Ultrapar Participações S.A. (NYSE:UGP) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So is the teaser does it make sense to keep on having your own stations with branded stations, if that will mean excessive capacity considering your Petrobras quota. So this is the question. And about the divestment of some of the stations what the impact that it has had on volumes? Do you use any metrics of cubic meter sold per station comparing that to new stations just to understand really how many more stations would have to be sold for you to complete your strategy? Thank you.

Leonardo Linden: Good morning, Regis. Well, Petrobras is still the main supplier of Ipiranga, regardless of the circumstances. This is the partner that gives us really the confidence in supply that we need to operate and this is going to remain so. Petrobras does not supply the whole market. There is a deficit which means imports and Ipiranga will keep on importing the product. We’ve got ready for that. We have our supply area ready to purchase from all over the world. We’re going to do it competitively. And I really think that the Brazilian market — the Brazilian market pricing will get adjusted to the model in which you have Petrobras price and imported prices. Marginal molecules are more exposed to the spot volume and this is how we have addressed it.

And this is how the market will get set out. But whether we should keep on investing or not well interesting point because investments of quality are always worth making, because there is a natural churn in the network and you naturally make placements. And just referring back to your point of the closure of stations it’s part of the process. Even though, we are dealing with the long tail that we knew you had to close, it’s part of our network activities. We’re always going to make investments of quality, but as we said right from the beginning our investments are really — we are raising the bar of the quality of investments and we do that because we want to improve continuously our network. If we get the average of our stations in 2021, it was below 170 cubic meters.

The average today is over 220 cubic meters. That’s the average of our current stations. So it means healthier business. Here, we have investments over 330 cubic meters, and some — these investments are on average of 40 cubic meters. So yeah, it’s worth investing, provided that they are investments of quality otherwise it would make no sense. I think I’ve answered all your questions, but if you want to hear anything else please let me know.

Regis Cardoso: No. That’s okay. Thank you very much. Great results, guys.

Operator: Next question comes from Matheus Enfeldt from UBS.

Matheus Enfeldt: Hello, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. The first one about capital allocation and your expectations. Recently, I mean, as an expert and there is the whole know-how of Ultracargo. This kind of format or companies, what we’ve been analyzing is there still room for purchasing anything larger or different diversification thinking about your process really more than anything specific. My second question about Ultragaz. Margins are still impacting the results but it has been a consistent surprise to the market, but there are two points about maintenance of margins. Thinking in the long-term much more than let’s say 2024 in hearing about the regulatory concerns about the regulations over the gas bottling, and how are you dealing with the regulatory risk?

And secondly, do you think that this margin levels would open the possibility of replacing sources maybe going more into natural gas, when price of fuel is going down, wouldn’t be a risk of margin just to focus on this specific gas applications you have?