Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Alpargatas video conference for the fourth quarter of 2023 results. Today, we have with us Liel Miranda, our CEO, and André Natal, our CFO. This conference is being recorded and simultaneously translated to English. The Q&A will be made in the following way: after the initial presentation, we ask those who are willing to ask a question, use the Zoom toolbar to raise your hand and wait until you are directed to ask your question. Before continuing, I clarify that any statements that may be made during this video conference regarding the company's business prospects, projections, and operational and financial goals constitute the management's beliefs and assumptions based on information that is currently available. I'd like to now give the word to our CEO, Liel Miranda, who will start our video conference. Liel, the word is yours.
Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here with you today to talk about Alpargatas. I joined the company a week ago, so I have very little understanding of 2023. But I would like to introduce myself first. I have over 30 years working in consumer and products goods with two companies, Souza Cruz in the tobacco industry, where I was the CEO over these companies for 2 years, and also at Mondelēz. Before that, I had an international career working in Chile, Canada, England, and China, holding global positions. And here I am onboarding, which started even before the announcement in December. I have had some opportunities to be with the team and understanding the diagnosis that was made in 2023, and with the turnaround plan that has been being implemented so far.
I'm certain we have the tools, and we are on our route to regain our growth in 2024. I'm very excited with this opportunity to join Alpargatas. Everybody knows it's a brand with a huge potential, Havaianas, right? Which is a unanimity in Brazil, and I have the opportunity here to keep building this brand in Brazil. And also we have lots of international potential abroad, so we can go back to growing and expanding to international markets. A huge opportunity for growth. The turnaround plan, which was introduced before, and is already showing certain signs of recovery. From the strategy that we have put into practice, we are certain that the focus will be the most key aspect to consolidate the turnaround financial plan and regain this momentum of growth.
The most important channels are most important in the most important channels, in the most important markets, to accelerate our market leadership and at the same time, grow those markets and those channels where we still see lots of potential, but we still don't have all the power there. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to give the word now to André Natal, our CFO, who is going to be going through the results for the fourth quarter of 2023, and then I will be back to take some questions at the end.
So good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you to share the results for the closing of our fourth quarter, 2023. I'm going to the first slide. On this first slide, we would like to remind you that what we are going through is a journey.
It's a journey that has several phases, different fronts. In a turnaround process, more importantly than knowing which problems to attack, we need to know which ones we have to attack first, and how to define the sequence of a priority. Defining priorities and stick with them, it's super important to understand and create the foundations for the next step. None of the steps that have been done or we are taking right now, they end here. They are a process, but it's important that we do what comes first, first, and then what comes next. We have been trying to make this absolutely clear throughout this journey, what our priorities are, what needs to come first in this journey.
So I remember from the second quarter in 2023, in actually the announcement of the first quarter, we said that the most important focus was our cash. To make first adjustments, that was going to be super, extremely relevant to create the foundations, to have the calm necessary to work on all the agenda that came after. We had to start with an agenda of controlling the leveraging of the company, which, you know, had been growing steadily, and we had to focus to make sure that this agenda was taken care of. We are going to show you a little bit more about the actions that have been taken and the results that we have had so far. But it's important to show that these initial movements will not stop. They continue.
These are recurring processes that are in place inside the company, such as being more efficient and saving in costs that we have. So we're trying to make sure that you understand that these waves, they will come after each other, and they will be ongoing at the same time. After these first adjustments on efficiency and on the working capital discipline, we also need to recover our volumes in Brazil. You know the story well. In the past quarters, we had a large compression of volumes in Brazil, which we hadn't seen in a long time in Brazil, and this compression generated the maintenance of our operational scale and manufacturing scale. So we had a compression of results, a large compression of results that originated from this loss in volume, which has its basis on the inventory levels, as you heard before.
So it was important to prioritize this agenda as well, and we are quite happy to say that it has evolved so far a lot, and it shows signs of an operation that goes back to another level of manufacturing and inventory levels and efficiency, as well as a connection between the sell-in and sell-out levels. And obviously, Brazil, as it's the biggest operation and the biggest part of our results, it was the most important thing to come first. But this doesn't make the other agendas less important. They will be the target of our attention, of our full attention from now on. The resumption of our international operations, which also suffered last year because of a series of different issues. But we took the opportunity last year to make a huge strategic revision, review.
Liel has mentioned that he has had contact with--has been having contact with all of these diagnoses and also all of these topics that we have shared with everyone. As well as with the new strategic choices that we would like to implement and deploy from now on in the company, because we believe it's going to be a really sustainable growth model. And this goes through the resumption and rebuilding of our capabilities in our international operations. I think execution is a key topic. Once these priorities are clearly defined, we are going to have the focus on executing it in a disciplined way, explore the potentials that we see for the brand and for the company. So on this next slide, we are going to explore what we have done so far.
I think these are important and relevant results, but this is just the first step. It's very clear to us, the challenges that lie ahead of us, but on the other hand, we also need to be proud of what we have done, what we have executed so far in terms of creating a discipline in the company. When you look at the first to the first graph on the left, we see a Working Capital cash release in the first quarter, and from that moment on, a successive release of Working Capital cash. Even before we talked about the Rewire project, which was much focused on our S&OP and a reconnection between the commercial and manufacturing and logistics areas, so that we could have a more streamlined distribution chain and sales more connected to our manufacturing, and the purchases more connected to the manufacturing and sales.
So all of that already shows, the numbers speak for themselves, a better connection. We have a better connection of those processes. Of course, we have more things to go. This is a gradual and continuous improvement, but we certainly can see a clear evolution of the working capital cash release, not only in the accounts payables and receivables, but also in our inventories accounts, which was a structural problem that the company lived, but it's much more equated right now. On the second graph, in blue, on the right side, we also see that we had to break the CapEx. The company had a very large budget for the year.
It had been investing a lot of money in expansion projects in the previous two years, and it started out 2023 with a budget of BRL 114 million in investments, and gradually we managed to define more priorities that were more clearly seen and make decisions to effectively reduce the capital allocation for our CapEx and ensure that we had what was only essential, given the importance of the control of the leveraging of the company. So we end the year at a CapEx level that is close to half of what we started at the first quarter in 2023. The same for the green graph.
We told you that, when it comes to expenses, a very important agenda of simplification and reduction of expenses and increase of efficiencies, we needed to do one work that was extremely detailed, and we did it throughout the second half of the year, and we found many opportunities for reducing expenses. We also told you in the second quarter of last year that we could not wait for the results of this detailed work. We had to start by reaching the low-hanging fruits in the expenses of the company. I think the graph speaks for itself as well. This has been made to a certain extent.
So we brought the expenses level to a substantial decrease compared to the first quarter and in the second quarter, and from the third quarter on, we started to see the results of that reduction, 12% and 13% reduction, respectively, and which is persistent up to now. Obviously, this is a continuous process of reduction of expenses and gain of efficiency. The combined effect, all of them, it's a very important action to contain. Everyone knows that the company was already the company used to have a negative leverage, or it was a net cash, zero leverage, and it came up to a level of 2.7. We mentioned in the last quarter that we didn't believe that this was going to continue to go up.
We saw the leverage starting to stabilize over time, and in fact, it stopped going up and it's now decreasing. But obviously, it's important to mention that the EBITDA numbers, historically published by the company are not... They have never talking about write-offs in the extraordinary accounts, and of course, this will affect the cash accounts. Since they were very relevant in the fourth quarter, they will hide a little bit of the real substantial deleveraging in the yellow line. But it was important to offer you clearly, offering you adjusted numbers to see the trajectory of the leveraging and the decrease that we have been able to produce in this first moment in the fourth quarter of 2023. The leveraging, adjusted by the write-offs, was in the amount of 1.6x the EBITDA.
From my point of view, this set of graphs that you can see on this slide are a good foundation to show the success of this first wave of actions. This is not the end of... It's not the end of this first wave. It remains, but we, on the other hand, created the basis, the foundations for the company to aim to find new investments and find energy and time to work in other agendas, such as the expansion of top line, strengthening of the brand, and other agendas that we will be prioritizing from now on. On the next slide, we see also a very strong results in cash generation. For over a year, the company burned about over BRL 100 million a month.
Overall, we burned BRL 1.2 million of cash, and from May and on, or onwards last year, we maintained the descendants of cash generation or cash release, which was confirmed also in the fourth quarter of 2023. This graph also speaks for itself. The company avoided a trajectory of financial stress, and now it has the solid foundation that we needed to start building from the, from now on. I would like to go back to this slide because in a simple way, we can show our value chain and our business cycle. It starts at the raw material, to the sales, to consumers on the right side of the screen. These are related to the fourth quarter of 2023.
So we confirm here the hypothesis that we believed in. We had already mentioned to you that we believe that the basis had been established for reconnection of the growth of the sell-out. So for the first time, we had a positive growth of the sell-out. This is very important for resuming our scale economy. The sell-in also has a very important variation compared to what we saw in the previous quarter, so it's sell-in much more, much closer to the sell-outs we have right now. If we compare in numbers of pairs sold in the sell-in and sell-out, they are much closer, and the adjustments happened, as you can see in the green graph, which is the adjustment to the inventory levels. We had told in the past that there was a...
That we had much more inventory than we needed in the chain, and we believe that as long as we couldn't make sure that these inventory levels were normalized, we wouldn't be able to reconnect to the sell-out healthy levels. We saw a much closer reconnection in the third quarter and also in the fourth quarter. There was some adjustments in the curves that you see, but the results of this curve is much smaller than what we had seen before, so we probably are very close to the end, or the adjustments in the inventory level are over. The pickup in sales and obviously connected to the reduction of our production levels, that was to a certain, to a certain degree, result.
In a certain moment of the year of 2023, we were producing -30%, which was a huge retraction, you know, to contain the application of working capital into finished projects. So this, combined with the pickup of the selling, because of the season and because of the reconnection with the sell-out, we started to see our own inventory going down, having steeper decreases throughout the year. This was very important for that recovery of working capital. And as for the raw material, we maintained a very low rhythm of purchase of raw material. We found it was very important as a discipline for raw material purchase in the company to bring the inventory levels of raw material close to the operational levels.
We have lots of different opinions about where the commodities prices are going, so deleveraging the strategic inventory of raw materials that we had, we had had in 2022, happened in 2023. So this yellow line speaks for itself. So we can see how much the inventory levels went down throughout the year, because we, even though we had a smaller production level, we kept an even more substantial decrease in the purchase level of raw material. So we saw an almost linear decrease, so we are much closer to what we have to operational level of our raw material inventory. In the next slide. I just want to point out to you that the sell-out is not so different, -1 throughout the year. So at a certain moment, it was -13, and now we are at -1.
But on the other hand, the average selling was -13%. Of course, this is all of these numbers for the Havaianas Brazil. And this -13%, that was almost -20% at a certain point of the year, explains a good part of the scale compressions and the margin compressions that we saw throughout the year, and which are much connected to the leveraging or deleveraging of the inventory levels that we saw in our chain throughout the year. You can see that the production in average was -24%, but it was at a certain moment of the year, we were producing less, even less. So this also shows an important evolution in the decisions we made. At a certain moment, this impacted our costs because we needed to lose our manufacturing scale.
However, we ended the year with a resumption of this production scale, being able to see the wins in the productivity levels that we introduced it in our factories. On the next slide, we see the sell-out and sell-in numbers that I mentioned before, and we had already shown to you. In the first and the second quarter, there was a huge disconnection between the two bars. This was the biggest part of our adjustment. The third and fourth quarters, these numbers, these two bars are much closer, which for us, is very important for us as a symptom of what is to come ahead of us. On the next slide, we can see the effects of all of the things I mentioned before on our gross margin and EBITDA margin.
As for the gross margin, we have a sequence of evolution, a small evolution of one percentage point. But it's important to remember that all of those margins are contaminated because of the effects of the write-offs. These are non-recurring effects, and they are, you know, they arise from decisions that have been made in previous years of accumulating inventory of certain products. But when we clean up these numbers, and we made sure we did that, so they were on a comparable basis. When we clean the write-offs, we come to a gross margin adjusted of 24.5%, which is superior even to the margins we had in the fourth quarter of 2021. There is a series of adjustments and actions behind that.
There is a spectacular work that has been made inside the manufacturing and gain productivity and efficiency and balancing of our production lines. That's a very important work that has been done, which makes us have a stronger gross margin, adjusted gross margin. And it's important to mention that we found, we managed to reach this gross margin manufacturing minus 10 million pairs compared to what we used to manufacture. So if we imagine that the Brazil, Brazilian business is going to grow, and we grow together with the category, and we go back to that, to a scale similar to the one we used to have, we should also have favorable effects here. When we look at the blue graphs, we see not only the elements of this resumption of scale, we got very close to the breakeven of the Brazil operation.
In the second quarter, we had -1% EBITDA margin without the adjustments. Obviously, this hurt a lot. You know, the results of those quarters hurt a lot, you know, the overall results of the year. But when you look at the leveraging, this has been much more contained, not only because of those cash effects, but also because of recovery of this EBITDA level. Once again, it's important to mention that the write-offs are inserted. So when we clean up the write-offs, we come to an EBITDA margin adjusted of 25%, which is similar to the one obtained in the fourth quarter of 2021, at a much larger manufacturing scale that we had at that time.
Obviously, this one has been impacted by all of the elements that I mentioned previously of the resumption of the manufacturing scale, but also because of the zero-based budget and all action statement. As for the operational international operations, we had a hard quarter. The other quarters, historically, they are negative in EBITDA margin, because these are quarters where the seasons are against our main product. Europe, for example, we have a very low level of products sold in this fourth quarter. You know, we sell much more during the summer. So the fourth quarter is much less relevant and much more concentrated on Asia and Pacific territories, the APAC. It's a traditionally weak, seasonally weak quarter, and in this quarter in particular, the fourth quarter, 2023, we saw an event of destocking movement in APAC, similar to what we saw in Brazil.
We watched it in Brazil, in the first and second quarter in Brazil. In Asia, in the Pacific regions, this is happening right now, this destocking movement, which was also a result of decisions that had been made previously of increasing our inventory levels in those regions. So somehow these inventories had to be drained, and they started to be drained. It's simple to realize that in this volume, that was small, a volume of 6 million pairs. Obviously, it's not enough to reduce all of the effects. Obviously, it's not possible to have any kind of reasonable margin over, you know, sales of 3 million pairs, 3.5 million pairs. This is what generated the biggest part of this compression of margin. The scale factor is, you know, accounts for 64%.
Of course, there is some inefficiency effects, especially related to the new logistics operation in Europe. We have already mentioned this previously, but certainly the scale effect was extremely relevant, accounting for 64%. And we don't see any reasons in this quarter to make any kind of suppositions about the next quarters EBITDA levels of the company. This was the results, the one-time results of a never-seen-before situation. Here, I'd like to show you some important adjustments that we made to our balance sheet with... I won't go into the small items, but especially to mention that we have about BRL 1.6 billion in total adjustments, and these adjustments are concentrated mainly in the goodwill impairment of both Havaianas and Rothy's.
So we always have to be checking the recoverability test, running those tests, and we conducted them, running the projections for growth and reduction and also the capital costs for those businesses. So the reduction was a reduction of both the goodwill for both Havaianas and Rothy's, goodwill impairment. So we have this overall reduction of BRL 1.6 billion, which is added to all the reductions we have seen and which are not adjusted to our, in our EBITDA, in our write-offs of inventory of both raw material and finished goods. There is an important reduction of items in our balance sheet that are connected to those evaluations that have their routines and criteria inside the accounting practices and the accounting principles that are used in the marketing income.
Now I'm going to give the word to Rafael, who is going to detail and dive a little bit deeper into the numbers of the quarter. Rafael?
Thank you, André. Moving on now to the quarter figures. I think he, André, gave a lot of details about the Havaianas Brazil. We ended the quarter seeing a reduction of -3% in volume, with a pretty much flat result in sales. It's important to mention that this was the first 1% positive growth of the sell-out in a year. And as André mentioned, we started the year, you know, with zero sell-out.
In this yellow line, orange line, we see a decrease, the evolution of the decrease of the inventory levels, and this summarizes all the evolution that's in red, describing in detail the inventory levels. Moving on to our international operations, we saw very weak results. Our volume went down very steeply, especially affected by the EMEA. With -48% in volume and -6% in revenue. And we also saw a -6% in volume and -53% in net sales. In the North America, we saw a decrease in volume of -27% and -9% in net values. Moving on to our distributors markets....
Going to the gross profit margins, we ended at BRL 354 million compared to BRL 440 million of the fourth quarter 2022. It's important to highlight the effect of the write-offs, which adding Brazilian internationals, added up to BRL 77 million in the quarter. If we had adjusted these write-off costs, our gross profit margin would go from 35%-40%. It would have been 4-5 percentage points better.
As André mentioned before, we saw an improvement, a good improvement in the costs of our manufacturing when we make the adjustment by the write-off, especially because of the productivity in the factories, and the reduction of raw materials is starting to be seen now in our figures, and we are certain that these benefits will appear even more of the reduction in the raw material prices and the better utilization of our manufacturing. Moving on to expenses. We saw a fourth quarter with a growth of 5% in the consolidated expenses compared to the fourth quarter 2022.
It's important to mention that we have some expenses, especially related to distribution, which were above the fourth quarter of 2022, being the resumption of our distribution in Brazil, of larger volumes, especially with this strong challenge of costs which we are going to face now in 2024. We also saw an effect of BRL 3 million related to the simplification of our structure. Our zero ZBB packages went down 1% compared to the last quarter in the ZBB package. As for the marketing, there was a decrease in 20% in the consolidated numbers, which it was affected mainly by the international. The international numbers saw a decrease of -35% year-over-year, and in Brazil, it was of about -10% marketing in Brazil. Moving on, we reach our normalized EBITDA of BRL 60 million.
We have an EBITDA coming of our operations, positive BRL 7 million, adding up to 67 normalized EBITDA. We have here a very strong effect of the extraordinary item that André, and also in the goodwill impairment of both Rothy's and Ioasys, reaching our statutory EBITDA, which was negative BRL 1.1 billion. Moving on to our net financial position, we left a net debt of BRL 817 million in September 2023, to a net debt of BRL 551 million for December 2023. This is explained mainly by the working capital, net working capital release and the inventory reduction.
When we look at the sum of this operational flow plus CapEx, we see that we generated BRL 289 million to reach the end of the year with a net debt, much lower than we have already had throughout the year of 2023. Moving on to the working capital. There was an important reduction of inventories, and it is particularly important to mention that it happened both in raw material and finished goods, and in terms of receivables, we reduced it 23 days in the receivables, which are clearly the effects of the rewire and better planning of demand and sales, which start to show up in our inventory levels. There is still a lot of work to do. We expect to have better improvements for 2024.
As for the receivable, the accounts receivable, we reduced it 11 days of our receivables compared to the fourth quarter of 2022. Looking at our suppliers or our accounts payables, it's decreased a lot throughout the year, throughout 2023, both because we reduced it strongly, our rhythm of buying raw materials, but also because of the cost of the raw materials themselves, which decreased it a lot. Now, with the resumption of raw materials in the manufacturing level, that's still normalized, but much closer to our historical manufacturing level, we go back to our accounts payable, so certainly it will evolve gradually throughout 2024 with the normalization of our manufacturing operations. Speaking of Rothy's , specifically, speaking of the results for the quarter, there was an increase of 21% in the net revenue compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.
One more quarter of positive EBITDA of $5 million. We also had seen a positive EBITDA margin in the third quarter, so now it was a little bit more relevant than in the previous quarter... and also of $6 million in as of net profits in the fourth quarter. As you had already heard, in 2023, we had seen a very important evolution in the gross margin being delivered by Rothy's. It's connected both to the improvement in their manufacturing in the in in their factory in China, and also reduction of the last mile costs of the e-commerce, resulting in this sequential evolution of results.
It's important to mention that, Rothy's closed 2023 with this fourth quarter with a stable cash, so they didn't burn their cash in 2023 after the results that we saw in the fourth quarter of 2023. We are moving now to our Q&A. We're going to release you to ask the questions. The first question is going to be by Guilherme Villela, JP Morgan. Guilherme, go ahead. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for your presentation. My question is about these operational levels of Havaianas, Brazil. When you look at the Havaianas EBITDA of BRL 24 million, without the write-offs, we can see that there was a significant improvement in the SG&A rate.
Inside those little boxes, which ones were the boxes that most contributed to this improvement in the operational levels, and is this sustainable for 2024, do you believe? You mentioned the inventory levels, that is, has been cleaned up in a certain way. Do you believe that this tendency is going to be maintained for 2024? Can you repeat your second question, please, Guilherme?
My second question was about if this improvement in the operational levels can be expected. Is it sustainable for 2024, given the destocking of the channels, since you have, you have proceeded in your destocking of inventory? So is it sustainable when you look at the first half of 2024?
Guilherme, thank you for your questions. I think they talk about one very important topic. That's why we first attacked this, you know, agenda.
I will start with your second question. Obviously, there are two angles that we can look from. To keep higher margin rates, we need two things. First of all, we need to keep this operational level that we had at the end of the year. The answer for this first part is, yes, we believe that the operational scale, there are no reasons inside the structure of the company to result in the sell-in disconnecting from the sell-out. The results, as you saw in the graphs we showed, it's important to mention that the sell-out is always an estimate. It's not an objective and accurate account of exactly what was the accurate number, figures, or the pairs sold to all consumers in all of our thousands of points of sale across Brazil.
We don't have a number. So according to the estimates, even though there is some inaccuracy, we can see the trend of the numbers. So the numbers have confirmed in the narrative that we have been building, have been telling you, that we believe that there was one more quarter where we would have seen an adjustment, and then the next step would be to have a almost zero difference between the sell-in and sell-out. I would say that we have no structural reason to see one more occasion of destocking. The sell-in should in fact reconnect to the sell-out. This is what is in our estimated for the year, in our perspective for the year, that we are going to go back to growing.
Of course, this includes that the selling has recovered, but has been recovered in the year 2023. Since we have drained our inventories, we believe that those two numbers will walk hand in hand. As for considering the operational scale in Brazil, we believe that this number is going to continue stable throughout 2024. The second half, which is also important for this margin efficiency if seen, is that we maintain our discipline in the expenses. We had a very important adjustment in our expenses at first, which was extremely relevant. We decreased 13% all of our packages in our ZBB, our zero-based budget. This number was maintained in the fourth quarter, and what we can see for 2024 is that these efficiency levels should be maintained throughout the year.
As I mentioned before, we worked very closely and in many details. In this first year, we did, you know, we got more the low-hanging fruit, and in the second year, we have many analysis, a lot of support, and we mapped a series of opportunities that will be tackled in this zero-based budget process. It's not only the process of creating a mindset in the company, but also making permanent adjustments to our expenses. Of course, that part of these adjustments, part of them need to be retaken. But on the other hand, we have other actions that are being implemented right now at the beginning of this year as we speak, which should maintain or even amplify this level of efficiency that we have seen so far.
So I would say that this SG&A efficiency should be permanent, and it's something important for what we saw in terms of generating results for Brazil. I'm going to invite Rafael just to complement, maybe to breaking the breakdown a little bit of the numbers as you requested. Answering your first question, Guilherme, when we look at the breakdown, only looking at the Brazilian operation, we saw a reduction of about 10% in marketing in the quarter compared to the year-over-year numbers. And we also had a reduction in the G&A, general and administrative expenses. So those two accounts bring back the reduction of expenses in Brazil now.
It's important to reinforce that we mentioned a lot of this throughout the call we had last quarter, that the reduction in marketing expenses is not structural. We have been working to have savings coming from other expense lines, so we can resume our marketing investments even to higher levels of our recent history, and so we can contribute to the growth of our top line and to make our operational leverage, you know, will move on. So for 2024, structurally speaking, we do not expect to have a decrease in the marketing expenses, but we do expect a decrease in the expenses in all the other lines, so we can increase our expenses in marketing.
What brought our expenses up a little bit in Brazil were the expenses with sales, except for marketing, especially with distribution, that where we saw a reasonable growth compared to the fourth quarter 2022. Just as a reminder, this process of resuming the leveraging in Brazil, we were much more concerned with resuming these demands. So in 2024, our focus becomes much more the costs of our logistics to make sure that we can go back to lower levels of logistics operations costs.
Thank you very much, Rafael and André, for answering my question. Next question is from Larissa with XP. Larissa, go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Rafael, André, Liel. Thank you for taking our questions here. I have two questions.
The first is, considering the adjustments you have been making in the company, if you have anything related to timing, especially for the write-offs, to make sure that they're the right write-offs have been made, and also for the S&OP adjustments, if you have any updates on that. Second question, I'd like to take the opportunity and speak to Liel. I know Liel has a very little time, you know, on the chair as CEO, but I'd like to that Liel talk a little bit about the opportunities that he has already identified in the conversations that he has had internally.
Thank you, Larissa, for your questions. I will start by taking your first question, and then I will give the word to Liel to talk about his perceptions, his perspectives.
So, Larissa, as for the write-offs, it's important to call attention for some points. The first is that the, the write-off of products follows a criterion, and it's very important that we make sure we use this policy for write-offs. It's an evaluation that we have to have, you know, because our accounting principles demand, and we need to have a homogeneity. We need to have a constant adjustment. You know, we cannot subjectively decide. This is objectively made. So we have these criteria that we apply for raw material. We have different criteria for the aging of the collections and so on in the finished products. And we attain ourselves to these principles, to these criteria that are defined. And what's going to define it is a timing of adjustments.
Again, I think it's important that you look to the set of all adjustments that have been made throughout 2023. I would say that we had over BRL 2 billion reais in Brazil and reais in adjustments, considering the impairments and the write-offs of raw material and finished goods. So there is a series of reductions that were made, which are consequences of decisions that were previous to this moment and some of the decisions to the inventory. These are all like decisions that were made, like, several years ago, like 2, 3 years ago, for different collections of products that were, you know, brought and purchased and acquired to our inventory. And some of them were not-- didn't have much of a good sales, so the adjustments were great, but the timing for possible future adjustments for write-offs will happen as these criteria-...
push us toward this. On the other hand, it's important to notice that these adjustments are non-cash adjustments. They were already—when they were produced or manufactured, they were obviously they had a cash effect, but the write-off or no write-off of products is a non-cash product that follows timing accounting principles that have a specific criteria, as I mentioned before. So for our interpretation of the real cash generation of the company, we are trying to show you that even with the adjustments inside our reported EBITDA levels, we are making this disclosure so you can realize that what the real results were behind those numbers. So what I'm trying to say is that, first of all, I cannot anticipate any kind of write-offs until it actually happens.
Nowadays, we have a plan to address this kind of products that are in the inventory. They are sellable products, and of course, inside our criteria, as long as we realize that there are products which have quality problems or they don't have market value, they are written off. But all the other products in the inventory, they are products that have a commercial potential. We are going to seek solutions, market solutions, and if at any moment we find that a part of these products or the accounting criteria point that we should go towards the write-off, we will then proceed with these adjustments. On the other hand, I would like to emphasize that this shouldn't have a strong relevance from the perspective of interpreting the levels of results of cash generation of the company.
We always have to be making those adjustments, and that's why we are opening and disclosing these numbers, you know. So all of these other margins that we have in performance, I gave you this number, the figures with write-offs and without write-offs, so you could see that. Well, having said that, for in the second point of your first question about the S&OP, all of these processes are processes that will be continuously addressed and improved. We saw important evolutions with the arrival of our global supply chain VP. He is dedicated to fixing those processes and the numbers that we see now, which reduce the a reduction in inventory, lowering of our manufacturing numbers, much more connected to what we are actually selling to consumers at our sell-out. We managed to make all of this draining of working capital.
You know, we are waiting for the market to absorb all of the products that were in the inventory in our chain. Of course, there is a permanent evolution, as I said, so it will keep happening. We still have to improve as for the predictive demand models and the streamlining of this process, but nowadays, this process involves lots of people in the company, and everyone works closely, you know, with the vice presidents to see what is forecast for the month, for what's forecast for the years, what we have planned for that period, and make sure that from the purchase of the raw material to the commercial actions we take, they are actually speaking to each other.
I would say that a good part of the route has been walked, and this makes us, you know, calm to say that we have a process that is very well organized. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stop here. We still have room for improvement. We have some new adjustments to be made, even though we have made most of the most important adjustments. I think there are evolutions to come, and we can still streamline our processes. Let's listen to Leo now, to his perceptions.
Hello, Larissa. Thank you for your question. Just, just a second. Well, as I said before, there are three parts of my to my perception. The foundations of the company are very solid.
We have a very strong brand, a strong international presence, and this is a great asset, a great foundation for us to create, to generate the growth. We have a great footprint of both the factory and distribution. We are present in thousands of points of sales. We have thousands of partners, wholesalers, retailers. This scale allows us, as we demonstrated before, to explore, cost reduction and improvement at our top-line numbers as we go back to our operational scale. And the third thing is to have a long-term, vision for the company. The stockholders and stakeholders, everyone has a vision, so the company is over 100 years old, and, and we have this perspective of growing in the long term.
So the power of the brand, the scalability of the footprint, and also this commitment to the long term, gives me the perception that I am at a company that has a huge potential for for growth from now, from now on. The second part is much more the current moment, you know, this transition, this turnaround that has been started by the team, which, as you have seen, the first results is what the ones that were the most immediate, the most needed. André mentioned we needed to avoid to have any kind of leverage, financial problems, so we see positive signs for that, and of course, we will continue working with that. The second part is to go back to the level of the Brazil operations, the operational excellence, and where we also see some positive signs.
The third, obviously, will be the strategic revision, mainly of the international markets, which is a third priority for us, if you want to put this way. So in addition to what we see in the numbers, the signs we see for this turn around are positive, and we already have the actions and priorities to move on, especially in 2024 and the upcoming years. I think in my perspective is that we believe that with focus and a combination of protecting where we are already strong and build all the opportunities where we can grow, we are going to go back to growing. The company will go back to growing.
When I mention focus, I mean focus on channels, focus on international markets, focus on categories where we are already market leaders, while at the same time we look for other opportunities for growth. I think the first example of focus was mentioned in the release. We are separating the management of the international markets to give more focus to the European and Brazilian markets, to focus on their markets specifically. We are creating a business unit that is focused only on what we call distributors or export markets, which are all the other markets. This is a first sign, a good example of focus that we are giving.
We are giving absolute focus in Brazil, in Europe, for both teams responsible for those two geographies, and creating a new business unit to focus all the other markets where we have a huge potential, and prior to that point, maybe we're not exploring because of the lack of time of the teams which are responsible for Europe and for Brazil. So we are going to be talking a lot about that in the next quarters, of how we are deploying this focus to try to generate results faster for the company. I do hope that you have a positive perspective of my week, you know, reminding you that I have been here in the company for a week only.
Thank you all for your answers and good luck in your next challenges. Thank you very much, Larissa. Next question by João Soares with Citibank.
Good morning, Rafa. Good morning, Liel. Welcome to the company. I wish you lots of success. Good morning, André. I have two questions. First of all, I want to... I know it's still very recent, this diagnosis, you know. I would like to explore this point about the international markets, because the perception of a certain simplification, reduction of the complexity of the geographies complexity. I think it was before, there were several geographies that were strategic for the company, and each one of them presented individual challenges. So am I understanding it right? I want to-- How do you see this roadmap of recovery for international operations, considering that 2024, it's still seeming a challenging year, you know, with order levels, orders, the level of orders placed still a little bit below what was expected.
Secondly, I'd like to explore a little bit the write-offs and also the cost per pair. If this is reflecting, if this margin of the raw material margin is appearing because of the lowering of the cost of raw materials, what is the margin per pair that you can see for 2024, considering all the improvements that you had in 2023, and will have in 2024?
Thank you, João, for your question. For your questions, in fact. I'll start by answering. I will answer a little bit of both questions, and Liel and Rafa, they might complement, you know, my two answers. Thinking of the international markets, I think the first important thing to say is what I mentioned at the beginning.
Obviously, we needed to prioritize or define what was a priority, and naturally, throughout 2023, which was a very important year for the company. Because of everything we saw so far on our slides, and because of all the advancements we made in our agendas, it was super important that we clearly defined our priorities for 2023, and obviously, to change the capital structure in the leverage and in our discipline of expenses in the company was extremely important as a first step to creating the foundations and give us the energy to do everything we want to do. I think there is a huge opportunity in the international markets. But in order to do that in the right way and exploring its full potential, we needed to have those priorities executed before.
This has been somehow made, but remember, this is still a continuous process. Along the second half of the year, we had an opportunity to have a deep dive in the international markets, and I think there were many takeaways from the analysis that we ran. These were not analysis made by one or two people. Lots of people participated in these, in these analysis that were made, and they were based on data, research, survey. It was not a diagnosing or diagnosis that was based only on the perception of individuals. There was a lot of analysis, a lot of data involved. Leo, as I said, has had the opportunity of looking at this work in detail, and he can also comment on his perception about that.
So all of this work has been shared, and it's important to create a convergence in the company, you know, across all the areas, in order to make sure we are all on the same page of where we are right now, what has brought us here, where we are right now. And I think I would say you are quite right. There is not an only reason, an only factor that we can blame on for having a worse performance for the international markets in 2023 than it was, you know, compared to the previous years. 2023 was a more typical year for the international markets, but we looked at back in 15 years of data, trying to understand the performance, and we looked at,
We broke it down by country, and we looked at a level of details that we were not capable of looking at. But we came to some takeaways that are very important, some learnings which are very important. I think that what you mentioned of simplification of our footprint is connected to what Leo mentioned of us having focus. Maybe one of the biggest learnings from this time working internationally is that the company spread across many geographies without any kind of consistency, both from the commercial or selling or distribution perspectives. And also when we look at the volatility of volumes, I'm not talking specifically about the decrease in the demand of volumes for 2023. I'm talking about several, you know, occasions.
We saw that we are, we spreading over 120 countries, and when you see the the strategy of for breaking into those markets, the, the pricing, the volume levels over the years, what we, we saw, it demonstrates to us that there was a footprint that it was very inconsistent over time. Again, I'm not talking about one year; I'm talking about a series of years. So it shows a lot of inconsistency in this market, the way we approached each one of those markets. So it's important to, to, to make clear for us that the international business is not a dogma, it's an opportunity. We're not in 120 countries just to be able to say we are in 120 countries. We want to have each...
That each one of those countries is contributive to the overall results of the company. When we looked at the balance sheet for each one of the countries, we even realized that in many countries, we're actually making a loss. So we don't think that we are going to make this anymore. This is not the objective of the business. We don't want to be in as many countries as we can. So even though we are in 120 countries, in some countries where we would like to be much more present, we sub-invested in those places. So we diluted our investment in some places where we had we didn't have, you know, good, relevant, consistent results.
On the other hand, we lacked investment in certain very important markets, which were relevant to build a very relevant international market. The good thing is that we don't have any kind of symptoms. We had lots of data to look at that there is any kind of tiredness towards our brand. Quite the opposite, we are top of mind in most of the places where we are working, and the consideration of our consumers for our products is still high. So what we need to have from our point of view is this sense of a prioritization, focus, and stability so that we are able to work on businesses which are profitable.
That doesn't mean that we are not going to try to break into markets and try to make some investments to have an operation with a certain level of profitability. But the spread over so many countries with this level of sub-investment and inconsistency is something that we wouldn't like to repeat, and we won't do it. So I would like to leave it much clear, this message, that being in 120 countries is not like a mantra that's important to us. What is relevant to us is to make things which are really contributive to the brand and for our position in the market. Another important thing is that when you look at the data, all of this data, there is a huge market and very little explored in flip-flops, which is what we do well.
This is what we are recognized all over the world, and we have lots of space to growing flip-flops in relevant markets with profitability, with the right level of investment in the brand in those markets, and with a better execution. So overall, this is the focus that we are going, the direction we're going to go. We're going to have an opportunity in our next Investors Day to share this with, you know, in more detail to all of you. But I think it is clear, this diagnosis is quite clear, and this converges with everything you said so far. Just one thing, let me jump in to complement what André mentioned. In addition to having focus in the business, we also have to view to the capabilities.
We talked a lot about, in order to be meaningfully present, internationally speaking, we needed to create the capabilities. So it's not a matter of prioritizing, but being prepared because so we can actually win in those markets. So the S&OP processes, they have to continue to allow our logistics efficiency, not only in Brazil, but also internationally, become a capability. There is a series of capabilities, so investment in brands, capability of building brands in those markets that we have already started, and we will move them on. With the prioritization and focus on the markets that we have a short-term potential, we are convinced that our international strategy will go to the next level soon. And also, speaking of the correct investments in marketing, in our brand, it's important to complement what Rafael mentioned.
The 13% reduction in the, in the ZBB, that reduction does not include the marketing. We are treating marketing, you know, totally apart from the other expenses, because we believe that the marketing is something that we want to avoid. Something in the past, something in the past, when we saw that expenses in SG&A increased, so we decreased our, our, our marketing expenses, our marketing investment. So this is a negative, you know, funnel that we don't want to go into anymore. We want to have a positive. We want to simplify, gain efficiency in what's not essential, in the extra costs that we have created over time, so we can have more energy to make the right investments on our brand, in the correct places, in the correct geographies, and in marketing as, as, as a, as a whole.
As for your second question, João, in the cost per pair, I can say that we evolved a lot in our, in our capabilities for, in our manufacturing capabilities, our manufacturing capabilities of our manufacturing lines. We made an incredible work in terms of productivity of our workforce, productivity and optimization of our manufacturing processes. It doesn't mean that's over. We will keep working on that. We have clear goals to continue to gain efficiency. We have some investment projects which are actually very little money. They don't involve any kind of relevant allocation of cash, but still, we found some projects which had that huge potential for return on investment. Especially because these projects will generate additional gains inside this discussion of manufacturing productivity and manufacturing efficiency.
On the other hand, we went almost to zero when it came to our additional raw material purchase. Because of that, we could make very little use of the decrease of prices of our raw material. Of course, there is something, but it's very, very small. I don't want to make any guidance on where the commodities are going. We avoid to have any kind of opinion on that. You know that I worked for over 20 years working with commodities, and I know that we don't know where commodities will go.
But having said that, we know that if the raw materials maintain the same level where they are right now, but of course, I cannot guarantee this will happen, but if this happens, if this unfolds like that, there will be margin to add profitability to our margin per pair out of these, you know, gains from the price of raw materials. But again, we don't have any opinions on the pricing of commodities. What I want trying to say is that there is a lot of profitability in the cost per pair. What we did right now was to reduce our inventory.
Now that the inventory is at a normalized size, we go into a second moment of the movement, which is recycling the inventory with a smaller price, which will eventually help us to make more economies to our cost per pair.
Thank you very much, all of you, for taking my question. João, thank you very much. We're going to go to the last question by Tales, with Safra, Banco Safra.
"Good morning, Liel and André. I have two quick questions. First of all, it's a follow-up on the international operations. I think you were clear about what you intend to do to improve the international operations, but in your mind, do you think this process of reorganizing the international operations will end in 2024 or will move on to 2025?
I would like to understand what would be a normalized cash flow cycle for the company, you know, thinking of when all of the adjustments have been improved.
Tales, thank you for the questions. I'm going to take the first one, and the second one is going to be taken by Rafael. About the timing of the international markets adaptation. It's important to say that the international markets will be a huge focus for us in 2024. In the release, we mentioned a restructuring of the business units. Liel mentioned that as well. Now, we put together all of the markets that we operating through distributors into a normal business unit to have more focus and coherence in our commercial approach, and so on, and operational approach as a whole. So this is one of the elements.
We are bringing a new leadership who is awarding the company at the end of this month, to be in charge of the operations in Europe, which is our largest international market, and certainly has a series of opportunities to be explored. They all were mapped over the last months. There was a lot of data analysis with, in conversation with the Europe's team. So we have a very clear agenda to be executed. Of course, this agenda is not a three-month agenda. It's not something that's going to be concluded quickly. It's not like reduce the CapEx or stopping to make one specific investment. It's an agenda of building, of you know, this...
For instance, this destocking movement exists in Asia and happened and affected the fourth quarter in Asia, and we believe it will probably continue throughout a part of 2024. So there is this execution throughout 2024 that obviously, as you know, in our business, the seasons have very clearly defined, you know, dates. So it's hard to tell for sure when which of those actions will be in place when the summer in the Northern Hemisphere starts. Probably the full results of these actions will be seen in 2025, probably. But it's important to emphasize that, one, we mapped several opportunities for compressing expenses inside the structures, the international structures, in several fronts, both in operations, but also in SG&A. And these actions are being implemented as we speak since the beginning of the year.
With some growth of the volume in all of the international regions, we see some expansion. It's not a recovery to the scale that we once had in the past. There are several effects that we need to leverage. We don't think it's going to be a very short-term recovery, but we think it's important to mention that there is a certain level of volume, this decompression, that will be rolled out throughout 2024. And this should happen, you know, help. Well, we want to have all the problems resolved, you know, now at the end of January. Of course, this will happen throughout the year, but obviously, with these first effects, we certainly expect not to have the same EBITDA level we had in 2023, you know, as a whole.
We believe that the EBITDA level in 2024 should see a substantial increase for obvious effects of increase in the volume and because of this economy, expenses. You know, we don't give any kind of guidance, so we cannot tell you any figures in terms of where we think it will be at. But it's important to bear in mind that the opportunities are mapped, the things are happening, the things are being deployed. The results should see an improvement throughout the year, but this is something that takes, you know, a few months to be implemented and felt. So probably we will be seeing them mostly in 2025. And Rafael, I was going to tackle the second part of your question about the cash cycle.
As for our main working capital lines in the cash flow cycle, you saw that we had an important evolution, both in the accounts receivable as well as the inventory levels. When we look at the inventory levels, we are still above medium-term levels that we have had in the past. So as a consequence of this entire process of improving our operational capabilities as S&OP and demand planning, we believe that our average inventory level will keep decreasing throughout 2024. This is a topic that we will continue to address... not only 2024, but also in the next years. As for accounts receivable, we believe that this is not where the biggest gains will come from. There was some important reduction there in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to the fourth quarter 2022, but we don't expect additional gains.
However, in our accounts payable, there is a double effect that we suffered in 2023 because of the very relevant purchase of raw materials. Our raw material purchase went up to, reached up to 55%, our average purchase levels. It's considering also that we were, we paid much less than we were, you know, we had purchased in 2022 and 2021. So what we see as gains from now on is still related to an additional reduction of our average time inventory. I don't believe that we are going to have any kind of accounts payable differences as we pay raw materials. We buy raw materials at a more normalized pace.
We believe that we're going to see, that we are going to see an evolution in 2024 in our working capital lines and working capital cycle.
Thank you very much, Rafael, for taking my questions. Since we don't have any more questions, we are going to have André with the closing.
Well, that's it, guys. I think that it was clear for you that in a process of turnaround process, it's important to show you the trends that are ahead of us, the symptoms that we find behind what can be seen, you know, more immediately, the numbers, you know. So we have been trying to show you a movie, not only a picture, and to see inside the movie, all of these elements, including what we are focusing on, to be able to build on for the future.
I think we are engaged, the team is motivated. We have a clear plan. We have a shared plan and a shared diagnosis of our priorities. These are the foundations, which is an alignment between all of us for the continuity of this agenda. We have had very good signs in these agendas, but we also see that there is a very good potential for the company from now on. We will continue working on this agenda, and I think we will still have a lot to benefit from it in the future. I'd like to thank you for this opportunity. I think it is clear where we are at, and we are going to be in touch in the next quarters, in the next releases. Good morning, everyone. Have a great day.