Good morning, everyone, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to Vivio's First Quarter of 2025 Earnings Release Video Conference. I would like to point out to those who need simultaneous interpretation that we have this tool available on the platform. To access it, click on the interpretation button using the globe icon at the bottom of the screen and choose the language of your preference: Portuguese or English. For those listening to the video conference in English, the option to mute the original audio in Portuguese should be done by clicking on "Mute Original Audio." We also inform you that this video conference is being recorded and will be made available on the company's RI site, where the complete material of our earnings announcement is available. You can download the presentation from the chat icon, even in English. During the company's presentation, all participants will have their microphone disabled.
We will then start the Q&A session. To ask a question, click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen, write your question, and use the company to join the queue. Upon being announced, a request to activate your microphone will appear on the screen, and then you must activate your microphone to ask questions. We advise that questions are asked all at once. We emphasize that the information contained in this presentation, in any statement that may be made during the video conference related to the business perspectives, projections, and operational and financial goals of Vivio, constitutes beliefs and assumptions of the company's management, as well as information currently available. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, as they refer to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or not occur.
Investors should understand that general economic conditions, market conditions, and other operating factors may affect the future performance of Vivio and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Today, we have Mr. Leonardo Birro, CEO of Vivio, Frederico Oldani, Vice President of Financial Administration, and other directors. I now turn over to Mr. Leonardo Birro. Please proceed, Mr. Leonardo.
[Foreign language]
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being present at our conference in the first quarter. We will talk about the financial results, and in the end, we'll be available for the Q&A. I would like to start with a reflection on the execution of our first quarter. We started the year very optimistic with what we're doing.
We had, as you know, a very intense year with project reorganizations, diagnoses, and as we commented in our last call, in 2025, we are focusing on execution. The first results are seen in the first quarter. We are very optimistic with the future. I will highlight some aspects, and then throughout the presentation, we will get into the detail. The first main objective is the evolution of our gross margin, and we can see this expansion in the first quarter, reaching 13.8% of gross margin, 0.3 percentage points greater than the first quarter of 2024, and the best we have had in the last five quarters. This results from business growth, better margins, renegotiation of important contracts we have had in the last years within another market context. We have more business discipline to renegotiate them, and they started in the first quarter but will continue in the second quarter.
This leads to confidence that it will continue evolving throughout the year. We worked with different integrations, and then we can decrease expenses, especially fixed expenses. We decreased our expenses in almost 6% when compared to the first quarter last year. For fixed expenses, we had a decrease of 9.6 percentage points when compared to the first quarter last year. This is something we see over the second quarter. This is translated into improvements in our EBITDA margin, not only a better margin, but with more adequate expenses. We have an expansion of 0.6 percentage points in the EBITDA margin when compared to the first quarter of 2024. The third main pillar for the year, the cash flow and cycle, we commented about this in our last call, and we are aiming at the levers of the company. We have very positive news.
Seasonally speaking, the first quarter is the one that we have the highest cash consumption because of the development of our stock, which is done in the beginning of the year. In the first quarter of 2025, we had the lowest first quarter consumption since 2021. When compared to last year, it's less than one-third of what we had. This is because we readjusted our cash cycle and are focusing on optimizing deadlines and receivables. The cycle had a reduction of 11 days when compared to the first quarter last year. This reduction would have been even greater, but we had the development of our stocks. We only have a definition of the actual percentage, and this year, it was basically half of what it was last year. This is something that we can only see at the end of March.
Our sales for March were affected by a lower adjustment, and therefore clients have less stocks. They bought less than they usually buy, and this will be reorganized in the upcoming months. Therefore, we can already see the regulation of our stocks. If it were not for this factor, we would have had a cycle reduction of 11 days that is even greater than in previous quarters. This has to do with our accounts payable funding our stocks. Even with higher stock levels, it was funded by accounts payable. The evolution of receivables will be seen over the second quarter and in special in the third quarter of the year. The initial message is that we started the year following our plans and budget for the year, and that places us at a very good position for the upcoming quarters.
Other important factors to highlight here. We have celebrated 90 years of Kramer, one of the main brands and companies we have here. We're very proud with the history of this company and everything it has developed. This is something that happened in 2018, and we are planning on continuing growing in the upcoming quarters and years, and therefore we are very proud to have this brand in our business. This is a three-year project, and we made two purchases with manufacturing options in different areas. Over the past years, we've been preparing to merge these two plants. In this picture, we can see the new building. The construction was concluded at the end of the third quarter. We migrated to FW Plant for this new operation in April, and now throughout May, we are migrating these plants.
Therefore, as of June, we're going to have a very modern plant with an ability to expand that is very relevant. It is the largest in South America with an ability to expand, in a category that has low penetration in Brazil, with opportunities for growth leading to synergisms once the operations are in place as of June. I will talk about this, and then Fred will comment about the details of our financial highlights. In the first quarter of 2024, we had the results you can see here based on our effort to renegotiate contracts, reduce sales and businesses where we understand the ROI and margin levels are levels that we're going to operate with from now on, and adjusting our revenue based on the current market. This does not mean that we will have decreases throughout the year.
Our expectation is to have a mild growth of our net income, but in the first quarter, we had the effect of contract renegotiations. For the other items, I've already highlighted them. We're focusing on cash generation, renovating our cycle, and improvements in the gross profit. With that, I will turn over to Fred so that he can talk about the details, and in the end, I will come back for the Q&A.
[Foreign language]
Thank you, Leo. Good morning. I will start with slide number seven, talking about the net profit. We had readjustments of CMED, which was well below our initial expectation, and changed our sales plans, especially of hospitals, clinics, and vaccines, which are usually part of our stock in March.
March purchases are usually higher than in the other months, and then they are reduced over the second quarter so that we can use the prices before they increase. Because the adjustment was much lower than in previous years, with much higher interest rates, the appetite of hospitals, clinics, and laboratories was substantially lower. When we look at our performance in February, we grew. This is in line with what we expected. All of our performance, which had decreases, are explained by this effect of CMED. Also, we are concluding some contracts, but this effect is not very relevant in the first quarter. Basically, everything that we saw was this purchase effect, which usually happens in March, and did not happen this year. We do not believe that this will have any impact on demand for products.
It is just an adjustment in the purchase timing for the first and second quarters. In the lab and vaccine channel, we still grew. Here, the main highlight is the vaccine channel. It has had robust growth, and we can see important changes here, especially in the area of vaccines. We had different launches, and many of these are focused on children, but we have different vaccines that were launched, such as herpes zoster, and we have an important share for our adult audience. This has been a very significant growth driver. Our leadership position is very solid. Moving on to the next slide, I would like to talk about our performance in the two segments where we had decreased profits. In retail, it was compensated by actions in the first quarter and also mixed adjustments in our retail portfolio.
This decrease in retail is, according to plan, and the margin effect more than compensates the loss we had in the first quarter. This is all according to plan. For services, we are still hurting from effects of loss of contracts. We have already normalized the issues or the problems resulting from the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, but our performance is well below our potential. There are a series of changes in place, especially in the manipulation business. We created a new management dedicated to this business, and our pipeline is very interesting for clients and new contracts, especially in the area of manipulation, where we believe that from now on, we will grow again with this business. This is an area where our performance was below than expected, but we will start working on it now.
I would now like to talk about gross profit. It reached BRL 397 million, and this is the largest gross margin we have had. Since 2023, we are working with better mixes, better selection. We are not going to work with contracts that do not deliver results as expected, even though we had a decrease in the two businesses that have a higher margin, which is retail and services. If you look individually, our businesses had higher margins than we see for consolidated. Because of the decrease in retail and services, this mix could have been even better, but we will start delivering what we commented we would do at the end of last year. Now, in the first quarter, we can see a clear direction that the company is following in terms of prioritization of results. In slide number 10, I will talk about expenses.
Leo has already talked about this. We had a decrease of almost 6% in our expenses, non-recurring events. I would also like to comment that there was a decrease which could have been even better. We are making higher levels of provisioning of PDD this year after all of the adjustments we made at the end of the year. We reviewed our assumptions and adopted a more conservative position. The decrease would have been even higher last year in the first quarter. We had a reversal of PDD in the order of BRL 3 million. This year, we made a BRL 7 million provision. We also reduced expenses since the second half of last year. We've been working to achieve this, and we have a 70%-75% on all of these areas that have been captured.
We have some important areas, especially in regards to freight, where we will have a more intensive agenda in the area of transportation after the second quarter. Regarding our expenses, what we've promised is being delivered. Once again, it shows our commitment with improved results and adjustments in our operation. With that, our adjusted EBITDA was basically stable when compared to the first quarter last year, even though we had reduced our revenues. We had margins which were good, but still below the levels we are pursuing. The EBITDA shows that the actions implemented by the company are following the right track. In the next slide, slide 11, we have the financial results. We had a decrease in the order of BRL 2 million, and we can see some effects here.
First, the increase in the interest rates, which increases our debt, but we also have a positive effect of repurchase of debentures, and they have more than compensated the increase of expenses caused by higher interest rates. We had BRL 20 million of loss in the first quarter, which is very close given the size of the company and the effects we've worked with. There is nothing here that is far from our expectations. Now, I will talk a little bit about the cash flow. We commented about it. We had the lowest cash consumption for the first quarter since the beginning of the company. The first quarter is seasonally a quarter where we have cash consumption. The impact of sales decrease was not significant for this performance in the first quarter.
The CMED effect, if it had happened as we had planned, it would have simply migrated or part of the operating cash. Even though we had the impact from CMED, at the end of the day, it was not very relevant. For the remainder of the year, we will follow the plan to recover operating cash after the renegotiation of contracts. We've worked with shorter periods. Since March, we've had significant improvements. For example, clients who bought with a time frame of 120 days, this was reduced to 75 and 90 days. All of our renewals, we have tried to reduce anything greater than 60 days, and we've been quite successful in this renegotiation process. We believe that we're following the right track so that we can have more operating cash when we conclude contract renegotiation cycles. This will be done in the second quarter.
Everything else is according to plan. CapEx, BRL 38 million. This is probably one of the highest investment quarters because of what Leo mentioned. The wipes plant is being unified now, and we have issues that make our expectation for the second quarter to be lower than what it will be in the first quarter. We also have a cap of BRL 156 million for the year, including M&A, and we believe that we will be well below this cap. We do not see any concerns regarding this fact. In slide 13, the cash cycle, we had a cash cycle of 59 days, and when we compare it to last year, we have 11 days less. It is worth mentioning our inventory. It was higher than last year, three days.
Because of the usual dynamics, this inventory goes back to the regular levels, and in the end of the second quarter, it will be below these 70 days. Our accounts payable, we believe that it is well adjusted, and we will have a larger gap between inventory days and the accounts payable cycle. This will increase to 4-5 days. In our accounts receivable, we are aiming at levels below 60 days when we conclude the renegotiation of our contract cycle. With that, our working capital closed at 18.4%. At the end of the year, it was 16.7%. We understand that this is a seasonal matter, and we will remain firm to release working capital throughout the year of 2025. Finally, our debt and leverage. We closed the first quarter with a leverage of 2.4x.
We had a mild increase in our net debt in the order of BRL 40 million. This is totally to be expected because of the seasonality and the cash flow for the first quarter, and also because of the increase of our debt caused by higher interest rates. We are very confident that our leverage is decreasing. We have a decrease curve until the half of last year. This was anticipated in the negotiations we had, and our management is committed to taking all of the actions required so that our leverage goes back to 3.5x in June 2026. This is our schedule. We have cash. Cash generation is more than enough to meet all of our payments planned for the rest of the year. We will have to discuss debt throughout 2026, but with operations at very different levels from what we see here now.
In other words, when we discuss leverage again, we will be at a significantly better situation than we were at last year when we renegotiated these amounts. So this is what I wanted to share for the first quarter, and we are now available for the Q&A session.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the Q&A session. I would like to remind you that to ask questions, you must click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen and write your question to join the queue. Or you can also use the raise hand icon to join the queue. Upon being announced, a request to activate your microphone will appear on the screen, and then you must activate your microphone to ask questions. We kindly request that questions are asked all at once. Our first question is from Mr. Felipe Amancio from Itaú BBA. Your microphone is open.
[Foreign language]
Hello, good morning. I have two questions. The first one is about expense control. This quarter, we've seen very strong control and compliance to the company's capture plan. I wanted to understand to what extent you've been able to capture and how much is still missing. My second question is about growth. You commented during the presentation that you expect to have a small revenue increase this year. What is the main driver going to be? Hospital and clinics, laboratories, or in the recovery of any other segment?
[Foreign language]
Hi, Felipe. Thank you for being here and for the questions. I will start answering, and then Fred can complement. We still have part of our expense plan to conclude in the second quarter. We have the plans we mentioned. We also have the distribution center with duplicated costs.
We will reduce them, and there are potential other operations where we have synergism. As Fred commented, we have concluded 70%-75%, but we still have part of it for the second quarter. We should have captured the results completely after the third quarter, but this is our expectation. We still have not seen operational leverage. When we resume sales, we will see this leverage take place with lower percentages, and so this will be captured. Regarding growth, all of our businesses have some level of growth planned for the year. None of our businesses will have decreases. In some areas, we will have higher growth percentage. For example, in the distribution channels with the government, we have had a very good performance. Even though the first quarter was a quarter where we had a lot of price adjustments, we do see growth in this segment looking ahead.
Also, for services with a new administration with the addition of Nelson, we also see a resumption of services for the second quarter. We are going to grow in all of our segments. We were more disciplined and conservative with medications. We are renewing contracts, and the negotiation is more strict now, more conservative for prices and deadlines for payments. We see that this is an area where we will also have growth. Thank you very much.
The next question is from Mr. Gustavo Tizio from Bank of America. Gustavo, your microphone is open.
[Foreign language]
Perfect. Thank you very much. I have two questions. I wanted to explore the negotiation of contracts for the second quarter since we are already halfway through the quarter. Are clients accepting to change contracts? You said that a loss of revenue could happen because of these renegotiations.
What have the results been? Are they any different? Also, I would like you to explore a little bit better competition, especially in retail, because we thought that there would not be such a strong competition, but we still see some decrease in revenue. I just wanted to better understand what the problem is here. Is it competition? Is it price? Are people buying less? Thank you very much.
[Foreign language]
Thank you, Gustavo, for your question and for being here. Contract renegotiations have been very successful. We still have a lot to happen in May and perhaps even in June. CMED is a bit lower. We see a very good dialogue with clients and the industry, understanding the dynamics of the sector, the challenges with distribution. We need to renegotiate our basis, and therefore this dialogue is very positive.
We've already renegotiated a good part of our contract, reducing our deadlines, capture of new contracts. This is aligned with our plan, and that puts us in a condition to have better results. We have more discipline. We're more conservative, and we can already see the benefits. Together, we all benefit from this movement, and our competitors are also doing that. We are trying to renew the conditions, which were no longer adequate to the current reality of the sector. We are very optimistic with contract renegotiation. Regarding retail, we have very important facts here. There was an impact in some important categories for us, but we do have others which are more price-sensitive. For these, our policy is a little bit harsher, such as wipes. This is very sensitive to price. Competitors sometimes take longer to adjust their price.
At the end of the day, the raw materials are the same. These are global commodities, tissue on tissue, cotton. Sometimes price adjustment takes a little bit longer, and there are areas where we have harsher competition in the first quarter, but this will be normalized over the year, and the expectation is for us to grow in retail as well. Excellent. Thank you very much.
Our next question is from Renan Plata, Citi. Renan, your microphone is open.
[Foreign language]
Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity. I have two questions. The first one is regarding the lower CMED. You commented that your product mix is a little bit below the average, and Leo talked about competition. I would like to know if you see any opportunity to decrease discounts, trying to think that prices should be a little bit higher than CMED. Can you do this?
The second question is regarding PDD. You commented about changes in the provisioning policy. I wanted to better understand if you have already reached your target here and what the rest of the year is going to be like.
[Foreign language]
Thank you, Renan. I will answer the first question, and Fred will talk about PDD afterwards. Yes, CMED was in the order of 2.6%-2.7% compared to 4.5% last year. This, in itself, already has an impact when we compare the second and the first quarters. We have reduced additional discounts in addition to lower CMED adjustments. We have closed different contracts, and we have seen the competition follow this as well, follow this movement. We have seen the same austerity at different levels, but the direction for the whole sector is the same, which is very positive for us to guarantee the sustainability of the business.
We will see repricification above CMED and also a time reduction. Regarding PDD, we changed our loss estimates. We started working with more conservative expectations, the recovery of these amounts, and after the beginning of the year and after the adjustments that we had last year, we have reviewed basically client by client. In face of the current scenario, 5% of our net income is possible. Today, we're talking about expectation of future losses. If over time we see this, we can complement provisions, and if we review this number, we can review this amount. It is adequate today, and there is an expectation of losses within a macro scenario that we can see. If it worsens, we will increase, and this is how it's going to work from now on. Yes, it was very clear.
Our next question comes from Gustavo Tizio, Bank of America.
[Foreign language]
We have received a question via chat, and I will answer it. If in our deleveraging curve, we consider any divestments, the answer is no. No divestment is required for our deleveraging curve and to reach the 3.5 level in our negotiations with our creditors. We will do this as possible, but our curve does not count on divestment.
The Q&A session is now over, and we would now like to turn over for the final considerations of the company.
[Foreign language]
Once again, we thank you all for your presence and reinforce our commitment and our confidence in 2025. We started the year with good news according to the main strategic fronts for the year and the main indicators that we proposed to improve throughout the year.
In the second quarter, we are renegotiating contracts, adjustments of our accounts receivable, whose benefits we will see in the third quarter, as commented here. Based on the cost reduction, cash generation, we've had the lowest cash expenses we've had for the first quarter. We are available to clarify any concerns you may have, and thank you very much. The video conference for the first quarter of 2025 video is now over. The department is available to answer any remaining questions. Thank you very much to all participants, and we wish you an excellent.