Given our leadership in the Brazilian SMS market and the more balanced market dynamics, we’ve been able to leverage a more efficient cost structure to gain market share with certain strategic large enterprise customers, which led to the strong recovery in SMS volumes with healthy profitability levels. CPaaS also delivered a solid 13% increase in gross profit when compared to the first 9 months of ’22, reaching a gross margin of 33.2%, up 5 percentage points. We are confident that this strategy will help us improve our relationship with these customers, allowing us to capitalize on cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Also, our SaaS business, despite facing the downsell in large enterprise in our consulting business, reached BRL134 million in gross profit in the first 9 months of the year, a 13% increase compared to the first 9 months of ’22 and reached a gross margin of nearly 64%.
This is mainly related to revenue growth and the consolidation of Movidesk. Moving to the next slide. We highlight our EBITDA evolution since the second quarter of ’22, which is a direct result of the decision to pivot saving to a SaaS company and focus on improving profitability. It has not been easy, particularly given the complex macro environment. But as you can see, our strategy is paying off with the third quarter of ’23 marking the fifth consecutive quarter of positive EBITDA. EBITDA was positive BRL16.5 million in the quarter, up from BRL9.9 million a year ago and BRL15 million in Q2 of ’23. The stronger EBITDA is mainly related to the gross profit expansion I just explained, coupled with the execution of our savings plan initiated in July ’22.
The disciplined execution of this efficiency plan led to an 8.4% drop in nominal G&A expenses, reducing the ratio of G&A as a percentage of revenue to 16.7% in 9 months from ’23 from 18.5% in 9 months of ’22. Also in Q3 ’23, we had a BRL0.6 million impact from non-cash earnout expense related to SenseData. Year-to-date, our EBITDA already totals BRL55.7 million, on track to meet the guidance for the full year. In fact, our last 12 months EBITDA of BRL79 million is already within the guidance range. In terms of cash flow, we ended September ’23 with a solid cash balance of nearly BRL120 million, in line with the previous quarter and a direct result of our focus on cash preservation without jeopardizing our sustainable growth. The combination of stronger EBITDA and a stricter control of working capital was enough to pay for capital expenditure and debt service accumulated in the year.
Now let’s discuss our guidance for 2023. To finish, I would just like to reiterate the guidance we previously set for 2023, as we are confident with our performance so far, and we are expecting a good Q4, which normally boost our revenue and will positively impact our EBITDA, which, as I just said, is already on track to meeting the guidance. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks and we are ready to take your questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions].
Shay Chor: You got one here on the webcast. Can you comment on your consulting business and why it has been so difficult to make it work?
Cassio Bobsin: We’re going to take this one. So when we are addressing the enterprise market, this year has been a tough year, a tough environment, which means decision-making cycles are taking longer than expected. That’s why, even though we’re bringing new enterprise customers, especially to our SaaS offerings, it is taking longer than expected to ramp up their revenues. As we expect in the next couple of quarters to get this on track, especially as we’re seeing new logos coming and new projects being under launch phase, it’s still not being in our results, but we expect the next couple of quarters to have a higher flow of enterprise customers coming and impacting our revenues.
Shay Chor: Thank you, Cassio. So I’ll keep going here. We saw an acceleration of CPaaS in the third quarter, seems completely different from H2 of last year. Can you comment on this different dynamic?
Cassio Bobsin: Sure. Last year, we had a very tough competition on the CPaaS space, being talking about the last couple of quarters. We were able to get back with a more competitive approach this year. So that’s why we’re getting back our market share and are also advancing more than we had in the past and with profitability. So we’ll be able to combine more aggressiveness on the market with a positive flow of cash coming from this business. We see the market — even though, it is a mature business, it still has lots of opportunities for us, considering we are the largest players in the region. So we’re able to — being able to benefit from that position in the market to bring especially big customers that are driving their growth on the space with Zenvia.
And these same customers, we’re exploring new opportunities with them to also advance more into the solutions side, which means the SaaS revenues between the same customers. So we’re getting more presence on the CPaaS space, and we expect that in the short to midterm to also benefit us on the SaaS market as well.
Shay Chor: Thanks, Cassio. Can you give us an update on earnouts due next year? Have you been able to restructure any more of those? Are you trying to restructure some of your debt? So I’ll take this one. Yes, as we’ve been discussing with you since Q2 of this year, we’ve been discussing with all our creditors, banks and including the seller’s finance to restructure — continue restructuring as we did. This is an ongoing conversation. We have time helping us here because markets seem to be improving somewhat in terms of credit and funding alternatives. And due to our effort in generating EBITDA, but also having a very strict control of working capital, we’ve been able to push our cash and our liquidity to put us in a better position to renegotiate debt.
