To access it, click on the interpretation icon at the bottom of your screen, and please select your preferred audio, English or Portuguese. For those who are listening to this in English, you can mute the original audio in Portuguese. This video conference is being recorded, and it will be available in the Investor Relations part of the website of the company, where the full material for the earnings calls will be made available. It's also possible to make a download of the presentation. During the presentation, all participants will be with their microphone- muted. We will start the Q&A session. To ask questions, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and write your question to enter the queue. Once called, you will be requested to activate your microphone, and you should do so to make the question.
These questions should be done all at once. We highlight that the information in these presentations and declarations that may be made during the video conference related to the business perspective, projects, forecast, and operational targets from Americanas, they are part of the beliefs and assumptions of the company. Future considerations are not a guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may refer to future events and therefore depend on circumstances may not occur. Investors should understand the economic conditions, market conditions, and other operational factors may affect the performance of the company in the future and actual results that are different from those expressed in these future considerations. Today, we are here with the executives of the company, Fernando Soares, CEO, Sébastien Durchon, CFO, and the Director of Investor Relations.
We will give the floor to the CEO of Americanas, sir, who will start the presentation. Mr. Fernando, you may proceed.
Welcome. Good morning, everyone. I believe that we can go to the agenda. First, I need to start this call sharing with you that it is a very special day. We registered the judicial recovery proceedings yesterday, which will go through the court, but this is a very special day with us. All the aisles, all the rooms in our headquarters here was in a different mood. I am bringing forward this discussion because everyone will talk about the three pillars that led us to bring forward this decision. The first is, which is part of our registration yesterday, that we followed all the obligations we had in the plan.
I will talk more about this later. We also execute a transformation plan that was very relevant in the company from the operational perspective and also strategic. The third, which is a little of the content of the material that we'll go into detail of the figures later. As we end 2025 with consistent, very consistent figures, I would like to go ahead and say cash bigger than the debt, positive net result and a better operational, much higher. It is really important. It is a year closing that is very symbolic for us, and I would like to thank everyone. Now even more to all the members, all the employees, everyone who is in our stores, in our office, in our regionals.
I also want to thank the leadership of the company, including [Leonardo Coelho], who started this plan some years ago. Mainly our consumers every day in our store, many of them fans, many of them helping us transform the company. Our Board and also our suppliers and partners, which have supported us and will continue supporting us in this moment of reconstruction of the company. Having said that, I would like to start with the first slide, which highlights what is this new company. It is very important to start getting used to this new structure. In 2022, we were a company half digital, half physical, and this company operated in a very independent way, had different strategies, distinct strategies, and isolated investment. Who knows our offices here, they were also separated offices. It had a very-
It had no operational structure, no logistical operation that were our own. We had our FinTech, which was a very strong strategic to retain our clients in the digital channel, which is a very common channel in retail. This company transformed completely to this graph that is in the middle of the screen and started being a physical store, having the store as in the center of our plan and the main point of contact to potentialize our relationship with the customers. The structures now are integrated, the strategies are converging, and we follow the same purpose of value. The physical store, it is the core of our business. The digital complements, giving our customer more availability. We have redone the whole business, and we have reduced the marketplace with having new strategic partnerships. We don't have M anymore.
We have another service platform. We reposition our brand. Now we are working with a lot of financial discipline, operational focus. We've transformed all of this in an agenda of reconstruction in the future. We talked about this in the last call. We're going to reinforce and follow up this plan. It's a 100-year plan of sustainable growth. I will give the floor to [Durchon], who will. I will come back to this strategic talk in the end of the talk.
Thank you so much. I will start highlighting some figures to understand better how Americanas is today.
Last year, we saw the delivery of more than BRL 16 billion in the physical, as Fernando said, and an expressive growth of almost 8%. I wanted to highlight this figure. We have around 1,500 stores in all the states in the country, and I think we are the only company can do this, and we have the contact of millions of clients. We have over 40 million clients in our base of active clients. Fernando talked about the members, 26,000 employees all over the country. We reduced just last year our accumulated 18% our expenses.
With all of that, we were able to reach an EBITDA adjusted of BRL 1.1 billion. The IFRS with the rent, of course, we have BRL 277 million, which is an improvement of BRL 169 million compared to 2024. He mentioned a very important point in the capital structure to go into detail later. We closed last year with a cash position. We had more available cash than the sum of all the debts of the company. Going a little bit further in slide five to talk about sales. We start with the last quarter of last year.
Most people know that the market situation was a quarter that was very complicated with several retailers having the results saying that the same-store sales were negative growth. Even with this complicated market, we were able to grow almost 3% comparing to same-store sales. In the whole year performance, very robust, 7.8% increase year-over-year. Highlight also that looking at the sales in this retail, our sales grew 13% much higher in the same-store compared to the company. The magic of our work, deep work was done of transformation of the structure of our business, and many stores reduced the sales sector. We made a whole work of optimization.
We were able to improve the sales higher than the growth of sales of the company. Same-store, it's worth highlighting that it is much higher than the inflation, 3.4% above inflation. Going to the slide six, to the gross profit. The logical consequence of the evolution of the company, we have a consistent growth of our margin, and a 13.4% in the whole year. You can observe that this growth of the gross profit represents 96% of the sales of the company. You can observe that the margin was higher than the growth of our sales. This means that we were able to, besides increasing sales, improve very much the gross margin of the company.
Looking in the whole year, we improved 2.2% in this indicator. Talking about sales, we're going to detail in the slide seven the expenses of the company. Looking last year, we had a considerable reduction in the last, especially the last semester of the year, where we took a lot of decisions of optimization of the cost structure of the company. This last quarter of the year, we did not capture 100% of the effect of the optimization done. It's a partial effect of this optimization of last year, and this will appear in 2026.
Over 20% year-over-year, that's 6% improvement of net sales of the company. EBITDA in slide 8, I brought both concepts Adjusted that we can see directly in our financial demonstrations. We were able to increase in the P&L, right? We were able to see the effect of IFRS 16 considering the rent of the companies. We had a growth even more impressive. We increased the EBITDA about BRL 277 million against BRL 108 million in the year before. I made a bridge on the right side to understand better the evolution year-over-year because we have in the variation of the EBITDA of the company two effects very distinct.
The first effect is that we talked about in the beginning of this presentation, that there is an operational improvement, very big. Yeah. 770 improvement. In this Adjusted EBITDA, we also had some effects that the volume reduced a lot in 2025. This represents a negative variation of BRL 600 million. In this variation of improvement of EBITDA, we have a BRL 800 million improvement. In the next slide, the net result of the company will show the operations. You know that we have two companies in the process of sales. We this sale will happen as we finish this Judicial Recovery procedures yesterday.
Focusing on the part of the company that we continue, Americanas, the net result of this year was positive BRL 98 million. We did this bridge, that it is on the screen, that it's worth remembering that in 2024 we approved our recovery plan and as the agreement that was closed in that time, we knew it we saw a lot of cut in debts. Taking this effect of the result of 2024 of BRL 13 million plus the impact if we adjust this one-off that happened in 2024, the net result of our continued operation, it was in 2024 negative of BRL 182 million.
Looking at the EBITDA and we have BRL 160 million growth, and we look at the net result, we have an even bigger growth of BRL 280 million. In the 10th slide here, I summarized the last two years just to show the evolution, a very clear result of the company's transformation that Fernando mentioned in the beginning. I will talk about each indicator, but looking at sales, 7.8% same stores, 15%, almost 15% to last year's, expressive growth of over 20%. The margin of the company improved, reached 27%. We reduced the expenses of the company. All of this we have as a consequence, have an improvement of BRL 3.7 million of the EBITDA in the company.
In the 11th slide to talk about the capital structure. As I mentioned in the beginning, we have a net cash situation in the right part of the slide. Looking a little bit better in the end of last year, we had gross debt. Our debentures below you can see, with interest, represent a total debt of BRL 2 billion. We had BRL 1 billion in cash available, BRL 1.4 billion in receivables. Then we presented here the liabilities from the recovery period. We pay every month. We have paid over half of it. We have this debt remaining of BRL 442 million. Adding all of this, we have this net cash position.
In slide 12, here we see the cash flow of the last 12 months. The left is the position that we had in the end of 2024, BRL 2.8 billion. On the right, the position in the end of 2025. This evolution, the first point is that we had some variations of discount. In 2024, we did not have taken the decision to sell HNET and this cash of these two companies were in the position in the cash of the company. On the other side, it was being considered a discontinued. We changed along 2025, HNET left another line of discontinued operation in year two, and the digital came back.
From a starting point of BRL 3 billion and a variation through several effects had the consumption of cash that is small of BRL 200-something million. This, it's worth highlighting the reorg that was done last year, a work of improving the working capital, which will benefit the cash, BRL 335 million released through this work. This work will continue in 2026. We had an investment. We took the decision to invest in the stores, in our system a little bit more, BRL 200 million last year. Yeah, we had several segments that were extraordinary, a recognition of PIS and COFINS of BRL 200 million.
We took the decision that made a lot of sense from the liabilities that we closed the transaction with FM, and then the BRL 25 million in cash. We paid out according to the recovery proceedings these installments of BRL 250 million. Again, we closed the year with a net cash position positive. These results that I wanted to talk about in detail, and now I will. Fernando has already talked about that is a very important milestone for us. In slide 14 to talk a lot about this request yesterday that we made to leave this recovery proceedings and or Chapter 11.
It's important to say that happened in a very short cycle compared to other processes that are similar. It happened in two years, which is the minimum deadline. It was an obvious decision for us for several clear reasons that I will mention here. We followed all the obligations of the plan, and it was from this perspective that it was a different recovery plan. We paid off most of our suppliers in cash since March 2024, and the suppliers are the ones that are being paid in installments and the ones that we have, the suppliers that we're still paying in installments. This will end 2028. Through several decisions, we strengthened the base of our stores and also of the digital.
The results that I just mentioned, 2025, we have a sustainable growth achieved with this transformation, this deep transformation of the company. I wanna highlight once more this operational improvement in the last two years, of savings, BRL 2 billion in savings captured in the last two years. This permanent achievement of improved operational results, and this will continue. Highlighting all of this, we closed the year with a cash position, a net cash position positive with a lot of visibility, even with a very high interest scenario that we still have. Due to all these reasons that we decided to go ahead with this request to leave the Judicial Recovery proceedings.
We trusted that we in the future, and it's a way to once more to make a declaration of commitment of the company with the employees, clients and suppliers. Now I will give the floor back to Fernando to talk about the strategy of the company and the future that we have ahead.
Thank you so much. As you said very well, in the second block, we'll talk about the future and where we're going. Moving on to the next slide. We already had in the end of 2024, taken the decision, very important, as the store, as the core business we have, the main connection to our customers. So since the half of last year, we've been working a lot. We have done over 10 million interviews with our consumers.
We started drawing what will be our plan of 100 years. Internally, we like to say that we are only 96 years old, but we're very happy to start preparing what will be this birthday of 100 years. A very important point in this strategy that is a detail, that is an internal detail, but I will be happy to share, is that we understand that it's an element of differentiation and I want to share with you what is this differentiation point that we are using here in the next slide. AMER stands for. It reminds us that our employees are in the first place, we value the diversity and the plurality of our people, and also in the background, trained people, motivated people, taking care of our operations. We have changed our agenda to take care of our teams.
M means Merchandise. It reminds us how important is our business since 1929, buying, selling with a good price promotion and taking care of curating the diversity, the range of our products. I remember very well buying CDs and DVDs in Americanas stores. E remembers Excellence, Operational Excellence. It's a pillar that we worked hard for in 2025. It's a continuous improvement. We really work hard, and we know that we have a lot of opportunity to work and improve our operations. At last, R, which is a new pillar and really important for us. R stands for Relationship. Building a deep relation, building a positive impact, transparency and trust. R stands for the way that we keep the relationship with our customers, with our suppliers, and eternally among the teams.
This AMER way will push our business forward, our plan forward. We are leaving this dynamic in 2025, but we are really excited in intensifying this for the next years. Moving on to the next slide, please. Having said that, we're gonna go to the center with our stores, our customers, our AMER way and our 100-year plan. We have chosen these great avenues of growth once more, most of them continuous. The transformation of our stores, the transformation of our diversity of products, Americanas Ads also, and also the pillar of consumer and growth that involves our digital and financial services. Today, I've chosen to highlight three points. I will talk about store transformation and the variety of our products. The transformation has already started. Looking at the
we have this same-store sales growth, and this has been able to. I would like to highlight beverage with a significant growth and cleaning products. New lines of products. For 2026, we're giving even more relevant to what Americanas is really well known for and operates well with our events. We are nine days from Easter, which is very important for us, and a lot that has happened this year and still has a lot to happen. When we go to stores, it's nice to share that we had three new stores opening. We have opened in Belém, Queiroz and Camaçari. We have one more launch for April. 54 of our stores have gone through a process of optimization. We will continue doing this dynamically.
You will notice that it was mentioned last week, a partnership with [iPlace], a very important partnership. We have others to be announced in the next month. It eases our movement in the store, but also the positioning of the categories that we work with. It gives even more consistency to our diversity of products. We are very happy with this. We have much more to say, 2026 to 2027 and 2028. I would like to also share with you that we have a business unit that is new one, which is Americanas Ads. We're looking at this as an opportunity that is very big for the industry, for our suppliers to build a relationship, a real relationship with our consumer.
We've been talking a lot about the new retail, how much digital and physical complement each other, how the consumer, you know, wants to have a retail where they can have an experience, you know, scrolling in the real world, go through the shelves, talk about convenience, finding a sale, finding something that they will find they will give themselves a nice gift. Americanas has the potential to bridge this gap and deliver this in a very nice way to the suppliers and industry. Over 800 cities, we are the retail with the biggest number of followers in the social media, over 40 categories and adding physical and digital, 95 million visits. We have a great potential. We started working.
We made an event with the industry. We have a lot of motivation along the year. It's an avenue of growth, not only for us, but also to our partners. No doubt, it's a great differential for our consumers in stores. Once more, one more slide. The last I'd like to highlight. We talk about the this year is this consumer and growth that talks about digital. As you know, we have our credit card, over 500,000 cards. The CRM has got some boost. We have 36 million identified clients. We've been using this base very well. It has an improvement performance of over 200%. We know our customer in each store of Brazil. We have the loyalty program again. Cliente A.
Cliente A program has no sales directed to the client. It's 3x bigger, the expenditure of each client in this program. In our checkout, we can already pay with this loyalty program, so it's a new way to have this relationship with our consumer. We are launching our credit in some regionals. We have some possibilities of 10 installments for purchases. The new digital that is part of the store, which is pick up in the store and also shipping, is growing a lot. We had a quarter-to-quarter growth of 11%. 97 of the stores already are active with this. americanas.com that has this partnership with Magalu. I'd like to highlight some of our stores in this new part of our digital has a digital penetration of over 20%.
We are convinced that this new digital is part of our future and delivers a need that our consumer was already asking for a long time. Moving on to the next slide. The next one, this is being responsible, socially responsible. Our transformation, thinking about the future, operational excellence. Parallel to this, you know, doing our role, which it has always been really well done. We are members of the Instituto MOVER. This is very active pillar for us, and will continue being so. Now, going to the closing, I brought for you to see in the last slide what was the theme of our convention. This declaration of future that we're making today started in the last, in our last, earnings calls.
We had the opportunity to do with the whole team to live this AMER way that I mentioned some slides ago. The theme was very appropriate, very suitable, Americanas back to the future. We reflected about this with our team, that we needed to respect and learn with the past, live intensely the future, the present, and then build our future. This is our mentality. 2025 was no doubt a very hardworking year. A lot of discipline. We took decisions that were very difficult, but we took them in the right time. We were able to transform our business, while following our recovery proceeding plans. This is a declaration of commitment. We will follow this mentality. We know that we will still have a lot of challenges ahead and a lot of opportunities ahead.
Now we are guided through a vision of the future, a sustainable growth for the next several years. 2025 was a very special year. Yesterday was a milestone for our business, we are aware that and very humble of our responsibility to keep building a future of this company that is so dear by us, by our employees, and by our consumers. Thank you so much for sharing the results of 2025 and the plans for 2026 with all of you. Let's move on to the Q&A.
Now we will start the Q&A sessions. Remembering, for you to ask questions, you should click the Q&A icon in the bottom of your screen and ask a question to enter the queue.
Once called, you'll be requested to turn on your microphone and ask the question. We ask, please, that all the questions be made at once. The first question was sent by an investor. Initially, congratulations, everyone, for your recovery plan that is ongoing. My concern has been the fall in the base of clients reported month-to-month. How can you revert this scenario? The stores are very well organized, but with a restricted movement, especially in the key date of the year. How to expand this base? Leaving the recovery plan, this brings more credibility. How can you bring these institutional investors closer to the company?
I will start by the question about the client base. You're right. Within absolute numbers, it has fallen in 2025.
We closed this work of transformation. We had to close with 300 stores, more or less. Obviously had an impact in this base of clients. We were not able to keep these customers with the closed store. This has to do with the transformation now. In a different context, we don't have more massive closing of stores. We are, you know, the normal gain. Sometimes some stores will happen, but won't be something expressive. This effect will not impact in the future. We started opening some stores. We opened three already this year, and this will revert this effect. Another answer that I would like to say, mention what Fernando said.
All the work of CRM that it's being done, and it's a recent reconstruction, this will help the growth in the digital. In this moment, our digital 2025 represents 4% of total sales of the business. With an expressive growth that we have in this digital in this moment, we will have other ways of capture clients. Our expectation from now on, I'm not saying that will be immediate, but it's to see these numbers start growing again in the following months.
Thank you so much for the question and complementing a lot of marketplace strategy that we showed in the first graph with a company structure that's completely different. The marketplace has a client base that is relevant, that is not the same client base that was in the store.
What I wanted to say in this point, how to extend this business, this client base and it is part of our strategy of consumer growth, that these are added service, especially Cliente A, Cliente A. It shows that it makes our consumer spend three times more. It's something very important in the strategy. Knowing that we have a client base that is very big, our role is to make sure that they have, you know, ticket expenditure and visiting the stores. New clients is always really welcome. The base, improve the frequency and ticket, and then it's assortment and service. Thank you for the opportunity to complement with this. I believe there was. The second question is a theme that is very interesting.
The talk of the company with the investor. Even with the request that we made yesterday to leave the recovery. It's part of our agenda in the company to look for the next month to bring this closer relationship with analysts and investors.
The next question was sent by Angelo. Believing the future of the company, are you planning to make partnership with Amazon in Mercado Livre?
Angelo, good morning. We are open to any opportunity that address a gap of our consumer. Everything that we're drawing here, part of this view, what can I maximize, you know, store base, the journey of our consumer, of our customer experience. When we make a partnership with [iPlace], we bring a digital brand to the physical world.
We also have our stores as an important asset. As the marketplace needs 1,500 places of delivery in Brazil. I believe so. I think there is space for partnership, but they have to go through this center that we chose to work, which is consumer in the store. We made this announcement with Magalu. And you can buy and you can pick up in the store and can receive through Magalu. So there's a lot of possibilities, but always we remember this view. So whatever maximizes the assets in the store and more customers.
Our next question from Luiz Guanais. Is it possible Americanas reach a gross margin of 35% and EBITDA at 7%-10%? This margin will make the company change levels.
Luiz, I can agree with you from a mathematical perspective, but let me explain how we think here. Gross margin is very delicate point. Our greatest objective here is not to reach a gross margin of, you know, specific percentage points. What we want is to grow our margin because that will pay the expenses of the company and leaves a greater EBITDA below, you know, in the P&L. It's a very sophisticated game. Increase the price is easy, but the client doesn't like that. Our positioning with the client is a positioning of a very competitive price. We are improving, and we do this with a lot of caution, very cautious and showing a lot of trust in the lines of work.
It's part of our objective to improve this gross margin, but always trying to find an optimization in reducing the losses, for example, in this line of work that in our point of view, doesn't make sense to, you know, lose this competitiveness with our client increasing prices.
The Q&A session is over. I would now like to give the floor to the company for the final considerations.
I would like to thank all of you for being part of this earnings call and later on, the first quarter is almost finishing. Soon we'll talk again. See you later. Count on us. Count on our commitment, our team, and see you next time.
The audio conference of Americanas S.A. of the fourth quarter results 2025 is now over. I wish everyone a great day.