Afya Limited (NASDAQ:AFYA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Luis Blanco: And France (ph) Blanco speaking, just to give more color on the first topic regarding M&A in Mais Medicos, you need to remember that we always keep our capital discipline allocation, okay? So the first restrictions regarding this possible new targets with Mais Medicos, first, we needed to buy the entity as a whole. And as you know, we have this threshold of having 60% of the revenues coming from medicine business. So if an institution that doesn’t have medicine, just want this Mais Medicos 3 license, we need to see how important these licenses will be under the future operations of this company. Why I’m saying that because it’s important to remember that’s not the Mais Medicos program, you cannot carve out the license from [indiscernible] if you don’t have the course recognized.

So it’s not possible to carve out just the medicine course and buy this medicine course coming from Mais Medicos, if the course is not recognized by the Ministry of Education. So I think this will take some time to get to the table. But that’s for sure, with or without these kind of targets, we’ll keep have in our capital discipline allocation, okay?

Unidentified Participant: Okay. Super clear. Thank you, Virgilio. Thank you, Blanco.

Renata Couto: Okay. So next question comes from Lucca Marquezini from Itau.

Lucca Marquezini: Good evening, everyone and thank you for taking our question. As regarding the Digital Services segment, so the release mentioned that the company had a strong increase in B2B engagements. Can you please provide some color on this performance and also comment what should be the next steps within this vertical if you have new initiatives and you expect still strong growth in the coming quarters? That would be very helpful. Thank you.

Virgilio Gibbon: Hi, Lucca. So just to remember, we started offering the B2B offerings to the market beginning on first quarter of 2022. Today, we almost have around 200 contracts signed, most of them with pharma companies to give them all kinds of access to our physician ecosystem, the spreading content, new protocols, education and learning objects to the physicians and also typical ads using our social network here. So this type of offering is getting even more used for the pharma companies, the kind of exchanging the traditional way that they have the sales representative reaching physicians to do the marketing to sell their medicine, their drugs. So they are using even the more the digital channel and with a strong growth of — not only reputation, but we are, I think, the right pattern to them to have the right way to reach physicians and the best time using their time in the best way.

So what we think is that, well, our strategy here to reach the pharma industry as on the B2B contracts, it’s more basically on landing and expanding strategy. So today, we have like for the fifth, the five big companies, we have more than 10 contracts with them. So it’s been more recurring relationship with them and ramping out B2B contracts. So that’s the type of offer that we are offering to B2B and to pharma companies and also start using this type of product also to providers in the same way that we are doing to pharma companies. By the end of the day, providers, they also want to reach physicians to generate more demand and also to drive more volume for their operations for their hospitals. So this is the type of solutions and opportunities that we are offering using our ecosystem.

Luis Blanco: And if I may add, Lucca, one point here, is that until the first semester of this year, most of our contracts basically were campaign-based, okay? So the pharmaceutical companies hire us for specific campaigns for specific drugs for a specific type of physicians. From the third quarter, we started new products. We launched it as a matter of fact, our first product that is generate recurring kind of revenues and recurring type of relationship that is — it is Rx Insights that provides insights for prescribed drugs under our ecosystem. So we are moving from campaigns to these kind of recurring revenues, that’s very, very important for us in the ramp-up of the business.

Lucca Marquezini: That’s very clear. Thank you, guys.

Renata Couto: [Operator Instructions] While we wait for next question, I’m going to read a question that we received from the Q&A. It is regarding the Mais Medicos 3, how does the CapEx in terms of cost per seat compare to usual M&A per seat cost of roughly BRL2 million per seat? You want to take this?

Luis Blanco: Yes. I’m going to take this. We are seeing that these Mais Medicos 3 will be around BRL25 million to invest and deploy the site. Just making a round calculation, if we consider BRL30 million, just rounding with 60 seats, we would say about BRL500,000 per seat that is much, much less than this BRL2 million per seat that it’s kind of number of multiple that you see in the market. So it’s doing this, getting the license and deploying these greenfields is accretive for us.

Renata Couto: Yeah. And BRL25 million to BRL30 million is our expectation as of today. So the next question comes from Lucas Nagano from Morgan Stanley.

Lucas Nagano: I have a follow-up question on the regulation related to injunctions (ph). So now that the Ministry of Education revoked that measure that basically invalidated the injunctions that didn’t comply with Mais Medicos 3, the current value decision is from [indiscernible] to evaluate some of those requests. Do you think that more medical schools could be opened outside of Mais Medicos in the meantime, like while the [indiscernible] trial doesn’t resume? Like how do you perceive this risk?