This call will be conducted in Portuguese by the company's management, and you can listen to the simultaneous translation in English by clicking on Interpretation. To those listening to the English version, you can mute the original audio by clicking on the button Mute Original Audio. The presentation will be shown in Portuguese, and the English version is available for download at ri.paguemenos.com.br. Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements that may be made during this call are based on beliefs and assumptions of the company's management, as well as information currently available to the company. These forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties since they refer to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur.
Investors, analysts, and journalists should understand that events relative to the macroeconomic environment, to the industry, and also other factors may lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in said forward-looking statements. Today, we have with us Mr. Jonas Marques, CEO, and Mr. Luis Novais, CFO and IR Director of the company. Now, I would like to hand the conference to Mr. Jonas Marques to start his presentation. Mr. Marques, you may proceed.
Good morning, all. We're starting this earnings call with a lot of energy and joy. I have been listening to a lot of comments saying that I am always full of energy and enthusiasm, and enthusiasm to me is to have God inside of us. I am on vacation, but I have to lead by example. In these five days, I have been having a lot of fun, relaxing with my loved ones, but of course, I had to be present here with you today because of all the respect that I have to our employees and our shareholders, because here I am only a spokesman. Talking about our employees today, I want you to look at this screen. Here we have a photo of Edvin Eduardo. Edvin Eduardo is one of our agents in our Beach Park store, and we know that everybody loves vacationing.
Whenever you go to the Beach Park, which is one of the largest water parks in Latin America, there's a store there now. We also have Clinic Farma. Sometimes we take our kids and they get hurt. Now you're being well taken care of in the largest water park in Latin America as well. I want to send hugs to all our 26,000 employees, to their families, and this is so important. We read some news in the media saying that joy leads to profit, and we truly believe in that because at the end of the day, everybody was born to be happy. I also had a very good surprise that I was just told that our entire extended leadership team is present in a room in our headquarters in Fortaleza watching the call with us.
This brings a lot of energy to this call, and we are all united by the same purpose, which is bringing health with love to all people in Brazil. You, as an investor, you're looking at the screen, and I know you want to see the numbers, and numbers follow behaviors. Rena, can you show them our numbers to prove that everything that we're doing is so consistent? We had yet another quarter of record-breaking numbers, historic, records in all our variables. Is eight bullet points a lot? No, we could have 18 here, but we only chose eight because we don't want you to get confused. I'm going to mention some things that are in our release. First, our market share. For more than 13 months, we have been seeing an increase, a consistent increase in our market share in all regions of Brazil, with special highlight.
If you see our results, Novais is going to talk about this, with special results to the North and Northeast, with a large number of points being gained, very expressive growth. Why? Because it comes from our active customer base. We're growing our number of clients, we're growing our average ticket, and we are growing the frequency of these customers in our stores. I say behavior because we embrace our customers. Pague Menos customers are not numbers. They have a story. They have a name. Nobody goes to a drugstore to buy shoes or clothes. Nobody wakes up happy and goes to the drugstore. That's why our customer service is record-breaking, and this is what's bringing us additional customers. Also, the share of our digital channels, beautiful work being done by Priscila and Renato in our digital team, it reached 18.7% share of our sales.
It's more than a 50% increase, and this has been going on for more than six months, and there's more to come in the future. Vaccination, a more than 500% increase in our vaccination rate. Vaccination is so important because it also brings credibility to our customers because vaccines are extremely necessary and have really changed our humankind. If you want to offer complete services, we need to offer vaccination services. Our average sales per store. We are looking at an alligator's mouth, but it's not an alligator's mouth. It is a steel bar, and this is inverting very quickly. This is not here, but it is in our earnings release. We grew the number of over BRL 1 million revenue stores more than four x. Comparing quarter two 2024 to quarter two 2025, it was a four-fold increase.
We also use telemetry to recover our stores that used to have a negative EBITDA. I'm not giving guidance here, but we will continue to close this gap, and we will do this faster in the future. Our EBITDA margin reached 6.1%. It is the highest since quarter two 2021. Jonas, can you repeat, please? Yes, the highest EBITDA margin since quarter two 2021, 6.1%. Nearly two years ago, when I joined the company, this was the main question that I got. Your EBITDA is still very low. Thank you for your feedback. You see that we really hear it, and we really make it happen so that we can deliver good numbers. The ROIC was 22.9%, and this is the magic of growth. Growth can solve a lot of issues. We're growing, we're diluting our expenses, and we're improving the use of our capital.
PME, which is the average stock time, is also a record. It is the best since quarter two 2019. You remember that one year ago, we were managing our unproductive stocks, but retail is about the details. Here, there's no magic bullet. Here, we have several things that need to take place in our obsession for retail. Retail starts with a V in Portuguese, V for vida, V for life in Portuguese. That's why we pay attention to details. We need to have a very sharp eye to details, and we should never stay in our comfort zones. There's no compliance allowed here. Now, let's go to the second chart. This chart even makes me emotional, and people think they have vision problems when they see these numbers. Here, you see on the left our real growth. Our real growth. This was on the news.
We are growing five x the inflation rate, five x, reaching a same-store sales level of 18.1%. It's spectacular. You ask me, will you continue to grow? That's what we're working for, and we cannot give guidance. If you look at this, it's nine months, nine consecutive months that we're over 17%. You will see that a great part of this growth is about volume. Do not be mistaken. When you see companies presenting their same-store sales, look at the composition. What comes from the mix and what comes from volume? Ours comes from volume. Just a note, I don't want to focus on our competitors. Competitors will only improve our muscle tone so that we can continue to fight. You see on the left our same-store sales growth, and in the center, we see our EBITDA margin in the last 12 months.
You see that in quarter two, 5.1%, the accumulated is 5.1%. Also, an upward trend. The PME is dropping. The net income has exponential growth. You see that in 2023, we had a loss, but since we started delivering profit, we haven't stopped growing. We know that we are at a time of high interest rates, and that increases financial expenses. If you want to make it happen, you find the means to it. If you don't want to, you find an excuse. The ROIC, I had already mentioned it. These are my initial announcements, and now I'd like to hand the conference over to Luis Novais. Thank you.
Good morning, Jonas. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the introduction. Jonas, yes, you have really high levels of energy. It's hard to keep up, but I will try to follow your example.
We have a lot of good news to share with you this quarter. Let's start on chart seven with more details on our gross revenue. Gross revenue grew by 18%, driven by the elements that are on the right side of this chart. Branded drugs is the most important category right now to us and to any drugstore, with a very important increase in the customer base that we call continuous care customers. This is a reflection of better customer care, better assortment, and better store execution. Our sales campaigns, we have our sales team supporting us, the marketing team supporting us with sales campaigns. For example, in May this year, we had the Pague Menos anniversary campaign, and we grew 22%, supported by all the sales campaigns that were executed with the industry. Digital channels are also having a spectacular performance.
We reached a very high share in the company sales. We had growth in all components of our sales, the customer base, the frequency, and the size of the shopping cart. A very balanced growth in all of these components, and also our operational levers, telemetry, CRM, marketing, and store execution. All the sales components, very positive evolution this quarter. On the next chart, we give you more details about our sales growth. On the first chart, we have the same-store sales by region. We have a low dispersion in our growth between regions. All regions are growing more than 17%, and all states are growing above 15%. We didn't have any states growing less than 15%, and this shows that our growth is structural and not just localized. The second chart shows the components of this growth. This is very well balanced.
About half or 8.7% is the growth in our average ticket and 8.6% in customer service. The two average ticket components, the number of items per shopping cart, very important, and half of this is the inflation, about 4%. Customer service, or customer served, we had a balanced growth in the frequency of purchases from these same customers, and we also had a sea of growth in our customer base. There's a large proportion of new customers that are now visiting our stores. Finally, the growth by category. Branded drugs and generic, 23.7%, 18.7% increase, is very impressive. Prescription drugs accounted for 54% of this company's sales. Weight loss drugs had a very important share in this quarter. We executed the launches really well, congratulations to our sales team and store execution teams.
Hygiene and beauty was the one with the lowest growth rate, 11%, but 11% is also very significant in this category. We see a recovery compared to quarter one this year, where we had a 7% growth, so we are now growing more with hygiene and beauty as well. On the next chart, as a reflection of this growth in our sales, the market share, just like you heard from Jonas, we had yet another quarter of very strong growth in our market share, reaching 6.6% national share, 44 bps more than quarter two last year, growing in all regions in Brazil, and very important highlight to the Northeast, where we grew 110 basis points. We went from 19.5% to 20.6% share, and we didn't have so many new openings in this period, only 12 new stores, a smaller proportion.
Here on the right side, comparing with Abrafarma and the industry as a whole, our performance was much above these two comparison blocks. On the next page, we see the components for this market share gain. Here we have a very important highlight. For example, in the first column, based on IQVIA data, the market grew 10.5%, composed by 5.5% participation of new openings, 6.8% average price, and 1.8% closing of stores. There is a small proportion there from volume, which had a reduction of 0.5%. The entire market lost 0.5% of its volume compared with quarter two last year. The second column is Pague Menos and Extrafarma. We grew at 18.4% in IQVIA data, nearly double what the market grew. This is composed by 1% of new openings, 6.5% price, and 11.5% volume. It's very striking the difference in volume when we look at the other peers here.
None of them grew in volume, only Pague Menos and Extrafarma, and this was very significant growth, 11.5%. In the third and fourth column here, we have chains and associations with very well-aligned growth, but they're losing volume, and independents is the one that lost the most, nearly 4.5% of their volume and 3.8% in the closure of stores. On the next chart, gross profit and gross margin, another good news. We grew 30 bps our gross margin year-on-year. The gross profit increased 19.2%, so two items put pressure on the margin in this quarter. We had a lower inflationary gain in the second quarter. There was a readjustment of about 3.7% in the price of drugs, and last year it was 4.5%. The mix, we had a relevant growth in prescription drugs.
We gained a lot of share, and this category has a slightly lower margin than our entire portfolio, comparatively speaking, but we offset that with three elements: a relevant reduction in the stock loss rates. We have been improving our stock losses after the Extrafarma integration. We also had relevant improvement in sales conditions. The industry is supporting our campaigns, and we were able to maintain and improve our margins, and AVP, which is the non-cash effect, which is a combination of average interest rates and payment terms, which positively contributed to the poor margin this quarter. On the next chart, we have excellent news, the dilution of our expenses. We were able to dilute our expenses by 60 basis points. We went from 25.1% to 24.5%.
This is due to relevant growth in our sales and a much smaller growth in our expenses, so the operating leverage was really high. We also had some variable expenses that increased in the quarter because our sales are increasing a lot, so variable expenses tend to increase as well. We also made relevant investments in in-store employees to improve our customer service and operational efficiency. Since we are growing greatly in categories that depend on assistant sales, for example, chronic care customers with more participation of PBMs, we also had a relevant growth in a popular pharmacy program, which is a process that is a little more complex in our stores. This demands more employees. This is what we saw this quarter. Also in the back office, we have been reinforcing and training our corporate team to be able to sustain and advance the company's growth.
We also had an incremental variable remuneration increase, considering that we are exceeding all operating targets of the company. As a result of the growth in our sales, growth in our margin, and expense dilution, our EBITDA increased nearly 40% in the quarter. We went from BRL 177 million to BRL 244 million, which is a record-breaking margin of 6.1%. We grew nearly one percentage point on margin, which also happened in quarter one this year, a growth of 0.8% in quarter two, with contributions from the improved margins, expense dilution, and a small increment in our administrative expenses. On the next chart, as a consequence of all this, we had a super relevant improvement in our net income. We went from BRL 44 million to BRL 60 million, a 36% increase. In the past 12 months, we are accumulating more than BRL 200 million in net income.
On the right, we have the bridge of our net income, very positive effects from our sales, BRL 32 million, and a margin effect of BRL 35 million. In quarter two, we also had an important pressure on our financial results of BRL 50.6 million, a combination of interest rates that are 4 percentage points higher than quarter two last year. We also have a pain point, which is related to growth, the financing of a larger working capital, which is a consequence of the company's growth, so the financial expenses were slightly higher. On the next chart, we have more details on our working capital, another very good news. We're improving the company's working capital. We reduced it 3 days year-on-year from 56 to 53 days. This improvement was concentrated in stock management.
A lot has been done to decrease our low turnover stock in our stores and distribution centers and improving our reverse logistics. The average payment term, there was a higher share in prescription drugs, which is a category with longer payment terms. There's a marginal increase here of 1 day. The average receipt time, we also have the same proportion in quarter two last year, but we have the effect of anticipation advances here. If we exclude the effect of advances here, we also see an increase in the average customer payment term because of Popular Pharma, a Popular Pharma program that has longer payment terms, and also the prescription drug category that we are offering more financing options to our customers in this sense. Next page, in debtness, we follow our deleverage strategy. We go from a net debt plus advances of 3.4 x- 2.6 x.
It's nearly one EBITDA of reduction in one over one year, so 0.8 x the EBITDA compared to quarter two last year. In addition to this relevant reduction in the net debt EBITDA ratio, we also had a very important reprofiling of our debt. Our entire finance team was working hard for historical fundraising for the company, with a spread reduction from 1.65x- 1.55x for a total of BRL 830 million raised. When we look at Pague Menos ratings, there's a 20 bps distance here, so this was very strong work being done by our finance team, working with the banks to be able to raise these funds. We also prolonged our debt terms from the duration from 1.44x to 2.38x. We're very comfortable in the management of our debts.
The last chart, as a consequence of this important improvement in our operating results, management of our cash cycle, we had a very strong improvement in the company's ROIC, as you heard from Jonas in the beginning. Growth in our average sales, operating margin, and improving our working capital allowed us to achieve nearly 23% ROIC this quarter. It's practically a 10-point increase year-on-year. With a lot of good news, I finished my part of the presentation. Yes, so much good news. Thank you so much, Novais. Yes, now I hand it back to Jonas. Since the start, and by the start, I mean January 2024, so 20 months ago, we were talking with our team about our mantra, and our mantra is that every day in all our stores to all our customers. This is our mantra.
This sounded at first like three separate sentences, but it is a strong statement, and it attests our commitment to a very strong execution. I always get a lot of questions asking, what's changing about our execution? We're talking about 25,000 people, 26,000 employees, 25,000 of which are in our stores. We just have to convince them that they have a true purpose, to convince them of what they have to do every day and that they have to put our hearts and their hearts in what they do. Of course, this is not a small task, but one thing that is striking to me is that all this improvement in our operation and operational excellence that we have been achieving comes from one single source and one single type of work: our people. Working on our people, understanding their needs, because everybody was born to be happy.
This is not just a shrink talk. When we hear parents wishing their kids are happy, people always want their loved ones to be happy. Parents want the best for their children. We learn, unfortunately, the world can be very selfish, but if we look at our equals and we let them be who they are and we engage with a greater purpose, and if we give them the tools they need to work, of course, for execution, you need to have processes, you need to have good technology, and most importantly, you need to have active listening, you need to care about what you're doing, and we have to explain that. That's the type of execution that we want every day in our stores, and we want it to happen every day to all our customers in all our stores. As I said, there's no magic bullet.
We will have a lot of time for questions, but I'm really thankful for your support, for the support from our shareholders. You have all our respect. It doesn't matter if you have one share or millions of shares. You deserve our deepest respect so that we can work with an owner mindset and deliver good results, because life is not easy for anyone. If you chose to invest in Pague Menos, we hope you will continue to invest in the future, and we hope you will believe in our company and what we are doing and how we want to rescue humanity and rescue humankind and bring solid results to our shareholders. I'm very thankful to our team and their family members and also to you, everyone who believes in us.
Please send us all your feedback, visit our stores, buy from us, let us know what is working well, what is not. There is no magic bullet. There are many aspects that we consider when working to improve our company, and this involves a lot of hard work. Over time, we're visiting our stores, we're looking at the parking spaces, we're entering the stores, talking to people, because this is not about us at all. It's always about people, the impact that we can make actively listening to our customers. I'm very happy to be here in this call with you, listening to these very beautiful numbers, not just the top line, but also the bottom line. I heard that we have truly exceeded all consensus from the top to bottom. Of course, now we can open for questions, and we are available to support you.
Maybe some of the questions I will leave for our Pague Menos Day, which I will advertise in the end of the call. Let's open for questions now.
We will now open the floor for questions. We will take questions from investors and analysts. To ask a question, please click on raise hand. If at any point your question is answered, you can leave the waiting line by clicking again on the same button. Our first question is from Mr. Ruben Couto Santander. Mr. Ruben, go ahead.
Good morning, Jonas and Novais. I have a question about your sales growth, which is still very strong and still accelerating. Looking at this by category, prescription drugs had a very major acceleration in the quarter. Novais even mentioned that you had an effect of weight loss drugs and how much they contributed to the sales.
I want to hear about this dynamic specifically for weight loss products. Have you been seeing an above-than-normal effect in terms of contribution this quarter? There was an important launch. There were some changes in the type of prescription forms. Have you identified any stock movements that have driven these numbers in quarter two more than what's normal usually? Can you talk about weight loss drugs specifically and how they behaved in the start of quarter two after the changes? Sorry, in the start of quarter three after the changes.
Yes, let me start and then you can hear from Novais. The first part of your question, the latest numbers that we heard yesterday will come from Novais. First, we need to connect with what we said in our first call in February when we announced the results for quarter four and quarter one.
The growth in the sales of drugs comes from our strategy that we call CCC or PCC, which is Continuous Care Patient or Continuous Care Consumer. These are the people that truly need our attention. These are our chronic customers, chronic patients. The strategy that we are implementing since January 1st, 2024, with the help of telemetry, knowing exactly where we needed to improve our assortment, that's how we started to fix that iron bar of the average sales per store because 70% of the sales comes from prescription drugs. You will see that we grew even with weight loss drugs, but that was not the only one that grew. Can you talk about the micro numbers, Novais?
Thank you for the question, Ruben.
Jonas already mentioned this, but I think the highlight for us in weight loss drugs is the execution and the approximation that we have with working in close proximity with the industry. Until recently, we had an undershare in these categories, but now with better supply, today we have a share that is consistent with the size of the company. Another thing where we saw a relevant advancement was the execution of the Mounjaro launch. The execution was flawless. We were the first company offering this type of product for consumers in Brazil, and the sales volume was very relevant, and the supply really supported the company's growth in the second quarter specifically. As you saw from the market, the need for prescription started in June for this type of medication. We were afraid this would decelerate sales, but we didn't see that.
In June and July, sales were equivalent to the previous months. We're very happy with our execution and how much this category is contributing to our overall growth, not just us, but the market as a whole. We are much better at the execution in weight loss drugs, and we are also betting on these evolutions that the market is expecting for this category as a whole.
Perfect. Thank you. Very clear.
The next question is from Rodrigo Gastim Itaú BBA. Thank you.
Good morning, Jonas. Good morning, Novais. I have two questions. My first question is about your gross margin, one of the things that were most striking in this quarter. For the gross margin, what I want to know is, can you isolate what comes from the headwind effect of the industry? The slightly lower pre-price increase or semaglutide.
When I look at the 30 bps increase, if I remove the margin, it was flat year-on-year. How much pressure comes from the headwinds in the industry so that we can understand how much you're delivering with improvements in our operational and commercial efficiency? This is my first question about the bridge in your gross margin. My second question, Jonas, in your initial comments, you talked about closing the productivity gap compared to Abrafarma and other peers. If you were to list the three main levers to maintain the closing of this gap looking forward, what would be these levers? Thank you. These are my two questions.
Yes, I can start, Jonas. I will talk about the gross margin. Thank you, Rodrigo, for your questions. Fortunately, we're seeing a lot of evolution in our gross margin.
We are improving our stock loss rates, as we already mentioned in previous calls. We're still working on stabilizing the contributions from Extrafarma, also working in closer proximity with the industry and the industry financing commercial campaigns that we executed, for example, the anniversary campaign and all the other commercial campaigns with the support of the industry. All these operational improvements have been more than enough to offset the higher proportion of branded drugs and semaglutides and weight loss drugs that have a proportionately lower margin and have put some pressure. This quarter, we also have had the effect of a lower inflation rate. However, an inflation rate of 3.7% this year compared with 4.5% last year did put some pressure, but it wasn't that much of a pressure. Prescription drugs and weight loss drugs like semaglutides put more pressure, about 20 bps.
All the other operational improvements, for example, improving our stock losses and improvement in our commercial conditions, were sufficient to neutralize this effect. Consequently, we were able to improve our margin in the quarter. About the productivity gap, would you like me to start or you start, Jonas? No, go ahead. You can start. We achieved a very important milestone with average monthly sales of BRL 800,000 per store. That is still a very relevant opportunity to improve this further in Extrafarma stores. The same store sales of Extrafarma this quarter were close to 19.3% or 19.4%, whereas Pague Menos 17.8%, 17.9%. The Extrafarma stores are growing at a faster pace than Pague Menos, but the two banners are very well balanced in terms of their growth level. The Extrafarma stores still have a much lower average sales per store than the BRL 800,000. It's closer to BRL 600,000.
There is a lot of room for bringing Extrafarma stores to the same level of Pague Menos stores. As you heard from Jonas, more than 400 of our stores are selling more than BRL 1 million. There is a lot to expect from the future in terms of store operation. Our entire operating team, telemetry, so the operational and the technology teams are really supporting us in the clusterization of our stores by productivity indicator in order to improve productivity indicators. There is a sea of opportunities for improvement here. A lot of nice things being done. We will now convert another 42 stores from Extrafarma to Pague Menos. Digital is soaring. We have many other levers that we're working on to further decrease this gap.
Pricing, assortment, we will tell more on our investor day, like you heard from Jonas, but we still have a lot of room and a lot of work to do and room to grow.
Since my name is vulnerability, I'm glad Gastim asked the question and you went first because I had time to think, because having his honorable presence in our call makes me nervous.
Gastim, we are servicing our customers with resoluteness and with our hearts. Everybody wants to be well served and listened to and embraced. In the end, everybody wants to come out of the drugstore with their product in their hands or with their question answered or with the best counseling. My second point is assortment. We were able to improve our assortment, and you could see this when we focus on continuous care customers or continuous care patients.
These customers go to the drugstore much more often, and they buy different multiples of the drug. If I had two boxes and they needed three, they would probably go to another store and bring their prescription to the other store because they need three. Another thing that we created a while ago is the infinite aisle. If you go to our store, and even if, as we strive to have everything in stock in the stores, if we don't have what you need, it will have it delivered to your house. Execution without compliance, as I said, there's no comfort zone here, and feedback is never taken personally. As I said, there's no magic bullet. We have to pay attention to all the relevant things. How do we measure execution?
We have telemetry that we plug in into our stores, and from those KPIs, we can understand which ones are generating more results and where we still need further alignment. For example, store openings. We can know when a store is open in the first 30 minutes. We know, for example, punctuality opening our stores. In the first 30 minutes, we know which stores are late to open. I think retail is life. Retail is very dynamic, and when we treat people with respect and we show them that mistakes are tolerated because mistakes here are tolerated, like we heard from Fernando Alonso, you have to pay attention to all these details. Creating psychological safety in our team so that they can say where they need help, where we can help them improve, and we need to have a very good two-way communication, very dynamic.
These are the three things that have truly allowed us to capture these levels of same-store sales, and we will not stop here because the model that we came up with is so solid, and it really, really numbers will follow behaviors, and I see the behaviors are still there. Servicing our customers with assertiveness, with good assortment, and perfect execution, like you heard from Novais.
Excellent. Thank you. Very clear.
The next question is from Joseph Giordano JP Morgan. You can ask your question now.
Hello. Good morning, all. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. First, you talked about productivity and a relevant gap between Extrafarma and Pague Menos' stores. Today, when you're converting the banner, what is the uplift in your revenue that you expect in the first months after conversion? My second question, you were talking about digital.
What is the behavior that you're seeing in terms of margin? How much are you driving sales in digital channels to gain customer loyalty? What is the margin gap in this category? These are my two questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Joseph, for your questions. I can start. About the productivity gap, when we convert an Extrafarma store to the Pague Menos banner, the growth in sales, we have already converted 120 stores, and we see that the growth in sales is very favorable. The return on investment with these conversions is very positive. These stores, the first stores are growing about 30% compared with the same quarter last year, whereas the average growth in the company is close to 18%. They are growing at significantly higher rates than the company average. We are looking at a group of stores.
We have states where the Extrafarma banner is more present and stronger. Perhaps in these states, we have a larger gap compared with the overall company average, but still, the numbers are very favorable. As I said, we will convert another batch of 42 stores in the second quarter this year, in the second half of this year, and we also expect that these stores, these newly converted stores will contribute to the company's growth. In digital, the gross margin, the company's total margin or the total margin from digital has improved greatly. Just to give you some reference, comparing year-on-year, there was a 4% improvement in our gross margin, and the EBITDA margin of the digital channel is very close to the four-wall margin of the entire company.
Digital has been contributing a lot, and an important part of the customers that we are acquiring, customers that hadn't bought with us in the past 12 months or who increased their shopping basket or their frequency from digital channels is very relevant. If I'm not mistaken, 15% of the newly acquired customers are coming from our digital channels. We're very happy with these results. We're very happy with digital. It's bringing incremental customers, incremental margin to the company. What we are doing is improve usability, improve OTD or the product dispensation time until it is delivered to our consumers' residence. This has dramatically improved. It is a relevant part of our customers being serviced less than two hours from the time they place the order. The level of satisfaction of our customer base has been increasing greatly, and the participation of the share of digital is increasing accordingly.
We're very positive about the future of digital. Joseph, it's an honor to have you here. Last time, it was Guilherme sending my greetings. We're very honored with your question and your interest in our company because we are working to improve all these data
Just to add to what Novais said, there are some important marketplaces where we have an OTD of 65%, and now we are at 95%. We are obsessed with improving every detail, and digital sales cannot be a margin detractor. This is not what we want. We do not believe this strategy of offering to download the app inside the store and ask them to buy at lower prices. No, we believe omnichannel, and we are taking the main performance KPIs and improving each and every one of them.
Our last mile challenge continues to be on with the team that we have and with the humbleness we have to work on every detail. We really want to be an important player in these channels. For more than six months, we're growing more than 50%. This is a very important slice of our sales, but we want to grow with quality. Thank you for your question. Just one more follow-up question. You said something interesting about chronic patients that you have been able to gain more share in sales. For example, if they use 12 cartons per year, you're selling three or four at the same time due to stock availability. I have a question. When we look at your chart, we have to think of affordability of higher volume. What are you doing to be able to convince them to buy four cartons at once?
Are you offering installment payments or a more competitive price if they buy more? What is the strategy to gain more share in chronic-use drugs? We're not convincing. It's not push. It's pull. I can't really give you a lot of information because we know our competitors are watching, but we have hundreds of thousands of people that visit our stores 48 times per year. Even when they buy, our chronic care patients will come back. Why? What do you need to have in addition to a good assortment? We use AI tools for this. We need to understand how many times this person is going to come to our stores every year. We have identified sales. When we put all the algorithms together, we understand what is the predictability and the frequency expected for each customer.
One thing that you mentioned, and you're right, it's not enough to have the product in stock. We also have to have the best price. How can we be called Pague Menos or pay less and make customers pay more? We have a competitiveness index which is measured every day, and we want to have the lowest price. This is what makes our growth extremely consistent, and this makes our team very happy because our growth is not about price. It is about volume, more than 12%, as you could see. We are selling at prices where consumers really feel taken care of and respected because we know that the financial cost can be a problem. We have a high rate of families in debt in Brazil. We have to treat them in a differentiated manner because we know that part of their income is committed to buying drugs.
They need to have as much benefit as they can. If they buy more, they'll pay less.
Thank you.
I thank you for your question.
The next question is from [Ian Sisking, BTG. Mr. Sisking], you can ask your question. The next question is from Danny Eiger, XP.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question and congratulations on your results. Congratulations to you and your entire team because this is not the work of one man only. I have some questions. First, about productivity. We talked a lot about productivity, but I want to further explore how we should think looking forward. You said that 25% of your farm is already selling over more than BRL 1 million, and that that would be the benchmark level.
Do you think it is possible to achieve this level for your entire park of stores, or are there regional characteristics of certain cities or states that could be structural limits in your effort to reach these levels in all your stores? The productivity gain, is it the main lever to recover the productivity of these less profitable stores that you talked about in the start of your call? My second question is about competition. We are seeing a more intense competitive dynamic in the industry, both for your peers in drug stores and also other channels, for example, hygiene and beauty, when on digital specifically.
I want to hear your take on how you're seeing the dynamics from these two different angles, both on the side of drug stores and how much comes from other channels, and also a possible potential new player that could come if the sales of drugs in grocery stores is approved in Brazil. Do you see this as a major risk for your industry? Thank you.
It's great to have you here, Danny Eiger. How can we break this down, Novais? I can start talking about productivity and a little bit about the competition, and then you can continue.
Danny, thank you for your question. About productivity, as we already said, 25% of our stores are already over BRL 1 million in average sales per month. We haven't seen any structural difference between the other 75% of stores and these 25%.
We want to bring all our stores to sales close to BRL 1 million. There are some very nice things happening in the company, as you heard from Jonas, the team engagement, the telemetry work, which is allowing us to improve store productivity. We will tell you more during our investor day, but there are so many things taking place. For example, the banner conversions are evolving, still evolving, and there's no reason why Extrafarma stores will not reach the same store sales level of the Pague Menos stores. We have 350 stores that we can bring from BRL 600,000 average sales to BRL 800,000. The company sales will increase as a whole. We're also putting a lot of effort in improving digital sales, and dispensation happens at the store. We also have two major work fronts with our commercial and supply team, which is store supply algorithms and pricing rules.
This will help us improve our price position and increase our sales volume. We have the new distribution center being operated in Pernambuco. We have several levers that we're working on to continue to improve the average sales per store. We're very positive. Within two years, we went from BRL 600,000 to BRL 800,000 average sales. It is a major growth, nearly 35%. We still have a lot of the good things to expect for the future. About the competition, what I can tell you is that our industry has always been very competitive, and I don't think it is different now compared with previous periods. Hygiene and beauty, as you said, yes, we see a higher level of appetite from other non-traditional competitors such as marketplaces. For us, we had an increase of 11% in this category. It is very relevant, this increase in volume.
Despite the additional competition, we're performing really well, which shows that we still have room to grow. We see a weakening of independents, and we are showing much better performance when compared with the other Extrafarma chains. This moment is very positive for us in the market. We opened 16 new stores in the past 12 months. We grew 19 bps, our market share in the Northeast only. There is a lot of room to grow, to continue to grow. The sales of drugs in grocery stores is an old subject and may evolve this time or not, but we need to keep focusing on improving our internal execution, becoming more proactive, and better servicing our customers so that they'll become loyal. If we have additional competition, we are already competing with grocery stores in deodorants and diapers, and our performance is still very good.
If this happens in the future, we would like grocery stores to comply with the same regulatory rules and to be obliged to have the same storage conditions and have a pharmacist to answer questions so that this will not cause or worsen the problem of self-medication, which is a major problem in our population. Jonas, anything to add?
Novais, you're so brilliant today. Congratulations. The DC is not Pernambuco. It's Paraiba. Oh, yes. Thank you for that. Danny, our greatest competitor is ourselves. We still have a lot of value to capture. We showed in the past nine months growth rates above 17%. We still have a lot of details that we can improve and keep evolving, our operational excellence, and we want to give consumers a choice. The choice is theirs. We will focus on what we can control. We cannot control Mercado Livre or other online competitors.
What we can do is keep growing our customer base, our average ticket. When these customers see that they are treated differently by us, that they have a differentiated treatment, that we're very committed with the omnichannel experience, that we're growing at very high rates in digital and online sales. If we truly work on this really well and we continue with our discipline of every store, every day to every customer, we will be able to truly close the gap that we have with other competitors.
Thank you, and congratulations on your results.
The next question is from [Ian Sisking] BTG.
Good morning, Jonas and Novais. I have two questions. First question is about the GLP-1s. What do you expect in terms of opportunity with the patent breaks that we are expecting for next year, considering the good execution that we're seeing in the category?
My second question is about productivity, a follow-up of Gastim's question. Could you please share with us what is your aspiration? Where do you plan to get in the next one to two years in terms of store productivity? Thank you.
Can I start, Jonas?
Yes, go ahead.
About the patents for GLP-1 inhibitors, we see this as an opportunity. There's no doubt. The price of these products today is relatively high for an important portion of the population, which has no access due to the average ticket in this category as a whole. With the patent breaks and with the national solutions that are being launched, we should have a much lower average ticket for these launches, for these products, than for traditional drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, and a significant part of the population will start to have access to these products.
We see this in a positive light, and there's a good opportunity for the sector to continue to grow and this entire category to continue to grow. About productivity, here, we haven't really been talking. We don't want this to be any sort of guidance, but we are very optimistic about the growth in our average sales per store. We have been stressing the topic of telemetry and store operation, and this has been making a huge difference to us. We have been performing much better in all the elements that Jonas talked about: the team engagement, store execution, commercial campaigns, and all these digital channels and everything that we are expecting, that we already have mapped and are expecting for the future. We have a very detailed map.
We hired a strategic consulting firm one year ago, and they helped us map the value to be captured in each of these levers. We have a very robust team working internally to steer each of these levers. Which are the indicators that we need to pursue and the implementations that we need to implement to continue to improve our sales and our margin? This is very well explained here internally in the company, and we are monitoring this evolution, and we're very positive about it. We're very positive with our average sales per store in the future. We can't really tell you where it could go, but we know there's a lot of room for growth.
Thank you, Ian. I'd like to thank all the colleagues from BTG for your presence. Last month, there's something I said in the beginning of this call.
A few calls ago, I talked about the tripod that guides our work. First, to have an insurgent mission. Second, being obsessed with the front line. Third, protagonism and my owner mindset. Obsession for the front line. We are visiting the whole of Brazil. Last month, we visited six states in three days in one of our trips. We visited our DCs and our stores. It's very interesting when we enter a store and we talk to the manager. The second thing they sell us, the first is their name, and the second thing they tell us is we're going to be a more millionaire store. We created the Million Club, and we have three pillars. One of them is the Million Club. We need to explain to them the DRE, and we do this literacy work with them. We're investing in training a lot this year. We're training them.
We have explained several, we have talked about this several times before, how much we invest in training. When they understand the DRE, they understand the magic because for millionaire stores, it's the collective unconsciousness. This is about expense dilution. This is about acceleration. They are very focused on losses. They want their losses to be low. I go to meetings every month to talk about losses because losses are margins that you're losing, right? Just to give you some more color that we do have pillars and that we're monitoring them closely. We have live sessions with all the stores every month, and we are creating a culture for people to truly be recognized. We want to celebrate, to recognize them because they enable a much more solid and healthy company, and we want to continue to close this gap in the future.
Perfect. Thank you, Jonas.
Thank you, Novais.
Thank you, Ian.
Next question is from [Thales Granellos] Safra.
Good morning, Jonas. Good morning, Novais. Congratulations on your results. There are a few points that I want to cover here. Most of them are already being answered, but I still have some questions. How much of this growth in branded drugs comes from GLP-1 inhibitors of the 13%? How much of your sales today comes from this category? Was there a significant change from three months ago with the arrival of Mounjaro? Also, the theft in São Paulo, have you seen any improvement with the initiatives that the industry has implemented? Another point, which is still not clear, I don't know if you can tell us this, but how long do you expect for it to take till you close the gap between Extrafarma and Pague Menos?
I know you're no longer disclosing the split in sales between the two banners. We have to look at the consolidated numbers. I think Jonas mentioned this, that it took us two years to go from BRL 600,000 to BRL 800,000, and two years is a feasible timeframe for closing the gap. Yeah, because if one improves, the other one will improve as well. What do you think, or will it be faster, in your opinion?
I'll go first. Thank you, Thales, for your questions. The GLP-1 category, as you said very well already, accounted for about 3% of our sales in the past. We believe that in the market, some players even have a higher level of share of this category. Today, I'd say we're closer to 5, 5 point something percent. As I said in the past, this was an undershare.
We didn't have a compatible share of this category, compatible with Pague Menos's share in the market as a whole. Today, the gap is closing, and this is due to a closer proximity with the industry, good supply, and execution of these products at our stores. As a consequence, since we went from 3% to about 5% share, these two percentage points contributed to the total growth of the company. Now, the thefts, I think the entire market knows that the incident, the number of incidents is growing, but our prevention loss area has been working actively. The security team is working with the industry to reduce these indicators. In this case, fortunately, I think we suffered less than some other players that we have a lot of contact with because we talk about the problem with competitors because we're working together to tackle it.
Apparently, we are suffering less with this problem than other players in our industry. The Pague Menos Extrafarma productivity gap, it took us about two years to go from average sales of BRL 400,000, BRL 420,000, BRL 430,000 to BRL ,620,000, BRL 630,000 . I think it will take less time to close the gap of the next BRL 200,000 between the BRL 600,000 in Extrafarma to the BRL 800,000 in Pague Menos. Of course, this is not a promise. We cannot guarantee this, but we're very positive. The banner conversions are performing really well. We still have a lot to improve in our operations, store operation for Extrafarma, the furniture, the facades, because they went a long time without any investments in the Extrafarma stores. They are in need of investments. We already executed some of these interventions last year.
We're executing others this year, but there's still a lot of room to improve. We're very positive that in the short term, we will be able to equalize this productiveness by store. Thank you for your questions.
Thank you, Novais. Thank you, Thales, about the theft. This is important. We're much below our fair share in terms of theft. At Pague Menos Day, we'll give you more details, but we are working with intelligence, past data, future projections, and we are being very careful because this will make a difference in our losses. Our loss numbers have been excellent. Maybe at Pague Menos Day, we should talk about this data.
Yes, noted. Thank you. Thank you, Jonas. Thank you, Novais.
I think we need to close now. We are on time. Any more questions? We have one last question. Yes, let's briefly answer the last question. No problem.
Take your time. The next question is from [Marcio Zacco], Bradesco. You can ask your question now.
Good morning, Jonas, Novais. We have two quick questions. The first is for HB, Health and Beauty, Hygiene and Beauty. You saw an evolution from quarter one to quarter two and a gap between growth and consolidated growth decreasing from 10% in quarter one to 7% this quarter. What explains this decrease in this gap? Was it the promotions, the anniversary campaign? What do you expect looking forward? Do you think this gap should get closer to zero, and how long will it take? My second question is about the margin gain that you had with the better commercial conditions with the industry. Was this a one-off event? Was this more related to the anniversary campaign that you had in May? Can you please explain? Thank you.
Thank you, Marcio, for your question.
The growth in hygiene and beauty is very healthy for us at the level of 11%. It drifts away from the company's performance because the entire company is focusing on continuous care customers, so the more core categories in a pharmacy, so prescription drugs. We are focusing on the counter, customer service quality, training of the team, PBM assortment. We are drifting in these categories and growing well in hygiene and beauty at 11%. Yes, you're right. This quarter, we had help from our commercial campaigns, our anniversary months, but not just the anniversary campaign. We are performing better in all these categories that compose the beauty and hygiene category. We have good expectations to see this continue to improve in the future.
Improvement in our commercial conditions is not just a one-off event in the second quarter. The commercial team has been working together with the industry to work in closer proximity, and we have good expectations for the second quarter, for the second half of the year in this sense.
Just one follow-up. You see, you expect this 11% to be maintained in the future?
We expect to continue to grow at lower rates than prescription drugs, and it will grow less. However, the level of growth will still be healthy, as we saw in quarter two at 11%. I cannot guarantee that it will continue to grow at 11% because the comparison basis for the company, since we are very, a lot of consecutive quarters growing at 16%, 15%, comparison basis become much stronger now than in the past. We're very happy with the category.
There's space to improve, and this should continue to improve in the future.
Thank you, Novais.
We thank you.
Novais, we never take a step back only to increase or improve our momentum.
Can we close now?
Just a few words. Thank you for staying this far. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for your interest. Please believe in our team. This is not about myself or about Novais or about the VPs. When I talked about our extended leadership, I mean Directors, Executive Managers, all Managers, and all employees. Suddenly, magic happened, and they felt part of something bigger, with a lot of growth, with a lot of dedication, something that we're building together, and we will continue to build.
We will continue to strive every day to offer high-quality customer service so that we can really make it worth spending our life energy because this is what this is the greatest asset that we have, the now. The now is our greatest asset and how we're writing our story and the legacy we leave for the people after us. Have a great day. Have a wonderful day. Have a blessed day and a blessed week. We will see you shortly in our Pague Menos Day, which will be on September 4th. September 4th at 9:00 A.M. We will disclose data, bonus data, because we will have a lot more time to show you, to show what our team is doing, and we can answer your questions directly. Our doors are open.
If you're an investor, if you decided to invest in us, to believe in us, this is the least we can do for you. We are [Hexa], and we are now moving to [Hepta]. This is not guidance. We just have to work hard. You have to work hard because I'm still on vacation, and now I'm going to relax with my family. Have a great day. Bye. See you next time.
This conference call is now over. Thank you for attending, and have a great day.