Locaweb Servicos De Internet SA

BOVESPA:LWSA3

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Operator]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Locaweb's Second Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. Today, with us, we have Mr. Fernando Cirne, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Rafael Chamas, Chief Financial Officer, Investor Relations Officer; Higor Franco, BeOnline and SaaS Director; and Mr. Willians Marques, Commerce Director.

Today's live webcast and slide presentation may be accessed through Locaweb's website at www.ri.locaweb.com.br. The slides of the presentation are also available for download at the webcast platform. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements made during this conference call are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Locaweb's management and on information currently available to the company. They involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to future events, and therefore, they depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that conditions related to the macroeconomic scenario, the industry and other factors could also cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.

Now I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Fernando Cirne to start his presentation. Mr. Cirne, you may proceed.

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Good afternoon to all our customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders. It's a pleasure to be here today with you to talk about the excellent performance that Locaweb had in quarter 2 2021.

I have 3 highlights to share with you today. One of the most important is the strong growth of our operations when compared with the same period last year. And in 2020, we had a period of huge growth, and that's why it's such an important highlight. We had a growth of 57.1% in our consolidated net revenue year-over-year. And in the case of Commerce, compared with quarter 2 2020, which was a very strong quarter for Commerce, this growth reached 159% year-over-year.

And when we break this number down into subscriptions, this reflects the true increase of our customer base. We had an increase of 204.7% year-over-year in our subscription revenue and 134% in our Ecosystem revenue. So the total net revenue of the group in the first half of 2021 is already approximately the same revenue as that for the whole year of 2019. And the Commerce net revenue for the first half of 2021 is already higher than the revenue for the whole year of 2020. This is certainly a spectacular performance for the group, and I must thank all of our employees for these brilliant results. The EBITDA of the Commerce segment has been growing strongly and already accounts for 56% of the consolidated EBITDA.

The second highlight of this quarter's earnings is that even with the reopening of the economy, we were able to maintain a very strong pace of addition of new stores. And we prepared for this. We knew that the pandemic should be slowing down by now. So we expanded our customer acquisition channels. We have 2 examples of new channels, and these are not the only new channels, but we have influencers and the freemium model, which was adopted by Dooca; increased investments in marketing; strengthening of our commercial teams and improvement in our processes.

And process improvement here is not just a high-level term. I can give you, as an example, the improvements we made in our process is focusing on our customers so that they can more easily launch their stores online, so that they can better reach their customers and activate their services faster -- for example, with the onboard service. This led to a 32.7 increase -- 32.7% increase in our customer base between December '20 and June '21. It's a lot for a very short period of time and an increase of 40.7% in the addition of new stores compared with quarter 4 2020.

Now on Slide #3, we see that we had a strong growth in our TPV for the payment transactions at 88.6% increase year-over-year. And we know that quarter 2 2020 was a period of very strong growth for the company. With the acquisition of Bling, our Commerce segment has reached approximately 100,000 active paying subscribers.

Another very important highlight this quarter is that all the acquired companies had excellent performance this quarter. They even showed an acceleration of their performance if compared to prior to the acquisition. So this shows that the acquisitions that we made were very assertive and that this new ecosystem is working the way we planned, and this will bring even better performance in the future.

We had significant advances in the agenda of acquisitions with the purchase of Bagy and Octadesk -- with the acquisition of Bagy and Octadesk. We had an excellent performance in BeOnline and SaaS with an increase in sales volumes year-over-year. And once again, we know that quarter 2 last year was a very aggressive quarter for us and also an increase in the SaaS share of the segment. And we had gains in productivity across the entire operation with reduced churn, which is already a result of this new ecosystem, which is better for retaining customers and also for better excellence in our customer service with the RA1000 stamp from Reclame AQUI.

Now on Slide #3, I mentioned that we had an excellent increase in our net revenue, and this is very clear in this chart. You see that in quarter 2 2020, we had already shown an increase of 70% year-over-year compared to quarter 2 2019. So huge performance gain for the company from '19 to '20. And now the Commerce segment had an increase of 159% in its net revenue. Very expressive numbers.

On Slide #5, here, we talk about customer acquisition. We continue to increase our marketing efforts. We're expanding our channels, optimizing our sales channels, improving processes. And what we saw is that the addition of new stores did not slow down in the second quarter compared with the first quarter this year. And this is very important. We knew there was -- the market was concerned about the slowing down, but this did not happen, and quarter 2 showed an increase of 40% compared with quarter 4 last year. And our customer base -- or our subscriber base, better say, increased 32% compared with December 2020, showing the excellent performance of the Commerce segment.

On Slide #6, we see that we are forming the most complete commerce ecosystem in Brazil for SMEs. And further, we will continue to improve the number of integrations in our platform. We went from 437 integrations that we had last quarter to 483 integrations by the end of this last quarter. We continue to be an agnostic and open system. So even if we have our own ERP solutions, we have 347 integrations with other ERP systems. We have integrations with e-mail marketing, payment solutions and so on. And a great achievement, which makes us really proud and is already yielding results, is a native integration with Facebook and Instagram. It's a transparent integration into Tray's panel with product management on Facebook and Instagram, page and campaign management. You can install the new Facebook API automatically.

And just to give you an idea of the results, we had more than 3,000 installations in just 5 days. This is to show the huge potential of social commerce. It is certainly a strong trend, and Locaweb has been heavily investing in this light.

Now a little bit about our recent acquisitions, so the 3 most recent acquisitions -- Bling in the end of quarter 1. Bling is an online management software for micro and small businesses with a focus on e-commerce. It is a SaaS-based solution for physical, virtual and hybrid businesses. It is the ERP system with the greatest penetration in Tray. Most of Tray's customers require an ERP system. I think this is a characteristic of any e-commerce platform. But about 30% of Tray's customer base was already using Bling, and that's why we chose Bling for this acquisition. It has an ARR of BRL 60 million and a high chance of synergy across our ecosystem with marketplace, logistics, credit. There's a huge potential for synergies between Bling and the rest of our ecosystem.

So Bling is here to accelerate this ecosystem, to bring new customers to this ecosystem, and the ecosystem will also accelerate Bling. So it's a huge state of symbiosis. Just to give you an example, if we had -- already had 30% of our Tray customers using Bling, you can imagine the potential that we have for synergies. Another advantage is the data volume from Bling's customers that can be used for credit concession. So it was a fantastic acquisition.

Another very interesting acquisition was Octadesk. Octadesk is a platform that enables SMEs to better relate with their clients at all stages of the customer journey: marketing, sales and services. And not just customer service. And why is this so important? We have already acquired some sales operations, such as Etus, Ideris and Social Miner or All iN. And Octadesk will help us orchestrate all these efforts in addition to improving customer service, allowing us to use chat bot, artificial intelligence and conversational commerce, as we have been using, and it's something that has been really helping us -- our clients improve their conversion rates. Octadesk has an ARR of BRL 25 million. And just to give you an idea of the volume of messages managed, more than 3 million messages per day. So it's -- it was a fantastic acquisition for us. Welcome, everyone from Octadesk, to our ecosystem.

And when we talk about commerce, we have an example of an e-commerce platform focused on social commerce, which is Bagy. It is a quick and simple solution for SMEs and individuals to set up a virtual store in minutes and have a strong presence online. It has a strong engagement on social media. Everything is native, integrated with Facebook and Instagram. So if you want to launch a store and immediately start selling with the support of social media, Facebook and Instagram, this is the right solution for you. Bagy has more than 13,500 customers. This was another fantastic acquisition, which will certainly speed up everything related with social commerce for Locaweb. So congratulations, and welcome, everyone, from Bagy to our ecosystem.

So this is the current status of our ecosystem on Slide #8. Today, in the center, we have our 4 platforms -- or 5 platforms if we consider Tray Corp as well. Now we have Octadesk, not just for aftersales but orchestrating all the sales efforts. We have Bling, our ERP system also conversing with all the other processes. We have Vindi. We have our sales tools, All iN, Social Miner, Etus, Ideris. We have Yapay, Plug (sic) [ CPlug ] and Credisfera for payments and credit and Melhor Envio for logistics. And as I said, we are already yielding good results, such as increased ARPU, reduced churn -- we can already see a reduction in churn across our chain due to higher customer lock-in. And this is just the beginning. There's much more to come in the future. And also acceleration of customer acquisition, and this acceleration of customer acquisition will be much clearer 2 slides from now because we're going to show you what's happening with the acquired companies. They are truly accelerating when compared with the pre-acquisition period.

So now on Slide #9, we're going to show the results for BeOnline and SaaS. We continue to grow our booking levels compared with last year. So we had another 15% increase compared with quarter 2 last year, which was already a very aggressive period for SMEs, 15%. For Nextios, 47.3% increase. And we were awarded the top level of excellence in customer service at the website Reclame AQUI, the RA1000 stamp. This is a huge achievement which shows that we're very -- focusing on providing the best service to our customers.

And the SaaS revenue increased from 30.5% to 39.2% year-over-year in the BeOnline and SaaS segment, which means that we are selling more and increasing the share of the segment in our sales, which is very relevant.

Now on Slide #10. Here, I must reinforce once again that we have been very assertive in the acquisitions that we're making. We, so far, have acquired 18 companies, and all of them were the right decision to make at the time. So we -- quality of the acquired companies is one of our utmost priorities, also a very structured integration process and the high synergy of the new operations in our ecosystem, which allows these companies to ramp up and accelerate our ecosystem.

Here, I have 7 examples. Of course, we can't give you all the numbers, but I have here 7 examples showing the power -- the true power of the synergy, 200% increase in the shipping GMV for Melhor Envio. And still in Melhor Envio, there was a 283% increase in the number of customers at Melhor Envio. Very expressive numbers. In Dooca, our e-commerce platform, there was a 192% increase in their customer base year-over-year, a huge increase. The addition of new clients in Bling, an increase of 133%. And remember what I said, this is the power that our ecosystem has to generate sales for the ERP system, 133% in a very short period of time. Bling is a very recent acquisition. So just the start -- this is just the start of the synergy. Also increase in the number of Bling customers, 74%. As I said, this was already a very high-growth operation, and now it's just going to skyrocket. And a 73% increase in Vindi's TPV, which is much better than it had before the acquisition. And also a 50% (sic) [ 58% ] increase in Ideris' customer base. So these are some examples. And these are huge contributions to the 159% increase in the net revenue for Commerce.

Now on Slide 11, we're not done yet. We want more. And why do we want more? Because we want to have an ecosystem that will have SMEs -- will help SMEs with their e-commerce efforts. We need to have a well-orchestrated package of services, and we want to be a one-stop shop for all our customers. So we will continue with the acquisitions. We will continue to look for companies with recurring revenue, consolidated products with people that will stay with us after the acquisition with a huge potential for cross-sell and upselling synergies in our ecosystem.

So we continue with our funnel of M&As, and we already have 6 MOUs signed or under negotiation. So we won't stop.

Now I hand it over to Higor, our BeOnline and Saas Director, and he is going to show what we have been reaping in terms of synergies between the companies we acquired.

[Higor de Araújo Franco, executive]

Thank you, Fernando. Good afternoon, everyone. As you heard from us in previous conference calls here on Slide #12, we see that our agenda of cross-selling synergies is evolving really well, and we can already see very clear results. Of course, the road map is very long term, and we still have deliveries that have not yet been completed. But we can see that in a very short time, we have been able to explore synergies and cross-sell, not just within BeOnline and SaaS but also between SaaS products and Commerce products and activities.

So here on the top, we talk about Etus on Slide #12. Etus is already present in the entire purchase journey for the entire digital family. So we have WordPress. We have hosting. We have an offer inside Locaweb's website and also in the site builder. Etus is a very good example of how we are getting good results from these synergies. We already see a very expressive increase in sales compared with the previous year. In June alone, we had an increase of 253% in sales compared with June last year. Etus' customer base grew by 60% year-over-year. This means that Etus is truly benefiting from this cross-sell, and it has been growing organically at a fantastic pace.

On the bottom of this slide, we already have the POS -- CPlug POS integrated with Delivery Direto. So all POS customers that already have -- that also have Delivery Direto, they can get the orders in the POS and they can organize everything related with ordering using Delivery Direto and also other components either for order collection or for physical stores. And the joint offer of POS, CPlug and Delivery Direto is evolving really well. We already have many customers running Connect Plug and Delivery Direto together in a joint offer for existing customers and new customers.

Another interesting example is the integration of CPlug and Samurai. Samurai is an e-commerce company that has a very interesting expertise in integrations. They have a great technical staff that's really knowledgeable about market integrations. And we have been using Samurai with CPlug and Delivery Direto for market integrations. So in the case of CPlug, Samurai is performing integrations of the CPlug POS with more ERP -- more complex ERP systems. Here, we have the example of SAP. And Samurai is also connecting Delivery Direto with other external POSes.

So in these 2 examples, Samurai is building the integration, monitoring the accesses, evolving the APIs, and it gets a participate share of the revenue in these projects as if it were an integration plug-in for CPlug and Delivery Direto's customers. So Samurai works as a plug in, in the offer of the 2 products supporting the integration and expanding our capabilities, expanding the capillarity of these products in the market.

Now on Slide 13. Here, we have an example of how this cross-sell is not just restricted to the time of the sale, but it's a much deeper cross-sell effort. This is an example. On the left side of the slide, we have an example of a contextual cross-sell based on customer behavior within the product use journey. So in this case, e-mail marketing customers who have already sent messages and want to use behavioral features, behavioral triggers. It's what we call repiqueing so you can resend e-mails based on certain settings and configurations. So when you're defining the settings for repique, the customer will receive an offer to expand the performance of this campaign using Etus.

So at this point here, when they're using the product, when they are setting up the product, we will give them a behavioral-based offer and an Etus offer so that they can expand their contact base and expand their campaign. So when they click Contract, when they click buy, the green button -- on the website itself, they can choose the type of profile they want and automatically when they click Contract, all the billing will be done by the same Locaweb user. So customers do not have to go to another page or another screen and register again, no. With their own Locaweb account, they will be billed for the Etus product as well.

And on the top right, we have an example of how we're also intensifying cross-sell with suggestions based on buying predisposition. For example, here, we will show some suggested products based on some propension algorithms that we run while the customer is using the product, that dashboard. And these suggestions are based on products they registered with, products they contracted previously, the level of use of these products, the average ticket of this customer with us. So this is another example of how we've been working with this contextual cross-sell.

Now on Slide 14. Here, we have another interesting example of contextual cross-sell. Here, we're using algorithms that will assess the number of contacts of the customer in the same e-mail marketing product. And based on the progression of contacts and based on the campaign e-mail sent, we will either suggest Etus or not so that they can expand their contact base during the analysis of the e-mail marketing list. So they will upload the contact list. We will review the contact list, look at quantity and quality. And depending on the results of this analysis, we will offer Etus to the customer to expand this contact base and to expand this campaign on social media. This way, they can capture more contacts based on this cross-sell effort. And they can fire a campaign both through e-mail and also social media. And these cross-sell offers take place at different points of a product use journey. It's something that is much more in depth than just doing this cross-sell at the time of the purchase. And we are strongly advancing this agenda. We have dedicated teams which are studying the best moment for use and the propension algorithms. And we have been capturing excellent synergies with these initiatives.

And now I hand it over to Willians Marques to talk about Commerce. Williams, the floor is yours.

[Willians Cristiano Marques, executive]

Thank you, Higor. Good afternoon, everyone. So let's continue. Now let's talk about our efforts in Commerce in terms of cross-sell.

Here, we have some examples. Our agenda has been very intensive. And our efforts are parallel. All our units are developing this work simultaneously because all our units, all our platforms already have an API-oriented architecture.

The first example here is an integration between Delivery Direto and Yapay. And it's also a cross of segments. So we have Yapay for all the billing and payment options of Delivery Direto customers. So it's Commerce and BeOnline. So in addition to exploring synergies between the Commerce unit, we also have synergies of Commerce with any other units in Locaweb.

The integration of Melhor Envio with Yapay is already operating. So this gives the customer more options. They can use their Yapay balance for shipping. And this is very popular right now, particularly due to the marketing efforts that we implemented and the integration between Yapay and Melhor Envio.

Another example for Yapay, we launched in record time the integration with Yapay and Dooca. So about 20 days after the acquisition, we already had businesses using Yapay on the Dooca platform, which opened to us a new horizon to gain even more TPV. So this is in line with our journey of adding financial services with all our other services.

Vindi also has a huge potential for payments. This is something we already talked about in other releases. And now we start to see the results. So Vindi is already entering a very mature phase of acceleration in terms of adopting Yapay as its payment solution. Etus also is already using Yapay for payment slips. It's an integration that is already taking place.

We already have the beta integration for a digital marketing SME solution for Digital Miner. So this is an initiative for customer acquisition, which adds a lot of intelligence, on-site campaigns, off-site campaigns. So this is a product that Social Miner designed to bring all the technology that it has to enterprise customers, offering to Tray customers. We already have the beta running, and we're already starting to see very positive results.

We also have Ideris, our Marketplace Hub, which is already running with all the integrations with Tray Corp and evolving in this agenda in order to better service the Tray retail customers. So there's already a huge synergy gain or potential gain here so that we can have one single marketplace solution.

Credisfera, our credit operations are already integrated with Tray. And I'm going to share a little bit of this experience with you. It's a very transparent integration and we already see the results from this offer.

Dooca, which didn't used to have an automatic integration with Bling, so Bling's staff is now building a new integration with Dooca and we're already running the beta. And Tray, which already had a good integration with Bling. We heard that Bling has a great share at Tray, and now we're improving and expanding this integration so that it can be the first integration for Bling. So this is a summary of these synergies.

We have many initiatives here, and I'm going to give you more details on Slide #16.

So here, we have the example of Vindi, and the good news is that Yapay already accounts for 10% of Vindi's TPV. This is growing as the months go by, and it's already exceeded other companies. 70% of new Vindi customers already use Yapay. And this is very important, because in addition to converting the customer base, we are already the most commonly used option for all customers. And 20% of Vindi customers already run Yapay.

And on the right side of this slide, we see the opposite. Looking at the TPV process by Yapay, we see how much it has scaled up with origins from other Locaweb units. So in quarter 3 2020, we had basically -- everything was Delivery Direto. And then as we generated other synergies with Delivery Direto, with Etus, we started to see the representativeness of the cross-sell revenue growing in Yapay. So today, more than 10% of the TPV process by Yapay comes from Locaweb units.

Now let's move on to Slide 17. Here, we have an example of how we are performing this transparent integration. Just like we did for Facebook and other solutions in our ecosystem, Credisfera also actively participate in the lives of our customers in their dashboard. So we have a menu with all the options of the Tray platform, and this is a screenshot of Tray's dashboard. And now we have a new option there on the menu, the credit option, and our retailers can offer -- can get offers from Credisfera through this menu item. So this is one way we found for them to have access to these products without having to leave their environment. So it's not a link. It's an offer they get inside their management dashboard. And this is something that we're trying to do for all the synergies and experiences that we want to provide, either for Credisfera, Melhor Envio and Ideris. We want to use the same model, very transparent and frictionless, where customers can use our entire ecosystem from the same dashboard.

And now I will hand the conference over to Rafael, and I thank you very much for your attention.

[Rafael Chamas Alves, executive]

Thank you, Willians. Good afternoon, everyone. Now on Slide 19, here, we have the highlights of the quarter, some very impressive numbers as we heard during this presentation. The net revenue in quarter 2 grew by 57% year-over-year. The Commerce operation had a 159% increase. The operational indicators that help us understand what happened, in addition to what was shown by Fernando, particularly when it comes to customer acquisition, the GMV increased by 65% year-over-year. We closed the quarter with BRL 4.6 billion. And the TPV, which was boosted by all the integrations and synergies, grew by 88.6% and closed quarter 2 with BRL 712 million.

And not only did we grow, but also we continued to be a profitable company which is generating cash. So we see a 58% increase in the adjusted EBITDA of the Commerce segment and BRL 41 million and 28% growth in the adjusted EBITDA for the entire operation. And despite our very intensive M&A agenda, we still have a very robust cash position, BRL 1.9 billion of net cash in -- by the end of quarter 2 2021.

On Slide #20, here, we see the performance of our different business units. As I said, we closed the quarter with BRL 184.3 million. Commerce shows a very accelerated growth and accounts for approximately 50% of the business, 46%. And in quarter 2 last year, we talked about 7.9% (sic) [ 27.9%. ] And this relevance is due to the 2 business verticals that help us monetize Commerce. Subscription revenue grew by 204% and closed the quarter with BRL 35.6 million. And the Ecosystem revenue, which is more transactional, grew by 134% year-over-year. And when we add these 2, this leads to the 159% growth in the period.

For BeOnline and SaaS, a very good pace of growth as well. We had 17.6% increase year-over-year. We closed the quarter with nearly BRL 100 million in revenue for the sector and an 8.9% increase in the customer base. So now we have 402,000 customers in BeOnline and SaaS.

In Slide 21, Fernando went over some of this data, but it's very important to highlight that this is the revenue progression of the company on the left. And on the right, we have the first half of '20 and the first half of '21. And some very impressive numbers here. We closed the first half of '21 with a Commerce revenue of BRL 150.2 million, which is basically twice as high as the revenue for the entire year 2019. It's already higher than the revenue for 2020, which was BRL 142 million. So in 6 months, we already covered last year's revenue, and we doubled when compared to 2019's revenue. So our consolidated was BRL 345 million in 6 months, which is basically the revenue of the entire year 2019. So our company has been truly accelerating its revenues in the different verticals, and we have some very positive growth prospects for the future.

On Slide 22, here, we see the EBITDA of the company, the adjusted EBITDA. We see growth in all sectors. Consolidated increased by 28.8%, closing the quarter at BRL 41.3 million compared with BRL 32 million year-over-year. The Commerce operation already accounts for 56% of the company's adjusted EBITDA. So if we think about CapEx, the Commerce operations for cash generation, it is already the predominant factor. So Commerce closed quarter 2 with BRL 22.9 million, a 58.5% increase year-over-year. And the BeOnline/SaaS operation shows a growth of 4.4%, closing the quarter at BRL 18.4 million.

Now on Slide 23, it's important for us to understand the impact of the acquired companies on our margin. I shared this with you last quarter, and it's important to keep monitoring because this shows that we're not losing -- we're actually gaining productivity and growing and maintaining some very interesting profitability levels, improving the group's margins. But of course, when we look at the strictly accounting EBITDA, we have a maturation period for the acquired companies. And first, we have to complete their integration and then start seeing them grow.

So on Slide 23, the consolidated -- organically, we had an expansion in our margin, 27.3% to 27.7%. And the acquired companies will cause a reduction, which made us close the period with 22.4%. Now applying the same dynamics for the other segments, Commerce, the Commerce operations are still running at organic margins over 40%, so 41.5% for quarter 2. However, considering the share, the participation of the acquisitions, we closed at a margin of 27% for quarter 2.

BeOnline/Saas, the same dynamics, 20.8% for quarter 2 2020; 20.3% for quarter 2 2021, organically speaking; but considering the acquired companies, a margin of 18.5%. So we're still growing at a very fast pace. We're maintaining high profitability and a high cash-generation capacity. And when we look at the strictly accountable EBITDA, this is a reflection of the maturation time and the integration time, and we will see this margin recovery in quarter after quarter.

And on Slide 24, we see the adjusted net income. We had a net margin of -- an expansion of 87.7% year-over-year. And when we talk about purely accounting numbers, this is important when we see this in our balance sheet. These are 2 effects of our M&A model, our M&A dynamics, which is the amortization of intangible assets because of the price allocation that we do when we do M&As. And the value is already considered in the price paid. That's why we call it price allocation, which went from BRL 1 million to BRL 6.2 million in quarter 2 2021 and the adjustment to present value of acquisition earn-out. Our acquisition model entails earn-outs. This is provided for in our liabilities, and since our liabilities are long term, they behave just like that. So they are recorded at a value that is lower than the potential earn-out. And we have the interest accumulating quarter after quarter until this earn-out is paid out, which showed a BRL 10 million -- a growth of BRL 10 million year-over-year. And we also adjusted based on the same dynamics that I just mentioned. This is included in the price and the PPA. So considering these adjustment dynamics, we go from a BRL 3.6 million with a margin of 12.9%.

Now I will hand it back to Fernando for his final remarks.

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Thank you, Rafael. So just to recap the main highlights for the quarter. We -- see, this is Slide #26, by the way. The company continues to accelerate even with the reopening of the economy and even when we compare with data from quarter 2 2020, which was a very good quarter for us. Our operations are growing above market indicators and comparable operations. Our Commerce operation is accelerating and gaining share within the group. As I said, we are now over 55% of the EBITDA coming from Commerce. We see an ongoing evolution of the commerce ecosystem, both with M&As and also with R&D. We don't really focus on R&D, but there's a lot of work involved in the integrations and also in-house development and evolution of our platforms.

This is very important. We are a technology company, and more than half of our staff is made up of engineers. We have huge assertiveness in our M&A process with strategic fit and operational success of all the companies acquired so far. We have a process for integration of the acquired companies, and we already start to see very consistent results from these integrations. This means that we're very confident and comfortable about the acquisitions that we made, and we're also very confident about continuing with the M&A efforts in the future.

And finally, many of the acquired companies already show a very accelerated growth. And you -- this will certainly be confirmed in the coming quarters.

Thank you very much. I think we still have a few minutes to answer some questions. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Leonardo Olmos, UBS.

[Leonardo Olmos, analyst]

You talked about the expansion of your channels to reach your customers. What do you see in terms of future trends for channels? And how can these new channels affect your dynamics -- not your growth but the current dynamics?

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

I'm going to answer about the margin, and then Willians can talk about the channels. The CAC is increasing. We are spending more with new channels, but this is not really affecting the EBITDA. And why is that? Because the growth of the company is supporting all that. So we do not see any degradation of our margin. We see a trend towards maintenance of the margin. This is very important because we are expanding, and the exponential growth of the company is supporting the increased marketing investments without degrading our margin.

So this is for the second part of your question. And now Willians is going to give you some examples of channels that we are exploring.

[Willians Cristiano Marques, executive]

All right. So Leonardo, regarding the channels, in order for us to maintain the increase in our customer acquisition, we started to explore new channels. So we gave you the example of influencers, for example. It's a very well-structured operation to have influencers and some ambassadors that will promote the company and use the services. So these are people that are references in their expertise, either entrepreneurs, business owners who have their e-commerce, who have their virtual stores and will talk about the platform, the payment options and all our solutions.

What we see in this case is that we have a CAC which is not so higher than that of social media because today, Google and Facebook also had to increase their prices. And compared with these channels, we spend an amount that is very similar in terms of customer acquisition, but we have a productivity gain because many of these customers already had an educational part of the work done with this influencer. And when they're here to contract the platform, very often, they previously watched training courses and videos. There's a lot of influencers that work with education. So this means that we have higher quality in this customer acquisition.

Another example is the Dooca project, which is the trial. Dooca didn't used to have a trial. Tray didn't have a trial. So we launched this trial recently. This is helping us improve customer acquisition. A great part of these customers do not really contract a plan after the trial period, but what happens is that those that contract a plan with us are customers that already went through the first decision-making process of continuing with us or not. So during the first 15 days is where part of our churn takes place.

So this in the LTV will have a cohort of customers with a higher LTV because we already had the first filter of these customers. So this in the CAC over LTV, even if we're spending more, we have a higher LTV. So these are examples that -- well, despite the changes in the dynamics of customer acquisition, this will not affect our CAC. We are indeed spending more. We're investing more, but the ratio of LTV and CAC and the ARPU and CAC ratio are very positive for us. With all these solutions, the average ticket is always -- is also increasing. So I hope to have answered your question, and let me know if you need anything else.

[Leonardo Olmos, analyst]

No. That was perfect, very clear. It makes a lot of sense. Congratulations for your results.

[Operator]

The next question is from Bernardo Guttmann, XP Investimentos.

The next question is from Vitor Tomita, Goldman Sachs.

[Vitor Tomita, analyst]

I have 2 questions. Thinking about your ecosystem and the promising acquisitions that you recently made, the next acquisitions will add new markets and new capabilities to the ecosystem? Or do you think the next acquisitions will come to strengthen the verticals where you are already present? So what is your pipeline? What does your pipeline look like in this sense? Is there a specific part of the ecosystem that you're looking to further strengthen?

And the second question, I don't know if maybe you can shed some light on the growth of the Commerce segment. How much of it is divided between Dooca, Tray and Ideris or the GMV growth excluding Ideris?

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Vitor, this is Fernando. We consider our ecosystem to be very complete, but it's an endless effort, right? E-commerce is not something trivial. I remember that when I used to have an online store, we only had e-mail marketing and banner, and that was it. But today, in order to have a virtual presence, you need to do marketplace, social commerce, inbound. It's much more complex now and not even mentioning logistics, so it's very complex.

And e-commerce for SMEs is even more complex. E-commerce is evolving and will continue to evolve. And that's what we're doing. Social commerce appeared. We added some social commerce offers, conversational commerce. We recently added conversational commerce. E-commerce will continue to evolve, and we will continue to have including new solutions into this ecosystem because our customers' SMEs will demand these new tools, either for lead generation or for management or for customer service. Everything has to be present in these ecosystems. So as I said, it's an endless work. It will never stop evolving. And we will also be looking at new verticals. So we're working in these 2 fronts: completing our ecosystem and looking for new verticals.

And regarding your second question, we can't really give you more details about the GMV breakdown by platform.

[Operator]

The next question is from Gabriela Moraes, Itaú BBA.

[Gabriela Moraes, analyst]

I have 2 questions. The first question is about the addition of sellers. How are you working on adding new sellers? And in quarter 3, do you see an increase in your churn? Because we saw a good acceleration in the seller addition, but some deceleration compared with quarter 1.

And the second question is about the Yapay. We see that the share of your acquired companies is already 10% of Yapay. So how do you see this looking forward?

[Fernando Biancardi Cirne, executive]

Gabriela, so I'm going to answer your question. The first part is about booking. With the new channels that we're exploring, we see that we were able to maintain our booking at very high levels, well above the pre-pandemic levels and very close to the peak pandemic levels. So what we see is very sustainable growth. And with the testing and opening of new channels, we project that we're going to continue to grow and to create new booking opportunities. So in spite of the pandemic -- of the slowing down of the pandemic, which is a good thing, right, we see that the demand for e-commerce continues to grow.

And with the new channels, we can compensate for the more accelerated demand of the peak of the pandemic. But our booking levels will continue to be very high.

The churn, we have a normal behavior in the premature churn. In the first 6 months, we lose part of this base, and these are practically those customers that were not able to operate their virtual store or gave up the project or changed their strategy. And then the churn becomes really small. What we see in the past 3 months, in the past quarter, is an improvement in the premature churn. It's been higher in the past, particularly in the peak months of the pandemic, where we had a very accelerated entry of new customers. And very often, they were not really prepared for that.

And now we see improvements in these numbers, and this is also a reflection of our educational efforts because we are more and more strengthening the e-commerce school, our educational units, to train these customers. And we -- that's why we see this improvement in churn.

Now regarding Yapay, in Vindi, we still have a great part of the TPV. So we still have a lot of work ahead of us for a few years. And Vindi and the other units are growing. So in addition to increasing the share, Vindi is also growing its customer acquisition. So we believe that despite the higher share, this ecosystem will continue to grow.

We have Dooca as an initial ecosystem. Our share is still very small. We are just starting. So we start to see some good prospects for Dooca, including with the new trial for a better entry of customers. We have Bagy, the recently acquired company. And we don't have Yapay integrated yet. We are studying this integration right now. And Bling, that has both online channels and payment links and also some projects for payment acquisition in the physical world. So we believe that with Bling and CPlug, we can also work in this sphere. And with Delivery Direto, we still have some share.

So considering the companies already acquired, we still have a lot of TPV to capture. And these are companies that grow organically. And we also have our pipeline, and one of the premises for our M&As is that these companies have synergies with our current units. And nearly all M&A so far have opportunities for payments. So in our pipelines, we also have good opportunities to activate payments with Yapay.

[Operator]

The next question is from Marco Nardini, XP Investimentos. [Operator Instructions]

I think this was the last question. Okay. So this question-and-answer session is now closed. Now I hand it back over to Mr. Fernando Cirne for his final remarks.

[Flávio Jansen, executive]

I'd like to thank you all for the number of attendees today in this conference call, an impressive number of people. We're happy to have you here with us. We're very proud of our results. So once again, I'd like to thank our customers, suppliers, employees, and particularly our shareholders. And we'll see you soon in 3 months, hopefully. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

[Operator]

The second quarter 2021 earnings conference call of Locaweb is now over. Thank you for attending, and have a great afternoon. You may disconnect your lines now.

[Statements in English on this transcript were.

spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]