Boa tarde a todos. Sejam muito bem-vindos. Muito obrigado pelo interesse no nosso call de resultados referente ao quarto trimestre de 2022. Bom, eu vou começar antes de a gente normalmente vai ir direto pro Q&A, eu só vou começar falando um pouco aqui do que a gente divulgou ontem sobre o a mudança do nosso modelo de parceria com o Helisson, que tá aqui com a gente desde do início da nossa operação. O Helisson iniciou conosco em 2019, focado principalmente na evolução da nossa tecnologia, que era a nossa prioridade naquele momento. Ficou praticamente um ano e meio fazendo isso pra essa evolução acontecer. Em novembro ali de 2020, nós adquirimos a i9XP, uma empresa de tecnologia focada em atender grandes e-commerces.
Nesse momento, o Helisson fez a passagem da área para o Edson Tavares, que era o founder e o atual CEO da i9XP naquele momento, que assumiu aqui na Via a posição de CIO e vem fazendo uma consistente evolução da nossa plataforma. No início de 2021, o Helisson passou a colaborar com a evolução do marketplace, enquanto o Edson focava na evolução de todo o nosso parque de tecnologia e na tecnologia no marketplace, principalmente no onboard de seller. Vale lembrar que nós iniciamos 2021 com 4,000 sellers e terminamos o ano com mais de 120,000 sellers somente em 2021. Enquanto isso acontecia, o Helisson colaborava ativamente com o grupo que estava fazendo o desenho estratégico da cauda longa e do papel do marketplace na Via.
O plano estratégico do marketplace se consolida no segundo tri de 2022, quando a gente declara que a gente tava direcionando todos os nossos esforços pra cauda longa.
Directing all of our efforts to the long tail with a focus on increasing recurring and customer volume. In mid-2022, Edson left the marketplace and he started taking on our position as people and performance. I just wanted to say that Helisson brilliantly fulfilled his mission here at Via, starting the digital transformation, supporting us with the evolution of our marketplace, and really helping us in the innovation. Helisson, we want to say thank you so much for this great partnership that is definitely not stopping here. What's happening now is that we're maturing a cycle. This decision is in every way and in common agreement. Helisson will continue to support Via as an advisor in all of the innovation processes. Having said that, we'll also be working on some changes here in reorganizing the C-level.
Sérgio, he was our C-level and he was conducting investor relations, communication, and logistics. He will now accumulate people and performance, and he'll stop focusing on logistics. He is our CTO. Sorry. He will accumulate the logistics part as well. As part of his job description. With this major change that we believe is key to have a bigger advance in the intensive use of technology and data analytics, we believe that we're taking on a whole another leap in our performance at Via, which interacts a lot with all of the evolution of our logistics services and accuracy of our deliverables to consumers. All of this brings in a direct relationship with strong evolution that we have with our volume of sales. Please keep following us to see what's going on at the moment.
We are absolutely planning this. This was a scheduled and a planned move and followed the agreement and collaborative effort with Helisson, who does act as an advisor supporting us in the entire innovation process. Gabriel, the floor is yours, and now we can start the Q&A.
Great. Thank you, everyone. Our first question is from João Soares from Citibank. João, you may proceed.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Well, about your growth and plans, could you talk about the market a bit? I think in the last revision of, when we were thinking about this and, I wanted to hear your strategy with the now changed expectations of the market space and environment. Also if you could talk about the marketplace, you've been talking about this issue with Helisson.
Now as a little bit of the and I wanted to hear about the average ticket since you're advancing along. It seems that this average ticket brings in a bit of pressure. We wanted to know about this and how we're looking at 3P going back to expanding and having robust growth. If possible, there was a bit to hear a bit of both expenses. We had significant growth in expenses in the fourth quarter. How do you consider the situation for 2023?
Perfect, João. Thank you so much for that question. We're going to start with physical stores. We opened 60 stores last year, and we closed down 21 stores. From these 21 we closed, basically that's poor performance. Something we've been working on this form.
Here we would be able to fit in about 60 and 80 stores. We've already mapped this out. It would be about 60 to 80, but with the entire context going on and the interest rates happening and all these questions, we really changed the plans. We should have about five in-store this year. That's a roadmap we were already studying for a while. POS has been already negotiated, but we. Basically here, the scenario, once it's improving a bit, we can accelerate this very quickly. Stores seem to be very ready. This entire period, we did 16%. In the fourth quarter in physical stores, we lost. This is the roadmap we have. We can keep up with the same pattern, and we believe we need to work on this a little better.
As things get, we work on a solution that involves this. It will work, relationship with consumer increases our position and there's this whole structure behind the stores. For this year, about 5-10 new stores. When you look at AP and our strategy, yes, we follow along with the strategy to continue to evolve with average tickets that are a little smaller. We've moved on. Not below BRL 100 . That's not our target yet. We will continue to value long tail because we've seen very clear signs. We can see the level of recurrence with consumers has been growing and frequency as well. The amount of items per purchase as well. This has been growing.
We own 79% in the volume of orders in the fourth quarter in retail, and we were able to balance out the GMV. When we set up the strategy, this finished in the math, the markets with score. From then on, we had a drop in GMV. We've already bounced this out. Growth of about 20%. This growth has, we've continued to see net levels that are higher or the same in January, February, March. We continue to be extremely focused on the strategy to gain. Now the third point on it makes sense. I'll pass this on to Padilha. He can provide some details on this fourth quarter.
I think it really makes sense to look at the expenses year-over-year because, back in 2016, they will have a level of expenses that we can then work through. A very strong plan that, we've been moving on with. A very aggressive plan for performance gains and greater productivity, which is really the fruit of all of the investments we've been doing in the last few years and a reduction in expenses. I think here we do have room to think of something that's about two points of EBITDA coming from all of the gains we've had been demonstrating this year. Padilha can get into the details of the fourth quarter.
As we mentioned, there's a bit of a distortion. In regards to some credits that we had seen in that quarter that would be distributed during a year, but they were concentrated in that specific quarter. It gets a little distorted, but the best indicator really is the level of expenses in the year. We're talking about 24%, 24.2%. That's pretty much the level that's recurrent. Without the labor effects, about 23.30%. That's the recurring level. It's really difficult to compare the total expenses with the market because we have operations with the DC in the entire operation, which brings in some possible difficulties as well for comparison. If we exclude the NPL effect, we're talking about a level of expense that is probably the more comparable number when looking at the rest of the retailers in Brazil.
We have been in this level for the past five quarters. We've been working on this. This has been very important for gains in productivity. Roberto talked about two points, which is really our target here. We've been focusing strongly on this continuity of our expense reduction plan for 2023. We have a very strong target as well to search for these 2 percentage points and increase the profitability of the company.
Very clear, Padilha and Roberto, thank you very much.
Thank you, João, for your participation. Our next question is from Pedro from Bradesco. Please, Pedro. I think you're on mute, Pedro. Can you hear me now?
Okay, great. Thank you, guys. All right. Good afternoon, everyone, thank you, Gabriel, for taking my question.
I'll work on two here to make things a little simpler. First, we would like to hear from you guys about a bit of the takeoff in the year with sales performance, but also the gross margin, not only from a quality perspective in the stock, which seems to be very good, but also considering default impact as well. Also taking advantage of the second question, I would like to know if we could get a bit of your mindset on the capital structure. We can see a big opportunity for market share gains, which would basically require some levels of investment and how we can equate this in the best way if we discount receivables. It's gonna be something like a primary. We just have these two main topics to discuss. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Thank you, Pedro, for that question. About 2023, yes, we did have a challenge right in the beginning for default. I think we're handling this pretty well. We've seen a bit more rationality in the overall market, and this has been quite positive for competitive advantage. This is a scenario we like playing in, where profitability can be preserved. When it comes to the quality of the stock, we have pretty good quality. We had a significant reduction in the volume of stock. We started off in the previous year, where we really focused on the pandemic due to a lack of products. As this was structured, we reduced this without margin pressure. Considering the quality of the stock, we were able to remove all of the stock without pressuring our margins.
That's where we really have the quality of the stock and a very low rapture, right? We see there's a balance in the margins in the first quarter, and we've been able to reach levels of market share gains that I'd say now in March, we've had some signs where our market share is really at its maximum historic level that we've ever had when it comes to online. That does not mean the growth of 1P is still a little complex. In our 3P, we've had strong growth as well, and in the stores, we continue to be quite strong as well. We're very focused on purchasing at this store and the physical store. This is a bit of the radar about the capital structure here.
We were able to have a reduction in the stock. We may have some fine-tuning, but we had the payment terms that have been completely equal to the level of stock. This is very important for this growth movement and trend. We've been moving along very well for the renewal and postponing of these payments. This is very positive. We are in a scenario where we can really grow and capture the market share. Part of our sales come through the Buy Now, Pay Later system. We've been able to grow to be able to have this level of growth that we've been estimating. If we don't have the total, it's very close to the total.
We believe that the market should have an improvement when it comes to credit throughout the year. Discounts on credit cards are as an option. At this moment, we're not working on a bigger debt level. We want to roll out some bit of the debts that the company sells for this year.
Oh, yeah, that's perfect. We've had very advanced conversations after all of this advance with an event with a big retailer. The banks positively provide some signs that with the payments we have to that are going to be reaching maturity in the second and third quarters. These have been moving along very well. I want to reinforce one point here. The company had very strong cash generation this year.
Next year, we are foreseeing a lower cash exit with the possibility to also keep a level that's very high in monetization for taxes, close to about BRL 2 billion- BRL 2.5 billion. This also helps with all of the other elements that Roberto's mentioned that really lever us in this achievement of the market share.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you, Pedro. Our next question is from Dani at XP.
Thank you for taking my question. I have two here on my side. First is a follow-up on the EBITDA margin that you mentioned. We have about 2 percentage points that we should see captured very quickly throughout the year.
If you could bring in a bit of the drivers and even the path for capturing this throughout the year, that would be great, and it would help us a lot. A second point is getting back to Helisson's point, and even if you could maybe give us an update on how the structure's doing in your incentive program and retention for the main executives. You had mentioned that you had some stock options that were a little older in the level of prices. If you could give us a bit of update if this was renewed and if you've been working on this to be able to have the retention on some of the key executives in the company. Thank you.
Okay, Dani, thank you for that. About where you're gonna have the EBITDA gains. I think we have this huge productivity program, a lot of this is based on what we've been investing in and how we've been investing on the company. Let me give an example. If you see what we presented on the evolution of can be our revenue per seller. The productivity gains we've had on, based on all of them, is not comparable, and it's a lot greater actually than the pre-pandemic period in 2019. This is a small example, but it's really in all of the company's departments and areas. We had a lot of productivity coming from logistics. We were able to add a lot of technology and a lot of algorithms that have been really conducting the distribution and allocation of products.
This modification now, Edson's taking on this position with logistics as well. This gives us the expectation that we should accelerate the intensive use even more of technology for, in logistics. We have different initiatives in the company, and we also have productivity here at the headquarters. We've also been meshing with this a bit, and we've been able to gain more productivity. For a while, we had to duplicate some structures, so we had people building new things and also people handling the past things. Now we can make this become a single structure after this entire cycle. There's a bunch of different initiatives going on at this moment at Via.
We've been, obviously, we have a big challenge here, but we are very committed to this and to working on this plan. It's nothing new. This has been something we've been working on since the second semester last year. We've been activating this plan, and now it's really seeing we have a sequence to, for 2023. About retention for the executives. We've been also working on a recurrent stock option plan in the company, and we have another original plan as well in the company which you were referring to back then as the stock price is positioned at about BRL 4.90 and a few cents, I'm not sure of. But this is kind of under the water.
Everyone at Via is aware what we have as value creation at Via does not interact with the actual value the company has, and the executives are here. They're committed to the company in the long term. We've been working on some decisions here that are quite difficult in the company that don't value executives in the short term. All of this is to the detriment of something we really believe in. It's BRL 4.97, the value of the stock in our plan. We had a change last year. We added up, We had the postponing of this period with the executives. In exchange, we had 30% of restricted, which is gonna be maturing in the next years.
We also have a study group in our committee for people and performance and our board. We've been studying a possible postponing of the execution of this plan from the moment when it's vested by the executive. The barrier in the second semester of next year. We're debating if this makes sense to postpone, and executives would maybe have more time to exercise this. It's a conversation that's doing pretty well, we still don't have the end of the conversation addressed, and we've been working on this topic.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dani. I wanted to invite Alexandre Namioka from Morgan Stanley. Ale, please.
Thank you guys for taking my question. I wanted to focus a bit more on logistics, especially in the fulfillment model that you consider in the fourth quarter. We saw penetration and fulfillment reaching about 21%. If you compare that with the 20% in the third quarter and 16%, if I'm not mistaken, in the second quarter. We are seeing a bit of this penetration also starting to reach some saturation. Could you help us understand what would be the level of penetration in this mix of services and logistics that you're seeing within the logistics for the sellers? If there's any additional investments you have to work on when it comes to capacity in your fulfillment centers to be able to continue to increase this penetration.
Alexandre, thank you for that question. I will start off here, and then, Sérgio, you can help me with the answers. First, no, we have not seen a need for investments.
Via has been reducing stocks for over a year, so we have room now to work on this operation. We already have our logistical network all set up, and we have all of the stores operating as logistical hubs. We think that when it comes to space allocation, we really have an opportunity to bring in more players into our logistics. I think we can split this between fulfillment and also with logistics as a service, which has been growing a lot. We mentioned a few of the players that are already doing this, and we see a demand for this kind of service, so we can be very competitive considering that the network already exists.
In fulfillment, yeah, we had growth where we were able to start off really in the second quarter of last year. We had exponential growth. We have room to grow still a lot. There's appetite from the seller. It's really about one more point of control at this moment than actually being at this limit for growth, right? Sérgio, if you could add on to that.
Well, that was very clear. Anyways, just about the difference in the semesters. We started off this fulfillment practice in March 2022. We have this photograph here of the last three months of 2022. We have less than nine months evolution, leaving from zero and heading to 20%.
We consider this healthy growth, and it is impacted by a mix of categories and SKUs that can interact with the system in so many different seasonalities that we went through in the end of last year with the World Cup as well. This doesn't remove from our route a horizon of potential that we see as at least double this, 40% or 50% penetration in fulfillment in the amount of orders and requests. You can remember that this is under that umbrella of Envias, all of the service platforms where we really see the potential of going from 70% and growing to a potential horizon of 70% or 80% because there's always some people that will work on their logistics themselves. Maybe there's a balance point there.
I want to remind you all that we started off with this service considering the cost competitiveness that we have, being able to be profitable, and we were able to charge below the average market cost. We're really happy with the evolution we've had and now we're gonna move on to new horizons and technology intensiveness in logistics with Edson do Edinho coming in. We see this path that we've looked at with major potential. We've seen the existence of NPS levels for those orders that are processed through greater developments and fulfillment. This also contributes to costs. Along with this, we've been growing a lot as well with our operation that we call the as a service, which is really open ocean.
That also, once again strengthens the density even more on the operational efficiency and density for new routes. This path continues, and we will be expanding to another two DCs. When I'm talking about this, we are really talking about the fulfillment and Mar Aberto, and this continues practically without any investments, due to the release of the different areas and the reduction of the stock that I would like to highlight without affecting our stock out during last year.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Super clear.
Now I'm gonna call Gustavo Fratini from Goldman Sachs. Gustavo, you may proceed.
Thank you, Gabriel. Hi, guys. How's it going on this side? We basically have two questions here. The first one is about forms, and how we noticed a bit of a drop in penetration from the CDC and maybe a possible increase in co-branded. I wanted to understand what are the main reasons behind this. How much you're looking at this penetration. The second question is more about the credit panorama. How is this deterioration of the NPLs or if we've reached the bottom, what's the appetite for risk to provide these loans?
Thank you for that question. I'm going to pass the phone to Calabro. He can give us a lot of details on this.
Hi, Gustavo. Can you hear me? Good afternoon. Thank you for that question. First, I want to talk about participation. The fourth quarter historically has a drop in sales, which is really an effect of Black Friday. In this fourth quarter, there was a setback, a little more about the demand of credit. We also noticed consumers in the fourth quarter focused most on paying their debts, even with the help from the government support policies, the Auxílio Brasil at the time. That's a little bit different than what we noticed historically in the fourth quarter. This was the same as the fourth quarter of 2021. As we noticed, what you mentioned, we've seen this positive effect. We have the growing participation of the Buy Now, Pay Later in our sales.
Also, to be able to recover the indexes of approval and granting that we had in the past. For the effects of the Buy Now, Pay Later, that's pretty much it. You talk about the co-branded card, we really have had a performance that is very significant. In our presentation, we've had highlighted the growth of the participation from co-branded ever since 2020. We grew this in our sales regardless, well, without cannibalizing the portfolio and the Buy Now, Pay Laters. We have this very safe strategy where both modalities of payments grow. Of course, each of them have their own characteristics. The co-branded card, we know that up until a certain level has no interest. These are different target audiences.
About the co-branded card, we've been able to perform in line with our targets, and we believe in the growth constantly, just as the Buy Now, Pay Later in our sales. When it comes to the default, I'm gonna talk about the fourth quarter and also what we've seen in the first quarter. We have two effects. One is because of that small part, because of this setback, we had this reduction in the portfolio. I also talked about the revision of the policy we had mentioned.
We were also noticing a worsening in the scenario, and we have this second effect where you have this positive effect as well because it's a consequence of payments from customers that were already in a portfolio above 90 days, and they had payments that we call partial payments, right? What happens is, you have maybe, like, five installments that are late, and they don't negotiate this, but they have a possibility of paying one or two installments. This provides two effects. First, the over 90 portfolio has more deterioration because the customers kind of stopped in this range of delays above 90 days. This is an extremely positive effect because besides improving our indexes of recovery, it also contributes to our losses indicator.
Our loss indicators, as you noticed, they've dropped because of this effect with the recovery in our portfolios and also because of the effect where you kind of hold out to the rollout. If you didn't have these payments, these payments would probably roll out to the portfolio above 180 days. When it comes to the beginning of the year, January and February, I also mentioned that we had performed some careful openings for our credit policy. Because we've had some excellent indicators. This allows us to have provisioning indicators and the overall, so it's smaller in the next quarters. Also we can sell more on the Buy Now, Pay Later modality.
Well, very clear. Thank you.
Well, our next question is from Nicolás from JPMorgan. Nicholas, please.
Well, thank you, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I had two, actually. First, I wanted to know about your guys' plan to try to understand if these two EBITDA points we should see spread out throughout the year or if it's just more of a case where we're looking at this from the second quarter up ahead. The second question is about those suppliers. I wanted to know if you've seen some better procurement terms in the last month and what your relationship is on that side. Thank you.
Well, good afternoon. Thank you for the question. From the efficiency perspective, I think that it's gonna happen throughout the year. We'll have this capturing process throughout the year and maybe a little lower now in the first quarter, but a little more accelerated in the second quarter. There's a lot of things we're doing that won't be full in the quarter. Throughout the year, we should see this evolution in the productivity net view. When it comes to suppliers, I'd say that it's a pretty good ratio. Via super significance in the segments where it operates at 1P. The ratio is really good. And considering the events that took place, we've seen suppliers looking at us as a strategic channel to offset these volumes. We've been moving along to help this happen without major bets on an over volume of purchases and stocking.
We'll be accelerating this level of purchases with the industries. Things are really under control regardless.
Okay. Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Nicolás. The next question is from Iago, from Genial.
Good afternoon, guys, and thank you for taking my question. Some of them are already addressed. I wanted to address this point for Nicholas. You guys, excellent work so far. Reduced the stock a lot without harming the revenue and the margins. What can we expect for 2023? Something similar to 2022? Is there better improvements? Could you give us some more granularity? That would be great.
Well, thank you, Iago, for that question. We reduced BRL 1.6 billion and 25 days in the stock. We are about 95 days at the moment. I'd say that the levels of 2023 should be close to 95 days. Maybe, as I mentioned, we have the opportunity to work on something a little bit beyond this, but that seems to be very, really surgical. There's some technological aspects that are taking place in logistics throughout this year, and it could open up other opportunities for us. I would say that it's close to something near this cycle that we're looking at, like 90-95 days average. The stock will vary according to the seasonality. But that should when it comes to the UFC, it should be around that.
Thank you.
Thank you, Iago. Our next question is from Eric from Santander.
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking our question. I think on our side, we have a point here about the take rate. We've noticed some news on the overall market, when you look at profitability. Just to understand, quarter-over-quarter, you had a bit of a drop in the take rate. I wanted to know if it's more like seasonality or occasional. When you search for profitability, which seems to be a very frequent topic for all of the players, I wanna understand if besides fulfillment and credit, which other levers you guys are looking at for a possible increase in take rates.
Also, considering this moment where everyone's kinda increasing their rates a bit more, do you see a possible opportunity to capture a bigger amount of sellers or something in this sense with maybe maintenance of some rates versus the increase you've noticed in a more generalized way?
Well, thank you, Eric, for that question. What we've seen in the fourth quarter is pretty much the seasonality of the fourth quarter. We actually were the first ones to increase the take rates in the market. Thankfully, most of the other players also followed along due to this need that everyone has at this moment to search for greater profitability.
The fulfillment is something that's really important for us to keep on levering the profitability with the sellers and the Buy Now, Pay Later in the marketplace is also a big option. We also have various different things going on throughout last year. Now we're forcing the sales with interest on credit cards. This is something that's been very successful at the stores and online as well, which should be matured by the online players in the search for profitability. Maybe this is a path we should follow as well. We also have the ads program that should gain more relevance throughout this year. We added this. We have some improvements still to work on.
We'll have news coming along as well, but this will take place throughout the year. We have different initiatives, coming from different areas. I think the biggest initiatives are really at the fulfillment level where you have profitability gains and productivity gains. The more we have the turnovers, the more productivity we have in the distribution centers and in our routes, and also through the Buy Now, Pay Later funding items of the marketplace.
Thank you. Super clear. Very good.
Thank you, Eric. Roberto, now I'll pass the floor to you because we have no other questions.
Okay. I just wanna thank you all for your interest, in our earnings call here. Nice to be with you, and have a great afternoon.