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

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the Audio Conference of Americanas S.A. for the Release of Q3 2024 Results. I would like to highlight that simultaneous interpretation is available on the platform for those who need it. [Operator Instructions] We would like to inform that this video conference is being recorded and will be available on the company's Investor Relations website, ri.americanas.io, where the complete earnings release material can be found. The presentation is also available for download in the chat icon, including the English version. [Operator Instructions] We emphasize that the information contained in this presentation and any statements made during the video conference regarding Americanas' business prospects, projections, and operational and financial goals constitute beliefs and assumptions of the company's management as well as information currently available. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions since they refer to future events and, therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, market conditions and other operational factors may affect the future performance of Americanas and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Today, we're joined by the company's executives, Leonardo Coelho, CEO of Americanas S.A.; and Camille Faria, CFO and Investor Relations Officer. I will now pass over the floor to the CEO of Americanas who will begin the presentation. Please, Mr. Leonardo, go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to begin as usual by thanking the teams involved in executing the several important stages of our Judicial Recovery Plan and once again involved in the delivering of the quarterly results in a very timely way. The results for this third quarter of 2024 are the first after we did the capitalization and the payments of most of our creditors. We have eliminated nearly all the prepetition debts and transformed Americanas into a company with the volume of financial obligation and remaining from the Judicial Recovery equivalent to our cash and receivables. So therefore we addressed one of our main issues that was to balance our capital structure. This restructuring also resulted in a reversal of our equity that was negative BRL 30.4 billion in June 2024 to a positive equity of BRL 5.7 billion positive at the end of September 2024. Most of the execution events of the plan occurred in July, and after turning that page, we are now fully focused on retail, starting a new phase of our business strategy based on some new pillars: commercial efficiency; operational efficiency, which includes financial efficiency, of course; and the restoration of the credibility of this company that has been on for 95 years. We're going to talk a little more about those details in our session. In this new phase, we updated our values and our purpose that were written by many hands and shared with the entire team to guide us in building this chapter of our history. In this third quarter, the pursuit of commercial, operational and financial efficiency remained strong. We are continuing reorganizing the stores, adjusting the store size and the layout, the standardization of the display, and assortments tailored to demand. As these actions mature, we are evolving towards the opportunities and I talked about that in our latest call. We're gaining more experience and increasing the complexity of our actions portfolio for recovery in Americanas. That's how we did the store modulation project, the pricing models and the logistics restructuring. Additionally, we announced the hiring of 2 more executives in this quarter to strengthen our execution in brick-and-mortar and also focus, as is the case of Renato Drumond on our digital transformation of the brick-and-mortar, B&M retail. Today, we can say that we have a full team to continue with this profound transformation efforts, and we are already beginning to see some positive effects in the results disclosed for this Q3, which we'll now break down for you. Moving on, Camille and I will jointly present the results for this period ending in September 2024, and then we'll return to discuss the updates on our strategic plan for Americanas. So moving on to this next slide, talking about the highlights of Q3 '24, especially in the operating front, you see some advancement in our profitability. The total GMV for the Q3 2024 was up BRL 4.7 billion, which represents a decline of 4% when we compare to Q3 '23. Our B&M platform is still growing. It grew 11.2%, and it repeats the positive expansions in the first 6 months of '24 that we presented in August this year, which is, of course, a resilient growth of our brick-and-mortar. When it comes to digital, we had a decrease of 45.5%. It's a very steep decline -- decrease in function of the strategy of not continuing the first-party digital retail. Although this 45% is like a relevant decrease, it's a smaller percentage compared to the 75 percentage that we showed the first 6 months of '24. It shows some regularization of our digital retail. It's worth reminding you that during the year of 2023 in our digital retail, we still had some sales of -- big sales, especially the third party to the first party, I mean, and especially in this third quarter, we are accelerating our sales from this first-party inventory. So it's a big difference still when compared quarter-to-quarter. Talking about net revenue of Q3, it increased 0.6% when we compared to the revenue of Q3 '23. So it shows a positive -- consolidated positive result. So we bring that as great news to you. And especially when it comes to profitability, our strategy worked, had positive impacts. And now we have a gross profit of BRL 1 billion and a gross margin of 32.4%, 2.6 p.p. better than the third quarter of '23. Our adjusted EBITDA after the payment of rents was positive at BRL 252 million. And when we look at this indicator before the payment of the renting costs, as is the best practice of the market, we reached BRL 497 million positive in the third quarter of '24. So we record a net profit of BRL 10.3 billion. That was a result of our Judicial Recovery Plan executions with all the haircuts, with the prepetition debts, as it was a result of the approval of this plan in July '24. One of the most important events in our quarter was the reflect of this Judicial Recovery Plan in reprofiling the debt. So we got out of the BRL 45.2 billion to a gross debt of BRL 482 million since we settled almost the totality of our debts, our prepetition debts in July as I mentioned before. So Camille will talk a little more about those events further on, on this presentation, but it's important to show you that we close our quarter with a cash position better with more receivables and less gross debt in BRL 482 million. So moving on to the next slide, it brings the representativeness gain in our B&M platform in the total GMV for the trimesters and the first 9 months of the year in September. So we moved from 63% in the first 3. And when we look at the first 9 months year to year, we left a physical brick-and-mortar that represented 59% to 71% for the first 9 months of 2024. So as I mentioned in the previous slide, our total GMV decreased 4%, impacted by the decrease of the digital GMV, but the brick-and-mortar GMV grew 11%, even considering the reduction of our -- of sales numbers, and the decrease that we planned inside our strategy in the sale of higher ticket products as big televisions, notebooks and air conditioning units. So this is good result in the brick-and-mortar retail. It was boosted by the development of the 3 strategic fronts that we talked before in our previous earnings release, which are: having the right product with the right price in the stores; conducting intelligent negotiation with our vendors and partners and seeking operational efficiency in even best store -- the better store. So talking about the intelligent negotiation. We've been analyzing all the categories of the company, find a balance of negotiation that's more efficient with our creditors seeking for new partners. The objective here was and still is to increase the assortments in the stores focused in the growth of sales in categories that we identified that there is a potential demand from our clients, and they lead toward bigger margin to Americanas. That is the case of our clothing stores and different other departments. If you visit our stores during this week, from this moment to the Christmas session, you can see Christmas assortments, many products very strong. That is from this strategy. When it comes to the better store front, we've been designing a schedule based on the relation between the shopping cart and the categories that form this cart. So we use the layout in the stores to make the journey of our customers more fluid and interactive. This new model is still under testing sessions, but from our preliminary results, we'll have a quick rollout for the rest of the stores, of course. Some other initiatives that are bringing results. We've been observing an increase in the number of items sold and number of transactions in our brick-and-mortar. We also increased the sales per square meter. That's a very big indicator for measuring the productivity of our stores. And this indicator is also impacted by the decommissioning of stores that have low productivity. We have no dogmas here when we talk about closing and opening of new stores. I'm going to share some detail on that later on. In relation to the digital, we are more stable and our O2O, online-to-offline, is more relevant in our business model, digital business, focused on the integration of the omnichannel integration. So the client defines the source of the sale. And we are prepared to deliver both in brick-and-mortar, digital and in a hybrid model. So we're increasing 28% of the stores with the infinite shelf model in the third party, and we have 700 stores with this option. And we're still increasing the pickup store and the delivery using the inventory of that specific store. Our omnichannel strategy reinforces the focus on our client and emphasizes the confidence that the client has at Americanas in many different journeys. So our kiosk sales, they have different categories for the assortments of the store. As for example different models of phone, household appliances, air conditioning, computers, laptops and furniture. Moving on to the following slide. You can see the sales for the same-store and for the first 9 months of 2024. And yet maybe it's our most faithful indicator to show the importance of this moment because it captures the biggest part of the gains from our actions that we implemented inside Americanas. So we included here an indicator that discounts the mix change, as I said before. The main one is the reduction of higher ticket items like big screen TVs and the household appliances. And the increase of the most traditional portfolio and then the seasonal as the Christmas portfolio that I mentioned before. So the same-store sales grew 13.6%. That is a very robust growth. And when we take off the change from this mix change, and we compare the same categories with different stores, we see growth of approximately 17%, even with a decrease of the sales of household dipping 10% -- household appliances sales. Here a quick comment. When we talk about the reduction of the household appliances sales, I'm talking about TVs, laptops and computers, but all the portable electronics like sandwich machines and other devices, we've been increasing the sales because they are part of the assortments that talk directly to our customers. So when it comes in the first 9 months of 2024, the same sales stores were up 17.7% and when we discount the effect of the mix change, it goes up to 22%. It's a big number, even considering that the baseline from '23 is not the best one to be compared. But the positive results from our brick-and-mortar are a result from the implementation of that series of initiatives that we talked from our latest calls. Among them, the new pricing model that's inside the strategic pillar, right product, in which we seek to have the best and most suitable offer at the right price to our clients. So in the year of '23, we had a unique price per product in all the national territory and the implementation of this new pricing system makes us evolve to a regional model, and we have planned an evolution for specific prices per municipality and per store type in a short term. So as part of this objective of offering the right product, so we are still using the strategy of consolidation. Talking about the clustering of '23, taking into consideration the size of the stores, now we have a more detailed model with over 50 clusters that combine variables like size of stores, region, sales and logistics, of course. And we talked a little bit about that in the latest earnings release. Another initiative that we consider very important that contributed to the positive results are the logistics projects. We have the Pit Stop with deliveries that are monitored and informed by containers that it makes our unloading in stores, the replenishing of the stores way better and we have some route intelligence way better. So we have the high-frequency project that increases the recurrence of the replenishment for some stores. And since we had more profound conversations with our vendors, the combination of those actions made us that we increased the lowest stock-out rate in our stores from our top 600 products that represent almost 50% of our sales. Another factor that positively impacted those indicators of same sales stores is the closure of stores with low sales and profitability performance. We analyze thoroughly the performance of each store, and we concluded that for those stores that even with all the changes and the new strategies would not achieve the positive results. So we go there and close the stores quickly. On the same page, we continue to execute our store network, store portfolio optimization strategy this quarter and we're considering the opening of new stores. So we are at the latest phase of selection for some locations to open new stores. So Americanas is coming back to the traditional brick-and-mortar, traditional retail, I mean, and seeking to optimize its operation. So let's talk a little about the financial part. I'm going to ask Camille to help me out here.

So let's move on to Slide #6. At the top of the screen, you see our consolidated net revenue for Q3 '24. It grew by 0.6%. So it's a different trend from the previous slides. That was the drop in GMV by 4%. The explanation lies in the mix change across channels and the tax impacts on gross revenue deductions. Moving to the bottom of the slide, you can see that we have a gross profit slightly above BRL 1 billion. That was 9.2% higher than Q3 '23. And we have also a growth in the gross margin that grew by 2.6 percentage points, presenting 32.4% of the net revenue of the quarter. It's important to emphasize that the gross profit in Q3 '24 was positively impacted by some extraordinary operational events. We had that in the first semester of the year, and we've mentioned that in the previous call. So in this quarter, we had the extemporaneous recovery of VPC of approximately BRL 47 million and the use of ICMS tax credits of approximately BRL 41 million that we also had in the first and second quarters of the year. So we remain focused on profitability and omnichannel integration and the positive performance results comes from the strategic initiatives that Leo mentioned before. And as they gain traction, they offer new potential for margin expansion. So we are moving confident, and we're going to keep seeing this expansion movement in our gross margin. Moving to Slide #7. Let's talk a little bit about SG&A and EBITDA. So we can see a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA for Q3 '24, totaling BRL 497 million for the payment of rent compared to the negative adjusted EBITDA of the Q3 '23 of BRL 269 million. So when you look at the first months of '24, this very adjusted EBITDA reached BRL 765 million compared to a negative EBITDA of BRL 1.2 billion in the same period of '23. Just, I'd like to remind you that this adjusted EBITDA for the quarter excludes revenue from recovery Independent Committee investigation. So this quarter excluded the revenue from a haircut applied in the payment to vendors, totaling BRL 106 million, resulting from the settlement of financial debts in July. We also excluded expenses of BRL 56 million in expenses related to the Judicial Recovery and investigations. And both expenses were accounted under some operating income and expenses category as we did in the semesters. The period EBITDA was benefited from extraordinary operational events such as the reversal of a write-off of ICMS tax credits totaling BRL 500 million, which with the change in the channel's sales mix is very likely to be used in the coming years. It was also impacted by the events mentioned in the previous slides when we talked about gross profit. And looking at the bottom of the slide, the SG&A expenses, excluding depreciation and amortization, totaled BRL 1.1 billion, a reduction of 2.3% when we compare to the same quarter of last year '23. The expenses represented 34.4% of the company's net revenue in the period, a reduction of 1 percentage point, 1 p.p. compared to Q3 2023. Looking at the first 9 months of '24, SG&A expenses represented 32.4% of the net revenue in the period. That is a significant reduction of 5.9 p.p. when compared to the 38.3% recorded in the first 9 months of '23. So it shows that the company continues to take important steps in restructuring its operational framework and reducing expenses. Let's move on to Slide #8. As Leo commented in the introduction, we can see that the evolution of our debt after the execution of the Judicial Recovery Plan. So the implementation of the Judicial Recovery Plan that began in March, but had important events in July, in just over 6 months, enabled a drastic reduction in our indebtedness. And this is the first balance sheet that we are disclosing with this restructured debt. So in Q3 '24, we completed the restructuring of the financial creditors, reducing our gross debt from BRL 45.2 billion that was our debt in June '24 to BRL 1.7 billion by the end of September '24. On this slide, we detail the main accounting movement that occurred, starting from the gross debt on June 30 and reaching gross debt on September 30. I'm not going to enter into further details because we talked about that in some different occasions. But I'd like to note that this movement includes only financial debt, and it does not include payments made to nonfinancial creditors, such as vendors, for instance. And we're going to show you the balance later. Gross debt on September 30 comprises of public debenture that we issued as BRL 1.6 billion. So we had a cash sweep of BRL 278 million that made the balance of this debenture in BRL 1.6 billion. And we have a debt of BRL 75 million from Grupo Uni.co, which is not being part of the recovery, was not restructured. So the total gross debt is BRL 1.7 billion with at least 95% of this total maturing in 4 to 5 years with a 2-year interest grace period. That's a characteristic of our debentures. So moving on to Slide #9. We show you our new capital structures, way that's leveraged, and it's maybe the most deleveraged in the sector. So we consider the gross debt presented on the previous slide, BRL 1.7 billion, and we deduct only cash. Cash plus receivables, we would reach a net debt position of BRL 635 million -- I'm sorry, deducting only cash. If I deduct cash plus receivables, we would reach a net cash position of BRL 482 million. So today we have more cash balance and receivables than we have financial debt. But as I said in the previous slide, we also have a commitment to settle debt with certain vendors who by choice are under the Judicial Recovery Plan, will be paid in up to 60 installments, and we started those payments in April '24. Total credits in this modality were installment payments for vendors were BRL 726 million, which when we brought to the present value add up to approximately BRL 510 million. Although this balance is classified under accounts payable, you're not going to see that in our financial debt, since it's not part of the normal operational movement of goods procurement for the company. We believe that it's more appropriate to include it in the financial leverage calculation. Americanas also has a commitment to pay creditors who chose to settle their debts through Restructuring Option I. That was an option with 70% discount in a single installment in 2039, or they opted for the General Payment Modality with an 80% discount in a single installment in January 2044. These debts, when we brought to present value, total only BRL 12 million in Q3 2024. And they are recorded under long-term liabilities. And, of course, here, we consider it more appropriate to include those obligations in the leverage calculation. So when we add those 2 Judicial Recovery liabilities to the financial debt of BRL 1.7 billion, we reached a total obligations of BRL 2.2 billion. After deducting the company's total cash resources, including cash and receivables, we ended September '24 with a financial obligations position plus remaining Judicial Recovery obligations equivalent to our cash and receivables balance. So we achieved 0 net debt, which is also great news and was aligned with our latest plan. So this is a neutral cash. So cash plus receivables is close to the debt of the company. So moving to Slide #10, we also comment another topic that we talked about in our latest earnings call. We had an idea to change our equity. So here, we present the evolution of equity from the end of Q2 '24, moving from a negative balance of BRL 30.4 billion to a positive balance at the end of our Q3 as of September 30 of BRL 5.7 billion, reflecting the implementation of the Judicial Recovery Plan of the company. This amount of BRL 5.7 billion is lower than the estimate shown in the latest earnings release due to the deferred IR -- income tax of BRL 4.1 billion. This is the fifth part of the graph here, and we had not included that in our previous analysis. It was a failure in our accounting here. But we are now including that. So this is our positive equity on September 30, 2024. So now I'll pass the floor back to Leo to detail our operational strategy.

Thank you, Camille. On this slide, we see the store that we've been using for the latest 18 months. And it was designed in 2024 and the first half of '24. The goal of working on the first pillar of like stop the crisis. Today, I think we can say that we walked really well in this pillar. So this first major block of our reconstruction strategy is not as relevant now as it was before. Completed the work of the Independent Committee of Investigation as well as the efforts taken by the Federal Prosecutor's office regarding what happened here. And from our side, with all those topics well investigated, we called General Meeting of Shareholders, extraordinary one, where one of the items on the agenda was the accountability of those responsible and the compensation for the damages caused to the company. Besides that, with the debt reprofiled, restructured, we can finally focus 100% of our efforts on the 2 pillars you can see here, which is generating cash and expansion. But for us to focus and adjust that focus on our new reality here, we changed the scheme of our store to embrace a new attack plan that is on the basis that's people and culture. So here, we needed to rebuild our team, and you could observe that we did it since the arrival of [indiscernible]. But along '24, since with the crisis, the company lost, we had to perform some layoffs in certain hierarchical levels. And we lost great executives. But we decided to strategically, Camille and I, we decided to be closer to the operations in the year '23 for us to feel the company and what was the performance and experience and better understand the structure of the company and managing brick-and-mortar and digital. So starting in Q2 2024, we continue on this reconstruction and then Eduardo Noronha arrives, and he comes to the VP of Management. Tiago Abate comes for the financial services, Paulo Drago as the CEO of Hortifruti da Terra, Fernando Soares as Operations VP, the COO, as we call it internally; and Renato Drumond, it was the last one to join us. He came as VP of Digital and Marketplace. The next slide, we show a little -- because remember that the base was people and values. But when it comes to values, we had to do in parallel of this reconstruction team. We had to revisit our culture to basically emphasize 2 main points. First, what kept us alive amid this crisis speaks volumes about our purpose. First, like we identified why people still came to Americanas in 2023, both in the brick-and-mortar and the digital channels, despite all the bad news that were broadcasting during 2023. Despite all the operational difficulties, they kept coming, they kept buying. So we didn't lose much performance in B&M. But when we entered further into detail, what made our customers to come and keep doing business with Americanas, we realized that it happened because Americanas is capable of making people's lives easier. So you could buy chocolate, shampoo, laundry, and we can also solve concrete problems like changing the products, buying some appliances like a blender. So this is the center of our purpose, to solve people's lives. So as a consequence of that, we revisited our values and it didn't change from the purposes we had. We're still being resilient. We want to make the right thing and generating impact on the society. So this updating and the redacting is important to show that we reinforce our purpose. And at the end of the day, the basis of the store is very, very, very solid. Our purpose was mirrored on our operations, and they're basically mirrored on these new 3 pillars. The first pillar, commercial one, the question that we have to answer is how Americanas solves people's lives when it comes to products and services. From this perspective, we have to guarantee to assure that the experience of our customer in our stores actually solves their lives. So we developed strategies of right products, map the journey to the categories that we identified and also the other categories in which we are competing, but not necessarily leading. So we start in '24 to develop a complementary product profile so that this journey is complete within the store. For example, let me illustrate that what I mean. If I had stores, if we sold only cell phones, it would not solve the lives of our customers. What do we do? We coupled the sales of plans of mobile -- the mobile plans, the accessories and also financial and products and insurance, for instance, and extended guarantee. So this composition is what we understand as the entire customer journey to solve its problems. And we're doing that much closer to our vendors because we understand that their participation is very relevant to understand the complete journey and to have like, of course, champion offer in the stores. We have many examples of success in this regard. We have some business plans with many vendors, over 40 of those vendors. And we plan the entire operation from the basics, like when we're going to sell and where, up to the most complex part, that is to study logistics and how we can offer and put the products in the right stores since we have over 1,600 stores. And we have to understand the client in the whole journey and how the client and customers relate to Americanas, and we can offer products increasingly tailored to its necessity. And we're going to have more credit products in the next quarter. The operational strategy, the pillar in the middle, the question is, how do we make the customers' life easier? It's way more centered in the stores. So we have a well-adjusted store, with the layout and planogram well adjusted. So a customer of Americanas that enter one of our stores in the Middle West needs to have the same experience of store when it goes to the south of the country, Northeast, Southeast, and the North. And we have to make it happen in a very common way, and we have 1,600 stores, and it's one of the challenges for Fernando as VP of Operations. In terms of financial efficiency, now that we have our structure of capital resolved, we have to ensure we keep making the best decisions on capital allocation, especially for us to grant that this work, we put the efforts we put in '23 and '24 are not lost by bad decision-making in the future. So this is the last issue that we have to address to achieve commercial efficiency and operational efficiency. The last pillar by restoring credibility is about recovering the corporate dialogue we had with the market, with banks, insurers, and present this new phase of Americanas. We have to go back to the industry associations and participating actively, get a strong voice as we usually had and resume discussions with regulatory agencies on matters that affect our businesses. So if we do our homework, we're going to keep growing financially, and we're going to restore the relevance that Americanas has built along 95 years of life. So the numbers are good, but the game is far from over and we didn't win. We have many challenges ahead. And this is how we work here. We have a long road ahead to unlock all the opportunities that we see here, single purpose that is to serve better our customers. It's a continuous process, but we are still confident in the transformation of Americanas into a lighter, simpler and especially for its customers, a more profitable company. And therefore, we keep here united and focused on keeping Americanas as a relevant part of the Brazilian people's lives. Thank you so much. I think we can move on to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Danniela, sell-side analyst at XP.

First question I have here is I'd like you to help me think on medium-term perspective. What's going to be the channel mix composition for the company? And what's the value proposal for each channel like brick-and-mortar and then digital online? Talking about brick-and-mortar, can you talk a little more about the pilot for the remodulation of the stores that you mentioned on the release so we understand it better. And my second question is about the dynamics of the EBITDA. This quarter, you had a positive EBITDA, but there was a nonrecurring impact. And I'd like to understand how we're planning to deliver a positive EBITDA in a more recurring way.

Thank you, Danny. Let me address the first 2 questions and then the third one related to EBITDA, Camille will answer that. Regarding the channel's mix, Americanas has faced this value proposition by offering the omnichannel integration, everything at the same time everywhere. This is a very bold proposal, but it's impossible to do. Now what we built during 2023 is to understand why the Americanas customer in the brick-and-mortar channel and the digital channel did not abandon Americanas during '23 with all the problems we had. And the answer I mentioned in previous calls about our indexes that we investigated. It was measured, and we saw relevant clues on why that happened. It happened fundamentally because of our traditional assortments. The assortments that go like to the chocolates and candies and going to hygiene and beauty, cleaning and household appliances, toys. So if you had to answer that in a simple way, I'd like to say that the value proposition of Americanas, that is to solve people's lives in our stores, goes to a very closer mix to the mix of the past that mixes a bit of indulgency of small values and a lot of consumption of items of relative low tickets, but very resilient to the crisis and very resilient when the customer is restricted in its purchasing power. So the expansion of the sales in our stores was a very robust growth, especially considering the moment of the Brazilian market today. Regarding the question about channels, we understand that what defines the channel is our customer. So therefore, we cannot be a complete retail in this business. We have a strong brick-and-mortar channel, and we're sticking from that physical brick-and-mortar strength, all the elements necessary to build digital that serves the necessities, that addresses the problems of our clients. So when I said about the strengthening of the O2O as one of our main initiatives, now let's say that's we have to grant that the inventory of our stores is available to our clients even coming from a pickup store or delivery strategy from the store. But complementing that portfolio, we are still having the same offer. Now regarding modulation of stores, here the design is a little more complex because we started at first bringing this structure of modulation in 5 clusters due to the size of the store. So we have like 14,000 SKUs, about 9,000 SKUs are fixed. They are in our stores all around the year and some are seasonal assortments like Easter items, Christmas items. And in those different clusters, those 5 clusters we had, because of the size of our stores, we selected what would fit in our stores. So smaller stores would have assortments connected to convenience, and our biggest stores, the assortment was connected to variety. What we did now, we moved on to the next step. We did a modulation and a replenishing of our stores based on 5 clusters, helped a lot in logistics efficiency. It was paramount at the first moment of '23. But on the other hand, it doesn't address the necessities of our clients in different locations we work. So we included different variables like income, [ CD ] the store serves and the size of the store category, what kind of assortments do these stores offer. But they need to be capable of integrating those more generic layout and understand the competitors around those clusters and what are the type of customers that live around the stores to be able to have an assortment way more adjusted to that customer. At the end of the day, we want to avoid sending the same amount of beach chairs to the stores of [indiscernible] and Copacabana to the store of Campos Do Jordao. So we have to fix it, right, that makes for us to be able to use every inch of our stores in the most efficient way. And the last question about EBITDA, I'll ask Camille to answer you correctly.

Thank you, Leo. I'd like to tell you, Danny, and to address another written question we received about EBITDA. If we exclude our sources of revenue, we still had a positive EBITDA. So I'm going to answer those 2 questions. So let's separate extraordinary results, recurring effects and what's operational and nonoperational. So we recognized some effects that we called as extraordinary. But they have operational nature. Everything that doesn't have an operational nature, we are purging from the adjusted EBITDA. So those are effects that are intrinsically connected to our operations. In fact, they are extraordinary. But we don't like to call them nonrecurring because they repeat, but they are not predictable. For example, recovery of extemporaneous VPC happened in the first half of the year, and it happened in this Q3. It might occur in future quarters. Value of the amount they vary and we cannot predict them. But the same with taxes. We had this ICMS issue. We have tax credits that were provisioned in the past, and we're about to get that and we predict that we're still having this effect in our results for a long time, at least for 1 to 3 years, we're going to have this positive impact. So those are impacts that impacted economically and financially the company. So this idea of nonrecurring, I don't like that label. They are more like occasional, but they have operational nature. But isolating that question, talking about the pure EBITDA at the operation without those extraordinary effects, if you purge the BRL 500 million from ICMS that we had this quarter, we would have an EBITDA negative of around BRL 250 million post payment of rents. Before payment of rents, it was neutral and after that, negative about BRL 250 million. But I think that if we have the same calculation for the first 6 months of the year and purge the extraordinary events on the first half, you would see that the EBITDA was more negative. And we have to take into consideration that in the first half of the year, we had the Easter event that is very profitable, very profitable for the company. And this third quarter is a bad quarter in terms of season. We don't have any big event. We don't use Easter, Black Friday and Christmas. So naturally, it would be a worse quarter, but it was better than the other quarters of the year. What shows us an evolution. We're going to the right way. We are running a marathon, not sprinting, but we are running a half-marathon at least. We have a long way ahead. But the important part is that we're showing evolution in the right way. We're increasing the revenue, delivering consistently, expanding our margins consistently and, as you can see, optimizing expenses, lowering the G&A. So we want to keep tracking and make this EBITDA -- the purely operational EBITDA positive from the daily operations without the extraordinary effects that took our EBITDA to this positive level in the quarter, being very transparent. We are still negative in this purely operational EBITDA, but we're evolving, going to the right direction.

Our next question is from [ Andre Pizzit ], an investor.

What's the CapEx of maintenance of the company?

We didn't have a CapEx slide this quarter because it was so low. But if you consider the first half CapEx, it was inferior to BRL 100 million. It's not bigger than that. So in fact, for the maintenance of our all the stores, portfolio, our business, this is the figures of our CapEx. We have a project that we have been mentioning in that market. That is the unification of our [ RP ] system. That's a big project for the company. But also, we didn't release any value guidance, but it's not going to make a difference in our CapEx. So you can use the first semester CapEx as a very conservative model for our business.

If I can add, if we're talking about the stores, [ Andre ], we closed over 100 stores since the relevant impact of January 11 of '23. But the stores that we closed, all the shelves and equipment comes back home and the ones that are in well shape, we use in different stores from this inventory of products and assets that we bring home. So for the stores, we have been very careful when using the assets from the closed stores. So it's going to be the same for the opening of new stores. So we're going to open our new stores using our shelves, the shelves we took from the closed stores.

Moving to our next question. It comes from [ Andrea Suarez ], buy-side analyst.

What was the cash in this third quarter and the expectation for the next quarter?

[ Andrea ], this is a tricky question for this quarter. It's complicated to talk about cash. As I mentioned in July and August, we had many stages of the Judicial Recovery Plan. So the capitalization of the company, liquidity of reverse auction, liquidity of Option II, option of restructuring. So some vendors gave us that line. So it's a very complicated cash dynamics. It's very hard to isolate the operating cash dynamics from the company's cash balance. I cannot do that right now. But from this fourth quarter, we'll be able to see the cash dynamics of the company without the Judicial Recovery effect because we concluded everything, we completed the last steps and everything you see about the movement of cash comes from the operation. For the future, we don't have a guidance, so I cannot tell you about the future dynamics predicted of generating and consumption of cash.

The Q&A session is now concluded. IR Department of Americanas S.A. is at your disposal, and we are moving the floor back to the company for the closing remarks. Please, Mr. Leonardo.

I would like to thank, again, everyone. First, I'd like to thank our customer and emphasize our commitment in recovering our capacity of enchanting and charming the crowd of customers in our stores and digital channels. I'd like to thank, as usual, all the internal teams and especially finance and accounting, by the balance sheet and the earnings release timely produced and the level of effort that you had put to write them. And I'd like to extend my thank you to the operation team, the commercial team's support of Hortifruti Natural da Terra [indiscernible] that you're putting in this new movement of the company and in the necessity we have of working strongly hard not to be shaken by the bad news and not to be euphoric by the good news. I'd like to thank also our Ame team that during this time still had big changes. They pivoted their strategic layout, strategic plan and they are still solid. Like I mentioned, the financial and credit services, we're going to have a more relevant position in our stores. And finally, I'd like to thank each one of our associates in our stores and in the distribution centers by the works of the quarter, especially for this rigorous and correct preparation they performed for the Black Friday and for the Christmas season. So we are ready for the latest quarter, for the last quarter of the year. That's a very important one. But we're still aware that we have a lot to do. So those are the closing remarks from the management of the company.

I thank all of you for your participation. Have a great day. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]