Good morning, and welcome to Atento's third quarter 2021 results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal the conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. If you are at your computer, please use the Submit- a- Question box in your webcast viewer. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Pablo Sánchez, Chief Marketing Officer and ESG Director for Atento. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Welcome everyone to our third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Before proceeding, please note that certain comments made on this call will contain financial information that has been prepared under International Financial Reporting Standards. In addition, this call may contain information that constitutes forward-looking statements, which are not warranties of future performance and involve risk and uncertainties. Certain results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. We encourage you to review our publicly available disclosure documents filed with the relevant securities regulators, and we invite you to read the complete disclosure included here on the second slide of our earnings call presentation. Our public filings and earnings presentation can be found at investors.atento.com. Unless noted otherwise, all growth rates are on a year-over-year and constant- currency basis.
Here with us today's call are Carlos López-Abadía, Atento's Chief Executive Officer, and José Azevedo, Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will move to a Q&A session. As we have been doing in the recent calls, we will do our best to answer all questions received. We believe the Q&A session is relevant part of the call, so we encourage you to ask your questions over the phone, through the webcast systems, or even by sending us email. I will now turn the call over to Carlos, which will do today's call from our Madrid office.
Good morning. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. We would like to discuss with you today a strong set of Q3 results that reflect the continuing improvement of Atento's performance. We show continued improvement across all key financial metrics, starting with revenue, with 4.1% growth in the quarter, and EBITDA with 14.7% growth, with a margin of almost 14%, 1.2 percentage points higher year-on-year, which puts us on a solid track to meet our guidance for the year. Revenue growth has been driven by Brazil, with a very strong performance of our Telefónica account, delivering 19.3% growth in the quarter and continuing growth of our U.S. operation. U.S. has grown 40% in the quarter, while more than doubling EBITDA.
Our EBITDA performance continues to improve with highest EBITDA and EBITDA margin since the beginning of our transformation, with BRL 51 million in the quarter and BRL 141 million in the nine months to September. We also continue to reduce leverage with net debt to EBITDA at 2.8x already within our guidance for the year. Sales performance is critical to an enterprise, but when shifting from legacy sectors to more higher potential sectors, sales are even more important in managing the transformation profitably. We continue to improve our sales engine and the shift to new economy high potential sectors. We have increased our sales results in the nine months to September by 34%. More importantly is the quality of these sales. We increased EBITDA margin of new sales 3 percentage points from pre-pandemic levels while improving hard currency sales by 77%.
Revenue in the target sectors of media, tech, and more retail represent now 11.2% of our base, up from 8.3% last year. We have added 14 new logos in Q3 and 40 in the year- to- date. Now, beyond financial indicators, I would like to talk to you about something very important to Atento and to myself, the impact that we have on the people and communities that we touch. We are proud to have introduced a new and stronger ESG plan to leverage more of Atento's strengths to make a difference. Our plan covers all three areas, environment, social, and governance. As a company with around 150,000 employees, we probably have an opportunity to make a greater direct impact in the social arena.
Let me highlight our initiatives in diversity, reskilling, and in giving first job opportunities to many. We're also very proud to have joined recently the Tent Partnership for Afghan refugees in the U.S. I am looking forward to keeping you updated on our progress and contributions in ESG. Finally, we want to reiterate our guidance for the year and give you visibility to our targets for 2022. Two years ago, around this time in our investor conference, we shared with you our three-year objectives. Since then, we have had a pandemic and many changes in our industry and markets, but we still want to reiterate those very same objectives for 2022. We disclosed in our 6-K that we suffered a cyber attack in Brazil that was detected early and affected a small number of our servers.
Now that we are back to normal, I want to take this opportunity to thank our clients publicly for their support. Sadly, I learned that many of them had suffered similar attacks as well, unfortunately, a common challenge for many of us. Thank you very much. José, over to you.
Thank you, Carlos, and good day everyone. I will start by presenting in more detail how we continue to deliver on our turnaround plan and why we are on path to achieve our 2021 guidance targets. As we continue executing the last phase of our transformation, we have focused more on accelerating the profitable growth we have been able to achieve to date. Going to the numbers on slide 10, you can see our key third quarter figures. All regions performed very well year-over-year, with total revenue growing 4%, boosted by both U.S. multi-sector growth and higher Telefónica revenue in Brazil. The 3.5% growth in multi-sector sales was mainly driven by the Americas due to U.S. client wins, mainly in public services. U.S. revenues totaled $29 million in the quarter, hence $84 million in the nine months. A 40% increase compared to the last year.
Importantly, we continue generating profitable growth. In fact, we delivered the best third quarter EBITDA since we initiated the transformation plan. Also, we delivered growth across all regions. Our strong performance reflects the client wins in the U.S. and Brazil, combined with the success of the efficiency initiatives that we began implementing in 2019. Looking ahead, the BRL 51 million of EBITDA that we deliver in Q3 put us on track to meet our EBITDA margin guidance for the year. Our consolidated EBITDA margin was 13.9% for the quarter, with Brazil being the highlight. Its margin increases to 17.6% from 16.2% in last year's quarter. In the Americas, we expected margins to continue expanding as we continue growing in the U.S. market.
Of note, U.S. programs had EBITDA margins around 20% in Q3 2021. Moving to the next slides. Our nine months results were strong too, also attesting the success of Atento's transformation. I would like also to highlight that U.S. growth was 40% on the nine months and is consistent with our strategy to expand Atento's hard currency revenues, which now represent 25% of total revenue with 28% of EBITDA being in hard currencies. The key message, I want to deliver here is a 12.6% EBITDA margin that we achieved in the nine months, which has already put us within our guidance range for the year. Because Q4 is a seasonally stronger, we are confident in our ability to meet our full- year guidance.
As Carlos mentioned, we expected to finish the year within the guidance range or better, especially in terms of top-line growth, particularly given the high demand for CX services we are seeing currently. As I said, at the beginning of my remarks, the main challenge now is to use the solid foundation we have built to accelerate profitable growth. The main ways to accomplish that are to continue expanding our U.S. business, hence increasing our exposure to hard currencies even more. Now let's take a look at our cash flow, which also represented our best performance since launching the transformation plan. We generated $26 million of operating cash flow and nearly $7 million of free cash flow. Also a record for the third quarter.
I would like to point out that the positive free cash flow was a shift despite it being a quarter in which we made bond- interest payments. For the nine months, free cash flow was -$30 million. As we advised on last quarter's call, this was mainly due to $16 million in tax payments that we were postponed from 2020 under government pandemic relief programs and to $11 million in one-off expenses related to the debt refinancings. Excluding these one-offs and growth-related expenses, working capital and CapEx, run rate free cash flow was approximately $14 million in nine months 2021. Cash CapEx was 3.2% of revenues in nine-month 2021 as compared to 2.6% in the same period last year. The increase mainly reflects investments in IT to allow for an acceleration in growth in the future. Finally, Atento's capital structure.
We ended the quarter with net debt BRL 550 million and a strong cash position of BRL 146 million. Our leverage was 2.8x already within our full -year guidance range of 2.5x-3x. This is a direct result of the consistent improvement in EBITDA that we have delivered in recent quarters. As we have been saying since our Investor Day in November 2019, improving the capital structure is one of the key elements of our rerating process. In addition to 2021, we are confident in our ability to deliver even more in the reach out target net leverage of between 2x-2.5x by end of 2022.
I would like to take the opportunity to reinforce that we maintain the guidance for 2021 and the guidance for 2022, as we presented in the three-year plan. This concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you for your interest and support. Let's go back to Carlos for his closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much to all of you. I think we covered the results, some ideas that we have for the future. Other than thanking you for your attendance and participation, I would like to invite you for your questions. Having the dialogue, they always enjoy much more than they prepared remarks.
We will now begin the question- and- answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch- tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. If you are at your computer, please use the Submit- a- Question box in your webcast viewer. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Pablo Sánchez for the questions received via webcast.
Thank you very much. We will start with some questions we have already received. First one is, U.S. sales have been strong. How sustainable is this growth? And do you have a long-term market position in mind?
Well, they have been strong for sure, and we expect it to continue to be. Do we have a long-term target? We continue to grow. We start from a relatively low base, and obviously there's always an advantage to be a relatively small player coming in. We expect to continue to grow at a very fast pace. We got a 40% growth in revenues, as you saw, this quarter. We expect to continue at a high growth of rate.
Quite frankly, from a market positioning perspective, one of the things that we've learned competing in the U.S. market is that we seem to be, I think some of the clients tell us that we seem to be the best kept secret of the U.S. market, a company that is in the top five worldwide and is virtually unknown. I expect that as we get more credentials, we are better known in the U.S. to even have a better opportunity to serve clients and to continue to grow. Thanks.
Let's go to the next one. Do you expect to expand your base of tech media and more digital clients at the same pace? Or can you accelerate it?
Well, we are very happy with the pace at which we're growing. Obviously, we would like to accelerate it. As I mentioned in my remarks, we, and you've seen in the slides, we've gone from 8.3% of our base to 11.2% of our base. We expect this expansion to continue. These are sectors that are highly attractive to us. We chose them for a reason, or for several reasons, one of them being that they are naturally high growth themselves. You start working with companies in these sectors, and there is a lot of potential to grow with them.
In addition to that, they tend to be companies that place a higher emphasis or higher value to— o n higher value services, higher quality, et cetera, allows us to deliver more value to them and to get better margins ourselves. There will be a continued emphasis in these sectors, and expect to continue to grow in these sectors.
Next is, can you comment more on main drivers of the margin expansion in Brazil? Is there more room to improve there in terms of cost structure and in the other markets?
Well, there's always opportunity for improvement. We are happy with the results and the margins that we get in Brazil, but there's always opportunity to do more as there is everywhere else in Atento. Yes, we do expect and we will continue to expand margins in Brazil and elsewhere, particularly in some markets where we have even higher opportunity to expand margins. There's two components to that. One is the cost base. Sometimes when people talk about efficiencies, they're thinking about just cutting costs. What we have been deploying, and we will continue to deploy is better ways to do business. Methods, practices, and technology that allow us to deliver the same or higher quality service at a lower cost point, not simply just cut costs.
Cutting costs has a natural end to it, but improving the way you operate has the potential to continue to give us incremental improvements year- on- year- on- year. That's one component, and we still have opportunities to do so across Atento. The other component is the revenue component or the margin, the natural margin of what we sell. We have improved not only in the amount of sales, the sales growth, but also the quality of those sales. Part of that is reflected on higher margin, selling higher margin services in higher margin sectors. I also mentioned in the prepared remarks that we have grown 3 percentage points in sold margins. That shows as well that there is opportunity to improve also from the sales side or the revenue side. The answer, the short answer to that is yes, we expect to continue to improve.
Thanks. Next is what are your medium and long-term targets for hard currency revenues?
We don't have any specific or hard target for hard currency, if I can use hard twice in the same sentence. We expect to continue to grow our share of hard currency revenue and margin. We're doing that, and we expect to continue to do that. Is there a target? Clearly we will continue to grow hard currency sales at a disproportionately large share of our total sales. We expect to continue to do so significantly over the next foreseeable future. Particularly, I mean, for us, the current hard currency markets tend to be EMEA and U.S., particularly the U.S. We've seen and we expect to see continued growth at a very high margin.
I think that we have one question on the phone.
That question is from Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks for taking my questions. Carlos, curious in terms of the cyberattack, do you have insurance for that? And does that, those revenue losses get recovered? How does that work?
We do have insurance. As I mentioned, well, I didn't mention in the remarks, but I think we alluded to in the press release when the 6-K when it happened. The impact in terms of the number of servers was relatively small. We detected it very early. We have, just to give you a sense, about 67,000 machines in Brazil only, and it, you know, only about in the 20s, 20-something machines were affected. We detected it very early. We cleaned it up essentially in the first 24 hours. I'm very happy with the speed at which it was detected and corrected.
I also, if you allow me, Vincent, I want to take the opportunity to thank our customers again. As I mentioned earlier, it was a surprise. I can't say it was a pleasant surprise, but it was a surprise to learn how many of our customers have been affected, some of them multiple times in the very recent past, you know. I just can't thank them enough, both from the public and the moral support that we received. As I mentioned, I think I mentioned on the presentation that we don't expect to affect the guidance that we've given you for the year.
In terms of the Telefónica relationship, what does the pipeline look like of new deals? Is that healthy and are the margin on those deals similar to the recent margins you've gotten on Telefónica deals?
The pipeline is very healthy. We still have to win this business. As you know, pipeline doesn't equate to sales always. But I'm very happy with the Telefónica relationship. We have, as you've seen, we've grown this year. We don't expect that to go on forever. As you know, my intention, our expectation is to grow the multi-sector, that for us is the non-Telefónica part of the business, to grow it at a faster than the market growth rate. That to more than make up the over time decrease of the Telefónica business.
We expect to do that. I think it's healthy for our customer mix. In the meantime, in response to your— In terms of the margins, we'll continue to focus on business that is very valuable to both Telefónica and ourselves. As I mentioned many times, the only way to get good margins, decent margins in any business is to make sure that you are delivering significant value to the customer. The answer to your question is yes, we have a good pipeline. We still have to win it. We may be making some announcements in the near future. But in general, I'm happy with what I see with Telefónica. We think, and I want to be clear, we think a long-term picture in which we grow more of the rest of the business than Telefónica.
José, one housekeeping question. For the nine months, what was the constant currency revenue growth?
In constants, we are close by 5%.
For the nine months revenue growth, it's 5%.
Yeah.
Is that right? Okay, thank you. Just one more if I may, for Carlos.
Sure.
The ManpowerGroup relationship is it, is there anything to update us there or is it too early to comment on?
No, it's a bit too early. I expect to push in the multilingual business. It's a long-term play for us. We'll be updating you mostly through next year. That's where the ManpowerGroup relationship is playing out.
Okay. Thanks for answering my questions.
Sorry, let me correct. Only the 5% is for Q3. The 10% is the nine months. I'm sorry, because I answered only for the Q3.
No worries. Thanks for that correction and t hanks for answering my questions.
Thank you, Vincent.
Again. Excuse me. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. If you are at your computer, please use the Submit- a- Question box in your webcast viewer. Please stand by as we poll for questions.
Great. Let's go on with some of the great questions we are getting here. Carlos, can you tell us why the company has been successful in winning born-digital U.S.-based business?
Sorry, to grow born-d igital?
In winning born-digital U.S.-based business.
U.S.-based business. Well, in general, let me try to answer in, you know, two pieces. Winning born-digital was a question of putting our mind and our backs into it. We decided to focus on a number of segments, and born-digital being one of them, as I mentioned in an earlier, on an earlier question, because they have natural characteristics that are very attractive to us. You know, high natural growth, you know, interest in higher value-added services, et cetera, right? Clearly we put our mind to it and our backs into it, and obviously, the results are there. Particularly in the U.S., it was a combination also, I think I mentioned earlier. A combination of, you know, we focus in the right segments. We focus into it.
We executed on it. We built a very strong team that we didn't have a couple of years ago, and we continue to build it as we expand. In addition to that, as I mentioned earlier, we had a little bit of the David versus Goliath advantage, you know, with the small guys in the U.S. that actually are part of a much larger company that actually has a lot of credentials, ability, and capabilities. Several customers have told us that we're the best-kept big secret in the U.S. We will continue to exploit that and continue to grow very fast, particularly in those sectors, but in general, in that, those, and other sectors.
Thanks. We have two questions about the 2022. Let me try to put together. First one is if you can comment on the expectations for growth for 2022. The second one is a bit more specific, asking about the EBITDA margins as laid out in the Investor Day presentation at the beginning of the plan. Can you review those margins again and tell us why you feel confident in achieving them for the next year?
Well, let me start with that. First, we are confident to achieve them, and part of that is because we as a management team made the commitment of delivering those and pandemic or other disasters being no excuse to that. We feel very strongly, the whole team feel very strongly about delivering those. Beyond our confidence, we have done a number of things that makes us feel more confident. One is we have introduced a lot of changes in terms of our ability to serve our customers in a more efficient way. We are changing. We haven't finished yet.
There is still quite a bit to achieve, but we have been introducing methods, practices, technology common across our regions and trying to institute best practices across them all. As I said, we have started. There's still a lot to be achieved, but you can already see that we are delivering at a higher contribution margin than before. Those improvements that are obviously recurring and additional improvements, as I mentioned, we believe we have only started down that route, should help us to be even more confident than we were two years ago now.
In addition to that, on the revenue side, as you can see, not only we keep on improving our sales capabilities every year, but also we're selling at higher quality, better margins. Again, you know, two years ago was a plan, a vision. I think now we have two years of track record that gives us the confidence that we will meet the commitments that we put out there for all of you.
Next one is, can you simply remove the currency hedge, or would there be a large financial penalty for doing that?
Well, I think the specifics of that are probably for José, but I'll tell you that we're looking at different options that we have on the currency hedge. As with any such hedges, you know, depending on the macro movements can go in different directions for or against you. Clearly we're looking at the options that we have to make sure that we maximize the positive impacts of the hedge and minimize the negative ones. José, anything else?
No, it's exactly that, Carlos. We're looking for options that we have. The simple answer for that is normally all instruments like this one, we have to pay the mark-to-market. As you mentioned, we keep on looking for opportunities to change the structure.
Great. Next one is, as we head into 2022, would the company consider buying some shares back in the open market, especially considering how cheap the stock is relatively to the value of the business?
Well, you know, anything is possible, but at the moment, I have no intention. I don't foresee buying shares or having the use of cash to be dedicated to buying shares. Much higher priority as always, I think I mentioned this from the beginning, the highest priority is the expansion and improvement of the business. There's two particular areas where we're emphasizing the use of cash. As we move from a legacy customer base to a new set of customers, we need CapEx to grow the new customers. That's a high priority for us as the essence of the transformation of Atento. In addition to that, as we introduce better technology, higher technology, new services, new capabilities, and the renewal of the technology base is also a high priority for us. So, for us, I prioritize those particular uses of cash way before any share buybacks.
Okay. Next one saying congratulations on strong results and margins. The growth in Brazil slowed down this quarter. Are we seeing any improvement, as things are starting to open up again?
Yeah, we had a couple one-offs in Brazil this quarter. One had to do with some tax adjustments and another one on some business that we chose to exit because of the low margins. Yes, we have high expectations in Brazil. We did very well in Brazil. Telefónica has performed. Vivo in the case of Brazil performed very well for us this year. I expect to resume the growth in multi-sector Q4 and on. I have high expectations for Brazil. It's a great economy. Obviously, we have the uncertainty of elections next year, but that's nothing that we're not used to managing through.
At the end of the day, as the pandemic ends and hopefully, you know, we're seeing the last waves of it, the positive impact of economies that, you know, come back up to speed as we've seen in U.S. and some other places, will also come to Brazil and other economies in Latin America, and that will be good for the economies, will be good for the industry, will be good for us as well.
Great. Next is asking if do you anticipate any financial effects from the cyberattack in October? What are your target run rate leverage and EBITDA margin over the next three years?
That's a multi-part question. I think I answered the first part on the cyberattack. What was the second?
The second one, what are your target run rate leverage and EBITDA margin for the next three years?
We have not prepared to disclose those today. Actually, this gives me the opportunity to recommend to you guys not only to do that disclosure, but to do it in the context of an industry or Investor Day that it was probably over the week. We think we moved the Investor Day. Initially, we're thinking about November timeframe. We probably will do it in spring. It's not that we've canceled in any way, shape, or form. I think we owe that to you.
I think it is not only something that we owe that to our investor base, but something I find particularly beneficial to engage in a more direct discussion with many of you, get your views, and also give us the opportunity to give you an expanded, perhaps or hopefully an expanded understanding of what this management team is planning to do. Stay tuned. We'll announce the date, but we're looking at sometime in the early spring of next year.
Next one is asking if you can provide some additional color on the contracts which have been executed in Brazil?
Probably not today. I'll have to think about what is disclosable and what is not. I'd rather just stay quiet. By the way, they're not huge or that material. I mean, it's relatively small, immaterial to the overall Brazil business or Atento.
Let me ask. I don't know. Let me check and ask if we have some question on the phone.
We have no questions on the phone at this time.
Yeah. Okay.
Oh, pardon me. We just got one in. The next question. One moment please. The next question is from Eriko Miyazaki-Ross with Global Evolution. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the earnings. Just wanted to quickly follow- up. I think you mentioned at the time of the bond roadshow that you were expecting to get to marginally positive annual free cash flow over the next couple of years. Can you just elaborate whether you actually expect to hit that target, I guess, for FY 2021, considering I guess the fact that you've talked about how Q4 is typically seasonally stronger. Then I guess kind of what you're anticipating for FY 2022 as well on the free cash flow side of things?
I don't think we're providing guidance for 2022 on cash flow. José, on 2021, where do we stand?
We expect to be in the break-even. We talked about to be positive by around BRL 10 million. What we have is we invest a bit more in terms of CapEx because we got some new business that we have to invest into. The expectation is to be by break-even or positive by around BRL 5 million. That is the expectation that we have. For next year, we spoke sometimes about the free cash flow. We maintain the same. It will be a positive one.
Great. That's helpful. Then just to clarify, with respect to the sort of break even or slightly positive free cash flow that you're expecting for FY 2021, is that including some of those one-off items that you mentioned before? For example, I guess on the tax, the refinancing, et cetera.
Yeah. No. That will be with everything, yeah, included.
Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.
Let's go on with the written questions. Carlos, we have, "I'm happy to see the Investor Day scheduled for April. Why was this moved from November? Was it related to the COVID?
We had so many things going on around the same time. If you've scheduled one of these, you'll see that the, you know, the windows are relatively small if you have Thanksgiving at one end, a variety of other events that you don't want to clash with. At the end of the day, we ended up with very few windows and with a lot of work in Atento. We thought it would be better. We collectively ourselves would be better served if we moved it to early in the year.
Next one is, "Can margins in Americas and EMEA get as high as Brazil?
Yes. Actually, the U.S. margins are already ahead of those of Brazil. That's already a fact. EMEA, the markets there are a bit more complicated, but I believe that they can go as high and potentially higher. In EMEA, there's a number of levers, but one very important one is to be able to provide services to customers in Europe and serve them from Latin America or offshore to a significant— nearshore or offshore to a significant degree. A lot of our business in EMEA is served out of Spain. We've been improving significantly the margins in EMEA.
We are closing the year with a record margin, EBITDA margin seen in EMEA. We're very happy that we have proven that existing business can be run at a higher margin. It can— to get significantly higher, one of the levers is the nearshore. The other levers is, as I mentioned, the multilingual component that we will be not only exploring but pushing through 2022.
Most of them have already been answered. The last one is, "Without providing 2023 guidance, do you think you might be able to increase EBITDA margins even further in 2023?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think one of, I don't know if that question comes from the same investor that put that to me on an email not too long ago, and something that I took note to cover at length in our investor conference. The answer is yes. I think some people, and again, I don't know where the mentality of capped returns EBITDA could possibly come from. I have a mentality of, hey, you know, our job is to expand any barrier, perceived or otherwise, to performance.
As I mentioned, you know, the efficiency improvements we're introducing are not, in case somebody had that impression, are not about, "Hey, let's cut costs. Let's do, you know, let's run, work harder, run faster, you know, sell the furniture." Those kind of efficiencies are short-lived and absolutely limited. The efficiency that we've been achieving and deploying, and by the way, I insist there's a lot more that we can do, we have only started, are efficiencies based on doing the work in a better way with better processes, better methods, better technology, using best practices. The variance that we had was significant from the best performing center to the worst performing center. We have reduced those. We still have a long way to go in terms of improvement. That improvement is ongoing, it's recurring, and you can build on top of that.
The improvement that also comes from better contracts, better sales, participating in higher margin markets such as, for example, the U.S., that is also recurring, and because compared to other competitors, other large companies, we have very little exposure to those inherently higher margin markets. We have a lot to go, a lot to improve from that perspective as well. The answer in terms of our capability to continue to improve margins, margin expansion, as well as growth, but particularly margin expansion is, you know, I don't see any limitation in the near future. The only limitation is execution, how quickly can we implement those changes. We have been already doing so. Again, nothing that I'm saying here is something that I'm making up.
Just take a look at what we've done over the last two, three years, and you can extrapolate or make your own conclusions. Anything that I'm telling you is something that we already are delivering. What I'm telling you is that we're not only gonna continue to do that, but we're gonna improve on it. The answer is a categorical yes, we can significantly improve our performance, and particularly in terms of margin and margin expansion.
One last minute one that I see. Why do you think you are winning business in the USA? Is it new bids or is it winning business from competitors?
I'm not sure what the difference is, but the answer is the same. We had very small presence in the U.S., so the vast majority of what we're winning is new customers, new logos. We're expanding in the new areas, in many cases, new segments. I don't know if I announced in this group; we have opened two new centers in the U.S., one in Miramar in Florida, the other one in Salt Lake City. We continue to expand the business and gain in new logos, new sectors and sometimes even new industries.
If there's nothing else, Pablo, he's giving me the sign that we're done here. I would like to thank you all again for participating.
As I mentioned, I always enjoy more the Q&A than the prepared remarks, so, please keep your questions coming. Thank you very much.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.