Americanas S.A. ($AMER3)

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for waiting. Welcome to the audio conference from Americanas S.A. So I highlight those on the simultaneous translation. We have this two available in the platform. Just click on the interpretation icon in the bottom of your screen, and please select your preferred audio English or Portuguese. For those who are listening to this in English, you can mute the regional audio in Portuguese. This future conference is being recorded, and it will be available in the Investor Relations part of outside of the company, where the full material for the earning calls will be made available. It's also position load of the presentation. [Operator Instructions]. We highlighted the information in these presentations and declarations that may be made during the video conference related to the business perspective, project. forecast and operational targets from Americanas. They are part of the beliefs and assumptions of the company. Future considerations are not guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may refer to future events, and therefore, depend on circumstances may not occur. Investors should understand the economical conditions, market conditions and other operation factors may affect the performance of the company in the future conduct the results that are different from those expressed in these future considerations. Today, we are here with the executive the company, Fernando Soares, the CEO; Sebastien Durchon, CFO; and the Director of Investor Relations. We will give the floor to the CEO of Americanas, who will start the presentation. Mr. Fernando, you may proceed.

Welcome. Good morning, everyone. I believe that we can go to the agenda. But first, I need to start this call sharing with you that it is a very special day. We are -- we registered the judicial proceedings recovery yesterday, which will go through the court, but this is a very special day with us. The all the aisles, all the rooms in our headquarters here was in a different mood. And I am bringing this bringing forward this discussion because everyone will talk about the three pillars that led us to bring forward this decision. The first is, which is part of our registration yesterday that will be we follow all the obligations we had in the plan. Then I will talk about more of this later. We also executed a transformation plan that was very relevant in the company from the operational perspective and also strategic. And the third which is a little of the content of material that will go into detail of the figures later. As we ended 2025 with consistent very consistent figures. I would like to go ahead and say cash bigger than the debt positive net result and a better operational much higher. So it is really important. It is a year closing, there is very symbolic for us, and I would like to thank everyone. And then now even more to all the members, all the employees, everyone who is in our stores in our office, in our regionals. I also like to thank the leadership of the company, including Leo Coelho, who started this plan some years ago, mainly our consumers every day in our store, many of them, many of them, helping us transform the company. Our Board and also our suppliers and partners, which have supported us and will continue supporting us in this moment of reconstruction of the company. Having said that, I would like to start with the first slide which highlights what is this new company. It is very important to start getting used to this new structure. In 2022, we were a company half our digital, half physical, and this company operated in a very independent way, had different strategies, distinct strategies and isolated investment. Who knows our offices in here, they were also separated office. We had a very -- had operational structure, logistical operation that were on, we had our fintech, which with a very strong strategic to retain our clients in the digital channel, which is a very common channel in retail. This company transformed completely to this graph that is in the middle of the screen started being a physical store, having the store as in the center of our plan. And the main point of contact to potentialize our relationship with the customers. The structures now are integrated. The strategies are converging, and we follow the same purpose of value. The physical store, it is the core of our business. The digital complements giving our customer more availability. We have redone the whole business, and we have reduced the marketplace with having strategic partnerships. We don't have anymore. We have another service platform. We have -- we repositioned our brand. And now we are working with a lot of financial discipline or operational focus. And we will transform all of this in an agenda of reconstruction in the future. We talked about this in the last call. We're going to reinforce and follow up this plan is a 100-year plan of sustainable growth. So I will give the floor to [ Sebastien ], who will -- and then I will come back to this strategic talking at the end of the talk.

So thank you so much. I will start highlighting some figures to understand better how it is the Americanas today. Last year, we sold a little bit more of BRL 16 billion in the physical, most in the physical, as Fernando said, and an expressive growth of almost 8%, but I wanted to highlight this figure. So we have around 1,500 stores in all the states in the country. And I think we are the only company who can do this, and we have the contact of millions of clients. I would have over 40 million clients in our base of active clients. Fernando talked about the members, 26,000 employees all over the country. We have -- we reduced just last year, our accumulated our expenses. And with all of that, we were able to reach an EBITDA adjusted of BRL 1.1 billion. And all the -- and the IFRS with the rent, of course, we have BRL 277 million, which is an improvement of BRL 169 million compared to 2024. He mentioned a very important point in the capital structure to go into detail later. But we closed last year with a cash positioning. We had more available cash than the sum of all the debt in the company and going a little bit further in the Slide 5 to talk about sales. To start with the last quarter of last year. Most people know that the market situation was a quarter that was very complicated, with several retailers having the results saying that the same-store was negative growth. We were able even with this complicated market, we were able to grow in almost 3% comparing to same-store sales. And in the whole year performance, very robust 7.8% increase year-to-year and highlight also that looking at the sales in this retail, or our sales grew 13%, much higher in the same store compared to the company. The magic of work -- deep work was done of transformation of the structure of our business and many stores reduced the sales sector made a whole work of optimization, we were able to improve the sales higher than the growth of sales of all the company. And the same store, it's worth highlighting that is much higher than the inflation, 0.34% above inflation. And going to the Slide #6 to the gross profit, the consequence -- the logical consequence of the evolution of the company, we have a consistent growth of our margin and 13.4% in the whole year. You can observe that this growth of the gross profit represents 96% of the sales of the company. You can observe that the margin was higher than the growth of our sales. And this means that we were able to besides increasing sales, we were able to improve very much the gross margin of the company. And looking at the whole year, we improved 2.2% in this indicator. And talking about sales, we're going to detail in the Slide 7, the expenses of the company. Looking last year, we had a reduction considerable in the last, especially in the last semester of the year, where we took a lot of decisions of optimization of the cost structure of the company. And this in this last quarter of the year, we did not capture 100% of the effect of the optimization done, so there will be -- it's a partial effect of this optimization of last year, and this will appear in 2026. And over 20% year-to-year, that's 6% of improvement of net sales of the company. EBITDA in Slide 8. I brought both concepts adjusted that we can see directly in our financial demonstrations in and we were able to increase the -- in the P&L, right? And we were able to see the effect of IFRS 16 considering the rent of the companies. We had a growth even more impressive. We increased an EBITDA of BRL 277 million against BRL 108 million in the year before. And made a bridge on the right side to understand better the evolution year-to-year because we have in the variation of the EBITDA of the company. Two effects, very distinct, the first effect is that we talked about in the beginning of this presentation that there is and operational improvement, very big BRL 770 million improvement and in this adjusted EBITDA, we also had some effects that -- and the volume reduced a lot in 2025. This represents a negative variation of BRL 600 million. So in this variation, of improvement of EBITDA. We have BRL 800 million improvement. In the next slide, the net result of the company we show the operations. You know that we have two companies in the process of sales, so this sale will happen as we finish this recovery, judicial recovery procedures yesterday, and then focusing the part of the company that we continue Americanas, the net result of this year was positive of BRL 98 million. We did this bridge that it is on the screen that it's worth remembering that in 2024, we approved our recovery plan and as the agreement that was closed in that time, we knew -- we saw a lot of cut in debt. So taking this effect of the result to 2024, of BRL 13 million plus the impact we adjust this one-off that happened in 2024. The net result of our continued operation, it was in 2024 negative of BRL 182 million. So looking the EBITDA, and we have BRL 160 million growth, and we look at the net result, we have even bigger growth of BRL 280 million. In the 10th slide. Here, I summarize the last 2 years just to show the evolution a very clear result of company transformation that Fernando mentioned in the beginning. I will talk about each indicator, but looking at sales, 7.8% same stores 15% -- almost 15% last year's expressive growth of over 20%. The margin of the company improved, reached 27%. We reduced the expenses of the company. And all of this, we have, as a consequence, have an improvement of BRL 3.7 million of the EBITDA in the company. In the 11th slide, to talk about the capital structure. As I mentioned in the beginning, we had a have a net cash situation in the right part of the slide, we had a negative we had -- looking a little bit better. In the end of last year, we had a gross debt, our debentures below, you can see with interest represent total net of BRL 2 billion. We had BRL 1 billion in cash available, BRL 1.4 billion in receivables. And then we presented here the liabilities from the recovery period. So we pay every month. We have paid over half of it. We have this debt remaining of BRL 442 million. Adding all of this we have this net cash position. In the Slide 12. Here, we see the cash flow of the last 12 months. The left is the position that we had in the end of 2024, BRL 2.8 billion. And then on the right, the position in the end of 2025. So this evolution, the first point is that we had some variations of discount. In 2024, we did not have taken the decision to sell HNT and these cash of these two companies were in the position in the cash of the company. And on the other hand -- on the other side, it was being considered a discontinued -- and we changed along 2025. So HNT left, another line of discontinued operation in year 2, and the digital came back. So from a starting point of BRL 3 billion and the valuation through several effects had the consumption of cash that is small of BRL 200-something million. This is worth highlighting the regroup that was done last year at work of improving the working capital, which we benefited the cash, BRL 335 million released through this work and this work will continue in 2026. And we had an investment. We took a decision to invest in the stores, in our system, a little bit more BRL 200 million last year. We had several segments that were extraordinary, a recognition of PIS and COFINS of BRL 200 million. And we took the decision that made a lot of sense from the liabilities that we closed the transaction with PGFN and then the [ BRL 125 million ] in cash and we paid according to the recovery proceedings installments of BRL 250 million. And again, we closed the year with a cash the net cash position positive. So these results that I wanted to talk about in detail. And now I will -- Fernando, he has already talked about the -- that is a very important milestone for us. So in Slide 14, you talk about this request yesterday that we made to leave this recovery proceedings and our Chapter 11. And it's important to say that happened in a very short cycle compared to other process that are similar. It happened in 2 years, which is the minimum deadline and it was an obvious decision for us for several clear reasons that I will remember here. We followed all the obligations of the plan. And it was from this perspective that it was a different recovery plan. We paid off most of our suppliers cash since March 2024 and the suppliers are the ones that are being paid installed and the ones that we have the suppliers that were still paying installment, this will end 2028. So through several decisions, we strengthened the base of our stores. And also the digital, so the results that I just mentioned in 2025, we have a sustainable growth achieved with this transformation, this deep transformation of the company. One highlight was more this operational improvement in the last 2 years. of savings, BRL 2 billion savings captured in the last 3 years. And this permanent achievement of improved operational results, and this will continue. And highlighting all of this, we closed the year with a cash position -- net cash position positive with a lot of visibility even with a very high interest scenario that we still have. And due to all these reasons that we decided to go ahead with this request to leave the judicial recovery proceedings. And we trust that we -- in the future, and it's a way to once more to make a declaration of commitment of the company with the employees clients and suppliers. And now I will give the floor back to Fernando to talk about the strategy of the company and the future that we have ahead.

Thank you so much. As you said very well, in the second block, we talk about the future and where we're going. So moving on to the next slide. We already had in the end of 2024, taken a decision, very important as the store as the core business we have, the main connection to our customers. And so since the half of last year, we've been working a lot, we have done over 10 million interviews with our consumers. So we started drawing what will be our plan of 100 years. Internally, we like to say that we are only 96 years old, but we're very happy to start preparing what will be this birthday of 100 years. So a very important point in this strategy that is a detail that is an internal detail, but I will be happy to share is that we understand that it's an element of differentiation. And I want to share with you what is this differentiation point that we are using here in the next slide. AMER stands for reminds us that our employees is that in the first place, we value the diversity and the polarity of our people. and also in the background, trained people, motivated people taking care of our operations, we have changed our gene to take care of our teams means merchandise it reminds us how important is our business since 1929, buying, selling with a good price promotion and taking care of curating the diverse range of our products. So I remember very well buying CDs DVDs in Americanas stores and it remembers excellence, operational excellence. It's a pillar that we worked hard for in 2025. It's a continuous improvement. We really work hard we know that we still -- we have a lot of opportunity to work and improve our operations. And the last R., which is a new pillar and really important for us, R stands for relationship, building a deep relation, the positive impact transparency and trust and R stands for the way that we have to keep the relationship with our customers, with our suppliers and internally among the teams. And this one way of will push our business forward, our plan forward. We are living this dynamic in 2025, but we are really excited and intensifying this for the next years. So moving on to the next slide, please. Having said that, we're going to go to the center with our stores, our customers our AMER way and our 100-year plan. And we have chosen these great avenues of growth, once more, most of them continuous. The transformation of our stores, the transformation of our diversity of products. Our Americana ads also and also the pillar of consumer growth that involves our digital and financial services. Today, I've chosen to highlight three points. I will talk about store transformation. And the variety of our products. So the transformation has already started. Looking at the we have this same-store sales growth and this has been able to -- I would like to highlight beverage with a significant growth and cleaning products new lines of products and for 2026, we're giving even more relevant to what Americanas is really well known for, operates well with our events. And we are 9 days from Easter, which is very important for us. And a lot of that has happened this year. It still has a lot to happen. So when we go to stores, it's nice to share that we had three new stores opening. We have opened Belém, Aquiraz and Camaçari. We have one more launch for April. 54 of our stores have gone through a process of optimization. We will continue doing this dynamic. You have notice that it was mentioned last week, a partnership with Wepink, a very important partnership. We have others to be announced in the next month. It enjoys our sour movement in the store, but also the positioning of the categories that we work with, so it gives even more consistency to our diversity of products and so we are very happy with this. And we have much more to say in 2026 to '27 and '28. I would like to also share with you that we have a business unit that is new one, which is Americanas ads. We're looking at this as an opportunity that is very big for the industry for our suppliers to build a relationship, a real relationship with our consumer. We are -- we've been talking a lot about the new retail, how much digital and physical complement each other how the consumer wants to have a retail where they can have an experience, you know, scrolling in the real world go through the shelves, talk about convenience, finding a sale finding something that they will find, they will give themselves a nice gift and the Americanas has the potential to bridge this gap and deliver this in a very nice way to the suppliers and the industry. Over 800 cities. We are the -- we have -- we are the retail with the biggest number of followers in the social media over 40 categories and adding physical and digital, 95 million visits. So we have a great potential. We started working. We made an event with the industry in -- we have a lot of motivation along the year. It's an avenue of growth, not only for us, but also to our partners. But no doubt, it's a great differential for our consumers in stores. Once more, one more slide. The last I'd like to highlight, we talk about this year, is consumer and growth that talks about digital as we have our credit card, over 500,000 cards. We have the CRM has been -- has got some boost. So we have 36 million identified clients. We've been using this base very well. It has an improvement performance of over 200% and we know our customer in each store in Brazil. We have the loyalty program, again, Client A. Client A program has no sales directed to the client. It's 3x bigger, the expenditure of each client in this program and in our checkout, we can already pay with this loyalty program. So it's a new way to have this relationship with our consumer. We are launching our credit. In some regionals, we have some possibilities of 10 installments for purchases and the new digital that is part of the store, which is pick up in the store and also shipping is growing a lot. We had a quarter-to-quarter growth of 11%. 97 of the stores already are active with this, americanas.com that has this partnership with Magalu. I'd like to highlight some of our stores in this new part of our digital has a digital penetration of over 20%. And we are convicted that this new digital is part of the future and delivers a need that our consumer was already asking for a long time. And moving on to the next slide. So the next one, this is being responsible, socially responsible. So our transformation, thinking about the future operational excellence in parallel to this, not doing our role, which has always been really well done. We are members of the [ Instituto Mover ]. We have our we have -- this is a very active pillar for us, and will continue being so. And now going to the closing, I brought for you to see in the last slide what was the theme of our convention. So this declaration of future that we're making today started in the last -- in our last earnings call, we had the opportunity to do with the whole team to live this AMER way that I mentioned some slides ago, and the team was very appropriate, very suitable Americanas back to the future. We reflected about this with our team that we needed to respect and learn with the past, live intensely the future -- the present and then build our future. And this is our mentality. 2025 was no doubt a very hard working year, a lot of discipline. We took decisions that were very difficult, but we took them in the right time. We were able to transform our business while following our recovery of proceeding plans. So this is a declaration of commitment. We will follow our -- this mentality. We know that we still have a lot of challenges ahead. and a lot of opportunities ahead. And now we are guided through a vision of the future, a sustainable growth for the next several years. 2025 was a very special year. Yesterday was a milestone for our business, but we are aware that we are very humble of our responsibility to keep building a future of this company that is so dear but by us, by our employees, by our suppliers and by our consumers. Thank you so much. for sharing the results of 2025 and the plans for 2026 with all of you, and let's move on to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] First question was sent by an investor. Initially, congratulations to everyone for your recovery plan that is ongoing. My concern has been the fall in the base of clients reported month-to-month. How can you revert to this scenario? The stores are very well organized. But with a restricted movement, especially in the key date of the year, how to expand this base? And leaving the recovery plan, this brings more credibility. How can you bring these institutional investors closer to the company?

It is -- so I will start by the question about the client base so you're right, within absolute numbers, it has fallen in 2025. We closed this work of transformation we had to close with 300, 300 stores more or less. So obviously, had an impact in this base of clients. We were not able to keep these customers with the closest store. So this has to do with the transformation now in a different context. We don't have a massive closing of stores. We are the normal gain. Sometimes some stores will happen, but it won't be something expressive. So this effect will not impact the in the future. We started opening some stores. We opened three already this year, and this will revert this effect. Another answer that I would like to say mentioned what Fernando said, all the work of CRM that is being done and it's a recent reconstruction. This will help the growth in the digital in this moment, our digital 2025 represents a 4% of total sales of the business. So with an expressive growth that we have in this digital in this moment, we will have other ways of capture clients. So our expectation from now on, I'm not saying that will be immediate but is to see this number start growing again in the following months. And then thank you so much for the question and complementing a lot of marketplace strategy that we showed in the first graph with company structure that is completely different the marketplace has a client base that is relevant. It is not the same client base that was in the store. But what I wanted to say this point how to extend this business, this client base, and it is part of our strategy of consumer growth, that these are added service, especially Cliente A. Cliente A, it shows -- it makes our consumer spend 3x more, so it's something very important in the strategy. And knowing that we have a client base is very big. Our role is to make sure that they have ticket expenditure and visiting the stores. So new clients is always really welcome. But the base improved the frequency and ticket. And then it's an assortment and service. But thank you for the opportunity to compliment with this. And I believe there was -- so the second question is a theme that is very interesting. The talk of the company with the investor. Even with the request that we made yesterday to leave the recovery. So it is -- it's part of our agenda in the company to look for the next month, this to bring this closer relationship with analysts and investors.

The next question was sent by Angelo, believing the future of the company, do you -- are you planning to make partnership with Amazon in the Mercado Livre?

Angelo, on. We are open to any opportunity that address a gap of our consumer. Everything that we're drawing here, part of this view, what can I maximize in our store base, the journey of our consumer of our customer experience, so when we make a partnership with IP, we bring a digital brand to the physical world. We also have our stores as an important asset as the marketplace needs 1,500 places of delivery in Brazil. I believe so. I think there is space for partnership but they have to go through the center that we chose to work, which is consumer in the store. We made this amount with Magalu and you can buy and you can pick up in the store and can receive through Magalu. So there's a lot of possibilities. But always, we remember this view. So whatever maximizes the assets in the store and more customers.

Our next question from Luis [ Geha ]. Is it possible Americanas reach a gross margin of 35% and EBITDA at 7% to 10%. These margins will make the company change levels.

Luis from I can agree with you from a mathematical perspective, but let me explain how we think here. So gross margin is very delicate point. Our greatest objective here is not to reach a gross margin of specific percentage points. What we want is to grow our margin because that will pay the expenses of the company and leaves a greater EBITDA in the PLL. So it's a very sophisticated game. So we increased the price is easy, but the client doesn't like that. And our positioning with the client is a position of a very competitive price. So we are improving and we do this with a lot of very cautious and showing a lot of trust in the lines of work. So it's part of our objective to improve this gross margin, but always trying to find an optimization in reducing the losses, for example, in this line of work that in our point of view, doesn't make sense to lose this competitiveness with our client, increasing prices.

So the Q&A session is over. I would now like to give the floor to the company for the final considerations.

I'd like to thank all of you for being part of this earnings call and later on to have the first quarter is almost finishing. So soon we'll talk again see later, count on us, count on our commitment, our team and see you next time.

The audio conference of Americanas S.A. of the fourth quarter result, 2025 is now over. I wish everyone a great day. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]