I would like to invite all of you to visit our new Energia store right next to this building in the same block. We will have a guided visit with all of you who are attending in person today. This new store will be inaugurated tomorrow, and you will have the privilege to see it firsthand. Now I would like to invite to the stage Marcos Grasso.
In 1841, in the small village of Sneek in Holland, two brothers, Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer, they were 20-something at the time, and they took the little money they had, they borrowed some money, and they opened their own business. It was a warehouse. They slept on the roof, and they started to visit the farms in Holland to sell to farmers fabrics and merchandise they had at the time. This was 185 years ago.
185 years of history of C&A in fashion retail, overcoming obstacles, pursuing opportunities, and reinventing itself with an entrepreneurship spirit and a sense of ownership. It was with this spirit that 50 years ago, C&A opened its operations in Brazil with a very clear proposition, offering accessible fashion, quality fashion, and relevant fashion to Brazilians. Over the course of these five decades, this company was able to build a leading brand, and those who have been following our brand for all these years, you know that there was a lot of creativity involved, not just in our products but in our communication, innovation, and also a profound knowledge of the local market, which is what makes C&A be seen by the Brazilian public as a Brazilian brand.
It also developed a broad network of suppliers, expanded its presence throughout the country, and invested in the education of thousands of professionals who have influenced an entire industry in our country. This trajectory was supported by values that are still central to the company, customer focus, collaboration, respect, financial discipline, and long-term vision. I believe that this capacity to evolve and adapt, still complying with its values, is very relevant for this moment we are going through right now in Brazil. Seven years ago, our IPO started a new chapter in the story of this company with its own governance, autonomous governance, always in the best interest of our shareholders. We have an independent board, very engaged, very lean, which works really hard and is committed to value creation. With our management, we have a trust-based relationship and a very candid and frequent dialogue, and also constructive challenge.
We support, we challenge, we question, and we monitor our management's work. We have four very active committees, our strategy committee, our technology committee, technology and AI. We have our people and ESG committee, and audit, finance, and risk committee, where in addition to the participation of each of the councilors in our committees, we also have external members who are very experienced and help us enhance the quality of the discussions, our understanding, and the qualification and evaluation of the board's decisions. Our board works in four fronts. First, leadership. We ensure competent leadership with compensation aligned with value creation. We plan succession of our managers continuously. And we foster a culture of performance. The second point of work of this board is strategy. We contribute to the right strategy, capable of strengthening our brand, increasing our relevance with our customers, and create sustainable value.
The third focus of our board, capital. We maintain rigor and discipline in the allocation of capital, seeking growth with returns, with an ROIC and with ROIC and cash generation as the central reference for our decision-making. Number four, governance. We monitor the execution, we manage risks, and we protect the interests of all our shareholders. Leadership, strategy, capital, and governance. These are the four pillars of the work of our board. Nearly four years ago, we launched our Energia strategy, which expanded customer understanding of our brand, focused more on fashion, increased the focus on fashion, and improved execution. This discipline expanded margins, transformed our capital structure, zeroed our net debt, enhanced our investments, and strengthened our team. As you're going to hear during our session today. Perhaps most importantly, we demonstrated our capacity to transform strategy into execution and execution into results.
This is what gives us the confidence we need for our next cycle. Today, we have a stronger C&A, more disciplined and better prepared to capture the opportunities we have ahead of us. We are also aware that we are now entering a new cycle with uncertainties in our economy, more demanding customers, greater competition, either locally or cross border, with a reasonably demanding consumer and fast advancements in technology and artificial intelligence. This is very different from the years in the past. Our growth will be our priority, always accompanied with return on capital and value generation. That's why adaptation will continue to be a very strong focus for us. Today, Paulo and the rest of the team will present to you the next chapter of Energia.
This new chapter deepens and accelerates the current initiatives and at the same time opens up new growth avenues to improve productivity and create value. The board has been active in the discussions of this strategy and the discussion of our environmental and social commitments, and the development of the capabilities required for good execution. We are supporting this strategic movement, and we will be monitoring its execution with rigor and discipline, and at the same time maintaining the flexibility and agility required to respond to the changes in the macroeconomic environment and the competitive environment. As board members, we have trust in our management. We have trust in the competence of the team. The spirit of entrepreneurship that started in Sneek, Holland, 185 years ago, continues present today. Identifying opportunities, adapting, and turning opportunities into value. This is the spirit that guides the construction of C&A's next chapter.
On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank you all for being here. I'd also like to thank the COFRA management for their presence. Now I'd like to hand it over to Paulo.
Good morning. As you heard from Marcos, today, we will go over the advancements in the past three years. I don't know if you were here 2 and a half years ago, nearly three years ago, when we spoke for the first time about the Energia strategy. Since then, we've been advancing our company, clearly understanding that more than just a strategic cycle, there's a clear purpose behind it.
Also, there are clear priorities for the company during this strategic cycle, which ensures a level of energy and focus of those who are leading and those who are working, which facilitates and allows for adequate execution of these initiatives, and most importantly, the capture of the impacts that come with these initiatives. This is the timeline post-IPO. First, we had a fashion tech period, then Energia started in the end of 2023, and now in 2027, it has created the conditions for us to raise the bar and take the company to its next level of growth. This is the idea. However, we still have the same purpose: impacting people so they can be whatever they want to be through fashion. This does not change. This continues to be an important pillar and a constant pillar of our business.
Behind the Energia cycle, there was a very strong belief in a few dimensions and a few strengths. The first one is that we have a very strong brand in this country. It is adored. It is loved by our customers. Number 2, we have a truly enviable portfolio of stores. We have the best locations. Our POSs have the best locations in the best shopping malls in Brazil, and also the best locations inside those malls. The third great asset that we have is the quality and the experience of our team. The combination of these three elements, combined with what Marcos was talking about, which is our capacity to reinvent ourselves, and this is what we have been doing for nearly 2 centuries. This was the magic formula that unlocked a level of value creation that is very impressive.
Now, knowing that we have a super brand, a super portfolio of stores, and a highly capable team. Let us focus on the quick wins that we have that require little investment. Let us improve our offer, let us improve the assortment that we bring to our customers, let us improve the journey people are having in our stores, and let us improve the relationship or strengthen the relationship we have with our customers. This was the basic idea, and from then we were able to develop our strategy. What was our objective for each of these points, each of these elements? This is a summary. We wanted to improve the company's productivity. We wanted to improve sales per square meter, and here it is clear that we were able to do that. We also improved productivity. We continue to be a beloved and desired brand among Brazilian consumers.
With our products, we had important developments in all our product categories, including the acceleration of new product categories. We built a new store model, a store model that is innovative and stands out. As you heard from Marcos, we invite you all to visit our new store because you are going to see this materializing and happening in practice. We strengthened our supply chain. You are going to hear more about this from João, but the test and learn philosophy, where then C&A as being a leading player implementing the test and learn methodology, increases the proximity with our supply chain. We also increased the frequency, not just the size of our customer base, but the frequency of our customers, and we also increased the share of C&A Pay. Remember that in the end of 2021, we had zero.
The C&A Pay share was zero, and that's when we started the process, and 5 years later it has reached nearly 30% of all sales with a card that, in our opinion, is the most technological and the most client-friendly card in our market, in our industry. It's as we always joke, you pay smiling with our card. Now, let's talk about productivity. We had a 30% increase in our sales during the Energia cycle. Not only did we grow our sales and our productivity, but we also improved our margin. There was someone who'd always say to me that margin is the price that customers pay for your product, and selling with a good margin is a very interesting part of this story. Here we're talking about nearly 5 percentage point increase during this period. Sorry, let me go back to the right slide. Profitability.
That is a company that for 20 consecutive quarters is posting margin increases. This is what I call consistency, and with that growth acceleration, this brought our gross profit per square meter to a 30% increase during the Energia cycle. So now when you look at all these dimensions, when you look at the financial dimension specifically, we're talking about growing sales with a growth in our gross margin, a 76% increase in our adjusted EBITDA, and this all allowed us to significantly reduce the company's leverage. In 2023, we had one position of capital structure and a certain level of indebtedness, and after this Energia cycle, we're coming out on the other side much stronger, not just for the consistency and the capabilities that we built during this time, but especially because today we can invest in our business.
We have regained the capacity to invest in our business by evolving this very same business. We had important developments in all fronts, in all dimensions that we committed to improve. Products and categories, we expanded our assortment, we evolved our assortment in improving value perception, and at the same time growing consistently our margin. We discontinued our mobile phone business seamlessly and discreetly with no disruption, and Fashiontronics used to be an important part of our business, but it was not bringing the returns that were aligned with our purpose of allowing our customers to be whatever they want to be through fashion.
We are following up the journey of our customers in all our channels, in our physical channel, the Energia stores, which is an icon of this transformation, but also with our new digital journey, which brings innovation and differentiation to the customer journey on our website and on our app.
In terms of brand, we begin with this KPI that is very interesting. We had an increase of 13 percentage points in our NPS, and we continue to be the best-known brand in this country, a brand that people think about with a CRM machine that has been built about this. We have increased penetration by 6 percentage points. We are now in a condition of break-even. Even with all the macroeconomic problems we faced during the period, default has not impacted our day-to-day work. This environment mentioned by Marcos, that dynamic of new technology, we haven't been merely a follower. We have adopted initiatives, a very determined attitude. We want to be an actor, a protagonist in that transformation.
Through our commercial intelligence, we are able to create connections, whether it is in planning and distribution, in pricing, all of that integrated with data based on an investment platform that we created soon after the IPO. AI is a reality at C&A and is part of our great moments when we make decisions. RFID is being implemented. As you visit more and more stores of C&A, you will see the possibilities of this through FTID. None of this would be possible, of course, without a team that is ever more robust than it was back in 2023, with a management philosophy, a philosophy of meritocracy, highly aligned with what we do. This leads to positive financial results. A business of BRL 650 million has been reduced to zero. We have eliminated that dependence on that category, as it did not have a strategic fit.
We did this very strategically, very smoothly. We have changed 1,900 different areas within C&A and renovations, 32 stores even within a difficult cash situation during the period. This is not the case now, but we were able to renovate 32 stores and have opened 16 additional stores and base with a share of 28% over our sales. I spoke about the leadership team. This is the team that is presently leading this company. If you look at the descriptions, we have people who have been in this industry for a very long time. Of course, this is an important asset. Our team was further reinforced in the last 3 years. We have João, who came after Donati in the commercial area, 15 years in the area. Carol, who came from the market, leading the people in the business.
Bruno, who used to be from a business unit, he is now leading the technological dynamic in the company. Not technology for the sake of technology, but technology focused on a profound transformation in the business. Cecília, who comes from consumer goods, used to work at Heineken, and now she's helping us to reinforce our brand. We have Felipe, who used to work at C&A. He spent some time away from the company and is now back leading our new business dynamic. Thiago, who presently has become a highly strategic person, helping us build our strategy, formerly working at Boston Consulting Group. All of these people have that know-how in the industry and that ability to transform our business. Our management model, mentioned very briefly by Marcos, we have well-established KPIs, an in-house governance model.
Besides the model that comes from the board, we have a committee within C&A. I do not know if you know it, the classical investment committee. It is very difficult to have an investment approved, not because we do not want to approve investments, quite the contrary. We want to ensure the return on the investment. What we truly want to do is to capture the impact of our investments and that dynamic of an expeditious or very agile execution. When I look behind to the Energia project, I can see a great deal of evolution in all dimensions, financial, journeys, management, and the quality of our team. We have made great strides, but there is still a great deal more to be captured. The more we advance, the more we see that there are many opportunities there to be captured. We are in a more complex situation at present.
Marcos referred to this. The level of competition for the customer's pocket is not only in the field of apparel. Other industries are also competing for the customer's pockets, the bets, for example. This takes on several dimensions. Besides that, we have the foreign players, of course, with that rather incoherent dynamic of heavy taxing among players, which is part of our day-to-day work. There are deep technological changes happening in the day-to-day of consumers, in the way that you manage a business, and this alters our in-house processes, but also enables us to enhance our speed and the customization, personalization of messages with the customer. This customer has become ever more omnichannel. We have never been able to understand clearly when a journey begins and when it truly ends. We push ourselves a great deal here, looking at the channel saying, "This is a digital customer.
This is a brick-and-mortar store customer." That no longer exists. They could begin in our brick-and-mortar store and go on to the digital to carry out their purchase or vice versa. That is why we speak so much about omnichannels and the integrated work of all channels, which is where value lies. It does not matter if one channel grows more than another. We have changed the dynamic of supply, especially based on that speed, that item of speed. Speed represents value. To understand what happens with a consumer, a desire the customer has, if you delay to respond to that stimuli, it is a loss of value, it is a loss of opportunity. And what we are doing through the test-and-learn philosophy is to bring about greater speed for the consumer that comes into our store.
We want them to look at our products and say, "Look at these beautiful things," these truly relevant products that do not only come about because of the talent of people. They come about because of that ability to offer new products in minor volumes, and then to bring in ever more products and more options of that new project. This is what will bring the consumer to our store for them to think, "Yes, this has a great deal to do with me." And finally, the shift in the labor market. We have heard discussions about the journeys that dispute for talent, which is getting ever more worse.
Now that proven execution of our Energia project has strengthened us, not only financially, which is a fact, we have reduced our net debt to zero, practically, but because of that in-house capacity to execute what we have agreed upon and what has been structured up to create more value for the company. This enables us to be stronger, more ready for any new initiative or project we want to put in place. Well, because of all of this, what we are saying is that we're going to speed up this Energia project and what we have now called Full Power. We are coming from the constructor of our Energia project based on our internal energy. We have carried out a great deal of evolution.
The company has become capitalized through our results, and we now have that ability to further accelerate the initiatives and to capture value from those initiatives. This is what we call Full Power. This means we can renovate more stores and inaugurate a greater number of stores. Full Power means we can develop new financial products, test them based on the test-and-learn philosophy, test and develop new financial products. Full Power means we can develop new businesses, and ACE was the first very concrete initiative that the market has been able to observe. Full Power means full power in the digital dimension as well. Now, simply to give you some examples, I will then go into greater detail. What it means to accelerate, to speed up this dynamic of our new strategy, the new Full Power strategy.
This comes from that capacity of having generated BRL 3 billion in cash in the last three years. What is full power exactly? It's the leveraging and speeding up the drivers of the Energia project, along with some growth drivers. Let's do this in parts. We're speaking about the brand dynamic that continues to be a very important dynamic that we will continue to strengthen. We move forward with our product levers and strategies. We're going to ever more strengthen the omnichannel journey, of course, enhance our relationship with customers. But we are also going to expand stores and give way to new businesses, new sources of revenue and growth for the company. All of this backed up by intense use of technology, but something that is focused and 100% pragmatic. We want to create an impact on our return on capital invested. We're going to enhance logistics and supply.
We will refer to this in greater detail further ahead. We want to give this a great deal of granularity. And of course, with our talent, with the strength of our leadership, we're going to continue work with our philosophy of sustainability and environmental management. Now to speak about each of these sectors. We have already spoken about the brand. Very soon, Cecilia will speak more about this. In product, for example, the intention here is to further enhance the value perception of our collections. How do we do this? Through the speed dynamic. As I said, speed is value. A relevant product is worth more. There is less markdown. We are able to work with full price. Secondly, the quality perception will continue to evolve, and the assertiveness will come from a consistent execution at top scale, which is what we call test and learn in our collections.
The second dimension, the omnichannel journey. We have an obsession in increasing the productivity, the sale per square meters in our stores. This is a key driver for C&A. Because of this, we are going to carry out between 100 and 120 Energia Store renovations. You will be able to observe this renovation next door in the Paulista store, where the journey is easier, more intuitive, and of course, much more pleasant. What shines here is the product, and this is the idea, to increase sale in the same square meters that we presently own. We are going to enhance the dispersion stores. 60 to 80 more stores will be part of this program. 15% omnichannel sales, a very significant stride, and we want to increase threefold the number of omni customers we have at present.
In terms of relationship, once again, with obsession, we are looking at the annual spending of each customer based on purchasing frequency, but we also want to expand the customer base. We will do this through personalization and that machine of data of customer behavior. This is the raw material we are using to hold a more relevant conversation whenever we have contact with the customer, but something that is more personalized, always more assertive. Loyalty and C&A Pay. We are creating a continuity with the customer. But a caveat, as I mentioned with C&A Pay, as of now, we are going to begin to test this on new products, new financial services as well. Store expansion. We are going to be opening 60 to 80 new stores during the period. In new businesses, ACE will be the first.
Yesterday, we inaugurated the second ACE store in the Bourbon Shopping Mall as part of that same philosophy of test and learn. We are testing the concept until we have full clarity of its impact. We are going to press that button of the accelerator, and we are very able to do that. All of this based and structured on technology. Logistics. A more regional logistics model, and we have been investing in hubs, as you will hear very shortly about, and we want to be closer to the last mile, to that place where we can quickly react to the consumer.
That is where we are moving towards. In people and ESG, we are thinking about how to add new competencies, new capabilities to leverage, to strengthen the culture of C&A, that pride of belonging to a culture that respects people. That respects diversity, but also something that is very pragmatic and focused on the customer.
Now I would like to call Cecilia to the stage, and she is going to talk about our brand, how we plan to advance with our brand, and I will come back in the end for my closing remarks. Thank you.
Hello. In the next few slides, I want to discuss with you the main asset that we have, our brand, a strong brand that is now celebrating 50 years in the country, celebrating this week and today, celebrating 50 years in this country. The strength that brought us to this point is the power we have to keep building and keep moving beyond and growing for the next 50 years. I would like to start by telling you about our ambition. Paulo touched on this.
He said many things, but the way we describe this new cycle is that brand is everything. Brand is cross-sectional. During today's morning, all our presentations will be based on two main points, how our brand can work to solve the main pain points of our customers, and this is our great ambition. We want to continue to be the most preferred and beloved brand in the country, and at the same time, we want to further strengthen our relationship with our customers. We saw a lot of evolution in this relationship building over the years, but we want to create increasing connection, increasing frequency, and value perception by our customers through everything that we offer to them in our stores, experiences, products, and creating value to C&A.
In the last years, during the Energia cycle, you heard from Paulo about all the capabilities that we were able to develop. We learned a lot about branding, we learned a lot about relationship, but what we learned the most about is about the people who come to our stores, our consumers. We identified and understood who our target consumer is. Our target consumer has the typical socioeconomic profile of Brazil, has the average ticket of the category, but what's very interesting about our target public is that they buy once a month in similar stores, and 62%, I believe this number will increase in the next years. Paulo already told you that we want to build a journey for our consumers that is not just about the physical or the digital, but it is everywhere. It is omnichannel.
We strategically analyzed our numbers to understand how they behave, how they relate. In order to create connection and provide them with good service, we need to understand what the main drivers are, what really moves them, what fashion means to them. So that's what we wanted to understand, and there's actually a duality here. On one hand, this client, this consumer, wants repertoire. She wants trends, she wants what's in, she wants to be inspired. But at the moment of payment or the moment of purchase, what they want is versatility. So our project, our process is what we want is to be able to insert this repertoire into the everyday lives of our consumers. So this is our high-level understanding of who they are.
Paulo talked about our committees, and we have a specific committee, which is our client committee, our customer committee, where we have our main business leaders, and we sit once a month to try to better understand the 1 million consumers that visit our stores. We have 19 million active customers, and we investigate their behaviors, what they're buying, what they want, where they're heading, and what are our main opportunities in the market. We reinforce our leadership and we go over everything that we've built so that we can create the best experience to our consumers and so that they can really find themselves at C&A. Everything we do is for this purpose. We are the top-of-mind brand. We've been here 50 years in Brazil, and 100% of the people know and talk about C&A. But more than knowing what C&A is, they also prefer C&A.
We are the preferred and the most beloved brand in Brazil. In terms of purchase consideration, we are also number one. This results from our consistency, our presence, the assertiveness in the quality of our products and in our communications. This also results from the iconic communication and the impact we had over these 50 years. In this most recent Energia cycle, we made ourselves more and more present in their everyday lives. Present in what is relevant for them, creating connection and engagement. in 2024, we were at Rock in Rio. We had a collab with PatBO, and we launched this new positioning, translating into this signature, "We will see you at C&A." This conversation about seeing yourself at C&A and seeing you at C&A evolved into a conversation so that customers can really see themselves at C&A.
In 2024, we were at the Lady Gaga. In 2025, we were at the Lady Gaga concert in Rio de Janeiro, and C&A was there present. Now, when I talked about the demographics, I also talked about what fashion means to our consumers. In partnership with Box1824, we ran a survey in 2025 to understand what type of emotion is created when you wear an outfit. There are different emotions. When we talk about omni, it is not just about the buying journey, but at the moment they start looking for an outfit, thinking about that special event. This is a journey that if we monitor, we can identify very positive emotions that we can generate and influence there. In this survey that was published in the market in partnership with Box1824, we also had our own campaign.
That was, when you find the look, you feel it. In 2026, we started with our denim week in a very iconic place, which was the red carpet, the most well-known red carpet in the world, at the Oscars. We brought our collection and our denim collection, specifically in collaboration with Gustavo Silvestre, and Carol Ribeiro was wearing our denim and presented during 24 hours. Her dress is the dress she wore is in the back of the room if you want to take a look at it. This increases presence, cultural relevance. Also in 2026, we sponsored concerts in Rio. This year it was Shakira. Our celebration started in the start of the year. We had partnerships with fashion stylists and editors, and next week we have another event planned at Rock in Rio, and we have more to come.
All this communication creates great connection. This brings me back to the concept of our brand, because there is no use having good communication and a good conversation if you do not have a product portfolio which genuinely evolved, having in mind all the needs of our customers. I do not want to steal João's thunder, but I just want to show you this balance because I want you to understand that we are really seeking true connection with very strong energy. Of course, all the campaigns and the cultural moments that I shared with you had specific collections attached to them and something that is really dear to us. The denim week has always been relevant throughout these years. In 2024, there was an iconic product that was launched by us. It is becoming iconic now, which is the Peruvian cotton T-shirt.
We scaled up this product in 2025 in the test and learn model, and today it is a great hit. Just like this product and other collections, we are always advancing in our partnerships. This year, in addition to the dress worn at the Oscars, we had our denim week with great collections, partnership with fashion editors, and the result of all this work is that in the end of the day, we were able to recover our consumers. These consumers are back to C&A. They are once again connected with C&A, and most importantly, we were able to expand our customer base. In numbers, this new customer base grew 14% in the past few years. Paulo shared with you the figures showing how much we increased our frequency. Not only did we increase our customer base, but those we had lost returned.
16% are back with us and they are back to purchasing with us. More than just buying our products, because of course we look at the relationship between spending frequency and expansion of our customer base. These customers are more and more satisfied. They are happier and happier with C&A, and these are numbers that we look at every week in our governance effort. These are the numbers we look at and we monitor. What are the attributes that are ensuring the best connection and the best relationship between consumers and C&A? In the past cycle, we were up by 13 points and we had improvements and progress in all our channels. We have specific plans because regardless of the journey, we want our consumers to find themselves or to see themselves at C&A. For 2030, we want our brand to stand out increasingly more.
We want it to have icons and easily recognizable symbols. We want consumers to be able to find themselves in their outfit, and we want our signature to become the truth for them. I want to show you a short video about our communication work. Before choosing an outfit, we had a lot of encounters with the. We thought of all the combinations, our hairstyle, the shoes, the climate, and then we imagine ourselves arriving at an event. This is what we learned about you in the past 50 years. Fashion is expectation. It does not start at the moment of the purchase, and it does not finish when you are ready to go to your event. Fashion is stepping everything that comes before imagining, combining, reinventing yourself. It is the joy of experimenting new possibilities and seeing yourself in a new way before you get out of your house.
We are with you in this moment of preparation for your special date or for your work interview, a festival, or just a regular Tuesday. Live your moment. Enjoy the fashion. After all, the preparation ritual is just as pleasant as the event itself, right? We will see you at C&A. But how do we plan to do this? We have a very clear strategy. First, consistency and impact. When we define the I will see you at C&A message, we want now to strengthen this message, amplify it, and understand how we can see them, or they can see themselves at C&A using proprietary codes in a very clear and engaging way. The communication plan always needs to be present, because if you are not seen, you are not remembered. We want to have this always on communication plan.
Whatever the channel, wherever they are, at our stores, on social media, we will always be present, always on. Another very strong point that was touched on by Paulo, then you are going to hear more from Felipe, is how can we strengthen our relationship with our customers? In the Energia cycle, we developed great capabilities, we prepared ourselves for hyper-personalization, which has already started. We know that two, three weeks from now, we will be even better, two, three years from now, even better, more and more assertive, more and more targeted. Because the more we know our consumer, the more we build a virtuous cycle that will boost our brand even more. When we understand our customers, we bring clearer benefits to them through our loyalty program.
In a market where credit is a requirement, this is something you are also going to hear from Felipe. Credit will also be part of our relationship strategy, because when we put customers at the center, we see everything as branding, we are sure that we will have more and more customers with higher and higher frequency, with a higher and higher LTV. To summarize our conversation, the main takeaways are that the past few years built the foundation for everything that we plan to build looking forward. We have a great opportunity to increase the number of customers, acquire new customers. We still have a great opportunity to bring more customers with higher frequency, with higher engagement and connection with C&A. What allows us to do that is our strong brand and the strategic team that supports us.
When we say that customer is everything and brand is everything, I cannot tell you everything about our communication efforts, so now I am going to invite João to the stage to tell you about how we connect and translate this into the reality of our products.
Speaking after Cecilia is very difficult. She is a showwoman. I would buy anything she wants to sell me. The product evolution was a central element of the success of our Energia strategy. In this Full Power cycle, it will continue to be a central element. For this cycle, our objective is to keep developing more and more relevant collections, more and more versatile, added to the use of technology as a central element in our decision-making process. There was a very clear impact on our results.
The evolution of our products allow for consistent growth in all our core categories, women's, men's, kids. We saw disruptive growth in the past three years, we were able to maintain our dominance in strategic categories such as denim and basics, which are our important pillars for C&A. We also expanded our strategic presence in what we call complementary categories. These were categories that in the start of the Energia cycle, we identified a relevant opportunity to increase our presence, our market share, we made investments in the past three years, these investments resulted in relative growth and success to these complementary categories. We had developments in our assortment and area design in beleza and intimates, we were the first company to enter the athleisure market with our sportswear category.
All these categories posted disruptive growth, and we had a more than 80% increase in the past 3 years in these categories. These results were only possible because we had a strong evolution in the perceived value of our products by our consumers. This is not me saying, our customers are saying. Our NPS surveys, post-use NPS surveys, show increases in the quality perception of our products quarter after quarter in fit ability, durability, and the cost-benefit ratio of our products. Like you heard from Cecilia, these are numbers that we have been monitoring, and we have weekly meetings to look at the numbers, to look at our NPS, and to ensure that we have consistent evolution in our product attributes, value perception in the eyes of our consumers. These results are not by hazard.
They come from very profound changes that we made in our philosophy and the product construction methodology of C&A. These changes allow us to more assertively meet the needs of our consumers. I will share a little bit about these strategies with you. The first one was touched on by Paulo. We had nearly 2,000 renovations in strategic areas, improving the customer journey at our stores, always with a strong philosophy of efficiency and financial return from these renovations. A very symbolic case is our dining area. By renovating the dining area in one of our stores, we have an upside of 10%-15% of conversion in that category in our stores, and we use the same renovation strategy for other areas in our stores. We renovated the basics area, the intimates area, sportswear, kids, beleza, under this test-and-learn methodology.
According to the return, we would expand that strategy to a larger number of stores. Today, we have completed all these renovations, but we now have our Energia Store as the greatest potential in this new Full Power cycle. We are now starting the testing and rollout of equipment in strategic areas inside our stores, our Energia Stores, that will have a relevant potential to increase conversion and capture more sales per square meter in our upcoming cycle.
Additionally to that, we have also invested strongly in our product creation, trend mapping, and in our teams working on style. We use data and analytics to make sure that our creative work becomes ever more concrete. In real time, we map all of the launches of our main benchmarks in Europe and the U.S. Once again, based on analytical tools, we determine the product tests that we should carry out in our own collection. We also have research hubs disseminated throughout the globe. We have one in London, one in Barcelona, and one in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. This enables us to keep contact with creative worlds to have more inspiration for our designers.
We strongly invest in our product team in the last three years, bringing in new capabilities to C&A, investing in the empowerment of our style in commercial decisions, working with our designers and suppliers, which of course is very important when it comes to generating products in a more creative fashion. None of this would have been possible were it not for a robust advance in the capability, the creativity of our supply chain. We invested in our Latin America matrix, enhancing purchases threefold, the lead time there is very similar to that in the domestic market. We are investing in the speed, the creativity of our domestic suppliers.
As Paulo mentioned, a product purchase with velocity will sell better, will sell at full price, this is something we have proven during the last few years, that gives us that intention of increasing the speed in our supply chain. We are also investing in other forms to transport our offshore products, once again, to guarantee greater speed in the Asian market, more specifically in China. We have been quite successful when it comes to new procurement formats to guarantee that greater speed. There is still a great deal of room there.
40% of the female collection purchased from Latin America and Brazil is purchased with a lead time less than 60 days, in the Full Power cycle, we can expand this speed to other divisions of male, fashion, sportswear, expand the speed matrix for products coming from other sources, whether it is in Latin America or Asia. This entire process is supported on that test philosophy, a highly disciplined philosophy we have in the commercial area and product area. We carried out more than 3,000 product tests, these products are distributed throughout Brazil in clusters that are representative of the demography of our stores. This allows us to work with smaller volumes of products, with greater speed, more analytic and data to understand where these products should be scaled to, where their performance will be better, acceptability by our customers.
We are going to enhance our test capability to guarantee a renovation without risk for our new collections. This is work that has been expanded in the company work between all of the divisions and businesses as part of the Full Power cycle. Despite having captured a great deal of progress in the Energia cycle, we believe that there is still room to leverage these same fronts in the Full Power strategy, to ensure their implementation in other businesses in the company by expanding their impact in the business as a whole. Besides this process and the Full Power cycle, we are going to foster the use of technology to make feasible the decision-making process, generating more productivity and efficiency for our style teams, allowing us greater assertiveness when developing our new collections.
The product team has a strong partnership with the technology team, and we believe we can unharness new growth avenues for C&A in the coming 3 years. We are going to mainly begin by fostering the use of artificial intelligence in the creation or development of our product. We have trained 100% of our design teams, and now, besides having better capabilities, better taste for the Brazilian market, they now have the ability to generate new products based on images generated by artificial intelligence. This, of course, has leveraged the creative process of designers, enhancing the possibility of impact of such products. We are automating the main operational tasks involved in product development, the creation of technical cards, registration, allowing our better designers more time, more creativity to focus on what they really do well, creating beautiful products that fit our customers extremely well.
All of this has a strong impact on the creative capacity of C&A and our ability to generate new products. Additionally, we are rolling out our dynamic assortment tool. This is an algorithm that we have built and deployed in the last 3 years. It is being used by approximately half of our teams, and it has shown us an increase in our capability of reacting to the different needs of our customers in this continental country. We are working with greater granularity, with more assertiveness in the supply of these collections throughout the country. We are going to begin a new cycle of our dynamic pricing. For those who follow C&A for more time will know that this has been very important in the Energia cycle, unharnessing the margins in the company.
We are now enhancing those algorithms for markdown and others, making these algorithms ever more powerful, more assertive, which allows us to unharness a new growth cycle in the company. The idea of telling you all of this is to transform intelligence in desire in a product, and the product in growth, so that each customer can be whatever they want to be through fashion. This will allow us to create products with an extremely high perceived value, as you can see in the case of the T-shirt made with Peruvian cotton. In the case you do not know this, when you visit the store in Paulista, go through the basic area and buy a T-shirt. I can guarantee this is the best T-shirt in the Brazilian market. If you buy 2, you will get a discount, which increases the perceived value.
This is a product that was tested way back, has been scaled back, and nowadays represents the Full Power of our brand in the domestic market. To close here, the key takeaways. We have grown consistently during the Energia cycle with significant strides in value perception and the assortment of categories. However, we can still advance further. We are going to continue to scale up the foundation of our product transformation, an improvement in the purchase journey, our ability in the creation of products, and a test and learn policy that will be highly disciplined. We are going to use technology as a leverage for our internal capabilities, especially through the development of products through AI, dynamic assortment, and dynamic pricing. All of this to generate products with extremely high perceived value, products that, of course, will be beloved by the entire Brazilian market, like our Peruvian cotton T-shirts.
Very well. I would now like to give the floor to Fernando Brossi, our Chief Operating Officer and Financial Services, making the product magic happen in our different channels. We no longer speak about sales points. We have a huge number of channels at present. Welcome, Fernando Brossi.
Well, Paulo spoke about the technological change that is happening, the change in purchasing behaviors. We have a stringent discipline to listen to our customers, and the purchase dynamic has undergone several changes in our vision. Our journey has to be ever more omnichannel, and this integration will come from having a brick-and-mortar store that becomes ever more digital and the digital channels that will be more integrated into the brick-and-mortar stores, helping us generate the flow and solutions to improve the journey within each store.
I am going to share with you our Full Power ambition for physical stores, and then we are going to go deeper into the omnichannels. When we speak about physical stores, we have that conviction that we will continue to evolve consistently in the productivity of the current store base. Secondly, we want to speed up the number of square meters at C&A, and we are going to work on the expansion of new stores. We will share with you what we learned in the last Energia cycle and why we are so confident about the future, where we are going with Full Power. Thirdly, we will speak about the Essência C&A, one of the answers of omnichannel. It is a model of service that C&A has developed. I would like to go more in depth in this with you to, once again, accelerate omnichannel adoption.
When we look at the performance of C&A, we spoke about the Energia cycle, where we would increase sales per square meter faster than the rest of the market, and we delivered there. I would like to speak about two programs here, the dispersion program and the store renovation program. I presented this a little more than two years ago when we said that there was a difference in the performance we had at each store vis-à-vis the potential that we detected in each of the stores in the market as a whole. This is where we focused our attention. More than 100 stores underwent some change. We had 34% growth in those stores above the growth that we presented and well above the market growth. These activities were carried out based on each store, as each store had a different need.
It went through the team, the profile of the leader, and number of people. We revised the layout, we reviewed the journey, carried out minor works to improve the circulation flow within the store. We also went through the assortment, the promotion of assortments when we were not very competitive, or in Park Shopping Mall, for example, if we have a customer that likes fashion, we increase the fashion item in Brasília. If we have a customer who buys more clothes for work, we focused on that. We also carried out process adjustments to enhance operational bottlenecks. This dispersion program ended up being very successful, and we believe that in the next cycle, we can work on another 80 stores. When we speak about renovation, we renovated 32 stores disseminated throughout Brazil in 15 different states. During the Energia cycle, we pointed out the energy of the C&A brand.
We obtained very positive performance with 28% growth above what we observe in the market. Notwithstanding this, when we speak about the change in the customer behavior, we see that their behavior is changing extremely quickly. Customers in this new model, we had to see if we still needed to advance further in terms of changes. We worked on a new store concept, which is called the Energia Store. I will introduce it for those who have not seen it yet. That was our new Energia Store in Center Norte Shopping Mall, and this Energia Store was a response to all of the changes in customer behavior. There are five important points that change in these stores. First, the visibility of collections. What appeared in our research was a difficulty of customers finding products. We gave products greater visibility.
This completely changed the game to change the customer flow. You will see that stores now have a dynamic that is not very obvious. We use cameras, and we capture the journey of the customers who walk throughout the entire store to change here. Secondly, we understood that customers were asking for more help, and oftentimes they would come with their mobile phone, say, "I saw this product online. Where is it here in the store?" We had to evolve in our service model, and we launched the Essência program that we will speak very shortly about. Once the team has more contact with the customers requesting help, we had to empower the team to be able to respond to the question. We developed an app, an app that truly facilitates the work of the seller with the customer.
Sometimes the product is no longer in the store, and our team can carry out sales through our digital platform that will be delivered free of charge to the customer's home, or the customer can look for the product in another store. Once again, this is the omnichannel concept. Finally, the service areas, the fitting room, and the cash were reviewed. They are now closer to one another, and they offer greater ease. The average time to carry out a purchase has dropped 30% due to this new model. The new Energia Store was in Center Norte. One year later, we have an increase of sale of 15 points and 15 additional points in NPS. The customer enjoyed the store more and, because of this, is buying more at that store.
Now, if we look at the growth potential of this model, as Paulo mentioned, we have that opportunity of carrying out 120 new renovations in different areas. In Interlagos, we are going to work with a light model, which will not be exactly the same as that of Center Norte Shopping Mall, but includes all of the change in circulation, product visibility, service, of course, and the service areas. The goal of the Energia Store is to have higher productivity per square meter, a very clear evolution in the customer perception, we are able to observe this, and generating that integrated omnichannel experience, and this is where we have our greatest opportunity for evolution.
I want to talk about our expansion, the increase in our square meters, and where we are planning to open new stores and share with you the context, because here in Brazil, shopping malls have a foundational role. Today, 80% of all the physical retail sales take place at shopping malls. We have more than 600 throughout Brazil. Very impressive. Nearly 500 million people visit these shopping malls every month in Brazil. Of course, this affects our resilience and when competing with the cross-border. What did we do with the Energia cycle? The main point was that we revisited our model to decide where we want to have a presence and how to open that presence.
We adopted different market tools to help us, for example, understand, based on mobile phone use, who is actually entering the shopping malls to have much more assertiveness about the profile of the consumer in that shopping mall. With these advancements, we are performing well above our business cases, on average 30% in our sales, which brings a return rate that is much higher than what we expected. This gives us confidence to continue with our acceleration strategy. 80% of the new points of sales that we mapped will be new shopping malls, so new C&A POS. So expansion of our coverage in cities where we did not have a presence before. We will be present in some existing shopping malls and some greenfield projects as well. The focus will be in cities with up to 500,000 people in the south, southeast, and the midwest of the country.
Midwest is a region that is now showing a lot of growth with a lot of opportunity for increasing our share, and we will have iconic projects such as the launch of our new store, the inauguration of our store tomorrow here at Avenida Paulista. That you will have the chance to visit today. I would like to talk about omnichannel and our Essência customer service model. The Essência model, we believe it has to be relatively simple, and it is indeed simple. It starts with our store staff paying attention to be able to establish connection with our customers. So they will say, "Good morning," they will nod to the consumer to let them know you are available.
If they need, they will call one of our employees, and at that moment, with the employee app, we can help them provide them with what they need and offer them what they need. The main elements here are respect and high energy. You should be present in one of our early meetings in the morning to see the level of energy, and we want to bring this essence. That is why it is called Essência. We want to bring the essence of C&A to our consumers in our stores. What is happening with the Essência customer service model? We increased the training hours, so 80% more training hours per employee. With this increase in training time, we saw a 25% reduction in our turnover. We were talking about competitiveness when we talked about the labor market.
This is very important and good news, and as I said, we saw strong growth in the NPS of our stores. Why is customer service so important? Because the journey is now different. Consumers go to our store, sometimes they already made a pre-purchase, and they already looked for the products online. This is the omnichannel, and the omnichannel client has a twice as high value compared to our regular consumers. The omnichannel consumer, an increase in our omnichannel consumers is directly related with increasing our sales per square meter. Talking about omnichannel, our purpose here is that the omnichannel strategy can boost growth for C&A, growth in our sales per square meter, and also the expansion of our customer base. What we want is to reach 15% penetration of the app and the website.
How to do that, we want to be more present in the pre-purchase stage so that we are always top of mind and first choice for our consumers. In our stores with our staff and technology, we want to have all our channels really integrated. Now, to go into more details about what we've already done and where we're heading, I want to invite Roni to the stage. He's our e-commerce director.
Hello. During the Energia cycle, we deepened our work in digital. We started building our website and our app. We needed to listen to our consumers, and our consumers were telling us what they expected from our website and what they expected from our app. So during the Energia cycle, we established the foundations. For a few months, we were surveying our consumers in mirror rooms.
I spent months in mirror rooms listening to our consumers, looking at our app, looking at our competitor's app, international apps, to hear what they expected from us, what they expected from our app. In parallel, I know you have all been through this experience. We saw the advancement of ChatGPT, Gemini, and the changes in our behavior. I think that everybody here starts their day today talking to some sort of AI platform, and this was a behavior that also changed among our consumers. Our team realized that their searches were different. In the past, they would search for products only. Now they started to converse during their search. I want to share with you the foundations that we established to be able to double the share of e-commerce, to double the penetration of e-commerce in our sales.
It's not just about growing digital for the sake of growing. We want to become the top-of-mind omnichannel brand, providing consumers with what they want, where they want, at the time when they want it. In record time, we were able to relaunch our website and our app, like you already heard from João. Please visit our online channels, visit our website and our app, and you can see for yourself that we are offering a new experience. Previously, our website and app was all about price. Remember that I said that we detected a change in behavior, and we were monitoring this, and we responded to this. Consumers started to type into their search, and this was brought to us by our team. We map everything with heat maps and surveys.
We realized that they were inserting other things other than the words dress or black shirt into the search box. They started to type, for example, "I need advice. I have an event. I have a party. I'm visiting my family in Switzerland. What do you recommend?" At that moment, we did not really have recommendations in our search engine. It would only reply about specific items. We were pioneers in Brazil. We were the first in Brazil to add context to our search. In the search box itself, because we know that customers were no longer looking at the menu, they were looking for the search box. C&A was trying to find ways to advance in our search engine. I want to share with you what the changes were. Our new digital experience is already bringing results.
It was not just about changing the appearance of the website with beautiful photographs or visuals, which we actually also did. We have better visuals, and it is a much better experience. It is the most beautiful visuals that I have ever seen. It was not just about the visuals. We already have more traffic due to the better content, an increase of 40% in the visits to our pages, the website, and the app. Also, a 29% increase in website conversions. This is very expressive. More than 5 percentage points of increase in our gross margin. What does this mean? It means we are improving their experience, we are bringing more traffic to our website, but profitable traffic, with profitability increasing as well. It is not just selling for the sake of selling. It is bringing customers and helping the brand grow as a whole through the omnichannel experience.
I want to share with you something very innovative that we implemented. C&A was also a pioneer in this field. We created the Home for You. What is the Home for You? If you visit our website or our app, you register, and you start your purchase experience by using our search box. After a little while, when you enter the C&A app, you have a personalized homepage for you. This is incredible because it is your store, your homepage, personalized exclusively for you. Of course, this boosts conversion. We have seen expressive results in the initial tests. We saw a 5-time increase in conversion of those who go through the experience of having a Home for You. In parallel, you remember I said we saw changes in consumer behavior and our behavior. We today also use ChatGPT and Gemini.
Of course, you have your preferred AI platform, Claude, but we use them, and we talk to them. We saw this change in their behavior. They were asking for advice in our search box. What should I wear for a festival? What should I wear for a party? We were the first to launch in Brazil our personal shopper AI. Our AI agent talks to the consumer and gives them advice and recommendations for what they need for that specific event. There are some conversations that last more than 3 minutes. One single conversation more than 3 minutes with a personal shopper, and that helped us double our conversion. We had a 5-time increase, and now we are doubling our conversion with the conversational AI commerce.
Since we are very certain about the objectives we have for 2030, we know that one of the things that we want is adherence to these tools that are provenly effective. Our challenge is to increase the frequency of use of these tools by our consumers because the conversion rates are skyrocketing. I am sure all of you also have WhatsApp, and this is also available on WhatsApp during your conversations. You are going about your business, but you have your personal shopper in your WhatsApp offering you products and what you need, and they can understand what your budget is for that purchase, what level of discount you need, where you can pick up your products, how you want them delivered. We have record delivery times of up to 2 hours. Also you can buy at the physical store.
The personal shopper also helps you find the product in our store because this tool also includes the store mode, which helps you locate an item inside our stores. Furthermore, if you do not find your size, you can immediately know which store has your size available, and that product can be transferred to that store or sent to your home directly wherever you are. This is what I wanted to announce to you today. But talking about it is not enough. I also want to show you this digital experience. I want you to pay attention because it is indeed incredible. These are the levers for 2030. I already touched on some of the advancements and some of the improvements that we made to get there, but we have a lot more to come. The omni assortment is becoming way more relevant.
We want this to be easily accessible to our consumers so that they can access it from anywhere. We want to intensify the omni-journey. It does not really matter whether it starts at the digital channels or the physical store. We want to serve these customers in the best way possible. People talk about an app-first strategy, but our strategy is an app omni strategy because our app, it was made to service anyone, anywhere. I talked about AI platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini, and today our consumers are already going to ChatGPT and Gemini looking for products and our company is appearing in the replies because we already worked on content for that. Not just SEO content, but also thinking of something greater and broader that is already bringing results and we will see even more results in the future.
Finally, I think the main takeaway here, number 1, is our focus on consistently advancing our productivity and our sales per square meter. This will come from our stores, from our digital platforms, from this integration as a whole. We will also increase the number of square meters, opening new stores in cities where we did not use to have a presence before, and we will use all the strength of the C&A team under this customer service model that we call Essência C&A, which is now kicking off, and it has great potential to deliver much more in the future. Now I would like to call Felipe to the stage. He will talk about relationship and how we plan to advance in this further engagement with our consumers.
Customer relationship is at the center of our Full Power strategy. It is the vehicle to increase proximity with our consumers and bring our connection to them to the next level. Today I want to share with you why understanding, listening, and servicing our customers better and better is a point of attention for us, and how these CRM loyalty and credit tools can be engines to help us get there. Combining CRM loyalty and credit is adopting the customer's point of view and designing your solutions based on that. It is not just about adding the strengths of individual teams. It is a unique perspective, looking at the customer's point of view, bringing this in-house and having a clear purpose of creating connection that generates frequency, connection, and retention as engines of this relationship. To make it clearer, what are the roles of each of these levers?
CRM identifies the consumer, loyalty rewards the consumer, and credit provides them with access, but in a different way than the standard ways the industry works. Each purchase or installment payment or redemption of rewards is a way. These are not three isolated initiatives. There is a compounded effect. The more they buy, the more they engage, the more they interact, the more our engines learn, the better our tool gets and the better the response. The result is increased frequency, increased lifetime value, and increased ticket. The main asset we have today at C&A is our customer base. In C&A and new C&A&VC only, we have 40 million customers to engage and we have an active base of 19 million customers that will increase in the future. We also have the C&A Pay, which has a lot of work in progress ahead of it.
We want to work based on science in a granular way with great profitability. Talking about CRM, this is what we built during the Energia cycle. In the Energia cycle we had more than 130 journeys automated with our new CRM, more than 1,000 different personalized combinations that generated a very clear uplift of these new journeys, and we were able to expand our capacity to contact this customer base. It is a different model that we are operating now. We have better segmented campaigns, personalized engines, and the enrichment of our customer base. The use of AI here, as you heard from Paulo, it is not just because AI is cool. AI here was really helpful. It helped us understand how to refine what is not working and how to scale what is working. So it is the applied and practical use of AI.
How are we using AI in practice today? We have campaigns being targeted based on customer profile and integratedly. So customers will receive a certain type of promotions linked to a personalized recommendation for their profile and the best C&A Pay offer to them, whether they are already an existing customer, if they are a new customer for C&A Pay, if there is any different promotion if they use C&A Pay.
Now, this logic as a whole translates in the way we are rethinking of our loyalty program going forward. Something that I would like to explain in greater detail. We begin with that integrated logic, CRM, credit, and loyalty. We begin with success cases, but mainly we have begun with the customer to understand what was their desire and what makes sense for them.
We are thinking of delivering financial advantages, purchasing benefits, a differentiated purchase, and of course, recognition and exclusivity. I would like to reinforce a part of credit that is so very important, not only in the context of Brazil, but especially for the C&A customer. A credit that is offered at the right moment, at the moment of purchase, is a very accessible tool, and it creates greater loyalty of the company with the customer. It is what we call bed-and-finance in a context that makes sense.
After the customer adheres to that financial product, the credit, the link with C&A will not only increase, it will have a leap, and we will see that frequency purchase will more than double, average ticket will be 25% higher, and the spending at C&A will be much higher than in other categories. It reinforces that credit relationship, and customers will continue to come back to C&A. Which are the credit scenarios going forward? There is a very clear pillar here. Private label is our foundation, and this is where we would like to continue to grow.
We think there is a lot of room for that, but simultaneously, we understand that there are opportunities by listening to our customers, and that we can test and develop new financial products that will connect to the customers, make sense in this new journey, and allow the customer to connect more with C&A and to always come back to us because of the fashion. Now, the discipline, the governance, and consistency of risk will not decrease, it will simply evolve. That is what has brought us up to this point and will enable sustainable growth in the long term, and value generation and returns for shareholders. To speak specifically of C&A Pay, this is one of our competitive edges, and it was conceived differently from everything that existed in the retail market. It is a very simple product integrated into the purchase journey. There is no means of payment.
The person is the means of payment. What we need is a person that can carry out the purchase very quickly at the store. The credit approval of less than one minute and the limit is dynamic at the moment of purchase. It is possible to make adjustments to refine the credit to respond to the solution the customer needs at that point. Now, based on that and supported by the use of technology underlying this to permit autonomous journeys for the customer, this shows us how C&A Pay has been able to become consolidated as an operation throughout the years. This began in December of 2021 as an independent operation. It has already reached a break-even point. This was easily adopted by the customers, and this is an operation that grew in the most adverse moments of credit in Brazil.
Consistently, quarter after quarter, we improve the quality of our portfolio, reducing the default levels. There is intelligence of credit and collection that has allowed for this. We are able to use these technologies. We are using AI before the mass use of AI, but we also have a team that is strongly driven by innovation and that truly wants to challenge the status quo, looking for new forms of offering credit. We have been able to make strides with this as a product, and we now know how to generate greater value for the customers and greater value for C&A. We understand that this is a moment where, yes, we can move forward with new tests and products without altering the risk profile of C&A, because private label is our door of entry, and the customers are our priority.
For some time already, we have been developing in-house models for personal loans. We are gradually refining this, understanding this further with a great deal of discipline and, of course, risk management. We believe we have great opportunities ahead of us. This is the example of a card with our banner where they could use the card beyond C&A. It is good to use the card within our store, but customers want to use the card outside of our store, always preserving that experience. So it has to make sense for the customer. It has to have a return so that the customer can consume more and always return. This is what gives meaning to that journey. In closing, we do have a very clear horizon of growth. It is our customer base, CRM, loyalty credit, and the engines we will use to further explore this.
We have more than 40 million customers that we are going to engage. We want to grow our active base ever more, and we could perhaps create the largest engagement system for customers, something never seen before in retail, and credit will be one of those key levers. But we want to grow with a great deal of discipline, risk control. I would now like to turn the floor over to Felipe Albuquerque, that will share with you another very important initiative we are developing in the company. Thank you. On May 20th of this year, we launched our ACE brand, positioned in the premium segment with positioning a store and channels independent of the mother brand. Although this is a different business, it is complementary. It is adjacent to the business of C&A.
I will speak to you about the strategy underlying this, the change we have observed in customer behavior, and the potential market we have going forward. Now, let us begin with a change with the customers. We are going through a moment where the relationship between sport, fashion, and lifestyle has changed. We have lost the frontiers between these universes. This is a more fluid thing, and of course, your wardrobe has to accompany this. We use the term athleisure, a cross between the functional part of sportswear with the aesthetic part of fashion.
These wardrobes are more versatile and allow you to go throughout your day wearing those same clothes. Instead of being put into a drawer of sports clothes in the closet, you can wear this all the time. The global market in 2026 was of approximately BRL 400 billion with an annual growth of 7% for the last five years.
But when observing the market, what draws attention is that these are not the purely performance brands that are leading to this growth. The engines are the brands, the lifestyle. When we observe the global market, we see consolidated players to the left of the slide with a growth of 10.5%. I'm sorry, he apologizes, 1.7% CAGR, while the lifestyle brands, athleisure, are growing at a faster pace of 24.6%. What happens in Brazil? Two things happen in Brazil. The market of performance brands is growing at a very fast pace. Our brands growing 10.5%, and the good work of lifestyle brands growing at 40% a year. Now, which is the size of this market in Brazil? At the end of last year, we got very close to BRL 40 billion, 19% of the total apparel and footwear market in Brazil.
Now, the market will be BRL 50 billion in 2030, and the change of behavior is important here with a change and accelerated growth of the market. Where do we position ACE here? Now, the product platform has three very clearly defined pillars. The first is the sensory part, the touch, the comfort. Clothes that you feel that you can spend the entire day with, that you want to spend the entire day with. We have proprietary products with our own technology, and the results of the customers is impressive here in terms of recognition. And then we have that product that changes without really changing. That is an item that will be used in gyms and will go on to the rest of your wardrobe. We have that coming together of wardrobe with a sports market.
And third of all, we have that smart minimalism that translates into versatility, the overlay of products to improve your look, and that feeling that this collection is truly timeless. Now, why was this born in C&A? What is it that C&A contributes besides that focus on the customer? And this is what ACE is born with. We created a business unit with marketing channels and other areas that are independent and manage the ACE business within C&A. Now, we have the best sourcing in the market, the best suppliers. The supports, the construction of these collections, our tech with the most advanced positions in the market, complementing the journey of our product logistics, both with a local and international network, with C&A supporting the brand. And the back office with the best human resources, the best financial part, once again, supporting the growth.
Now, this is born with low cost, but with a great deal of robustness. And the sportswear channel continues to grow, leading in the retail market. Now, digitally, there's a brand that was born with an omni-channel focus. This is a brand that was born with everything that he said to us for C&A. This is also included in our omni-channel journey. We launched our app in the fourth quarter this year with a total focus on product experience in the store, architecture and product advancing hand-in-hand, reinforcing that premium positioning. This brand was designed by designer Marcelo Rosenbaum, and we see this in the store where C&A opened its first store 50 years ago. We see time of permanence, assisted sales, not only during sales, but also in after sales. And a bit of our future ambition for this brand. In wave one, learning. We're in the second wave.
The second store was inaugurated in Shopping Mall Bourbon. In September, we will land in Rio de Janeiro, and then we will go to Belo Horizonte and continue our expansion, always based on the learnings that we have had in previous stores. In wave 2, we have that ambition to expand asset light, perhaps take our model to franchises. This is a model that began at home with strategic partners supporting us, and it will now go through the test and learn process as we understand, which is the scalable part of this model. We will have a rollout nationwide, but always prioritizing the quality of our choices. I'm going to show you a very short video that shares with you what I have just explained to you and what we have learnt in this very short time. The sport market is transforming the way people live.
The union between sports and lifestyle is changing. Based on this observation, ACE emanated. The DNA combines three elements, the sensorial, the precise modeling, and the all-day-long concept that goes through the entire routine, consolidating that junction between sport and fashion, and that smart minimalism, ensuring that this will be the new aesthetic for your day-to-day. It was necessary to build a brand that could reflect the change of behavior in terms of how you look, bringing together lifestyle, fashion, and movement. In the store, we bring together natural material and very comfortable areas, all of which tell the same story. Digitally, we have built a platform to enhance the relationship with our customers, campaigns, press, activations, constant relationship with our squad of creators, and partnerships that expand the presence of the brand. The response of the customers confirmed that we're on the right path.
In the first 2 months, we had 24,000 followers, 61.9 hits, 4.5 tickets online, and much more. More than launching a brand, we have begun the construction of a strategic asset for a category that is under expansion. ACE proceeding at its own pace. We launched a strategic asset for a market that is under expansion. It has clear differentials, and we're very enthusiastic with it. I would like to invite everybody for a short break. Thank you all for your attention. And of course, we will have more time to speak about this. Thank you.
Let's start the second part of today's morning session. I'm now going to call Bruno Ferreira. He is in charge of technology, and he is going to share with you our visions and priorities for the next cycle.
Thank you. Thank you, Laurence. Today I want to tell you how we are evolving on the technology side and how we're structuring technology for our next phase. Before I start, I would just like to reinforce what we said about our ambition and the philosophy with which we are treating technology in the past few years. We have four important tech pillars at C&A. First, technology at C&A is seen as a strategic pillar. As you heard from Paulo, technology has a role in our decision-making, the executive decision that is present in the main decisions that we make.
Another motto for us is that technology has to be 100% aligned with the business. It is not just technology for the sake of technology. We are here to meet or comply with the business objectives and to boost the company's performance. The third important pillar is focus on results. I come from sales, so this is something that I saw during my career, and we will not prioritize any initiative or activity that is not closely linked with the positive impact on our results, like you heard from Paulo.
Finally, technology as a driver of our operational model. We want it to be productive, to modernize the way we work, and to help employees achieve their full efficiency. Whenever I talk about technology, I like to show this chart, because for me, technology is not just a short-term view. We have been working with technology at C&A since our IPO.
This is what is enabling us to evolve, and I am sure that everybody in sales today is talking about technology, and this is what is enabling the advancement of technology in the different areas. We start with the foundations, one of the most important part, of course, the modernization of our legacy technology, our data lake, all the important ERPs such as WMS. One thing that I think is the most important is our cloud structure and the migration of our data systems into the cloud.
This is very important to ensure the scalability we have today. When you hear from Johny or João and he talks about pricing, we are talking about very robust analytic models running behind the tool, and this was only possible because of the foundation that we built in the past. This is what allows us to scale this and scale this fast in our company.
Then we move to the Energia cycle, which is when we built the platforms that connect the foundations that we had built before, connecting the foundations to the business. So the CRM engines that you heard from Cissa, Commercial Intelligence Hub, hyper-personalization, our CRM engines. So that is when we connected all these platforms. One important point during Energia, we created our applied technology committee. So today we have a committee with participation of the entire executive management, including Paulo. We have meetings once a month. We bring market experts to speak. These experts help us discuss the trends and ensure governance of our initiatives, ensuring a good pace of delivery and of capture of results. Now we are going to a new phase, which is the phase where we will ensure these initiatives gain scale. Today, we have much more readiness to activate all this.
We will evolve much strongly in the second phase of our Full Power strategy. Tech is already a reality that is generating measurable impact for the company. So let me start with business intelligence. You heard from Johny, he talked about pricing. We have intelligent supply mechanisms. We have intelligent procurement mechanisms and assortment management mechanisms already delivering relevant numbers, both in terms of margin and sales and stock efficiency. Then we have digitization, so everything related with digital conversational solutions, like you heard from Roni, hyper-personalization solutions, which are also a reality. We are seeing a 4 to 5-fold increase in our conversion rate compared to the average of the website, so a true evolution, like you heard from Roni . Finally, we have important developments in productivity. 90% of customer service interactions today use generative AI with a very high success rate.
We also have self-checkout at our stores. We are now implementing our new self-checkout model to more than 200 stores this year. This will provide Fernando Brossi and the operations team with a quicker experience at the cashier when paying at our stores. In addition to product development, we also launched our first collection in the beginning of this year. We are now in the middle of the year. So we launched the first collection created by AI in the start of this year. You heard this from João when he started his speech. Now, looking forward, how are we structuring technology? We thought of technology, and we built our technological plan for the next cycle based on four value generation thesis or levers. First, artificial intelligence, commercial intelligence. So management of our collections and the construction dynamics led by Johny, focusing on increasing our sales per square meter.
Also customer experience, so website, app, and the in-store journey, focusing on increasing and transforming our visits. Cissa mentioned 1 million people walking into our stores every day, so turning these visits into sales. The third value thesis is related with customer relationship. So we will increase the frequency of our consumers. We want them visiting our stores more frequently. So this is a clear measurement KPI. Finally, number 4, productivity and cost efficiency. So how can we implement and roll out technologies across the company and the use of generative AI so that we can advance with this agenda? So our first lever, this is the one that I like the most. The creation of a collection or commercial proposition is the most important step, right? This is about creating the products, the items that will be present in our stores.
The intelligence hub, when we created it, and it is now at its final rollout stage, will bring us out of that time when we had similar assortment between the stores with small variations, and now we have a smarter assortment, a more optimized assortment of products in our stores. So this movement and this set of tools that I am going to show to you will facilitate the management. Because in a typical store, we have 30,000 options of items to our consumers. We need to be able to manage this in a scalable way. Our commercial intelligence hub is already delivering on this. We have planning tools using math and analytics to decide for each item what will be the price, where will this product be classified, the price. The price changes every week, so we have models for that.
Also, assortment, we have dynamic assortment in half of our teams, and we plan to roll out completely by the end of the year. Also, procurement management, supply management. We also implemented the SIA, which is our smart supply system. All these systems are already a reality. They are already using AI and using a lot of data and mathematical information to create these precision accuracy models. This will allow us to scale, because this is what we wanted when we created this commercial intelligence hub. We want to increase the company's capacity to make more granular decisions. So which store has which type of location for which type of customer profile so that we can meet their needs. So for me, it is very clear. We want to optimize assortment and increase availability of the products in our stores.
This will help us increase our sales per square meter and reduce our inventory days and use our capital more efficiently. This second lever is also very important to me, which is customer experience. The theory here is that we want to have a tool to integrate customer journey using technology in the store and on digital to remove friction and obstacles from their journey, creating a better experience, leading to higher conversion rates from that 1 million people visiting our stores every day. We have two locations here. One in store. We are going to use expanded RFID to help customers find items in our store, in addition to all the other benefits of the RFID technology. We have the new self-checkout methodology, a more modern. Then we're going to launch the mobile checkout now so that the payment experience can be faster and simpler.
Intelligent systems, like you heard from Brossi today, we have the employee app. This is already a reality in C&A. If you go to C&A and you give your taxpayer ID, they know what you bought in the past, what you like, if that store has the item you want, and offer your items right there, right then, during your journey inside our store. We're going to launch for workforce management, some systems to improve the productivity of the staff in our stores, to be able to do what Brossi was talking about in his sense that we want to free their time so that they can provide better service to our consumers inside the store. We really want to focus on workforce management. In digital, you also heard from Roni that we want to personalize using AI. So mass personalization using AI conversational journeys.
Another point that we rolled out, we were pioneers, and we are seeing very good results, and we understand that the next step is expanding that. A new, more modern digital platform. We will keep working to advance our platform and make it more responsive. And finally, what Brossi said about integrating the different channels. The employee app is our main channel, so how can we make this transaction smoother, more seamless to consumers inside our stores? Now, as for our customer relationship, what we want to achieve. The theory behind this is that consumers go to our stores. On average, they buy 12 times a year, so three times at C&A. So we have a lot of opportunities here to get consumers to buy more in our stores. And how do we plan to do this? Through hyper-personalization. We advanced our CRM models.
We want to advance our AI models, AI-based models, especially for content generation. We already have an ongoing project to advance with our content generation. WhatsApp. We're bringing conversational technology into WhatsApp now. Today, we already use WhatsApp for sales. We already have relevant sales on WhatsApp, both actively and receptively. And with conversational capability, now we want to allow customers to finalize their payment inside WhatsApp and buy their products there. This creates a lot of opportunities considering the size of the customer base that we have and how this allows us to actively contact them using the conversational mechanism. And finally, like you heard from Felipe, we want to advance in our loyalty program, a new mechanism together with C&A Pay and CRM platforms to manage our relationship with our customers and increase their frequency. And our last lever is corporate productivity.
We want to renew the operational model of C&A, change the way it operates, and allow it to operate based on AI systems and technology systems. AI adoption plan. Today, generative AI is already a reality. We are already using market tools, and we are expanding this use. Of course, it is not just about making PPT presentations using AI. We want to improve stock outs, inventory time, pricing, inbound pricing, outbound pricing. This is the focus when we talk about AI use in our company. To wrap up, these are my main takeaways. We have four value levers, commercial intelligence to advance our sales per square meter, customer relationship to advance in frequency, smart journey, smart technology journey, either on Omni or digital to improve conversion rates. We want to be the productivity engine of this company to be able to reduce costs and increase cost efficiency.
Absolute focus on results. This is where we want to focus. We are looking for improvements. Also alignment with the business, AI in service of the business. Using AI to improve alignment and comply with the shared objectives that we establish, a C&A for every customer in relationship, and we also want to advance our productivity. These are the main points, the four main points, the four main challenges that we want to tackle and where we should concentrate the use of technology in our next cycle. Of course, technology is ever-changing, and probably next year we will have a lot of novelties to announce. Now I would like to call my longtime friend and logistics director, Hussein, to explain about our logistics network.
Now, looking at all the evolutions in our products and the experience that Energia and Energia Full Power have in its design, we also need to revisit our logistic model. I want to share with you what this trajectory has looked like so far and how we are advancing towards these improvements. We started with an ambition of having logistics as an enabler of delivery of our strategy by offering the right product at the right store at the right time. Always pursuing better speed, flexibility, and efficiency, and progress as the company grows and expands. In this redesign of our logistic model, we adopted an approach that is a structured approach focusing on five strategic guidelines. The first is readiness for growth.
We want to ensure capacity to grow, logistic capacity to meet the needs of our store expansion, category expansion, and also the new categories and new businesses that will come in the future. This design also provides us with greater speed to deliver our products faster to consumers, like you heard from João. Test and learn with increased agility and speed, and also greater speed in the frequency of delivery of our stores and replenishment of the items, so that we can improve our total turnover, reduce the stock requirements, reduce the total inventory in our system, increasing stock efficiency. We also talked a lot about personalization, replenishment intelligence, dynamic assortment. This is what our model needs to deliver, this personalization store by store and granularity in our replenishment and supply where it makes sense.
All of this within a frame of financial efficiency, evidently in the search for greater productivity of our operations, discipline in the return of investments, and our use of capital. We want a model that will be resilient to adapt to the market changes, macroeconomic changes, mitigating operational and logistic risks of a specific site or operation. Additionally to that, we have three different lenses in this construction. All of this with the help of specialized consultancy. We looked at fashion benchmarks to see how they were working with logistics, delivery, and much more.
We assessed our operational levers, the location, the level of automation, mechanization of our distribution centers, and we worked with this modulating data, building this through a tool for logistic enhancement, working with 1,000 different designs until we came to the final assessment of the model to know which would be the best design for C&A. We did not begin with a predefined model or a choice. What we did was to survey the different possibilities to get to our future logistics model. Based on this, we're going from a centralized logistics network that has already fully complied with its role up to this point. But with the growth of C&A, the increase of capillarity of the stores, and our need for faster and faster deliveries, we saw that the challenge did not lie only in generating more capacity. We had to have capacity at the right place.
With this information and with all of these analysis, we decided to move towards a more regional logistics network where we bring the inventory closer to the demand. The first important point of this review is a new operation in the northeast in Pernambuco, that. This is a region where we have relevant demand of our customers and sales, so we're bringing that inventory closer. It's an issue of stock regionalization, something typical for the northeast. With this, we will be able to faster service that region. We're revisiting the role of distribution centers as a whole. We had a single DC distributing products in the past. We now have four different DCs operating as last mile, as entities receiving products, and three of them distributing the orders.
With this, we are evidently able to reduce the dependence on a standalone site, bring about greater speed, and with the implementation of logistic hubs, especially in those regions where the transit time tends to be longer, we have a better frequency and cadence of supply. This model distributes our capabilities in a much more efficient way, allowing for modular growth, optimizing the discipline and use of capital as we advance in this growth according to the needs of each region.
Now, this transformation is already taking place. The new logistic network has come out of the paper. It has already been implemented in practice. We have a new DC in Pernambuco beginning its operations. Very probably it will be concluded at the beginning of 2027, and we are beginning to operate and distribute to the stores in the northern region. We reformulated our DC in Santa Catarina, where we have automation flow division to distribute orders directly to the DCs and also for all the stores in the south. We have urban hubs in Rio Grande do Sul and Goiás, servicing them with greater frequency in the stores, enabling us to have greater speed. We have also grown our operation, enhancing our capacity in São Paulo, the push and pull for São Paulo and also in the northeast because of this hub.
Now, this setup has a very interesting value as we carry out the implementations. We are able to collect the results, which means we will continuously have that benefit of learning from each of these implementations. When we look at our logistics network, we saw the need to enhance our supply model through SKUs and push and pull, all of this connected to that vision that we have for speed. When we look at benchmarks and other market references, we see that these products that have a shorter lifespan have to get to the stores faster. We have to have more efficiency in sending them. We work with suppliers, logistic, both domestically and internationally, so that this product could get to the store faster, and this new trend is already available. Stores will be supplied with packs and a more efficient cross-docking.
Now, we are operating a great deal of tests. These tests have to be very quick, have to be scaled up very quickly. Once they have been scaled out, we are going to focus on consistency and take the products through push and pull and SKUs. On this front, of course, we will be working with the highest volume possible to conclude our service. With our push and pull model, we will get to the total supply with a potential of 70%. Until 2020, we did not have a push and pull service for SKUs. We have been evolving throughout the years. Last year, we reached 54%. This year, we continue to evolve with the expansions of capacity that we have underway. This percentage continues to grow, and this is the potential capacity that we expect throughout the Full Power, 70%.
Along with this, we also have new plans for investment that are fully connected to these levers to strengthen our logistics. Now, we can look at four different dimensions, further automation in our operations, in our discussions. We always speak about automation at the right measure, and this is what we discuss in our investment committees to guarantee that this will truly help us in productivity and speed, infrastructure development, creation of new sites, hubs, or the renovation of present-day sites to expand their capacity, specialized operations in push and pull for e-commerce and beleza, and more systems, analytics, and the use of AI in the operations. Now, we already have a number of initiatives that have been put in place or that are being implemented.
For example, the DC in Santa Catarina, where we have reformulated everything, new automation for faster distribution, the DC in Pernambuco, that is a new site with push and pull that will guarantee speed and productivity in our operations. We are also expanding the DCs in São Paulo in terms of their capacity for push and pull, ensuring the equipment will allow for greater efficiency and speed. We are using our RFID in these operations, not only to guarantee the assertiveness of inventory and distribution, but to have greater speed and efficiency of operations. In the beleza operation, in the beauty operation, we are working with specialized cosmetics in the industry that is already underway. We have the whole potential of growth for beauty at C&A. In e-commerce, we have state-of-the-art technology.
Despite this, we continue to invest, enhancing its capacity and further resources for a faster service for our customers. All of this set up to build the capacity to create that very fast and efficient logistic network. This combination of regionalization, intelligence, and distribution, and a strengthening of our inter-logistics is what we have designed here, and this is what will enable us to deliver a logistic that will make feasible the growth of C&A in a very flexible, expeditious, and efficient manner. This is the new design that we have constructed. We are implementing it at full steam, and I would like to give the floor to Carolina, our partner in this transformation. She works with people, culture, and ESG. Thank you, Hussein. If you would like to leave your notes there.
In the next 15 minutes, I am going to share with you how people, culture, and ESG have developed their capabilities during the Energia cycle and how all of this will enable us to work with a Full Power project. Our ambition here is somewhat greater than merely making all of this feasible. We want to enhance everything. We believe that raising productivity with performance-driven culture and development of new capabilities will be a leverage, not only something that will allow for feasibility. We are going to continue with the consistency of our ESG, always focusing more on circularity and diversity. Here we have the levers or pillars built during the Energia cycle. I would like to mention them very quickly and then go into more detail in each of them. We have strengthened our leadership. We have a stronger leadership.
Paulo spoke about this, Marcos referred to this as well, as well as all of our other colleagues. We have a management model that is generating very good results. Training is a lever for performance and productivity. Training is something fundamental for us. All of this supported by our culture and ESG. I am going to speak about our first pillar, our leadership, with a specific viewpoint of 65 partners in the company. They are called partners because they have company shares. Which is the characteristic that these top leaders share? They have a very interesting mix of a deep knowledge of the business. 63% of them have more than 10 years of experience in fashion retail, 27% of them have been at the company for more than 15 years. We have 30% new executives in this group complementing the capabilities that we deemed that we needed.
Roni , digital CC, and marketing and branding. Felipe himself, who is a specialist in financial services. This mix of a deep knowledge of the business and additional competencies is something that is very powerful. These are the teams leading Full Power. Still speaking about these 65 leaders, we have a highly structured process to map succession. Everything begins with assessment, performance evaluation, but a very careful process to map successors and a design of the development of these executives so that they can take on new positions. This is a process followed closely by the board and our committee. The name of the game here is discipline. We are highly meticulous in this segment, and we produce results like Bruno that has come from commercial planning to technology, simply due to the talent he has, but also thanks to our planned development process.
I will show you how effective this has been through figures. 66% of our partners in this group were promoted internally within the company. 15% of this group, like João for example, were trainees at C&A. They have a chip of our culture already in their system. Another important figure during the Energia cycle, our partner retention level was of 93%, which means we have very high engagement. A page that is very important, powerful, speaking about the alignment with C&A goals. This partner of 65 partners have 60% of executive compensation that is variable. 50% through short-term incentives, 50% through long-term incentives. If we zoom in on these short-term incentives have business targets. We are speaking about targets that will guarantee EBITDA profit, sales, NPS, but we also have individual targets that sustain the company's strategy, ESG goals, succession goals.
Yes, we do have succession goals and indicators that you have assisted here. Sales per square meter, frequency of purchase, conversion. All of these are part of our strategy and allow it to move forward. When it comes to the long-term incentives, we have annual deliveries, but in truth, they are PSUs, performance shares. Because of this, they have two performance indicators. We work with TSR as well as working with return on invested capital. Very powerful tools for alignment. The board helps us in this design, and this is the result of joint work that represents years of investment. In the case of the short-term incentives, our general goals, which are business goals, are not valid only for executives. They are valid for the entire company. They are simple, general goals, and transform this into a stronger alignment program.
Another pillar or lever is our development, and I would like to highlight some features. We have a very powerful platform, 97% of satisfaction rate for those who take part in our training. 92% is the learning of our content. There are other interesting characteristics. We have a design team that works with proprietary content. The Essência cycle, which is our service cycle designed in-house, went through this group of designers.
Our greatest differentiator under this model is the group of 27 specialists who are in charge of delivering this training. Working in the vertical structure of the company, we can get to the store staff, to the store employee, and we are already seeing the results of that. We heard this from Brossi. We had reduction in turnover, improved NPS of our stores. I would like to mention an example. In partnership with Bruno, we are now working with AI literacy of our employees. After completing our training, we see a 15 percentage point increase in the adoption of AI, not just for PPT presentations, but an effective use of AI in their work. I find this very positive. Culture, you heard from Paulo. Paulo talked about culture, Brossi talked about culture. We do have a very genuine, authentic culture. We value our people.
Respect is not negotiable, but we want to bring a different lens to you, which is a capacity that we developed over these 50 years in Brazil to shape our culture based on our strategy. For example, during the Energia cycle, we focused more on performance, we focused more on accountability. We were really focusing on the customer. What about now, during the Full Power cycle? The same capacity to adjust our course will help us make the most and then boost the results of our workforce by using technology, AI, but always maintaining very humane relationships and our pillar, which is taking care of our people and valuing our people. Caring for our people is translated into our listening work. We listen to our team three to four times a year. The satisfaction levels is 93%.
Externally, we are being recognized with the Great Place to Work certification, which really contributes to our image as an employer, and this really helps us be a company increasingly attractive to new talents. I finished this part about people and culture, and now I would like to talk about ESG. Our ambition is to keep evolving consistently in our ESG agenda, always guided by our goals, always supported by our transparency, and the engagement with our stakeholders, particularly in our supply chain, our employees and our customers. Here, the important takeaway is that we are advancing in all of these different aspects of ESG, and consistently. We give highlight to our diversity targets, which is translated in the form of women present in our leadership, Black people, Indigenous people in our leadership, and we have achieved all the targets. In ESG, the name of the game is consistency.
I really like this chart because this is precisely what it shows. We started in 2006 by auditing our supply chain, working in close proximity with our suppliers. Over time, we have been achieving better and better levels and indicators, which is proof to our consistent evolution. During the Energia cycle, we started being part of three indices, the B3 indices and IFRS sustainability. This shows the consistency of this work. Lastly, this is a very important chart. This is social. The Instituto C&A is turning 35. It celebrates 35 years when we are celebrating 50 years of Brazil. During C&A Energia, we revisited our focus. We are now working on productive inclusion through entrepreneurship and employability. We work nationwide in all the communities, in all the places where we are present with physical stores, with a highlight to our volunteering program.
Approximately 30% of our employees do voluntary work at least once a year. I finish my presentation by talking about the Instituto C&A because this is something that makes us really proud as a company and as executives. I have one last page, Laurence. These are my takeaways. Number one, our team is ready for our Full Power cycle. Our executives are well-prepared, well-aligned, very experienced, and we have a high capacity to attract. We have a management model that favors alignment and boosts performance.
We have a very strong culture that also attracts new talents, and we have a training program that enhances performance and creates execution capacity. Finally, we continue to evolve in our ESG practices, and we will be giving more light and visibility to circularity and diversity. I would like to call Laurence . He is going to talk about profitable growth, capital discipline, and share with you the numbers that you have been waiting for.
We are getting close to the end. Energia. The Energia cycle brought to us a very clear strategy, a strategic conviction of our focus on product journey and relationship. This brought profitable and disciplined growth to our company in the past years, reducing our debt level and restoring the investment capacity of our company. Energia paved the way for acceleration of our Full Power strategy. Based on everything that was said and the evolution of our fashion products, the update of the buying experience, and the enhancement of all of our channels, the company had growth combined with gross margin expansion. This performance, combined with expense discipline and reduction of our debt, led to an increase in the company's net income.
We have brought our net income to a different level. Discipline in expenses has always been part of our culture, and including during Energia, during our transformation, we were able to maintain a stable level of expenses versus our sales. Thinking of expense dilution, we were able to absorb the discontinuation of the mobile phone business and also the termination of the Bradescard partnership with a period of lower revenue from financial products. We were also able to reduce the company's requirement for working capital. We have an interdisciplinary committee that sits down every month to discuss the main indicators of inventory, receivables, and payables. There is a very interesting dynamic to these meetings, very granular, detailed discussions about our operations.
This constant pursuit of efficiency continues to be an important lever for generation of resources that will fund and support the continuity of the growth of this company without resorting to third-party resources, to third-party funds. The cash flow of the company was allowed by the combination of higher profitability, increased profitability, and capital allocation discipline. This is what allowed us to expand our cash generation. During Energia, we saw a consistent increase in the conversion of results into cash, which supports and expands the company's investment capacity. Also, during the Energia cycle, we invested approximately BRL 1.1 billion in initiatives connected with store expansion, renovations, logistic evolution, technology to enhance our agility and the intelligence of some key business processes. At the same time, as you heard from Paulo, we created an investment committee, which meets biweekly or even more frequently to preserve our agility.
This committee is in charge of decisions that look at all the projects taking place with a minimum tier of 18% for the projects, a minimum IRR for the projects of 18%. This is what allows us to measure at a better cadence, monitoring returns with greater proximity and accuracy. This model improved the quality of our decision-making related to projects and capital allocation. It also improved the company's mastering and engagement when seeking better capital allocation. Even with accelerated investments and with all this growth, we significantly reduced the company's debt, moving from a net debt EBITDA ratio of 1.5x in 2023 to a position close to our net cash in 2025. This reduction contributed to reducing our financial expenses, strengthening our net income, and making our balance sheet more resilient.
When we look at the cash generation during the Energia cycle, we allocated nearly 50% for reduction of our debt. One-third was allocated for investments as CapEx, and approximately 12% were targeted at returns to our shareholders. As of 2024, we have recovered our capacity to pay dividends. If Energia meant a cycle of capacity building and capability building for this company, Full Power is now a cycle for intensification and value capture of these capabilities. Our ambition for 2030 is to sustain consistent growth, supported by increased productivity, cash generation, and discipline in capital allocation. This value generation framework combines expansion, growth, and productivity, as well as discipline in capital allocation. We will continue to increase the productivity of our current stores through the dispersion project, through our renovations, and we will also accelerate the contribution of digital, increasing the company's operating efficiency as well.
This will all be executed with the same discipline and the same mindset that we consolidated throughout the Energia cycle. Capital allocation and the strengthening of our balance sheet comes to significantly change the way we plan to allocate capital during the Full Power cycle. During the Energia cycle, a major portion of our cash generation was targeted at payment of our debts and interests. During the Full Power cycle, capital allocation will concentrate on greater investment capacity, so CapEx and shareholder returns. We have proven our capacity to invest during the Energia cycle, and financial soundness is what will allow for continuity of this investment cycle. We will continue to invest in the company's growth, steering our CapEx to renovation, store expansion, logistics, and technology.
Whereas at the same time, we will keep paying close attention to the macroeconomic context that considering the modularity of our management, we will allow for adjustments in our course along the way. The return on invested capital will continue to be one of the main drivers of decision-making in our company. Our ambition for this new cycle is the continuity of high returns on our invested capital. Even during a more intense investment cycle, we will maintain the capital discipline that we established throughout the years. Our debt, we also plan to keep our debt, our leverage at low levels, healthy levels. We believe that this level of leverage is more sustainable considering the current context of our country. We are planning to fund most of the investments for the Full Power cycle through our own operating cash generation.
My takeaways, the Energia cycle consolidated a stronger, more solid, more profitable, and financially sound company. The ambition during Full Power is to increase sales, expand our margins gradually and consistently. Always seeking better returns on capital and also better shareholder returns. This is my final message to all of you. I stop here, and now I would like to call Paulo back to the stage for his closing remarks.
All right. I think what we intended to convey to you today includes some very clear messages. The first one is about Energia. I think it was very important to ensure closure to that discussion that we started 3 or 4 years ago, to try to show you what we established at that moment, and what we actually achieved and realized with the Energia cycle.
But more than just the results that we shared with you, this has created new capabilities for the company, and this will act as a bridge for even further value generation in the next round. That is what we call Full Power. That is why we call it Full Power, because now we will be able to play this game with Full Power and realizing all the potential of this company. Yes, we achieved very significant results with Energia, growth, margin, EBITDA, leverage, productivity, branding, consumer preference. You saw that we improved our logistic capacity, digital capacity, technological capacity. This is a different company compared to 2 and a half years ago. I am sure you had a chance to see the power of the team that was on the stage today, talking about each of the dimensions of these strategy.
But more than just the individual capacity of each of the experts that were here today, if you were really paying attention, you understood that there is a common language among all those people. It is more than just an expert talking about their expertise. We truly believe in teamwork. And the team is more than the sum of its individuals. Because a group of talented individuals combined with a clear strategy, a clear connection with consumers, and a clear connection with a corporate purpose, is able to really boost the individual capacity and build something unique, something different, something very difficult to copy and to replicate. We will raise the bar looking forward, and that is why we call the next cycle Full Power.
We will bring our products to a different level of interest and relevance to our consumers, supported by the speed and the depth of our surveys, our research, and the speed with which we bring this to consumers. We will build more omni journeys and more robust journeys with more Energia Stores, like the one you are going to visit after this session, and this is not easy. When we talk about results, it sounds like results is just about investing money, and then you get your results. No.
Results will only happen when you mobilize your consumer interest to something better than the other options they have. This is what we have been doing, and this is what we plan for our next cycle because we want to show our consumers that our story is more interesting than our own story last year, and that is why sales are increasing.
We will intensify the dynamics of our customer relationship, not just being closer to consumers, but also more assertively conveying the right message to the right consumer and managing our results indicators showing the effectiveness of these activities. We will use C&A Pay at its full potential. We created this from scratch, and this resulted in a solid business, and now it's time to expand our ambition and seek greater gains in financial services in this country, because we know that financial services are very relevant in Brazil. We will also look for new locations where C&A is not yet present, and we will also look for new opportunities where we are already present. This store that we will visit today is one example of that.
In a very iconic location in the city of São Paulo, in the Paulista Avenue, in the state where we have the most stores in the country, but it's still worth opening a C&A store closer to our consumers. It's a mix of new locations and still relevant locations, not micro locations, so locations that are still relevant for consumers. New locations combined with new opportunities in existing locations, special opportunities in locations where we already have stores to further intensify our presence. We will pursue new businesses just like we have always done, in a very practical way, in a very clear way. One example of that is the ACE brand, like you heard from Felipe. It is a business segment that is growing very fast, and where we have the right skills to win. So we are now creating a new format.
You heard today for the first time, this is the first time we are announcing our ACE concept, and we are now testing and trialing this idea to see whether it's going to produce the results that we expect. Then we're going to scale this and accelerate this in a non-conventional way through a franchise model that we're also building the capacity to make happen. This is all supported by technology, like you heard from Bruno. It's very nice to be here hearing a business person talking about technology. So practicality, connection, clarity of the impact of that specific application, the impact on our results. Logistics, you heard from Hussein, he talked about our model, and that is our model. It's a model that we created after lots of research because we wanted this model to have everything to do with C&A.
C&A is about speed, granularity, assertiveness. So we want a more regionalized and more effective model. That is what we are doing here. We want to have the right product at the right place at the right time. The right product at the right time sells more with less weight, less markdown, improving our bottom line, and improving the return on invested capital. This is the ideology behind our logistic model, and it is this team here and the skills and competencies that we are working under our culture, adapting our strategy to bring these new skills and to further embody the company's culture. This is something that we're doing at the same time, taking care of the environment, focusing on circularity, which has been a great driver of developments and advancements in this segment.
Having a group like this one, like the one we have right now, is what qualifies us for our next phase, which is Energia Full Power. At first, we called it Energia Full Power, then we thought it was too long, so we are going to call it Full Power. It is an acceleration of the Energia cycle. It is the maturation, the next phase of Energia, and it will equip us with the capacity to pursue all the potential this company has today through the talents in this team and this very talented leadership that we have today.
I hope that this has been interesting, clear, and very productive for each of you that has been with us live, for those who are at home or in the office. Our greetings. We do hope this was a productive session. We are very confident and very proud of the new path we are building for this company when it comes to value generation. Very well. We will now go on to our Q&A session. Let us begin our question and answer session for management. I would like to invite Paulo, Brossi, Carol, and Johny. We are going to sit up here and, of course, are at your entire disposal to answer your questions.
You can ask your questions live using the microphone. Joseph, good afternoon.
Congratulations for the event. I would like to explore two very relevant points when we look at your plan going forward. Most of your cash generation was used for the deleveraging, and this is a big discussion in the sector, once again because of the macroeconomic uncertainty. How much could have been paid out to shareholders? You showed 12% CapEx in a range materially higher than what we saw last year. So how should we think about the payout of this cash to shareholders? Are we going to become a powerhouse as we continue to grow? Looking at this operationally, we have a decision that is strong going forward. You have an expansion plan that has some risk and several renovations. Which is your mindset about the risks that we are going to face?
Are you going to test and then accelerate or simply proceed full power? Which is the profitability of that channel vis-à-vis the profitability of the company with all of that logistic network? Thank you very much.
Well, Joseph has a combo of questions here. Very well. Let us begin. As we showed you in the graph, perhaps you did not have sufficient color there, but going forward, in the first place, there is a strategic conviction that full power is a continuation of the Energia cycle, and we have clear opportunities of capturing value in this next cycle. The priority, of course, is executing our CapEx, our strategic initiatives to capture, to extract that value from the assets that we have and create new avenues for growth. Also, seeking investments that will release capital through operational efficiency. So the priority is to execute our CapEx and our strategic initiatives.
As we go forward, any cash surplus that we will have in the future will go back to the shareholder. As I mentioned, the previous cycle was one where we had significant work to reduce our indebtedness. Part of the indebtedness was the buyback of the right to sell financial products. This was an important asset that we, once again, were able to achieve. Going forward, execution, the Energia cycle allowed us to once again pay out dividends. But as mentioned, we have several opportunities through our CapEx of implementing initiatives, expand stores, technology, and update the entire logistics system. Now, to respond to your question related to risk, Brazil is Brazil and will continue to be Brazil. The oscillations of greater or lesser risk are part of the equation.
The team at present, I think, have sufficient clarity and maturity to look upon the opportunities we have to create value, Full Power. We look at the history, not through the specific moment of what is happening this month or this half of the year. Instead, we look at 3 or 4 years of return. I believe the Energia cycle clearly reflects that scene where we also had fluctuations. We're always connected to what happens in the short term, but the strategic path, the long-term path is very clear, and we are going to pursue it. Perhaps this will mean a delay of some months in some periods, but the path and the direction will not change regardless of the macro scenario. We're presently living through a very challenging moment. The third question refers to logistics.
Regarding the digital part, an important issue is that with the advance of omnichannel, it's very difficult to discuss how to allocate expenses and what will belong to each channel. The way we look at this is less per channel. In omni, we had an increase of 5 points in gross margin. The profitability of the omnichannel is very sound, and the focus of our energy is how the platforms will bring a greater flow to the stores and how the stores can convert this to the digital platform when we don't have the product. Our profitability has had a good progress.
It is at a healthy level. We're going to look at C&A as a whole and less by distribution channel per channel. We can make significant strides in penetration without a deterioration in the company's margin or the financial results by leveraging omni. This is the path we will follow.
If you allow me to continue here from BBA, two questions, one from the operational side. We have two different boxes, a top-down box that is more difficult, Paulo mentioned this at the beginning of the presentation, and another box that you showed us, how much you have of internal leverage in the company. When you put together these two components net wise, which is the comfort that you have of evolving the main metric that you have, which is sales per square meter. There is the hesitancy of investments that these macro indicators may slow down, that is out of your control, and we will have growth that is very low, very close to inflation. So which is the comfort that you feel in terms of that metric? If you allow me to pose my second question to Laurence .
Laurence , to go back to capital allocation, to make this fully clear, you conveyed important information, CapEx 7%-8% of your revenues, leverage close to 1.5%. Now, 0.5 until 1.5 times in leverage, that money will be returned to the shareholder. Is this a good understanding of what you said? Thank you. Those are my two questions.
The answer is yes. We did not show you the figures. We can't make projections, but that graph shows you that the return to investors will be double of what we returned during the Energia cycle. That level of CapEx, cash generation will cover the CapEx that we require for our strategic plan, and any cash surplus, yes, will be returned or paid out to the shareholders.
Regarding your first question, this is the way I prefer to think. If everything were the same in terms of context, growth is your improvement in customer performance, from one year to another, you have to deserve that growth. The macro context, this is the engine of the car. The macro context could be a tailwind or a headwind. Now, tailwinds are ever more rare in our country. Now headwinds with the engine is what at the end of the day gives us the result we're speaking about.
You spoke about our level of confidence in our engines. Our level is very high, and we try to refer to that. There are so many dynamics, so many opportunities for the evolution of this business. Even more so if you look upon this through technology. One thing is what you know, another thing is how you are boosting the company with this engine.
The potential of the C&A engines is very high. That is why our confidence level is very high. We don't control the macroeconomic dynamic. The headwinds perhaps are stronger at present, but they could increase or decrease. We can't control the size of these. What we can control is the power of our engines, and with these, we're going at full power.
From BTG Pactual, we also have two questions. The first, to advance in the discussion on margins. All the initiatives to boost your sales, to improve productivity, renovations, the dispersion program. From the viewpoint of margin, which are the main levers for this? Is there more room to think about an improvement in gross margin? Is there more room for an improvement in margins through SG&A? To understand exactly which are the levers, a lower level of markdowns, a higher logistic efficiency.
The second question about competition. You were very clear in terms of your channel strategy, the penetration of the digital universe. The digital part has gained importance. We saw the cross-borders gaining force here. We have the taxes that we have on this. Looking forward for the sector, perhaps there will be an acceleration of the digital part when you think about that window until 2030. Before thinking about a figure of 7%-15%, has there been an acceleration at present because of the movements in the sector? Will this gain force going forward? Which is the initial reading of that window? That is my question.
Gross margin. João.
As we showed you in the presentation, there is a package of issues and advances in products, and these will, of course, generate an impact on our margin. In the 2030 cycle, we are going to continue to move forward in our margin as we did in the last cycle. We have the technological investments to allow us to have greater assertiveness in the collection, a reduction in markdown. One of the margin drains is the markdown. If we are more assertive, because of the investments in technology, logistic, and product development, the assertiveness should increase, and we can reduce the markdown levels and preserve our margins.
Additionally, we are working closer to the product, to our supply base, and although we have reinforced the impact of speed on our logistic matrix, this speed will not be gained at any cost. We have to continue to evolve in the business. Our strategy is that the cycle for the coming 3 years will be a positive margin cycle. Well, competitors.
I am going to focus on the dimension on the speed of penetration. Roni tried to show us that we have worked in terms of preparation, and we have a very good foundation for the last cycle, the Energia cycle. We used the growth strategy to acquire clients in a more aggressive way with low profitability, and that is why Joseph asked about the profitability. That was not the path we followed. Although we committed to greater advances with you in Energia cycle, we first of all worked on the infrastructure and becoming prepared. Now we see conversion figures that are very high this year because we have evolved. Now, conversion is growing, is at a healthy level, and those investments that I mentioned will enable a better profitability.
Secondly, that connection of the online sales with the stores, the dimension of omnichannel, is becoming a matter of survival. We have no other option, and platforms do not have that when we think about external competition. We travel for research, and this is what we are observing. The store becoming a hub where the customer will come to pick up the product and live an experience. Yes, we do believe we can grow profitably. We can seek those 15% through the store asset. We are in the best shopping malls and the best locations. This should increase our resiliency to compete significantly in this growing market.
Thank you. João Soares from Citi. First of all, I would like to thank you for the event, for the clear presentation of your strategy. I would like to ask about specific points. First of all, the store expansion in shopping malls.
If you could give us perhaps a bit more color, which will be the size of these stores' sales per square meter, and how does this compare with your legacy stores at present?
My second question is for you, Felipe. You talked about financial services, but what are you aiming at? Which financial services? A private card, a private loan. What is your ambition and the timing of this strategy? One last question about your CapEx. Of that 7%, 8%, how much is geared towards logistics?
First, about the stores. It is important to mention that within our portfolio, we have different scenarios, and stores have different roles. They end up having different roles. Let me answer first about the where. Cities up to 500,000 people because, besides the Paulista store, and we will have others like this, the level of penetration we have in large capital cities is already very high. With the progress in digital, you can increase your relevance without necessarily having to open new locations. However, when you move away from the large capital cities. That is why we are talking about cities with up to 500,000 people. That is where the greatest opportunities lie.
The size of these stores, of course, it depends on the city and the surroundings, but we are talking about 1.5, 1.6 thousand square meters. This is the average size. The dynamics of these new stores are. The dynamics is a great contributor to the margin. The metric that we call store contribution, which is a net margin from that store, is much higher in those cities than in other cities because the occupancy cost is lower. The size and the role of that store, it has to do with profitability. We go back to that question, what is the sales per square meter in your brick-and-mortar stores? Will the sales per square meter be lower than in the large city, São Paulo?
Yes, of course. The sales per square meter will be lower. But if we consider the advancement in omnichannel, and we bring omnichannel into those stores, then as soon as you do that, the clients in the surroundings of the store buy more because they can exchange their products if they need, then you start moving to a different level. That is why we believe that entering these new cities will contribute to increase our margin, and we will be able to compete with capital cities because omnichannel will play a different game in those cities. But this is something that we are starting to accelerate now that will help us equalize the results. Now, in respect to the CapEx geared towards logistics, in a Full Power cycle, we are estimating about BRL 200 million to BRL 300 million in a Full Power cycle in total. And why this range?
It is a range because our model is a regionalized model. It is a modular model. We believe that along the way, we can and will make adjustments if needed. We have this flexibility. That is why we are giving a range between BRL 200 million and BRL 300 million in logistics in the next few years. There is another question here. Oh, what about Felipe's question? We forgot about Felipe's question. Yes, about financial services.
Thank you for your question.
Can you stand up, Felipe, please?
In the current strategy, the initial design talked about up to 35% share. Of course, the macro scenario did not contribute towards that. But we advanced, and we are close to 30%. And we understand that the progress that we see in the current product will create more opportunities for further improvement in the future.
The second dimension to your question is that when we talk about new products, loans, we've been working with loans, modeling, testing for 2 years, and we're starting to scale it up right now. As the cohorts improve their performance and profitability and delinquency rates, there is a clear space to advance further. Based on industry data, I think we can reach very interesting levels. Your third point about the private card, I think that starting next year, we will have some rollout, some testing. Like everything we do, we'll test, learn, and refine, and then scale as we feel more confident in terms of credit risk. This all together gives us a clear opportunity to generate this additional EBITDA for C&A. Moreover, we think these products will generate more connection so that customers return more to the stores. That's what we saw when we tested the loan product.
Good afternoon. My name is Vinícius Strano from UBS. Thank you for your presentation. I'd like to explore your market share, the gap between productivity and profit per square meter compared to your competitors. If we look at 2024, you had a productivity gap vis-à-vis the industry leader. In 2026, you were able to reduce that gap. So I want to understand what you expect in terms of the improvement in your sales per square meter and evolution of your market share, considering all the exogenous and macro factors that will affect all of us. I want to know what the relative growth will be if you are expecting further reduction of this gap against your competitors or the industry leader at the same speed that we saw in the cycle between 2024 and 2026.
There are many initiatives here that you split. For example, that you shared with us, store renovations, advancements in your push-pull strategy, the credit products. Where do you plan to focus the most energy or the most time to continue to evolve your market share? Also, I have a question about your logistic model. You're moving towards a more regionalized and decentralized model. We see your 2 main competitors are still more centralized. What were the motivations for that, and how do you see that as a differentiator or a competitive advantage?
Thinking about the dynamics of our sales per square meter, there's a very clear potential. Working on our levers, we will create the conditions to achieve significant increase in our sales per square meter in the next few years.
Now, thinking about the gap, of course, we all have a competitive side, and we are looking for ways to beat competition. This is something we always monitor, but we cannot really control how much our competitor is advancing. Yes, we do wish to advance. We have seen a lot of progress in the past years, and we plan to continue advancing in our sales per square meter. As I said, sales per square meter is a reflex of how much you're evolving as a whole. In your product offer, your capacity to generate more interesting journeys to your consumers, and actually convert those journeys into concrete sales. We are now completely obsessed with evolving all these dimensions, so we should probably see great evolution in sales per square meter as well. This is the first. About the logistic model.
Again, we did all the homework we had to do, and we analyzed this in depth. We look at different models from all around the world. We had European specialists sharing with us the lessons learned in those countries, in those companies that operate in Europe. There is not one single winning model. There is the model that will better meet the needs of your business and the needs of your consumer. Based on that, we built a model that, in our opinion. First, we are talking about a continent-sized country, and one item that leaves São Paulo and has to go to the northeast by truck, it takes 7-9 days. 7-9 days is a very long time. We are always talking about speed. You heard us talking about speed 50 times today. We want to respond to what is happening in our stores today.
If you do not have the black Peruvian cotton shirt, size medium in that specific store, this is a sale that we are missing. How much does this cost? What is the potential impact of that stock-out? If I have a stock-out like that in the northeast and it takes me 9 days to replenish, how many sales are we losing? Based on these discussions, with these specialists, we were able to build our own model to meet our own needs. Considering these needs that we have, it became very clear that this proximity is very valuable. That is the beauty of having a regionalized model to work closer to your consumer with better proximity and better capacity to react to demands. We are not inventing anything new here. We are just providing continuity to that strategic trajectory that we have been developing over time to increase our relevance.
Because as soon as someone enters our store looking for a specific item, that black Peruvian cotton shirt, size medium, and it is not available, it is a sale that you are losing. You are not selling to that person, though that is the type of productivity increase that we want, and that is why we are working with a more decentralized logistic model.
I am Felipe Rachid from Goldman Sachs. You talked about the work you have been doing with your supply chain, both in terms of how you are developing your suppliers in the region and also optimizing transportation of products that come from Asia. Can any of these initiatives have a more relevant impact, particularly in your winter collections? Because in this quarter 2, quarter 3 season, the collection risk has been very high. One year is good, the other one is not so good. What can you do to mitigate this oscillating risk?
That was a very good question. This is something we have been discussing internally, particularly for seasonal items. Today, we operate in a call that we call the drops model, which is a special purchase that we make of imported products within the season. Every year, we have been increasing the relevance of this purchase. This year, this model was applied in our winter purchases. Part of the purchase decisions for quarter 4 are made in quarter 2. Because we want to have a better level of reactiveness or better possibility of reacting if you have extreme climate changes, which has been common.
In Latin America, there's an interesting story because it is a sum of the level of quality and the finishing of the products that come from Asia, because you have mainly raw materials, and through some tax incentives, you can bring better quality raw materials from abroad. This, combined with the lead time of a product that is manufactured locally, nationally. This is not something we've been using very frequently for our winter collection, but it's been very relevant for other items such as high summer dresses, T-shirts of our high summer collection. We have been using this strategy a lot. The combination of these two elements is what allows us to assume purchase commitments that are not so large and better meet the needs of consumers depending on the collection. For Asia, this has a smaller relevance when we think of the total volume.
But year after year, we've been increasing the weight and the relevance of this type of planning for our purchases. For China, this has been very promising as a possibility to unlock a much more agile procurement model than what we use today in the national market. We have time for two more questions.
Good morning. Thank you. I'm Eric from Santander. I have a quick question. You talked about ACE, and I see that there are different phases to this project. I want to better understand what are the KPIs you'll be looking at that could eventually cause you to speed up or slow down the first and the second part of this project. What can we expect in terms of economics? You talked about a minimum IRR that you expect for these projects, but can you please give more color of what we should expect and when we should expect to start discussing a franchise model for ACE?
Thank you, Eric. I think the number one KPI is the growth in flow and conversion under these stories that we have been building, both online and offline, with these new stores. This should translate into sales per square meter and effectiveness of the business plan that we developed for these stores. That's when we will be able to speed up, and really step on the gas and speed up, because the economic model of franchise is something we have been looking into for a while now, and it's becoming clearer and clearer that we have a great opportunity there for acceleration. But of course, the first step is testing the platform.
Once we have clarity on the platform, that's when we will take the next steps of this less capital-intensive expansion of these stores.
Good morning. I'm Pedro Caravina from XP. Congratulations on today's presentation. I have one last quick question. I was impressed with the conversion rates that you shared for your new hub and the AI personal shopper. I want to better understand what is the potential in terms of acquiring new customers or sales potential, and how should we interpret those numbers? When did you collect the data? What is the comparison basis? Because it was not clear to me.
Okay, I can answer that one. Roni, you can add anything, if you like. First, what does this mean in practice? When you think of all the flow coming from the website and the app, sometimes it comes through the search with a regular search. They see the reply with the PDP and all the items. The customer would scroll down looking for the product they wanted. Now, if you think about it is very difficult. This is a very difficult journey for the customer. It is difficult to find the right product that way. When you use these tools, the level of relevance of algorithms, bringing something closer to what you really need, it is much better. So in practice, of all the people who access the tool and use the tool, the conversion rate is 4 to 5 times higher. This is the most straightforward answer. What was the period? The period depends on the technology, because we did not roll out all of them at the same time, so it depends on the time of the rollout. But if we look at the past month, those are the numbers that we have. Roni, anything to add?
I do think it makes sense, because if you stop and think, just like in our physical store. So what is different about the new Energia Store compared with the other stores? We can showcase items much more easily. There is less density. There is more visibility. We are more focused on display and showcasing the product, so it does increase sales. Products that were on the wall are selling more now because they are seen the wall. It is just like the app. When you are able to present your collection to consumers better, when it is more visible. This is something that we discussed internally. If you go to the store and you say, "I did not find anything I liked," I would like to tell you, let us go back with me and let me show you what I have.
If this is what you offer to your customer, of course, they will find one or two items they like. So this dynamic of having someone help you find your items completely changes conversion. The conversion rate of assisted service in our stores is 40%, and it is the same with our website or app when we have AI assisting this sale. So this is what is behind it. This is the paradox we have in our business. When you think of stores like C&A, you think of a place with countless possibilities and countless options, but sometimes having many options can be a hindrance, can create cluttering or more difficulty finding what you are looking for. When you combine all these possibilities and you have someone assisting you in the very broad context of a very broad assortment that we have, conversion skyrockets.
That is what we are seeing in digital more clearly now. Because instead of having to search for pants, and we have thousands of options, you can tell the agent, "I need a pair of pants because I have my end-of-year celebration at the company I work," and then the algorithm will help you find what you need when you give it more context. This is a basic principle. You have more clarity, you have more conversion. Very well. I would like to close today with some final comments. I think we really met the goal, which was sharing with you a balance of the Energia cycle, the learnings, the challenges. Now presenting to you the new cycle and what is the strategic north until 2030, and also share with you how much we believe in the strength and the potential of the Full Power cycle until 2030.
A special thanks to the entire team behind the event today, the organizers. I would also like to thank our leadership and each one of you who dedicated time and engaged in making this event possible. Thank you all for your presence and participation. Rogério Ueno and his team will stay here and will be available if you have any further questions or if you want to know more about what we presented here today. Thank you.