Anima Holding SA

BOVESPA:ANIM3

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Very well. I think we can start. Once again, welcome, everyone. We're here to present the results of 2022.

I'm Marina Gelman, IR. Our Director, we have Eduardo Garcia everybody knows our manager Marcus Peixoto better known as Botafogo, CFO of Inspirali; Marcelo Bueno, our CFO; also -- sorry, our CEO; and Andre Tavares, our CFO. Now this is the real one.

Well, if Marcelo had been turned into CFO, what would be my title. I would have been stepped down. Yes, we can keep you as CFO for this earnings results call.

So for questions and answers, we're going to do, as we did in the last call. Please raise your hand as we have seen some. And at the end of the presentation, we're going to open up the audio so that people can ask their questions live. And then we have our team, a member of our team, answering.

With all of this, we can now start the presentation. Marcelo, please.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you, Marina. Good morning, everyone. It's a great honor to be here. I'd like to create all the educators of the Anima system. Everyone present in this room, this hybrid experience that we have. We are physically present using technology. I'd like to greet all our Board members, partners I'm going to break the protocol here. I'm going to greet my wife, and it's her birthday and I'd like to greet all of you on her behalf as well. It's a very important moment, special one. I'd like to share some important messages that we have on the first slide of our presentation, but a very adverse scenario. Well, we had a pandemic. The pandemic is over. We're much better controlled. We have a war of change in the interest rates. So it's a leak that moves from 2 to 14 in few months at Anima.

We are showing the results that show our discipline, the 13th quarter with evolution of EBITDA margin that shows our determination regardless of the adverse scenario, we are here to generate results, and this means sustainable economy that will last years. The first message I'd like to share is this one also the real growth of our ticket. We have been insisting that we should have our brands increasingly better positioned where they deserve to be. So quality positioning with the scale. And Anima has proven that it is possible to deliver quality, scale education 399,000 students getting the best, well, 394,000 students and average ticket being placed where it should be real growth of net real ticket of Anima Core and Inspirali totally aligned with our strategy, showing this soundness of our value proposal.

This is extremely important. And in addition, which is also very important is that despite the challenging scenario, we managed to increase our ticket positioning our brands where they deserve to and keep our staff. Our students have the experience, and they are able to stay, and we have managed to reduce dropout, and we have a clear agenda and where we had our [ Selic ] interest raised from 2% to 14%. And I hope as of July, it should be reduced because this is not sustainable. So we have to -- obligation of facing it, having a clear agenda of deleveraging the company. We have a clear agenda of deleveraging the company so that we can indeed increasingly add value to our tickets.

I -- with this, I turn over to Andre Tavares, our CFO, so that we can proceed with our presentation.

[André Tavares, executive]

Thank you, Marcelo. Good morning, everyone. Once again, it is the reason for pride to be part of our quarterly earnings results presentation and talk a bit about our results that we've collectively managed to generate all our stakeholders is a great summary of our consolidated results. This quarter, we have strike -- a year of integration of the acquisition that I would see that was most transformational in the history of our company, which was the acquisition of the units of the institutions that were part of Laureate, Brazil. And since May 2021, they make up our ecosystem, the Anima Ecosystem is learning. The results show everything for themselves. The numbers are superlative because this year's numbers, they carry fully the numbers of the institutions coming from Laureate.

But even when we look at the relative evolutions, we see that there has been an advance that was quite significant. We've reached net revenue of BRL 1.8 billion. In the first semester, we have 2/3 coming from Anima Core. And the Inspirali part accounted for 30% digital learning, gaining relevance as an important segment almost 400,000 students on our total base of students. And as Marcelo mentioned, we highlight practically a stability in terms of dropout, considering the scenario we're going through the situation. And the evolution of the ticket we've had, we are very confident and very proud that this number represents perhaps the most eloquent message our student gives us in terms of satisfaction and how much they see value and quality education that they have been experiencing with us.

Relative numbers are [indiscernible]. Gross profit, almost 5% points. This flows to operating results and also reflecting the adjusted EBITDA. We've reached over 600 of EBITDA this [indiscernible] with a margin of almost 34% vis-a-vis 30.4% first half of the previous year. As the completion of 1 year of the acquisition of the Laureate units, you must have noticed that we have changed slightly the way we've presented our results and the breakdown of our results. We historically show the base block vis-a-vis the acquisition block once the year is completed, we understand it makes much more sense now and actually 100% aligned with the way we generate the -- or we manage the organization of our breaking down the results in 3 major blocks. The 1 that we call Anima Core -- the other one, Distance Learning and the Inspirali block.

As you've seen now, I'm going to talk about the indicators following this rationale this method of presenting our results. For Anima Core, we celebrate especially the evolution of the ticket in academic education, reminding you that Anima Core, all medical schools are Inspirali and the digital learning is in the digital learning. You can see on our release exactly all the units considered and covered by Anima Core. And this evolution of the ticket of academic education has been a result of this important move that we made, especially in the integrating units. When we look at Anima Core, we had an evolution of the ticket of 14.5% and -- as we've been saying for some time, this has 2 different configurations.

At the integrated units, where we have our revenue management model implemented for a long time. We had a growth of ticket to 3.7%, but we've also had the behavior in terms of volume of students that was much more consistent, I would say. And for the units being integrated, where we had the concentration of most of that drop in the student base that you see in the chart on the left, -- this group had a drop of 251,000 to 226,000 students. And this drop was part of the units being integrated, and we understand that is not only the effect of the difficult economic scenario we're going through, but also a side effect that was expected by ours of repositioning of the ticket, as Marcelo mentioned, and repositioning our ticket was of great magnitude.

We've managed to reposition the ticket at 29%, but notice that we still have some room so that in the next years, we managed to align even more the units that are integrated to the units be integrated since we have space in the numbers that we see here. And we intend to follow this path. And we're knowing that the main trigger of the volume of students. The number of students registering is the macro and we are super confident that when the macroeconomic scenario is better. We'll have good positioning and the effect on the revenue will be much greater if we hadn't done this, work of repositioning our ticket now.

With that, our net revenue of this block closed on BRL 1.15 billion gross profit moved to over 60%, almost BRL 700 million and operating result moved forward despite with all these numbers, we had 4.6 percent points in a better operating result above 40%, showing how much Anima Core is a healthy segment and a good profitability. We also celebrated the dropout rate practically stable. We've implemented the units we integrated a great part of the methodology of loyalty of our students and these numbers, especially in the context we are going through. They fill us with confidence for the results of the forthcoming quarters.

On the next slide, we see the numbers of digital learning or distance learning. It has actually gone over or exceeded BRL 100 million in net revenue, a growth of over 40%. And we know how much distance learning has become an important pathway for growth and powerful leverage so that we expand access to quality education with a number even greater [ studios ]. We reached an operating result of 21% and for distance learning is still modest, I would say. But everybody knows how much distance learning is a business that grows in merging more fastly as you have a growth in the base of students and revenue base. At this pace of growth of 40%, we also believe that in the forthcoming quarters, operating margin will follow a trend of growth that will be quite strong.

An important topic for us to bring up is that in 2022, all the distance students have registered with their curricular academic projects within the E2A academic model bringing more integration to all our segments. I'd like to now invite our colleague, Marcus Peixoto Botafogo, CFO of Inspirali, to talk a bit about Inspirali. And then while I have some water talk about the 2 next slides pleasure.

[Unknown Executive]

It is an honor to be here with you. Thank you for your presence over 180 people attending our webinar or our call. It's a great honor to be here. Thank you very much. Inspirali is something that many of you know it's easy to understand when we put Anima in these 3 blocks. You have core in person with operating margin with 40% recomposition of pricing of the acquired units, a clear history there. And then you have the distance learning more modest 20% growth of 40% and here, it's almost the opposite. This is a growth that is relatively modest and the student base, we see the maturing of [ our schools] growth from 10,000 to 11,000 to 10.4% growth but a margin -- operating margin of almost 60% -- and this is quite profitable with great resilience.

And our Board members comment, Daniel Castanho comments, we don't want to increase margin here. We want to deliver the best academic experience to our students were going to get a degree with the best doctors in all the schools that we have in Brazil. So the great challenge here is not to increase profitability. When we grow ticket, for example, 15% with grown average ticket above inflation. It is because we want to be sure that we'll have the ability to invest be it in OpEx, CapEx to have the best academic experience for those future doctors. There is a growth front that is very important, which is the doctors that have a degree in our schools and all the medical schools in Brazil, and the other countries surrounding us which is lifelong learning of doctors.

We took that in the financial market environment, everybody studies a lot. They do MBA, CFA, they study a lot. We feel a bit like [ nerves ], the real [ net ] actually are the doctors, they study much more than we do. And they study all their lives, which is a great responsibility on our shoulders as an educational company to provide growth pathways for technical training, avenues, and that's also a business opportunity. That is very important and relevant. What we can tell about this building of lifelong learning led by our CEO, [indiscernible] , our Chief Medical Officer, Professor [ José Lúcio ] and all the C-level team, especially [indiscernible] -- he is our Chief Growth Officer, is the building of this system of lifelong learning, where we show the IBCMED. IBCMED is a very interesting company that we've acquired. We have acquired the control.

It's plugged into our medical schools at Inspirali and sped up its growth with very interesting products for these doctors that have a degree. It's a lower ticket of medicine, but we have an average ticket of 1,000 over 2,400 students, especially with these fronts of this mosaic of lifelong learning of doctors that we expect to have an interesting growth at Inspirali.

On the next slide, please. Within all this work that has been conducted from the integration of the units that have been -- that were acquired in June last year. We have -- we showed a guidance to the market that it may reach to BRL 350 million in deflated value running rate of improved EBITDA. In 5 years, we have captured over BRL 176 million of those synergies. We follow with disciplined firm steps we're very solid towards capturing all the potential synergies of this large assets that have been acquired.

This is even clearer in the next slide. Here, we have plotted the past 4 years since the second quarter 2018, when EBITDA margin IFRS 18 was 22.4% and putting this item it's a better margin. Each quarter, the first quarter that has a year-to-year comparison, second quarter 2019 has shown a growth and that has been the case in all quarters in the past 13 quarters. This chart is interesting for me to comment because there's no merit to it. Well, they started it much before -- they started it much before I did. This is work that was conducted for many years, a great focus on the return of the company, cost management, expense management for each and every unit being acquired in this journey in which M&A has been very important to Anima, they brought units that could have better academic performance of students and a better return to the shareholders.

This chart shows it very clearly with the recent speeding up in the past 4 quarters in average the EBITDA of the last 12 months. The past quarter had an average increase of 500% points on average. That was important and relevant acquisition, what it shows in the base -- consolidated base is very important. We can see how much better it is, how much synergy we have, as we mentioned at the precise. This perhaps is the best snapshot of this consistency and management the senior management of Anima, you must have seen at the beginning of our call was very appropriate tone of sobriety as Marcelo as our CEO, making it very clear that we're living at a macroeconomic situation that is difficult. The interest rate has decreased a lot, inflation steals the money from the pockets of families.

And even so, we've repositioned ourselves and the dropout rate has been small. We had great focus on what we can do indoors. So the macroeconomic scenario, increase in [ Selic ] rates or the interest rate is outdoors. And what we -- this shows very clear what we can do indoors or inside our walls with excellent results.

Well, thank you, for the Inspirali numbers and also showing consolidated numbers and moving on to the end, we see the behavior of our CapEx, how much we have seen clearly the gains of scale that we have presented here in all segments of CapEx. If we look at CapEx in the first half, we had -- it accounted for 8.3% of revenue -- net revenue and now accounts for 5.5% in a clear scale gain. CapEx increasingly is prioritizing the area of digital transformation, how much we've been gaining in terms of synergy, efficiency the number we've mentioned in terms of dropout has a great contribution of the improvement of our services. And what we've been doing is ensuring sustainable growth of long-term of our company being increasingly more criteria, especially at a time in which our leverage requires from us cash management that has to be extremely responsible.

And this is what we're going to see on the next slide. We had cash generation of BRL 360 million, quite strong, accounting for almost 60% of adjusted EBITDA. And we've ended the first half with a cash positioning of BRL 1.214 billion, once again giving us great confidence that we move into the second half of the year with insufficient financial soundness to keep on growing and presenting even better results to close talking about our cash and debt or indebtedness. We have a significant positioning of our cash of [ BRL 1.214 ] billion, excluding the our covenant and our dormant debt envisage that we exclude the effect of the IFRS 16. We have net debt -- adjusted net debt of BRL 2.640 billion, and we have a leverage of 3.4x.

As Botafogo mentioned, even with the scenario that is quite adverse in terms of increase in interest rates, just for us all to have an idea we managed in the first quarter from first quarter to second quarter last year or first quarter, we made that very important move of liability management of prepayment the first tranche of the third debenture of Anima that had a CDI cost plus 475, and we issued the debenture of Inspirali at CDI plus 260 in all consider base. We -- in this movement, we captured BRL 215 million -- over BRL 2 billion. Annualized, we're talking about over BRL 40 million in terms of savings and financial expenses. When we look at CDI, from second quarter to first quarter annualized, the evolution was 205 bps.

We are following extremely focused and extremely committed to the agenda that is priority to all of us in the company and the deleveraging process, be it via cash generation, operating cash generation growing and be through strategic movements that lead to deleveraging and also through the liability management strategy, which is one of our main activities here at the treasury of the company. So this is a priority agenda Marcelo is insistent on our Executive Committee meetings, and I'm sure we follow this track, this semester or we had the stability even despite the worsening of the interest rate. But I am confident that we're going to follow clearly in this process of decreasing these numbers through deleveraging with this. We closed the numbers.

I turn back to Marcelo so that he can close the conference and Marina can brilliantly conduct our Q&A as you always does. Thank you, Andre. Thank you, Boto. Thank you very much to all of you.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Actually, I just wanted to emphasize some important points for us to conclude. First one is the evolution of demand of many shareholders of breaking down into 3 major blocks, Anima Core, Inspirali and Digital. I think this is important thus emphasizing transparency and our governance, this is the first. Second, I'd like to congratulate everyone in our ecosystem in the return to school. We had a brave return. We let Andre went through this and Botafogo here. We moved from 19 systems to 6 in our turnaround. We saw integrations in Laureate, took 2 institutions in the same town with the academic -- different academic systems. So we made this integration that requires bravery that is painful. We faced problems, but we done it. We've implemented E2A actually on distance learning.

So this half return to schools as much more -- it was much smooth and people where we had more use of technology for IT management, engineering, and we have a pilot in law, the students who wish to use more technology or less technology according to their own personal convenience. I think this is also important. And to conclude I think CapEx also, we are investing in digital transformation and being able to maintain levels of investment in digital transformation will make Anima to be differentiated in an increasing manner.

My final conclusion is that markets have made movements of sell-off. But I think this quarter, both abroad and here in Brazil has proven that companies are overcoming their results showing that the companies are greater and Anima is the case of great pride aligned with this perspective, focused discipline and results regardless of the adversities that we are facing.

Thank you very much for your time, we open up for Q&A session.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Thank you, Marcelo and Andre, Okay. Let's follow the order. If you can have Vinicius Figueiredo from Itau BBA.

[Vinicius Figueiredo, analyst]

Can you hear me?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Perfectly.

[Vinicius Figueiredo, analyst]

I have a first question that you have exported quite well during the presentation regarding tickets, the integrated units representing fast catch-up regarding the price of integrated units, so units being integrated actually. So the first question is, you comment that the gap can be bridged, but I would like to understand the main challenges for the bridging of this gap. Obviously, there is the macro environment. But apart from that, what would be the main challenges? And what is the expectation regarding timing of it? And the second question would be regarding private funding. This increase that you've shown is being motivated by your being able to install the integrated units, and it had an impact when we look at the accounts receivable.

Is this a one-off effect considering this main scaling up or should we imagine that this should gain participation or stake as time goes by? And I try to understand that in the working capital.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Vinicius, I'm going to now talking about the ticket. We have the guidance of synergy first, and we visited the 350. You remember that we talked about 5 Avenue, 350 were 3. And 1 of the 5 was revenue management technology. This is a first cultural change. So investing in quality, and the brands married to be in the appropriate position in quality and for this education is [ priceless ]. And Laureate had this agenda. We can talk about that. It has an agenda company that was being sold that prioritized for some semesters volume to the detriment of ticket. And this did not scratch the brands or tonnage, the brands thank goodness because they're very strong. So it's worth actually making a comparison of Anhembi Morumbi, Sao Paulo.

After the application of our methodology Anhembi Morumbi that we've inherited. They are fantastic brands as UNIFACS, as Potiguar [indiscernible]. In other words, there are brands that have fantastic position in IDM in Rio Janeiro greetings to all those brands in Rio. So with methodology technology, cultural change, we repositioned them where they manage to be. I do not silver bullet, it's just 1 single thing to be done. Yes, there are several initiatives that would discipline we get to where we are showing out. What we started doing now. Would you like to -- Marina would like to add.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

I'd like to remind you of a bit of the history. But just to resume Vinicius, at the time, post the FIES Crisis 2015, '16, there was a movement in the market. And until then worked a lot in the data construction because at the FIES time, there was a demand. It was a great offer of funding. So it did not depend so much on the effort of the institution. There was this move of revisiting ticket, and again, without a well-structured data department, we partially moved into this movement. Once we had a structured and ready data structure in 2018, we started with what Marcelo is talking about, and we move towards that. We lived exactly the scenario and our brands. When we look at the brands of the units that we've integrated last year.

There is no reason why they shouldn't leave the same history and it requires discipline, as Marcelo said, encourage, why? Because there is an immediate reaction in terms of volume that Andre has shown, but we're not afraid of that because we know that our positioning is a positioning of value, as Marcelo said. And that is what remains. Value positioning is what remains for long-term sustainability of education, we believe a lot is here to stay. There's no reason why it shouldn't happen here as we are observing, it is already happening to what happened to our brands, disciplined, courage, resilience to know that we can get there with our values and our principles, but what we are aiming.

Just to add here, there is a very positive point of this move, and we knew that intuitively, but the tech, the reality check is sovereign, and we've had the first reality check now, and this is very clear as to how much the brands that came in the acquisition may have in the mid last year, how much the brands have remained very strong in the drop in the student base that we've seen is much more resulting in our analysis from a difficulty of the macroeconomic scenario more than from this move itself. And I've answered your question directly. What is the main impact, the main obstacle that we see to move and is towards this movement is precisely the income or revenue recovery. The economic recovery of our students, especially in the regions where those institutions are.

So considering a high inflation scenario, this is something that worries all of us. From the positive standpoint, we have the resilience and the power of the brand. And we have our intent of moving with this trend, and we are very attentive to the payment ability and the income evolution of our students in these markets. This is the main obstacle that we have to pay attention to that may be removed. As Brazilians, we expect it to be removed, but we have to pay attention to it. And this revenue management model of our seeking the optimal ratio between volume and ticket is [ quite ] fundamental. And your second question, you asked the growth, if you look at the financing base, this total has remained stable when we had public funding FIES plus PraValer or the real one, it's about 10% and of the new students -- the entrant students.

We mentioned -- I don't know if you remember that we were going to see the probability integrated at Laureate, they do not have the PraValer or what was expected and is more professional that is our main partner in this area and somehow also offsets smaller or lower performance of the public funding. But we do not see in the mid-, long-term, I would even say, unfortunately, because Brazil needs to have an appropriate solution for affordability of funding for the increase in the number of students, but we do not see neither in the short- or mid-term, then increasing this percentage of students. I'd say that we are very much in what's going to be the recurring. Obviously, PraValer gaining some space considering the integrated that we have not seen. But it's very much what we've seen in the first half of the year.

[Vinicius Figueiredo, analyst]

Excellent. Your answers have been very clear.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

The next person here is some Samuel Alves from BTG.

[Unknown Analyst]

I have 2 questions here on our side. The first one is on the personnel cost line, we've seen another important dilution in this cost line to understand where all the collective bargainings have already happened or you have a sort of delayed 1 in the second half? And the second question is about Inspirali. Another question that we have here on the margin. You've shown the margin at Inspirali growing at about 140 basis points year-over-year. I don't know if there has been some kind of reclassification, but you show an operating margin of 55% in this quarter. Previous quarter was about 64%. I don't know if there has been some kind of reranking or there's on important seasonality. The student base is even greater quarter-over-quarter. But it's just to understand what leads to the change in the level of the operating margin at Inspirali, that's it.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Well, Samuel. Thank you for your question. As for cost with staff or specific gains on this side come as we -- it's been happening in the past year comes from the efficiency gains, bringing through the implementation maturation of our academic mall of E2A, the Anima Learning Ecosystem and the implementation of the academic model in the acquired units more recently. And regarding collective bargaining, we have basically 2 collective bargaining movements that have not yet happened of professors and teachers Sao Paulo [indiscernible] in our case are actually the most impactful one. But we don't see in our analysis and what's happening in the negotiations, we don't see a scenario in which these collective bargaining results will be above of what we have provisioned.

Within our analysis with our increase -- salary increase that have been provisioned in the first half, we don't believe there should be any significant gain and there shouldn't be any impact or pressure on our costs because of these collective bargaining for salary increases.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

So regarding the Inspirali, I ask Marcelo Botafogo to say something.

[Unknown Executive]

Samuel, we have 2 effects at Inspirali quarter-to-quarter. One of them is that at Inspirali, we are in the process of constructing Inspirali. Its margin is still stabilizing, especially the part -- from 31st of March when we formalize it, and it becomes an independent company with an external partner. So it is more clear from the 31st of March, what is the going forward? So we have a bit lighter in person of Anima Core. The first quarter is much more profitable for several reasons. We have new students registering new teachers being admitted at Inspirali, where we have other students that take our preceptors that we take a bit longer.

Some costs come a bit after the revenue first quarter. First quarter is actually much more profitable. But you can consider the second quarter as with a more appropriate proxy or what are we going to see from now onwards.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

The next row person is Renan Prata from Citi.

[Renan Prata, analyst]

It's very quickly and the line of your -- what we call the PDD, since it's relatively low as you include BRL 25 million of runoff, so the provision for doubtful accounts. If we look at the first quarter of '22, it's a PDD or PDA, relatively low. We'd like to understand what we should imagine for this line looking forward. I know there are several initiatives both from Laureate and Anima underway. Just to understand at what level we should view this line looking forward?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Thank you for your question, Renan. If you make perspective of the provision for doubtful accounts, PDA vis-a-vis what we had before, the Laureate acquisition is a PDA that is higher, more pressured than what we used to have in the previous years at Anima, especially in the pre-pandemic period. From the pandemic, the [indiscernible] with the support that we had and the flexibilization we had our PDA from 2020, 2021, 2022, stabilized at a level that was much higher than it used to be in 2018, 2019. This was a trend that was quite clear that did not change. Since last year, we've been implementing a PDA methodology that is even more conservative as we've been saying in the past releases. And we've completed now. We made the last move that is the wagon effect. We had a systemic change.

The integrated units, our PDA was based on the age of the title. And we adapted to what we had the units being integrated having PDA based on the oldest title, well, the -- and there with that tax ID, and we actually take all the debt of the students. So we completed that. So we have the PDA methodology all integrated, which was actually one of our goals for this year with our auditing and risk committee. We've completed that. Now since we -- as we had anticipated, we started living first, we had a negative impact of this methodology that was more conservative we started living the positive impact of the receivables management model of delinquency that we've learned a lot with the integrated units.

And we should not neglect the fact that we have a macro environment that is very challenging, several indicators showing that in various industries, we have levels of PDA and delinquency levels that are at the highest in their history. I'd say that to us, we consider it is above what we would like to have considering the quality and resilience of our brands, considering the importance of our students, the students give to quality of education. We still wait or expect to see additional effect of this model of implementation will this model be implemented of delinquency management. I'd say this delinquency level that we have now, considering the economic conditions that we have internally, it seems that it is a level that is much closer of what would be for recurrent and what we should expect from now onwards.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Next person enrolled is Vinicius Davis from [indiscernible].

[Unknown Analyst]

It's just a quick catch up. Just talking about the deleverage process of the company. We know that Anima has a very extended portfolio of brands. But just for us to map the situation here, is there any process of any specific brand that you think or may have some kind of divestiture or the divestiture will be through other pathways that is not a specific brand.

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Vinicius, there is -- it's an agenda that actually analyzes some possible divestiture in a specific brand, but it's a broader agenda. We -- I could look at it and say results are good. We are happy but that's not this mindset. I have encouraged the team for us to have an agenda that is even greater of simplifying and agility to increase our returns and also an agenda for the physical spaces of the company. That's a priority. We have analysis of possible negative points, operating points and possibly some brand. We are looking diligently at various fronts so that we can indeed put it into effect and put the company at a better positioning and more comfortable one. This is our priority, Andre Tavares and my team that is multidisciplinary, and this is a great priority to us. Would you like to add Andre?

[André Tavares, executive]

So we are extremely committed and attentive Marcelo and the whole team. We have been prioritizing consistently all the initiatives that aim at our deleveraging. Of course, in our industry, we deal with dreams of people and people that trust the quality -- training and quality education to our brands, our institutions and our professors. We have to be very careful and very delicate when we talk about negotiating educational institutions. And we're going to do this indeed. We have some institutions, we believe, can be object of a possible negotiation to have that more speed in our deleverage, but we're going to do that based on our DNA with great care and choosing very well, who would be the institutions or groups that could move on and give sequence to this process and giving the respect to our students that have entrusted us with their undergraduate or graduate studies.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Next person in road is Mirella Olivera from BofA.

[Unknown Analyst]

Well, it just resuming ticket we're seeing the considering competitive scenario of the segment. I think the strong branded in the end person has an effect in this Distance Learning ticket?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

Well, Mirella, we have learned a lot from Laureate. And one of the learnings that we've had the 2 other synergy Avenue one I mentioned is revenue management and the other was digital. We've been learning a lot with digital. What we see here is that we're serving a market that we did not serve before Laureate, a new market, then those students may indeed through digital join the Anima Ecosystem and no longer stop their education with continuous or lifelong learning. So we see that the brands are not weak. Our brands are stronger and may be more aligned with our strategy, including in the Distance Learning.

We -- what is part of our strategy and part of the learning that we've had with the units being integrated, and it is cohesive to our ecosystem proposal for you to tap into the strength of local brands in the region, so that to boost Distance Learning. I would say, Mirella, that we're moving to markets where the power of those brands is less present. And actually, we've seen that in Distance Learning, the ticket has remained flat, but we believe that as we mature and grow, we also believe that the power of those brands is relevant indeed to the ticket in Distance Learning. Of course, we have to understand that competitive learning and distance learning is stronger. And the students have, considering their economic features, they give increasing way to the fees or tuition fees and the brand put in the units in hybrid education and in person teaching it's actually spread into also Distance Learning.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

And we have a last person enrolled Caio Moscardini from Santander.

[Caio Moscardini, analyst]

I have a question here. You've mentioned on your release SG&A was pressured to support the teams of Inspirali and digital learning, do you still have to hire more people of this structuring of the teams is structured? Or from now onwards, we should expect a bit of dilution in G&A. If I could ask another question going back to the receivables. On the FIES side and lifelong learning, they had a great variation or change. Could you give some color to that and what we expect from now on?

[Marcelo Bueno, executive]

As I said, we have a clear agenda specific of greater significance of our structure. I have led this intensify this move. And we really want to resume our organizational chart aligned by the journey of our students. So we have simpler organization. And as a consequence, we have to improve our SG&A. This is the backbone that I have been setting to people with a clear agenda from now onwards. Andre, would you conclude with that with a few points.

[André Tavares, executive]

Just to reinforce that. We have a clear agenda with that of SG&A. And I'd say this process of pressure coming, especially from the structuring of Inspirali and distance learning that has been done and most of it marginally, one, a few things for us to complement. But I'd say the pressure is practically covered. So we should see on the consolidated part, especially a dilution of G&A. We're working strongly towards that. Of course, this should have an impact, especially in the recurring of 2023. We're going to sow the seeds this year, so that in 2023, we can see whether these things can be seen more significantly. Regarding receivables, in lifelong learning.

It is, as I said, in terms of PDA, it is already the implementation of this work of better management of delinquency receivables as we see the number improving. And we have the mix effect of lifelong learning in medical schools and also graduate studies that becomes more relevant, Caio, in terms of the results of lifelong learning with that, we have a positive impact. And we have better [indiscernible]. And with that, we have improved those effects, improving the delinquency management model and the mix with graduate studies being re-ranked for that group and for FIES or public funding. It varies a lot depending on the efficiency of the transfers of the federal government. We've never had any problems, but never is a long time.

Well, in the past few years, we haven't had problems with that, but sometimes they -- depending on the calendar they have in their red tape, we see the actually have some transfers earlier on others, some are delayed and for FIES ends up having some impact. But from the standpoint of recurring we see no significant changes.

[Marina Gelman, executive]

Thank you all very much. We're now closing, very punctually 1 minute early. Until I say goodbye, it will be punctual.

[Unknown Executive]

So we thank you all for your attendance, for your participation. Well, greetings and have an excellent week. Thank you all very much. Thank you all.