for the entire industry. Talking about leverage, like financial leverage. I mean, we actually had a debt that was high, so we started an organized process to bring new money, bring in money with a partner. We were able to reduce leveraging. This is not a concern today.
In practice it is still high because of the interest rate that we have today in Brazil. We're now gonna just wait and see to reduce leverage. This is not what we're gonna do in the real world. We're gonna make sure that we can reduce our leveraging. This is not for medicine, because medicine is a value-added business for the brand. To date, we don't have any process or a sales process for medicine, you know. Our focus is on distance education. We had actually more pressure in the past around the leveraging and financial leverage. Today, we don't have any pressures. Today, we don't have anything around that today as a concern.
Okay. Good morning. Vinicius from BS. I'm gonna ask just one question so that we can take our tour.
Talk, talk about the integration. I wanna know how you guys manage the hubs, because they have two different models. I wanna understand what's the cross-expansion strategy. How can you create confidence so that in the regions where there is some kind of overlapping, you can maximize the numbers of enrolled students, profitability and quality, so that there's no welcome between from one brand to the other, and there's no internal negative competition.
I'm gonna go. I'll go first. It's not only about having a partner for both brands. I think for all the hubs this is true. We have a lot of intelligence to position the brands in, and the implications. We're learning. We have been learning.
What we told our partners, this is what we do. We can tell you, too, that we're talking about two different markets, two different business models, two different process, two different VPs. This is the way it is gonna be in the future. We have to make sure that we adjust the pricing, communication. This is not only for the places where we have the two brands at the same time. Across the board, we do this so that both brands can benefit. We don't privilege any of the brands because we have investors interested in both of them. It put everybody together to have the best of that municipality for the two brands.
We gotta be careful because the partner can't feel that they have been harmed somehow because we're giving privilege to one of the brands, and we've been successful in doing this.
We used to be competitors, but we're now, like, in the same city, and this is what our partners said. Pedro said that we need to be careful. This is one word. The other word is trust. We should trust them, and everything that. They should trust us. We're on the same market, even marketing. Respect each other. As competitors and now with a strategy in data and management, this will strengthen our brand even more. That was a very positive response that we got. We can now open UNIASSELVI or UniCesumar's hubs. That's it. There's more. There's our premise, and this is a question that all our when our partners ask us about that, we are convinced that both companies have very clear, robust positions. Compare us to others. This is UNIASSELVI.
UNIASSELVI, this is UniCesumar. They have different business models, and that's totally different. They take these two up, and that has helped us also achieve our goals better.
I have a question that's about the market and also about competition and, position. UNIASSELVI's behavior has been very clear.
Perspective on tutors and on mentors. Part of your competitive advantage was around this professional and the other didn't have, or at least it was not that relevant, at least. It's not easy to understand, right? This, what has been the change and what's the competitive advantage of UniCesumar? Because even if you had pressure in the last three years, I mean, going from face-to-face education to distance education, do you have war prices in the market and so on and so forth. UniCesumar grew with a ticket and a market share. We cannot find a difference in format that is significant.
You talk about content quality, of course, but I need to understand the differential, not just the price differential or what's at play, but what UniCesumar has done to lead to a different approach, even student retention numbers, which I'm really impressed. It's not clear. Can you expand on this?
Well, I'll start, and William can add to that later. Okay. Content is very clear. Everything we built, our education methodology, it was very clear now. We need to set the hub on this journey. That's a point that makes us really increase our intake, student intake. In UniCesumar, our hub are part of our academic delivery, of educational delivery. As a result, we have well-organized, well-structured hubs. There's a feeling of belonging. Students feel they belong to the school.
Also the experience that UniCesumar has gained that other brands don't have, and that has a huge impact. The experience that we gained over the last few years in terms of relationship and how this relationship works and how it can be activated. There are three pillars: learning, and relationships, then content quality, and then the hub as part of our educational delivery of our teaching product. That's our differential. I'd also like to mention the case of our Department of Permanence. Everyone works or focuses on student retention. That's very reactive, but we do preventive action. That's why we call it student permanence. We do everything we can to ensure that students remain with the school. UniCesumar started. In 2019, we had 5% retention with regard to the previous year.
By following up our students' journeys, that made a huge difference. Again, the three pillars that Pedro mentioned, the three pillars lead to better scores in market evaluation because we have a better satisfaction level and as lower CAC or CAC, and that has, of course, led to our better net promoter score in the last five years. Thank you, everyone. I think this was a very intense morning with lots and lots of information. I invite everyone who's here at Maringá to have our campus tour. Thank you very much.