Anima Holding SA

BOVESPA:ANIM3

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Marina Gelman, executive]

So welcome everyone to one more earnings results presentation for the first quarter 2022. We're very happy to be here, exercising, in practice, this hybrid feature, the 4 of us together, together, again, wearing no masks and at the same time having you all in a practical and efficient way, everybody safe and being able to be wherever you like to attend our call. So it is a great pleasure. Let's remind you that here, if you wish to listen to English [Operator Instructions] So we have Marcelo Bueno, our Founder and CEO; André Tavaras, our CFO; myself, Marina Gelman, IR Director; Eduardo, who everybody knows, Eduardo Garcia, who is our IR Manager.

And with this, I once again welcome you all and turn it over to Marcelo. Marcelo, it's up to you.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Marina, André, Edu. It is a great honor to be here. I'd like to thank the IT people that is making this hybrid experience feasible. We should walk our talk. We're walking technology, as Marina so says, or sustain is not -- it's virtual, in person how much technology we're going to use in this call. In this call, we're bringing in yet another innovation, which is having questions with more interaction, with more synchronous education. Eduction will be increasingly synchronous/asynchronous. So this is thanks to the choice that we made 6 years ago, approximately, for hybrid education. I can say that it is inspired in other sectors. So people were using omnichannel.

So we went through the pandemic, and we are here very happy to be an example in this call, but also for having returned to our activities with intensive on-campus from the 7th on March. With the better situation of COVID, we managed to have in-person activities at all our units, so we have more innovation, greater use of technology for those who wish to have it, and having students in the center of our attention and letting them doing that.

I had to actually share this message with you. Anima is different. We are different. We make this hybrid choice in everything we do, including our earnings conference call. So we have hundreds of investors, analysts, shareholders and partners to experience this quite different technology. It's important to share this message.

Moving to the results presentation of our first quarter. First, I'd like to share 3 important messages. First of all, the increase in our ticket. Education has no price, it has value. This is important for our discipline to put our ticket to where our brands deserve. Second, the continuous evolution of our margins, increase of our revenue, 14 quarters -- consecutive quarters that we have had a growth in margin and revenue. This shows discipline in execution. It's important to share this message with you as well. So we can see the student base growing to 333,000 students. Net revenue in our quarter, BRL 902.4 million. Net income, BRL 51 million. Free cash generation, very important, 73% of our EBITDA, BRL 247.5 million; EBITDA of BRL 339.1 million. And so we are capturing BRL 93.3 million in intake, and that shows -- that is quite important of what I said.

And with respect the past 3 months, main transactions of higher education, too, were of Anima transformational relationship with the acquisition of the assets of Laureate Brazil in a longer period I mentioned. So it shows that we are through the integration process. So that put us at another level, something we had always dreamed of doing. So we have our expansion area that is both organic and inorganic. We've always sustained our vision is of greater value generation in higher education in Brazil. So we made this transaction, and we had the honor of making a strategic alliance. We've chosen our partner, the best partner in health, greatest ecosystem in health care, which is DNA Capital that made a strategic investment in our medical vertical, which is Inspirali.

So I'll turn over to Eduardo Garcia, who is going to make a presentation. Just let me remind you that we had in this quarter, the rating that has been quite high, at the moment that the macroeconomic situation is so challenging, the risk has increased, Anima once again showing its difference with a higher rating. Congratulations to all. It's a reason for great pride.

[Eduardo Garcia, executive]

So let me talk to you about our operating performance. Good morning, everyone. Our first vision, we've shown in the first quarter 2022, an increase of the student base of approximately 145%, very much explained by the acquisitions that we had in 2021 that would have been quite relevant. We show our distance learning and our new growth path representing 24% of the base with 80.1 students thousand -- 80,100 students. This is quite important in terms of our consolidation.

Another important point that we break here for our results is dropout. Dropout moved from 7% in the first quarter 2021 to 12.1%, considering all units. If I could only compare the integrated units, all of those before the acquisitions of the other units acquired in 2021, we would have a drop of 7% to 10%. The greatest reasons for dropout related to systemic integration we had from December to January. This drops -- this creates some kind of friction. It was possible it was impacting the reenrollment.

Second point is related to what we have been talking about with all investor debt in 2021, because it is a pandemic year, we actually were more lenient in terms of fines and interest. So we, in 2022, we get back to normality. We actually reduce the level of discounts. And second point, the units that we had from the acquisitions of last year, they had a level of dropout that was a bit higher, but actually, our bad debt was a bit better. So this is a consolidated vision in terms of dropout when we analyze all the results and what happened.

Moving to the average ticket, what we can see, which is quite important, something we have been highlighting that we have been differentiating ourselves and positioning ourselves in terms of ticket according to the quality we believe we implement to our students. And this represents directly the transfer of ticket. If we compare 2021 to 2022, only the integrated units, we managed to have a transfer of 17.3% in our ticket, very much explained by the increase of the relevance of medical programs and also the way we monitor and control all results, in which we allow the visualization of the impact of real increase that took place in all courses.

When I include the acquisition, the acquired units in June 2021, we see a ticket represent higher than inflation. But as we have been said, this year, we had an impact of carryover of the basis decision of the past 2 years of the units that have been acquired. They were actually having a lower ticket. This would pressure the ticket this quarter, but with our positioning and our [ cavalry ] over and intake, we had an increase in the ticket still above inflation.

We have been talking a lot about this in our last interaction and would like to reinforce the importance to us of this number. The ticket of all undergrad on-campus, well, not considering distance lasting -- distant learning that has a different dynamic in terms of volume, the relevance to this number to us, Marcelo, even with this trend that you have explained in the units be integrated and a certain reduction, how much it's been important to us to present this number, growth of 12% of inflation in a year which we had very high inflation rates, showing clearly how we have been having very good results from our work of repositioning our sales, putting our pricing point of the brands of the integrated units and units in integration being integrated at a place in which we believe is more cohesive to the quality and tradition and history of all our brands.

I'd just like to complement a trend that it's quite interesting that we are now living with the integrated brand, something very similar to what we lived, with what we had with the integrated brands in 2017, 2018 and 2019. How much prepared we are, we see the results, 70% of integrated units to reposition ourselves because we've also had -- in 2016, '17, we had a strategy that was similar, and it was a time that we create tools and instruments to deal with the repositioning of the ticket. It happens, how interesting it is that we are now living the same wave, looking at the integrated units with all our internal learnings that have been matured, perfect.

To conclude, the ticket -- bringing ticket of distance learning to with level 202 level, third quarter, as I said, this has explained the compared to the third quarter, this is a strategy we had. And this actually is related to the process of using the brand as a pilot of the integrated units as we see and we're going to expand this in a more effective way.

Moving to intake, the great highlight that we have here to you in addition to the increase in the ticket from 17.3% of the integrated units, when I look at the intake, I see an increase of students at 13.3% compared to the same period last year. So we can have an appropriate dynamic to attract students differentiating ourselves because of our quality. The other pathway would be exploring that has a significant number is the distance learning or that we had 27,000 students first quarter 2022, and acquisitions that we had in June, the assets of Laureate Brazil. We see getting to the pricing point that is appropriate, as André has just mentioned, getting to a point in which the intake base is a bit more pressured, but the ticket comes in a solid way, and we managed to get better net revenue, better point in the midterm.

What is important here? We have 2 very important messages. First, we should have -- we have been different and showing that what matters is revenue. So we have to find the right spot between volume and ticket and looking towards the healthy and best revenue for our company. This is the message and takeaway message for all of you. We see what's been happening, what Marina mentioned. So it's a culture that takes longer to be broken down.

The second important message is that we are -- I mentioned this to our Board of Directors, we are here to continue the digital business of Laureate to keep it growing, and in parallel, we're going to test the hypothesis that Laureate has always sustained, that there is another market. The market would not cannibalize our core or hybrid learning with on campus or in person.

So as you said, we are carrying out pilots in our brands, and we realize there is actually a great avenue to be explored that Anima would not be exploring, a pathway of access with conditions of integrated quality as we like being different also in this market. So these 2 messages that we have to make them very clear, absolutely. And to conclude, intake with intake of 93,000 students in the first quarter of 2022.

Moving to another important factor for Anima, though we don't have novelties regarding micro data, is academic quality. We'd like to highlight the chart on the right-hand side on concept, of course. We bring information that since 2018, we launched 375 new courses in the E2A. We've been having intake with synergies and improving quality. 94% of these courses have received grades 4 and 5 from our education ministry. We have consolidated with the hybrid model, bringing innovation to the education segment.

And I'd like to turn over to André to talk about the financial performance.

At our turn, we implemented E2A, all new entrants and all integrated units, especially Potiguar, [ adfacs actually and IND ] Morumbi. And now we're going to have the rollout of the other units.

[André Tavares, executive]

Perfect. Thank you, Edu, for presenting the main items of operating performance. I'm going to make a few comments on the financial performance. Looking at our net revenue breakdown or composition, we see greater representativeness, be it from Inspirali and digital learning or distance learning has been [ likely ] getting close to practically 30% of our net revenue. Distance learning exceeding 5% in lifelong learning, learning, reaching close to 4.5% -- close to 5%. That's creating a distribution that is increasingly homogenous of our net revenue, and the growth is quite significant. Be it in terms of net revenue, where we reached over BRL 900 million of net revenue in the first quarter; be it in gross profit, where we reached almost BRL 650 million -- reaching BRL 650 million in gross profit; and operating result, and we get this mark of BRL 440 million in this first quarter.

On the next slide, we see the breakdown of the 3 blocks. And basically, we have base block, acquisitions and lifelong learning as you are used to following in the breakdown of our results of base and acquisition blocks as something we always said would happen, and it's where we want to head to, right, Marina? We have quite similar numbers, quite similar numbers with the exception of growth. Acquisitions, obviously, since the bases are different, we have very strong growth. We look at net revenue of the base block also growing in this quarter almost 4%, although we know that there are difficulties because of the very maturity of markets and institutions that make up this base block.

We have with this growth an expansion of the growth margin that has been growing efficiency gains of E2A, lower costs related to intensive use of technology and acquisitions, and at an operating margin that is even higher in the acquisition block. Representativeness of medical schools is higher than the base block, a bit higher than the base block, reaching an operating margin of practically 50%. Revenue of almost BRL 600 million, operating result of practically BRL 300 million. So the blocks are at levels that are quite similar. That's where we have been headed to. So this is the goals. We broke down into blocks that had different prices, but they are quite similar now.

On the next slide, we can see the growth of lifelong learning. And in this quarter, we had quite significant growth in graduate studies, both on-campus and distance learning, reminding you that this is not ostensive. So it contributed quite strongly to the expansion of operating margin, also reaching very close to 47%, very close to the base block and the acquisition block, which makes us very happy and even more confident in this growth strategy of this block of our businesses.

On the next slide, we're going to look at -- we also see extremely significant growth of distant learning when compared to its own base. You've seen it accounts for over 5% of revenue, but accounts for 24% of total number of students, having the student base having grown over 50%, quite relevant scale in the quarter reached almost BRL 50 million in revenue, operating result of BRL 11 million, an operating margin of almost 24%. And as we own here now, the -- as business learning gains scale, the expansion of margin is also very significant. As Marcelo mentioned, we see digital learning as a great opportunity. So we're learning a lot with distant learning, and it actually is a new growth pathway to our whole Anima ecosystem.

As I've mentioned, we have Eduardo [indiscernible], we have Eduardo also lead the team and help us make this decision that we have another market. And it is also important to say that we are already working on digital well, which is our results with qualitative gains and also significant gains. So this is important to be mentioned. So this is a very interesting agenda. We're very excited about it.

On our next slide, we see the growth of Inspirali. Inspirali is a very significant business within our Anima ecosystem. In the first quarter, we celebrated the completion, not the end. The closing was actually the beginning of our relationship, the more than fruitful, more than productive with our DNA Capital partners. So at Inspirali, we were very pleased to close this deal on the 31st of March, and all the effects are featuring here in our financial statements. So we have a long-term process in the board. We have members -- independent members that are quite significant and quite important. Inspirali's [ earned a ] reason for our pride, and it's a very important moment for education in Brazil.

So at Inspirali, we had a student-based model over 122%. We reached almost BRL 270 million in revenue, organic CAGR, C-A-G-R, of 15%. And if we consider the acquisition, we reached almost 90% growth -- yearly growth compound in the past 4 years, reaching an operating margin 64%, another school beginning of operations of another medical school of UniFG Brumado . Special greetings from Brumado, UniFG, it's a beautiful school. We have the management there, CEO, all wonderful team, greetings to all of you, totally focused on Inspirali, considering the new pathways. So we've had over another 50 seats with our UniFG at Brumado.

So on the next slide, we can see what is projected in terms of student base and seats at Inspirali. They reflect the compound annual growth rate. So we can -- so the people are celebrating at Brumado. Greetings to Mr. [ Zeloso ], Chief Medical Officer of Inspirali.

As to synergies, we give continuity to the integration process, work of our transformation and integration office, and we have a continuity in this process of capturing synergy. Just to recall, we had a projection of an increment of EBITDA in year 5, post integration and acquisition of Laureate, BRL 350 million, and we have captured in the past 10 months, we've captured BRL 125 million. If we calculate how much the BRL 125 million would represent on a yearly basis in terms of recurrence, we reach a level that is higher to BRL 200 million.

We may -- we had the M&A on the 6th of May 2003. We have been having M&A operations, for our overall comment, look at this, we feel they are a trivial thing. It's important to stress this. We moved from December to January from 19 systems to 6. This generates pain noise. This is a very important movement. Many schools of Laureate had their own academic systems. So there were many systems. We simplified the whole structures from 19 to 6. This is not trivial to implement E2A, new entrants, this is not trivial. I've talked about real life implementation for all the distance learning students replacing market level, adding value in terms of quality for students. This is something that we have to put color and life to this that has been supported by our Board. It generates results.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Sorry. I just wanted to add to what you're saying, we know what it is to live an integration. This is our history from day 1. We know that to making different, that moving away from the comfort zone hurt a touch, we know that sometimes people don't feel the pain is very nice. But our confidence is to look at our academic quality indicators to see that there is no situation in our history where academic indices have not improved. We bought institutions of very high quality. We had the pleasure of integrating [indiscernible], UniCuritiba, it's an honor to have them with us. We are very privileged to have integrated the assets we have integrated that did not come at a poor quality situation, much on the contrary. What has happened, we've improved the quality. It is not trivial for students and professors to have the -- having the change in status, but knowing that the result in 100% of cases is of improvement because we are here to transform the country. We don't have any other goals, and it feels -- makes us feel reassured that we get there at all times.

[André Tavares, executive]

Fundamental, Marina. We also have the board of our -- we have the support of our Board and everyone, all the teams. They are the base. They have actually supported the turnarounds, the pains and the delights of integrations. And actually, I wanted -- I had a point about making this statement and reminding everyone that despite the decision of our -- despite having been extremely challenging and demanding, it is a decision that is fundamental to implement the economic model, E2A, and then move on, on this line of quality improvement as you've mentioned and also fundamental, Marcelo to reap additional synergies benefits so that we can get to the BRL 350 million that we pointed out, initially very well observed and mentioned by both of you.

On the next slide, all of this is seen as an EBITDA growth of 143%, most importantly than this number, the 3.5 point growth of our margin from 139 to -- from 34% to 37% and getting to an EBITDA of almost BRL 340 million.

On the next slide, we see we have been making great efforts internally giving privilege to our cash generation. We'll talk about it in a while. We have been making great efforts in terms of priority -- prioritization of choice -- of choosing our CapEx, making CapEx to have high return rate. This number shows this quite a lot. We moved from BRL 38 million of CapEx in the first quarter last year, accounting for 9% -- 9.2% of our revenue to BRL 43 million, which accounts for 4.8%, practically, in relative terms, practically half of what we had last year. Of course, this has an important scale gain. In the combined operation, we also have been making great efforts to prioritize the most important activities in our transformation process of digital transformation because it generates new bases and gains of scale, a new service render. We are extremely committed to reaching a CapEx level, especially when cash generation is so important to our company, to reaching a CapEx that has high return rate.

Getting close to the end, we reinstate how much this execution ability has reflected into a strong generation of cash we get to operating cash generation. Apologies, the free cash generation after working capital, the CapEx, of BRL 247 million, showing high conversion of EBITDA into cash of 73%. We've also had the reflects of perfection of our activities of investment and funding with the investment of BRL 1 billion Inspirali, getting to the end of the quarter with a cash position of BRL 1.4 billion.

Next slide, I believe, is the last one of our presentation. With these numbers, we have a leverage rate of 3.4x. We consider the past 12 months pro forma, reminding you of what we said in the beginning. This move has actually been a important part of our rating improvement, showing how different we are, how Anima is different. At a time when it is rare for you to see a Brazilian company to have a better rating, Anima managed -- we all together managed to get yet this other accomplishment. And with the positive outlook, even better rating, we ended with a net debt of BRL 2.5 billion. And this leverage rate, though deleveraging, although it's a leverage that -- well, we never lost confidence of this ability of deleveraging that reassures us, but we're not yet comfortable. We're still paying attention and committed and prioritizing the deleveraging agenda, be it by operating margins and also by divestitures underway because we don't see in the macroeconomic scenario of our country, we do not see a horizon that is close a reduction of the interest range. So we're extremely committed.

And now I'll turn over to Marcelo. Thank you for being with us during the slide presentation, and I turn over to Marcelo for the final remarks so that we can move on to our Q&A session.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you, André. I think it's important to have this final point. I'd reinforce that last week, we had a conference in New York. And on Saturday, I was talking to Botafogo, our CFO at Inspirali. So I was talking -- I think it's important for us to look at the --- watched the film on the 13th November 2019. We announced first in Curitiba. And then as Marina said, when in Curitiba and we saw we leveraged the company at a moment of great challenges, and we opened 2020 January with a follow-on and putting the company in healthy levels again. Next, we had pandemic. We had the great honor and success in the transformational transaction of Laureate to honor, but also courage, right, Marcelo, and that's an important moment of a transaction that had a strategy that was specific and within the strategy.

Yes, we had 100% cash operation. We had the support of great Brazilian banks. We had [ the present ] in December 2020. We had another follow-on. And next, we moved towards a clear agenda of deleveraging. And as we mentioned here, we've completed this strategic move of DNA Capital that has brought in important funds to our unit Inspirali and it's following soon. We have this concern. It's a clear agenda within our priorities of the company, the management and I as CEO. This is a very important agenda, which is deleveraging the company, putting it at levels that we can be reassured.

And with this, at this stage I'd like to thank everyone. Thanks for this important moment of a hybrid in-person experience directly from Anima at Vila Madalena. I suggest you come and visit us.

And with this, I will open for the Q&A session.

[Operator]

Thank you, Marcelo. Now we're going to ask [ Mattios ] for his support, who's hiding in the room with us. Everybody knows Mattios. Mattios, let's start with somewhere and the order of raising hands. Thank you, somewhere always with us and always honoring us, Mattios is going to open the audio for you to ask your question.

[Samuel Alves, analyst]

I have some questions about the same topic, on cost base. You've mentioned on the release that the gross margin improvement has been led by 4 factors in terms of expenses ramp up of the academic model, growth of the segments with greater margins, readjustments of the wages of the faculty, and great scale gains. The question was more to which of these factors -- which factors have been more important in this quarter? If you imagine that the effect of the wage increase of the faculty that has not happened in the first quarter, it should follow inflation for the rest of the year. This is it?

[André Tavares, executive]

Samuel, thank you for your question. Well, Samuel, actually, we cannot break down the effects of these 4 items that you've mentioned so well with the attentive reading of our release. I'd like to say that we can give a main highlight to E2A, the implementation of the academic model and the scale gains deriving from the new operations. E2A is a model that adapts very well to scale gains and adapts very well to your having an ability of integrating different curricular of different schools. I believe -- I'd say all of them are very important. Not -- one is not more representative of the area, and the gains deriving from the implementation of E2A along with the scale gain represents certainly the most important part.

With regards to collective bargaining, they are being agreed on and now in mid-May, June. And perhaps it's a bit early to talk before we end our negotiations, but the pace we see in our negotiations is a pace that is quite respectful and respectful. So we do not work on any scenario in which we have readjustments that will be above inflation. The scenario still will be a readjustment following inflation or even a bit below, okay?

[Operator]

The next one we have, with raised hands, [ Luca Martinzini ] from Itau BBI.

[Unknown Analyst]

[indiscernible] have led to this increase?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Okay, [ Luca ], thank you for your question. I'd say that we are at a time which -- perhaps we are at a time of which bad debt is highest, the highest, that's reached its high point. I don't see any sign of increase in bad debt because we have a combination of 2 factors, the factors of adopting a methodology that is more -- that is stricter than what we had previously, a methodology that we've adopted in the integration units. However, along with the methodology, we've implemented a model of delinquency management in the integration units that were much more successful than what we used to have in the integrated units. So I'd say that we're going through this process of change and integration. And then as we changed the methodology, this has a direct impact to the numbers, but the management model yields results in a slower way. It yields results as we actually implement all the processes and systems and practices that were more common in the units and integration. I'd say that our expectation here is that were this be implemented, we will see actually an improvement along the year of those bad debt.

[Operator]

Our next person that has raised a hand is Leandro Bastos from Citibank -- from Citi.

[Leandro Bastos, analyst]

I have 2 questions on my side. First, I'd like to go into dropout topics. You talked about the reasons of unifying criteria, stricter policy after the years of the pandemic. I'd like to understand whether this is a new level we should think from now on, or if you have a one-off because of this change. If you could comment on the direction of this line, this will help. Second question, I'd just like to get an update in terms of the divestiture, the environment in terms of negotiation of markets today. My side, this is what I heard.

[André Tavares, executive]

Okay. I'm going to talk about the first question, Leandro. Can you talk about the second, Marcelo?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Sure.

[André Tavares, executive]

Leandro, thank you for your questions. As to dropout rate, we opened dropout rate from integrated units and units being integrated. As we calculate revenue, we try to get to the optimum price balancing dropout and bad debt. We are at the beginning of this journey, I would say. You're seeing that the units being integrated have higher dropout in the integrated units, and we are trying to optimize this trade-off. So I believe that when we look at the dropout of integrated units, the consolidated dropout rate, we have the explanation or even seeing a slight improvement because the integrating units should migrate to the number that were presented today in the integrated units. The units in integration had a number that were above 12%, integrating is higher consolidated above 12% and integrated above 10%. And we should see actually a migration of the consolidated number to a number that would be closer to the integrated units. I'd say that this is a more recurrent base, right, Leandro?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

And the agenda of the divestiture or disinvestment. As we've mentioned here, we made a presentation that it was transformational to venture with [ FDIC ] at 2%. The interest rates briefly moved from 2% to 13%. This is not trivial. And we have to be paying attention to this. We've been receiving this impact in our pocket. Actually, this is a priority to the company, not only are we going to leverage the company generating cash and making a healthy operation to generate cash and paying the debt. However, with this scenario that nobody was expecting it to be so aggressive as part of our management intensify investments so that we can lower this exposure faster. This is a priority. We have made some moves, but we have others on our agenda as priority to us. This is the main message I'd like to share with you.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Lucas Nagano from Morgan Stanley.

[Lucas Nagano, analyst]

[Indiscernible] I'd like to understand the [indiscernible] challenges and results and what expectations you have [indiscernible]. Second question is regarding the integrating [indiscernible] if you can give us color on [indiscernible] Laureate, you mentioned pressure regarding ticket generation [indiscernible] possibility. And what about re-enrollment [indiscernible] considering current inflation rates. So do you attribute or have the increases of the dropout rate to this rate of reenrollment?

[André Tavares, executive]

Thank you, Lucas, for your questions. I can talk about the units and integration. Marcelo can talk about distance learning units at traditional and the pilot project we carried out. No doubt, the units in integration, as we've mentioned here, our idea, our priority was to set the pricing point at the brands at a place we believe is the correct place for them in terms of the market. And this goal has been fully attained. You've seen that we've grown 17% of our ticket in integrated brands, when we put those of integration, consolidated, we had a growth of 12%. This, no doubt, brought greater pressure to intake because we are on this journey of changing systems, where we are on this journey changing the mindset of our commercial team. This actually put pressure on the volume.

And we actually have a certain difficulty of making comparisons because the level of analysis systems of the previous year were not into the Anima system. So it is somewhat difficult to make a comparison of a precise number. But what we know is that there is a certain pressure on the volume, but we are very much -- very comfortable that we are on the path of attaining the optimum point that maximizes revenue between volume and ticket and, especially at a time in which we have the return of macroeconomic activity that is stronger. And we know this has great impact to the volume. We will have our pricing points of those units being integrated at the right spot, being able to leverage our revenue of those units even more so. So we are quite comfortable with this possible and momentary pressure to the volume, but seeing the trajectory of revenue in a very positive way. So this is a cultural change.

Well, this is normal, is normal in a sales project to be privileged to the volume. So we broke this logic. This is the [ kind of lows ] not trivial. We have systems integration, as I've mentioned, from 19 to 6 systems. We had a presentation of the academic model. All of this together led to this process to be even more challenging. But well, the levels are fantastic. In the Northeast of Brazil, their brands are fantastic in the Northeast of Brazil. So perhaps you don't know, various marketplaces in the Northeast many brands are private, they are -- have more recognized than the federal universities, many of those markets. And they are now part of our system of Anima. Doesn't make anything for those brands to -- so there is no sense in anyone going to war in terms of price. This applies to all units of education. So everybody loses if there is a price war. With these strong brands, we should not be different. So it's very important to have this specific intake mentioned regarding our brands.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Regarding the second question on business learning, digital learning. As I've mentioned and Marina also mentioned, that we are [ manditorized ] by our Board to keep on working on our digital experience and making this agenda being fulfilled to power. So that is the hypothesis Laureate uses using its brands, unlike other players, and also other players have a national brand. If we use regional brands because higher education in Brazil is regional, we would meet that another market that was not being met by Anima before. And we've been testing it and practically completed the test so that we can move forward in this sense. And one of the important tests has been BPs that we've used to integrate the brands, and you see with the DL portfolio that has not cannibalized the traditional practices, hybrid education previously called on-campus or in-person, that we've proven this at this moment, very important now. And now improving the product so that we can have a product that actually makes us feel proud considering the Anima brand.

Lucas, I don't know if you're happy.

[Lucas Nagano, analyst]

If I could just understand better the reenrollment process at the Laureate units this year?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

There has not been any different number from what we are already observed at the integrated units, again, the historical Laureate units. We have great difficulty the comparative difference because there were different methodologies of calculation. When we compare to the integrated units, the numbers have been quite similar. There's been a systems changes there occur when we change systems, and then we correct these things then and [indiscernible] ahead.

This was the last hand raised. I'd like to thank everyone for the almost 200 people that have followed the call with us, saying it's a huge privilege to be once again together that we do not have to be distant anymore, that we can be together. Our students, our professors can be together when they so wish at the convenience of each one. This is joystick we have been talking about so much. It was so difficult to explain what it was. This is here happening. It's become a reality faster than everybody imagined. Thank you very much, indeed. Thank you, Edu, for the partnership. Eduardo has been actually helping a lot of people. Those that sent the questions on the chat, we're going to answer them directly. Most of them, there are 2 things on the Q&A that André has mentioned and the other questions that have been asked.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

I like to reinstate Marcelo's invitation. To get to know Learning Village, well, you make an appointment with us. It's very interesting what happens here, just us getting to back to site visits. Edu is looking forward to traveling around Brazil with everyone, me too. So a lot of things have happened during the pandemic. We haven't been able to see everything yet. So it's time to get back to get to know places. We've made some visits, and they have been quite interesting and reinforce actually the availability of our IR team for any questions that you may not have addressed here, and respecting the time of everyone and ending punctually at 10:59. Thank you all very much.

[Unknown Executive]

Have a good day and an excellent week. Thank you very much.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]