As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 28, 2023.
UNITED STATES
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For the fiscal year ended
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Securities registered or to be registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:
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Securities registered or to be registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:
None
Securities for which there is a reporting obligation pursuant to Section 15(d) of the Act:
None
Indicate the number of outstanding shares of each of the issuer’s classes of capital or common stock as of the close of the period covered by the annual report:
The number of outstanding shares as of December 31, 2022 was
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the
Securities Act. Yes
If this report is an annual or transition report, indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file
reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Yes
Note- Checking the box above will not relieve any registrant required to file reports pursuant to Section 13
or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 from their obligations under those Sections.
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or
15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the
registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.
Yes
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-
accelerated filer or an emerging growth company. See definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.
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Large accelerated filer ☐ |
Accelerated filer ☐ |
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Emerging growth company |
If an emerging growth company that prepares its financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP,
indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any
new or revised financial accounting standards† provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act.
† The term “new or revised financial accounting standard” refers to any update issued by the Financial
Accounting Standards Board to its Accounting Standards Codification after April 5, 2012.
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report.
If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐
Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b) ☐
Indicate by check mark which basis of accounting the registrant has used to prepare the financial statements
included in this filing:
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☐ U.S. GAAP |
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☐ Other |
If “Other” has been checked in response to the previous question, indicate by check mark which financial
statement item the registrant has elected to follow.
Item 17 ☐ Item 18 ☐.
If this is an annual report, indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in
Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).
Yes
Certain Definitions
Unless otherwise indicated or the context otherwise requires, all references in this annual report to “Zenvia” or the “Company,” “we,” “our,” “ours,” “us” or similar terms refer to Zenvia Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries; references to “Zenvia Brazil” refers to Zenvia Mobile Serviços Digitais S.A.
The term “Brazil” refers to the Federative Republic of Brazil and the phrase “Brazilian government” refers to the federal government of Brazil. All references to “real,” “reais” or “R$” are to the Brazilian real, the official currency of Brazil. All references to “U.S. dollar,” “U.S. dollars” or “US$” are to U.S. dollars, the official currency of the United States of America. All references to “Central Bank” are to the Brazilian Central Bank (Banco Central do Brasil).
Financial Information
Zenvia Inc. was incorporated on November 3, 2020, as a Cayman Islands exempted company with limited liability duly registered with the Cayman Islands Registrar of Companies. Zenvia Inc. became the holding company of Zenvia Brazil, through the completion of a corporate reorganization on May 7, 2021 whereby Zenvia Brazil shares were contributed to Zenvia Inc. Until the contribution of Zenvia Brazil to us, Zenvia Inc. had not commenced operations and had only nominal assets and liabilities and no material contingent liabilities or commitments. Subsequent to the completion of the above referred corporate reorganization, we began to consolidate financial information in order to reflect the operations of Zenvia Brazil.
As a result, the audited consolidated financial statements prepared by Zenvia Inc. subsequent to the completion of the reorganization are presented “as if” Zenvia Brazil is the predecessor of Zenvia Inc. Accordingly, our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this annual report on Form 20-F reflect: (i) the historical operating results of Zenvia Brazil prior to such reorganization, (ii) the consolidated results of Zenvia and Zenvia Brazil following such corporate reorganization and (iii) the consolidated assets and liabilities of Zenvia and Zenvia Brazil for the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021.
We maintain our books and records in Brazilian reais, the functional currency of our operations in Brazil and the presentation currency for our financial statements. Unless otherwise noted, the consolidated financial information of Zenvia and Zenvia Brazil contained in this annual report is derived from our audited consolidated financial statements as of December 31, 2022 and 2021 and for the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, together with the notes thereto. All references herein to “our financial statements” and “our audited consolidated financial statements” are to Zenvia’s consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this annual report, which were, prepared in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS, as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board, or IASB.
Special Note Regarding Non-GAAP Financial Measures
This annual report presents certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are not recognized under IFRS, specifically Non-GAAP Gross Profit, Non-GAAP Gross Margin, Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss), EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA. A non-GAAP financial measure is generally defined as one that purports to measure financial performance but excludes or includes amounts that would not be so adjusted in the most comparable GAAP measure. Non-GAAP financial measures do not have standardized meanings and may not be directly comparable to similarly-titled measures adopted by other companies. These non-GAAP financial measures are used by our management for decision-making purposes and to assess our financial and operating performance, generate future operating plans and make strategic decisions regarding the allocation of capital. We also believe that the disclosure of our Non-GAAP Gross Profit, Non-GAAP Gross Margin, Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss), EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA provides useful supplemental information to investors and financial analysts and other interested parties in their review of our operating performance. Potential investors should not rely on information not recognized under IFRS as a substitute for the IFRS measures of earnings, cash flows or profit (loss) in making an investment decision.
We use Non-GAAP Gross Profit, Non-GAAP Gross Margin, Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss), EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA, collectively, to evaluate our ongoing operations and for internal financial planning and forecasting purposes. We believe that non-GAAP financial measures, when taken collectively, may be helpful to investors because it provides consistency and comparability with past financial performance and facilitates period-to-period comparisons of results of operations.
Non-GAAP Gross Profit and Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss) are measures that exclude amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations. Our acquisition activities have resulted in the recognition of intangible assets, which consist primarily of client portfolio and digital platform. Finite-lived intangible assets are amortized over their estimated useful lives and are tested for impairment when events indicate that the carrying value may not be recoverable. The amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations is reflected in our consolidated statements of profit or loss and intangible asset amortization is an expense that typically fluctuates based on the size and timing of our acquisition activity. Accordingly, we believe that excluding the amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations enhances our and our investors’ ability to compare our past financial performance with our current performance and to analyze underlying business performance and trends. While amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations was excluded from Non-GAAP Gross Profit and Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss), the revenue generated by such intangible assets acquired from business combinations has not been excluded from such non-GAAP financial measures.
Non-GAAP Gross Profit, Non-GAAP Gross Margin and Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss)
We calculate Non-GAAP Gross Profit as gross profit plus amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations.
We calculate Non-GAAP Gross Margin as Non-GAAP Gross Profit divided by revenue.
We calculate Non-GAAP Operating Profit (Loss) as profit (loss) adjusted by income tax and social contribution (current and deferred) and financial expenses, net plus amortization of intangible assets acquired from business combinations, expenses related to branch closing and expenses related to IPO grants.
EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA
We calculate EBITDA as profit (loss) adjusted by income tax and social contribution (current and deferred), financial expenses, net and depreciation and amortization.
We calculate Adjusted EBITDA as EBITDA plus expenses related to branch closing, expenses related to IPO grants and goodwill impairment. In particular, the exclusions in calculating Adjusted EBITDA facilitates operating performance comparisons on a period-to-period basis and such exclusions remove items that we do not consider to be indicative of our core operating performance.
Market Information
This annual report contains data related to economic conditions in the market in which we operate. The information contained in this annual report concerning economic conditions is based on publicly available information from third-party sources that we believe to be reliable. Market data and certain industry forecast data used in this annual report were derived from our management’s knowledge and our experience in the industry, internal reports and studies, where appropriate, as well as estimates, market research, publicly available information and industry publications. We obtained the information included in this annual report relating to the Brazilian communication platforms market, and more broadly, the industry in which we operate, as well as the estimates concerning market shares, through internal research, public information and publications on the industry prepared by official public sources and specialized industry sources, such as the Central Bank, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, or FGV, Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística), or IBGE, World Bank and International Data Corporation, or IDC, Brazilian Association of Software Companies (Associação Brasileira das Empresas de Software), or ABES, Mobile Time, amongst others.
Industry publications, governmental publications and other market sources, including those referred to above, generally state that the information they include has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but that the accuracy and completeness of such information is not guaranteed. We have no reason to believe any of this information or these reports are inaccurate in any material respect and believe and act as if they are reliable. We have not independently verified it and they are subject to change based on various factors, including those discussed in “Item 3. Key Information—D. Risk Factors.” Governmental publications and other market sources, including those referred to above, generally state that their information was obtained from recognized and reliable sources, but the accuracy and completeness of that information is not guaranteed. Estimates of market and industry data are based on statistical models, key assumptions and limited data sampling, and actual market and industry data may differ significantly from estimated industry data. In addition, the data that we compile internally and our estimates have not been verified by an independent source. Information derived from management’s knowledge and our experience is presented on a reasonable, good faith basis. Except as disclosed in this annual report, none of the publications, reports or other published industry sources referred to in this annual report were commissioned by us or prepared at our request. Except as disclosed in this annual report, we have not sought or obtained the consent of any of these sources to include such market data in this annual report.
Rounding
We have made rounding adjustments to some of the figures included in this annual report for ease of presentation. Accordingly, certain of the numerical figures shown as totals in the tables may not be the exact sum total of the figures that precede them.
Emerging Growth Company Status
We are an “emerging growth company,” as defined in Section 2(a) of the Securities Act, as modified by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. We will remain an emerging growth company until the earlier of (1) the last day of the fiscal year (a) following the fifth anniversary of the completion of our initial public offering, (b) in which we have total annual revenues of at least US$1.235 billion, or (c) in which we are deemed to be a large accelerated filer, which means the market value of our shares that is held by non-affiliates exceeds US$700.0 million as of the prior June 30, and (2) the date on which we have issued more than US$1.00 billion in non-convertible debt during the prior three-year period. As an emerging growth company, we are eligible to take advantage of certain exemptions from various reporting requirements that are applicable to other public companies in the United States that are not emerging growth companies including, but not limited to, exemptions from the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and any Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, rules, including any future audit rule promulgated by the PCAOB (unless the SEC determines otherwise). Accordingly, the information about us available to investors will not be the same as, and may be more limited than, the information available to shareholders of a non-emerging growth company.
Forward-Looking Statements
This annual report contains certain information that constitutes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or Exchange Act, that are not based on historical facts and are not assurances of future results and as such, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many of the forward-looking statements in this annual report can be identified based on forward-looking words such as “aim,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “can,” “continue,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “likely,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “potential,” “probable,” “project,” “seek,” “should,” “target,” “would,” or the opposite of these terms or other similar expressions.
Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. There is no assurance that the expected events, trends or results will actually occur and we undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements and estimates whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our current belief or expectations as of the date of this annual report and estimates on future events and trends that affect or may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, liquidity, prospects and the trading price of our Class A common shares. Although such forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and information currently available to us, which we believe to be reasonable, none of the forward-looking statements, whether expressed or implied, are indicative of or guarantee future results. Given such limitations, investors should not make any investment decision on the basis of the forward-looking statements contained herein.
Our forward-looking statements may be affected by the following factors, among others:
Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. The accompanying information contained in this annual report on Form 20-F, including without limitation the information set forth under “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects,” identifies important factors that could cause such differences. In light of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions associated with forward-looking statements, investors should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Additional risks that we may currently deem immaterial or that are not presently known to us could also cause the forward-looking events discussed in this annual report on Form 20-F not to occur.
Our forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this annual report on Form 20-F, and we do not undertake any obligation to update them in light of new information or future developments or to release publicly any revisions to these statements in order to reflect later events or circumstances or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
Certain Risks Relating to Our Business and Industry
We have substantial liabilities and may be exposed to liquidity constraints, which could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.
In the context of our inorganic growth through acquisitions, we have recorded in our consolidated financial statements as of and for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 an amount of R$351,630 thousand as liabilities from acquisitions (being R$60,778 thousand recorded as current liabilities and R$290,852 thousand recorded as non-current liabilities), representing 41.0% of our liabilities as of December 31, 2022. Also, as of December 31, 2022, our loans, borrowings and debentures amounted to R$166,834 thousand, of which R$89,541 thousand was current and R$77,293 thousand was non-current, while our existing cash and cash equivalents amounted to R$100,243 thousand as of December 31, 2022.
If, for any reason, we are faced with continued difficulties in increasing our cash generation and/or accessing financing, this could hamper our ability to timely meet our principal and interest payment obligations with our creditors in general. See “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—B. Liquidity and Capital Resources—Liquidity.”
We have a history of net losses, and we expect to increase our expenses in the future, which could prevent us from achieving or maintaining profitability.
We have incurred net losses in the past, including a net loss of R$243,025 thousand for the year ended December 31, 2022 and R$44,646 thousand for the year ended December 31, 2021. We seek to improve our profitability, by taking measures to increase our EBITDA; however, we expect to have increased expenses with interest, depreciation and amortization, which may adversely impact our profitability. Also, we may not succeed in increasing our EBITDA to be profitable, as we seek to continue to expend significant funds to expand our direct sales force and marketing efforts to attract new customers, to develop and enhance our products and for general corporate purposes, including operations, upgrading our infrastructure and expanding into new geographical markets. To the extent we successfully increase our user base for our SaaS segment, we may also incur increased losses because costs associated with acquiring customers are generally incurred up front and may not be recovered from our customers, while the nature of the SaaS services refers to license subscriptions for the use of Zenvia platforms, where it is recognized proportionally to the time used. Our efforts to grow our business may be costlier than we expect, and we may not be able to increase revenue from our customers in a sufficient manner to offset our higher operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including as a result of the other risks described herein, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications, delays and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the value of our business and Class A common shares may significantly decrease. Furthermore, it is difficult to predict the size and growth rate of our market, customer demand for our platform, user adoption and renewal of our platform, the entry of competitive products and services, or the success of existing competitive products and services. As a result, we may not achieve or maintain profitability in future periods. If we fail to grow our revenues sufficiently to keep pace with our related investments and other expenses, our business would be harmed.
The market for our products and platform is relatively new and unproven, may decline or experience limited growth and is dependent on businesses continuing to adopt our platform and use our products.
We develop and provide a cloud-based communications platform that enables businesses to integrate several communication capabilities (including SMS, WhatsApp, Voice, WebChat and Facebook Messenger) into their software applications, empowering them to simplify communications along their end-consumers journey. This market is relatively new, unproven and subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including changes to end-consumer behavior, technologies, products and industry standards. The utilization of tools such as APIs and Bots by businesses to build, foster and simplify communications with their end-consumer is still relatively new, and businesses may not recognize the need for, or benefits of, our products and platform. Moreover, if they do not recognize the need for and benefits of our products and platform, they may decide to adopt alternative products and services to satisfy some portion of their business needs. In order to grow our business and extend our market position, we intend to focus on educating current and potential customers about the benefits of our products and platform, expanding the functionality of our products and bringing new technologies to market to increase market acceptance and use of our platform. Our ability to expand the market that our products and platform address depends upon a number of factors, including the cost, performance and perceived value associated with such products and platform. The market for our products and platform could fail to grow significantly or there could be a reduction in demand for our products as a result of a lack of acceptance by businesses, technological challenges, competing products and services, decreases in spending by current and prospective customers, and weakening macroeconomic conditions, among other causes. If our market does not experience significant growth or demand for our products decreases, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be materially adversely affected.
Approximately 65.6% of our revenue comes from our CPaaS segment and a substantial part of such revenue is generated from our SMS text messaging service. A reduction in our revenue from this service could materially adversely affect our operation results, cash flows and liquidity.
A substantial portion of our revenue is currently dependent on our SMS text messaging service. As a result, a reduction in revenue from this source of income, whether due to increased competition, cost increase from network service providers, adverse market conditions or a general reduction in demand for SMS text messaging services or other factors (including our inability to generate revenue from the other products we offer to our customers), could materially adversely affect our operational results, cash flows and liquidity. See also “—If we cannot keep pace with rapid developments and changes in our industry and fail to continue to acquire new customers, the use of our products and services could cease to grow or decline and, thereby, adversely affect our revenues, business and prospects.”
A significant portion of our revenue is currently concentrated on our outlier customers and an economic slowdown affecting these customers could lead to decreased demand for our products and services, which could adversely affect us.
A significant portion of our revenue is currently concentrated in our outlier customers, which are our top 10 largest customers in terms of revenue. For the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, 37.0%, 34.5% and 33.1%, respectively, of our revenue was derived from such customers. Of our outlier customers, our single top customer alone accounts for more than 10% of our revenues. For the years ended December 2022, 2021 and 2020, 12.5%, 13.0% and 9.8%, respectively, of our revenue was derived from such single top customer. Therefore, a slowdown in the industries in which such customers are concentrated due to market forces, macroeconomic conditions or regulatory changes could result in decreased demand for our products and services. In particular, such customers are particularly vulnerable to the effects of adverse macroeconomic conditions due to the corresponding impacts that macroeconomic factors typically have on end-consumer spending. Such effects may affect our revenue volumes, results of operations and profit margins. For example, certain of our outlier customers reduced the usage of our SMS text messaging services in April 2020 as a cost-saving initiative designed to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on their businesses (the usage of such SMS services was restored to comparable levels in the succeeding six-month period). In addition, any adverse market forces affecting the industry in which our customers are currently concentrated also increases our counterparty risk as it may heightens their risk of default.
If we cannot keep pace with rapid developments and changes in our industry and fail to continue to acquire new customers, the use of our products and services could cease to grow or decline and, thereby, adversely affect our revenues, business and prospects.
The Customer Experience (CX) SaaS platform market in which we compete is subject to rapid and significant technological changes, new product and service roll outs, evolving industry standards and changing customer needs. New technologies can disrupt SaaS platforms, making them outdated and ineffective to attend to increasing customer demands.
Also, our CPaaS platform is currently substantially dependent on our SMS text messaging services. Although we believe there is still a growing market for SMS text messaging services, there has been an increase in alternative messaging channels that use data connections such as internet protocol based, or IP-based, messaging services, e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram and Line, which could impact our growth in CPaaS.
In order to remain competitive and continue to acquire new customers, we are continually involved in a number of projects to develop new products and services, in both CPaaS (communications platform as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) segments. These projects carry risks, such as cost overruns, delays in delivery, performance problems and lack of customer adoption. Any delay in the delivery of new services or the failure to differentiate our services or to accurately predict and address market demand could render our services less desirable, or even obsolete, to our customers. Furthermore, despite the evolving market for CX communications, the market may not continue to develop rapidly enough for us to recover the costs we incur in developing new services targeted at this market.
In addition, we deliver services designed to simplify the way that businesses connect with their end-consumers. Any failure to deliver an effective and secure service or any performance issue that arises with a new service could result in significant processing or reporting errors or other losses. As a result of these factors, our development efforts could result in increased costs and we could also experience a loss in business that could reduce our earnings or could cause a loss of revenue if scheduled new services are not delivered to our customers on a timely basis or do not perform as anticipated. We also, and may in the future, rely in part on third parties, including some of our existing and potential competitors, for the development of, and access to, new technologies. Our future success will depend in part on our ability to develop or adapt to technological changes and evolving industry standards. We cannot predict the effects of technological changes on our business. If we are unable to develop, adapt or access technological changes or evolving industry standards necessary to meet our customers’ needs on a timely and cost-effective basis, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected.
Furthermore, our competitors may have the ability to devote more financial and operational resources than us to the development of new technologies, products and services. If successful, their development efforts could render our services less desirable to customers, resulting in the loss of customers or a reduction in the fees we could generate from our offerings.
We expect to be increasingly dependent on WhatsApp, since it has become a preferred channel of communication in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. Since WhatsApp is notably strict about the manner in which companies are allowed to interact with WhatsApp users, changes in the policies or in the terms and conditions of use of this communication channel might also adversely affect market potential and attractiveness for WhatsApp based solutions in the event such changes result in a decrease of possible use cases or result in increases on message content restrictions. For instance, in 2021, WhatsApp made changes to the conversation-based pricing policy of its business platform. As a result of these changes, certain interactions between businesses and their end-customers, which were previously free of charge, may now be subject to charges under certain conditions. This change so far had no significant impact in our operations, but we cannot guarantee that a future increase in costs in the usage of WhatsApp will not adversely impact our results of operations or the expected growth derived from the usage of this channel of communication or that we will be able to pass such costs onto our customers.
Failure to set optimal prices for both our SaaS solutions and CPaaS solutions could adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We charge our CPaaS customers based on the use of our products. One of our pricing challenges is that our costs related to network service providers, on whose networks we transmit SMS communications, which is our main product within the CPaaS segment, can vary given certain elements that may be difficult for us to predict, such as pricing increases upon renewal of our agreements with such providers and/or annual adjustments on SMS fees as a result of inflation or otherwise, that we cannot pass onto our customers and/or certain minimum take or pay SMS volume purchase obligations imposed on us by network services providers and the volume of which we cannot guarantee will be contracted by our new or existing customers. Additionally, fees paid by us to network service providers can be also affected by the enactment of new rules and regulations (including an increased amount of applicable taxes or governmental fees). This can result in us incurring increased costs that we may be unable or unwilling to pass through to our customers, which could adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition. For more information about our relationship with network service providers, see “Item 10. Additional Information—C. Material Contracts.”
Our SaaS solutions are mostly charged based on a subscription-based revenue model. We may fail to set pricing for subscriptions at levels appropriate to maintain our revenue streams or our customers may choose to deploy products from our competitors that they believe are more favorably priced. Similarly, we may fail to accurately predict subscription renewal rates or their impact on our operating results. Given that revenue from subscriptions is recognized for our services over the term of the subscription, downturns or upturns in sales may not be reflected immediately in our results.
Further, as competitors introduce new products or services at prices that are more competitive than ours for similar products and services, we may be unable to attract new customers or retain existing customers based on our historical pricing. As we expand internationally, we also must determine the appropriate price to enable us to compete effectively internationally. In addition, if the mix of products sold changes, including the ongoing shift to IP-based products (such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), then we may need to, or choose to, revise our pricing to remain competitive. As a result, in the future we may be required or choose to reduce our prices or change our pricing model, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We may require additional financing to support our future capital requirements and we may not be able to secure such financing on favorable terms or at all. Our current level of indebtedness could make it more difficult or expensive to refinance our maturing debt and/or incur new debt.
We intend to continue to make investments to support our business and may require additional funds to support our capital requirements. In particular, we may seek additional funds to develop new products and enhance our platform and existing products, expand our operations, including our sales and marketing departments and our presence outside of Brazil, improve our infrastructure or acquire complementary businesses, technologies, services, products and other assets. Accordingly, we may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. If we raise additional funds through future issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our shareholders could suffer significant dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those of holders of our Class A common shares. Any debt financing that we may secure in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities. We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth, scale our infrastructure, develop product enhancements and to respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business, results of operations and financial condition may be adversely affected.
Our current level of indebtedness could affect our credit rating and our ability to obtain any necessary financing in the future and may increase our cost of borrowing. In addition, our level of indebtedness could make it more difficult to refinance our existing indebtedness and could make us more vulnerable in the event of a downturn in our business. In these and other circumstances, servicing our indebtedness may use a substantial portion of our cash flow from operations, which could adversely affect us as well as to fund our operations, working capital and capital expenditures necessary for the maintenance and expansion of our business activities. As of December 31, 2022, our total loans, borrowings and debentures outstanding was R$166,834 thousand, comprising R$89,541 thousand of current and R$77,293 thousand of non-current.
If we fail to anticipate and adequately respond to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards, changing regulations, and changing consumer trends, requirements or preferences, our products from both the SaaS and CPaaS segments may become less competitive, which may adversely affect our sales.
We need to understand our consumers’ behavior and needs in order to prepare for the next shift in the relationship between businesses and their end-consumers so that we are well positioned to propose and develop new products to support this change in consumer trends and behavior. Additionally, we need to understand the communication channel of choice between businesses and their end-consumers throughout all phases of a customer journey so that we are in a position to quickly develop and deploy the communication channel that businesses need to most effectively communicate with their end-consumers.
We cannot guarantee that we will always be able to offer the products and services sought by our customers. We are subject to potential changes to consumer habits as well as to demand for products and services by our customers (and the end-consumers of our customers). This requires us to adapt to their preferences on an ongoing basis. Accordingly, we may not be able to anticipate or respond adequately to changes in the habits of our consumers (and the habits of the end-consumers of our customers), which may adversely affect our sales. In addition, we cannot guarantee that the habits of our customers (and the habits of the end-consumers of our customers) will not change due to factors such as limitations or restrictions on the movement of people, including due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, if there are changes in customer habits, we cannot guarantee that we will be efficient and effective in adapting to meet those habits.
The market for communications in general, and cloud communications in particular, is subject to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements and preferences. We may not be able to adapt quickly enough to meet our customers’ requirements, preferences and industry standards. We may face obstacles in our search for a digital transformation related to corporate culture, business complexity and the lack of processes that make employee collaboration and integration feasible. These challenges may limit the growth of our platform and adversely affect our business and results of operations. The success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to adapt and respond effectively to these changes on a timely basis. If we are unable to develop new products that satisfy our customers and provide enhancements and new features for our existing products that keep pace with rapid technological and industry change and applicable industry standards, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. If new technologies emerge that are able to deliver competitive products and services at lower prices than ours and more efficiently, more conveniently or more securely, such technologies could adversely impact our ability to compete effectively. If we do not respond to the urgency in meeting new standards and practices, our platform and our own technology may become obsolete and materially adversely affect our results.
Degradation of the quality of the products and services we offer could diminish demand for our products and services, adversely affecting our ability to attract and retain customers, harming our business and results of operations and subjecting us to liability.
Our customers expect a consistent level of quality in the provision of our products and services. Our customers use our products for important aspects of their businesses, and any errors, defects or disruptions to our products and any other performance problems with our products could damage our customers’ businesses and, in turn, harm our brand and reputation and erode customer trust. Although we regularly update our products, they may contain undetected errors, failures, vulnerabilities and bugs when first introduced or released. Real or perceived errors, failures or bugs in our products could result in negative publicity, loss of, or delay in, market acceptance of our platform, loss of competitive position, lower customer retention or claims by customers for losses sustained by them. In such events, we may be required, or may choose, for customer relations or other reasons, to expend additional resources in order to help correct the problem, which may result in increased costs to us. Any failure to maintain the high quality of our products and services, or a market perception that we do not maintain a high quality service, could erode customer trust and adversely affect our reputation, business, results of operations and financial condition.
If we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand and increase market awareness of our company and products, our business, results of operations and financial condition may be adversely affected.
We believe that maintaining and enhancing the “Zenvia” brand identity and increasing market awareness of our company and products, is critical to achieving widespread acceptance of our platform, to strengthen our relationships with our existing customers and to our ability to attract new customers. The successful promotion of our brand will depend largely on our continued marketing efforts, our ability to continue to offer high quality products, and our ability to successfully differentiate our products and platform from competing products and services. Our brand promotion activities may not be successful or yield increased revenue.
Negative publicity about us, our products or our platform could materially and adversely impact our ability to attract and retain customers, our business, results of operations and financial condition.
The promotion of our brand also requires us to make substantial expenditures, and we anticipate that these expenditures will increase as our market becomes more competitive and as we expand into new markets. To the extent that these activities increase revenue, this revenue may not be enough to offset the increased expenses we incurred. If we do not successfully maintain and enhance our brand, our business may not grow, our pricing power may be reduced relative to our competitors and we may lose customers, all of which would adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our segments (CPaaS and SaaS) depend on customers increasing their use of our products, and any loss of customers or decline in their use of our products could materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. In addition, our customers generally do not have long-term contractual arrangements with us and may cease to use our products at any time without penalties or termination charges.
Our ability to grow and generate incremental revenue from both our segments (CPaaS and SaaS) depend, in part, on our ability to maintain and grow our relationships with existing customers (including any customers acquired through our acquisitions) and to have them increase their usage of our platform. Customers are charged based on the actual usage volume of our products, and if they do not increase their use of our products, our revenue may decline and our results of operations may be adversely affected. For more information as to our product offerings, see “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Our Customers.”
Most of our customers, both from CPaaS and SaaS, do not have long-term contractual arrangements with us and may reduce or cease their use of our products at any time without penalty or termination charges provided they give us thirty days’ prior written notice. Customers may terminate or reduce their use of our products for a number of reasons, including if they are not satisfied with our products, the value proposition of our products or our ability to meet their needs and expectations. We cannot accurately predict customers’ usage levels and the loss of customers or reductions in their usage levels of our products may each have a negative impact on our business, results of operations and financial condition. If a significant number of customers cease using, or reduce their usage of our products, we may be required to spend significantly more on sales and marketing initiatives than we currently plan to spend in order to maintain or increase revenue from customers. Such additional sales and marketing expenditures could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. See “—A significant portion of our revenue is currently concentrated on our outlier customers and an economic slowdown affecting these customers could lead to decreased demand for our products and services, which could adversely affect us.”
If we are unable to increase adoption of our products by customers and attract new customers, our business, results of operations and financial condition may be adversely affected.
Our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our products will depend, in part, on our ability to effectively organize, focus and train our sales and marketing personnel. Also, the decision by our customers to adopt our products may require the approval of multiple technical and business decision makers, including legal, security, compliance, procurement, operations and IT. In addition, sales cycles for businesses (particularly for large businesses) are inherently more complex and these complex and resource intensive sales efforts could place additional strain on our product and engineering resources. Furthermore, businesses, including some of our current customers, may choose to develop their own solutions that do not include our products. They may also demand price reductions as their usage of our products increases, which could have an adverse impact on our gross margin.
In addition, in order to grow our business, we must continue to attract new customers in a cost-effective manner. We use a variety of marketing channels to promote our products and platform, such as events and webinars, as well as search engine marketing and optimization initiatives. We periodically adjust the mix of our other marketing programs such as regional customer events, email campaigns and public relations initiatives. If the costs of the marketing channels we use increase significantly, we may choose to use alternative and less expensive channels, which may not be as effective as the channels we currently use. As we add to or change the mix of our marketing strategies, we may need to expand into more expensive channels than those we are currently in, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. We will incur marketing expenses before we are able to recognize any revenue that the marketing initiatives may generate, and these expenses may not result in increased revenue or brand awareness. If we are unable to attract new customers in a cost-effective manner, our business, results of operations and financial condition would be adversely affected.
Our number of active customers for the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020 was 13,336, 11,827 and 9,442, respectively. We have been able to so far successfully, but cannot guarantee that we will continue to, increase the number of our customers and revenues generated within the active customer base. Our Net Revenue Expansion (NRE) rate was 108%, 122% and 113% for the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Net Revenue Expansion (NRE) rate is a metric that indicates how much revenue has grown with the same customers, which can come from organic growth of one product (i.e., an increase in the volume purchased of the same product) and also cross-selling (i.e., customer base using more than one product). For more information about our Net Revenue Expansion (NRE) rate, see “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—A. Operating Results—Principal Factors Affecting Our Results of Operations— Expansion Strategy and Net Revenue Expansion (NRE) Rate.”
There can be no assurance that we will be able to sustain or grow our customer base or sustain or improve overtime our Net Revenue Expansion (NRE) rate.
Potential customers of our CPaaS and SaaS segments may be reluctant to switch to a new vendor, which may adversely affect our growth.
As we expand our offerings into new products (such as IP-based products), our potential customers may be concerned about disadvantages associated with switching platform providers, such as a loss of accustomed functionality, increased costs and business disruption. For prospective customers, switching from one vendor of products similar to those provided by us (or from an internally developed system) to a new vendor may be a significant undertaking. As a result, certain potential customers may resist changing vendors.
We continue seeking to attract new customers. In furtherance of this objective, we held “Mundo Zenvia,” a customer day event, in October 2022 and are working on solutions to address the potential resistance of customers to migrate to a new platform, by creating resources to educate them on the functionality and operation of our products. In additional, some of our solutions, such as the Consulting segment from D1, which we have consolidated with our SaaS segment for reporting purposes, provide us with insight to improve the functionality of our SaaS and CPaaS solutions vis-à-vis the products and solutions offered by our competitors. However, there can be no assurance that our approach to overcome potential customer reluctance to change vendors will be successful, which may adversely affect our growth.
If we do not develop enhancements to our products and introduce new products that achieve market acceptance, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
Our ability to attract new customers and increase revenue from existing customers depends in part on our ability to enhance and improve our existing products, increase adoption and usage of our products and introduce new products. The success of any product enhancements or new products depends on several factors, including timely completion, adequacy to customer needs, adequate quality testing, actual performance quality, market-accepted pricing levels and overall market acceptance. We cannot guarantee that product enhancements and new products will perform as well as or better than our existing offerings. Product enhancements and new products that we develop may not be introduced in a timely or cost-effective manner, may contain errors or defects, may have interoperability difficulties with our platform or other products or may not achieve the broad market acceptance necessary to generate significant revenue. We also have invested, and may continue to invest, in the acquisition of complementary businesses, technologies, services, products and other assets that expand the products that we can offer our customers. For instance, since the completion of our initial public offering, we completed the acquisition of Sensedata Tecnologia Ltda, or SenseData, and One To One Engine Desenvolvimento e Licenciamento de Sistemas de Informática S.A. - Direct One, or D1, in order to add to our product offerings a customer actionable data platform and a platform that connects different data sources to enable a single customer view layer into our product offerings. Further, on May 2, 2022, we completed the acquisition of 100% of the share capital of Movidesk Ltda., or Movidesk, a company focused on customer service solutions to define workflows, providing integration with communication channels and monitoring tickets through dashboards and reports. See “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Our Recent Acquisitions—Consummated Acquisitions.” We also intend to continue developing new SaaS services, which may require us to maintain and/or increase a developers team and, therefore, may lead to higher expenses in research and development. For instance, on February 2023, we announced the integration of ChatGPT technology, into our mass texting solution, Zenvia Attraction, to provide increasingly personalized and efficient suggestions in the composition of messages. There can be no assurance that these investments and any future investments will result in products or enhancements that will be accepted by existing or prospective customers. Our ability to generate additional usage of products by our customers may also require increasingly sophisticated and more costly sales efforts and result in a longer sales cycle. If we are unable to successfully enhance our existing products to meet evolving customer requirements, increase adoption and usage of our products, develop new products, or if our efforts to increase the usage of our products are more expensive than we expect, our business, results of operations and financial condition would be adversely affected.
The market in which we participate is intensely competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
The market for cloud communications is rapidly evolving, significantly fragmented and highly competitive, with relatively low barriers to entry in some segments. The principal competitive factors in our market includes our ability to offer solutions embedded in the main channels of communications, the ease of integration and programmability of our solutions, product features, cost-benefit, platform scalability, reliability, deliverability, security and performance, brand awareness, reputation, the strength of sales and marketing efforts, customer support and customer service experience, as well as the cost of deploying and using our products.
Our competitors fall into four primary categories:
Some of our competitors and potential competitors are larger than us and have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, more established customer relationships, larger budgets and significantly greater resources than we do. In addition, they have the operating flexibility to bundle competing products and services at little or no perceived incremental cost, including offering them at a lower price as part of a larger sales transaction. As a result, our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards or customer requirements. In addition, some competitors may offer products or services that address one or a limited number of functions at lower prices, with greater depth than our products or in different geographies. Our current and potential competitors may develop and market new products and services with comparable functionality to our products, and this could lead to us having to decrease prices in order to remain competitive. Customers utilize our products in many ways and use varying levels of functionality that our products offer or are capable of supporting or enabling within their applications. Customers that use many of the features of our products or use our products to support or enable core functionality for their applications may have difficulty or find it impractical to replace our products with a competitor’s products or services, while customers that use only limited functionality may be able to more easily replace our products with competitive offerings. Our current or prospective customers (as well as some of our sales channel partners) may also choose to replicate some of the functionality our products provide, which may limit or eliminate their demand for our products.
With the introduction of new products and services and new market entrants, we expect competition to intensify in the future. In addition, some of our customers may choose to use our products and our competitors’ products simultaneously. Furthermore, our customers and their end-consumers may choose to adopt other forms of electronic communications or alternative communication platforms, which could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
With the completion of the acquisitions of Rodati Motors Corporation, or Sirena, D1, SenseData and Movidesk, we expanded the scope of our offerings and now also offer to our customers multichannel communications, generation of variable documents, authenticated message delivery and contextualized conversational experiences, including customer service solutions to define workflows, by integrating communication channels and monitoring tickets (through dashboards and reports), as well as communication actions and specific 360º customer journeys, from our acquired companies. As we expand the scope of our products, we may face additional competition. If one or more of our competitors were to merge or partner with other competitors, the change in the competitive landscape could also adversely affect our ability to compete effectively. In addition, some of our competitors have lower listed prices than us, which may be attractive to certain customers even if those products have different or lesser functionality. If we are unable to maintain our current pricing due to competitive pressures, our margins will be reduced and our business, results of operations and financial condition would be adversely affected. In addition, pricing pressures and increased competition generally could result in reduced revenue, reduced margins, increased losses or the failure of our products to achieve or maintain widespread market acceptance, any of which could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We have experienced organizational changes to our business associated with our growth and may not be able to effectively manage those changes.
We have experienced growth in our business in terms of employees and customers, and we cannot assure that we will be able to effectively manage those changes. For example, our consolidated headcount was 1,191, 1,085 and 470 employees as of December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, respectively, an increase of 9.8% to December 31, 2022 from December 31, 2021 and 131% to December 31, 2021 from December 31, 2020.
Our consolidated headcount as of December 31, 2022 takes into account the reduced workforce outside of Brazil of 49 employees, from 108 employees as of December 31, 2021, resulting from management’s review of our corporate structure, as furnished to the SEC on a current report on Form 6-K on November 10, 2022, to support our growth. As of December 31, 2022, we estimated that this measure will reduce around R$40.0 million in personnel expenses on a yearly basis as of 2023. Such reduction is in line with the current global economic scenario and the acceleration of the integration of our acquisitions and is being combined with several other cost-cutting actions as we focus on cash preservation and EBITDA generation. While we believe these changes may help us achieve a more cost-efficient organization and will be of long term value to our shareholders, the full scope, scale and impact of the reduction in workforce is not yet known. The resulting changes and related disruption may have near-term effects on our business, growth and profitability.
Despite the reduction in our international headcount, we are working towards expanding our brand presence outside of Brazil. We currently have offices in Argentina, the United States and Mexico and are in the process of reaching/acquiring customers in other countries in Latin America and internationally.
We may fail to effectively execute, or achieve the stated goals of, the reduction in workforce or our key strategic priorities. Our plans may also change as we continue to refocus on our key priorities. These actions may take more time than we currently estimate and we may not be able to achieve the cost-efficiencies sought. In addition, the reduction in workforce may negatively impact employee morale for those that are not directly impacted, which may increase employee attrition and hinder our ability to achieve our key priorities. Any failure to achieve the expected benefits from the reduction in workforce or from other recent management and personnel related changes could adversely affect our stock price, financial condition and ability to achieve our key priorities.
We have also experienced growth in the number of customers, usage and amount of data that our platform and associated infrastructure support. Our number of active customers for the year ended December 31, 2022 increased to 13,336, from 11,827 in the year ended December 31, 2021 and from 9,442 in the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of 12.7% and 25.3%, respectively, during each year.
We believe that our corporate culture has been a critical component of our success. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team and nurturing our culture. As we expand our business outside Brazil, namely Argentina, Mexico and the United States, and mature as a public company, we may find it difficult to maintain our corporate culture while managing this growth. Any failure to manage growth and organizational changes in our business in a manner that preserves the key aspects of our culture could harm our future prospects, including our ability to recruit and retain personnel, and effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. This, in turn, could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
In addition, as we have rapidly grown, our organizational structure has become more complex. In order to manage these increasing complexities, we will need to continue to expand and adapt our operational, financial and management controls, as well as our reporting systems and procedures. The expansion of our systems and infrastructure will require us to commit substantial financial, operational and management resources before our revenue increases and we cannot guarantee that our revenue will increase.
Furthermore, if we continue to grow, our ability to maintain reliable service levels for our customers could be affected. If we fail to achieve the necessary level of efficiency as we grow, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
Finally, as we continue to grow, we expect to continue to spend substantial financial and other resources on, among other things:
These investments may not result in increased revenue or the growth of our business. Accordingly, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to offset our expected cost increases and achieve and sustain profitability. If we fail to achieve and sustain profitability, our business, results of operations and financial condition would be adversely affected.
The outbreak of highly communicable diseases worldwide, such as the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, may lead to greater volatility in the global financial and capital markets resulting in an economic slowdown that may adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial performance and the trading price of our Class A common shares.
Outbreaks or potential disease outbreaks may adversely affect the global capital market (including the capital market where our Class A common shares are traded), the global economy (including the Latin America economy) and the trading price of our Class A common shares. Historically, certain epidemics, pandemics and regional or global outbreaks, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19), zika virus, ebola, H5N5 virus (popularly known as avian influenza), foot-and-mouth disease, H1N1 virus (influenza A, popularly known as swine flu), middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have affected certain sectors of the economy in the countries where these diseases have spread.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures adopted to contain its spread significantly restricted the movement of people, goods and services worldwide, including all of the regions in which we operate, adversely affected the global financial and capital markets and led to an economic crisis in many countries, including Brazil. Like many other companies, including our customers and prospective customers, on March 16, 2020, our management decided to close our offices and we started to gradually reopen them as from August 31, 2020, to the extent allowed by municipal local rules. In October 2020, we announced our plan to implement Zenvia Anywhere, a remote work arrangement for employees, which we later adopted as a permanent arrangement based on positive employee feedback and our initiatives to attract talent no matter where the individual is based and to build a global team mentality. We believe this model has been successful and we have continued with the remote work arrangement. In addition, our operations may be adversely affected in case of another outbreak causing large-scale employee absence.
Even though our experience with remote working has been positive and we believe it aligns with our corporate culture, it is possible that we may have a negative impact on our operations in certain situations, such as in the event of natural disasters, power outage, connectivity issue, or other event occurs that impacts our employees’ ability to work remotely. In such circumstances, it may be difficult or, in certain cases, impossible, for us to continue our business for a substantial period of time.
A new outbreak of any highly communicable virus could have a far-reaching and a material adverse impact on the financial capacity of our customers, suppliers and third-party business partners and potentially lead to an ongoing global economic downturn, which could result in constrained supply or reduced customer demand and willingness to enter into or renew contracts with us. Any of the foregoing could have a material adverse effect on us. Customers are charged based on the usage of our platform, and most of our customers do not have long-term contractual arrangements with us and, therefore, most of them may reduce or cease their use of our platform at any time without penalty or termination charges. If our customers are unable to pay us or reduce or discontinue their contract with us, we may be adversely affected by the inability to collect payment amounts or a reduction in revenue. We also may experience impact from delayed sales cycles, including delays with signing or renewals of contracts on the part of existing and prospective customers, or reducing budgets or the commitment term related to our product and service offerings. In addition, global recessions and/or economic slowdowns, notably in Brazil, including a scenario of rising unemployment may result in less commercial activity during a pandemic and after the outbreak has subsided, having the potential to decrease the demand for our products.
We believe that our sales in the year 2020 would have been higher in the absence of COVID-19 pandemic, as some of our customers implemented cost-saving measures to manage their businesses during lockdowns and constraints, which included setting caps to their IT and marketing budgets that ended up adversely impacting the usage levels of our products by them, and it took nearly six months to restore the usage of our products to the pre-April 2020 level.
As modern-day society has become increasingly dependent on usage of voice and messaging services for communication needs. We believe there will be increased strain on and demand for the telecommunications infrastructure, including our voice and messaging products, which may require us to make additional investments to increase network capacity, the availability of which may be limited. For example, if the data centers on which we rely for our cloud infrastructure and the network service providers with which we interconnect are unable to keep up with capacity needs or if relevant governmental or regulatory authorities limit our bandwidth, our customers may experience service delays, interruptions or outages. From time to time, including due to the COVID-19 pandemic back in 2020, our data center suppliers and our network service providers have had outages which resulted in disruptions in service for our customers. Any of these events could harm our reputation, impact our relationships with customers, cause them to reconsider or terminate the use of our products, impair our ability to increase revenue from existing customers and grow our customer base, subject us to financial penalties and liabilities under our service level agreements and otherwise adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Although we did not experience any material impact derived from the COVID-19 pandemic in our operations and financial condition during the year 2022, we may be in future periods due to consequences of it, such as supply chain constraints and higher inflation, which remain a risk to us in the near term.
Our quarterly results may fluctuate, and if we fail to meet securities analysts’ and investors’ expectations, then the trading price of our Class A common shares and the value of an investor’s investment could decline substantially.
Our results of operations, including the levels of our revenue, cost of services, gross profit and other operating (expenses) income may vary significantly in the future. These fluctuations may result from a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control, including general market volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and may be difficult to predict and may or may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business. If our quarterly results of operations, forward-looking quarterly and annual financial guidance or expected key metrics fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, then the trading price of our Class A common shares could decline substantially. Some of the important factors that may cause our results of operations to fluctuate from quarter to quarter include:
The occurrence of one or more of the foregoing and other factors may cause our results of operations to vary significantly. As such, we believe that quarter-to-quarter comparisons of our results of operations may not be meaningful and should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance. In addition, a significant percentage of our operating expenses is fixed in nature and is based on forecasted revenue trends. Accordingly, in the event of a revenue shortfall, we may not be able to mitigate the negative impact on our income (loss) and margins in the short term. If we fail to meet or exceed the expectations of investors or securities analysts, then the trading price of our Class A common shares could fall substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits.
Additionally, global pandemics such as COVID-19 as well as certain large scale events, such as major elections and sporting events, can significantly impact usage levels on our platform, which could cause fluctuations in our results of operations. We expect that significantly increased usage of all communications platforms, including ours, during certain seasonal and one-time events could impact delivery and quality of our products during those events. Such annual and one-time events may cause fluctuations in our results of operations and may impact both our revenue and operating expenses.
If we are unable to develop and maintain successful relationships with sales channel partners, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
We believe that continued growth of our business depends in part upon identifying, developing and maintaining strategic relationships with sales channel partners that will apply service layers over our products (including consultancy, implementation, integration development, flows development, solutions developed using our platform, among others). Sales channel partners embed our software products in their solutions, such as software applications for contact centers and sales force and marketing automation, and then sell such solutions to other businesses. When potential customers do not have the resources to develop their own applications, we refer them to our partners, who embed our products in the solutions that they sell to other businesses. As part of our growth strategy, we intend to further develop business relationships and specific solutions with sales channel partners. If we fail to establish these relationships in a timely and cost-effective manner, or at all, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. Additionally, even if we are successful at developing these relationships but there are integration problems or issues or businesses are not willing to purchase our products through sales channel partners, our reputation and ability to grow our business may be adversely affected.
We rely upon cloud infrastructure and physical data center providers to operate our platform, and any disruption of or interference with our use of these cloud infrastructure or physical data center providers could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We outsource our cloud infrastructure to various cloud infrastructure providers, which host our products and platform. We also rely on certain third-party providers to provide us with physical data centers to host certain of our products. Our customers need to be able to access our platform and products at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance. These service providers operate the platforms that we access and we are therefore vulnerable to service interruptions in those platforms. We have experienced, and expect that in the future we may experience interruptions, delays and outages in service and availability due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, networking issues due to internet backbone provider outage, human or software errors, website hosting disruptions and capacity constraints. Capacity constraints could be due to a number of potential causes, including technical failures, natural disasters, pandemics such as COVID-19, fraud or security attacks. In addition, if our security, or that of such services providers, is compromised, or our products or platform are unavailable or our users are unable to use our products within a reasonable amount of time or at all, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these performance problems within a period of time acceptable to our customers. It may also become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our platform performance, especially during peak usage times, as our products become more complex and the usage of our products increases. To the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, our business, results of operations and financial condition may be adversely affected. In addition, we access the platform of our cloud infrastructure providers through standard IP connectivity. Any problem with this access can prevent us from responding in a timely manner to any issues with the availability of our products. More generally, any changes in service levels from the cloud infrastructure providers may adversely affect our ability to meet our customers’ requirements.
Any of the above circumstances or events may harm our reputation, erode customer trust, cause customers to stop using our products, impair our ability to increase revenue from existing customers, impair our ability to grow our customer base, subject us to financial penalties and liabilities under our service level agreements and otherwise harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
To deliver our products, we rely on network service providers and internet service providers for our network service and connectivity. Disruption or deterioration in the quality of these services or deterioration of the financial capacity of such service providers could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. Also, our platform must integrate with network technologies and we expect to continue to have to integrate our platform with other software platforms and technologies. In addition, if our products and platform are unable to interconnect with any of our network service providers, software platforms and technologies, our business may be materially and adversely affected.
We currently interconnect with network service providers to enable the use by our customers of our products over their networks. Furthermore, many of these network service providers do not have long-term commitments with us and either they or we may interrupt services or terminate the agreement without cause upon 30 days’ prior written notice. If a significant portion of our network service providers stop providing us with access to their infrastructure, fail to provide these services to us on a cost-effective basis, cease operations, or otherwise terminate these services, the delay caused by qualifying and switching to other network service providers could be time consuming and costly and could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. In addition, from time to time we may advance payments to network service providers (or other service providers) in order to obtain better pricing conditions. A deterioration of the financial capacity of any such network service providers leading to difficulties of credit recovery could adversely impact our financial result. Further, if problems occur with our network service providers, it may cause errors or poor quality communications with our products, and we could encounter difficulty identifying the source of the problem. The occurrence of errors or poor quality communications in connection with our products, whether caused by our platform or a network service provider, may result in the loss of our existing customers or the delay of adoption of our products by potential customers and may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Also, our platform must integrate with network technologies and we expect to continue to have to integrate our platform with other existing software platforms and technologies (such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, other Apple and Google systems, among others) and others to be developed in the future, and we need to continuously modify and enhance our products and platform to adapt to changes and innovation in technologies. For example, our network service providers may adopt new filtering technologies in an effort to combat spam, filter spam and unwanted phone calls, messages or robocalling. Such technologies may inadvertently filter desired messages or calls to or from our customers. If network service providers and/or other software platforms that we integrate (or expect to integrate) with our platform, or our customers or their end users adopt new software platforms or infrastructure, we may be required to develop new versions of our products to work with those new platforms or infrastructure. This development effort may require significant resources, which would adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. Also, there can be no assurance that any such platforms and technologies (such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) will continue to provide us with access to their infrastructure. Further, such platforms and technologies may be subject to specific regulations in each country where they operate, and we depend on such platforms and technologies that we use in our business being compliant with such regulations. For instance, if any such platform fails to comply with the applicable regulations or certain orders from competent authorities — e.g., disclosing confidential information or blocking access to certain users deemed to have committed illegal activities — such platforms and technologies may face sanctions, including being banned from operating in the respective country.
Any failure of our products and platform to operate effectively with evolving or new platforms and technologies could reduce the demand for our products. If we are unable to respond to these changes in a cost-effective manner, our products may become less marketable and less competitive or obsolete, and our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
If we are not able to increase our fees or to pass fee increases from network service providers or developers of IP-based messaging services to our customers, our operating margins may decline.
Network service providers have in the past, and may in the future, unilaterally charge additional fees or change prices due to commercial, regulatory, competitive or other industry related changes that increase our network costs. For more information regarding our commercial relationship and agreements with network service providers, see “Item 10. Additional Information—Material Contracts.” While we have historically responded to these types of fee increases through a combination of negotiations with our network service providers, absorbing the increased costs or changing our prices to customers, there is no guarantee that we will continue to be able to do so in the future without a material negative impact to our business.
Also, the developers of IP-based messaging services that we use in our platform (such as WhatsApp) may in the future unilaterally charge additional fees or change their prices due to commercial, regulatory, competitive or other industry related changes that may adversely affect our costs. See also “—Failure to set optimal prices for both our SaaS solutions and CPaaS solutions could adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition.” For example, in 2021, WhatsApp reformulated the pricing model for the usage of their messaging services. Even though this measure did not have to date a material effect in our results, we cannot guarantee that future changes will not impact our results, since we may not be able to reflect increased costs in our prices to our customers and/or assure the continuance of the agreements with such customers.
If we are unable to increase our fees or pass on cost increases and other fees in the future due to contractual or regulatory restrictions, competitive pressures or other considerations, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected. Additionally, our ability to respond to any new fees may be constrained if all network service providers in a particular market impose equivalent fee structures, if the magnitude of the fees is disproportionately large when compared to the underlying prices paid by our customers, or if the market conditions limit our ability to increase the price we charge our customers. In addition, we cannot guarantee the continuance of the agreements with our customers since they may terminate the agreements by providing a thirty days’ prior written notice.
For more information regarding our commercial relationship with network service providers, see “Item 10. Additional Information—Material Contracts.”
Our reliance on SaaS technologies from third parties may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We rely on hosted SaaS technologies from third parties in order to operate critical internal functions of our business, including enterprise resource planning, customer support and customer relations management services. If these services become unavailable due to extended outages or interruptions, or because they are no longer available on commercially reasonable terms or prices, our expenses could increase. As a result, our ability to manage our operations could be interrupted and our processes for managing our sales process and supporting our customers could be impaired until equivalent services, if available, are identified, obtained and implemented, all of which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our use of open source software could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to possible litigation.
Our products and platform incorporate open source software, and we expect to continue to incorporate open source software in our products and platform in the future. Few of the licenses applicable to open source software have been interpreted by courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a manner that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our products and platform. Moreover, although we have implemented policies to regulate the use and incorporation of open source software into our products and platform, we cannot be certain that we have not incorporated open source software in our products or platform in a manner that is inconsistent with such policies. If we fail to comply with open source licenses, we may be subject to certain requirements, including requirements that we offer our products that incorporate the open source software for no cost, that we discontinue our products that incorporate the open source software, that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon, incorporating or using the open source software and that we license such modifications or derivative works under the terms of applicable open source licenses. If an author or other third party that distributes such open source software were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses, we could be required to incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations and could be subject to significant damages, enjoined from generating revenue from customers using products that contained the open source software and required to comply with onerous conditions or restrictions on these products. In any of these events, we and our customers could be required to seek licenses from third parties in order to continue offering our products and platform and to re-engineer our products or platform or discontinue offering our products to customers in the event we cannot re-engineer them on a timely basis. Any of the foregoing could require us to devote additional research and development resources to re-engineer our products or platform, could result in customer dissatisfaction and may adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We may face challenges in the expansion of our operations and our offerings into new market segments and/or new geographic regions within and outside of Brazil.
In July 2020, we concluded the acquisition of Sirena, a company that develops SaaS that enable corporations to manage sale processes through WhatsApp accounts. Sirena currently operates outside of Brazil, and has offices in Argentina, the United States and Mexico. Our acquisition of Sirena represents the first step in our strategy to expand our business outside of Brazil. We expect to continue to expand our international operations and to increase our revenue from customers inside and outside of Brazil as part of our growth strategy.
On July 31, 2021, Zenvia Brazil completed the acquisition of the, direct and indirect, interest of 100% of the share capital of One To One Engine Desenvolvimento e Licenciamento de Sistemas de Informática S.A. - Direct One, or D1, a platform that connects different data sources to enable a single customer view layer, allowing the creation of multichannel communications, generation of variable documents, authenticated message delivery and contextualized conversational experiences. Upon consummation of the acquisition of D1, we also became indirect holders of 100% of the share capital of Smarkio Tecnologia Ltda., or Smarkio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of D1 and a cloud-based company that combines an automated marketing platform through chatbots with a platform for creating, integrating and processing conversational interfaces that can be used by developers and business users. Smarkio was acquired by D1 in December 2020 and D1 started consolidating Smarkio in its financial statements as of December 1, 2020. Smarkio was merged into D1 on November 1, 2021. For more information, see “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Our Recent Acquisitions—Consummated Acquisitions.”
On November 1, 2021 we concluded the acquisition of SenseData, a SaaS company that enables businesses to create communication actions and specific 360º customer journeys, supported by a customized proprietary scorecard called SenseScore. The acquisition of SenseData is a step forward for Zenvia to consolidate its position as a unified end-to-end CX platform.
Further, on May 2, 2022, we completed the acquisition of 100% of the share capital of Movidesk, a company focused on customer service solutions to define workflows, providing integration with communication channels and monitoring tickets through dashboards and reports.
See “—We may pursue strategic acquisitions or investments which may divert our management’s attention and result in reduced cash levels, increased indebtedness or dilution to our shareholders. The failure of an acquisition or investment (including Sirena, D1, SenseData and Movidesk) to produce the anticipated results or achieve the expected benefits, the failure to complete a pending acquisition, or the inability to fully integrate an acquired company, could adversely affect our business.”
We may face challenges in connection with the expansion of our operations and our product and service offerings into new market segments, and/or new geographic regions within or outside of Brazil. Also, see “—If we do not develop enhancements to our products and introduce new products that achieve market acceptance, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.”
As we expand into new market segments or geographies, we will face challenges associated with entering markets in which we have limited or no experience and in which we may not be well-known. Offering our services in new industries or new geographic regions may require substantial expenditures and takes considerable time, and we may not recover our investments in new markets in a timely manner or at all. For example, we may be unable to attract a sufficient number of customers, fail to anticipate competitive conditions or fail to adapt and tailor our services to different markets. In addition, although the industries into which we are considering expanding our offerings are subject to risks similar to those of our current business, profitability, if any, in our newer activities may be lower than in our more mature segments, and we may not be successful enough to recover our investments in them.
Expansion and development of business in new geographic regions within Brazil and in other jurisdictions may expose us to risks relating to staffing and managing cross border operations, lack of acceptance of our products and services, and particularly with respect to our operations outside of Brazil, increased costs and difficulty protecting intellectual property and sensitive data, tariffs and other trade barriers, differing and potentially adverse tax consequences, increased and conflicting regulatory compliance requirements, including with respect to privacy and security, lack of acceptance of our products and services, challenges caused by distance, language, and cultural differences, exchange rate risk and political instability. Accordingly, our efforts to develop and expand the geographic footprint of our operations may not be successful, which could limit our ability to grow our business.
Operating in international markets requires significant resources and management attention and will subject us to regulatory, economic and political risks in addition to those we already face in Brazil. Because of our limited experience with international operations or with developing and managing sales in international markets, our international expansion efforts may not be successful.
In addition, we may face risks in doing business internationally that could adversely affect our business, including:
Our failure to manage any of these risks successfully could harm our international operations, and adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We may pursue strategic acquisitions or investments which may divert our management’s attention and result in reduced cash levels, increased indebtedness or dilution to our shareholders. The failure of an acquisition or investment (including Sirena, D1, SenseData and Movidesk) to produce the anticipated results or achieve the expected benefits, the failure to complete a pending acquisition, or the inability to fully integrate an acquired company, could adversely affect our business.
We may from time to time acquire or invest in complementary companies, businesses, technologies, services, products and other assets in the future. For instance, in July 2020, July 2021, August 2021 and May 2022, we closed the acquisition of Sirena, D1, SenseData and Movidesk, respectively. We also may from time to time enter into relationships with other businesses to expand our products and platform, which could involve preferred or exclusive licenses, additional channels of distribution, discount pricing or investments in other companies.
The success of an acquisition or investment will depend on our ability to make accurate assumptions regarding the valuation, operations, growth potential, integration and other factors related to that business. We cannot assure investors that the acquisitions we consummated (such as Sirena, D1, SenseData and Movidesk) or our prospective acquisitions or investments will produce the results that we expect at the time we enter into or complete a given transaction. Furthermore, acquisitions may result in difficulties integrating the acquired companies, and may result in the diversion of our capital and our management’s attention from other business issues and opportunities. We may not be able to integrate successfully the operations of the acquired companies, including their technologies, products personnel, financial systems, distribution or operating procedures, particularly if the key personnel of the acquired company choose not to work for us, their products or services are not easily adapted to work with our platform, or we have difficulty retaining the customers of any acquired business due to changes in ownership, management or otherwise. If we fail to integrate acquisitions successfully, our business could suffer. In addition, the expense of integrating any acquired business and their results of operations may adversely affect our operating results. Further, there can be no assurance that we had or will have full access to all necessary information to assess any assets acquired or will acquire and identify and mitigate the risks, liabilities and contingencies in connection with the due diligence performed. We may discover liabilities or deficiencies associated with the assets or companies we acquire or ineffective or inadequate controls, procedures or policies at an acquired business that were not identified in advance, any of which could result in significant unanticipated costs and adversely impact our business. Also, in the context of our acquisitions, we may face contingent liabilities in connection with, among others things, (i) judicial and/or administrative proceedings of the business we acquire, including civil, regulatory, tax, labor, social security, environmental and intellectual property proceedings, and (ii) financial, reputational and technical issues, including with respect to accounting practices, financial statement disclosures and internal controls, as well as other regulatory matters, all of which may not be sufficiently indemnifiable under the relevant acquisition agreement and may impact our financial reporting obligations and the preparation of our consolidated financial statements, resulting in delays of such preparation. Moreover, the anticipated benefits of any acquisition, investment, disposition, divestment or business relationship may not be realized, such transaction or relationship may turn out to be less favorable to us, or we may be exposed to unknown risks or liabilities. For example, an acquired business may perform worse than expected and a disposed business may perform better than expected.
In addition, intangible assets and goodwill acquired in business combinations may not be realizable and could result in impairment, if our projections of long-term growth do not occur, or if macro-economic events reduces the expected industry growth.
As a result of the intangible asset and goodwill impairment testing in the year ended December 31, 2022, we recognized an impairment of R$136,723 thousand in our SaaS cash-generating units, or CGU, that reduced the carrying amount of goodwill of this CGU to its recoverable amount. This impairment is attributable to the combination of a slower-than-expected revenue growth of our SaaS CGU in the context of a challenging macroeconomic scenario and an increased perceived risk resulting in higher discount rate. Further impairment charges with respect to our goodwill and intangible assets could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations and shareholders’ equity in future periods.
Further, certain acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures we may enter into in the future may prevent us from competing for certain customers or in certain lines of business, and may lead to a loss of customers. We may spend time and money on projects that do not increase our revenue. To the extent we pay the consideration of any acquisition in cash, it would reduce our cash reserves, and to the extent the consideration is paid with any of our shares, it could be dilutive to our shareholders. To the extent we pay the consideration with proceeds from the incurrence of debt, it would increase our level of indebtedness and could negatively affect our liquidity and restrict our operations. Our competitors may be willing or able to pay more than us for acquisitions, which may cause us to lose certain acquisitions that we would otherwise desire to complete. We cannot ensure that any acquisition, partnership or joint venture we make will not have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations. For further information about our recent acquisitions, see “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Our Recent Acquisitions.”
Future legislative, regulatory or judicial actions impacting our products, services, platform and/or our business (including CX communications platform and software products) could also increase the cost and complexity of compliance and expose us to liability.
In the countries where we operate there is currently no specific regulation for CX communications platform and software products and/or services companies like us. However, although we understand that existing regulations do not fully contemplate our business as currently operated (including our CX communications platform and software products and services) this matter is continuing to evolve in Brazil and internationally. As a result, interpretation and enforcement of regulations often involve significant uncertainties and sudden changes. For example, the Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, channel that integrates our omnichannel feature, allowing users to make or receive calls over the internet or internal networks, could be determined by the regulators to be subject to licensing and communications regulatory requirements. As a result, regulatory scrutiny and enforcement may apply to our business (or part of it). Adjusting our services and/or applying and obtaining any such licenses to be in compliance with applicable requirements and regulations may take considerable time, lead to fines and even unexpected expenses to adapt our operational models. Future legislative, regulatory or judicial actions impacting our products, services, platform and/or our business could also increase the cost and complexity of compliance and expose us to liability. There can be no assurance that legislation or regulation will not be enacted for purposes of regulating our activities and that any such legislation or regulation will not adversely impact our business. In addition, as we expand our business into our other jurisdictions or as we expand our portfolio of product offerings to our customers, we may become subject to regulatory oversight. Our products and platform and our business are subject to privacy, data protection and information security, and our customers may be subject to regulations related to the handling and transfer of certain types of sensitive and confidential information. Any failure to comply with or enable our customers to comply with applicable laws and regulations would harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We and our customers that use our products may be subject to privacy and data protection-related laws and regulations that impose obligations in connection with the collection, processing and use of personal data, financial data, health or other similar data.
The privacy and security of personal, sensitive, regulated or confidential data is a major focus in our industry and we and our customers that use our products are subject to federal, state, local and foreign privacy and data protection-related laws and regulations that impose obligations in connection with the collection, storage, use, processing, disclosure, protection, transmission, retention and disposal of personal, sensitive, regulated or confidential data. Laws and regulations governing data privacy, data protection and information security are constantly evolving and there has been an increasing focus on privacy and data protection issues with the potential to affect our business. The nature of our business exposes us to risks related to possible shortcomings in data protection. Any perceived or actual unauthorized disclosure of personally identifiable information, whether through breach of our network by an unauthorized party, employee theft, misuse or error or otherwise, including the data protection of our customers, the end-consumers of our customers and employees or third parties, could harm our reputation, impair our ability to attract and retain our customers, or Subject us to claims or litigation arising from damages suffered by individuals.
Law No. 13,709/2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, or LGPD), entered into force on September 18, 2020 to regulate the processing of personal data in Brazil. The LGPD applies to individuals or legal entities, either private or governmental entities, that process or collect personal data in Brazil and which processing activities aim at offering or supplying goods or services to data subjects located in Brazil. The LGPD establishes detailed rules for the collection, use, processing and storage of personal data and will affect all economic sectors, including the relationship between customers and suppliers of goods and services, employees and employers and other relationships in which personal data is collected, whether in a digital or physical environment.
Since the entry into force of the LGPD, all processing agents/legal entities are required to adapt their data processing activities to comply with this new set of rules. We have implemented changes to our policies and procedures designed to ensure our compliance with the relevant requirements under the LGPD. Even so, as it is a recent law, the National Data Protection Authority (Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados, or the ANPD) as regulatory agency may raise other relevant issues or provide new guidance that will require further action from the company to remain fully compliant.
The penalties for violations of the LGPD include: (1) warnings imposing a deadline for the adoption of corrective measures; (2) a fine of up to 2% of the company’s or group’s revenue, subject to the limit of R$50 million per violation; (3) daily fines; (4) mandatory disclosure of the violation after it has been investigated and confirmed; (5) the restriction of access to the personal data to which the violation relates up to a six-month period, that can be extended for the same period, until the processing activities are compliant with the regulation, and in case of repeated violation, temporary block and/or deletion of the related personal data, and partial or complete prohibition of processing activities; and (6) temporary or permanent prohibition against conducting activities related to data processing. Any additional privacy laws or regulations enacted or approved in Brazil or in other jurisdictions in which we operate could seriously harm our business, financial condition or results of operations. Under the LGPD, security breaches that may result in significant risk or damage to personal data must be reported to the ANPD, the data protection regulatory body, within a reasonable time period. The notice to the ANPD must include: (a) a description of the nature of the personal data affected by the breach; (b) the affected data subjects; (c) the technical and security measures adopted; (d) the risks related to the breach; (e) the reasons for any delays in reporting the breach, if applicable; and (f) the measures adopted to revert or mitigate the effects of the damage caused by the breach. Moreover, the ANPD could establish other obligations related to data protection that are not described above.
In addition to the administrative sanctions, due to the noncompliance with the obligations established by the LGPD, we can be held liable for individual or collective material damages, and non-material damages caused to holders of personal data, including when caused by third parties that serve as operators of personal data on our behalf.
In addition to the civil liability and administrative sanctions by the ANPD, we are also subject to the imposition of administrative sanctions set forth by other laws that address issues related to data privacy and protection, such as Law No. 8,078/1990, or the Brazilian Code of Consumer Defense, and Law No. 12,965/2014, or the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet. These administrative sanctions can be applied by other public authorities, such as the Attorney General’s Office and consumer protection agencies. We can also be held liable civilly for violation of these laws.
Similarly, many foreign countries and governmental bodies, including in the countries in which we currently operate, have laws and regulations concerning the collection and use of personal data obtained from individuals located in their jurisdiction or by businesses operating within their jurisdiction. Laws and regulations in these jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of personal data that identifies or may be used to identify an individual, such as names, telephone numbers, email addresses and, in some jurisdictions, IP addresses and other online identifiers.
In addition, we continue to see jurisdictions imposing data localization laws, which require personal information, or certain subcategories of personal information to be stored in the jurisdiction of origin. These regulations may inhibit our ability to expand into those markets or prohibit us from continuing to offer services in those markets without significant additional costs.
As we expand into new industries and regions, we will likely need to comply with new requirements to compete effectively. The uncertainty and changes in the requirements of multiple jurisdictions may increase the cost of compliance, delay or reduce demand for our services, restrict our ability to offer services in certain locations, impact our customers’ ability to deploy our solutions in certain jurisdictions, or subject us to sanctions, by national data protection regulators, all of which could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. Additionally, although we endeavor to have our products and platform comply with applicable laws and regulations, these and other obligations may be modified, they may be interpreted and applied in an inconsistent manner from one jurisdiction to another, and they may conflict with one another, other regulatory requirements, contractual commitments or our internal practices.
We also may be bound by contractual obligations relating to our collection, use and disclosure of personal, financial and other data or may find it necessary or desirable to join industry or other self-regulatory bodies or other privacy or data protection-related businesses that require compliance with their rules pertaining to privacy and data protection.
We expect that there will continue to be new proposed laws, rules of self-regulatory bodies, regulations and industry standards concerning privacy, data protection and information security in Brazil and other jurisdictions, and we cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, rules, regulations and standards may have on our business. For instance, the State of São Paulo recently enacted a law determining that a consumer may restrict the receipt of telemarketing, SMS or WhatsApp messages in their mobiles by registering their phone numbers in a specific registry. There can be no assurance that the public in general will not adopt this tool to restrict the receipt of unsolicited telemarketing, SMSs and WhatsApp messages. A broad use of this tool by the public (particularly if its adoption is extended to other Brazilian states or foreign jurisdictions where we operate) may materially adversely affect our business as it may prevent our customers to effectively use our platform to promote their businesses. Moreover, existing Brazilian and foreign privacy and data protection-related laws and regulations are evolving and subject to potentially differing interpretations, and various legislative and regulatory bodies may expand current or enact new laws and regulations regarding privacy and data protection-related matters. Because global laws, regulations and industry standards concerning privacy and data security have continued to develop and evolve rapidly, it is possible that we or our products or platform may not be, or may not have been, compliant with each such applicable law, regulation and industry standard and compliance with such new laws or to changes to existing laws may impact our business and practices, require us to expend significant resources to adapt to these changes, or to stop offering our products in certain countries. These developments could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Any failure or perceived failure by us, our products or our platform to comply with new or existing Brazilian or other foreign privacy or data security laws, regulations, policies, industry standards or legal obligations, or any security incident that results in the unauthorized access to, or acquisition, release or transfer of, personal data or other customer data may result in governmental investigations, inquiries, enforcement actions and prosecutions, private litigation, fines and penalties, adverse publicity or potential loss of business.
We may be materially adversely affected in the event that we are in violation of anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws and regulations in the jurisdiction in which we operate.
We operate in a jurisdiction that has a high risk of corruption and we are subject to anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws and regulations, including Brazilian Federal Law No. 12,846/2013, or the Brazilian Anticorruption Law, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, or the FCPA, and the U.K. Bribery Act of 2010, or the Bribery Act, as well as other similar anti-bribery and anti-kickback laws and regulations in the jurisdictions where we operate. Brazilian Anticorruption Law, the FCPA and the Bribery Act generally prohibit companies and their employees and intermediaries from authorizing, offering or providing improper payments and benefits to government officials and other persons for improper purposes. We are in the process of implementing an anti-corruption compliance program that is designed to manage the risks of doing business in light of these new and existing legal and regulatory requirements. Violations of the anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws and regulations could result in criminal liability, administrative and civil proceedings, significant fines and penalties, forfeiture of significant assets, as well as reputational harm.
Regulators may increase and/or initiate enforcement of these obligations, which may require us to make adjustments to our anti-corruption compliance program, including the procedures we use to verify the identity of cardholders and to monitor our transactions. Regulators may also reexamine the transaction volume thresholds at which we must obtain and keep applicable records or verify identities of cardholders and any change in such thresholds could result in greater costs for compliance. Costs associated with fines or enforcement actions, changes in compliance requirements, or limitations on our ability to grow could adversely affect our business, and any new requirements or changes to existing requirements could impose significant costs, result in delays to planned product improvements, make it more difficult for new merchants to join our network and reduce the attractiveness of our products and services.
Changes in laws and regulations related to the Internet or changes in the Internet infrastructure itself may diminish the demand for our products, and could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
The future success of our business depends (particularly for IP-based messaging services) upon the continued use of the Internet as a primary medium for commerce, communications and business applications. Federal, state or foreign government bodies or agencies have in the past adopted, and may in the future adopt, laws or regulations affecting the use of the Internet as a commercial medium. Changes in these laws or regulations could require us to modify our products and platform in order to comply with these changes. In addition, government agencies or private businesses have imposed and may impose additional taxes, fees or other charges for accessing the Internet or commerce conducted via the Internet. These laws or charges could limit the growth of Internet-related commerce or communications generally or result in reductions in the demand for Internet-based products and services such as our products and platform. In addition, the use of the Internet as a business tool could be adversely affected due to delays in the development or adoption of new standards and protocols to handle increased demands of Internet activity, security, reliability, cost, ease-of-use, accessibility and quality of service. The performance of the Internet and its acceptance as a business tool has been adversely affected by “viruses,” “worms,” and similar malicious programs. If the use of the Internet is reduced as a result of these or other issues, then demand for our products could decline, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Changes in tax laws, tax incentives, benefits or differing interpretations of tax laws may adversely affect our results of operations.
Changes in tax laws, regulations, related interpretations and tax accounting standards in Brazil may result in a higher tax rate on our earnings, which may significantly reduce our profits and cash flows from operations. In case of an increase in taxes applicable to our business and we cannot alter our cost structure to pass our tax increases on to customers, our financial condition, results of operations and cash flows could be materially adversely affected. Our activities are also subject to a municipal tax on services (Imposto Sobre Serviços), or ISS. Any increases in ISS rates would also adversely affect our profitability.
In addition, Brazilian government authorities at the federal, state and local levels are considering changes in tax laws in order to cover budgetary shortfalls resulting from the recent economic downturn in Brazil. If these proposals are enacted they may adversely affect our profitability by increasing our tax burden, increasing our tax compliance costs, or otherwise affecting our financial condition, results of operations and cash flows. Tax rules in Brazil, particularly at the local level, may change without notice (although certain principles contained in the Brazilian federal constitution and certain procedures contained in applicable law must be observed). We may not always be aware of all such changes that affect our business and we may therefore fail to pay the applicable taxes or otherwise comply with tax regulations, which may result in additional tax assessments and penalties for our company.
Furthermore, we are subject to tax laws and regulations that may be interpreted differently by tax authorities than by us, for a variety of reasons. The application of direct (such as income tax and social contribution) and indirect taxes, such as sales and use tax, value-added tax, or VAT, provincial taxes, goods and services tax, business tax and gross receipt tax, to businesses like ours is a complex and evolving issue. Significant judgment is required to evaluate applicable tax obligations. In many cases, the ultimate tax determination is uncertain because it is not clear how existing statutes apply to our business. One or more states, or municipalities, the federal government or other countries may seek to challenge the taxation or procedures applied to our transactions imposing the charge of taxes or additional reporting, record-keeping or indirect tax collection obligations on businesses like ours. New taxes could also require us to incur substantial costs to capture data and collect and remit taxes. If such obligations were imposed, the additional costs associated with tax collection, remittance and audit requirements could have a material adverse effect on our business and financial results.
In addition, we may benefit from certain tax incentives related to research and development and technological innovation, established by Law No. 11,196, dated November 21, 2005, as amended, or Lei do Bem, and regulated by Decree No. 5,798, dated June 7, 2006. Our ability to benefit from these incentives depends on our compliance with certain obligations. Failure on our part to comply with certain obligations in accordance with the applicable rules or to provide the documentation required to substantiate such tax credits could result in the loss of such incentives that have not yet been used and claims by the Brazilian tax authorities of the amount corresponding to taxes not paid as a result of the incentives already used, in addition to penalties and interest under Brazilian tax laws. If any of our tax benefits expires, terminates or is cancelled, we may not be successful in obtaining new tax benefits that are equally favorable, which may materially adversely affect us. See “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—E. Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates—Income tax and social contribution.”
Furthermore, as we expand our business into new jurisdictions, there can be no assurance that any such jurisdiction will have tax treaties with the other countries where we operate and that we will not be subject to “double taxation” issues or other tax-related concerns.
If we are unable to obtain or retain geographical, non-geographical (i.e. telemarketing numbers), regional, local or toll-free numbers, or to effectively process requests, such numbers in a timely manner due to industry regulations, our business and results of operations may be adversely affected.
Our future success depends in part on our ability to obtain allocations of geographical, regional, local and toll-free direct inward dialing numbers, or DIDs, at a reasonable cost and without overly burdensome restrictions because DIDs are necessary to access the public telecommunications network (even through VOIP technology) and the business model developed by us and our subsidiary, Total Voice Comunicações S.A., or Total Voice, requires the management of DIDs on behalf of our customers in order to timely and effectively complete and receive calls at reasonable costs. Our ability to obtain allocations of, assign and retain DIDs depends on factors outside of our control, such as applicable regulations, the practices of authorities that administer national numbering plans or of network service providers from whom we can provision DIDs, such as offering DIDs with conditional minimum volume call level requirements, the cost of these DIDs and the level of overall competitive demand for new DIDs.
Regarding the expansion of our services, in order to obtain allocations of, assign and retain telephone numbers in other regions, we may be required to be licensed by local telecommunications regulatory authorities, some of which have been increasingly monitoring and regulating the categories of phone numbers that are eligible for provisioning to our customers. In some countries, the regulatory regime around the allocation of phone numbers is unclear, subject to change over time, and sometimes may conflict from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Furthermore, these regulations and governments’ approach to their enforcement, as well as our products and services, are still evolving and we may be unable to maintain compliance with applicable regulations, or enforce compliance by our customers, on a timely basis or without significant cost. Also, compliance with these types of regulation may require changes in products or business practices that result in reduced revenue. Due to our or our customers’ assignment and/or use of phone numbers in certain countries in a manner that violates applicable rules and regulations, we may in the future be subject to significant penalties or further governmental action, and in extreme cases, may be precluded from doing business in that particular country. We have also been forced to reclaim phone numbers from our customers as a result of certain non-compliance events. These reclamations result in loss of customers, loss of revenue, reputational harm, erosion of customer trust, and may also result in breach of contract claims, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Due to their limited availability, there are certain popular area code prefixes that we generally cannot obtain or could have limited access to. Our inability to acquire or retain DIDs for our operations would make our voice and messaging products less attractive to potential customers in the affected local geographic areas or could restrain our capability of offering VOIP services for telemarketing purposes. In addition, future growth in our customer base, together with growth in the customer bases of other providers of cloud communications, has increased, which increases our dependence on needing sufficiently large quantities of DIDs. It may become increasingly difficult to source larger quantities of DIDs as we scale and we may need to pay higher costs for DIDs, and DIDs may become subject to more stringent regulation or conditions of usage such as the registration and ongoing compliance requirements discussed above.
Additionally, in some geographies, we support number portability, which allows our customers to transfer their existing phone numbers to us and thereby retain their existing phone numbers when subscribing to our voice and messaging products. Transferring existing numbers is a manual process that can take up to 15 business days or longer to complete. Any delay that we experience in transferring these numbers typically results from the fact that we depend on network service providers to transfer these numbers, a process that we do not control, and these network service providers may refuse or substantially delay the transfer of these numbers to us. Number portability is considered an important feature by many potential customers, and if we fail to reduce any related delays, then we may experience increased difficulty in acquiring new customers.
In Brazil, the Brazilian National Telecommunication Agency (Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações), or ANATEL, recently determined that telemarketing calls are required to use a non-geographical 0303 pre fixed code for customers be able to identify them. Although we enable our customers to access such non-geographical codes in order to comply with such determination, we might not be able to adjust to new regulations in a timely manner, which may lead to fines or unexpected expenses until we are fully able to become fully compliant with applicable laws and regulations. Also, if we fail to comply with such regulations we may lose customers and revenues, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition. See “—Certain Risks Relating to Our Business and Industry—Future legislative, regulatory or judicial actions impacting our products, services, platform and/or our business (including CX communications platform and software products) could also increase the cost and complexity of compliance and expose us to liability.”
Any of the foregoing factors could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our credit facility arrangements contain restrictive and financial covenants that may limit our operating flexibility and any default under such debt agreements may have a material adverse effect on our financial condition and cash flows.
Our credit facility agreements contain certain financial and restrictive covenants that either limit our ability to, or require a mandatory prepayment in the event we, incur additional indebtedness and liens, merge with other companies or consummate certain changes of control, acquire other companies, engage in new lines of business, change business locations, make certain investments, pay dividends, make any payments on any subordinated debt, transfer or dispose of assets, amend certain material agreements, and enter into various specified transactions. We, therefore, may not be able to engage in any of the foregoing transactions unless we obtain the consent of our lenders or prepay the outstanding amount under these credit facility agreements. These agreements also contain certain financial covenants and financial reporting requirements. We may not be able to generate sufficient cash flow or sales to meet the financial covenants or pay the principal and interest under these credit facility arrangements.
Failure to meet or satisfy any of these covenants could result in an event of default under these and other agreements, as a result of cross-default provisions. If we are unable to comply with our debt covenants, we may be required to seek waivers or renegotiate our existing agreements. For example, in 2022, we renegotiated our financing agreements such that no financial covenants were applicable in that year; however, there can be no guarantee that we will be successful in future renegotiations if we fail to meet the financial targets for our current and future debt covenants. If we are unable to obtain such waivers, a large portion of our debt could be subject to acceleration. In the event of acceleration, we could be required to renegotiate, restructure or refinance our indebtedness, seek additional equity capital or sell assets, which could materially and adversely affect us. See “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—B. Liquidity and Capital Resources—Indebtedness.”
Furthermore, our future working capital, borrowings, or equity financing could be unavailable to repay or refinance the amounts outstanding under the credit facility. In the event of liquidation, our lenders would be repaid all outstanding principal and interest prior to distribution of assets to unsecured creditors, and the holders of our Class A and Class B common shares would receive a portion of any liquidation proceeds only if all of our creditors, including our lenders, were first repaid in full.
Our holding company structure makes us dependent on the operations of our subsidiaries.
We are a company incorporated under the laws of the Cayman Islands with limited liability. Our material assets are our direct and indirect equity interests in our subsidiaries. We are, therefore, dependent upon payments, dividends and distributions from our subsidiaries for funds to pay our holding company’s operating and other expenses and to pay future cash dividends or distributions, if any, to holders of our Class A common shares. The amount of any dividends or distributions which may be paid to us from time to time will depend on many factors including, for example, such subsidiaries results of operations and financial condition; limits on dividends under applicable law; its constitutional documents; documents governing any indebtedness; applicability of tax treaties; and other factors which may be outside our control. Furthermore, exchange rate fluctuation will affect the U.S. dollar value of any distributions our subsidiaries (which are currently mostly located in Brazil) make with respect to our equity interests in those subsidiaries. See “—Certain Risks Relating to Brazil—Exchange rate instability may have adverse effects on the Brazilian economy, us and the price of our Class A common shares,” “The ongoing economic uncertainty and political instability in Brazil may harm us and the price of our Class A common shares” and “Item 8—Financial Information—A. Consolidated Statements and Other Financial Information—Dividends and Dividend Policy.”
Breaches of our networks or systems, or those of our cloud infrastructure providers or our service providers, could degrade our ability to conduct our business, compromise the integrity of our products, platform and data, result in significant data losses and the theft of our intellectual property, damage our reputation, expose us to liability to third parties and require us to incur significant additional costs to maintain the security of our networks and data.
We depend upon our IT systems to conduct virtually all of our business operations, ranging from our internal operations and research and development activities to our marketing and sales efforts and communications with our customers and sales channel partners. Individuals or entities may attempt to penetrate our network security, or that of our platform, and to cause harm to our business operations, including by misappropriating our proprietary information or that of our customers, employees and sales channel partners or to cause interruptions of our products and platform. In particular, cyberattacks and other malicious internet-based activity continue to increase in frequency and in magnitude generally, and cloud-based companies have been targeted in the past. In addition to threats from traditional computer hackers, malicious code (such as malware, viruses, worms, and ransomware), employee theft or misuse, password spraying, phishing, credential stuffing, and denial-of-service attacks, we can also face threats from sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors who engage in attacks (including advanced persistent threat intrusions) that add to the risk to our systems (including those hosted on cloud infrastructure providers, internal networks, our customers’ systems and the information that they store and process. While we devote significant financial and personnel resources to implement and maintain security measures, because the techniques used by such individuals or entities to access, disrupt or sabotage devices, systems and networks change frequently and may not be recognized until launched against a target, we may be required to make further investments over time to protect data and infrastructure as cybersecurity threats develop, evolve and grow more complex over time. We may also be unable to anticipate these techniques, and we may not become aware in a timely manner of such a security breach, which could exacerbate any damage we experience.
Additionally, we depend upon our employees and contractors to appropriately handle confidential and sensitive data, including customer data, and to deploy our IT resources in a safe and secure manner that does not expose our network systems to security breaches or the loss of data. We have been and expect to be subject to cybersecurity threats and incidents, including employee errors or individual attempts to gain unauthorized access to information systems. Any data security incidents, including internal malfeasance or inadvertent disclosures by our employees or a third party’s fraudulent inducement of our employees to disclose information, unauthorized access or usage, virus or similar breach or disruption of us or our service providers, could result in loss of confidential information, damage to our reputation, erosion of customer trust, loss of customers, litigation, regulatory investigations, fines, penalties and other liabilities. Such liabilities are also related to the penalties, lawsuits and other regulatory scrutiny arising from the LGPD and the Brazilian Code of Consumer Defense. According to the Brazilian Code of Consumer Defense, consumers may file complaints with consumer protection agencies, comprising the Federal Consumer Agency (Departamento de Proteção e Defesa do Consumidor), and the local consumer protection agencies, or PROCONs. In case consumer protection agencies identify a violation of the Brazilian Code of Consumer Defense, such agencies may impose the penalties set forth in section 56 of the Brazilian Code of Consumer Defense (commonly a fine that varies from R$800 (eight hundred reais) to up to R$9.5 million, depending on the size of the company, the advantage obtained as result of the practice and the seriousness of the case). Consumers may also file civil lawsuits seeking compensation for damages. In addition, the Public Prosecutor’s Office may initiate a proceeding which consists of civil inquiries or investigations arising from consumer complaints in order to verify the company’s compliance with consumer law. If the inquiries or investigations conclude that there was no infraction to the law, administrative proceedings filed by the Public Prosecutor Office may be postponed or closed. However, administrative proceedings may also lead to Terms of Conduct Adjustment, or TACs, entered into between us and the relevant authorities, which are intended to adjust our conduct to certain requirements and legal standards, or lead to a public civil action (ação civil pública) against us. Accordingly, if our cybersecurity measures or those of our service providers, fail to protect against unauthorized access, attacks (which may include sophisticated cyberattacks), compromise or the mishandling of data by our employees and contractors, our reputation, customer trust, business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. Vulnerability to cyberattacks may increase in light of our adoption of a permanent remote work policy (Zenvia Anywhere), a measure that we implemented as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we maintain errors, omissions, and cyber liability insurance policies covering certain security and privacy damages, we cannot be certain that our existing insurance coverage will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available, and in sufficient amounts, to cover the potentially significant losses that may result from a security incident or breach or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim.
For further information regarding sanctions, see “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Regulatory Matters—Impacts of the enforcement of Law No. 13,709/2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais), or LGPD, to our products and platform and our business model.”
Unfavorable conditions in our industry or the global economy or reductions in spending on information technology and communications could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our results of operations may vary based on the impact of changes in our industry or the global economy on our customers. Our results of operations depend in part on demand for information technology and cloud communications. In addition, our revenue is dependent on the usage of our products, which in turn is influenced by the scale of business that our customers are conducting. To the extent that weak economic conditions, global inflation, higher interest rates, geopolitical developments, such as existing and potential trade wars, and other events outside of our control, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, result in a reduced volume of business for, and communications by, our customers and prospective customers, demand for, and use of, our products may decline. Furthermore, weak economic conditions may make it more difficult to collect on outstanding accounts receivable. If our customers reduce their use of our products, or prospective customers delay adoption or elect not to adopt our products, as a result of a weak economy, this could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
A material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting has been identified. If we are unable to remedy such material weakness or fail to establish and maintain a proper and effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting, our ability to produce timely and accurate financial statements, our results of operations and our ability to operate our business or comply with applicable regulations may be adversely affected.
After our initial public offering completed in July 2021, we became subject to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires, among other things, that we establish and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting and disclosure controls and procedures.
In connection with the preparation of our audited consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2022, we and our independent registered public accounting firm identified one material weakness in our internal controls over financial reporting as of December 31, 2022. A material weakness is a deficiency, or combination of control deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of our annual or interim financial statements will not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.
The material weakness identified relates to the ineffective implementation and operation of general information technology controls, or GITCs, in the areas of user access and program change-management over information technology systems that support the financial reporting processes, which resulted in business process controls that are dependent on the affected GITCs. This material weakness did not result in a material misstatement to our consolidated financial statements. In response to the GITCs deficiencies that had already been identified and reported by our external independent auditors, we designed and implemented several internal controls, seeking to enhance our control environment.
However, the GITCs implemented during the year ended December 31, 2022 did not operate on a timely basis to provide sufficient assurance regarding the remediation of the material weakness identified during the audit of our financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2021. Although we are confident that the remedial measures mentioned above improved our internal control over financial reporting and address the underlying cause of this material weakness, we cannot assure investors that our efforts will be effective or prevent any future material weakness or significant deficiency in our internal control over financial reporting. See “Item 15. Controls and Procedures — B. Management’s Annual Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting” for additional details.
In addition, we cannot be certain that we have identified all material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting or that in the future we will not have additional material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting. Moreover, while we currently do not expect that the expenses we will have to incur to remediate the above referred material weakness will adversely affect our business, we may incur in unforeseen expenses.
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We may not be able to successfully manage our intellectual property and may be subject to infringement claims.
We rely on a network of contractual rights, trademarks, patents and trade secrets to establish and protect our proprietary rights, including our technology. For further information regarding our intellectual property, see “Item 4. Information on the Company—B. Business Overview—Intellectual Property.” Third parties may challenge, invalidate, circumvent, infringe or misappropriate our intellectual property, or such intellectual property may not be sufficient to permit us to take advantage of current market trends or otherwise to provide competitive advantages, which could result in costly redesign efforts, discontinuance of certain service offerings or other competitive harm. Others, including our competitors, may independently develop similar technology, duplicate our services or design around our intellectual property, and in such cases, we could not assert our intellectual property rights against such parties. Further, our contractual arrangements may not effectively prevent disclosure of our confidential information or provide an adequate remedy in the event of unauthorized disclosure of our confidential information. We may have to litigate to enforce or determine the scope and enforceability of our intellectual property rights, trade secrets and know-how, which is expensive, could cause a diversion of resources and may not prove successful. Also, because of the rapid pace of technological change in our industry, aspects of our business and our services rely on technologies developed or licensed by third parties, and we may not be able to obtain or continue to obtain licenses and technologies from these third parties on reasonable terms or at all. The loss of intellectual property protection, the inability to obtain third-party intellectual property or delay or refusal by relevant regulatory authorities to approve pending intellectual property registration applications could adversely affect our business and ability to compete.
We may also be subject to costly litigation in the event our services and technology infringe upon or otherwise violate a third party’s proprietary rights. Third parties may have, or may eventually be issued, patents that could be infringed by our proprietary rights. Any of these third parties could make a claim of infringement against us with respect to our proprietary rights. We may also be subject to claims by third parties for breach of copyright, trademark, license usage or other intellectual property rights. Any claim from third parties may result in a limitation on our ability to use the intellectual property subject to these claims or could prevent us from registering our brands as trademarks. Even if we believe that intellectual property related claims are without merit, defending against such claims is time-consuming and expensive and could result in the diversion of the time and attention of our management and employees. Claims of intellectual property infringement also might require us to redesign affected services, enter into costly settlement or license agreements, pay costly damage awards, change our brands, or face a temporary or permanent injunction prohibiting us from marketing or selling certain of our services or using certain of our brands. Even if we have an agreement for indemnification against such costs, the indemnifying party, if any in such circumstances, may be unable to uphold its contractual obligations. If we cannot or do not license the infringed technology on reasonable terms or substitute similar technology from another source, our revenue and earnings could be adversely impacted.
In the future, we may also introduce or acquire new products, technologies or businesses, including in areas where we historically have not participated in, which could increase our exposure to intellectual property claims. Any claims or litigation could cause us to incur significant expenses and, if successfully asserted against us, could require that we pay substantial damages or ongoing royalty payments, prevent us from offering our products, or require that we comply with other unfavorable terms. We may also be obligated to indemnify our customers or sales channel partners in connection with any such litigation and to obtain licenses or modify our products or platform, which could further exhaust our resources. Litigation is inherently uncertain and even if we were to prevail in the event of claims or litigation against us, any claim or litigation regarding intellectual property could be costly and time-consuming and divert the attention of our management and other employees from our business. Patent infringement, trademark infringement, trade secret misappropriation and other intellectual property claims and proceedings brought against us, whether successful or not, could harm our brand, business, results of operations and financial condition.
In addition, laws of the countries where we operate do not protect intellectual property and other proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. To the extent we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying, transfer and use of our proprietary technology or information may increase.
We cannot be certain that our means of protecting our intellectual property and proprietary rights will be adequate or that our competitors will not independently develop similar technology. If we fail to meaningfully protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected.
Our customers’ and other users’ violation of our policies or other misuse of our platform to transmit unauthorized, offensive or illegal messages, spam, phishing scams, and website links to harmful applications or for other fraudulent or illegal activity could damage our reputation, and we may face a risk of litigation and liability for illegal activities on our platform and unauthorized, inaccurate, or fraudulent information distributed via our platform.
The actual or perceived improper sending of text messages, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages or voice calls may subject us to potential risks, including liabilities or claims relating to the LGPD and other consumer protection laws and regulatory enforcement, including fines. The scope and interpretation of the laws that are or may be applicable to the delivery of text messages are continuously evolving and developing. If we do not comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations due to the failure of our customers to comply with these laws by obtaining proper consent, we could face direct liability.
Moreover, despite our efforts to limit any such use, there is a chance that certain of our customers may use our platform to transmit unauthorized, offensive or illegal messages, calls, spam, phishing scams, and website links to harmful applications, reproduce and distribute copyrighted material or the trademarks of others without permission, and report inaccurate or fraudulent data or information. These actions are in violation of our policies made available to them. However, our efforts to defeat spamming attacks, illegal robocalls and other fraudulent activity will not prevent all such attacks and activity. Such use of our platform could damage our reputation and we could face claims for damages, copyright or trademark infringement, defamation, negligence, or fraud and be subject to fines imposed by our network service providers. Moreover, our customers’ and other users’ promotion of their products and services through our platform might not comply with federal, state, and foreign laws. We rely on contractual representations made to us by our customers that their use of our platform will comply with our policies and applicable law, including, without limitation, our messaging policies. Although we retain the right to verify that customers and other users are abiding by certain contractual terms, our customers and other users are ultimately responsible for compliance with our policies, and we do not systematically audit our customers or other users to confirm compliance with our policies. We cannot predict whether our role in facilitating our customers’ or other users’ activities would expose us to liability under applicable law. Even if claims asserted against us do not result in liability, we may incur substantial costs in investigating and defending such claims. If we are found liable for our customers’ or other users’ activities, we could be required to pay fines or penalties, redesign business methods or otherwise expend resources to remedy any damages caused by such actions and to avoid future liability.
We depend largely on our senior management, other key employees and qualified personnel, the loss of any of whom and our inability to continue to attract other qualified personnel could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our future performance depends on the continued services and contributions of our senior management, other key employees and qualified personnel to execute on our business plan, to develop our products and platform, to deliver our products to customers, to attract and retain customers and to identify and pursue opportunities. The loss of members of our senior management, other key employees and qualified personnel could disrupt our operations and significantly delay or prevent the achievement of our development and strategic objectives. In particular, we depend to a considerable degree on the vision, skills, experience and effort of our founder and chief executive officer, Cassio Bobsin.
If members of our senior management team resign, we may not be able to sustain our existing culture or replace them with individuals of the same experience and qualification. The replacement of any of our senior management personnel would likely involve significant time and costs, and such loss could significantly delay or prevent the achievement of our business objectives. The loss of the services of any of our senior management or other key employees for any reason could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Our future success also depends on our ability to identify, attract, hire, train, retain, motivate and manage other highly skilled technical, managerial, information technology (particularly developers) and marketing, product, sales and customer service personnel. Competition for such personnel is intense, and we may not be able to successfully attract, hire, train, retain, motivate and manage sufficiently qualified personnel. If we are unable to retain and motivate our existing employees and attract qualified personnel to fill key positions, we may be unable to manage our business effectively, including the development, marketing and sale of our products, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. To the extent we hire personnel from competitors, we also may be subject to allegations that they have been improperly solicited or disclosed proprietary or other confidential information.
In addition, even if we are successful in hiring qualified sales personnel, newly hired personnel require significant training and experience before they achieve full productivity, particularly for sales efforts targeted at businesses and new regions (including outside of Brazil). Our recent hires and planned hires may not become as productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the future in the markets where we do business.
Volatility in, or lack of performance of, our Class A common share price may also affect our ability to attract and retain key personnel. Many of our key personnel are, or will soon be, vested in a substantial number of our Class A common shares in the context of our equity incentive plans. Employees may be more likely to terminate their employment with us if the shares underlying their vested options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the original exercise prices of the options, or, conversely, if the exercise prices of the options that they hold are significantly above the trading price of our Class A common shares. If we are unable to retain our employees, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. For further information regarding our long-term compensation incentive plans, see “Item 6. Directors, Senior Management and Employees—B. Compensation—Equity Incentive Plan.”
We face exposure to foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations, and such fluctuations could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
As our international operations expand, our exposure to the effects of fluctuations in currency exchange rates will grow. For example, global political events, including the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, the recent conflict between Ukraine and Russia, trade tariff developments and other geopolitical events have caused global economic uncertainty and variability in foreign currency exchange rates. While we have primarily transacted with customers in Brazilian reais, in light of our international expansion we expect to transact with customers in Mexican pesos, Argentine pesos, and U.S. dollars, among others. We expect to significantly expand the number of transactions with customers that are denominated in foreign currencies in the future as we continue to expand our business internationally. We also incur expenses for some of our network service provider costs outside of Brazil in local currencies and for employee compensation and other operating expenses at our non-Brazil locations in the local currency for such locations. Fluctuations in the exchange rates between the Brazilian real and other currencies could result in an increase to the Brazilian equivalent of such expenses.
As we continue to expand our international operations, we become more exposed to the effects of fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Accordingly, changes in the value of foreign currencies relative to the U.S. dollar can affect our results of operations due to transactional and translational remeasurements. As a result of such foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations, it could be more difficult to detect underlying trends in our business and results of operations. In addition, to the extent that fluctuations in currency exchange rates cause our results of operations to differ from our expectations or the expectations of our investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the trading price of our Class A common shares could be adversely affected.
Except as described under “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—B. Liquidity and Capital Resources—Indebtedness—Working Capital,” we do not maintain a program to hedge transactional exposures in foreign currencies. However, in the future, we may use derivative instruments, such as foreign currency forward and option contracts, to hedge certain exposures to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates. The use of such hedging activities may not offset any or more than a portion of the adverse financial effects of unfavorable movements in foreign exchange rates over the limited time the hedges are in place. Moreover, the use of hedging instruments may introduce additional risks if we are unable to structure effective hedges with such instruments.
The costs and effects of pending and future litigation, investigations or similar matters, or adverse facts and developments related thereto, could materially affect our business, financial position and results of operations.
In the ordinary course of business, we and our subsidiaries are and may continue to be in the future parties to tax, civil, labor and consumer protection proceedings, as well as arbitration and administrative investigations, inspections and proceedings whose outcomes may be unfavorable to us. As of December 31, 2022 and 2021, we have established an amount of R$39,750 thousand and R$36,076 thousand, respectively, in provisions for disputes that represent a probable loss for us and our subsidiaries. Also, we are not required to record provisions for proceedings in which our management judges the risk of loss to be possible or remote. However, the amounts involved in some of these proceedings may be substantial, and eventual losses on them could be significantly high. Even for the amounts recorded as provisions for probable losses, a judgment against us would have an impact on our cash flow if we were required to pay those amounts and the eventual losses could be higher than the provisions we have recorded. Unfavorable decisions in our legal proceedings (including court decisions unfavorable to us in amounts above those provisioned for or that prevent us from carrying out our projects, as initially planned) may, therefore, reduce our liquidity and have a material adverse impact on our business, results of operations, financial condition and prospects. For more information on material legal proceedings, see “Item 8. Financial Information—A. Consolidated Statements and Other Financial Information––Legal and Administrative Proceedings.”
There are risks for which our insurance policies may not adequately cover or for which we have no insurance coverage. Insufficient insurance coverage or the materialization of such uninsured risks could adversely affect us.
Our insurance policies may not adequately cover all risks to which we are exposed. In addition, we may not carry insurance sufficient to compensate us for any losses that may result from claims arising from defects or disruptions in our products. We cannot assure investors that we will be able to maintain our insurance policies in the future or that we will be able to renew them at reasonable prices or on acceptable terms, which may adversely affect our business and the trading price of our Class A common shares. Moreover, we are subject to risks for which we are uninsured, such as war, acts of God, including hurricanes, other force majeure events and breaches of the security of our systems by hackers. The occurrence of a significant loss that is not insured or compensable, or that is only partially insured or compensable, may require us to commit significant cash resources to cover such losses, which may adversely affect us.
Certain Risks Relating to Brazil
The Brazilian federal government has exercised, and continues to exercise, significant influence over the Brazilian economy. This involvement as well as Brazil’s political, regulatory, legal and economic conditions could harm us and the price of our Class A common shares.
The Brazilian federal government frequently exercises significant influence over the Brazilian economy and occasionally makes significant changes in policy and regulations. The Brazilian government’s actions to control inflation and other policies and regulations have often involved, among other measures, increases or decreases in interest rates, changes in fiscal policies, wage and price controls, foreign exchange rate controls, blocking access to bank accounts, currency devaluations, capital controls and import and export restrictions. We have no control over and cannot predict what measures or policies the Brazilian government may take in the future, and how these can impact us and our business. We and the market price of our securities may be harmed by changes in Brazilian government policies, as well as general economic factors, including, without limitation:
Uncertainty over whether the Brazilian federal government will implement reforms or changes in policy or regulation affecting these or other factors in the future may affect economic performance and contribute to economic uncertainty in Brazil, which may have an adverse effect on our activities and consequently our operating results and may also adversely affect the trading price of our Class A common shares. Recent economic and political instability has led to a negative perception of the Brazilian economy and higher volatility in the Brazilian securities markets, which also may adversely affect us and our Class A common shares. See “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects—A. Operating Results—Principal Factors Affecting Our Results of Operations—Macroeconomic Environment.”
The ongoing economic uncertainty and political instability in Brazil may harm us and the price of our Class A common shares.
The Brazilian political environment influenced and continues to influence the economic performance of the country. The political crises affected and continue to affect the trust of investors and the general public, causing economic slowdowns and an increase in volatility of securities issued by Brazilian companies.
Political instability has been exacerbated by the Brazilian polarized presidential election held in October 2022. After having his criminal convictions related to Operação Lava Jato overturned and his political rights restored by the Brazilian Supreme Court, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ran for office in the presidential election and narrowly defeated President Bolsonaro. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office on January 1, 2023. In the aftermath of the November 22 presidential election, there have been countrywide roadblocks and protests by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro disputing the election results, culminating, on January 8, 2023, in riots in the country’s federal capital, Brasilia, where protesters stormed government buildings, including the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace. It is unclear whether this heightened state of political and social tension will dissipate or intensify in following months and what resulting impacts may occur to adversely affect our business operations or the safety of our employees, our customers, and the communities in which we operate.
Furthermore, the federal government’s difficulty in having a majority in the National Congress could result in a deadlock, political unrest and massive demonstrations and/or strikes, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Uncertainties regarding the current government’s implementation of changes in monetary, fiscal and social security policies, as well as the relevant legislation, may contribute to economic instability. These uncertainties and new measures may increase the volatility of the Brazilian securities market.
The president of Brazil has the power to establish policies and perform governmental acts related to the conduction of the Brazilian economy and, consequently, affect the operations and financial performance of companies, including ourselves. We cannot predict which policies the President will adopt, much less whether such policies or changes in current policies could have an adverse effect on us or on the Brazilian economy.
Furthermore, Brazil’s federal budget has been in deficit since 2014. Similarly, the governments of Brazil’s constituent states are also facing fiscal concerns due to their high debt burdens, declining revenues and inflexible expenditures. While the Brazilian Congress has approved a ceiling on government spending that will limit primary public expenditure growth to the prior year’s inflation for a period of at least 10 years, local and foreign investors believe that fiscal reforms, and in particular the reform of Brazil’s pension system, which was approved in 2019 by the Brazilian Congress, will be critical for Brazil to comply with the spending limit. Discussions in the Brazilian Congress relating to fiscal reform remain ongoing. Diminished confidence in the Brazilian government’s budgetary condition and fiscal stance could result in downgrades of Brazil’s sovereign debt by credit rating agencies, negatively impact Brazil’s economy, lead to further depreciation of the real and an increase in inflation and interest rates.
Any of the above factors may create additional political uncertainty, which could harm the Brazilian economy and, consequently, our business, and could adversely affect our financial condition, results of operations and the trading price of our Class A common shares.
Inflation and certain measures by the Brazilian government to curb inflation have historically harmed the Brazilian economy and Brazilian capital markets, and high levels of inflation in the future would harm our business and the price of our Class A common shares.
In the past, Brazil has experienced extremely high rates of inflation. Inflation and some of the measures taken by the Brazilian government in an attempt to curb inflation have had significant negative effects on the Brazilian economy generally. Inflation, policies adopted to curb inflationary pressures and uncertainties regarding possible future governmental intervention have contributed to economic uncertainty and heightened volatility in the Brazilian capital markets.
According to the National Consumer Price Index (Índice Nacional de Preços ao Consumidor Amplo), or IPCA, which is published by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística), or IBGE, Brazilian inflation rates were 5.8%, 10.1% and 4.5% for the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Brazil may experience high levels of inflation in the future and inflationary pressures may lead to the Brazilian government’s intervening in the economy and introducing policies that could harm our business and the price of our Class A common shares. One of the tools used by the Brazilian government to control inflation levels is its monetary policy, specifically in regard to the official Brazilian interest rate. An increase in the interest rate restricts the availability of credit and reduces economic growth, and vice versa. During recent years there has been significant volatility in the official Brazilian interest rate, which ranged from 14.25%, on December 31, 2015, to 2.00% as of December 31, 2020, 9.25% as of December 31, 2021 and 13.75% as of December 31, 2022. As of the date of this annual report, the official Brazilian base interest rate is 13.75%. This rate is set by the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Brazil (Comitê de Política Monetária), or COPOM. Any change in interest rate, in particular any volatile swings, can adversely affect our growth, indebtedness and financial condition.
Exchange rate instability may have adverse effects on the Brazilian economy, us and the price of our Class A common shares.
The Brazilian currency has been historically volatile and has been devalued frequently over the past three decades. Throughout this period, the Brazilian government has implemented various economic plans and used various exchange rate policies, including sudden devaluations, periodic mini-devaluations (during which the frequency of adjustments has ranged from daily to monthly), exchange controls, dual exchange rate markets and a floating exchange rate system. Although long-term depreciation of the real is generally linked to the rate of inflation in Brazil, depreciation of the real occurring over shorter periods of time has resulted in significant variations in the exchange rate between the real, the U.S. dollar and other currencies. In 2014, the real depreciated by 11.8% against the U.S. dollar, while in 2015 it further depreciated by 32%. The real/U.S. dollar exchange rate reported by the Central Bank was R$3.259 per US$1.00 on December 31, 2016, an appreciation of 16.5% against the rate of R$3.905 per US$1.00 reported on December 31, 2015. In 2017, the real depreciated by 1.5%, with the exchange rate reaching R$3.308 per US$1.00 on December 31, 2017. In 2018, the real depreciated an additional 17.1%, to R$3.875 per US$1.00 on December 31, 2018. The real/U.S. dollar exchange rate reported by the Central Bank was R$4.031 per US$1.00 on December 31, 2019, which reflected a 4.0% depreciation of the real against the U.S. dollar for the year. Due to the COVID-19 and the economic and political instability, the real depreciated 47.2% against the U.S. dollar since December 31, 2019, and reached R$5.937 per US$1.00 as of May 14, 2020, its lowest level since the introduction of the currency in 1994. The exchange rate reported by the Central Bank was R$5.218 per US$1.00 on December 31, 2022 and R$5.048 per US$1.00 on April 26, 2023. There can be no assurance that the real will not again depreciate and/or appreciate against the U.S. dollar or other currencies in the future.
A devaluation of the real relative to the U.S. dollar could create inflationary pressures in Brazil and cause the Brazilian government to, among other measures, increase interest rates. Any depreciation of the real may generally restrict access to the international capital markets. It would also reduce the U.S. dollar value of our results of operations. Restrictive macroeconomic policies could reduce the stability of the Brazilian economy and harm our results of operations and profitability. In addition, domestic and international reactions to restrictive economic policies could have a negative impact on the Brazilian economy. These policies and any reactions to them may harm us by curtailing access to foreign financial markets and prompting further government intervention. A devaluation of the real relative to the U.S. dollar may also, as in the context of the current economic slowdown, decrease consumer spending, increase deflationary pressures and reduce economic growth.
On the other hand, an appreciation of the real relative to the U.S. dollar and other foreign currencies may deteriorate the Brazilian foreign exchange current accounts. Depending on the circumstances, either devaluation or appreciation of the real relative to the U.S. dollar and other foreign currencies could restrict the growth of the Brazilian economy, as well as affecting our business, results of operations and profitability.
Infrastructure and workforce deficiency in Brazil may impact economic growth and have a material adverse effect on us.
Our performance depends on the overall health and growth of the Brazilian economy. Brazilian GDP growth has fluctuated over the past few years, with contractions of 3.5% and 3.3% in 2015 and 2016, respectively, followed by growth of 1.3% in both 2017 and 2018, 1.1% for the year ended December 31, 2019 and a contraction of 4.1% for the year ended December 31, 2020. Brazilian GDP grew 4.6.% in the year ended December 31, 2021 and grew 2.9% in the year ended December 31, 2022. Growth is limited by inadequate infrastructure, including potential energy shortages and deficient transportation, logistics and telecommunication sectors, general strikes, the lack of a qualified labor force (particularly developers), and the lack of private and public investments in these areas, which limit productivity and efficiency. Any of these factors could lead to labor market volatility and generally impact income, purchasing power and consumption levels, which could limit growth and ultimately have a material adverse effect on us.
Developments and the perceptions of risks in other countries, including other emerging markets, the United States and Europe, may harm the Brazilian economy and the price of our Class A common shares.
The market for securities offered by companies with significant operations in Brazil (which is our case) is influenced by political, economic and market conditions in Brazil and, to varying degrees, market conditions in other Latin American and emerging markets, as well as the United States, Europe and other countries. For example, share prices of companies with significant operations in Brazil (whether they are listed on NASDAQ, NYSE or the São Paulo Stock Exchange (B3 S.A. - Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão)) have historically been sensitive to fluctuations in U.S. interest rates and the behavior of the major U.S. stock indexes. An increase in interest rates in other countries, especially the United States, may reduce global liquidity and investors’ interest in securities issued by companies with significant operations in Brazil, adversely affecting the price of our Class A common shares. Interest rates have increased rapidly in the United States in the year ended December 31, 2022. For instance, in March 2022, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised its benchmark federal funds rate by 0.25% to a range between 0.25% and 0.50%, the first increase since December 2018. The U.S. Federal Reserve recently increased interest rates in the United States to a target range of 4.75%-5%. It is anticipated that the U.S. Federal Reserve will again raise the federal funds rate in the coming months up to a peak of 5.1%. This, in turn, may redirect the flow of capital from emerging markets into the United States because investors may be able to obtain greater risk-adjusted returns in larger or more developed economies. Thus, companies in emerging market economies could find it more difficult and expensive to borrow capital and refinance existing debt. This may negatively affect our potential for economic growth and our ability to refinance our existing debt and could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, cash flows, prospects and the market price of our shares. Technology companies have been sensitive to the effects as investors may look to higher yield short-term investment options rather than wait for technology companies to generate long-term growth and expected future cash flows.
To the extent the conditions of the global markets or economy deteriorate, the business of companies with significant operations in Brazil may be harmed. The weakness in the global economy has been marked by, among other adverse factors, lower levels of consumer and corporate confidence, decreased business investment and consumer spending, increased unemployment, increase in inflation, reduced income and asset values in many areas, reduction of China’s growth rate, currency volatility and limited availability of credit and access to capital. Developments or economic conditions in other countries may significantly affect the availability of credit to companies with significant operations in Brazil and result in considerable outflows of funds from Brazil, decreasing the amount of foreign investments in Brazil.
Crises and political instability in other emerging market countries, the United States, Europe or other countries could decrease investor demand for securities offered by companies with significant operations in Brazil, such as our Class A common shares. Investor sentiment in one country may cause capital markets in other countries to fluctuate, affecting the value of our Class A common shares, even if indirectly. The economic, political and social instability in the United States, the trade war between the United States and China, crises in Europe and other countries and global tensions, as well as economic or political crises and social unrest in Latin America or other emerging markets, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, can significantly affect the perception of the risks inherent in investment in Brazil.
In addition, the U.S. president has considerable influence, which may materially and adversely affect the global economy and political stability. We cannot ensure that the U.S. presidential administration will adopt policies designed to promote macroeconomic stability, fiscal discipline, as well as domestic and foreign investment, which may materially and adversely impact the trading price of securities of Brazilian issuers, including our Class A common shares. Growing economic uncertainty and news of a potentially recessive economy in the United States may also create uncertainty in the Brazilian economy. Further, on January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom announced it had officially exited the European Union, commonly referred to as Brexit, and entered a transition period. Brexit has caused and may continue to cause political and economic uncertainty, including significant volatility in global stock markets and currency exchange rate fluctuations. The effects of Brexit will depend on many factors, including any trade deals that the United Kingdom makes to retain access to European Union markets. Brexit could lead to legal uncertainty and give rise to potentially conflicting national laws and regulations as the United Kingdom determines which laws of the European Union will be replaced or replicated. The potential impact of Brexit on our market share, sales, profitability and results of operations is unclear. The economic conditions in the United Kingdom, the European Union and global markets may be adversely affected by reduced growth and volatility.
Furthermore, global markets are currently operating in a period of economic uncertainty, volatility and disruption following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine has provoked strong reactions from the United States, the UK, the EU and various other countries around the world, including from the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beginning on February 24, 2022, the United States, the UK, the EU and other countries announced broad economic sanctions against Russia, including financial measures such as freezing Russia’s central bank assets and limiting its ability to access its U.S. dollar reserves. The United States, the EU and the UK have also banned people and businesses from dealings with the Russian central bank, its finance ministry and its wealth fund. Selected Russian banks will also be removed from the Swift messaging system, which enables the smooth transfer of money across borders. Other sanctions by the UK include major Russians bank being excluded from the UK financial system, stopping them from accessing sterling and clearing payments, major Russian companies and the state being stopped from raising finance or borrowing money on the UK markets, and the establishment of limits on deposits Russians can make at UK banks. The United States, the EU and the UK adopted personal measures, such as sanctions on individuals with close ties to Mr. Putin, and placed visa restrictions on several oligarchs, as well as their family members and close associates, and freezing of assets.
While the precise effect of the ongoing war and these sanctions on the Russian and global economies remains uncertain, they have already resulted in significant volatility in financial markets, depreciation of the Russian ruble and the Ukrainian hryvnia against the U.S. dollar and other major currencies, as well as an increase in energy and commodity prices globally. Should the conflict continue to increase, markets may face continued volatility as well as economic and security consequences including, but not limited to, supply shortages of different kinds, further increases in prices of commodities, including piped natural gas, oil and agricultural goods, among others. Although the length and impact of the ongoing military conflict is highly unpredictable, the conflict in Ukraine and any other geopolitical tensions could have an adverse effect on the economy and business activity globally and lead to (i) credit and capital market disruptions, (ii) increase in interest rates and inflation in the markets in which we operate, (iii) lower or negative global growth, among others.
Geopolitical and economic risks have also increased over the past few years as a result of trade tensions between the United States and China and the rise of populism. Growing tensions may lead, among others, to a de-globalization of the world economy, an increase in protectionism or barriers to immigration, a general reduction of international trade in goods and services and a reduction in the integration of financial markets. These developments, as well as potential crises and other forms of political instability, or any other as of yet unforeseen development, may harm our business and the price of our Class A common shares.
We are continuing to monitor the situation in Russia, Ukraine and globally and assess its potential impact on our business. Any of the abovementioned factors could adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition, and operating results. The extent and duration of the military action, sanctions and resulting market disruptions are impossible to predict, but could be substantial. Any such disruptions may also magnify the impact of other risks described elsewhere in this annual report.
Any further downgrading of Brazil’s credit rating could reduce the trading price of our Class A common shares.
We may be harmed by investors’ perceptions of risks related to Brazil’s sovereign debt credit rating. Rating agencies regularly evaluate Brazil and its sovereign ratings, which are based on a number of factors including macroeconomic trends, fiscal and budgetary conditions, indebtedness metrics and the perspective of changes in any of these factors.
The rating agencies began to review Brazil’s sovereign credit rating in September 2015. Subsequently, the three major rating agencies downgraded Brazil’s investment-grade status:
Brazil’s sovereign credit rating is currently rated below investment grade by Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch. Consequently, the prices of securities offered by companies with significant operations in Brazil have been negatively affected. A prolongation or worsening of the current Brazilian recession and continued political uncertainty, among other factors, could lead to further ratings downgrades. Any further downgrade of Brazil’s sovereign credit ratings could heighten investors’ perception of risk and, as a result, cause the trading price of our Class A common shares to decline.
Certain Risks Relating to the Recent Developments in the Banking Sector
Recent bank closures and failures and financial instability in the United States and elsewhere have caused uncertainty and fear of instability in the global financial system generally. In addition, certain financial institutions have experienced volatile stock prices and significant losses in their equity value, and there is concern that depositors at these institutions have withdrawn, or may withdraw in the future, significant sums from their accounts at these institutions. Notwithstanding intervention by U.S. governmental agencies and governmental agencies from other countries to protect the uninsured depositors of banks that have recently closed, there is no guarantee that the uninsured depositors of a financial institution that closes (which depositors could include us) will be made whole or, even if made whole, that such deposits will become available for withdrawal in short order. There is a risk that other banks, or other financial institutions, may be similarly impacted, and it is uncertain what steps (if any) regulators may take in such circumstances. As a consequence, for example, we may be delayed or prevented from accessing money, making any required payments under their own debt or other contractual obligations or pursuing key strategic initiatives. In addition, such bank failures or instability could affect, in certain circumstances, the ability of both banks and investors to undertake and/or execute transactions with us, which in turn may result in shortfalls or defaults under existing investments. In addition, in the event that a financial institution that provides credit facilities and/or other financing to us closes or experiences distress, there can be no assurance that such bank will honor its obligations or that we will be able to secure replacement financing or capabilities at all or on similar terms. There can be no assurances that we will establish banking relationships with multiple financial institutions, and we are expected to be subject to contractual obligations to maintain all or a portion of our respective assets with a particular bank (including, without limitation, in connection with a credit facility or other financing transaction). Uncertainty caused by recent bank failures – and general concern regarding the financial health and outlook for other financial institutions – could have an overall negative effect on banking systems and financial markets generally. These recent developments may also have other implications for broader economic and monetary policy, including interest rate policy.
We maintain our cash and short-term investments with a diverse group of large global financial institutions, with 92% of our cash and cash equivalents in Brazil, 4% in Mexico, 2% in Argentina and 2% in the United States. Therefore, we believe we have minimum exposure to bank failures in the United States and elsewhere. For example, our exposure with respect to the recent Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)’s failure totaled less than US$100 thousand (R$510,721, considering the exchange rate of R$5.218 per US$1.00 as of December 31, 2022) at the date the SVB failure was announced. We have since then been able to transfer the majority of these amounts to other bank accounts. As of March 31, 2023, we had less than US$9 thousand (R$46,330, considering the exchange rate of R$5.218 per US$1.00 as of December 31, 2022) at SVB, which amount is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and we have no credit facilities or other financial relationships with SVB; therefore, we do not anticipate a material impact to our financial condition or operations as a result of SVB’s transition into receivership by the FDIC. Also, we have no funds deposited with Credit Suisse, a major global financial institution which was recently subject to a significant degree of instability. However, for the reasons described above, there can be no assurances that conditions in the banking sector and in global financial markets will not worsen and/or adversely affect us or our results of operations.
Certain Risks Relating to Our Class A Common Shares
An active trading market for our Class A common shares may not be sustainable. If an active trading market is not maintained, investors may not be able to resell their shares and our ability to raise future capital may be impaired.
Although our Class A common shares are listed and being traded on the Nasdaq, an active trading market for our Class A common shares may not be maintained. Consequently, investors may not be able to sell our Class A common shares at prices equal to or greater than the price paid by such investor. In addition to the risks described above, the market price of our Class A common shares may be influenced by many factors, some of which are beyond our control, including:
In addition, the stock market in general has experienced substantial price and volume fluctuations that have often been unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of particular companies affected. These broad market and industry factors may materially harm the market price of our Class A common shares, regardless of our operating performance. In the past, following periods of volatility in the market price of certain companies’ securities, securities class action litigation has been instituted against these companies. Any such litigation, if instituted against us, could adversely affect our financial condition or results of operations. If a market does not develop or is not maintained, the liquidity and price of our Class A common shares could be materially adversely affected.
The market price of our shares may be volatile or may decline sharply or suddenly, regardless of our operating performance, and we may not be able to meet investors’ or analysts’ expectations. Investors may not be able to resell our Class A common shares they hold at a price equal to or greater than the price paid by such investor and, therefore, may lose all or part of their investment.
The market price of our Class A common shares may fluctuate or decline significantly in response to a number of factors, many of which are beyond our control, including, but not limited to:
In addition, price and volume fluctuations in the stock markets have affected and continue to affect the stock prices of many SaaS and CX communications platform companies. Often, their stock prices fluctuate in ways that are unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of companies. In some instances, shareholders have filed a class action lawsuit after periods of market volatility. If we are involved in litigation regarding securities, this could subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and management attention from our business and seriously undermine our business. In addition, the occurrence of any of the factors listed above, along with others, may cause our share price to drop significantly and there is no guarantee that our share price will recover. As a result, investors may not be able to sell our Class A common shares they hold at a price equal to or greater than the price paid by such investor and, therefore, may lose some or all of their investment.
As of December 31, 2022, our controlling shareholders, in the aggregate, own 100% of our outstanding Class B common shares, which represent approximately 93.26% of the voting power of our issued capital and 58.91% of our total equity ownership, and control all matters requiring shareholder approval. Our controlling shareholders also have the right to nominate the totality of our board of directors and consent rights over certain corporate transactions. This concentration of ownership limits an investor’s ability to influence corporate matters.
As of December 31, 2022, our controlling shareholders own 100% of our Class B common shares, resulting in their ownership of 58.91% of our outstanding shares, and, consequently, 93.26% of the combined voting power of our Class A and Class B common shares. See “Item 7. Major Shareholders And Related Party Transactions — A. Major Shareholders.” These entities will control a majority of our voting power and will have the ability to control matters affecting, or submitted to a vote of, our shareholders. As a result, these shareholders will be able to elect the members of our board of directors. Our controlling shareholders will be able to appoint the totality of our board despite owning a non-proportionate number of shares and any corporate restructuring, merger or consolidation or any business combination transaction will additionally require the approval of our controlling shareholders so long as they each hold Class B common shares. In addition, our Articles of Association require the consent of our controlling shareholders before our shareholders are able to take certain corporate actions, including to amend such document. For more information, see “Exhibit 2.01. Description of Securities Registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act — Item 10.B. Memorandum and Articles of Association — Share Capital.” The interests of these shareholders may conflict with, or differ from, the interests of other shareholders. Our controlling shareholders’ decisions on these matters may be contrary to an investor’s expectations or preferences, and they may take actions that could be contrary to an investor’s interests. Our controlling shareholder will be able to prevent any other shareholders, including investors, from blocking these actions. So long as these shareholders continue to own a substantial number of our shares, they will significantly influence all our corporate decisions and together with other shareholders, they may be able to effect or inhibit changes in the control of our company.
The disparity in voting rights among classes of our shares may have a potential adverse effect on the price of our Class A common shares, and may limit or preclude an investor’s ability to influence corporate matters.
Each Class A common share will entitle its holder to one vote per share on all matters submitted to a vote of our shareholders. Each holder of our Class B common shares will be entitled to ten (10) votes per Class B common share so long as the voting power of Class B common shares is at least 10% of the combined voting power of the Class A common shares and Class B common shares then outstanding. The difference in voting rights could adversely affect the value of our Class A common shares by, for example, delaying or deferring a change of control or, if investors view or any potential future purchaser of our company views, the superior voting rights of the Class B common shares have value. Given the ten-to-one voting ratio between our Class B ordinary and Class A common shares, the holders of our Class B common shares collectively will continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our shares and therefore be able to control all matters submitted to our shareholders requiring the approval of an ordinary resolution so long as the Class B common shares represent at least 9.10% of all outstanding shares of our Class A common shares and Class B common shares in addition to certain other rights to which our controlling shareholders are entitled (see risk factor immediately above and “Exhibit 2.01. Description of Securities Registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act — Item 10.B. Memorandum and Articles of Association — Share Capital”). This concentrated control will limit or preclude an investor’s ability to influence corporate matters for the foreseeable future.
Future transfers by holders of Class B common shares will generally result in those shares converting to Class A common shares, subject to limited exceptions, such as certain transfers effected to permitted transferees or for estate planning or charitable purposes as well as transfers between our controlling shareholders. The conversion of Class B common shares to Class A common shares will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common shares who retain their shares in the long term. For a description of our dual class structure, see “Exhibit 2.01. Description of Securities Registered under Section 12 of the Exchange Act — Item 10.B. Memorandum and Articles of Association — Voting Rights.”
Our status as a controlled company and a foreign private issuer exempts us from certain of the corporate governance standards of the Nasdaq, limiting the protections afforded to investors.
We are a “controlled company” and a “foreign private issuer” within the meaning of the Nasdaq corporate governance standards. Under the Nasdaq rules, a controlled company is exempt from certain Nasdaq corporate governance requirements. In addition, a foreign private issuer may elect to comply with the practice of its home country and not to comply with certain Nasdaq corporate governance requirements, including the requirements that (i) a majority of the board of directors consists of independent directors, (ii) a nominating and corporate governance committee be established that is composed entirely of independent directors and has a written charter addressing the committee’s purpose and responsibilities, (iii) a compensation committee be established that is composed entirely of independent directors and has a written charter addressing the committee’s purpose and responsibilities, and (iv) an annual performance evaluation of the nominating and corporate governance and compensation committees be undertaken. Although we have similar practices, they do not entirely conform to the Nasdaq requirements; therefore, we currently use these exemptions and intend to continue using them. Accordingly, investors will not have the same protections provided to shareholders of companies that are subject to all Nasdaq corporate governance requirements.
Class A common shares eligible for future sale may cause the market price of our Class A common shares to drop significantly.
The market price of our Class A common shares may decline as a result of sales of a large number of our Class A common shares in the market (including Class A common shares issuable upon conversion of Class B common shares) or the perception that these sales may occur. These sales, or the possibility that these sales may occur, also might make it more difficult for us to sell equity securities in the future at a time and at a price that we deem appropriate.
As of December 31, 2022, we had 18,075,058 outstanding Class A common shares and 23,664,925 Class B common shares.
Our controlling shareholders or entities controlled by them or its permitted transferees will be able to sell their shares in the public market from time to time without registering them, subject to certain limitations on the timing, amount and method of those sales imposed by regulations promulgated by the SEC. If our controlling shareholders, the affiliated entities controlled by them or its permitted transferees were to sell a large number of Class A common shares, the market price of our Class A common shares may decline significantly. In addition, the perception in the public markets that sales by them might occur may also cause the trading price of our Class A common shares to decline.
Our Articles of Association contain anti-takeover provisions that may discourage a third party from acquiring us and adversely affect the rights of holders of our Class A common shares.