Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to Grupo Panvel 's conference call to announce the results of quarter one 2022. This conference call is being recorded, and the replay will be available right after the call on the company's investors relations website, where you can also download the presentation. We inform that all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the company's remarks, and then we will open for questions when further instructions will be given. Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements made during this conference call are based on beliefs and assumptions of Grupo Panvel 's management and the information currently available to the company.
These forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties because they refer to future events, and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors, analysts, and journalists should understand that events related to the macroeconomic environment, to the industry, and other factors may lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Today, we have with us Mr. Julio Mottin Neto, CEO, and Mr. Antonio Napp, CFO and Investor's Relations Director. Now I'd like to hand the conference over to Mr. Julio Mottin to start his presentation. Mr. Mottin, you may proceed.
Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here with you today for this conference call. We will start today's call with an overview of quarter one. Well, to us, this was a very interesting quarter. We were able to maintain the level of sales growth that we had already seen in quarter four 2021, a very interesting growth level. We grew at 19.5% in quarter one, which is very robust even when we consider our same stores and mature stores. For mature stores, this is one of the figures that we follow up very closely here in our company, and the growth level was very robust, as you can see in this presentation.
In the 12-month compound growth, we had more than 68 new openings, and if we consider the past 24 months, we are talking of 113, nearly 115 new stores inaugurated. Even when we consider this very robust expansion scenario and the inflation rates, which have been challenging to all retailers, we have been showing a lot of resiliency in our results. Our net income, for example, we showed robust growth year-over-year. Our EBITDA, although in percentage terms, it's not yet where we want it to be, w e also had significant growth year-over-year.
Considering this very aggressive expansion scenario, this large volume of new openings and stores maturing, we can see that the company has been really resilient in its cost management, and this cost management effort can be seen in our bottom line. For retail, we had a 19.3% increase in our retail gross revenue services, which is also a very important vertical that we have. We have been investing greatly in services, and we believe that we still have more room to grow in services to become more and more representative in the pharma retail in Brazil. It's a phenomenon that we can already see, for example, in pet shops. In pets, we see a share of 8% or 9% of our sales, so we see that pharma, we still have a lot of room to grow in terms of pharmaceutical services.
And why not start thinking of the beauty market as well to provide services in the beauty market? These are the short-term challenges that we have. One of the short-term challenges that we have are point-of-care testing. We have a lot of tests that are already being offered in our stores, and this is the continuity of this inertia that was broken by the COVID exams. And in vaccination is already a reality and we have a lot of room to grow, particularly in children's vaccination, which is a very interesting market for us. And we are focusing, one of our points of focus for the long term, so that we can have greater and greater representativeness of services in our share.
Digital continues to be very stable, very balanced. It's worth noting that we are not really using the practices that we see in other retailers of converting store sales to digital. This is not a practice that we adopt. We understand that digital creates value to consumers, that it creates time savings. So we want to be a part of this world, so to provide time savings to our customers so that our customers can see our digital platform as an upside that adds to the convenience of buying from Panvel in their everyday life.
People can use click and collect, or they can receive their goods at home. And we see increasing quality. Our NPS surveys are conducted regularly, and when customers use the channels for the first time, they receive the questionnaire. If they walk into a store for the first time, they receive a questionnaire. And also for the digital channels, it's the same. So we have been regularly measuring our quality. And I am sure that this can be seen in this good sales performance and this quality that we can imprint into all the customer experiences and all the points of contact with the consumers. So to us, this has been a very positive quarter, and now we're going to hear from Napp the details about our financial results.
So let's go into our results, and I'd like to start with some highlights. So I'd like to explore with you the concept of consistency in Panvel over time. When you look at these charts, you see that the gross revenue and the average sales per store over the past decade has been presenting CAGR of 14% and 7%, and both above inflation rates. And this quarter, we are seeing even more acceleration. It's important noting that the growth in the first quarter already comes after a sequence of very strong first quarters since 2019. From 2019 until now, our sales grew by 50%. This is an average CAGR of 14.1%. Very relevant.
And it's also worth noting that we are a company that has never had any losses in our history. That's why we're very proud to say that consistency, soundness, and innovation are the trademarks of Panvel. Now going to sales on slide number four. Here, we would like to stress our very strong sales performance in quarter one. An increase of 19.3% year-over-year, which is above the market average. And this is not just due to the store expansions, but also the growth of our average sales per store above those of other players.
Here we see the comparison of Panvel and other pharma chains in the first quarter. We continue with our target of increasing our average sales per store. In quarter one, we reached BRL 550,000 per store, an 8% increase year-over-year. We cannot forget that this goal was achieved even with the acceleration that we have been performing of our physical structure since 2020. When we look at the same line on slide number number, we can see our same stores growth and mature stores growth, very robust results that allow us to stand out among the competitors, 11.8% for same stores and 10.3% for mature stores, well above inflation of the categories that we sell in our stores during the period. Moving forward, we started the year with 15 new openings in quarter one, another record-breaking number, 68 stores in the last 12 months.
We are very happy with the ramp-up of the new openings, of the most recent new openings, and this leaves us very comfortable about Panvel's ability to execute its expansion plan. Later, we are going to look at the results and results of these stores per state, but I can anticipate that the numbers are very robust. As a direct consequence of the growth in our average sales and the successful expansion, on slide number seven, we see that Panvel's market share continues to grow, reaching 11.6% in quarter one, an evolution of 0.1 percentage point year-over-year, growing in all states of the South Region. Once again, Panvel is showing its consistent execution strategy. Here I would like to highlight two important factors.
The first one is that our market share growth took place in a quarter with a very strong comparison base because the data for quarter one consider all the selling informed by our distributors. We know that small drugstores anticipate the purchase of drugs, and this is very relevant in the start of the year. The second highlight here is the strong growth of our drugs market share in the South Region. This is totally in line with our strategy because we continue to invest in the follow-up of the journey of chronic patients for generics and also Panvel Corporate Health. Going to digital on slide number eight, all the numbers make it very clear that Panvel continues to be a benchmark in the pharma market.
In quarter one, the sales penetration was at 15.5%, which we consider a very high number if we compare. In the same period, we have a strong growth of the traffic of customers in our physical stores, particularly in January, when we had the slowdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we had an increase in testing. All this increase is related with the quality of our delivery.
We continue to have the quickest delivery in the pharma retail in Brazil, and we can deliver within one hour in all cities where we operate. We are doing all this with a service level of 97%, which is great. To make all this possible, we count on a structure of 126 delivery stores and nine dark stores, and also the click and collect modality, which is active in 100% of our stores. We also continue to see more downloads of our app, and we reached 2.3 million downloads at the end of quarter one.
Another important point is that all this growth in digital, at least in our case, is not an offender to our margin. Using the structure of our existing stores for delivery and the lower CAC, we can accelerate digital sales in a profitable way, increasing the store's profitability. Another strategic pillar that really made a difference in Panvel was the services arm called Panvel Clinic. Panvel Clinic is a critical part of our health ecosystem, and once again, we were leaders in the provision of health services to the community in the Southern Region. In quarter one, we continued to expand our service rooms. Our healthcare rooms. 317 stores already have a clinic. Speaking of vaccination, we reached nearly 60% share in the Southern Region in vaccination.
For COVID testing, we reached more than 38% market share. With all this, we have been able to maintain 40% of services share in the Southern Region, which is 3x higher than our share in the region. As a consequence of this penetration this quarter, we reached 4.5% share of services in our revenue. This means that services for Panvel is already a reality today. As I said in the beginning, we really want to tap these two shifts in inertia.
The first one was the flu vaccination, which really helped us enter the vaccination market, and I think children's vaccination is the greatest opportunity here. Also COVID testing already helped us come out of this inertia, and the possibility of point-of-care testing having a very high representativeness, a very high share in our revenue. We want to tap this reality that is already here to grow further and further in the future. This is a huge opportunity in services.
Yes, you're right, Julio. While other people are talking about health hubs in the future, we are already making a difference right now. Yes, we have been talking about the future of health, but before we start talking about the future of health, we need to build this reality today. The reality today is what happens in our stores. We have been able to show that our stores have had the traffic for that. Yes, we're monetizing all the projects in the short term. Now on slide number 10. This is the last slide about our sales. Here we talk about our private label, which is another critical pillar of our strategy, both in terms of brand and margin.
We are the only chain that lets consumers bring our brand into their homes. Private label reached 7.7% share in our total sales, and 21% for hygiene and beauty. This quarter, we also saw a drop in the sales of some items related with the COVID basket, such as masks, and this affected the overall share of Panvel products. This should be a seasonal movement, and this should be balanced out by the end of the year, either with the new launches or the growth of our private label products. Yes, we're selling fewer masks, but we're selling more makeup, right? There's an offset. Yes, you're right. With about 900 active SKUs, Panvel products, our private label, are a strong support to our gross margin and 6 percentage point above the rest of the products. 60% of these products are produced by our own industry, Lifar.
This ensures quality and superior margin in all our private label operations. On the next chart, slide number 11. Here you have some illustrations of the Panvel private label products among those 900 SKUs that we operate today. Finally, this virtual cycle of our digital and physical strategy, we can see that when we measure our customer satisfaction. This you can see on slide number 12. Here we have a summary of the main customer service KPIs that we always monitor. Panvel is still very unique in combining accelerated growth with the best customer experience. Our NPS closed the first quarter at 80 points, a 4-point increase year-over-year, and we continue to have the best evaluation in pharma retail, reaching 8.4 points. We are still the best application according to customers. This has always been in our DNA.
That's why we keep investing in customer digitization, getting to know their consumption habits, and offering more and more personalized offers. This means we're growing with good results, and we're growing by maintaining a culture and our good quality. We are delivering on two important challenges here, having good results and more robust growth, and also maintaining very good quality in your stores. Now we see details about our gross margin. The retail gross margin suffered a pressure of 0.6 percentage point in quarter one and closed at 29.8%. This decrease is directly related with the growth of drugs in our mix, particularly for special drugs, and we're going to go over that later. We also see a quick drop in items related with the COVID basket, but we still understand that this is a very healthy growth, very gross margin.
We have good prospects for the year as we continue to evolve in our generics project. Also we are monitoring the evolution of other products related with convenience, hygiene, and beauty. Also there was the readjustment for drugs in April, which will also be a factor that will be relevant for this year's exercise. With all these elements, we maintain our prospects for 2022 to deliver a gross margin at the same levels of that of 2021. When we look at our expenses on slide 14, it's very clear that we are working hard towards efficiency. In quarter one, selling expenses grew 4 percentage points year-over-year, in line with the expected, considering inflationary pressures and the store expansion. For G&A expenses, financial discipline was even more relevant here.
We increased by 2.2% our G&A expenses, and we continue to have the best G&A expense level in our industry. It's important to note that this expense control and high productivity are also part of the company's DNA. When we look at the productivity KPIs, such as number of employees per store, Panvel continues to be a benchmark for the pharma retail market. Investing in productivity, in our opinion, is the best way to fight inflationary pressures on our costs. Now we talked about sales margins and expenses, now let's go into our results. Our adjusted EBITDA closed the quarter at BRL 39.7 million, equivalent to 4.1% of our gross revenue, a 6% increase year-over-year.
This EBITDA margin was practically at the same percentage level of the past two quarters, and we understand that the growth in our EBITDA, even if a little below our sales, considering the inflationary setting and all the investments that we have been making, this is another sign of the consistency and soundness of our business. When we look at the retail EBITDA, the consistency of our execution becomes even clearer. Even with a margin reduction that is related with the speed of expansion that we already talked about, and also the reduction in the gross margin that we already talked about, this quarter's margin is at a very good level and in line with expectations. We have been doing a very assertive expansion. The new openings have had a good performance so far.
We have more than 113 new openings the past 25 months, and we have been maintaining a very relevant and significant EBITDA level in retail. This shows the consistency and soundness of our results. In line with everything that we said so far, we come to the net income of the quarter on slide 17. The adjusted net income reached BRL 25.6 million, equivalent to 2.6% of our gross revenue. This strong growth was another highlight of this quarter. The Grupo Panvel here again, was a benchmark in the market, and we continue to be one of the most profitable operations in the pharma market, with a net margin that reinforces our operational excellence. I would like to thank all the employees and all the teams that have been working hard to deliver these very good numbers, always having the customer at the center.
On slide 18, we can see our cash cycle. We had great evolution in the normalization of our stocks after the peak we had in quarter one last year. We are also consistently improving our average payment term. This has improved our cash cycle in 13 days in the first quarter of 2022, is a 13-day improvement year-over-year, and there is still room to improve the days of stock and also the payment terms for suppliers in 2022. Another highlight is our very solid capital structure. We closed quarter one with a very low leverage of 0.3x our EBITDA, and we believe that this conservative cash position gives us the confidence we need to continue to grow and invest in the coming years. This makes a lot of difference in the current scenario with higher standard interest rates.
Now, after going over our operational and financial indicators, we would like to share with you some more details about our strategic pillars. Today, we are going to go over some of them to give more color about what we are planning for the future. Let us start with our expansion, our new openings. Here, I always say that it is no news that physical stores are and will continue to be for a long time, the gravitational center of our business. This is our most important strategic pillar, either due to convenience, capillarity, support, and last mile delivery. Expanding our geographic footprint is key so that all our other strategic pillars can be effective. Our expansion plan is defined until 2025 with a strong focus on the southern region. By looking at these slides, we can say confidently that we are delivering very good results in all our regions.
We have had robust returns measured by the ROIC of the stores in each state. When we look at the performance of Paraná and Santa Catarina particularly because these are regions that have a strong share of maturing stores, our EBITDA year- after- year is getting closer to that of Rio Grande do Sul, the state where we have most of our mature stores. When we look at the market share in our states, all of them close to 5%, the opportunity becomes very obvious. There is a lot of room to grow with good results and low risk of cannibalization. This is also valid for the inner cities of the state of Rio Grande do Sul that present a great opportunity for growth. Panvel is the only chain in the southern region that has crossed all borders and is prepared to advance to other states.
After very careful work over the years, we have become a very renowned brand in the region and not just in our origin state. This strategy is also addressing the expanded middle class. Our constructive model stores, the popular stores, will account for 25% of the expansion in 2022. If we consider that our standard format is hybrid and serves different publics, it becomes even clearer that Panvel is doing the homework to reach different socioeconomic classes. Still on this topic, on slide 21, we give more visibility to this strategic pillar that is very important to Panvel, which is the inclusion of customers from different socioeconomic levels. This topic goes beyond the popular stores. The popular stores are a constructive, flexible model that we started in 2020 very successfully.
Well before that, we were already working on other initiatives to turn our stores into more accessible stores to socioeconomic levels from A to C. One of the pillars here has to do with the mix of products that we sell in our stores. Today, if we look at our stores from the standpoint of the product mix, we have 193 stores in our cluster that we call mixed pop, mixed popular, so a little over 1/3 of our stores are mixed popular. The numbers are very relevant. These stores are pulling our growth up with higher growth levels compared to the general growth levels of all stores.
Our product mix is defined by looking at the public in each region, and this is very important so that you understand that Panvel is very well prepared to serve different realities, different socioeconomic levels, and to respond to inflation rates. In addition to the product mix, we are also advancing in our generics line, in the sales of generic products in our stores. The results from the standpoint of sales share and margin will become clearer in quarter two. If we look at quarter one and we exclude the COVID-related items, this category is already growing at 30% per year. Also, we cannot go without saying that private label is also a very important sales lever and inclusion lever because these are good quality products at accessible prices.
The more and more intensive use of all these tools that I mentioned so far, combined with the appropriate communication strategy with each of the publics, is the key element so that our strategy can reach more and more customers. On slide 22, here is an update about our health ecosystem. We already talked a little bit about Panvel Clinic. We are going to talk more about that and also about the other initiatives. To us, the health ecosystem is a natural evolution of our business. If our mission is to provide health and wellbeing, and if we have the customer at the center of our decisions, it is natural that we want to deliver more and more products and services in our physical and digital channels. Panvel is already a health ecosystem.
It already has real initiatives that are generating results and traffic in our stores and making our customers' lives easier. Here, the first pillar of our health ecosystem is Panvel Clinic, which involves all the services that we provide. As we said, the drugstore is already a reference in health services, and right now it is still for vaccination and point-of-care testing, but we are taking very seriously all the services that we can offer in the future. We are very focusing on expanding the options to our customers. To us, the drugstore is the ideal place for primary care and preventive medicine, so we have a lot to expect in this journey. We will expand our work with point-of-care testing, and we will work a lot with the data that we have, because data is an important tool that we still need to explore further.
Here we have a highlight, which is the health wallet. This year, we are including in our digital platforms all the examinations or tests or vaccines or the history of drugs used by individuals in a platform or interface that is going to be called the Health Card. So our consumers can access in this Health Card everything they have bought or used in Panvel related to their health. This is an important step because in the future, we believe that we will be moving to an open health market and the owner of health data will be the consumer themselves. So we want to be ready to connect with all the other information and help people have control of their medical records. So this is a great advancement in terms of the use of data and information this year. Yes, it is indeed very important.
A good way to accelerate all these projects are the partnerships that we have been establishing. We truly believe that the drugstore has all the conditions to be a centerpiece in this ecosystem due to convenience, capillarity, which is something that the other links in the chain do not have. That is why we understand that the stores can be a very attractive hub for all these partnerships. Still about our health ecosystem, when we go into partnerships, we need to stress the importance of Panvel Corporate Health. This is an arm that was created in 2021 and that comprises health plans, special drugs, and patient management. This B2B2C relationship is one of our strengths, and it already accounts for 1/3 of our sales. This is due to partnerships with companies and HMOs.
We continue to invest in the digitization of all these relationships through exclusive sites and apps and looking for more partners in the future. We believe that Panvel Corporate Health is a unique product in the market because it offers a wide range of products and services that are all integrated. Sales to patients, treatment follow-up, and sales of products directly to HMOs through our wholesale operations. This structure is already showing concrete results, and it has been a key piece of our strong sales growth that we saw in Q1. In this period, the sales of special drugs had record-breaking growth rates of 63%, and Panvel already has a 25% share in this market. We continue to work towards establishing new partnerships that will further increase our sales in the coming quarters.
Another very important piece of our ecosystem is the follow-up of the customer journey for chronic patients, chronic and continuous use drugs. Here in this pillar, we use all the robustness of our Bem Panvel loyalty program. We have invested heavily in the past few years in data science and analytics to understand and increase customer loyalty, always respecting the best practices of data protection. The results are very clear. We have a customer base of nearly 13 million taxpayer IDs, duly identified and clusterized in a unified customer base, which is one of our greatest differentiators. With this unified customer base, we can follow up the entire journey of our customers. For chronic patients, for chronic use drugs, in 2021, we rolled out a few projects to increase customer loyalty, as you can see here on slide 25.
By applying some very simple concepts that are based on very in-depth data analysis. We are working with the concept of treatment management through, for example, front desk reminders. Front desk reminders are available in all our touchpoints with the customer. This very simple action has been bringing some very great results. In first quarter, front desk reminders already accounted for nearly 12% of the sales of continuous use drugs. These reminders are through email, SMS, at the store, and at all touchpoints. This is totally omni-channel. Another important concept is savings, because this makes prices more accessible to ensure good adherence to treatment, which is one of the challenges that we have in our country. Last year, we also launched our continuous use program.
In partnership with the labs, we have more than 130 SKUs where we offer special conditions to our consumers with a very good conversion rate. Nearly 90% of the sales of these items in Panvel are already related with our program. We can clearly see, as we mentioned before about our market share, that the share of these items, of all the products that participate in this program, have grown greatly recently, showing the success of this loyalty initiative. Also still within the topic of our health ecosystem, we can't go without mentioning our innovation pillar. Innovation is also something that has been in the company's DNA for many years now. On slide 26, we have some of our innovation fronts.
We have the Panvel Labs, which has mapped more than 250 startups connecting all these companies, and many of the solutions that we showed during this presentation have gone through this program. We also have a startup acceleration program through which we are right now working with six startup companies, and their applications will be used by our business. There's a possibility that we will invest in these companies. This program will continue until September, and this is linked with the launch of our first corporate venture capital. We are at the final stages preparing our CVC, and we will share this with you shortly in the future. With this initiative, with the CVC initiative, we want to be in the forefront of the health tech market to meet the demands of the health and wellbeing markets.
Panvel wants to reinforce its role as a convergence point for different products, services, and technologies, particularly in primary care, acting as a health agent capable of providing health and wellbeing for a much longer time to our customers. Now going to digital. It's worth noting that in the start of the second half of the year as programmed, we will be launching the first phase of our marketplace. Our marketplace will be focused on wellbeing, health, and nutrition, and the first wave will be focused on strengthening categories that already exist in our stores. In this first phase, we will have 10 sellers and about 5,000 SKUs available. We're very much focused on the customer and the quality of our last mile delivery.
We continue to believe that there's no use having an e-commerce or a marketplace if you can't ensure very good level of service and fast delivery. With this in mind, we continue to develop this project very carefully. We're very practical in our mission, which is to increase the customer's shopping cart with items that make true sense in their health journey.
Yes, one of the most important points in our marketplace initiative is curatorship. Curatorship of sellers and curatorship of products. This doesn't really impact our costs or services, so that's why this is the main focus. What we want to offer is a more complete mix of products and services within the verticals that we're already working with, service levels that are comparable to what we have today. We have no ambition of having a marketplace to compete with other large marketplaces in the market. This is not our focus.
Now we're coming to the end of this presentation. I'd like to stress, as you heard from Julio in the beginning, that we're very happy with the results that we achieved so far and that we're very optimistic about the rest of 2022. This was yet another quarter where we were able to balance growth, investment, innovation, and a very solid capital structure. We are rigorously following our 2025 plan to double the company's sales and improve our margins. Thank you all for attending this call today, and we are now available for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now open for questions. We will take questions from investors and analysts. If you have a question, please press Raise Hand. If at any point your question is answered, you can remove yourself from the line by clicking on the same button. Please wait while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Mr. Vitor Pini. Mr. Vitor, your microphone is open.
Hello. Good morning. Good morning, Julio. Good morning, Napp. Thank you for the presentation. I have two questions. First, about your sales. In Q1, you had a very good performance in same store sales and store productivity also increased despite the 50 new openings. How do you see the sales performance for the first half, too? I would like to know whether your retail mix has already balanced out. Also related with sales, your services revenue versus the total revenue. Was there any variation in the share of services after the slowdown of the pandemic? The other topic that I want to ask about is your margins. What do you expect in respect to your margin over the year in balancing the repricing, the new openings, and the gross margins? How do you see this balance in terms of SG&A?
Okay. I will try to answer about our sales. We started quarter with a very good prospect for our sales. We have a very positive outlook about our growth. We had good numbers in April and now in May. In services, Vitor. Well, first thank you for your question. I did not thank you for your question, I apologize. In services, as expected, the share of services is decreasing this quarter. As an offset, other categories are growing very relevantly. As you heard, we see good growth in generics, good growth in special drugs as well.
We have a good performance in hygiene and beauty, personal care and beauty, makeup, and other items. When we look from the sales perspective, we continue to be very positive. When we look at the product mix, we are also very positive because this allows us to balance our growth margin. This is what is happening right now. Also, there was the repricing that took place in the second quarter. Looking at the rest of the year, Vitor, we believe that this year still offers some very important opportunities to grow our margin.
Of course, we are also paying attention to the inflationary effect, and this is the greatest concern right now in the market, where this inflation rate could go, and this is not just in Brazil, but all over the world, or how far it could grow. But in terms of our repricing and improvement in our product mix, and also this very strong work that we continue to carry out to obtain productivity gains in our operations, we are still very optimistic about our margin gains throughout 2022. In sum, April was good, and May started very strong.
Thank you. To ask a question, please press the button, Raise Hand. The next question is from Danniela Eiger, XP. Danniela, your microphone is open.
Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. My first question is about one of Julio's comments during his introduction. He said they would start thinking of services in the beauty market. Can you please explain a little more? Are you thinking of going into the aesthetic market? Have you looked at the profitability and uptake among consumers? Because you have a strong penetration already with your private label in beauty, so maybe there could be an interesting cross-sell opportunity there. Can you give us more information about this potential lever for the future?
My second question is about your expansion . Napp, you shared with us the ROICs per state, and thinking of a broader dynamics of the marginal expansion of your ROIC, we have seen a lot of retailers, not just in pharma, but in also in other industries, talking about the cost of construction materials right now. How do you see this impacting your marginal ROIC since you're also seeing same store sales increase that maybe could compensate for that?
Yes, we do see a lot of potential in services. We're closely following the democratization of beauty and the aesthetic services that has been happening. For example, the application of botulinum toxin, and also other related services. Over the course of this year, we are planning a pilot in this sense. I think this is an opportunity that is ahead of us. I know this is not the ideal example, but the pet market is a very good benchmark for that. Because the pet market, well, of course, they're serving animals and we serve people, but they serve animals both in health and beauty and grooming. This would be an interesting opportunity to look into looking forward.
Danniela, about the expansion and the ROICs. Yes, we do indeed see the inflation on the construction costs. This is a reality today. What we have been seeing in the new stores opened in the past two years, and also the most recent new openings in the start of 2022, is that what has been helping us compensate and maintain our marginal ROICs at the level that we want, and some of them even exceeding the expected, is that we have been having a good growth in our average sales per store, in the maturation curve above our model.
The average sales per store growing faster allow us to stay at good ROIC levels as well. We're paying close attention to all that. The numbers show. We opened more than 100 stores in the past two years, and our level of assertiveness is very good, even with the cost inflation. This can be seen in our numbers. If this wasn't happening, we wouldn't be delivering these EBITDA numbers or net income numbers. The key right now is that the average sales per store that we are obtaining in our new stores is above expected, and this is helping compensate for the other factors.
If there was any problem with our expansion plan, we would be seeing these problems right now. For example, the question that we always got was, well, Panvel was opening 40 stores per year, and now they're going to open 60 stores per year. Will there be a consequence to that? But no, we have been able to sustain our results and also sustain our quality. We have proven that we have the ability to grow faster. We also have the market for that. Despite all the competition and despite the volume of competitors and the high popularity of drugstores, we see that if you have a good proposition, if you have good quality, there's always space in the hearts of the people.
Yes. Along those lines, when we look at our market share data, Danniela, we are probably at our eighth or ninth consecutive quarter of market share increase in all the states in the region, and we see that in smaller cities and in the capitals. When we break down this data, we see that we're gaining share in our current stores, and also the existing stores, and also new stores. We know that our competitors are also opening new stores in the southern region, but we will continue to open new stores, and these new stores are doing really good and growing above average. These numbers reinforce our conviction in our plan, our confidence in our plan, and that's why we are being able so far to deliver the results that we wanted.
Thank you. Excellent.
To ask a question, please press the button Raise Hand on the bottom bar. The next question is from Maria Clara Infantozzi, Itaú BBA. Maria Clara, your microphone is open.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thank you for answering my question. Here in Itaú, we would like to understand the ecosystem of Panvel. You talked about a lot of initiatives in CRM and in increasing the offer of services in your store, and now with a greater focus on the rollout of your marketplace. So what is the level of investment that we can expect looking forward for the delivery of all these initiatives, and what is the impact on your profitability in the short term?
Yes, we are talking of a continuous evolution. Yes. We don't really believe in revolution. We don't like revolutions. We like evolution. We like evolving in everything that we do. So all the investments that we do, they evolve. The marketplace is not so different from what we do today. People today, they buy using our digital platforms, and if the store delivering those products, so today we have more than 150 stores that deliver for the online platform, and if one of those stores does not have the product available, one of our DCs, we have one in Eldorado do Sul, close to Porto Alegre, and one in Curitiba. One of our DCs will deliver the product in three or maybe two days. The mechanics, the order splitting, and all the investment in the backstage for orchestration of the inventories, this already exists.
We already have this in place. For example, for the marketplace, if it's going to be delivery number three of order number 13, so instead of our DC delivering, it's going to be a seller. We also already have a platform to control our deliveries, so we know exactly at what time and on what day that product was delivered, and the same platform that we use to control our deliveries is being used for the marketplace. This means that this is just a continuation of the consumer experience and continuation of our investments. It's not so different in terms of CapEx of everything that we have been doing so far. So you shouldn't expect anything so different in terms of impacts and results because we are working on the continuous evolution and natural evolution of the investments and the customer experience.
An example of that is our digital platform. As we said, our digital sales are growing. We have been investing in digital for years, and it has never been an offender to our margin. Here I'd like to remind you of the central pillar because everything works around our stores, our physical stores. When we talk of services, we're talking about our stores. We're talking about Panvel Clinic, which is inside our stores, and we're going to add more revenue to Panvel Clinic. When we talk about the follow-up of the customer's journey, the monitoring of the customer's journey, these customers will buy in our physical stores or they'll buy online, and they're coming back to our stores and buying more. That's what we are investing in.
Also, when we look at Panvel Corporate Health, Panvel sells products from the stocks that we have in our stores, from the partnerships that we already have, bringing more customers to the store. For the marketplace, the marketplace is an evolutive process. It's an evolution of what we already do. Our vision for the marketplace is very practical. Our vision is that it has the potential to increase the customer shopping cart, but there will be a slow ramp-up with good curatorship, bringing the right customers and bringing the right solutions, and it will not replace all the rest. It will be an additional piece of the puzzle of the ecosystem. Yes, in the case of Panvel clinics, the vaccination clinics, we'll have 95 vaccination clinics by the end of the year. This is very significant.
If we look at our stores, we're talking of more than 20% of all our stores having a vaccination room. In these rooms, we will also offer point-of-care tests. There's no revolution going on here. There's no brand-new investment or any very relevant new investments. It's just a continuation. Also, the Health Card that we talked about, if they take a shot at a Panvel store, if they get their blood pressure measured, if they measure their glucose levels at a Panvel store, they'll want to know the results a few months from now when they're in a physician's appointment. So we'll offer to them the Health Card with all their records. We have had for a long time now, and this is something that we're using, we have a unified database.
This was an investment that was made three or four years ago, and this same unified database will support the Health Card initiative. So it's all a continuation. The key is to make the right decisions over time so that you don't have to do any rework. That's what we have been doing. We have been making the right decisions, and on top of those right decisions, we will make other investments.
Yes, I understand. It's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Maria Clara, for your question. To ask a question, you can press the button raise hand. The next question is from Vitor Pini, Banco Safra. Vitor, your microphone is open.
Hello again. Napp, during your presentation, you showed a very low leverage level and the reduction you had in your working capital. What should we expect in terms of your leverage level for the rest of the year with all your new openings? Do you have any other actions that you are taking to improve your cash flow and working capital for the rest of the year?
Yes, Vitor, we do have some actions in our plan. We have a lot of room to still improve our cycle. Let me give you some examples. All this work that we are doing in generics has a very significant impact on our payment terms, and we still have more to come looking forward. We also have a project that is very focused on reducing our delivery lead times, internal deliveries, I mean, coming from the supplier to our distribution centers. We have good opportunities to improve these internal processes and release more cash to be used by the company.
CapEx discipline. Yes, CapEx discipline is critical. All the studies show that all the investments that we make have to be compatible with our capital costs. When we combine all these actions and our investments foreseen for this year and our investment in working capital, we will finish 2022 with a very low leverage level. Of course, we will have a small net debt, but in relation to our EBITDA, it will not get to one time our EBITDA.
Thank you so much .
Thank you, Vitor. This question- and- answer session is now finished. I would like to hand the conference back to Mr. Mottin for his final remarks. Mr. Mottin, you may proceed.
Thank you all for attending. This has been a great audience, great questions, and we will see you for quarter two. Yes, thank you all for attending. Thank you for taking the time to be here. I hope you enjoyed this call. Our investors relations team is at your service. You can send your questions later if you want. All the questions that we received today and we could not answer during the call will be answered later this week and next week. Have a great day.
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