Now, I will turn the conference over to the CEO, Mr. Carbonari, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Carbonari, you may begin your conference.

Transcription

1 Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. At this time we would like to welcome everyone to Anhanguera Educacional s 1Q07 results conference call. Today with us we have Mr. Antonio Carbonari, CEO; Mr. José Luiz Poli, Chief Academic Officer; Mr. Ricardo Scavazza, COO and Investor Relations Officer; and Mr. Marcos Guimarães, CFO. We would like to inform you that this event is recorded and all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the Company s presentation. After Anhanguera Educacional s remarks, there will be a question and answer session for analysts and investors. At that time, further instructions will be given. Should any participant need assistance during this call, please press *0 to reach the operator. Today s live webcast, both audio and slide show, may be accessed through Anhanguera Educacional s Investor Relations website at by clicking on the banner Webcast 1Q07. The following presentation is also available to download on the webcast platform. The following information is available in Brazilian reais and in BR GAAP, except when otherwise indicated. Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements will be made under the Safe Harbor of the Securities litigation reform act of Forwardlooking statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Anhanguera Educacional management and on information currently available to the Company. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions because they relate to future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions and other operating factors could also affect the future results of Anhanguera Educacional, and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Now, I will turn the conference over to the CEO, Mr. Carbonari, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Carbonari, you may begin your conference. Antonio Carbonari: Good morning, everyone, friends and shareholders. I am Antonio Carbonari, CEO of Anhanguera Educacional. In this conference call, we will present the financial results of the 1Q07, in which we reached our strategic goals. We are very happy with our results and optimistic about our operational prospect. Our results reflect the success of our strategy which is to offer highquality education at affordable price to working adults. 1

2 With us today we have Professor José Luiz Poli, Chief Academic Officer; Mr. Marcos Guimarães, CFO; and Mr. Ricardo Scavazza, COO and IR Director, to whom I will now pass the word. Ricardo Scavazza: Good morning, everyone. This is Ricardo Scavazza speaking. First of all, I would like to highlight the key elements of our Company s strategy. We believe that the strong financial results our Company presented in this 1Q07 reflect the success of our strategy to obtain strong sustainable growth with improving margins, creating very interesting return for our shareholders. The elements that I would like to highlight for our strategy are four key elements: first, our focus on serving one specific target customer, which is the working adult student. This is a student that works during the day and studies at night, typically a student of middle-income or lower-middle income, who is searching for a graduate degree for advancing in his career. This is a market that today in Brazil is very fragmented, mostly served by familyowned Companies throughout Brazil that are small and that lack professional management. We believe we have a significant competitive advantage in comparison to those Companies. It is a market that practically did not exist 15 years ago in Brazil, it is an emergent market that is showing a very strong growth rate. And we believe that, at this point, it is still significantly underpenetrated and it has a significant potential for growth for several years still in Brazil. Second, we think that another key element is our value proposition for the student. We pursue to offer the best price within our segment, with differentiated quality of education. We see that our tuition is currently competitive across all markets where we operate today. We intend to sustain that leadership, and we think that our differentiated business model will make it possible for us to continue to sustain that price leadership and, in addition, we see that we consistently deliver a differentiated quality of education in comparison to our direct peers; the quality of education as measured by internal surveys, as well as measured the Ministry of Education. Another key element of our strategy is our replicable business model. We have a model of having multi-campuses operation. Each campus operates under standard business and academic offices. And also, we have very solid quality assessment tools that ensure the replicability of the model with consistent results in terms of quality of education. We believe this model has been successful and will continue to be successful in delivering this quality of services and quality of education in all the campuses that we open, and this model will allow us to rapidly expand to a new market, always sustaining the same standard of services that we provide today. 2

3 Another and the last element that we would like to highlight is our focus on gains of scale. By having a centralized management structure, we ensure strong control of operations, and we drive gains of scale. So, we believe that our structure today is very solid and will enable us to manage efficiently our expansion, keeping very strong control of our operations as we grow. We believe there are significant gains of scale to be earned, and we expect to dilute our central administration costs over time, as we grow our top line. To conclude, we would like to state our goal, which is to be the leading provider of working adult education in Brazil, offering the best combination of quality education and affordable prices. We believe that we have a very differentiated business model today in our segment. We, today, still focus on the State of São Paulo, in Brazil, and we are now implementing our expansions throughout other regions of the country. Our vision is to be a national provider of working adult education and really attain and sustain a national leadership within our segment. Turning to the next page, we present the key highlights of our financial performance for this quarter. The Company posted a very strong growth on top line. We will elaborate on the drivers of that growth further in the presentation. Growth on gross profit was even stronger than on the top line, there were significant improvements in the gross margin. In terms of EBITDA and net earnings, growth was even stronger. Not only were there improvements in terms of the cost structure of the campuses, but also we experienced some gains in our centralized management structure, resulting on this bottom line net earnings growth of 243%, comparing 1Q06 to 1Q07. Moving on to the next page, we present a build-up of our revenues growth. The first driver of our Company s top line expansion is related to the expansion of number of campuses. At the beginning of 2006, the Company operated 11 campuses. Between the 1Q06 and the 1Q07, we implemented seven new campuses, three of which were greenfield openings and four were acquisitions. More recently, we concluded other acquisition, which is not included in the 1Q07, bringing the number of operating campus to 19 at this point. So, for the period under analysis, the number of campuses grew by 63%, which is the first driver of our top line growth. In addition to that, we also increased the average number of students per campus by 30%. That growth reflects the maturation of our campus base. This is a process that we expect to continue to see in future years. It is a characteristic of our business that, when you open a unit, in the first year you only have a fraction of the total potential number of students for that unit, as you only have first-year students at that point. As the unit matures, you accumulate co-hoards of students. You are not graduating students, and you are accumulating new entrances. 3

4 So, you see, typically, a speed growth, particularly in the first four years of each unit. A significant proportion of our units are in that maturation stage. So as those units mature, we expect this number of students per campus to continue to grow. Another aspect that brought us a growth in number of student per campus was the change in the type of units that the Company is implementing. In the past, the Company did implement a few smaller units, units of the size of 1,000 to 1,500 students, and now our strategy is to implement campuses that have a capacity from 3,000 to 6,000 students. So, over time, we should expect, as the smaller campuses from the past become less relevant, and the Company matures this new campus base, we should expect this average number of students to mature to a level above this 3,000 average student level. Those two factors together translated into a very strong growth in average enrollments, of 117%. The number that is presented for average enrollment in the 1Q07 does not reflect the full impact of the acquisitions that were done in the quarter. We are only counting the acquisition of Unibero, the São Paulo unit, for February and March, and for the Fênix acquisition we are only counting the number of students in March. So, a pro forma number, including the addition of those acquisitions, would be even stronger than the numbers shown here for average enrollment. In terms of average ticket, the growth reflects inflation. Our strategy is to pass on inflation each year to tuition, so this indicator reflects this adjustment, plus a slight change in our program mix. All this together translated into a net revenues growth of 125% for the relevant period, which is in line with our expectations. Moving on to the next slide, we are showing some additional color on our recent expansions. You see, on the slide, that the Company has been very active in implementing expansion initiatives; we have been opening units through acquisitions or greenfield openings every month. We did one acquisition in November, one in December, three greenfield openings in January, one acquisition in February, one in March and one in April. So, this throws some color for you on how active the Company has been in implementing its expansion, and we would like to draw your attention not only to the number of units that the Company has implemented in this period, but also to the increase of the size of our addressable market, that resulted from this acquisitions. We take a top-down approach in directing our expansion initiatives. We have a very subtle analysis of potential markets throughout Brazil, and we are 4

5 prioritizing our acquisitions in markets that we think that have most a potential market, favorable demographics and favorable competitive environment within our segment. So, you see that those expansion initiatives that we did in the past 12 months resulted in a very significant growth in our addressable market. The highlight here, obviously, is the acquisition in São Paulo, which added to our addressable market 1.5 million people. The criteria here for target population is number of people within the age bracket of years old, and also added to our market 400,000 students. So, the entrance in São Paulo alone represented a growth in the size of our addressable market of almost 5x. Even not considering São Paulo, the other acquisitions and greenfield openings that were implemented in the period also represented a significant growth in the addressable market. You see that, excluding São Paulo, we added 600,000 potential clients in the period. It is a growth of 80% in comparison to our addressable market back in the 1Q06. In terms of size of the market, a growth of 67%. I think this gives you an idea of what we are trying to do through our expansion strategy, we are trying to enter new markets, bring our business model to a larger number of cities, always focusing on the most interesting cities in Brazil. I would also like to highlight that even after these latest expansion initiatives that we did, we are still only addressing to less than 15% of the potential market in Brazil, so we think that in the future we have a significant growth potential by exploring those markets where we already operate, and by further expanding our addressable market, by entering new cities through the same strategy, of acquiring and implementing new units, greenfield. Changing to the next slide, we provide an analysis of our margins. The Company improved its margin significantly in the period. We had a net margin, adjusted for the amortization of goodwill, in the 1Q06, of 17%, and we improved this margin significantly in the 1Q07 to more than 25%. The key factors driving the margin improvement were: first, the improvements in the cost structure, we gained 10 p.p. in terms of direct costs, those include all the costs at the campus level. The key drivers of that improvement in costs were: first, the maturation of the campuses; the increasing average number of students per unit, that we have already commented in the previous slide results on a dilution of the fixed cost per campus. We expect, and this is natural in our business model, for each unit to improve its margins as it matures. So, a unit, typically, a unit in its first year has a margin that is lower than the units that have already matured. So, we always expect this improvement in margins, and as the average number of students per unit has improved significantly in the period, this reflects in our cost structure. 5

6 Secondly, we have been focusing, since 2005, on implementing several initiatives for improving our productivity at the campus level by reengineering our business processes at the campus level, and also by centralizing several activities from the campus level to the central administration. Those initiatives have been consistently improving our campus margin. The margins improved from 2005 to 2006, throughout the year of 2006 we experienced a margin gain, as we implemented those initiatives. So even between the 1Q06 and the other following quarters of 2006, we saw those margin increase and we believe that those initiatives have matured in this quarter, showing the potential for gross margin that we have at this point. We do not expect to sustain the same level of gross margins for the year, though. We think that for following quarters, some aspects should bring our margins down and offset part of this margin gain that we experienced in the first quarter. Those drivers are, especially, the addition of acquisitions, the companies that we are acquiring, and that we acquired in the first quarter, have a gross margin that is below the margins that we experience in our business model; so, as the weight of those acquisitions becomes more relevant, this should impact our gross margins. In the 1Q07, this impact is more limited because, of the two acquisitions that we did, one was only accounted for two months, one for one month and one, as it was done in April, is not reflected in the first quarter results, as those acquisitions are fully accounted for in our numbers and, as we do more acquisitions, we continue to have that trend of bringing in new operations with lower gross margins. We expect that to pressure our consolidated margins for the Company and, in addition to that we have, in our business, it is typical to have a seasonality for gross margins that drives margins across the year to lower levels. This is a result of the natural dropout that we have in the business. Typically, you have your peak of number of students in the first quarter of the year, and through the following quarters, what you experience is a gradual dropout of students, that is natural. So, between the first and second quarter, typically what you see is that the second quarter has a margin that is lower than the first quarter. We typically bring that margin back in the third quarter, as there is a small intake in July. That drives the gross margins back up again, and they go down again in the fourth quarter as a result of a further dropout. So, we would just like to highlight that the current gross margin levels should not guide the expectations for the year. We think that, together with the impact of the acquisitions and the impact of the seasonal impact of dropout, together should drive our gross margins closer to the levels that we experienced in In terms of selling expenses, there was a negative impact in our margins for the quarter when compared to This is a one-time event. It reflects the fact that in 2006 the Company did not accrue the provision for doubtful accounts on 6

7 a quarterly basis, we only did this provision for the fiscal year, at the end of the year. And as in 2007 we are doing such provision on a quarterly basis, this is representing this difference in terms of selling expenses between 2006 and Selling expenses are, basically, marketing costs and the provision for doubtful accounts. In terms of marketing costs, we are at the same level in proportion to net revenues as we were in 2005, and the difference really is reflecting this change in the accounting procedures between 2006 and The third important factor that affected our margins is the dilution of G&A. We gained 2 p.p. in our margin by diluting our G&A. We think this shows the trend that we expect to continue in the future, for growing top line and having these gains of scale in our central administrative structure. We think that those gains were made in a context where at the period we did some improvements in our central administrative structure throughout the year of 2006, and also we have the weight here accounted in these G&A expenses of the acquisitions that we did. But even with those two factors driving G&A expenses up, we were able to gain those 2 p.p. by diluting our G&A expenses. We expect in the future further dilution in that line as we intend to grow our top line further in 2007, representing ever further dilution of our centralized administrative structure. In addition to that, by integrating the administrative structure of the acquisitions we also expect to experience a further impact of this dilution of G&A. Altogether, our expectation that was already communicated in our earnings release is to achieve an adjusted net earnings for 2007 of R$56 million, representing a margin above 20% for the year, a significant gain in comparison to the level that we experienced in Moving on to the next slide, it represents our historical growth in EBITDA and net earnings. What I would like to comment here is that you see a constant trend of margin improvement, which is also reflected in the 1Q07 results that we presented today. This improvement in margin in our analysis is related to the constant improvement that we have done in our cost structure at the unit level. This improvement that has been constantly occurring since 2004 relates again to productivity gains at the unit level, centralization of activities from the units, and the process of maturing our campus base. In addition to that, we are also seeing this trend of diluting our central administrative expenses. You see that trend when you compare 2005 to Also, that trend is very clear in the analysis of this quarter s results, and we expect to continue to pursue this dilution in the future. 7

8 Moving on to the next slide, it represents an analysis of our cash flow. First, there was the impact of the IPO proceeds, we raised R$360 million with the IPO, the Company generated an EBITDA in the period of R$ 55.9 million. You see that the impacts of taxes and working capital are small, representing a very high conversion of EBITDA into cash. This is a characteristic of our business. We have a very low impact of taxes in our cash flow due to the tax breaks provided by the Prouni program, and also our very efficient financial cycle enables us to grow without consuming relevant cash in working capital. Other items in our cash flow, including operating expenses, those basically relate to the IPO, especially regarding banking fees. And we did spend in the period R$ 30 million in acquisitions and R$ 21 million in CAPEX, resulting on the final balance of R$ 299 million of cash at the end of the 1Q07. Moving on to the next slide, we comment on the performance of the stock. We were very pleased with the way the market received our Company. We believe that the appreciation of the stock reflects the investors confidence in our strategy and in our management team, and we are very committed to continuing to deliver on our financial performance and really provide a high return for our shareholders. In the final slide, for closing remarks, we would like to state that the management will continue to focus on the delivery of the 2007 financial targets. Our key target, that was provided as guidance, is to pursue these net earnings of R$ 56 million. That is, this indicator is considering the concept of adjusted net earnings that is translated in our prospects and in our release, that concept basically takes the net earnings excluding the amortization of goodwill from acquisitions and the IPO expenses. So, our target for this indicator for the year is R$ 56 million, and we expect to achieve that target by continuing to expand number of units to greenfield openings and acquisitions, by basically continuing to implement the same strategy that we presented back in our expansion section of the presentation. Keeping operating costs under control. Our Company is very focused on having a very strong control of quality of operations and also costs at unit level, and we expect to continue to be very focused on managing that aspect of our business. And the third factor is to continue to pursue further dilution of our central administrative expenses, and we expect that to happen by expanding our revenues and by integrating the acquired campuses and realizing the synergies that we expect to have with this acquired Companies, driving our G&A costs down and even increasing the dilution that we already presented for this quarter. With that I end the presentation. I would like to pass on to Prof. Carbonari for his closing remarks. 8

9 Antonio Carbonari: I wish to thank you all again. Remember that our good results must be shared with all the Directors, staff, teams, coordinators and the faculties for their outstanding job, and to our growing number of students for believing in us. Thank you again. Ricardo Scavazza: With that we end our presentation, and we are open for questions. Carlos Martins, Credit Suisse: Hi, good morning, everyone. Just a quick question on the G&A expenses. What kind of decrease are you expecting for 2007 in terms of G&A expenses at a percentage of net revenues with the opening of new campuses and the acquisitions you are foreseeing for the year? Thanks. Ricardo Scavazza: Hi, Carlos. Thank you for the question. We are not providing specific guidance for the G&A expenses, but what we can say is that we expect to grow our top line further in That aspect alone should represent additional dilution of G&A expenses as a percentage of net revenues. Only by having the impact of the acquisitions that we already did, if you, for instance, analyze the 1Q07 in a pro forma basis, looking for the full impact of revenues from the acquisitions that were done in the quarter, that percentage dilution would already be more representative. As we have a target of continuing to open new campuses and doing acquisitions, by expanding this top line we expect that percentage to increase. In addition to that, we are in the process of integrating the acquisitions that we have already done, and that process of integration should drive costs down and also impact positively this percentage gain on the G&A line. Carlos Martins: OK. Thanks a lot. Pedro Gil, Fortress Investment: Hi. Good morning. Congratulations on the great quarter. Just a quick question here. Very simple, if you can walk us again through the increase and the timing differences in these selling expenses and where did that come from. That is all. Thank you very much, and again, congratulations. 9

10 Ricardo Scavazza: OK. Well, the selling expenses line basically includes two items; it include the sales and marketing cost, but it also includes the provision for doubtful accounts expenses. In 2006 we did not accrue the provision for doubtful account on a quarterly basis, the provision was done at the end of the year. We were a private company, so we tracked this provision on our managerial statement, but we were not doing this provision on our accounting. In 2007, we started to do this provision on a quarterly basis, so each quarter we are doing the provision for doubtful accounts. When you compare the quarters you see this difference, higher expense on 2007 in comparison to 2006, but this difference should net out for fiscal year, as the current levels of provision that we are doing for 2007 is at the same levels that we provisioned for So, it is basically a difference of a timing of accounting for the provision. We should have maybe done an adjustment on this item to normalize our results for 2006 and show to you the results of 2006 normalizing the provision against 2007, then you would not see a difference, but we were advised by our auditors to show the pure accounting results, and this was the way that we accounted for this expense last year. Pedro Gil: OK. Excellent. That was perfectly clear. Thank you very much, and congratulations. Operator: Thank you. At this time we have no further questions. I would like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks. Ricardo Scavazza: Thank you, everyone, for participating, and thanks for all the investors that have backed our Company in this first few months in the capital market. We are very pleased with the results of the Company. We are very pleased with the response of the financial market to our story, and we are very committed to continue on delivering and bringing attractive returns to our shareholders. Thank you all for participating. 10

11 Operator: Thank you. This thus concludes today s Anhanguera Educacional 1Q07 results conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. 11