Good morning. Welcome to Investor Day 2020, Universo Americanas. I am Fabien Picavet. I am the Investor Director at Universo Americanas, and today I have Raoni Lapagesse, who is the Executive Director of Investor Relations at B2W Digital.
Good morning, Fabien. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here in our event. Even if virtually, it's a pleasure to have you here at Investor Day 2020. This year, due to all the circumstances, we prepared an event that is 100% digital, with such a special content, with very special speeches that we'll share this morning. Fabien and I are here live. We are in a studio in our digital lab in Rio, and we'll spend this morning here with you. For that to be possible, we are taking all care and following all the protocols. Right, Fabien?
Yes, Raoni. We reduced to the most the people necessary here. Everyone present in the studio was tested and is wearing mask except for Raoni and I, to facilitate the communication with you. Due to the same reason, we chose to record the presentations that will be presented this morning, and we'll be back live for the Q&A session. Right. For you to organize and make the most of the content we have here, we'll start with the agenda. Let's see. The first presentation, Raoni and I will update the status and the highlights of Investor Day 2019. We'll have Miguel Gutierrez, CEO of Universo Americanas, talking about the strategic view of the company. We'll have Timotheo Barros, CEO of Americanas, talking about the physical platform. We'll have Wellington Souza, that is the Let's head, and he'll talk about the fulfillment platform.
We'll have João Guerra, CTO of Americanas, talking about our data-driven culture. We'll have the presence of Anna Saicali, CEO of IF and Ame, and she will talk about our model-driven innovation. Then Marcio Cruz and Jean Lessa, the CEO and CTO of B2W, will talk about our digital platform.
After all presentations, we'll come back live and Fabien and I will have here on the stage the CEOs, Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Saicali, Marcio Cruz and Timotheo Barros for the Q&A session. We'll count on your participation by sending your questions to the email that you can see on the screen. We'll repeat them during the presentation. Questions may be sent to the address id20@universoamericanas.com.br. Let's have our first presentation. Just to remind you, we'll have the evolution and the highlights of 2019.
The first highlight was the credit card, Ame, partnership with Banco do Brasil. This is a digital first credit card, completely linked to the app, Ame, and you can have it in our stores or Ame app. Another news that we had last event was the partnership between Ame and Stone. During this year, we've had many other partnerships like with the Cielo and Getnet. This way, Ame is spreading its acceptance and is present in 2.8 million places. Another highlight was Ame Pro that was launched. This is our retail system. It's available for merchants, and this is the system we use in our stores. In its mobile version, we have more than 5,000 PDVs working. It was very important during the main event this year because it allowed us to deal with the clients no matter where they were in the store.
We also launched our opening schedule for seven new centers of distributions, focusing on being closer to the client. Last year, we launched the new CDs, and we had 15 distribution centers. In 2019, we opened two new ones, and in 2020, we already opened five of them. In 13 months, we account for all the openings that we should be until 2020. We'll give more details in the centers of distribution with Wellington Souza in his presentation. Another highlight was the internet procurement launch. The team was hired this year. The opening of the office will be next year due to the situation this year, but the operation is already very important to leverage the cross-border and on brands operations. Another point we highlighted in the acquisition of Pedala and Courrieros. We procure and we merged with them with a new model that is bikes delivery.
Since the last year and during this year, we had integration of the companies in our operations. It has leveraged the ship from store and the categories of markets with Americanas Mercado. Only in 2020, we had more than 1 million deliveries by bike. Another highlight is the launch of Americanas Digital. We have about 100 square meters focused on technology, assisted sales, helping people to buy through the internet. It has been proven a very important O2O hub this year. We also launched our goal of reaching 100 million items available to our clients until 2022. During 2020, we had a big spread in new items. This November, we overcame 80 million offers.
We are quite well in positions to overcome our goal for two years. We also talked about the speed-up growth of the physical platform, focusing on the database of clients and the frequency of relation with the clients. We'll talk more about it in Timotheo Barros's speech. He's the CEO of Americanas. We talked about the route of growth of B2W that was much higher than our expectations. It motivated us to rethink our plan of growth for the next years, being even more ambitious. Marcio Cruz, CEO of B2W, will talk about the new route of growth for the next years when he presents B2W Digital in our platform. These were the main highlights of Investor Day 2019. We lived that during this year.
It's very important for you, let's remember to send your questions to the email that Raoni mentioned in the beginning and that you see on the screen. We invite Miguel Gutierrez, and then we come back for the Q&A session. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. See you soon.
Thank you, Fabien. Thank you, Raoni. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here with us, and welcome to our Investor Day 2020. To me, it's an honor to be here with you. I'd like to start talking about what we are doing this year, in 2020. Such a different and challenging year. We had to overcome and reinvent ourselves individually and collective, in such a way we could be present here today. As presented last year, Universo Americanas comprises Americanas, B2W, Let's, Ame, IF – Innovation and Future.
Along with the sellers and merchants and suppliers, we try to have a bigger client base and increase the demand, all that to be even more relevant in the daily lives of our clients. In such a different year like this one, when Universo Americanas is celebrating 21 years of social relevance, our priorities have changed. We had to start preserving the health of our team, our clients, and help society to overcome such a difficult moment. When we talk about team, I would like to thank all the efforts of our team that could make our Universo working during this period. This way, we could preserve almost 15,000 job positions. We applied all the safety protocols. We have 80% of our personnel in home office. We are taking all the security measures to ensure safe operations.
Besides, we created a network of assistance and coverage for all the costs and prioritization, and we had more than 30,000 consultations and COVID tests and had more than 15,000 vaccinations. This way, we could make the company working, which helped us deal with millions of clients during the pandemic. We changed our work. We prioritized essential items. We kept our stores open whenever possible, having alcohol and masks. We had all the safety protocols followed in our operations. We created new models of delivery and disclosed all the guidance for prevention according to the WHO. In such a way we could in fact have safety sales for our clients. At social level, we try to be actively participating in the efforts of society to overcome such a difficult moment. We created our institutes, Juntos Somos Mais Solidários, that made millions of donations.
We went to China to collect our PPEs. We donated more than 300,000 masks and tons of alcohol and gel for families in the Amazon. We distributed more 1 million bottles of water to many communities, donated more than 300,000 hygiene kits to the elderly in many places. We participated in the construction of campaign hospitals in Rio. Currently, we are participating in the adequacy of the vaccine factory along with Fiocruz. We know this period is not over. We believe that we are helping everyone to be closer to the end. All that comes along with our commitment with a sustainable growth based on the pillars of environment, social and governance. Since 2015, all our sustainability strategy is in line with the Agenda 2030 of the UN. Out of the 17 ODS, we chose five as our priorities.
We want quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, a reduction of inequalities, and actions against climate change. We have a lot of accomplishments to mention. On the environmental side, our operations is neutral carbon. 100% of our emissions are compensated by forest projects in the Amazon. We have the inventory of CO2 since 2010, and it's audited since 2016. Our bike fleet accounts with more than 1 million deliveries. At social level, we have a partnership with the Fundação Amazonas Sustentável to promote social inclusion, entrepreneurship, and the marketplace in the Amazon.
We promoted gender equality, and our invest has already 50% of leadership of female leaders. We have a strategical partnership with UNICEF, making available job positions for low income youngsters. We created education foster programs that reached more than 4,000 teachers and thousands of students. In the governance level, we have a lot that has been done. Nowadays, we offer 100% to all stakeholder. This year, 47% of our members in the council are independent. We have six specialized committees that the audit committee is comprised 100% of independents. Our development agenda is based in ISS recommendations and IBGC. Next steps, we want to look for certification. Our priorities for the upcoming years. The base our efforts are promoting sustainable growth, having the best talents, improving innovation environment, intensifying data analytics use, increasing procurement frequency, making broader our supply chain platform, generating value, and reinvesting in that.
Given that all, I would like to introduce a video that tells a little of our background.
Universe. You know. It lives in constant expansion, even in the most difficult times, because the universe is adaptable. We are just like that. We adapted ourselves, invented ourselves, and we went far beyond from that. It is not for any reason that we have a universe in our world and a universe of people surrounding us, true superheroes that dedicated their best to every need, to every delivery. Our heroes made us stronger than ever, making our mission the strongest as possible, bringing Brazilian people everything they need, anytime, anywhere, with all safety possible. In 2020, undoubtedly, what they mostly needed went far beyond products. They needed solidarity. They needed safety that they went to pick this up from the other side of the world. They needed care. They needed hope.
Indeed, great actions marked our year, but the small daily happinesses weren't forgotten as well. We needed to facilitate Brazilian people's lives, hence we looked for solutions in order to save time and money, overcoming all expectations. We are not stopping there, because this was only 2020, and we have many years ahead of us in order to keep writing the story of this country. Believe us, we've been doing that for over 90 years with the same spirit to overcome and deliver from 1929. Let there come 2021. We'll keep on expanding. Also because the universe is constantly expanding, and when it grows, we grow as well, hence opening a universe of new opportunities.
As you know, our Investor Day 2020, we introduced a few goals for the upcoming three years. Now I would like to mention a little on our evolution steps and our metrics over this year. The expansion of Universo Americanas keeps going on. We've reached 4.4 billion annual visits. We already have more than 2,000 suppliers. We have 1,713 physical stores distributed in over more than four cities. We can respond to more than 100% of postal codes, and we are answering 77% of the PIB. Nowadays, Ame is accepted in over 2.8 million stores. We also have 87.7 thousand sellers. That means our universe keeps expanding despite this so different year.
When I see our bases of active clients, last year, we established a dream of reaching 2022 with over 46 million customers. This year, we've reached that goal. We have evolved eight million active customers in relation to past year.
When we see our frequency, we evolved that in 18%, a benchmark which was 8.6 contacts per year is already 10.1. We are following a good path in order to reach the two-time goal. When we see our bigger figures, taking November that year, our total GMV has reached BRL 39 billion. Our online GMV has reached BRL 25 billion. We've reached 336 million transactions, and we've offered our universe 81.8 million items this year. We are over our planning from what we presented last year. Now, I would like to update our action strategy regarding values. Last year, we introduced our strategy comprising three great thrusts: H1, H2, and H3. In this organization of ideas, H1 followed cash flow, cash generation. It would be our physical platform. H2 would provide an exceptional growth by means of digital world. That would be, in this case, B2W.
H3, we would develop new initiatives, eventually, that would be conducted by IF. We believe that this approach will allow us to tackle different initiatives simultaneously. We've done more, this year, we gave one step ahead in order to organize ourselves differently to make that model work with more celerity. In 2018, we created IF that went to become the leadership of our matrix. We invited Anna Saicali, present from B2W to be head of that, we can see the results in this case. Back then, in H2, Marcio Cruz took over the CEO position of our digital platform. This year, we gave one more step, creating Universo Americanas, we created a specific structure for that. Nowadays, I'm busy with Universo Americanas. At the level of the physical platform, Timotheo Barros, who was CEO from Let's, became Americanas' CEO.
With the exit from Timotheo, we invited Wellington Souza to take over Let's. We created a framework comprising people and customers that will comprise the universe as a whole. The leadership is in charge of João Guerra. All this personnel will be with us over our presentation, and they will be able to share some of their excitement on what we've been doing. Another very important step we've given was improving our capital structure. We've made a combination, a strategic one, with equity and debt. We made a follow-on of BRL 7.9 billion in Americanas store and increased our capital in the order of BRL 4 billion at B2W. We reduced our debt. In terms of that, we entered the international debt market with two 10-year gain of $500 million. Total, we've caught more than $4 million that will be used to increase our growth phase.
With that, we will be able to invest our cash flow in our operations, being more ambitious with our purchase algorithm. We've created that. We've created our purchase algorithm. We believe in creating long-term added value. To do that, we believe we need to in our financial discipline. In order to guarantee that, we made our big bang growth model that basically will have the biggest goal of identifying and prioritizing possible growth routes to our universe. With that, we established priorities, create a funnel of strategic opportunities, sectors, and companies. Once that is done, we proceed to a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the several opportunities, so as analyzing whatever is necessary. After that, we do an execution on creating value. We are excited about these dynamics. As of now, we've met 54 opportunities in nine priority segments.
In order to give you an idea what we've been doing, for example, inside our axes H1, H2, H3, identified, for example, that a specialized logistics could contribute to our H1 and our H2. A drug store could contribute in a special way to the growth of our universe, and so on. Well, to wrap this up, I would like to say, Universo Americanas is unique, flexible. It has outgrew what was established for 2020, inventing changes that will fight for a superior growth to what was previously predicted for the upcoming years. I would like to thank the participation from everyone, and I would like to invite now Timo, who will move on with our presentation. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Miguel. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Investor Day 2020. This year has been bringing a lot for us to learn. We've accelerated our initiatives. We've been doing many different things. We've been delivering consistent results, and above all, our team had been giving a great show. We've made some material to share with you all on what we've been doing in our physical platform. The physical platform is a very important leverage to Universo Americanas, in order we can get more and more relevant in our daily customers' lives. We want to save time and money overcoming expectations. What means being swift, selling at a fair price, operating at the highest level of services.
Over the years, our physical platform had been constantly reinvented in order to answer consumption needs in the several sales journeys of our customers. Within the last 20 years, we've created several pop stores. We've been investing intensely in people, technology, and distribution in order to offer to our customers everything, all the time, anywhere.
Our business model is unique, and it has a few differentials: unique capillarity, great client bases, elevated purchase frequency, broad assortment, strong presence in events, and multiple formats. When we see the evolution of our physical presence over the years, we left from 19 stores to more than 1,700 stores. From more than 30 stores to more than 700 stores over all states and federal districts. It's a 77% coverage of our population. Such a capillarity is unique, and it leaves us closer from all our customers. Doing an X-ray of our stores' profile, we have very interesting information. When we see the separation, the division of stores between capitals and the outdoors areas. When we see the demographic density, 27% from our stores are in cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants. Such a combination is very powerful. Outside the big centers, outside the big capitals and smaller cities.
Our client base is also a great differential. We have 30 million active clients. Our audience is basically female, and when we look at the age and the age groups, the profile, our audience is younger. Talking about the youngsters, recently last July this year, Beewolf, that is a platform to measure the preferences of the youngsters from 16 to 24 years in Brazil. They launched a ranking of preferences of national and international brands. We were in fourth place. This is a very important indicator because we are attending all kinds of audiences in terms of age. Our business is a high-frequency business. When we look at the flow of visits to our stores, we are talking about more than a billion visits a year at our stores.
It's more than 280 million transactions a year and as a result, we have more than 11 times a year of a person visiting a store. This is a great unit of the business model. We have a big assortment at our stores. You can buy chocolate or a full screen TV. We sell more than 45 categories, including food, health, beauty, personal hygiene, electronics, toys, and so on. When a client enters a store, they know they will find what they need. We also have a huge presence in events. When we look at our calendar, we are talking about more than 40 events distributed in a year. We have the national and big impact events like Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas, with a big flow of visits to the stores.
We also develop our own events like Beauty Special, Chocolate Show, Crazy for Cookies, and Kids Special. When we look our multiple formats of stores, they are quite flexible. We have five models: traditional, express, convenience, Ame Go, and digital. They can vary from 50 to more than 1,000 square meters, which generates a lot of flexibilities for us to be in different cities with different sizes or being on the streets or in a shopping mall and so on. All that is only possible due to our team. This is a make-happen team. We deliver results. We are more than 24,000 employees. We are a young team. 84% is less than 30 years old. 100% of the managers are trained internally. It's part of our culture. This is a big differential to us, and 60% of our leadership is female.
Here I would like to thank especially our team who worked and is working nonstop to make all the operations happening to comply with the consumption demands of our clients. Talking of purchase, shopping experience, we have a lot of initiatives to share with you. The first one is payment via Ame in our stores. Today, Ame is accepted in 100% of stores. Paying with Ame by transformational is much more than paying through an app. This is a power loyalty tool. There is no contact. It's very safe and very fast to the client. When we compare credit card or debit cards and Ame is three times faster. We have many functionalities in the app, and I would like to emphasize the possibility of having cash-in in the PDV of all our stores.
When we look at the Ame transactions this year, the volume was 2.7 times higher than last year, and the frequency of shoppings of an Ame client is 3.1 times higher than a client that doesn't use Ame. This is a very important model to increase our frequency of purchase. Another initiative to emphasize is Ame Pro. This is our mobile PDV. It's implemented in 100% of stores. It gives a lot of agility and speed to the experience. The client can enter the store and pay at any site of the store. It's much more convenient and much more agile for the client. We have 5,000 mobile PDVs implemented, so this is 33% in the PDV base of all our operations. Another highlight is Ame Pro, our proprietary PDV technology. It is 25% faster than the previous solution. It works continuously.
It's a net cloud solution, means it can operate 24/7, so it doesn't end on fiscal negotiation. The backstage operation is much better. It was important for our network in Black Friday because we left most of ours open 24 hours to make the operations more fluid. Assisted sales is also another initiative. We had more than 800 stores and great part of the clients demand information and wants personalized treatment and consultancy. It is a place where we can concentrate all services, all the sales. It's a huge success. We are quite happy with the results and our goal is in a short time to reach and take the services to all the company stores. WhatsApp, we launched it in March, April this year. This new purchase sales channel that is implemented in all our stores. It's an assisted sale with direct contact between the client and the employee.
Many times the contact is so personalized that the client demands the associate dealing with the WhatsApp to make the delivery. It's very nice for us because all the deliveries are carried out in about one hour, leaving from our stores. Digital manager implemented in 100% of our stores. It is a way of knowing the neighborhood and understanding the consumption needs, understanding the demands, and adjust the assortment and increases the engagement of the community to the store. It allows differentiated promotions and sales. Now instead of having national big campaigns, we have differentiated campaigns one by one, store by store. Ame Go, besides being a model of store, it's a big lab for us to test demand and new ways of operating. It's a model in which there is no cashier, no lines. You take the product and you go in a fluid way.
We have three stores operating, and this is a big learning now for us. In a similar way, we are also testing the Scan and Go. It is installed in Ame app. It also allows us to operate with no lines, no cashier. The client just enters the store, chooses the product, scans it, pays through the Ame app, and leaves. It's very fluid, very fast, generating basically no wastage during the sales process. We also have the self-checkout. That is the one with 20% less time in lines. It's implemented in three states in some stores.
In the stores it is implemented, 90% of the transactions go through the self-checkout. When we look at all the initiatives that we presented and another set that we have been developing, it takes us to the new ways of interaction with the store, more speed in dealing with the client, and more mobility of operation. This is a way of making it revolutionary for the client and improving their experience. Now, talking about the combination of both worlds, the physical and the digital platforms. When we have a physical platform, we have a set of characteristics, and the same is worth for the digital platform. When we combine both characteristics and attributes, we can offer a set of services and solutions that is quite powerful. For example, the O2O solutions came from this combination of physical and digital.
It is also possible because we are part of the Universo . I would like to give some examples to show this O2O experience and how one channel potentializes the other. For example, the client goes to one of the store in search of a fish. In the kiosk of our store, we can offer this kind of product to the client. In this way, we can offer the physical, throwing the flow of visits of clients to the digital world. On the other way, we have the click and collect. The client enters the website, chooses a product, and chooses a store for the delivery. He goes to the store to take the product. According to our research, 54% of those who collect product in the store end up buying another kind of product.
This is the understanding, the point of view of the digital potentializing the physical platform. Again, this combination of both worlds is quite powerful and ends up speeding up both businesses, the physical and the digital platforms. Another example of potentialization of improvement is that all our stores are online. All the sorting of all the stores are available 24/7. It means that the store is open all the time. If the client is at home and then they choose a store, and generally we all have our preferences in terms of stores. You enter a preference store and you can navigate any time, any day.
You can check all the assortment in the end with Ame. When you finish the process, you define if you want to take the product in the store or if you want to receive the product delivered in your home. Talking of delivery, this service is available at all our stores in 705 cities. Another novelty is Store Mode. This is a virtual assistant to give more fluidity to the client in our stores. How does it work? The client with the Americanas app, with a geolocation. The system knows that you are close or within one of our stores, it opens the app in the Store Mode, offering a lot of functionalities so that you can shop better. You can navigate the promotions and all the products and scan the price.
Now we have you to show the combination of both worlds, the physical and the digital, and how businesses can be improved. "Don't forget to buy the diapers, please." "Okay, I'll go to Americanas, it gets fast." Navigation through the stores closer to the online address. More than 1,700 active stores. More than 22,000 deliveries working in more than 750 cities. Purchase experience that we just saw is transformational and shows the combination of the physical and digital channels. This, what we saw happens many times at all stores every day. Just to remember, our vision of future is to be more relevant in the daily lives of our clients. This way, improving our physical presence and our capillarity to be even closer to our clients is part of the strategy, and this is how we'll keep up opening stores.
We mapped 2,090 potential cities that could have at least one store. 750 cities, we are still there, and 1,336 would be able to receive at least one store. When we run the growth algorithm, we'll see more than 2,000 additional stores that can be opened over the years. The growth algorithm is not summarized in only expanding the areas of sales. We won't expand that with only opening stores. We have other leverages like, for example, knowing better the market where we are, increase the options in the regions and our own markets, intensify the use of analytics, spread the initiatives O2O, improve Ame not only as for payment but also as a powerful loyalty tool, and use the local workforce in the regions where we are. This way, we reach to the end of our presentation.
Once again, I thank you all for your presence, and I invite Wellington now for Let's finished platform.
Good morning. I am responsible for Let's. Let's is our logistics and distribution platform. When we see the history of our company, we see that logistics has been in our scope. We created Let's in 2018 with the goal of giving support to all our initiatives in Americanas' Universe, both in the physical as in the digital world. When we understand and put our customer in the center of that very strategy, we have a lot of innovation and a lot of people, which is our competitive differential. We see how easy and simple it is to understand that we want to deliver as fast as possible, and in order to do that, we need to be closer from our clients. We defined six strategic pillars. First of them is expansion of our supply chain platform. We've opened five distribution centers over 2020.
We are closing our year with 22 distribution centers spread all over our national territory. We've opened DCs in Fortaleza, Salvador, Ananindeua, Brasilia, and Vitória. Well, figures are huge and what makes us very proud is that we are delivering within 24 hours in over 700 cities all over Brazil. We are talking about over 700 cities having a delivery system within 24 hours. Now, regarding the acceleration of our automation plan, we started 2019 with two sorters. We've opened seven sorters over 2020, and they were key to overcome this year. We have a great goal, reaching 2022 with 17 sorters. These are goods screening devices. We want to reach 2022 with 17 sorters, doing 90% of these deliveries by sorters. Sorter is a screening device. It increases our screening capability and our shipping capabilities. We have a greater gain at about more than 50%.
Talking about strengthening our distribution fabric, we are talking about more than 700 stores, distribution centers. We are talking about 200 hubs. We are talking about national capillarity. What would help us and also our partners and sellers with faster deliveries, we are talking about smaller cost, an increase on the frequency of delivery, and greater availability of vehicles in our national territory. Comparing the two models, the conventional model and embedded model, we can see clearly the biggest advantage of the embedded model, because you have a van, a truck, any type of model, leaving a distribution center from Lojas Americanas, and you have another one leaving B2W. When you have an embedded model, you have the same truck with goods from Lojas Americanas and B2W bringing to our Let's bases. From there, we distribute quickly to our customers so as to our stores.
Gaining a scale that is better than the previous model. Sustainability has been always very important for us. Perhaps one of the topics that is mostly innovative, we are all the time thinking in alternative ways of delivery. This year, we made 1.8 million bike deliveries. This year, we saved 85 tons in CO2 emissions. That's just the beginning on alternative delivery models. Regarding that, we also have our container bases. Basically they have the same role. You have a reference point between model. It takes the good and quickly. This distribution is made in an average array. We can have either a fixed basis or something mobile, using from our capillarity store parking lots. Also click and collect places, what would give gain and momentum in our scale. Now talking about fulfillment centers. This topic for us is something very important.
We have a robust platform basis. B2W Fulfillment guarantees a quicker delivery, guaranteeing that we will have an intelligence and assortment, we'll have an optimal stock management, guaranteeing flow. A greater exposition of products in order to reach a greater customer experience, in order to do more sales with our sellers. The biggest advantage that Americanas is totally scalable. We can have a scalability which is greater than what we have normally. Well, regarding what's good to our sellers is both good to our customers. Everything we've made on having an exclusive CEO on the intelligence of assortment, having better service, again, we are talking about having the fastest delivery in Brazil. Everything to help our sellers to sell more.
Now regarding delivery time, when you have a seller in 3P and you compare delivery time with our 1P, and we bring our sellers inside B2W Fulfillment, we are talking about delivering 3P at the same speed of 1P. We are talking about delivering 55% plus faster. Our delivery will be 55% faster when our seller is within our B2W Fulfillment platform. Now talking about expanding deliveries in up to three hours. We've started in January with our ship from store. It was somewhat shy. We've scaled exponentially inside this model over the year, and in November we've reached 147,000 deliveries within three hours. We are only able to do that because we have our own crowd shipping platform. We are talking about 22,000 couriers delivering over 700 cities, and 79% from our deliveries are done using our Ame Flash.
Talking about pickup points and lockers, this information is fantastic. We started in 2018 with 1,001 click-and-collect points. In 2019, we had 8,347 click-and-collect points, and we've closed 2020 with over 10,850 click-and-collect points in all our national territory. We are talking about stores, on partners, and metro stations. We are talking about many click-and-collect points. A lot of capillarity. Again, talking about lockers, we started in January with three lockers. We are wrapping up December with 81 lockers, and that's an equipment which is fully standalone. A lot more convenient, providing a lot of convenience to our clients, and we believe that's a technology that will be expanded by us to use our capability in order to offer an optimal service in many other places all over Brazil. Now to wrap this up, we are very proud.
We've done in November, 47% of our deliveries within 24 hours. We've done 73% of deliveries up to within 48 hours. What makes us the fastest delivery in Brazil. I would like to invite you to watch a video together with us just to see our operation. Everything we've mentioned here, how it is practiced, all this robust logistics and distribution platform live. Just so we see how things are done. I would like to thank you all and invite you to our Christmas, which is the biggest Christmas in Brazil, and I would like to call João Guerra, who will be talking about data-driven culture. Thank you.
Hello. It's a pleasure to be here with you again to talk about something that we love, that is the data-driven culture. We've been dealing with that for a long time in the company, and I'll talk a little bit about it. Basically, this is based on three pillars: people, processes, and technologies. People with a digital mindset and passion for data, technologies to store, process, and illustrate in a fast way the big amount of data, and processes that we can change everything, making everything faster and more profitable. People is something so nice to talk about that we have a video to show you. Today, Universo Americanas comprises more than 37,000 people and more than 1,500 data specialists working daily, focusing on development and use of this culture.
Within this team, more than 190 engineers and data scientists are responsible for challenging the universe to work in the fields of big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. Look at the profile of the data specialists in Universo Americanas. 78% have STEM training focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 77% have less than four years in the company, and 80% are up to 35 years of age. This is the evolution of a team made of the best talents with digital initiatives and a strong presence in professional networks like LinkedIn, where we have more than 1 million followers. Besides, we have a lot of events like the more than 160 lives and webinars, more than 60 meetups, and more than 20 technical mentorships to identify differentiated profiles to our data specialist team.
We want more of these talents entering the company. We have more than 100,000 new enrollments for the opportunities and jobs in the universe. We can emphasize initiatives like admissions and onboarding, 100% digital hiring for a day, and summer jobs in international universities, gamified training processes, and we have more. Besides this highly qualified team, we have more than 210,000 hours of training and partnership with centers of training and knowledge like Harvard, COPPEAD, FGV, and our digital lab. This is our initiative along with PUC-Rio. Well, you could see that we have a lot of trained people in the network. The second pillar, technology, it has to be very new, modern to deal with that. We thought about our current bases. We have more than 20.8 million machines, 82 million SKUs, and 46 million active clients.
This combination generates huge databases, it's not only. We have more than 4.4 billion visits and 3.5 billion searches, giving us more than 336 million transactions, more than 3 PB. For us to deal with all that, we need to create technological architectures to address two variables: complexity, very large data, and fast data. We needed huge processing, we need to give data in real time to all the users. Today, multi-cloud, we work with the main providers of the market. We have an architecture of an API that is free. We can connect to all of the existing systems. We are multi-frameworks with all the programming languages on the market to change digitally our processes. We like roboting a lot, more than 350 processes today use robots and mainly use artificial intelligence.
We have more than 1 billion code lines using machine learning, computer vision, and many other technologies. Good people with good equipment brings processes that need to be changed. What did we do? The first example was the commercial area. People are clicking all day long searching for information, so it stores products multiplied by variables. It is a lot waste of time to search for information. What did we do? We developed a search tool that is fast and information is there promptly using machine learning, NLP, and optimized consultation. The reports are now more than 15,000 consultations a day, and the analysis time, it decreased to 90%. Another process, imagine our clients trying to search for items on the website. The first thing they do is to simulate freight. It is more than 70 million, and we know this is decisive for them to buy.
How do we calculate that? There is no doubt we use a lot of mathematical models and optimization and machine learning. With that, we want the client to have the lower cost and the better profitability to the business. You can see in the map how was our conversion before and now. In the darker areas, we are selling more with new calculations automated. Ame Digital is revolutionizing the way we use money, and now money becomes digital. We are much more concerned about frauds. We have more than 4.3 million transactions per month. What do we do to understand if all of them are correct? We started with a super algorithm, seeing more than 200 variables, and that can see if the transactions are okay or not. We could have less than BRL 20 million in losses and in prevention.
We could increase our rate of approval and reduce the expenses. Imagine how we can use data to leverage the sales. We have 6 brands, 14 channels, 20 moments, more than 1,600 possible mechanics to promote something. Created decision algorithms to say what is the best channel. Here we see some promotion that was quite well done. We had 2 items in the physical stores. In the physical stores, we showed Chocolate Show that went to the Americanas app, and the client could get on the stores or receive at home. It was a huge success. In one day, we sold more than BRL 100 million of these items, and we could reach 400 RPM, which is wonderful.
As the last example, imagine the problem that we had five years ago, how to populate our stores with the best managers in cities where we didn't even have stores. This was our expansion plan. We thought, "Well, we need to use something more mathematical." We used people analytics algorithm to select and train the people. We took the main attributes of a manager, how they were producing results over the year, and created a mathematical model with the help of Harvard University and the data scientists of West Point and in the lab of PUC-Rio. The process was so good that we called them People Machine. It became a case in Harvard University. It's being studied now. If you want, you can just go there and check. Well, it was a pleasure to be here with you today. Now I will invite Anna, who will talk about Ame.
Thank you, João. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you again. Today, I'll talk about Ame. I'll tell you where we're going to. Before, I'll show a video to show who is Ame. Stop and think. Three years ago, would you leave home without a wallet? What if someone said you could pay just showing your mobile to a QR code? Stop and think. What if someone requested back then to invest in an idea like this? Did you think of it? Well, probably you think. It depends on us. You think ahead. We created it, Innovation and Future.
This is to take us to a new horizon for us to be always envisionary and change our points of view, our values and beliefs and ideas never seen before. Innovatives with Ame, a revolution to the daily lives of people. If we stop and think, cashback, long-distance payment, everything in a single app, what is normal today was a pioneer for Ame two years ago. Look what happened. Ame redefined a whole category, become a huge success, a reference in the whole country with more than 15 million downloads. Ame is now over one billion transactions in a month. This is the best way to pay in the best retail platform of the country. In the more than 1,700 stores all over the country. We didn't stop. We were even more innovative, and even nonstop in search for partners. How many partnerships could come from that?
We changed the way of purchasing in many stores, bars, online stores, kiosks, or even street sales. The sky is not the limit. Ame gave access to everyone, every social classes, all kinds of businesses. New opportunities to those who buy and sell. Only in Black Friday last year, do you remember paying with Ame would be a reality? In 2020, Ame bumped even more. Credit card is now in the past. Ame is three times faster. From a digital wallet, Ame became a super app. It became everything. What does it mean exactly? Stop and think how much you can do with Ame today. Pay bills, fuel the car, recharge the mobile, make a loan, purchase, call the plumber, even a medical appointment online or physical. Well, Ame is that.
Ame is for us to work with the Pix, with the instant transfer using QR code, with the technology for payment since the beginning. You can do everything, even do good things, right? If we stop at a moment, it was for that, to think about our partners. Let's continue with the donations, because this is Ame, inclusive, democratic, young, innovative. Where are we going to? Well, you tell us. Come with us to think about the next normal that will be even more innovative. Ame will keep up surprising. Where are we going to? Ame has started as a digital payment and more intelligent way of dealing that using cashback, and suddenly became a super app.
It started with some competitive differentials that were very important, credibility of the best brands in Brazil, Lojas Americanas, B2W, with more than 46 million active clients from a total base of 80 million clients. It benefits from the traffic of 4.4 billion visits a year to the stores and websites. A lot of technology, proprietary technology and open APIs and mini app platforms, and a digital team that is highly qualified and with a history of success. Today, we are more than 700 Amers. We work with a fast method with more than 30 squads. We are a reference in meetups. There are technology and data meetings with a lot of exchange of knowledge and networking. This team meets absolutely every year, once a year in the Ame Talks to talk about different subjects. This is a very important engaging event.
Besides this very special team, Ame started with use cases relevant to the people's daily lives, that is to buy at the best brands on the internet, and in the more than 1,700 Americanas stores all over the country. Just briefly, the Ame family has grown and became a complete ecosystem. Besides the super app, we also have Ame Plus, that is the super app for those wanting to sell. Ame Pro, this is the operational retail system to manage your business. This is an ERP, also allowing the store owners to upload their products in marketplaces. We have those autonomous stores that are Ame Go, with a lot of technology like machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence. For you to be Ame Go, you accredit with Ame app. We have Ame Scan and Go, a technology for self-shopping.
This is a solution where you scan the barcode on the Americanas stores, and automatically everything is paid by Ame. Ame Flash, that is our crowd shipping platform for deliveries in up to 60 minutes. Besides that, Ame started Pix Native. The first two functionalities of Ame were payments and instant transfers with the technology of QR code. We understood that Ame will have even more traction with the open banking, allowing payment at Ame itself with third-party financial institutions. I have a bill to pay, and I will pay with Ame app with the money that I have in another bank. We also understand that it will bring much more opportunities to speed up the roadmap of Ame. Besides that, I think it's important to show that in numbers.
The TPV of Ame over the next two years has grown 11 times and generated a lot of sales for offers and owners. We showed last year that every BRL 10 in cashback given to the client, the next client shopping would be 6 times this cashback. Today, every BRL 10 given in cashback to the client brings back additional sale of 11 times more. Ame generates additional sales. I can say that besides generating additional sales, it brings clients to the universe. 60% of the new Off Us clients started buying the on-us, and this is a growing current. The offers have an important role to Ame. It is getting traction because it is accelerating a lot. The frequency of Ame increased three times from 2018 to now, and this year, 2020, 76% of the use frequency comes from offers.
This is important to remember that Ame's operations is here less than a year. Another important point that I think is new and we are proud of, is that we increased the sales in Ame this November in three times. We made BRL 2.7 billion this November. We have to remember that November is Black Friday, so everyone is selling a lot and we could make the TPV three times higher. By the way, talking about Black Friday, Ame is still very relevant. We sold some fun facts last year. So the core items like day four. One out of five notebooks sold on the internet, one was paid with Ame. The same, one out of five smartphone, one out of four cell phones. And we are talking about products with high added value, but Ame also sells a lot of iPhones. But it's very democratic.
It's present all over the country. We don't live only of selling iPhones. We sell tickets cheaper than e-commerces. We can be in Shopping Iguatemi, in a very high-class shopping mall in São Paulo with 50% of share in the store. Ame also has 72% share in Queimadas, a very poor city in Paraíba. All that because it attracts to its base millions of partners in many different segments, like supermarkets, pet shops, fast food restaurants, drug stores, clothes stores, jewelries, both physical and online. We cannot forget our partners, the street sellers. They had a wonderful participation in Ame during this carnival, which was incredible what they did. Ame, the offers, is very important for Ame, but Ame is very important to offers to the store seller.
We saw that in the Black Friday, in the physical and in the digital, all the partners used Ame as a way of payment and a way of selling more. All that is part of a strategy that is very simple. Apparently, it is very simple, but in fact, it's not that simple to make it happen. It makes a whole lot of sense to us, because what does Ame want? To be more and more relevant in the daily lives of the clients, increasing the frequency of use, both in on-us, in our brands, because this is a big royalty program, and also in offers. To sum up, as long as Ame facilitates the main journeys of clients, we are bringing more clients using Ame. More clients using Ame, we bring more frequency. More frequency brings more relevance.
More relevance brings more journeys of clients to participate. This is how we understand we need to keep up. We want to be relevant in our clients' daily lives and be able to offer them everything they need. In a vision of future, let's remember that we started as a means of payment. This means of payment was very powerful with a loyalty program in on-us, and also to offers. At the same time, we started with expertise with our team and the knowledge, and we then offer and created a marketplace of products and services, financial and non-financial services, everything thinking about treating well our client and with a big vocation for banking. Let's remember that our marketplace of products and financial services is completely asset light.
We have a vocation for banking because we are offering a series of financial products and services. Recently, Ame acquired Bit Capital, that is a core banking platform based in blockchain. Bringing Bit Capital with a team that is completely differentiated, very special, with a lot of domain and knowledge in Pix, open banking, compliance and all regulatory aspects. They work with open APIs. We understand this association will speed up a lot the business plan of Ame and connect Ame to the financial system. When we look at the addressed market, the potential market of Ame, we are talking about BRL 1.3 trillion. This is on its own a huge potential, and little by little we see this potential becoming a reality.
Yes, we have great opportunities in on-us and huge opportunities in Off Us. We are wondering for more. We understand this is just the beginning and there is more to come. That's what I had to tell you. I would like to thank a lot. Now I will call Marcio and Jean, who will talk about B2W.
Good morning, everybody. It is a pleasure being here with you. Welcome once more for Investor Day. Today, I am talking about our growth strategy for the upcoming years. We split the agenda in three blocks. First, we will talk about our platform on how scalable it is to grow even more. The second block, strategy, how will we be addressing our growth for the upcoming years? On the third block, I will be showing a little on how we will do that, and our focus will be on the growth algorithm. Before starting, I would like to show you a video that shows what happened over 2020. 2020, a year that can be counted in different ways. The year of everything, all the time, anywhere.
It started promising, and we entered a new category with the purchase of Supermercado Now, reinforcing our position as top of mind on e-commerce by entering BBB20, the biggest in all times. All of a sudden, a quarantine left a million people at home, and customer behavior changed. Thank goodness we were born 100% digital, 100% adaptable. We've made our assortment broader with supermarket products. We started Americanas Mercado, and we started delivering essential products on the same day, within three hours in all Brazilian states. To millions of salespeople, we brought a solution. Taking on the pace of innovations, we accelerated in another direction: entertainment. We had 12 mega lives with incredible artists, Seu Jorge, Luan Santana, Cláudia Leitte. Just Marília Mendonça alone had more than 16 million views. We had more than 85 million views and innovations are only that.
We've mixed entertainment with sales, bringing the live commerce phenomena to Brazil. A platinum success pathway, but it was unseen. Bringing people that are referenced, our sellers in the marketplace, and we have more. We have more than 60 new customers. We've grown in 2020 equivalent to the five last years. We have the app Americanas, the most downloaded in the category purchases, and we have also optimized our capital structure. We had BRL 6.7 billion capital. Indeed, we are very proud of our figures in 2020, and we are ready for the next years. It is time to speed up and fly higher. Well, I will talk about the evolution of our business model.
B2W is the digital platform from Universo Americanas, and it has a prominent role within our universe, with the goal of connecting people, products, and services, connecting our sellers and partners with all the 21 million active customers we have. When we see the background of our evolution from the very creation of Americanas in 1999, from the first year when it was able to earn BRL 25 million until September this year, total payment volume, which was 1,000 times Americanas' first year figure. Over that time, we passed through cycles of growth and investments. Mostly comprised in 2013-2014, we've made several purchases, 10 purchases of technology companies, three logistic purchases, a very successful history of purchases and integration. Last year, we purchased Pedala and Courrieros, making even bigger our logistics and distribution capability. Last year we purchased Supermercado Now.
At the beginning of this year, we bought them. The evolution of our business model from 2017 until 2019 was very important. We became a platform. Before that, we were an e-commerce focusing on 1P sales, and then moved to a hybrid platform, which has 1P, 3P and services combining the best of both worlds. With that, we started focusing on mobile because customer behavior evolved within time, and we are no longer an intensive capital flow business generating sustainable growth. Over time, we've invested a lot in technology and mainly analytics in our evolution steps. With that, we reached the platform we have nowadays. November figures, we have more than 87 million sellers connected, offering more than 82 million products to our more than 21 active customers. I mean, those who have bought things for the past 12 years. We have a traffic of 3.4 billion.
The more we round and round the circle, this platform evolves based in six business fronts. E-commerce with 1P, 3P, O2O with our main brands, Submarino, Americanas, Supermercado Now. We also have an entertainment front. We have huge expertise over streaming TV, we've launched that in Americanas. We also have other technology services that we offer to all our partners. Logistic service with Let's. Another important front on financial services with our fintech, Ame, and its proprietary products, and also have B2W Ads, which is an important way to monetize all this traffic that we generate in our platform. To talk about the platform and our scalability, our capacity to grow, we need to talk about three pillars: people, technology, and logistics. Starting from our team, which is a very balanced team between men and women, mostly in technology.
Looking to our leadership, we have a leadership that has experience. It has many years in our company, but they are quite young. An important data is that 45% of this leadership came from the purchases we've done and also from some key positions within the market. This year, we had an important event. We've got the Selo Great Place to Work, and that's shown by the output of our teamwork and also innovation. For example, Supermercado Now has won the ELA Awards in selection process, what's very important when we are talking about bringing new stuff to our platform. We've been very attentive and present in universities, holding partnerships with the biggest and most important teaching institutes. Now I would like to invite Jean, who is our CTO, to talk about our technology team, and he will be also talking on technology applied logistics. Jean, welcome.
Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Marcio. Once more, welcome you all to our Investor Day. It's a pleasure being here again with you. As Marcio mentioned, our technology team from B2W is the most numerous team in B2W and keeps increasingly growing, hiring people from all over Brazil. One of our main skills nowadays and regarding our expansion B2W are skills, machine learning, data. For that, we created a program. It's called Data Academy. Talking about leadership, it is working directly with me. We have a very senior leadership which sees most of our purchases in technology for the past few years. To exemplify how technology is inserted in B2W business, we brought an important case, which is Squad from Americanas Mercado, which we assembled this year.
Right after purchasing Supermercado Now, one of the first things we wanted to do was using the whole strength from Americanas brand to leverage our market. For that, we created a squad with technology, market, and logistics from several areas of the company. From Let's, Supermercado Now, B2W. That created a standalone squad. With that, we were able to create Americanas Mercado, which will be mentioned, and we were able to grow eight times more if compared to last year's figures. Another important pillar to our growth is technology. We've chosen two examples here to show how our platform is rather elastic nowadays, capable of support B2W's growth. Last year, we've mentioned elasticity in the volume of requests of order that we need to put forth on Black Friday.
We brought two examples, which are basically the capability of processing orders in our platform, which is RPM, requests per minute, and the capability of data processing. Over this year, we had many peaks and valleys. Our platform must withstand all peaks. The biggest differentiator is that with all lives and 24-hour deliveries, those peaks and valleys are rather often and in a more unpredictable volume. Our platform is ready for that. We can see the curve over the year with a few examples on peaks and valleys. Another important feature is that we've run load charge tests over the year. This year, before Black Friday, we've tested that, and we decided to apply 30 times the number of orders that we believed we would have in our Black Friday.
Since we've been extremely successful, we are very confident that our platform is capable of supporting an even bigger volume than what we have nowadays. Another important matter is that with all this data processing and orders, we need to process a lot of data. Now I'm not going on the numbers, on the figures of data processing, but all this data processing, whenever demanded by the customer, it needs to be very swift. Whenever you do a search nowadays, our search needs to respond a definition we've done in tops 200 milliseconds. Aside from processing a lot of information, we need to respond that to our customer very quickly. Another important thing we've done this year is integrating search and advertisement platforms, hence creating ourselves a tremendous growth capacity with ads.
Ads, if compared to last year, it grew 2.5 times what we had last year. Talking about logistics. Logistics is a very key pillar to our growth. Wellington mentioned about our expansion on our logistic fabric, a very important feature for three-hour deliveries is the scalability, the capacity of scaling couriers. When we deliver within three, we also have peaks and valleys behavior, not only over the year as we have in our traditional e-commerce platform, all the day. For that, we have a very elastic capacity on couriers. Aside from all events I've mentioned this year, we've run a few tests where we activated three times the volume of the highest peak. All this logistics expansion enabled a very important change for us in our regional relevance algorithm.
When we look at 2020, when we had 300 stores all over the country in 110 cities, we've expanded to more than 700 cities. That helped our relevance algorithm when we left from a perspective of 27 areas to 137 areas. What does that mean? That means our customer, whenever he or she looks for something and that thing is located in one of those 137 regions, the algorithm looks for the closest storage, what means a quicker delivery and cheapest. Right after that evolution, we were able to evolve conversionally speaking within all national areas. Thank you. Again, Marcio, your turn.
Thank you, Jean. We've mentioned the evolution of our business model on the scalability of our digital platform, and we needed to address a very important topic, which is our capital structure. We've done two extremely relevant operations over this year. The first of them was the capital of BRL 4 billion, the equity, that helped us in September to BRL 2.7 billion of gross cash. We've done another operation that's our entrance in the worldwide market. We had a 10-year-old bond, the first company to issue an international bond, that was equivalent to $500 million or BRL 2.7 billion. Our capital structure from now on will enable us to keep going in a new growth route. Now on the second block, I would like to talk to you about our strategy. Just to recall it, we've been managing the company on three-year cycles.
After creating B2W and the integration phase, we had two important plans, building our digital platform that I've mentioned beginning from 2013 until 2015, focusing on logistics and technology procurement, and then another moment on generating cash on sustainable growth and sustainable and exponential growth in our marketplace. Last year, I had the opportunity of showing you our 2020, 2022 plan with the motto, everything all the time, anywhere, everything focusing in high-frequency categories and convenience to our customers in O2O in quick deliveries. Just to recall, from 2013 to 2016, we've evolved in our business model what enabled us growing with profitability and generating cash. We've added more than BRL 6 billion to our GMV, elevating our margin to and our EBITDA for over 9% and our cash reaching BRL 190 in 2019.
We had an expressive growth in marketplace, adding more than BRL 9 billion, what reached almost 62% of our total sales volume, making us reach an optimal balance between 1P and 3P. Both of them are now ready to move on with our growth route. Mentioning marketplace, that came mainly because we've multiplied times 10 an assortment that we added to our platform. Well, now talking on our current strategies plan. This plan from 2020 to 2022, our main focus is being increasingly more relevant in our clients' daily lives. What means being present in their journey and the motto, Everything Anywhere. That means bringing more assortment to our customers so they can look in our Americanas app and find anything they need. Anywhere is attached to convenience, enabling our customers to buy whenever they want, whatever they want, giving more convenience for them.
What's important to mention is that this first year, we had a growth within the first nine months, GMV of 21%. I would like to bring further details to you on how this growth occurred. Our client base, as I've mentioned, we've reached 21 million. We've added 6 million, which is equivalent to our growth from the past six years, so very expressive. Aside from increasing our bases, what's important is that where we increased at, we have long-tail customers that buy assortments, what grew seven times more than those that buy electronic goods. We are aligned and focused with our plan, which is being increasingly more relevant in our customers' daily lives. What is important? Why is that important, growing in long-tail customers? Because they have been spending six times bigger than the initial purchase, what brings more recurrence and purchases.
This brings a plus 60% growth if comparing to previous years' figures. Just to summarize our past investment and growth plans, we reinforce our execution capability and delivery as well, and our current plan. The first year has shown a great opportunity for us to grow a lot more, accelerating this pace from now on. With that, we enter a new growth route. For that, we'll be investing a lot more. We'll be investing BRL 5 billion with the next few years. BRL 4 billion comes from our capital increase that I've mentioned with you, and the other BRL 1 billion comes from reinvesting part of our cash generation that we will be generating for the upcoming years. It is important to highlight that's a sustainable growth. Generating cash, we'll be able to maintain our commitment of generating cash.
With that, we've been keeping a growth over the market with our market share. From now on, we'll accelerate this growth phase with that investment we'll be doing in order to grow over the average of the three market players. We will accelerate our growth route, and now we enter our last block, talking about how will we make it grow. We have three main fronts, improving purchase experience, focusing on loyalty from our customers, and being present in consumers' minds. Our growth algorithm has seven important variables. I'm talking about assortment, personalization, faster delivery, our app, our fast delivery free of cost, accelerating Ame, our fintech. And reinforcing it all on recalling our brand in the customers' minds. Talking about assortment, last year, we've mentioned long tail categories, huge categories. E-commerce has a low penetration, where we see a lot of opportunity to grow.
We grew a lot the assortment over this year, we've made it triple when we compare November status with the previous years. Most importantly, we grow where we need it. We've grown five times and there's assortment categories. By growing them, we have a bigger basis to increase our growth. Now talking about recurrence, I would like to highlight Americanas Mercado category. That's where we advanced a lot, where we purchased Supermercado Now by the beginning of this year, and we were able, by that means, growing inside that category. In assortment, we've increased 17 times, and that's a category which has eight times more recurrence than the average from our customers. Also important is that when we purchase such a company and we connect that to our platform, having access to all the components of Universo Americanas, we were able to integrate that in record time.
For example, Ame nowadays represents 30% on market orders, and 60% from those orders are delivered via Let's. Faster and with more efficiency. The consumption profile from our customers has changed because we are serving two different journeys. If comparing 2019 figures with the current year, we see that there was a stronger focus on electronics. When we see this year, we see that fresh items like fruits and vegetables, some groceries are bringing more recurrence to our business. That, once more, is totally aligned with our focus in that plan. Now another variable, very important one, by the way, which is personalization. Personalizing means knowing our customer very well, their consumption habits, how are they paying that. When numbers are big, we are talking about the recommendation. We have more than 10 billion recommendations over the year, and notifications of more than 15 visualization h aving a scale reach,
We needed to use a lot of technology, artificial intelligence, in order to do that in real time. Just to illustrate, if a customer does a request, an order nowadays, they will return 10 times more in our app to do anything, either looking for the order tracking, for the details on the product he purchased. It's important that he returns, when he returns, we'll learn more from him, at each of those returns, we will have the opportunity of offering a greater experience, bringing more assortments to his site and converting. The figures can be either three to 30 times bigger, the greatest challenge is doing that in scale, we have an opportunity to advancing that. That's an important investment front from now on.
Another important variable is the fast delivery. When we talk about fast delivery, Wellington mentioned a little bit about our capillarity. We are increasing a lot our capillarity in all the country. Having more capillarity means delivering faster, and being faster is having more conversion. On the other hand, more capillarity is being closer to the client with lower costs for delivery. Lower costs means us being able to charge less from the client. Once again, it's more conversion, and the more conversion, the more volume. We increase more and more our logistics mesh. When I talk about fast delivery, I'm talking about three hours or 24 hours. Deliveries in three hours, we increased almost 300% in terms of volumes of deliveries, and we will progress on that.
The opportunity here is to go to more cities, connect more sellers in the O2O, and also in 1P with the fast deliveries in three hours from the more than 200 hubs that we also have. This is a very important front. When I say delivery in 24 hours, I mean we have developed a lot our deliveries in 24 hours in 1P. We reached 46% of our total volume, and we'll progress even more on that. In 3P, I'm talking about progressing in fulfillment, that is getting the delivery service of 3P closer to 1P. We grew 165% in sellers when we go to the fulfillment and we have faster deliveries, 55% faster and also more efficient because we get closer to the level of service and quality of service of 1P. Opportunity here is in having the fulfillment with all the distribution centers.
We have 22 spread in the country. Also in the 200 hubs that we have. Having stocks in the seller in the hubs for faster deliveries. This is what we will invest in and develop more. Another important variable of our algorithm is the app. Remember that Americanas was the app that had the most downloads in the shopping category this year, so we are ahead of our competitors. We have more than 100 million downloads when we account all the apps. Only this year, 46 million downloads. We developed a lot the number of monthly users with almost 40 million. This is very important because the app client can have a better experience. Thus, they visit three times more when we compare to the desktop and there is a conversion that is 2.6 times higher.
It is all connected to the previous variables of fast delivery or customized delivery, because we can give a better experience by customizing the delivery. Another innovation that we brought this year to our app was the live commerce. That is a phenomenon in China. This is quite a relevant business. We brought it to Brazil, and it allow us to make the client be more engaged in searching for my products and converting more and spending more time with us. When the client spends more time with us, they also give more information to us for us to customize more and more this experience. Our team prepared a video to you, and I would like to show and present the progress that we have in the app during the year. Client experience. Send your questions to id20@universoamericanas.com.br. More convenience, closer and faster.
Inclusion of more than 5,000 products and delivery in 3 hours. Your payment has been concluded. Your request is under deliver. Coverage in more than 700 cities in Brazil. 1 million items delivered in three hours in only two months. 200 million views in 40 lives. 50 hours of broadcasting in five months. More than 130 purchase, 54,000 clients satisfied, 117 new features. Everything all the time, everywhere. Another very important variable to our algorithm is Americanas Mais. That is our fast delivery service with free freight. We have more than 1 million clients in the service today. The important point is that the clients rebuy much more with a higher spending as well. From now on, all our clients in the app will be Americanas Mais clients as well, and thus will bring a much better experience to the clients.
Another variable that is very important in our algorithm is Ame, our fintech. We are growing a lot in terms of amount of clients using Ame in our apps. Why is that important? Because these clients have a spending three times higher than the clients who don't use Ame. We'll keep up investing a lot in this front here to grow more and more the use of clients with Ame. Well, to tell all that to the clients, we have another variable that we have to invest a lot, the brand presence in the client's mind. Brand memory is done in three months, and we made researches to know a lot of indicators about our brand. Americanas is still the first brand of the consumer when we ask them the question. At all surveys, they are top of mind, but despite that, we see many opportunities.
Another variable that we look in the survey is the preference of brand. When we compare among the regions, we see there's still a big gap and opportunity for us to work better the brand in some regions. When we compare the biggest and the smallest region, there are eight points, percentage point in gap. This is a big opportunity for us to work. Another important indicator is the share of voice. The search related to the category. Despite developing a lot in the long tail category and assortment, there's still a big gap when we compare with electronics, for example. The good news is that there is still a lot of space to develop on that. All our communication will be based in these three pillars.
We are talking about fast delivery in three or 24 hours, also exploring the trust of the client in our brand with original product and also with a huge focus in compliance. The most important point is that we'll be working more and more in a regional way to capture these opportunities that I mentioned before. Well, this is how we close our algorithms with the seven variables that I mentioned. The important in this algorithm is that all variables are connected and fed back and we develop the algorithm and allow us to grow more and more being in this growth route. That will start from now on. Once again, I would like to thank you for your presence and for trusting us, for being all this time here with us. Once again, thank you. Now in the next session, we'll have the Q&A. Thank you.
Hello. Welcome back. We are here live in our studio in the stage created at B2W Rio. I thank you all for sending the questions. Now we have on the stage the CEOs, Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Saicali, Timotheo Barros, and Marcio Cruz. Thank you all for your presence. Let's start our Q&A. Thank you, Raoni. Starting our Q&A, the first question, Miguel, is to you. It's a repeated question about our capital structure. We have a history of working with debt, and we had important movement to change the capital structure this year. What is the reason for that, and what are the future plans about that?
Well, thank you, Fabien. This is a wonderful question. We have a history of more than 20 years working with debt. We believe that it maximizes the return of our shareholders, and we still believe in this approach. On the other hand, working with debt is a mix of science and mysticism. Science because we work with thinking about the future, paying attention of what may happen, and when something quite unpredictable happens, we need to find a way out, just like this year is happening. In general, we had a follow one with a 7.9 total of our prediction that was about 3.3 to be approached in B2W. Why? Because we believe it will allow a higher growth of our digital platform. 2.6 would be our idea to be in the reformulation of the debt in the controller that ended up last year with 3.3 debt.
We foresaw some debt in the controller. The remainder, about BRL 2 billion, would be for us to invest in our operators along with Ame and Let's. That is, there are a lot of good things to be done with this possibility that we open even to release a little bit our future capital flow. Everything make us understand that in the end of the year, I mean, when everything is concrete in the universe, we would have a debt of about zero or a little bit positive. B2W will work with a positive cash that will allow a better growth, and the controller will work a little bit negative or close to zero.
Okay. Thank you, Miguel. Now, our next question is from Danniela, from XP, and I'll make it to Anna Saicali. How do you understand the evolution of the results of Ame and what are the ideas for 2021?
Well, thank you for your question, Danniela. Let's remember that Ame invested their operations. There is not so long ago, it's been growing fast. The goal is to improve people's lives. 2019, in fact, was the first year the focus was a lot in converting this huge database of active clients that we have here and spread the acceptance of Ame. 2020 is still this idea of converting the client database and converting acceptance with partnerships, now with a huge focus in offers. Despite the pandemic and everything that we are living this year, for 2021, we want to integrate Ame to the financial system. We still have the priority of converting more and more clients to our bases in this universe and bring new clients from offers.
We want with this platform of marketplace and products and services that are financial or not, we want to start offering to our clients a complete solution that a super app can offer, and it means being integrated to the financial market as well.
Thank you, Anna. The next question is, Timotheo, is to you. It comes from Luiz Guanais from BTG Pactual. He wants to know about the growth base of the stores and the expansion for next years.
Well, thank you for the question, for the participation. Well, 2020 has been quite a challenging year. We've learned a lot. We've been doing many different things and adjusted our assortment. We launched a lot of services and solutions like WhatsApp and the digital managers. It was a year of novelties. Obviously, due to the pandemic, our priority was to ensure safety and health of our clients and our workers. We postponed our expansion plan. Translating into numbers, we'll open about 30 stores this year. That is an expansion of 1% of our sales area. Looking ahead, we want to be even more relevant in the client's daily life.
The capillarity and the expansion plan has an important participation in this process. For 2021, we expect at least 6% of expansion in our sales area, but we have to remember that it depends a lot on the pandemic. We are following all the process. Due to the progression of the pandemic, we'll determine the pace of opening. We have to remember that when we are talking about the growth of the physical platform, it is not only expanding the sales area. We have powerful tools to leverage the growth. For example, Ame. We've seen during the presentations that we have speeded up a lot the payment in Ame in our stores. Ame is a powerful loyalty tool. It brings a lot of frequency when we look at a client paying in our stores with Ame.
The frequency is three times higher compared to the client that doesn't use Ame. We have O2O, we have increased a lot. We are integrating more and more the physical and digital worlds. Looking ahead, we are quite excited and happy with the perspectives ahead of us.
Thank you, Timotheo.
Our next question comes from Robert Ford from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and that's for Marcio Cruz. Marcio, how do you see a relative growth in relation to the other place and above all, looking at 2021, the demand of the customer's demands and e-commerce?
Thank you, Raoni. Thank you, Robert Ford, for your question, your participation. Before talking about our growth in 2020, it is important talking about our year. Aside from the total GMV growth, that's like 53%, a little over what our market has. We need to look at that figure with further details on how we deliver that growth. If we look, we highly evolved our customer bases. That's equivalent to our past five years in one single year. As I've shown in my presentation, in customers, we aggregated long-tail customers who buy different types of things like groceries.
That's something that aligns to our strategy. What's most important is that those clients return. We've increased our recurrence, and this customer has a spending that is bigger than what I've shown before. All those advances are well-aligned with growing in long-tail assortment. We entered new categories, for example, Americanas Mercado that we've advanced. Again, it brings a lot of recurrence, what forms an important asset altogether for 2021. When we pick up these assets and summing them, the platform is ready to scale. It has a lot of scalability, mostly speaking on technology and logistics. Another important point is that we've adjusted our capital structure also by means of the two operations we've done by elongating the debt, what allows us to enter a new growth route. Regardless on macroeconomic scenarios for next yearCompetition, harsh competition for next year.
We see a lot of opportunities on how we build our growth this year and what will that provide us, given we invest more, we'll have a more accelerated if we focus on the seven variables of our growth algorithm. That's it. Thank you, Raoni.
Thank you, Marcio. Our next question is addressed to Miguel, something very often about M&A. What is being asked basically is whether is there a prioritary segment and also other questions on the negotiations with BR?
Thank you, Fabien, for your question. I would like to say the following. Our universe has reached 46 million customers. Every business that shows some recurrence in this universe, we are interested. We created an algorithm to ensure a financial discipline on long-term decisions. We've mapped more than 50 opportunities in nine different segments.
The most rational would be from that amount of positive figures would be gathering initiatives to make that universe grow. Aside from that, we have investments that will support this growth. As past weeks purchase that will allow us grow with Ame. Regarding BR, this year it has been an excellent partner. We created together something that provided for distance payment that's been very productive. We are very interested in the convenience segment. We are moving on towards that. Eventually, that agreement wasn't closed because we passed through a very difficult period with all due restrictions we had regarding functioning, on store operations, and so on. Secondly, we prioritized our relation established by means of Ame, aside from including in marketplace BR Mania. We are very excited with that potential business.
Thank you, Miguel. Well, our next question is addressed to Anna. It comes from Ravi, from HSBC. He asks us to mention a little on Pix and what is the strategic planning from Ame.
Well, Ravi, thank you for your question. I would like to say that Ame, it's a Pix native platform because it was born with QR code technology, and its first functionalities were instant payment and transfers. We are integrated with Pix from the very beginning. This week, the Universo Americanas was integrated to Pix, started doing payments via Pix, both digitally and physically, by means of Ame and Bit Capital. Bit Capital is a purchase we've done Monday that week. We are bringing Bit Capital, which is a core banking platform company. It has a differentiated staff, a masterpiece technology that will help us on Pix open banking technologies and knowledges, which will help us a lot in integrating with the financial system.
We'll be able to offer this solution to our merchants as well. I think Pix will rise, bringing a positive impact both in Pix and open banking to our platform.
Thank you. Our next question is addressed to Timotheo. It comes from Julia Rizzo from XP Advisory. How do you see the evolution future of physical stores?
Julia, thank you for your question. To talk about physical stores evolution, let's recall our perspective of our future. Such a perspective is being increasingly relevant in our customers' daily lives, and it translates into convenience. Our customer increasingly demands more convenience. What means being swift, selling at a fair price, operating a high level of service, having high availability from our stores, and so on. When we see the features, the characteristics, the features from our stores, we can address that all.
Just to recall, our physical platform has a unique capillarity. We are present in all states from Federal District, over 700 cities, more than 1,700 stores and more than 750 cities. We are increasingly closer from all our customers. That's convenience to us. Aside from that, our customer base is very powerful, predominantly feminine, responding, age diversity from youngest to the elderly. Another feature from our stores is the transaction volume. We have a customers flow over 1 billion a year, more than 3 billion transactions a year. A high frequency model, which our frequency was at about 11 times, but as Ame gains more room in our operations, the tendency of that frequency is being increased. We also have broad assortment from electronics, from chocolate. We have more than 45 categories.
Whenever a customer comes to our store, he or she knows that whatever he or she needs will be found, and that means convenience. That's very convenient to our customer. We are present in all events, all over Brazil, and we have multiple formats. We can either enter a region or a district. We can operate within a shopping center. We can operate in a commercial center. With that, we can address those new consumption needs, the fastness demanded by our customer, the fair price demanded by our customer. Aside from that, we are doing a lot of investment in order to revolutionize and improve our customer experience within our stores. Over this morning's presentation, we've given several examples. We've mentioned Ame Pro, Mobile PDV.
We have also WhatsApp and digital managers, among other initiatives that we have in ongoing process in order to turn purchase experience a lot more fluid. Finally, the combination, we have the digital world, which is only possible because we belong to that universe. The beauty of the universe is the combination of the assets of the physical that allows us accelerating our initiatives operating 24 hours a day.
Thank you, Timotheo. Well, we have, Marcio, a lot of questions related to fulfillment. We have some people mentioning the recent movements in competition. Others mention that we've been acting in fulfillment for over two years, but the general perception is that that hasn't escalated in Brazil yet. If you could talk a little on fulfillment strategy and whatever you can share with us on the subject.
Thank you, Raoni. Thank you all who made questions about fulfillment. To talk about fulfillment, I need to talk about benefits. What's important is why is that good for the customer and why is that good for the seller? Fulfillment all about reaching service levels from 1P to 3P, what means delivering faster. In our fulfillment, we already have these metrics. Deliveries became 50% times faster when we apply them in fulfillment and sellers' storage. The quality also is improved. We have 6% wall points being increased for the customer. It's a good impression, and it's also good for the seller because they sell more. We are in fulfillment, in fact, for two years, and those two years have been a lot of learning for us. We've learned a lot over that time, what worked well for the seller and how could we use our assets in a better way.
Now we have a few thousand sellers in fulfillment, and we are operating within four states. I think another very important point, which is something remarkable for us in B2W, is our logistic capillarity. Nowadays, we have 22 distribution centers spread all over Brazil and 200 hubs. We will be using those hubs, which are urban hubs, in order to put sellers' storage closer from our customers, hence short cutting the delivery time. That's a differential from ours, and we will be using that to give a greater experience from our customer who buy in the marketplace. Finally, as I've mentioned in my presentation, Americanas Mais, which are a quick delivery service, free of charge, and our clients will be connected both by Ame and fulfillment. One feeds back the other.
A seller in Ame that will be in Americanas Mais will have a free of charge delivery, which will help us escalating fulfillment in a more accelerated manner. Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Marcio. We'll wrap Q&A session right now. Questions that weren't responded live will be responded by the RI team, and I would like to invite Miguel for the final considerations.
We are reaching the end of our event. I would like to leave as the final message that the year 2020 is a year that we are very proud of what we've been doing, and this is thanks to the wonderful team that we have that can make everything work and being adjusted to all the challenges. We are quite sure that everything we did in 2020 was right. That is the restructure that we had with Universo in a more visible way, the changes that we made in our structure. Everything make us very strong about what is about to come in the next years.
I would like to thank you all for your presence, and I would also apologize for the little delay that we had in the beginning, but this is a little bit of what I mentioned before of managing that, and sometimes we have science, sometimes we have mysticism to deal or things that happen by chance. It was a problem that we had here, but I hope it didn't influence interfering the presentations. I would like to wish you all a lot of success, health, and that we start next year well. That for us will be a very important year to grow. Thank you all.