Virgilio Gibbon
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead
Thank you, Renata. And thanks everyone for joining us today. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to have effects all over the world, we remain committed to the health and safety of our employees, students, teachers and communities we operate. Before I get into a discussion of our second quarter and first half results, I want to take this opportunity to reflect on our first year as a public company. We were able to build and deliver some results. While we are currently dealing with the pandemic and resulted economic challenges, we are confident in the strength of our company as we continue to enhance and grow our business. We have achieved or position as the leading medical education company in Brazil, partially through acquisitions. Over the past year, we have completed six acquisitions and created a successful track record of integration of acquired companies, delivered cost efficiency and synergies. Last month, we acquired our first digital health tech company, PEBMED, adding digital assets to our service offering. With respect to medical seats, we have added more than 700 in less than one year, 70% of our goal for adding 1000 medical seats over a three-year period post IPO. Taking into account the two most recent acquisitions our medical seats now stand at 2,143 seats. On top of that, we still have more than 800 seats be analyzed under under MoU contracts. As you can see over the past year and also during the COVID-19 crisis our financial results, have been great, consistently exceeded our guidance, delivered strong top line growth, improving profitability, generating free cash flow and maintaining a healthy financial position that creates a virtual cycle of capital allocation opportunities and cash generation. Now Page 5, I will show our financial highlights. We delivered another solid quarter with broad base organic revenue growth. Contributions from acquisitions, margin expansions and cash flow improvements, reflecting our excellent execution even during COVID-19. This executional excellence has enabled us to exceed our financial expectations for the second quarter and surpass our first half 2020 guidance, position us for another great semester. During the first half occupancy was at a hundred percent during the quarter and given this strong demand from medical seats allowed us to maintain the same price strategy. As a result revenue increase 54% year-over-year. It’s important to note that as we moved all classes for online platform in March, were not able to offer some of the practical classes during the semester. This deferral has impacted our first half net revenues in R$14 million, but we will be fully recognized in the second half. Our team executed well in key areas of our business, particularly with great acquisitions, extracting synergies and scaling Afya’s operation. In turn, we generate a significant top line growth and margin expansion in the quarter and six-month period. We still have synergies to capture as we move ahead with an integration of Uni Novafapi, Medcel, UniRedentor and Uni São Lucas. We completed the first two integration immediately after the second quarter. And for the last two is expected by the first Q of 2021. Lastly, our balance sheet is strong with over R$1 billion in cash and cash flow generation with an 83% EBITDA to cash rate. Our financial strength and cash flow generation capabilities afford us flexibility to execute our expansion strategy and remain opportunistic, nurturing our M&A pipeline. Moving now to Page Number 6, we will discuss about PEBMED. Although PEBMED a 3Q event and we had a conference call to discuss the acquisition, I want to take some time today to reinforce the importance of this acquisition. As a reminder, PEBMED provides tools and content for health care professionals through the WhiteBook and Nursebook apps and through the PEBMED news portal. It’s also the market leader in clinical decision software, and has an extremely popular app ranking the top 10 Brazilian apps by consumer spend. The business lot of consists of both paid subscription and free content. This was an important acquisition for us as it progresses our digital effort to improve the user experience and efficiency of both healthcare students and other healthcare professionals. Our strategy is to combine quality medical education with intensive use of technology, and PEBMED is a key component of it. With this acquisition, we enter into the digital health services segment and strengthen our BU2 product offering, which is also a relevant component of our growth strategy. On Slide number 7, we will discuss a little bit more of our digital strategy. The pandemic proved that both individuals and healthcare professions were willing and able to adapt to a more digital world and caused us to accelerate the expansion of our digital business. We are committed to provide innovative technology solutions that assist our students as they spend more time online to work and study. Additionally, we see the opportunity to maintain a relationship with our postgrad students and through their entire careers. Our increased product offerings is driving more uses to our digital assets. During the quarter, our monthly active users increased 27.6% compared to the first quarter of this year. Stepping back and looking at the long-term opportunity, there was already a seasonal shift happened in the digital healthcare world even before COVID-19. We believe that this shift has been accelerating in the last several months and will continue post-pandemic. Additionally, we believe that the shift combined with our strong brand and the deep connection we have built with our students and alumni, position us to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. On next slide, we’ll start to discuss about our recent acquisitions. As you all know, M&A is a key pillar of our growth strategy, and we are taking a disciplined approach to grow our portfolio. During this time of significant business disruption uncertainty, we are taking steps to strengthen our leading position. Now where we see the opportunity, we accelerate our strategic plans. To that end, during the past week, we announced two strategic and accretive acquisitions. The first one was Faculdade de Ciências Médicas da Paraíba, a post-secondary education institution offering under red medical programs in the state of Paraíba. It’s our first school in this state. The second was Faculdade de Ensino Superior da Amazônia Reunida, or FESAR, a post-secondary education institution authorization to offer on-campus undergrad course in medicine in state of Pará, our second school in this state. Seeing these measures of Paraíba adds 157 seats and is the second largest acquisition for us in terms of approved medical seats. We see the opportunity to increase our organic growth rate, primarily as we increased the number of seats at maturity at Ciências Médicas da Paraíba to 1,130, up from 850 currently. FESAR brings another 120 medical seats and currently has 227 medical students and a potential of 864 medical students at full maturity. Combined, these two acquisitions take our medical seats up to 2,143 seats. Now on Page 9, we will see our integration track record. As I just mentioned, we have completed six acquisitions the past year. And as indicated on both charts, we have a successful track record of integrated these acquisitions and capturing synergies. In January, the margin expansion has been over 1,000 basis points in slightly less than a two-year period after acquisition. The current operating environment has not slowed our integration process with recent acquisitions, and we are moving ahead with the group you see listed in the box on the right-hand side of this slide. As integrate acquired companies and gain further scale, we are able to see value creation and margin improvements, reflecting cost efficiencies and synergies. Now on Page 10, we will talk about our future perspectives. We are coming off of a very successful year as a public company, and 2020 is also a great start. We have a successful business model with highly-predictable growth. We will continue to focus on five key areas: first, strategic M&A.; second, pushing further into our digital initiative; third, successfully integrate acquisitions; fourth, delivering sustainable and predictable growth; and five, maintaining a health balance sheet. Beginning with M&A, which has been and will continue to be a key component of our strategy, we have completed six acquisitions after IPO, both medical schools and digital. Importantly, we have a solid pipeline that has been growing during this challenge period. As I mentioned earlier, we are working diligently to further enhance our digital capabilities. We will continue to invest in our strategy to add more digital assets and solution to support our medical students and other health professionals. While BU2 represents a small part of our overall sales to date, we see significant opportunity to grow this business. Our solid balance sheet, coupled with strong cash flow generation, create a virtual cycle, providing the financial flexibility and competitive advantage to continue executing on our M&A strategy. And given the high predictability of our business model, I’m confident in our ability to generate meaningful cash flow, further strengthening our financial position. Overall, our consistent momentum is continuing, and we are pleased with our results in the first year as a public company. For the second half, we have already fulfilled 100% of the medical seats, and we are confident to achieve our second half guidance, confirming the resiliency and the right predictability of Afya’s business model. I will now turn this call over to Luis for more color on our financial results and second half 2020 guidance. Thank you.
Luis André Blanco: Thank you, Virgilio, and good morning, everyone. I would like to stress what Virgilio just said, I’m particularly proud what we delivered a successful quarter and the first half results that exceed our guidance. As already discussed, at the end of the first quarter, we were able to quickly move all of the classes online, which in turn enable us to report a good first half. Moving to Page 12. My discussion will focus on the main and most significant P&L items. There is additional inflow in the earnings press release that we – you can refer for further – more information. Our second quarter earnings represent a solid result in view of the current global environment and as you will hear over the course of my presentation, we had a very good quarter across all key metrics. Let me highlight a few. Both medical seats and students saw significant increases during the quarter. With respect to the number of medical school seats, we added 414 seats year-over-year, for a total of 1,516 by the quarter end, a 38% increase over second quarter 2019. Reflecting the seating maturation process, the total number of students in the second quarter 2020 was 9,097, an increase of 64% over the same period of the prior year. And as you heard from Virgilio, subsequent quarter end, we added another 277 seats with the acquisitions of FCMPB and FESAR. Taking into account the acquisitions we have already made, our full potential as of today is 2,143 seats and more than 15,000 students. which lead us to a 13% organic CAGR in the student base, considered the period between 2019 and 2026. Net revenue for the quarter was up 48.8% year-over-year to R$274 million. Excluding the acquisition of UniRedentor and UniSaoLucas, pro forma net revenue grew by 18.8% year-over-year, reaching R$219 million. The increase was primarily driven by organic revenue growth, mainly due to the maturation of medical school seats and an increase in average ticket. The strong top line growth, combined with cost efficiency and resulting synergies from acquisition was reflected in adjusted EBITDA, increasing 73% to R$180 million and a margin expanding 780 basis points, excluding the consolidation of UniRedentor and UniSaoLucas, pro forma adjusted EBITDA increased 44% year-over-year to R$98 million, and the margin increased 780 basis points to 44.8%. Adjusted net income was up 163%, reflecting the revenue contribution, synergies captured and margin expansion from the consolidation of acquisitions. Earnings per share increased 183% from R$0.23 in the second quarter 2019 to R$0.65 in the second quarter of 2020. Moving on to Page 13 for a discussions of key operating metrics by business unit. We delivered a solid growth across both business units, continuing performance very well. Growth is a key operating metrics, as shown on this slide, is being driven by combinations of organic growth and acquisitions. Starting with BU1 our average monthly medical tuition fees at the semester end were R$8,157, which was 14% above the same period in 2019. This reflects a combination of new students enrolling with higher tuition rates combined with the students graduating with the lower tuition. As shown in the middle chart, 76% of our combined tuition fees are derived from medical schools. The combination of a 32% increase in the number of students and 14% increase in average ticket results combined tuition fees up 50% when compared with the first half 2019. With respect to BU2, we had almost 16,000 active paying students at the quarter end, an increase of 47% over the same period last year. We can see an increase of 26% and 22% in the number of students of prep course and CME for B2B and B2C, respectively. Regarding Medical Specialization & Others with UniRedentor, we saw an increase of 161% in the number of students. Moving on to a deeper analysis of revenue and EBITDA on Slide 14. We are fortunate to have an experienced team that’s proving once again that they can continue to successively execute the complex work of integration acquisitions and capturing synergies. As shown on this page, we have provided net revenue and adjusted EBITDA bridges from our historical second quarter 2019 revenue to the reported second quarter 2020. For the first half, net revenue increased 69% to R$547 million. Excluding the consolidation of UniRedentor and São Lucas, net revenue grew 47% in the first half to R$476 million, with a contribution of R$93 million coming from acquisitions and R$60 million coming from organic growth, which is comprised of the maturation of medical school seats and an increase in average ticket. UniRedentor contributed revenue of R$14 million in the first half, while Uni São Lucas contribution was R$31 million. On the right side of the page, we show the first half 2020 adjusted EBITDA. During the period adjusted EBITDA increased 82.7% year-over-year to R$259 million with 360 basis points, expansion in margin and R$23 million contribution from UniRedentor and São Lucas. Excluding the consolidation of UniRedentor and São Lucas adjusted EBITDA advanced 66.5% with R$48 million contributed from prior acquisitions and R$46 million coming from organic growth. The adjusted EBITDA margin, excluding these two companies expanded 580 basis points. Moving next to a discussion of cash flow on Slide 15. Cash and cash equivalent of R$1.1 billion at the quarter end was up from R$960 million at year-end 2019. The significant increase in cash compared to year-end 2019 reflects strong cash flow generations and the proceeds from the July 2019 IPO and the February 2020 follow-on offerings. The majority of these funds is invested in low risk Brazilian reals-denominated instruments. The total debt was R$535 million at the quarter end 2020, up from R$361 million at year-end 2019, related to acquisition payables. Cash flow generation remained strong in the first half of 2020, increasing 81% to R$202 million, which results in a cash conversion ratio of 82.6% compared to 85.4% in the first half 2019. This was a slightly lower cash conversion ratio year-over-year and it’s mainly due to the consolidation of Medcel business and our students’ renegotiations overdue monthly installments due COVID-19 crisis. Turning next for a discussion about guidance on Slide 16. We are pleased with our second quarter and first half results and our guidance for the first half of this year demonstrates that we are still in early stage of growth. As a reminder, the world is still in the middle of a pandemic. Economics are slowly opening up and our guidance takes into account the best information available at this point of time. Two key metrics for second half 2020 guidance are the follow: second half 2020 adjusted EBITDA margin ranging between 45.5% and 47%; our guidance includes the impact of the adoption of IFRS 16 and includes UniRedentor starting February 2020, São Lucas from May, PEBMED from late July, and excludes any other acquisitions that may be concludes after the issuance of this guidance. And as we look ahead, we have a complete intake process for the upcoming semester and even the strong demand we saw for seats, we have filled 100% of our medical seats, maintaining our revenue growth resilience and high predictably, even under these uncertain times. Additionally, included in the revenue outlook is the revenue recognition for some practical classes that could not be held during the first half and were pushed out to the second half of 2020 upon the reception of the classes. This amounts to R$14 million. To sum up, we are pleased with the strong quarter and first half results and the continued momentum in our business. We’re confident the strategic investments we are making to advance our growth strategy will enable us to continue to deliver consistent revenue and profitability growth as we remain on track to achieve or exceed our fiscal 2020 financial targets. Afya is in the strong financial positions with a high liquidity. We have a history of robust cash generation that clearly defines margin growth strategy and this team with a proven track record of delivering results and handling difficult times. And COVID-19 has not changed any of these factors. This ends our prepared remarks. We are now ready to take your questions. Operator, please open the lines for questions.