Casino, Guichard-Perrachon S.A. (CO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the First Quarter 2021 of Casino Group Conference Call. I now hand over to Mr. David Lubek, Chief Financial Officer of Casino Group. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for attending our quarterly results conference call. I hope you are all remaining safe and well. This time last year, our Q1 2020 conference call took place during a stringent lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. A lot has changed in the year. All companies have had to adapt to a new environment. With the rollout of the vaccine campaigns, we can start to envision a return to normal in the coming quarters. Of course, we must remain prudent, and the future remains uncertain, but we can already draw lessons as to how we fared during this crisis, our current situation and our future perspectives. In short, we are coming out of this period in significantly better shape, as shown in our Q1 results today. This is a result of our strategic positioning, the speed at which we acted and the total dedication of our teams. Compared to a year ago, I would sum up our situation in 3 key assessments: first, our operations are much more profitable; second, our financial situation has clearly improved; and third, our growth opportunities in the most attractive segments of the market are bright. We are now set for clear leadership in the group's areas of excellence and are best placed to take advantage of the key megatrends in our relevant markets. First, we are much more profitable. Group EBITDA increased by 21% year-on-year at constant exchange rates, with France and Latin America both contributing to this improvement. Let's start with France. EBITDA grew plus 19% over the quarter, and EBITDA after rent payments was up 372%. These are very pleasing numbers, explained by 2 key achievements, which were already seen in Q3 and Q4 2020. First, strong efficiency plans in our stores. As mentioned during our full year results, our hypermarkets are now profitable, and all the other banners have reached an excellent level of profitability. We have made the most of technology to streamline our operations. Automated checkout, sales scanning and digital couponing have all been implemented, and we are adding the rollout of leading-edge AI technologies to monitor shrinkage and products availability. All of these have contributed to sustained cost savings, while also improving our customers' experience, as we can see from NPS improvements across all our banners since the beginning of the year. Second, extremely strong and profitable growth at Cdiscount. The marketplace revenues and digital marketing, both growing 43% during the quarter. We are very pleased with how Cdiscount has performed since the beginning of the pandemic, and I will return to discuss Cdiscount in more detail later on. So both our brick-and-mortar operations and Cdiscount have contributed to this strong increase in EBITDA in France. In addition, food e-commerce has grown plus 38% over 1 year and plus 97% over 2 years. This is structurally profitable growth, powered by our exclusive partnerships with 2 key players, Ocado and Amazon. This is a unique edge, and it positions us very well for future growth. A few comments on sales in our brick-and-mortar stores. As was expected, Q1 sales showed a decline compared to Q1 2020, which was an exceptional quarter. In March 2020, we faced unprecedented demand, especially in our urban and proximity formats, with consumers stocking up at the beginning of the first lockdown, leading to a surge of plus 6% in like-for-like over that quarter and double-digit growth in our proximity stores. Sales have normalized in Q1 2021, and we saw a temporary reduction of inhabitants and tourists in the Paris area and also temporary restrictions on our store operations during the latest lockdown. This decline in sales makes our EBITDA growth more impressive with EBITDA margin up 130 bps over the quarter. Looking forward, we expect sales growth to resume when we start to lap a more normalized comparative period and when we start to see the impacts of our expansion plans in proximity formats. We expect this to be as soon as this summer. We're already making good progress on our expansion plan with 115 stores opened over the quarter, 15% more than in our targets. Our target for Q2 is 200 more stores, and we are confident on our ability to deliver. Our proximity stores in Monop', Franprix, Vival, Naturalia, Casino Shop are very attractive to franchisees and quick to deploy in attractive settings. Now a few words about Latin America, which also contributed to our profitability growth. Both Assaà and GPA have just published their Q1 results, and I encourage you to refer to their detailed publications. I will highlight the key takeaways. In short, this was again a strong quarter for both companies, with combined EBITDA growing plus 32% from BRL 1.2 billion to BRL 1.6 billion. All of this in the context of the pandemic, which has proven particularly difficult in Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay. This overall context makes their performance even more remarkable. Sales growth was again high in Brazil, with organic growth at plus 12.1%. This includes a strong dynamic in cash & carry with Assaà posting plus 21%. At GPA, some of our key assets also performed very well. Proximity store sales were up plus 38% and online delivered an impressive plus 137%. One last comment on LatAm. The spin-off of Assaà was very well perceived by the market. Since the announcements of the spin-off of AssaÃ, the combined listed value of both company has increased from BRL 62 per share to BRL 125 per share or USD 12 per share to USD 23 per share, since they are also listed in the U.S. This has resulted in an increase of the value of our stakes from EUR 1.1 billion to EUR 2.1 billion, over EUR 9 per Casino share of additional value. In our view, this is just the beginning. We are excited by the prospects for both companies, which we consider as strategic assets. Assaà is the only pure cash & carry company in Brazil and the fastest growing by far over the past 10 years. GPA owns a unique combination of premium stores, such as Pão de Açúcar in Brazil and Carulla Fresh in Colombia; hypermarkets attuned to customer needs, such as Éxito Wow; strong supermarket brands, such as Mercado Extra and Compre Bem; and a clear advance in online capabilities. We see lots of potential for further performance and further increase in the value of both our stakes over the next years. Now getting to the second points on my assessment. We are not only much more profitable. We also have a much stronger financial situation. With the improvement of our results and constant discipline on cash flow management, our debt reduction has accelerated. Net debt reduction over 1 year, including TRS unwinding, has reached EUR 715 million at the end of March. That is EUR 150 million better than at the end of December 2020. Over 1 year, our gross debt-to-EBITDA ratio in March has decreased by 1.2 turns of leverage from 6.8 to 5.6x. The credit market has taken notice of the dynamics of the last few quarters. We have successfully refinanced our EUR 1.2 billion 2024 Term Loan B, cutting its costs by almost 1/3, while extending its maturity by 18 months. We have regained full success to the unsecured debt market with the cost of funding in our latest unsecured issuance that is lower than the initial cost of funding on our secured debt. We remain fully committed to financial discipline, cash flow generation and further reduction of our leverage. Inventory management remains a daily focus of our teams with added inputs from the latest available technologies, including artificial intelligence. Our CapEx is well managed, and our exceptional cash costs are decreasing, in line with the finalization of our transformation plans. One other important factor that has been noted by the credit markets. Our key assets have been strongly increasing in value. This gives us a lot of options for the completion of our EUR 4.5 billion disposal plan in France and various opportunities to turbocharge the growth of 2 of our star assets at this stage, Cdiscount and GreenYellow. This leads me to the third part of our assessment. We are ideally positioned to take advantage of secular megatrends to boost our growth. We have identified these market trends for a number of years now, and the pandemic crisis has made them even more relevant. I will stress 4 of these key trends. The first one is customer need for immediate service in food retail. This means proximity to the customer for brick-and-mortar stores and a seamless experience in online food delivery. We have both. We have proximity, of course, with our unique mix of brands from Franprix to Vival, and including Monop', Naturalia, Casino Shop, Spar, Casino Supermarkets, and our new formats such as Casino in# toutprès and Casino Bio. We have all the right tools to grow fast in our franchise model. Our banners have been collecting awards from best franchise and best [ super ads ] for Franprix to most recently, the recognition of Naturalia as Benefit Corporation. First in the French food retail market due to its strong ESG commitments and customer transparency. Owning such a portfolio of brands allows us to adapt to local needs, both for franchisees and customers. It allows for faster and more efficient expansion. We expect this expansion to accelerate starting from 115 stores in Q1 to at least 200 in Q2. This will deliver significant growth in our sales. We also have an edge in online food delivery. As mentioned before, we have 2 key partners in this market, Ocado and Amazon. Our logistics warehouse is already running at EUR 100 million per year, with sales in Q1 up plus 166% compared to Q3 2020. Its full capacity is EUR 500 million per year. Beyond this first warehouse, we are already thinking about further expansion of our Ocado operations. As for our partnership with Amazon Prime Now, it has become even stronger, with Monoprix now the only provider of express food delivery on Amazon app in the Paris area and 4 other key big cities. This is a clear recognition of the excellence of our model, and it allows us to extend our reach to new customers. There is also a connection between these 2 key trends, Proximity and online. A dense network of Proximity stores allows for various last-mile solutions, building on our leadership in our key geographical areas. We have extended partnerships, most recently with Uber Eats, 500 stores planned by Q3, coming on top of our operations with Deliveroo and Shopopop. We have rolled our click and collect and home delivery apps in all our banners, including Franprix, where online sales have been growing triple digits. This gives our customers lots of different options and allows for various ways to reach new customers. Online and proximity both correspond to the structural needs of today's customers. We are ideally positioned to grow on both these channels in a synergistic way. The second trend is the shift to technology and data management in retail. We have a real advantage here being the first mover in this space. 63% of our sales in hypermarkets and 53% in supermarkets are now done either through cell checkout or through all smartphone apps. We have successfully streamlined our front office, and we are now rolling out solutions for our back office as well with the use of artificial intelligence tools to monitor inventory, shrinkage and layout optimization. We have put in place personalized couponing and data monetization through advertising with RelevanC. This is a clear driver of improved profitability and cash management. It is also a boost for top line growth. The tools that we have used to improve our customers' experience and optimize our promotional management can now be sold to other companies. RelevanC already provides search services and has moved decisively this quarter with 3 key developments. The first one is a partnership with Unify, the digital arm of Group TF1, giving access to 26 million profiles. The second is the acquisition of Inlead, a technological platform that will allow RelevanC to complete its offer to small and medium businesses in any country. The third one is our digital partnership with Intermarché, which will greatly enhance RelevanC's offer to suppliers. We have been talking more RelevanC recently. Their retail media activity has grown 50% year-on-year in Q1. As you remember, they were already strongly profitable with EUR 18 million of EBITDA in full year 2020, and they are just starting their journey as a B2B company with software as a service component. We are particularly excited about RelevanC. We expect them to become as important in their own field as Cdiscount and GreenYellow, 2 other previous start-ups that have grown to fully fledged leaders in their respective markets. This brings me to the third trend, the accelerated transition to online in nonfood retail where Cdiscount is ideally positioned. Cdiscount has delivered another fantastic quarter with excellent growth in its key areas of focus. First, the marketplace. Marketplace revenues grew plus 43%, reaching EUR 197 million over the last 12 months. Cdiscount's ecosystem of 13,000 vendors and the 100 million SKUs is driving the success along with its top-quality logistics facilities, which helps expand express delivery for third-party vendors. Fulfillment by Cdiscount, where Cdiscount ships the goods for the vendors, ensuring a reliable service to the customer, also increased plus 43%. This is a virtuous circle by which more vendors and SKUs bring more customers, which in turn attract more vendors. Second, digital marketing. As you all know, digital marketing is a strong growth component of any serious online company today. Cdiscount has clearly accelerated on this front, with Cdiscount Ads Retail Solution, CARS, a 100% self-care advertising platform, enabling both sellers and suppliers to promote their products and brands. Other features include the recent launch of Google shopping campaign management for suppliers and marketplace sellers, all of this leading to plus 43% year-on-year growth. Third, Octopia, our turnkey marketplace solution. Octopia offers ready-to-operate services to international retailers and e-merchants. It includes all 4 key elements needed to operate a successful marketplace: products as a service, merchants as a service, tech solutions and fulfillment as a service. Octopia is the only player in the market to fully handle those 4 assets. It is a unique value proposition to address the e-commerce market in Europe, with 900,000 websites at a EUR 600 billion market that is growing fast. Octopia's growth in Q1 was plus 86%. As you can see, capturing just a small part in that EUR 600 billion market would transform Cdiscount's business profile, and our teams have embraced this challenge. Overall, the pandemic has accelerated the transformation of Cdiscount's market and the transformation of Cdiscount itself. As mentioned in our recent communication, this opens up new possibilities, including potential market operations. This could help strengthen Cdiscount's leadership and also crystallize some of its hidden value. It is too soon to give any more detailed comment. At this stage, I can only stress that as much as Cdiscount has already delivered, we see a lot more potential looking forward since you have the right tools to address an extremely attractive B2B market. The fourth trend is the energy transition that we all need to face in the challenge against climate change. Ambitious decarbonization goals, including net zero targets, have been set by countries and corporates alike. The 2 main drivers of this transition are: first, energy efficiency solutions; and second, the development of renewables. Within renewables, the highest growth segment is solar power and especially decentralized solar power, which is set to grow exponentially. Renewables position at the heart of this decentralized energy transition. It addresses its diversified corporate customer base with its unique model, combining energy saving solutions and self-consumption based on decentralized solar production. In a decentralized world, what matters is the right access to customers through the right combined offer, and GreenYellow has both with its unique model. Q1 numbers again confirmed its strong momentum with the acceleration of its pipeline of solar projects to 720 megawatts compared to 565 megawatts at the end of Q4 and a pipeline of additional opportunity at 2.5 gigawatts. The energy efficiency solutions pipeline is now at 355 gigawatt hours, with a pipeline of additional opportunities at 600 gigawatt hours. GreenYellow is now shifting to a green IPP model. Instead of selling its assets to fund its growth, it will hold the assets to generate long-term recurring revenues and cash flows. To fund its growth, we are looking, as recently mentioned, at various options to raise additional equity, which could include market operations. The teams involved are particularly enthusiastic with this new phase. At this stage, it is too soon to give any more detail, but we will, of course, inform the market in due time. As with Cdiscount, we believe there is a lot of hidden value in this company. Let me conclude before we turn to the Q&A. Casino is first and foremost a food retail company with a very distinct positioning on a number of brands at the forefront of customer satisfaction. It is also much more than that. Our DNA is constant innovation and the ability to grow companies from small operations to leaders in their field. We did that in Brazil with AssaÃ, which went from a BRL 3.5 billion company to a BRL 40 billion company. We did it with Cdiscount, which started as a small website with less than EUR 1 million of turnover and is now set to become a leader of the marketplace business in Europe. We did it with GreenYellow, which was an internal start-up designed to help us optimize our energy costs and is now a leader in the decentralized energy transition. And we are doing it with RelevanC, which we started as an in-house team and which is now turning into a software company. The pandemic has been a challenge for us, as for others. As shown in our Q1 results, we were well prepared, well positioned and ready to adapt our model even faster. So to make it clear [ online ], we now have, first, an excellent level of profitability; second, a much stronger financial position; and third, all the levers in place for sustained and profitable high growth in our key priorities within and beyond food retail. Casino, in short, is extremely well positioned to take advantage of the new environment in which we operate. Thank you for your attention. I'm now ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have a first question from Andrew Gwynn from Exane BNP Paribas.

Two questions, if I can. So obviously lots and lots of detail on the growth initiatives. But coming back to the call. The retail business, obviously, some pretty soft performances. I appreciate obviously the tough base. But I'm just wondering if you can pull out perhaps what kind of ex COVID performance might have been? I know that the Brazilian business did that. I appreciate that's very, very challenging, but just give us a better idea of the underlying performance, reasons for some of the optimism that's coming from here. And actually, indeed, on that optimism, I think back to last year, I think in the first quarter, actually, it was a period where you felt that profit growth was going to be very, very good. And actually, as it happened, the first half was, in the end, quite disappointing. So to what extent -- or how confident are you that the strong growth -- profit growth we've seen in the first half -- or first quarter, sorry, can continue into Q2?

Thank you, Andrew. Well, first, on the commercial performance, there are 2 things here to mention. If you look at the different banners, Monoprix and Franprix over 2 years are growing, 2.4% Franprix, 2.3% Monoprix, in a market that is, overall, declining over 2 years, the Parisian market. I mean, in Paris, what's happening right now is that some of the inhabitants had moved away during lockdowns and remote work. There are no tourists. So this is a market that has been hurt recently. On this market, Monoprix and Franprix are actually gaining market share. So of course, we expect as soon as this market normalizes, as soon as the Parisians comes back to Paris and tourists come back, that growth will resume. In any case, in the local market, Franprix and Monoprix are outperforming the market. Convenience is growing as well at 3.5% over 2 years, despite the fact that we're heavily exposed to touristic areas, particularly in the mountains, where we have had no tourists during Q1. So these are, I would say, good performance. For hyper and supermarkets, they've been hurt recently by the restrictions on traffic in the stores. It's difficult to quantify. But of course, we know that when our stores, which usually benefit from that extended hour offer, are restricted in the hours that hurts the business, obviously, and that will stop as soon as things normalize. And the one difference with perhaps with others is that we have not pushed extremely hard on the drive. Our hypermarkets are performing actually, we think, as the rest of the market, if you look at the stores themselves, and pushing very hard on drive with a lot of promotions and a lot of advertisements. It's not creating value. It's not creating long-term loyalty. We're creating long-term loyalty with our Casino Max app, our Casino Max subscription. And I think this are the basis for durable growth. So difficult again to appreciate precisely the impact of COVID. But obviously, over 2 years, except the hypermarkets, all the banners are either stable or growing, despite being in a tough condition for the Parisian market. So I think this actually bodes well for for the rest. And of course, as you've seen, food online business has been growing extremely fast. Now profit growth, you referred to last year. Last year, what happened was very different. In Q2, we had a lot of costs due to COVID. And that's what hurt our profitability in Q2 and in H1. We had announced after H1 that we expected this cost to subside, and that's what happened in Q3 and then in Q4. So we now have 3 quarters in a row where profitability has increased regularly, above 100 bps of EBITDA margin improvements. So this -- I don't see any reason why this would change in Q2. In Q2, we would still have the impacts of the H2 improvements that we started last year. Of course, there will not be the bonus that we suffered from, so to speak, in our results last year when we paid it. So that, of course, bodes well for comparison of profits between Q2 this year and Q2 last year. And overall, we expect over the year that quarter-after-quarter, we should be able to deliver, as we have been in the last 3 quarters now.

Next question from Xavier Le Mené from Bank of America.

Yes. Two, if I may. The first one, just back on the EBITDA growth on this question, but can you help us maybe by building the block of the EBITDA progress in Q1. So you had a negative impact from sales, but you've got some cost savings that are rolling out from last year. You maybe have also other revenues like GreenYellow and Cdiscount picking up. So can you help us a bit to understand actually where the progress are coming from for the EBITDA? And linked to that, actually, just a detailed one. But last year, actually, your EBITDA was EUR 20 million higher. So that's what you reported. So it seems that you adjusted last year EBITDA. So if you can also comment on that. And the second one is that you talked about some kind of normalization potentially coming from summer onward. But do you expect actually -- are you seeing already some normalization from May or not? Just to have a comment of what you're seeing actually.

Yes. Thank you, Xavier. So first, on the EBITDA evolution compared to last year. As we mentioned during our Q3 and our full year results, we have rolled out a plan in H2 that delivers roughly EUR 30 million additional EBITDA per quarter. So that was the case in Q3 and Q4. It's still the case in Q1, so that's plus EUR 30 million. On the negative side, we have, of course, the impact of the fall in net sales compared to last year, net of some health prices costs that we had last year that we don't have anymore this year. So that's -- that the impact you can estimate it at a bit above EUR 20 million, negative impact there. And the rest are positive impacts from additional cost savings, variable costs. We adjusted our variable cost on top of the EUR 30 million structural savings. We have increased profitability in Cdiscount. Cdiscount doesn't publish detailed EBITDA number by quarter, so I can't disclose it myself. But obviously, with the kind of growth that you've seen at Cdiscount on the marketplace, it has significantly contributed to our EBITDA. RelevanC also contributes. I would say these are the main drivers when we look at the EBITDA growth in Q1. As for last year's EBITDA, as we mentioned in the footnote, last year's EBITDA, at the end of Q1, we had registered some of the -- we had some exceptional costs due to COVID that we had registered at that time as exceptional cost per our usual accounting rules. Since we had a clear decision by the end of H1 that all COVID costs, whatever the nature, should be put in EBITDA. We corrected that. That was reflected, of course, in our H1 results already. And we restated in the Q1 accordingly. As far as normalization is concerned, it's still too soon because we still have restrictions in place in our stores. So it's too soon to see any kind of normalization. We still have no tourists. We don't have really the Parisians coming back in Paris. Those who -- remote work is still in place. So we -- I guess that things, for the Parisians sector, should start to normalize from June if the current plan that has been announced by the government is followed through. And for the rest, it will depend on the lifting of the various restrictions that we have compared to last year. So I think it's a bit too soon to speak of normalization. We see -- on a 2-year basis, we see roughly the same trends, and we should see an improvement progressively, I think from June, and especially clearly for July since last year was not particularly strong in July.

Next question from Clement Genelot from Bryan Garnier.

Yes. Two questions from my side, if I may. The first one is on growth. Would we expect the same magnitude of like-for-like decline in Q2 in France, given broadly unchanged their comps versus Q1? My second question is on cash. Just wondering why did you draw down EUR 200 million of credit line in Q1, while also having issued EUR 350 million of commercial loan white papers?

Yes. Growth, it's difficult to make a precise prediction on like-for-like in Q2. So I'm not going to venture because it's too soon to know how June will look like. We'll still start to pick up beginning mid-June, I don't know. But of course, we have the same kind of comparison point in Q2 and Q1. There's a big difference, which is that in Q1 last year, we had both in trading sales and in EBITDA, while in Q2 it was the opposite. We had still the increase in sales, but the decrease in EBITDA. So what we should expect in Q2 is we won't have the exceptional sales of Q2 last year. But also, we won't to have the exceptional cost. And of course, last year, the net of the 2 is negative. So the net this year will be positive. And of course, we're going in Q2 to continue, as I mentioned, to roll out our expansion plan and to develop our e-commerce growth. So I think this should be the way we see things. And from June, we should see -- we should start to see some normalization, I think. As far as the commercial paper, well, it's a bit like last year. Last year, we drew some commercial paper -- some credit lines. We had actually little commercial paper last year, but we had the EUR 350 million credit lines drawn. That's always the case in Q1. These are linked to the usual swings in working capital. So last year, we drew 350 million credit lines. We saved EUR 200 million. This is what we do. And of course, it's the usual movement. In Q1, we have a negative working capital movement; in Q2, positive; in Q3, negative; in Q4, very positive. And this year, importantly, the movement is better than last year since our net debt at the end of Q1 improves more compared to last year than it did at the end of full year 2020.

Next question is from Arnaud Joly from Societe Generale.

Yes. I have 2 questions. The first one -- sorry to come back on the EBITDA performance. I missed a part of the answer you made with Xavier. But just to make it clear, for retail France, so excluding -- and excluding Cdiscount and GreenYellow. What is the underlying EBITDA margin in Q1 if you exclude cost of savings and COVID costs, just to see what is the sensitivity of the EBITDA margin to the like-for-like sales performance? And the second question, in Paris, notably big cities. We can see that the drive piéton continues to develop. So have you noticed any negative impact on your convenience stores, so mainly in Paris? And Monoprix has just opened a drive piéton as well. So what are your ambitions there?

Yes. Thank you, Arnaud. EBITDA margin increased overall, as you have seen, by 130 bps in France. We don't detail at this stage France Retail and Cdiscount because we don't -- Cdiscount doesn't publish its own result. But what I can say is that both Cdiscount and France Retail increased their EBITDA value. So as you have seen, since the value of EBITDA in France, even excluding Cdiscount, increases, with sales declining, this means the margin has increased a lot, and this is due again to cost savings. As far as Cdiscount is concerned, it's, of course, is a positive contribution. The reason is not really material in Q1 in terms of explanation of growth of EBITDA. So that's why we didn't mention it as a factor. The key factors for EBITDA growth is, first, the EUR 30 million improvement of costs due to our transformation plans. We had a negative effect of the net sales, but these were largely offset actually by additional savings and variable costs. And on top of that, we have the increased profitability of Cdiscount. And marginally, contribution from RelevanC, but this is really marginal and not a key factor on the scale of 1 quarter. Drive piéton, yes, we've seen that for years, the development of drive piéton. What we have seen so far is it doesn't affect our local market share. As I mentioned, Franprix and Monoprix have performed relatively better than the overall Parisian markets. I think what happens is that when you open a drive piéton, you can attract some of your customers, usual customers. Instead of going to your stores, they're going to go to your drive piéton. It's not obvious that it allows you to gain new customers from rival brands, not obvious at all. So what we're doing is we are opening a few of these outlets to extend our offer, and it's at Monoprix in Paris. It's an offer that -- it's actually the Monoprix Plus offer. The same offer you can get at Ocado, and it's powered by the same back office. So the idea is just to give people additional -- some additional ways to get delivered the goods, if they're not sure what time they're going to be at home. They prefer to go down and get their goods downstairs, they can do it. But that's basically the idea. For us, we are rolling out various partnerships, as mentioned. That's the way we see things. We have a dense network of stores. And we can use them both for home delivery. Just remind you that Franprix can deliver you in thirty minutes in Paris. It's quite fast. We have click and collect offers. We have all the offers, actually. And when we have a dense network of stores, it's rather easy to roll out these offers and the leverage on partners, which we've done with Amazon, with Deliveroo, with Uber Eats, with Shopopop and so on. So that's how we see things. So far, our strategy seems to be working since we are relatively gaining in the Parisian area.

Next question from James Grzinic from Jefferies.

I just had 2. The first one, I presume just a clarification. The absence of your outlook or reiteration from the [ finance ] in the release. It's just -- we should assume that it's confirmed in terms of the outlook you provided by your [ finance ]? And the second one, when do you expect to build your CFC back to or up to full capacity? When do you expect to reach EUR 0.5 billion of sales?

Yes. James, thanks. Yes, of course, we confirm all the outlook that we gave. It was just -- it was barely 2 months ago. So of course, it has not changed. We still expect EBITDA to grow in France, cash flows to grow, exceptional cost to decrease and CapEx to be contained and our expansion plan to be rolled out as planned. So this is totally confirmed. As far as our Ocado partnership is concerned, we are -- first, we are ramping up the facility. The first facility started from nothing last summer, and it's now running at EUR 100 million per year run rate. When will we get that EUR 500 million, difficult to know, of course, in advance. We -- so far, their capacity is ramping up according to our plans. It will take probably a few years to get to EUR 500 million. Will it be '23, will it be '24? I don't know yet. But we see this target, of course, as our targets once we are at full potential. It will probably take still a few years, but we are already very pleased with the speed of development. And on top of that, of course, we're thinking about other options with Ocado, various ways that we have to extend our offer without waiting for the first warehouse to be saturated. We can do other things in other places. So we are looking at that, and we'll announce things when we have decided, of course, not before.

Next question from Rob Joyce from Goldman Sachs.

So just 3 from me. Firstly, just to help us understand the business a bit more. Of the sort of EUR 60 million EBITDA GreenYellow generated in 2020, how much of that is from recurring streams from assets that you own? And how much of it is from energy savings projects? The second one is just on another business, you mentioned Cdiscount. So GMV growth around 12% in the quarter. Seeing quite a few online businesses with both first party and marketplace sales reporting GMV growth of 50-plus in the first quarter, just wondering what's the difference between GreenYellow and these are other businesses, which I thought would see similar structural dynamics? And then finally, just wonder if you could help us in terms of just putting a number to the asset disposals over the trailing 12 months. So I think you said net debt was down EUR 467 million. Just wondering what the cash in from asset disposals has been over that same period.

Yes, Rob. First, on GreenYellow, first, essentially the all -- virtually all of the EBITDA from last year of GreenYellow was due to recurring revenue. There was very little disposal margin revenue. In the past, we had some of these disposals, but GreenYellow is now moving to a model where they're -- an infra-like model where they will keep the assets. So these revenues were all recurring revenues. And these recurring revenues, we don't really distinguish energy saving and photovoltaic projects in the sense that you mentioned. Both are actually asset-based revenue generating. The idea, in both cases, what GreenYellow does is they go to a customer and they do the investment. GreenYellow does the investment. They invest either in megawatts producing solar power or megawatts producing, so to speak, energy saving device. And then these generate recurring revenues with very high margin, of course, and very good paybacks over the years. So I would say that's the important thing to mention. Well, so far, we don't disclose more about GreenYellow that they set details of their -- of the way it's structured and the different assets, perhaps we'll give more later. But in any case, in both cases, it's recurring revenues from asset-based source of revenues and very interesting for the customer because they don't have to invest themselves. GreenYellow does the investments. As for Cdiscount's GMV, well, 43% growth of marketplace revenue. I think this is a very good number. If we compare ourselves with the market, if we compare ourselves in terms of variation of, let's say, our customer flow, customer traffic in our relevant markets, we think we're growing at the right pace. It's difficult to compare to this or that other players, which is probably perhaps not exactly in the same geography, by the way. But in any case, our goal basically is to keep growing this digital marketing at this kind of rate, which is, if we keep that rate, we would reach in a few years a very high level of EBITDA. Keep on growing the marketplace GMV, of course, with the same kind of growth that we've seen last year, and this is already a good level. And it's, certainly, growing. You've seen the growth of Octopia. That's very distinctive. I don't know of any other, actually, player in this market that has this kind of offering. It's growing 86%. So we have to look at the whole picture. And overall, this gives, I think, a very satisfactory growth picture for Cdiscount. Asset disposals. Well, the asset disposals during the last 12 months, they are well known. I mean they're the ones -- there are not more asset disposal mentioned than the ones that were already mentioned at the end of last year. So you had the Leader Price disposal and the Vindémia disposal that happened, basically, in the last 12 months. These were the main disposal. One, I mean, it gained us a net of around EUR 600 million after paying the franchisee, the other EUR 180 million. And these are the major disposals over the last 12 months, and our net debt deduction from the -- including the TRS, decreased by EUR 750 million. So not very far from that number, actually. That's how we would sum up things. Is there another question?

There is no more questions.

Okay. Well, thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes the conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.