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Today, we are joined with the company executives, Fernando Soares, Chief Executive Officer, Sebastien Durchon, Chief Financial Officer, and Investor Relations Officer of Americanas S.A., and Fábio Medeiros, Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs. Mr. Fernando will begin the presentation. Please go ahead.
Good morning. One more time, I would like to thank all the members, over 50,000 consumers every week in our stores, and also our partners, suppliers that have been fundamental for this journey of transformation and construction. For those who followed us in the first call of the year, we started the year very strong. This opening influenced by Easter, that was part of the month of March, therefore it helped the growth of the company.
The second semester continued very strong as May and June, with rates of growth high. Durchon will go about these numbers very soon. In the next slide, talking about this first half of the year, I would say that we are proud of the first results of the transformation that we have been doing in our business model.
I have a repeated slide to remind you of what is the transformation of the business. In 2022, we had a business, half of it was digital and e-commerce. We had business units that were independent, distinct strategies, and investments isolated. Our digital was constituted of the modality of a 1P and 3P marketplace. We still had the structure of Ame as a fintech, and we had the strategic of acquisition and customer retention through this model of e-commerce. In 2025, we are another company, a company that has the store at the center. The structure is absolutely integrated, the strategy is converging, and a new proposal value. The physical core of our business and the digital deliver one channel to the same client, therefore complementing fees.
We have revised our 1P, reduced our marketplace, having the focus as our strategic partners, deactivated Uni.co, relaunched our service platform, repositioned the brand, and now have worked with a lot of financial discipline and operational efficiency. The main result of this model is in the graph on the right, and it is the improvement of a consistent operation. We still do not have a profitable business, but the journey looks very positive and we have now the ability to balance our cash. This number is mainly on operation, an improvement of BRL 200 million in this semester compared to the last semester, where there was already an improvement of BRL 38 million compared to the first six months of 2024.
This operational result is a combination of the efficiency of our resources, of our rate of return top line above market average, and the contribution of the new digital and all the services that we have been adding to this new transformation. The main highlights of the semester before I hand the floor to Durchon are an expressive growth in gross revenue, 5.22%, a performance that is very important in the same store sales. A growth of 9.3%, a growth even bigger of our gross revenue per square meter due to our restructuring work of the stores, 10.3% growth compared to the semester last year. Our new digital strategy delivering a growth of 74.6%. This is in the modality O2O, which is online to offline, where you take the product out of our stores that is spread over a thousand stores in Brazil, 1,448 stores to be exact.
This has a BRL 76 million reduction, and adjusted EBITDA of BRL 161 million. As I mentioned before, BRL 250 million operational improvement in this semester compared to the previous semester. The Cartão Ame growth over 100,000 cards every month in our stores, and a very relevant growth of our revenue for service of 34.9%, service gross revenue. Those are the main indicators that highlight the improvement and our growth in same-store sales. Durchon will now go into detail in the following slides, our figures.
Thank you so much, Fernando. Good morning, everyone. This is the evolution of gross sales. In a general way, as Fernando mentioned, it was a semester of a robust growth. Our gross revenue had a growth of 9.3% compared to the same period.
We had Easter following in March, so this was favored compared to the 2025 as we had a good Easter sales in the month of March. In the same way, this first semester in a way was penalized. I am sorry, in the second quarter was penalized due to this. From January, same-store sales grew 17.8%. This growth of our sales, especially May and June, were double-digit. This has led us to a 9.3% growth of same-store sales. We have a growth rhythm of 2x the period. It is very noticeable as many retailers had almost a zero or negative type of result. As Fernando highlighted, the sales per square meter was even bigger, showing 10.3%. This is an improvement of our structure. Let us move on to the next slide. We have a better commercial performance in this second quarter.
Here we have our gross profit due to our physical stores. The two operations combined represent 96% of our sales. We have had a growth that is very elevated in the quarter. Looking at the whole semester, the gross profit grew almost 7%, BRL 1.7 billion. It is important to highlight our margin gross profit improved 0.5% to consolidate at 20. Moving on to slide seven, our key capacity to operate events along the year. Besides the high sales, BRL 1.1 billion in the Easter period, we also had an expressive sales in the World Cup period. Our operation in general was able to sustain this growth with almost 30% compared to peer. The sales grew 40% in number of items.
We can see clearly through the Easter and World Cup, our capacity to operate events is a big strength of our sales, and we will have more events coming ahead. We have the Black Friday in November and Christmas, which are very strong in Americanas, but we still have several other, as our anniversary in September, Children's Day and Halloween. In summary, they have one great event per month, which is a great opportunity to increase our sales and surprise our clients. In slide eight, I want to spend some time to explain the performance of two of our operations that are growing in a very fast way. You can see the main indicators of performance in the Multibloc. We had a growth almost of 75% of growth in the first semester and represents 5% of our gross revenue due to many modalities that are available to our customers.
Partnerships with the Smiles. We also implemented in our stores, over 1,400 stores. As I mentioned, we also used our digital to capture new customers, especially in the big events of the year. In the graph below, we have our gross revenue and also the sales of insurance and the cards in the first semester. It grew 35% compared to last year. This growth was driven by the Cartão Ame. We sold over 100 cards per month in the first semester. Now they have generated in the last six months, a total turnover of BRL 1.2 billion. Even as this is growing, these have a key performance in to understanding better our customers, 38 million of customers in our physical stores and online. We are still growing intensely in our CRM to strengthen even more this identified customer base.
Our program of loyalty launched last year already demonstrated a great promising result. On average, they spend 3x more than a non-loyalty client. Talking about our expenses and EBITDA. In the last years, this first semester was marked by a significant improvement of our operational efficiency. Our general expenses reduced year-to-year 4.5%. We absorbed 100% of the operation in the period, and we had a gain of productivity in percentage point, our expense of 3.3 percentage points compared to 2025 in the last semester. This is robust growth of our sales, our improvement and our margin of gross sales that I mentioned. We were able to have an relevant improvement as highlighted by Fernando. In the adjusted EBITDA IFRS 16, we finished the semester at 250. We had fiscal credits, remember, in 2025.
Our operation improved BRL 251 million, it went from -BRL 68 million to show an improvement of basically BRL 500 million in just two years. On slide 10, we have Hortifruti Natural da Terra update. It appeared in our P&L in a separate line. It discontinued, but I would like to highlight two facts that are important. At first, we started the second semester last year with a turnaround in Hortifruti. Then with a bit over a semester with a strong intense work from our team, the results of 2026 already shown an improvement, very clear. The sales of same-store sales is up 6%, while most of the food retailers had a fall in sales and a very low same store. We are replicating this, improving this model of Hortifruti. We had a margin increase of 1.5% higher.
Also, we are gaining some efficiency in Hortifruti with the fall of SG&A and a working capital of 80 days, and this has generated a positive cash result. The second point that I'd like to highlight referred to Hortifruti is that we are advancing in the sales of the Natural da Terra stores in São Paulo. In May, we signed a contract of 10 of these stores. All the stores that are being sold, they are deficit stores, and this demonstrates in a gain of cash. This will be removed from our debentures. We also intensifying our efforts to sell the six remaining stores Natural da Terra. Now going to slide 11 to talk about our capital structure and our net debt. We have BRL 2.1 billion with interest. With cash and equivalents, we had BRL 1 billion.
Adding the judicial recovery that we are paying in installments and removing to receive from the sales of Uni.co, the net debt is BRL 1.2 billion, total net debt. Here we have a cash flow in the last 12 months focusing on the cash generation of the operation. We can see in the graph, even though our operations are still consuming cash, this consumption has been reducing semester per semester.
The impact on cash of the first semester was with a reduction compared to the semester last year. Another positive evolution, the working capital of the company improved BRL 284 million. We also are investing in the future with BRL 220 million. But we cannot forget in this cash generation that we took the decision to use part of our cash generation to reduce our BRL 430 million that was used in extraordinary expenses. Now I'll give the floor to Fernando again to talk about our strategic advances.
Let's talk about our plan. This is the plan that will lead us to the anniversary of 100 years. If you go to slide 14, I brought here once more a slide that we used in the beginning of the year and explains a little the plan for 2026 with its combination of performance and transformation. We executed our commitments with a lot of discipline, but also provoking not only planning, but also plant the first seeds of the future that will improve even more our results in the following years.
Remembering that the main pillars of the year's operations and supply, all the commercial area, consumer net growth, which is our business unit, digital and financial services, loyalty program, Americanas Ads, which is a business unit that is new, that we launched at the beginning of the year. At last, a multidisciplinary group that looks at daily all of our opportunities of optimization of costs and expenses. In the next slide, we are going to go through all the costs related to performance, to then talk a little bit more about transformation. The evolutions of the indicators in this slide explain our consistent operational improvement. A same-store sales growth of 9.3% are even stronger sales of gross revenue per square meters of 10.3%, digital in the semester growing 74.6%, with SG&A with a reduction of BRL 76 million. This represents a reduction of 3.3 percentage points.
Associated productivity of our employees of 12%, customer identification growing at 9 percentage points, and our rent cost, we are able to negotiate 2 percentage points below the inflation, which obviously contributes to the graph on the right, which is the same graph that I showed in the beginning of this meeting. I would like to highlight the operational improvement is fundamental so that we can build a healthy position and advance to the future.
As was highlighted by Durchon, I would like to say once more that our company still does not generate result, but it comes from a journey to a very. We are bringing BRL 297 is still negative, but with an improvement of BRL 251 million coming from the growth of top line, but also our disciplined execution in the bottom line. There we advance to the future in the next slide, and our future is already planned.
Our core of our business in the center of the line are our stores, and within our stores, management of assortment of variety is smart pricification and excellent operation. This wheel allows better service to over 50 million customers, 38 million identified. The more we are able to work on these fronts, we improve our sales, average ticket, and consequently, the margin of our main business. We added to this core what I call organic growth through CRM, loyalty program, digital mobile, and all the financial service and store expansion, which was not a short-term pillar, although our recent inaugurations, a reinauguration that have happened in the last six months. On top of that, we have two new sources of global revenue, very strong.
Our Ads business unit was launched in the beginning of this year, and now our vision to logistic that stopped being a cost center and became a service center. All of this structure serving at our core is supported by our excellence center , financial, legal, technology people, and management, and procurement, and we want to be a reference in the Brazilian retail in each one of these areas. I would like to highlight, to give one example of the front, one of the most important ones within our core in slide 17. I would like to share with you a little bit of what has been happening in our stores due to our operational excellence. We have just launched the mobile store. It is a new one. It is a support for our store managers with artificial intelligence in the palm of their hands.
The most important, the AI will help the daily routine. Besides all the process and all the indicators, AI delivers to the store managers what are the opportunities they need to prioritize, giving a cluster of the store due to the cluster, due to the state and to the model of the store that this manager is running. AI not only helps the routine, but also says what is the main opportunity, what should be the indicator to be treated with the meeting with the team. When this is executed, AI reads the results and learns, becomes even stronger to prioritize in the following days. Our store managers do not receive at the same time the same messages. They receive the prioritized message that makes a big difference in the result of the store in that day and also at that hour, and the system keeps on learning.
Besides that, all the services are within mobile, like stock control, price ticketing. All of this doesn't need to go back to the office. It stays at the hand of our managers. It's one of the fronts. It's already happening. It's undergoing some tests. We say that the future has already started. I'll move on to Fábio. I'll give the floor to Fábio. While all the transformation is happening, we are still talking about sustainability and responsibility, and that's what Fábio will talk about to close our call today.
Thank you, Fernando. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I would like to present one single slide that shows many of the initiatives of sustainability that Americanas is working on.
It's important to highlight and register and underline that although the huge challenges and obstacles we have had over the last three years, Americanas kept following its sustainability agenda, being loyal to its values and principles. Here at Americanas, we know and we believe that the most important and more important than the results are to deliver results doing the right thing. So deliver results doing the right thing is one of the most important pillars that sustain our culture. Moving our agenda and sustainability, it's to do what is right. I will start by illustrating our participation in the defense codes for the Black consumers as one of our initiatives. We participated, elaborated, and adhere to this Black customer defense. It was led by L'Oréal. It started with the racial equity movement, and it was one of the measures to combat racism in the consuming market.
Besides Americanas, other 17 companies signed in a commitment to follow these consumer rights. L'Oréal itself, Alpargatas, Carrefour. This group is very active in discussions over guidelines, improvements of practice, advances in the commitment in the absolute reduction in the case of racism in retail. Moving on, the campaign, SOS Sudeste. As everyone knows, the southeast region of Brazil had a lot of mudslides, flooding, that left many families homeless and municipalities in state of emergency. Americanas, together with União BR movement, with a group of volunteers that work since 2020 to vulnerable communities across Brazil, launched a campaign, SOS Sudeste, with the objective of mobilizing its customer base to support these areas affected by the rains. Through this initiative, Americanas has donated over 17 million items of hygiene and dressing, and cleaning to many areas affected.
It is still concerned, it has its nucleus of mental and emotional therapy to provide services to these employees that were impacted by this climate situation. At last, and most important, Americanas will come back in September 2026 to publish, in a volunteer manner, its annual report of sustainability. Why voluntarily? Because a company with a judicial recovery has a different treatment and is not obligated to publish this report. We understand that it is about time, following our principles of transparency and ethics to show what we have been doing in the company overall, because we have had a great advance in accomplishing the judicial recovery plan, we requested to leave. Therefore, we will publish in a voluntary way this annual report in 2026.
We did not publish in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and now it is our opportunity to make this change in this fraud crisis, chapter with judicial recovery. Most important than turning the page, this report will show and demonstrate our plan or the plans to the future. In Americanas, we know that the future has already started, and one of the opposites of this plan will be celebrating 100 years of the company, of Americanas company, that is already at our doorstep. This report will also include the new study of material, this our new ESG plan in Americanas. That is what I had to share. Now giving the floor back to Fernando.
Let us advance to Q&A. My closing message, I like very much this slide. The image of this slide represents our team, and this team will keep on working hard with a lot of discipline, with a lot of energy, so that we can keep improving and transforming the company, which now has a future vision, a strategic plan that is very robust. I am sure that we will get stronger and better in this anniversary. I would like to really thank who have been following us in this last 40 minutes, who have been questioning us, giving us feedback, and supporting us to rewrite the story of our company that is one of the most cherished companies in Brazil. Thank you so much.
Now we will start the question-and-answer session. Remember, to make a question, you should click on the globe icon in the bottom of the screen and write your question to enter the queue. Once announced, a request to open your microphone will appear on your screen, then you should activate your microphone and ask the question. Please ask all the questions at once. Our first question was sent by Angelo Luis. He says: What is the forecast for the company to conclude the judicial recovery by the shares by the main managers and start generating a profit?
About leaving judicial recovery, we cannot say a date because it is not up to us. Who will make this decision is being analyzed. What we can say is that it is already in our mind, we have already left. We are looking ahead. We will have decisions in the following months.
Our next question comes from Thiago. He says: The initial beliefs that the results present reflect a company that is very structural profitable, where we are still looking at the transitional effects due to the judicial recovery. In other words, what is the capacity to generate cash in Americanas in a normalized scenario without extraordinary situations and renegotiations of liabilities and using fiscal credits?
I will start the answer, then I will move on to Durchon. We believe that we are showing a journey that is very positive, and this journey is composed by two fronts that are very healthy, which is the top-line growth, and also our discipline that has been represented by economy of BRL 76 million. The combination of what I call peer operation explains a journey that is very positive that we are delivering. Durchon will complement with the numbers that I mentioned.
Just complementing, we talked about the result of EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, operational, very consistent, BRL 250 million a year. In this semester, it will last BRL 297, so we can see that we continue in this rhythm. We will improve even more up ahead. This EBITDA reaching zero, we stop consuming cash. Another point that I would like to highlight is that what we are doing, we can see we are doing very intense work of working capital. In the last 12 months, we have improved. I will talk a little bit the other part of your question, which is a very dense question.
We talked about the extraordinaries. We have a very valuable assets that we cannot totally use up to now, but this company has many fiscal. We have BRL 3.8 billion of fiscal credits, ICMS, PIS/COFINS, that we will use in the following years. Not in the far future, we will have accumulated fiscal losses. We have fiscal loss BRL 6 billion that we have not placed in the balance. We do not plan to use right now. But it is important to remember this because it is BRL 4 billion in fiscal credits, so we have a reduction from now on of the taxes to be paid by the company that are very big, and this will help the cash generation in the future for sure.
The next question comes from João, and he asks, "In the quarter, the suppliers and the line of stock changed. Is there a working capital strategy difference in the company? In the receivable lines in the balance, this has a reduction in the, or this is a forward receiving of products. Can you say the size of the volume of these receivables that have been brought forward?"
João, thank you for the question. Very technical. Let us go by parts. The retail has seasons that are very highlighted. We talked about Easter. When with Easter, this has several other directions in the performance of sales. But this also appears in the balance. So if you focus on the quarter or semester, it seems like the working capital has had a difference, but it is a seasonal one. What is happening is that at the end of the year, you have Black Friday, you have Christmas, you make the sale, so you receive the cash from clients, and you pay each of the suppliers this merchandise in the beginning of the next year. In the quarter, we had the same impact with Easter, and this year we had a great part of sales with Easter, positively affecting the cash, and we paid suppliers right in the second.
It is also very dangerous to focus on the retail in one quarter. You have to look in a semester in the last 12 months to neutralize this seasonal effect. This is what we try to do in our finances, in our cash variation in the last 12 months and not only the last months. This working capital has improved. We are able to advance in the optimization of our inventory. Everything is improving in the last 12 months.
Our next question comes from Thiago. "After the financial restructure, Americanas started presenting a better equity situation, but part of its assets are tax credits that depends on future events. Can you say what parts of the company's equity is converting to operational reoccurring operational cash? How can you say what the situation of this in the five years?
We have many assets, fiscal assets in the balance, the current and the non-current, BRL 3.8 billion, adding this semester of PIS and COFINS. There is not a timeline to using this very precisely, but if you look at the balance, we have accountable road and part of what we will use the next 12 months of BRL 800 million from this. I will repeat my comment about accumulated losses. Added to this BRL 4 billion, we have BRL 6 billion of fiscal losses.
Our next question comes from Ricardo. He asks, "What are the initiatives or partnerships on new suppliers that are on the radar of the company at the moment? Have you thought about creating a shelf for the fitness public, the fitness customer?
The company could be a reference in this." Ricardo, thank you for this question. If you go back to the slide where we talk about strategy, when we talk about the core of our business, one of the greatest pillars is the variety that goes with your suggestion. Yes, we have mapped the. We talked about sweets, toys, hygiene and beauty and house cleaning. We're doing some tests to define, and we're able to stretch this variety, this assortment. Among these five we have, we are absolute leader in many of these products such as, for example, sweets. This is the truth for chocolate. The question is, how do you put inside the same world, you stretch and gain differentiation? Our provocation is already happening in some stores.
Ipanema store here in Rio de Janeiro, we were there in person last night, and in the hygiene area, we had makeup test. To have a shelf of supplements makes a lot of sense. Some stores are testing, some brand, some assortment stretching. We have also had tests with partners with perfumes. We will have pet product. Over 20 tests- 30 tests similar to this that you made comments are already happening in drawing the future, and we should have some answers according to the indicators that come out. We are able to roll out these ideas and make them a standard in all of the stores.
Our next question comes from Ron Cleber Ribeiro. "Congratulations on the hard work. It has a visible improvement in results. Do you have an expectation to recover the margin in the following quarters?
You are looking at the consolidated margin, so it has an effect of subsidized that is negative in this margin in the semester. You are right. But focusing on Americanas, that represents 96% of the consolidated sales, the margin has improved in the semester, highlighting it in the presentation, our gross margin has improved 0.5 percentage points. So our margin is totally sustainable. We do not see, we do not forecast a worsening of this margin.
The next question comes from João and he says, "When will be the date of the first payment of debentures and bonds from the company? What will be the value of this payment?"
João, the first payment will happen in October this year, BRL 19 billion. It is a quarterly payment.
The conference is now closed. I wish a great day for everyone.