Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting. Welcome to this event. We are going to talk about a relevant fact today, which is the acquisitions of Qconcursos. We are going to listen to the presentation of the company now, and then we are going to have a Q&A session where further instruction will be provided. Should you require any assistance during this conference, please request the help of one operator by typing asterisk zero. Mr. Eduardo Haiama, please take it over.
Good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to say thanks. Thank you for being present here. This is a conference about the acquisition of Qconcursos. We are very happy with this event. We are very happy with this investment. What we are doing here, we expect to be of great help.
It is definitely going to be helpful to our digital platform, and it is going to complement our portfolio. It is going to be of great help to accelerate things that we had outlined already and things that we are planning for the next few years. It is going to anticipate two or three years worth of investment in the future. Moving on, getting to the first slide. What is Qconcursos? This is a company that has been in the market for over 10 years. We have been helping those that participate in these processes all over Brazil. In the last few years, this became a 100% digital company. This is a company that we can call an ed tech. It is completely cloud-based, completely digital in its content.
There are over 400,000 students that are paying students and a further 1.4 million students that have free access in the freemium model. One other interesting point about the company is that in terms of people that have gone through the company, we have roughly 17 million students that have been through the company somehow. One thing that really jumped to our attention was not only these figures, which are quite good. When it comes to digital technologies, they developed some very adaptative technologies, and we believe strongly in that. We feel that this is going to really accelerate and fast track our work towards the same direction we have been heading to. This is going to enable us to have a high-quality, customized teaching. In summary, just to summarize the gist of what we expect, obviously, we expect to expand our base.
It will be a further 400,000 paying students and 1.4 million in freemium. We expect to strengthen our vertical, to strengthen our digital vertical. With that acquisition, YDUQS is going to surpass the threshold of one million students. Just to explain a little more in further detail about what this idea of Qconcursos, or literally concurs means, we have the CEO, Caio, of Qconcursos, and let us hear it from him. Please, Caio, take it over.
Thank you, Haiama. I am very happy to be here with you. I am very happy to be a part of this acquisition, of this partnership between Qconcursos and YDUQS. To introduce myself, I am Caio Moretti. I am the CEO of Qconcursos, and I am here to explain to you what the company is all about, where we come from, and what are the few next steps for us.
Qconcursos is a complete platform for these processes. Basically, what we do is we integrate different parts of the selection process into one platform, and we create a completely modern and integrated environment, and especially customized for each student. As a highlight, the first point that we can touch, just like Haiama said, we have over 420,000 subscribers and a growth of 80,000 subscribers in 2020 alone. Despite the difficulties, revenue has grown 8.5 times since 2014. Over 15 million single accesses per month. Our NPS is off the charts. One of our major concerns is to keep hundreds of thousands of students very satisfied, and the NPS gives us that certainty we are on the right track. These students need support a lot of the times.
That is why we are really focused on our NPS, and we want to keep it between 96. Our satisfaction rather in 90%. We talk a lot about technology, and we talk a lot about the figures. We have up to 60 million exam questions solved per month. We had 1.8 billion exam questions solved, 20,000 orders per minute. As an acknowledgment, we had the iBest 2020 Award as the best online education service in Brazil, besides the RA1000 label or the stamp. We have the largest traffic in the education sector, and the 14th largest traffic of all sectors in Brazil. What do we do actually? In practical terms, what do we do? Why do we exist? We are there to make learning more accessible to everyone. This is at the core of our mission.
When we understand how we can make this purpose a reality, we have four hows, and the first one is to integrate different steps of study, so the student doesn't have to look for different solutions in different places. The second how is to create scalable solutions or solutions that can grow exponentially at a linear cost. These are solutions that we can provide more and more at a lower cost. Technologies. We create technologies to accelerate learning. We use artificial intelligence as well as other pieces of technology so we can fast-track student learning and we understand that everyone has a limited amount of time. How can we accelerate this process? Fourth, constant feedback. We have a very strong exchange with our students, teachers, and stakeholders, and we are always trying to improve and fine-tune our process.
Our NPS shows that. This creates a product and a solution that we understand it is practical, accessible, and modern. It is practical because it's very easy to use, especially due to the integration. It's accessible because you are very concerned about having a scalable solution, and you want to make sure that a lot of people can access that at a lower cost. Modern because we integrate all of the steps, and especially, we use technology to fast-track student learning. What is our business model? It could be no different, right? If our purpose is to make education accessible, how can we translate that into a business model? It wouldn't make sense for our purpose to go one side and our model to go another.
We work in a freemium model, which means that basically anyone can sign up for free in the platform and make use of a great deal of our services free of charge until they understand that there is a moment to make a purchase. We use our product to accelerate the need of purchase from a user perspective. We have some solutions that are scalable. First, you learn about the solution, especially with the organic traffic. As it was said, we are one of the largest traffics in the country. We have a lot of organic traffic, which makes for a low acquisition cost. People learn about the product, start using the product, they test it out, and see a necessity. They get engaged, and they make a purchase.
This purchase is much more precise, and our retention for this reason is quite higher because people effectively know the product, they have tested it, and they trust the brand because it enables people to test the services before you pay for them. This is our business model from the get-go, and it has been quite successful. This is one of the factors that we credit the most when it comes to the 2020 pandemic. We were able to grow and expand our base in 80,000 people because people can effectively try out our product, and they can really test it. We lost the audio. We lost the audio. Trying to get it fixed. Please stand by. [Non-English content ] .
Speakers, please proceed.
Well, let's just continue here. When it comes to the study experience in a traditional sense, it is completely divided. There is a number of tools that don't communicate amongst each other. You go from offline to online and vice-versa. You have to toggle between different tools so you can study. At Qconcursos, our focus is to provide tools within the same environment in an integrated fashion for every stage of your study. Community. When it comes to studying for selection processes, it is complicated. In the market, a lot of people don't feel the pride to say that they are part of a selection process. They don't know if they are going to get approved or not. A great distinguishing factor of ours is our community, is a collaboration from student to student.
A lot of those distinguishing factors, like I said, they have an impact on our pricing. The business model in most of the market ensures that the product is usually expensive and the cost of acquisition is much higher. That is a major distinguishing factor for us. We were created as a technology company, and we focus on scalability from the get-go. When it comes to accessibility, we are talking accessibility on a price level, on the access level, and accessibility to make sure that even people that live in the countryside of the state with an unstable internet connection is able to access and study. Also acquisition. The market today is completely addicted to paid media and paid advertisement.
For 12 years, we have been investing in our own technology to bring what we call organic traffic, which reaches the website in a much more focused way, and it reaches the website because people really want our product. They want our service, not because they were necessarily impacted by some advertisement. From a product perspective, like I said, today, we have three free plans and one paid for. We have the basic plan, which is part of the freemium model. If the students want to acquire a product, we have three options on our shelf. The first one is premium, for those that want to practice intensively and to improve their performance. This is a product for our core, which is the practice questions. We have 4,000- 5,000 questions answered per minute in our peak.
Premium Plus is a recent plan of ours which came in late 2020, which was when we understood how we can bring some customization, how we can bring a unison for the students in a way that is accessible, financially speaking. It was a major technology effort, machine learning, and we deployed a number of tools, especially when it comes to study about learning experiences, so we can present a plan that really focuses and directs student learning without having a teacher behind it. Of course, we have teachers that guide us and help us with using the technology, but the technology enable us to scale up. We have our top product, which is Unlimited. It is right here. It is available for those that are looking for a focused approval.
The Unlimited subscription option, it complements all the previous products, but in a partnership with a different player, we make available some ultra-focused materials for specific selection processes. If you are interested, you can use our Unlimited subscription. When you look at the in hindsight, since 2010 to this moment, our user base has not stopped growing. In 2021, even though this is the middle of the year, we already have 17.5 million users registered. That is the growth we are having in our base, and we see a great singularity with growth and the paid users. In this slide, we can actually see the two sides. First, we have a machine that generates traffic and subscriptions, and there is a social aspect which enables people to study, and on the other side, we convert those users into paying users. Of course, that generates our revenue.
Today, we have 17.5 million people subscribed, which is a relevant portion of the Brazilian population, and 420,000 students studying with us every month, which is also a substantial volume. Why are we unique? I am talking about different aspects of it, but why Qconcursos is unique. First, because we have the most practical way to study in the market. This is not us saying that. This is not us saying it about our own product. It is our customers. When we ask why they chose Qconcursos, over 80% of the answers, and we have a lot of answers, they revolve around practice. It is practical. There is a lot of practicality. We really zeroed in on how to make the learning process more practical. Usually, it is a tough process, right? On the other hand, we are a premium product at an affordable price.
We learn how to deal with this issue because charging affordable prices is not a problem. You can have an extremely high-quality product at an affordable price. Third, but not least, we have the biggest collaborative study community in Brazil. We have tens of thousands, actually hundreds of thousands, not only clients, but free users as well, that contribute to each other's study. That is extremely relevant because it shows just how powerful it is to have a community, and users are motivated, and of course, they stay with us for longer. Our growth strategy, which is a summary, is we have an aggressive price made possible by a scalable product. We are easy to use. We have a lot of focus on that, and we are impossible to leave due to our major focus on retention, on quality, and quality products and service.
The more we focus about servicing a student well and listening to our students and fulfilling our mission, the more we are able to execute our strategy, which produces a sustainable growth. It has been sustainable out of the gate. Our performance. This is an outlook of 2014- 2020, which grew 8.5x in the last six years. That shows that in parallel with all of our growth, despite all the investment and all the adversities in 2020, our strategy and our sustainable growth has proven to be very successful. Good morning, everyone. I want to tell you a little bit about the background of our digital solution and our ecosystem. Very briefly, from 2006- 2009, that was the early stages. 2010.
In 2009, more precisely, we started to actually do distance learning courses, and from 2010- 2018, we maintained that focus and we started growing. We grew very fast in our partners network as well. In 2019, we consider that to be our major transformative year. There was yet a new generation to impart content in a new way, and that was the biggest leap that we took in our platform. Our focus was very much on quality. We came away from the physical structure, and we hired the best teachers to work in the online platform. With that, we are able to offer the very best in education in the market. That was a very intensive year. At that point, we have 600 centers. Our current focus today is we focus on customization of teaching.
A great deal of our brands, they are institutions which provide an extremely quality study for a lot of people. Our step now, the step to be taking now is to provide a very high quality teaching and great academic content with a lot of people, to a lot of people. We know the best way for students to learn, and we know what they have to learn, and that is where it comes in. This year, as we have said before, we are concluding the year with 2,500 centers, which is great capillarity. By 2022, we are able to reach very small towns, and in the next year, we are going to hit that mark, 2,500. Our digital learning process, we already started since 2006. Even when we were dealing with in-person training, we already focused a lot on the internet.
We were not focused on analog teaching tools. We started with the internet. Even though we did some acquisitions throughout our history, we worked with some more analog institutions, but very quickly, we went back to this track because we were focusing on the future. A very high quality teaching, like I said. Richness of objects, that was really important. That was important in the past, and it's going to be important in the future. Students learn in a different way. When it comes to learning objects, just like we work with podcasts, with video, we work with text as well. We work with interaction teacher-student, and student-student interaction. This is key to make sure we have a customized teaching in the future. We have a modular and flexible learning process, which is really important for us to work with new brands and different brands.
Our product is completely done by us, so we are able to include other brands in our portfolio. We are able to quickly launch new products which are definitely in line with our teaching style and the next few steps. We want to have an adaptative and personalized teaching with a lot of technology. That entails on having a teaching that is adapted to each student. The next step after that is to have success-oriented teaching processes for students. Today, we need to know what is the impact of our learning process for the future of students, whether it's to get approved in tests or for professional success. With everything that we have here, we have to make sure that every student can learn in his or her own way, in the most adaptative way possible that is most in line with their personality.
With that, we can predict what is going to be the future in terms of automation and the learning process overall. How are we going to get there? In part, by doing what we are already doing and doing it better, and in part, by adapting ourselves to some new ways of working. But we still have academic rigor. We have quality and flexibility, like I said before. A lot of technology and innovation is coming into play. I touched on the selection process and the teaching part. We focus on the comprehensive education for people in their adult life. Not only post-grad courses, free courses, and public examinations, but we also have digital teaching. There are many aspects to it. We have a relationship team, we have a learning team, and we are now thinking about students' lives with selection processes and public examinations.
We always talk about delivering teaching, but the expansion of our centers is really, really important. This local relationship in smaller towns is really key, but also in major urban centers as well. To have a close relationship with the student physically, in person, is also important. Public examinations or selection processes come into play at this moment because we contribute to technology and innovation, as we see in this picture here. But in the previous slide, when we were talking about the personalization or the customization of teaching and a prediction of the future success of students, in our distance learning process, we have learned in the last 11 years, if you think about distance learning, really 15 years, we've been thinking about those distance learning disciplines.
And with that, we have learned to have the best content available in the market, the best experience for students to learn this content. We are getting together and learning quite a bit when it comes to the public examinations, because public examinations are much more than a mere selection process. It is a way to evaluate people. We believe that we can only have the best customization in the market and actually know the best way for students to learn if we do a proper assessment of these students. We are going to learn with the public examinations how to assess these students. We also use a lot of technology to know that right away, and to know what is the selection process that students are going to be best capable to learn. We can do that in different environments.
We can do that for grad students, postgrad students, whatever course we offer. Having public examinations and different selection processes in our ecosystem is a major step, and to keep track on the success of our students in the future. We are going to know what the students are doing with us, how they are doing overall. We are going to know if they are employed and what their future is unraveling like. Yeah, like I said, public examinations and selection processes are going to be a major leap for us, and that growth for the future is going to be really important. It is also going to be a great learning opportunity for us in our ecosystem. That is what I had to share with you. Thank you. Eduardo, you can take it away.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good morning to you all. We are at YDUQS. We are here with the folks from Qconcursos. It is great for those that are. We are completing our 50th anniversary, and it is great to see what is happening here. My generation is actually the first generation that is learning with the following generation. It is not only father or mother to son and daughter anymore, and it has been a fantastic experience to us.
This business, considering the size of it, this is something that would not be. In and of itself, it is already a relevant fact, and we wanted to do this because we feel that there is a huge impact to our business and how we are going to do coming down the road and moving forward. When we decided to do that, we were wondering, but we are sure of it now, and since we have another different negotiations in between, we are now absolutely sure.
As you know, you know our discipline, right? I am sure that this is an interesting business in and of itself. Just to add on to my colleagues that spoke before me, this business is very interesting standalone from a financial perspective. Here is a company that is growing quite a bit. We have all the indicators, and we have all the conviction that it is going to continue to grow. But the surrounding, the add-ons, the additional aspects to the business is also what convinced us to move forward. Qconcursos is a company that has many things that are similar to our DNA, and I think, the main thing that we have been talking about as a company is that they have an ability to be the most affordable prices in the market and still provide a very quality service at a cheaper price.
Just like us, they were able to break this mold, this false vision that good has to be expensive necessarily, and there is a great expansion that is happening now, and that is where the education market is moving towards. It is also from a social perspective. How does our country have to grow? We have to grow in our classes, our C, D, and E classes, and for that much, we need affordable prices, and that is the mindset that folks have here. From a main business perspective, I think this is quite good. We have absolutely no intention of interfering on the management of the business. This is something that we were talking about this morning. They have to continue to think the way they do. They have to focus on their products and their customers. Down the road, we can assess the monetization tool.
It has worked in an outstanding way. It is fantastic. Nobody reaches the 14th largest traffic on the internet if you do not have a very customer-centric mindset. When it comes to this point, when it comes to the customer or the client or the product, this is something that is absolutely essential for all the companies in this sector to work on. This is something that we touch on a lot. We have a great ability to compete, quote-unquote, protected by a diploma. When it comes to getting out there in the jungle, the world is absolutely competitive. I think these folks are teaching us, and they are teaching the rest of the market in this sense.
We had great expectations to come here and learn, myself, as a member of the board, to sit with them once a month to see how things are developing and perhaps bring some ideas to this environment. You have the mindset that is really customer-centric. Speaking on the short term, they have a great vision of analyzing questions and feedback to the students and keeping track on student development, and we know that this is a very precarious situation in the country overall.
There is a great journey that is one step ahead of the distance learning market. There is a lot of things that are happening. We are being copied by the competition, which we appreciate not only as a feedback form, but also to make some important improvements in this sector. If everyone does those improvements, if everyone uses the technology, we are going to be able to have more access. I am sure we are going to have a best country.
Our challenge is to continue moving on, then we can actually get to the challenges. As I have told you, we are looking at other things. If somebody was disappointed that we are not announcing value, there is a very strategic issue here, that is why we are not talking about this. Thank you very much to everyone. Thank you. I have seen that there is a sense of pride and joy, it has been working with all the acquisitions that we have done. Then it is your go round. I always say that we are going to do the M&A. I am going to answer the Q&A. We are going to invest. We are going to invest the M&A. We are going to invest into the remote learning, looking at education, we are looking at continuous learning, lifelong learning, digital learning. Thank you very much.
Now we will start the Q&A session. Please type asterisk 1 for the question, if you want to remove the question, type asterisk two. Our first question is from JP Morgan. The floor is yours.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. While we were talking about the end of the presentation, the asset in and itself seems very interesting. What are the points for synergy with all the other assets for your lifelong learning? If you can give us a little bit more idea how this new M&A, Qconcursos, is actually working with your lifelong learning program.
Marcelo, once again, if you are looking at cost and synergy, we are not seeing in the short term anything very relevant. Of course, we are very tempted to say, we have 17 million users registers.
We have four or five million users per month, two million fixed, 400,000 students. We can use that as a platform, for example, announcing our courses. Within the idea of protecting the business and letting it flow in a way that it is working, which is their success, we, at the first time, we are not considering that hypothesis. It might be that we are changing that overview without really causing any problem for the client and the customers, actually. This is a business that in and in itself, we are looking at it is very valuable to actually invest from the financial standpoint if it was not. This is a business for YDUQS that I would say they have a great track record, great success, we have to look at the positioning here in the market. That is very important. That is key.
We can see that they are charging a fraction of the competition, that is a trend. So when you ask me if the remote learning, the price will drop, we are always challenging ourselves to making things cheaper, this is their mindset. So from the standpoint of the business, it is interesting, of course, if we look at, this is something that this is different. We are not talking about insurance. This is very important in terms of investment. How much can we learn and how much can we bring? We are thinking about the codes. We have a distance remote learning that is digital learning that is very good. We have different orders of magnitude. These are things that we have to take a look at, we need to focus on the customer.
We have lines of code that will allow us to take the next step in front of the competition. It's not an idea of looking at cost and synergies. I was joking around with the people. I want people to know their interests and vice versa. These are independent operations, and we have to make it grow and not hinder our operations and vice versa. No. It will be a different, even company. Let's just say CNPJ number company. You're going to capture ideas, different portfolios of solutions, and we will have different knowledge and different technologies. Yes, exactly. Aroldo is here. He is Chairman of the Board, and I'm also on the board. Other two directors are on the board.
The idea is to follow up on the idea here, the ideas, and of course, something that is very important and YDUQS. Well, Aroldo has already commented on that. We are organizing all of the digital vertical learning, the digital learning, the lifelong learning. They have to have independence. They have the different squads working in a way that we have a group of people that are only thinking about the future of education.
Thank you. Next question from Itaú BBA Bank.
Thank you very much for this opportunity. Can you comment on the You have the base of operations of YDUQS. How does this company fit in your base of operations?
Okay. Let me give you, Caio.
So cohort of the students at Qconcursos. Can you repeat the question?
Cross-selling-
Oh, cross-selling. Yeah, cross-selling. Okay. Let me go over cross-selling, and then you can talk to my colleague. Cross-selling. Well, we have Damásio Educacional. We have [inaudible] also works with the ENEM- level exam. We are interested in improving the level of the students. If you ask me what is the big issue here is to improve secondary education. This is something that we want to do, but I don't think. Well, looking at the short term, we are not really having an opportunity for cross-sell. It's on the table. Well, we have a lot of things from Damásio, and we have true analysis with [inaudible] . Thank you. Well, the champion cohort. 90% of the sales, when we are talking about the cohort, I am bringing all of these sales that were executed at the end of the month. What is the turnover of the sales 12 months?
That's about 40% when you look at a specific cohort. That 40% is regarding the 12 previous months. Because even though we are offering monthly options, we also have annual plans because it's easier to pay this investment. So we have the cohorts of monthly and annual plans, and we can compare them. So webcast Mr. Abacuelio from Scotiabank. Well, let's see how we can work with the courses and how can we train the professors, the teachers. Well, first of all, we have to look at the minimum unit of learning , UMA. So how can we reduce the content in a video or a text form so that it is enough to be digested and make sense? So we can have a class, for example, a pool of classes.
We have several thousands of video classes and text content about, for example, different types of lines of work, and we are updating that. On the other hand, to structure the courses, we have the database of Qconcursos. We do not know what is going to be said in a test. So we use our database for questions to understand, for every test, what is the probability of a subject matter to actually be taken into consideration. And we use that mass of data. So we use that information to have a directed study based on what we have of records and predictability for that call of tender or public contest. We have a lot of availability available, and we have the predictability of what is going to be on the test.
We can direct the students so that, for example, in a pre-digital world, when nobody knows what will be said, Qconcursos can look at the past, and we can prepare for the public examination courses, and we can look at the previous tests, and then we can estimate what will be the theme of the next test. We are updating the pool of teachers that are always updating that content, and we are continuously updating that library.
Next question. Lucca Brendim from Bradesco. Please.
Hello, good morning. My question is, you mentioned that these students actually use the annual plan. How many of these students are actually recurring students for a second, third year?
The average time of the student at Qconcursos is about 26, 27 months. So we understand that after the first sale, they actually stay for two, maybe a little bit over two years. They return a lot. Once again, they are preparing for the public examination. And the retention numbers and engagement numbers, we have a number that is higher than the average of the market. We are keeping 70%, 75% of our students engaged. It is very difficult to keep the students studying and using the product. So effectively, our rate of retention for these students is about 26 months after the first purchase.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Since we do not have any more questions, we return the floor to Mr. Eduardo Parente for his final thoughts.
Well, folks, I hope we were able to impart just how excited we are with this new group that is joining the YDUQS family now. We feel this is going to have a huge impact, especially on the short term when it comes to our operations. This is a new beginning. This is a very clear new beginning. There is not going to be a lot of fireworks, but we are getting into the ed tech world.
We are already seeing a huge growth, and we are acquiring an ed tech company that is very solid with a huge track record and with a lot of capabilities that is very similar to us as well. So that is it. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you for bestowing us with your trust, and have a great day ahead. The YDUQS audio conference is now concluded. Thank you for your participation, and have a great day.