Companhia Paranaense de Energia - COPEL (NYSE:ELP) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 9, 2023 7:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Daniel Slaviero - Chief Executive Officer

Adriano Rudek de Moura - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Fillipe Andrade - Itau BBA

Gustavo Faria - Bank of America

Giuliano Ajeje - UBS

Antonio Junqueira - Citi

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the videoconference of Companhia Paranaense de Energia, COPEL to discuss the Results of the Third Quarter of 2023. This video conference is being recorded, and its replay is available at the company’s website, ir.copel.com. The presentation is also available for download. We would like to inform you that all participants will be only watching the videoconference during the presentation. And at the end, we will initiate a Q&A session when further instructions will be provided.

Before proceeding, I would like to emphasize that forward-looking statements are based on beliefs and assumptions of COPEL’s management as well as information currently available. These forward-looking statements may involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions because they relate to future events and therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors, analysts and journalists should understand that macroeconomic events, industry conditions and other operating factors may lead to results that differ substantially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.

Here to present this video conference are Mr. Daniel Slaviero, CEO of COPEL; Mr. Adriano Rudek de Moura, CFO of the company; as well as officers from the subsidiaries who will be available during the Q&A session.

I will now turn the floor to Mr. Daniel who will initiate the presentation. Mr. Slaviero, you may proceed, please.

Daniel Slaviero

Good morning. Thank you all very much for joining us in our video conference. We had another quarter with solid results, BRL1.4 billion of adjusted EBITDA, which is equivalent to a 27% growth vis-à-vis the same period of last year. Moura will go into more details, giving you a few more numbers of our third quarter. But I would like to focus on presenting the status of the execution of our strategy. And also, I will talk about what we promised to the market during our offering.

In our last call, I presented the pillars of this new COPEL, which involves people, the review of the holding role, operating efficiency and discipline in capital allocation. Therefore, I would like to briefly present the evolution of each of these pillars for the last 90 days. Our priority is people. We have completed the certification phase of the voluntary redundancy program, or PDV, with 1,437 people having signed up and a total estimated severance cost of BRL610 million. The annual estimated savings is BRL428 million from the layoffs, which will take place during a transition period until August 24, bearing exceptions that will be assessed by the company in order to guarantee the organization’s knowledge management, rendering of services to our customers related to the transaction.