Christian Gebara: No. I don’t think so, Vitor. I think, on the contrary, I think our ability to migrate prepaid to hybrid is still there. But what I just highlighted is the same ability is also there for hybrid to pure postpaid and is also there for hybrid with new businesses embedded in package together. What we see here is that we have, like, a sales machine that is very difficult to replicate in any sector. We’re talking about 1,800 stores. We are talking about 23 million unique users going up in the app. We are talking about our WhatsApp that’s using artificial intelligence. We’re talking about our call center that are now driving much more sales than it used to do before. So, our ability to sell more to our customers and upsell, we think prepaid to hybrid, hybrid to pure postpaid, pure postpaid to Vivo Total, and then adding to this additional services is still there and it’s growing.
So, I’m totally, have the different view on that. I think the ability to do so is going to be up. And then the discussion, if it’s more hybrid to pure postpaid or more prepaid, I think what we need to do here is to offer the best value proposition to specific customer, and that’s why we also have a big data that is very powerful and allow us to be very well segmented and to offer the right offering to the right customer, but I hear is the ability to sell more and that’s what is driving us lifetime value that we increasing and with acquisition cost that is very, very, very low. Regarding price of the FTTH and the competition, we are rational in our pricing here. It’s difficult to talk about competition here. We are the number one, number one in network, the number one in the size of home passed.
We are reaching 29 million by the end of the year. We’re number one in the number of customers, 6.3 million customers. We’re number one in the share of net adds. And we are the one increasing the speed, we are the one increasing ARPU, and we are the one reducing churn. So, we know how to compete, and we know that we have a different value proposition. Then in my opinion, very, very, very difficult to replicate.
Vitor Tomita: Very clear. Thanks a lot for the reply.
Christian Gebara: Thank you, Vitor, for the question.
Operator: Next question from Carlos de Legarreta with Itau BBA.
Carlos de Legarreta: Good morning. Thank you for taking the question. I have two on my side. I guess probably for David. So, first of all, during the quarter, the effective tax rate was typically high, if I’m not mistaken. So, I was wondering what’s the nature of that. And secondly, on the size of the leases, I know they have been increasing for — by double digits year-over-year for the past couple of quarters. But at the same time, I know you’re also decommissioning sites from the Oi acquisition. So, I’m just wondering how to reconcile those two and how to think about the motion of leases going forward. Thank you.
David Melcon: Thank you, Carlos, for the question. So, regarding the first one have to do with the effective tax rates, tax rate is impacted by the value of the interest on capital that we distribute every year. So, if you look over the last — in Q1 last year, we declared R$396 million. This year, we declared R$300 million. So, that mean that’s R$96 million less, which has an impact — direct impact in the line of expenses. For Q2, we are seeing that so far, we have already declared R$380 million compared to the R$320 million from the previous year. That means that in the second quarter, we will have an opposite effect. So, it will be an opposite effect when comparing year-over-year. Regarding the leases, as you mentioned, last year, we accelerate the negotiation with the towers company from the contract we acquired from Oi. So, we decommission around two-third of those.
So at the moment, this is something that if you look to the liabilities we have in our balance sheet now in — at the end of March, you can see that they’re almost in line with the same number that we’ve had from previous year. So, we have R$13.4 billion at the end of March, and we have R$13.6 billion at the end of December. So this is going down. So, how to reconcile with the with the payments? Again, if you look to the evolution, we are being — just applying some efficiency initiatives, and the number that you see in the first quarter, we are paying R$651 million. And if you look to the average of the amount paid over the last 12 months, so the quarterly, and the average, we paid R$689 million. So that means that we have a reduction of almost R$40 million.
Going forward, we would also have the benefit or we expect the reduction on the interest rates, and this is something that will bring also some benefit in the future. Also, I don’t know if you were looking to the cost — Carlos you want a comment on financial expenses. I think it’s important when you analyze the year-over-year evolution is that in the previous year, we have a positive effect of around R$100 million coming from the monetary update of some of the tax credit that we have on the PIS/COFINS last year. So, if you compare year-over-year, we need to reduce — increase R$100 million last year, so we are seeing a reduction. Going forward, so far, what we are seeing in the month of April, we are seeing some upside. So, thinking of next quarter, we will see some positive evolution of some of these particular items on the financial expenses.
