Good morning, and thank you for waiting. Welcome to the presentation for earnings for Q1 2021 for Lojas Quero-Quero. My name is Vinicius Pretto de Souza, Investor Relations Manager, and I have with myself Mr. Peter Furukawa, Chairman, and Jean Pablo de Mello, CFO and Investor Relations Director. This webcast is being transmitted by the internet. You can access it at ri.quero-quero.com.br. For the Q&A session, questions should be sent through the webcast platform. This webcast is being recorded and will be available on our website. Before continuing, we'd like to clarify that any declarations that may be made during this webcast concerning business perspectives of the company's projections and operational financial goals are based on beliefs and assumptions of the board of Lojas Quero-Quero and information currently available. Considerations about the future are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks and uncertainties.
They relate to future events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operational factors may affect the future results of the company and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such considerations about the future. To begin the presentation, please let us go to slide number two. Our agenda will cover updates on the operation during the pandemic, general results, the progress of expansion projects, and also results and earnings of Q1 2021. After this, we will have the Q&A session. Slide number three, and I would like to pass the floor to the chairman, Mr. Peter Furukawa. Peter, you may proceed.
Good morning. It's a great pleasure to talk to you again. As Vinicius Pretto said, anything that I say about the future are wishes.
They are not a guidance of what the company intends to do, but it is what we in the board would like to do. This year was characterized by the second wave of COVID, unfortunately. As you can see, last year, green represents 100% of stores. Red represents closed stores due to the pandemic. On March 17, we began to close some stores, and we had a period with all the stores closed. This year, at the end of February, we had the beginning of restrictions, and the orange bar is when the sale of construction material is allowed because we are considered as an essential activity. We cannot sell home appliances inside the store. The area is closed off inside the store, home appliances and furniture. We can sell by Zap or clients calling the store or salespeople calling clients.
Even with these restrictions, we were able to have good sales in home appliances and furniture in March. Obviously, we follow all the health protocols, safety protocols. We demand the usage of masks, distance between people, a lot of concern in the stores to avoid health problems with our employees or clients. After the end of March, stores opened once again, and we see April operating normally with all the stores open. We don't see any concern yet with a third wave of COVID for the time being. We're operating normally, and we're not seeing any strong pressure to close stores again. In the south, we have a good vaccination schedule. Our state, Rio Grande do Sul, was number one in terms of number of people who have already received shots, vaccines. Next chart.
Well, as a result of this first quarter, we had a growth in same-store sales of 40.5%. Reminding you that last year, the drop in Q1 was only 6%. These 40% were very good growth. I believe I can congratulate our team. Congratulations to our team. You can see on the right our growth in market share continues much higher than the market. We have increased more and more our share-winning market. Our aim is to grow more than the market. Growing as much as the market will not be enough to support the growth that we want to have, not only as a company but also as professionals at Quero-Quero. Our gross sales in retail grew 51% in comparison with 2019, 56% strong growth, which shows our growth in EBITDA and net adjusted EBITDA and also net profit.
The interesting thing is that when we began to close the stores, obviously, I thought we would end the quarter without selling home appliances, restrictions on home appliances and furniture. I thought we would close the quarter below our budget. We did very well in January, February. We were above our budget, and March was not that bad. In the end, even with restrictions that we had in March, we were above our budget, which is aggressive. We closed the quarter above our budget for the year, at least for Q1. Also some questions that may appear. April, I'm talking publicly, I can say this. Otherwise, Pretto can correct me if I can't say this, but April, the performance was very strong in April, even stronger than January, February. I see a very good situation for Q2 for the time being. Next chart.
We have five pillars. We had four pillars in the company. Right now we have five pillars. The first is to win markets. During the last five years, reminding you that we had the strongest recession in Brazil in this period. The whole team, we always work hard, conscious that we have to grow more than the market because the market dropped and we continued growing. First of all, we want to win market share. We have to grow much more than the market, and we have been able to do this. 40% same-store sales in Q1 is a good growth. We have the possibility of growing more in the same stores. We have to focus on this. This comparison must bear in mind that in the last few years, we opened many stores.
The maturity of these new stores takes six years to get to a good level. It takes six years. We have the growth in these new stores of the previous years. We monitor the growth of mature stores, those that are older than five years, and they have been very strong. We have to increase our market share in the same stores, which is low. In Q1, we opened nine stores. In Q1, we opened less stores and we revamped more stores. When we revamp or we change the size of the store, the growth is better because those that are the same. For example, when we move from a small store to a larger store, normally the store structure is very similar. The gain in share we have goes directly to EBITDA. To grow in the same stores is always better.
We revamped 19 stores. The team worked very hard in revamping, and we have nine new stores. We have plans. Our desire is to open 70 new stores this year. Currently, we have 76 contracts signed for this year. Probably 10 of these will be opened next year and the rest this year. The situation is very positive in terms of opening 70 stores this year. We have some cases where unfortunately there have been cases of COVID during the construction, so we may have some late. Some people have to go to the hospital, so the construction stops in some stores. In general, we're doing well. We opened six stores in April. We have an aggressive calendar for new stores being opened, and we believe we will reach what we have planned for this year.
In terms of the second pillar, excellence in credit and collection, we have an important focus on this. In Q1, we had a drop in delinquency in past due because in Q1 last year, we put more restrictions on credit. At the end of Q2 and the rest of the year, we went back to normal conditions, this shows the improvement we had in past due amounts in our portfolio. Our delinquency was low, and now it's even lower. This is because of the effort of stores in renegotiating debts. In the past, we waited for the client to get to 180 days to negotiate, during the beginning of COVID, we changed our posture. We're renegotiating debts earlier, this gave us very positive results. Our team continued to do this. We are still doing this with good results for our PDD.
We continue with a good situation in credit and collections. Our policy is also to leverage results to grow more our gross profit than expenses. Gross profit grew 38.3% and expenses grew 23%. You know that when we grow rapidly, always operational expenses grow more, but we have been able to do more with less. We had a growth of 161.9% in adjusted EBIT in the quarter. This is our objective. Our adjusted EBIT, as I said, arrived at 161.9%, and net profit BRL 11.6 million, a very good result within our expectation, even higher than our internal budget. We created a new pillar that we call phygital sales. We are in small cities, as you know. We'd like to highlight that 80% of our stores are in cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants. The average of 80% of the stores are 80,000 inhabitants.
They are relatively small cities but give us good results. Since we're in these cities two, three times a week with deliveries, we have a very good logistics and we made a focus group at the end of last year testing the concept of increasing our assortment number of SKUs. My dream would be for someone in a small city, for example, like Cambará do Sul, when they go into our store, to see a store similar to a home center in large cities. Obviously, we can't have all these products, but we have a platform where the person can see these products on a big screen as if they were entering a larger store and being able to buy all the products without having to go to a larger city, even in cities with 20,000 inhabitants. We tested this concept. It was very well accepted.
The fact that we can offer another 22,000 SKUs guaranteeing delivery between two to five workdays, or otherwise, the person does not have to pay if we don't deliver on time. If people have a problem, they don't have to call an 800 number, no email. They go to the store and they solve everything with their salesperson. It's a local sale. This was something that these cities appreciate. We built a team to take care of this project. We hired a director from another company who knows a larger assortment like home centers have, and we are working to have these 22,000 SKUs, making them available with interesting technology. I can't show this to you now, but people can walk into the showroom that we're building now in our old debut.
The client can go into this store, see the products, and so it's a very interesting technology. We tested, it worked. We believe that this will be a pillar, and now we have a showroom in a distribution center that clients can see on the screen. We don't know what this will represent yet. We will begin this project in the distribution center with a showroom that people can see on the screen at the stores in Q4. We intend to begin because if it works very well, we may run out of products. We don't want this in all the stores. We will begin small in a very well-structured way in Q4, and then we will expand this to more and more stores. I'd like to remind you that we brought 600 new SKUs.
Products in Mais Três will be sold in all the other stores. Today, these sales of products that are not physically present at the stores. These products that are not physically in the stores represent 13% of our sales. This is helping us in our growth. I believe we may have another avenue of growth with this new platform, but for the time being, we don't know how much this will represent. We are implementing, for example, more products in floor tiles, tools, and also home appliances and furniture. We're introducing more products for lighting products, decoration products, and this will enable people in small cities to have a larger assortment available and receiving in two to five days, and we guarantee that we deliver on time, or they don't have to pay. I am very optimistic.
We don't know what will happen, but I'm very positive and optimistic, and the team at Quero-Quero is very optimistic with these initiatives. We will continue always with our culture of high performance. At the beginning of the IPO, I said that we wanted to train quality managers, and we have done this. At the time, we had 230, 240 employees being trained to be store managers. Today, we have 400 employees being trained to become store managers for the next three years. I've shown this in some conferences that the performance of our new managers is even better. First, because we are at a time when construction is doing very well, selling very well, and you can see this in our numbers. We had two learning points: to focus on the quality of new managers, and we have improved the performance of our managers.
Another point that we saw in the old harvest, five, seven years ago, we waited more. We allowed six months to work on stores when they were not doing very well. We learned that we cannot do this. We have to make changes during the first month. If we don't have the right results, we have a SWAT team that goes to the store to look at everything. Normally, it has to do with the team. New manager who believes there is a hierarchy, but this no longer exists. There is a leader, when we get this right, the leadership, when we have a good leadership, stores begin to sell very well. We're no longer waiting. We act rapidly, now the new managers are having even better results. Our old stores had a payback of 28, 30 months.
I wouldn't be surprised if we won some months with the new initiatives in correcting problems earlier. Apart from this, we continue with our culture of bringing brilliant people to work at Quero-Quero, training them. This year we had 5,500 applications for our Corporate Trainee Program. Those who get the best grades, we bring for group dynamics, interviews, and then we hire. This year, of these 5,500, we brought 15 candidates, brilliant people to work at Quero-Quero. I always say, I believe we have a very good team, very differentiated team, both at stores and also in the positions at headquarters. Exceptional people, brilliant people working here at Quero-Quero. Outliers. These are outliers.
Like we have Jean and Pretto that are fantastic, and we have many people like this at Quero-Quero that make me proud of the company, and there's a saying that to have a high-performance people, you need to hire high-performance people, and then you build a good team. We have a fantastic team here. You have visited us, and you noticed this. I'm very proud to be part of this group here. The next chart, please. Here we see the nine stores that we opened in Q1, four in Paraná, four in Santa Catarina, and one in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. At the beginning of 2019, we went from 190,000 sq m to 271,000 sq m. This includes the revamping. We expand some stores.
The rent goes up, of course, but it has been very good to increase the size of our stores where we have a good team and where we have potential for growth. We have a growth objective within the same stores and also in new stores. We continue with 80% of our stores in cities with less than 80,000 inhabitants. Sorry, less than 100,000 inhabitants. In these cities, our model works very well. In part, this protects our business model in comparison with other networks. It's not easy to work in a small city with the profitability we have. Here we show the stores that were revamped, that were improved. You can look at this chart as a glass that is half full or half empty.
This chart, for me, shows that we have a lot of market share to win, and we have nine stores in phase III, 80 stores in phase II. In other words, we have many stores to improve and reach a phase II or phase III, as we call them. The stores we open are phase I, and then we expand them to phase II, phase III, and this helps us to win 20 percentage points in market share every time we increase the size of the stores. The managers must be ready for this. Even if we didn't open many stores, we would have a good potential to growth in the same stores. This makes me very motivated, and it's challenging, but we have a good avenue for growth, and we've done this very well. Next chart, please. Here, I was talking about phygital sales.
Two or three times a week, we deliver in these small teams. We have a team that knows the city. When we began to sell well the products that are not physically in the store, we said, "Why are we selling so well?" The answer was Mr. Peter. We always ask to have more products to sell because we have the clients, we have potential to sell much more in these cities. This motivated me. We have the store people that are very aligned with us wanting to sell more products, and the more assortment we place there, the more we sell. We increased our inventory by BRL 20 million, BRL 25 million. Our inventory is BRL 300 million. We're increasing the number of SKUs by BRL 20 million to BRL 25 million. It might not work, but if this happens, we will have to sell these products at sales.
My expectation as I see things, and being very frank with you, everything has been very positive. We're selling well. I'm very happy. We have a good relationship with the communities where we are present. This allows us to expand the number of SKUs in a conscious way with our feet on the ground. I believe we will grow on this platform, too, in the next few years. Our initial objective is 22,000 SKUs. We have two large challenges in this project. The first, in my opinion, internally, we have to solve things. For example, how do you increase from 8,000, 10,000 SKUs to 22,000 SKUs with the pictures of these products in SAP? Also the tax part. The fiscal part is very good. They're doing an excellent job to place these products as being available for sale on our systems.
We have a robust SAP. This is being done very carefully. We believe that today we will be able to have all these new products. We also have the challenge of obtaining the products from the vendors. This assortment in industry capacity is not very well, but we have good perspectives, but it's being a challenge to obtain the products, to buy the products. In Q4, we hope to begin these sales. We have another great challenge in the project, how to make the client perceive, have the perception that the store in their city has all these new products, that we're taking all these new products. How do we work with the perceptions? Of course, clients will be able to buy using their cell phones.
In the interior, people want to leave their homes, and they want to go to the store, talk to people. They can buy at home, but we want them to go to our store and talk to our salespeople. My first idea didn't work. We wanted to have an enormous screen, 3 by 3 meters in front of the store on the facade showing the storeroom. The cost, the CapEx is very high. The cost is very high. Maybe a smaller screen from now on, and with advertising on local radio stations to bring these people to buy these new products in our stores. This is the challenge, to bring these people to our stores in the next few years. People must know that they can buy exceptional lighting products, exceptional decoration products in these 22,000 SKUs. I'm very motivated.
I believe this is the main challenge in this project. On my part, this is what I had to say in terms of updates. We are at a very good time for the company. Also, we would like to highlight that some people are surprised with our performance, but what we are reaping is the result of the work done three years ago. If, as I said to you, we stop opening stores today, we will feel this three years from now. In the next three years, basically, this is what we have done. We need a good execution to get results in the next three years and maintain excellence in execution and this fantastic team we have at Quero-Quero. I'm very proud to work here with this fantastic team. Now I'd like to pass the floor to Pretto. Oh, there's one more chart.
One more chart, sorry. I said I'm very proud of the people working with me. Last year, we had a program called The Challenge of Doing Good Things. The company donates part of the gross product to buy products and donate to people during the pandemic. It's not only this. The concept that we have in these campaigns right now, and we are still living this pandemic this moment. People are truly having great difficulties in obtaining food. That would be unthinkable in Brazil, but it's happening. People are not being able to buy food. We said it's important to have empathy, understand people's suffering, but we have to do more than this. We have to have compassion. We have to give from us a little of what we have to others. Not the company, we individually.
We should put our hands in our pockets and do something for others. With this, we become better human beings. We had this campaign. Everyone believes in this, and the directors, everyone donated, all the employees donated, the managers. Many people donated money, and the company supplemented this also with more money. We were able to donate more than 38,000 food baskets. It's little when we think of the needs, but it's what we can do. I'm very proud of this team at Quero-Quero, and it was incredible because the second time, every employee, even if they did not donate, every employee received a food basket to donate to someone who needed food, and they had to take the food basket to the people. This is important to understand the people's problems, and we had excellent results at Quero-Quero.
Once again, I'm very proud of the team we have here. Okay, now the next part.
Thank you, Peter. Now I'd like to pass the floor to Jean to talk about the company's results during Q1.
Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here talking to you and talking about the earnings of Quero-Quero during Q1. Peter already made a summary, so the objective is to go into more detail how we got to these results that we consider as being very positive. On slide 10, I'd like to begin with a factor, an indicator that is very important for us. We had growth in the same-store sales of 40.5% in this quarter. Yes, we had a weaker period in the past, but we also had restrictions in Q1 2021.
Even with this, we delivered a growth of more than 40 stores in same-store sales. This shows the growth of sales of more than 51%. You can see that we are growing very strongly, both in comparison with last year and also versus the time before the pandemic. Versus 2019 also, before the impact of the pandemic. A very interesting result that shows that we're winning market and the growth of the company. The second business activity is financial services. Even last year, as we discussed previously, with an impact on the portfolio due to restrictions on credit, we're seeing a growth of revenue, a growth in the portfolio, and more important, with a better quality portfolio also. Later, we will go into more detail about the credit portfolio.
We are very happy with the results because delinquency is very low, and this shows that the initiatives we used last year allowed us to grow the results and improve the quality of the credit. Financial services grew 11.6%, also expressive growth in relation to the same quarter in 2019. The third activity is the credit card. We had a positive growth in revenue with impact from the restrictions for the usage of our card, especially outside our stores. The result is positive and also positive versus 2019, a period that did not have the pandemic. These three business activities, going on to the next slide, make us show that we had a growth in the consolidated revenue of 39.1% in the quarter, 52.5% in comparison with the same period in 2019.
We have a booming market in retail for construction material, and a market that we consider is being very positive. We have benefits. For example, consumers have more disposable income now because they are spending less with leisure, so they are investing in their homes. Another important point, lower interest rates are allowing us to have a booming market, and this allows people to revamp their homes or build their homes. Lower interest rates than in previous years. The growth in revenue also brings net operational revenue growing with the same performance of 38.3% in Q1 2021. Going on to slide 12, we will cover a point. It's not enough to grow revenue. We need to maintain profitability. We had a growth of 38.3% in gross profit in Q1. We had margin gains in retail and also margin gains in financial services.
Even though financial services had lower growth, we were able to maintain the gross margin of the company in line with what we did in the previous year. A gross margin of 40.2% and also aligned with the previous year. In the pandemic, we were able to continue growing our gross margin and maintaining the company's profitability. You can see that the profitability is higher than the one we had in the previous years, especially in 2018 and 2019. This growth of 38% in gross profit. On the next slide, we will see that apart from gross profit, we have also operational leverage. The company's adjusted EBITDA, more than we can see here, a growth of 92% in relation to the same quarter last year. Here we also had some non-recurring expenses. We see here the numbers.
This is not only this growth in relation to 2020, but it's also a growth that is consistent with the impact of the pandemic. This growth in EBITDA is due to the good sales and the conditions and challenges that we had. Thus, the EBITDA margin of the company in Q1 had an adjusted margin of 4.9%. EBITDA margin, sorry, adjusted EBITDA margin of 9.2%. We see here a strong growth of profitability and results. This growth in EBITDA can be seen on this slide, showing here the net profit. We reached a net profit of BRL 11.6 million in this quarter. You can see that in the previous semesters, we had negative numbers, and now BRL 11.6 million in profit. It is not totally comparable in relation to previous quarters because since the IPO, we have the options plan.
When we exclude some factors, we get to a net profit of BRL 14.2 million, which is a very positive result. After talking about net profit, I would like to give some details about the company's operation. Going on to the next slide. Let's begin with the credit portfolio. As we said before, at the beginning of the pandemic, we became more conservative in extending credit, but since Q2 2020, our credit portfolio has been growing constantly. We had a growth of 10.9% versus same quarter in 2020, which was before the pandemic, and also an important growth in relation to Q1 2019. We continue originating credit, and we're growing the credit portfolio. Very important is to see that at the end of Q1 2021, we reached a delay of 7.9%.
Delinquency is very low due to our conservative position in giving credit during last year, and as Peter said, also making our operation more efficient and a good collection work, thus giving us low delinquency. The portfolio is growing and also the quality of the portfolio is better. The next slide, I would like to talk about the TPV. Volume of transactions in the credit cards. You can see here that we had a growth in Q1, 13.2% growth with the usage of the cards inside our stores, more than 18% of cards being used inside the stores, and a little lower growth of the use of the credit card outside the stores due to restrictions in other places like gas stations that had a stronger impact by the pandemic. The growth is almost 20% in relation to Q1 2019, which was 18.4%.
Next slide, we'd like to talk about the cash position liquidity of the company. We closed Q1 2021 with a consolidated cash of BRL 264 million. Excluding FIDC, you can see that we closed the quarter with a net debt over EBIT of 0.5, better than in the same quarters of previous years. If we continue with what is happening, we had a first semester in 2020 where we took out additional loans due to the uncertainty during the pandemic. In Q3 2020, we had a primary offer, BRL 264 million, and in Q1, due to seasonality, when we have less sales than in other quarters, and we consume cash, so we increase the consumption of cash, but we have a better situation than we had in the first semester of previous years.
It's important to show our care, our focus on the cash generation of the company, even while we are investing the proceeds of the IPO in growing the company. I will give you more detail on the next slide, 18. You will see that we invested BRL 15 million in Q1, and this includes the opening of new stores in the first quarter, but also, as Peter mentioned, revamping. We revamped another 19 stores, always improving the stores and increasing the performance of these stores. Apart from this, we're investing in two new distribution centers, one in Sapiranga, which is the distribution center on the picture here. It was inaugurated in April, in Q2 this year, and we're investing also in the third distribution center of the company in the city of Corbélia , in the state of Paraná.
We're investing, as Peter said, we want Quero-Quero ready to offer phygital sales. We believe this has great potential. Yes, we can invest and get results in this project. Thus, we'd like to close the presentation on earnings and data about the company. Now I would like to pass the floor to Vinicius to begin the Q&A session.
Thank you, Jean. We'd like to begin the Q&A session. The first question is from Bob Ford, Bank of America, and will be answered by Peter. The question is, Peter, can you talk about the evolution of the phygital model? Do you believe you can accelerate the acceptance of this model by salespeople and clients?
Bob, it's a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for participating in our conference. Well, about phygital. I mentioned many points.
We're trying to bring these 22,000 SKUs, 22,000 new products, implementing this in Q4. I'm afraid of accelerating this. Why? We have another BRL 20 million in inventory, a little of each product. We don't know what we'll sell. If I accelerate and we begin to sell everything, the distribution center will be empty. The vendors will take a long time to replenish our stock. I believe it's good to begin to have the phygital in 60 stores to see what sells more, then make a projection for other stores, then we adjust the inventory, and then open this to all the stores. The team can lose motivation if they sell and we can't deliver, we don't have the products. We have to be careful.
There's another saying at Quero-Quero, "Let's go slowly because we want to go fast." All the implementations we made at Quero-Quero that were a success, we ran tests, we expanded, corrected, improved everything we wanted to do. In these 12 years, of course, we made some errors. When we want to do things very fast, sometimes it doesn't work. We want to have this in Q4. We want to begin the project in Q4 with the first 60 stores. In January, more stores. March, more stores. I believe this speed is the best, understanding the culture of the company and how we work. To accelerate this, even if we wanted, everyone wants to accelerate. This is our wish, I don't believe we would have a good experience. In terms of the salespeople, the salespeople are, yes, desperate to do this.
They want very much to do this. They earn commissions, so the more they sell, the better for them. They earn commissions. We won't have to motivate the salespeople. Yes, we call this project 1PL, but we have one with 600, 700 SKUs, which is 1P in operation, plus the products we have only in some stores. This allows the salesperson to sell, and they represent 13% of our sales. They're very motivated, the salespeople. You mentioned the consumer is the most important person. How will we make the consumer understand? We're discussing this internally. Yesterday, we worked on this, the level of investment and where we have to invest. We're making a survey in all the stores right now. This is good.
We have people within the store, our salespeople, and the clients who come to the store, but the salespeople are local people, so we're asking them what they suggest the best way to take this information to the people, to the consumers. I believe we need to advertise in local radio stations, long commercials in local radio stations. Because once they come to our stores, once they see a 70-inch screen, our showroom, when they feel that they can walk into this digital showroom and look from all sides at the product, this will give them the perception that they are in a larger store. Another point, in the last case, if people want, they will be able to talk to a promoter, sales promoter, who is inside the digital storeroom live and try and ask questions or see some different accents.
The promoter will have a GoPro and show the product from different angles. We want the clients to come to the store, and they will understand this concept. This is our challenge, and we will be testing this as of October 1st. We want even before that, but for the market, we're announcing October 1st. Did I answer your question?
Thank you, Peter. Next question, also from Bob Ford, Bank of America, and will be answered by Peter. The question is: What are you thinking about the consolidation of industry in your markets? Do you think this trend can accelerate consolidation?
In the past, we had local store owners suffering more than today in terms of results. This is my opinion. Our competitors are selling more, not as much as us, but they are selling more. There is an improvement in their results, the competition.
We believe that now every year we have 10, 15 local stores close, and we go to these cities and we open stores in their place. I don't see this accelerating. Less stores from competitors are closing. In small cities, people don't buy everything from the same store. They buy from various stores. If you're building a home, you don't buy only from one store because others become sad. We're winning market share little by little. Like I said, there is a lot of space to grow, and this project is not a short-term project. We have to look at this during 10 years. We had a fund who came to interview our directors. They did an in-depth work, and the feedback they gave us was interesting.
They said, "It's interesting, we talked to the directors and some managers, different from other companies, people are not there only for a certain period." At Quero-Quero, people want to stay there for the rest of their lives. I thought this was very good. Yes, this is a project for our lifetime, for 10 years. Many good things to be done. We're winning market share little by little. I don't see too many competitors closing. We have a larger assortment. This helps us, definitely.
Thank you, Peter. Next question from Thiago Macruz, Itaú BBA, answered by Jean. Can you give us an update about price increases in the supply chain? Also comment on the competition.
Hello. Thank you for participating. First, concerning rupture, as we discussed previously, the pandemic affected the logistics chain of the industry.
In Q2 of the previous year, we had a great impact. At that time, between Q2, Q3, we had lack of products, rupture, more difficulty to obtain the necessary products. It has improved. In Q4, it was better than Q3 last year. Q1 improved January, February. We had an expectation that at the end of Q2, we would be closer to normal situation. Unfortunately, we had the second wave of the pandemic, and this had an impact on the supply chain. We did not see a worsening in Q1. It did not get worse in Q1, but it stopped improving due to the second wave of the pandemic. Concerning inflation. During the previous year, we had a growth. You can see this in the news. We had inflation in all the products, double-digit inflation price increases.
During this first quarter, we had some products that had an even higher price increase. This also due to the exchange rate. Yes, we have had inflation since the beginning of the pandemic, but we are being able to raise our prices too. We pass these price increases on to our products. For the time being, we are being able to maintain the profit margin. In terms of competition, Peter commented on this. The market for construction material is booming. We're growing, but this doesn't mean that the competitor is losing or closing our local competition in retail. We're winning market. In the long term, we believe there is a lot of potential to win market, win market share with the same stores, and of course, with expansion to win more market and going through consolidation, yes.
We believe that construction material in retail in small and medium-sized cities has a lot of potential. It is a market where our model is better and has a greater potential for growth during the next few years.
Thank you, Jean. The next question is from Richard Cathcart, Bradesco BBI, and will be answered by Peter. The question is: Could you talk about the plans to open stores in São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul? When can we expect these inaugurations?
Thank you once again. It's good to talk to you. I will answer your question. Before that, my perception about Mato Grosso do Sul and São Paulo, this is a line on the map. They continue being cities with 50,000 inhabitants, the same culture. Actually, my perception is that it's going to be even better when we get to São Paulo, the State of São Paulo.
You have less resistance to new networks than in the south. There is less resistance to new networks. In Santa Catarina was good. Paraná, we went up even better. Answering your question, we will open this year three stores on the border of Paraná with Mato Grosso, even in Guaíra on the border. We're going with one of them is a store that is closing in the city. That's the best payback, less than 12 months because the clients are there. We buy the inventory and we rent the same store that is closing. We will open these three. This year we haven't planned stores in São Paulo. We have three in Mato Grosso but no stores in São Paulo yet. Daniel, our expansion director, working in the company for 42 years is always a little afraid of São Paulo.
People from the south are a little cautious. He went to visit in the city of Paranapanema. He visited 29 cities and he came back very motivated. He said, "Gee, there is more opportunity in São Paulo than here. Cities need our stores." He came back very motivated. Next year, 2022, we should have some stores in Pontal do Paranapanema. There's a store called Nova Londrina. It's a little above Maringá, 50 km from the border of São Paulo, and the results are fantastic. Very good results. Next year we will open in the interior of São Paulo. There's a lot of space in Santa Catarina, Paraná.
Thank you, Peter. The next question is also from Richard and will be answered by Jean. The gains in market share are similar in all cities or do you have more market gains in smaller cities?
Hi, Richard.
In reality, when we look at the performance of our stores, they are very similar. The performance is very similar. Of course, a city with 30,000, 40,000 inhabitants, we will be able to have a better result. The profile of our stores, they're very similar. When we talk about market share, since sales are similar, yes, the market share, the gains, the growth of these stores are very similar. In cities of 11,000, 40,000 inhabitants is homogeneous, but the market share is greater in smaller cities since the market is more restricted. For example, 15,000 inhabitants in relation to 30,000 inhabitants. That is why we are able to open stores with 5,000 inhabitants and also in 50,000 inhabitants. In a city of 70,000 inhabitants, we can open three stores. No. In larger cities, we open two stores, maybe three stores.
Stores with similar performance, we try to win market. We believe there is a great potential to grow. As Peter said, on average, in these cities where we are present, we had only 7% of the market. There is a lot of local competition. We're growing, but there is a great opportunity to grow and win market share.
Thank you, Jean. The last question, Eric Huang from Eleven Financial Research, and will be answered by Jean. The question: Can you give us more color about inventory as phygital makes progress? Can we expect greater changes in inventory?
Hi, Eric. I believe that in relation to working capital, we always had a great focus on working capital. Yes, as Peter said, we will invest in phygital, these 22,000 additional SKUs this year with the project in full work in 2022. We don't expect an impact on inventory.
We want to have focus on cash generation. We don't see any changes in the turn of the inventory. It's an investment like an investment in a new distribution center. It should not have an impact on our days of inventory. Of course, when we open the new distribution center for phygital, there will be an impact, there will be an increase, but in the long term, this should not impact the plan. It should not be very different from the history of the company.
Thank you, Jean. We'd like to close the Q&A session. Thank you very much for the questions. I'd like to pass the floor to Jean and to Peter for their final comments.
I'd like to thank you all for participating in our conference call. The investor relations team is available. Please visit our website and see the information we have there.
Once again, thank you very much. I'd like to thank the team who allowed us to have this webcast. Peter, you have the floor.
I'd like to thank you all. I'd like to make two comments. First, we didn't mention even increasing our capital with the primary and investing in working capital. Our ROIC for Q1 this year was 30%, which was fantastic, very good. We should continue with this focus in maintaining a high ROIC. Normally, it's 26%. Our vision is 26%. We're a little above 30%, which is a very interesting number. Eric's question reminded me of the inventory. When we implemented the 1P program, 300 SKUs, 400 SKUs, 600 SKUs.
We did some bullying with the manager of this project because his DDA was 800 days, and he said it's going to take three years for him to get to our DDR, average DDR. In eight months, his DDR is the same as the company's, so we have to stop the bullying. This was a good surprise. I believe that even increasing, there's the increase of the DDR. As time goes by, we will go back. We will reach the level we have in the other categories. We measure this very carefully. Once again, thank you. Thank you for your time. We're here to answer your questions. If you need any clarification, we have a very good investor relations team, Jean, Paula, giving us support in investor relations. Please, I believe we're on the right track at Quero-Quero. Thank you very much once again.