B3 SA Brasil Bolsa Balcao

BOVESPA:B3SA3

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q3

[Operator]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the audio conference call of B3 earnings results for the third quarter of 2020. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and broadcast live via webcast. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Daniel Sonder, Chief Financial Officer of B3.

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. I'm here with the Investor Relations and the Finance teams. And I just want to take the opportunity to thank them for putting the materials together for the call and for the other media that we have used to share our results with you.

We had a very successful quarter with positive results in most of our businesses. We are seeing a very important development in the Brazilian capital markets with more companies accessing the markets for both equities and debt transactions and also more and more investors using the products and services of B3 to diversify their portfolios in an environment of low interest rates and that has brought additional volumes to our platforms. We think this is a structural change.

In addition to that, we've also seen quite a bit of volatility in our markets due to the economics and health news related to the pandemic and also volatility in all types of asset prices, including FX, equities and others.

I'm going to turn over the call to Marcela. She's going to get into a little bit more detail about each one of the segments and some of our numbers, but it's going to be a rather brief conversation, and then we'll open up for Q&A. Thank you.

[Marcela Bretas, executive]

Thank you, Daniel. Good morning, everyone. I'll just, as Sonder mentioned, go through the highlights of the quarter very briefly. I assume most of you have already read the earnings release, and maybe you have the opportunity also to listen to our podcast, which we make available every quarter.

So this quarter, as Daniel mentioned, was a solid quarter, especially when we take a look into our equities -- listed equities business, we had a very strong quarter in terms of volumes. So ADTV reached almost BRL 29 billion during this quarter, and the inflows of new investors was one of the key reasons that supported that -- those higher volumes. At the end of the quarter, we had more than 3 million individual accounts in our depository, which was 120% higher than what we observed at the end of September last year.

Moving on to our derivatives business. Volumes remained somewhat stable versus what we observed last year, but we had a positive impact in terms of revenues, coming mostly from a higher share of FX contracts in our product mix as well as higher RPC since some of our contracts are priced in dollars.

On our OTC business, we continue to see strong volumes in terms of banking funding instrument issuance and stock, which has been 40% up year-on-year. And also, we continue to see stronger volumes in terms of capital -- local debt capital market transactions with stocks up 9% year-on-year.

Finally, moving on to our infrastructure for financing business. Revenues were still down this year, 19% quarter -- this quarter compared to the third quarter of last year. However, we started to have some positive signs of potential recovery for this market. So starting August, we started to see recovery in terms of volumes of vehicles sold and financed. In September, we had a very strong month, the best month of the year to date and also even a little bit better than what we observed in 2019. So we have reason to believe that hopefully the remainder of the year will have more positive dynamics for this segment, which has been suffering a lot with the quarantine as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In terms of ex-revenues, we reached a BRL 2.5 billion in gross revenues, which was roughly 47% higher than what we observed in 2019. And our EBITDA for the quarter reached BRL 1.7 billion, a 79% margin, driven by this growth in revenues mostly and disciplined expense control. I just think it's worth mentioning as well that this quarter, we had a nonrecurring impact coming from the settlement of a legal dispute we have with a spread bankruptcy state, which impacted our revenue expense and tax line. And it's worth mentioning that this has somewhat affected our results for the quarter.

Finally, I'd like to highlight our debt position at the end of the quarter, which was BRL 6.9 billion after the issuance of BRL 3.55 billion debenture in the local market that we issued in August. And the pay down of our BRL 612 million global bond that was due in July. With that, we reached an indebtedness level of 1.2x gross debt to EBITDA at the end of the quarter.

Having said that, I think we can open up for questions. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Thomas Peredo, BTG Pactual.

[Thomas Peredo, analyst]

So my first question is regarding the retail liquidity provider. Do you have an expectation of when will it be expanded to other products, for example, equities as CVM already indicated that they would like this new service to be tested in more than -- more products than just mini-contracts? And also, if you could share us if you have any study or estimates of how much have the retail liquidity provider contributed to the fast growth pace of mini-contracts? By coincidence or not, we noticed that mini-contracts volumes accelerated a lot since the retail liquidity provider was implemented.

And a second question, if I may, is how you're looking at the EBITDA margins going forward as with the new levels of volumes, you are more and more closer to 80% EBITDA margin level? Can we expect more change in pricing policies to share margin in scale with market participants? And the new equities pricing scheme that we implemented during first half next year, do you have any estimates on the impact to trading margins and EBITDA margins of this new pricing policy, given that the volumes increased a lot since you announced it and gave kind of an estimate of the impact?

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

So thank you very much for the question. So let me try to address this. We are in ongoing conversations with market participants and with the regulator about the liquidity retail provider, RLP, on the progress and the next steps that we're going to [bring] for this product. This was a very, very important innovation that B3 brought to the Brazilian market. And we -- it was a, let's say, long road in terms of getting everybody to think together, both market participants and retail brokers and regulators and, obviously, our teams in operations, technology and rules so that we could create this new feature into our platform. The regulator has been a great partner of B3 in the development of this and has obviously done a thoughtful job in terms of understanding the impacts and the consequence of this in the market, which seems to be pretty positive up to now so when they had a chance to look at the product and make a decision recently on whether to move forward with it, their decision was in the direction of maintaining this product, which has been in a kind of a pilot phase for the first year.

The next step would naturally be to expand it into other products, as you mentioned, but we are really taking it gradually and working together with the market and the regulator to make sure that everybody is comfortable whenever we take that next step. So I don't have a particular date. It's an ongoing conversation. It's high on our priority list in terms of things that we think could help the further development of the business of the brokers and ourselves, and we're going to do this when the regulator feels it's the right time to do so.

In terms of the impact, we don't have, let's say, we are releasing numbers about RLP. It's public in our website, and I can direct you to some of the statistics. I'm not going to get into a lot of the statistics here. But it's important to understand that, let's say, some of that activity that is now happening in the RLP was already part of our volumes that was directed towards through direct trades from the retail brokers over the time before the RLP was put in place. But it's also interesting to note that as we brought this on to the exchange, more people were able to access it or brokers were able to offer it to their clients. It used to be restricted to a handful of brokers, which were, say, executing this type of transaction. And then when we, let's say, formalized the RLP with CVM, it became something that is more broadly used by market participants. So there's certainly an impact on our -- on the volumes of mini-contracts that you see. I think that it would have been very detrimental to the whole ecosystem, including ourselves, if B3 had not put together this innovation a little more than 1 year ago. But I've sent you some of the 36 tables, and you can look a little bit more on what exactly is happening there.

With regards to your second point on EBITDA margins, we have been working on changes in our pricing. As you know, we did face some delays to put in place the desired changes. And this will come online during the first half of next year at some point, and we will continue to study these things. We don't manage the company not necessarily looking at our EBITDA margin. We try to look at how the perception of clients is regarding our services, our product set, our innovations, our pricing too. So pricing is definitely one of the components of the conversations that we have with clients.

And as stated before, our long-term objective is, in fact, to share with the market the benefits of the growth that we're having. We remain absolutely committed to it. We are not planning to change course. And it's just that the implementation that we expected to see this year was unfortunately delayed, and it so happens that it happened in the same time that we saw a very sharp increase in volumes. So we gave an estimate -- you asked for an estimate. We gave an estimate last year or very early this year. Looking back 12 months, we were talking about a reduction of BRL 250 million in our total revenues in this, let's say, bad debt. But if we were to apply that rule again, and I don't have the number here at this point, but it would have been a much bigger number in the past 12 months just because of volumes went up significantly, and this is a volume-driven discount scheme so that the more people trade, the less they would pay and less they would have paid if that was already in place in 2020. So I would look at our gross margin as somewhat abnormal, and we expect that it will be somewhat different once we fully place the changes in pricing.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] This concludes today's Q&A session. I would like to invite Mr. Daniel Sonder to proceed with his closing statements.

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Well, thank you for joining in. I hope that our materials are clear and that this call was helpful. And if you have any further questions, please reach out to us. We want to be helpful. Bye.

[Operator]

That does conclude B3 audio conference for today. Thank you very much for your participation. Have a good afternoon, and thank you for using Chorus Call.