Americanas S.A. (AMER3) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to Investor Day 2020 Universo Americanas. I am Fabien Picavet. I am the Investor Director at Universo Americanas. And today, I have Raoni Lapagesse who is the Executive Director of Relation with Investors at B2W Digital.

Good morning, Fabien. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here in our event. Even if virtually, it's a pleasure to have you here at Investor Day 2020 this year. Due to all the circumstances, we prepared an event that is 100% digital but with such a special content with very special speeches that we'll share this morning. Fabien and I are here live. We are in a studio in our digital lab in Rio, and we'll spend this morning here with you. And so for that to be possible, we are taking all care and following all the protocols. Right, Fabien?

Yes, Raoni. We reduced to the most the people necessary here. Everyone present in the studio was tested and is wearing mask, except for Raoni and I to facilitate the communication with you. Due to the same reason, we chose to record the presentations that will be presented this morning, and we'll be back live for the Q&A session. Right. For you to organize and make the most of the contest we have -- content we have here, we'll start with the agenda. So let's see, the first presentation, Raoni and I will update the status and the highlights of Investor Day 2019. Then we will have Miguel Gutierrez, CEO of Universo Americanas talking about the strategic view of the company. Then we'll have Timotheo Barros, the CEO of Americanas, talking about the physical platform. Then we'll have Wellington Souza that is the LET's head, and he'll talk about the fulfillment platform. Then we will have João Guerra, CTO of Americanas, talking about our data-driven culture. Then we'll have the presence of Anna Saicali, CEO of IF and Ame, and she'll talk about our [ model-driven ] innovation. And then Márcio Cruz [ in general last ], the CEO and CTO of B2W, will talk about digital platform. After all presentations, we'll come back live and Fabien and I will have here on the stage the CEOs, Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Saicali, Márcio Cruz and Timotheo Barros for the Q&A session. We'll count on your participation by sending your questions to the e-mail that you can see in the screen. We'll repeat them during the presentation, so questions may be sent to the address [email protected]. Now let's have our first presentation. Just to remind you, we'll have the evolution and the highlights of 2019. The first highlight was the credit card, Ame, in partnership with Banco do Brasil. This is a digital-first credit card completely linked to the app, and you can have it in our stores or Ame app. Another news that we had last event was the partnership between Ame and Stone. During this year, we've had many other partnerships like with Cielo and Getnet. This way, Ame is spreading its acceptance and is present in 2.8 million places. Another highlight was Ame Pro that was launched. This is our retail system. It's available for merchants, and this is the system we use in our stores. In its mobile version, we have more than 5,000 PDVs working. It was very important during the May event this year because it allowed us to deal with the clients no matter where they were in the store. We also launched our opening schedule for 7 new centers of distributions, focusing on being closer to the client. Last year, we launched the new [ CDS ], and we had 15 distribution centers. In 2019, we opened 2 new ones; and in 2020, we already opened 5 of them. So in 13 months, we account for all the openings that we should be until 2020. We'll give more details in the centers of distribution with Wellington Souza in his presentation. Another highlight was the another Internet (sic) [ international ] procurement launch. The team was hired this year. The opening of the office will be next year due to the situation this year, but the operation is already very important to leverage the cross-border and on-brand operations. Another point we highlighted in the acquisition of Pedala and Courri, and we procure and we merged with them with a new model that is bikes delivery. Since the last year and during this year, we had integration of the companies in our operations, and it has leveraged the Ship from Store and the categories of markets with Americanas Mercado. Only in 2020, we had more than 1 million deliveries by bike. Another highlight is the launch of Americanas Digital. We have about 100 meter squares focused on technology, assisted sales, helping people to buy through the Internet, and it has been proven a very important O2O hub this year. We also launched our goal of reaching 100 million items available to our clients until 2022. During 2020, we had a big spread in new items. And this November, we overcame 80 million offers. So we are quite well in position to overcome our goal for 2 years. We also talked about this speed up growth of the physical platform, focusing on the database of clients and the frequency of relation with the clients. We'll talk more about it in Timotheo Barros' speech. He is the CEO of Americanas. Last but not least, we talked about the route of growth of B2W that was much higher than our expectations. It motivated us to rethink our plan of growth for the next [ 2 ] years being even more ambitious. Márcio Cruz, CEO of B2W, will talk about the new route of growth for the next [ 2 ] years when he presents B2W Digital in our platform. These were the main highlights of Investor Day 2019, and we'll leave the deck during this year. It's very important for you. Let's remember to send your questions to the mail that Raoni mentioned in the beginning and that you see in the screen. Now we invite Miguel Gutierrez, and then we come back for the Q&A session. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. See you soon.

Thank you, Fabien. Thank you, Raoni. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here with us, and welcome to our Investor Day 2020. To me, it's an honor to be here with you. I'd like to start talking about what we are doing this year in 2020, such a different and challenging year. We had to overcome and reinvent ourselves individually and collective. In such a way, we had to be -- could be present here today. As presented last year, Universo Americanas comprises Americanas, B2W, LET'S, Ame, IF, Innovation and Future. Along with the sellers and merchants and suppliers, we try to have a bigger client base and increase the demand, all that to be even more relevant in the daily lives of our clients. In such a different year like this one, when Universo Americanas is celebrating 20 years -- 21 years of social relevance, our priorities have changed. We had to start preserving the health of our team, our clients and helped society to overcome such a difficult moment. When we talk about team, I would like to thank all the efforts of our team that could make our universe -- Universo working during this period. This way, we could preserve almost 150,000 job positions. We applied all the safety protocols. We have 80% of our personnel in home office. We are taking all the security measures to ensure safe operations. Besides, we created a network of assistance and coverage for all the costs and prioritization. And we had more than 30,000 consultations and COVID tests and had more than 15,000 vaccinations. This way, we could make the company working, which helped us deal with millions of clients during the pandemic. We changed our work. We prioritized essential items. We kept our stores open whenever possible, having alcohol and masks. We had all the safety protocols followed in our operations. We created new models of delivery and disclosed all the guidance for prevention in the -- according to the WHO. In such a way, we could, in fact, have safety sales for our clients. At social level, we try to be actively participating in the efforts of society to overcome such a difficult moment. We created our Institute, Juntos Somos Mais Solidários, that made millions of donations. We went to China to collect our PPEs. We donated more than 300,000 masks and tons of alcohol and gel for families in the Amazon. We distributed more 1 million bottles of water to many communities, donated more than 300,000 hygiene kits to the elderly in many places. We participated in the construction of campaign hospitals in Rio; and currently, we are participating in the [ deposit ] of the vaccine factory along with FIOCRUZ. We know this period is not over, but we believe that we are helping everyone to be closer to the end. All that comes along with our commitment with a sustainable growth based on the pillars of environment, social and governance. Since 2015, all our sustainability strategy is in line with the Agenda 2030 of the UN. Out of the 17 ODSs, we chose 5 as our priorities. We want quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, a reduction of inequalities and actions against climate change. So far, we have a lot of accomplishments to mention. On the environmental side, our operations is neutral carbon. 100% of our emissions are compensated by forest projects in the Amazon. We have the inventory of CO2 since 2010, and it's audited since 2016. Our bike fleet accounts with more than 1 million deliveries. At social level, we have a partnership with Amazonas Sustentável Foundation to promote social inclusion, entrepreneurship and the marketplace in the Amazon. We promoted gender equality and [ our invest ] has already 50% of leadership of female leaders. We have a strategical partnership with UNICEF, making available job positions for low-income youngsters. We created a foster -- education foster programs that reached more than 4,000 teachers and thousands of students. In the governance level, we have a lot that has been done. Nowadays, we offer 100% to all stakeholders. This year, 47% of our members in the council are independent. We have 6 specialized committees that -- but the Audition Committee is comprised 100% of independents. Our development agenda is based in ISS recommendations and BGC (sic) [ IBGC ]. Next steps, we want to look for certification. Our priorities for the upcoming years. The base -- our efforts are: promoting sustainable growth, having the best talents, improving innovation environment, intensifying that analytic use, increasing procurement frequency, making broader our supply chain platform, generating value and reinvesting in that. Given that all, I would like to introduce a video that tells a little of our background. [Presentation]

As you know, our Investor Day from last year, we introduced a few goals for the upcoming 3 years. Now I would like to mention a little on our evolution steps on our metrics over this year. The expansion of Universo Americanas keeps going on. We've reached 4.4 billion annual visits. We already have more than 2,000 suppliers. We have 1,713 physical stores distributed in over more than 4 cities. We can respond to more than 100% of postal codes, and we are answering 77% of the [ GDP ]. Nowadays, Ame is accepted in over 2.8 million stores. We also have 87,700 (sic) [ 86,700 ] sellers. That means our universe keeps expanding despite this so different year. When I see our bases of active clients, last year, we established a dream of reaching 2022 with over 46 million customers. This year, we've reached that goal. We have evolved 8 million active customers in relation to past year. When we see our frequency, we evolved that an 18% benchmark, which was 8.6 contacts per year, is already 10.1. So we are following a good path in order to reach the 2 time goal. When we see our bigger figures taking November that year, our total GMV has reached BRL 39 billion. Our online GMV has reached BRL 25 billion. We've reached 336 million transactions, and we've offered our universe 81.8 million items this year. So we are over our planning from what we presented last year. Now I would like to update our action strategy regarding values. Last year, we introduced our strategy comprising 3 great fronts, H1, H2 and H3, and this idea -- organization of ideas, H1 followed cash flow -- cash generation. It would be our physical platform. H2 would provide an exceptional growth by means of digital world. That would be, in this case, B2W. H3, we would develop new initiatives, and eventually, that would be conducted by IF. We believe that this approach will allow us to tackle different initiatives simultaneously. But we've done more. And this year, we gave one step ahead in order to organize ourselves differently to make that model work with more [ celebrity ]. In 2018, we created IF that started that when to become the leadership of our matrix. We invited Anna Saicali, President from B2W, to be head of that. And we can see the results in Ame's case. Back then in H2, Márcio Cruz took over the CEO position of our digital platform. This year, we gave one more step, creating Universo Americanas, and we created a specific structure for that. Nowadays, I'm busy with Universo Americanas. At the level of the physical platform Timotheo Barros was CEO from LET's, became Americanas' CEO. With the exit from Timotheo, we invited Wellington Souza to take over LET'S. Then we created a framework comprising people and customers that will comprise the Universo as a whole. The leadership is in charge of João Guerra. All these personnel will be with us over our presentation, and they will be able to share some of their excitement on what we've been doing. Another very important step we've given was improving our capital structure. We've made a combination, a strategic 1 on -- with equity and that we made a follow-on of BRL 7.9 billion in Americanas store and increased our capital for -- in the order of BRL 4 billion at B2W. We reduced our debt. In terms of debt, we entered the international debt market with 2 10-year gain of $500 million. Total, we've kept -- we fetched more than $4 million that will be used to increase our growth base. With that, we will be able to invest our cash flow in our operations, being more ambitious with our purchase algorithm. We've created that. We've created our algorithm -- purchase algorithm. We believe in creating long-term added value. And to do that, we believe we need to in our financial discipline. In order to guarantee that, we've made our big bank growth model that, basically, we had the biggest goal of identifying and prioritizing possible growth routes to our universe. With that, we established priorities, create a further of strategic opportunities [indiscernible] sectors and companies. Once that is done, we proceed to a qualitative and quantitative and the several opportunities so as analyzing whatever is necessary. After that, we do an execution on creating value. We are excited about these dynamics. And as of now, we've met 54 opportunities in 9 priority segments. In order to give you an idea what we've been doing, for example, inside our axis H1, H2, H3, and it's by, for example, that specialized logistics could contribute to our H1 and our [indiscernible]. Our drugstore could contribute in a special way to the growth of our universe and so on. Well, to -- that is what I would like to say. Universo Americanas is unique, flexible. It has outgrew what was established for 2020, inventing changes that will provide for us superior growth to what was previously predicted for the upcoming years. I would like to thank the participation from everyone, and I would like to invite now Timotheo, who will move on with our presentation. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Miguel. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Investor Day 2020. This year is being a lot -- has been bringing a lot for us to learn. We've accelerated our initiatives. We've been doing many different things. We've been delivering consistent results; and above all, our team had been giving a great show. We've made some material to share with you all on what we've been doing in our physical platform. The physical platform is a very important leverage to Americanas Universo in order we can get more and more relevant in our daily -- customers' daily lives. We want to save time and money, overcoming expectations, what means being swift selling at a fair price, operating at the highest level of services. Over the years, our physical platform had been constantly reinvented in order to answer consumption needs in the several journey -- sales journeys of our customers. Within the last 20 years, we've created several of stores. We've been investing intensely in people, technology and distribution in order to offer to our customers everything all the time, anywhere. Our business model is unique, and it has a few differentials, unique capillarity, great client bases, elevated purchase frequency, broad sortment, strong presence in events and multiple formats. When we see the evolution of our physical presence over the years, we left from 90 stores to more than 1,700 stores -- from more than 30 stores (sic) [ cities ] to more than 700 stores, overall states and federal districts, it's a 77% coverage of our population. Such a capillarity is unique and it leads us closer from all our customers. Doing an x-ray of our stores' profile, we have very interesting information. When we see the separation, the division of stores between capitals and the south -- and the outdoors areas, when we see the demographic density, 27% from our stores are in cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants. So such a combination is very powerful outside the big census, outside the big capitals and smaller cities. Our client base is also a great differential. We have 30 million active clients. Our audience is basically female. And when we look at the age and the age groups, the profile, our audience is younger. Talking about the youngsters, recently, last July this year, B Youth, that is a platform to measure the preferences of the youngsters from 16 to 24 years in Brazil, they launched a ranging of preferences of national and international brands, and we were in fourth place. This is a very important indicator because we are attending all kinds of audiences in terms of age. Our business is a high-frequency business. So when we look at the flow of visits to our stores, we are talking about more than 1 billion visits a year at all stores. It's more 20 -- 280 million transactions a year. And as a result, we have more than 11 times a year of a person visiting stores, so this is a grand unit of the business model. We have a big assorting at our stores. You can buy chocolate or a full-screen TV. We sell more than 45 categories, including food, health, beauty, personal hygiene, electronics, toys and so on. And when a client enters a store, they know they will find what they need. We also have a huge presence in events. So when we look at our calendar, we are talking about more than 40 events distributed in a year. We have the [ Nash ] and big impact events like Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas with a big flow of visits to the stores. But we also develop our own events like Beauty Special, Chocolate Show, Crazy for Cookies and Kids Special. So when we look our multiple formats of stores, they are quite flexible. We have 5 models, traditional, express, convenience, Ame Go and digital. They are stores that can vary from 50 to more than 1,000 meters squares. We generate a lot of flexibilities for us to be in different cities with a different size or like being on the streets or in a shop and so on. All that is only possible due to our team. This is a make happen team. We deliver results. We are more than 24,000 employees. We are a young team. 84% is less than 30 years old. 100% of the managers are trained internally. It's part of our culture. This is a big differential to us. And 60% of our leadership is female. So here, I would like to thank especially to our team who worked and is working nonstop to make all the operations happening to comply with the consumption demands of our clients. Talking of purchase shopping experience, we have a lot of initiatives to share with you. The first one is payment via Ame in our stores. Today, Ame is accepted in 100% of stores. Paying with Ame [ by transformation now ] is much more than paying through an app. This is a [ powerful ] tool. There is no contact. It's very safe and very fast to the client. When we compare credit card or debt card and Ame, Ame is 3x faster with many functionalities in the app. And I would like to introduce the possibility of having cash in, in the [ BTB ] of all our stores. When we look at the transactions this year, the volume was 2.7x higher than last year. And the frequency of shopping of an Ame client is 3.1x higher than a client that doesn't use Ame. So this is a very important model to increase our frequency of purchase. Another initiative to emphasize is Ame Pro. This is our mobile PDV. It's included in 100% of stores. It gives a lot of agility and speed to the experience that the client can enter the store and pay at any site of the store. So it's much more convenient and much more [ adjustable ] for the client. We have 5,000 mobile PDVs implemented, so the 33% in the PDV base of all our operations. Another highlight is Ame Pro, our proprietary PDV technology. It is 25% faster than the previous solution. It works continuously. It's a cloud solutions, means it can operate 24/7. So it doesn't depend on physical negotiations. The backstage operation is much better. It was important for our network in Black Friday because we left most of our stores open 24 hours to make operations more fluid. Assisted sales is also another initiative. We had more than 800 stores and great part of the clients' demand information and one's personalized treatment and consultancy. It is a place where we can concentrate all services, all the sales. It's a huge success. We are quite happy with the results. And our goal is, in a short time, to reach and take the services to all the company stores. WhatsApp, we launched in March, April this year, this new purchase sales channel that is implemented in all our stores. It's an assisted sale with direct contact between the client and the employee. Many times, the contact is so personalized that the client demands the associate dealing with the WhatsApp to make the delivery. And it's very nice for us because all the deliveries are carried out in about 1 hour leaving from our stores. Digital manager implemented in 100% of our stores. It is a way of knowing the neighborhood and understanding the consumption needs, understanding the demands and adjusting the assortment and increases the engagement of the community to the store. It allows differentiated promotions and sales. So now having national big campaigns, we have differentiated campaigns one by one, store by store. Ame Go, besides being a model of stores, is a big lab for us to test and maintain new ways of operating. It's a model in which there is no cashier, no line, so you take the product and you go in a fluid way. We have 3 stores operating, and this is a big learning now for us. In a similar way, we are also testing the Scan & Go. It is installed in Ame app. It also allows us to operate with no lines, no cashier. The client just enters the store, chooses the product, scans it, pays through the app, Ame app, and leaves. So it's very fluid, very fast, generating basically no [indiscernible] during the process -- the sales process. And we also have the self-checkout that is the 1 with 20% less time in lines. It's implemented in 3 stages in some stores. And in the stores, it is implemented, 90% of the transactions go through the self-checkout. When we look at all the initiatives that we presented and another set that we have been developing, it takes us to the new ways of interaction with the store, more speed in the dealing with the client and more mobility of operation. This is a way of making it revolutionary for the client and improving their experience. Now talking about the combination of both worlds, the physical and the digital platforms, with the physical platform, we have a set of characteristics; and the same is worth for the digital platform. When we combine both characteristics and attributes, we can offer a set of services and solutions that is quite powerful. So for example, the O2O solutions came from this combination of physical and digital. It is also possible because we are part of the universe. So I would like to give some examples to show this O2O experience and how one channel potentializes the other. For example, the client goes to one of the store in search of [ fish food ], in the kiosk of our store, we can offer this kind of product to the client. So in this way, we can offer the physical throwing the flow of visits of clients to the digital world. On the other way, we have the client collect. The client enters the website, chooses a project and chooses a store for the delivery. Then he goes to the store to take the product. And according to our research, 54% of those who collect products in the store end up buying another kind of product. So this is the understanding the point of view of the digital potentializing the physical platform. And again, this combination of both worlds is quite powerful and ended up speeding up both businesses, the physical and the digital platforms. Another example, potentialization of improvement, is that all our stores are online, all the sorting of all the stores are available 24/7. It means that the store is open all the time. So [ if the client's ] at home and then they choose a store, and generally, we all have our preferences in terms of stores. So you enter a preference store and you can navigate any time, any day. You can check all the assortment and in the end with Ame. And when you finish the process, you define if you want to take the product in the store or if you want to receive the product delivered in your home. Talking of delivery service is available at all our stores in 705 (sic) [ more than 750 ] cities. Another novelty is Store Mode. This is a virtual assistance to give more fluidity to the client in our stores. How does it work? The client with Americana apps with a geolocalization, the system knows that you are close or within one of our stores. So they open -- it opens the app in the Store Mode, offering a lot of functionality so that you can shop better. So you can navigate the promotions and all the products and scan the price. Now we have [ you ] to show the combination of both worlds, the physical and the digital and how businesses can be improved. [Presentation]

Purchase experience that we just saw is transformational and shows the combination of the physical and digital channels. This -- what we saw happens many times at all stores every day. Just to remember, our vision of future is to be more relevant in the daily lives of our clients. This way, improving our physical presence and our capillarity to be even closer to our clients is part of the strategy, and this is how we'll keep up opening stores. We mapped 2,090 potential cities that could have at least 1 store. 750 cities, we are still there and 1,336 would be able to receive at least 1 store. When we run the growth algorithm, we'll see more than 2,000 additional stores that can be opened over the years. But the growth algorithm is not summarized in only expanding the areas of sales. We won't expand that with only opening stores. We have other leverages like, for example, knowing better the market, where we are, increase the options of -- in the regions and our own markets, intensify the use of analytics, spread the initiatives, O2O, improve Ame not only as for payment but also as a powerful [ right tool ] and use the workforce -- the local workforce in the regions where we are. This way, we reached to the end of our presentation. Once again, I thank you all for your presence, and I invite Wellington now for LET'S finished (sic) [ fulfillment ] platform.

Good morning. I am responsible for LET'S. LET'S is our logistics and distribution platform. When we see the story -- the history of our company, we see that logistics was -- has been in our scope. We created LET'S in 2018 with the goal of providing -- giving support to all our [indiscernible] in Americanas Universe, both in the physical and in the digital world. So when we understand and put our customer in the center of that very strategy, we have a lot of innovation and a lot of people, which is our competitive differential. We see how easy and simple it is to understand that we want to deliver as best as possible. And in order to do that, we need to be closer from our clients. So we defined 6 strategic pillars. First of them is expansion of our supply chain platform. We've opened 5 distribution centers over 2020. We are closing our year with 22 distribution centers spread all over our national territory with open DCs in Fortaleza, Salvador, Ananindeua, Brasilia and Vitória. Well, figures are huge and make us very -- and what makes us very proud is that we are delivering within 24 hours in over 700 cities all over Brazil. We are talking about over 700 cities having a delivery system within 24 hours. Now regarding our -- the acceleration of our automation plan, we started 2019 with 12 -- with 2 sorters. We've opened 7 sorters over 2020, and they were key to overcome this year. And we have a great goal, reaching 2022 with 17 sorters. These are goods screening devices. We want to reach 2022 with 17 sorters doing 19% of these deliveries by sorters. As I said, sorter is a screening device. It increases our screening capability and our shipping capabilities. We have greater gain at about more than 50%. Now talking about strengthening our distribution fabric, we are talking about more than 700 stores, distribution centers. We are talking about 200 hubs. We are talking about national capillarity, what would help us and also our partners and sellers with faster deliveries. We are talking about smaller costs, an increase on the frequency of delivery and greater availability of vehicles in our national territory. Now comparing the 2 models, the conventional model and the embedded model. We can see clearly the biggest advantage of the embedded model because you have a van, a truck, any type of model, leaving a distribution center from Lojas Americanas, and you have another one leaving B2W. And when you have an embedded model, you have the same truck with goods from Lojas Americanas and B2W bringing to our LET'S bases. And from there, we distribute quickly to our customers so as to our stores, gaining a scale that is better than the previous model. Sustainability has been always important, very important for us. Perhaps one of the topics that is mostly innovative, we're all the time thinking in alternative ways of delivery. This year, we made 1.8 million bike deliveries. We will no longer have 85 -- this year, we saved 85 tons in CO2 emissions. And that's just the beginning on alternative delivery models. Regarding that, we also have our container bases. And basically, they have the same role. You have a reference point between model, and it takes the good, and quickly this distribution is made in an average array. So we can have either a fixed basis or something mobile, using from our capillarity, store parking lots, also Click & Collect places, what would give gain and momentum in our scale. Now talking about fulfillment centers. This topic for us is something very important. We have a robust platform basis. B2W fulfillment guarantees a quicker delivery, guaranteeing that we will have an intelligence and assortment will have an optimal ex -- stock management, guaranteeing flow, greater exposition of products in order to reach a greater customer experience, in order to do more sales with our sellers. The biggest advantage that the [ overcome is ] totally scalable. We can have scalability, which is greater than what we have normally. Well, regarding what's good to our sellers is both good to our customers. So everything we've made, on having an exclusive seal on the intelligence of assortment, having better service, again, we are talking about having the fastest delivery in Brazil, everything to help our sellers to sell more. Now regarding delivery time, when you have a seller in 3P and you compare delivery time with our 1P, and we bring our sellers inside B2W fulfillment, we are talking about delivering 3P at the same speed of 1P. So we are talking about delivering 55% plus faster. Our delivery will be 55% faster when our seller is within our B2W fulfillment platform. Now talking about expanding deliveries in up to 3 hours. We've started in January with our ship from store. It was somewhat shy. We've scaled exponentially inside this model over the year. And in November, we've reached 147,000 deliveries within 3 hours, and we are only able to do that because we have our own crowdshipping platform. We're talking about 22,000 couriers delivering over 700 cities. And 79% from our deliveries are done using our Ame Flash. Well, talking about pickup points and lockers, this information is fantastic. We started in 2018 with 1,001 Click & Collect points. In 2019, we had 8,347 Click & Collect points. And we've closed 2020 with over 10,850 Click & Collect points in all our national territory. We are talking about stores, on partners and metro stations. So we are talking about many Click & Collect points, a lot of capillarity. Well, again, talking about lockers. We started in January with 3 lockers. We are wrapping up December with 81 lockers. And that's an equipment which is fully stand-alone, a lot more convenient -- providing a lot of convenience to our clients. And we believe that's a technology that will be expanded by us to use our capability in order to offer an optimal service in many other places all over Brazil. And now to wrap this up, we are very proud. We've done in November 47% of our deliveries within 24 hours. We've done 73% of deliveries up to -- within 48 hours, what makes us the fastest delivery in Brazil. I would like to invite you to watch a video together with us just to see our operations. Everything we've mentioned here, how it is spread, all this robust logistics and distribution platform live just so we see how things are done. [Presentation]

I would like to thank you all and invite you to our Christmas, which is the biggest Christmas in Brazil. And I would like to call João Guerra, who will be talking about culture, data-driven culture. Thank you.

Hello. It's a pleasure to be here with you again to talk about something that we love. That is the data-driven culture. We've been dealing with that for a long time in the company, and I'll talk a little bit about it. Basically, this is based in 3 pillars: people, processes and technologies. People with a digital mindset and passion for data; technologies to store process and illustrate in a fast way the big amount of data; and processes that we can change everything, making everything faster and more profitable. People is something so nice to talk about that we have a video to show you. [Presentation]

Well, you could see that we have a lot of trained people in the network. Now the second pillar, technology, it has to be very new, modern to deal with that. So we thought about our current bases. We have more than 2.8 million merchants, 82 million SKUs and 46 million active clients. This combination generates huge databases, but it's not only. We have more than 4.4 billion visits and 3.4 billion searches, giving us more than 336 million transactions, more than 3 petabytes. So for us to deal with all that, we need to create a technological architecture to address 3 variables: complexity, very large data and fast data. We needed huge processing, and we need to give data in real time to all the users. Today, multi-cloud. So we work with the main providers of the market. We have an architecture of API that is free. We can connect to all of the systems, existing systems. We are multi frameworks with all the programming languages on the market to change digitally our processes. We like roboting a lot. So more than 350 processes today use robots and mainly use artificial intelligence. We have more than 1 million code lines using machine learning, computer vision and many other technologies. Good people with good equipment brings processes who need to be changed. And what did we do? The first example was the commercial area. There, people are clicking all day long, searching for information. So it's stores multiplied by products multiplied by variables. So it is a lot waste of time to search for information. So what did we do? We developed a search tool that is fast, and information is there promptly using machine learning, LP and optimize the consultation. So the reports are now more than 15,000 consultations a day. And the analysis time, it decreased 90%. Another process. Imagine our clients trying to search for items on the website. The first thing they do is to simulate freight. It is more than 70 million, and we know this is decisive for them to buy. And how do we calculate that? There is no doubt we use a lot of mathematical models and optimization and machine learning. With that, we want the client to have the lower cost and the better reachability to the business -- profitability. You can see in the map how was our conversion before and now. In the darker areas, we are selling more with new calculations automated. AME Digital is revolutionizing the way we use money, and now money becomes digital. So we are much more concerned about frauds. We have more than 4.3 million transactions per month. So what do we do to understand if all of them are correct? We started with a super algorithm seeing more than 200 variables, and that can see if the transactions are okay or not. We could have less than BRL 20 million in losses and in prevention. We could increase our rate of approval and reduce the expenses. Now imagine how we can use data to leverage the sales. We have 6 brands, 14 channels, 20 moments, more than 1,600 possible mechanics to promote something. We then created decision algorithms to say what is the best channel. So here, we see some promotion that was quite well done. We had 2 items in the physical stores. In the physical stores, we showed chocolate that went to the app, and the client could get on the stores or receive at home. It was a huge success. And in 1 day, we sold more than BRL 100 million (sic) [ BRL 10 million ] of these items. And we could reach 400 requests per minute, which is wonderful. And as the last example, imagine the problem that we had 5 years ago, how to populate our stores with the best managers in cities where we didn't even have stores. So this was our expansion plan. So we thought, well, we need to use something more mathematical. So we used people analytics, algorithm to fulfill -- to select and train the people. So we took the main attributes of a manager, how they were producing results over the year, and we created a mathematical model with the help of Harvard and the scientists -- data scientists of West Point and in the [ Lab of PUC ]. The process was so good that we call them people machine, and it became a case in Harvard. It's being studied now. If you want, you can just go there and check. Well, it was a pleasure to be here with you today. And now I will invite Anna, who will talk about Ame.

Thank you, João. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you again. Today, I'll talk about Ame. I'll tell you where we are going to. But before, we'll show a video to show who is Ame. [Presentation]

And where are we going to? Ame has started as a digital payment and more intelligent way of doing that using cash back and suddenly became a super app. It started with some competitive differentials that were very important, credibility of the best brands in Brazil, Lojas Americanas, B2W with more than 46 million active clients from a total base of 80 million clients. It benefits from the traffic of 4.4 billion visits a year to the stores and websites. A lot of technology, proprietary technology and open APIs and mini app platforms and a digital team that is highly qualified and with a history of success. Today, we have more than 700 Amers. We work with a fast method with more than 30 squads. We are referencing meetups, that are technology and data meetings with a lot of exchange of knowledge and networking. And this team meets absolutely every year, once a year in the Ame Talks to talk about different subjects. This is a very important engaging event. Besides, this very special team, Ame started with user cases relevant to the people's daily lives, that is to buy the best brands on the Internet and in the more than 1,700 Americanas stores all over the country. Just briefly, the Ame family has grown and became a complete ecosystem. Besides the super app, we also have Ame Plus, that is the super app for those wondering to sell. Ame Pro, this is the operational retail system to manage our business. This is an [ RP ]. Also allowing the store owners to upload their products in marketplaces. We have the autonomous stores that are Ame Go with a lot of technology like machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence. For you to be Ame Go, you accredit with Ame app. Then we have Ame Scan&Go, a technology for self-shopping. This is a solution where you scan the bar code on the Americanas stores. And automatically, everything is paid by Ame. And Ame Flash, that is our crowdshipping platform for deliveries in up to 60 minutes. Besides that, Ame started PIX native. The first 2 functionalities of Ame were payments and instant transfers with the technology of QR code. And we understood that Ame will have even more traction with the open banking, allowing payment at Ame itself with third-party financial institutions. So I have a bill to pay, and I will pay with Ame app with the money that I have in another bank. We also understand that it will bring much more opportunities to speed up the road map of Ame. Besides that, I think it's important to show that in numbers, the TPV of Ame over the next 2 years has grown 11x and generated a lot of sales for Off Us and On Us. And we showed a year last year that every BRL 10 in cash back given to the client, the next -- I mean, the next client shopping would be 6x this cash back. They -- every BRL 10 given in cash back to the client brings back additional sales of 11x more. So Ame generates additional sales. And I can say that besides generating additional sales, it brings clients to the universe 60% (sic) [ 68% ] of the new Off Us clients started to buy the On Us. And this is a growing current. The Off Us has an important role for Ame. It is getting traction because it is accelerating a lot. The frequency of Ame increased 3x from 2018 to now. And this year, 2020 is 67 -- 76% of the user frequency comes from Off Us. This is important to remember that Off Us -- operations in Off Us is less than a year. Another important point that I think is new and we are proud of is that we increased the sales in -- the sales in Ame this November, 3x. We made BRL 2.7 billion this November. We have to remember that November is Black Friday so everyone is selling and we could make the TPV 3x higher. And by the way, talking about Black Friday, Ame is still very relevant. We put some fun facts listed there. So the core items of Black Friday were 1 -- out of 5 notebooks sold on the Internet, 1 was paid with Ame. The same, one out of 5 smartphones and 1 out of 4 cell phones. And we are talking about products with high added value, but Ame also sells a lot of iPhones. But it's very democratic. It's present all over the country. And we don't live only of selling iPhones. We sell tickets cheaper than e-commerce. So we can be in shopping Iguatemi, in a very high-class shopping mall in São Paulo with 50% of share in this store. But we -- we also have 72% share in Queimados (sic) [ Queimadas ], a very poor city in Paraíba. And all that because it attracts to its base millions of partners in many different segments like supermarkets, pet shops, fast food/restaurants, drugstores, closet stores, jewelries, both the physical and online. And we cannot forget our partners, the street sellers, they had wide participation in Ame during this carnival, which was incredible what they did. But Ame -- the Off Us is very important for Ame. But Ame is very important to Off Us, to the store seller. And we saw that in the Black Friday, in the physical and in the digital, all partners used Ame as a way of payment and a way of selling more. All that is part of a strategy that is very simple. Apparently, it is very simple, but in fact, it's not that simple to make it happen. But it makes a whole lot of sense to us because what does Ame wants? To be more and more relevant in the daily lives of the clients, increasing the frequency of use, both in On Us, in our brands, because this is a big royalty program, and also in Off Us. So just a map. As long as Ame facilitates the main journeys of clients, we are bringing more clients using Ame. More clients using Ame, we bring more frequency. More frequency brings more relevance. More relevance brings more journeys of clients to participate. So this is how we understand we need to keep up. We want to be relevant in our clients' daily lives and be able to offer them everything they need. In a vision of future where we are going to, let's remember that we started as a means of payments. This means of payment was very powerful with a loyalty program in On Us and also to Off Us. And at the same time, we started with expertise with our team and the knowledge and we then offer and created a marketplace of products and services, financial and nonfinancial services, everything -- thinking about treating well our clients. And with a big vocation for banking. Let's remember that our marketplace of products, financial services, is completely asset-light. But we have a vocation for banking because we are offering a series of financial products and services. Recently, Ame -- I mean this week, not recently, this week in fact the beginning of this week, Ame acquired Bit Capital. That is a core banking platform based in blockchain, bring -- that is bringing Bit care with a team that is completely differentiated, very special with a lot of domain knowledge in PIX, open bank, compliance and all regulatory aspects. They work with open APIs. We understand this association will speed up a lot of the business plan of Ame and connect Ame to the financial system. When we look at the market addressed -- the addressed market, the potential market of Ame, we are talking about BRL 1.3 trillion. So this is on itself a huge potential. And little by little, we see this potential becoming a reality. So yes, we have great opportunities in On Us and huge opportunities in Off Us. We are wondering for more. We understand this is just the beginning, and there is more to come. So that's what I had to tell you. I would like to thank a lot. And now we'll call Márcio and Jean, who will talk about B2W.

Good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure being here with you. Welcome once more for Investor Day. Today, I'm talking about our growth strategy for the upcoming years. We split the agenda in 3 blocks. Of course, the first, we'll talk about our platform on how scalable it is to grow even more. The second block, strategy, how will we be addressing our growth for the upcoming years. And on the third block, I'll be showing a little on how will we do that, and our focus will be on the growth algorithm. But before starting, I would like to show you a video that shows what happened over 2020. [Presentation]

Well, I'll talk about the evolution of our business model. B2W is the digital platform from Universe Americanas. And it has a prominent role within our universe with the goal of connecting people, products and services, connecting our sellers and partners with all the 21 million active customers we have. When we see the background of our evolution, from the very creation of Americanas in 1999, from the first year when it was able to earn BRL 25 million until September this year, total payment volume which was 1,000x Americanas first year figure. And over that time, we passed through cycles of growth, investments, mostly comprising 2013 to 2016, we've made several purchases -- 10 purchases of technology companies, 3 logistics purchases, a very successful history of purchases and integration. Last year, we purchased Pedala e Courri, making even bigger logistics and distribution capability and last year with Supermercados Now, at the beginning of this year, we bought that. The evolution of our business model from 2017 until 2019 was very important. We became a platform. Before that, we were focusing on 1P sales and then moved to a hybrid platform, which has 1P, 3P and services, combining the best of both worlds. With that, we started focusing in mobile because customer behavior evolves with time. And we are no longer a intensive capital flow business generating [ accelerated ] growth. And over time, we've invested a lot in technology and mainly analytics in our evolution steps. And with that, we reached the platform we have nowadays. So November figures, we have more than 87 million (sic) [ 87,000 ] sellers connected, offering more than 82 million products to our more than 21 (sic) [ 21 million ] active customers, I mean those who have bought things for the 12 years (sic) [ 12 months ]. We have a traffic of BRL 3.4 billion. The more we round and round the circle, this platform evolves based in 6 business fronts. First, e-commerce with 1P, 3P, O2O with our main brands, Submarino, Americanas, Supermercados Now. We also have an entertainment front. We have huge expertise over in TV, and we've launched that in Americas. We also have another front, technology services, that we offer to all our partners, logistics service with LET'S. Another important front, financial services with our fintech, Ame, and its proprietary products. And also have B2WADS, which is an important way to monetize all this traffic that we generate in our platform. Now to talk about the platform and our scalability, our capacity to grow. We need to talk about 3 pillars: people, technology and logistics. So starting from our team, which is a very balanced team between men and women, mostly in technology, looking to our leadership. We have a leadership that has experience. It has many years in our company, but they are quite young. And an important fact is that 45% of this leadership came from purchases we've done and also from some key positions within the market. This year, we had an important event. We got the seal Great Place to Work, and that's shown by the result of our teamwork and also innovation. For example, Supermercados Now has won the -- an award in selection process. What's very important when we are talking about bringing new stuff to our platform, we've been very attentive and present in universities, holding partnerships with the biggest and most important teaching institutes. Now I would like to invite Jean, which is our CTO, to talk about our technology team. And he will be also talking on technology applied logistics. So Jean, welcome.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Márcio. Once more welcome you all to our Investor Day. It's a pleasure being here again with you. As Márcio mentioned, our technology team from B2W is the most numerous team in B2W and keeps increasingly growing, hiring people from all over Brazil. One of our main skills nowadays and regarding our expansion in B2W, our skills, machine learning, data. And for that, we created a program, which is called data academy. Talking about leadership, it is working directly with me. We have a very senior leadership which sees most of our purchases in technology for the past few years to exemplify how technology is inserted in B2W business. We brought some -- an important case, which is squad from Americanas Mercado, which we assembled this year. Right after purchasing Supermercados Now, one of the first things we wanted to do was using the whole strength from Americanas brand to leverage our market. And for that, we created a squad with technology, market and logistics from several areas of the company, from LET'S, Supermercados Now, B2W, that created a stand-alone squad. With that, we were able to create Americanas Mercado, which will be mentioned. And we were able to grow 8x more if compared to last year's figures. Another important pillar to our growth is technology. We've chosen 2 examples here to show how our platform is rather elastic nowadays, capable of -- to support B2W's growth. Last year, we've mentioned elasticity and the volume of requests of order that we need to put forth on Black Friday. So we've got 2 examples, which are basically the capability of processing orders in our platform, which is PPM, requests per minute, and the capability of data processing. So over this year, we had many peaks and valleys. Our platform must withstand all peaks. The biggest differential is that with all eyes and 24-hour deliveries, those peaks and valleys are rather often and in a more unpredictable volume, so our platform is ready for that. We can see the curve over the year with a few examples on peaks and valleys. Another important feature is that we run load charge tests over the year. That -- this year, before Black Friday, we've tested that, and we decided to apply 30x the number of orders that we believe we will have in our Black Friday, and seems to have been extremely successful. We are very confident that our platform is capable of supporting an even bigger volume than what we have nowadays. Another important matter is that with all these data processing and orders, we need to process a lot of data. And now I'm not going on the numbers, on the figures of data processing. But all this data processing, whenever demanded by the customer, it needs to be very swift. So whenever you do a search nowadays, our search needs to respond, a definition we've done, in tops 200 milliseconds. So aside from processing a lot of information, we need to respond that to our customer very quickly. Another important thing we've done this year is integrating search and advertisement platforms, hence, creating ourselves a tremendous growth capacity with ads. And when we -- ads, if compared to this year, it grew twice and a half what we had last year. Now talking about logistics. This is a very key pillar to our growth, one information about our expansion on logistically -- on our logistics fabric but a very important feature for 3-hour deliveries, the scalability, the capacity to upscaling couriers. So when we deliver things, we also have peaks and valleys behavior, not only over the year as we have an e-commerce -- our traditional e-commerce platform, but all the day. And for that, we have a very elastic [ capability ] on couriers. Aside from all the events I've mentioned this year, we run a few tests, where we [ indicated ] 3x the volume of the highest peak. All this logistics expansion enabled a very important change for us in our relevance, regional relevance algorithms. So when we look at 2020, when we had 300 stores all over the country in 110 cities, we've expanded to more than 5,000 cities and more than 700 cities. That helped our relevance algorithm when we left from a perspective of 27 areas to 137 areas. What does that mean? That means our customer, whenever he or she looks for something, and that thing is located in 1 of those 137 regions, the algorithm looks for the closest storage, what means a quicker delivery and cheaper. And right after that evolution, we were able to evolve, conversionally speaking, within all national areas. Thank you. Again, Márcio, your turn.

Thank you, Jean. Well, so we've mentioned the evolution of our business model on the scalability of our digital platform, and we needed to address a very important topic, which is our capital structure. We've done 2 extremely relevant operations over this year. The first event was the capital for -- and the BRL 4 billion, the equity that helped us, in September, to BRL 2.7 billion of gross cash, and we've done another operation. That's our entrance in the worldwide market. We had a bond, 10-year-old bonds, the first company to issue an international bond, and that was equivalent to $500,000 or BRL 2.7 billion. And our capital structure for now will enable us to keep going in a new growth route. Now on the second block, I would like to talk to you about our strategy. So just to recall it, we've been managing the company on 3-year cycles. So after creating B2W and the integration phase, we had 2 important plans, construct -- building our digital platform that I mentioned at the beginning, from 2013 until 2015, focusing on logistics and technology procurement; and then another moment on generating cash on sustainable growth and sustainable and exponential growth in our marketplace. Last year, I had the opportunity of showing you our 2020-2022 plan with the motto, everything, all the time, anywhere, everything focusing in high-frequency categories and convenience to our customers in O2O and quick deliveries. Just to recall, 2013 -- from 2013 to 2016, we have evolved in our business model, what enabled us growing with rentability and generating cash. So we've added more than BRL 6 billion to our GMV, elevating our margin to -- and our EBITDA for over 9% and our cash reaching BRL 190 million in 2019. We had an expressive growth in marketplace, adding more than BRL 9 billion, what reached almost 62% of our total sales volume, making us reach an optimal balance between 1P and 3P. And both of them are now ready to move on with our growth routes. And mentioning marketplace, that came mainly because we've multiplied times 10 in assortment that we added to our platform. Well now, talking on our current strategy's plan, this plan from 2020 to 2022. Our main focus is being increasingly more relevant to our clients' daily lives, what means being present to our -- in their journey. And the motto, everything, anywhere, that means bringing more assortment to our customers so they can look in our app and find anything they need. And anywhere is attached to convenience, providing our -- enabling our customers to buy whenever they want, whatever they want, giving more convenience for them. What's important to mention is that this first year, we had a growth in -- within the first 9 months, GMV of 21%. Now I would like to bring further details, too, on how this growth occurred. So our client bases, as I've mentioned, we've reached 21 million. We've added 6 million, which is equivalent to our growth from the past 6 years, so very expressive. But aside from increasing our bases, what's important is that where we increase that. We have customers, long-tail customers that buy assortment, what grew 7x more than those that buy electronic goods. Again, we are aligned and focused with our plan, which has been increasingly more relevant in our customers' daily lives. What is important? Why is that important, growing in long-tail customers? Because they have been spending 6x bigger than initial purchase, what brings more recurrence in purchases? So this brings a plus 60% growth if comparing to previous year's figures. So just to summarize our best investment and growth plans, we reinforce our execution capability and delivery as well. And our current plan, the first year has shown a great opportunity for us to grow a lot more, accelerating this base from now on. Well, with that, we entered a new growth route. So for that, we will be investing a lot more. We'll be investing BRL 5 billion with the next few years. BRL 4 billion comes from our capital increase that I've mentioned with you. And the other BRL 1 billion comes from reinvesting part of our cash generation that we will be generating for the upcoming years, but it is important to highlight that's a sustainable growth. So generating cash, we'll be able to maintain our commitment of generating cash. With that, we've been keeping a growth over the market with our market share. But from now on, we'll accelerate this growth base with that investment we'll be doing in order to grow over the average of the 3 market players. So we will accelerate our growth route. And now we enter our last block, talking about how will we make it grow. We have 3 main plans, improving purchase experience, focusing on loyalty from our customers, and being present in our -- in consumers' minds. Our growth algorithm has 7 important variables. So I'm talking about assortment, personalization, faster delivery, our app, our fast delivery free of cost, accelerating Ame, our fintech, and reinforcing it all on recalling our brand in our customers' minds. So talking about assortment, last year, we've mentioned long-tail categories, huge categories. E-commerce has a low penetration, where we see a lot of opportunity to grow. When we grew a lot the assortment over this year, we've made it triple when we compare November's data with the previous years. But most importantly, we grow where we need it. We've grown 5x in these assortment categories. By growing them, we have a bigger basis to increase our growth. And now talking about recurrence, I would like to highlight market category. That's where we advanced a lot, where we purchased Supermercado Now by the beginning of this year. And we were able -- by that means, growing inside that category. So in assortment, we've increased 17x. And that's a category which has 8x more recurrence than the average from our customers. Also important is that when we purchase such an -- such a company and we connect that to our platform, having access to all the components of this universe, we were able to integrate that in a record time. For example, Ame nowadays represents 30% on market orders, and 60% from those requests -- from those orders are delivered via LET'S, faster and with more efficiency. And the consumption profile from our customers has changed because we are serving 2 different journeys. If comparing 2019's figures, we see with the current year, we see that there was a stronger focus on electronics. And when we see this year, we see that fresh items like fruits and vegetables, groceries are bringing more recurrence to our business that once more is totally aligned with our focus in that plan. And now another variable, very important one, by the way, which is personalization. Personalizing means knowing our customer very well, their consumption habits, how are they paying that. And when numbers are big, we are talking about the recommendation. We have more than 10 billion recommendations over the year and notifications of more than 15 billion visualization. Having a scale reach, we needed to use a lot of technology, artificial intelligence in order to do that in real time. So just to illustrate, if a customer does a request and order nowadays, they will return 10x more in our app to do anything, either looking for the order tracking, further details on the product he had purchased. But it's important that he returns. And when he returns, we'll meet -- know more, learn more from him. And each of those returns, we will have the opportunity for offering a greater experience, bringing more assortments to his site and converting. And the figures can be either 30 -- 3 to 30x bigger. And the greatest challenge is doing that in scale. So we have an opportunity to advancing that. That's an important investment front from now on. Another important variable is the fast delivery. When we talk about fast delivery, Wellington mentioned a little bit about our capillarity. We are increasing a lot our capillarity in all the country. And having more capillarity means delivering faster, and being faster is having more conversion. On the other hand, more capillarity is being closer to the client with lower cost for delivery, and lower cost means us being able to charge less from the client. Once again, it's more conversion. And the more conversion, the more volume. So we increase more and more our logistics mesh. So when I talk about fast delivery, I'm talking about 3 hours or 24 hours. Deliveries in 3 hours, we increased almost 300% in terms of volumes of deliveries, and we'll progress on that. The opportunity here is to go to more cities, connect more sellers in the O2O and also in 1P with the fast deliveries in 3 hours from the more than 200 hubs that we also have. So this is a very important front. And when I say delivery in 24 hours, I mean we have developed a lot our deliveries in 24 hours in 1P. We reached 46% of our total volume, and we'll progress even more on that. And in 3P, I'm talking about progressing in fulfillment. That is getting the delivery service of 3P closer to 1P. So we grew 165% in sellers. When we go to the fulfillment and we have faster deliveries, 55% faster and also more efficient because we get closer to the level of service and quality of service of 1P. Opportunity here is in having the fulfillment with all the distribution centers. We have 22 spread in the country and also in the 200 hubs that we have. I mean having stocks in the seller in the hubs for faster deliveries. So this is what we invest and develop more. Another important variable of our algorithm is the app. Remember that Americanas was the app that had the most downloads in the shopping category this year. So we are ahead of our competitors. We have more than 100 million downloads when we account all the apps; only this year, 46 million downloads. We developed a lot the number of monthly users with almost 40 million. And this is very important because the app client can have a better experience. Thus, they visit 3x more when we compare to the desktop. And there is a conversion that is 2.6x higher. And it is all connected to the previous variables of fast delivery or customized delivery because we can give a better experience by customizing the delivery. Another innovation that we brought this year to our app was the Live Commerce. That is a phenomenon in China. This is quite a relevant business. We brought it to Brazil. And it allow us to make the client be more engaged in searching for my product and converting more and being -- spending more time with us. And when the client spends more time with us, they also give more information to us for us to customize more and more this experience. So our team prepared a video to you, and I would like to show and present the progress that we have in the app during the year. [Presentation]

Well, another very important variable to our algorithm is Americanas Mais. That is our fast delivery service with free freight. We have more than 1 million clients in the service today. And the important point is that the clients rebuy much more with a higher spending as well. So from now on, all our clients in the app will be Americanas Mais clients as well. And thus, we'll bring a much better experience to the client. Another variable that is very important in our algorithm is Ame, our fintech. We're growing a lot in terms of amount of clients using Ame in our apps. And why is that important? Because these clients have been spending 3x higher than the clients who don't use Ame. So we will keep up investing a lot in this frontier to grow more and more the use of clients with Ame. Well, to tell all that to the clients, we have another variable that we have to invest a lot, the brand presence in the client's mind. So brand memory, brand -- is done in 3 months, and we made researches to know a lot of indicators about our brand. So Americanas is still the first brand of the consumer when we ask the question, ask them the question. At all surveys, they are top of mind. But despite that, we see many opportunities. Another variable that we look in the survey is the preference of brand. And when we compare among the regions, we see there's still a big gap and opportunity for us to work better the brand in some regions. So when we compare the biggest and the smallest region, there are 8 point -- percentage point in gap. So this is a big opportunity for us to work. Another important indicator is the share of voice, so the search related to the category. So despite developing a lot in the long-tail category and assortment, there's still a big gap when we compare with electronics, for example. So the good news is that there is still a lot of space to develop on that. So all our communication will be based in these 3 pillars. We are talking about fast delivery in 3 or 24 hours; in showing more and more assortment to the clients, showing that we have everything; and also exploring the trust of the client in our brand with original product and also with a huge focus in compliance. But the most important point is that we'll be working more and more in a regional way to capture these opportunities that I mentioned before. Well, this is how we close our algorithms with the 7 variables that I mentioned. And the important in this algorithm is that all variables are connected and fed back and we develop the algorithm and allow us to grow more and more, being in this growth route and -- that will start from now on. So once again, I would like to thank you for your presence and for trusting us, for being all this time here with us. So once again, thank you. And now in the next session, we'll have the Q&A. Thank you.

Hello. Welcome back. We are here live in our studio in the stage created at B2W [ Rio ]. Thank you all for sending the questions. And now we have on stage the CEOs, Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Saicali, Timotheo Barros and Márcio Cruz. Thank you all for your presence. Let's all -- let's start our Q&A.

Thank you, Raoni. Starting our Q&A. The first question, Miguel, is to you. It's a repeated question about our capital structure. We have a history of working with debt, and we had important movement to change the capital structure this year. What is the reason for that? And what are the future plans about that?

Well, thank you, Fabien. This is a wonderful question. We have a history of more than 20 years working with debt. We believe that it maximizes the return of our shareholders and we still believe in this approach. But on the other hand, working with debt is a mix of science and mysticism, science because we work -- we're thinking about the future, paying attention of what may happen. And when something quite unpredictable happens, we need to find a way out, just like this year is happening. But in general, we had a follow-on with a BRL 7.9 billion total of our prediction. That was about BRL 3.3 billion to be approached in B2W. Why? Because we believe it will allow a higher growth of our digital platform. BRL 2.6 billion would be our idea to be in the reformulation of the debt in the controller that ended up last year with BRL 3.3 billion debt. So we foresaw some debt in the controller. And the rest about the remainder, about BRL 2 billion, would be for us to invest in our operators, along with Ame and LET'S. There is -- there are a lot of good things to be done with this possibility that we open even to have -- to release a little bit our future capital flow. So everything make us understand that the end of the year -- I mean when everything is concrete in the universe, we would have a debt of about 0 or a little bit positive. B2W will work with a positive cash that will allow a better growth. And the controller will work a little bit negative or close to 0.

Okay. Thank you, Miguel. Now our next question is from [ Daniela from Sispim ]. And I'll make it to Anna Saicali. How do you understand the evolution of the results of Ame? And what are the ideas for 2021?

Well, thank you for your question, [ Daniela ]. And let's remember that Ame invested their operations. There is no -- not so long ago, it's been growing fast. And the goal is to improve people's lives. 2019, in fact, was the first year. The focus was a lot in converting this huge database of active clients that we have here and spread the acceptance of Ame. 2020 is still this idea of converting the client -- the base and converting acceptance with partnerships but now with a huge focus in offers. Despite the pandemic and everything that we are living this year, for 2021, we want to integrate Ame to the financial system. We still have the priority of converting more and more clients to our bases in this universe and bring new clients from offers. But we want -- with this platform of marketplace and products and services that are financial or not but we want to start offering to our clients a complete solution that a super app can offer, and it means being integrated to the financial market as well.

Thank you, Anna. The next question is -- Timotheo, it's to you, and it comes from Luiz Guanais from BTG Pactual. And he wants to know about the growth base of the stores and the expansion for next years.

Well, thank you for the question, for the participation. Well, 2020 has been quite a challenging year. We've learned a lot. We've been doing many different things and adjusted our assortment. We launched a lot of services and solutions like Whatsapp and the digital managers. It was a year of novelties. And obviously, due to the pandemic, our priority was to ensure safety and health of our clients and our workers, and we postponed our expansion plan. Translating into numbers, we'll open about 30 stores this year. That is an expansion of 1% of our sales area. Looking ahead, we want to be even more relevant in the clients' daily life. So the capillarity and the expansion plan has an important participation in this process. So for 2021, we expect at least 6% of expansion in our sales area, but we have to remember that it depends a lot on the pandemic. We are following all the process. Due to the progression of the pandemic, we'll determine the pace of opening. But we have to remember that when we are talking about the growth of the physical platform, it is not only expanding the sales area. We have powerful tools to leverage the growth. For example, Ame, we have seen during the presentation that we have speeded up a lot the payment in Ame in our stores. Ame is a powerful royalty tool. It brings a lot of frequency when we look at a client paying in our stores with Ame. The frequency is 3x higher compared to the client that doesn't use Ame. We have O2O. We have increased a lot. We are integrating more and more the physical and digital worlds. And looking ahead, we are quite excited and happy with the perspectives ahead of us.

Thank you, Timotheo. Well, our next question comes from Robert Ford from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. And that's for Márcio Cruz. Márcio, how do you see relative growth in relation to the other plays? And above all, looking at 2021, the demand of -- the customers' demands and e-commerce.

Thank you, Raoni. Thank you, Robert Ford, for your question, your participation. Before talking about our growth in 2020, it is important talking about our year-end. Aside from the total GMV growth, that's like 53%, a little over what was -- what our market has, we need to look at that figure with further details on how we delivered that growth. If we look, we evolved. We highly evolved our customer bases. That's equivalent to our past 5 years in 1 single year. And as I've shown in my presentation, in customers, we aggregated long-tail customers who buy different types of things like groceries. That's something that aligns to our strategy. And what's most important is that those clients return. So we've increased our recurrence. And this customer has a spending that is bigger than what I've shown before. So all those advances are well aligned with growing in long-tail assortment. We entered new categories. For example, market category, that we've advanced. And again, it brings a lot of recurrence. What forms an important asset altogether for 2021 and when we pick up these assets and summing them -- so the platform is ready to scale. It has a lot of scalability, mostly speaking on technology and logistics. Another important point is that we've adjusted our capital structure also by means of the 2 operations we've done by elongating the debt, what allows us to enter a new growth route. So regardless on macroeconomic scenarios for next year, competition, harsh competition for next year, we see a lot of opportunities on how we build our growth this year. And what will that provide us given we invest more, we'll have it more accelerated if we focus on the 7 variables of our growth algorithm. That's it. Thank you, Raoni.

Thank you, Márcio. Our next question is addressed to Miguel, something very often, about M&A. What is being asked basically is whether is there a [ prioritary ] segment and also other questions on the negotiations with BR.

Thank you, Fabien, for your question. I would like to say the following. Our universe has reached 46 million customers. So every business that shows some recurrence in this universe, we are interested. We created an algorithm to ensure a financial discipline on long-term decisions. We've met more than 50 opportunities in 9 different segments, but the most rational would be from that amount of positive figures, we'd be gathering initiatives to make that universe grow. Aside from that, we have investments that will support this growth as best we expect with purchase that will allow us to grow with Ame. Regarding BR, this year, it has been an excellent partner. We created together something that allowed -- provided for distance payment. That's been very productive. We are very interested in the convenience segment. So we are moving on towards that. Eventually, that agreement wasn't closed because we passed through a very difficult period with all due restrictions we had regarding functioning, on store operations and so on. And secondly, we prioritized our relation established by means of Ame aside from [ Mincluni ] and marketplace, BR Mania. So we are very excited with that potential business.

Thank you, Miguel. Well, our next question is addressed to Anna. It comes from Ravi from HSBC. And he asks us to mention a little on PIX and what is the strategic planning from Ame.

Well, Ravi, thank you for your question. I would like to say that Ame, it's a big native platform because it was born with [ QR code ] technology and its first functionalities were instant payments and transfers. We are integrated with PIX from the very beginning. And this week, the Americanas Universe was integrated to PIX, started doing payments via PIX both digitally and physically by means of Ame and Bit Capital. Bit Capital is a purchase we've done Monday that week, and we are bringing Bit Capital, which is a core banking platform company. It has a differentiated staff, a masterpiece technology that will help us on Bit's open banking technologies and knowledges, which will help us a lot in integrating with the financial system. And we'll be able to offer this solution to our merchants as well. I think PIX will rise, bringing a positive impact both in PIX and open banking to our platform.

Thank you. Our next question is addressed to Timotheo. It comes from Julia Rizzo from XP Advice (sic) [ XP Advisory ]. How do you see the evolution of future physical stores?

Julia, thank you for your question. To talk about our physical stores' evolution, let's recall our perspective of the future. Such a perspective is being increasingly relevant in our customers' daily lives. And translating that, it translates into convenience. Our customer increasingly demands more convenience, what means being swift, selling at a fair price, operating a high level of service, having high availability from our stores and so on and so on. When we see the features, the characteristics, the features from our stores, we can address it all -- that all. So just to recall, our physical platform has a unique capillarity. We are present in all states from federal district over 700 cities, more than 1,700 stores and more than 750 cities. So we are increasingly closer from our -- all our customers. That's convenience to us. Aside from that, our customer base is very powerful, predominantly feminine, responding -- major diversity from youngest to the elderly. Another feature from our stores is the transaction volume. We have customers flow over 1 billion a year, more than 3 billion transactions a year. So a high-frequency model, which -- our frequency was at about 11x. But as Ame gains more room in our operations, the tendency of that frequency is increased. We also have broad assortment from electronics, from chocolate. We have more than 45 categories. So when a -- whenever a customer comes to our store, he or she knows that whatever he or she needs will be found, and that means convenience. That's very convenient to our client -- customer. We are present in all events all over Brazil, and we have multiple formats. We can either enter a region or a district. We can operate within a shopping center. We can operate in a commercial center. So with that, we can address those new consumption needs, the fastness demanded by our customer, the fair price demanded by our customer. And aside from that, we are doing a lot of investment in order to revolutionize and improve our customer experience within our stores. Over this morning's presentation, we've given several examples. We've mentioned Ame Pro, mobile PDV. We have also Whatsapp and digital managers among other initiatives that we have an ongoing process in order to turn purchase experience a lot more fluid. And finally, the combination we have, the digital world, which is only possible because we belong to that universe. The beauty of the universe is the combination of the actives of the physical that allows us accelerating our initiatives operating 24 hours a day.

Thank you, Timotheo. Well, we have Márcio, a lot of questions related to fulfillment. So we have some people mentioning the recent movements in competition. Others mentioned that we've been acting in fulfillment for over 2 years, but the general perception is that, that hasn't escalated in Brazil yet. So if you could talk a little on fulfillment strategy and whatever you can share with us on the subject.

Thank you, Raoni. Thank you all who made questions about fulfillment. Now to talk about fulfillment, I need to talk about benefits. So what's important is, why is that good for the customer? And why is that good for the seller? Fulfillment's all about reaching service levels from 1P to 3P, what we're delivering faster in our fulfillment. We already have this metrics. Deliveries became 50% times faster when we apply them in fulfillment and sellers' storage. And the quality also is improved. So we have 6 percentage points be increased for the customer. It's a good impression and it's also good for the seller because they sell more. So we are in fulfillment, in fact, for 2 years, and those 2 years have been a lot of learning for us. We've learned a lot over that time, what worked well for the seller and how could we use our assets in a better way. Now we have a few thousand sellers in fulfillment, and we are operating within 4 states. I think another very important point, which is something remarkable for us at B2W, is our logistic capillarity. Nowadays, we have 22 distribution centers spread all over Brazil and 200 hubs. So we will be using those hubs, which are urban hubs, in order to put sellers' storage closer from our customers, hence shortcutting the delivery time. So that's a differential from ours, and we will be using that to give a greater experience from our customer who buy in the marketplace. And finally, as I've mentioned in my presentation, Americanas Mais, which are our quick delivery service, free of charge. And our clients will be connected both by Ame and fulfillment. And one feeds back the other. So a seller in Ame that will be in Americana Mais will have a free charge -- free-of-charge delivery, which will help us escalating fulfillment in a more accelerated manner, okay? Thank you.

Thank you, Márcio. We will wrap Q&A session right now. Questions that weren't responded live will be responded by the RI team. And I would like to invite Miguel for the final considerations.

So we are reaching the end of our event. I would like to leave us the final message that the year 2020 is a year that we are very proud of what we've been doing, and this is thanks to the wonderful team that we have that can make everything work and being adjusted to all the challenges. We are quite assured that everything we did in 2020 was right, that is the restructure that we had with Universo in a more visible way, the changes that we made in our structure. Everything make us very strong about what is about to come in the next years. So I would like to thank you all for your presence. And I would also apologize for the little delay that we had in the beginning, but this is a little bit of what I mentioned before of managing debt. And sometimes, we have science. Sometimes, we have mysticism to deal or things that happen by chance. And it was a problem that we had here, but I hope it didn't influence -- interfere in the presentations. I would like to wish you all a lot of success, health and that we start next year well that, for us, will be a very important year to grow. So thank you all. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]