Good evening, everyone. I'm Salvador Villaseñor, responsible for investor relations at Walmart, and I want to thank you for joining our live Q&A session following the first quarter 2025 earnings release, which was published yesterday evening. Joining me today is Ignacio Caride, President and CEO of Walmart de México y Centroamérica, Dolores Fernández Lobbe, our CMO, and Paulo Garcia, our CFO. We will make every effort to answer as many questions as we can in the 45 minutes we have scheduled for this call. We kindly ask you to limit yourself to one question as courtesy to others. Now we'll start right away and go to the first question.
We will now start the Q&A session. If you have a question, please press the question button in the browser. Please make sure you are not in full screen mode to see the button. The first question is from Mr. Alejandro Fuchs from Itaú BBA. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Hi, Ignacio, Paulo, Dolores, Salvador. Thank you for the space for questions. I have one quick one on my side, maybe for Ignacio and Dolores. On Bodega, it seems that in the quarter, semester sales for Bodega increased, let's say, 1% or a little bit below 1%. I wanted to see how you're thinking about the growth of Bodega going forward for the rest of the year, right? It seems that macro environment is tough, but we would assume that value-oriented formats like Bodega and the soft discount should tend to outperform, right? What are maybe you guys doing in order to incentivize a little bit the top line at Bodega? What are some of the initiatives you're working on? Maybe we can discuss a little bit how the format has been performing and what you expect going forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Alejandro. Thank you for your question. I will let Dolores give a little bit more color, but what I can tell you is we've seen progress on Bodega along the quarter. Maybe at the beginning, a little bit slowed down in food and certain items, but as we were taking commercial actions, mainly focusing on price points and other decisions, we start seeing positive recovery and even positive traffic at the stores by the end of the quarter. We can expect a better improvement going forward.
Maybe to complement on that is, when we saw the start of the year, this softness in consumption, we put pretty fast some commercial plans in place, focusing on price points and affordability for our customers. You know that Morralla is one of our famous campaigns and then other commercial plans focusing on more investment in unit price, more investment in affordability in smaller packages to make sure we had the right value proposition for our customers. We have also seen not only that these commercial plans work very well, but just to give you some color on the e-commerce business, the only one business that we have in Bodega, it has been growing high double digits in the first quarter.
It shows that all the plans that we have in place and the value proposition that we have for that customer has been accelerating the growth as the quarter went by. Good outlook for the coming months for Bodega.
Thank you, Ignacio, Dolores. I know Salvador said one question. Maybe if I can just do a quick second one, very short, if that's okay. Sorry, Chava. For Paulo, in terms of working capital, we saw a little bit of a worsening this quarter. Inventory is a little bit higher, payables faster, right? Wanted to see if you could elaborate, Paulo, a little bit on what is, when should we expect that normalization, what is driving this maybe working capital dynamic, and if you expect this to normalize throughout the year. Sorry, thank you.
On the working capital, let me start, and if Dolores also wants to talk on inventory, happy that Dolores can build about that. We have said in the past that we had to improve our working capital, in particular our inventory situation. I think the softer environment, and to some extent softer than people would have expected, also tended to accentuate the problem. I think when you looked at accounts payable, it is mostly a reflection of the mix of our assortment. The fact that the ones that have longer payables days, so to speak, are the ones not rotating as fast as they should does not mean necessarily that I am paying, of course, faster to the suppliers than I was doing before, Alejandro. I think that will tend to be adjusted as we tend to rotate to the inventory in a similar situation.
Tends to link, connected with the general merchandise, which, as you know, you've seen it from what we put in our cost, and these durable goods are more in a softer performance at this stage. Tends to pack payables. Inventory is in an area that we are focusing, addressing. We have plans in place, and we expect to address that throughout the, continue to addressing that throughout the year.
Maybe just to complement on inventories, we are taking short-term actions and medium-term actions. As Paulo mentioned, the sales softness at the first quarter was what caused these higher days on hand in the first quarter, but we can adjust purchases, and we are adjusting in the short term, but also in the medium term, as we mentioned before. We are working on processes and tools to make sure this inventory management is better every day.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Ben Theurer from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, Ignacio, Paulo, Dolores. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to maybe follow up a little bit on the dynamics and what you've been seeing, and you flagged obviously the softness at Walmart Supercenters in the first quarter. Just wanted to understand if you're taking any initiatives or any steps that you have to take in order to get this back on track, or if it was a sheer function of just the calendar effect that just caused the general merchandise to be a little bit softer in 1Q. Any color that you can give us as to what was happening at Supercenters and how to think about the Supercenter performance into 2Q and beyond. Thank you.
Yeah, connected to the performance in Q1, and you are right. What we have in our Walmart Supercenters is a higher percentage of general merchandise, right? If you compare to last year's Q1, where we had these government incentives also increase the durable goods sales during the first quarter. When you look at that comp versus last year's first quarter, we knew that the comp was going to be harder, right? That is part of what we see in general merchandise and the flip of Easter that is relatively more important for the Supercenter. That is what we've seen in Q1. As I mentioned with the other formats too, the groceries and consumer sales are growing faster, and we expect that to improve as we go by.
In Q2, we have the Hot Sale, which is a major event for general merchandise, where people usually wait to buy these kinds of products. We expect with Hot Sale in this Q2, general merchandise performance to be better than in Q1. Different comps definitely versus last year.
Okay. Just real quick, if I remember right, the Hot Sale last year, that was like partially April, partially May, it is going to be fully in May. There should be some benefit as to funds available from consumers, correct?
No, but Hot Sale is end of May and June. It is going to be fully in Q2. Last year was in Q2 too. The difference is between fully May or May and June, but it is going to be full in Q2 versus last year.
The help that you might get, the Ben is the help you might get in Mexico, you know that you get the profit sharing payment. That tends to happen throughout the months of May. It tends to happen mostly at the end of May, not always entirely. I think this time around the hot sale, it will get the, let's say, the tailwind, so to speak, of having the PTU or the profit sharing payment to help sales during the hot sale. Whereas in the past, last year, people got their money after the hot sale event, in many cases.
One more thing to add here is when economy starts to slow down, people tend to be a little bit more cautious, especially on durable goods. That typically affects a little bit more Walmart and other formats. You can see it as well as in the marketplace. That is, we are more heavy on general merchandise.
Okay, great. Thank you very much, Ignacio, Dolores, Paulo. Congrats. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Ms. Irma Sgarz from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Thank you. Sorry, I haven't been able to enable my camera, but I was curious to understand what you believe drove the 100 basis point decline in customer price perception, and what are you planning to do to revert this? Do you expect to require more aggressive rollbacks in prices, or is it more a matter of investing in marketing around those campaigns to let the customers know that you effectively have a good price gap? Maybe to some extent, it's linked to that. Can you just talk a little bit about what gives you the confidence that there should be a gradual recovery in consumer demand in the coming months? Thank you so much.
Yeah, I can start with the one regarding price perception, and you can talk on the consumer demand. Regarding price perception, as you just mentioned, it's a matter of different levels. Not only what we invest in pricing competitiveness versus our competitors, but in private brands and communication. What we've seen in this first quarter with this softness in the consumption, we have seen a more competitive environment with higher communication and more aggressive pricing. We see that that might have affected the price perception that we have in this first quarter. We have been investing the same in our price gap. We feel comfortable around the levels that we have of price gap in the market, even so above our internal target. We are still investing in pricing.
We're still investing in our KVI key items, and we are adapting commercial plans and communications to make sure all the investment we are doing is reflected in the price perception with our customers. We think that is what affected the price perception Q1, but we are confident that with everything that we are doing it is going to be reverted in the future.
Yeah, just on the macro. First of all, Irma, just for me to repeat what we've said before in the past. I think you first need to look at the general fact that we have good visibility of the transitory nature or the phasing effect of the government subsidies, the Easter impact, the leap year. We had expected that, and we gave a heads up on that one. If we look as we look already to April, we already see improvements in terms of the consumption. We see improvements in the traffic across all the banners. I am referring this also on like for like, not just on the calendar effect, the fact that now we have the Easter.
We're seeing that gradual improvement, and that's the gradual ramp up that we expect to see in consumption, as well as in terms of the growth in our sales that led us to confirm still the full year guidance in terms of sales growth around 6-7%.
Very helpful. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Bob Ford from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Could you please expand on some of the expense pressures you're facing as well as your mitigation efforts? On Cynthia is collecting all the information we have from our business, and together with benefits , could you give a few examples of how Cynthia is creating actionable insights for your vendors? Thank you.
About Cynthia? Yeah, Cynthia. Sorry, it was a little bit low, the volume. As we told the investor community during our Walmart Day, Cynthia is collecting all the information we have from our business, and together with benefits and what is going on with our customers, we can already identify about 40% of our transactions with beneficios, and this is generating a lot of information. All that is available for our suppliers, and they are working and analyzing and understanding much better and have much better information for them to take better actions. Not only that from their side, but we are also using that same information and same access to the tool where we can be much more granular on the decisions that we take, especially on the commercial side. Let me give you an example.
One of the things we can do is understanding from a broader assortment in, for example, Bodega Aurrera Express, which are those shopping journeys, what is the customer is looking and what is the right assortment to have rather than a broader assortment, maybe a little bit smaller, but more targeted to what the customer wants based on not only actual transactions and actual changing dynamics from the consumer. All of that is happening, still early stages, but I'm more than confident that this will generate a big disruption going forward. As I said, at our Walmart Day, we are moving slowly, but consistently from estimating to knowing what is going to happen with sales in the future. I'm very confident with this. We still see a lot of opportunity going forward.
Thanks, Ignacio. The other question was just expense pressure, some examples of what you're facing as well as some examples of mitigation efforts.
The expense pressure, Bob, thanks for the question. Let me take you that. First of all, I think what you saw in quarter one, let me see the numbers and you know that very well, but let me just reiterate. We are delivering in line what we said that was the guidance in terms of our expenses for the year. We said that you may remember in the past we had double-digit growth on our expenses. I mean, now talking that's about a high single digit. In terms of the basically, that is driven by our gross investments.
The gross investments, Bob, they will continue because they are the ones, what are we talking about, accelerating expansion plan, what are we talking about, remodeling and maintenance of our stores, what are we talking about, e-comm, and to some extent invest in our associate value proposition. That will continue because we are here also for the long term. What we're doing on the present is a twofold. One is our everyday low-cost philosophy. We have a small resilience of items what to do every single day in order to bring efficiencies in the store. A second one is we are stopping the projects that are not adding much to our sales, particularly the smaller projects. We are prioritizing them in this tougher environment, focusing on the big things.
The third one, and more importantly, we keep on working on transformational projects that will help us delivering more efficiencies going forward. Like we've talked to you about, sometimes it sounds there's a repetition, but we are looking at electronic shelf labelings or digital shelf labelings. We've done, of course, the multifunctionals in the past. We know the automation that we're doing in our cities and distribution centers. If we really want big savings, we need to do things of this scale over and above the things that we do on a daily basis to be more efficient in the store.
Also reducing our inventory levels, which is one thing that we are focusing, Bob, will enable us to drive efficiencies across our network, both in the distribution centers, but also in the stores, and we'll be able to manage that with less people on the ground.
For me, it's very important to we need to manage the short term, of course, but we are going to keep investing for the long term. This is very important. We can have an economic slowdown, but that doesn't change our long-term plans in the country. We just need to adapt to the reality. One of the things I'm asking the team is how can we become more efficient every single day? How we can automate, how we can use digital tools in order to do less manual work and be much more efficient on a day-to-day basis.
Sometimes that requires some short-term investments in order to get longer-term benefits going forward. This is on a constant basis. What we are always looking is to invest with a great ROI and with a clear strategy going forward.
The one thing that I forgot to mention is that we're doing the pilot, Bob, you probably know. There are a lot of concerns on our end, but also everyone around the labor reforms and that potentially reducing to 40 hours. We have now a pilot in 100 stores where we are taking a lot of learnings to see how we can cope with that if and ever that law will be enacted in the incoming periods. Yeah.
Very helpful, Paulo. Ignacio, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
I will just kindly ask you to keep to one question because we can see the list is a long list of questions. To see if we give time to everyone to ask a question.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Ms. Renata Cabral from Citi. Please go ahead.
You're on mute, Renata. Sorry.
Yes. Thank you. Hello. Ignacio, Dolores, Paulo, Salvador. Thank you so much for taking my question. Just one. It is on Walmart Express. We are seeing an absolute and relative improvement in the performance of the format. We know that the company has been doing several actions for the improvement of the value proposition, specifically for this format. My question is, can you give us some examples of actions that are in place and that have been driven with the performance and the timeline for all the Walmart Express formats being operating under the proposed changes? If there is still some time to do that or if that is concluded and now we should see only the results. We know that it is an ongoing process that will never end, but I mean in terms of the biggest actions for the change in this format. Thank you so much.
I can start and then you can complement. The main actions that we did in Walmart Express that we've been sharing, but now we're starting to see the results of everything that took time, was first regarding assortment. One of the things we did with Walmart Express is we knew that we needed to enhance the assortment, put more premium assortment, and increase the value proposition for the customer in that end. We have included more than 1,000 new items in the store, premium items, but not only have we increased the assortment, we have also given better visibility and space in the store and communication regarding all the innovation and the new assortment that we have. The second thing that is really important for this format as a supermarket is fresh, everything related to perishables.
We have invested in not only the look and feel and the assortment in fresh, but also in service. One of the things that we did was we need to invest more in service in these formats. We have invested not only in our bakery, but in our meat sections, and that is paying off. The growth that we see in these key areas that generate traffic to the stores are very good. The margins are improving. The traffic is improving. The service and everything we are investing is paying off too. I will say it's service, it's assortment, and then it's value. When you talk about value in Walmart Express, it has to do with the right price for the right quality items. We've seen our price perception in Walmart Express has been improving too.
You see our number for all, but Walmart Express is still improving its price perception, although we are introducing more premium items. Traffic is improving, sales are improving, and margins are improving because although we are investing in price with these better sales and the way we invest and how we manage the margins and the price mix, the results for Walmart Express are improving overall.
Yeah. Let me build on that. There are three other things that I believe are super important. The first one is we brought back our butchers and bakeries. That is giving great, going to the service part, as now our customers can choose the width of the meat cut or they have actually fresh baked bread at the store, something we did not have in the past after the conversion, and we are reintroducing that. That is resonating very well with the customer. Finally, all the online service with on-demand, it is where we are the fastest delivering, where our infill is much better, and we have a higher service level for e-commerce. All of this is resonating very well with our customers and bringing them back to our format.
Thank you so much. No, just a follow-up. All the Walmart Express are already operating under those changes that you mentioned now, or is it still an ongoing process?
It's always an ongoing process because we test different things in different stores, but most of them have already a big part of new assortment. There are certain things that are already in place for all of them and others are in the rollout process. Again, as you know, you have about 100 Walmart Express stores, so it takes some time sometimes to roll out different changes. We always have trades and the premium more the stores of the Walmart Express will have these things that Ignacio and Dolores were talking about.
Very clear. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Alvaro Garcia from BTG Pactual. Please go ahead.
Hi everyone. Good afternoon. My question is on the 100-store pilot that you ran on labor reform. I was wondering if you could maybe, one, assess the probability of labor reform passing. I know that's difficult. Two, sort of what are the key learnings and what are the key challenges from the shift in structure you need to put together, assuming that labor reform does pass as advertised?
Yeah. Thank you, Alvaro. This is something we started last year, actually, or more than a year and a half ago. Actually, it started when I was on the role on operations. What we are doing is actually running the stores with a 40-hour format for our associates and identifying where's the bottlenecks, what are the things that we can do, what are the things we need to eliminate. It is a big focus on productivity. Big findings is that there are certain things that we do right now at our stores that we will need to stop doing and how we work and understand how they impact about stopping those and how we can offset it with technology or actually eliminating the process. One of my beliefs is the worst thing you can do is optimize a process that you do not need.
We are using these 100 stores in different parts of the country, in different trade areas to understand the impact of the things we're doing. Of course, we know that the change in regulation won't come from one day to another. It's not that we're going to move from 48 to 40 from one day to another. It's going to be gradual. That gives us the time to keep adapting. We are already operating 100 stores with labor working 40 hours. They're still growing. They're still operating. It's helping us understand the productivity circle that we need to have there to operate our 3,000 stores in that way.
I think if you ask us the question, sorry, just to build on Ignacio, do you expect this to come? I think the answer will be we expect this to come at some point, Álvaro. I think this was a promise from the president for doing a stint as a president of Mexico, whether that's in a year or 12 months, or 12 months, 18 months or six months. We do not know, but it will come. What we are sure for sure is that it will be gradual when it is implemented.
The good thing about this pilot is it's also helping us right now. We are identifying things that we can stop doing that do not generate a bigger impact. We are transferring that to actual productivity right now. It is always a good exercise.
How do you feel about paying, I guess, under the new structure more overtime under that new structure?
The idea is not to increase overtime. Actually, part of what we expect and know about the reform is going to consider this, the overtime pay as well. It is going to be very difficult for the labor force for the whole country then. The idea is to be more productive, not to be more expensive to cover those extra shifts. We do not expect to pay overtime above what we typically need.
Super. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Antonio Hernandez from Actinver. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for the special questions. Just a quick one regarding Sam's Club. How much of maybe the consumer environment or overall trends and competitive environment, maybe private label as well, how do those factors play into the performance of this last quarter, which was the outperforming sector?
Yeah. Sam's Club was our best-performing format. We are very happy with what we're seeing. Of course, it's resonating, the value proposition that we have, even though it was not an easy quarter as well for Sam's, but we are very happy with what we're seeing with them. I don't know if you want to be there.
Yeah. Just a couple of things that I'll say just to build on Ignacio. First of all, Antonio, what is driving the growth of Sam's is the business individual member. Our business still is composed of individual member and the business member, B2B, and still is a significant chunk of our Sam's business. The one that is driving all the growth is the individual member. It's driven by the CVP, the customer value proposition, or in this case, member value proposition that we offer that is bringing excitement, new items to the table that are attracting the individual member. We're increasing the penetration of the individual members also to the more premium members. In particular, the big driver of that has been fresh. Fresh in Sam's has been a big driver of traffic. The traffic in Sam's is a lot more premium.
You have also to acknowledge that Sam's versus the other formats, probably it's a little bit more affluent in terms of the social pyramid and less exposed to the softer environment. The team has been doing a good job in capturing, increasing individual members and bringing in items that are exciting the member and also increasing penetration of Member's Mark, which is the private brand of Sam's. As you may have seen it in the past, the stores are really bringing interesting items, particularly tag ones that we have from the U.S. That is an attractive proposition that keeps on working in Sam's, despite the fact that I also have the challenge on general merchandise this quarter, like we saw in particular in the Walmart Supercenter.
One more thing is Sam's was a little bit behind in terms of technology, especially on e-commerce, the platform for e-commerce and the operational part. We've been doing a lot of those transformations last year, and we are starting to see the benefits of the new backend, the new platform, the new operational process at the store. Service levels are improving. E-commerce is starting to add some value as well to the Sam's world. We are seeing ourselves as mainly the only club who actually gives this type of service at this scale and with this service level. We are very happy with that. That resonates a lot with our customers, especially members.
Perfect. Thanks.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Ulises Argote from Santander. Please go ahead.
Está ahí. Ulises?
No.
No.
Our next question is from Mr. Alexander Namioka from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Everyone, thanks for taking the question. Most of my questions have been answered, maybe starting on the e-commerce side, I think you focus a lot on the initiatives you have in place to sort of see this revenue ramp up, at least on the store side. Curious to hear if you have any specific initiatives in the short term to help boost e-commerce sales across your businesses, right?
Yeah. Regarding e-commerce, and we shared some of this during the Walmart Days. We have seen a softer growth on the marketplace at the Q1, but we have seen constant growth, double-digit growth on our on-demand groceries and consumables business. We keep investing on service. We are improving our crowdsourcing capabilities in the stores. We have the best infills that we have ever had. We have a very good service with our customers in e-commerce. As we mentioned at the beginning, we have three main initiatives for this year. One is to accelerate the marketplace with new sellers and new capabilities for that platform. The second big one is the one hallway that we mentioned at the beginning. All the plan is on track. We already started with some internal tests.
The plan that we share with you this year, we're going to have only one app with one merch hallway taking advantage of the food and consumables traffic to enhance our sales as a whole in e-commerce. Are keep on track. That's good news for us. The third one is regarding quick commerce and faster deliveries. We mentioned at the beginning of the year that we were increasing the number of deliveries, orders that we were delivering in less than 90 minutes. We keep on enhancing that number. Very good news for service with the customer, faster deliveries, and all the investment and initiatives thinking about the long term and having a full e-commerce value proposition better for the customers are still on track.
Yeah. Because we've been building this for quite a long time, we are already profitable, especially in on-demand. This gives us the advantage to keep reinvesting and also why we keep being profitable here. Scale here matters. We reach a scale that already puts us in a very comfortable position of being profitable and keep investing in improving the service levels while we see other players still trying to scale in order to build a profitable business going forward. I am very happy with what the team is doing. I am very happy with the results, especially in on-demand. We will double down on investments, especially for service levels, as this will put us in a big advantage against everyone else. Good progress here, not only during the quarter, but what we're seeing in terms of technology going forward.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Froylan Mendez from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thank you very much for taking my question. You mentioned positive contribution from ecosystem initiatives to your gross margin, 20 basis points, if I recall correctly. Could you please expand on which initiative is bringing the positive delta? Is this a matter of lower cash burn or actually these initiatives moving to profitable territory? Also in that sense, what is the expectation for the positive impact for the full year in 2025?
Yeah. Hi, Froylan. How are you? Let me answer to that question. The biggest contributor to that, as we've discussed in the past and also will be the biggest contribution going forward, tends to be around advertising, so our Connect business that falls into the gross margin. That's the number one contributor when you look at the gross margin accretion. All of them are contribution. The second one that is also contributing is our Bait business, our telephonic business, because there's a gross margin that is accretive to the organization. Also, we talk sometimes on financial solutions, particularly when we refer to factoring, dynamic discounting. We've been talking in the past that that's also helping those numbers. Primarily, one will be on advertising. That will continue to be the case.
We have alluded to the fact, for instance, on Bait, we do not do it necessarily because of that. Actually, Bait, we talked to the fact that actually it is breakeven, actually positive to the overall business, just on a standalone basis, let alone the additional traffic that we have discussed with you that it is bringing to the stores, both actually to the stores, digital stores, but also online stores. I think if you ask us what is our plan and what we do in the money, we always have been open about that.
The contribution to the new businesses should help us to create additional funds that we can invest in the strategy. We can invest in the long term. We have a growth strategy that we can push in order to keep growing and then delivering the requirements that we need from a margins perspective or returns on investment. We've made a commitment in the past on sales and on returns on investment, and that's what we keep on commitment going forward.
Thank you.
Is it helpful? It doesn't sound, but I hope so.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is frowm Mr. Héctor Maya from Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. Thank you very much for taking my question. Ignacio, just wanted to get more clarity on Bait. I mean, with the consumer softness that we are seeing, I was wondering how Bait could be evolving as a traffic driver considering the strong user growth that you are getting, any color on the dynamics there or on how it could be helping a specific category or format more than another. If so far, there could be an upside risk for the MXN 10 billion in revenues expected from Bait in 2025. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks. Bait is, I would say, one of our best-performing ecosystem verticals. It has been growing steadily. This is because our offering to the customer is extremely good. We are one-seventh of the cost of the leader in the market. On top of that, we are giving some additional benefits if the Bait customer goes to the stores and participates in our benefits program. What we are seeing is the value of the ecosystem coming to play, being a Bait customer has benefits when you visit our stores and when you buy online. That is resonating very well with our customers. Traffic is generated, of course, to our stores because of the benefit.
If you're a Bait user and you buy at the stores, you will get extra data to consume for free that we give our customers and other benefits in terms of if you recharge your Bait account with our Cashi platform, that gives extra megas as well. The ecosystem, this is a beautiful ecosystem, is how we can reinforce each part of the business with one another. This is resonating very well with our customers, and you're seeing it with the growth we are having and how we keep gaining customers there. In terms of income, even though it's not our main priority for us, it's how they add up to the ecosystem, but we made it public in the Walmart Day that we expect about MXN 10 billion coming from Bait during the year. We expect to hold to this commitment going forward.
The revenues.
Yeah, revenues.
The revenues.
Revenues, you're right. Yes.
Yeah. We said just one last bit from Ignacio. Ignacio said it all. We also did a Walmart Day. We actually gave some data in terms of the beneficiary customers because we now can track the ones that are Bait and the ones that are non-Bait, that actually the Bait customers have a higher spend, the frequency. It is just also they have been increasing their frequency and their spending throughout the period. The people that come to our stores to actually recharge or top up their Bait SIM card phones, of course, they are driving more traffic to the store.
There's another thing that is important to start mentioning. When you try to build, when you're building a financial ecosystem as well or financial services, one of the things that helps a lot, especially to give out credits or to give access to credit lenders into our customers, is the algorithm we can create in order to have better scoring. That algorithm is reinforced by the telephone line from our customers from Bait or the history they have at the stores of consumption or remittances or all the information we have from our customers. When you put all that together into this algorithm, it gives you much better information to the credit lenders to be more confident in order to give up credit.
Actually, I would say the telephone number and the Bait information is one of the most important ones for the creation of the algorithm. We can expect all of this information that we're generating from the whole ecosystem to give us a big, big benefit in the creation of the algorithm, knowing better our customers so we can be able to give them a bigger credit with better recovery of those credits to our credit lenders. This is all parts of the ecosystem we're building and happy how it's progressing.
Perfect. Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Daniela Bretthauer, HSBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Can you give us an update on the Cashi strategy? I know you mentioned that you tested with employees and then it's been, I don't know if it's open loop already, and perhaps how if the remittances function is already in place. That was the first question.
Okay. Yes, we already started to launch the open loop on a very small base of customers. We finished the friends and family test, and now we open it to our top customers, let's say it this way, or more active customers. We are progressing on a steady base, and we want to make sure everything's working perfectly here. I'm going to be a little bit conservative on the aggressiveness of the rollout, basically because we're starting to manage other people's money, and we have to be very careful with that. During this rollout, the digital remittances will be a reality. It's not there yet, but it's going to be in the following months once we accelerate the rollout of the open loop. Remittances is a part of our business.
We have certain percentages of this market through our stores, but it will transfer to the digital remittances pretty soon. Just to give you a little bit more color on this, about 40% of the remittances in the country are being done digitally. We want to participate in this market. We are building, and we already have most of what is needed to do this transfer. We can expect this to come in the following months.
By year-end, for sure, you will.
Yes. Yes, we should be. Unless we have unexpected delays, we should have it during this year. Yes.
Okay. Thank you. My second question would be regarding Sam's Club. You mentioned that most of the long-term investments are focused on productivity and efficiencies. To that end, Walmart US has gone completely checkout- less at Sam's Clubs, and they have the scanners also in place. Do we have expectations to also move towards that in Mexico and Scan & Go? Any updates in terms of automation for Sam's Club? That would be great.
Yeah. Like always, we try to leverage as much as possible from the U.S., especially on the things that work. We can expect to, at least for us, to start testing all of this. We already have Scan & Go working here in Mexico. Penetration is still kind of low. I would expect it to be a little bit higher right now. Again, we need to adapt what works and what we know is going to work. Not everything applies the same to the Mexican customer or Mexican philosophy versus the American reality. Everything that we have in the company in the U.S., we analyze it, we test it, and if it works, we deploy it. If it does not work, we stop it. You can expect us to test, to have at least a try to see if it is the right way to go here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your question. That was the last question. I will now hand over to Mr. Salvador Villaseñor for final comments.
Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us and for participating in this call. I will now hand over to Ignacio for his final remarks. Please, Ignacio.
Thank you, everyone, for the interest in our company. Although we knew this was going to be a tough quarter, I'm happy with how we have progressed and how we've managed the quarter. I'm very confident on all the plans that we have going forward. We have a second quarter with Hot Sale, with seasonal events like Mother's Day and summer campaign. It is a very actively commercial quarter. We are confident that we have the right business proposition and the right commercial proposition for our customers. We expect the.
Growth.
Yeah, the growth to start accelerating. Sorry, I got stuck there a little bit. The growth to start accelerating a little bit more. As we expect that the rest of the year have a little bit more benefits. Thanks, everyone, again. It was a tough quarter, but we are happily progressing on our strategy, and we expect the year to start improving going forward. Thank you very much.
Great.