After a fall in 2020, profits of B3 companies more than triple in 2021

After falling 35% in 2020 because of the effects of the pandemic, the profit of companies listed on B3 more than tripled in 2021.

According to data from financial information consultancy Economatica, the average earnings of a group of 291 publicly traded companies jumped from BRL 68 billion in 2020 to BRL 228 billion last year – a 235% increase.

The amount far exceeds the pre-crisis moment, when companies profited R$ 105 billion.

“The values ​​were very significant, with increasing profit and revenues in the period. Even isolating 2020, which was a bad year and which has a weak base, the result is twice as much as in 2019, before the coronavirus”, says Economatica’s institutional and commercial relationship manager, Einar Rivero.

Unlike small and medium-sized businesses that did not survive the pandemic, large companies learned from the crisis and came out strengthened.

An example of this is the return on equity (ROE), an indicator that measures how much value a company can generate for the business and investors based on its own resources. In 2020, this profitability dropped from 12.08% to 7.02%.

Last year, it jumped to 20.49%. The result reflects an increase in revenues well above operating expenses.

While net sales grew 45.9% last year, spending rose 22.4%, according to Economatica. In this equation, cash advanced 12%, from R$ 483 billion to R$ 541 billion.

Efficiency

In the opinion of economist VanDyck Silveira, president of Trevisan Escola de Negócios, companies have cleaned up in terms of efficiency within their organizations (but not productivity).

“There was an improvement in spending, in inventories and in the allocation of resources, which now appears in the balance sheets”, says the executive.

According to him, the pandemic brought many changes to the corporate world, such as the home office, but also resulted in layoffs and the replacement of labor with machinery and new technologies.

When there is rehiring of personnel, the salary is lower. An example of this is that the average income of Brazilian workers dropped by almost 10% in one year, and it should take time to recover.

In addition to the greater efficiency of companies, Silveira highlights that the result for 2021 also reflects the boom in commodities (oil and minerals).

Although the Economatica survey does not include Petrobras and Vale so as not to distort the average, many companies linked to these sectors end up snapping up part of the increase in these prices. Oil and mining are among the ten sectors that most profited last year.

But the champion was electric power. In a year of energy crisis, in which the country almost experienced a new rationing, companies profited BRL 52.2 billion compared to BRL 44.8 billion in 2020.

The numbers reflect, in addition to a recovery in demand that fell in the first year of the pandemic, the rise in energy prices, as the increases are passed on to consumers’ tariffs.

In a report by Itaú BBA, analysts say that some companies would benefit from the readjustments based on the IGPM. Last year, the index accumulated a high of 17.78%.

Another factor that helped companies improve results was reductions in losses and bad debts.

In addition, with the need to generate energy to compensate for the drop in the volume of water in the reservoirs, some generators started to produce more expensive thermal energy. In some cases, the price was more than R$ 2 thousand per megawatt/hour (MWh).

exceptions

According to Einar Rivero, from Economatica, almost all sectors registered a recovery in 2021, except for the education and Transport and Services segments – the latter includes civil aviation companies, which are still suffering the consequences of the pandemic and may have more problems because of the pandemic. rise in fuel prices. Gol, for example, had a loss of R$ 7.2 billion in 2021; and Azul, for R$ 4.7 billion.

*The information is from the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo.