DLocal Limited (NASDAQ:DLO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Pedro Arnt: Jamie, so thanks for the question on banks. And I think that’s simply one of the feedback we got from investors is that perhaps we hadn’t educated the Street enough on how it is that we actually carry out repatriation of money and there was a perceived notion of potentially more usage of alternative assets or smaller broker dealers, and that’s simply not the case. The vast majority of our fund flows, ForEx derivatives are carried out either through globally systemically important banks or national market-leading banks or regional market leading banks. And I think it’s just an idea to give increased disclosure on not just what we do, but how it is that we do it.

Sebastian Kanovich: Thank you, Pedro. Jamie, on the question on the commercial front, we cannot disclose the name, but we’ve onboarded the multi-vertical global leader, which is one of Top 5 biggest companies in the world. When you look at our merchant base, we’ve been able to disclose some of those products. We continue to work with others to be able to name them during this call. But we’ve also been very open about the fact that we want to onboard the Top 500 companies on the Internet and make sure that they are customers of ours. In investor discussions, I’ve been very open about the fact that there are some of those that we’re missing and we knew who they were, and we wanted to make sure that they were our customers. Today, we are proud to say that one more logo has become a customer of ours.

Jamie Friedman: Got it. Thank you, both. I’ll jump back in queue.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Neha Agarwala with HSBC. Your line is now open.

Neha Agarwala: Hi. Thank you, everyone. And congratulations on the results. My question is more on the tax rate. We’ve continued to see an increase quarter-over-quarter on the effective tax rate. Could you explain — I saw the reasoning in the earnings release, but could you talk a bit more about why the effective tax rate is going up? And more importantly, should we expect this trend to continue? And is this inbuilt in the guidance that you have provided or it’s not on the bottom line, but should we continue to expect this to go up in 2024 as well? And what is a good rate to expect in the coming years? And also the concentration in your top merchants continue to increase, which likely means a pressure on take rate. So is there a way that you can diversify a bit more? Is that a goal that you’re looking at to reduce the concentration in the Top 10 merchants? Thank you so much.

Diego Cabrera Canay: Hello Neha. On taxes, the income tax rate that we have is the result of the country and product mix that we have. And as you know, we don’t solve for that. Particularly, we have been seeing in the past few quarters, a sequential increase in our local-to-local business, and that is basically taxed on local tax rates, which are higher than our average. So that is the main driver to that. Also, we discussed before about the inflation adjustment that has a loss that is non-deductible for tax basis, and that also affects the tax rate. We don’t guide to a particular tax rate. Again, we say that said, we’ll continue the same line that is now, but it will continue to change based on the different trends that we have in our country mix and product mix, service mix.

Pedro Arnt: Hi, Neha, on concentration, we don’t manage our business to that metric. I think the increase in concentration you’ve seen is a testament to how much share of wallet we’ve continued to gain from some of the largest global retailers and that’s good news. Having said that, if we think over longer periods of time, Seba was mentioning, we aspire to have the 500 largest companies, digital companies in the world going through the platform. And so the longer-term tendency, yes, we believe we will diversify, add new logos and that over longer periods of time we should see diminishing dependence on any one or 10 single merchants. Also, remember that that Top 10 is not always the same Top 10 as you had in the prior quarter.

This quarter, three of those are actually new Top 10. So there is increased diversification going on even when the concentration in the 10 in any given quarter might have gone up, driven by the stellar performance in Mexico and Brazil of our platforms product.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. Our next question comes from the line of John Coffey with Barclays. Your line is now open.

John Coffey: Great. thank you very much for taking my question. I had just had two short ones. I saw that the revenues in Chile look like they went down about 9%. And it seems like Chile had always been a fairly good grower. I wasn’t sure if there’s any one particular driver there. So just like to hear a little bit more about Chile. The second question is, it looks like sales and marketing, those expenses stepped up in Q3. Perhaps that ties to Pedro’s earlier comments that you’re investing in your sales channel. But how should we expect your thoughts about investing in the sales and marketing going forward through the rest of this year and onward into next year?