Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Via Varejo's conference call to discuss the results for the second quarter of 2020. This call is being broadcast via Internet, and the slide selection will be controlled by you. If you are in the English version, please refresh the link for the download. The analyst questions will be answered, and the journalists should talk to us via email or our website. Before turning the floor to Roberto, I would like to say that the forward-looking statements made during this conference call regarding business perspectives, projections, and operating and financial goals are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Via Varejo's management and on information currently available. Forward-looking statements are not guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they relate to future events and, therefore, dependent circumstances that may or may not occur.
Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operating factors could also affect the future results of Via Varejo and cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. With us today, we have Mr. Roberto, CEO of the company, and Mr. Orivaldo Padilha, CFO and IR officer. Now I would like to turn the floor to Roberto.
Good afternoon, everyone. I would like to thank you for being interested in our company and for being with us on this call. I hope that all of you are doing well and your family also. To start, I will give you a brief overview how we are at here at Via Varejo regarding COVID. We are taking all measures needed to keep a good health. We already have 2,017 stores open. That is 95% of our stores.
Both our stores as well as our logistics are following strict protocols for the safety of our employees as well as customers. In our headquarters, most of 90% of people are still working remotely in their homes. We do not have a date to go back, and we are not in a hurry either. We adapted really well to this new way of operating, and we are very productive with this remote working. As I said in our last call, with this huge change that we saw in the world, the winners are going to be those that adapt faster, and we are performing all needed adaptations to our business, whether for the current moment or for whatever comes ahead. Now, talking about our second quarter, and I'm not on the presentation yet.
This has been a very challenging quarter, and it was extremely transformational for the whole world, and especially for Via Varejo. I believe it was even more transformational. Before starting, I should thank some people. First, really a huge thanks for Via Varejo's team. That's a great team. It's amazing to see their resilience and capacity to adapt, as well as the passion that they have to serve over 85 million customers. Thank you very much, Via Varejo's team. I know that many of them are here with us this afternoon. I also would like to thank all our customers, whether oldest clients, the ones that we have for a long time, or the other ones that are just checking our apps and our digital platforms and really enjoyed what they have seen and ended up staying with us.
It is really a privilege to be able to serve you all. We'll do everything we can to keep these new consumers in the house. I also should thank our 444,521 shareholders, and probably all of them are our customers as well. Thank you for believing in our company and in our capacity to carry out the largest and fastest digital transformation of the Brazilian market. I think that the figures that you will see this afternoon will make you very pleased. This is our fifth call, and I believe that the market already had the opportunity of getting to know us better. I want to stress some of the messages that we have been bringing to you since we started, and I would like to reinforce them, to stress them.
First, we are strongly committed to the coherence and governance in all of the decisions that we make here at Via Varejo. We will always be looking for very fast progress, but in a very consistent way with a lot of transparency, both in our transformation as well as in our results delivery. I think that consistency and transparency is something that we have been repeating since our first call. As we deliver in every quarter, it is more clear that we do have that commitment, and that it is coming through. We are a transformation case in the market today. A lot of people talk about us. We are a democratic company. You can see the number of shareholders. We are inclusive, not only in terms of the team that is here, our customers, but also in the stock market. I think this is very nice.
At every quarter, we have been improving the level of information that we have here so that everyone can have a better understanding of what is this company and also the potential that the company has. After a year, I think all of you can see how much we have delivered, it is very clear also to see the consistency of this team. We are not here to win a soccer match. We are here to take the world championship. That's what we want. Via Varejo is ready for that, we are also preparing ourselves for that competition. We do respect our competitors, I can say that Via Varejo was not taking all the room, all the space, that it was ours, we are doing that now. This is a long-term journey. I want you to have that very clear.
In spite of being a long-term journey, we are very determined about fast deliveries. We want to take Via Varejo, and Via Varejo is already there, but we want it to be even more the way and where people buy, all Brazilians, where, how, and the way they want it. We are going to go after consumers. We are going to have this relationship with consumers the way they want. Now turning to page two of our presentation. I think it's important to say who made this transformation of Via Varejo, who transformed Via Varejo, this digital giant, which we already are. We just carried out a survey in-house, and the results are just out. We are today 41,000 active employees. The average of age here is 36 years, and the average time at Via Varejo is around 5.4 years.
47% of our team is comprised by women, 53% men, and we have 53% of our team in the leadership of the company. We consider the leadership here, since the coordinator, all of them are leading positions in a lot of our stores. Remember, each one of the stores is a company in itself, and we do have CEOs of the stores, and the 53% in leadership are women. We are following Brazil's path. Brazil has already more women as the head of the house, and I think we are very well represented here. We have over 2,000 disabled people working here and 1,750 apprentices that do engage in our culture, and we have everything to write a beautiful story with these apprentices, and they can become employees in the future. What we are looking for here is to have a huge diversity.
We want the Brazilian society to be represented within Via Varejo. We are able to talk to the society, to Brazil, and I do believe that we are on the right track. We still have a lot to do, we are in an expedited path and in a very good trajectory. Turning to the next page. I think that, once again, stressing this is the way of purchasing for every Brazilian, whatever, whenever, and however they want. This is a reality. This was a very challenging quarter. We have seen over 80% of our stores, actually 100% of our stores were closed. We were able to serve our consumers where they wanted to be served. We were able to quickly migrate our sales to the online channel. Padilha will later show how that performance happened on a monthly basis in the quarter.
It's amazing to see how fast we were able to do it. We had a total GMV of BRL 7.3 billion, considering that out of these BRL 7.3 billion, BRL 5.1 billion came from the online GMV, and this is unprecedented. There is no way that a non-digital company be able to have such a high GMV in the online channel. We are very pleased about this result, and even happier about the quality of the result. On the next page, now looking at the highlights. Once again, I will repeat myself. We had the BRL 7.3 billion total GMV, and out of this total, 70% was in the online channel. The online makes up for 100% of lost sales due to the lockdown. We more than made up for this in GMV.
I think that with the pandemic and showing our capacity to quickly adapt, we created the Text Me on WhatsApp, and this is a huge success. It became a worldwide case at Facebook, I think other retailers will follow in the same trajectory. We talked to some of them, we did transfer knowledge. This is an important moment for retail where people needed to find a way to maintain their revenue. We did play that role. That sale represented 20% of GMV in that quarter. Even with the over 1,000 stores already opened, we are still going very strong on the Text Me on WhatsApp. We are already in the 3rd generation. We are ready to go to the 4th generation of that, we are able to have over 20,000 sales reps become online and digital.
To the right, we grew 180% in the second quarter of 2020 vis-a-vis the prior year. If we consider June alone, the growth was 365%. 1P, we have grown 311% in the second quarter. If we isolate June itself, it's 422%. In the 3P, we grew 180%, and over to 111% in June alone. For 3P, we have a huge avenue of growth. We are just starting our marketplace business. I will talk more about that. We have exponential growth in the number of MAUs. Remember, when we got here a year ago, we took the company with 1.5 million monthly active users in our apps, and today we have concluded the second half of the year with over 15 million active users. This is a huge growth. This is all in a sustainable fashion.
I will be using this word, sustainable, a few times because there were some questions when we published it and disclosed the numbers that people asked about how sustainable was this growth. I will show you that this is absolutely sustainable. On the contrary, we did gain margin in this period of time. On the next page, I think that this is very clear. Our quick and accelerated digital transformation, it already happened in Via Varejo. We start our share of online in the GMV of 18.5 in the second quarter of 2019 to seven. Of course, this was driven by the pandemic, but it will never be level where we were at before because the stores, now over 1,000 open stores, our online is still growing at an accelerated pace. Even with the stores opened and reopened, these stores are selling very well.
Even then, the online growth is still accelerated in this current period. The GMV 1P growth went from a negative number last year to 311% in the second quarter now. In the GMV 1P plus 3P growth, also, we had a decrease, a negative number, but also we went to a growth of over 180%. Here, I think we have something that can be very enlightening for all of those that had questions about how sustainable was the sales growth of Via Varejo. Our gross operating margin, that is, we do not have any recurring impact. In fact, this is life as it is. In our operating margin, we did 27.3% in the second quarter of 2019 to 30.7% in the second quarter of 2020. It's much higher. We did have a very significant growth in the online channel without burning money, without damaging the company's profitability.
Very much on the contrary, Padilha will show you the breakdown of our gross margin and also how much we gained in terms of margin with the online operation in the second quarter. This gain is here to stay. We already have that integrated. The number of monthly active users went from 1.5 million - 15 million. The monthly online visits, we had 73 million in 2019. Now in the second quarter of 2020, it's 187 million, and the number of sellers went from 4,700 now to 6,000 sellers. We have no problems at all to bring in sellers to our platform. We did have a problem on the platform itself, but we were able to do an accelerated onboard of sellers. This is being unlocked with a new platform, and we should grow in the onboard.
There are a lot of sellers that want to come in, and we want to take advantage of all this traffic that we are generating. This is going to bring in a lot of recurrences on the 3P and the other way around as well. We are in a very much winning trajectory. On the next page, we have the MAUs. It shows the consistency that we have been having in the growth of monthly active users. If you analyze from June of 2019, it was 1.5 million. In September, that's when we adjusted the platforms, and it started accelerating the online business. We have been adding 3 million users per quarter, basically 1 million new users a month in a consistent fashion. What happens was that with the pandemic, we ended up having 7 million users more in this quarter.
Once again. We do now have product donations here, and we are getting those in a very consistent fashion. Whether of the customers that we already have in Casas Bahia or the new customers that are coming in, that are trying what we have that is new, they like it, and we are working hard on our CRM with all the data intelligence that we have gained to maintain, to keep these customers with us. 32% of our sales already come from our app. It was 12% last year, 34%. By m- site, we are gaining a lot of traction in our app. We had promised a new app now, the other day today, actually, we promised the new apps and front ends. We already have the Casas Bahia app up and running. Better usability, better search, and checkout and product shows.
It's totally renewed with the top technology. Turning to the next page, talking about marketplace. We are just in the beginning of our journey. I should say that there is nothing that exists today in the market in terms of technology for marketplace that we cannot have here. The technology today is more affordable and faster, and just check what we have seen in terms of transformation in this company in the past year. We will quickly gain traction in the marketplace. We are going to use all this power that we already have in our service for 3P for this flow. We will have all our sellers or our sales reps selling 3P products. Our credit operations also will be available for 3P products as well, and our logistics will be at service for 3P as well.
We gain a lot of traction. This is already robust growth. We had almost BRL 1 billion of GMV in the marketplace. There is a lot to come. The journey is just in the beginning. We already have 4.2 billion SKUs in our marketplace. We have a lot to happen from now to the end of the year. On the next page, talking about margin and inventory. In our last call, I said that we had the right decision of people receiving goods and merchandise when the pandemic started. This was the right decision. No question about it. That is related to our core business. We know how to play that game. This is in our DNA. We have 100% of our inventory that is renewed. This also helped in our margin increase. We kept receiving merchandise.
We are maintaining our balanced inventory levels, although we have a stock out here and there. Maybe there was not enough shipping in the pre-COVID time, but we are fairly well-planned of the industry. Also, the omni-channel integration is helping us a lot. The stores are logistics the way they can, in all areas they can, and a strategic execution for pricing. This is a competitive advantage. We have a lot to come in this pricing mode, but we have an amazing team in our commercial area, and they also have that in their DNA. We are very confident about our trajectory in terms of margin and inventory. On the next page, the payment book. This is a very traditional means of payment for Casas Bahia. We have historic relationships with our consumers. This is a very resilient system, and Padilha will go into the details here.
The little of the delinquency that we have seen going up in the beginning, it had a lot to do with not having a store to go in and make the payments. This already adjusted itself at a very fast pace, but Padilha will go into the details. We started in the mid of the second quarter our digital payment book. We have the same payment book that our customers already know, and it's very democratic. Now they do have a digital version. We already have a portfolio of almost BRL 120 million. It is available for our approved customers. We are ramping up that until the end of the year, so it should gain representativeness in our digital sales. We also increased the base of pre-approved customers. We did change our scoring model. We reviewed all our credit engines.
Our data scientists are working hard with our credit operations team. It did help us in that sense. Now, in the second quarter, we also increased almost to the maximum the way that we granted credit. 90% of the decision is already automated. There is an intelligence in order to analyze the credit using our models, and that already represents that 90% of our sales credit operations. We are on the right track. The credit operations is growing in Via Varejo, Casas Bahia, of course, and now on the online as well. We do have a path that is moving towards growth. On the next page, our tech culture. We are also very much working on increasing our tech team. We already have 1,400 developers, 120 squads in three tech hubs and 29 tribes.
This is a very robust team, and we have just announced yesterday, I think, we are opening 300 openings for our tech team already in this new mode. The team is going to work remotely. They will be hired to work on remote charges. That breaks a lot of paradigms in terms of the team wanting or not to be in certain places. These new employees will be operating from wherever they want to. On our next page, we have the performance and the development of our platform. It's still accelerated. We promised a lot of things in Via Varejo that used to be on ice but being renewed. It's already up and running. Our experience of the cell phones and mobile phones in the hands of our sales reps for them to sell, this is being rolled out.
We already have it within two states with this new model, and by the end of the year, 100% of Brazil will have that available. The new experience, the use of Wi-Fi so that we can have register that consumer, understand the consumer so that our sales reps will know about the consumer, who it is, the history of that consumer, the credit limit that is pre-approved for he or she. This is very accelerated in terms also of geolocation. I think this is going very well with the online channels. We have the new apps, we also have the new front end. There are a lot of improvements to come in the future. In the marketplace, we are now adding the new platform that will unlock the onboarding, and we'll be able to have an accelerated onboarding for resellers.
This is going to improve our game in terms of recurrence and also a better assortment. On the next page. Now talking about logistics, we had promised for this year 120 mini hubs, and we already have 380 of them. With what we still have in this third quarter, we want to reach 500 mini hubs. All the cities in which we need to have a mini hub, we will have that. That is going to happen this year. Already, this is a differential. This is a competitive advantage that is unprecedented. Via Varejo has several sustained pillars, and logistics is one of them. It really differentiates us a lot from everything else that you see in the market. I think that the barrier of technology, we already made it clear, this is no longer a huge barrier. It is accessible and fast to go over it.
Now to put together the logistics structure that this company has, that's not easy, that's not fast. To be present in most Brazilian cities with the last mile for the inner cities and as the online gains more representativeness in Brazil today, 6%, basically on the large capitals where logistics is easy. When we go inside the smaller cities in Brazil to have these 1,000 stores to serve the logistics and all this network, this will unlock the potential and will allow us to have an important advantage in the Brazilian market. For ASAP Log, we integrated that in the second quarter. It is already active with 330 of the current 380 mini hubs. It's just a matter of a few more weeks so that we can have it active in all our mini hubs. The process is accelerated.
In the 3P, we will have, as I said, we will have logistics serving our 3P sellers as well in the marketplace. That should happen by the end of the year. It is already available today. ASAP Log, they already operate in our 3P, but this all is going to be going through Via Varejo's logistics. I think we gain another important avenue there. Just as an extra piece of information, in the second quarter of 2020, just on the online, our logistics have processed over 5 billion deliveries with an efficiency level of over 95%. That is important because that has to do with our NPS and the level that we are present also in the complaint site, for instance, in the Reclame Aqui, Via Varejo have had a bad leadership in that website in the third quarter of last year.
I invite you all to check it now. We are not in the position where we want to be. There is a lot to be done, and we are more or less in 60-90 days of taking a huge quality leap.
Consumers sales. Suddenly, we already go after that position we had last year. There are other retail companies that are in a place where we were in the past. We are very pleased about the path we are following regarding the speed of our logistics.
Talking about our bank, this is our digital wallet that already works as a super app. We already have over 1.7 million downloads. Acceptance has been really outstanding, and we promoted the total integration of banQi in the second quarter. With that, we were able to share our database. That banQi comes in with more than 35 million clients. We already have 83% growth in new accounts in the second quarter 2020 versus the first quarter of the year.
If we only look at July alone, we see a 93% growth over the second quarter. I mean, in relation to the second quarter. That is an outstanding growth. GPV is also growing. It's growing 120% in the second quarter. We already have more than 160,000 CDC clients on board. We also experience an amazing and significant reduction in client acquisition cost, given all of the customer base and the information we have on our clients. It's much cheaper for us to acquire a new client, unlike what we see in the market in general. Our acquisition cost is extremely low. Moving to the next page. Here we look at our capital structure at the end of the second quarter.
I think we corrected one of the major problems or deficiencies that we had, and I'm referring to the company's capital structure. In the second quarter, we ended the quarter with BRL 7.4 billion in the cash, between cash and unsold receivables. We changed our capital structure with more than BRL 10 billion in transactions. Our follow-on was extremely successful. I think this was the first major follow-on during the pandemic period. We were able to capture BRL 4.4 billion of the new shareholders that came on board our Via Varejo. With that, together with other measures that we also adopted, we were able to redeem a promissory note in the amount of BRL 1.5 billion. There is a new debenture of equal amount for up to two years.
We also protected the company with 2.5 billion CCB up to two years as well. We concluded the acquisition of Airfox and ASAP Log. On the right-hand side, despite a quarter with great challenges, we were able to generate BRL 246 million in positive cash. This is an improvement of BRL 1.4 billion vis-a-vis Q2 of 2019. We also had a final and an appeal decision for PIS and COFINS of BRL 364 million. This is very transparent because we are just outlining what is recurring and what is not recurring. This capital structure puts us in a very sound position, and allows us to promote all the transformation we have in our pipeline.
Therefore, our position is very sound, and we are ready to face all the new challenges along the road. Now moving to the next slide. When we look at all the transformation that we already promoted, we have to then probably look at Via Varejo's next steps. All of these next steps are very well outlined. We move on our daily journey to improve conversion. This is the everyday or the real operation of any online business of the Casas Bahia app already delivered. Now we are pursuing the delivery of our new apps for you and extra.com. We are also trying to launch all of that before Black Friday of November with the same usability, with UX renewed and ease of navigation and a better cart and less clicks until you finalize your purchase.
Everything that is applied in the Casas Bahia app will also be available in the other apps. There are still some further improvements for the Casas Bahia app. This involves a continuous improvement journey. By the same token, we start our pricing journey. Our data scientists are focused right now in revisiting our entire pricing journey so as to make it more intelligent. There are some gains to be captured, both in terms of sales and also in terms of margins that can be captured. Moving on to marketplace. We are focused on a real-time onboarding of sellers. We will also very soon open to sellers the possibility of sellers having coupons, and then they will manage the coupons and the discounts they want to grant inside the platforms. Envvias, which is also Via Varejo working in favor of 3P.
We are also engaged in this journey, and our journey also involves full commerce for the sellers who express interest. We can provide an integrated operation. All of these are part of our journeys, and these enhancements will come every quarter. In the next coming quarters, we will gain one new company every quarter with all of these new improvements. Also, we are optimizing the offline business, the FMI through the app and mobile. We will boost sales of 1P and 3P. There is a group, the modality ship from store. We want to reach 500 mini hubs in the third quarter. Therefore, we will grow this potential, and we will focus on doing that last mile based on the mini hub. This represents very significant savings in our delivery costs. Wi-Fi also.
Wi-Fi is widely available when our consumer is in the store, we capture the app of our customers in the store, so we can provide information to our sales rep more quickly. If they want to go embark on a journey in a store using the apps, we are preparing our brick-and-mortar stores to be even more integrated with our online service and vice versa. We move on our journey to improve, enhance our tech culture. We will improve our São Caetano tech hub. We want it to be ready to face this new technological wave. Our policy, our home office and our officeless policy is more robust. We just opened 300 new vacancies for home office engineers. We are now putting together our new home office policy after this period is over.
Everybody is working from home. We are focusing on this new way of working, and this is across the company. We are very agile across the company in terms of methodology and technology for the company. There are many things happening at the moment. I believe that our technology is 100% present in all of our business areas. The other way is also true. In every corner of the technology, we are breathing and experiencing the business. That's why we are very focused on this new journey. In banQi, there are many new functionalities. We are adding more features. There is yet a lot more to come. We will be totally integrated with Pix once it's ready to operate. The bank will be ready and operational.
Also with the QR code agency and account or the branches and the account will come by the end of the year. The corporate account is also something that is in our pipeline. Now I will turn the floor to speak about the results, the financial results.
Good afternoon. I just want to make sure that the audio is okay. Now we start on page 17 with the first financial figures, comparing with the figures from last year. Here I start with GMV, and these numbers refer to the numbers that we showed before. The company is growing a lot, and this compensates for all the losses coming from the stores that were shut down during the pandemic period for 1P and 3P. These are the numbers that we already referred to them.
This really illustrates a very robust growth with the peak in June of almost 40% of total GMV, BRL 365 on the online, BRL 522 in 1P, BRL 211 3P. Stores falling 27%. In the release, we also try to answer questions from investors regarding to what will happen to the stores after the reopening. The concept of same-store sales that we applied in the past are very difficult to be reapplied now after the shutdown and the reopening. We try to think about that in a more effective way. Using an old concept of same stores open in May, April, and June, we arrived at a 15% growth of stores following the concept of same-store sales.
If we compare the days that these stores were open this year in the second quarter of last year and the second quarter, that lead us to a number of 23%, meaning that the physical stores that were reopened were able to capture also a very significant growth. On page 18, this is a growth breakdown of the results. Here we see the important results for the company showing total GMV growing 710%, gross profit, it's not BRL 6,461 million down. Gross profit, 1.182%, better than last year. In addition, this also is impacted by the tax credits of physical goods that has already been posted in the first quarter. I will show you how this was accounted for in the different lines of our P&L and SG&A, or general and sales and administrative expenses, minus 25.9%.
This is a very different behavior throughout the quarter, but I will show you how the operating expenses and operating margins behaved. We arrived at an accounting results of 10.52 EBITDA, BRL 555 million, BRL 573 more than the year before, 4.20 percentage points higher. Financial income also impacted by tax credits, BRL 74 million better than the year before. Net income, therefore, of BRL 65 million, 1.2%, an improvement of BRL 227 million when compared to the same quarter of the year before, 3.92 basis points. Next page 19. We will isolate the non-recurring effects of the quarter and also the same quarter of 2019 in order to run a comparison without these effects.
This year, therefore, we had BRL 240 million of that tax credit that was accounted for in our gross profit, BRL 123 million of the same tax credit monetary correction posted in our financial expenses, which was enhanced. Excluding these impacts, the operating loss of the company in the quarter was BRL 175 million or BRL 3.30. In the same quarter the year before, there were also several adjustments that were made of non-recurring effects. The first one was BRL 51 million of tax credit sales and BRL 157 million in expenses of fiscal fees, expenses with advertising and marketing. The adjustment was BRL 203 million for EBITDA, BRL 134 million in terms of net income. Once the adjustments were made, we move to the next page 20. Here we were able to notice the operating performance in both quarters in a comparable basis, like for like.
Therefore, we had BRL 7,260 against BRL 7,173 last year of total GMV, growing 1.2%, 85% better. Operating gross profit, BRL 1,621, slightly below last year in monetary terms, but 3.4 percentage points higher than last year. I will have a special slide just to explain this effect and also to demonstrate that this is real in terms of SG&A, BRL 1,365 or 29.9% when compared to 25.30% of last year, the same quarter last year. This has the strong impact of the shutdown of the stores, BRL 147 million better than the year before, 0.60 percentage points. Adjusted EBITDA, BRL 340 million or 5.9%, which is almost twice as much of last year, which was BRL 179 or 3.0%. Financial expenses were worse, and that includes all of the initial impacts from the onset of the pandemic, especially late April and May, and because of interest rates.
Minus 49%, but in terms of percentage, it was better. Net income, we had a loss of BRL 176 or -3.3% when compared to the operating figures of BRL 296. Even with the pandemic this year, our loss was improved by BRL 120. It was much worse when we compare to the figures of the same quarter of the year before. On slide 21 here, we have a very clear snapshot of what happened throughout the quarter. These first three months were totally different. This is the first time that we break down the figures for every month to be more transparent. In April, our GMV was BRL 1.871, much lower. The online operations didn't react immediately, but it was a gradual reaction. From April to May, there was a growth of BRL 630 million of GMV.
If you look at June and April, there was an increase of almost 1 million in terms of invoicing. That was exceptional performance, and this refers or is attributable to the online transformation of the company in this quarter. Therefore we were able to recover our revenue. It was a strong recovery. As you can see, I'm talking about that even in the previous quarter, because we referred much of the incredible potential that the company has to post a good gross margin for product because of the know-how of the company, because of our inventory management expertise. 30 points. I'm talking now about profit. At the end of the quarter, we had our gross revenue reaching 30.7%. In terms of expenses, as stores were reopened and with all of our revenue, both from physical stores and online e-commerce, shows productivity gains.
We started with 29.8 and 24.0 in June. Certainly, all of that involves very strong and stringent cost and expenses management. We were really thirsty in terms of looking at rent, at all of the possibilities that were opened up by the government, and all of the different mechanisms were used by the company. With all of that, it's very clear that the company was able to recover promptly, coming from a negative EBITDA close to 3% in March to 2.70 negative in April, and a positive figure in May, and even surpassing 10% in June, which showed that that loss was basically something that occurred in the first 30 days of the quarter. Next slide. Here, we explain what is the breakdown of the gross margin of 30.7 when compared to the year before, which was 27.3.
First of all, we must look at a very important change of a loss of mix in furniture. This is a strong loss in terms of monetary volume in brick-and-mortar stores, and this accounts for a loss of half a percentage point in our gross profit. In the mix of channel, in gross profit in the stores, it's a bit higher, especially because of the furniture category and other relevant categories. We have operating results in payment books and services, extended warranty. Here in the changing channel, we have lost 0.3%. Certainly, with the recovery of stores and the reopening of the stores, this mix will experience a rebound, and we'll start on a recovery path in terms of forfeiting an agreement that was turning to a bad chain debt.
It's no longer a cost in the gross profit, but it's a financial expense, and this improves the margin to 0.6%. All of the negotiation gain, considering all the decisions taken by the company on the onset of the pandemic to have robust inventory to cope with the situation, proved to be assertive, and that's why we were able to experience this impressive gain of 5.6%, which allows to have a gross margin growing 30.7%. In the next slide here, we strengthen and reinforce our inventory management practice. We made the decision to enhance our inventories at the end of April. We did not close our distribution centers. We made commercial agreements with our suppliers. We charged for products that were rejected by other clients who shut down their warehouses.
At the end of the quarter, we reached a level of BRL 5.302 in our inventory. Most of you who talked to us during the process might remember that this meant a potential of almost BRL 8 billion or above BRL 8 billion when we talk about sale price. On the right-hand side of the slide here, we have the same concept in terms of days of inventory. The days of inventory went from 100-124 days. When we look forward and look at our future selling potential, we can certainly say that this is absolutely normal and that the company can keep their inventories and their replenishment costs despite this challenging moment and a moment when our suppliers are going through restrictions. Now moving to slide 24. Is it okay? I see another image here.
On page 24, here I'm showing our cash position at the end of the quarter. This is more just to show you that after the follow-on, this position does not consider any new cash position considering what happened at the end of the quarter. Excluding this fact, between the first and the second quarter, the company generated almost BRL 250 million in cash. If you look at the same variation between the first and the second quarter of 2019, we used up BRL 1.1 billion. We can say that the company improved its operating cash position in more than BRL 1.3 billion or almost BRL 1.4 billion more. Certainly, because we were able to extend CCB in the follow-on, we are now in a very comfortable position whereas we have more than BRL 7 billion in cash.
The final slide before we finish the presentation and go into the Q&A session, this is the balance sheet position of our CDCI. This is the first time that we show you this chart, because I think that this can help you understand how we stand. This refers to the pages that appear on the ITR. The ITR has an accounting view, and therefore, future interest rates, assets, and liabilities appear on separate accounts. When we look at this in a managerial perspective, we have BRL 3.15 of assets to receive and another amount that should be passed over to banks. If we look at the previous quarter this year, our position was slightly lower, and during the months of April and May, until the stores began to reopen, we did not produce so many payment books, and this position appears here in our receivables.
In this quarter, we had 776 interests to be accrued and BRL 88 million of active interests to be accrued in our liability line. Therefore, the position of provisions for doubtful accounts, it means that this accounts for 2.3% of our book to be received on in terms of total receivables. I've been reinstating this every time I talk to our investors and analysts that our payment book has a historical resilience. This is not something new, because whenever there is a crisis, the payment book proves that it is still very resilient and provides low risk. Certainly, there was a bubble of delinquencies, actually in April and May, and this was mainly due to the shutdown of the stores because only 6% of the collection was outside the stores, and 65% of all the payment books of April were paid, but 35% were not paid.
I'm already disregarding those payment books that were postponed. Payment was postponed to the end of April. Once stores began to reopen in the second half of May, the collection process was expedited. There were times that there were lines in the stores, and we had to be very careful because the lines were long, and we had to be careful because of the social distancing protocol. At the end of June, July, and August also, we had a great evolution if we compared to periods in the onset of the pandemic. We see a very strong rebound. The recovery is coming, and it's very good. This recovery should also be gradual throughout this quarter and this half year.
This shows that we will see the return of new payment books and new credit operations, because we do believe that this is a very safe instrument for the company. We don't see any major risks down the road, and this is reflected in this amount of provisions. We also believe large potential for this instrument because this can help us even grow further, considering that many banks use credit card limits because this is different when compared to the use of payment books. Still talking about digital credit. Our digital credit operation is now providing almost BRL 120 million in our portfolio. This is a very safe instrument with great potential, low risk. Our risks are totally under control by us. That's it. Thank you very much. Now, Roberto.
Now we are going to start our Q&A session, starting with a question by Victor from Credit Suisse. Roberto and Padilha, he wants to know if the online sales increase came from new customers, existing customers, and if you had cannibalization between Casas Bahia stores sales and online sales, especially when the stores started reopening.
Victor, thank you very much for your question. We did have a mix of both. A lot. Of new customers are new to our base and a lot of our customers buying via digital. We do have a number of new consumers. As we reopened the stores, we kept growing a lot in the online. Physical stores, we are growing a lot. The sales reps from the brick-and-mortar stores are selling, whether to customers that are going into the store or customers that are talking to our sales reps via WhatsApp, and also our online is growing.
Obviously, there is a balance there. We are growing on the online as well, even after the stores have been reopened.
Our next question is from Bob Ford from Merrill Lynch. Bob would like to understand a little bit better how is this new relationship with Globo in terms of functionality and how this partnership will work in our marketing department?
Hello, Bob.
Thank you for your question. Globo has just launched the T-commerce. This is experimental at this moment. It's something that was just opened. We started just last weekend. We are engaged in this project with them for a while, and we always challenge our agency and all our partners. We ask them how we can innovate in terms of selling and having a relationship with our consumers. Globo invited us for this partnership, and we are working on this project with them. Basically, there is an interaction of what happens with viewers. They can buy several of the products that are in the show that is running on TV, and that is in a very interactive fashion. With their remote control, they can place an order or using their mobile phone and a QR code. This was a nice initiative.
The test went well, and we are engaged with Globo, and we are still working on this innovation process with them.
Next question from Tobias from Citibank. His question is whether in our perception of the company, what does this recovery mean in the strong growth of the physical retailer? Is it due to the measures by the government or some distribution between segments, or whether this trend will continue?
Tobias, thank you very much for your question. It's very difficult to draw a conclusion at this point, Tobias. As things are going so well, we are not even questioning where all of this is coming from. What we see is that, in fact, there are some sectors like traveling and some other industries that were heavily hit. Because consumers are working straight from home, and this has a direct impact with our business.
A lot of people in Brazil are not used to buying online. People that did not buy online now they are going back to the stores, and the sale is more conservative because they are not just browsing the store. As a matter of fact, when they walk into the store, they have a very good idea of what they want to buy. They go straight to the sales rep, and the sales rep can help them decide what will be the best product for them. Therefore, it's difficult to understand the impact of the Coronavoucher at this point. We are noticing a very strong consumption in the brick-and-mortar stores and by the same token, on the e-commerce side as well.
Next question from Thiago Macruz from Itaú. He wants to understand what are the main drivers that can explain that gross margin.
Online traffic was strong, it took you forever to extract some benefit, and maybe you didn't have to enter into any competition, and whether there was a more pricing retagging in the period.
Thiago, thank you for the question. The market is strong as it has always been. Competition has been around as it has always been. It's part of our DNA to play this portion game. We have an excellent team in charge of that, and I think we just took good advantage of this moment and advantage of the enormous flow of new clients that came in during this period. Our brands are very strong. What we were lacking maybe was to add more excellence to our services. Consumers always wanted to buy online from us, but we just got to be ready to cater to the needs of these consumers.
Now we are ready because now our platform is terribly functional, not only to serve this customer, but we have the entire logistic service ready to serve these customers. Therefore, it's just a combination of our good brands with everything else that we've been doing. I don't recall having just a single thing that made things happen. I think with the pandemic, it became more apparent, but we were already growing our online penetration.
pandemic is that the cake became more digital, more online, and many consumers that used to consume in other locations, they also turned their eyes to us, and they tried it out. They liked what they saw, and they gave us the opportunity to make a sale and also to deliver right. Our satisfaction level is high. We already see some return customers. The market was probably asking whether there was any margin destruction. No, there is no margin destruction. There is no cash back. We didn't use any artificial things to do the sale. What happened was that consumers migrated to us because of everything we did for the company throughout this last year.
Next question from Daniela Bretthauer from Eleven. She wants to understand if the service revenue that usually has a good margin is at a new normal or if there was a structural change. Also, if our delinquency should go back to regular levels still this year.
I will answer the first part of the question. Padilha will take the second. Hello, Daniela. Thank you for your question. Service sales, it is damaged by e-commerce. We believe that credit operation sales and e-commerce with the digital payment book, we are already on the right track there. We are going to increase credit operations. Service sales, those are not as simple. As all the stores are reopened, we'll go back to the same volume that we had for service sales. That also is going to affect our margin. There is a trend to improve the service sales, of course. I'll turn to Padilha for the second question.
Hello, Daniela, thank you for your question. As I have already said, there was a strong recovery of payments of our customers after the stores have been reopened. Obviously, we did not wait for them to go to the stores to make their payments. In the beginning of the pandemic, then a little bit before actually, we already had developed several digitization actions. Some of those projects were running already three quarters ago. We did launch our payment book digital option as a pilot before, and we did that with our own customers. It is not in an open sea, so we do have a controlled delinquency rate. The customers that did not make any payments on April or May, they went back paying in May and June. In June, that's when we measure it in different ways.
In the four main weeks, in the comparable form, the volume of payments of June beat all receivables volumes in the pre-COVID weeks up to March. We still see that happening. Calibra and the new team collection, they had already digitized the collection. Now, several collection initiatives, portals, plans, plan renegotiation, all of that was open for customers so that they could shift their payment to their new reality. In a way, this is bringing a lot of return for our collection department, credit recovery, and we also have seen that we are starting now a normal period. We don't have a single indicator here. Several indicators show the recovery in a very relevant fashion.
In addition to that, also considering our digital payment book, we start going back to the volume of contacts that we had pre-COVID times, and that increases our portfolio mass, and that loops enable possible risks. Also talking about credit granting, the new area is developing several tools to improve the credit concession analysis. Roberto has showed us that 90% of that is already automated, and this percentage is increasing. Every month, we have new technologies and new ways to improve it, both credit granting as well as collect. We were telling you that, especially in the follow-on meetings and also after in the pre-follow-on, post-pandemic, telling you that this is a resilient portfolio. You did hear that from the founders of especially Casas Bahia because that's where we have a very strong credit operation since the company started, actually.
All of that summed up gave us confidence to say that the risk was low, and now we are just proving it with the figures. Just a matter of safety, we do not have that ADA in our portfolio going up, but we see a lot of opportunity for our credit operations gaining more penetration and relevance on stores sales and now on the online sales as well.
Next question from Guilherme Assis. Two questions. How were sales in July for Father's Day? What was the trend? I think Padilha explained that, but also how is the provisioning policy for credit operations, if we expect to increase the provision considering the end of the impact of the emergency funds that the government has granted the population.
Well, June, July was very good. Father's Day also was good.
Both the brick-and-mortar sales and also online sales are following a good trajectory. About the second question, I think Padilha already talked about that. Now I would like to go back to Guilherme 's question. Part of all that happened is that everything that we're doing with marketing, with our brands, and all the intelligence of CRM that is applied to this huge base of customers that we have. This is not much used in the company before, but we have a lot of data scientists who work on the analytics of the space and generating and extracting from it all potential for consumption and relationship that helps explain the growing movement that we are seeing on the online.
Next question from Andrew, from Morgan Stanley. He would like to have more details about the changes on the seller onboarding in the marketplace. A little bit about the profile of the category.
Andrew, good afternoon. Thank you for your question. We had a very long line of sellers. This will be solved now once onboarding is released. We will pursue real-time onboard from now till the end of the year. We will do a refilling of categories in our marketplace. We've been testing several categories. We have a very clear idea of what the categories are and what are the sellers who make a difference, maybe in other marketplaces in the Brazilian market. The good news is that most of these sellers are willing to join us. They are willing to get on board.
Sellers are not loyal because marketplace is a big shopping mall, and sellers want to be in wherever has a large flow and with brands that can add more sales to them. Therefore, as we improve our service level, and we are quite transparent with that. We chose to focus on the 1P corrections because this would give more support to the company, and this is very apparent in our current results, and we arrived at a very good level at 1P, but there's still a lot more to be done. I can say that our stability is good and the quality level is also good, and our team is now totally immersed in our marketplace. What I can say is that there is nothing in technology that is available in other marketplaces in Brazil that Via Varejo cannot have in the next one, two, or three quarters.
Technology is not a barrier. We have an excellent team. On the other hand, there are several features that only Via Varejo can offer. What we'll do, we will then focus on these features and make them available. Most part of all the competitors in the marketplace do not have such a vast popularity. Most marketplaces don't have more than 20,000 sellers that would be willing to sell all 3P items at Via Varejo. Most of them do not have their own credit operation and with the same track record history that we have, and this will also be available to our marketplace. Not only that, we have a gigantic number of hits. This will also be at the service of the marketplace. We have more than 15 million active users, and at first, all of that can boost the marketplace.
After that, once the marketplace is boosted, this will generate a recurrency to Via Varejo. This is a win-win situation. This brings about other opportunities to gain with logistics services and many other things that are still in our pipeline and our radar. In most marketplaces, you don't have a bank as we do have here, which is totally driven by more than 80 million customers that we have in our customer base. Maybe what we're missing in the marketplace, it's enhanced technology, but once again, there is nothing available in the market that we could not have it ourselves. We will be able to deliver that and to deploy that very soon. As we evolve, we will gain more traction, not only in 1P, but also in 3P. Our development driver is now 3P at the moment.
This question from Joseph from JP Morgan.
He wants to learn the company's strategy to attract talents in technology, and what are the main challenges in terms of development looking forward in the next three months?
I think somebody asked Helisson that same question yesterday, so the answer is right off the top of my head. In fact, I think good people attracts good talents. We have an exceptional team working in our technology area. Helisson have a great team working at several levels. The tech people, they love a challenge. They're driven by challenges. The challenge to transform Via Varejo, and also given the company's potential, considering what has happened and what is yet to happen, this draw the attention of a lot of the tech people, and we can clearly see that being translated into the onboarding of new people coming to Via.
I think that when yesterday we decided to open 300 new positions, and we are offering the possibility of working from home. In 24 hours, we have been very successful. This is on the tail of the success we are experiencing since three months ago. We want to say, I think people are willing to say, "I was part of one of the largest transformation cases in the Brazilian market." People are very enthusiastic and highly motivated to be part of this team. I don't know whether I forgot any other part of your question.
Deliveries, I think, and developments.
Next, deliveries. This is very much aligned to the last slide of my presentation, because I think it has a lot to do with the new apps from the other brands. We will put a lot of intelligence in our pricing management and our inventory management feature.
As we have 500 new hubs, we embark a lot of intelligence so that we can leverage inventory in a more intelligent way to the mini hubs to lower the cost of our logistics, and we want to deliver quicker. We have to optimize offline and online and to promote an enhanced integration. We will intensify that integration further. Pretty soon we will no longer look at where the customer is coming from, because the sales rep in the brick-and-mortar store is placing the sales as well. All of our back office structure is being reviewed. We are making several deliveries in a very transparent way to all consumers. This also has a lot of efficiency gains for our business, and certainly this represents a bigger and gigantic innovation with banQi after this integration with us and after that big dive into our customer base.
This is just a bit of what I can tell you. There is more, but I can't just say everything now because I know that the competition is also listening.
Next question, Roberto. Ruben from Santander. What can we expect in terms of the behavior of brick-and-mortar stores after the third quarter and on?
Thank you, Ruben, for your question. If I well understood, how can we plan the stores, right? If I well understood, our storefronts, right? I think that the strength that we have gained with the online sales reps, the digital sales reps, showed us that we have the ability of migrating consumers from channels and even from physical stores. All retailers are constantly analyzing their stores' footprints. This is in the DNA of all retailers that have physical stores. We will keep on analyzing that footprint, but with some important pillars. The store that has a relationship with consumers and sells, and that has that relationship with consumers, we'll check those.
The stores that will be serving the last mile, that is the last mile delivery starting on that store. Also the store has a click-and-collect unit for consumers. They buy online and pick it up at the store, whether 3P or 1P. This is going to define the review of our store's footprint, and we are constantly analyzing that, but I cannot tell you anything now. I just can tell you that we'll be reviewing our pipeline, based on these pillars.
I think there's this energy here in this question. Irma from Goldman Sachs is asking if there are possible opportunities to buy a store or real estate from competitors. Maybe there are companies that are having a hard time in this pandemic, and if that could be good for Via Varejo.
Hello, Irma. Good afternoon, and thank you for your question.
First, we look back. Reactivating our store expansion plan. Analyzing these pillars that I just mentioned, which are the stores in a relationship with consumers, the stores serving the last mile and the stores for the people like them. We are mapping some areas in Brazil where we need to add stores. We'll move on with our expansion plan for these areas. We are always analyzing the situation. We are not considering the purchase of any retailers. Yes, we do have extra points of sale or physical stores that are available. There are opportunities on the table, and we are analyzing those. Whatever makes sense for us to move forward with our expansion plan. We are analyzing these pillars.
Next question from Gustavo, UBS. He wants to know whether there is still any potential to improve your gross margin looking forward. What about the loyalty program, something to do with cashback?
Well, Gustavo, we love to gain more margin, and we never rest our case when it comes to our margin. We are always pursuing more. Therefore, we are trying to be more efficient in many of our processes. As I said, we are putting a lot of data scientists at work to improve the quality of our pricing decisions. I think that all of that has an impact on profitability. I cannot tell you precisely how much more we could improve, but this is something that it's an ongoing pursuit. In terms of loyalty programs, especially cashback programs, just to be very objective. Cashback, it's a beautiful name just to reduce margin and give discounts.
This is the summary of a cashback is. It gives out discounts. We don't think about doing that. We do not have that in our range. We do have an advantage because we have good enough margin that would allow us to do that. We also believe that there are other paths that can help us to add more customer store base. This is something we've been doing. You can see that if you look at the results from previous quarters. Right now, the company does not intend to do anything that could deteriorate its margins or that could offer some major discount. We still believe that we have to focus on growth with sustainability and good continuity.
Next question from Pedro from XP. He would like to hear a bit more about banQi and how that fits into the long-term strategy of Via Varejo.
Pedro, thank you very much for your question. Well, banQi fits perfectly well with our long-term strategy. I believe that at first, Via Varejo will generate a lot of customers to banQi because of our customer base. Secondly, banQi will also generate a lot of recurrency to Via Varejo. banQi will have its own life. They will not depend on Via Varejo. We hope that banQi will, at the end, become a digital wallet of the Brazilian C class, where we'll be able to add a large number of services to that bracket of society. I'm saying that what we have today is already a major differential to that bracket of society, because in most cases, they do not even hold a banking account.
We want to be the digital wallet for these people because they already have a conversation with our stores, and certainly we can also benefit from that recurrency. Both organizations can run parallel. One can be the facilitator of the other.
There's a last question here. Another question from Bob. It's a very nice topic. How do we see the potential of the digital payment book for the company in the future? If you want to make your closing remarks, I think we can end the call.
Okay. Thank you, Bob, for your second question, and it's really good. We see a very important avenue there. Everything that we have built and that we have here in our credit operations is now available through our digital format as well. 90% of our credit is already under our digital automation process, and we concluded that there are no barriers to have a strong credit operation in the digital area as well.
This is a huge potential to the company and a surface level exclusive for consumers that are coming in to the online, and they need a means of access that will understand them better. This is a great important avenue for growth in the online payment operations. Well, I would like to thank you very much for staying with us. I know this was a longer call, but this was a very important quarter with excellent news, transformation. I think we have improved three years and three months here at Via Varejo. My message is that we are ready to go beyond retail. When we came here, we wanted to go back to the retail and then to have a retail excellence, and now we are ready to go beyond retail.
The future is open to us, we'll keep on following that execution with a lot of focus, a lot of transparency, and great consistency in our deliveries. We'll move on growing our Via Varejo. Thank you all very much for participating. Thank you.