Good morning, everyone. Thank you for waiting. Welcome to GPA's Q1 2023 earnings conference. Please note that the simultaneous translation function is available on the platform. To access the service, click the globe-shaped icon labeled Interpretation at the bottom side of your screen and choose your preferred language between Portuguese and English.
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If you're listening to the conference in English, you can also mute the original audio in Portuguese by selecting Mute Original Audio. We would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded and will be available for replay on the company's IR website alongside the complete earnings release material. You can also download the presentation slide deck using the chat icon. During the company's presentation, all participants will be connected in listen-only mode. Following that, we will begin the Q&A session. To ask a question, please click the Q&A button at the bottom side of your screen and write your question to join the queue. Once your name is announced, a request to activate your microphone will pop up on your screen. You must then activate your microphone to ask your question.
If you have more than one question, please ask all of them at once and wait for the company's response. We'd like to underscore that the information contained in this presentation and any statement made during this conference relative to GPA's business prospects, projections, and operational and financial targets are based on its management's beliefs and assumptions as well as currently available information. Forward-looking statements are no guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, seeing as they refer to future events and therefore rely on circumstances that may or may not materialize. Investors must understand that general economic conditions, the state of the market, and other operating factors could affect GPA's future performance and lead to results that are materially different from those expressed in said forward-looking statements. Joining us today are GPA's CEO, Marcelo Pimentel, and its CFO and IRO, Guillaume Gras.
I will now turn the conference over to Marcelo Pimentel, who will begin the presentation. Please, Mr. Pimentel, you may proceed.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for your interest in joining our Q1 2023 earnings conference. In this introduction, I will present some of our most important developments within the plan we devised based on our six strategic work pillars, which keep us focused on the primary goal of returning the company at large to a path of sustainable growth. Let me start with the top-line pillar, which shows overall sales growth by 17.5%, picking up over the fourth quarter of 2022, an important seasonal period. The sales result was driven by our expansion with the opening and maturing of new stores, including those converted from hypermarkets and the rebound in customer traffic, especially in Pão de Açúcar and Proximity stores.
I'd like to draw your attention to our same-store sales growth by 6.3% versus Q1 2022, which is excellent news considering the scenario of declining consumer spending and inflation. Pão de Açúcar, which already accounts for 46% of the group's total sales, reported 7.5% same-store sales growth, largely fostered by the increased perishable goods penetration, the result of an important work to readapt this category's proposition, as well as the assortment review project, both led by our sales team. In Proximity stores, we continue to see double-digit growth in same-store sales and a share of perishables 2.1 percentage points higher than in Q1 2022. We also achieved an all-time high on-shelf availability level, improving stock out by 2.2 percentage points while managing to reduce inventory turnover by 2.7 days.
On another excellent news, in addition to sales growth, we also reported market share gain in self-service over the last six months, with our most remarkable result being recorded in March. Also on this slide, is our second pillar, service level, measured by our NPS, which I am incredibly pleased to share with you picked up nearly 20 points this quarter versus the first quarter of 2022, with all labels showing improvement, especially Mercado Extra, which recorded an increase by almost 24 points. At Pão de Açúcar, the rise was by 17 points, and even better, accompanied by a larger active customer base, higher purchase frequency, and increased monthly spending by customers at the store.
In fact, the number of premium customers which spent 4 times more and visit supermarkets more often, and which had decreased until the third quarter of 2022, now have reported growth of about 10%. This enhanced NPS result is a consequence of the work we did to increase on-shelf availability, improve customer service at the store, the multipurpose training of our cashier operators, which directly affects the queue length issue, and the installation of more self-checkout totems in stores. To close this slide, I'd like to talk about the headway we've made on the digital front with improvements on our app and other improvements focused on providing better omni-channel customer experience. We've reported 7% growth in this quarter with a GMV of about BRL 402 million, which preserves our leadership position in the food retail e-commerce space.
This result was largely provided by our increased assortment, especially of perishables, the greater availability of delivery times, and wider range of fast delivery options. On this front, the integration of James as a logistics engine allowed us to sustainably grow our share of same-day deliveries in 1P, which reached 70% this quarter. We've also updated our app, providing a simpler, more intuitive layout to offer users a more seamless and interesting experience. We've reported an increase of over 330,000 active users in the Pão de Açúcar Mais app, reaching over 1,200,000 users over the month. In the 3P partnerships front, we are leaders in food retail with partnerships with iFood, Rappi, and others.
It's important to point out that our margin on the digital front is growing by 2.5 percentage points over the last quarters, making this a channel that has a driving margin for the entire company. In the next slide, I have a few updates about our expansion plan, which is still advancing as provided. Since 2022, we have opened 78 new stores, which this quarter alone brought in BRL 402 million in incremental sales for the company. We've made headway in our top 15 stores, which were premium stores from the group located at strategic locations for the Pão de Açúcar label and which are a priority when it comes to the revitalization and enhancement of our model. Offering, for example, outstanding services such as package and package wrappers and also wine and cheese experts to help clients.
Our expansion project is still underway, focusing on proximity stores, especially in the labels Minuto Pão de Açúcar, with a greater capillarity potential in the city of São Paulo and the entire metropolitan area, as well as more verticalized regions. For the Pão de Açúcar store label, the strategy prioritizes cities with a high potential for premium customers that hasn't been tapped on. About the profitability pillar, I will leave it to Guillaume. I just wanted to point out a few major points. Being our gross margin, which over the fourth quarter of 2022 came to 24.4% and is the best margin point that we've reached in the last few quarters.
This is a result of the headway we've made in our strategic pillars, most importantly with continued improvement in same store sales and premium formats, and also the enhancement of our sales negotiations with increased penetration of perishables and reduced losses. To finish this first part of the presentation, I'd like to point out the ESG and culture pillar. On the fight to climate change, we've reduced greenhouse gases by 20%, in the scopes one and two compared to the same period last year by replacing the most pollutant machinery and also providing maintenance to our store equipment. The efforts we have been made in the last few years allowed us to reach our reduction target expected for 2030 last year, which is excellent news.
We have also released our new target for 2023, pledging to reduce our emissions by 50% through 2025, considering 2015 as the base year. In terms of promoting diversity, I'm also very pleased to talk about the headway we've made, focusing on expanding female leadership within the company. Women in positions of leadership at GPA make up 39.3% of our staff, which places us very close to our target of reaching 40% by the end of 2025. On the social impact front, I'd like to point out the solid work we've done in food donation that's being led by the Instituto GPA, supported by all our stores. During this quarter, we were able to add over 380,000 meals, including donations of fruit, vegetables, and other greens to our food banks and partnering organizations, helping hundreds of families.
This is work that I love to encourage and which I'm very proud of. I'd like to state that we have also conducted initiatives for emergency support of people affected by rainfall in the north shore of São Paulo in the month of February. We collected 26 tons of food and doubled our donation volumes, which came to over 52 tons of food and also over 4,000 units of one and a half liter bottles of water. With that, I conclude my initial words and turn over to Guillaume for the details of our financial performances.
Thank you, Marcelo. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in the GPA earnings call. First, I'd like to point out that since completing the request to register Grupo Éxito as a publicly held company in category A, and since its level 2 BDRs were approved for trading, Éxito's results are now being reported separately from GPA's. The financial information pertaining to the first quarter of 2023, which Grupo Éxito released on May 3rd, can be found at the CVM and on its investor relations website. The impacts of Grupo Éxito's results on GPA are being considered in operations that have been discontinued as of Q4 2022. Starting with slide eight, where we present the total revenue of Novo GPA Brasil, which reached BRL 4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2023, with strong 15.4% growth.
After subtracting taxes, sales amounted to BRL 4.5 billion, resulting in a 17.5% increase driven by new stores, the conversion of two hypermarkets, and the consistent resumption of customer flows in stores in recent quarters. The same-store sales indicator is up by 6.3%, with a highlight on the 7.5% increase of the Pão de Açúcar brand, which represents 46% of total sales. This is the fourth consecutive quarter where this brand has shown acceleration, mainly marked by the progress made in the strategy to increase penetration of perishables, as well as strong growth in basic groceries. The proximity format remained with strong double-digit growth at 12.4%.
This increase occurs even compared to a stronger comparison base from the first quarter of 2022, and given the more pronounced seasonality this year with the resumption of the vacation period on the coast after two years of restricted social isolation measures due to the pandemic. This has a punctual impact to this format because of greater exposure to metropolitan region. In the mainstream Mercado Extra and Compre Bem brands, same-store sales growth was 2.2% with different performance between each brand. Mercado Extra reports consistent increase offset by the negative impact of the business repositioning of the Compre Bem brand. At gas stations, we see a recovery in volume with same-store growth compared to the previous year at 18% due to reopening hypermarket stores after the transaction with Assaí.
In the same-store revenue comparison, we had a 6.4% reduction, which is due to the 21% fuel price deflation compared to Q1, 2022. Finally, in e-commerce, our GMV was BRL 402 million, which is 7.0% growth compared to Q1, 2022, and reached online penetration of 10.2% of total sales. As Marcelo has already mentioned, we consolidated our leadership in digital food retail, which in addition to leadership under the 1P model, continues to grow in 3P partnerships where we're already leaders in the main platforms. On slide nine, we present the financial performance of Novo GPA Brasil, which does not include the effects of the international perimeter.
I'd like to highlight that as of this quarter, we will no longer show the pro forma view ex Hiper, given the immateriality of its effects on expenses one year after the hypermarkets were sold. Gross profit reached BRL 1.1 billion with a 24.4% margin. As you can see in the graph on top, we have a better margin compared to the last two quarters. That is 1.8 percentage points higher than Q4 2022. This result reflects same-store growth, especially in premium formats, as well as the development of commercial and business negotiations, the increased penetration of perishables, and reduced losses. Compared to Q1 2022, the gross margin is down by 2.5 percentage points.
In fact, impacted by high inflation, which puts high cost pressure on goods, labor, and logistics. Also due to adjustments from repositioning the brands and formats which now are starting to show more effective positive results as of this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA amounted to BRL 270 million, with an adjusted margin of 6.0%, which is a slight increase compared to the last two quarters. Compared to the first quarter of 2022, we show a dilution of 0.8 percentage points in SG&A, with BRL 22 million less general and administrative expenses. This partially mitigates the effects that pressured our gross margin. Moving on now to slide 10, we see our consolidated financial performance, which includes Cnova and the discontinued activities of the Grupo Éxito and hypermarkets.
Our continued net income dropped by BRL 167 million, reaching a net loss of BRL 315 million. Despite our consolidated adjusted EBITDA being in line with the first quarter of 2022, sorry, 2023, the financial result had a greater negative impact, given the decrease in financial income related to the monetary restatement of ex Hiper receivables and the increase in financial expenses related to the increase in the CDI rate here in Brazil. On the chart on the right, we show the consolidated net debt, which reached BRL 3 billion at the end of the period, with a BRL 1.7 billion drop in the past 12 months. This is in line with our de-leveraging plan. The company maintains a strong cash position of BRL 3.5 billion, which is equivalent to 3x its short-term gross debt.
We maintain our focus on our plan for financial de-leveraging with the sale of non-core assets and the advancement of our successful segregation of the Grupo Éxito. On slide 11, we have more details on the development of our operations schedule. As you can see here on the slide, since September 2022, we have progressed in the segregation process. In April 2023, we had some significant deliveries with the end of the legal period for opposition by creditors, which I should mention completed without any challenge. Also, we completed Grupo Éxito's registration as a publicly held company with the CVM and submitted the request for listing and including BDRs, level two BDRs, for trading on B3.
From now on, we now await the ADR program to finish its registration with the SEC and the New York Stock Exchange to disclose our share distribution date, which should occur during the second quarter of 2023. I now conclude our financial result presentation. I'd like to open the session for questions and answers. Please, I should remind everyone that here in this call we have Carlos Barrio and Ivana from Grupo Éxito. We'll now begin our question and answer period. Just as a reminder, in order to ask questions, please, you must click the Q&A button on the bottom of your screen, type in your question, and wait to be added to the queue. When your question is called, you will receive a request to turn on your microphone. At that point, you must turn on your microphone to ask questions.
Please ask all questions at once. Thank you. Let's move on to our first question.
Our first question comes from Felipe Cassimiro, sell-side analyst with Bradesco. Felipe, we will activate your microphone so you can ask your question. Please, Felipe, you may proceed.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Can you all hear me?
We can hear you, Felipe.
Okay. Thank you. Well, my first question, much in line with what we had asked in Q3 about your online growth. You mentioned about improved service and the improved app and a presence across every platform, but we see online sales growing even below Ponto Super sales and much lower than the entire brand's sales. I mean, from what I remember from Q3, did the migration to the app cause any problem considering the systems migration, or is there any rationality in terms of price or payment terms?
I just want to understand from a structural perspective, where are we going or where should we be going? Should overall sales be growing faster or not? My second question has to do with the gross margin. Even though we're seeing progress, and I understand that it takes time for these initiatives to take effect on gross margin, but I still thought it underperformed our expectations. We believe that gross margin is the most important driver for us to get to where we want till the end of the year. What can we expect moving forward, and what could create benefits in terms of improving the gross margin in the next few months so we can see improved figures moving forward in the next few re-releases?
Thank you, Felipe. Well, let's start with the online results.
We are very positive about the news we bring you about our online performance. There are two sides to this. First of all is that we had an improvement that also had an effect on our same store sales. With all the improvements we've made to our brick-and-mortar stores, what we're seeing now is increased customer traffic. Customers who are now going back to their regular purchasing behavior in brick-and-mortar. It's important to remember that we did go through transition periods that had an impact that was actually lower than we expected. We went from 308,000 clients a month to 1 million.
We're seeing the quality of those clients also improve, and we're seeing higher penetration of other categories on the online front and products that really didn't have much of a penetration in online, such as groceries, which is now growing more online. In Q1, we saw the penetration of perishables increase by over 30%, which we hadn't seen before. What's the difference here? One thing we should point out is our penetration of online sales, even though it's growing less aggressively than it has historically, is still over 10%. Our ambition, our target for this year is to come closer to 15% by the end of the year.
We believe that in terms of penetration, we should see improved brick-and-mortar sales and a return of clients to their regular behavior with that intense in-store purchase experience, keeping the same experience that we were offering online, which we believe is very positive. We're seeing over 50% of our 1P clients going for on store pickup, and we're also seeing the increase of our penetration in the 3P segment. There's also a ramp up here. We became a top seller on iFood. We preserved our leadership in Mercado Livre, and we are now ramping up our operations in other marketplaces such as Magalu and others that we are joining as well. We expect that over the course of this year, that will continue to grow. The upside here has to do with offsetting things.
We've told you that we also changed our pricing model and our loyalty bonus system on the digital side so that it could also help us drive results. We could be growing more aggressively, much more aggressively actually on this front if we relinquish some of our profitability. That's something we do not wanna do. We want our growth on the digital front to be incremental to the company's overall results. We are increasingly migrating to a system where our stores will become hubs. We are substantially reducing our share of online sales from our distribution centers. This adjustment that we're doing definitely is contributing to the company's overall earnings. What we expect is to see those online sales increase as a share of the company's overall sales.
You're absolutely right, with regard to your concerns, and there's an incredible work being done by our sales team. As we said before, the project to adjust and manage our categories, which we are running very successfully, comes with this gap period or transition period because it brings in products that are being excluded, and there is an impact at this very beginning. I would say that until Q2 or the end of this quarter, we probably will have addressed most of that, which is when we expect to have concluded this project with 90% of earnings, and that's when we conclude this transition. The work to renegotiate our contracts with our suppliers is underway and should be concluded in late May and early June, which is when we expect to again see our margins expanding again.
We have told you before, and we continue to expect that to reach the high singles until single digits until the end of the year in our gross margins, both with what we just told you and with our work in SG&A, which has been also very successful and has been very consistent, and we will continue to do that. It's important to acknowledge that right now we are investing in bringing customers to Pão de Açúcar stores. We've invested in opening new stores. The NPS rate in those stores is absolutely fantastic, and the growth rates we're seeing for these stores is twice as high as the average for all stores within the company. The important thing for us now is to bring clients back.
The good news here is we are seeing double-digit growth in customer traffic and also an increase in spending, an early increase in spending, which we expect to continue over the course of the year.
Here Guillaume speaking, just adding to the gross margin comments. We also have the effect of increased perishables penetration. As Marcelo said, we reported an increase this quarter and also an increase in our margins over the previous quarter, even though it has deteriorated versus one year earlier. We also have efforts to reduce the decrease, and that will allow us to have slightly wider margins. It is currently just under 3%, so there's room for improvement, at least 70 basis points or 80 basis points, and we will continue our efforts to improve those figures.
Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you, Felipe.
The next question comes from Felipe Rached, sell-side analyst from Goldman Sachs. Please unmute yourself so that you can ask your question. Thank you, Felipe.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. I hope you're all doing great. Thanks for the chance to ask this question. I just have a quick follow-up compared to the last question. Compared to gross margin. I mean, in terms of gross margin, I understand that you are still in a bit of a friction period while you normalize the product selection and all that. I'd like to ask, what would you consider to be a sustainable level for gross margin in a permanent basis? Looking at expenses, sequential profits I think are greatly dependent on operational gains or is there any project that you hope to undertake to improve that?
Again, also talking about stock outs and the increase in perishables, this new product selection, let's say, could this have a significant impact in turnaround from now on? Thank you.
Thank you, Felipe.
All right. For gross margin, what level? We believe that it should be approximately 26% or 27%. All this work we've been doing to review the product selection is a work that started under the Pão de Açúcar brand and now starts cascading down to proximity stores and to other stores, and that includes digital. As we redesign these categories, implement them on store shelves, and also implement the process of trickling out selected products, the new selection will start operating at better margins. With regard to expenses, we have one project that we completed at the end of Q4 2022, namely the structural review of all the structures here at the office. We did that and realized BRL 150 million in gains that we've already divided up into the year of the year 2023, and this work is now recurring.
There's another project we're doing in partnership with Falconi, which is to create a zero-based budget, and that means looking at any and all expenses whatsoever. This project is expected to bring something between BRL 150 million and BRL 200 million in additional savings. A great deal of this has already been captured. Many of these are still in the finalization stage for each project, but they're very practical hands-on changes that I think will have a direct impact on what we've been talking about. That is to reduce at least 1 percentage point in our expenses.
Just to add, Marcelo, says Guillaume. We also have two relevant projects that have an impact on the group's infrastructure. The IT and logistics. In terms of IT, we have begun the move to cloud project.
This is a two-year project that actually began late last year. It should bring approximately BRL 40 million in recurring gains per year. In logistics, we also have been resizing our distribution center networks. We should have some increased efficiency this year.
Exactly, Guillaume.
In terms of perishables and with regard to their impact on working capital, the answer is yes, and we are already seeing a positive impact. We recently saw a three-day decrease in capital from the past year, and after implementing this project, we've also added another two-day improvement to our working capital numbers. It's important to highlight the amazing work by all the teams, supply, sales, and the store teams. I should mention that we've been doing this, that is reducing inventory days while reaching record numbers of in-store availability. It is a very serious analytical project that's being done.
We are reducing inventory and simultaneously improving inventory for clients. This is the best of both worlds.
Excellent. Thank you, folks.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Thiago Suedt, sell-side analyst with XP. Thiago, we will now open your microphone so you can ask your question. Please, Thiago, you may proceed.
Good morning, guys. Can you hear me? Just confirming. Okay. Great. Thank you for taking your questions again, congratulations on the results you've just reported. I just wanted to follow up quickly on profitability. In your release, you talk a little bit about the initiatives you've made on the Compre Bem store label, and there was, in fact, a negative impact that ultimately upset the Mercado Extra performance. If you could maybe share with us how significant that impact is, just so that we can have an idea about its impact on those results. Also from a divestment plan perspective, which is directly connected to the company's deleveraging plan, I just wanted to hear from you about the most significant processes you have in place in addition to Éxito's spin-off, which we addressed during your investor day.
These are the two questions we had. Thank you guys.
Thank you, Thiago. Well, I will address your first question and take your second one about the divestment plan to Guillaume. With regard to Compre Bem, you're absolutely right. In fact, if we look only at Mercado Extra, the increase reported is over 7%, so that's really affected by Compre Bem. This was a strategic choice we made to shift the model and particularly make the model more profitable with Compre Bem. May is actually the last month when we're running this model, and we expect to, starting in June, see that performance improve in comparable terms, but now with a much more profitable model than what we had before.
Being very pragmatic in terms of sales, we still expect to see in comparable figures a weak second quarter, but a much better June already, and definitely starting in the second half of the year, this supermarket channel, this chain of supermarkets will probably be reporting much better results than what you're seeing right now. Compre Bem specifically will begin to perform in a very different way than what we're seeing until May. About divestment plans, Guillaume.
All right. Sales of non-core assets for this month account for between BRL 700 million-BRL 800 million. Focused specifically on three assets. The sale of three assets, three real estate assets that account for just over BRL 300 million. The second is the sales back over our headquarters, about BRL 250 million.
An old Hiper store that's already been closed in the Barra neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, which accounts for about BRL 250 million. There are other smaller assets that account for just under BRL 100 million. Where are we on these three projects that are already underway since the beginning of the year? We were expected to end at the end of Q2, the operation of those three stores. In early Q3 of this year, we expected to close the season this back of the operation of the other store and the Barra store will be sold for later in the year in Q4.
What we expect for this year is a cash in between BRL 700 million and BRL 800 million, referring to these operations.
Perfect, everyone. Thank you for your answers.
The next question comes from Nicolas Larrain, a sell-side analyst from JP Morgan. Please unmute your microphone and feel free to ask your question.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I'd like to ask you a question about the release you reported from March. You reported good results compared to February. I'd like to ask, in that sense, how you expect April to do compared to March.
Thank you, Nicolas. It's true March was a spectacular month for us. It was a month of double-digit growth. It brings with it some seasonality as well. The start of the Easter seasonality that was quite important for us. Something important I should highlight in the first quarter as a whole is that we round out the quarter with growth on all brands, on all regions and all categories. Growth across all three of those categories. That proves that the work that is being spearheaded by the team is consistent. It leads to consistent growth. That's what we want. We don't want any growth to be dependent on category B or C, or a given brand or region. April also brought with it good growth. We had an amazing Easter season. With that, we hope to follow up with structured growth in the subsequent months.
The key thing for us in the foundations of our turnaround is that this improvement needs to come consistently, as I mentioned, across all business units, brands, and regions where we have stores.
All right. That's very clear. Thank you.
The next question comes from Maria Luisa Guedes, sell-side analyst at Citi. Please unmute your microphone and feel free to ask your question.
Hello, everyone. Can you all hear me?
We can hear you. Good morning.
Thank you for taking my question. Most of my questions have already been answered, but I have a few questions about the Pão de Açúcar brand. I just wanted to understand a little bit more about your same-store sales. It's been driven by your categories and assortment. Do you expect or do you believe that has come from other categories as well? What do you expect from Q3? Do you expect those that level to slow down, or do you expect the same level we are seeing this quarter?
Thank you. Good morning, [Maria Luisa. Well, this advance in same-store sales, even as I mentioned in the previous answer, of course, we are very happy about this, and happy about this is a structural movement across categories.
Obviously, perishables has been a very important category for us, even because of how much we want to focus on our customers reconnection with the Pão de Açúcar brand as they return to stores. As I mentioned earlier in my speech, in the Pão de Açúcar brand, specifically, perishables already has a 50% penetration or 50% share of sales in stores, which is what we want because not only does it help with building loyalty, but it also brings in a larger margin. There's also the work that we are conducting in terms of a multi-channel operations. We just launched this improvement in our app, and the app also brings this connection with our brick-and-mortar stores. It connects the entire experience, connecting to the customer and bringing that person to store, and also our change with the Cartão Pão de Açúcar.
We changed the loyalty benefit that we provide with our Cartão Pão de Açúcar, and because we had removed many of the benefits of people who use that card outside of Pão de Açúcar, what we're seeing now is customers understand that if they use their Cartão Pão de Açúcar in Pão de Açúcar stores, they enjoy special discounts for our private label brands and cheeses and wines, and also a level of loyalty points that's one of the best ones in the country of any card if they use their Cartão Pão de Açúcar within our supermarkets or online. Another thing that we're showing is an improved value proposition for these customers. With that, we're seeing penetration increase. In addition to that, there's the work that we are doing in partnership with Stix.
More and more Stix have become the currency our customers are using in stores. Even when they collect points outside of our stores, and we have expanded our partnerships with Stix tickets, we are now seeing customers coming into the store and paying for their purchases with Stix. What are we seeing in the Pão de Açúcar brand? Our operations team and our sales team have been doing incredible work in improving and enhancing our stores. We worked on the cashier operations, the increase in the number of experts in critical areas for perceived value, such as cheeses, wines, and our bread stores. All of that to improve the experience of our customers when they come into our stores.
Also very significant and very healthy work from our marketing team to communicate all of that to our customers. Simultaneously, last week, we officially launched our partnership as a master supermarket of the MasterChef TV show. This is a TV show that is on the air throughout the year, so the brand will be very active and very lively on TV screens. We expect that brand awareness to be preserved throughout the year. Very soon, we'll be announcing the launch of our new loyalty program. We are already running tests with a select group with those improvements that we're making, and we expect to relaunch our Mais program by June, which definitely will be very important to keep our customers active and bringing them back to the Pão de Açúcar experience, going back to the brand's DNA.
In terms of results, we expect to continue to grow, our share of customers, continue to grow our share of premium customers, which is very important for us. That core base of customers that spend 4 times as much on our stores and visit our stores a lot more often. We improved our stores. We improved our value proposition, of our products. We improved our communication with customers and also improved the relevance of our brand in our customers' minds. What we expect now or what we are already starting to see is that response for customers. We expect to continue to see that in the next few quarters.
Thank you, guys. That was very clear.
Our Q&A session has now been concluded. I will now turn the conference back to Marcelo Pimentel for the company's final remarks.
Once again, I'd like to thank everyone for attending our earnings conference. The results we've reported in this first quarter already show early progress with significant deliveries that point to our consistent planning and to the sharp focus our entire team has been working with. I always like to remember that we are in a 3-year turnaround project, and that being consistent in this process is critical, fundamental for its success. We had major signs of progress during this time. A month of March like we hadn't seen here at GPA in a long time. This second quarter, we've already started in a different way, on another level. In April, we reported record-breaking Easter sales in different categories, and we're also seeing a very significant seasonal period this quarter with Mother's Day in May.
Our continued like-for-like growth this quarter, our progress on operational fronts in terms of on-shelf availability and our service level, in addition to our store opening plan and our growth on the digital front. We have many levers, a lot of momentum and many deliveries ahead of us. Once again, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the entire GPA team for their dedication in this process. Thank you to everyone, and have a great day.
GPA's earnings conference is now concluded. The company's IR department is available to answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much for your attendance, and have a great day.