pre_text: CAPITAL MANAGEMENT The primary objective of the Company’s capital management is to ensure that it maintains a strong credit rating and healthy capital ratios to support its business and maximize the stockholders’ value. The Company also ensures its ability to operate continuously to provide returns to stockholders and the interests of other related parties, while maintaining the optimal capital structure to reduce costs of capital. To maintain or adjust the capital structure, the Company may adjust the dividend payment to stockholders, return capital to stockholders, issue new shares or dispose assets to redeem liabilities. Similar to its peers, the Company monitors its capital based on debt to capital ratio. The ratio is calculated as the Company’s net debt divided by its total capital. The net debt is derived by taking the total liabilities on the consolidated balance sheets minus cash and cash equivalents. The total capital consists of total equity (including capital, additional paid-in capital, retained earnings, other components of equity and non-controlling interests) plus net debt. The Company’s strategy, which is unchanged for the reporting periods, is to maintain a reasonable ratio in order to raise capital with reasonable cost. The debt to capital ratios as of December 31, 2018 and 2019 were as follows:
table: As of December 31,
table: 2018 2019
table: NT$ NT$
table: (In Thousands) (In Thousands)
table: Total liabilities $158,199,746 $163,347,778
table: Less: Cash and cash equivalents (83,661,739) (95,492,477)
table: Net debt 74,538,007 67,855,301
table: Total equity 204,397,483 202,913,915
table: Total capital $278,935,490 $270,769,216
table: Debt to capital ratios 26.72% 25.06%
question: Analyse this data from a financial earnings document. What is the increase / (decrease) in the Net debt from 2018 to 2019?