Morning. My name is Daniela, and I will be your conference operator. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Welcome to the second Liverpool Day. There will be a question and answer session after the presentation, and instructions will be given at that time. Any forward-looking statements made during this presentation are based on information that is currently available. They are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations and assumptions discussed today. This may be due to a variety of factors, including the risks outlined in El Puerto de Liverpool's most recent annual reports. Please refer to the disclaimer on the webpage for guidance on this matter. I would now like to turn your attention to a brief introductory video.
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Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Graciano Guichard, El Puerto de Liverpool's CEO, for some opening remarks. Mr. Guichard, you may begin.
Buenos días a todos. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to our 2nd Liverpool’s Day. Just as a quick intro, 2020 was a year where we all fought for survival. In our case, we became leaner, we became faster, and we became more agile. In 2021 and the 1Q of 2022, our goal has been to maintain and even increase that momentum. To do more with less, to do more with less cost, to do more with less inventories. Today, our presentation is focused just on that, on all those new projects, all those new initiatives that we feel are going to keep transforming our company. Making El Puerto de Liverpool more relevant to our customers, allowing us to continue growing both in revenues and in profitability.
The team that is presenting these initiatives to you today, you already know them. They were here last year. I only have two new introductions to make. Carlos Marín wasn't here last year. He is a General Manager for the Liverpool brand since January 2021. Alejandro Melgar, who is the new General Manager of Suburbia, he began on December 2021, just a few months ago. Having said that, I'm gonna pass the presentation. In case you have any questions, we're all gonna be here at the end. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. Could you go to the next one, please? Last year, in our Liverpool Day, we presented our ecosystem strategy. Today, we are excited to share with you the progress we've gained in this first year of execution. Next one, please. As you might recall, we shared with you the aspiration of wanting to be in the first screen of our customer's smartphones. When we say in our slogan that we want to be a part of your life, we really mean it, and we mean not only on your physical life, but also on your digital one. We know we need to be on our customer's mobile to be where our customers do shopping research, where they get inspired, where they transact and get services, among others. Next, please.
We also shared that our strategy would be built by leveraging our key strengths. The first one, our key brands, the second one, the loyal customer base that we have and that in this year we've grown to be approximately 15 million unique traceable customers. Knowing and understanding our customers allows us to try to anticipate their needs. As we also shared, we also have our financial services capabilities, where half of our sales are done with our own credit cards, thus creating a very powerful virtuous cycle. It is also worth noting that a significant participation of our cardholders in what we call our PIF, which is a monthly subscription which provides peace of mind by packaging insurances, assistance services, and extended warranty, among others.
The fourth strength is that we see our store footprint as a competitive advantage, and finally, our wide assortment and portfolio of exclusive and private label brands. It is important to highlight that multi-category customers buy up to four times more. Next, please. Finally, in this slide, you will be able to again see the summary of our strategy. You might recall that we shared our vision of becoming the top shopping option for Mexicans with three key objectives. First, growing on e-commerce. Second, strengthening our omni-channel capabilities. Third, increasing the stickiness or frequency of transactions and interactions. Last time, we shared our key initiatives to reach these goals and some key enablers required. Now , in this presentation, we want to share the progress we've made in some of these key areas.
To start, let me turn it over to Carlos Marín, who will share how we are leveraging our stores as a competitive advantage and as a cornerstone of our omni-channel strategy. Carlos?
Thanks, Mauricio. Good morning, everyone. I'm Carlos Marín, Liverpool's General Manager, and I will talk about the omni-channel strategy we have. First of all, we have the store at the center of our strategy. For the foreseeable future, it will continue as the main sales channel. We have a great footprint, better than anyone else's. We see the store as a place for differentiated experiences and services to having the best possible assortment in a frictionless environment. Integrating the store to an omni-channel strategy brings us operating efficiencies and the possibility to use them as fulfillment centers. We will talk about our footprint and about the store as an experience center, a service center, and a fulfillment center. Next, please.
As we can see in this slide, just as an example of the two biggest cities in the country, our stores are strategically located close to the economic segments we target. If there is population outside of our service radius, most of the times are lower segments than the one we focused on. We just showed two cities, but it is the same for the whole country, so I believe we have an advantage that no one else has. If we do things right, we will be able to serve almost the entire country in the same day on next day basis. Next, please. Well, as I just mentioned, the physical channel remains a big part of our total sales, but the digital channel is growing rapidly, either through our .com sales or via the extended catalog.
For 2020, during the pandemic, online sales more than tripled, and it was natural that with all the stores open it was going to drop a little in 2021. The basis, as you can see, is now much higher. The extended catalog also shows good growth. This is a sale we make through established stores. Remember, around half of our points of sale are mobile, where we can show the extended catalog of our products and the products of marketplace. Next, please. We see the store as an experience center. We know the customer expects a differentiated experience when they come to the store. That's why we are working shoulder to shoulder with our most important partners and brands to get the experience to the next level.
We have great spaces with great brands such as Nike, Apple, Samsung or Disney, just to mention a few. For example, as you can see here, we have the Disney store inside our Liverpool stores where customers get access to the same products they will get at the theme parks. Or with Nike, we have the biggest space in Latin America at the Satélite store. This obviously has to go hand in hand with great service from our sales force. Next, please. We also use our stores as service centers, and I think this is very important. We want to offer our customers more services while at the store than just transaction. We want them to feel comfortable, listened, and taken care of.
We have a project called Value-Added Services where we map all type of services our customers would like to have at our stores. For example, we have our interior design service where customers can access professional designers, doesn't matter if it is a big or a small project. The beauty experience where people can get from a haircut to a facial treatment or simply get their nails done. We are transforming our multimedia spaces to offer geek help, a service where people can solve problems, mainly with their laptops or cell phones. We're working also really, really hard on the personalization of services and products. Through the last years, we have been evolving from a simple in-store operation to an omni-channel operation, where it doesn't matter where the customer is buying, they can get access to all the benefits of shopping at the Liverpool ecosystem.
Whether they buy in the store and want their products delivered to their home, or buying online and want to pick up in store and all the possible combinations. As we can see, next slide, please. Using the stores as fulfillment centers give us many advantages. First of all, delivery time. In one day, same day, or next day delivery, as well as click and collect within two hours. Resource optimization, well, we have the staff and infrastructure in the stores, so let's just involve. Cost reduction in terms of logistical efficiencies and inventory turnover. As our logistics team will mention, deliveries from the store are significantly less expensive than deliveries from the distribution centers. In order to achieve this, we have sales recognition from our sales force, so they can promote any product in the ecosystem.
Doesn't matter if it is in the store or not. That also represents higher income for them, and they become sellers of extended catalog and the marketplace products. Last, the customer service we can give in our stores for in-store and online sales, I think it's great. We give digital customers the peace of mind that they know where they can solve their problems if they are not completely satisfied. Many of these store customers call our contact center, but some of them prefer to have face-to-face interaction. Let's remember that the Liverpool brand represents reliability for most of the Mexican customers. Next, please. Well, in this omni-channel strategy, click and collect has a very important role. During the last years, this has been evolving fast and continuously.
This evolution allowed us to implement, for example, flash deliveries, where customers can pick up their products in less than two hours. Antonino will comment more on this. It is important to mention that multi-channel customers are much more profitable than single-channel customers. For example, digital customers, when in the store, they make additional transactions. For example, 20% of our customers that go to pick up something at click and collect end up buying something else. More than half of customers that make a return end up making a purchase. Next one, please. Well, in order to be able to reach what we have mentioned, we needed to do some store improvements in terms of renovations and innovations. That required investments and a lot of work, but we feel comfortable with these changes in all of our stores.
For example, we relocated click and collect modules to main stores, main store entrances and developed in-car pickup and drive-through delivery options for customer satisfaction. We also redesigned the workout space and signs for consistency with the strategy. As we can see in the photos in the next slide. Well, we also implemented a new position in the stores called the omni-channel leader, who is responsible for verifying that all processes involved are being followed correctly. Here you can see some examples of the click and collect and drive-through options we have in the stores. Next, please. Well, all of what we have been talking about couldn't be true without a good inventory management. It is imperative that we have our inventory as close as possible to where the customer is buying it.
That is why we are working on investing a lot of resources in the planning, assortment, and allocation projects. It has the objective of providing our products wherever and whenever the client needs them, either physically or digitally, through a technological platform called ONI. In simple words, speaking of any single category, planning will tell us how much to buy with long-term visibility. Assortment, what to buy based on attributes performances. Allocation, where to send it. All of these using advanced analytic capabilities and artificial intelligence, providing us the chance to make this task not only based on the past, but on the forecast. We are being very ambitious in this issue and plan to start using the first modules during the following weeks. The complete implementation will take place during this and the next year.
Now, Edwin Serment, our Head of Logistics, will get into some more details. Thank you.
Thanks, Carlos. Hello, good morning, everyone. I present you the top priorities that we have defined to improve our competitive advantage, which is the store from a logistics perspective. Next slide, please. First, we start with the people. We strengthen the omni-channel culture by integrating our processes with our client and user interaction focus to serve the client in a seamless environment with our clear goals to fulfill our delivery promise. By user, we mean that any collaborator in the store can do this. The store is the backbone of a convenient business model for our clients. We have enabled different purchasing and delivery methods capabilities that address the different needs for our clients.
We also implemented logistics processes that have been incorporated into the functions of the store associates in a simple and clear manner. In addition to adjustments made in certain physical spaces to meet peak demand, we also do local management accountability, and this has been achieved. Last mile transportation capabilities have been diversified to meet peak and valley demand efficiently. As you can see, the lead time delivery improves by 75% compared to the traditional model of delivery from a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Second top priority is the inventory. With the incorporation of improved distribution capabilities, we are in the process of redesigning logistics processes to be efficient and agile in the cross-dock and warehousing processes. We will expand our logistics infrastructure with PLAN and seven omni-channel fulfillment centers.
This will give us the capacity to replenish 90% of our stores only in 48 hours. That same infrastructure is the growth platform for the initiative Marketplace Fulfilled by Liverpool. Today, we fulfill 90%-92% of the products from the stores, and these initiatives are focused on making that model sustainable. The third top priority are the digital initiatives. We define delivery radiuses that we relate to our clients' delivery preferences and the inventory availability. With this, we enable transportation capabilities and offer the option of fresh deliveries. Fresh deliveries now represents 12% of our total deliveries. Next slide. PLAN. We are going to implement PLAN, Plataforma Logística del Noreste, in two stages. We have started the first phase with a control operation, and right now we're in the process of moving the big-ticket product category operations.
The immediate benefits are increase of our warehousing capacity by 188%. Also, 152% increase in processing capacity. We will have quality control benefits 70% above what we are right now, and our lead time will have an improvement of 14%. Also, the cost of processing there will have an improvement of 14%. We will complete our transition by September of this year. For phase two, PLAN will operate as the central node of our logistics network, as it will consolidate the operations for all the group brands. It will be integrated with a network of seven omni-channel fulfillment centers that will allow us to be closer to the demands. We intend to start operations by 2025. Next slide, please. Our competitive advantage is getting stronger.
In the past two years, we have accelerated the evolution of same-day and next-day deliveries either to home or in our click and collect model. Our ambition is to reach 47% share of deliveries by the end of 2022. This way, we improve our customers' shopping experience with our omni-channel model and highly competitive delivery times. We do it in a convenient way for our clients because with the store we achieve flexibility and serve our clients in a very comprehensive way. Our competitive advantage reduces logistics costs in order to consistently offer our clients free shipping. Next slide, please. Now we will present to you a short clip.
Hay eventos que detonan nuevas realidades. Con el inicio de operaciones de PLAN Big Ticket, comienza la primera etapa de la transformación de la cadena de suministro para la mercancía de muebles y línea blanca. Por su diseño integral con enfoque en el cliente, PLAN Big Ticket está preparado para lograr importantes eficiencias en los procesos de recepción, almacenamiento y envío, gracias a sus pilares de flexibilidad, escalabilidad y sostenibilidad. Con un incremento de hasta 20% en productividad, PLAN Big Ticket será capaz de absorber un gran volumen de mercancía en poco tiempo, adaptándose así al comportamiento del mercado. Esa flexibilidad, junto con la integración de nuevas capacidades, permitirá reducir el tiempo de procesamiento al menos en un 14% para hacer llegar la mercancía más rápido a nuestros clientes.
Los sistemas inteligentes de citas y calidad permitirán enfocar esfuerzos en proveedores y mercancías de mayor riesgo para reducir hasta en un 25% los errores y defectos, evitando que lleguen a nuestros clientes. Es escalable, ya que está preparada para crecer su infraestructura de manera rápida y con una baja inversión adicional. Además, esta primera nave es parte de un diseño maestro que permitirá el crecimiento de naves adicionales según lo demande el volumen en los próximos años. También cuenta con un modelo de seguridad listo para crecer rápidamente e incluso ser desplegado en cualquier ubicación logística gracias a la automatización de diversas actividades. Con una visión de largo plazo, está diseñada para operar de manera sostenible, cuidando tanto a la comunidad como al medio ambiente.
La nave operará logrando importantes ahorros en el consumo de energía y agua, además de lograr la neutralidad en la gestión de sus residuos y emisiones que dañan la capa de ozono, cuidando la seguridad de los colaboradores que la operan. Plan Big Ticket consolida el modelo de entrega de muebles y línea blanca de Liverpool, Suburbia y Boutique para seguir generando las mejores experiencias hasta los hogares de nuestros clientes. Tú eres parte de esta gran transformación que se detona con Plan. Mejoremos juntos la experiencia de nuestros clientes en todo lugar, todos los días, toda la vida.
I will handle it to Antonino Guichard. Thank you.
Thank you, Edwin. Hi, everyone. Hope everyone is doing well. It's my turn now to talk to you about the digital strategy and what we're doing so far. As Mauricio Braverman mentioned before, we successfully implemented seven sites, two apps, all under the same strategy, allowing us to grow faster, move faster and technology, implementing new technology in all our platforms and all our brands. We have launched in the past year, the Suburbia app, and also we're launching the Banana Republic site in the next couple of weeks. This will be our eighth site, all, as mentioned before, running under the same e-com platform. Can we go to the next slide, please? As Edwin mentioned, we have the ability now to do flash deliveries. Flash delivery for us means the same-day delivery or next-day delivery.
Now, we're able to join our customer's location with the closest store inventory. This, as mentioned here in the pictures, will allow the customer to know exactly if the product is able to arrive today, next day, or if he chooses to do click and collect deliveries, it will be in less than two hours. All this with real-time inventory while the stores are open and operating. Also, part of our strategy mention is growing our assortment. Can we go to the next slide, please? For us it's very important to continue to grow our product offering. Mainly, with our buying department combining with big data analysis and the new business model of Marketplace, we have been able to grow tremendously our growing assortment in the past years.
Despite the pandemic numbers, we were able to grow 38% last year, and we're aiming to have tremendous growth in the upcoming five years. Talking about this assortment growth, I will talk to you about Marketplace. Next slide, please. As you know, we launched our Marketplace model in 2019 with major building blocks to do. This is our last 2021 performance, which I would like you to take step by step. First of all, and most important, we grew our customer base by 123%. Also, we were able to grow with tremendous talent, finding the right talent, the correct talent, and keeping it operating with us. It's very important for Liverpool. We have now a almost 60 people team working only to grow this business model.
We've implemented a new quality system, which has allowed us to have 97% order acceptance from our sellers. 96% order deliveries on time. We were able to do some building blocks that will take us to the next level. We have launched, as mentioned by Edwin, the Fulfilled by Liverpool model, focusing on our delivery capabilities, especially with our big ticket items, allowing Liverpool to deliver what it does best, our big ticket. We've also are able to integrate all data with a 4PL manager, giving the customer the ability to find whenever they want their products and where they are. We have also implemented an API capacity, so the seller and Liverpool are completely automated.
Finally, we also launched a stock out model, allowing us to be able to mix the seller inventory with Liverpool inventory, and this will reduce completely the stock out option in the store. Which means our sellers and vendors are now mixed together, so our sales team will always have inventory to sell. Marketplace now represents almost 50% of liverpool.com. We have over 50 sellers now selling with big ticket items Fulfilled by Liverpool. We grew our sales 53% regarding last year. We were able to grow 58% in orders, and these orders, 8% were done through the store, which represents around 20% of sales were done with the seller app in the store. Of all those orders, 25% were delivered by click and collect within the stores.
We were able to grow 85% of new sellers. We were able to grow 97% of our active offers, and we were able to increase 91% our active sellers, allowing this business model to grow tremendously and we foresee it keeping it this way for the next couple years. Next slide, please. Talking now about our e-commerce performance, I want to talk to you a little bit about how well we've been doing. Well, we have grown tremendously in session growth comparing 2020 with 2021, despite the pandemic and the tremendous growth e-commerce had worldwide. Also, it's very important to mention that we have grown our monthly active users year-over-year over almost 15%, now having around nine million active users per month. Next slide, please.
Talking about customer acquisition, it is very important to mention that this is the company's customer acquisition. We had a steady growth from 2018 to 2019. Due to the store closures and the pandemic, we lost around 20% of customer acquisition. However, in the past year, we were able to turn it around. We grew 23%, and now we are expecting to grow almost 11% in customer acquisition and continue that trend. All of this is doing with a personalized omnichannel experience. Next slide please. We have to return the mom-and-pop shop offer to all of our customers. They wanna feel confident that Liverpool will always be there for them. As mentioned before, we have implemented a personalized experience all under one ecosystem. Can you go to the next slide, please?
We have an omni-channek order history now. We have able to mix what's happening offline with online, mix it all together, and now you have it on the, in your hand, in your pocket. We have personalized content through all of our customer database. We have now e-ticket options which will allow you to have in your app all the transactions you've made, so you can do follow-ups, you can do maintenance, you can do installations, all under one hand. We've implemented wallet, we've implemented personalized Monedero Electrónico all through the app, and now we have a personalized coupon hub. We also have the geo-localization to anticipate deliveries, and this allows our logistics platform and our sellers platform to give better and faster performance for our customers.
Finally, we've implemented a hyper-personalized experience, meaning that we are now able to have more than 90% of our database having a personalized experience. You can go to the next slide, which means how are we doing? These are just a few examples of how through mid-season sale, Ventas de Sal, which was a couple weeks ago, and our 48 special sales a couple weeks ago, everybody had a different experience regarding on what our algorithms are telling us and the probability that you will find the best assortment for you in Liverpool. This has been already implemented, giving us tremendous increase in sales. Following the worldwide trend, can you continue, next slide please? We've implemented also live shopping. As you know, especially in the Asia market, live shopping is very important and very trendy.
We have implemented here. What is live shopping? Live shopping means that somebody is an expert in the product, either our buyers or our sellers, are going live on our platforms, selling the best assortment we have, telling you how it works, and how can you continue to improve your product buying. We already have on Facebook and on social media more than 86 days of viewing time. We continue to invest in this project and tropicalize it into Mexico's market. All of this strategy has been giving us, next slide, please, our expectations of how digital GMV sales will grow. We're expecting to grow 33% this year, but as you can see here, we continue to grow our forecast and continue to be on a heavily increased sales trend.
Now , I will turn it to Santiago de Abiega, our General Manager of Financial Services.
Gracias, Tony. Hello, everyone. It's good to be with you again. I'm gonna give you a quick overview of an update of all of the product and services that we are developing on our financial services offer. Can we go to the next slide, please? Okay. This chart, I'm sure you've seen it before. On the first ovals that we have here, is everything that we already have and we are in the process of developing and increasing the number of services and products that we are offering our customers. As we saw on our last meeting, we have the Monedero Digital, which I'm going to give you an update. Crédito Conoce , which is all our private label cards with all of our different, payment plans that we have.
We have the Crédito Otros , which is the co-branded cards, the personal loans, which is something that we are testing today, and the insurance business, no? The distribution of insurance, in which we have a whole variety within our offer that we have today. On this last oval regarding this one, and all the products, these new products that we want to offer our customers, all I can say right now is that we have been working on it and we have had significant progress. Hopefully, once we have something more concrete, we will be able to communicate it pretty soon. What are the benefits of developing all of these, financial services offered?
Well, the same way that you've heard from my colleagues of all of the development that we have on our ecosystem and on our marketplace on the commercial side, well, we wanna do exactly the same thing on the financial services by complementing the ecosystem of El Puerto de Liverpool. You know, obviously, this is also going to help to increase the frequency of the visits that we have from our customers. This is going to give you more information on the customer. This way we will have this information to offer different commercial offers to our customers, no? Obviously, also leverage all of the omni-channel presence that we have within this as the financial offer. If we can go to the next one.
Now, I'm gonna give you some example of the things that we've talked before and the new things that we are doing on the financial services. We talked about the bill payment hub. Well, we launched this nationwide in November 2021, and it is beginning to get more and more important, even though it's still not too big. As you can see, these past months, we're having close to 15,000 transactions and close to MXN 10 million in transactions by paying. These are actual screens that we have on our app, so you can directly pay your bills charged to your Liverpool credit card. Next one, please. Okay, I also wanted to share with you these new products. These are very small today, but we started testing them in some stores.
We have a secure credit card. This is a department store card that allows the applicant to begin or to repair their credit history. Customers, even customers that have a bad credit history, they can apply for this card and start creating their new or repairing their new credit history. This allows us to go to a segment of customers that in the past we were not giving credit to. We launched this test, this pilot test in October 2021. Today we are in 29 stores. We are refining the product. We are learning from it. Hopefully we will start rolling out this to more stores. We also start testing pilot test on Livercash, which is cash loans. They are based on the line of credit of our customers on the credit card with installments of up to 24 months.
We launched this in November 2021, and this has become something very interesting that we are learning from it and hopefully we will be launching it nationwide pretty soon. Next one, please. We also talked on our last meeting about credit online, the applications that we have online, with the digital channels. Today, the results are very good. Today, we have had over 57,000 new accounts generated originated by this channel, no? Which is on these past months, it has represented 14% of all of the originations of the company. Today, this is our number one origination channel. By June 2022, what's next? We are going to introduce the biometric authentication.
This means, because today all of these new applications that we are originating through this channel, these 57,000 accounts, they have all been for customers that do have information on the credit bureau, what we call as the hits on the credit bureau. By June, we will be able, with this biometric authentication, we will be able to originate accounts for customers that do not have information on the credit bureau. We believe that this is going to increase substantially the number of accounts that we are gonna be creating through this channel. No? Also, in June, we're gonna be releasing the instant virtual card, which this means that you do the application, online, you get your card immediately, and you can just start shopping at that moment digitally, or you can go to the store and also start shopping with your e-wallet.
Next one, please. We also talked about the Monedero Digital, which is Monedero Digital, just to remind you, is the Liverpool digital money. We launched it in June 2021. As of today, we have close to 500,000 active Monederos. The purchase amount that we've had with these Monederos is around MXN 300 million, which most of these transactions we've had them done online. 84% of the transactions that are being done with the Monedero are done online, and the other 16% are being done in store with the e-wallet. This is very important for us also because this allows us to get information from customers that probably were not transactioning with our credit card, and we did not have that much information.
This way we can get information from mostly all of our customers. Next one, please. I think this is my last slide. We also talked about Crédito al Consumo, which is our non-revolving consumer credit with an initial down payment. With bi-weekly installment plans. We call these mini pagos. Mini payments. This is designed for lower, medium, and upper lower segments for the acquisition of goods. This product also allows us to get to a segment that also before, we were not giving credit to. Customers, what they want to have is the certainty of the fixed payment is going to be within the next months or bi-weekly payments. Today, we have, I think it's 21 stores that we're doing the pilots.
By the end of this year, we're gonna have a rollout to 80 more stores. By 2023, we hope to have all 190 stores with this offer. We're doing this in Suburbia right now, which we believe there's where we have this segment of customers. We are also working to have the automatic downsell and upsell of all of our products, no? We can offer in Suburbia the Visa card, we can offer the department store card, then we can offer the Mini Pagos. Then the Aparta Moda, which we. It’s customers that go, and they start paying their goods without taking them home until they finish paying. We also get information from these customers.
Once we see that the customer's paid, they take the goods. At that point we can start doing upsell for these customers. We are also thinking of the next to offer also the secure cards here to the customers of Suburbia. These are only some examples of the things that we are working on, the things that we are offering in order to complement the financial services offer and ecosystem. I think that's it on my side. Thank you very much. Alex, you're next.
Thank you, Santi. Can we move to the next slide, please? Good morning. Today, I would like to share our value proposition that will be our main strategy and focus for the following years. This strategy is customer-centric, and will help us improve the overall experience in the omni- channel journey, letting us to achieve our profitability goals and set the basis for the future expansion. Next slide, please. We are working to improve our store layouts in order to offer a better customer experience with friendly adjacencies that will support the journey in our stores. In addition, we will develop a clear signage strategy for the departments from our store entrance and across all the touch points of our customer. The offer of our services will be visible for everyone to achieve a comfortable and easy way to navigate the sales floor. The next, please.
To improve profitability and the customer shopping experience, we are redefining our store clusters to be clear about which departments or categories we will offer per location. We will work towards building a clear definition of what brands we have per store, so the customer has a coherent and appealing offer of our products. We will strive to have profitable brands for the business and attractive for our clients, without losing focus that our core business is our private labels. We will continue with our guideline proposal by defining the right locations and categories that we can offer per store. With a clear signage and supported by digital tools to offer an extended catalog and thereby make physical spaces more efficient. We will maintain healthy inventory levels aligned with objectives to deliver a great store experience and reduce promotional activities.
We will seek to maintain a business model with the best possible product and competitive price proposal to promote full price sales. Finally, all our efforts are customer-centric. The next slide, please. We will continue with our growth plan in the coming years by opening close to 15 stores per year. In order to support our value proposition strategy, this year we are going to invest in remodeling and improving some of our existing stores. The next slide, please. We recognize customer service as a key part of the value proposition, so we are working intensively with a team to offer a friendly and timely service with an omni-channel approach. We will continue to promote our app and digital strategy and complementing with kiosks at our point of sale.
We will offer an extended catalog in certain categories and be more efficient on our sales floors. Thank you for your time, and now , I will turn it over to Zahié Edid.
Thank you, Alex. Good morning to everyone. This is Zahié Edid. I'm the HR Officer, and it's a pleasure once again to be here with you to share what we have been doing and what we are expecting to do in terms of ESG. So next, please. Last year, we had the opportunity to share with you the cornerstones of what will become our sustainability strategy. The footprint that we are seeing here. During 2020, we mainly defined the goals and set the route to achieve results in our sustainability model. Next, please. Today, we are glad to share the ESG results in our Integrated Annual Report 2021. It's designed to focus on our individual stakeholders and bring an integrated view on our contributions to the global agenda and the SDGs goals.
We invite you all to take a deeper look into our annual report by scanning the QR code that is in the screen. I want to underline that this is the first report that aligns with the GRI and SASB standards. Next, please. Today, we want to bring you an overview of the ESG goals in the coming years by topic, okay? Let's start. Starting with an environmental standing point, we have set ambitious goals for 2040. First of all, as we work on decelerating climate change, we are committed to attaining net -zero emissions on our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. We will do this by cutting back on fossil fuel consumption for our operations in the coming years, integrating electric vehicle solutions to our distribution fleet, as well as searching for clean and renewable energy sources on a national scale.
In terms of waste management, we want to improve our capabilities for recycling in stores in order to be able to prevent waste output comparable to 100% of what we generated in 2020. Finally, we are committed to reducing water consumption, increasing water treatment, and integrating our capacities for rainwater capture to achieve water balance. Next, please. In the social dimension, education is one of our top priorities. We see this as a chance to connect with the communities and emphasize that well-prepared people facing a different way the challenges in life. Towards 2030, the goal is to reach more than 100,000 beneficiaries on a skill development programs via our online university, and benefit social integration. On the other hand, gender equality will be on the agenda. Our main purpose is training women in middle management to accelerate their development.
Topics like communication skills, improving talent management, innovation, networking, and making decisions with data will be reinforced to empower and develop talent. We strongly believe in an open talent culture without a gender quota, but giving the same opportunity and recognition for women. Next, please. Finally, in terms of governance, we define important commitments by 2030. One is centered in our responsible sourcing program, which is oriented to develop our strategic suppliers and collaborate with them to add value to the chain, to all the value chain. The program encourages and audits suppliers to guarantee human rights, labor practices, and environmental compliance wherever they operate. The second goal is to promote sustainability with our commercial partners, developing more sustainable collections and products. By 2030, we'll be labeling 100% of sustainable attributes of the products in the catalog offer. Next, please.
With all of these commitments, we want to show you the way we want to make a difference in our business to achieve a more sustainable future and be close to the community, and serve other customers every day, anytime, anywhere. Thank you for your attention. Now we go with Enrique.
Thank you, Zahié, and good morning to everyone. I'm gonna close, you know, the presentation that we have to move on to the most interesting part, which is, of course, the Q&A section. Very quickly, the next slide, please. As you know, we had a very strong first quarter this year. It's worth to highlight, and I'm sure you were well aware of that the year-on-year comparison was relatively easy because last year, during the first quarter, we have a significant number of stores, particularly in the central part of the country, closed during the first basically 45 days.
After saying that, I would like to point out that March, which was more of an apples to apples comparison, was also very strong for basically all our business units. In this couple of slides I'm gonna share with you, I'm gonna compare against 2019. That's pre-pandemic. I'm sure that this gives you more color on what the performance that we have in the first quarter looks like. For Liverpool continues to perform very strong. Same store sales growth against, again, the first quarter of 2019 was almost 25%, which is big, obviously. The total revenue for the company in Q1 was a little bit above MXN 32 billion.
That was 17% above the same quarter, basically three years ago, pre-pandemic. Digital sales, as you saw, were basically flat in terms of sequentially against the previous two quarters, around 20-21%. Again, I would like to stress the fact that it's this is 3x the share that we had in 2019. Retail gross margin also performed very well. It was 32.6% during Q1, and this was almost 300 basis points above the same period three years ago. As you can see, all the numbers look very, very strong. The next slide, please. Our NPLs continued to perform very, very well. We closed March with an NPL of only 2.4%. This is a little bit less than half of what we had three years ago.
Again, we continue to be surprised by how good this KPI is performing. In terms of EBITDA, we posted almost MXN 5 billion of EBITDA in this quarter. This was a growth of 67% against the same quarter three years ago. EBITDA margin of 15.3% was also record high, 450 basis points above what we had three years ago. Finally, the net profit that we posted in Q1 was MXN 2.2 billion, and this was a little bit more than 2x what we had in Q1, not only in 2019, but also you see in Q1 in 2018, we also see basically that net profit is two times ahead.
Finally, I don't have a slide on that, but we also saw very strong results in other KPIs. Marketplace, Antonino covered, grew 41% year-on-year, came very strong. In terms of logistics, our last mile delivery cost decreased 7% year-on-year. Our delivery times improved 25% year-on-year. Click and collect, which, as Edwin pointed out, is very, very important for us, reached a 31% share in Q1. Again, it's still below the pre-pandemic level, but has recovered significantly. Finally, during this Q1, the same day and next day deliveries increased almost 90%. The ship-from-store delivery is more than double against the prior year. As you can see, these are very strong numbers across the board.
I will move now to the Q&A part. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now conduct a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press the Raise Your Hand button located at the bottom of the screen. If you are connected via telephone, please dial star nine. We remind you that all lines have been placed on mute. When it is your turn to ask a question, you will be unmuted. If you have placed yourself on mute, you will need to unmute yourself to ask your question. We will now pause for questions. Our first question comes from Maricel Andrade from Credit Suisse. Please ask your question.
Hi, it's Vanessa Quiroga from Credit Suisse. Thank you, very much for taking my question. It's mainly about logistics. This is a part that has surprised us more positively in the last few quarters on how Liverpool has been able to consistently reduce delivery costs since traffic started normalizing also at the stores and sales started recovering. I would like to understand better what your expectations going forward regarding a further reduction in delivery costs that you are expecting, especially when Arco Norte becomes fully operational. If you could give us a picture, a flow example of how your logistics will change before and after the full PLAN project. Thank you.
Yes, Vanessa. Thank you. Let me first talk about the economics, and then Nela will pass the mic to Edwin, to give you the flavor on how Arco Norte is gonna change. Arco Norte, and also the fulfillment centers are gonna change our network. First, in the terms of the delivery cost, I think that there are three main factors that have helped us in this first quarter of this year. The first one is that you see our digital volumes. The share was basically sequentially stable, both comparing to year -over -year. We saw 16% reduction in the digital GMV because as you pointed out, the stores were open and we are basically having a more of a normalized shopping experience.
That of course, helped in terms of the delivery cost because there were less lines to serve. The other two factors are click and collect. As I pointed out, click and collect is now running at 31%, and this is significantly above, of course, of what we had the prior year when the stores were closed for the first 45 days of the first quarter. Finally, also, the other thing that has helped a lot is the ship from store. I mean, ship from store, as I pointed out, is basically 2x above what we had in the prior year. That also, what we see is that, the last mile cost of a direct shipment from the store is basically like 65% below what you have to pay when you don't have this kind of delivery method.
I would say that those are the three things that have helped us. Looking forward, we are expecting a significant increase in the digital GMV for the latter part of the year.n Now that things are more apples to apples, and hopefully we're not expecting to see any store closures, we're expecting, you know, that digital GMV will close at around 28% for the full year. Since we started the year with only 21%, we're expecting a significant pickup. As Antonino pointed out, this translates into almost a 33% increase year-over-year for GMV. That will put pressure on the delivery cost.
The other thing that is gonna be pressure on the delivery cost this year is that we will have an overlap of the Arco Norte project that is starting up and is gonna be ramping up gradually to finalize the movement from Huehuetoca to Arco Norte by July, August of this year. We basically, during the first six or seven months of the year, we're gonna have, you know, like the operation simultaneously of both Huehuetoca and Arco Norte. That overlap will translate into several million dollars of additional logistics expenses. That will also put pressure for the latter part of the year on the logistics expenses. Now, I'll pass the microphone to Edwin Serment, so he can give us some color on the store network, or rather the logistics network. Go ahead, Edwin Serment. Thank you.
Thank you, Enrique. Vanessa, I will try to answer your question in a very simple way. The stores are the advantage. Every time we sell in the stores, we need to replace the inventory. The whole network is focusing mainly in stores as the advantage. The core of the logistics is gonna be Arco Norte and the fulfillment center operating at full capacity. We will handle the inventory in collaboration with the buying office. The buying office is gonna experience with the support of the new capabilities of distribution with planning assortment allocation. They will have the ability to reserve a small amount of inventory to react to demand.
That will put us in a very advantageous position. We will do the replenishment to the fulfillment centers or Arco Norte if it's needed. In the peak seasons, we will balance the volumes, handling part of the volume to the fulfillment center in order to maintain the stability in the level of service. The cost obviously is highly reduced because we have the proximity of the stores. We're moving the merchandise in a bulk way through the long haul way to replenish the store is way much less cost. It costs less than doing the last mile delivery. I hope I answered your question well.
Yeah. I mean, I think I wanted to contrast, like compare and contrast between how you are working today in terms of that flow, of how that product flows, throughout your logistics infrastructure now compared to what you expect it to be, with PLAN. Then also follow up-
I'll chip in on that one.
Yeah. Yeah, thanks.
Our logistic was built to deliver merchandise to the stores. Basically, we had a distribution center which had a cross dock, and what it did is it delivered the merchandise to the stores, and that was it. What we have today with the e-com is that we have to take that merchandise outside of the store, and if it's on the same city, it works really well. It's as Enrique said, it's about a third of the cost, if you do it through a distribution center. The problem is, if that merchandise is gonna be delivered outside of that city, there we have a problem, 'cause I have to take the merchandise out of Mérida, let's say.
I have to bring it back to Mexico, and then I have to send it to wherever place it's gonna be delivered. What we're gonna do is we're working first on the brains of the matter, which is the planning assortment and allocation structure. That will help us have the merchandise closer to where we expect it to sell. To the customer with artificial intelligence. The flow is now gonna change. We're gonna have some of the merchandise kept on Arco Norte. This is 2024, because remember that what we opened in Arco Norte today is big ticket. In 2024, we're gonna open something. We're gonna keep some merchandise on Arco Norte.
We're also gonna keep some merchandise on the seven regional distribution centers, and the store is only gonna have what it needs to sell in the next, let's say, one week. With this distribution center, we can deliver to the store the replenishment in less than 48 hours. In most cases, in less than 24 hours. What we're gonna do is, we're not gonna ship the merchandise before, we're gonna keep it. That's gonna help us reduce markdowns, it's gonna help us increase sales, because we're gonna have the merchandise where the merchandise is selling better. It's gonna help us increase the inventory turnover, and it's gonna help us deliver faster to our customers. That's the logic behind Arco Norte and the seven distribution centers.
That's amazing. Yeah, thank you. Just a follow-up on click and collect and shipping from store. What's your target in terms of where you want click and collect to be as a percentage of total e-commerce, and also what percentage for shipping from store?
Dimension. We intend to achieve 44%-47%, and this is based on the customer preferences and the way we have the inventory allocated right now.
Those are the figures, Vanessa, for this year. Those are our goals for this year. I think like long term, we envision that click and collect hopefully goes back to the high 30s, low 40s that we had before the pandemic. That ship from store will eventually in the next several years grow to 30% or so of our delivery. Hopefully, we'll have like 65% of our lines delivered using these competitive advantage methods.
That's great. Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ulises Argote of JP Morgan. You may now ask your question.
Hi guys, thanks so much for all the information today. One question here. You spoke about incrementing the credit offering and a bunch of new products that you're rolling out. Anything that you can share there, kind of priority-wise across those initiatives, maybe something on the timeline that you expect. The second part of that question also kind of relates to the NPLs. Those levels have been quite low. How does this play in your overall strategy? How much of a push can we expect on you guys becoming more aggressive towards expanding the credit portfolio in the short mid-term once again? Thank you.
Thank you, Ulises. I'll take advantage that we have the expert on this two questions, that we have, Santiago, of course, here. Santiago, you wanna take the these two?
Yes, Enrique. Thank you, Ulises. Very good questions. I'm gonna start with the second question first regarding the NPLs. I can tell you is that, yes, we are surprised to see the levels of NPLs that we have today. Nevertheless, let me tell you that even in the worst times of the pandemic, we never lowered our acquisition rates, nor the approval rates that we had. We maintained them. Obviously, we got less accounts because obviously we had our stores closed and people didn't apply for. At the beginning, we didn't have the online application. Our approval rates, they have kept the same. Actually, let me tell you that these past months we've seen higher approval rates even than the ones that we had prior to the pandemic, no?
Today, we're having approval rates between 40% and 45% on our portfolios, no? Definitely, I think one of the reasons is that unfortunately, with the pandemic, we lost a lot of the bad accounts or the most riskier accounts, and the write-offs had an important increase during the last year, especially on the second semester of the last year. That made the portfolio stay very clean, no? That is why today we have these levels. Actually, we closed with 2.1%. Definitely, we do believe that we cannot maintain, and actually we don't want to maintain these levels of NPLs. We expect by December to have 100 basis points higher.
We expect to be closing around 3.1% versus the 2.1% that we had in December. We feel very comfortable with this because we are seeing right now the entry rates that we have, the early stages that we have on our, let's say, buckets, and we can see that they are even better than what we had expected on our budget, no? We do believe that we can achieve this 3.1%. Nevertheless, even though we are seeing this increase in obviously, in balances and this increase in NPLs, the loan loss reserve, which is what goes directly into the P&L, it is still going to be, let's see, we believe 35% lower than the one that we had last year.
I don't know if that answers your question regarding the NPL. Yes, we have a lot of things that we are doing to increase the portfolio profitability. If you look at accounts, we are expecting to originate about one million accounts, which is pretty close to last or even a little higher than what we originated in 2019 before the pandemic. Obviously, we've been working a lot in line increases. We're gonna be doing over one million line increases this year, which is much higher than even what we had prior to the pandemic. Also, overdrafts. Overdrafts is something that we've been working with our systems in automatic overdraft that customers can go beyond their credit limit.
That's also very important, and that is giving us a lot of new sales. No? We have been working with all of our risk models. We have today 20 risk models, and all of these models don't have more than one year. These have been already adjusted to this new situation, no? These are behavioral models and acquisition, origination models and collection models, no? We do believe that this is also going to help us to retain this growth of the portfolio.
Thank you, Santiago.
Your first question regarding these new products that we want to introduce. Unfortunately, I cannot give you that much more information. As I mentioned, all I can tell you is that, yes, we've had substantial progress with this. Today we have some agreements that we are negotiating. We are in this process. What we do hope that within the next one or two months, the most, is that we will be able to give you more information on this.
Okay. Thank you very much, Santiago. That is very clear. Thanks for all the color that you shared here. That's very helpful. Guys, another question if I may. I think this one a bit quicker, but I think Carlos was talking around that metric on 88% of the consumer within nine minutes from the store. Is this on the larger cities, or what's the detail around this metric? Just to understand that a little bit better. Thank you.
Yes, Carlos Marín, do you wanna take that?
Yes, Enrique, thank you. No, I would say it's on a national basis. On a national basis. Obviously, in the big cities, it's much less than that, no? Because the stores are located within, let's say, three or four kilometer from most of our target consumers. I would say it's on a national basis.
Okay, perfect. Understood. Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you, Ulises.
Our next question comes from Luis Willard. If you could please state your company name and then ask your question. Thank you.
Hi, guys. Good morning. This is Luis Willard from GBM. I have a couple of questions. Maybe I'll start with the longer one for Graciano. I mean, after a couple of years of challenges and learnings from everybody, I mean, what would you say Liverpool as an organization learned so far? Especially how much better prepared do you think the company is, you know, to face the next 10, 15 years? That will be the first.
I think we learned a ton. You learn a lot when you have pressure, and 2020 was really a tough year. But what I think we learned the most is we need to move faster. We had to move faster in 2020, and we have kept that speed. I believe. We also learned to do a little bit more with less. For example, a good example is the margins. You see the margins today, and the reason we have good margins on Q1 of 2022 is because we have less inventory. We learned to work with less inventory due to both the pandemic and also the scarcity of products we've been seeing.
That led us to better margins because we have less product in excess that we had to mark down at the beginning of this year. We've implemented an agile process, the way of working with sales, which we didn't used to have before the pandemic. What we learned is something that we didn't talk about today, but when the pandemic began, we didn't fire anybody, and we kept paying the payroll every month. Since most of our vendors, not my vendors, but my salespeople, make money out of commission, we gave them a bonus even though they were not selling. We kept paying our vendors throughout the pandemic on time, which not everybody did.
What we learned also is that having those values and sticking to the values on the toughest time pays back. For example, we've had the less turnover in terms of people that we had pre-pandemic on the last year. We also have, I would say, a better response from our personnel. Now that we have scarcity on the products.
The vendors prefer to sell to Liverpool than to anybody else because they have the confidence in our brand. We learned a ton of things. I think we will have to stay on this talk for a while to tell you all of them. I would say values is one, also moving fast and becoming thinner. Those are the most important.
Thank you.
How they're gonna
Yeah.
I see Liverpool in the next 15 years. I don't think that today, planning for 15 years is doable. Maybe five, three, but 15 is too much. I would say that's gonna help us change the company. The company you see today is not the company you're gonna see in five years, and it's not the company you're gonna see in 10 years because the world is evolving too fast.
Yeah, that was very insightful, and thanks for the answer. If I may, another one. This is faster. If I got it correctly. Well, first, can you share with us the level of penetration of sales or SKUs that you currently have available for same-day and overnight?
Tony, I don't know if you can answer that one.
Perfect.
Hi, Luis. How are you? Yes, I think I didn't explain it correctly. What we have is real-time inventory combined with where the customer is. It depends where you are located physically and the closest store to you to get to real-time or next same-day deliveries. It's up to where the customer is. Let's say, for example, if I'm close to the Polanco store in Mexico City, I have available for same-day delivery all the inventory from the Polanco store. I don't know if that answers your question, Luis.
Yeah, perfectly, Antonio. Thank you. You would say that you're basically perhaps in the most relevant stores, as you mentioned, Polanco and Satélite, the big cities. You're close to having most of your, let's say, 80/20, you know, the 30% of the SKUs that make 80% of, I don't know, sales or EBITDA or however you measure it, already available on same-day or overnight. That means if you continue to hike same-day penetration or overnight penetration, there's not going to be a material incremental cost. I don't know if I explained myself correctly.
I don't think that is that high, I think, Luis. I think that we still have, you know, opportunities in terms of allocating the products closer to where the customer is. I think that we have a big opportunity basically with the project that Carlos shared some highlights, the PLAN assortment with the location. The location part is where you know, we're gonna send the inventory. The idea is that you know, we have a very high probability that we're gonna be able to sell it to you the same day or next day. Again, that today is still a big improvement area.
All right, Enrique and Graciano. Thank you.
Thank you, Luis.
The next question comes from Rodrigo Alcántara. Please state your company name and ask your question.
Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Yes. Yes. Go ahead, Rodrigo.
Thanks for taking my question. Rodrigo Alcántara, UBS. The first question is quite interesting regarding the projects that you have on the fintech side, secure credit card, the cash project. Just curious here if you are partnering with any fintech company or with any, you know, startup specialized in this or if you are, you know, developing these projects all on your own. If that's the case, what would be the rationale of doing that? Just curious because, you know, looking at what other retailers are doing in partnering with fintechs, et cetera. Stay on this topic on the credit side. Enrique, just curious.
I mean, your NPL levels, I mean, you know, whatever it happens, if it increase a couple of basis points more than NPLs, I mean, the reserve coverage that you have are quite good. Just curious if we may see, for the remaining of 2022, perhaps further reversals or releases on the provisions for bad debt. That would be my question on the financial services side. I have another one on the e-commerce and logistics if I may.
Yes. Let me give you some perspective from my side, and then I'll pass the mic to Santiago. In terms of your first question on the fintech projects, the reason why, yes, the idea that we have is to partner with someone, and the rationale behind that is that we don't have any intention to apply for a banking license. So that's why we need to partner with someone. As Santiago has pointed out, I mean, we are still not ready, you know, to give additional information on that, but hopefully we'll have something to share pretty soon. That again is the most important reason why we need to work with someone besides us.
In terms of the NPLs, as Santiago pointed out, we are planning to close this year with an NPL of 3.1%. That would translate into a provision in our P&L of like MXN 1.2 billion. As you saw, we basically had a reversal of close to MXN 300 million in Q1. That means that for the rest of the year, we're gonna charge to a P&L close to MXN 1.55 billion during the next three quarters. We are frankly not expecting to see any more reversals flowing to our P&L for the balance of the year.
As you also pointed out, we closed March with a very, you know, healthy coverage ratio of close to 13% of our gross portfolio. The idea that we have that is that we have still some uncertainty. As hopefully this goes away, we are planning to reduce that coverage to something in the neighborhood of 8.1% by the end of the year, which is more, you know, normalized. Those are the details. Santiago, you want to provide any additional color?
Thank you, Enrique. No, well, I think you explained everything very well. Regarding the provisions, as Enrique just mentioned, yes, that is the reason why I mentioned that even though we're increasing our NPLs, that we were going to have less loan loss reserves on our PNLs. That is because we're gonna be definitely. There are two reasons. First, the amount of reserve that we had at the beginning of the year, and then that we're gonna be lowering the ratios over the total balance. As Enrique just mentioned, today, it is close to 11.3% of the coverage, that ratio that we have over the total balance of the credit portfolios. Yes, we're thinking on lowering those to probably 8.2% by the end of the year.
Even though the coverage ratios that we ended up last year on only the NPLs, which is all of the balances past due over 90 days, we closed over 5x the coverage on those balances, the NPL balances. Which by the end of this year, even though we're lowering the coverage on the total balance to 8.2%, we expect to have that coverage by the end of this year at 3 x. We do believe that that is the reason why by lowering these coverages, we will be able to lower 35% the loan loss reserve. Regarding what you said about the FinTech, yes, we're looking at, as Enrique just mentioned, for these new products that we want to launch, the ones that were on the last COBO, yes, definitely we're looking and partnering, let's say, with a strategic partner.
On the other projects that you mentioned, like these new cards and the credit loans, and obviously I didn't mention, but we are also started looking at buy now, pay later. In these cases, today these tests that we are doing right now, we are doing them ourselves. We want to learn, we want to see. Definitely, yes, in order to grow and to launch it as the nationwide, yes, we're looking also to see if there is a FinTech or a technology company that can help us develop these products on a much efficient and faster way. I don't know if that answers your question, Rodrigo.
No, that was perfect. Then the second one, very quickly on the e-commerce and logistics. I mean, the no shipping cost has been like your standard compared to other e-commerce retailers. Just curious, as you're pushing more and more the flash delivery thing and trying to stand out on the delivery times, just curious if perhaps you may be charging delivery at some point in the future or you will continue with that flagship of not charging the delivery, but what are your thoughts on this regard? That would be it. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Rodrigo. No, we don't have any plans, frankly, to charge for the delivery. I think that ship already sailed. It's competitively very hard, you know, to charge the customer while having a free delivery even before, you know, the e-com arrival. That was a thing that we have in favor of our customers, so we don't have any plans in the near future to start charging for the delivery.
Okay. Thank you very much, Enrique.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Ruben from Morgan Stanley. You may now ask your question.
Hi, Andrew at Morgan Stanley. Thanks very much for the question. Was hoping you could dive in a bit more on Marketplace. I'm curious on your commercial strategy, how you think about selling other brands, how that competes with perhaps your first party and how you make sure you're controlling that end-to-end consumer experience. Really, just more on the benefits and trade-offs as you continue to ramp up the Marketplace would be very helpful. Thank you.
Yes, thank you, Andrew. I think that, Antonino, do you want to answer that?
Yes. Perfect. Okay. Hi, Andrew. Thank you for your question. Regarding our strategy, as mentioned, the last Liverpool Day, we're focusing our Marketplace on complementing our first party merchandise. That being said, what we've done in the past year is especially focusing on what we want to maintain and keep growing and some complementary products that we are not specialized in selling. That's our more specific strategy that we're following. As I mentioned before, the other one that is very important is the stockout project. Which means, let's say for example, any brand, let's say, Adidas and our merchandising team buys 20,000 of the small size shirts, and then it finishes. Now we've implemented with some vendors an automatic system that lets them know.
If they have that shirt, that size, it turns on automatically online, and it turns on automatically on the store app. We never stop selling that product. Our Marketplace is complementing our first party sale. Our Marketplace is also maintaining our first party sale, so we reduce the stockouts and we can give a better opportunity for our clients. I don't know if that answered your question.
Yes. That's helpful. Just a follow-up, if I may. You spoke about the loyal customer base, I think 50 million uniques. Can you talk about where you are in the journey of customer data, understanding the purchase behaviors, whether that's in store or online, overlapping with financial services as well? Just a better sense of how far you are along in terms of the loyalty benefits, customer data, things of that nature. Thank you.
Yes. Our 50 million customer base has grown, but also we've been able to understand better our customers. In previous year, our goal that we mentioned on the last previous Investor Day is to have been able to personalize each of our customer base up to 80%. The other 20% remains when a customer buys in cash, and we don't have that much information about them. I'm very proud to say that right now we are around 55%, close to 60%, so we're ahead of our goal. We can identify 60% of our customer base, and that's what we're personalizing, and that's what we're focusing on. As we continue to grow, we try to grow our database with better information from our customer. As Antonio mentioned, Monedero Electrónico is one that is helping us.
Also we are ahead of our goal, so I believe within the next couple of months, we will reach our 70% by the end of this year, and that will help us personalize and hyper-personalize, which is the new trend.
Great. Really helpful to get those updates. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew.
My next question comes from Antonio Hernández. Please state your company's name and then ask your question.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the space of questions. This is Antonio Hernandez from Barclays. My question is regarding private labels. I mean, this is of course a huge appeal of Suburbias and clearly a much lower penetration in Liverpool, in the Liverpool format. Do you think that this could be a good strategy maybe especially in the midst of inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints on some merchandise? Do you think this is feasible on Liverpool, as maybe also some consumer trade down? Thanks.
Yes. Thank you, Antonio. Carlos, do you want to provide some perspective on private labels in Liverpool and the importance that they have?
If you want, I'll take it. I cannot hear Carlos.
Yeah. Thank you, Graciano.
Private labels are really important in Suburbia, but what we needed on those private labels was to increase the margin, so that's what we are doing. In terms of inflation and supply chain, private labels will help us, but also developing a countrywide vendor organization. We've been working with the Cámara de Vestido and the Cámara Textil with the different chambers of production to increase the availability of product in Mexico, being that private label or not. I believe private labels are more of a differentiator against our competition, which is Amazon and Mercado Libre and Walmart. I believe private labels are not gonna work. That's not a defense against inflation or that.
It's a differentiator we're gonna have to increase both in Liverpool and Suburbia. In terms of inflation, we are, as I said, developing.
A nearshore cost vendor base.
Okay, thanks. Can you provide more light on what's the penetration at Liverpool format? Thanks.
On what? Sorry, I didn't hear.
The share that private labels have in the case of Liverpool.
Oh.
I think they are around in the case of our soft lines we are around 10%-15% global share of our private labels in the case of Liverpool. As you know, in the case of Suburbia, we're talking basically around two-thirds of the soft lines that Suburbia sells are private labels. That's more or less the shares that we have.
Hopefully you can hear me now.
Yes, Carlos, go ahead.
Thank you. Yes, Antonio. As Graciano and Enrique just mentioned, a private label for us, for Liverpool is an important part of our strategy. I will say one of our five to six main strategies. We are developing brand by brand. I think in a private label, there's a journey that you need to follow up. First of all, you need to have the correct product. Then you need to be able to present it in the correct way in the stores, and then make the marketing and letting the customers know that product. I think in most of the private label brands we are in this second or third phases.
We are taking an integrated approach to start treating these private labels as we will do with an external brand with a type of communication and marketing that represent the DNA of each brand. We have a DNA plan for each one of these brands, and we are doing this with all of them. Last year we started doing that way with MAP, our women clothing brand. Sales more than doubled last year while we did this. This year we are doing this with our HAUS. That is the home supplies brand that we have. P
That is, mainly focuses on juniors. That's the two that we are working this year. Last year also we launched in furniture two important brands, that is, HAUS in the furniture category, and Casagora, that is high-end furniture with excellent results. Yes, absolutely private label gives us some advantages in the situation we're living now.
Perfect. Thanks a lot. I appreciate all the color. Thanks, and have a nice day.
Thank you, Antonio.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Rodrigo Echegaray. Please state your company name and then ask your question.
Thank you. This is Rodrigo Echegaray from Scotiabank. A couple of questions, one for Mauricio. What is the main challenge you see today in terms of the retail transformation, culturally speaking, but also from a technology standpoint? The second question is for Zahié Edid. What would be the main challenges that you face today in terms of recruiting and promoting a more diverse pool of talent, especially for senior management positions? Thank you.
Go ahead, Mauricio, please.
Thank you, Rodrigo, for your question. Regarding the challenges, I'll probably name three. The first one is IT. As we pointed out last year, transforming our IT department is a process that's still ongoing. We're combining new technology with older technology and ensuring a smooth transition and transitioning to an API, a more web services formats and services is something that is an ongoing practice, as well as continue developing our talent in that area. So that would be challenge number one. The other one would be culture, which I think, as Graciano has pointed out, that our team has been very resilient and very adaptive to the new technologies.
We've been able to get the right incentives and communicate properly how digital helps us all as part of our ecosystem strategy. That's been evolving well, but obviously, it's a big family and something that we continue working on. I guess the third one is prioritization. As we transition more and more services into digital services, we obviously have a bunch of ideas, new products that we want to develop in different areas, digital, fintech to name a few. Obviously prioritizing between the different ideas and managing the backlog in an efficient and proper way is obviously a challenge that we're learning and getting better at. Hopefully I answered your question.
Very clear. Thank you, Mauricio.
Thank you. Thank you for your answer, your question, Rodrigo. I think that here in Liverpool, our main challenges around attracting people is to show how flexible we are, you know? Right now we are working on that workspace. That we are committed to foster and strengthen diversity and inclusion in our workplace. Okay? Mainly is that. Then specific skills that we are needing. Right now we are moving as well in the upskilling of our talent, internal talent.
We strongly believe that we have the opportunity to bring elements across of all what we have learned in the last two years and help people to train them and grow inside internally in the company. Okay, we have as well the university, our virtual university, the UVL, and help to bring as well the formal studies that we bring to the middle management and help them know what is specifically needed in the business units. I don't know if that's part of your question.
Yeah, no, certainly. I mean, obviously on the technology front, that's one area of opportunity, but also on the gender front as you can obviously see, there is obviously a big opportunity. I know it's not easy, but just wondering, you know, if there are specific actions in that regard. I guess you mentioned a few, so thanks a lot.
Thank you.
I would add something on that question. I have two pictures on my office entrance. One is of the first Liverpool directors meeting. I don't know, it probably was 1993 or 1994, so somewhere around that. The second is of last year's picture. What is amazing is this is managers. It includes store managers. On the first picture, there were probably four women, and on the last picture, we probably have somewhere around 40% of women. I think we've been moving well towards it. We don't have quotas because we don't believe in it. We believe in giving the opportunity to the best persons for the position, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or whatever.
It's not only gender, but I think we've come through a lot in the last 10 years.
Oh, fair points. Thanks, Graciano.
Thank you, Rodrigo.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Robert Ford. Please state your company name and then ask your question.
Hey, good morning, everybody. Thanks for the presentation and congratulations on the results. It's Bob Ford from Bank of America. How are you thinking about cross-border e-commerce competition, particularly as competitors like Shein assess opening up the infrastructure in Mexico? Enrique, you mentioned that you're averse to a banking license, and I was curious as to why. I have my suspicions, but I'd love to hear your views. Lastly, how should we think about the balance of in-house software development and third-party applications? Maybe, you know, it would be helpful for me anyway, if you could touch on some of the more pivotable or pivotal enabling functionality that we should look for, both in e-commerce and financial services over this year and maybe next.
Yes. Thank you, Bob. Graciano, you wanna share your perspective on cross-border?
Sure. I think Amazon, MercadoLibre, Shein, and a lot of others, Alibaba in the future are gonna do well in Mexico. They have a lot of catalogs, so it helps them. We have the de minimis that are exempt from taxes, which is something we don't like because I don't believe it helps us play on a level playing field. We've always had competition, and competition helps us grow. We follow closely what our competition does, and we try not to copy it, but to improve it and to translate it to what our market wants. We are gonna have tough competition, but we've always had tough competition.
On the Investor Day, like 20 years ago, it was Zara, and then it was Best Buy. Yes, we are gonna have tough competition, and we are gonna learn from them, and that's gonna make us better as a company.
Graciano, you mentioned earlier nearshoring some of the supply chain and private label. Maybe can you expand on that and what does that mean in terms of maybe reducing the inventory you carry into every fashion cycle or being able to respond more rapidly to trending topics in social and having the right product at the right time? You know, particularly in Suburbia, where you may face some of the cross-border a little bit more directly.
It's not only on private label. We're also trying some of the brands. International brands are looking more to Mexico as a manufacturer country instead of Asia, mainly China. It's not only our own brands. It's as a whole. We're helping them by introducing them to vendors we know that work with good quality and stuff. It can be a little bit higher in cost today, but that cost, as you said, is reduced by higher inventory turnover, which reduces markdowns, which increases again the margin. It gives us better service as well because then we have the vendor right next door.
There are a few pros and cons, but mostly I believe that if we build the Mexican textile sector, which was hit a lot when China entered the agreements and everything, in the middle term, it's also gonna give us a better economy. That's gonna improve our sales as well. I see a virtual cycle by having more vendors here in not only Mexico, it will also be Central America.
Yeah.
Around your second question, Bob, around the banking license. I mean, it's very easy. It has to do with all the regular regulatory requirements that you have to cover as a bank. As you know, it's a very regulated industry. You have to have tons of people doing all the legal and compliance functions. Frankly, we're not, we don't have any interest at all in having to set up something like that inside Liverpool. That's why we believe that it's better and faster for us to work with a strategic partner. Your next question regarding the software development and how that is changing between what we used to have before, which basically was, you know.
We used to develop, you know, our own systems many way back. Then, of course, we jumped into the trend of buying the best-in-class things like SAP, at some point in time ATG, and so on and so forth. Then basically changed the world just to, you know, just quote-unquote, because it's not that easy, but anyway, it was then, you know, to set up those systems and do minimum developments. Now we're back once again moving into doing more and more custom developments. I'll pass the microphone to Mauricio to share some perspective on this front. Go ahead, Mauricio.
Thank you, Enrique. Just to give a little bit more color on what Enrique mentioned, as part of our IT transformation, for example, in the past year, we hired basically an IT architect. We hired a director of software development. As Enrique mentioned, the idea is that to identify our core competencies and our core capabilities that we believe are key and central to our strategy, and trying to develop software on our end and having more control over that software development. Obviously, we have agile squads in many of different products, not only on the e-commerce side, but also in fintech, as you mentioned. Now those agile squads obviously identify customer needs, prioritize them, manage the backlog and trying to release new functionality in different sprints.
We're basically in the process of migrating the, I guess, the old ways that Enrique mentioned and trying to smoothly transition into this new agile methodology.
Mauricio, would you highlight any, you know, the more pivotal and enabling functionality that you think is critical to reach the penetration rates and service levels that Liverpool is targeting?
Obviously, there are a bunch on the e-commerce side and on the fintech side. I believe Antonino and Santiago shared some of them. I'll probably highlight on my perspective and then probably invite Antonino and Santiago if they want to pitch in and share their views. In my view, on the e-commerce side, personalization is key. The name of Shein has been mentioned in the past, but this idea of personalizing, having a vast assortment and being able to personalize the right assortment in the right way for the right customers, I think it's functionality that is key. As we have more customers and more assortment, the idea of helping in product discovery is obviously something that is very important.
Everything that we're doing in that regard, I estimate that it will continue being very important. On the fintech front, Santiago mentioned many of the new products that we want to launch. I believe we have great insight and great acceptance from our customers in terms of credit functionality that we can provide in terms of the insurances and the insurance functionality and the way we sell them online. I mentioned the PIF as part of our monthly subscription service where we package not only insurances, but also system services as well as extended warranty and others. Building on top of them and adding new products is something that we proceed doing in an agile methodology.
I don't know, Antonino and Santiago, if you would like to share some ideas, in your spaces.
Thank you, Mauricio. Thank you, Bob. Just developing on what Mauricio is mentioning. Yes, of course, personalization or hyper-personalization is one of our pivots, projects that are coming and we continue to improve. There's a lot of e-commerce that are coming to life, but I'm saying with all the work that Edwin and his team has been doing, the logistics improvement is also a very important moment for our e-commerce. There's another tool that I would like to talk to you a little bit about. It's product customization online. That's not an easy thing to do and we're working heavily with Carlos and his team to put this customization live. The other one is now the new trend is also the e-com experience.
In order for us to keep this going, we're implementing new services online, not just the financial one, but also the retail ones. We have to explore and continue exploring the other channels like WhatsApp Business, also social shopping, as I mentioned before, live shopping. Our e-commerce trend now has a lot more things and a lot more channels to focus on, and that's where we are already exploring them, we are using them, but we need to take them to the next level.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Thank you all very much.
Thank you, Bob.
The next question comes from Álvaro García. Please state your company name and then ask your question.
Hi, gentlemen. It's Álvaro García from BTG Pactual. Hope everyone's well. A couple of questions. My first one's on assortment. You mentioned you expect a significant growth over the next couple of years. I think it was 42% growth this year. I was just curious if you could sort of break that down. You know, is that entirely driven by your 3P? You're obviously living through some supply chain issues. You know, is that all 3P or is some of that you know, in-store stuff as well that you can better balance given your infrastructure makeup now? That's my first question.
Yes. Thank you, Álvaro. Antonio, you wanna take that?
Well, hi, this is Carlos Marín. Thank you, Álvaro García. Well, mainly, our 1P will grow, but in a more stable basis, and the big part of it will come from 3P. Yes.
Nice. Great. My second one for Mauricio or Santiago. I know we've already touched a lot on this topic today on the fintech environment. It's clear you don't wanna apply for a banking license, but I was wondering if Mauricio or Santiago can maybe sort of provide an update on just the fintech environment generally. It seems to be very sort of slow-moving. Seems that all of the actors behind the scenes who are your potential partners are sort of stuck in neutral. Any comments on the fintech environment in Mexico would be greatly appreciated.
Go ahead, Mauricio, and then Santiago, I guess.
Yes. You wanna start, Mau?
Sure. Álvaro, thanks for your question. I probably would like to highlight a couple of areas where we have actually partnered with fintech. One of them is the one that Santiago showed, which is the bill payment hub. In that one we're actually working with a fintech that was actually recently acquired by a big brand, basically a Mastercard. We're also working with a fintech on connecting to the SPEI systems. For example, all of our cards already have a CLABE, you know, a CLABE.
Mm-hmm
You know, number assigned to them, and we're connecting to that using STP, which is another fintech. I guess we continue seeing, analyzing and exploring different fintechs. Where we see value where we can partner, we're happy to do so without reinventing the wheel. I guess part of the ecosystem strategy is to partner with companies that can complement our value proposition, and that's where we are selectively doing where it adds value to our customers and to our value proposition. Santiago, I don't know if you want to add something.
Yes, please. No, Mau, I think it's you covered it in all. I don't know if
I guess the question, Álvaro, was more on your take on the competitive landscape on what you know, fintechs are doing, and our perspective is that they're-
Yeah.
Not doing much.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. Just to complement that, and that's exactly right, Enrique, just sort of how you think of other cards or other offerings or other fintechs infiltrating your ecosystem and sort of defense that you might have to play on that front, given how attractive your platform is.
Well, yes, definitely we see all these fintechs and all these new players here in the market offering their credit cards. There are some that are beginning to become important that we start seeing even in Liverpool. We start seeing them. Right now it is small, but they're growing fast in participation in our sales with these cards. Definitely that is why we need to move real fast offering and developing all of our technology strategy to be able to offer and to be able to be as agile as they are being, let's say, on their offerings, you know?
That is why we want to also keep developing and these new products that we wanna go into that hopefully soon we will be letting you know what we're doing, because yes, we're seeing this as a very big competition coming through.
That's clear. Well, thanks so much for the event. It's always great to meet you guys once a year. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Álvaro.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Joaquin Ley. Please state your company name and then ask your question.
Hi. Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, Joaquin.
Hi.
Good morning.
Joaquín Ley from Itaú. Thank you. Thank you for the call. I have two follow-up questions. The first one is on margins. You know, I mean, you mentioned that, you know, healthier level of inventory is allowing for this, you know, super healthy gross margin that we saw in the first quarter in the commercial business. Still, I was wondering how sustainable is that going forward as, you know, persistent high inflation eats into the purchasing power of the Mexican consumer, and you might have to normalize your markdown activity, right?
When you put that together with what you just said about reserve creation of about MXN 1.2 billion for this year, it looks like the last time, Enrique, you talked about margins for this year, that if I remember correctly, you said that they would be kind of in line with last year, about 15.8%-15.9%. It seems that the newer margins could be materially higher than that, maybe closer to 17%. I would like to hear your thoughts on that. That's the first question, and then I would have a follow-up on logistics.
I hope you're right, Joaquin, and we get to this 17%. But frankly, as you're saying, and well, what we saw in the first quarter was, you know, like a virtuous, you know, like a combination of very low markdowns due to the very healthy inventory position. Also, you know, as I mentioned, less pressure from logistics expenses because of the factors that I mentioned also before. Also, in terms of the EBITDA margin, NPLs were positive because we did the reversal that you saw.
Yes, I think that the difference that you know we have against 2021 and even against 2019 is definitely not sustainable. What we think is that we are a little bit more optimistic on the margin front because of the head start that we have in Q1. Now we're thinking that we'll probably get to the 16.5%-16.6% that we have in 2019 in the pre-pandemic. That's what we have in our financial plan right now.
All right. That sounds plausible. Thank you. On the logistics side.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Sorry, Enrique. Just to complement. Another thing that is helping us with the margin, with the gross margin, this first quarter was the combination of our soft line and hard line business. We're seeing a higher increase in the soft line business than in the hard lines. As you know, our soft line business has higher margin than the hard line. That's also something that is helping us in this mix.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you, Carlos. Thank you. Also that includes Suburbia, which is finally, you know, like in a better shape in terms of inventory, less markdowns and doing much better in terms of both sales and especially on margins.
Okay. Second question on logistics. As the Big Ticket facility for Arco Norte comes into operation this year, what are you gonna do with Huehuetoca? Are you gonna shut it down, or are you gonna use that facility for serving the metropolitan area?
The idea that we had at the starting point was, you know, to do a bidding process to sell it. But we frankly, we're not, you know, very happy with the offers that we received. As you can imagine, I mean, the environment in Mexico doesn't help a lot in terms of people want to invest a lot of money. Now we are changing gears and are planning to lease it. I mean, frankly, with the new design of the leased network that Edwin explained, we don't need that additional facility. The idea that we have is to lease it to third parties.
Okay, great. Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Our next question comes from Jorge Mauro from Fundamenta. Please ask your question.
Yes. Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, loud and clear. Go ahead, please.
All right. Perfect. Yeah, my question is, going back to the credit business, just trying to clarify a bit because, if we focus on the NPL formation, it has been very low in the last three quarters after the pandemic, about 1.1%. Historically, formation was more closer to 2%. Looking at your guidance, it seems that this should increase a bit to 1.3%. Just what changed here? I mean, you are not being as aggressive gaining credit as you were in the past. Why is that formation is roughly half as it was before the pandemic?
Yeah. NPL is just, I mean, to clarify, we closed last year at 2.2. We expect, I mean it sounds like low, but basically, you know, one percentage point is a 50% increase in the NPL ratio. I guess we're expecting as we, you know, like things normalize, we are gonna see like higher delinquencies. You're right. I mean, we're still well below the normal levels pre-pandemic. We're around 4.5% more or less on average in the several years before the pandemic. We're still running well below. We believe this is probably gonna take us, you know, two to three years to get back to what the NPLs we had historically.
Santiago, I'm sure that you can provide some perspective on what's behind the low levels that we have seen in the recent past.
Can I add something, Enrique? I think something that is also true is that last year, because of still the uncertainties we had on everything, we ended up with provisions that were higher than our historical average. That's why we probably need to make less provisions this year.
Yes, you're right. I mean, last year we still ended up with a very high, you know, coverage ratios in every single KPI that you see in terms of coverage. We are way above what we had pre-pandemic, and that was because we took a very cautious approach due to the, you know, uncertainties regarding the Omicron where we were gonna see additional store closures. Now that we're more confident, the idea, as we also pointed out, is to bring the coverage ratios down. Still above the ones that we had pre-pandemic, but not as much as we had at the end of 2021. Thank you, Luis. Santiago, you wanna provide some perspective on what's behind the performance?
Yes. Maybe just to complement the levels that we have today. It is not that we really tighten up that much. As I mentioned before, our approval rates, even in the worst time of the pandemic, we kept them the same. Probably in the only part where we tighten up was on cash advances that we are reopening right now. We are reopening cash advances. We're gonna be growing 30% versus last year.
We're not gonna get yet to the levels that we had prior to the pandemic. As I said, today, we're gonna be opening we are gonna be originating more than one million accounts. Let's not forget that also the levels that we have today on NPLs, but last year we had the higher write-offs that we've ever had. That is because all of the accounts, the riskier accounts that we had pre-pandemic and that we lost that left us a portfolio with less riskier accounts. That is why these accounts started to you know be what we call totaleros, that they pay total balances and so they don't generate interest. That is why that is one of our goals right now, to regain the profitability of the portfolio.
Also we see these levels because last year we had all of these big write-offs that we haven't had in the past, no. That left us a very clean portfolio. That right now our challenge is to start growing and that's why we have been opening. Actually, today, let me tell you that the levels that we have on our cut-off points on all of our risk models are much more flexible than what we had even before pre-pandemic. Right now, as I told you, we're close to 45% approval rates on our credit. I don't know, Jorge, if that answers your question.
Yeah, that's great. Just two follow-ups there. If you could share the percentage of totaleros today relative to what it was before the pandemic or just rough figures, how much has increased? And then also looking at the growth of your credit portfolio relative to the growth of sales, it has been lagging in the last quarter. Should we expect that to normalize and your portfolio should be expected to grow in line with sales going forward?
Yes. Actually, what we expect for this year is to grow pretty much in line with sales. Actually, we expect to probably gain a little bit of participation. This would mean that we will be growing in the sales with our products, just a little over what the company is expecting. I'm sorry, what was the first question again? Can you repeat that?
The percentage of totaleros.
The totaleros. I'm sorry. Yes. Regarding the totaleros, well, it depends. As you know, on our credit cards, we have a lot of different credit plans. Let me give you an example. For example, in the deferred payment plans that, for example, buy in November and start paying in February or in March, those have incredibly changed because in the past when we got to March, when we start charging or collecting from the customers, probably we had, you know, 20% of customers that had paid their total balance even before we start requesting the payment. Today, what we've seen is that more than 50% of those customers have already paid the total balance.
There is no way that we can start, you know, revolving because the idea is that when we get there and we start requesting for the payment for these customers to start revolving. In those cases it has even more than doubled the customers that are paying, you know. Hopefully, I think the good news here is that this past two months, what we've been seeing is that the portfolios is starting to revolve a little better than what we had all, you know, the previous 12 months. We are beginning to see that the growth in interest, for example, generated by the portfolio is that they are beginning to grow at levels of 17%-18%, which is nice. We do believe that we're getting there or at least we're on the way.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Jorge.
The next question comes from Nicolas Riva. Please state your company name and then ask your question.
Thank you very much. This is Nicolas Riva from Bank of America. I have two questions. The first one going back to the financial services business. You said quite a few times in this call that you're looking to partner with a fintech or with a banking service provider. I wanted to ask what exactly this banking partner would do, because I can think of three things that they could do. They could take on some of the credit risk right in your credit or loan book. Number two, they could help you fund the loan book. Number three, they could just provide expertise on new financial products or maybe a combination of these three or something else.
If you can discuss what exactly this banking partner would do in the financial business. Then the second question, if you can provide any color in terms of liability management plan. At the end of last year, you bought back about a third of your 2026 bond, but you still have over $1 billion in cash and you have a very comfortable debt schedule. You don't have much debt at all maturing in the next 12 months. If you can provide any color regarding liability management plans, especially around the 2024 and 2026 dollar bonds. Thanks.
Yes. Santiago, you wanna talk about what we expect the strategic partner to bring to the table?
Yes. Thank you, Nicolas, for your question. I would like to clarify here that when we talked about this partnership that we're seeking right now and that we're working on, this definitely has nothing to do with our credit business and our loan portfolio, no. That is going to be something that we're gonna keep ourselves. They are not gonna be doing any underwriting on that. That business is going to be. We're gonna keep it exactly the same way that we've had it. For the new products and what we saw and probably, you know, for our current accounts and investments and those kind of new products that we are working on right now, those are the kind of associations that we wanna have with any strategic partners.
As Enrique mentioned, we don't wanna get into a regulatory arena because we would need to be a bank, which we're not gonna be, if we wanted to, you know, to get funds from the public, you know. That is where we want to find any strategic partner specifically.
Okay, thanks.
Enrique.
Now, regarding the liability management, Nicolas, I mean, we really don't have any plans to do anything like we did last year in terms of you know, prepaying neither the 2024 or another part of the 2026. I mean, we feel very comfortable. Our cash flow projections for this year, basically, I mean, we think that the free cash flow after CapEx is gonna be close to zero. That will allow us to pay, you know, with cash we have in hand, the dividends that we already paid and the ones that have been announced.
The second amount that we have due in September this year of Certificado Bursátil and still end the year with cash on hand of around $1.2 billion. I mean, as you pointed out, our maturity schedule is very comfortable. Quite frankly, the way interest rates are right now, I mean, probably doesn't make any sense for us to issue additional debt because we don't need it, and it would be more expensive. Again, we have no plans to do anything on that front. Okay. Thank you very much, Enrique.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from Irma Sgarz, from Goldman Sachs. Please state your question.
Yes. Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. Many very good questions have already been asked, but I just had one question on the Fulfilled by Liverpool. I was just curious how relevant you believe this can become over time. I understand you're leveraging or looking to leverage your capabilities and specifically in bulky items, but whether you see that sort of extending to a broader range of assortment and how relevant overall you could imagine this becoming. Is it just sort of in your mind just sort of a niche product for specific categories, or can it become something broader? In that context, I'm just curious how much demand you're getting or whether you feel that you need to actually provide incentives to lure vendors into your fulfillment infrastructure. Thank you.
Yes, thank you, Irma. You want to provide some color on that, Tony?
Yes. Thank you, Enrique. Hi, Irma. Thank you for your question. Our Fulfilled by Liverpool is just recently launched, and, as you know, we've always delivered big ticket items, you know, way before e-commerce, so that's one of our competitive advantages. Right now we started focusing on Fulfilled by Liverpool with big ticket items. I believe Liverpool is one of the best companies to deliver big ticket items, and we're focusing there. We started on the last trimester of last year. Right now, as I mentioned before, we have around 60 sellers and we have a lot of demand. Right now we're working a lot with Edwin and the way they're opening the Arco Norte, so we have a little bit more space to be able to service this new business model.
Of course, we're still more as a niche in big ticket items, but we're also we see it growing faster. We have already started with some softline products, and the demand from our sellers, it's impressively high. It's a business model that it's also being pressured by our sellers. We don't have to go and they're already asking for this business model and I believe it's gonna grow tremendously in the next couple of years.
Great. Very exciting to follow this. A second question I would have is, I apologize if this has been addressed or answered in another part of the presentation that I may have missed, is on sort of the opportunity for advertising and leveraging the fact that you obviously have a loyal customer base and an impressive amount of unique monthly active users. Is there any sort of plans? Is there any projects underway to potentially monetize this through the sellers that you have or the brands by sharing data, by making space available for them, sort of in the line of a merchant media model that we've heard other retailers speak about?
You wanna talk about that, Gras?
Yeah. I can. Please. Yes. That, that's on me. And the answer is no. We don't do it on the stores either, even though Walmart and several other people do it. Because when that happens, you end up advertising Apple and Samsung and all those vendors that have money for that specific purpose. That's something we don't wanna do right now because we believe in having the client as a center. We prefer to do what Antonio said, that we prefer to show the customer what's relevant for him, not show the customer what's relevant for our vendors that have money. Right now we're not planning on it and I don't like it, frankly. It...
We know there's probably some revenue to be made there, but we're not planning on doing it right now.
It's very interesting perspective. Thank you.
Thank you, Irma.
We will now pause for any further questions.
I guess we are done, I think. Any additional comments that you wanna make, Graciano?
No, I just wanna thank everybody for being here. Thank you all for the presentations and whatever you need in terms of further clarification, don't hesitate to contact us.
That concludes today's event. All the materials presented today will be readily available in Liverpool's Investor Relations website. Thanks for joining. Have a good day, and you may now disconnect.