Afya Limited (NASDAQ:AFYA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Luis André Blanco: Hi, Fred. It’s Luis speaking. I will take the two questions. The first was regarding guidance. We are pretty much in terms of midpoint aligned with the guidance. And remember that the guidance included UNITs and included the expansion of the mix with the growth of Digital and the Continuing Education that has lower margins than the Undergrads focused on, you mentioned. So it includes UNITs. UNIT is the first year. We had the transaction year that the service will still be provided by the former sellers until the end of the year when we do the integrations of UNITs to our unit — our service . So it’s pretty much the same in terms of margin, the guidance within our 2022 results, but we have to have in mind these UNITs and the mix effect, okay?

Regarding net debt, it’s always important to remember that we have seasonality on our operations. The most part of our cash in a quarterly basis generated during the first quarter and the third quarter, because we have the intakes, we have the renegotiations of all the students for the new term. So you are going to see — you are going to always see a better cash conversion in these two quarters if we compare to the second quarter and the fourth quarter, okay?

Virgílio Gibbon: Just to add a point and also on the second half, the fourth quarter, Fred, we also have the vacations, and therefore, there is less payments only in December. So there’s a lot of cash payments in December that reduced the cash position for all higher education sector, actually for all education sector in Brazil, okay?

Fred Mendes: Perfect. Very clear, Virgílio and Blanco. Thank you.

Renata Couto: Of course. So the next question comes from Lukas Magellan from Morgan Stanley.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey. Good evening. Thank you for taking our questions. We have two questions. The first one is a follow-up on regulation. The question is, should another Mais Médicos program happen anytime soon after the end of the suspension or do you need to wait for Supreme Court’s definition? And the second question is related to Continuing Education, how much growth can you achieve at — for maturation and what are the perspectives for future expansion of campuses?

Virgílio Gibbon: Okay. Lukas, I will take the first one here and what will happen on the Continuing Education here. So under the regulation, it’s likely to happen this semester, another process that will release more capacity to the entire sector. So the Minister of Education doesn’t have to wait any Supreme Court decision to release the Mais Médicos release or any program that is similar. So the expectation is that once we have the freezing process finished in April, they will be ready to announce the new program. The issues that they just put this group together that we analyze would be the new frame, the new characteristics for this new Mais Médicos and still have to wait to come up a solution and to release to the entire market.

Under the Continuing Education, so it’s a lot of opportunities here in terms of growth. We are growing year-over-year almost 50% in terms of revenues in 2022. Just remembering that we almost stopped our operation during the pandemic. So this is a very beginning — this is a market that is a very high growth in terms of addressable market. We have 15% to 20% physicians growth that will enter in this market, looking for new Continuing Education and we are outperforming the market growth here. So remember that we just launched seven new units offering 100% of under — of graduate programs and most of them related to new capitals — located in new capitals and we have more than 60 programs offering right now on our portfolio. So today it’s more than 4,000 students.

We are aiming at least to reach 10,000 students by 2026. That’s what we are aiming as an opportunity here in three years to four years.