Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Esprinet Fiscal Year 2023 results conference call. Please note that this webinar is being recorded, and after the call, the podcast will be posted on the Esprinet website in the investor section, together with the presentation. For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only mode. However, you will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. Please note again that this presentation contains a forward-looking statement, so I would like to draw your attention to the regulation note on page two regarding the information contained with this document. I'm Giulia Perfetti, Investor Relations and Sustainability Manager of Esprinet, and with me is Alessandro Cattani, CEO of Esprinet.
I will now turn the call over to Alessandro to present and comment with you the fiscal year 2023 results. Alessandro, the floor is yours.
Thank you, and welcome everybody to the presentation, and well, it's. Let's jump into the presentation. It's been a year of transition, I would say. A year where we faced a number of challenges, but where we have achieved also a number of successes, overcoming these challenges. But let's dig into what happened. Well, first of all, what did we face in 2023? It's been, as we said, a challenging year, especially for the screens market, so PCs and smartphones, and in general, for everything linked to consumer demand. We came from 2022 with record profitability, but a year where we piled up an excessive inventory.
So during 2023, we gave priority to the balance sheet improvement over profitability. And last but not least, we had an old tax dispute that we eventually closed, effectively eliminating a really high risk, a potential risk for the company. So which kind of goals did we had, did we have during this year? Well, the first goal that we set was to grow in the higher margin product and customer segments because we have, and we still have, in mind a clear goal to grow our gross profit margin, and in time, therefore, also our EBITDA margin. Second, we wanted to exit the structurally low return on capital employed product customer combinations.
During our growth in the last years, we faced certain businesses, which we thought we could bring to a reasonable return on capital employed, either by improving the profitability or improving working capital. Some of them proved exceedingly challenging, and we decided to exit those businesses. And last but not least, we had the goal to bring the working capital back to sort of physiological levels. And so what we did, proudly, I would say, we reduced the inventory levels while improving gross profit margins. We'll see them later on, but we definitely had a major, major reduction in our levels of stock if we compare what happened in 2022 against this year.
In December 2022, we closed the year with more than EUR 670 million of inventory, and we went down to EUR 514 million. A sharp reduction of more than 23%. So, pretty pleased with this result. We improved our high-margin segments also by means of acquisitions that we did last year, Sifar and Lidera. And we began cutting costs and rationalizing our processes to address the new environment. We are deep into experiments with AI and with other processes that are being automated. And last but not least, we reorganized the group, especially in Italy, so to have legal entities focused on their respective reference markets.
So Esprinet focused, the Esprinet brand focused on screens and devices, so generally speaking, clients, everything that is out of a data center. V-Valley, in the different countries, focused on solution and services, and now Zeliatech focused on the nascent and growing business of green solutions, solar business, and energy efficiency solutions, especially for the data center. What happened during this year is that we demonstrated a couple of assumptions that we have always put in front of our investor community. The first one is that we were able to reduce by 20%, as I said before, the inventory levels without major devaluations. As a matter of fact, with gross profit margins that were up against previous year, proving that the stock protection mechanism in place worked effectively.
Secondly, we have sadly reduced the revenues by close to EUR 700 million, and we have reduced the EBITDA by EUR 27 million. But if you think of the magnitude of the reduction in revenues and compared to the reduction of the EBITDA, we have proved that the business model of distributors, and then Esprinet specifically, has a strong resilience in terms of profitability that is guaranteed by a low fixed cost structure, so a low operating leverage. And one thing is to say it, one thing is to prove it in such a challenging year. What we have to do moving forward?
Well, first and foremost, recover volumes on those market segments with lower margins, but which can still guarantee adequate return on capital employed by means of good working capital management. It was really challenging to do so last year because we had such a high level of inventory. Now, that inventory is not at the place where we'd really like it to be, but it's definitely way down. We think that we can go back to the drawing board and design programs, sales programs, and interactions with volume vendors in order to grab part of the market share that we lost on these segments, that indeed provide lower margins than, for instance, solutions and services.
But with the help of a better management of working capital, can still provide good and sometimes excellent return on capital employed. So we'll focus, not only in our second goal, which is to grow in high-margin lines of solutions and services, but in the recovery of shares of those businesses with lower margins. Again, only provided that the working capital can bring us, although the low margins, a good return on capital employed. Needless to say, the further goal is to keep optimizing working capital. Interest rates stay high. Our return on capital employed plummeted, mostly because of the inefficiencies that we had in 2022 and 2023 in working capital management.
We are on a good path of reduction of our working capital days, of our cash cycle days, but there's a lot of work there still to do. We continue to look for growth opportunities also through acquisitions. Again, in line with what we did in the recent years in the regions where we're already present, bolt-on acquisitions of small or medium-sized companies with excellent profitability, and we'll keep on looking at opportunities in Western Europe to expand our footprint in other regions. But let's dig into the evolution of our sales. Well, as I said, it's been a challenging year for the market. As you can see, the market of distribution in Italy, Spain, and Portugal was down, respectively, -4%, -2%, -5%.
But what's particularly interesting is to see what happened at customer type. -12% on retailers and e-tailers, and 2% growth on resellers. If you look at product segment, the product categories, screens, PCs and smartphones were down 7% in the market, and devices which are significantly represented by by consumer products were down 11%, with solution and services were still up 7%. So as you can see, yes, we lost share in in a little bit of share in solution and services. We were more or less in line with the market in devices. We really lost share in screens, and we really lost the share big time in retailers and e-tailers.
This is coherent with our target of reducing our working capital and working away from those exceedingly taxing businesses in terms of Return on Capital Employed, and probably we overdid here. I go back to the previous comment; there's probably space for gaining a little bit of share that we lost while being so focused on the Return on Capital Employed. Now, if you look at the profitability, the gross profit margin was up to 5.54% in sales compared to 5.22% in 2022, and it was up consistently quarter by quarter, also in Q4, 5.21% grew up to 5.38%.
Of course, given the sharp reduction in the top line, we had a reduction in absolute terms of our gross profit. EBITDA adjusted was down accordingly, and although a little bit less in Q4 against the average of the full year. Cash conversion cycle was down two days compared against the Q3 2023, and up two days compared to Q4 2022. But if we look, and later we'll do single quarter and not the average, which is dragging the numbers down, the path of improvement is truly significant. The net financial position was back again positive. We have been cash positive for the last probably 14, 15 years. Just last year, we had this spike in working capital so big that it drew us into negative.
This year we closed positive by EUR 15.4 million, against negative by EUR 83 million last year. Even more so if you consider that we have reduced sharply the level of factoring. Return on capital employed is down, essentially, because of the average net invested capital, which is going down moving forward. Now, if we look at the pillars, if we group together the devices, screens, and our own brands, which we now sell under the Esprinet brand, and solution and services, which we sell under the V-Valley brand, you can see that we had 43 basis point of EBITDA margin reduction in the Esprinet sub-segment full year, and 47 in the V-Valley sub-segment.
Given the different mix for the first time ever, the EBITDA adjusted provided by V-Valley outgrew the absolute value of the Esprinet area. The interesting point is that this reduction of 43 and 47 basis points is compared to an increase of 65 basis points, which we'll see in a second, of our overall SG&A, mostly because of the lower absorption of fixed cost due to the reduction of revenues by EUR 700 million. That means that on average, we had an improvement of our gross profit margins by line of business, which is even more remarkable if we consider that we had close to 30% more. Sorry, 0.3% higher factoring costs recorded in gross profit. We were able to bring down to customers this increase in factoring costs, therefore, in interest rates.
Even so, thanks to a better mix and a better management of the relationship with customers, we were able to improve our gross profit margins, as we have seen before. This bodes well in case of improvement of our top line moving forward. Also, in light of the fact that we are hard at work in the reduction of our cost structure, which has grown not so much during the full year, and for the first time, in Q4 was even down compared to the previous year. You'll probably have seen that we have posted among the adjustments an adjustment of roughly EUR 1 million for the layoff of a group of top managers, mostly in Spain, one in Italy.
We have had, but we post them as recurring revenues, already, a quite significant adjustment of the head count in Spain, with tens of layoffs. So we are quickly adjusting our cost structure to deal with a change scenario. So that's the key highlights on the five pillars. One comment on the solution business. First and foremost, you have seen in the previous slide that we closed the year with EUR 900 million of solution and services. Here, you see that we report EUR 1.091 billion.
That's the invoices that we made to customers, but due to the application of the accounting principle IFRS 15, part of the software, as well as the cybersecurity and cloud sales, were booked as margin only, with the agent concept. And so the as-reported number is roughly EUR 190 million less. But if we compare it to the figures of the market that we have seen in the previous slide, where everybody books the revenues. Let's say, gross of the IFRS 15 adjustment, we have now more than EUR 1 billion in sales. The market for us, sorry, service, storage, and networking has been a bit challenging.
We are far bigger than what we were in 2021, but in 2022, we won a couple of big tenders, which we were not able to win again this year. And so, most of the differences due is driven by these big deals, but we compensated with organic run rate sales. Software had the same issue. Last year, we had a significant deal of around EUR 30 million, which we had not this year, again, a tender in Italy. With on the other lines of businesses, especially cybersecurity and cloud, we posted really interesting growth rates, especially in cloud, so we're pleased of the progression that we are having. Very often, they think of us as a as a purely PC company, PC distributor. We are not, or at least we are no longer.
What's interesting, I would say, is that more and more we are diversified distributor covering all areas of the market, and we'll come in a second to a number of opportunities stemming from the growth of AI, Artificial Intelligence. Okay, if we move to the P&L here, most of the things have already been discussed. What I would highlight is the enormous growth in the financial charges. We have faced triple, almost triple rates in our average funding cost because of the Euribor growth. I remember everybody, beginning, well, end of 2022, we had a negative, still negative Euribor. We are now north of 3%.
Although we have a portion of our funding, which is at fixed rate, we still incurred in higher costs. The tax rate on ordinary business is stable, around a bit less than 25%. Then we add the impact that we have discussed at length, the impact of our non-recurring items. Vast majority of these EUR 33.3 million are out of the settlement of the dispute with the tax authorities, which we disclosed in Q2 of 2023, so nothing new here. The non-recurring cost with the tax authorities has been charged as a non-tax deductible, and therefore, it directly hits on the net profit.
The EUR 1 million is related to the reorganization of the management team of the group, mostly in Spain, as I said before, we book as ordinary charges, the normal layoffs that we have with employees. And then we add EUR 2.6 million related to an extraordinary booking on a single customer in Italy, which undergo a procedure. For our methodologies, whenever a customer opens up a procedure, we typically accrue 100% of the position. If the customer will be admitted to the procedure, probably part of it, normally a significant portion of it, could be recovered. We are waiting to see the evolution of this situation, but we have booked it, yeah.
Therefore, before these adjustments, we would have closed with a net income of EUR 24.2 million. Because of this, and especially the non-deductible charge with the government, we are, for the first time ever in our history, with roughly EUR 12 million of negative income. I've been doing this business as a CEO since 2020, and I was here for a few years before, when the company already was not yet existent, but there were the independent companies that later on were merged into Esprinet. This is the first time ever we incur in a loss, and it's due to this EUR 33 million of net charge with the government.
Just to give a brief reminder, we were making in 2018, EUR 14.2 million of net profit, and in 2019, EUR 23.6 million. So we are north of 2019. In terms of EBITDA, 2020 we posted EUR 69 million, and we posted EUR 61 million, EUR 64.1 million. And in 2020, with the zero interest rates, basically, we had EUR 31.8 million net profit, this year, EUR 24.2 million. We come from two record years, and so we are back two years, more or less. Let's see if in the coming years, we will be able to start growing again. That's the mission, but we'll talk about it in a second.
Okay, if we go into our balance sheet, well, the key point around the net cash position is all around our operating working capital. If you compare it to December 2022, you see that there's no big changes in trade receivables and payables. The big improvement is out of inventory improvement, which is the task that we gave ourselves during the year. And, in such a difficult year, it was our key priority, and I'm happy to see that we deliver in this. At least in such a complex year, the key priority has been met. The second one was to keep on growing our gross profit margin, because it's easy to reduce inventory by devaluing your inventory.
It's harder to slash by 25% your inventory while you decrease your revenues by 15%, EUR 700 million, and therefore purchasing much less with your gross profit margin that is growing. That was a big challenge, and we achieved it. I would draw your attention also to the fact that we achieved this improvement in our operating net working capital, while reducing by more than EUR 150 million our factoring utilization, close to EUR 150 million. That is particularly significant because, of course, if we had had the same level of factoring, we would have had EUR 140 million of lower reported net working capital and reported cash position. So particularly good number here.
And that's for the balance sheet, the summary. We can see better the numbers with our working capital metrics. As you can see, this is the cash cycle with the usual average of the last trading four quarters. The path is clearly set. We have been running around 80 days, 75-80 days of payables, since, let's say, second half of 2022. Inventory is going down. The lower level of factoring is impacting our as reported DSOs. But if we look at the quarter-by-quarter figures, you see that after a disastrous Q4 2022, with 12 days of cash cycle, we're not yet back to a negative cash cycle in Q4, as we did in the four previous years, but we're down to 3 days.
The big impact being, the higher level of DSOs, again, driven by a lower utilization of, factoring. So we're pretty pleased here, and, and we see a, a good momentum, moving forward in this, in this direction. So, that's it for, for the numbers. Of course, the return on capital employed, given the, the level, this is calculated on the average of five quarters, for working capital is down, and it probably will take, a couple of quarters, to, to start going up again, because we have to work out the, the oldest quarters and bring in the new ones that are much better in terms of working capital before seeing the improvements. Now, a couple of words about our sustainability achievements.
As you know, regulations are changing, and sustainability is also in light of the changed attitude of consumers and companies alike, is taking more and more importance into the decisions of our customers. We keep on working on three major areas, our footprint on the environment, and I'm pleased to say that we have achieved all our targets. We have brought to zero scope one and scope two emissions, reduced by more than 10%, scope three. We have launched our first.
Green tech distributor, Zeliatech, which we hope in time will capture the opportunities stemming from the growth of demand in the green economy for green data centers, as well as solar powered houses, and offices and buildings, generally speaking. So we are there trying to grab this opportunity because sustainability is not only a fad, is truly an opportunity of doing business. We have improved our performance in our human capital. We have got, once again, the Great Place to Work and Top Employer certifications in all the countries in which we operate. We got the EDGE certification on gender equality. So we have done a number of activities, and we have excellent rates from our employees.
It's a good place, we're, we're working, and we keep on working, with our local communities to, to grow the perception of the importance of our group within, the, economy and the, the society as a, as a whole. Now, going to the, to what's happening, and what we plan for the future. Market trends. Well, if we look at our, well, at our, at the tech forecast that we see, but, this is also what, our key vendors and customers, as well as, the market analysts that we deal with, see for the future.
We all know that the macroeconomic headwinds are still relevant, but we are more and more, how could I say, confident that there's good opportunities of seeing inflation going down, and therefore opening the path to interest rate reductions. As a matter of fact, we are factoring that in the second half of this year, we should have in our numbers a small but still significant reduction of interest rates. Second analyst believe that the ICT market is ready to go back to growth, and that the distribution will be well positioned to grab this growth.
Most probably, this growth should be present during the second half of the year, probably at low single-digit rates, but still back to a growth path exceeding the expected GDP growth, as it has been more or less always in the last probably 10, 15 years. If we look at the breakdown by product segment, the infrastructure, hardware, so service, storage, networking should still grow, but there's a sentiment around lower growth rate compared to the past. Software on the other side should still be pretty much in demand. We have this multi-year government investment under the recovery and resilience plans, the NextGenEU, which is an important driver. There's been stop-and-go in Italy because of bureaucracy, Spain because of the change in the government.
We trust that this year, the situation should be more favorable, and so that these investments could help sustain the growth of this area. What is particularly interesting for us is product innovation, especially into artificial intelligence. We really thought that the real winners of the GenAI movement would have been the large hyperscalers, large data centers, and the software providers. Of course, they will have a big opportunity, but what's interesting is... and, of course, all the manufacturers of the components, think of NVIDIA, that are fueling the growth, the computing power in big data centers.
But what's interesting is that more and more vendors are telling us that this computing power, enormous amount of computing power, needed to run effectively these GenAI opportunities will be pushed into clients, so into devices that sit on companies' desks or sit in houses or in the pockets of consumers, so PCs, smartphones, appliances in general. This is a tremendous opportunity for us because we are not only playing in the data center space, it's as you see now, 25% of our revenues and close to and 50% of our profitability, but we are still a very strong player in the client business.
For us, this could turn into an interesting opportunity because these devices will be sold in big quantities, and most probably with better margin opportunities, because they are more complex and with higher sticker price. So here there's an opportunity. And last but not least, there's a bunch of emerging areas that still have a strong rate of innovation and that will keep on offering opportunities. We keep on talking about cybersecurity, and with the GenAI, cyber threat will be even more sophisticated, so there will be even more request of more sophisticated cybersecurity solutions and products. Everything as a service, so the renting of technology will keep on being interesting, especially if and when interest rates will go down. And then sustainability.
Sustainability will drive investments, because companies will need to comply to the new ESG regulations, but also because sustainability is bringing to the market a number of new technologies. And these new technologies is the last point of this of this slide, the fact that the ICT sector is going into adjacencies. We think of energy efficiency and renewable energy, electric mobility, those are clear examples of how the traditional IT sector is entering formerly analog businesses such as energy or cars, just to give an example. So long term, we see a bunch of opportunities. And to wrap up here, what are our group strategic priorities? Well, of course, create a sustainable value over time.
As I said, back in 2018, our group was making EUR 45 million of EBITDA and EUR 14 million of net. We grew in time to a record result in 2022, doubling the EBITDA and more than tripling the close to multiplying by four the net profit. Last year was challenging, but we were roughly 50% more than 2018 in terms of profitability, of EBITDA, and more than 50% in terms of net profit. So we are on a growth path, which has been stopped by a tough year. The first priority is to keep on having a strong geographical and product diversification. Last year has been particularly challenging for consumer spending and for clients, the PCs and smartphones, specifically.
Analysts think that the drive to GenAI could turn this year and the future ones into excellent years for PCs, and we are a player there. While the data center business could slow down in the near future, and we are looking into the opportunities of diversification, both from a geographical standpoint as from a product standpoint, the opening up of Zeliatech as our company in charge of grabbing the nascent market of solar energy, as well as sustainable and energy-efficient data center, is an example of looking after new opportunities in light of the need of keeping always a strong product diversification. Second, we'll keep on investing in the excellence of operations.
We need to provide our vendor community, our customers, services aligned with their expectations, and therefore, we are more and more focused on investing in our processes, also with the help of GenAI. The key priority will keep on being our relentless focus on return on capital employed. We want to work hard, not only in profitability improvement, but in capital employed optimizations as well. Because for us, an excellent ROCE means the possibility of getting back to a generous dividend policy, having the money to fund organic growth and to fund M&A. Let me say a word on the dividend policy. As you have seen, we have declared a zero dividend. We have proposed to the board, up to the AGM, to give zero dividend for this year.
We have discussed at length in our board, the dividend policy of the group is unchanged, so at least 50% of the net profit consolidated of the group every year. This year, the net profit adjusted was positive, but given the fact that for the first time ever, we had a negative result at as reported level. We decided to be cautious, and to suspend the dividend for one year, in accordance with the policy. But the policy is unchanged, and we really want to go back to giving a generous dividends in the future. We don't expect another charge, such as the one that we had this year. So, we should reasonably go back to giving a dividend the next year.
Fourth priority, keep on having a solid capital structure. The fact of not giving a dividend goes in the direction of keeping a good cushion of equity on top of our funding, traditional funding structure. We want to be always able to manage external shocks. Last but not least, our attention to ESG issues. We will give to the financial community our profitability guidance during Q1 result presentations in May. Actually, we'll have the board on May 13. So in that date, we'll give the usual guidance for the year. One last word around solid capital structure. We have already received a question around, by mail, around the news of the breach of a covenant.
I'm ready to answer questions over there. Just to give an indication, which you can find, as every year in our financial report, which is due to be published in a few days by the end of the month. But just to give a couple of numbers, as of December 2022, we had more than EUR 1.4 billion, EUR 1.4 billion of credit lines from financial institutions, of which EUR 480 million, roughly, short-term bank lines, 111 long-term loans, EUR 180 million of a short-term revolving credit facility, and then close to EUR 700 million of factoring lines for customers.
The level of utilization at the end of the year, and what was mostly linked to the factoring utilization, was around 17%, 20% the previous year. So we have a solid capital structure that we wanted to keep on for the future, for the future. In case there's a question on the covenant, I'm ready to answer, of course. And that's it, and thank you.
We can start with the Q&A session. Let me remind that to ask questions, you should kindly book your speech and then unmute your microphone. Okay, Gabriele Berti?
Hi, good morning, all. Thank you for your presentation and taking my question. First one, considering that you mentioned Zeliatech several time over the presentation, I wanted to ask which are your overall expectation for this business in the coming years? And also, in particular, if Zeliatech 's activities could benefit from an increase in demand coming from the incentive under the new Transition 5.0 plan. And second question, if now that the level of the working capital is back to a more normalized level, you can consider about being less cautious in taking certain businesses and therefore have more room to push sales, or for this is not an option, and maintaining the focus on net working capital remain the key priority?
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Berti. On Zeliatech, well, on the second question, will it benefit? Probably so. We have not been able to read in detail the new law, but generally speaking, it looks like the new law goes in the direction of more efficiency in buildings. And that's the general trend that lies behind the creation of Zeliatech. We have seen an opportunity in the energy efficiency of data centers, as well as in energy creation and efficiency in buildings. Buildings of all kind, of course. And that's why we have opened up Zeliatech, which is the receiving end of some businesses that we already had. Some of them, both years ago, if we take the da- the.
Energy efficiency for the build-up of a data center, the physical building in which the service and storage are typically hosted. These are really energy. How can I say? Energy-hungry situations where you need to power the machines and to cool them off. So there's a lot of energy included. Years ago, we bought a company in Italy, EDSLan , which was selling to special kind of electrical contractors that build physically this kind of data centers. We sell to them cabling, we sell to them cooling devices, and uninterruptible power supplies, UPS. In time, we want to grow this, as you have probably seen, there's a lot of demand in data center build-up.
Not only the machines inside, but the physical building. So we think that there's an opportunity, we are leveraging what we already had. Then there's the new opportunity driven by the solar business. So companies and families alike that are installing solar panels. We are not really in solar panels, as a matter of fact, so far. We are more in batteries, inverters, and if you probably remember, years ago, we signed already contract for the distribution of car charging devices, and not only car charging devices, bicycle, car charging devices and so on. And so we are putting all together. Yes, we think there's a good opportunity. We have not yet released any long-term target.
We think that this could potentially become something material, but first, we wanted to grow it, because we really need different people. We are hiring people from other industries, different kind of vendors and competitors as well. Customers are not traditional system integrators. IT resellers are more electrical contractors. So we first want to strengthen our presence there, and then we will give voice to some expectations. But, yes, the opportunity potentially is material. As per your second question around working capital, yes, we are not where we want to be. As you have seen, working capital is still higher than expected, but we are way better than the really unacceptable for us numbers of 2022, and definitely first part of 2023.
As I mentioned before, yes, this could help us address some sales that we lost, because we were so focused on reducing inventory that we were simply turning our back to our historical vendors, say, "Hey, guys, first we need to sell what we have in stock, then we can think of going after new opportunities." Now that not everything, but a lot has been done, selectively, we will go back to vendors, and I think and hope... Well, I don't know if hope and think, or think, hope, that some of them will be pleased to have Esprinet back on the scene, providing our logistical and financial and commercial capability to help drive their growth, and we'll be there. We will be, however, very careful on not bringing back problems into our working capital, that's for sure.
But still, we will be back on the market. How big this opportunity will be? Don't yet know, but we are more positive than last year, definitely. Thank you.
Another question from, Mr. Belwati. Mr. Belwati, I give you the floor.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. My first question is regarding Q4 revenues from the solution and services business. I see slight underperformance of this quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2022. So was it mainly because of the tenders you were mentioning, or because also a market component? And the second one is on D&N. I see that D&A in Q4 is slightly above D&A of Q3. So is it because of the payment effect of the acquisitions, or because of other things? Thank you.
Okay. So on the first question, is mostly linked to a big tender that was not there this year. We wanted the previous year, so on solutions, it's essentially this. The market, as I said, was anyhow is anyhow no longer growing so strongly as it has been in the previous two, three years. So I think that having a very diversified product range will help us because that area, with some differences, cloud, software, and cybersecurity, still going strong, could be areas where there will be less less, let's say, happiness in the market. That's the point. On your second question, are you referring it to depreciation and amortization?
I guess, is it the right question? Sorry.
Yeah, basically, if I'm looking at the Q3, it was at more or less EUR 800 million less, so that's.
Yeah, we made a few investments. We are working on a couple of projects in Italy for the automation of portions of our warehouse. And we have had some further investments linked to the acquisitions that we made of Lidera. So probably the big part of the effect is this one. We can look into the details, and if you want, we can send more info on this, but it's mostly linked to this effect.
Thank you. Perfect.
You're welcome.
Mr. Margi, do you have the floor?
Hello, good morning, everyone. Thanks for the presentation and for taking my questions. The first one is about the first months of the year. If you may provide a trading update for the first two months. So if you are starting seeing first a positive signals about a recovery in the market demand, or is still too early to see a reversal of the trend? And the second question is about 2024, so trying to translate the qualitative message you said before. So I think might we expect so a recovery in sales growth, but with a less restrictive focus on gross margin?
But the main focus remain the net working capital dynamics, so the aim is to achieve, again, a return on capital on a satisfactory return on capital. And if my consideration are correct from your point of view. And the last question is about your latest acquisition, if you could provide an update on Sifar. So, if you. Anyway, if you can provide us with an update on that acquisition. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks to you. Well, the consumer market at the beginning of the year is still showing no signs of recovery at all, at all. The reseller business in better shape. The PC market is getting better, definitely better. It comes from such a horrible year. It's not so strange. So all in all, the data center business is cooling off. The overall picture so far is in line with the analyst expectation and our expectation. So recovery of clients, the consumer spending is still cool, but hopefully improving, and the commercial business still going relatively well. We have to see the numbers in the second part of the year.
We come from 2023 with the analysts that were keeping on projecting a next quarter recovery, and we kept on waiting for this recovery, which never came. And we were fooled and trapped into this, and we kept on giving targets. We were fighting hard with our historical vendors because they were reading this forecast and pushing hard to put the products. We were trying to reduce the inventory, so it's been a challenging time. We don't wanna make the same mistake. Things are getting better, but we are not yet with the clear signs of recovery, I would say. That's what we are seeing so far.
As per 2024, our focus will be return on capital employed and profitability in absolute terms. So wherever we have lost unnecessarily share, because we thought that the combination of product customers could have given us structurally interesting return on capital employed, but we were focused on temporarily cleaning our working capital. Those areas will be chased and hopefully recovered. That doesn't mean that we will lower the gross profit margins per se, but it could mean that there will be a different kind of mix. Also, because in the market, if the evolution of the market will go as analysts expect, clients should be better, so PC and smartphone in the market should perform better than data center and solutions. So that's what they say and expect.
That is what might happen. Clearly, our focus is return on capital employed, therefore, we will keep on having strong focus on working capital management. That's the area where we, we will keep on looking for opportunity. Obviously, with a different starting point, we'll be in a position to sit in front of our vendor community and customers alike, and probably take more bets on the market than before, because we started from a cleaner slate. That's the situation. Sifar is performing pretty well. We are really pleased with this with this deal. Excellent margins. The market is a bit tougher than expected, but marginally so. But they're really performing very well.
We are now seeing if we can move their tremendous capabilities also in other regions, and see if, we can leverage these capabilities, in a better way. It's a bit early. The integration so far is a very light integration, because they really do a completely different business with very different customers alike. So we, we keep them separate, but, but things are moving, pretty well, and, it's a great team. We're really happy about what's happening.
There are no more questions? So I think we can, end the call. We, of course, remain at your disposal, so thank you for participating, and see you next time.
Thanks, everybody, and have a great day.