Recording in progress.
João Carlos Sousa, Guy Pacheco, João Carlos Sousa, 2024 results conference call. Please note that this conference is being recorded. For the duration of the call, your microphones will be disabled. However, analysts will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. To do so, simply click on the button to raise your hand, and we will give you access to the microphone. If you are dialing from a phone line, press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute yourself. I will now turn the call over to Mr. João Bento, CEO.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter results presentation. Q3 was a transition quarter towards what we believe is going to be a great final quarter since financial services are now normalizing, and express and parcels will keep beating all-time records. So if we concentrate, I'm with slide number four. If we look at the charts on the left, and if we set aside financial services, we've observed in the quarter 17.3% growth on revenues that then is simplified to a 28.6% growth on EBIT. Looking into more detail on the right-hand side to each business area, and starting with the logistics bucket, we see express and parcels achieving record volumes since we had during this summer volumes above last year's peak season. And then this very high growth of 46% year-on-year delivery up to now represents more than EUR 98 million.
I recall that we've celebrated last year the first time that CTT has distributed 100 million parcels. We have achieved almost that in the first nine months of the year. We have also improved our EBIT margin in the quarter up to 8.7%, and we have a very sound outlook for another record-breaking peak season in the fourth quarter. Moving to Mail & Other, we've seen price increase and mix compensating soft volumes. This happened mostly in August and September, but we are expecting a strong fourth quarter. Given that it has almost 7% more working days, we expect some mail backlog, especially from the state agencies, to recover. We will also benefit from increased cost sharing from financial services that will perform, and is performing already, much better. We've seen good early signs in October, as it will detail later on.
Moving to the bank and financial service bucket, we'd like to call your attention to the wide adoption of our app for subscription of savings certificates that was inaugurated during this quarter. It represents now almost five% of all placements on a daily basis. And the most significant fact in the quarter in terms of financial services was postponed to October, but we've seen a very significant increase in limits, sorry, a very significant increase in placements since the limit for each account was increased in early October. Moving to the bank, we've seen continued client growth with 29,000 new clients this year, and the focus on client engagement produced significant growth in business volumes. And I will illustrate that with a 46% year-on-year growth on deposits, which is a very high beat of the market growth that was just under eight%.
All in all, the bank produced a record Return on Tangible Equity at 12.4% in the first nine months of the year, which is already above the target that we have announced in the capital markets today. Moving to slide number five to give you a little bit more detail on the performance of parcels, we have observed the 34.2% growth vis-à-vis the same quarter last year. Since we had also a slight 4% improvement in revenue per item, this puts us in a very good position for a very strong peak season in the last quarter. Moving to slide number six leads to an even higher growth on revenues of 36.2% vis-à-vis the third quarter of last year, and with an improved EBIT margin reaching almost 9%, which confirms our claim that volume growth would produce operational leverage.
And therefore, for the simple fact that we are improving volumes, we are also improving profitability of this business. And with that said, I would move to slide number seven and pass the floor to my colleague João Sousa.
Thank you, João. Good morning, everyone. As you can see on slide seven, this quarter addressed mail traffic fell by 7.5% compared with the same period of last year. However, the average price per item increased 10.1%, offsetting the declared traffic through the pricing and also the type of product that we are selling to the customers. Going for the slide eight, where we see the revenues of mail, addressed mail revenues, we see we reached in this quarter EUR 82.4 million, marking an 8.9% increase of the revenues year over year. But what we'd like to say here, we see a positive outlook for the fourth quarter. Why? For two main reasons: more working days. So in the fourth quarter of 2024, we're going to have 6.8% more working days than the previous year.
And also, the first days of October show us an October momentum, with an increase of the Address mail revenues per working day, mainly coming from the backlog of the public administration, like João already was saying, that we're expecting in the third quarter and was postponed for this fourth quarter. With this, we see a positive outlook in mail for the fourth quarter of this year. On mail and others, just an additional note that business solutions and payments are performing well in this segment, with a year-over-year growth of 13% and 9.1% respectively. Coming, as you know, on this mail, it's on slide nine. Cost is an important matter. Inflation, elections, and lower financial service increase the costs, offsetting the cost saving that we are implementing in this area, reaching EUR 2.8 million in the first nine months of the year in EBIT.
But if you look for a normalized public debt placements, we could add more EUR 2.8 million recurring EBIT. On slide 10, sorry, you can see a little bit detail what we are doing since the beginning of the year on the cost side. We are seeking for additional gains on the distribution model. We are increasing focus on revenues per employee on our stores. And we continue the cost reduction program that's already exceeding the EUR 20 million target we designed in the beginning of the year and communicated on the Capital Markets Day. And we also understand for the future that we have to leverage. One is the pricing formula that enables us to recover in the past inflation. And also with the outlook we have for public debt, that with the normalization of the public debt, that helped to manage these fixed costs on mail.
Coming to slide 11, unfortunately, like João was saying, the postponement of the changing of the cap that we were expecting was postponed from the third quarter to October. And as you can see, after October 7, we saw more than 120% increase in daily public debt placements, following the cap adjustment, so that's like we expect. And even so, in the third quarter, we saw a growth in the placements already grow by 33% compared with the second quarter, supported by marketing efforts. So explain to the market the advantages of this solution for savings and also the introduction of the app that was well received in the market in the summer.
So, with these, I'd just like to leave two positive notes also in the public debt placements for the fourth quarter, that with the change of the cap, and also we believe that this is going to increase the competitiveness of this product for this quarter. And we also expect in November to launch the last feature of the app that the customer can now subscribe and do all the process in our app. So that allows that with more than 500 stores we had and the digital app gives more flexibility and accessibility for the customer to adopt this product. And now I pass to Guy.
Thank you, João. Starting with the bank KPIs on page 12, where we can see that the bank continues to capture a lot of resources, customer resources in the market. Customer deposits grew 46% until September year-on-year. That is significantly above the market, that according to Bank of Portugal, grew 7.9%. On the loan volumes, we continue to see this growth above 8%, 8.2% on auto loans, and the mortgages growing 8.7% year-on-year. The bank will continue to invest in commercial capabilities, be it digital and physical, in the stores to continue to increase client engagement to maintain and accelerate these trends going forward. On the next slide, we can see the financial KPIs. On the first nine months, revenues grew on the bank 2.5%.
If we exclude the effects of Universo that left the perimeter in the end of last year, we would have grown 14.5% during the first nine months as we witnessed some compression in net interest margin that now stands at 2.2%. And when we look to profitability, our profit before taxes increased 25.9% year-on-year. That led to the already mentioned by João return on tangible equity of 12.4%, and as such, within the guidance for 2025. On the page 15, we can see our key financial indicators, where we see a quarter of very strong revenue growth fueled by parcels of 14%, our EBIT growing 12.2%. And because of the investments in fleet electrification and capacity, our recurring EBIT is flattish at 19.6 million EUR, sorry. And our net profit declined to 16.2% year-on-year. On slide 16, we can see our revenue detail.
Our revenues grew 14%, completely driven by express and parcels that grew 36.2% year-on-year, or almost EUR 32 million, on the back of strong cross-border volumes and market share gains, both in Portugal and Spain, and with a slight price increase per unit that drove growth to the 36.2%. On mail, flattish revenues on the mail division, EUR 0.5 million of the 2.6% come from mail. The EUR 2 million is coming from business solutions and payments that are performing well, as João Sousa mentioned. Financial Services is heavily affected by volume still, although sequential improvements, we still suffered from a year-on-year decline of 51% in volumes and 27.2% decline on revenues that still are the difficult comparable. On the bank, 2.3% growth driven by essentially commissions and some growth on margin. On page 17, we can see our operating costs that increased 15.3%.
On E&P or express parcels, our cost grew 33%, completely aligned with activity. In mail, it's where we had this big cost increase of EUR 6 million due to wage inflation and the lower contribution for financial services that we expect to normalize going forward. On financial services, costs decreased EUR 1 million, completely driven by the lack of placements. The bank, pretty much in line with the investment in staff costs being fully offset by the reduction on impairments, our cost of risk now stands at 0.7% in the quarter. On slide 18, we can see the evolution of our recurring EBIT. Flat performance at consolidated level, but with a strong contribution of the express parcels. Growth in volumes and margin expansion that now stands at 8.7% drove this EUR 4.2 million growth.
In mail, a decline of 3.5 million EUR driven by volumes and OPEX dynamics that we already detailed. And in financial services, 1.3 million EUR decline impacted by activity. Bank grew 7.2% in the quarter, driven by the strong dynamics in resources. And going forward, we expect normalization on mail with further cost-cutting initiatives and recovering on volumes. And in financial services, we already see a new dynamic following the reset of the cap that brings us very strong confidence in the ability to normalize the past numbers of this business unit, as we always expected, but unfortunately, later in the year, as far as what was our initial expectations when the year started. On slide 19, we can see our cash flow. That operating cash flow stood at 29.1 million EUR, heavily affected by a negative evolution of the working capital.
Our working capital was affected by a delay in receivables from one of our biggest customers that since then has been solved, sorry. And this is expected to normalize going forward. We also have EUR 7.3 million impact on VAT recoverables. This is a new dynamic because of the increase of the intra-EU operations with the increase of integration between our Iberian operations. So that is expected to stay. The first one will revert and already reverted on October. Our free cash flow, as a result of that, stood in EUR 8.5 million. Our net debt is now EUR 2.7 million with a cash position if we exclude lease liabilities on EUR 154.8 million. We also witnessed in the quarter an increase of our lease liabilities that has to do with the renewal of the fleet, new electric cars, and new facilities to increase capacity in parcels, mainly in Spain.
With that, I will pass the floor to João Bento.
Thank you, Guy. So I invite you to close the presentation in slide 21. We deploy a bridge from where the third quarter results left us up to the end of the year. It makes explicit what needs to be done in the fourth quarter, both in logistics plus bank and financial services. As you might remember, we have decided to isolate guidance in the last quarter between financial services and the rest. And given that, we have a very strong peak season ahead of us, and we are projecting another record for express parcels. Also, the fact that mail revenues are showing, already in October, clear signs of improvement. And finally, the public debt placements will be significantly higher following what has been the behavior in the performance in October.
We reiterate the guidance based on a strong outlook for the fourth quarter that will leave us clearly inside the announced EUR 80 million-EUR 90 million range with a minimum of EUR 70 million for logistics. And with this, we leave the presentation and make ourselves available for Q&A. Thank you.
We are now available to take questions. As a reminder, analysts that wish to place a question should click on the button to raise your hand, and we will give you access to the microphone. Analysts dialing from a phone line should press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute yourself. We will take our first question from João Safara, from Santander. Please go ahead. Your microphone is enabled.
Yes. I hope you can hear me. I have a couple of questions. So the first question is regarding the quality service indicators. You've agreed on seven quality service indicators that, I mean, reading in the press seem a good achievement. But my question here is how this will impact your CapEx going forward, and if these new service indicators are achievable, which wasn't the case on the previous one with additional CapEx. So that would be my first question. And then the second question on cash flow. Apart from the VAT, which seems to be here this year and wasn't last year, I mean, when we compare last year's cash flow, roughly EUR 90 million versus what you have till now, EUR 8.5 million, I mean, there's a big difference.
So even if you recover the cash flow on the fourth quarter with the working capital, I mean, it seems to me that there will still be a significant difference. My concern here is that if this is something that may impact your dividend, and how do you see this going forward? I understand this year there was more CAPEX. Also, there's more lease expenses, which will probably continue to be the case as you grow in express parcels. So if you could give us a bit of, I mean, some reassuring message here on the cash flow because it seems that it's been clearly an underperformer this year.
Thank you, João. I'll take the first one, and the first couple of, and then pass to Guy. On the new KPIs, we don't see any reason for additional CAPEX. The KPIs come reasonably in line with the expectation. The indication, the overall guideline was that they should converge to European levels. They are slightly above European average. But while coming to the second part of your question, we believe they are, generally speaking, achievable. And in fact, it changes completely, well, the role the quality indicators play in our concession agreement. As for the cash flow, Guy will give you the answer.
Thank you, João. I should say that there are two parts to your question. The first is working capital. For sure, this will normalize. This is a one-off effect on our receivable. The other is a change of trend that, in a way, will stabilize going forward because the integration of the networks has increased and won't continue to increase in such an exponential way as we saw this year. The second part of your question is related mainly with the dynamics of financial services. As you know, financial services has a high conversion on cash flow because almost all the revenues that come from public debt converts to cash flow because we have costs that are already here and are shared with mail. And as such, there are few incremental costs to that revenue.
Please remember that we are lacking more than EUR 23 million year on year of that revenue. That is pretty much cash flow. That's the main reason. Going forward, we expect the financial services to normalize as we already are seeing. We have EUR 9 million year to date of revenues on this area, and we used to have more than EUR 20 million in a normal year. We see that normalization already during October, and that's what we would expect going forward. As such, between these two effects, there are more than there are already almost EUR 40 million of cash flow here. That's the main reason.
Yeah. Just a question on the dividend. So I understand, as you were saying, obviously, last year is not a good comparison. This year is also not a good comparison. I mean, going into the future, what would be the levels of cash flow, the ranges that you would expect this to be the normal for this company going forward? It can be a wide range, but just to have an idea.
Let's see, João. It will be growing. It should be above the EUR 45 million range. But it depends pretty much on your forecast on growth. We expect that the growth will continue to be strong, and especially next year with a combination of a strong or a resilient growth on parcels and bank and resurgence again of the financial services that, as you know, followed a very strong year with a bad year. But we expect that normalization to happen to the levels we are seeing in October, and that will put us within what we always said, between the 3.5 and 4 billion placements per year. And as such, we will have financial services growing again. And as such, cash flow would normalize to the above EUR 45 million. And last year, we also had a one-off on the cash flow generation due to the financial services outflows.
Okay. And just a final follow-up. Regarding the dividend, can you just remind us what, I mean, how would you set the dividend going forward? I mean, obviously, you started from a low base, but is this any relation with the cash flow that is being generated in a specific year or just from this level you would grow independently of the cash flow that is being generated in a specific year?
Yeah. Let's see. We have the policy in place up to between 30 and 50. Of course, we will try to keep that aligned with cash flow generation. That's why, in a way, last year, we reduced the payout almost to the minimum range of the guidance of the policy, sorry, in order to encompass what we already were expecting that this year will be less rich in terms of cash flow. So we aim to have a stable, slightly growing nominal dividend. And as such, we would play within the range in order to reflect the cash flow profile. And as such, what I would expect, although we didn't decide on dividend this year, will be more on the maximum of the range vis-à-vis the minimum last year.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
As a reminder, analysts that wish to place a question should click on the button to raise their hands, and we will give you access to the microphone. Analysts dialing from a phone line should press star 9 to raise their hand and star 6 to unmute yourself. We will now take our next question from Filipe Leite from CaixaBank BPI. Please go ahead. Your microphone is enabled.
Hi. Hello, everyone. I have three questions, if I may. First one on mail, and because the first period of the concession contract will end next year, 2025, I would like to understand what negotiations or changes should we expect for the second period of the contract if the price formula will be revised or renegotiated or what will change in this second part of the contract? Second question on mail, and because the reference period of the mail price formula for both the CPI and volumes is June, I believe that is June, do you already have a view or an expectation regarding the price increase for next year? Should we assume double-digit or high single-digit in terms of mail price increase?
Last one, just a clarification or a follow-up on João's question on cash flow and working capital because Guy said that expect working capital to normalize. This should be something to see already this year. I mean, should we expect a full reversion of the working capital consumption in nine months already in fourth quarter to reach a neutral level in this year? Thank you.
Thank you, Filipe. So we are, in fact, heading to the second period of the tariffs or price increase. We will gather again the so-called tariffs committee between ourselves, ANACOM, and the general director for consumers. We believe that the formula that we have agreed upon has produced interesting results. We don't see any lack of comfort, neither in the regulator nor the grantor, the government. So in principle, of course, we don't know what would be the result, but our proposal is that we should start our starting point should be the same formula. And as of today, we don't see any reason for it not to be kept in place for the second period. As for the price increase for next year, you are right.
We compute mail volume declines and inflation for the period between the second semester of last year and the first semester of this year. And the value that we are proposing for next year, it needs to be then confirmed by the regulator and approved by the grantor, is 6.9%. Guy will take the follow-up on cash flow.
On working capital, so we have three effects: the receivables that will revert. We have the VAT and some still CAPEX working capital. We expect the CAPEX working capital also to revert. But the VAT is a change that is here to stay. Why? Because we now have to claim the reimbursement of VATs of these intra-European transactions. And as those transactions will remain, this will be and this is the lead time to collect that reimbursement that will stay but not increasing as we saw because this is also related with the change of injection. So we have witnessed our main customers starting to inject all their volumes in Madrid. And as such, these international flows increase within our group. And this trend is here to stay. So we have EUR 7.3 million that won't revert, and most of the rest will revert.
Okay. Thank you.
We will now take our next question from António Seladas from AS Independent Research. Please go ahead. Your microphone is enabled. António Seladas, please go ahead. Your microphone is already enabled. As a reminder, in the meanwhile, analysts that wish to place a question should click on the button to raise their hands, and we will give you access to the microphone. Analysts dialing from a phone line should press star 9 to raise their hand and star 6 to unmute yourself.
Okay. So hello?
Yes, Antoni. We get you.
Okay. Sorry. So I have just one question related with the bank. Now, with the new shareholder, should we expect any change on the direction of the bank, on the strategy of the bank? So namely, more aggressiveness on loans. Is there anything that we should expect, or the bank will remain as it has been until now? Thank you.
Thank you, António. We should expect a reinforcement of the strategy around resources and savings because we will have with us in the capital one of the leading insurers in Europe. And as such, what we're expecting is an acceleration of the placement of the off-balance sheet products and, in a way, the same guidelines that we saw in the bank until now, but with reinforcement of this line of the savings. Also, in our view, both well with the new environment on interest rates.
So having more depth of products on the savings side will help us to achieve the increase of volumes that we have. Okay.
Thank you very much.
So we remind you again that if you want to place a question, you should raise your hand. In case there are no further questions, we will move on. Okay. As there are no further questions at this time, I would like to hand the call back over to Mr. João Bento, CEO, for any additional or closing remarks.
Okay. Well, just like to thank you for coming, and as I said in the beginning, it was a very decent quarter, a transition quarter for the last one, for which we have great expectations and confidence so that we reaffirm our guidance both for the ex-financial services part and altogether to end up in the interval between 80 and 90 million EUR of EBIT. So thank you again for coming. Our IR team remains available for you as usual. Good morning.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.