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

Good afternoon, and welcome to Americanas SA's conference call, where we will talk about the earnings for the first quarter of 2022. We have with us today, Miguel Gutierrez, CEO of Americanas SA; Anna Saicali; Timotheo Barros; and Marcio Cruz, Platform CEOs; and also Raoni Lapagesse and Fabien Picavet, Investor Relations Directors. This event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's event has a presentation which can be seen at ri.americanas.com. Any statements made during this conference call about the company's business perspectives, projections, financial and operational goals are simply beliefs and assumptions from the directors based on currently available information. Remarks about the future are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions because they refer to future events and, therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not come to pass. Investors should understand that the general economic conditions, industry conditions and other operational factors may affect Americanas' future performance and may lead to results that differ materially from the ones expressed in these forward-looking statements. The companies would like to clarify that the accounting information used for these comments are presented according to International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS, based on norms by the CVM and are all in Brazilian real. Now we would like to give the floor to the CEO, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Miguel Gutierrez, over to you.

Good afternoon. Thank you. Our journey has always been based on continuous reinvention as a way of keeping up with the changes in Brazilian society. This has allowed us to build a business model that is constantly changing over our 90-year history in different scenarios in the economy and in different social conditions. In the last few years, we have gone through a deep change started by reviewing our capital structure, which was reinforced by some strategic M&A movements. And this culminated in combining our assets and our bases between Lojas Americanas and B2W, creating a single Americanas for clients, investors, suppliers, sellers, merchants, franchisees, partners and for all of society. Our path has been based on a strategy of being increasingly relevant in our clients' daily life. The current challenges we face in the economy with high interest rates, with growing inflation, pressured in costs and in reduced incomes for our population do not scare us. But they do require us to be even more efficient in seeking balance between our main operational variables as well as our financial variables. We understand that the current scenario expands our responsibility. We believe in our social role and our relevance in relating to all of our partners. Therefore, just to give you an example, we have tried to offer a different level of assortment with great offers that are affordable for our clients. Through Ame, for all of our suppliers, sellers and merchants, we've anticipated receivables and we've also offered credit at competitive rates and fees. The story we've written so far represents all the changes that we've had in the last few years. And we've always had our clients at the core of our strategy. And this has been rewarded by a significant increase in the number of customers as well as the number of transactions carried out. This strengthens us and excites us for a new chapter in our journey, generating more value. We're only at the beginning of this new chapter. I'll now give the floor to Raoni and Fabien, who will continue this presentation. Thank you.

Thank you, Miguel. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Raoni Lapagesse, and I'm going to start our presentation with the operational highlights on Slide 4. This quarter, we reached 52 million active customers, which represents 4 million new clients in the last 12 months. Over this time, the number of transactions was over 431 million, up 62 million. Another indicator I'd like to underscore is the number of items sold. In the last 12 months, we had over 1.6 billion items sold, up 272 million items, considering assortment. We now have over 136 million items available in our platforms, up 37 million items in the last 12 months. We've also advanced in the number of sellers in our marketplace, reaching 132,000 sellers formerly connected to the platform. Continuing with Slide 5. Here, we highlight how our strategy has advanced and becoming more relevant in our clients' daily life. By going into new categories, we've increased recurrence and we're participating in different purchase journeys. Our actions and the preliminary gains from the operational combination are reflected when we see that in the first quarter of 2022, our active customer base grew 8%, while the number of items sold and transactions grew up even faster, 20% and 17%, respectively. This demonstrates that our customers are becoming more engaged and they are relating to the company more frequently. Slide 6 shows the operational highlights for the first quarter of 2022. Our total GMV reached BRL 14.2 billion, up 21.7%. Our net revenue was BRL 6.8 billion, up 28.4% versus the first quarter of 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA reached BRL 659.8 million, the highest for this period, up 57.9% versus the first quarter of 2021. Despite the negative impact of inflation on expenses, gains and synergies in combining the businesses, monetization for Ame and sustainable growth initiatives generated an evolution of 1.9 percentage points in our EBITDA margin versus the first quarter of 2021, a total of 9.8%. In the first quarter, our net results reached BRL 137.3 million negative, up 38.8% versus the first quarter of 2021. To neutralize seasonality, our adjusted cash generation in the last 6 months, that is the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, was positive at BRL 119 million, up BRL 481 million versus the negative BRL 362 million in the same period last year. The next slide will show how our physical and digital platforms have evolved. On Slide 8, we have information on our physical platform and its strategic role in our ecosystem. With Americanas SA, multichannel is no longer only a goal, it's already reality in our operations. Brick-and-mortar stores have become a significant hub for distribution and for relating to the customer. Our gross revenue for the physical platform went up 28% in the first quarter of '22 as all stores reopened and we got our clients' traffic again. To eliminate the effect of Easter in the last 4 months -- excuse me, sales in the same-store concept or SSS went up 10.3%. This quarter as a reflection of our multichannel model, we had a growth of 37% in O2O sales versus the first slide of 2022, reaching BRL 1.4 billion. On Slide 9, we see our expansion, making us closer to our clients. So far, we've inaugurated 28 new stores in 2022 in 26 cities, expanding our footprint to 8 new cities. Among them, we had 9 Americanas, 3 HNT, 4 franchise stores from the Grupo Uni.co brands and 12 stores for Vem Conveniencia. So we concluded the first quarter of 2022 with 3,581 stores. On Slide 10, we see some of the benefits that we have already reached as our business was combined. We now have a single database, allowing us to see clients in an integrated fashion and understand their purchasing habits. There are no longer barriers between migrating clients among different platforms, which allows us to fish in our own aquarium, improving our relationship and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. The number of downloads for the Americanas and Ame apps in our stores are a tangible example of this strategy. This year, we had over 6.3 million app downloads for Americanas.com and more than 1.4 million downloads for Ame in our stores. As operations were combined, we changed the levels of our fast delivery operations as we see on Slide 11. Stores became an important distribution hub and we expanded ship from store to 900 cities and accelerated the use of dark stores to store products, especially the ones purchased in digital platforms. This has allowed clients to receive their purchases immediately after buying and also reduced shipping costs. As a result of that, in the first quarter of 2022, nearly 35% of deliveries were carried out within 3 hours. A year ago, that was 14%. So we're at a different level. Moreover, 24-hour deliveries reached 59% of the total versus 44% 1 year ago. As a result of the ongoing initiatives such as fishing in our own aquarium and expanding fast shipments, as we see on Slide 12, the eCommerce platform continues to accelerate and posted a growth of 20.1%, again, above the average from our competitors. This was made up of a great performance in 1P, which grew 24.3%; and 3P, up 6.9%. This quarter's GMV was impacted by a safety incident in the second half of February. However, we saw the sales recovered quickly in the following weeks. Our clients continued buying from us. Disregarding the effects from this period in which eCommerce was unavailable, we estimated that our growth would have been 30% even with a challenging comparison, that was 89% in the first quarter of 2021. I'll now hand it over to Fabien, who will continue the presentation.

Thank you, Raoni. In Slide 14, we have the highlights for Ame, which continued to deliver surprising results in Q1 2022. In the last 12 months, Ame posted a TPV of BRL 28 billion, which accounted for a growth of nearly 2x versus the same period the year before. That is a consequence of the exponential growth of its monetization fronts in the quarter, seeing as Ame showed expansion of 55% in its EBITDA. In addition to that, our super app ended the quarter with over 32 million downloads and 12 million active users with 89 new features. I'd like to highlight the financial volume that was granted by the credit marketplace with Ame, which is no credit risk for the company and grew 3.5x. In Slide 15, we show the 3 strategic stepping stones of Ame. Ame has been changing into a comprehensive financial platform with the purpose of democratizing access to financial services and the goal of monetizing its ecosystem to have a substantial share of Americanas SA's results. We divide in 3 stepping stones: engagement, platform and credit. In the engagement platform, the loyalty program, digital wallet and marketplace for products and services and nonfinancial services with a super app and platform service platforms to our retail offering with Bank as a Service, Credit as a Service and Software as a Service. And in credit, financial services to suppliers, sellers, merchants, franchisees and clients. Ame benefits from all the customers in its ecosystem, whether they're consumers, sellers, merchants, suppliers or franchisees as well as those in the digital physical fulfillment or an ads platform as well as the innovation engine. Starting in Slide 17, we'll talk about the new avenues for growth within this context. We'd like to point out Americanas ads, our omnichannel advertising hub offering a portfolio of media technology and content solutions with fully integrated advertising resources across digital and brick-and-mortar, which allows our partners to connect with customers at many points in their purchasing journey. In 2021, traffic and our sales platforms, apps, websites and stores once again exceeded 4 billion, which turned Americanas ads one of Brazil's main advertising channels. Currently, we rely on over 20 advertising solutions purposed on catalyzing and advancing our businesses in several different sizes and markets, building communication strategies based on behavioral insights to improve sales performance and branding. The solutions cater to different advertising profiles, including sellers, suppliers and business partners. Among the highlights for the first quarter, we continue to optimize our offers algorithm and investing in displays according to context and behavior. In addition to that, we've expanded our media out-of-home solutions, reaching 12 stores in the first stage of the project with a footprint of digital panels and their displays. The sponsored displays platform, we have growth of 114% increase in revenue from the investment from advertisers. In Slide 18, we talk about Vem Convenience. On February 1, we began operations for Vem Convenience with 1,257 stores in small retail, 55 of which are stand-alone operations, which will use the local brand and 1202 stores in fuel stations operated by franchisees, which will continue to use the BR Mania brand. The partnership is designed to offer a new value proposition that will combine forces between Vibra and Americanas with vast experience in Brazilian retail as well as a network of POSS that expand nationwide with scale and supply structure as well as logistics technology and digital retail operations as well as renowned brands. Vem Conveniencia is a joint venture whose capital is owned by both Americanas and Vibra, split 50-50. And its result will be acknowledged by asset equivalents. On Slide 20, we talk a little bit about our ESG strategy. In Q1 2022, we signed the business ambition commitment, showing our commitment in developing an emission reduction target that is science-based and a plan to reach net zero. We were also ranked in the CDP Climate Resilience Index, which highlights companies for their high level of awareness about climate issues and their integration of effective measures in reducing their carbon footprint. Now a little bit about our social agenda. In partnership with Uniao BR and G10 Favelas, we helped in providing logistical support to transportation and to deliver 95 tons of food and water to cities in the south of Bahia to those families affected by strong rainfall and also a partnership with BR, where we donated over 50,000 items of our own brands to families affected by the rainfalls in Petropolis. Also in partnership with G10 Favelas, we've donated over 25,000 books of several different topics to libraries and communities and cultural centers and over 15 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Pernambuco benefiting over 1.5 million people. As a consequence of those initiatives, we ranked among the 5 leading retailers and sustainability across the world according to The Sustainability Yearbook in 2022. We were also once again selected to be part of the IC02 portfolio in the B3 Stock Exchange, once again confirming our commitment to transparency in our emissions. In Slide 21, some news that really fills us with pride. Americanas was once again recognized as an excellent company to work for by the Great Place to Work seal. Our team is the most valuable part of our business with over 40,000 associates that are imbued with a strong sense of ownership committed to the business and our purpose, offering better conditions to allow our associates to develop professionally and exceed day after day our goal and be part of GPTW shows we're on the right path. In Slide 22, we highlight another major accomplishment. Today, we are 1 of the 5 most influential brands in Brazil according to a survey released by Ipsos, being the first Brazilian brand to rank the list. In Slide 23, we show you the strategic model of Americanas SA, focused on offering consumer journeys that are increasingly more customized and more convenient across customer profiles. Unique assets built from a strategy that's over 90 years old have boosted and bolstered our growth strategy. Those assets are our active customer base of over 52 million, our business platforms and they are over 40,000 associates that are, again, imbued with a strong sense of ownership. Thanks to those unique assets we have distinguishing aspects such as a wide assortment focused on recurrent and convenient items, nationwide capillarity that's multichannel and a low cost of acquisition for customers. Our model seeks growth and profitability. With our unique assets and competitive edge, we were able to advance our organic growth dreams that's guided by development and the development of our platforms. On the future layer, led by IF, we have a number of disruptive initiatives that incentive the use of new technologies and boost development of our business. With that, we conclude our presentation, and we'll now turn over for our question-and-answer session. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will be asked by Joao Soares from Citibank.

I have 2 questions on my side. First, I'd like to hear a bit more about your growth. You mentioned online growth of 30%, and that is far above the industry average. So what should we expect for the future, considering all that you've discussed? How should we expect Americanas to grow from now on? What do you expect it will be like in April and May? Another point is I'd like to ask about your active users base. There have been some cyber attacks. So how has that base been affective? What was the impact of the cyber attack on your clients base? And what was the consequence of that? And also, if you'll allow me one last question. If you could tell us a bit about your seasonality? You said that you're recovering your cash generation. I'd just like to know a bit more.

This is Marcio. Thank you for that question. So to answer the first part of your question about growth. Well, as you know, we're not giving a monthly guidance. But just as a reminder, from the third quarter 2021, we have been growing above the market average. That's what we've been pursuing and observing since the third quarter. We also saw in the first quarter that, that happened. April is a month like any other. It continues the trends we saw in the first quarter. But we have been seeing some adjustments. Society has been changing. Interest rates are going up. Inflation is on the rise. So I have to underscore that this does not scare us. Our model has been very resilient when we look at our entire history. It depends far less on higher-ticket purchases, which are usually the ones that suffer when inflation and interest rates are high. So we don't see that we depend much on these higher tickets in both platforms. When we look at the first quarter and the growth we had then, these effects had already been seen. Increased interest rates, inflation was also going up. And we managed to grow even despite the incident. We grew at a rate high above the next main players. Besides our GMV growth, our clients base has also expanded significantly. And we've also grown in transactions and number of items. So that's important because it shows that we're becoming more recurrent in every platform and between platforms as well. That's very important. As a reminder, in April, we had one of the biggest events we have in the year, Easter. It's very important for physical stores and also in our digital channels. And we have the biggest Easter in our history in both channels. So that makes us even more confident when we look ahead. To answer your second question about the clients base. You mentioned the incident. An indicator we look at every day is the number of unique users in our platform, specifically our digital platform. So the number of unique users who made a purchase in our platform, right? After the incident, we saw numbers go up quickly in the next few days, above what we had before the incident in February. So it shows that clients that returned came back quickly to our platform. And we did not face any issues on that side. So the incident only affected us during that period. And after that, we resumed our daily growth in unique users making a transaction. And to underscore this, we finished the quarter expanding our client base. And as was mentioned, we've been fishing in our own aquarium. We've really increased the number of clients who are having their first online experience with us, especially in the app. So we did not see what you had mentioned, no. And to answer your third question, well, Joao will answer -- or excuse me, I will answer as well. So when we look at cash for the company in the first quarter, we had about BRL 3.3 billion. But it's important to exclude one-off effects. And we presented in our press release a table that differentiates these effects, out of which, 3 are exclusive to the first quarter. Purchasing shares, the security incident. So the sales, we did not have because of the fact that our website was offline. That impacts our cash and also the mismatch with Easter. So besides these effects, these 3 were one-offs for this quarter. When we remove them from the company's cash effect, basically, cash consumption in the first quarter was BRL 1.7 billion. If we look at the first quarter of 2021, our cash consumption has been BRL 1.5 billion. So it's basically in line despite this growth in sales. So this is related to just our regular business seasonality. So we have Black Friday, Christmas. And in the first quarter, cash usually is taken from our base as we pay our sellers and so on. So it's related to seasonality. It's important to highlight that we presented an account or a calculation, which I think is more truth, more representative for the last 6 months. And that removes some of the seasonal effects. When you look at the fourth quarter 2021 and the first quarter 2022, added up together, we had a strong cash generation of BRL 119 million. When we look at the previous year, that would have been up BRL 481 million. Our consumption had been a little bit lower than this year. We had a positive generation of BRL 119 million. So it was basically a seasonal effect. And it will be fixed over the next months. Nothing different from that.

That was very clear. And just one more question. Do you want to keep the same level of cash generation? Is that right?

If you look at last year, for example, you'll see that although we consumed BRL 1.1 billion, this number was made up again in the next quarter. So we want to have that same idea. We do have a balanced model. And this is something we've always been telling you. Our goal is to have sustainable growth, growth, profitability and cash generation. Nothing will change our views on that.

Our next question comes from Felipe Rached with Goldman Sachs.

I'd like to explore the gain in gross margin you guys recorded this quarter. I assume part of that came from the incorporation of the assets on the customer base. But in addition to that, what were the other levers that had an effect on the rest of your business? And what can we expect in terms of the behavior of those margins considering all the initiatives you've got to have underway?

This is Raoni again. Thank you for your question. With regard to our gross margin, we had a 0.4 percentage points as development this quarter. This was not an effect of incorporating the produce operations. When you look at same-store sales, our growth was by 10.3% with an overall increase in brick-and-mortar of 28%, where our gross margin is very contributor. But more important than that, I would like to invite you to look at our EBITDA margin, where we had a development of 1.9 percentage points. We had an EBITDA margin of 9.8% over the quarter. And essentially, in addition to that positive effect on our gross margin, we've also witnessed gains and the consolidation of our businesses and also the path of monetization with Ame, which has also contributed to those results.

That was great. Now if I could only add, Raoni, with regard to the decrease in the SG&A ratio with the business consolidation. It was great to see that effect. And I was thinking that maybe in addition to that, there might be some impact from a sort of less rational competition in the eCommerce environment. Have you guys seen a decrease in CAC or maybe have a decrease in sales expenses while continuing to keep sales at the same level?

Well, actually, when you think about customer acquisition costs, one thing that we are seeing in terms of opportunities is to manage a single customer base, which was what we've been calling to fish in our own tank. So we have been seeing intense competition, sometimes more than others. But that has an effect on several costs within the company. But the main point is considering those gains that I mentioned, especially operating gains with regard to the monetization of Ame. In spite of that, we've been able to deliver good EBITDA performance. So in terms of customer acquisition, I think the major development we've seen has been in the sense of fishing in our own tank. And we're talking about a tank of 52 million active users. And we've had increasingly more opportunity to consolidate that brand with the downloads of our apps, for example. We've had over 6 million app downloads with Americanas with a net cost of nearly zero. So I would point out that as one of the main developments we've had in terms of customer acquisition.

The next question will be asked by Robert Ford from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Congratulations on your results this quarter. How are you impacted by the cyber attack during the first quarter? And if you can tell us a bit about the integration of the companies and how you're doing with the dark stores, the assortments and physical stores? And finally, if you can tell us a bit about the Americanas functionality and how that's continuing to fall?

Bob, thank you for your question. I'll tell you about the cyber attack first. What we can tell you about the cyber attack and how it impacted our P&L is that it had an impact of about 10 points in our digital growth. So it was 20% this quarter. And when we look at when eCommerce was unavailable, if we did not have that, it would be about 30%. So that's what we can share about the impact that we faced.

Robert, this is Anna. I'm going to tell you a bit about the integration of fresh produce stores into our platform. This year, we started a value generation plan involving mapping and capturing synergies and the value generation plan for our assets here in Americanas and how we can accelerate our business plan for fresh produce stores and vice versa. That's why we're calling it a value generation plan and not only a synergy generation plan. It will continue. It will carry on until the end of the year. We found many fronts, technology, expanding stores, groceries relating to the suppliers, rent, best practices. Technology, I think, stands to gain a lot when we are able to use all of our knowledge and capabilities in the digital part of the operation and finally, logistics. So this plan will continue on all of these fronts. There's another important item, which is our own brands. Our team has a business plan from the management, which is in line with our business plan.

Bob, this is Marcio. I'll answer the last question on ads. We look at that as a major opportunity for our business especially now that the company is integrated. When we compare ourselves to other players in Brazil and the benchmark in eCommerce, we really have an opportunity of expanding fivefold the number. They are doing about 5% of the GMV and ads. So the opportunity we have is major when we look at it. So that's what we're focused on. Our main advantage is that we have all of the information and data from clients and from nonclients end-to-end. And we cover all clients' journeys when we look at digital and also brick-and-mortar. There are different journeys. So we have a very ambitious plan for ads, which is already being executed and it involves several initiatives. Our motors and algorithms for recommendations, for placing the products. We also have some expectations in combining our physical and digital platforms. We've made a comment during this presentation about a pilot we started in 12 out-of-home media plans. And we're doing this in a combined fashion. So now a supplier or a partner can launch a product and be seen by millions of people in a single day in the physical and digital platform. And that can be done simultaneously. And we can segment not only the digital but also the physical media out-of-home. This is something that we can place in stores. And it also will take traffic from outside the store because we're also in the store windows. And that can also be segmented according to the location and the audience for that store. So we have several initiatives. This is a business we're very excited about. And we have an ambitious plan to continue to advance significantly in our ads front with our partners and suppliers.

Our next question comes from Joseph Giordano with JPMorgan.

I wanted you guys to talk a little bit about the company, which is now operating in several different formats and with even remodeling project within Americanas. So what I wanted to hear from you is whether you guys have an estimate of what could be leveraged within your set of brick-and-mortar stores. We have now large stores, some of which are being driven to a multichannel strategy. But I wanted to know whether you guys have any plan in terms of diversifying those channels, especially when it comes to produce, especially in Sao Paulo and maybe Rio. So are we supposed to expect some advances we made in that space?

Timotheo speaking. Thank you for your question. Now when we talk about brick-and-mortar platforms, I think we cannot consider them as stand-alone platforms. You have to think about them within our ecosystem, which is a large network and within that one platform, potentializes another. So Ame potentializes Americanas isn't vice versa. So when we look at our stores within that ecosystem, every store is always changing. 3, 4 years ago, these were only points of sale. But now they are points of experimentation, where customers may sell or we may have product launches. You mentioned the brick-and-mortar platform as a wide ad platform for our customers and maybe even as distribution hubs. As we saw, we have a very leveraged growth because of our capillarity. Now because of this transformation and the role our stores play, we have been adapting them to these new roles. So over the past 2 years, our entire expansion plan has been within different models, models that comprehend all of these new characteristics and features the stores have. And simultaneously with that, all of our older stores are now being transformed. We've been remodeling them and readjusting them as well. Was that clear?

Yes, it was very clear. Thank you.

Thank you.

The next question will be asked by Maria Clara from Itau.

So from our side, we'd like to ask a bit about your perspectives for the second quarter in digital and in brick-and-mortar stores after having a strong growth in these 2 channels. And also, if you can tell us about what you expect for profitability in the next quarters since you will have synergies from the new operational structure?

Maria Clara, this is Raoni. Thank you for these 2 questions. Considering our expectation for the second quarter for the platform, digital and physical, it's a bit like Marcio said. For the first quarter, we have seen -- where we've had the opportunity to see that the company grew. Our total GMV grew 22% in a scenario where we had already been facing a number of effects from inflation, from higher restrictions in what customers could afford. It shows that our business model depends less on categories that have higher average tickets. We are very complementary when we look at our assortment. So that is a major competitive edge for us. Of course, when we look at this year, we still believe we will face challenges. Our business model with this resilience will allow us to overcome situations like this one that we expect for 2022. So for the next quarters and for the entire year, our goal is to continue to grow with profitability. This has been our history to always seek growth and profitability for our business. And it will not stray from that in 2022. We want to continue growing above our competitors. And we still have our eye on the macroeconomic scenario, high interest rates. And we're looking at what we can do in home to continue to grow with a good profitability level in the company. So I think those are the 2 points I had to share with you. Considering the profitability guidance, we usually don't offer a guidance in the company. But we have been able to see an expansion of 1.9 percentage points at our margins. So we understand we have great opportunities as our businesses are combined and also as Ame is monetized. So we want to continue on this pathway with Ame. So we have a positive EBITDA in 2022. And we started off by delivering a good advance this quarter.

Our next question comes from Ruben Couto with Santander.

I wanted to pick up on the last question, Raoni, with regard to Ame, whose result was really positive, moving on to a positive result for the year. Could you guys really break down that growth for us? How much do you see in terms of monetization? For example, you talked a lot about the EBITDA for the credit macro space. Is it already substantial? And also advancing your receivables credit, what were the levers that have been bringing this growth in GMV and also what role has monetization played within that?

Ruben, this is Fabien speaking. Indeed, we've been seeing strong development in Ame's profitability. And on that purpose of generating a positive EBITDA already in 2022, we're seeing that come from 2 fronts, one of them being revenue itself with our financial services gaining ground with credit cards and financial services to our sellers, and to all the participants of our ecosystem at large and also coming from greater efficiency. We have a huge competitive edge, which is we have Ame within our ecosystem. If we tap into that active user base of 52 million and offer them financial services and nonfinancial services and encourage them to pay using Ame, which is quicker and less expensive. And we have been a lot more efficient in that journey. So the combination of a rise in revenue, especially from financial services with higher efficiency in our customer acquisition cost has led us to a consistently better EBITDA performance within what we had outlined for Ame for this year.

Yes. That was very clear, Fabien. Now if you could add something. Over these last months of the year where the macroeconomic scenario has deteriorated, especially with the uncertainty that has come with the rise in the interest rate, has that affected the generation of revenue in any of those lines of service you just mentioned?

No, Ruben, we continue to move up in all those fronts. Even though Ame is just over 3 years old now, we continue to advance in financial services since the beginning of last year. So there's still a lot of opportunity to seize on, and we see huge opportunities on those fronts.

The next question will be asked by Gustavo [indiscernible].

So my question follows the same line as the last one on the physical platform. How much has this change in layout in assortment in the new store model and versus the previous model? And the second question is on M&A. You talked a lot about the M&A motor inorganic growth. What opportunities are you looking at this year? What should we expect when it comes to acquisitions?

Gustavo, this is Timotheo. So to answer your first question about the layout change that we have in our stores. Actually, this is one of the components of our strategy. What we're doing is revolutionizing the purchase experience in the stores, considering the new rules that they have since stores are now connected to a bigger ecosystem, to a bigger network that will have higher flow. So we have been testing a few stores. Results have been very encouraging. And it includes changes in layout, expanding assortment, technology. So using Ame, a combination as clients intensively use the app in the stores. So this was a group of initiatives. We want to expand these tests, and we're very excited about that. We're very excited about the results.

Gustavo, this is Anna. So to answer your question on M&As, we still see many opportunities. We're still looking. We're focusing today on integrating our business plan and the companies that we have acquired in the past. Last year or the last 2 years, we had 10 acquisitions. Last year alone, we had 7. We now have a new front that we mentioned, which is our corporate VC. Our intention is to promote innovation, attracting clients -- excuse me, talents, new technologies, investing in start-ups. But we're keeping an eye on it, although we have been focused on integrating the acquired companies. So we're looking at high-frequency segments, companies that will make sense in our universe in Americanas that can add information, new technologies or improve our services. We have a lot of financial discipline. We only do good business. But no idea is good at any price. And we're still analyzing everything with our team. We're keeping our eye on the market.

[Operator Instructions] This concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the conference back to Mr. Miguel Gutierrez for his final remarks. Please, Mr. Gutierrez, you may proceed.

Thanks, everyone, for joining our call. In the first quarter of 2022, we've made headway in major strategic fronts within our business and building a single Americanas for customers, investors, suppliers, sellers, merchants, franchisees, partners and society at large. We understand the challenges the economic scenario has presented. But we're already and vigilant to overcome this period with the same resilience we've shown over the years. We're still optimistic about the future we're building in line with our purpose to add all the world has to offer to improve people's lives. Thank you, everyone, and have a great afternoon.

Americanas S.A. teleconference has now concluded. We'd like to thank everyone for joining, and have a great afternoon.