Good morning. Welcome to the video conference of M. Dias Branco with reference to the results of the first quarter of 2024. We have with us Gustavo Lopes Theodozio, Vice President of Investments and Controllership; Fábio Cefaly, Director of New Business and Investor Relations; and Mauro Alarcon, Executive Officer for Information Technology. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded and that during the presentation everyone will be only listening, after that we'll start the question and answers, only for analysts and investors. The translation is available by clicking on the Interpretation button. For those who are listening to the video conference in English, the original audio can be muted by clicking Mute Original Audio on the bottom of the platform. The transmission is also being broadcast simultaneously on YouTube at the address www.youtube.com/rimdias.
We would like to mention that also any declarations which may be made during this teleconference relative to the perspectives of the business of the company, our projections and operational goals and financial goals, our premises and beliefs of the management of the company, as well as information currently based on information available, involve risks, uncertainties, and premises, as they refer to future events which circumstances which may or may not happen. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industrial conditions, and other factors that are operational factors can affect the future performance of M. Dias Branco and lead to results that are quite different than those mentioned in our future consideration. We'd like to pass this over to Gustavo who will start the presentation. Gustavo, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning to everyone.
It's a pleasure to have you here again with us in our results call. The company I would like to start the call expressing our solidarity to the people of Rio Grande do Sul who we continue to support them in several fronts. Fábio will talk a little bit about that further along in the presentation. I'm trying to minimize the effects of this tragedy. Factory in Rio Grande do Sul located in the Gaúcho in Bento Gonçalves, and possibly sits in a region which is higher. The factory was not affected. We have 1,100 employees in that factory. But obviously, due to all of this what this entire state is going through of the problems of the flooding, it does have an effect in function to logistics, supplier of raw materials, and etc. But we're going to talk about this a little further ahead.
But here we want to leave registered our solidarity with the people of Rio Grande do Sul, the Gaúcho people. And also to thank our team for these efforts and dedication and trégua that everybody delivered that everybody has done to realize in the first quarter of 2024. Looking a little bit more in the numbers, record EBITDA, we continue to with a strong generation of cash. We had volumes, lower revenue, basically due to the implementation of the SAP, something which you have been accompanying, which paves our trajectory in the future. A project which is advancing quite a bit. That's why we brought here today our Director of Technology, Mauro, who is going to speak to you at the end of the presentation. The market, the good news is that the market continues to be strong with the sellout doing well, better than the previous year.
The company has. We continue to be focused on innovation, launching new products with high added value, SG&A controlled at levels close to 20% of our net revenue as we have been talking with you about since 2020. We're seeing an evolution, a constant evolution of our margins, delivering the profitability that we had been speaking about. 82% of our debt is concentrated in the long-term debt, is long-term debt. We start. We continue with a triple A and a lot of discipline in relation to our strategic plan in this direction of growth, but growth with profitability. I'm going to pass this along to Fábio Cefaly to look at this more detailed presentation of our results. And then at the end, I'll come back to talk to you some more.
Gustavo, thank you so much. Thank you all. Okay.
For 2024, the first quarter of 2024, the details of the results, I would like to Gustavo mentioned a little bit about the principal numbers. What we see here is that the measures of generation of cash and profitability were much better than the last year. The EBITDA of BRL 277 million in this quarter since the first quarter, we had growth of 60% versus the first quarter of last year. The profit net profit more than doubled since last year, BRL 155 million in profit. And our cash generation, operating cash generation was more than 2.4 times the result of the same period last year. Net revenue was BRL 2.1 billion, well below that which we registered last year, basically for two reasons. One, the situation of average prices lower than last year, especially in the categories with less added value such as wheat flour and margarine.
We're a company that prices of commodities which have fallen last year and continue to fall this year. The second factor was the implementation of SAP, which happened at the beginning of January. This involved an interruption in our operations for a few days. And then it's exactly on this point that I wanted to initiate my speech. At the end of the presentation, we're going to invite Mauro, the Director of Technology and Information, who'll give us the context with a little more detail about the implementation of the SAP. The first thing I wanted to mention before we go to the numbers was an implementation which was successful. We did it in less than three months. And so in less than three months, we implemented this SAP. This happened in the month of January.
By the end of the quarter, we were able to recover our growth, recover our margins, and gain market share in the quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year. This implementation involved an interruption of operations from the standpoint of the factory and distribution and sales at the beginning of January. It was an interruption which was necessary and programmed for the implementation of any type of ERP of this size. And it represented a reduction in our sales in tons of approximately 31,000 tons in the first days of January. This was equivalent of BRL 60 million in contribution margin. So we look here at the first graph on the left-hand side of the slide. Normally, in the month of January, we have sales of 110 million tons.
If we look at the average for the last 4 or 5 years, this year, we have a sale of 44 million tons. So the 31,000 tons multiplied by the average price in January of BRL 5.1 per kilo with a contribution margin in the month of January of 37% brings us to an impact, estimated impact due to this interruption of BRL 60 million. As I mentioned here previously, looking at these numbers, the volumes year-on-year which were presented have shown a growth, a positive growth from January to February, February to March. So in January, compared with last year, there was a falloff of volume sold of 27%. In February, there was a recovery of year-on-year of the volumes of 7%. And we closed out the semester with 10% in the month of March, 175,000 tons that were sold in March.
This consolidated in the semester wound up resulting in a reduction in volume of 1%. However, this result happened only in the month of January. As these volumes grew and the dilution of fixed costs increased, our EBITDA margin went from 3.2% in January and closing the month of March in 16.2%. So the idea of this slide is to show you so that everybody understands, is on the same page, what was the impact of this interruption, this necessary programmed interruption for the implementation of SAP. Going forward, Mauro will give you a little more information about what's the context of this implementation. Here, before going into these numbers, I wanted to highlight two things. The first is that we relaunched the repurchase of stock, maximizing the generation of value for stockholders and also attending the long-term incentive program.
The period of this program is 18 months with closing in October of 2025. The maximum possible quantity that we can repurchase is 3.5 million shares in that period. That would be the maximum repurchase. The other highlight has to do with our process of innovation. At this moment, we're launching a new Lámen, M. Dias Branco Lámen. This is being presented to clients in the office in the fair. We believe that the sales will begin next month. It's an innovation which is for the new years. It's a project which is inserted in our search for levers of growth with products of high added value. The Lámen market in Brazil is a relevant market. It's a market of more than BRL 4 billion. It's a market which is closing out in the pasta market.
And this in the last five years grew 3.5% per year over the last five years in volume. In value, it had a growth of more than 10%. It was three years in the project was three years in the making. We consulted over 3,000 consumers. And this product of M. Dias, beyond attending two characteristics which are important for the consumer, which is practicality and indulgence, are inherent to this project, also brings the healthy factor. It's not fried. It's a technology that is similar to an air fryer. It has less salt, less sodium, and the same sabor. And from the standpoint of practicality, it's ready in two minutes, being that the majority of the market works with products that take three minutes. So we're very confident that it will be an excellent launch.
The clients are having contact with this product starting today in the office. In the next semesters, we'll be make a better report about the behavior of that. Going into the results, starting with the revenue and market share, the markets, the market information, the market overall of biscuits and pastas, of cookies and masses and pasta, the biscuit market grew by 3% in value and the pasta market 5% in value. Both markets grew in volume. The cookies grew 1% year-on-year and pasta grew 5%. They also grew in units sold and in terms of average price. Cookies went up 2% and the pasta stayed with the same price year-on-year, even at the moment of a falloff in commodity costs, commodity prices. The revenue had a retraction of 14%.
As I mentioned previously, the principal factor here was this interruption in the sale in the beginning of January, which involved a relevant falloff in the volumes. And here the question of average price due to the inflection of the falloff in commodities, which has to do with the average price of wheat, flour, and margins. As I mentioned previously, it represents a retraction of 1% and a retraction in price of 13%. We gained market share during the period in the principal categories that we operated in, starting with the market share volume in cookies. We had an expansion, sequential expansion of 31%-32.6% in the fourth quarter to the first quarter. We looked at we're back at the same result that we had at this time of last year. In pasta, we also grew from 28.2%-28.6%. And in wheat, flour, from 10.3%-11.2%.
So when we look, as I mentioned previously, about the interruption, necessary interruption for SAP and the gain in market share, it's evidenced here that the company has been able to prepare very well for such an important transition of operating system. When from the ODS to the SAP, we've been able to supply our clients at the end of the year in a way that we did not have any kind of stock out for the final consumer at the beginning of January. So we have recovered our volume sold to the clients over the quarter. And we assured the availability of products for the final consumers with a gain in market share. Our market share value had an expansion in cookies, in wheat flour, and a slight retraction of 0.2% in pastas. The results for revenue for the two regions of M.
Dias, defense and attack, was relatively similar in the defense area. We had a retraction of volume a little bit smaller due to the average, the fact that we have had a recovery that was faster after the implementation of SAP. But in general, they were close. Those numbers were close. Going from revenue and going to this question of taxes and expenses, the first information that we have in relation to these two principal commodities, the red line shows the spot price of the market, both for wheat flour, as well as for palm oil, our average cost and our stock. Both wheat as well as palm oil have presented reductions in prices year-over-year. The palm oil in the quarter, our cost was below the market. For wheat flour, it was a little bit above the market.
But that's because we have with wheat, flour, we have a slightly bigger stock in relation to palm oil, which the revenue, the production has a recovery during the quarter. So the expectation is at some point in time, in the next few months, our curve will basically come together with the market price. The gross margin was good news for this quarter. We closed the quarter with 33.6% above the 27.1% that we had last year in the same quarter. The reduction of variable costs on the curve we see per kilo and the fixed cost per kilo. The variable costs over these in the first quarter and of the fixed cost, stable fixed cost of 1.1%, seeing that we've been able to absorb the inflation of the period. And these two factors were enough to compensate the falloff in average prices year-on-year of 5.8%-5.2%.
So we got to a positive inflation between the reduction of costs and reduction of costs recovering our volumes to close with 36.6% of gross margin for the period. The SG&A, as we mentioned, as Gustavo mentioned, we closed the month of March with 20.7% with sales based on net revenue. For the quarter, the percentage was 24% but was strongly impacted by the reduction of sales in the month of January and by the recovery in February. So there was here a slight deleveraging operationally in terms of volume per revenue. But as the volumes recovered, we recovered, we came back to the level of 20%-21%, which has been our historical average since 2021, as you can see in the four quarters of 2023. As we see in the EBITDA margin for the quarter was 13%, higher than the 7% of last year.
The nominal EBITDA also grew. The fall-off quarter-on-quarter has a lot to do with the seasonality factor. We closed the month of March with 16.2%, which shows that the recovery after the implementation of the SAP system, both net revenue as well as the net margin accompany the same trajectory of the EBITDA. The growth of nominal profit above that of the EBITDA is due to the financial results. We closed this quarter with a net cash. Last year, we had a net debt. This benefited our results, our financial results. Going into the generation of cash and debt and investments, we had a cash generation of BRL 138 million in this quarter versus BRL 57 million last year. The increase was due to the growth of EBITDA.
We also had an investment in working capital of BRL 143 million, basically for the recovery of the volumes and the recovery of production, what's proven here, what's clear from these numbers. I'll look at the two lines at the bottom on the stock level. In clients, we go from 30-60 days. There was an effort to resupply all of our clients during the months of February and March. So several one-off actions, conceding more credit, better terms, and using our unleveraged balance to offer this for to resupply the stocks of our clients. Our stock also increased from 64-102 days. This is in finished products, already discounting the environment for the next three months. Our suppliers were in an increase of 59-75 days. This increase is positive for our cash generation. Basically, there were two factors involved.
One is the calendar effect in the month of March. But there's also the effort from the area of supplies of M. Dias and the other areas to increase gradually this line of suppliers. As I commented previously, we ended the quarter with more cash than debt. And this gives us a net cash position of 0.1% compared to the net debt, which is when that company has more debt than cash in the first quarter of 2023. So it was a trajectory of deleveraging, which was very fast over the last quarters, of 1.6% to minus 0. We turned one. And we closed the quarter with a AAA rating from Fitch. More than 81% of our debt is long-term debt, as Gustavo mentioned previously. We invested in a quarter BRL 52 million, 15% more than last year, the focus, priority focus on the digital transformation area.
We remember now our strategy for growth, which all of you know, focused on our core business, which is the principal, which is cookies and wheat flour. There's a tremendous amount of growth in the last quarters and years. The rest is with the intention of deleveraging the brands of Latinex and international with exportations and Acacias, which presented very Las Acacias gave us a first year, which helped us to maintain the company with growth and EBITDA margins above 10%. As I mentioned in the presentation of the previous quarter, our plan of growth for 2020 involves levers and habilitators in the area of attack, Vitarella in the southeast, Piraqué, Jasmine, and Finna as our principal brand of wheat flour for the consumer.
And now with cookies and with Lámen, as I mentioned previously, and the exclusive brands and the cash and carry, which in the Northeast has gained traction over the last few months. And this is a bet by the end of the year, an important bet for the end of the year. And for all of this to happen, this is what's helping this to happen, marketing, especially in the higher added value products.
Lámen, unfried Lámen, has received a relevant in relation to sales, the excellence, commercial excellence with Joint Business Plan with focus on the points of sale with a better horizon of time for our clients, all of the revenue management, which is the details of pricing, service levels, all of the other levers and enablers wind up not working so that these products can be handed to our clients at the time and place and quantity agreed on, and a digital transformation where Mauro, we'll go into more details. Looking at our ESG, as Gustavo mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, we have an overview of some of the initiatives that are underway in Rio Grande do Sul. This is our donations, which will be put together for the victims. So far, we have 47 tons of food destined for donations.
We sent the first part of the 13th salary to the more than 1,100 employees of our Bento Gonçalves employees and financial support, food baskets, and psychological assistance to the employees. These are the indicators of sustainability for ESG of the quarter and the three pillars of ESG, which are commented in detail in the release. So now I'm going to pass it over to Mauro, who's our director of technology and information. He's going to go into more detail, especially about what was the environment for this implementation of the SAP.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Mauro Alarcon, director of technology for M. Dias Branco. As I mentioned, as Gustavo mentioned, and Theodozio, we are here to comment on our digital sales in the project for the implementation of our new system. In the first quarter of 2024 was a historic moment for M.
Dias Branco with the implementation of the new SAP S/4HANA. And it's an important jump in business processes where we focus greatly on the simplification of our processes and the utilization of a standard, the best practices in the market. With this slide here, which I presented at the M. Dias Branco Day in December of 2022, these are the main enablers for the. We're trying to internalize the TE team with great capacities, technical and behavioral, aligned with our business and the retention of attraction and retention of talents, focus on value creation, and also maximizing and bringing more return on the investments in technologies, which touch our returns, the great enablers, and our strategy. Also on the program of innovation, we continue to advance, connecting with several startups, seeking challenges in the business looked at by our committee of innovation.
We're looking at methodologies and agile technologies so that our company, with the size that we have, is able to react quickly to any major changes in the market. The last point is the democratization of technology where we try to find our sales through digital agility so that non-tech people will assume this technology in low-code and RPA technologies, the development of analytic panels. Talking about the problem, the project is Simplifique, a simplified project. The implementation of the SAP, it was the modernization, the change of our Oracle EBS, which was set up in 2007 when we did our IPO. Now we've changed it to the latest generation SAP, the newest and more scalable, more secure.
The only thing that is used. It will be used in Uruguay and any other unit with our capacity for organic and inorganic growth, both in Brazil and outside. And it's also in line with our ESG agenda where we try to optimize our technological resources focused on sustainability. So today, the ERP is running in a big public cloud, the AWS, a market which is highly available with two data centers in São Paulo and also in the U.S., guaranteeing the continuity of our business. The project went way beyond ERP, which we started in 2020 when we wanted to change the ERP that we had. It was 80%. It was 75% customized. And we took our 80 legacy systems, adding and accelerating the implementation of the new ERP via SAP, minimizing the customization and using as much as possible the standard use.
When we look at the numbers of the project in the next slide, we can see the size of this project. The strategy of implementation was greenfield. In other words, we started from nothing, integrating the new ERP with 27 existing systems. And beyond the greenfield, we also utilized the strategy of Big Bang, where we put all of the units at the same time so that we would be able to utilize, since the beginning of the fiscal year, the same ERP, one ERP to manage all of our operation, looking at the complexity of data caused by the use of two different ERPs. For the implementation of this ERP, we had a blackout of three days from the 1st of January to the 3rd of January. We took advantage of this period to migrate all of our data, integrate the systems, do the tests.
From the 4th to 7th of January, we piloted three units. From the 8th to the 10th, we had a ramp-up of all of our units. This explains the impact on the month of January of the 31,000 tons that we did not produce because the units were not yet with the ERPs, as was mentioned by Fábio Cefaly. In this slide here, we say that where we did the centers of distribution, 27 centers of distribution, more than 700 people were involved on this team, both for M. Dias Branco as well as our partners, 320 business processes mapped out, which were implemented in the new ERP, only 7%, 23 processes were customized with a new report, new functions because the ERP did not attend us.
When we talked about the Big Bang, we had to train all of our users and employees in the new ERP. We had more than 16,000 participation in training, connecting 47 legacy systems and managing more than 20 different technology suppliers, 20 different technology suppliers. Looking forward, we would see, how do we look at these waves of digital technology? The first wave, we call the technological debt, where we have to advance in connectivity with Wi-Fi in the cloud with Microsoft 365, bringing agility to our employees. We executed the first wave in parallel with this digital transformation while the technological debt was implemented, implementing systems and platforms which were structural. And we accelerated the digital transformation for those 38 systems that I mentioned.
And now, with the successful implementation between our ERP and our SAP S/4HANA, we started the third wave, which is called efficiency, digital efficiency, where we seek efficiency in our core processes with the use of tools such as the lifecycle of a product, the modernization of our IBP, which is our tool of integrated management, the final adjustments of our ERP, which we did, and the use of intelligence, generative AI, which was a copilot. And we want to turn our employees and our employees of M. Dias Branco in super employees. So we're in development of certain questions, looking at the financial ideas to create a roadmap, a digital intelligence, a generative AI. And we seek to increase the efficiency of our salesforce and our employees. And we try to democratize in the company and the governance of these tools with artificial intelligence.
This is all aligned with our innovation team, with diverse areas for analysis that are prescriptive to become a more agile company in facing our challenges compared with our competitors. So that's what I have. And I'm going to pass it back over to Gustavo.
So that's it. We're going to open up the Q&A session here. And then we'll come back for a final comment.
We'll now start the session of questions and answers for investors and analysts. If you would like to make a question, please click the raise hand button. If your question has been answered, you can leave the line clicking on the same button. Our first question comes from Thiago Duarte of BTG Pactual. Sir Thiago, please go ahead. Your microphone is open.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. This is Thiago. Good morning, Gustavo and Fábio. It's a good opportunity to speak with you, as always.
I wanted to bring two questions to discuss a little bit more. First of all, the question of volumes. Fábio, in his presentation, said that it was a little bit that volume that was stronger of the fourth quarter was an anticipation of the clients to take advantage of the adjustments in the implementation of the SAP. And on the other hand, over this quarter, you showed that month-on-month, the acceleration of volume, when I look at the volume of March, it looks very strong for one month, considering that the recent history and the recent past with your average monthly volumes when you look at the average monthly volumes of the company.
I wanted to see if you could qualify for us if this volume in March is also a little bit of the reconstruction of stock by the clients so that not only an anticipation of the fourth quarter, but also during February and March, tend to understand a little bit more qualify this very strong volume in March, which you have shown us here? Also, in the discussion of volumes, it's very clear that what the company has done, there has been a very strong concern. There's always been a very strong concern for the recovery of market share, which was lost during recent periods. We wanted to see if you could qualify for us how comfortable you are with the current level. This seeking of recovery of share is at what level, and where do you want to get?
We're trying to imagine what you consider your market share to be fair if it's balanced for the company. And also, finally, if I could extend my question, if you could tell me a little bit about the average price. I remember that in your last teleconference, Gustavo mentioned that he had even an expectation of recovery of average prices in the first quarter, which did not happen. So obviously, you mentioned in the release, there were questions of mix, the falloff in prices and commodity prices. If you could elaborate a little bit more for us going forward, what space innovation has, whether it be via price or mix, failed to deliver an average price that we don't see in the first quarter? Those are my questions.
Okay, Fábio. I'm going to start here, and then Fábio, you can add. Thank you for your question.
I'm going to speak with you again. Let's take one step back to go into your question about March. What in practice has happened is we had done a planning to have a relatively high security stock in December because with the implementation of the program was going to mean that the factories would be stopped for 8-10 days in January. We raised our stocks in December so that we'd be able to cover the market during January. The problem is that the fourth quarter came very, very strong. This very strong sales in the fourth quarter wound up consuming more of our security stock. So what happened in January, I didn't start off with the security stock that I wanted. It was lower than we thought. So we had a lot of stockouts in January.
Since I only ran in the second half of January, I had my factories running. February was also affected by not being able to form these stocks, to build these stocks, to be able to attend the demand of all my clients, the sell-in. So this happened in March, which happened in March. So I gained market share. Why? Because they were supplied due to the strong sales in December. They were able to be supplied for January and, in some cases, for February with a little more protection of M. Dias. In March, I would say that the normalcy came back with the stocks to levels that are acceptable and the rupture diminishing. If we look forward, looking at the data of the market, it's good news. We had a question of it was an interesting question. As Mauro mentioned, in 2007, we implemented Oracle.
It was time to do a migration due to the way that the size of the company has become a much bigger company, much more sophisticated, with more operations in the States and with the most recent acquisitions. So we saw a demand to have data infrastructure, which is better, which is part of our agenda of transformation. This was normalized in March. When we look at the market, we don't see March as an outlier. We're at the beginning of May, and the sellout continues strong. The first quarter was only not better due to this lack of stocks on hand, which we tried to protect us during this transformation. The market has recovered well. We've seen this in the Nielsen data, and we see this growth. Theoretically, it's a good problem. It's easy to resolve because it's all in-house, and the process of implementation is past.
So now we're capturing this volume, diminishing the stockout, and rebuilding stocks and preparing for the second quarter, which is what we've seen. So obviously, the volume continues strong. Market share, we could say, below one-third of the market is something that we don't really like. Anything above one-third is already on the balance between market share and profitability. But anything below one-third of the market is something that we would be worried about. We understand that we're recovering, as we've said, this market share with responsibility. We operate market share without losing our margins, recomposing our EBITDA margins and our net profit margins. And we've seen this growing quarter after quarter. You can see that February was 14.2, March was 16.2.
White cookies because it represents half of our revenue, and it's the category we have the biggest margins. So we had a reduction in average price in the fourth quarter for the first quarter and about 1.7%. 90% of this falloff was in mix. So it was practically no reduction in price and mix in the lines, as Gustavo mentioned. We started to grow in a more accelerated way and in the categories of cookies where we lost a share over recent years, like Maria, Maizena, cream crackers, which are products in volume, which when they grow, they improve the dilution of our fixed prices, which is positive also for the evolution of our margins.
Very good, very clear.
Not sure that's very good.
Thank you very much.
Our next question is from Guilherme Palhares from Santander. Guilherme, please go ahead. Your microphone is now open.
Good morning, Fábio, Gustavo. Thank you. I want to thank you also for the donations you're making for the southern region. The situation continues very difficult. I wanted to take advantage to mention that for helping the employees, that they're helping all your employees. They are safe, and it will come out of this situation. I have two quick questions. Following what Thiago mentioned, if you could update us on the stock in the chain, do you see any stock problems? Is there a stockout problem? What would be normal at the beginning of May in terms of stock in the chain due to this dynamic of sellout, which apparently was higher than you imagined? And the second point, when talking about the price lists, if this has happened in all the new prices, has that applied in all segments and the level of intensity of these prices?
Thank you, Guilherme. Thank you very much. How are we doing today in terms of stocks? We imagine that the limit of ideal stock between 90 and 93 days, we closed well below that. When we look today at our stocks in the middle of May, our stocks have all been rebuilt. We should not have any more relevant problem in stockouts. We see this in the month of May. We should close with the same perspective, no type of problem of supply, basically, for the sell-in for June. The plants are running at levels that are higher than last year, basically due to the movement that we've seen in strong sell-out. The stocks are being rebuilt. No expectation of stockouts for May or June.
We had a little bit of a rupture in May, not relevant to the stockouts in January and February, but we're fully aware of the problem and should have solved completely in May and June. So back to our volumes of stocks, it should be well normalized in May and June. Okay, Guilherme, answering the second part of your question in relation to our price list, as Gustavo mentioned previously, we made an increase in the month of April in cookies, pastas, and wheat flour. There was a percentage of increase in these categories of 2%-5%. There are some variations in subcategories and regions, but it was something between 2% and 5%.
Thank you very much. Just to make one follow-up question, I imagine that you and the question of M.
Dias, having the visibility, how is your turnover in retailing and the capture from this price list?
Well, Guilherme, you're correct. We're talking about stocks, and we're talking about M. Dias. The indicators of sales attending our orders from the retailers, the OTIF, show us that we are supplying within the correct time and the correct mix, the retailer. I don't have here today the data for retailing, but I can get that. And I don't know how I can send you that following up.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Pedro Fonseca from XP. Pedro, go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, Gustavo, Mauro, Fábio. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is about the channel, perhaps more directed towards Mauro.
If you could explain to us that the recovery of cash and carry coming from the change of the ERP was quicker, if there was any motive for that, a specific motive, more operational, and this represented a growth in the cash and carry sales, but it was also a channel which has already been growing quite a bit. So my question is, is the tendency for us to expect this to fall off in the next three quarters, this activity, or maintaining the actual current levels? What can we expect in terms of share in cash and carry? And also, as far as cash and carry, it'd be interesting if you could share with us a little bit of how is the performance of the exclusive brands? This is something that we've talked quite a bit about in the call of results as to how you guys are performing.
The second question, forgive me if this was already answered, but when Gustavo was answering the first question, I got a little bit cut off here. The sequential prices in pasta, did it have any effect from mix? Talking about mix of channels, or was that a falloff in the category as a whole? Thank you.
Hi, Pedro. This is Fábio speaking. I'm going to start answering, and then after that, if necessary, Gustavo and Mauro will join in. The first question of the cash and carry, it represented 30% of our sales in this quarter above the fourth quarter of last year. What happened in practice was, since it's a volume-wise channel, which is a high-volume channel, it represented a recovery of the orders more quickly than the other channels. We're also able to attend this channel in a way that was a little more accelerated.
There was no change in strategy or commercial focus. It was much more a question of the first quarter due to the interruption that Mauro described here in the details and afterwards, later than that, the recovery. So as Mauro commented, so Pedro here, this has to do with since the volumes are higher and the distribution is simpler because these are large closed cargoes, this was the category that we sent the first cargoes due to the volume that they sell. It's much more a question of prioritization due to the simplified delivery process than eventually the problem of definition of the system, implementation of the system, etc. Has to do with the distribution. The simpler distribution in the everything leads to in a closed truck, makes this process more simple. So it's just that.
Excuse me, Fábio.
The question of the exclusive brands, which today there are three brands for three large cash and carry clients, we started to in the first quarter, we had and afterwards, we gained traction month on month. So we have products with lower average prices. They do not compete with the other brands of M. Dias. And this model is very much connected with our clients. So obviously, we monitor this cannibalization, but this is not a theme that it's not a problem that we see today. These are brands that have added volume to our revenue. The expectation is that these three brands will gain traction over the next few months. In relation to the price of pastas, there was an impact, a mixed impact, which was much lower than in cookies.
There was, yes, some adjustments in price to give us a little more competitiveness in certain items in this category.
Very good. Thank you very much. That's very clear. Just to confirm one point, this sequential falling in price and the price of pasta, combined with the cash and carry increase and the launch of the exclusive brands, the private labels, does this explain this falloff in price? Just to confirm that. Within pastas, there are several subcategories. There is common, which has a lower price in the market, and also the price of wheat fell in recent months, and the price of the common pasta has accompanied that commodity price. So yes, there was a reduction in price in this subcategory of products.
Okay, once more, I thank you. Our next question comes from Gustavo Troyano from Itaú BBA. Sir, Gustavo, please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity.
I wanted to come back to another question that when you mentioned about the increase in the price lists in February, there was a convergence of your costs with the costs of the industry, which is running a little bit below the price of acquisition. What I wanted to see is that we've seen an increase in prices with a reduction in costs in the second quarter, the second half of the year, in these months up until now. And the second question based on that is, how do you see the industry behaving in relation to this dynamic?
It'd be interesting to understand within the pasta and cookies, how do you see the rationality of prices if the industry has accompanied the prices that you have listed, and how is this dynamic of market share in the second quarter right now, in the second half of the year, in the second quarter?
Here, this is Fábio speaking. Your comment in relation to the relationship between price and cost is correct. When we look at the curves, these are moves that are very gradual, principally due to cost factors. There is an expectation, as you mentioned, yes, but it's something that will be very gradual. In relation to the dynamic of prices in the market, what we've seen is a dynamic that is rational. I'm going to use some public data.
When we look at the IPCA of cookies, the price is practically stable over the accumulated for this year. It's falling less than 1%. Pasta, the same thing. Wheat flour, same thing because they're companies, the commodity. When we look at the short term, the dynamic of March and April, it looks at a scenario which could have some increases in commodity prices. There is a possibility of some increase in commodity prices, which opens up space for a change in the prices of the tabela, as we commented previously.
Thank you, Fábio. I think that's clear.
Our next question is from Isabella Simonato from the Bank of America. Isabella, please go ahead. Your microphone is open.
Thank you. Thank you, Gustavo, Fábio. I'm going to come back to this discussion of market share and the price, especially the price of pastas.
You mentioned that you have a comfortable level of share in both categories. First of all, I wanted to clarify if we're talking about if we're talking about volume or value, to see if we're on the same page. Then independent of that metric, when we look at pastas, you're still a little bit above that level when we talk about the cookies. I saw that in this quarter, you're a little bit more promotional than the rest of the market. Even so, I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, but it seemed that you had an answer in share, which was a little bit slower.
So in reality, I wanted to understand when we talk about the strategy of pastas and the focus of the company in general on innovation and adding value, how does that apply to the category of pastas, specifically of massas, which was always a—it's something that showed the movements and prices of the rest of the competition. So first of all, I wanted to clarify. I wanted to tie this all together, taking in mind what you're planning in terms of share over time.
Thank you, Isabella. I'm going to start here, Fábio, and then if you could add on if you feel. We already talked about market share volume, volume market share, but it was a 1/3 in volume. In terms of market share, if we look at the most recent quarters, there's a much I would have started pointing out there's the question of well-concentrated.
In the common pastas, the kamu, it's very common in the Northeast. The biggest trouble was not to offer discount prices. It was much more the readequation of the product profile. And I'm not sure if it was the last call or the second-to-last call where we were launching onto these new brands with a lower price, but differently from the other time when we came in with the private labels. So now we enter, instead of just low price, we look at low cost. So there were changes, internal changes in the formulation, a strategy of different packaging so that the product wouldn't be not only less costly, but also become cheaper with very lower; there's lower cost. So the margins continue at a growing level. So this is a little bit of our strategy, not to promote brands that were existing.
I increased the volume of the exclusive brands. So that was the principal strategy for this gain in market share in the short term, which we saw now. It's very much concentrated in pastas, pastas como. The strategy of the company, even though we are not comfortable when the market share is below one-third of the market and I'm going to ask you to give me a little color. The program of the company, looking forward, is growth, the three dimensions of growth more and better in Brazil, entry in new categories, internationalization. But the first pillar is growth in Brazil, very much run by the company the opportunities that the company sees in the Southeast. So we still have a trajectory, a very big trajectory which goes through marketing. We have increased the investment in marketing. It goes to a better level of services in the South Southeast.
We don't have the same level of service that we have in the North Northeast yet. It goes to the points of sale, the biggest bargains with certain regionals in the South Southeast. So we have a very robust program, which we look at the strategic plan in the first pillar. We have had several consultancies to look at the operation. What we've done recently in common pastas is a tactical plan for the recovery of market share. But even in the long term, we're talking about growth, but once again, growth with profitability. No, we're not going to do anything crazy. We have a position that's more conservative, is to grow, taking one step at a time so we don't have to step backwards. This is our trajectory in that direction.
Thank you for the explanation.
For the question of Pedro and this question of exclusive brands, can you codify what that means inside of the category of pastas and also orient us a little bit more the average margins that you're looking at compared to the rest of the portfolio of pastas, the higher numbers above, and a little bit of the delta between what it is now and what you would like it to be? We have become a category which is more relevant, as you mentioned, one of the drivers of strategy is what we can contribute. We need a little bit more of color than what we're seeing. Still very small, this volume. We're talking about a price that's 10% or 20% lower between the exclusive brands.
As I mentioned, we have the cost, the lower cost, but it's still very much concentrated because we're doing this for some cash and carries. It's still very much concentrated in the Northeast. We started with 3 or 4. It was 4 now and 3. So it's still a small volume. During the negotiation with these players to guarantee that these volumes of these brands, which are already existing, that are already in the market, were not diminished. We won't be cutting that back. We're going to deliver these brands, these exclusive brands, so you'll be able to bring a flow to the stores, this cash flow, this sales flow to the stores, prices lower to the consumer, but a guarantee that we're going to maintain the historic volumes of purchases of the other brands. We're doing this very cautiously.
You're not going to see any crazy things growing in a crazy way. It's going to be consistent growth, but slow. It won't be tremendously relevant.
Okay, that's great. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Lucas Ferreira of JP Morgan. Sir, Lucas, please go ahead.
Hi, everybody. Good morning. I have two follow-ups. One is about prices of the my question is about these prices isn't coming just to compensate the increase of the ICMS in those states that have recently changed their laws. Just given if you have an estimate, an average estimate of how much this increase of 2%-5% that has been announced and this increase in prices. The second question, one year ago, the question of the portfolio is how to make this portfolio more premium, the premiumization of the portfolio, so to speak, such as Jasmine and Latinex.
It was becoming more premium, to make this more premium. My doubt is when you look at the strategy of the company. We're looking at two points, but it continues to be a strategy of premiumization. But these new brands that you're launching, that I imagine that it'll be a good part of the growth of this volume in the next quarters. And the gross margin is when we look at the average margin, even with this growth in volume. It's a question of this gross margin grew. So this is my question. If this movement is going to diminish a little bit the gross margins from the standpoint of the strategy, both looking at the premiumization and what we've been seeing. Thank you.
Hi, Lucas. Thank you for your question. In truth, the strategy continues to be the same, adding value. It's what we always say.
There's no point to prioritize only profitability. You can't prioritize only market share. In fact, you have to run the company looking at both. There's no magic formula in management. So if you're very much looking only at margins, then you lose share. If you look only at market share, you lose margins. So it's not a decision. It's a simple, easy question. So what we've had to do is implement the exclusive brands again, reimplement these exclusive brands, as I mentioned, low price, but also low cost, to be able to hold up the loss of market share and aim at the capacity, the productive capacity of our factories with fixed costs and so forth, which is a strategy that, once it's done, makes it unviable to have strategies for gains of margins through the growth that you're seeing with the Piraqué brand, which has this slightly higher price.
All of our most recent launches, without exception, were launches with higher margins than the average of MGS. We have several products in the market, but the launch of the non-fried Lámen, this new process to air-fried Lámen, which will guarantee a pricing which is higher than the conventional Lámen. We have a very robust plan for the expansion of what's healthy. We have a director who is responsible for the expansion, who's also from Jasmine with Fit Food. We have a marketing campaign for the first time for Jasmine, looking at the expansion of that company. So there's a lot of things happening at one time. It's not that we haven't stepped back and are looking only at market share. No. There's a grouping of actions which address both vectors of growth for the company.
However, due to the size of the company, it's important to be concerned with production capacity and market share, but we're not leaving behind any strategy of the healthy products, healthful and added value products, such as the dynamic which you mentioned of snacks and so forth going forward. I'm going to also pass this over to Fábio. But in relation to the price increase, in relation to ICMS specifically, we then made this change for the states which we pointed out in the last quarter. Some states in the South Southeast posted some increases. We have several states in the Northeast that are increasing. These price increases also take into consideration these new tax laws.
There was the approval of this legislation of certain fiscal benefits, which even though for M. Dias doesn't have much effects because we're a SUDENE company, but it also has an effect on some commodities, a little bit of the mix of cost increases and expenses that we have looked at. Fábio, did you have anything else to add?
Thank you, Gustavo. I just wanted to add to the first part of your question about pricing and premium products, the movements, and we conversed about this in the category of brands. These are not exclusive. Once we see an effort in recovering the volume and recovering market share in the category as a whole, but especially in the simple pastas, which has a huge volume, especially in the Northeast, we have at the same time the launch that Gustavo mentioned of this new Lámen product.
We look at the pricing of this new Lámen in terms of BRL per kilo. It has a price which is 80% higher than the average price of our pastas. So we're able to evolve in these two routes, having volume and lower prices, and which benefits the majority of consumers. Looking at our gross margins, we also have the capacity to do innovation, new products which will be disruptive in the market, which has an average price quite a bit higher, which has an opportunity for growth, for strong growth. It's a category which in volume grew almost 4% a year in recent years. So to prove what we've said here, these ways forward are not exclusive. They wind up adding to each other.
Very good. Thank you very much.
The Q&A session is now closed.
I would like to pass it over to Gustavo so that he can make his final considerations.
I want to thank you all for your participation, and we place ourselves at your disposal, myself and Fábio and all of the IR team, to clarify any questions that you might have. Thank you all very much.
The video conference of M. Dias Branco is now closed. We thank you for your participation, and please have a good day.