We will start the call on results of the first Q of 2022 Allied. I have Silvio Stagni here, that is CEO, Gustavo Antunes, the CFO, and they will present the main highlights of this quarter, and then we will have the Q&A session. If you have questions, you can send via chat, and we will answer them later. Now I will pass on the floor to Silvio so that we can start. Thank you.
Thank you, Fabi. Thank you, everyone. Good morning. I am sorry for the technical issue. I hope now you can all access and watch it. Today, our goal is to present the first Q results. As usual, we disclose these results in the night before with the closing of the stock market, but here is an opportunity to clear any doubts you might have. As usual, we present the company in three business pillars.
We will check them comprehensively, and then we will go into details of each one of them. In the end, Gustavo will go into the details of the finance evolution. Starting with the digital retail, we finished the first quarter with 39 online stores. These stores use our brand, Mobcom, that is connected to the main marketplaces in Brazil, or Apple, Google, HyperX, and Xiaomi brands. Even in the marketplace, we manage those brands to our partners. In digital retail, there is also a program, iPhone pra Sempre, iPhone Forever, with Apple and Itaú. We are celebrating this successful partnership, and this is one of the main sales channels in Brazil. In this pillar, we present a 17% growth compared to last year. Going back to 2020, we grew 224% in this period. We keep having a lot of success in this pillar.
The physical retail pillar closed with 222 stores, and in these brands that you can see here on the store. This was a recovery quarter after two years of the pandemic, where the flow of people was quite damaged. This quarter, we present a 26% growth compared to last year, and 56% compared to 2020. The physical retail is back. Lastly, distribution. We kept our clients base with more than 3,000 clients. We kept our expressive market share in the main electronic categories in Brazil, 70% of smartphones, 11% in notebooks, 19% in video games, with a growth of 22% compared to last year. Please remember that the basis in 2021 was quite strong. We were strong in 2021 due to the demand of electronics that happened after the pandemic.
Even though, we can present 22% of growth, and we will comment on that in the next slides. On the next slide, we have our budget. Our revenue as a whole, BRL 1.4 billion in the first quarter. The best one in the history of Allied if we compare to 2019, we double the size of the company. Please remember that in 2021, we were benefited by the demand of electronics, like TVs, computers, video games. Even so, we started 2022 with expressive growth, 20% compared to last year, 24% compared to 2019 to 2022. It shows the resilience of our strategy in the three business pillars, and we are always presenting good results in the end. Now you see how we grow, and we are very proud of this slide because we grow in volume and in quality.
To give you an example, we took the smartphone market. On the left, we compare the volume of sales of smartphones in Brazil in the first quarter last year and this first quarter. The Brazilian market grew 1%, we grew 8%. In the middle, we have the average ticket. The average ticket in Brazil grew 3%, and we grew 14%. In the end, multiplying both of them, Brazil grows 4%, and we grow 22% in value. It shows that we gain share. Here we are showing smartphones, but we gain share in smartphones, notebooks, and tablets, and it shows the increase of our profit. There was a growth of the average ticket due to inflation in the Brazilian market, but our growth is above the inflation and what it represented. Now we will talk about retail.
That is our commitment to you, to keep these strong retail buyers. If we compare to 2019, we more than doubled the amount of revenue in retail. We reached BRL 350 million. Despite this expressive growth in distribution, the retail share is still capped compared to what we had last year, with 26% of the retail being represented in the total of the company, and 15% is digital retail. That is where we grow the most. Some qualitative aspects. Now we are proud to say that we were once again chosen one of the top employers in Brazil for the third consecutive year. To us, this is the result of our practices of managing people. What in the end of the day is a value that we add because we can attract and retain talents in the Brazilian market.
A program that I would like to mention that is celebrating a year now, and now we launch at the shares, we have this program of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We understand that diversity of thoughts will bring a company that is more profitable. We see market research showing that, but more than that, we want to make Allied a place where everyone feels good of working. We started this program one year ago with the census of our almost 2,000 employees to understand our population. Then we had the phase of getting all the culture of the leadership of Allied, and now we have an action program to ensure that everyone feels good working for Allied and have opportunities, and wants to come here every day. Lastly, before going to the pillars, I would like to talk about our digital transformation.
We are investing a lot to make Allied a more efficient company, a more modern, faster company, so that in the end of the day, we can offer better service to our people. Some pillars. We are a VTEX partner for a long time. All our platforms, our 39 stores are connected to the main marketplaces and bank platforms via VTEX. That is an important partner providing us the possibility of having omnichannel team. Today you can buy Mobcom and get it in the store, so you can receive it delivered in two hours. All those points were brought by VTEX, our partners. In terms of transportation management, we are investing strongly in a platform of TMS. Therefore, we can improve the deliveries and the freight value and calculate automatically the price of each one of the freights of the goods that we deliver in our daily basis.
Our sales platform today with the 221 stores that we have in Brazil, it is important that we can predict the demand of every store, considering every model, every color, every product. That is why we have a machine learning platform learning on each store what is the demand, the product at the specific time of the year. The platform is already working, and then we can have effective stocks in the minimal level necessary, so that we can attend the consumer without having excess of capital use on the stores. With 39 online stores, we can optimize the many solutions that we have. Automated solutions for pricing and financial counseling, and working with the clients in the post-sale. We have synergy among the 39 stores, and we can improve our forces.
Lastly, we have a partnership with a startup incubator, Distrito, and we will speed up our innovations. Our innovations won't depend only on our own developments, but also on searching for solutions that are already there in possible startups in Brazil. Now, briefly about each one of the pillars before passing on to Gustavo to go into the financial details. First, distribution. We had BRL 1 billion in the first quarter, almost 2x what we had in 2019. Our strategy of new categories and new brands is showing successful. In the last presentation, we told you that we brought PlayStation now, and we are already a PlayStation consumer, and we started being successful in this category with this brand.
All the categories grew a lot, and Gustavo will show that in terms of amounts, we decreased a little, but the amount is compensated by the average ticket, and we will discuss that later. So this is the distribution with a very strong quarter, and it keeps having been an important pillar in our company, showing that we are still having a growth in this segment on our business. On the next page, we have digital retail growth that is wonderful here from 2019 to 2022. We grew almost 5x . Here are some important points. We finished the first quarter last year with 28 online stores, and this first quarter this year has 39 online stores. So we grew in the number of stores with huge opportunities to keep growing. We are connected to the main marketplaces in Brazil. We are connected to many platforms of bank marketplaces.
Today we have a relevant presence in all the Brazilian market. In terms of digital retail, we have the program iPhone Forever, iPhone pra Sempre. In May, we have the first cycle of 21 months, so we are changing the iPhones of the first buyers, which puts us in the market of recertification that we told you, and in the last presentation, we will have some news in terms of this market. Lastly, physical retail. The physical retail had two weak years due to the pandemic, but we are growing now in the first quarter of 2022. If we compare the same-store sales to last year, 26% of growth in same-store sales. It is significant. We go to average revenue that is equivalent to the rates before the pandemic. This growth from BRL 290 million to BRL 350 million must be emphasized.
If we consider that compared one year to the other, we decreased the amount of stores. We understood that after COVID, some physical points don't have the same flow of people as before, so we changed the number of stores. Even with less stores, 37 less stores, we can grow 20% in our income, which shows that the decision was correct. Last point of physical retail is the launch of Galaxy S22. The Galaxy launch is important to our Samsung stores. It always happens at the beginning of the year, but some important points here. First, Samsung measures the success of their launches compared to the previous launch. S22, in the pre-sales period, that are the 15 days before the effective launch of the product, they sold 2x more than Galaxy S21. So it shows how strong this market and the success of this model.
It was the biggest amount of sales in the pre-sales period of any smartphone. Two important points here. Samsung has a strategy to select some channels to have their launch in some Samsung stores that they are one of these channels. It's important to participate on that. Second point, we launched the product with the strategy of a super value trading. You would bring your used product, and we super value them to purchase your S22. So it shows that our strategy to enter on the market of recertification, it has everything to be successful because it is a sales strategy that is important for new products from all the brands. Big numbers then. If we consider the last 12 months finished in the first quarter of 2022, BRL 7.3 billion in revenue, BRL 422 million in EBITDA, and BRL 222 million in net profit.
So we keep our NPS in 81%, and we kept the expressive market share in smartphones, 7%, notebooks, 11% in the Brazilian market. If we compare from 2020 to 2021, the CAGR is 25%. These are the highlights of the first quarter. Now I'll ask Gustavo to go into the details of our financial results. Let's go, Gus.
Yes, thank you, Silvio and Fabiana. Good morning, everyone. We will start here discussing some more details than what Fabiana presented, Silvio presented. We finished the first quarter growing 22%, both in sales and in raw profit. This is the result of showing a resilient distribution, big growth in the digital retail, and also the physical retail coming back. In terms of EBITDA, we decreased marginally. We have BRL 76 million in the first quarter. In net profit, we are almost BRL 75 million. We have a strong comparison basis. We were talking to the market that part of what we experienced in margin in the two years was benefited by big global disruptors and so on. We have history basis now.
The best way of understanding that, the simplest way is that in the first quarter 2022, with the end of the pandemic, and people had no more restrictions, and when we compare this period to 2019, that is the left bar. We believe that the comparison is the one that makes us understand how the company lives this period of restriction of mobility and restriction of visits to shopping malls and so on. We leave the pandemic growing in annual terms. It is as if annually we grew 24% in revenue, 31% in EBITDA, and 23% net profit.
We are very proud to look back and say that we faced this period of turbulence and uncertainty with a lot of resilience and strength, and we are proving how strong our businesses are. As one business is more obstructed with the other, we can reach the consumer, or we can reach retails, our business partners, and have the brands that we represent being in the lives of the Brazilian consumers. This is the first part, more general. Now we will talk about distribution. In distribution, we have the best quarter in our whole history, and this is the result of having strict partnerships with big retail companies and also regional partnerships in 2022.
A great benefit that we had is that the regional retail was more benefited by the global supply chain, and there is the opportunity of the retailers, big or small ones, having more access, and we all benefit from that. We now have, again, commercial relations with all our partners. In terms of gross revenue, we grow. We go to BRL 97 million compared to the period before the pandemic, so it is quite expressive. It is almost 50%. On the right, as Silvio mentioned, we experience in this quarter, compared to the last one, some decrease in volume, mainly because of categories like computer devices. The main categories bringing revenue to our company, we kept the volume or grew. We are talking about computers, mobiles, games, and printers. The big categories we can have good work.
On the bottom left, we can see the volume and distribution we have in mobile, so this is the bar. Computer accessories, so how it grew. Healthy mobiles like cells and tablets. If you compare to the first quarter of 2019, as the base is 100, we are growing and bringing more volume of sales and marketing to our business. Now let's go to the next page to talk about retail as a whole. On the top left, we have retail growing 20% compared to last year. It doubles, so 123% compared to the first quarter of 2021. Silvio mentioned that. On the right, we see the digital retail with expressive growth.
I think we were quite competent in surfing the wave of digitalization that came forcibly to all the companies during the pandemic, and it's here to stay in our value proposal of being a partner of the retailers who have marketplaces, so that we have competitive offers and a broad portfolio complementing all of them, so that we can have prices and logistics and delivery and flexibility to talk to more than 30 partners in different ways. It's been proven strong and makes us grow exponentially every year in our digital retail. The physical retail is also growing. We have constant growth. Particularly in this quarter, we can see people having more flow in the shopping malls. That is the biggest part of our launch.
After two years in which the launch moment in the first semester of the year had some frustration because they were launched during the restriction periods. Different from that, this quarter has the launch of Galaxy S22 in such a way that people could experiment that and visit the stores, and we can provide our value proposal as a whole that is not only having a good telephone, a good product, but visiting the store and having a differentiated treatment and experience. So this is our proposal for the physical Samsung stores, and it's quite strong in such a way that we grow 26%. In the gross revenue profit, we are growing, especially in this quarter, in some percentage and in the percentage of the gross profit as a whole. Now we'll talk about the digital retail. I guess Silvio could cover basically everything.
We are a digital retailer that is able to grow a lot in revenue, and it comes with a mix that goes against the other two quarters because we are growing volume. The average ticket after this robust growth is stable, and we are close to BRL 2,000. We believe a lot of that is the effect of the currency exchange and things that happened last year. On the next slide, we'll talk about physical retail, and the big message here is after growing a lot in the number of sales points we had before the pandemic, 29 kiosks, and we now have 50. So we grew almost 40%, and the stores were from 77 to 97, and we are expanding and experiencing our Store in Store model. These were two difficult years for all the retailers, and to us it was not different.
After making this expansion viable and this growth viable, now this is the time to have some maturity and create action plans to the stores that we believe can be better. Improve our client bases. Obviously, we also increase the volume of transactions based on these financial institutions, so we could reach 63,000 activated cards in 273 sales points where we offer the solution in our stores and partner stores. In the bottom part, you see 20 million sales done with this possibility of products. We believe that by the moment, the life of the average consumer is more difficult, obviously, with the interest and so on.
Being able to offer this possibility to the consumer, having on the background our solution of intelligence to talk to the consumer and bring them to the negotiation, and obviously with the negotiations and incomes, we see after two years that we can improve our client bases that are good payers and to whom we can offer new products, new conditions, clients that make us improve our relation. It's very important to us. We talked a lot about our revenue and our gross revenue, gross profit. In this page, we traditionally show what we have below that. I would like to emphasize two points here. The first one is that we deliver positive EBITDA, a net profit positive. We can see that we have difficult situations, but when we look to the first quarter of 2021 and the first in 2019, they were almost the same.
We finished the pandemic delivering more than 2x we had when we started. We are very proud of the result we are delivering. In terms of expenses, it's important to emphasize, we have expenses with the sales where we grow more. We grow 25%. This is a singular point on how we grow that are the expenses, the variable expenses. As our retail, maybe physical or digital, is more representative and nominally it can grow, it's part of our operation to pay rates for the credit card, and 90% of our retail is via credit card. If you sell more, you pay more. Our strategy, our presence in the digital retail with marketplaces also implies that in sales, we pass them to the marketplaces because in fact, we have this rate.
With this increase in sales, this is an intrinsic nature of the business. When we look at general expenses and administrative expenses, we grow 18%. It's less than in revenue. I think that we have these peculiarities, and I'll ask now to go to the next page that we talk about the debts. You may all remember because in the results of the fourth Q 2021, we finished with a high cash flow, BRL 174 million. Back then we said that this is not recurrent, and we would keep that in the long term, and this is a reflex of specific negotiations with the suppliers to have payments in the end of the year, and negotiations with the suppliers, bringing a bank, for example, for the financial operation and gaining in the end of the year, so we avoid expenses.
We have cash, and in the first Q, everything is normal. We finish the financial negotiations and operations payments are due, and this is what we see when we finish the use of cash. We had BRL 174 million- BRL 110 million, and the majority of the consumption of this cash is to pay suppliers. Another part is because in the natural course of our businesses, we improve our stock. On the one hand, it explains our cash, and on the other hand, in terms of suppliers, I did not mention, but it is available. I did not talk about the sales expenses because in the financial, we have the cost that impacts our DRE. To sum up, we fnish the first Q with the level of leverage that is quite low.
We have less than 1x the net debt and EBITDA, so it gives the space so that we have different conditions of marketing with partners and looking eventual acquisitions and new businesses, and Silvio mentioned the investments that we have in digitalization. We still have a lot of space to use that to grow and change our business. I finish here. Now I pass on to Fabiana and Silvio to check if we have some questions.
Gus, thank you. The first question that we have here, I will make to Silvio. That is how you see the supply scenario. Is there any kind of normalization?
Thank you, Fabi. Well, in this first quarter, we had a supply that was almost normal in all categories of products, cell phones and computers and so on. But looking at the situation that we have in China, for example, with this policy of COVID-zero, that impacted a lot, not only the manufacture of some components, but mainly in the shipment of parts and goods to Brazil and the rest of the world. We hope that in the second quarter, we have an impact of supply that is not as strong as we had in the beginning of the pandemic, but we are being prepared to restrict supplies in the second quarter.
Thank you, Silvio. The next question I will make to Gustavo. It is about Soudi, how you see the expansion of credit via Soudi in the scenario of more financial restrictions?
Well, thank you for the question. I think I mentioned specifically some points, but I will develop on that. In moments of financial restriction, having a credit solution is something that the consumer values. In the last three years, we tested the solution, we had pilots, we expanded, and we could be more familiar to offer the product and also to understand how we sell, how we relate to the client.
After three years, we feel that we are completely able to provide a service and give this opportunity to our client. This is what they need the most because in abundant times, maybe credit is less valued by the client, by the consumer, than at the moment they in fact need solutions to go on with their lives and have their consumption choices. On our side, we must also be prepared for that because on the other hand, it is much more risky for the market. Some things favor us.
I think that having three years of experience on that and understanding who in our bases is the client that pays well, is a good client who renewed the credit. This is a reason to make it easier for us to know the consumer and the profile of the consumer that works well. We are very comfortable and optimistic on that. The second point is that the differential of our offer in the financial services, what we have different is Knox Guard. That is a Samsung solution, is an app that is installed in the mobiles. We developed at home a management layer. It is a CRM tool and a charging tool so that we can remind the client that they have a bill to pay, and if they want to have an agreement, we can get in touch with them.
This is a differential because we are always in touch with the client to understand eventual problems and minimize them. I think it is an additional comfort that we have. Lastly, we are working to sophisticate our operations in financial services. Within the options that we have, one of them is to have a card with a brand. We are analyzing the options on the market, and also we have more recurrence and one more offer of product to our clients. I think that is the solution, is trying to bring this scenario as one more opportunity, having learning for three years how to do that.
Thank you, Gus. Now I will make two questions together about the dynamics of volume. They are questioning how we see the dynamic of volumes in the distribution, and there is a question in the mobile category and how we see that. I will pass it on to you, Silvio.
Okay, thank you, Fabi. The mobile market is showing very resilient. It grew a lot with the pandemic, but even if we look at last year's second semester, where there were doubts about energy planning and the future of work, and if they would be employed, even during this moment that cooled down the market a little, the cell market is always very strong. This year has an important factor to keep up growing, that is the 5G sales. Because the 5G is established to be on July. Probably there will be some liberties so that many Brazilian stages can implement that until September, but July and September are realities this year.
All the new technology brings a demand peak. The 5G will not be different. On the contrary, it is a much more disruptive technology than any one that we had so far. It will bring a consumer experience that is quite different, and it will strongly foment the market of machine-to-machine and the ability to have items connected in all areas. 5G is the biggest fomentator on this market. The S22 that we launched and we mentioned, that is one of the smartphones that sold the most in pre-sale, so it is 5G. It starts to show that 5G has a demand. Also, the operators, Claro, Vivo, TIM, they have an important role here. They implement this network, and they have an important role to foment the demand, showing to the consumer the advantages they will have with these technologies.
Despite all the concerns that we have this year, like the war, elections, unemployment, inflation, despite all that, we believe that the volume of smartphones will be very positive in 2022 as well.
Okay, Silvio. Thank you. I have another question here about the strategy of the operation in physical retail. It is more incisive in the Store in Store format. Looking to Samsung format, do you have visibility on return to make sense to expand in this sense? I think it can be to you, Silvio.
Okay, good. I think it's an important point to explain here because the kiosks are different stores. Generally, what we do is to enter a new point with the kiosk, and if we prove the demand of the shopping mall there, we change from a kiosk to a store.
The great majority of the sales points that we closed, except one, were kiosks. So they were new points, more peripheral points, where the flow of people after two years of pandemic was to its normal trend. A kiosk is easy to close, to change. So we understood these kiosks. In terms of stores, we are changing some stores to smaller points. So we make use of opportunities in some shopping malls with the open stores, and we moved to bigger and better sales points. And we see the results because we grow the revenue. When we talk about Store in Store, we have many brands. But in the end of the day, the success of Store in Store is quite related to the flow of people that these retailers have. And some retailers in some categories suffered more than others.
That's why we had this operation, and we end up closing some Store in Store in retail, presenting difficulties in flow of people. At this moment, just to give you an example, we are expanding our Store in Stores, and this is very successful in a specific store. This is one of the best experiences that we have in this business segment. 2022 probably is not a year of great expansion in terms of points of sale. But at this moment, we are discussing with our partners to expand in a conservative way. In 2022, with all uncertainties, probably it's not the year to expand strongly. But in digital, the physical retail, we still have an important strategy to bring movement to our business ecosystem.
Okay, Silvio. Thank you very much. I think we have time to one more question. I'll make it to Gustavo. It's about the dynamics of marketplace commissions. We mentioned the quarter in high commissions, and you would diversify with new incomes. Could you develop that a little bit more?
We showed here that sales in retail is our biggest growth, so as we sell more online, we pay more commissions. And we wrote in our report, if you read, you can see all the details, but there was a disproportional using these expenses. It's a reflex of what we had in the media. We are talking to investors and other peers. This was also an effect of the marketplaces improving this rate, so we also suffered a little of that. On the other hand, I think the beauty of our business is that we have 30 partners, so somehow we can navigate and mitigate this effect.
If in some of the marketplaces, the commission becomes high and will disturb our profitability, there are other forms that we can search for. We are with all the big retailers, but we are in bank platforms and operators platforms. I think that we felt that, of course, but the way to mitigate that is having the many sales channels working in an aware strategy to privilege the best conditions that we may have.
Okay, Gus. I think we have some time. There is a question here to Silvio about the assembly in the end of April. There were two new board members. In your understanding, what is the strategy to help the company with that?
Okay. Thank you, Fabi. We have a Board of Administration that is quite strong in the company, helping a lot in the business administration, and we brought two additional people to this board. One is Yaëlle, that is a person with a vast experience in payment ways. She worked in Carrefour in Brazil, and today she is in Argentina in another financial company. We had the opportunity of mentioning with you our results in our Soudi payment means, our strategy to keep growing. We searched on the market for someone with experience in this segment to help us on that. The other person that came, I mean, in fact, came back to the board, is Marcelo Radomysler, that is one of the founders of this company, one of the persons that knows Allied the most.
Extra officially, he helped us, but now he is part of the board, and he is part of the daily life and the decisions. With his knowledge on the company, he will give great help to us.
Okay, nice. Thank you, Silvio. I think we can finish now. I would like to thank you all for your participation. Once again, I would like to make our RI available in case you have doubts and questions. Thank you for your participation.
Thank you all, and bye-bye.