Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to LWSA's Q4 2023 Earnings Conference. Joining us today are CEO Fernando Cirne and CFO and IRO Rafael Chamas. For the Q&A session, we will also be joined by Be Online SaaS VP Higor Franco, SME Commerce VP Willians Marques, Commerce and SaaS Enterprise VP Alessandro Gil, and Financial Services VP Cassius Schymura. This conference is being streamed online via Zoomcast with simultaneous interpretation into English and will be available for replay at ri.locaweb.com.br. You can download the slide deck for this presentation at the same website's Results Center under the Financial Information tab. The reported figures are denominated in Brazilian Real and have been calculated in accordance with Brazil's standard accounting practices as per the statements, guidelines, and interpretations issued by the Brazilian Accounting Pronouncements Committee.
Before moving on, we'd like to mention that the statements contained in this document regarding LWSA's business prospects, operational and financial forecasts, as well as future growth estimates, are merely projections and, as such, are based solely on its management's outlook for the business. This outlook relies heavily on market conditions, the performance of the Brazilian economy, the industry, and international markets, and therefore may change without prior notice. Unless otherwise stated, all variations in rounded-off figures here presented have been calculated in thousands of Brazilian reais. This business performance report includes both accounting and non-accounting data, such as organic and pro forma operating and financial results, as well as projections based on the company's management's expectations. The non-accounting data have not been reviewed by independent auditors.
For the question-and-answer session, we kindly ask that you use the Q&A button located at the bottom side of your screen to submit your question. When doing so, please remember to state your name and the name of your company. As standard practice, your name will be announced so you can ask your question live. A request to activate your microphone will then pop up on your screen. I will now turn over to Mr. Fernando Cirne, who will begin the presentation, followed by Mr. Rafael Chamas. Please, Mr. Cirne, you may proceed.
Thank you, Paulo. Welcome to our Q4 2023 Earnings Conference. I'd like to thank all analysts and everyone who, in some way, contributed to the results will be presented today. Moving to slide number three, I would like to start by talking about profitability, EBITDA, and cash generation during this Q4.
On the topic of EBITDA, our consolidated margin came to 19.7% in Q4. That's 3.7 percentage points higher than in the same period the one year earlier. This was the widest quarterly EBITDA margin since the company began its acquisitions process. Also, on the issue of EBITDA margin, the EBITDA margin for the acquired companies came to 10.2% that quarter. That's 22.1 percentage points higher than two years ago. The company has been working steadily over the past few years to grow this margin since then, and we increased that margin by 13 percentage points over one year earlier. That was the result of strong operational leverage and the strong growth by most of those companies we've acquired. This is something we really wanted, and we had been telling the market we would work steadily to have these gains, and that's what we've delivered.
Obviously, there's still room for growth, but we understand these 22 percentage points that we've widened the margin of the last two years were a significant gain. Our adjusted EBITDA increased by 41.5% versus Q4 2022 and 26.3% versus Q3 2023, the prior quarter. This is another important message. We have been able to grow our EBITDA more than we've been able to grow. And lastly, to the cash flow point, our free cash flow has outgrown our EBITDA. It came to BRL 84.3 million this quarter, which is 93.8% higher than in Q4 2022. This is to say the company is gaining more efficiency across its value chain, growing its cash more than its EBITDA, and growing its EBITDA more than its growth. That's the message we wanted to send to you during these highlights.
As for growth, our net revenue grew by 14.8% versus one year earlier, and overall in 2023 we grew 13.9%. Our commerce operation grew by 18.2% versus one year earlier, reaching BRL 243 million, and in 2023 it grew by 21.8%. Now moving on to slide four, it's very important to give you some context about this period when our profitability grew so much. We'd like to add context in what we determine were four very clear periods since the company had its IPO. First, we had the pre-IPO period, a time when we were very much focused on the Be Online and SaaS operations. Those operations accounted for 80% of the company's revenue. The company was growing less but with wider margins. This was a time when we were taking our first steps in our e-commerce operation. This was prior to our IPO.
Then we had our IPO, and we began to see outstanding growth because of this movement in the inorganic side. We began to create a more powerful ecosystem, and yes, we began to enjoy narrower margins because the margins of the acquired companies were a bit lower. Then we interrupted our acquisitions, and we entered the maturity period, which is a period that ended at the end of last year. That's when our ecosystem came to 20% of Brazil's e-commerce ecosystem. We worked on integrating all our M&As. We saw a substantial increase in profitability because of our operational leverage, and also were able to streamline our brands and corporate structure. Now, what do we expect moving forward? Well, we expect to continue to grow our profitability.
There's still room to grow our profitability, but we are now showing the market that this is something we know how to do and we're skilled to do. We'll also be accelerating our growth, and we'll talk about this a little bit further, and also unlock some values within our ecosystem. Moving on to slide five, it's also very clear how we are showing the company to the market today. We now have a much leaner company when it comes to our different journeys. We have four essential journeys: one, which is our old Locaweb, our Be Online SaaS operation, we have our Commerce SMEs and Commerce Enterprise journeys, as well as our ERP journey, all while working with two essential cross journeys, which would be our financial services journey and our logistics journey as well. But in essence, we're talking about only four when talking about business journeys.
This is a lot simpler when you consider the number of companies we've acquired. This is a much simpler company with only four business journeys. This is much because of the technical integrations we've accomplished and also a result of the brand simplification process we've been through. This essentially sums up what LWSA looks like, and these are the journeys we'll move forward to add value to our stakeholders and also grow the company value as well. Now moving on to slide six, when we talk about growth, we did provide some acceleration. Again, it's important to remember that growth, while very important, also comes with EBITDA margins that are outgrowing our revenue growth and also free cash flow that's outgrowing our EBITDA. Of course, we want to grow, but we do not want that growth path to eat away at our EBITDA and free cash flow.
So we have a few avenues for that. First of all, expanding TAM via Wake. This is a mature process that is expected to bring more revenue in the second half of this year. Then pricing. We understand our suite of products, especially on the commerce side, may grow in value, and we've been working on that since Q4 of 2023. But there's still a lot of room to work on. This is a long-term effort, which is why I say that the impact of pricing on our revenue will be incremental over the course of this year, just as the one on the cross-selling side. We've already done a lot on the logistics side, and it's working really well. And this is another effort that should have an impact over the course of 2024.
Lastly, on financial services, we are still at a go-to-market period, so there's still a lot to do, but everything is very well orchestrated and well planned in-house. We should see the impact on revenue later in the second half of this year. Lastly, we have inorganic growth. We know how to do inorganic growth, and we've done much of what we planned to, but I would say that right now is not a very easy time for us to continue to grow inorganically. First of all, because we have a very well-rounded ecosystem. We have no product gap to fill. We're talking about acquisitions that would have to make sense concerning the size of the company. They would have to be suitably priced when we compare to the size of the company. It should also be compatible with the way we operate currently.
The companies we've acquired so far are profitable. I mean, we're talking about a 10% margin growth. So this is not a simple formula. We have never stopped looking at potential acquisitions, but at this point, any new acquisition would have to fall in line with these three points, which makes this not a simple move, but we have never stopped looking at it. All of that working with continued investments in AI. We already have AI products that we have put out. And AI pervades not only our operational side, but also it has great potential to improve all journeys across our ecosystem. So we're very much engaged on the AI front, which will certainly help to boost our avenues for growth. Now moving on to slide number seven, I'd just like to quickly go over a few of the company's operating indicators.
We have our commerce revenue, which increased by 18.2% over the last year. That's broken down into subscription revenue and ecosystem revenue. Our platform subscription revenue was up by 22.5% and on ecosystem by 15.2%. That was largely because of Squid. We're working hard to gain profitability in Squid. We did gain some profitability during this quarter. This was one component that helped to boost our margins by 10%, but it also came with the effect of making us more selective when it comes to less profitable contracts. So our revenue from Squid was slightly lower because of that. We became picky here when it comes to selecting our contracts. And that had an impact on what we call the ecosystem revenue.
I'd say that in the long term, ecosystem revenues tend to outgrow those from platform subscription, and commerce tends to have a wider share of the ecosystem revenue. But right now, when we are balancing out the revenue from Squid, we saw this dip, but we expect that to move up again in the medium term. Moving on to slide number eight, here we have our GMV from the ecosystem and subscriber base in the commerce operation. Our ecosystem GMV has grown by nearly 18%. We've reached nearly BRL 17 billion in transactions this quarter alone, which is to say we had a substantial rate of the Brazilian commerce ecosystem GMV. So lastly, our commerce subscription base came to nearly 200,000 stores. That's a very strong figure. And it shows how representative we are and how prepared we are for the company to start growing again.
This is not something we rely on, but we are seeing the economy accelerate. We have nearly 200,000 subscribers who are poised to sell more. And this is not considering or rather, not considering subscribers. We have 470 customers operating within our ecosystem. So moving on to the last slide of our highlights, our own store GMV growing by 22.7%. And it's important to point out the QOQ increased by over 17%, which is again very representative. Obviously, this is a quarter where we had Black Friday and where we had Christmas, but nevertheless, this is a very interesting figure. And finally, our TPV, our payments operation, saw BRL 1.8 billion during this quarter. That's a 20.7% increase year-over-year. Well, that's essentially it. I think it's a sound overview of our operation during this quarter.
I think it's important to highlight the slide with our stages that shows investors the four different periods for the company. A lot has happened over these last four years since we had our IPO. And it may seem like our strategy has changed, but in fact, it's very clear for us that we had these different periods: the acquisition period, the change in ecosystems, the maturity period, and now a time for growth and gain profitability. So thank you very much for your attention. I will now turn over to our CFO, Rafael Chamas.
Thank you. Thank you, Fernando. Good morning, everyone. I will start on slide 11 showing you a few more figures. Fernando added some context, and we'll now go a bit deeper. We ended our quarter with a net revenue of BRL 347 million. That's a 15% increase year-over-year driven by commerce.
Our commerce operation increased by 18%, ending Q4 at BRL 243 million. Quarter-over-quarter, of course, the last quarter is a strong quarter given the seasonal period with Black Friday and Christmas. This is a strong quarter for us, but we grew in commerce by 9% quarter-over-quarter, moving from 224 and ending Q4 with BRL 243 million reais in our commerce operation. Moving on to Be Online SaaS, Fernando touched on the widening of our overall margins and also the margins for our acquired companies. This is much because of the operational leverage and increase in revenue, which becomes very clear when we look at the gross profit for the company. This chart shows the performance since Q1 of 2022, and we end the last quarter with a gross margin of 53.7% for commerce and 47.7% in the commerce operation. That's a 3.4 percentage point increase overall.
So we also saw the overall consolidated result going to BRL 165 million, which contributes to what I'll show you next, which is the adjusted EBITDA for our operation. So moving on to slide 13, as I mentioned, we ended Q4 with BRL 68.3 million in EBITDA. That's a 41.5% increase versus when you were earlier. And on the right-hand side, the usual breakdown that we have to show you how our acquired companies have performed over time. So if you look at the yellow curve, the significant leverage becomes very clear. Starting in Q4 2021, we came to -12% margin for our acquired companies and increasing by nearly 22% or rather over 22% in these four years, coming to 10.2% positive.
It's important to highlight as well that both on organic commerce and in Be Online organic terms, we see levels close to normality at sound levels, but most substantially leverage is coming from the yellow curve, meaning the expansion in our acquired companies, which moved from 48.3% growing up nearly 7% over the quarter, which significantly contributed to this over 40% increase in the company's consolidated adjusted EBITDA. Moving on to slide 14, we have a little bit on some of our cash generation components. Fernando touched upon this as well. We have been able to grow at a very sound pace, and there are a few important components to that. Significantly, one of them is CapEx. The company's CapEx has gone down year after year when as a percentage of our net revenue.
We saw it at 10.5% in 2021, 8.9% in 2022, and we ended 2023 at 7.8%. So naturally, this has significantly contributed to the company's cash generation. Another important component on slide 15, which helps us to understand how the company's cash flow works, the companies which provide funding to our operations or financial operations seen as a percentage of our TPV, last year when I mentioned that what we expected was for the company to have something close to 0.8% as its regular level of revenue from receivables as a ratio of TPV was 0.8%, and we remain on that level, reaching 0.75% in Q4. And this obviously significantly contributes to the company's cash generation. So moving on to slide number 16, that becomes even clearer.
Here we have a snapshot of Q4 and the year at large when it comes to operational net cash, CapEx, and free cash flow. So as Fernando said, you can see that in Q4, our cash generation after CapEx was BRL 43.5 billion, so 93.8% over the previous quarter, and a very strong Q4 contributing nearly BRL 80 million. And even in the year at large, we saw very significant cash flow, 57.4% over last year. And I showed you CapEx two slides before, and here we can see the absolute values as well. There's been a relative decrease and continuity in the CapEx, which was at BRL 100 million last year and remained at BRL 100 million this year. So it's a company that's stuck to its strategy of growing sustainably while continuing to keep its cash flow at a sound level.
Now moving on to slide 17, I'll talk a little bit about the performance of our acquired companies and how that reflects in our earnouts. As we mentioned before, Q4 was an important one. Essentially, it determined the vast majority of the sums we have in earnouts. But going step by step, it has significantly shown a positive aspect for us. Our companies have, in general terms, grew. We saw Melhor Envio growing nearly 40% year-over-year, Bagy growing by 66%. That shows we have grown our SME operations and with great complementarity in the market. Also Bling, which grew by over 43% during this time. It was not just about growth. Again, I should highlight that our profitability, both in terms of EBITDA margin and cash flow, we've done really well. Our EBITDA margin came to 10.2% with our acquired companies.
We have a few highlights here. This allowed the company to perform really well when it comes to profitability and cash generation. Our acquired companies had a material contribution in that sense. A little bit about earnouts. We have this divided in two slides, slide 17 and slide 18, some components of that. I'll try to detail this as much as I can to make this crystal clear since Q4 essentially concludes the issue or most of the earnouts issue. With the performance in Q4, we had a BRL 76 correction in earnouts paid. This is not present value. This is the impact on our cash from our earnouts that should be BRL 756 million. One important thing to say is of these 756, BRL 651 million is already definitive.
So many of our major operations, Melhor Envio, Bagy, and Squid, have the payout sum already determined. So we have essentially BRL 100 million of these BRL 756 million, which are still variable based on performance. So this is an important time for us when earnouts is mostly definitive. So when we look at that from a cash perspective, which is why I'm talking about the cash impact, just to make this clear, these BRL 756 million in nominal terms, we expect to pay BRL 560 million of that in April of 2024, that is Q2, with BRL 195 million left to be paid in April of 2025, which is why I had said that those BRL 100 million is left from the BRL 756 million. So part of those BRL 651 million, which have already been determined, will not be paid in 2024. They will be paid in 2025, but the sum has already been set.
Now another two important aspects about our earnouts. First of all, the accounting impact due to the corrections we had in Q4. Another very important aspect is the fiscal benefit that these paid earnouts bring to the company. First of all, the accounting impact. The snapshot of everything that we have to pay in 2024 is already definitive, meaning it's already been recognized in our forecasts, in our income statement. Nothing else will be paid over this amount. Also for this definitive recognition, Q4 of 2023 includes in its financial expense, which is an important component for the accounting losses for the period, the net impact of the corporate tax of this correction, which was BRL 83.4 million in expense, meaning it had a negative impact on our profit.
And when we recognize the vast majority of that as a definitive sum, means that there is little interest being levied on the future amounts. The impact in the income statement is about BRL 35 million when considering the amounts payable in 2025, which is a very different snapshot than what we had in 2023 where the bottom line was very much affected by the interest over these payable earnouts. Now with regards to the fiscal benefit, this is very interesting. Mostly technology companies produce great fiscal benefits since seeing as many of their acquisitions, many of the payment of their acquisitions turns to goodwill. In our case, we're talking about a goodwill from this entire crop of acquisitions since our IPO of BRL 2.2 billion. A material sum from what we paid for these companies is turning into goodwill. That's about BRL 800 million.
I'm talking about cash sum. That's what this BRL 2.2 billion goodwill will provide us as a benefit when it comes to tax payments for the company. It's important to say that this goodwill is not a set sum. It is estimated for each acquisition, meaning larger companies entail larger goodwills. It is the case for Bling, which was our most highly priced company. It is seized once the acquired company is incorporated. So taking Bling as an example, which accounts for much of those BRL 2.2 billion, the goodwill for Bling will be seized once the company, in this case Bling, is incorporated by its buyer, in this case our holding, LWSA. In 2024, we begin paying those earnouts and no longer having contractual obligations as a buyer.
We begin to integrate these companies and consequently will be able to make use of this significant benefit, which is BRL 800 million cash which will be generated once we begin those integrations. Now moving on to slide 19. Once we've explained how the earnouts topic works, this is how the company's net cash will work. We ended the year with a net cash of just over BRL 1.1 billion. And looking at the company's net cash, what we have is BRL 651 million in definitive earnouts with about 110 in the dark red column with earnouts or performance-based earnouts to be paid in 2024, which is to say most of the payable earnouts have already been determined. And that's what the BRL 651 million means. So we have overall a net cash of BRL 350 million, already excluding the earnouts, both those that have already been determined and the performance-based one. So with that, we move on to our question and answer session. Thank you.
Please remember that you should submit your question via the Q&A button. As standard practice, your name will be announced, so you may ask your question live. Our first question comes from Fred Mendes from Bank of America. Fred, please, you may proceed.
Good morning everyone. Thank you for the call. I have two questions. The first of them, with regard to the Wake, you just glossed over it, but what could you tell us about this? What's the operation been like? Is there any significant impact? You mentioned most of that would come in the second half of the year, but anything more you could tell us would be very important. And also with regard to Tray, you saw the increase between Q3 and Q4, but there's a seasonal impact in Q4.
Q3 had been a bit weaker. So I just wanted to understand whether the entire pricing effect has already been well-rounded and whether you see no additional impact on Churn. I mean, is there any benefit to reap or has all the work been done when it comes to Tray? Thank you very much.
Hi Fred. Fernando here. I will turn over to Alessandro to talk about Wake and Willians will talk about Tray. Thank you for your question. They are very important questions. So please, Alessandro and Willians, take it over.
Thank you Cirne and thank you Fred for your question. Yeah, it really is important for us to give you some visibility of what's going on. As you will know, there's a mismatch in our operations between booking and client reception. And we come from a very strong Q3 when it comes to booking.
We were able to attain some very important brands such as InBrands and all the brands within that group Shop2 gether, which should be uploaded in the next few days. We have a few other contracts coming into play during this quarter. The actual result of this that has come with the excellent results from booking is expected to have their effects emerge over the course of the year. That's essentially what we have from our side. I don't know if you have anything to add, Willians.
That's perfect, Gil. Thank you for your question, Fred. Good morning, everyone. Specifically about the pricing in Tray, in May of last year, we had a substantial change charging the client for marketplace sales. This was indeed a very interesting increase in terms of ARPU. We understand that the impact that we should have has already been affected.
We lost a few clients in the first few months after the change, but that's now all been penciled in. We understand that between Q3 and Q4, that movement has already tailed off. Our results in Q4 have to do with that. When we come to the holiday season and Black Friday, we were able to obtain higher revenue. I'd also like to say Fred that we are always paying attention to different and new pricing opportunities. More recently, I can give you the example that we changed the pricing of Adin, which is our marketing intelligence product, which leverages the Wake Experience product. We were able to attain an 80% increment in our subscription revenue. So this is obviously not comparable to the platform revenue, but there was an 80% increment there. So we understand that a change in pricing should take place continuously.
We believe that Churn is very much controllable when we change our pricing according to how we believe our clients perceive the value of our tools. We want to deliver a solution that's fully one step with the store, the marketplace connection, logistics, and marketing tools as well. I'm not going to say there are no opportunities left, but this is something we're always looking at and making adjustments as we go, looking at Churn impacts as well as you all mentioned.
That was perfect and very clear. Thank you so much Cirne and Gil.
Our next question comes from Leonardo Olmos with UBS. Leonardo, please, you may proceed.
Hi, good morning, everyone. Congratulations on this quarter's results. I'd like to talk a little bit more about your revenue growth in 2024 and 2025 and what those dynamics would look like. One thing we really liked for these Q4 results was that the GMV versus the revenue from commerce are sort of walking hand in hand. For example, the GMV for own store grew 40% and for platform 43%. The ecosystem GMV was 18% and for ecosystem 15%. So I have two questions relating to that. First of all, the relationship between these GMVs, does it make any sense for us to continue looking at them? Because if there's any upturn in the economy, we could see an even higher revenue for Locaweb. So that's my first question. And also, could we see the ecosystem GMV closer to the ecosystem revenue? There was this gap between 18% and 15%. And lastly, the dynamics for SaaS, Be Online SaaS, there was an adjustment last year and revenue essentially didn't grow. The market usually adjusts that or corrects that for inflation. Do you believe that will be the course for you guys as well?
Thank you. Hi Leo, this is Fernando speaking. Well, we see a very interesting Q4 in terms of GMV. And that's because of Black Friday and Christmas. But we continue to bring a lot via store. So my first point is the acquired companies added a lot of operational margin. And this is something that's come to stay. That's the good news. And in January particularly, now talking about Q1 2024, we're seeing a good booking for commerce enablers, which are bringing a lot of new stores in. This should make this relationship you mentioned to remain the same. Now where the economy to pick up, we tend to see a variable or take rate related side taking off.
The subscription side has been relatively more stable because since the economy lost steam, we have been able to bring in many new stores. The result of that has been there's been more stability and even an increase in Q4 2023. We're seeing very sound, very healthy sales indicators. What we wanted and which I think is a trend was for the economy to recover. Once that happens, we tend to see an acceleration on the variable component, which is what we call subscription platform, and also an acceleration on the take rate side. If you look at the record, the take rate side has been increasing and should increase over time following our international peers, which involve a larger variable component of the operation. That should be the long-term trend over time. I tend to see this with good eyes.
I believe that we're building a very robust store ecosystem. This should allow us to later accelerate the variable side of our revenue. I would say that this is essentially the scenario. I know I didn't answer you very directly. I'm giving you more of a trend-based answer. We're going toward growing our subscriptions, but over time that should grow our variable side.
Yeah, I'm sorry for jumping in here. You would say that once, or at times, when the macroeconomic situation, you have a wider base of subscribers. With the macroeconomic situation going up, you should have a higher rate coming from a take rate. But it's not that you will be charging more on take rate. This is the GMV going up or would you say that is the percentage that will increase?
Well, you have variable aspects across the infrastructure such as payment, infrastructure, and even domains. So this variable component will allow the variable component of our income to go up. And that's why. And you also have other avenues for growth such as commercial services, which will also affect the take rate. And also, for example, Tray, you charge take rate on the marketplace. That's also a variable component. And even Bling, and Bling we have your marketplace franchises. That's another way to charge a variable component. So every part of the system has a variable component where when you have a higher number of transactions, you may charge more. So our ecosystem is becoming more aggressive in terms of when the client sells more. That will bring in higher revenue as the client sells more.
Yeah, that was very clear. Thank you. You just didn't talk about the Be Online SaaS side.
Yeah, that's with Higor.
Thank you. That will allow me to talk a little bit more about the segment and revenue at large. You talked about the inflation proxy for this market. That's not a bad one when you look at the long-term, but it's also not perfect when you look at the very short term, for example, quarter-over-quarter. There might be variations, one-off variations. That's because, well, if you compare for example our operations with that of our American peers, you'll see that this market, even in the United States, is not growing or growing very, very little. So this correlation with inflation is good when you look in a long-term horizon.
What happens in this market is at times when the demand is weaker, the market sort of fights for a higher sum, which reflects on higher selling costs. Our purpose with this business being very straightforward, and this is something I've been repeating over and over again, our purpose is to make this a cash-generating, profitable business. So we will not go into pricing wars because we believe that in the consolidated market, this is a hurtful practice. So our purpose is to continue to generate cash and continue to improve the margins of this operation over time. And maybe in a quarter when the struggle becomes fiercer and you need to increase sales revenues, we decide not to join the fight. So I might tell you on one or another quarter that the growth was under or underperformed inflation. And we understand that that's okay.
So the American standard is actually less growth than what we have in Brazil. So our benchmark is still the same. We continue to believe that this is a consolidated market, but that we're actually even outperforming our American peers over the last few years. I don't know if I was able to answer your question, but this is what we had. Yeah, I understood. So you may underperform one quarter or another and you are prioritizing your margins. That's perfect.
Thank you, Higor and Cirne.
Our next question comes from Froilan Mendez with JP Morgan. Froilan, please, you may proceed.
Thank you. Do you guys hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Great. Thank you. Could you give us a few details about the components that helped you in your organic margins for e-commerce during this quarter? And also the current levels of your organic margins. On the other hand, with Squid, I'd like to understand a little bit more about the changes that have occurred. What clients are you focusing on and what clients have you excluded? And what's the sustainable level for your margins for Squid you believe? And does that relate to the size that you expect this business to acquire? Thank you.
I will answer the first part of your question. This is Cirne speaking. And then I'll turn over to Ale. Well, we've enjoyed a very steady e-commerce margin. We saw a dip at the end of last year. We were able to recover. And that was because of the increase in costs in the payment company side. But we were able to recover very significantly during this quarter, especially because of our operational leverage and the costs of the operation.
On the cost side, that's essentially because of the payment side really. So obviously, this is a very helpful quarter because of Black Friday and Christmas, but this has been sustainable growth. We believe that this is a level of growth that can be sustained throughout the year and even increased over 2024. And I even told our investors during this quarter, we already expected to recover part of that decrease with cost savings/operational improvements. And I think that's coming essentially from the payment side. The platform side, we're talking about Tray essentially, growth should be slow there because our sales are doing good. But growing our leverage takes time, but it should also come as well. But it's mostly because of our leverage on the payment side. Now I'll turn over to Otávio who will be talking about the work that we've been doing on Squid. We've already contributed significantly there for our organic margin, but this will continue over the next few months.
Thank you, Cirne. Thank you, Mendez, for your question. So Squid works on several components in that sense. First of them, there's not necessarily a slowdown but rather a change in our commercial model for part of our clients. Before, we used to internalize the revenue from influencers. And now for a few customers, we're working with a mediation model. So the company is still growing as a business, but these steps help us to grow our margins. So in a way, our profitability is higher now. On another note, since the end of last year, we are now proposing a new organization for the company. We changed our internal flows slightly. We had an executive from Google called Júlia Fonseca.
Together with the rest of the team, we've been doing great work to accelerate our sales and improve our organization and improve our flows because we believed and still believe that they can be seized and made good use of. Looking at the longer term, we've invested heavily on optimizing our e-commerce platform. And that's sort of the great part within Locaweb. We are already seeing some results on Locaweb. And we're exploring that. This should really improve the commerce side.
Thank you. Thank you for your answer.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Christian Faria with Itaú BBA. Christian, please, you may proceed.
I just wanted to understand something. On your release, you talk a little bit about a few integration initiatives that would even justify the recovery in your gross margin, some cross-selling and process optimizations.
So I just wanted to understand that a little bit better, understand what you're doing, and also try to equate that with what you said about integrating that with your M&As. Do you expect your M&A strategy to accelerate moving forward? What could you tell us with regard to your strategy in those integrations and how can we expect that to affect your margins?
Hi, Christian. This is Rafael. So about the integration process, Rafael showed you a chart with the simplifications. And I think the most important one was to simplify not only internally but also start rethinking the company's structure to increase our focus on the client's operations. And that involved operational mergers and also changes in the structure of our operations. On Wake, we saw the merger of nearly seven companies. And when I say merger, that's a complete merger.
So the extinguishing of prior brands, integration of systems. We have several different systems. And when you integrate the companies, you integrate their systems. You start working on communication and sales systems in an integrated way. So again, looking at Wake's example, which I think is one that's been well established, all seven operations are now served by the same commercial team, the same sales pitch. So when we talk about integration, that goes way beyond simply thinking of a product. We're talking about rethinking the company's entire infrastructure. Cassius, who joined us recently, has also helped us to rethink our entire way to serve our financial customers. Back when Cassius joined us, we had one credit operations, one payment operation, one thinking of banking as a service with a digital account. And we were always thinking about our product as opposed to thinking about the client's needs.
So when Cassius joins us, we begin to rethink all of those products with a single purpose, which is to help our clients with their financial needs. So this was the first chapter in a long history of changes. It's important to remember that a very important person also joined us in the meantime, Otávio Dantas. Otávio worked in consulting for a long time. He came in to help us in this process of unlocking value growth, thinking about the customer journey. As I said, we want to be better equipped to streamline our processes and bring better profitability thinking about that simplification. So these are a few of the initiatives, Christian. But it's important to say that these are not dynamic. We want to really rethink our entire portfolio with a focus on our clients and their journey. That's critical for us to continue to evolve.
Perfect. Thank you guys.
No problem. We'd like to ask our participants whether anyone else has any question. Well, with no further questions, we now conclude the question and answer session. I turn the conference back to Mr. Fernando Cirne for his final remarks.
Well, I'd like to thank everyone who joined our call and all analysts who asked their questions. I believe that they really helped to clarify questions that were in the air and also thank everyone who helped us to achieve these results. We had some very important achievements in Q4 when it comes to our margins, when it comes to growth, which was really healthy. We have some important challenges for this year, but the company is definitely on the right path and poised to start growing again. We have achieved very interesting margins.
More importantly, our cash generation has been substantial for our shareholders. So thank you all very much. Until we meet again in our earnings conference for Q1 2024, thank you.
LWSA's Q4 2023 Earnings Conference has now concluded. We'd like to thank you for joining us and wish you a great day.