5/3/2024

speaker
Sergey
Head of Investor Relations

I'll now turn the call over to Mr. João Bento, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

speaker
João Bento
Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Sergey. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter results call. If you join me on page number four of the presentation, I would start to call your attention to the fact that we had revenue growth in all business areas except the financial services, mostly as a result of market expansion and share gains. both on parcels and the bank. In fact, the decline in financial services was more than offset in revenues, although not yet in margin, given the performance that we can see on the right-hand side, if you follow me, on excess in parcels first, with an amazing triple-digit volume growth in Spain and also double-digit growth in Portugal. That produced margin expansion, leveraging our increased scale Then on mail and others, we are benefiting from a very decent price increase, also good mix, and the effect of the elections that led to higher mail volumes. And we, of course, remain very focused on cost efficiency measures, given the fact that we believe that the mail business will perform better than before going on. Going forward, on financial services in detail, the commercial focus is now on distribution of insurance and related products, namely health insurance programs, and it's finally gaining traction. While public debt placements remain still in low levels, although we have a positive outlook for that. Finally, the bank performed with strong client engagement, and therefore growth in the business resources, and operational leverage driving significantly profitability in the quarter. Moving to slide number five, and with a bit more detail on the parcel business, we have seen volumes in Spain close to peak season levels, The peak season, well, continued throughout the quarter. This drove record growth on revenues, as we said, more than doubling year on year, if you compare the first quarter of last year with the first quarter of this year, both on volumes and on revenues, and also a very decent performance in Portugal, with great promising, again, in volumes and revenues with a significant growth. We have the parcels business on path for certainly another record here in Iberia. And if you follow me on slide six, we can then look at the margin, which expanded significantly, driven by operational gearing. We have, in fact, an impressive progress on the EBIT generation in Spain. We came from minus 1.5 million to plus 2.9 million. a very decent EBIT margin, already reaching 4.5%. And, in fact, we are benefiting from our prior investment on capacity and the resulting operational leverage when now volumes are as high as they remain being. In Portugal, likewise, we had an improvement on the EBIT margin from 6.5% to 7.4%, quarter to quarter, or year to year for the first quarter, with a continued improvement on the absolute value, margin growing almost 28% from 2.1 to 2.7 million. And here, again, grabbing market share and leveraging on the fact that we keep performing very well in distributing parcels using also the mail network. So we see a continued investment in expansion of capacity, since we are positive about the volume growth and the trend that we are feeling, to enable future growth and, of course, improved profitability. And with this, I would invite you to follow my colleague, Jean Sousa, to guide you through mail and recall.

speaker
Jean Sousa
Head of Mail and Others

Thank you, Joel. As you can see on slide seven, the increase of price and the type of needs are helping to offset some of the drop in volumes. We have a 10.5% drop in address mail volumes. If we take the effect of elections, it's minus 11.8 against the previous year. But the average revenue per item growing 18%. versus the previous year. It's also very important to mention that the price increase of 9.49% that was made in February is not fully reflected in the quarter. And we also have information from part of our customers, namely the public sector, that was a delay of the production in March, mainly because of these elections. So the election allowed us to have better traffic and more traffic in this quarter, but also was a backlog of production in May. that we are already seeing in . These allow us to achieve 100.7 million euros in revenue in this first quarter. That compares plus 5.9% against the same quarter in the last year. As you can see on slide eight, the elections allow us to have a positive effect in traffic and price per item, but they also brought an increase in costs in this period. We have 180.3 million euros of costs in this quarter that compares with 111.7 million euros with the quarter of last year, more 6.7 million, which results in 2 million euros in EBIT in this quarter that compares with 2.7 million euros in the quarter of last year. However, the cost-efficient program that we talked about in the last quarter is still ongoing, and we expect results in this year. Also, the effect of the price increase, we believe that when fully reflected will help to stabilize the margins in this business area. On slide nine, on the retail and financial service, we saw in this quarter a weak performance in the placement of public debt. mainly justified by the €50,000 caps that this series has per saver, and because the market still has the perception that the conditions are not yet very attractive compared with the other offers in the market. We believe that the levels of public debt should improve and revert to normal, mainly for two main reasons. The first one is the conditions. We believe that it's better than the market at the perception. And in that way, for the first time, IGCP allowed us to do communication campaigns, and we are doing right now. And we already see, it's every day, but we already see a positive path when we explain to the market that the conditions are more competitive than the market at the perception. And the second reason is we also believe that in the future the other offers in the market are going to lose competitiveness and with that this series of public debt is going to gain competition and allow us to increase the balance of public debt. At the same time, in association with the retail strategic that we have for CPP, that we already say want to be the largest and the best service platform in Portugal, we have greatly boosted insurance and health plans with very positive results, with a lot of attraction in the market. As you can see in the graph on the right side, we are looking for the health plans with very good attraction. And with this, we believe that we are creating a serious alternative for the future for retail business of CPP, And with performance control by CPP. That's guaranteed with also these services have a guaranteed revenue model that help a lot to control this business area. And with that, I pass for Pacheco.

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