Sabesp announced that it had exceeded its contractual sanitation expansion targets between 2024 and 2025 in its first full year of operation after privatization.
The company connected more than 1.06 million homes to the sewage treatment network, directly benefiting almost 3 million people.
According to Samanta Souza, executive director of Institutional Relations and Sustainability at the company, the volume of investments has increased significantly.
“We are, at this moment, doing four times as much as we did in the pre-privatization period,” he stated.
Until the third quarter of this year, R$10 billion had been invested, more than twice the amount invested in the same period of the previous year.
And to guarantee the sustainability of investments without compromising tariffs, Sabesp has already raised R$18 billion to cover investments until 2026.
The contract provides for a strategy to reduce the tariff impact through Fausp (Support Fund for the Universalization of Sanitation in São Paulo), which received 30% of the resources raised during privatization, in addition to the dividends that the state government receives as a shareholder with an 18% stake in the company.
Samanta explained that the fund establishes a ceiling for the tariff, ensuring that it does not exceed the amount that would be charged by Sabesp as a public company.
Acceleration in the pace of work
The company went from 600 connections sent to sewage per day during the Novo Rio Pinheiros project (2019-2023) to 2,400 connections per day in the post-privatization period.
According to Samanta, in addition to the capital, there was an improvement in management: “The contracting regime is no longer a bidding regime that takes around six months, in the best of all worlds, and in the worst case scenario of a year to bid for a work, and we now have bids carried out within 60 days”.
Inclusion of historically underserved areas
A differentiator of the new management model is the concept of “serviceable area”, which includes all regions of the municipality’s concession, whether rural or informal areas.
“One of the premises of the Sabesp privatization project was to bring water and sewage to those who never had access”, highlighted Samanta.
The director mentioned significant advances in informal areas of Baixada Santista, including the beginning of the implementation of services in Vila Gilda, in Santos, considered the largest slum on stilts in Brazil.
“There is a very considerable leap in this direction with the conjunction and union of efforts of the public authorities and the concessionaire to serve this population”, he concluded.
