Anima Holding SA

BOVESPA:ANIM3

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Okay. I think we can start. Good morning, everyone. Once again, welcome to Ânima Educação earnings results. We are here today with our CEO, Marcelo Bueno; our CFO, André Tavares, to present the results of such important and transforming quarter in our history.

If you need to listen to this presentation in English or call interpretation, you just click there, and you will hear the translation, the simultaneous translation. And for those who want to see the presentation in English, just click on the chat, and you have there the link to the presentation in English. [Operator Instructions]

As we've been doing it for over a year, we started our first quarter 2020 doing our virtual webinars with this. Once again, thank you all for your attendance. I'd like to hand over to Marcelo. Marcelo, please?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Good morning, Marina. Good morning, André. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for the IT support for our hybrid earnings results presentation. Thank you very much.

I think, as Marina said, this is an emblematic presentation at a historical time for the company, transformational time considering the unique moment for humanity still going through the pandemic, still requiring care and following all the necessary protocols so that we can keep on safe. This is an important moment. But for us at Anima, I think it's important for us to say that we've had a transformational moment.

We believe this has been the greatest movement of value generation, the consolidation of institutions from Laureate Brasil. We had the approval from CADE. On the 30th of March, we closed the transaction on 28th of March, and this is quite important. We're already publishing the results of the second quarter already considering June with Laureate, a totally different company. The numbers themselves speak for themselves, and they show that the company has moved to another level, the highest -- or the largest chain of higher education. And we also have what we've been calling lifelong learning that has been quite important. This is the message that makes us very proud, and I'd like to congratulate our transformation integration office.

We had a kickoff move on the 4th of January at the time. It was the integration preparation office, EPI. And as I mentioned, we are full blast, at full speed focusing on value generation integration. And now the former office of preparation is now transformation integration and showing the results of the company. So over 320,000 students, so 178.5% increase. So average ticket, so net revenue exceeding BRL 1 million, numbers that make us very proud.

And also, I think it's worth highlighting our Inspirali, our medical vertical that is gaining power and relevance that we're talking about almost 10,000 students in the world, 1,617 seats. Inspirali is in itself a medical school present in the main cities with the main brands of private higher education, important highlight for Inspirali.

And also, we can see in the numbers we should highlight the sound evolution of Unisul. It's a highlight with 6 months of numbers integrated to our balance sheet, and we have [indiscernible] work conducted over the integration period. And then we have the numbers integrated to Anima's balance sheet this year and numbers that make us very proud.

And lastly, I'd like to share a message. I've had the opportunity of speaking publicly that we made a choice for hybrid education. Over 4 years ago, we have a single FASEH joystick basis. Nobody expected that Friday, 13th of March, we put our students in safety in their homes in 5 days at the time over 140,000 students. We're prepared to return to in-person activity. Since August last year, we've been ready. We haven't been, so to speak, courageous or brave enough to resume and it's been a correct decision. We're prepared for the return from Carnival onward. We believe we would have some days of exaggeration of Carnival. And then we had the second wave of the pandemic. And then we maintained -- we kept our students at home and security and with quality education, 100% digital. Now we are returning. This is an important message. Following all the safety protocols, we're returning all the Anima ecosystem. We're calling it in the format of rotation by station.

With this, I conclude, and I hand over to Marina so that she can proceed with the presentation, and then we will have time for Q&A. Marina, it's up to you. Thank you very much.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Thank you very much, Marcelo. Let us proceed. Now talking about the student base that obviously has a very important reflex or effect on what Marcelo has just said.

We brought for integration from June, as Marcelo mentioned, educational institutions that have a student base equivalent or even higher than when we consider digital. Education, when we did not work with [indiscernible] at the -- base is superior to ours until May. So we have great growth in what we called the academic education, which is undergraduate plus masters and Ph.D. So we have a great growth, so 128% well in the medical area. This is quite a strong growth, but Marcelo's going to talk about Inspirali. We had a growth of almost 400% in number of students in our medical schools, giving greater robustness to this vertical that is intensely growing.

We add an important scale of students on digital. Within this line of hybrid that Marcelo mentioned, and we believe from 0 to 100% technology, everything will be possible in education with quality. We continue to look into this opportunity and to make several studies from the offer to this audience to keep this audience starting with scale within a hybrid proposal with sustainability.

As to academic education as a whole, we come together in the aggregate to this growth of 178.5%. We continue to be very proud of our team, of our technology experts and the intelligence we've developed for the dropout topic. We're not yet considering the units that integrated in June. They only joined in June. We don't yet have the effects of these brands, but we -- even during the pandemic because of this very clear explanation of Marcelo on the quality hybrid model, we have the dropout rate that is dropping by 0.8 points, meaning that our students are still resilient and quite happy with our hybrid educational model.

Moving to average ticket. We noticed that looking at Anima, not considering acquisition with -- considering the company, what we're talking about, organic average ticket, we see a growth of 12.7% in academic education. And with the acquisitions, essentially due to the effect of the integration units in June, we have a drop in the ticket, very much influenced by digital education or distance learning. Excluding the effect of digital education, the effect is more 1.6%. And here, we opened up the digital education ticket to understand the rationale behind the composition of this ticket. Most important here is that we move on very firm in our proposal of taking our ticket increasingly more to a position that combines and is related to the quality, our positioning of our brands in the markets where we operate.

From the standpoint of student loans, we have good news. We are increasingly less dependent on FIES, the federal funding program. So we generate opportunities for portfolio expansion. And yet they don't have the offer of PraValer. They do not have the offer of PraValer in their portfolio to us. It's a quite interesting opportunity for us to be able to expand the student base through private loans that allows more students to study overall. On the consolidated base, increasingly, we have a base of students with no loans, so the out-of-pocket students with less dependence on funding or loans.

As to academic quality, we are still standing out. We had the publication of the IGC, the General Course Index, in April. It was commented on the first quarter, although it was not just about the first quarter. But here, we can show that even with the integration of the institutions in June, where we have quality educators much higher -- or much above the market but not so high as ours, which is part of our history. Throughout our history, all the institutions and brands we've acquired up until today, the quality has always grown. Once we come in and we establish our academic model and we set our references and quality assumptions, we have room for improvement here. But anyhow, we continue even together with a rate of courses for between 4 and 5, much above both those listed and the private ones. And we hope that shortly, we will overcome or exceed the public ones in the consolidated results.

And now I would like to hand over to André. André, if you can join us, it will be great. Thank you.

[André Tavares, executive]

Thank you, Marina. Thank you, Marcelo. Once again, it's a great joy and satisfaction to be here with you to present the results of the second quarter. As Marcelo mentioned in the opening remarks, quite impactful, so transformational for Anima. I'm going to address the main aspect of our financial performance. I'll try to be as objective as possible so that we can move on to our Q&A.

On the next slide, we have a summary of the consolidated result, and we actually see quite strong growth on all indicators, strongly impacted by the integration of the acquisitions, be it the transformational acquisition that we made in first semester last year.

On the next slide, we remind you the changes we've made. In the first quarter 2021, no changes regarding the first quarter this year. But we always put in our releases and communications to the market and the way we manage the company internally. This is precisely the format we look at the base, the acquisitions and lifelong learning. We believe this vision is best suited to our strategy of mid-, long term.

If we look at these blocks, the base block, we see -- as we have been reported in the previous quarters, we see a certain pressure on net revenue, the more competitive markets and more mature institutions. And we have a pressure here with net revenue dropping around 3%. Even so, as we've been able to report in the previous quarters, even with this pressure on the revenue, we have been able to improve operating results. In the second quarter, it hasn't been different. In the first half of the year, it hasn't been different. We've managed to improved 1.4% points, especially to the gains deriving from our academic model, E2A, and due to the intense use of technology in the base block.

As to the acquisitions block, it is the one that is a highlight in the second quarter from the acquisitions of Laureate and the highlight to Unisul. The first semester 2020, we had a revenue of BRL 90 million. Now we've exceeded BRL 400 million in the first half. And the margin has moved up almost 6% points, reaching 45.9% operating margin. We remember that the acquisition block has actually exceeded operating margin of the base block because in acquisitions, we have greater representativeness of Inspirali. Medical schools are more representative in the acquisition block, which makes this block to have -- even not being totally mature, to have a margin that is higher than the base block.

On the next block, we address Inspirali, which has very significant growth. It is the main focus, has been the main focus of our M&A strategy, acquisitions. And at this time, first half, we see Inspirali accounting for practically 25% of our net revenue of academic education block with incorporation of the schools that are medical schools that came with the acquisition of Laureate. Basically, those at Anhembi Morumbi, at UNIFACS in Salvador and the ones at UnP, Universidade Potiguar, Inspirali has very significant growth in this semester, a growth of almost 300%, getting to BRL 240 million of net revenue, with CAGR -- organic CAGR of -- or CAGR of 19%. And then we see the acquisitions. So if we add the acquisitions, we had 129%. Regarding to gross profit, BRL 182 million and operating result of BRL 161 million. Now we know how much we have in terms of contracted maturing in the Inspirali courses. And this semester, just as we already had communicated previously, we see the courses having a positive development in the net ticket as the value proposal of Inspirali becomes even clearer. We had net ticket exceeding BRL 7,300.

So on the next slide, we see what is contracted. We had a great leap. If we look at 2021, Inspirali took 2 major leaps. First, with the incorporation of Unisul in the first quarter, practically doubled from to 2,400 to 4,840, double its size. And now it doubles again with the increase or with incorporation of [indiscernible]. We have a twofold increase, and we expect to have an increase up to 15,000 students. And we see here also an increase in the number of seats with quite significant growth as we incorporated Unisul, Anhembi, Portiguar and UNIFACS.

On the next slide, we talk about lifelong learning that has had major effect on the revenue, especially due to the graduate, lato sensu graduate studies coming from the units that were part of Laureate. And lifelong learning, just as we reported in Anima, the EBRADI, which is part that contains its -- in its portfolio our grad -- digital graduate studies, the digital graduate studies taken from the Laureate acquisitions, are also here in this segment of lifelong learning. So graduate studies become more representative. They have major importance in this revenue growth. And HSM with a strong recovery in the first semester in corporate education courses, greater acceptability of digital courses in corporate education, and at HSM specifically, strong readjustment of our general expense structure.

All of that combined led us to have an operating margin that moved a lot in this first semester regarding first half last year, reaching 13%, but with still great potential for improvement. And the revenue is broken down basically in these 3 groups, HSM plus HSM University, EBRADI and graduate study. So this is the net revenue broken down of lifelong learning.

So all of this combined led us to an adjusted EBITDA of BRL 315.6 million, a margin of 31.5% in this first half, moving up 1.3% points regarding first half last year. So this obviously is a number resulting from all the efforts from all the strategies that we've been implementing in the past years, especially now through moving -- or living through the pandemic. It makes it clear, the resilience and the power of our academic model, operating model and the clarity and sustainability of our results.

And here, we see CapEx, what we see in transaction of CapEx of the investments from property to a stronger investment in our digital transformation efforts. In a consolidated way, we are gaining efficiency. CapEx moved from 10% last year, first half last year to 8.3%. So gains of scale also has an important role. But we observed that in addition to this scale, greater efficiency, we have a clear transfer and transformation of CapEx profile moving more from works and refurbishment, investment in civil construction, actually furniture and equipment to the digital transformation. And also has an important role in improving our margins in service rendering, scale gains and also support to capturing our synergies deriving from our integrations and acquisitions.

Now let's talk about cash flow and leverage. We had a operating cash generation that was quite strong, close to adjusted EBITDA, almost BRL 300 million of cash generation in this quarter. And this quarter also has shown the acquisition of Laureate. Outflow of cash for the acquisition of Laureate operations. In the first quarter, we had part in -- out of the BRL 62.9 million. A small share of our move of deleveraging these operations is regarding the sales of the property in Rio and this small part, as we've announced to the market. But we had other moves communicated, and we're about to communicate and disclose and complete other deleveraging moves as we have been actually showing the market regarding all the moves. And we've closed with over BRL 600 million in cash.

On the next slide, we have the concept of leveraging indebtedness. So we have the effect of funding of BRL 2.5 million of our third emission of debentures, and funding has been used to pay for the assets of the Laureate group. And excluding the effect of the IFRS 16, as we had envisaged in our debt contract, we get to an adjusted net debt of BRL 3,220,000,000. That means a pro forma leveraging of this period of 4.6% -- or 4.6x, excuse me, in the period. We are very committed to prioritizing our deleveraging agenda that is coming basically from 2 fronts, first from the evolution of our operating margins and the divesting agenda.

So we started to operating the [indiscernible] and the sales of the international schools and the 2P [indiscernible] and we expect that shortly. We will have the completion of other moves or is in the lines for us to reach a leverage level that is more adapted to our history. You know this leverage is absolutely understandable considering this transformational moment the company has gone through, the transformational acquisition we've made. It wouldn't be different. But the very cash generation, the mechanism of lockbox made the Laureate to arrive with almost BRL 300 million. And [indiscernible] that was smaller than we had reported to market. The debt that we reported with Laureate of BRL 620 million, and the debt that came to us was BRL 300 million, BRL 320 million. So the cash generation that -- we had represented a great gain in our leverage that makes us feel very confident that we're going to continue following a trajectory of fast reduction and a strong one of this leverage index of the company.

I'd like to hand over to Marcelo so that he can make his final remarks, and we can move to the Q&A.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you, André. Thank you, Marina. I think we can open up for the Q&A. Thank you all for your participation and open up for clarifications that you consider timely. Let's move on, Marina.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

We have a first question from Yan Cesquim. Thank you. He says, I'd like to ask a few questions. First, how has Anima been designing its growth strategy and positioning in the distance learning segment? Should we expect an accelerated growth agenda for the new business unit? And the second question from Yan is, what are the first impressions of funding of second half in a qualitative way? What about the funding of the remaining assets from the acquisition of Laureate during this winter season? I'm going to ask you to talk about distance learning, Marcelo. Can you help us, please?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you, Yan. I have been saying -- we have been saying publicly, we from management, we have our integration committee. We have the Board to follow the work conducted by Laureate to go digital, their proposal to maintain the growth levels integration and actually have the integration with the operations of Unisul, virtual Unisul. This is what we've been doing at this time.

In parallel, we're quickly going deeper in the debate and checking, first of all, if the thesis that Laureate and other groups defend in these 2 markets, they do not contaminate, if they are complementary. So this information, based on data information, et cetera. If it is so, we have to move fast so that we can actually offer in our ecosystem quality education to various audiences and perhaps audiences that we did not serve until the acquisition of Laureate. Now we have the scale to think about that.

So actually, we're very much focused and keep on growing the 2-digit rate following integrations, having integration with Unisul. In parallel, we're completing the analysis with our Board and our academic committee so that we can make a decision and -- so that we can be able to share with you.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Great, Marcelo. Thank you. André, would you like to talk a bit about funding in terms of qualitative?

[André Tavares, executive]

Sure. Obviously, the intake or funding is -- we're prepared in terms of budget projections. We leave the second semester that was somewhat pressured in terms of funding. The country is still recovering economically. It's starting a process of recovery of the trust or confidence indices of investors, the business community, et cetera.

What we can say now, considering that we have practically half of the intake on board, we see a continuity of the movement we saw in the first quarter in which Anima managed to perform in a much higher way than the market average. So we are very confident that this second semester will be a semester of transition, strengthening our economy. And we should have in our vision the first semester with intake for 2022 that is quite strong. But in this second half of 2021, we believe that we're going to have a bit of continuity of intake from the first semester.

It is important for us to remember first to look at the student base, not only intake. And on the student base, as you've mentioned yourself, Marina, the numbers we're most proud of and most confident about is actually the reduction of our dropout rate. Our growth of students is quite sustainable, and this makes us very proud.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

I think it's important just to add, right, André, that we have all integrated intake, the area under a single leadership. So possible adjustments that need to be make and different positionings with our practice of replacing our ticket where we think our margins deserve. This is all being done in a consolidated way, in a combined way. This makes us feel very proud. We have, of course, a scenario in which we're not counting on economic recovery. We -- all Brazilians expect that. We cannot count on it. However, we see everything integrated and makes us feel quite confident to keep on working quite hard on that.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Thank you, Marcelo, André. Next question is from Caio Moscardini from Morgan Stanley. Thank you, Caio. The base block gross margin has expanded a lot to 810 bps year-over-year, which was very positive. But when we look at the expansion of the operating margin, it was only 80 base points. Could you explain what happened in the expense part in the base block? From now onwards, could we expect an operating margin spending at the same levels vis-à-vis the gross margin? André, can you help us here, please?

[André Tavares, executive]

Of course, Marina. Thank you, Caio, for your question. The first aspect, Caio, is that we should not look at the base block without the context of the whole company. Clearly, we have a strategy of M&A that is very strong. And you have the scale gain that many times is impacting the base block. But with the acquisitions, the scale gain on the consolidated part is quite strong.

If you look to Page 19 of the release, we see clearly the expenses and also the net gaining scale and efficiency. As acquisitions come in, they impact not only the G&A and the impact -- specifically the assets from Laureate, the impact on the corporate part as well, we see that there is an initial impact. But that is exactly the impact that we expected that gives us room to gain even more efficiency from now on with the scale gain that we've had.

Another point that is important to remind you of is that we've also had in the first semester an impact on our G&A of expenses related to the acquisitions and integrations. And we're very careful as to the classification of items is nonrecurring. Various items that should not actually be repeated next year, but that regard the operation that have been a result of the acquisitions of the integration process are part of our results. They are not put us in any way as nonrecurring.

I cannot -- I believe that we should not look at the base block in an isolated way. It's the mature block. And as we've mentioned, it has a pressure on the top line. But the management structure and the G&A of the base block is very much benefited you -- or tapped into. And it's diluted as we benefit from the structure and management to incorporate acquisitions.

So we can give you various examples. When we look at Anhembi Morumbi, Anhembi Morumbi is part now in the context of São Paulo regional, which was the management structure of São Judas. As you incorporate things and you look at the combined company, this is where we always look at, and we see an efficiency gain that is quite large including in the operating results.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Thank you very much, André. Perfect. Now we have questions from Lucca [ Marcazeni ] from BBI. Thank you, Lucca. Two questions from our side. First, is there still room for further margin gain coming from E2A? Could you give more color on what efficiencies should enable this gain, please? And the second question, regarding leverage, could you give a little color about what the next initiatives should be to continue this deleveraging movement, please?

I'm going to answer the first, right, André, on E2A. On E2A, Lucca, yes, we do have space for more gain because on one hand, we still have 1 to 2 years to be implemented fully to our operations, already integrated, mature. Because when we started implementing it last year, E2A, that we call 2.0, we put it until the sixth semester this year until the eighth semester counting with first, second semester 2021. Yes, we still have room for fully implementing it.

And in the acquisitions, even more so we have space. And when I talk about acquisition, I'm talking since UniCuritiba acquisitions made last year and acquisitions in 2021. We have space for complete implementation of E2A. And we should be seeing these efficiency gains related to having more people in the classroom, results of the model that integrates students better to our courses with a curriculum, all the part of the model academically in spite to a model. The better quality that talks to the reality, that communicates to the reality will live.

I should advertise it. For those of you who haven't seen the E2A 2.0 presentation, it's worthwhile checking it. It is on our website. So this is an initiative of educational quality that has, as a result, more efficiencies. Students are more integrated. They're studying the core curriculum and soft skills together.

And now I hand over to you, André, the question on leverage, please.

[André Tavares, executive]

Thank you, Lucca, for the question. As we've mentioned, in the first quarter, we have a list already of divestments, be it of similar operations that we've announced with Uni [indiscernible] of sales back, and we have an agenda of selling some assets. The sales of asset is a delicate move always, and we prefer to be more specific as the negotiations are completed. What is important for us to say is that we've disclosed certain things. Others are quite advanced in terms of their negotiations. And we should have some negotiations completed and some news shortly we expect. And we are very confident that both on the line of these businesses that are about to be completed.

And in the line of margin gains that is quite significant from the synergies that we've announced to the market, capturing the synergies with the acquisition of Laureate, we are totally confident that the trajectory of deleveraging will be fast and declining quite strong, especially this year and the first semester of 2022. So as soon as we have the closing of new negotiations, we will go to market as we did in the 2 previous cases, and give visibility of the 2 businesses that we're closing that contribute to the reduction of our indebtedness.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Perfect, André. Thank you. With this, we close the Q&A session, and we are obviously totally available to all of you through our IR team. We thank you all for your participation. Marcelo, would you like to close so that we can say goodbye? Thank you. Thank you, André. Thank you, Marcelo.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you, Marina. Thank you, André. Thank you, everyone. And we will keep on firm in the hope that the pandemic is but always very diligent, always working towards life, education, education transforming lives. And we're very proud to be resuming activities, respecting all the local protocols in each market we operate. We're resuming all the ecosystems of this week, and that fills us with hope so that we can continue to be firm in actually transforming the country through education. Thank you all very much. I wish you all an excellent week and a great day.

[André Tavares, executive]

Good day to everyone and an excellent week. Have a good day. Thank you.

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