Zamp S.A. (ZAMP3) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Technical Difficulty] closing financial -- sorry, we're just having a few technical issues -- already. They have already been resolved. We're just going through the disclaimer. Any future considerations will now be guarantees of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and premises because they deal with future events and, therefore, depend on circumstances which may or may not happen. Investors and analysts must understand that general conditions, sector conditions and other operating factors might affect the future results and might lead to results which differ materially from those expressed herein. I would like now to pass the word to Mr. Iuri Miranda. Please, Iuri, you may begin.

Thank you for the introduction, operator. Good morning, everyone. I hope that you and your family members are all doing fine. Thank you for the interest in our company and for your participation on this results call for the second quarter of 2022 from Zamp company. Today, with me in this presentation, I will have my partners, Gabriel Guimaraes, CFO; and Ariel Grunkraut, the current Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Technology, who will succeed me after 2023. It's with great happiness and lots of excitement that I would like to share with you another strong quarter result, a landscape of our business. And I would also like to talk about the last events at our company. After a long period of the pandemic, this was the first quarter where we had an environment, which was the closest to normal pre-pandemic. I'm referring to not having any more operating our restrictions. And with that, we see a gradual return of foot traffic. This scenario is closest to normalcy analyzed to important advances made throughout this entire time. This all helped us to boost our sales in an important manner, especially on the weekends, taking the company to a sales growth and also profitability above expectations or pre-pandemic levels. In the last 2 years, we mentioned quite a few times that we saw a consolidation in the segment of fast food in the Brazilian market. Market data in this quarter show that our perspective seems to be right with the macro scenario still adverse. The fast food chain, the ones that are best structured that have scale, who have a strong financial position, operating strong brands, and having a good added value proposition to the customers have added market share as we will be able to see further ahead. Back to normalcy with more traffic available allowed us to go back to the launches of new campaigns and new products, which are 2 of our great differentiators. The Stranger Things campaign, the launch of the Milans and CBF sandwiches, onion, bacon, and chicken sandwiches from the Popeyes brands are a few good examples of how this quarter was different. Well, let's talk about the differentiation of the Burger King brand. We got for the first consecutive time the award for most creative award or most creative company. It was the Cannes award, one of the most important. NBK Brazil was awarded 8x. Facts like this show the strength and creativity of our brand and our team showing that we are on the right path to have one of the favorite brands inside our segment. Let's talk about Popeyes now. The brand continues to fully advance and has reached in this quarter A traffic, which is significantly superior to 2019 in the same stores. We really do believe in the potential of the QSR chicken market, and we are well positioned to speed up the scalability of that brand. So this year, we'll be going into new markets besides the markets we operate in, in Sao Paulo and Rio. As we saw in our previous numbers and this one now in the second quarter was no different. We have been able to maintain an excellent balance between sales recovery, along with a growth of same-store sales of 33% for Burger King and 58% for our chicken brand, and gains in gross margin, where in this semester, we went over 60% to represent. Our strong sourcing work, revenue management, and data use have consistently shown their significance in our business throughout the last 12 months. The result of this quarter shows the resilience, the consistence, and the development of our operation, which sums up 4 consecutive quarters of full recovery. We have reached an adjusted EBITDA of BRL 127 million, an increase of BRL 116 million versus the second quarter of 2021. And an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.3% versus a margin of 1.9% in the second quarter of 2021. The second quarter margin for '22 is the biggest in our historical series for second quarter. Afterwards, Ariel is going to give us a little bit more information on the digital transformation efforts and how they have helped us in our revenues. But as a summary, the digital transformation continues being implemented. And the digital channels are ever more showing incrementality and helping in our operating efficiency. Our digital sales have overcome 32% of total company sales, a growth of over 50% versus the second quarter of '21 million. Still in this quarter of 2022, we approved in the assembly, the change in the company name to Zamp. That was a decision that we made in 2019 to absorb our 2 brands besides bringing a more technological language and to be ever more present in our consumers' minds. Additionally, we have announced in this semester, the start of the transition process for my partner, Ariel, who will take over the position of CEO starting in January of '23. This planned transition and structured transition, which will happen until the end of the year is another demonstration of our development, our leader development culture, our merit accuracy culture. I'll be heading the company until the end of the year. Ariel will be by my side until the end of the year. And I'm very confident that under his leadership, our team will take exempt to be the best restaurant operator in the world. So I won't say goodbye just yet. But I do have my goodbye presentation ready for you since 2018. And as recently announced in the market, we received a voluntary public offer for the acquisition of control of the company made by Mubadala. Our Board will issue a report on the offer, which will be published until the 17th of August. The report will be duly disclosed on our communication channels. Now I would like to pass the word to my partner Ariel to provide you more details on our sales and technology advances. And afterwards, my partner, Gabriel, will give you more details about the financial standing of the company.

This is Ariel. Thank you, everyone. I'm very happy to be participating in this call for the first time, and I will share with you important data from our company. If you look at Slide 4, you will see a development in the number of stores. In this quarter, we had the net openings of 3 stores, 3 same stores, freestanding stores, 1 open franchise in the closing of one same-store in a food court. We continue our expansion plans, which this year will be concentrated in the second semester. That way, we closed the quarter with 897 BK stores and 53 Popeyes, totaling 950 restaurants in Brazil. Slide 5 will show you the advance of the operating revenue a growth of 55% versus the second quarter of '21, overcoming the pre-pandemic numbers. In terms of same-store sales, we had 33.3% increase in Burger King and Popeyes. In the last 12 months, the company reached a historical sales record, reaching BRL 3.3 billion, 15% above the 2019 revenues. The growth of revenue was related to the taking back of traffic with the softening of the restrictions, the revenue management strategy, which allowed us to make important price movements with market share gains, and the investment we've made in our digital channels, which have shown a continuous performance growth even with the return of on-premise consumption. On the next slide, we can see a few of the campaigns we launched, which were sales successes. The partnership with Netflix, the launch of our Stranger Things combo, and the personalized sandwich launches using influencers. These campaigns helped us to leverage our sales. And along with that reach, same-store sales significantly above pre-pandemic levels. Also in this quarter, as you resaid, we achieved for the third consecutive time, the most creative company award in the Cannes Festival, the main creativity event in the world, something that no other brand has achieved. Burger King Brazil ended up being a highlight as the most awarded region among all the Burger King operations in the world, we continue to believe in the strength of our brand and our ability to innovate, we're still in our beginning stages. Going into Slide 7, we can see data from a trend that we have been seeing for quite some time in Brazil and abroad in terms of food service. The pandemic effect with all its offsets caused an acceleration of the consolidation of the market with growth in share in fast food chains. As you can see on the slide, the big change gained in the last 2 years, approximately 100 bps in participation in a market of over BRL 400 billion. If on one side, we see the fast food chains increasing their stake inside all the away-from-home eating. We've seen a second movement. And within the fast food chains, we have seen the big brands gaining share from the small brands. This affects summed up with the recovery of the mall activities and the strength of our brand contributed to that in the semester, we had our best historical market share for a second quarter in the year. This important growth of market share shows itself even more encouraging when we are able to join the sales performance with an even higher quality in the experience of our consumers according to the MPS Awards, an annual serves about the main fast food brands. Burger King stood out as the best operation in all of the segments. We continue aligning technology, quality, and efficiency to deliver the best experiences to our customers every day. Going into the next slide, we can see the strong trajectory of the Popeyes brand. The chicken market in Brazil represents a great growth opportunity for us. And although we're still in the baby steps of this construction, we see encouraging performances in terms of a national scale. After 3 years, of which 2 of them were in the middle of a pandemic, our annual revenue per store in this quarter is close to BRL 3 million. That result coming from our product differentiation, brand acceptance, and digital experience continues aligned with the plan we have so that gradually, we can approximate our Popeye sales to our Burger King sales. Going into the next slide, we see the consistent growth of our digital channels represented by delivery, self-service kiosks, and apps. In this quarter, the revenue from digital channels went from BRL 187 million in '21 to BRL 285 million, I believe you said, which represented a growth of over 50%. On Slide 10, we see our digital ecosystem. Today, we count on over 13 million users recorded in our CRM and 33% of sales already identified. The number tripled in the last 2 years. through our CRM, we're able to understand more and more our customers in that way, provide them more personalized and efficient offers. Our app continues to evolve. And with new features, relevance, and recurrency, we've reached the best rating in all of the restaurant industry in the country in the 2 app stores. During the quarter, we reached over 56% of our operations with self-service kiosks, and we hope to expand to another 80 stores until the end of the year. That is an important avenue of growth since it contributes to a better customer experience and diluting fixed expenses. We count on a few stores, which are 100% self-service, pilots, which are being tested in São Paulo, and we hope to share the results soon. Delivery once again has shown its resilience and incrementality even with the return of on-premise consumption, we reached 68% of our operations already set up for delivery or marketplace. This move continues to help us reduce the take rate and improve our profitability. Our loyalty program, our BK Club, considered the biggest loyalty program in Latin America for restaurants has reached 7 million registered users, a growth of 45% when compared to the previous quarter. This program continues as an important avenue of growth once it allows us to offer product services and benefits to our heavy user customers increasing their frequency and spend. With this, I would like to pass the word to my partner and CFO, Gabriel Guimaraes, so that he can cover the other important aspects of the company's performance.

Thank you, Ariel, and welcome. Going into Slide 11, we see our SG&A. At the end of the quarter, the cost of goods sold reached 33.4% of revenue, a drop of 340 basis points compared to the second quarter of '21, which led us to our best historical gross margin performance in comparable quarters. This result was based on 3 important pillars: our revenue management strategy, our sourcing and procurement projects, and our data acquisition. With that, we've been able to balance efficiently the sales recovery with gross margin recoveries. The sales expenses in the restaurants are seen on the slide. We show the strong operating leverage of our business through this slide. This advance happened, especially due to the virtue of sales growth connected to our digitalization strategy, which helps to maintain our expenses under control or personnel expenses under control, even with important salary increases in the semester. The continuous lease contract renegotiations, along with utility negotiations and so on did not bring about any extraordinary expenses, like, for example, testing our personnel constantly excluding the FX by IFRS 16, we had in this quarter an increment of 100 basis points in the BK margin if we compare to the same quarter of 2019. In terms of Popeyes, this evolution comes from deleveraging, and that was 13 basis points. In terms of SG&A, they had a slight increase, and they reached 6.5% of revenue. That growth happened due to important changes done in our compensation structure, trying to find a better balance between fixed and variable expenses preserving our meritocracy culture. This effect retroactive to the beginning of the year, and that's why it had a non-recurring impact on the quarter. Besides that, we continue preparing our business for a growth cycle in order to leverage our operation. On Slide 12, our adjusted EBITDA, we saw an increase of BRL 116 million when compared to the second quarter of 2021. The last 12 months, the adjusted EBITDA reached BRL 490 million, a historical record. This result, as we mentioned, comes from the consistent sales recovery with the coming back of traffic, the evolution of the gross margin, digital transformation and our discipline in costs and expenses going into the main part of the slide, we see that the loss of the company had an improvement of BRL 65 million coming from the operating efficiencies partially mitigated by the financial results. On the right of the slide, you can see that the total gross debt of the company was BRL 1.55 billion, allied to an available cash of BRL 564 million led us to a net debt of BRL 491 million. During the quarter, we had the issuance of BRL 350 million of debentures, which will be used for investments in CapEx, working capital, and to extend our debt. As our operating cash strengthen, our leveraging level reduced considerably, bringing the company to an adequate capital structures to speed up growth. Going into Slide 13. Our CapEx reached BRL 75 million in this quarter. Our investments were very focused in the participation of restaurants, technology, and maintenance of our assets. We continue to find excellent capital allocation opportunities, not only in new restaurants but also with great returns and renovations and especially in the digital initiatives. Our operating cash flow coming especially from our operating activity improvements contributed so that we had a cash generation of BRL 65 million better than the same period last year, even in a complex environment. Our cash generation represented 80% of the company EBITDA. With that, we close our presentation and open up for Q&A. Operator, please. Let's go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Thiago Bortoluci from Goldman Sachs.

Congrats on the numbers. Ariel, good luck with your new challenge in the transition. I have 3 questions. These are follow-ups from comments that you've already made. The first one, going back to that market share slide. I wanted to explore the trend inside [ cup ], where you had a strong competitive advantage, which was the people from 18 to 24 years of age. How's your market share? How has your market share developing among that each group? That's the first question. The second question in the mix -- the digital mix you talked about. Obviously, there is an accommodation with the return of the on-premise consumption. But if I were to calculate the delivery revenue. I see that in the last 2 quarters, you had a slight nominal drop year-over-year in revenue, while your competitor is talking about growing their delivery revenue in the high 2 digits. So I wanted to understand what you're reading in this performance gap. And if you continue understanding that this delivery sale is made dually incremental to what you had on on-premise pre-pandemic. And third, could you let us know your discount strategy? What's your average rate of customers, you're discounting? What's the average discount that you're applying to that base versus what we had prior to the digital channels? Those are my 3 questions.

Thank you for your questions. I'm sorry, we're hearing a little feedback. So we're just getting that fixed. Okay, let's go. First point in terms of market share gains on the 18- to 24-year range. What we have seen is that the market share gain has been seen in all categories, not just the 18 to 24 age group, and that's been confirmed by our perspective that in the post-pandemic strong structured brands with good product launches would consolidate the demand as a whole. And since fast food is very eclectic, I mean, you have children from the elderly eating our products. And we're seeing a market share gain in all the age ranges and not only in our target age range, which is 18 to 24. So that would be the answer to your first question. In terms of delivery growth, what we also have been working on for the past couple of years is having a good balance between delivery sales and profitability, which was an issue during the pandemic, where we were questioned. People asked if delivery would be something beyond the incremental sales. And if after COVID, we would also have a healthy margin in delivery. And during the 2 years, what we did was try to seek out a solution that we have called hybrid delivery where most of the volume that we could, we would migrate to one marketplace only finding a last mile solution where we would be able to absorb the cost where the cost would be absorbed by the consumer within the final transaction. In that way, we've been able to move 1/3 of all of our volume to the hybrid delivery, which brings us a margin of about 1/3 better when you compare a full-service delivery model. That's a very important structural change for us. We've been able to see that a delivery volume post-pandemic would be somewhere around 13% and 17%. So I believe that there might be an accommodation of volume a little bit higher delivery volume. We were looking at more mature markets like China prior to the pandemic, close to 20%. However, we have started to see that the coming back of foot traffic and more on-premise restaurants could happen in our market and then the stability of delivery could be somewhere around 13% to 17%. I'm going to ask that Ariel who deals with sales and he was responsible for developing this entire program, this marketplace program, and he's helped us in the numbers. He'll give you more information. Ariel?

Thank you, Iuri. Thiago, thank you for your question. Just to add to what Iuri said, we have over 650 stores, which have delivery services, and 50% of those businesses are already covered by our hybrid delivery. That way, that's an important profitability level, which will allow us to show delivery as being very resilient. We continue to see sales stable even during the recovery of the on-premise consumption, on-premise purchases. And in terms of discounts, this entire technology strategy has made it so that we would be able to migrate from a strategy of delivering generalized discounts to the consumer and now we do it in a personalized manner. Not only have we seen a more rational market in terms of price, but we have been very efficient in delivering discounts only to those people who we understand to be people who will provide us a counterpart, who will buy our products with that discount. So we've been a lot more assertive, and that's been one of the great levers in generating profit and gross margin for us.

Our next question comes from Marcella Recchia, Credit Suisse.

I have 2 questions. The first one. Well, it was really nice that you started to show the unit economics for BK and Popeyes. And my question, the first one is what is the potential you see for the brands in terms of sales per store in EBITDA margin, not giving us a guidance, but how much more potential do you imagine? Of course, Popeyes should reach breakeven, and we still have an avenue growth for that. But my second question is about gross margin. We have seen for a few quarters, a consistency in the cost controls, which is really impressive. I think there are many initiatives which would justify which you have talked about, including the discounts, the more personalized discounts. But my question has more to do with sustainability. How can we see the advance of that gross margin? Is there any more room for gains? Or is that a level that we can imagine as just sustainable?

Thank you, Marcella, for your question and the compliments on the numbers. We're very happy and excited with them. Let's start by the unit economics, how do we see our sales potential for BK and Popeyes? Of course, we're still in a moment of recovery. After the pandemic, where traffic is still not coming back to the pre-pandemic levels. We like to see that. We like to see the [ Copthall ] because to date, we still need something in high teens in terms of traffic with time and those high teens coming back to the stores, we'll see a sales acceleration, which will be very interesting. If we can deliver numbers with a traffic, with a high-teens gap in terms of foot traffic, we are extremely excited with what we'll be able to deliver in January in terms of operating leverage with the stronger foot traffic return. When we think about brand maturity, Popeyes will go through more maturity than Burger King. I mean Burger Kings got 3 years, of which 2 happened during the pandemic. So we're very happy to see the company Popeyes get to breakeven, and you follow us in the mall stores surprised us more than the Burger King mall stores. But with store sales close to 60% already getting to breakeven with an acceleration curve, which is superior removing the COVID effect above what we had expected at this time. Therefore, it continues to close its gap compared to the Burger King brand. How do we see the 4-wall EBITDA for both brands? We see a convergence in the future where there will be the maturing of the Popeyes restaurants and Burger King will be in a steady state. We are always seeking same-store sale increases. That's what we are always looking for. So once Popeyes matured, BK should start growing.

What is the margin we're talking about?

As you said, we don't provide guidance. But in our mind and in our plan, in an environment, which is 100% normal, we would be going after margin of 4 wall in the high teens. That's what we have in our mind. I believe that's possible. And based on everything that happened pre-COVID, we think it's possible. In terms of gross margin, we're very excited with everything that we've implemented, especially in an environment, as you saw where the inflation was very detrimental. Congratulations and the procurement team, the sales team and the marketing team, and the technology team as well. I would say, who, during these 2 years, were able to create a database like Ariel said, which will allow us to be -- I'd like to say, to be a sniper at a moment that we are providing discounts and to do revenue management, and that's been fundamental to our business. Retail will always need a value proposition. I can't see retail without a value proposition.

But the question is, how can you place the value proposition where it will make the difference where it needs to be placed and not to just throw away your margins?

So I think in those terms, we're extremely well prepared. Now, in terms of where we can get to with this, I'm going to give you an honest answer. At this time, I really don't know the potential size that I mentioned of the opportunity because like Ariel said, we have 7 million registered users in a loyalty program, which is only 1 year old, probably one of the -- I would say, the only loyalty program in the entire QSR industry, one of the few in the world. 7 million registered users, and we're still in the early stages of everything we can do with them. CRM, we started to do the update to segment by type of customer. And I would tell you that the sky is the limit in terms of what we can do, how we can optimize our margins. Once again, we are going back to our launches of premium products with things that we were extremely well known for prior to the pandemic, which we had to hold back due to a question of putting write-off for low demand. Therefore, there still is room -- and I believe that the main answer for up to where we'll be able to get to will come from the surprises that the technology can bring to our business.

Our next question comes from Rodrigo Almeida, Santander Bank.

Congrats on the numbers. It was very useful. I wanted to talk about the store opening pipeline. I mean if you could give us a little bit more detail if we could get a breakdown between Burger King and Popeyes stores and I think that would be great. Especially like your Popeyes mall opening schedule, I don't know what you have in mind, but I wanted to know about the potential of your store openings in malls. I wanted to understand the traffic for each one of the brands. And the objective is to understand the Popeyes traffic to compare it to the pre-pandemic levels. These were the main questions I had.

Thank you, Rodrigo. Let's go. First, in terms of store opening timing our opening strategy, let me take a step back. In 2021, we opened around 40 stores. We continue planning a number above that, the number above 2021 opening. And when I say well above, I say something like 1.5x to 2x more what we opened in 2021. We don't provide guidance to the number of openings, but that continues to be the plan we have in our minds. And like we said in the last call, our store openings this year will be concentrated mostly on the last quarter of the year. That is a consequence of the management done during the pandemic, where we reduced the growth base or the growth. And we started to take back these processes and the consequence of that is that we have a higher concentration in the end of the quarter -- in the last quarter. But the openings will happen. Now in terms of the second question, the breakdown Burger King, Popeyes, we should see something close to 50%, half-half with a slight difference between one brand or another based on the opening time licenses and so on. But we should see close something to a breakdown of 50% per brand. And your last question, if I understood it correctly, is what we're seeing in terms of Popeyes traffic effect is that above Burger King. Was that your question?

Yes. I just wanted to understand your numbers and the malls, your Popeye mall numbers.

Well, a big effect of Popeyes. First, it's a new brand, of course, which has been growing. We have a very interesting piece of data on hand that in December, in one of the first time that we launched the TV campaign for Popeyes. Here in São Paulo, Rodrigo, we got to be the third fast food, the third preferred the third preferred fast food brain among all of them. And for a brand that's 3 years old, of which 2 were going through the pandemic, that's an amazing story, right? And what are the fast food brands that you know in the country or abroad that in 3 years, became the preferred brand or the top 3 brands of fast food in the biggest city of Latin America? I mean that's a very expressive number and that will explain by itself a part of the growth we saw in traffic. The second piece is that in 2019, which was basically the first year of operation of Popeyes, we were still leveraging buys into things like delivery and therefore, delivery was something that helped when we compare with 2009.

Okay. It's very clear. Could I ask an additional question? I wanted to talk about profitability, but you've answered that part already. I just wanted to know about your strategic sourcing and lease negotiations. Who are you going into those negotiations? Are you talking about leases, rents or contractors? Just so I have an understanding and to understand more granularly.

Okay. Well -- who's the renegotiation being done with, please? Let us know.

Sure. I'm going to give this to Gabriel, and he had that issue. He had strategic sourcing, and he'll be able to explain strategic sourcing versus the renegotiation of some contracts.

Rodrigo, look, here, we are specifically talking about direct contractors. How do these procurement programs help the profitability of the company? Well, there's a series of initiatives to not only with our long-term partners, the great suppliers who supply our companies, but we also have a few solutions trying to seek out new suppliers, developing a few global leads who provide us benefits, analyzing terms of other contracts. We are very focused on our direct contractors, I'd say, in key suppliers. And going down the P&L, there are other renegotiations in place, but with other objectives, which are not directly related to raw materials. And then Iuri talked about this in the beginning. Technology will play an important role in the sustainability of the company. But as the come like every commodity cycle, we start to see a much more favorable environment, still with a certain global pressure, everything that you guys know about, but the environment certainly is much better than the beginning of the pandemic.

The next question comes from Vinicius Cruvinel, Bank of America.

First question is if you could give us a bit more detail about the 100% self-service operation and how you're thinking about replicating this model in existing stores and in future stores? And the second question is in terms of the loyalty program. We saw a strong growth margin. And I wanted to understand more if you could give us some more. How does this loyalty program customer compare to an average customer? And how do you see opportunities in terms of that loyalty program?

Vinicius, thank you for your 2 questions. Send Bob a hug for me, please. Well, the 100% digital stores. We have a few stores in São Paulo and the first results have been very exciting in terms of NPS. The NPS is superior, 2 staffed stars. This generates a characteristic. I mean, we had been trying the self-service totems or kiosks. And for that to happen, it's not enough that you just place a self-service kiosk because they think, “Oh, if I put in a self-service kiosk, all my NPSs will grow in all my stores.” That's not how it happens. The IT people have done spectacular work or in our fourth or fifth version of UX in order to make it more fun for customers, always learning how to bring and how to remove the friction in their interaction and how to make their self-service journey, the simplest and smooth as possible. That's been the objective that we've been working on. Actually, this has helped us to leverage the number, for example, of the BK Club numbers. And by consequence, allowed us to fuel or to feed our CRM numbers and data. Profitability comes from an increase in customer satisfaction. You get higher returns, more loyalty and that fits into the last question, which is related to how we see the more loyalty customer transactions versus non-loyalty customers. And I'm going to pass the word to Ariel, who will give you more details. Ariel?

Vinicius, just to answer the first question about self-service stores. Well, when you remove the responsibility from the operations team from customer service, you can guide the team to deliver a better experience in terms of the food production, the quality of the launch, temperature, and so on. So we've seen a win-win in this migration. And like Iuri said, our NPS has been superior to our traditional balcony NPS. That's one of the first insights. There's lots to learn still, and we hope to bring you some insights, some updates, but we should continue to increase the number of stores, pilots, full self-service pilots for us to have more granularity from the data. We're going to test those in different formats and in both brands, Burger King and Popeyes stores. In terms of the loyalty program, we continue to see a significant increase in frequency and average ticket of consumers who are loyal compared to the non-loyals. So we see a bit better average takes. We see an average ticket, which is a bit better. But the main benefit that we have seen from the loyalty program is the increase in frequency at a time where the consumer understands that if they consume more, they get more benefits, the points expire every 6 months. Therefore, we have been benefiting and we have been able to communicate this more assertively. Therefore, the BK Loyalty Club is not only a loyalty program, but it's also perhaps what unites our entire CRM strategy because I'm able to connect to that consumer still in a very individualized manner.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from João Paulo Andrade, Bradesco Investments.

Congrats on the numbers, and congrats Ariel on your new cycle and your new challenge. Thinking about the expansion with the more sustainable return of malls and an increase in delivery, would it make sense to expand BK more in malls? Or are you going to continue to focus on freestandings? And in terms of the traffic question, I imagine that part of the delivery increase comes from a channel shift. What do you think the potential is for the channels? Could you give us a cap perhaps on this normal traffic returns? Could we see a new level or a new number in normalized traffic different than the pre-pandemic levels?

Two great questions. First, in terms of BKs and malls, BK malls is an exception. We are already present in basically all the big malls in Brazil. Our presence is very massive. There might be opportunities. There are a few malls where we can have a second store, third store or there has been the opportunity of putting the store in a better position in the Food Corp. It will continue to be -- it will continue to be more freestanding, more street stores. In terms of cap, I'm talking about freestanders. In terms of cap, the cap of traffic, think about the following. I mentioned to you that there is still a high teens gap in terms of traffic. It's been improving gradually. It did see an improvement in the first -- from the first to the second quarter. July and August shows us numbers closer to the second quarter numbers, but we cannot give you an answer whether that traffic, the high-teens traffic, which is lacking. If it will return the 0% or if it will steady at 5%, it will be single digits or low teens. It's hard for you to estimate that. But on the other hand, what we do imagine is we do not believe that traffic will continue in that gap of the high teens. We don't believe that, that gap will continue. And if we are able to deliver the numbers with all the technology we're implementing, each percentage point that the returns in terms of traffic, who will bring an improvement to our results. So I can't really pinpoint a number, if it's going to be like it was prior to COVID but we continue to believe that this traffic improvement, this gradual traffic improvement will continue to happen. Let me give you an example to make it clearer. Corporate traffic, corporate office traffic, especially in the main capitals and the Southeast regions, mainly Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is still well below its pre-pandemic numbers. We're not talking about high teens there. We're talking about bigger numbers. We've seen information from other countries, other cities like Manhattan, New York, and where we know this doesn't only happen in Brazil. And this has -- the traffic has returned gradually. Well, if everybody going back to the office in the future? I still haven't seen an answer that will show us that. That leads to that, but certainly, companies that were operating 2 days in the office and 3 days remotely. We believe that those companies will accommodate and they will require more office days and less remote base. That's just an example, and we can see that also in the sales behavior during the week and during the weekend. During the weekend, we see a sales behavior closer to the pre-pandemic. And another factor where we see a rewarming up to our QSR business, our movies, cinemas. They've always been an important traffic generator for the food courts, and they are hitting back up. Hollywood, the Blockbusters are starting to be launched, but definitely, they're not in the full force that they were prior to the pandemic. We see one or another movie being launched. And when the movie is great, you see a huge traffic increase. So that's a traffic generator that we see returning in the future, helping us out.

João, if I may help as well. I think that the rationale is along those lines. The delivery in this quarter represents close to 13% of the company revenues. And today, it continues with an average ticket of 60% to 70% above the desk average ticket. So if you do that conversion to traffic, it should have an implicit traffic increase around 7% to 8% of the total company traffic. Iuri said prior that we continue to lack mid-teens in terms of traffic. So even if we had the assumption that the delivery traffic is 100% cannibalization effect, which is not an assumption that we think is reasonable. There would still be room to close a good piece of the GAAP traffic that the company has.

We now close the Q&A session. I'd like to pass the word to Iuri for his final comments.

Thank you, operator. First, thank you so much, everyone. We know that during the season of earnings report, you have lots of work to do. You have various calls and congresses and conferences. And so I know you guys have a little time, and I would like to thank you for your participation. I'd like to share our 3 priorities for the semester. The first one is organic growth of our 2 brands. We continue confident in the consolidation of the market and the gradual traffic return along with an innovative product calendar, increasing the customer experience using technology to improve profitability. These are all going to be levers, which will be significant to capture the demand that is returning to our market. Besides the baseline growth, like I mentioned, we'll have a reheating in the pace of store openings for Burger King and Popeyes. The second priority is to continue advancing in our digital transformation efforts. Technology has been fundamental an important ally in our digital transformation. We've been able to provide better experiences for our consumers. The NPS is showing that, and we offer product services and benefits which are much more personalized, which differentiates us from the other market players. The investment we've made in technology in the last 3 years, like we've been saying, it's showing its dividends and certainly, it will continue to show. So avenues, which will continue to be our priorities until the end of the year, like the BK Club, the CRM, the supply chain, which we talked about at length. And third, but not least important, the operating efficiency issue. Today, we're the biggest same-store restaurant operators in Brazil. And without a doubt, we have a strong franchise chain network, and this gives us a great database and the pandemic has brought new challenges to our market, including in terms of the actual operation of the restaurants. So we continue to seek out new efficiencies through the analysis of our procedures. Gabriel talked about only one of the procedures like the supply chain. And what we want to do is use technology with tools, having the customer at the center of the discussion generating value as the customer expects. With that, we'd like to close our call today, and I would like to once again thank for your participation and questions, and we are at your disposal in case you have any future questions. Thanks. May you all have a wonderful day.

The teleconference is done. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for using Chorus Call. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]