Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to 2022 Ambev Investors Day. I'm Guilherme Yokaichiya. I've been with the company for about eight years now. I joined here in Brazil back in 2013 in the finance department. Then I spent about six years in the Asia Pacific region, working mostly on FP&A and also participating on the IPO for Budweiser APAC. Early last year, I moved back to Brazil to lead the investor relations team, and it's a great pleasure to be here with you today. Today is a very special day for us at Ambev. After a long period of Zoom calls and home office, we are finally together in person. I would like to thank you all of the analysts and investors that made it here in person.
It's great to finally meet you. For those who weren't able to join us today, I'm looking forward to meeting you in person soon. In any case, I would like to thank all of you for taking time to be with us for the next two days. Today, we're broadcasting from Campinas. Campinas is a city about 100 km from São Paulo with a population of about 1.2 million people, making it the third largest city in the state. The city is also one of the largest research centers in Brazil and is also a technology hub, hosting offices for large tech companies such as IBM, Dell, and HP. Campinas is also home for Ambev Tech, the building that we are here today, which we'll talk more about later on.
Today, we gather a great team here from Ambev to share more about our transformation journey. Our goal for the next two days is to provide more transparency on our transformation, both regarding what we have already accomplished so far and also how it fits us. Please bear in mind that all presentations include past company data and do not refer to 2022 performance. No information disclosed in the event should be taken as a guidance, and there is no guarantee that any forward-looking statement will actually occur. Having said all that, I'd like to share with you the agenda of our event for the next two days. First, our CEO, Jean Jereissati, will share our purpose and strategic priorities. Then our CFO, Lucas Lira, will share his view on how we optimize our business.
Our CTO, Eduardo Horai, will lead you through our tech ecosystem, and the heads of our main tech ventures will share a little bit more about their businesses. Finally, at the end of the presentations today, we'll open the floor for analysts Q&A directly to those who presented today. Tomorrow, we'll start the day at 10:30 A.M. in our headquarters back in São Paulo. The day will be dedicated to our Brazilian operations. Eduardo Lacerda will start the day laying out the strategy for our largest BU and show how the tech platforms connect with our beverage business, followed by Dani Vaks, Pablo Firpo, Dani Cachich, who will talk more about our beer brands, our NAB and Beyond Beer businesses. Lastly, we'll again open the floor to the analysts for an analyst Q&A on Brazil beverages.
I hope you enjoy the next two days. Thank you for your attention, and please welcome Jean Jereissati to the stage.
Welcome, everyone. Glad to have you all here with us, both online and here with us. Thanks for joining this session. This will be a great opportunity for us to share where we are in our transformation journey. Last week, we had our Brazil annual strategy convention after two years off. It was amazing, great energy. I think we have some photos down here. We have never had so many women on stage and in the crowd, and I was very proud to see our company much more diverse in many ways. The theme of this meeting was the future is now. That was a way to highlight that our transformation is real.
It has started, has momentum, and it's in our hands to elevate and accelerate value creation. That's what we'll be talking about in the next two days. At first, I would like to introduce myself very briefly. I have been with many of you. I have been working at Ambev for 24 years. I did a bit of everything on the commercial side. I went to Central America to run our operations there, then China, Asia Pacific North, where I developed our business in there, and then came back to Brazil, to Ambev three years ago to accelerate the transformation of our business. Let me do a quick recap on our history. From the creation of Ambev in the 2000s, we had 15 years of strong growth and value creation.
During that time, we developed an amazing replicable model that allowed us to become the most efficient beer company in the world to expand geographically and non-organically, organically in a very efficient way. During this time, our EBITDA grew more than 10x and our market value more than 15x.
After 2015, though, we started to struggle. Volumes stalled, margins deteriorated, EBITDA stopped growing, and our market value started to reflect that. Macro played a big role and continues to play, but the reality is that the industry changed, consumers changed, M&A opportunities were not as relevant, operational efficiencies were more marginal, and we did not adapt. It was time then to evolve our growth model from operational efficiencies, M&A, and geographic expansion, to a profound reconnection with our ecosystem, to have innovation as a mindset to transform through technology. This new growth model is also part of a cultural evolution journey. It's all about being more collaborative, improving our active listening, and reinforcing our more long-term view in a company of owners that continues to dream big. With that in mind, we started to develop our new growth journey.
First, it was time to revert our negative trend on volumes. Our beverage business is our core, and we will only grow if it's healthy. 2019 was a turning point. 2020, we were able to grow volumes even with the pandemic. 2021, we reached our all-time high mark. Second, we have never lost our financial discipline, especially regarding free cash flows. Cash is king and always will be. The third is about ROIC. Along with EVA, we see that. In fact, our return was on a negative trend until 2021, and when we started to reverse. Lucas will go deep on these financial metrics and how we are approaching them in our transformation journey.
As we start to develop new business with different financial profiles, we believe this, the ROIC, is the best metric to fully capture the value we are creating in a company that is transforming itself. That said, when we look at our core beverage business, we continue to use EBITDA and EBITDA margin as a key performance indicator, and even though the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 and the cyclical effects of currencies and commodities that put a lot of pressure on our margins, the great news is that the initiatives that we took in the last two years, specifically in the investment on the portfolio rebalance, are already paying off. We have great momentum now, and as currency effects and commodities reverse to the mean, we believe our beverage margins should reverse at least to the high 30s% over time.
Eduardo Lacerda will elaborate further on that tomorrow. Pablo Firpo will come to stage, who will join us to discuss how the trends are in our favor in the non-alcoholic business. Daniela Cachich, who joined the company last year, will be here tomorrow talking about our growth opportunities in other alcohols and how we are approaching them. After talking a lot about the past, where we are now and giving some hints of where we are going, let me walk you through what we want to achieve and how we will do it. We want to lead and grow the category, to digitize and monetize our ecosystem, and also our core part of our DNA, we want to continuously optimize our business. I will leave that part to Lucas Lira that will come next. This is what we want.
To get there, we established this vision of Ambev as a platform, where we feel that being only a beverage company does not fully represent us properly anymore, and we like to picture ourselves more as a platform of inspiring brands that connects people in the ecosystem so that we can all grow together. This vision of Ambev as a platform is our how to win in the market. It's supported by five pillars that guide today the whole organization in everything we do. I will walk you through each of these pillars now, and you will see a lot of initiatives connected to them today and tomorrow. The first pillar of our platform is really elevating consumers and brands. It's by decision and by design that the first pillar, it is called brands for each and everyone.
We will show how we are a different company already in terms of building brands and connecting with consumers. I will try to portray that to you today and tomorrow. Our brands are what differentiate our platform. Dani Vax will talk tomorrow and about what we are doing in Brazil and how is our frame of building brands. It's about head, mouth, and heart, and heart. It's about being relevant in consumer's mind, entertaining, not interrupting. It's about delivering what consumers want with nothing else than the highest quality. It's about having purpose, higher values, building brands through archetypes and touching people's heart. I will give you a teaser with the example of how we used this concept and created Brahma Duplo Malte while we're strengthening the mother brand, Brahma. Let's go.
We wanted to establish a new reference of quality in the market, and Brahma was the perfect brand to join the fight, trusted by consumers, stable in the market, but lacking innovation. We put our hearts into it, and we listened to every single feedback. Nothing but a superior product with superior liquid and superior packaging would be enough. Single malt, origin malt, double malt, name it, and we can assure you we've tested it. Single malt, too difficult. Origin malt, good, but not enough. Double malt, wow, we have a winner here. With a strong concept, we started developing an outstanding recipe. We were digging for gold, but we found something even more precious, a golden creamy beer, the Brahma Duplo Malte. We made a perfectly balanced beer, the refreshing profile of the Pilsner malt with the malted signature flavor of the Munich malt.
We found the perfect spot for our product right between the core premium malt and the premium segments. We mastered our beer even more. We developed a state-of-the-art protein retention. That, my friends, makes the creamiest lager beer consumers can get. Wait, people want more than just drinking beer. They wanna hold a beer that shows who they are. We made Instagram-ready packaging. Take a look. We put our beer to the test, and we nailed it. We couldn't be prouder. We presented our beer to everyone. What about the biggest live stream project ever made by a brand? Sertanejo lives became a hit, and Double Malt became a hit as well. Five months later, we were already leading the core premium malt segment.
That was Brahma Duplo Malte. We bring to this pillar this concept of fans, okay? It's all about touching people's heart. There is the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. Might look a little bit abstract, but that's what we call, we measure our top of the funnel and the consumers that say that loves our brand. We do a survey every quarter with our consumers regarding affinity. The summary is that we ask, "So which brands do you love?" In the whole Ambev, in our footprint, we have 300 million consumers above 18 years old. 188 million of them consumed at least one of our products in last year.
In Q4 2021, we have 101 million consumers that said they love at least one of our brands. This is. We are really measuring, upgrading and with upgrading tools really to touch consumers' heart with our products. With that, with the survey, we can really measure progress and sentiment towards our portfolio. That was the Pillar 1. Then you will deep dive tomorrow with you more about the Pillar 1. Moving to the second pillar is thirst truly the future. This pillar is all about innovation. It's about developing capabilities to always be on the edge of innovation on everything that we do, from new liquids to packs, to brands, to experiences and business models. It's a broader perspective on innovation.
You will see a lot of this tomorrow, and this is not by chance. It's a muscle that we are exercising. It's a core competency that we have started to build three years ago, and it's on fire. To give you an example, looking at our alcoholic beverage as an example, we developed what we call our GOAs that are the growth opportunity areas. That's the big picture. We defined it that based on growing trends, demands from consumers that we focus when thinking about the white spaces in the innovation pipeline. It was based on that that we framed our goal of having at least 20% of our net revenues coming from new products based on the ambition towards mapped GOAs. Then we have a very disciplined approach towards it.
A deep consumer understanding. We have fully dedicated teams on developing liquids and working on insights. A lot of test and fail until we get there. Some golden rules, incrementality in everything we develop on innovation. It's great to see that we are having great results on innovation already. Above 20% of our net revenue is coming from innovation in 2021, and we are above with the basket of new products. We are above average gross profit and above average market share of the company. Let me call a video to give you a real example of what we did on innovation in 2021.
For the explorer.
We started researching and realized that we should launch a pure malt beer with a strong international brand. Which one?
Through a pilot with three different brands, we let the consumer tell us which had the most potential.
ABI has many brands. I think the challenge was precisely to look at everything that was available, but also made sense here in Brazil. We relied heavily on the Core Plus triad of innovation, quality, sophistication, and then we ended up arriving at Andes and Modelo, which are successful brands both in Argentina and Mexico.
For the third brand, some differential was still missing.
After that, there was still a difficulty: understanding which brand Brazilians would like the most and be able to pronounce the name. We got to Spaten.
It was time to start small, do the pilots, listen to the consumer.
When we say small, it was really small, 300 hectoliters. We had never produced so little with so much complexity.
We started having several meetings with master brewers from other countries to understand if those recipes, those beers, if they really made sense for our project.
In addition, they were three beers with completely different bottles. In short, it was a huge challenge for the company.
The initial plan was to run on the line in Guarulhos. However, there was a labeler arriving from Germany. It wouldn't be possible for us to wait for the labeler to arrive, right?
The solution was out of the box collective. Take the project to the Rio de Janeiro brewery, our largest brewery.
Andes in Argentina is a more classic beer that talks about beer style. Then it arrives here in Brazil, we do this play with Portuñol in the campaign, and the Argentine team didn't want to let it. In the end, we managed to use the campaign and everything was fine.
With Modelo it was another hassle. With such a small volume, this bent bottle could only be brought from Mexico.
With a few weeks left until production, we looked and thought: "This emblem looks like a football team, doesn't it?" Everything went back to zero and we had a new version in a few days. Was it a rush? It was. The adjustment order, the campaign of labels and supplies were many.
Everything adjusted. Campinas went with Spaten, Brasília with Modelo, Curitiba with Andes.
Here there was a whole science. First, where to place the product, how to execute, at what price. The team really felt that the project was in our hands.
The sales team starts giving feedback. "Oh, I liked this. This went well." You look at social media and, man, it's the consumer's voice that's there.
The dashboard results start to show that Spaten was always pulling away from the others.
Then there was no more doubt. Spaten was the chosen one. The rest is the story we're living today. What it produces, sells.
It never stops. Right? Expansion continues with learning and collaboration.
That was the goal that we were looking for in this pilot testing were really the trade up was the Core Plus. We see in mature markets, in many other markets, 25% of the volumes of the industry on the Core Plus segment and it didn't exist in Brazil. We know that there would be a place for us to win. Our international brand would be the next play. That's what we did last year, thinking about many international brands that we have and how we would approach, and Spaten is just doing great this year. You will see a lot more about our innovation process tomorrow. Going to the third pillar. Third pillar is about a toast to customer success.
The main question we are continuously asking ourselves is how can we maximize the success of our clients, of our customers? The best answer we have to that is the customer digitalization. Every time we digitalize one of our customer, its revenues grow. BEES, our platform for customers, is a key initiative on that. It allow us to offer the best digital solutions to our clients. Digital order taking, marketplace, financial services, other value-added services, while freeing up time and empowering our business reps to solve our clients' needs. Abilio will be here later today, and he will go with you over the connection between online and offline of BEES. André Mello will share the logistics initiatives that serve not only clients, but our consumers as well.
As one of the key metrics to measure progress in this pillar is NPS. To give you an example of Brazil, we have been growing NPS every year since we started the journey, and we've but we still have a long way to go. Along with improving NPS with our customers and growing beverage volumes and revenues, there are two very important initiatives that empower customer success. The first one is the adoption of this marketplace by our customers. When they adopt, everybody grows. Our marketplace allow us to connect other suppliers to our customers, serving needs that we were never able to fulfill before, such as an assortment with spirits, snacks, milk, oil, and the list goes on. What was amazing is the adoption was very fast.
By the end of 2021, we had already 370,000 customers buying products from our marketplace other than our products, and we reached an annualized GMV of BRL 1 billion, and it keeps growing. Only in Brazil, the total addressable market of this marketplace is higher than BRL 700 billion, with close to 80% more potential customers than we have today selling only beverages. We are excited about the value creation opportunity of this business. Incremental, no CapEx, limited need of incremental investment given our already established infrastructure, along with a very positive free cash flow profile. Leo Almeida, founder of Menu, a startup that we partnered in 2019 and then integrated on this last year, he is the head of our marketplace today.
He will talk more about that today and discuss some of the economics and reasons that make us so confident on this initiative. The second initiative, still inside customer success that I would like to highlight is the fintech, so originally called Donus and now renamed to BEES Bank. Our customer are extremely underserved from a financial service perspective, and that's what makes this initiative so relevant. Looking at financial services for small and medium business, this is a BRL 3 billion industry only in Brazil, and we started to accelerate it last year. By year-end, we already had 220,000 accounts opened, BRL 1 billion of TPV and our credit to our customers growing twofold versus the start of the year, the year Q1 2021. Figures are already very relevant and some trends are very encouraging.
For example, we have 30% of POS penetration in BEES Bank Donus, BEES Bank active accounts, and 34% of our active customers on the fintech. They use the BEES Bank app every day, so it's very recurrent. We will have Pantoja, Z-Tech CEO, sharing more details about BEES Bank later today. Pillar four. Let's go for pillar four. Experiences that come to you. As I just explained how technology is transforming our relationship with our customers in our third pillar, in this pillar, I will explain how technology is transforming our relationship with consumers, with our consumers. Due to our digital transformation, for the first time, that's not common. FMCGs have direct relation with consumers. We were able to build this capability, this muscle, in last five years. Paula and Stella will talk about this later today while presenting the DraftLine to you.
That is a revolution on media, on insights, and on responsiveness. Not only to enhance our marketing initiatives, but also to deliver experiences to our consumers. Zé Delivery is a great example inside this pillar. It started in 2015, an e-commerce delivering cold beer at an affordable price in 30 minutes at your door. The value proposition for consumers and partners is very strong, yeah, which makes Zé growth exponential. In December 2021, we reached 4.9 million active users in Brazil and 5.9 million orders. The venture is growing very fast and also our scale and efficiency gains, which make us confident in the business economics of our model. At Q4 2021, we were already at 77% commercial profit per hectoliter compared to comparable channels.
As this business grow, we expect to generate even better economics, and later today, Rodolfo will guide you through our strategy and the unit economics of Zé Delivery. Tomorrow we will see Zé Delivery in action. The dark stores, the delivery and the consumers. While delivery already presents a great potential, this is just a piece of the consumer journey. By connecting directly with consumers, we have an opportunity to build a very strong, solid relationship with each one, knowing them better and being able to offer customized solutions and experiences. From promotions to all, we can really customize experience and rewards. One of our consumers might dream about a meeting with Anitta, another might dream about a surf session with Gabriel Medina, and we can offer multiple customized experiences in our DTC platforms.
As we connect in the future, Zé with BEES, these promotions, these rewards or experience can be offered omnichannel. In home, through Zé Delivery, in bars, in supermarkets, or in restaurants. That's a big vision that we have. A single consumer, an omnichannel approach. This is our journey of the pillar four, the experiences that come to you. Finally, together for a better world is our fifth pillar. As we organize ourselves as ecosystem, which means that sustainable value is created by generating value to the ecosystem, to consumers, customers, suppliers, partners, and the whole society, along with our stakeholders. This is a key part of our strategy. Last year, we had our first ESG Day that gave us an opportunity to share this strategy in detail.
This investor day will be more focused on the digital transformation in Brazil, and we will have another ESG Day later this year. I would like to already share with you our most important initiatives on that front. A video, please.
Everyone deserves a future with more cheers. For this dream to come true, we need collaboration and shared growth. Always including nature, which provides the basis for our products and all life on this planet. In 2017, we launched five goals focused on the environment and our ecosystem that will be achieved by 2025. Since then, we have advanced strongly on this journey. 100% of our communities in high water stress areas with measurably improved water availability and quality. 100% of our direct farmers skilled, connected, and financially empowered. 100% of our purchased energy from renewable sources. 25% reduction in carbon emissions across our value chain. 100% of our products and packaging that is returnable or made from majority recycled content. 100% of our small entrepreneurs empowered with the tools they need for their development.
Valuing what is natural and local and practicing inclusion, we reinforce our commitment to grow together with the society. Ambev, we dream big to create a future with more cheers.
That was pretty much it. Excited. We are living a new chapter. Transformation is already happening, and it's real. Thank you very much for being with us, online or together here. Let's have two great days with all of you. Thank you very much. I call Lucas.
Can you hear me okay? In the back? All right. Let's talk about how we're thinking about optimizing our business. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. To those who made it here to Brazil, to Campinas, to Ambev Tech, welcome. To those of you that are connecting remotely, thank you for joining as well. It's great to be here and share a bit more of how we've been thinking about value creation since we embarked on this transformation journey. I'm Lucas Lira, Ambev CFO since April 2020, and together with my team, nobody does anything alone. I'm responsible for our finance organization as well as shared services. I was born in Minas Gerais, so I love a good pão de queijo, right?
If you ask mineiros who are from Minas Gerais, they'll probably say that any pão de queijo is good, but I love a good pão de queijo. I'm married to Mariana, and I'm Maria Catarina, Maria Valentina, and Maria Guilhermina's dad. I'm a lawyer by training. We do these crazy things at Ambev, right? We put lawyers to do other things and eventually move into finance. I joined Ambev as a lawyer in 2005, but I was lucky enough to be challenged outside my comfort zone over and over again. First in supply chain in 2011 to rethink our demand-to-dispatch operating model in Brazil. Moving to finance as head of Investor Relations in 2012. Going to AB InBev for over six years to work in finance with M&A globally. Back to legal.
When I thought I was out, they pulled me back in, back to legal for the SABMiller combination, and finally back to finance to lead M&A globally for ABI, taking Budweiser APAC public and divesting the Australian business in 2019. Every step of the way, three things, great people, big dreams, and lots of learnings. I've been around for a while, not as long as JJ, but for a while. It feels great to be right here, right now. Here's why. I believe we're at a very unique moment in our history at Ambev, a very fascinating moment. On the one hand, we have Chop da Brahma, which apart from being my favorite product, represents to me what brought us here, the strengths we've built over the years. It represents our history. It represents our people who dream big, and our owners.
It represents the beer category, our strong core business, and the amazing assets we have. It represents our resilience and our ability to deliver results. On the other hand, we have BEES. BEES to me is a symbol of our cultural evolution and our ability to learn to adapt. It's a symbol of the continued focus on people, with building a more diverse talent pipeline and a more inclusive environment. It's a symbol of how technology is allowing us to better serve our clients and consumers. It's a symbol of the opportunity we have to transform this company and write a new chapter of long-term sustainable value creation. It's not about one or the other. It's about both. We need both to work together.
Let's see what this means for me and my team as we in finance try to help the company build a great future. My main goal for today is to try and answer this exact question: how to make financial sense of our transformation. We've been asking this question ourselves a lot, and the investment community has been asking us this question a lot as well. We may not have all the answers yet, but at the very least, since we're at the early stages of our transformation. However, at the very least, today, I wanted to walk you through the financial logic that's embedded into our strategy, and what are the reasons to believe that if we deliver our plan, there is a path to sustainable long-term value creation for Ambev. To answer this question, I'm gonna focus on three topics.
First, a quick recap of how we got here and what our priorities are. Second, why we've elevated return on invested capital as a key metric going forward. Third, what are the building blocks of value creation, many of which we will highlight during the day, today and tomorrow. How we got here. As Jean briefly mentioned, right, this is our EBITDA and EBITDA margin performance over the last 20 years. You know this story really well. A mix of geographic expansion, M&A cost synergies, productivity gains, and operational excellence, leading to an organic EBITDA CAGR of nearly 18% until 2015 and EBITDA margin peaking at about 50%. Since 2016, the tide turned and facing the brutal facts, we were unable to sustain our financial performance.
EBITDA CAGR was a little over 3%, and EBITDA margin contracted to approximately 31%. The main culprits are well known, limited top line growth, changing market trends and competitive dynamics, as well as gross margin compression given tax changes in Brazil, currency depreciation vis-à-vis the US dollar, and commodity inflation. We clearly needed to do something about it. Step one was to look at the same 20-year history, but through a different lens, the lens of free cash flow. The simple yet powerful insight here was that despite our EBITDA growth and EBITDA margin struggles, we were able to sustain very solid cash flow generation, growing at a 10% CAGR since 2016. This was mainly due to the conversion of EBITDA into cash flow at a rate above 70% on average, thanks mainly to our negative working capital cycle.
Okay, insight number one, we managed to continue to generate a lot of cash. Great problem to have. Now, what do we do with it? In comes step number two. Step two was to take a close look at the evolution of our business itself, our strategy, and the 10-year plan that we built for our main operations. Since 2015, with the creation of ZX Ventures, we started to systematically invest behind going beyond beer. As a result, our business has become more diverse, bringing new dilemmas, different trade-offs. Our strategy has also evolved and is much more customer and consumer-centric than in the past. In 2020, we laid out a long-term plan for our Brazilian operation that began serving as a North Star to us. Insight number two, our business has evolved and will continue to evolve.
Bringing steps one and two together led us to reframe our challenge from the finance side, our little aha moment. Instead of just looking at how to drive EBITDA growth and margin recovery, we realized that the better we get at reinvesting our free cash flow generation behind investment opportunities with more attractive returns, the greater the chance of going back to a virtuous cycle of value creation. Which leads me to where we are today. Let's get our priorities straight first. This is how I summarize where me and my team have spent a disproportionate amount of our time and energy over the last two years. It all starts with great people and engaged people.
We've evolved since 2020, when protecting our liquidity, given the COVID-19 pandemic, and laying the groundwork to recover profitability were paramount, to 2021, where resource allocation and financial discipline started to take center stage. Looking ahead, our priorities are also crystal clear. First, we will continue to invest behind building a great team, a more engaged team. Second, we will continue to carefully manage our costs and expenses to look for ways to improve productivity and our working capital management. And third, we will continue to embed into our management system this focus on value creation, looking for better, smarter ways to generate better returns for our cash flows. All this in order to help the organization optimize our business, as well as digitize and monetize our amazing assets. This is the what. Now let's talk about the how.
As part of the process of reframing our challenge from the finance side, it became clear to us that if we continue to simply focus on EBITDA growth and EBITDA margin, we would become a more and more myopic organization. Therefore, we would either fail to allocate resources efficiently and/or probably miss out on some pretty sizable value creation opportunities. We went back to the Brahma days and decided to look again at EVA as the measure of value creation and return on invested capital as an additional way of looking at profitability given how our business is evolving. It's not that EBITDA growth and EBITDA margin are no longer important, because they are.
The more we looked, the more we felt that it made a lot of sense to bring these two metrics back into our financial management system, starting with an emphasis on return on invested capital. This way, we believe we see the bigger picture and truly measure if we are indeed reinvesting well our free cash flow, and ultimately making better decisions that lead towards value creation. Now let's take a look at our 20-year history from a ROIC perspective to see what we've learned from it so far. Until 2005, ROIC deteriorated thanks to declining NOPAT margin and declining asset turnover. This coincides with our international M&A expansion. However, from 2006 to 2009, ROIC actually recovered thanks to a step change in both NOPAT margin and asset turnover. In other words, we delivered on the M&A synergies for deals like Labatt and Quinsa.
Meanwhile, Brazil performed well organically. From 2010 to 2016, performance improved from a ROIC perspective, thanks to a continuous NOPAT margin expansion and asset turnover being taken to new levels. This is when everything came together. Now, from 2017 to 2020, we saw ROIC suffer from both NOPAT margin and asset turnover contracting to a lower level. We lost momentum, headwinds increased. Finally, 2021 was the first step of the journey to improve ROIC by focusing on not just one, but both levers, NOPAT margin and asset turnover. As you know, 2020 and 2021 were marked by pretty significant margin pressure. In 2021, we actually managed to improve return on invested capital, thanks to better asset turnover. It was a good start, but we still have much to do.
One of our main challenges going forward is to really balance both levers in order to consistently improve return on invested capital. Let's talk about how we think we can get there. In a nutshell, in order to consistently create value, we believe we need to get three things right. First, we need to strengthen and grow our core business, primarily through top line growth. Number two, we need to scale up our tech platforms, leveraging the core business capabilities and the unparalleled assets we have. Third, we need to dynamically allocate resources between the two, being agile to pilot at small scale and double down on what's working. Let's look at some examples. Today, we will focus on our tech capabilities, BEES Bank, logistics, Zé Delivery, Draftline, and Ambev Tech.
Tomorrow, we're gonna look at the core business units of Brazil Beer, Brazil NAB, and Beyond Beer. I put together this guide with a few examples of what you will see in the presentations to come and how they connect with the potential ROIC improvements going forward. Hopefully, this will help you better understand what we are trying to achieve from a financial perspective. We believe that the opportunities to improve NOPAT margin and asset turnover are plenty. I'm not going into each example now because folks will give you more color later, but let me double-click into BEES. BEES is a great example because it illustrates really well the opportunities, the challenges, the dilemmas, and the trade-offs we faced on this journey.
In fact, I would argue that maybe five, probably 10, 15 years ago, the business case for BEES may not have even seen the light of day internally because of how inherently different the business model was and how we frankly approached things differently from a financial perspective. We're evolving, we're learning, and BEES is showing us that it's possible. First, BEES has helped accelerate profitable growth of our core business. It's helped us serve better our clients. It's solving their pain points. It's bringing them more convenience, empowering them. NPS improves through initiatives like flexible delivery days, extended payment terms, improved cooler maintenance, while also bringing in additional revenue. BEES has allowed us to better understand the needs and preferences of our clients, which has led to more and better product offerings, smarter promotional campaigns, and revenue management tools leveraging technology.
As a result, BEES has expanded our distribution reach not only for beer, but also for non-alcoholic beverages and beyond the beer brands, given that we've increased the number of clients we serve. Second, BEES allows us to unlock profitable new business opportunities. The fast rate of adoption of BEES has allowed us to quickly bring in new revenue streams through sale of third-party products that are important to our clients through the 1PL marketplace model. Next, we're starting to work more and more with the 3PL software as a service model, which has better margins and more attractive returns. Further, given our extensive distribution capabilities and trusted relationships with clients, the customer acquisition and retention costs are far lower. There's also limited invested capital required to scale up, and we benefit from a negative working capital cycle.
As a result, despite the 1PL marketplace lower margin on its face, for instance, in 2021 was mid-single digits at the growth margin level, just to illustrate. BEES can still help us improve our profitability by generating attractive returns for the company and thus creating value. Put simply, more top-line growth, incremental NOPAT, limited incremental investments, and negative working capital cycle. Abilio and Leo will give you more color later today, but I wanted to share this in advance just to give you a sense of how to connect the strategy with the financial implications we see. To wrap up, I wanted to go back to the numbers and put things into perspective.
As I hope you will be able to see during the next two days, we've been investing behind many opportunities, not only in our core business, but also behind our tech capabilities that if executed well, can unlock sustainable long-term value creation, starting with continuing to improve our ROIC. We're very proud of our history and our performance to date, and how we've managed to deliver good returns over the years. We know we have to earn it every day. We have a clear view at what are the right levers and what needs to be done, but we have to keep delivering and transforming consistently. For us, this dashboard is a good guide on how we think of it going forward. We need to keep growing the top line. We need to grow EBITDA. EBITDA margins need to improve.
Free cash flow generation needs to remain strong, and return on invested capital is a metric we've elevated to give us the better picture, and allocate resources more efficiently as we try to grow efficiently. Thank you very much. I would like to invite Eduardo Horai to join me on stage. Thank you.
Thank you, Lucas. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Welcome to Ambev's Investors Day. My name is Eduardo Horai. I'm the CTO and VP of Technology for Ambev. A quick introduction. I've been working in technology for the last 17 years. Before joining the company, I spent seven years working at Amazon, building the AWS business across Latin America, leading the technology team from the early days of the cloud technology until it became a multi-billion dollar group. I've joined Ambev 2.5 years ago, really motivated by the big dream of the senior leadership to transform this huge transnational using digital and technology. Honestly, I've always been curious about the culture as well.
So far, these three years and a half has been a tremendous journey, a lot of lessons learned, and hopefully we'll be able to show you some of the things that we achieved throughout this transformation. Let me start contextualizing where we are. We are in Campinas in our global Ambev Tech office, where some of our key global projects, such as BEES, that you'll hear much more today, and Aurora, our SAP S/4HANA implementation, are being developed. In addition to Campinas, we have a big office in Blumenau, where our logistics, sales, and back-office applications are also being developed. We do also have presence in São Paulo, where our ventures such as Z-Tech and Zé Delivery are based out of.
We do also have other smaller offices in places like Buenos Aires, Argentina, and also people hired in home office across Brazil, as we need a lot of tech talents. We will cover much more about our tech people, our talent strategy later towards the day. Let's move towards the platform. I think JJ and Lucas mentioned our focus on transforming the company into a platform business. Our strategy is really based on the two big digital platforms, BEES for our customers and Zé for our consumers. How can we leverage our great assets to provide great service level and insights helping the whole ecosystem. BEES is part of a customer ecosystem that we know and we have a relationship for many, many years.
With our digital platform, we're expanding our offerings from financial services to selling other goods beyond beer or liquids, which is our marketplace. Zé is also building a strong ecosystem directly with our consumers, a brand-new space for us that we didn't know until recent years. As JJ mentioned, Zé has a very unique proposition, cold beer, affordable price in 30 minutes or less. Now that we proved that value proposition, we believe there are much more that we can add to this ecosystem. As I mentioned, there are many other services and assets that we are connecting into these two platforms to provide a better experience to our customers and consumers. This includes Ambev's strong footprint and fulfillment capabilities, as well as our financial assets, as Lucas mentioned. In a very nutshell, this is our platform strategy, and you'll see much more details later.
Let me cover the digital agenda for today. Abilio and Leo are gonna cover BEES marketplace strategy and performance. Later, Pantoja and Valter are gonna talk about our fintech business. André Mello is gonna give details on how logistics is really transforming to better serve our customers and consumers. Chung, Rodolfo Chung, will cover our strategy for Zé and performance. Last, Stella and Paula will show how we are connecting digitally our iconic brands with our consumers, how we are evolving our marketing to a social data-driven and personalized marketing, leveraging a lot of data and consumer insights. Finally, I'll come back again in the end of the day to connect all the dots and show how our technology strategy is gonna support all this growth.
Before we go into each business, and they're gonna go much deeper, I want to spend two minutes showing our technology framework that orchestrates and shapes our teams. This is fundamentally important for us to direct resources and efforts that are really connected to the platform. On top, as we all mentioned, we have BEES for our customers and marketplace, and for consumer, we have Zé with a lot of consumer insights. In the following layer, we have core services that are providing additional value and offering to the platform. We mentioned fintech, we mentioned logistics, but there are other things like our breweries and our supplier network. Everything above is powered by a data and analytics layer that collects, process, and store all the data generated across the company.
We do have a lot of algorithms on top of that is powering many parts of our business. You'll see that throughout the presentation. I will give more insights later as well. This is all enabled by our technology foundation to make sure that we are building robust, scalable, and secure applications being developed efficiently and fast. We leverage, obviously, the cloud and the modern architectures such as APIs and microservices, and we are also modernizing our ERP. We're consolidating, we're simplifying, we are building microservices to add flexibility around it and agility. Last, this is only possible with a strong team of technical talents. We have built strong company brands, as you saw today with BEES, Ambev Tech, Z-Tech and Zé.
We are hiring the best tech talents on the market, and we are creating programs to support their journey throughout the company that is very different from the traditional Ambev employee journey. Next, I'll let each business present themselves. They're gonna give much more details about the business, and then I'll come back later on the day to detail these three layers: data, tech foundation, and people. Let me call Abilio to the stage to talk more about BEES.
Complete, vamos te dizer
Hoje eu tenho uma diversidade maior, uma qualidade bem maior também pra agregar todo esse público que eu vou receber.
[Foreign language]Sou muito bem atendido pela Ambev, graças a Deus. Eu tenho um bom relacionamento.[/Foreign language]
Consigo ter uma conversa e uma troca de necessidades da casa que eu não conseguiria ter pelo aplicativo, né?
[Foreign language]Lança um SPAT, ele encaminha pra gente, a gente faz negociação com o cliente pra ver se aquela cerveja tem aceitação ou não tem aceitação, é tudo um ciclo integrado da gente pra saber o produto que a gente tá vendendo pro cliente da gente.[/Foreign language]
A Ambev sempre tem mudado muita coisa, principalmente a tecnologia, né, que vem acompanhando ano após ano. Com a chegada do novo aplicativo, o BEES, a gente ganhou o que eu acredito ser o mais precioso na vida, que é tempo. [/Foreign language]
Antigamente, a gente só tinha o vendedor uma vez na semana e eu era obrigado a pedir naquele dia o pedido pra chegar no dia seguinte. Hoje a gente tem a Ambev na palma da mão.
Ele chega pra você já com praticamente o pedido que você deve fazer. [/Foreign language]
Ele às vezes te encurta caminhos e também te faz lembrar algum produto que você pode tá esquecendo. Eu acho muito importante essa ferramenta também.
Quando cê abre o aplicativo, eles têm já um estudo do que cê mais compra, né? Já aparece logo no tópico ali do aplicativo pra que você já siga mais ou menos o mesmo pedido.
[Foreign language] a gente tendo na mesma plataforma diversos tipos de produto, isso com certeza facilita pra gente, porque a gente faz uma compra única com um único parceiro.
Eu tive a experiência de, por exemplo, o fornecedor de vodka não me entregar. Eu consegui comprar.
A empresa ganha comprando, ganha pontos e retorna pra gente em produtos. Produto é dinheiro. A gente consegue resgatar produto, que pra gente é dinheiro em caixa. Quanto mais compra, mais ponto você ganha. Tipo, vai ter os desafios do mês, tipo tirar foto de cartaz, geladeira da Brahma Duplo, essas coisas. Aí a gente vai ganhando mais pontos. Hoje é bem fácil fazer a solicitação de manutenção dos equipamentos no próprio app. Geralmente um ou dois dias. Já vem aqui, arruma, deixa tudo novinho.
Eu ligo pra assistência, no outro dia já vem, rápido. A assistência é rápida aqui. [/Foreign language]
Eu tendo essa possibilidade de marcar uma data, receber essa mercadoria em ordem, na hora certa, melhor coisa que existe. Com certeza a entrega flexível ajudou muito. A gente consegue fazer uma programação durante a semana. [/Foreign language]
Eu construí uma história junto com a Ambev. Eu era um pequeno comércio, hoje não sou melhor do que ninguém, mas sou melhor do que eu era algum tempo atrás, com o apoio todo que eu tive da Ambev.
It's always good to start by listening to our clients. My name is Abilio Secarechio. I joined the company in 2010. Since then, I spent most of my time in the sales team with several different positions. Now I take care of BEES here in Brazil, which I believe is the most exciting position in the company. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. We piloted BEES for the first time in April 2020 in Rio. After a very impressive adoption, we were able to see clearly that it was something our clients really liked, and we should scale up the implementation quickly. In less than two years, what was a pilot became 80% of our total revenue, representing 88% of our active buyers.
We were really happy to have what was a very traditional market becoming digitalized, bringing lots of opportunities for our clients and also for our company. At the same time we were digitalizing our relationship with the current base, we also had a relevant customer base expansion, since the digitalization gave much more autonomy to the clients. This autonomy also made it easier for entrepreneurs to become part of Ambev ecosystem. As a result, this brought us over 150,000 new customers in less than two years, achieving our all-time high in active buyers. This represents almost 1 million additional hectoliters, already excluding cannibalization effects. We still have a lot of space to grow.
This fast adoption and buyers expansion allowed us to become one of the top e-commerces in Brazil in terms of total GMV, which makes us really proud since we have a very young platform with lots of opportunities ahead. It is not just about digitalizing, it is really about creating deeper connections with our clients. One of the biggest benefits to have our clients online is the fact that now we have 25 minutes more interaction with them in a week compared to seven minutes on average that we had in the past, relying only on our frontline team visit. Another very good point is that since our clients buy inside the app, we save transactional time, so our BDR visit is much more focused on selling sellout activities such as execution, brand activation, as well as relationship building and service level, which have a huge impact on performance.
We became a company very focused on clients' growth rather than just interested on selling, and that gave us 20 points growth in NPS. We also can see here that there is a huge impact on volume related to how engaged our clients are to BEES. By engagement, I mean having more interaction with different BEES features and capabilities. Volumes from highly engaged clients outperform by 21 points in comparison to those that are still offline. The more engaged they are with this, the better our service level gets, and performance follows. We were able to get majority of the base and also the new clients digitalized, and we are building this deeper connection with them. What is really important to add here is that from this deeper connection, we became much more data-driven.
Once the platform became a very impressive way to understand our clients' needs, and also a powerful tool to customize our go-to-market. For example, we had over 14 million accesses in December last year, generating almost 90 million minutes connected. With 8,000 data points by each session, data is generating a much better understanding of our clients' behavior, allowing us to invest more in analytics, which became a way to customize every tool in the platform. We are evolving a lot on the way we use data to improve our clients' experience and to have our commercial strategy deployed through all platform tools. For example, we currently have proprietary algorithms working on customizing the selection of SKUs that are going to be promoted within the platform using all these different tools for that.
This is made customized for each one of our clients with a very deep statistical understanding of potential volume impact, conversion probabilities, and so on. Just like Netflix evolves on understanding what users are going to like to watch, we evolve on understanding what is best for our clients' success. This is a crucial step for a company that is innovating every day more and a portfolio that grows also by adding marketplace partners. This is part of the increasing role of our analytics team. I wanted to show you guys from here is a sample of what became our new go-to-market, which we call B2O, meaning Bis to Offline.
The B2O is our new go-to-market, and using artificial intelligence coordinates our commercial strategy through all BEES platform, taking advantage of the online tools such as the digital communications, quick orders, upsell, Club B challenge and promotions, but also coordinating the offline execution, mostly driven by our BDRs, the frontline team using BEES Force, as well as the customer experience center and our delivery. The idea here is to show you some sample on this and how we are becoming much more effective on the way we approach the clients and execute our brands. I'm going to start by talking about digital communications. The main goal here is to take advantage of this qualified and numerous audience, exploring the whole journey the clients have inside and outside the app. We aim on giving an awareness to the main strategies we have in terms of portfolio and also service level.
We have developed several media tools to capture most of our clients' attention, minimizing friction in order to have clients engaged and being impacted by the B2O objectives, promoting Ambev's portfolio and also marketplace partners that invest in media for reaching higher customer reach. We generate over 21 million impressions in a month, reaching most of our base with a click-to-rate by 18%, much above the social media benchmark. For example, on the slide, we have displayed what we just did during March for Brahma Duplo Malte Carnaval campaign. For this kind of campaign, we also use our channel on YouTube, which became a new source of clients' engagement and has shown very good results, reaching over 1 million views a month.
In this Brahma example, we increased distribution by 13% and volume by 20% in our new way for sales proposition. Let's see a summary of these tools working in a video, please.
Fala, gente. Vamos ver na prática como tudo isso que falamos impacta na vida do Seu João? Às 9:00 A.M., ele costuma conferir o seu estoque para fazer o pedido. A nossa inteligência artificial identificou esse padrão e, por isso, um pouco antes do horário do pedido, relembramos o Seu João de que tem uma promoção especial de Spaten, produto que o nosso algoritmo sugere de acordo com o perfil dele. Quando o Seu João abre o aplicativo para aproveitar a promoção e fazer o pedido, ele já recebe uma notificação da campanha de Brahma Duplo Malte. Ele primeiro adiciona os seus produtos que aparecem no pedido sugerido, e depois já vai pra aba de desafios para completar e garantir a sua participação na promoção. Na aba de desafios, ele também aceita um de execução.
É só tirar uma foto da geladeira abastecida que, na hora, o nosso aplicativo já faz o reconhecimento de imagem e aprova a execução correta ou notifica, caso algo esteja fora do padrão. Com todos esses pontos ganhos, o seu João vai até a aba de resgate para usá-los. Ele aproveita para resgatar baldes de Brahma Duplo Malte, que é superimportante pra fazer girar o produto que ele acabou de comprar na promoção. Ele também adiciona ao carrinho uma experiência única no camarote Bis do Maracanã. É isso mesmo. Teremos sete camarotes exclusivos para os nossos clientes nos principais estádios do Brasil. Não é demais? Agora, o seu João volta a navegar pelas abas do aplicativo e, ao adicionar Bohemia no carrinho, automaticamente a nossa inteligência de comunicação sugere Budweiser. Assim, garantimos um portfólio completo para ele arrasar nas vendas.
Na aba do carrinho, antes de encerrar o seu pedido, o nosso pop-up de "Aproveite e compre junto" relembra três produtos que ele não pode ficar sem, um óleo de cozinha, aquela vodka que já está quase acabando e Colorado 600. Para proporcionar a melhor experiência de compra possível, oferecemos duas novas modalidades de pagamento, Pix e cartão de crédito. Muito legal.
Besides communication, our deeper relationship with our clients is also being built by our engagement club, the Club B. In the club, our clients can earn points by buying products or completing challenge, such as promoting our brands in hotspots of their stores, for example. That also became a very important venue for portfolio development and price discount optimization. Since we are able to migrate discount to points, and that give the clients the autonomy for redemption in different categories, including trade materials, product from partners, what is also a new business opportunity. We have seen a growing interest from partners to be part of the club and incentivize their portfolio through points. With all of these new way to connect, engage, and sell to our clients online, we are taking advantage of the digitalization process to also revolutionize our offline execution.
Using data and advanced analytics, our frontline is now being guided by this Force, featuring tasks which ensures the right execution for each POC, totally based on the client's needs and integrated to other tools in B2O. The tasks are designed to deliver better service level, help customer digitalization, and completely change the way we execute and develop our brands, once it allow us to ensure task completion by image recognition. This optimization also contributed to have a bigger rate on OPEX per BDR, enabling buyers expansion without frontline cost increase. Let's see a deeper explanation of this in a video also.
Galera, estamos aqui no bar do Seu João novamente, e vamos relembrar algumas coisas que vimos com a Tauana e entender a realidade dessa semana. Na última semana, ele comprou Spaten, que foi sugerida pelo nosso algoritmo de sortimento pela primeira vez. Ele também cumpriu o desafio no Biz de execução de geladeira, como vimos no bloco anterior. Detalhe: pelo reconhecimento de imagem, o app identificou que a geladeira tinha produto da concorrência. Acompanhamos também que ele costuma comprar alguns destilados no marketplace. Olha que legal, o PDV recebeu um aumento no limite de crédito há poucos dias. Com base nisso e todo o histórico do cliente, somado ao nosso plano comercial, o algoritmo definiu as prioridades. Execute Spaten no cardápio do PDV e oriente sobre o TTC sugerido. Informe que o PDV teve aumento no limite de crédito recente e valorize a alteração com o PDV.
Oriente o PDV sobre os nossos destilados no marketplace. Ofereça outros SKUs. Execute a geladeira apenas com produtos Ambev. Na primeira tarefa, o RN vai executar a Spaten do cardápio. Nessa tarefa, o RN vai falar sobre o produto, explicar o posicionamento de marca e orientar sobre o TTC sugerido, encaixando o novo SKU no próximo cardápio impresso. Na seguinte tarefa, o RN vai comunicar o cliente que o seu limite de crédito foi ampliado, valorizando o aumento. Na próxima tarefa, o RN deve orientar o PDV sobre outros destilados do nosso portfólio no marketplace. Com a orientação do RN, João comprou o uísque pelo Biz. Por fim, chegou a hora de garantir a execução da geladeira no PDV. No final, ele tira uma foto pra concluir a tarefa e o algoritmo de reconhecimento de imagem já entende que a geladeira está no gabarito.
Essas tarefas conversam com a realidade do PDV numa combinação única, suportada por dados e alinhada com a nossa estratégia. Bom demais, né, galera? Bom, agora que o RN já concluiu as tarefas do PDV, ele pode encerrar a visita. Nesse momento, ele consegue ver o fechamento com o tempo de visita e a quantidade de tarefas concluídas. Muito bom, né?
Improving the offline execution, the delivery is a very important part in the client's journey. Here our focus is to ensure better service level, minimizing failures or delays with a better cost predictability and giving more flexibility to our clients. In the past, we used to have fewer dates available for each client, and now we offer much more options, allowing them to place an extra order when they need an extra product replacement. For that, we charge a delivery fee that became a new revenue stream, at the same time we improve service level. That is also coordinated by algorithms, improving sales curve linearization and cost efficiency by organizing available delivery dates and fees. This is something crucial to keep expanding our buyer base at a fast pace without adding delivery costs.
Wrapping up what I tried to show you during the last minutes together, we are really happy with the journey we had so far with this, which brought us to this new digitalized go-to market with a much deeper connection and understanding of our clients, allowing us to become a customized Ambev to each one of our 1 million clients. That has already proven to be a really powerful way for customer satisfaction, performance, and is helping us to manage this fast innovative environment. As a final message with a clear take on the results, here are the portfolio main distribution KPIs.
As a consequence of what we have just spoken about, we can see our total SKU distribution evolving by 27% since BEES implementation in Brazil, delivering our best number in history for POC average purchased SKUs with all main categories, increasing penetration within our base. To talk about one of these very important categories, I'm going to invite Leo, my partner, our director for Marketplace. Thank you very much. Leo, please.
Hello. Hello, everyone. Did you like the presentation, Lucas? Just to break the protocol, imagine just for a second everything that you show here in other CPGs. This is what a marketplace can allow us in the near future. Just to introduce my presentation, I'm gonna to present me. I'm Leonardo Almeida. I have 16 years experience in technology area. I'm economist, 35 years old. I'm from Minas Gerais. I'm born in São Lourenço. It's a small city. I chose those pictures because these pictures represent me a lot and everything that I love. The first one is sports at a competitive level. This was a competition in 2014. The second one is my wife, Claudine. Beer also I love a lot. The picture in the center, it's about Menu.
I love work, and I founded Menu in 2015 as a B2B marketplace in Brazil. At that time it was the first, and we did amazing work with this incredible team. I'm sorry. What is this? I did something wrong?
No.
Okay. Thank you very much. I selected this picture because this picture represents a lot why I'm here today. It was in 2017 in China, in Beijing, and I was in a road show that I prepare. I was negotiation with some VCs for a round B of investments in menu.com.
During the negotiation, at certain point of the negotiation, I was very advanced in the negotiation with a VC called Zoho, and the venture capitalist called me in a Starbucks meeting and they said, "Okay, man, what are you gonna do with these $X million that I'm investing in you?" I said, "For growth." They ask again, "What are you gonna do?" I said, "In sales and marketing." They said, "How?" I said, "Sales and marketing." They said, "How? How?" And the question never stop. At certain point, 10 questions later, they said, "Man, the name of the game, it's audience and assortment." I study a lot the Brazilian market and the Latin American market.
It was a VC focusing on Asia, and they said, "Man, it's almost impossible to win in Brazil or in Latin America without a large CPG. It's almost impossible to win without Ambev in your country. So I can invest in you, but I suggest you come back and start the negotiation with the partner, a local partner." I was frustrated at that time because I know it was a bit difficult to make this deal with Ambev. I come back and start the negotiation in 2017, and then in 2019, we sign a deal and thank you, Jean. This is why I'm here today. I think this photo explain a lot about our journey and why we are here. I have three years in Ambev since that day, and I'm founder of menu.com.
As Abilio said, and as Jin Lu in China said, "Attention, it's the name of the game." We came from seven minutes a week for a BDR visit to 24 additional minutes, 31 minutes in total. With this better attention, we can offer a broader portfolio for our customers. Attention, it's our first step in this journey and this transformation. The second one is assortment. When we talk about assortment, it's very important to offer a better assortment to put our customer in the center and increase the attention that we have and also assortment. I'm glad to be here to present to you the BEES Marketplace. The third pillar that I consider very important is experience.
When we put our customer in the center and understand what is the pain points and how we can help, truly help, this journey, we see that in average, the customer has 70 different suppliers per month. They buy from different 17 suppliers per month. It's a very complicated routine. It's a very tough routine in this business model. They deals with a very complex assortment, and this picture explain a little bit what about a phenomenon that we have in Brazil and related to the cash-and-carries and some distributors. When we look these pain points, it's hard to solve it. It's not easy. We was talking in the lunch, and it's hard to solve, but we choose to dream big here and to dream big in a digital way.
All of this, it's turning possible for us as BEES Marketplace. We are putting a complementary assortment in our warehouse and delivery at the same trucks for our customers. Talking about total addressable market and thinking about the size of opportunity, we, excluding modern trade, excluding large supermarkets, are talking about a BRL 760 billion market size. The total addressable market is huge. We are playing nowadays in a beer and alcoholic beverage. It's about a BRL 160 billion. In the same box with categories that we have synergy today, we have more BRL 252 billion in a market opportunity.
When we considering categories that we have no synergy, like meat for example, or vegetables, and when we considering box that we don't serve today, we have more BRL 348 billion of opportunities. It's a huge opportunity. It's a huge market opportunity with 1.8 million box. In a financial perspective, here is the investment perspective. Why to play in this game? We see that our customer is underserved nowadays. They have a weak relationship with their supplier. They have an inefficient purchase process. They have a lack of management tools, and also they have a poor service level. They have to go to the Cash & Carry's, they have to go to the players to serve them. Also it's a fragmented market.
The top ten leaders, the top five leaders, no matter how we choose the list, it's less than 10% market share. It's a very fragmented market with a high opportunity. First step is to do the basic. It's expansion. It's to turn the marketplace available in our operations. We came in 2020 from two operations to more than 200 right now, with more than 300 SKUs, and we are very proud to do this expansion with small improvements, as Lucas said, in the logistics side. The growth KPIs, it's exponentially. We have a very exponential growth. In customers, our CAGR per month in the last nine months, it's about 18%. We have 18% CAGR growth in customers with a 22% CAGR growth in GMV.
The CAGR of GMV is higher than customer because we are increasing also the AOV. With a very low market investment. The higher amount that we invest in marketing to attract new customer for marketplace, it was about BRL 2 million. Our customer acquisition cost is quite low, BRL 29. To measure our lifetime value, it's quite unfair because we don't have a proper churn because the customer is the same customer of Ambev. We considering that this is a business with a high single-digit profitability. With a low churn, it's almost unfair to share the lifetime value. We are very proud of the results, and we believe that we can keep going, keep pushing this in this business.
We have two different business model. The first one, it's 1PL, products with high synergy with our logistics, with our footprint. Here we have examples like Pernod Ricard, Kellogg's, and Kraft Heinz. All of these products, we can connect with our footprint and deliver at the same truck. We also have the 3PL business model. Here I connect with the question that I did for you, Lucas. Imagine everything that we show here, Abilio show here from BEES in other CPGs. The reality is pretty the same, and we can offer this product as a software, as a service in a more asset light model. BRF is our first partner here, and we are expanding this business model in the future. About assortment, very quickly, we have different categories.
Here is the Nielsen map of categories for on-trade. There are obviously some categories that have no synergy in the first step, like meat, vegetables, fruits, for example, or cheese or bakery. In fact, no work. All of the drinks categories, we have high synergy with our operations. We have a great sweet spot here. For example, coffee, carbonated, other categories, drinking milk, dairy, confectionery, snacks, and hard liquor, spirits. There is a lot of opportunities here. Here are some examples of the categories that are available in the marketplace today. Every supplier, when they came to our marketplace, starts in the first step as a silver partner, and they have an opportunity to go step by step and evolve in the partnership with us.
As a platinum partner, we have examples like Pernod Ricard, Mondelēz, Imperatriz Candjuba, and all of these partners can access everything that Abilio showed in the previous presentation. Finally, to give two messages here. The first one, this business is usually. It's not intended for us. It's usually in this business, a negative working capital. The practice of the market is 25 days payables, 25 days of inventory, 6-day receivables, and 14 days of a cash flow, and we are working aligned with the best practice in the market. The second one, it's they have high synergy with our footprint. It's a. It requires a very low investment to connect with our footprint. The example is here.
This is flow hacks, bins, shelves, grids, and it's improvements that we use for marketplace, but also we can use for beer, and it's a very small investment that we are doing. Off-topic note here, if the marketplace were independent from Ambev, we would need more than 10 Cash & Carry stores, for example, to serve the current demand. As Lucas said about the return on investment, we have a great example of this here. Guys, thank you very much. I would like to invite Pantoja to present a little bit about BEES Bank.
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Marcelo Pantoja. I am currently the CEO of Z-Tech in Brazil, which is our Ambev's technology hub focused on empowering small and medium-sized businesses to change the world through technology. I've been with ABI for 16 years, and before joining Z-Tech, I spent five years running multiple sales and marketing positions in the U.S. and more recently moved back to Brazil as regional director in the South region and then Director of Strategy and Finance. I will be here today with Valter Nakashima, CFO of our fintech Donus, recently rebranded to BEES Bank. Valter has an extensive career in finance, previously being the finance director for BanQi and head of finance for Livelo and Digio. Let's get started. Three years ago, when we created Z-Tech, we conducted a deep study to map the biggest pain points in SMBs day-to-day activities.
Among other findings, we realized that there was a big untapped opportunity related to giving them access to financial services in a fair way, so we could help them thrive and grow. At Z-Tech, we were very well-positioned alongside with Ambev and its established capabilities to lead this effort and promote financial inclusion for merchants in Brazil. Among the pain points we observed, we could highlight three. First, loss of sales due to difficulties in accepting cards. Second, high banking fees in general. Third, lack of access to credit lines to run their business or help their expansion. As a starting point, we built our first product portfolio to meet these needs. A digital wallet, which acts as a central interface to introduce them to digital banking services.
Two, a sales acceptance system, such as a physical point of sale terminal, like a POS machine or a digital gateway for e-commerce, which receives payments electronically and place the receivables in the e-wallet. Third, a debit card free of charge to help them better manage their relationships with suppliers. Fourth, a set of credit offerings that provide liquidity and flexibility for the POCs. How do these solutions work in real life? We can split our customer journey in four major steps and we developed the platform that has a positive impact on each one of them. First, when the POC owner orders products from BEES. At this moment, they have access to extended credit terms as well as new payment options like Pix or credit card to avoid paying cash.
Secondly, when their order arrives, the POC owner can also choose to pay via PagDireto, which is a proprietary tool that allows customers to select which bank slip or boleto they want to pay and instantly pay it to a supplier through a costless wallet-to-wallet transaction. As they no longer need to handle cash, the delivery process becomes safer and more efficient. The POC owner also earns cashback, which can be used in their next purchase at BEES. Third, we facilitate payments from consumers to POCs by providing POS machines that accept debit and credit cards as well as Pix QR code. Our e-wallet provides real-time management capabilities, offering a user-friendly digital interface that provides better visibility, facilitating all supplier financial transactions for the POC.
All of that, combined with a great user experience, creates daily engagement and high recurrence from customers. Let's see how it works directly from our customer. Please roll the video.
At Z-Tech, we are developing fintech solutions that helps to address major customers' pain points, promoting financial inclusion and leading the digitization of traditional trade. In an increasingly cashless economy, fintech adds value to Ambev's ecosystem by enabling digital money to flow from consumers' e-wallets through our marketplace, DTC channels and back in a unique value proposition where POC owners benefit, and we bring new sources of revenue to Ambev. By providing multiple cash in and cash out options, the e-wallet delivers a convenient banking account solution and primary access to financial services such as working capital credit, payments, and cards solutions. Different from other apps, the e-wallet is a high engagement management tool used multiple times throughout the day. Offering the e-wallet, POS machines, BEES points, and digitized existing discounts, cashbacks, and other rewards creates a unique offer to the POCs.
POS solutions, empowering POC sales and e-wallet cash-up. E-wallet providing an easy-to-use supplier experience. Credit improving POC's business financial health. Special rewards driving user base growth. All in a cycle of value creation for POC owners and Ambev. Z-Tech, empowering small and medium businesses to change the world through technology.
2021 was a great year for us at Donus. We deployed many products in the first semester, iterated and learned a lot, pivoted a couple times until gain traction through a great product market fit. In the beginning of the second semester, we were ready to ramp up. We then defined a clear go-to-market strategy, reaching all Ambev's DDCs, and even with a tough external environment due to the pandemic, we managed to open 220,000 accounts and achieve BRL 1 billion processed volume in the month of December alone. The utilization of our e-wallet has been growing at a fast pace, and 34% of active POCs use it every working day. In addition to that, 30% of active e-wallet POCs were using our POS machines to receive payments from their customers.
We managed to provide a safer and agile payment process for our POCs through PagDireto, which was responsible for the digitization of 13% of Ambev cash payments in December. Recently, this number more than doubled after Ambev's Pix acceptance launch earlier this year. Now, I will invite Valter to walk you through some of our financials. Valter, the stage is yours.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. Let's move to our P&L drivers and unit economics. We separate our financials in four main drivers. We have essentially three sources of revenue, and all of them follow the market standard take rates. Acquiring service, MDR, debit card interchange, and credit concession, the interest rate. With regards to cost, we have an opportunity because we still work a white label solution, which could provide some cost efficiencies in the future as we evaluate a super acquirer or acquirer model. In credit, we have a huge differential using clients' historical data for Ambev, combined with their transactional information through the e-wallet. It then feeds our credit algorithm, which then drives better results in terms of credit scoring and bad debt.
Third, we can manage our CAC with joint effort between our sales team and Ambev's field team, supported by customized marketing campaigns on digital channels such as BEES and social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Google. In December, we spent around 21 BRL in CAC, so much lower than industry standard. Also, within Ambev ecosystem, we are the official financial solution provider for the direct-to-consumer platforms, for example, Zé Delivery and Chopp Brahma Express, with a large array of possibilities to expand the service to their franchises and operation, just like payment gateway, Pix, and credit card acceptance. Lastly, we see the same efficiency happening on the retention costs.
We are able to create a unique value proposition for the POC's owner based on better utilization of existing discounts via cashback and digitalization of existing trade marketing incentives. Let's talk a little bit about credit. Okay? In 2021, you can see the difference in Ambev's short-term credit operation comparing the period pre- and post-Donus acceleration. We almost double the total payment extension. We reinvested a lot in short-term solutions as we took the major step to facilitate payment terms extension for the POCs and give it an opportunity to sell more and grow. At the end of the day, we increased 1.1 days under average terms. You may ask, what are we doing different? Well, we are basically talking about two things.
The first one, we are improving our credit scoring through algorithms to be able to offer credit to more folks without compromising our financial health. Second, we develop easier ways to obtain terms extension through technology. Therefore, we are changing the way Ambev use to manage a payments term strategy, evolving from sales management tool to a product inside a fintech. After exciting journey in 2021, we are now talking about a bold step to accelerate Donus in 2022. In order to strengthen our synergies with this, we are rebranding our fintech to be called BEES Bank. With this movement, we still operate as independent organization without any change in the management team. This change will allow us to get even more traction and quickly bring financial inclusion to more merchants. This change will bring relevant additional benefits to our customers.
More familiar with the brand and confidence, which brings credibility, better user experience. For example, single sign-on with this that facilitate their interface. It will allow us to use real-time data to bring a customized solution at exact time the focus is needed. Also it brings some benefits to our system too. Operational synergy, even lower CAC and CRC, and discount efficiency. Enhanced data analytics to better understand the business driver, optimizes conversion funnel, churn reduction, and also you can bring new financial products to merchants. What is the size of this opportunity? We are just getting started. Currently, we are operating with only Ambev's DDCs. So as to expand it to third-party wholesalers, which increase by 80% the volume potential.
If you consider the opportunity to play outside Ambev's current playing field, we estimate a total addressable market 20 times larger than the current one. We believe this marketplace could be a natural fit for this BEES Bank to tackle this opportunity.
Hello. Okay, great, Valter. Just to wrap up, I wanted to remind you all that everything we just presented was possible because we created Z-Tech three years ago as our technology hub focused on solving the main pain points of retailers, bars, restaurants, convenience stores, and groceries. Since then, we've been working to promote innovation through investments, partnerships, and development of technology solutions, which strengthen small and medium-sized businesses. Our first success case was menu.com, our B2B market platform incorporated into BEES last year, as Leonardo just showed you. Besides BEES Bank, we currently have three other companies in our portfolio. First, Get In, which is a startup that offers solutions to bars and restaurants through a single platform that manages their wait list, reservations, delivery, and digital menu.
Second, Lemon Energia, which is a startup that seeks to democratize the consumption of clean energy in Brazil, connecting local energy producers with folks, providing to them electricity bill cost reduction. Third, Mercafácil, a digital platform that aims to digitalize sales processes and manage marketing campaigns, CRM for small and medium grocery stores to maximize sales conversion. The key for our success is to combine the diverse expertise of entrepreneurs and their diverse teams with Ambev's assets, like strong brands and capillarity, to make these businesses grow and bring even more value to our ecosystem. Now, I want to hand over to Andre to talk about logistics revolution. Thank you.
Thank you, Valter. Thank you, Pantoja. Good afternoon, everyone. Now, we are going to switch gears into logistics and talk a little bit about how our platforms are changing its dynamics. Before that, let me give you a quick intro of myself. My name is André. I was born and raised here in São Paulo, and I had a slightly different career path than most of my colleagues here. After I left college, I spent seven years in the asset management industry, working in equity buy side. After those years, I decided to pursue a lifelong dream to study abroad and get an MBA degree. During that time, I had the opportunity to work at ZX Ventures. There, I redesigned the logistics to support Colorado's draft beer expansion plan. Ambev invited me to come back, and I did after my graduation.
I have worked as inbound logistics manager for Brazil, transportation sourcing manager for South America, and my last role as manager for Nexway, which is a logistic department focused on developing new capabilities to support our future. That's enough for myself, so let's talk about what really matters, logistics. First, I would like to talk a little bit about the logistics ecosystem we have built over the years. I'm going to split it in two fronts. One, we'll call hardware, which is basically the hard assets we use to get our products to our customers and consumers. The other, we'll call software. Here, we are talking about the set of systems and processes that support our hardware, ensuring efficiency, service level, and operational excellence.
Talking about hardware, since our first direct distribution center in Olinda, we've spent the last 25 years building a capillarity we believe to be unique in Brazil. Nowadays, we have 29 breweries, 157 wholesalers, and 111 distribution centers spread all around the country. These structures are equipped with over 2,000 heavy-duty trucks for transportation and over 8,000 light trucks for distribution. This is how we are able to get to cover 95% of Brazil's territory, directly reaching about 1 million clients in over 5,000 cities. This is our footprint in Brazil, and we have similar structures throughout LAS and CAC. To tap into the potential of all that hardware, we need technology. Let me guide you through what we call our software. First of all, let me start by apologizing for the slide.
I know it's a lot to take in, but that was the only way I found to convey the message I want. This is a simplified representation of our supply chain from farm to glass. From left to right, you can see our suppliers, our breweries, our distribution centers, and finally, our customers and consumers. At the top, you can see our control tower, which is a structure in Jaguariúna responsible to oversee all this process. As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts, and quite frankly, there is no escape. It is and always will be a complex system to manage, and the best way you have to do this is with technology. With that in mind, in 2018, we created a department 100% focused in logistics technology.
All these logos across the chain are systems that they integrated into our process, either a top-notch market solution or an in-house development. All the systems provide us with real-time information of the supply chain, bringing visibility and agility to our decision-making. Everything is integrated in a single data lake, and there is how we are able to control the whole chain from our control tower. We run complex analysis on the chain as a whole, not a single node. As of now, we are already diving into machine learning and building algorithms to improve our efficiency. For me, talking about cloud, data lake, analytics always seems to be a bit ethereal. Let me give you an example of the power of this integration.
Now, suppose you had a surge in demand for Brahma Duplo Malte 12-ounce flip can in a remote area in the countryside of Northeast Brazil. The system would analyze the demand for the whole region, identify a potential shortage, and would suggest a change in the production line. Our new plan, we need more cans, so the systems automatically sends a purchase order to our local supplier with no human interaction. Back in the day, this decision would take more than a day. Now, it happens in just a few hours with almost no human interaction. We have reached a great degree of maturity in our replenishment and deployment, and that brings a big stability to our process. Our goal is to have a fully autonomous process, reducing our time to react and implementing predictive tools. So far, we've talked about hardware and software.
Now, I want to close this chapter and open a new one, talk about our customers and consumers. Let's talk on how our platforms are changing the dynamics of our distribution, especially in the last mile. In the past, we had a sales model that we call one-to-many, meaning the same salesperson visiting several clients each week in an offline interaction with very little data. BEES and Zé changed that. Now we have an interaction that we call one-to-one. In this new world, each customer and consumer can order whenever they want, having an exclusive and personalized experience. Also, the digitalization enables us to offer different products and services, not only from a sales perspective, but also from a logistics one. With BEES, for instance, customers can now choose between different delivery dates, and to our marketplace, they have access to non-Ambev products.
Zé Delivery, on the other hand, brought the convenience of cold beer at home in less than 35 minutes at market prices. We became an ambidextrous company, able to directly reach both customers and consumers, and the combination of our hardware and software is key to support the growth of these platforms. While this digitalization changed the way we interact with customers and consumers, it also had another positive effect. Now, businesses and people can become our customers and consumers through just a few clicks. In the past few years, with BEES, our customer base reached the mark of 1 million packs. With Zé Delivery opening new areas across the country every day, our consumer base growth is exponential. The number of deliveries follows a similar pattern, and this growth led us to develop what we have been calling our third-tier distribution.
As you may remember, we talked a little bit about and shed some light on what we were talking about. Let me bring São Paulo's case to make it clearer. Here you can see the map of São Paulo downtown, and these are the orders density for both BEES and Zé. In the center, you can see the delivery behavior during the day. It is clear that the peak utilization of our assets occurred during different times. We saw the opportunity to capture synergies, integrating both platforms in one single logistics, and that led to a creation of an efficient 3PL. Relying on data, we found out that we needed structures to optimize our logistics. Dark stores anchored by Zé Delivery's orders and urban distribution centers, or UDCs, driven by BEES orders. Both structures are small warehouses located in regions with high delivery density.
Remember this concept, because it's key, delivery density. With the creation of the third tier in São Paulo, we integrated our B2C and B2B platforms in one logistics, increased our productivity, increased our delivery capacity, and brought convenience and flexibility to our customers and consumers. Now, we have warehouses in the most dense regions of the biggest cities with little space, not to mention potential traffic restrictions. It was time to review our transportation models. Let's talk about that. Before the third tier, we had a one-size-fits-all operation. No matter what was the order profile, all deliveries came from our DDCs in trucks. We needed smaller and nimbler vehicles. We are talking about things like motorcycles or light commercial vehicles. With different models, each asset can specialize where they are most efficient.
We shifted the small orders to UDCs with smaller models that can have a high delivery output count. With that, our distribution centers and trucks could specialize in delivering large orders with larger volume. What enabled us to do that is our delivery density. I'm talking about serving the consumer with the right asset at a lower cost. Now, I will show a video to help me summarize all this. This is what we have done so far in terms of building our third tier. Between UDCs and dark stores, we have built 85 units in seven states, which are responsible for over 37% of the deliveries in the region that they operate. We also have more than 400 light commercial vehicles and 40,000 motorcycles.
In terms of cost efficiency, Zé Delivery is having a 10% reduction in costs compared to the community POS. As for BEES, when we compare to our traditional distribution center, we have a 20% decrease in distribution costs in orders fulfilled by our third-party. This is the third-party we have been talking about, but before I go, let me give you a glimpse on what we believe the future of our logistics looks like. Today, we talked about how our platforms are changing the dynamics of our business. I also talked about how our logistics are evolving to support that strategy through a combination of hardware and software. We also believe in a more collaborative logistics, sharing this path with our ecosystem.
Creating an environment that raises the efficiency not only for ourselves, but for the supply chain as a whole, reducing costs and becoming more sustainable. This is what I would like to call Open Log. We now have our platforms. We know our platforms will keep us exploring new frontiers, and we are preparing ourselves to cater to their needs. This is how we see our logistics evolving as our platforms grow. The platforms will bring us more clients and more consumers, which will increase the delivery density, which will lead us to increase our capillarity and capacity, which brings more agility and flexibility to our ecosystem, which enables us to have more logistics services, which raises the convenience and service level for our clients and customers, which helps in bringing more customers and clients. Thank you for your time.
Now let me invite Piorke to the stage.
Thank you, André. I hope you guys all enjoyed the presentation so far. We'll now take a break. It's a 30-minute break. Before we leave, I'd just like to tell you that during the break, you'll see a short video from our colleagues from Central America and the Caribbean. It will be looping over. You guys can watch at any time during the break. See you soon.
Delivery. Rodolfo Chung, please come to the stage.
Good afternoon. It's not everybody. We're glad to be here. My name is Rodolfo Chung, and I'm very excited. We have all just listened to Freddy, who has been talking today about my point and the opportunities that, you know, a lot of them are open because of our B2C business model. Today I'm gonna talk to you, walk you through, the Zé business model. We're gonna talk about why it is so unique, yeah. We're gonna give you some key results and explore a bit of the potential and why we believe everything that we're talking is actually quite valuable for the region. The pricing can be quite valuable. We're gonna talk about this today. If you allow me, I'm gonna introduce myself first. Just introduce myself. I've been with Anheuser-Busch for 20 years.
I started with a company back in 2002 as a trainee. My career is rather unique because I had the opportunity to spend 15 of these years abroad. Two of them living in Belgium, doing my MBA, and then nine years in Shanghai, where I had several positions in commercial area. I helped, you know, the business to grow many times over in that region in China. Finally, in South Asia and Pacific with that goal, I had the opportunity to establish this direct venture in the region. That were the moment where I had experience with e-commerce, with product, right? Had a chance to work as a board member alongside some great partners.
Mainly, it was kind of this experience that, you know, combined both new ventures, but also worked many years with the main business. Maybe qualified me for this next role as pilot that I took since June 2020. I'm unbelievably excited here, you know, to be able to walk the organization through the transformation of DTC. If you allow me, I'm gonna start by reflecting back a little bit on the context that we had back then, right? On the context that we had when we decided to create that venture, which is the organization from where Zé Delivery was born, was created. We always talk about the importance of being an adaptive organization and the importance of having a whole set of governance, a whole environment conducive for us to create an organization such as that.
It started all back then, right? My first task when I arrived thinking about, okay, DTC might be big, might be a big opportunity. I talked to many people from inside the company and also outside the company to try to, like, get my mind around why we still care about DTC, right? Talked to many people, and I grouped them this way into four buckets. One, well, everything starts with the consumer, right? Because we believe that there are really unmet consumer needs. There are pain points from the consumers that we could solve much better with technology. Maybe some of them were around for, like, decades, but now with technology we could address them. For example, the return of glass bottles, right?
You can imagine how painful it used to be that you had to plan that, hey, I'm gonna go buy beer so I have to bring home these very bulky, heavy bottles to the market. It's not available everywhere, and then I have to exchange, and I can only buy the exact amount of the glasses that I drink there, right? Maybe this is one of the limitations of the model of the legacy model. See how everything will be different just with technology. You don't need to carry anything. You don't need to count the bottles, right? Just have this kind of where you might want to buy, just pay the label or might buy the bottle with the label, all things. Here's an example of consumer pain points that we can address, right?
That nobody was doing, and that's why it created an opportunity for us to create a business based on that. Now another big bucket is about revenue. We can increase a lot our top line both by new revenue streams, which we can explore and think about the opportunities that this can bring to the business, but also by just increasing the level of volume that Anheuser-Busch already sells a bit. The potential that this business has to improve the top line is not to mention the new that also can happen in the top line. Yeah. The other part, it will be about the new efficiency, right? We can optimize the route to consumer because we can transform the entire chain, make it much more efficient. Instead of relying on setups that are not made for beverages, they're not made for our operation or few countries, right?
We can have an entire ecosystem that is made beautiful for that. We can hopefully through this improve our bottom line because returnable glass bottles, as you guys know, are much more profitable for the user. Yeah. This is how we turn it into a much more efficient solution to help our bottom line. Finally, I think the third element of being closer to the consumer is very important for an FMCG like us to thrive, like, for the needs of the future, right? I think that by being closer to that, we can think about consumer lifetime value. We can think about understanding them as a platform for innovation, right? Being much more efficient in media, right? And generating insights that will make their life become more and more innovative into the future. Okay. Very good.
Now let's talk about Zé Delivery, you know, in itself. It all starts from the triangle of a very basic, a very simple and elegant, in a way, business model, which will look to address these three elements. We always offer the best competitive price supermarket products. We offer them cold, we offer them fast. Very simple, very elegant, but very efficient. Something that was not being addressed by the market before. Okay? In here, you can already see there's an element of being a direct platform, because everybody will deliver a bag how, where, and when they want. This also allows us to think there's way more possibilities beyond just, you know, 35 minutes delivery with a poor lady in her house, charged for the delivery fee. There's way more opportunities.
We already think that, you know, grocery delivery is time from here because there's more opportunities ahead. Okay? Now let's talk about the business model. I'd like to, you know, observe how unique it is by first thinking that we are a marketplace of how many actors. Most of the marketplaces, right, they are marketplaces of max usually three actors. The couriers, the delivery men, the consumers, and the sellers, which can be less than three. They are a small market. Many times the marketplaces are like this. iFood has four players. There's four players in the industry, and this makes all the difference. Because we said we collect all of the invoices to the driver directly. This whole business model is different. We don't need...
In our business model, we don't need to charge hefty commissions from the sellers. We don't charge 20+ commissions from the small companies, the small local market store or B2B restaurant. We need to price everything from the delivery man, which will be a much more sustainable ecosystem. We also need to charge consumers less, neither in prices nor in delivery fee. Because we have this model that has four actors instead of three. A little bit of how it works. First, the industry is responsible to supply our sellers with their goods, and they can choose how they do this. They might choose to do 10 minutes, or they can choose to do the way they prefer. There's nothing to stop them here. They have existing partnerships to distribute the product. They can use their own route-to-market.
They are responsible to distribute the product to the sellers. What happens, consumers will place the order. They place the order, of course, through the app. What that does is just allocates the orders to each one of the sellers. Yeah, allocates the order. We have an algorithm, a proprietary algorithm that allocates the order to the seller that will fulfill this in the most efficient way. The seller is the one that will carry the delivery man, that will provide the product and will deliver to the consumer. They are the ones who will do the actual transaction in itself. The payment and the invoice goes directly from the consumer to the seller. This is the unique because the business model, right, it doesn't go through Zap. What happens in the flow of money, right?
Zap will record all the orders and what this does is charge commission. We actually help with incentives and margin recompositions for the seller to be healthy and to provide financial transfers. After that, the seller will pay the couriers, the delivery fees. They will pay themselves, their partners, they pay them. We will monetize all the remaining business which will pay the paytech fee. This is how it works, and this is why it's unique and important that we understand this business model. Okay. Some of the sellers might be our own stores. We do have a setting where we have multiple retail model. We have multiple sellers addressing one single zip code, right? One of them might be fully owned by a multi. There will be a slight adjustment in the model.
This is the minority of the case at this point. A little bit about going to create on the digital platform business model. Right. The first thing, we are B2B-backed, and for a long time we didn't know if this would make sense or not. Today we are very sure that we are very different and there's a space for us being different from the grocery store perspective. Okay. Our times are totally different, right? We think, I don't know, on a Wednesday evening during a soccer game, we think in the pre-night-out on a Friday night, we think, Sunday morning when people are preparing for the family lunch, for the run for a barbecue, right? We can own the occasions that you are thinking about grocery shopping.
There's a total different pages, and we appeal to that moment, that mindset that consumer has at that moment. We today, we know that there are different shopping needs and different journeys. Okay? Those sellers are providing great service, right? Because they are very confident on the predictability of our platform, right? Also on the margin structure. If we run customer promotions, we will recompose, we'll reverse them and guarantee it after the margin, so they will know predictability in their business and therefore they can provide excellent service. Another thing that's very important, food here is seller-based. They go and come back from one seller. Why is it possible? Because we have high density and we have high predictability of the orders, right? Different from a restaurant that much less orders per night, per evening.
We have high density, so they can go and come back from the same place. It brings a lot of benefits. First, because they love to cook it face-to-face because it's cooked fresh for them. We all have problems that apply to my staff. You know, sometimes they get sick, usually they just cancel because there's a positive reason. If you cancel buying this food, right, and you don't get refund, they talk to robot, right? It's a very impersonal relationship, and that sometimes creates a problem. Here it's not. It's very humanized. You know, you know who you talk to, you know they have a phone number for you to complain or for you to get something. The other thing is that they have a structure capacity. They have a toilet to go, somewhere to pee, somewhere to charge their phone.
There are microwaves where they can heat up a meal that they might have. They have a base. These are all little things that might help their NPS. We really desire they will prefer to work in our platform than others because they have all the different features. Their delivery is shorter, their radio is much shorter, and their density of orders per night is much higher as well. If they go and come back, they are the only ones who can do reverse logistics as we spoke, and they're the only ones who can enable returnable glass bottle, which try to make the world just a little better. Okay? Let's talk about the cost. We always follow market process, supermarket process, right? Like I said, we also have very attractive delivery fees.
In general, most often we charge BRL 4.99, which is very, very attractive compared to the cost of retailers. Finally, think about the consumer experience. I know you haven't thought about it, but generally when you buy here is that it's much more simple, it's much cleaner because you buy a product, you go there with a programmer, you see how much it costs, what's the delivery fee, request purchase. You don't need to go seller by seller, see who carries what in the inventory and see which price each one of them has and have to compare. Sometimes you find a good price here, but the delivery fee is higher. You go for the one that has low delivery fee, but the price is higher. The battle is tough. We put all these hassles out of the customer journey.
You don't worry about who's gonna fix you your order. You just want burger at this price, at this time with this delivery time. We arrange everything for you. We will make it happen for you. That's why we feel like our consumer experience is quite unique in the marketplace. There we go. Now let's talk a little bit about how we got the numbers that we have today. We've been growing quarter-over-quarter, right? We think that there's a lot of room for sellers. We reached 6 million orders per month in the end of last year, 2021. This accounts, if you add all the businesses that we have, this is big. You know, the volume now, this is big. Already reaches 6% of the entire web volume.
More than this in revenues. It's not small anymore. It's quite representative, and we feel very confident that we really have a business model that is viable and has a lot of prospects. Now, we have today almost 300 cities, and we are pacing ourselves in terms of geographic expansion mainly because of two reasons. Well, first, because we already cover more than half of the population of Brazil, right? There is limited returns actually for the expansion. The other reason is very, very important. Because within these, the 300 cities that we are already present, there are different maturity levels. I'll say, for example, the number of orders per capita, per person per month, let's say. Some cities they are 10x more mature than others. A few cities are 10x more mature than most of them.
We build the same business model and didn't change anything. We are growing fast, many times over just by bringing the cities that are less mature to the maturity that some other cities achieve. The difference between them is not related to how big the city is or how rich or maybe the particular type of the city or whether it's a tourist type of geographic region or not. Nothing of this is correlated with the maturity. We believe that some of these can reach full penetration, right? There's a lot of growth just within this footprint that we have today. Now, today, we are reaching 3,000 sellers, 2,000 partners commercially, right? They are very satisfied, as you can see in the NPS.
On top of this, there are more than this in the queue to enter the system, right? We pace ourselves of how many in terms of the most active users we have here, the faithful users that always are returning and always come back, and they are ever-growing, right? They have other, you know, one of the main reasons for this respect, that they have a lot of spending and NPS. They're very satisfied with the service. Simple and robust. Not many features, not many fancy, but reliable. This is the most important for them. It always works, and it's transparent. Everything is over the price, the fee. There's no hidden fees. That's why they love the platform so much. Finally, the cool here, which has been growing, right?
We can always do better, but we also have quite positive NPS in this system already that you can request that here. Talking a little bit about unit economics, profitability. The first thing I wanna call to attention here is that it's really improving a lot. These are the unit economics. Sometimes I can translate into COIS for active user, right? Commercial installed active user of the off-trade, which is where we will be a majority, let's say. So the average of 2021, we were almost half. We just had almost half of the profitability in economics than the supermarkets. But within 2021, there was already a big improvement also coming from 2020. We already closed at 77% of the markets.
The direction is that we still have momentum, and we still have access, and we're gonna fully close this gap. We're gonna have the same unit economics, the same commercial installed as the supermarkets for Ambev and maybe even better. Right. There's no worry about do we lose money with this business or not. There's not even much worry about does it cannibalize the current channels or not. At some point, we might even be equally positive impact to the mix. How does this work? Here we open a few of the levers here, right? Especially the net revenue. That's how it was better. This is publicized here to all of us here. Yeah. Then we have much less fixed costs. We don't need to have corporate limits as we have in other channels. We do have specific costs here. Why?
We have the last mile cost that on everything maybe is caused by the delivery that we trust in the consumer, right? We also have a few different costs here in the forms of coupons. They're not that significant, you know, and it's a price we can both talk about everything that we have in the platform today. Without the other costs today, we, with the help of the difference, much better than the average supermarket, because of the LTV, because of the barrier to. We have today a profitability in economics that represents only 22% less percentage-wise than the supermarket and closing fast this gap. We believe can have reason to believe that this gap is gonna be closed and it gonna, you know, improve a lot. This is how we evolved during the last year.
These are three of the main levers that we will have to drive this improvement. First is the mix impact, where instead of usually we have a much higher weight in beer of returnable glass bottles and a higher weight of high-end. We have a much better mix than the average supermarket. The last mile cost has been driving a good efficiency, and there's more to come because there you can imagine that we can be more efficient in how we allocate, how we stack, how we route, how we combine orders. There are so many things that we don't even do. We don't even have click and collect yet. We don't have scheduled delivery yet. There's a lot of features that we know make it better that we can do even better than this.
We are very thankful because the support that we give to some of the sellers, we also have a journey that is getting better and better. There are still opportunity for us to improve, what do we need to have to support some of the largest power sellers. If we are doing these drivers, we can believe that we can be even better going forward in the unit economics of the business. Very good. Now I would love to talk with you about the brand that we have, which is kind of like a rough diamond that we have. It is a very special brand, and we built it like this, right? It's a very personal brand and personal means that we have fan lovers. The people love the brand. There's an emotional connection to the brand, right?
People see that as one of the brands in their WhatsApp group that helps them plan their weekend, helps them connect with their friends. It's a hero of the night out or they bring the brands to your place, to your barbecue, to your gathering. People are bringing. This is all natural. People do music, compose music. People create birthday parties with the brand name. People do tattoos. People do all kind of crazy things because this brand has this potential. Potential because today we only have 50% awareness, which is about four, not even four, of some of the leading grocery apps or delivery apps that we have. There's a lot of room for us to grow and make the brand common for many people. Okay. I finally say that we are very excited and we are in the beginning stage.
There's so many other things that we are planning to improve in our product, right? We have a consumer-centric testing. We do a lot of. We follow the product-led mentality and philosophy. We do a lot of testing of it. We test a lot. We learn a lot. We measure a lot the solution. We are always adding value to the problem, trying to solve a problem. Things are planning for plenty of BEES about online experience, physical stores, digital life, right? We gotta think about new digital models which we saw in that presentation. There's a lot of improvement coming in this, in the consumer, in the brand model side, right? You know, to personalize the platform to consumers, to reward the loyal user. There's so much for us to do.
I think that this is a little bit about why I'm so excited, not only about the results today, but about the prospect of the platform going forward as well. We already have profit margins. It's already a business that's sustainable by itself. There's room for us to expand in the business, and there's room for us to grow within this business model and eventually expand this model. I'd like to thank the attention of everybody, and I'll ask Stella and Paulo to the stage to talk about Draftline. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. My name is Stella. I'm Media Director and Data Lead in our marketing. Here is Paula, my partner. She's Marketing Transformation Director, and we together are responsible for Draftline. We will see more about this area during this presentation. Today, we are going to talk about how we have been using technology to understand more and more our consumers. Let's imagine if we could combine the best of two worlds. On one hand, technology, a lot of data, performance marketing, and all the best things that a B2C company could give us. The examples like Uber, Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, these companies have a strong intimacy with their customer and drive their business following this relation. On the other hand, iconic brand, intimacy, and love with our consumers.
Here we have the CPG side and AB InBev that we already know very well. This is our goal, our dream, and we have been working hard for that to bring the best of these two worlds to our reality. B2C companies have the advantage, a lot of data, a real information about our consumers and a constant growth mindset. As a real CPG company, we already have strong brand and see our consumers all the time. A real match between these two worlds will make the future our future. This has been our dream since 2008 when we created Draftline. We have a team that crosses four markets at AB InBev, and Brazil is one of the biggest and main operations we have. Draftline is an engine focusing on superior consumer understanding to create intimacy at level.
We want to see here that DraftLine is the operational system of the marketing transformation. Technology in one side, mad men, the traditional advertising eye for Madison Avenue, and in the other side, the math geek bringing the engineering mindset. This is the perfect combination between art to create the content future with science media mix. As very important, we could purchase this gift not given but not paid because this diversity is key for our strategy. This is DraftLine, our engine to make our marketing more digital, creative, and diverse. Now we are already going to see how we've been doing that. Let's take a look at some results. When we talk about digital, of course, the proximity to our consumers guided to important changes in our marketing.
Since 2018, we've increased our digital media investment more than 50% in order to follow our consumers' attention. We went from 30% to 47% when it comes to our digital media concentration. Now we are ready to shift this concentration and invest more in digital media than in open TV. Okay. We've been building our base for years, and now we are in our best moment to get the results. Investing in marketing and focusing our D2C has surely showed to us. Now we increased our database more than 100% in two years. Of course, always in a fair and transparent way with our consumers. This allow us to know better about our consumers and take the right message and product to them.
We can see the results and the impact of the initiative when we look at our volume of earned conversation of our brand. In 2018, we increased more than 300%. What does this mean? Here is the number of times that our consumers mentioned our brand during this conversation on social media. Of course, all this data allow us to be more creative and faster in order to follow the culture of our consumers. The best way to show the impact of our creatives is the recognition to advertising award, and we can already see good results. All of this is only possible because we are ready to attract, develop and retain the new profile of marketing, the profile that meets those two worlds that I mentioned, D2C and CPG companies.
We have in DraftLine creators and executives, producers, and media specialists, people who understand our business better than I do, and people with a fresh vision, with years of marketing experience. We have a team that combines generals and soldiers, and for us, this makes the difference in the future of our marketing. Now, we are a big company with a lot of brand investment in marketing, so any efficiency is very important to us and makes the difference. DraftLine Studios is not just a tech and creative agency. It has also been our source of efficiency. When we look at our media efficiency, we can already see that we are in the right way. Being more digital, creative, and diverse allows us to have one of our best media productivity in recent years.
In the last year, we are capable of measuring the increment that is generated by our media strategy in our sales. It's not about just media cost. We are buying more sophisticated media than before, so we have more segmentations and more people in place, but our return comes from effectiveness. What is this? It's the perfect mix between creative and media. In addition to have more intimacy with our consumers to talk with them and participate in their social media conversations, we are in our best moment. What did we do with this efficiency? Our marketing investment didn't increase more than the inflation last year, and even with the decline, we could launch three more brands. We reallocated the money to bring more value solutions for our consumers.
You already know DraftLine and our results, so my partner, Paula, will show you some examples. Thank you. The best way to start with our examples is talking about how we have been using data-driven insights to guide our core here. We have a platform that we call Own Insight, developed internally by our team, like here, that allows us to use our own data to generate actionable insights for our brand, being more agile and precise in the entire process. Let's watch the video to understand better.
That's how it works. Instead of hiring a research institute, the platform runs surveys through our first-party data. The big difference is that this time the research results belong to us. Thus, all survey responses we get in Mixhub consume our data platform, improving our data quality and making the CDP more efficient. This valuable information is used to understand consumer behaviors, to target audience, and to provide more precise segmentation, helping us to draw an accurate strategy to win consumers' minds and hearts. It can be through a new product, a new campaign idea, or even a new strategy itself. Creativity is the limit. The platform helped us to introduce Michelob in Brazil, identifying the targets and their new consumption occasions. We also used the platform to validate the market acceptance of Blue Ice Stick and a zero-alcohol blue vodka right after launch next.
We came up with a new flavor for Guaraná, a different flavor for each region in Brazil based on their taste preferences. It helped us to create a new short video content for Tônica and even a song to motivate vaccination among millennials. This is only the beginning. Own Insight. Data-driven insights for human-driven creativity.
Now let's see how we can use our data to be more creative and relevant together, given our food products and positions. Powerful insights, data-driven creativity, all this of course is very important for us. If we really want to get consumer attention, we need more. We need agility. All these insights give us real-time overview of 10.75 million open conversations every year on social media. We can understand and analyze what Brazilians are saying about the future and about our brand. We know what they say about our campaigns and their feeling regarding our product family. This kind of intelligence enables us to move at the speed of social. I will give you here two examples from a tweet to a TV ad.
Different ways to connect fast with our consumers, being relevant to them. We have a breadth and operation ready to respond quickly with set creative personality and purpose of each brand. We have 1,000 interactions per year on social media. We act as creators building relationships and communities of loyalists. We love this example. During the last Olympic campaign about the Gatorade , we changed all the Ambev logos in social media to orange. Someone asked us if we could create another specific logo for the Skol Puro Malte too. Our answer in this case, of course, was, "No, we cannot." This kind of response agility helps us to humanize our brand, and we become part of people's conversations in a very natural way. We can go further, and we can also be agile to take social conversations to offline.
We have a very recent example, like two weeks ago with Anitta, the biggest ambassador for Bud. For the first time, we had a Latin American actor, number one in the sport category. When we realized that, in a few hours we could create, produce it and air it, a TV ad with a message that the Brazilians were claiming for on the social channels. As a result, the brand was the most commented on the social media that day. Our agility and consumer listening worked together in this case. The right key is the connection between everything we just said. Once you have intimacy with our consumer, creativity and agility such that we can offer a great 360 experience with focus on Brazil.
The new marketing for us is not only about the top of the funnel anymore, but about what we call full funnel activation that integrates media, comms, and commercial trade execution. In order to do it, we have an integrated marketing content team still that we are not thinking only in the TV ad as it is, but doing full funnel activation with specific creative assets for each consumer touch point. Our last brand campaign had all the offline and digital media channels covered to generate the impact that we need. We had an exclusive promotion at the point of sale delivery engaging with our consumers, and also on-pack effort using digital coupons to create demand for our products. All this integrated with TV with specific kinds of assets. A full connected strategy to reinforce the brand message and increase our sales.
I will close this chapter of the presentation. I will give you three takeaways about our company. First, Draftline is the operational system of the marketing transformation. Because of that, we can be more relevant for consumers and efficient for our business. We believe this is the new way to build powerful brands generating bigger growth. We remember that Jean Jereissati at the beginning mentioned about the death of 3G and D2C roles. We are getting closer. As a platform company, Draftline plays an important role to connect the dots. More intimacy with our consumers means more lovers for our brand and more cheers for Ambev. Thank you very much and thanks so much for your attention.
Hey. Hello there, everybody. I hope you saw all the amazing possibilities that are emerging from our digital business model. We are heading towards the end of our presentation. We started with Jean Jereissati and Lucas giving a broader view about our strategy, and then you saw all our team went through key strategy and aspects of our platform. Now as we are closing up, I want to give you a deeper perspective on all the components that are enabling and accelerating Carrefour growth, which has been discussed. I'll start with data and analytics. Well, you all saw in the whole presentation a lot of comments around data. I want to start with one aspect. As we came from a strong e-commerce legacy, our process goes all the way back from our buying crop to the green and picking process and finally getting our product to customers and consumers.
The last years we have been digitalizing all this chain and based on our printed screen, create a lot of data. You saw many places today. As I think Andrea mentioned, as we cover 95% of the Brazilian territory, that gives a huge amount of data. In addition to that, as we are becoming more digital with our digital products, we are capturing more data, different types of interactions from products our customers are searching and to communications they are receiving. We understand which one has a better click-through rate, for example. You can see. I'm not gonna go one to one, but you can see all the million type of interactions that we have in our data platform that we didn't have two years ago.
All the data live in our data lake, an ever-growing data platform designed around data flexibility and privacy. Everything that we do in the company is captured, all the entire supply chain combined with the fact that we own a decade long of market information. It's a lot of information that allows our data science team to deliver insights and automation across spectrum of areas. Obviously, I won't go one by one, but you can see that we have a use case from top-line improvement to operational excellence and financial decisions. It's a lot of data that is really transforming the company. I just put some examples, some of those were already mentioned, of areas where we are really changing with data. For example, we have 30%...
We have 30% of the suggested orders based on our algorithms that are helping our customers to decide which products they should buy. Another example is when we are giving credit to our ecosystem, balancing risk and returns. The algorithm that we have has 50% less overdue payments compared to our previous process. In logistics, as André mentioned via our machine learning models, we increased our total capacity delivered by G by 12%. 12% on a busy sprint. We are giving our perfect routing and delivery times while still granting a 10% increase in daily route book accuracy. Another space that we're also exploring, we have algorithms on blue, on whether it's on the commodities where we believe that we should participate on top sales, boost negotiations that were just paying a price increase.
These are just some of the many examples that we have where we have data improving how we do business across all the chain and across our data platform as well. All this data, strategy and data platforms are only possible given our investments on improving our technology foundation. In a quick summary of our journey so far, we started in 2019 when we decided we need to evolve our ERP system. We had a proprietary code-based ERP, 20 years old, and an older version of SAP. Then we are building everything into a microservice network with a lean and what is called data mesh component. This is a long journey.
It's still not finished, still ongoing, but it has already allowed us to support 1 million transactions and faster promotions and pricing decisions due to this. It's a reality now in the market. In 2020, we also improved our development process. We put in place all what we call DORA and FLOW metrics that drives quality and efficiency. DORA means Develop, Release, and Respond capability. It was a research made by Google when they had several companies using the best practices during seven years, and they studied key metrics for high-performing technology organization. We could say today that we are on the top from the elite group of such organizations based on the visuals that we have below.
One example of a DORA metric is the mean time to recover, which basically tells how much time it takes for a service to come back if there's a failure. Because, you know, in the end, it doesn't matter how much you do, there's always gonna be incidents, there's always gonna be outages in your applications. Since failures can't be avoided, it's really important that we measure how long it takes for us to restore a system. We started two years ago with 75 minutes, which was more than an hour, and we managed to stay below 40 minutes last year. This is really transforming the availability of our system. Another metric that's not part of the DORA, but I think it's really important is our NPS. Net Promoter Score, which is measuring how all the systems, including internal systems.
In 2019, our NPS was 20. We had to shift our focus tremendously to focus on our user pain point and experience. We started last year with 47, obviously we want to improve, but it was a big jump. In 2020, we also decided to move everything we could to the cloud. It's been important to gain speed and flexibility without having to worry about non-added value tasks of the deployment effort. Today, around 70% of our infrastructure is in the public cloud provider. In that year, 2021, we tried to focus on data, both consumption and usage. We created our consumer data platforms that is more from Power, from Power that is the core of the consumer insights and external data.
We also defined a common tech stack to lower our costs and improve our agility. You can see some of the results from our time to market, which means how long it takes when you start to develop a feature to when that feature goes in production, which was 47 days, two years ago, and now it's 27 days. That includes legacy old systems as well as the new digital products. It's a tremendous speed towards innovation and agility. Earlier this year, we defined an API-first approach, which is gonna be fundamental for us to connect all the services of the platform and exchanging information on a more real-time manner. Then we are defining a talent branding strategy to keep our large ecosystem of developers in a much more easy and productive way.
This is a long journey of how we improve our technology foundations, every aspect of it, from our ERP to the digital platforms that you saw. We really want to become a high-performing technology organization. The last part I want to cover today, and it's really central to our transformation, it's our people. During the last four years, we built a strong ecosystem. As you can see, we went from less than 600 people in 2020 to more than 2,500 by the end of last year in all types of ecosystem. In 2019, we made this big leap when we acquired ATVC, a software company based in Buenos Aires that added 500 professionals to our company. The rest we basically grew organically.
Today, you know, it's a lot of people focused on technology and digital from that. We can say today that we are among the biggest tech companies in South America. More important than the size or the quantity is actually the quality. During this period, we also brought some of the best tech employees of the region, and we expanded into key roles. For instance, everything that we built on data today, we have more than 200 people on data and analytics between data engineers and data scientists in the company. Another area of growth is cybersecurity. Given everything that's happening in the market today, we really brought the best-in-class people and this protects this whole ecosystem and impacting all 70+ countries today.
All this growth made us completely review our employee value proposition, both internally and externally, as we are now competing for talent not with just CPG, but competing for talent with other big tech companies. I think that's nice, it means that we're building a higher tech for specific talent because it's challenging problems and review our benefits accordingly. This is in addition, we launched a bunch of different initiatives. I'll call out one example, which is Startup. That's it. We started in 2019, which focused on entry-level professionals. Given the lack of professionals, you know, all across the world in technology, this program is here to hire people with diverse background, not only technical background. We provide a real training platform with a mix of practical and theoretical classes.
They are located for some time in some projects until we have an open position that we hire effectively and fast. This program was really important for us for the growth that has come few months ago. Up to last year, we graduated and hired more than 500 people just with this program. This is really our baseline for entry-level professionals. That is also a quite good example of employer brands. We put a lot of programs that attract people and the best tech talent as we need to grow this platform. Yes, D&I, diversity and inclusion, is also a very important part of our agenda. There's a lot of different programs that you can see that we put in place in the last year, and we want to keep our focus on gender and racial diversity.
As I said, we brought a lot of people, you know, and we took care of our employee brand approach and a lot of new programs to talk about. But more important than attracting is to develop them. Here, we launched a new learning platform on day one. We partnered with some external vendors, and we developed a lot of technology specifically for this population. Product, UX, data, software development, architecture, and so on and so forth. With that, we are also launching specific career paths for each different role that we have in the company. You know, a lot of people, they require different skillsets than the traditional management role that we are used to. We are completely resetting and changing how we are upskilling and developing our talents. We still have a lot to do.
It's still a growing space, but we are very proud as we received some external recognition for delivery. We won first place on the Startup Awards and also first place on the 100 Open Startups in the corporate tech. Both are external recognitions of our work with the startup ecosystem. We are for one, the sixth best place and Great Place to Work in Brazil among the large tech companies in the region. Our team also recognized our efforts. We had a four out of five rate on Glassdoor, which is really a big mark, and it allows our internal engagement survey. These recognitions are just examples, and it's also shown in the graphs, highlighting the main engagement articles around our innovation, our commitment to sustainability, to the stock price difference, and our growth.
Just to wrap things up, I hope we were able to show you our digital platform transformation, how it's real, how it's a strategic path which our digital business with minimum buys and maximum contributors. Obviously, there is room to grow even more as we cross the data. The second message we share is the importance that transformation is not only on the new business, but it covers our core capabilities based on operations, on logistics, and in marketing. We are doing some of those with technology. In terms of technology, we invested a lot in data. Before now, all is available, our core business, our digital business, we are leading change through data science to create much more value in the company. This is just the beginning of our digital journey. There's much more that we can achieve through this.
Last, as I just mentioned, we invested a lot in our tech capabilities to conduct and build the platform, as well as drive efficiency and agility around the onboarding process. With our tech team at the center, it is very important that we want to show that we have the best place for tech talent to work and grow their careers. There's a lot more to do. Hopefully, this was productive. This is all for today on the digital platform and technology review. I think now we want to do a five-minute break, and we will be back with the Q&A for the listeners. Thank you.
Welcome back. So I'm sure you guys all have questions for the presenters today. This closed our presentations for today. So now we're just gonna start the Q&A session. Okay. To get started, I wanted to invite the presenters of the day to the stage. We'll also have Paulo Zagman for our detailed objectives here with us. While they get comfortable, we have 45 minutes for this session. Okay. Because nobody wanted to see the beer in your trunk when we started the day, right? I'll start from the good spirits here, from my left to my right. Okay. Modelene Xlaboa, you can start, please. Introduce yourself and then please keep it to one question each panel. Whenever you guys are ready, you can start.
Yes, thank you very much. Thanks for doing this presentation. It was like drinking from a fire hose. It was really, really good. I wanna start with Stella and Paulo. I have a question. I mean, getting into the heart and mind as goal of the consumer is so critical. I mean, here, John speaks about it, Sergio speaks about it a lot. How do you use data?
How do you use data that informs you on the motivations of the consumers so that you're not just reflecting back to the consumer what they want to hear, so that you're actually creating consumer insights that can elevate the brand identity and strengthen the brand identity. How do you use data to inform that focus?
I think it's more about how we put the use of data inside our marketing so our teams can get the insight, get the information. Sometimes it's about to get agility and bring to the consumer the right answer at the right moment and-
It's a good example. In one day, the people were talking about, and we put a TVC on global. I think it won't hide the beauty. On the other hand, we have the information to bring us more to her side. It's about how we can talk more closer to our consumers and put our brand very near to them. I think it's how we use the entire opportunity. Just adding something here. We believe in this combination between what makes sense for the brands and what makes sense for our consumers. Sometimes in brand in Brazil, we have this role in the group. We have the brand team, of course, is thinking about what's important to the brand communicates for consumers.
In the other side, we have Brand Finance with this kind of input from data, what's important for our consumers based on social listening data that we showed here, based on our own database that we have with the delivery data, for example, integrated in our database that we generated insights using our own platform. We believe in this combination. The combination, as we show it, about the best of D2C and CPG is about this because we believe in this combination about what's important for the brand and the brand message integrated with what's important for consumers too. This is our mindset.
Let me try to add on that too. I think this person's point is that our brands, they have been built to archetypes. Every brand has its archetype. It has its values and purpose. When we showed you the response of Budweiser on that post. Budweiser is the hero. Budweiser is courageous. We have an archetype behind the Budweiser brand and how it reacts to what's in the context. It always has this soul of each brand. We have Brahma is about everyone. We build Beck's as the explorer that explores the world. We had a thing in Brazil that everybody was fighting about eating meat or not eating meat.
There is a big conversation in Brazil that was very polarized and divided on the day of the barbecue last year. We, the Brahma team, was asked how to respond with Brahma. Brahma is about inspiring the Brazilian, is about uniting the Brazilian. That's the archetype of Brahma. Brahma went there and did an advertisement with a barbecue box and says, "Everybody's fighting. Let's sit around. We put everything. We put anything we want around, but let's talk about it." That Brahma, the archetype of everyone. If it was Budweiser, it's also into a video about fighting and being courageous. That is more rebel. It's more explorer. Every brand has a story of their own.
The context that what happened in the market is how we will react, but with the personality of each brand.
Thank you. Next question, Isabella, please. Can you stand up and ask your question? Also, can you—I think it. Just to stand up. Maybe I should just stand. You're welcome.
Okay. Hi everyone. My name is [audio distortion] . I'm from Credit Suisse. My question is for Lucas Lira. Thank you so much for the presentation. Basically, I understand that like is what matters, right? My question is that if what you are to reignite like when you have pre-elastic such as Trap, and you just need to add nutritional to that, right? What you have told us is that you will need new business to reignite your ROI speed, right? That is also suggesting that you will have limited invested capital on that. Based on our peers, for example, like iFood, Stone, my understanding is that they invest a lot to build capital, and then later on they will monetize that.
I just would like to understand a little bit better how do you intend to do that, right, with less capital than we've got? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for your question, Isabella. Can you hear me okay in the back? Okay. I think the realization was that in addition to the tangible assets, the distribution network of PepsiCo over the years has happened here, the direct distribution of the distributors. What we realized over the last couple of years that we also have these intangible assets, which were the trusted relationship that we have with millions of points of sale in Brazil that do business with us every single day.
When we combine the tangible assets that we have and with the tangible kind of trust that we've developed through points of sale over the years with our clients and customers, we just have this opportunity, right, to look for other ways to really, by solving customer pain points, by solving client pain points, not only add value to them, but leverage the asset base that we've been investing behind over the last 30 years. I think, and that's where kind of the mindset evolution, the mindset shift comes in. We've been more and more vocal about elevating return on invested capital. Again, it's not the only measure. It's not the only thing that matters, right? Everything's important. It does put front and center, right?
While it is for the margin, we think that it makes sense to look more and more to a return on invested capital lens. To go back to your question, I think this was the realization, right? That we have this amazing asset base, part tangible, part intangible, and we have the opportunity to put these assets to better use for our clients, our customers and our consumers.
Thank you. Next question please.
Hi, thank you. Isabella from Bank of America. I think my question is obviously Marcelo and Eduardo Horai. You guys saw several NPS during the year for demand initiatives. I know last quarter presentation you showed you're still around the 50. Once you improve, of course you have been improving, but once improved, I know that AB InBev is already above that in the 70s-80s. But can you talk about why it is not even higher, right? For some of the other initiatives, maybe these which has a great penetration already. What do you think is bringing or is not ramping on track to, what could be the opportunities to improve the business? Thank you.
I'll start and then I'll let Marcelo talk more about a couple of these. In the past there's three different perspectives, right? The ones that showed about the platforms equals external and internal platforms, right? For the internal platforms, NPS normally never explains that the user would tie directly with the platform. That's how we focus on the digital product, on the internal system. We have the ability to tool that. When you go externally, and then that is one is what you are going to make. There's a link between the digital product, the actual experience that the customer gets, the level when a delivery gets late or something. That's the more details of the whole system. That's why there's been a loyalty.
I think that is a really good example, because I think that strongly showed around our ability to really deliver constantly in the, you know, the transformation of the service. It's something that we probably never or obviously never fail. That's why the NPS products combined with preparation is very good. Yeah. To go a bit outside. I think, in my experience wise, really that is completely out of the curve. It's just amazing how what the team did within this. Usually the digital evaluation of our digital products is higher than the total. For example, what we can believe is really about customers that they want investment. Sometimes they stop thinking that, we're not going to solve all.
We can talk, we can postpone a little bit, but sometimes you have to say, "I don't have this investment. I will make these attempts a little bit." When it goes to the app, it is much higher. When we go to the daily relations that we have, and then logistics plays a big role. When we have peaks and we miss out something, the evaluation really goes down, more about the transaction and more evaluation. The long term relation that sometimes I think that is true. I would first compliment my presentation today is very frequent with the Donus owners. When they are giving the comment, they are evaluating everything that is helping. It's not just for the product itself, it's the whole service. The product is very frequent.
It's about like three or four, maybe in two months they're gonna evaluate you in a couple of weeks. Like the journey that we've been having in creating NPS 20 points as we mentioned here because the main message.
Yeah.
also with things that are more used to have this kind of very highlighted by the customer. Multi-class frequent and kind of easy. They're not easy as not being something that is not very, very stressful, but kind of easier to have more experience when they will have a chance to have problem, right? In our cases of a journey with a lot of things involved to improve, the trend is really good. Looking to everything that we spoke about here, the trend is gonna be good.
Any questions?
I know you got Lucas here. I want to be more than just for you. I know it's almost impossible to pick one question to answer all of you. The question I have is, if you speak to analysts, financial analysts who look at CPG companies, clearly you look at a lot of the variables, but I think the two that people are obsessed about. It is the margin and the market share, right? The first one, Lucas already explained that, it's relevant, but you're kind of migrating to a lower view. I want to ask about market share. If it's got a loose relevance for you. Obviously it's still important, but losing relevance given you're now in so many different channels, looking the market maybe in different ways to address whole market.
Are you guys still very obsessed about market share? Is this something that is a top priority for you or not anymore? How you guys can help us kind of demystify and try to manage your market share in this crazy new reality we are into? Thank you.
Let's talk about beer. Today, the day was really about tech. Tomorrow it will really be about beer. I was missing. I love tech, but I was really missing like, you know, [inaudible] and beer. That's a good way. Having said that, last year was the year by far that we gained the most market share ever. It was really something unprecedented, you can use. You think it's a little bit delayed on that thing. We have the data and we have internal data. It was an amazing year in terms of gaining market share. Looks like we are more obsessed now with growth.
In the past, we were addicted to like every week market share of supermarkets go up and go down. We are really looking at a more long-term, understanding where are the places that we could grow more, reestablish the momentum of the company on these places where we believe and let it grow. That's where we are. We are much more understanding consumers, asking what they want, fulfilling their needs, in replacing the company with momentum. We are passionate about real momentum now. It naturally comes with the market share. We are less looking at competitors and market share. We are looking more into customers and consumers and momentum for companies is key for them working.
Just to add to what Jean mentioned, and from a business and market share, we're also looking at brand value and [inaudible]. If you want to have a more holistic of how we're connecting with consumers at the end of the day, either through our core business or through one of our platforms, right? We do need to look at not only the customer [inaudible] but actually the number of brands. That's why we deliberately wanted to talk about number of brands today. Tomorrow, [inaudible] is going to talk about this a little bit more with everybody. I think it's market share important. We can talk about brand too.
Yeah. Definitely, that's the point. It was fun that when we started looking at market share every week, it was when we were really at our best. Really love the structural thing that we had to build the momentum of the whole company, even though making the architecture of things was nowhere near considerable in the beginning. When we look at the customer and we look at the long term, it's really when I look back on when it was at the bottom, then the market share came naturally.
Thank you for the question. Next up, Ricardo in the back.
Thanks, Rafael. Thanks again for making it happen. [inaudible]. I had a question for the group, I guess. We were digging to [inaudible] on the improvement in productivity in Latin countries. In order to keep it, elaborate a little bit more on two things. One, what are the indicators that were most important for you to achieve the improvement on the productivity side of your interest? And maybe more important, what is to come? Again, I want to focus on the distribution side, for example. Are people reconsidering their [inaudible] box? Talking about the distribution that is on, you know, available right now. It is perhaps much really the number of cities that you mentioned, a lot of cities, you know, catching up with the others.
Just your thoughts on the Q2 and what to do for the leader and what is to come?
Thanks for the question. I would start to say how important scale is for our business model in Zé Delivery. If you capture well the scale, it is 10 times more mature than others. I really have the playbook of how to get to a better productivity. I just need to add more scale to the cities that are, let's say, laggard that we just launched in 2021. Certainly a journey of the business that will catch up. The numbers that you saw here, they're all average of all the cities. I think that just by doing this and expanding to the city that less developed, you can already expect a big improvement in the unit economics, in the average unit economics.
There are things that I think that we will need to do for us. We really run from our stores first. We do have better economics, and we do have better service level. I think that there's a lot of room for us to improve that. With that will come another big piece of improvement in the unit economics. The nature of the orders, how many orders we put in one delivery, right? When the delivery man leaves the store with one or two, maybe three orders, this makes all the difference in the cost per order. I think there's a long way for us to be improving, and I think it's proven that we can do this without affecting the NPS of the consumer, the expectation of the consumer.
These are three of the things w ithin our business model, like I said, it is time to expand to get to be able to acquire other things that more investors put into on the rest market. These are some of the things that we are working today, and that's why we are confident that this new economy is quickly improving over time.
Thank you for the question, Ricardo. Next, Thiago.
We have to congratulate everyone for the presentation. Another question for you. We all know life isn't that simple right here, but you have to cut it down to one very specific area in your job where you cannot fail. What would you say is branding result, managing concentration and pricing, competition, these alternatives?
In reality, I cannot fail people. That's what we cannot fail. We have to have the best team in Brazil, and a culture that evolves, prepares the people, leaders for us to really succeed in the future. I think, so as we grow more and more, I grab everyone, the people that are in and have the organization and work together. Sometimes I make some decisions, but everybody fighting for the same goal. I think that, in my mind, is most important.
Having said that, so with that, and I'm very happy with this team that we have been building and the culture that we have been evolving. We are working on two things. We are working on the new portfolio. We are working on the delivery organization. Because these are the two things that takes a lot of my time and the time that I put a lot of hard work into this company.
Thank you, Thiago. Next up, Leonardo.
Good afternoon. Another thank you for the presentation, also for new members and things to go over. My question is probably maybe one from here, but then about the BEES probably start with some big brands, large companies, which is easy for them to the platform. Moving on, probably you're going to reach some small cities with better opportunity to maybe even changing the mix for these small, smallest cities. I wanted to tell you, Thiago, you're either going to be looking for profitability with this mix, but then maybe taking some risks or some change, but really make the brand follow the path or matching to other brands inside the ecosystem. Most of the time it's such brands, and maybe in the future could encourage the brand expansion.
Just to get an idea of how the strategy of the platform is going to be, it's going to play, especially while you're going to be growing for another city as well.
I think, first of all, BEES is a brand. We are in the daily news, we are talking about BEES. Of course that today Ambev and BEES, they are very connected. But BEES more and more will have its personality, will have its NPS, will have everything. Every time that we put a supplier inside BEES, we have in concept NPS. We have really to protect the BEES's brand. This is one thing. More and more it will be Ambev one thing and BEES is another. We don't want to have like a BRF, NPS. We want to have Ambev and BEES has its NPS, its NPS are different.
More and more, this thing about being a platform and not just myself delivering and bringing more suppliers and have this national reach and more and more putting suppliers over there, I think is the way to go on BEES. The concern that we have the most is really about services, NPS. We are not there on the thing about what type of for example, we decided not to put SKU level there. We had an opportunity to trial there, we decided not to. We could curate what we decide what to put and do. Probably there are 300 SKUs that I wanna do myself logistics. The big growth three years, five years from now will be about putting sellers, putting as a third party.
With this configuration, but you have to take care of big growth. I think this is what I can say. It's really about. In the end, I think the advantage of BEES is that nobody can do this with the low cost that we do. I think that we are leading in terms of reach and cost. In Brazil, we have a lot of revenue discount, high, low prices and brands that they're not reaching, that we believe that we can solve it too. In between these two things, there is a lot of value for us to build. I think somehow is really something that it has to make sense in terms of about from value, from value or from value creation. It's working? Okay.
Just to complement, I think we have to invite the customer or the client, the partner to the center of the room and ask to them what they want. Our relationship with the customer is very close, and we learn a lot with the relationship. I think your concern is there, but we listen every time and a lot with the customers, with these comments that they bring to us, and we can improve the experience with these, all of these, everything that Dan said, just not to repeat, but I agree.
Thank you for the question. Next question from Charlie Harding.
Thank you. Charlie
That's a good question. Somehow, just to mention one thing. I feel that we are stronger than ever in terms of attracting people. Okay. That's how I feel. I think somehow Ambev is more open. We went to the top line to talk about our plans, to talk about what we stand for, how our company plans to transform things into the future. I go into any university, and I talk about Ambev in Brazil, and I feel that my time is highly valued, and I'm really just graduating to show that where we are. There is a lot of excitement outside the company, inside the company about being part of this transformation that is coming. Okay. I just want people to know that.
Having said that, we had a huge value creation from 2014 to today. Okay? In the end, the value, the stock didn't go up. The wealth of the people that was through this moment didn't went as expected. We made a lot of changes on our compensation model. It's less leverage than what before based on options, and really toward short-term achievement. We changed it to be a little bit more reliable, to be more based on stocks and less options, and to have a better balance on the monthly and the best that we do that will mature in the long term. Okay?
For the last two years, we have been changing the compensation model that people lose and people feel that they can wait a little bit more for it to mature. I think this year was the announcement of change again that goes in this direction. Somehow the people now look at the compensation and feels, "Look, if this transformation happened with this type of compensation, I can stay longer." That's how I feel. It was keep the changes less based on this short-term achievement of the year, more on things that we mature in two or three, but are not options that keep underwater all the time. They are stocks and we put that to the test of them too, that it was too dilutive. We made some tweaks.
We talked about the transformation and how I see that my talents are arising. Just to add one thing to the compensation statement is the target sharing. All right. We've been speaking a lot about collaboration over the last two years. One example that really illustrates it is the decision in 2021 to have each leader share one target with his or her entire team, the exact same target, precisely to incentivize people to collaborate on the target achievement. It's about the collective group as opposed to the individual. Okay. Ram has a target that he cascaded to his entire management committee. It's the exact same target, pretty much. I have a target that I cascaded down to my entire team. You can guess what that target was, but it's the same. Right.
This is the logic, right, for each member of the management. Really to try and stimulate people to share targets that are exactly the same and make it more collaborative. Charlie, just to complement as part of the compensation, right? I think probably speaking for myself, I've never been more proud to work at Ambev. Like, being part of the transformation, being that each of these people have. I think it's amazing to be here at this moment. I'm proud of that part. It's very important, right? It's being a part of this group at this moment, it's incredible.
Thank you for your question. Next. You guys, Charlie Harding from Citi.
Well, first of all, thank you for the presentations. I think they have been pretty incredible. My question goes to Rodolfo.
I would like to circle back to the economics of that. I understand that the delivery people are a key factor in the business, and that having a physical spot to go back and forth is a really good differentiation from the other platforms. Still, I imagine that the actual paying is a really relevant part for the people themselves. I just wanted to see if you could give us some information on how demand goes on the peak time and how you position yourselves as compared to other delivery platforms.
Thank you very much for the question. We believe in each driver, their NPS. I think that we have to measure, you know, through the NPS. We have to really make sure that the ecosystem, all the players, including the couriers, are doing business at level up for us. We are gonna be gauging this and when making any decisions, it really, you know, are being out there now based on these metrics. Having said that, I think what is important is that we differentiate ourselves from other deliveries in terms of how the structure of payment, because of the demand curves that the uniqueness of our business.
If we just go and have the same ask per kilometer, the ask for orders that everybody else, then I think they're not gonna be taking advantage of what we are different of the difference. We get orders per hour for all delivery men. The number of orders that comes out of a door is much bigger than a pizza, for example. We talked about small setup, not big one, a small setup, which are 100, 200 orders in a day. You know, the time that he has to be waiting there for the next order to come, it's being multiplied way, but it's just like totally not comparable, not faster. One way to do this, the radius is much shorter. On average would be 2 km.
You know, you will never go for 16 meters, but you would go because that would come from that specific kitchen, from that specific restaurant that was your order. I think that we want to take advantage of these differences and pay according to that. We have a much higher possibility of riding orders, of putting two, three deliveries in one order. I think that we have to structure our piece to take advantage of that. Should you pay per order or should you pay per departure from the store? Maybe the second and the third fee is smaller because, you know, the guy just needs to do a little detour and stop. Right? All of this, I think that's how we are playing with this model to take advantage of the uniqueness of DTC and avoiding the direct comparison.
We're gonna have the same structure of remunerating our delivery man. What matters in the end is how much money he makes in an hour or per day. We also know that our delivery men, they're not gonna work every day for us. We have a lot of peaks, right? He may have commitments on the other jobs as well. This could be a part-time delivery support. I think that we have to put it all together, play to our advantage, right? Be able to compensate him better than the average in the back option without having to be like, provide in every single metric. What matters is that we use these as an incremental possibility for them.
Just to give you an example, it's not exactly numbers, but we are implementing something now that we say to our delivery to the best. It like. The numbers are not real, but it's like eight for one deliver 12, 15. You get 15 on a ride that's 3 km, you know. Then you come back. In this day to day. This is just an example, and they are very close to each other. This means that one round 15, he goes to the line again, to the queue again. It's much more than some deliveries get in a way longer. These type of things we are implementing and they are very appreciated by the delivery guys.
I'll give another example of the particularity that I had last, right? One constraint that I had is that once I get an order, I have to, I would say, opportunity to route that order, right, to combine with another order that is close by. I think that there is a problem there. It has five minutes. I do. You know what happens sometimes guys when they come within the hour, you go over to the bars. You deliver one beer, and the other one will not be the same spot. You know, it will be what? It will be across the river. It will be like 20 blocks away, because I won't get five. It doesn't give me five minutes to combine orders. Give me more time. Give me two hours, one hour. It's a game changer. I'm gonna put five orders in the same building.
You know, in most spots in the same block. All these are the tools that we want to work together with our customers, gauge the willingness to pay from our customers, and I think we can create a different ecosystem for everybody.
Thank you, Charlie. The SPT, a number of orders are operating, you know. If you can get a lot of orders, I really think we can work it out. That will be helpful.
Thank you, Sean. Let's start, Gustavo.
Hi, guys. Gustavo from Itaú. Thanks for the presentation. Actually, my question is for Lucas. Lucas, I just want a little bit more clarity on the graph that you showed us on what is the difference between asset turnover and the EBITDA margin. As I remember, the asset turnover is close to the all-time high or very close to that today, while EBITDA margins are slightly below the average of the core margins. What I'd like to hear from you is, looking forward, is it reasonable to expect that the biggest improvement in your overall EBITDA coming from leveraging or even higher improvement in your asset turnover, which is already high rather than an EBITDA margin improvement which is below average? Is it reasonable to assume that?
Because we saw in your slide that most of the initiatives that you're mentioning are focused on basically asset turnover improvement. Is it reasonable to assume that? How would you expect your driver to be for [inaudible] to be more focused on the asset turnover margin improvement going forward?
Thank you for the question. I think it's hard to give predictions here of what will happen, okay, but when we break down the two drivers, I think one of the objectives behind, like, sharing the data we shared today was partly because when we look at the environment in 2020, 2021, in 2022, we stayed in our cost profitability guidance. Everybody's following what's happening to commodities going into 2022. I think everybody acknowledges that it's, you know, to assume that, like, cost pressures are still around us, right? I think 2021 is a good example of where despite the cost pressure, despite the margin pressure and the low cap margin, right?
This contraction that we saw, we still managed to improve return on invested capital through asset turnover. Only time will tell kind of where we land in 2022, 2023, 2024. We wanted to bring back asset turnover to the conversation because since our business is indeed evolving and we are seeing all these opportunities leveraging technology to deploy our assets, right, to better serve our clients and consumers, we see a clear opportunity to improve asset turnover, right? That's how we wanted to break it down. The way we broke it down is show everybody that margins are important and will continue to be important, but they don't paint the full picture, right?
For us, when we broke it down the way we showed you today, that became very clear to us that we have to be very close to our believers that drive asset turnover to make sure that we are balancing both. At the end of the day, longer term, we're gonna have to have both, okay? In the short term, given what we're seeing in the environment, the better we get at the levers that drive asset turnover, the better the chance we believe we have to improve return on invested capital. Thanks for the question. Thank you. In the long run, both have to grow, right? I think the asset turnover story here that we have is a reference for what's coming next.
We are really a platform and really something that is on the dash through swift swing of commodity of consumers and customers. We are heavily in the marketplace, and we have the delivery going out to consumers. I think this asset turnover that we have is probably going to just grow right now.
Thank you, Gustavo. For our last question, Leonardo, you don't have a question?
Uh, inaudible.
If he wants. Yes, if he wants.
When you said that your 2021 was your biggest market share in the company ever had, would you be able to break that up into items and items?
Quentin, you helped me keep thinking of it. Yeah, we were saying it had this done, saying you helped me. Okay. It was really a lot toward the entry. It was really about gaining distribution. It was really about getting to the all-time high market share in bars and traditional trade. The platform and the reorganization and our popularity and bids and the price structure that we put in place to be more linear. It really made. It was an explosion of market share in the normal trade only. The good part is that now it was really market share gains in a depressed location. There was still our own small bars that we changed levels and now it looks like the win in our favor.
This is the segment that will go up, and we over index the market share. It looks like we're hungry, like we're just bringing out the flavor.
Okay. We're gonna really have a baby PowerPoint on that.
Thank you, Leonardo. With that, we close the session today. I would like to thank all of you for your participation, the analysts, the executives, and also all the investors that are here with us and also on the web. Tomorrow our meeting starts at 10:30 A.M. Brazil time. Have a good rest of the day and see you tomorrow.
Thank you.