Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us at Zenvia's Q3 2024 earnings call. I'm Cassio Bobsin, Founder and CEO. Thank you all for being with us today. The highlight of this quarter was the conclusion of the strategic plan we initiated back in 2018, when we decided to evolve from a CPaaS platform to become the most comprehensive customer experience SaaS in Latin America. After a series of acquisitions held before and after IPO aimed at this goal, the official launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud in mid-October is the culmination of this vision. This was a significant milestone in our full commitment to enhancing customer relationships through a practical and easy-to-use platform, full of AI-driven solutions and data analytics to enable brands to create experiences that are personal, engaging, and fluid, while making brands sell more and serve their customers better.
This innovative platform represents Zenvia's next generation of SaaS solutions, embodying the vision of our company outlined six years ago. At the same time, its launch serves as a cornerstone for our CX SaaS strategy for the next five years. The strategy is centered on driving organic growth and enhancing profitability, reducing leverage, pursuing the optimal capital structure, unlocking, and delivering sustainable value to our shareholders. Along with the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud, we also made strides this quarter in streamlining our operations and becoming more efficient, resulting in a notable year-over-year reduction in G&A expenses as a percentage of revenues that has been having a strong impact on our EBITDA, which is the main metric that we look at in terms of measuring our profitability. I'll now hand the call over to Shay to cover our performance in the quarter, and I'll be available for the Q&A.
Hello all, and thanks for joining us today. I would like to start with a snapshot of our performance. We are happy to report solid numbers in both Q3 and nine months of 2024, with double-digit growth in top line and profitability, and a strong expansion of our EBITDA year-over-year as we move to meet our goals for 2024. The results this quarter were impacted by three main factors. First, certain one-off temporary volumes in our CPaaS segment that were opportunistic for us in terms of revenue, cash balance, and EBITDA. The flip side is that this volume comes with lower profitability in percentage terms. But at the end of the day, our goal is to generate EBITDA in reality, not in percentage, reason why we'll continue pursuing opportunities in terms of revenues. That said, we don't expect the same one-off volumes in Q4.
Second, the increase in our SaaS segment comes mainly from SMBs. The segment not only grew double digits on a year-over-year basis, but also on a sequential basis. And we see more and more SMBs adopting our platform, especially with the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud. SMBs are the companies that will drive our growth moving forward, and third, the performance of the enterprise portion of our SaaS segment, in which we continue to see a very competitive environment with new sales below expectations and therefore putting pressure on profitability. The stronger gross profit that we reported, coupled with the strict expense control that is in place in our company, boosted our EBITDA to BRL 41 million in the Q3, growing almost threefold when compared to the same period of last year and reaching the highest quarterly level of the last three years.
Year to date, EBITDA totaled BRL 98 million, up roughly 150% from the same period of last year. And if you look at the last 12 months' EBITDA, it landed at BRL 135 million, which is within our guidance range of BRL 120 million to BRL 140 million. As a reminder, we're talking about the normalized EBITDA that excludes earnings and non-recurring events. Let's now take a closer look at performance per segment. As you can see in this slide, both SaaS and CPaaS kept expanding by double digits in both Q3 and nine months of the period of 2024. CPaaS revenues grew 37% and reached an all-time high of almost BRL 200 million in the quarter, mainly because of these one-time opportunities that I just mentioned in the beginning of my remarks, taking the nine-month revenues to BRL 485 million.
Our SaaS business delivered again an increase of 16% in the quarter compared to the same period of last year, the same rate we registered in the last quarter. This expansion came mainly from the SMBs, which is our growth engine and therefore is expected to gain share in our revenues next year. Sequentially, SaaS went up a solid 12% versus Q2. In the first nine months of the year, our SaaS revenues grew 15% year-over-year. Let's now take a better look at how this expansion has translated into our portfolio mix. As I mentioned in the beginning, we had a much higher participation of CPaaS in the mix of both revenue and gross profit in the periods because of the one-off factors I explained.
As we always discuss here, a higher CPaaS contribution to the revenue mix impacts our margin, but I would like to highlight again that the focus here was on capturing these high volumes in CPaaS that are converted directly into EBITDA, given we don't need additional G&A to generate that revenue. Looking ahead, we have been investing a lot on the integration of the SaaS solution, and we expect to leverage top-line growth with Zenvia Customer Cloud. As we move more and more into it, integrating all the businesses to the new model under Zenvia Customer Cloud, the company becomes mostly a full SaaS model with monthly subscriptions, leveraging its leadership in terms of channels. Here on this slide, we're discussing in more detail the adjusted gross profit and margins of both segments in the quarter.
In this Q3, we recorded BRL 102 million in consolidated adjusted gross profit, basically half from each segment, BRL 50 million in SaaS and BRL 52 million from CPaaS, highlighting the boost from CPaaS of 37% this quarter. But the margins from both segments, as you know, are not similar. We recorded a margin of 58% in SaaS and 26% in CPaaS. While the CPaaS margin remained stable, the SaaS margin went down by 330 basis points year-over-year, mainly from the enterprise impact that I just explained. So the combination of higher CPaaS in the mix with the lower SaaS margin brought our consolidated adjusted gross margin down 230 basis points, landing at 36%. Despite that, when looking in the first nine months of the year, we are still very close to the full-year guidance, as we can see in the next slide.
So looking at the nine-month numbers, we see that we recorded BRL 296 million in consolidated adjusted gross profit, boosted by the BRL 160 million from CPaaS, which went up 28% from the same period last year. The SaaS segment, in turn, contributed BRL 135 million, virtually the same amount from last year. The drop in the SaaS margins in the quarter is explained by the mix of large enterprises with lower margins that I mentioned earlier, but also coupled with the increase in infrastructure costs related to the final phase of the integration of the acquired companies that we have been highlighting since the Q1 of this year. As the CPaaS mix in revenues increased due to the one-off opportunities, consolidated adjusted gross margin for the nine months reached 4.7%, putting us slightly below our guidance for the year.
While management is never happy to see any number below guidance, we are much more focused on how revenues are translated into EBITDA, which is ultimately what will drive us to the leverage balance sheet. So let's discuss now our G&A, which is key to generating EBITDA. We remain laser-focused on keeping costs strictly under control throughout this whole year. We are leveraging our operations as we have been growing the top line by double digits without adding additional G&A, which enabled us to more than double our EBITDA in both periods. In fact, in the year-to-date comparison, we are bringing down our G&A as a result of increased productivity. This led the G&A as a percentage of revenue ratio to decrease to 13% in nine months of 2024, from 17% in nine months of 2023, representing almost 400 basis points drop.
If you look versus the same period in 2022, this is a drop of 540 basis points from the 18.5% ratio we recorded two years ago when we first started our streamlining in our efforts. We are very proud to have been able to pivot the company this way, improving the productivity that is vital for this next phase of growth, as Cassio mentioned in his opening remarks. Moving on to the next slide, another key index that we like to highlight is our EBITDA minus CapEx, which we believe is a crucial metric for assessing our ability to generate cash flow from our core operations after accounting for the necessary R&D in the business. This metric not only highlights our operational efficiency, but also helps you understand how well we are positioning ourselves to leverage, fund future growth, maintain financial flexibility, and reward shareholders.
As you can see in this slide, in the first nine months of last year, when we deducted the CapEx from our EBITDA, we still saw a negative figure, small but negative. Now, when we look at these nine months of 2024, our EBITDA minus CapEx improved BRL 52 million when compared to a year ago, and we see it now positive in almost BRL 50 million. In the last 12 months, EBITDA minus CapEx was almost BRL 75 million. Now, with these improvements in cash generation in mind, let's discuss some updates on our next steps. As we just saw in the previous slide, we expect that our EBITDA will keep increasing at a faster pace than our CapEx, as it has been the case for the last few quarters.
Obviously, having an EBITDA that is more aligned with our capital structure will allow us to increase our investment in client acquisition, triggering an acceleration of organic growth. We have improved our leverage a lot since we resolved EBITDA to positive territory back in late 2022. Putting into numbers, we have reduced our net debt to EBITDA from that period from over 10x to 2.2x at the end of September 2024. We believe that from the second semester of 2025 on, our cash generation will be more aligned with our capital structure. Until then, we'll continue to use working capital tools as well as seeking more flexible terms in existing loans. On the long-term front, we have already initiated our expansion outside Brazil. While it is still in the early stages, we expect to see a positive impact to our 2025 results.
To finalize, as we approach the end of the year, we are reiterating our guidance for 2024. Our tactics and focus have been and will continue to be on growing organically and generating EBITDA to keep the leverage in the company. Once again, we appreciate your continued trust as we move ahead. We are committed to building a profitable and exciting future for Zenvia. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks and are ready to take your questions.
We will now begin the Q&A session. Once again, for this Q&A session, we ask you to write down your question via the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Your name will then be announced, and you'll be able to ask your question live. At this point, a request to activate a microphone will appear on your screen. If you prefer not to open your microphone live, please write down "No microphone" at the end of your question, and our operator will read your question aloud. Our first question comes from Ramon Henriques Fonseca, Analyst at Sell-side UBS. Ramon, we are now opening your audio so that you can ask your question live. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Two from my side. First, could you please comment on how you are seeing competition in the SaaS segment, especially in large enterprises? And then we have seen an increase in total active customers in the quarter. How much of the net additions do you attribute to the launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud, please? Thank you.
Thank you for your question, Ramon. So starting at the beginning of the question about large enterprises and competition, we launched Zenvia Customer Cloud mainly focused on SMBs. Although we already have customers that are enterprise customers adopting our platform, we're still in the early days of that to understand how impactful will be adoption for large enterprises. But as we move with the adoption of Zenvia Customer Cloud, we see that the value proposition we're bringing to the market is quite unique by connecting the different points on the customer journey. And that for SMBs, it makes these be the most important solution for customer relationships that these companies are using. And we are seeing that enterprises are also benefiting of that. It's too early to understand how impactful that will be, but we are very excited on these first large customers adopting the platform.
Looking at the total active customers in the quarter, yes, we're having an increase, mainly because we're focusing on Zenvia Customer Cloud, as I mentioned, SMBs, and we're starting to get very good traction for both new customers and heavier adoption of current customers. That goes into the last part of our question, which is about the cross-selling. We are seeing that these customers, these cohorts that are already using Zenvia Customer Cloud, they have around 10x a higher cross-sell comparing to what we had before. Because before, we had to sell each of the second product that the customer would adopt would be like a new purchase from Zenvia. But with Zenvia Customer Cloud, we eliminated all the bureaucracy on adopting these other products. So they are a click away from adoption.
So that we're having 10x-12x the adoption of the cross-selling that we had before. And this is already starting to impact overall numbers. We're in the migration phase from customers of our former products, the standalone products, to Customer Cloud. It's still in the first waves of migration. And we're seeing that these customers, especially the ones that come from pure CPaaS, that goes to the third part of our questions. As we migrate customers from pure channel usage, from pure CPaaS usage to Zenvia Customer Cloud, they start using software in a couple of days because they see the benefit of using not just the channel, but all the software they're able to provide for them for marketing, for sales, for customer service, and so forth and so on. So that goes into the slight decrease in CPaaS customer base.
We're having a migration of these customers from being like pure channel customers to software customers. And that kind of addressed the whole strategy of Zenvia coming from a CPaaS and turning into a SaaS company. And Zenvia Customer Cloud is what's making all these happen in very practical terms. That's why we're excited for the next quarters to have more impactful numbers overall of these both new customers and migrated customers using this new platform.
Very clear. Thank you very much.
Let me pick some questions here from the webcast. And then it's an extension of what Cassio was just said. Can you share a little more details around Zenvia Customer Cloud? How is the rollout going? Anything you can share on a qualitative basis? And also, if there are any numbers that you can share at this stage, I'll just be upfront here and say that we can share very little in terms of numbers as it's in very early stages. And any number we share now can be polluted by being early stages. But I guess on a qualitative basis, Cassio can help you understand where we are and how we see the evolution on these early stages of the Zenvia Customer Cloud.
Sure. I mean, thanks for the question. We had a pre-launch of Zenvia Customer Cloud in March. And because we had just two products being combined into this new solution, and we had a very interesting rollout on this initial phase in March that helped us to fine-tune the product and prepare for the next phases. We launched in October officially Zenvia Customer Cloud with another of our products and then completing more parts of the customer journey. In practical terms, we had marketing campaigns in the first phase and the sales process for sales reps to engage with customers on digital channels. We had that in pre-launch in March. And then during I'll say around July, we launched the GenAI chatbot feature also in a pre-launch. And now in October, we launched two very important features. One is for ads optimization.
Now we entered the ads portion of the journey and helping companies to optimize their ad spending by understanding which customers convert the best, and we also launched what we call SERV, which is a very important part of Movidesk. The company that we acquired in 2022 is now part of Zenvia Customer Cloud. That was part of the launch in October, so now we have all these features from ads to marketing campaigns to sales processes to chatbot automation to customer support with ticket controls and automation, all already available for our Zenvia Customer Cloud customers. That's why we're migrating customers from these former products into this new unified solution.
And now, roadmap we expect to have in the next couple of months also the more data-driven features and AI-driven features that would use all this data that are being accumulated from all these different parts of the journey and the data that comes from the company's own systems that can combine to create more actionable insights that will help customers to nurture their relationship with their end customers. That's when we expect to complete the deployment of Zenvia Customer Cloud. And from there, we're going to evolve into agents that are going to help our customers to automate not only customer interactions, but also different processes such as churn prevention, cross-selling, ads optimization, and multiple features that we're working on to deploy and will be a very unique offering for the market. So that's a bit of a review of what we're working on and we are already launching.
So let me keep going here. And I think Caio can answer this first part, and then I'll take the second part. So Q3 revenues were impacted by non-recurring, and Q4 revenues usually have some seasonality. That said, how should we think of the quarter-over-quarter path for CPaaS, and what about SaaS?
Okay, so regarding CPaaS, we can expect revenue in Q4 is slightly below what we had in Q3. As you said, we have another recurring volumes regarding CPaaS. So even though we have seasonality in Q4, we expect a slightly below revenue when we compare with Q3. Regarding SaaS, we're still in the path of growth. We expect the same or a little bit better growth than we had in Q3. So the path for SaaS is the same that we've seen all of the year with growth. That's it.
Yeah, and the second part, I'll take this one. Given the volumes we're having in CPaaS, would it be fair to assume you are tracking ahead of guidance? No, I think that we are tracking within guidance for all the metrics. We are, again, as Caio just mentioned, there's some volatility on the CPaaS business in terms of revenues, which we don't expect to repeat in Q4. Although there is a seasonality, it's not going to be as strong as Q3. So we are comfortable at this point to reiterate the 2024 guidance that we have.
Again, if you have a question, please use the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to write it down, and we open your microphone live. If you prefer not to open your microphone, please write down no microphone at the end of a question. Our operator will read your question for you.
Question here for Cassio. How deep is AI embedded in the products? Are you able to charge more for having AI capabilities?
Sure. Awesome question, so we already have, I would say, about six or seven different features that are pure AI features. They go from copiloting for sales improvement, copiloting for customer support improvement, complete full automation of customer experiences. We have analysis of past interactions with customers to understand their overall perception of the brand and the relationship. We have AI being used for marketing campaigns and optimization. And that's the ones I could remember. And we're working on several other features because it's very, very useful. It's very practical to use AI embedded in the product. And the way that we developed this model for Zenvia Customer Cloud is that we are able to capture that by volumes on customer interactions.
And that's how we expect in the near future to long-term monetize all these features, not by charging tokens, because we understand at some point it's going to become commodity. But the results of that, which is how you are able to create better experiences for customers using our software, and that is powered by AI, but not charged by the same way that these AI platforms, generally speaking, adopt, which is token-based, because we are not just providing an LLM engine. We're providing a complete AI solution that uses data, that uses several other features on the product along with AI.
Another one here. Given the expenses reduction you've been delivering, do you think at some point it could potentially impact the company's future revenue growth?
Not at all. We come from a series of acquisitions, and it's pretty normal that as we find synergies, we're able to optimize our structure. And as we are combining all our products into Zenvia Customer Cloud, we're also optimizing the way we sell, the way we serve our customers. And that brings lots of efficiencies that can result in us keeping a similar organizational structure while at the same time we scale revenues because we're moving from a less optimized operation from the combination of acquired companies into a unified way of operating that helps us scale and avoid having to employ more people to do each part of the process as we get the benefits of integrating all the systems and the processes and the way we interact and serve our customers.
Yeah. And I'll just add on what Cassio said. We've been doing this. We've been streamlining our operations since the second half of 2022. So it's not something that came out of the blue and we are doing at once. So we've been planning this and we've been adjusting the operations over time. And as Cassio mentioned, as we have simpler products and simpler processes, that would naturally lead to cost reduction. So we are very comfortable in the way that we've been doing this in waves. You had a net income positive in the quarter. Can we expect more in the next quarter or next year? Obviously, all we do is seeking to deliver value to shareholders. And delivering value to shareholders, we'll go through P&L, right? So generating net income is something that we'll always seek.
Specifically this quarter, it's important to highlight that we had a one-off positive impact in finance income from a mark-to-market of the derivative that we have, but even excluding that, we would have had positive net income of about BRL 8 million, and that is a reflection of the good results and the positive EBITDA and the healthy results that we delivered, right, so obviously, we expect that as results improve, that they will translate into net income on the P&L, but also in EBITDA being converted into cash to help the leverage in balance sheet, so it's on us to continue delivering good results that will translate into both P&L and cash flow. Can you elaborate about guidance for 2025 in terms of free cash flow of EBITDA? Unfortunately, no. At this point, we are still looking into 2024.
We still have at least a month, right, Cassio, ahead of us to continue delivering results so although we are already planning for 2025, we are still much focused on continuing delivering in 2024 and guidance for 2025 most likely at some point early next year. Which stock price would be the minimum for Zenvia with regards to use the shelf offering? We don't have a specific share price. The offering for us is viewed as an opportunistic move, so it's there. If share price and cash flow are aligned, it will make sense for us to execute on the shelf and we have some limitations on how we can disclose prices and volumes but what I can tell is that it's an opportunistic move, and if share price and cash flow are aligned, we'll execute on the shelf. I think we are done here on the web.
I don't know if there are any further questions on the phone. Yes, that's it.
This concludes our Q&A session. I would like to turn the conference back to Mr. Cassio Bobsin for his closing remarks.
Thank you very much for all of you guys here. We're very, very excited with the results of this quarter, especially on what we're building for the future. It's an amazing experience having Zenvia Customer Cloud performing so well, and we see the trends and the numbers, and we expect them to get even better in the next couple of quarters, so see you guys next time.