Good morning everyone. Another virtual conference call. I would like to say that 2020 was a year not to forget. No one of us will. The pandemic, the whole atmosphere, difficulties, major changes. No one is to forget that so soon. Back in January last year, we were in New York on a road show for our follow-on. It was then that we started to have the first news of the pandemic. Eventual investors and funds would ask us how the pandemic would impact us, and at the time, we didn't know.
We are hearing the first news from China. We tried to talk to our offices in Taipei, Shenzhen, to know what was going on. Our stock even started to go down at the time because of the uncertainty of what the pandemic was going to be like. Anyway, we succeeded to have our follow-on at a very reasonable price, adding BRL 360 million to the company, which was very good at the time. That was a lesson learned. From then on, we started to try and understand the dimension of everything.
The first impact was on supply. China shut down in February. Then we started moving because most of our components come from China, also Korea, Taipei, and United States, but mostly from China. We had no parts because plants were shut down. At the end of February, beginning of March, China starts to open up and offer parts. What happens in Brazil? The pandemic hits, and by mid-March, the stores start to close. First, Magazine Luiza, Casas Bahia, then Lojas Cem. Store by store, everyone's shutting down.
At the time, 70% of our retail sales were in these stores that were shutting down. Panic. We stopped buying. We decide to reduce everything, have negative forecasts to know what was going to happen, what we would do. Back in February, we wanted parts to come in faster, and in March we said, "Stop. No more parts." To our surprise, in the end of March, beginning of April, there was a revolution in the demand of computers.
First, at companies that had to send their employees to home office. Banks just buy out all inventories. They go to the retailer to buy notebooks to their employees. There is a strong exchange devaluation at the time that hurts prices. The market takes a bit longer to react, so we have the perfect storm, not knowing what was going on. The market starts to react, and those sales in physical stores migrate to online. We all go home by mid-March, learn how to work online from our home offices.
All the administrative area of the company goes home, and we start to live this huge digital transformation, which is the highlight on page two. This digital transformation has to do with selling more online, having more robust websites, going from physical to online stores, having weaker clients being stronger in a faster reaction. We start to learn how to work from the distance, which is a great learning for the company as a whole. In April, May, searches for notebook on Google grows by 150% compared to the same period last year. Quite impressive. Incredible sales.
We sell out our inventory. So do retailers. There is no inventory left, and no one can replace products because we had slowed down in our purchases, and everyone did the same. Everyone reacted at the same time. Everybody fighting for parts going up in prices because of excessive demand. The third quarter was good. We could deliver lots to retailers. It is still not going with inventories back to normal, but retailers with their stores open, selling a lot online, selling a lot. Supermarkets selling a lot. Well, supermarkets remained open, so it is a segment that grew a lot.
We had then a third quarter that was very good and a fourth quarter that since the beginning of the year, we had not had deliveries as we had in the fourth quarter. Remember, the government stopped before the companies after this first movement of buying to have products for their employees to go home, start to recover in the fourth quarter. It is a convergence of factors, the government recovering, the corporate segment recovery, and a very strong consumer segment, which enables us to hit all records in our history with the revenues of BRL 887 million.
Added to all that, this demand for computers, and I am talking a lot about computers. Whatever we prepared for three years ago when Positivo became Positivo Technology and having different business areas, the leasing of computers, Positivo Intelligent Homes . People at home wanted automation. The sales of lamps just exploded. In the Prime Day, we sold 35,000 lamps, everything just selling out in i ntelligent home products. We go to small retailers that are eager to sell, and we start to supply to them.
Servers, everyone needs servers. We have a spectacular year in servers and also a very good 4Q. Everything going on, no area doing poorly except for educational technology because schools were still closed and physical products like LEGO and Micro:bit were no longer demanded. In the whole of the avenues of growth, everything doing very well, accounting for 19%, which make us very happy. That is, we are also changing the company profile, adding a bit more profitable businesses to our portfolio. So we already have BRL 473 million of revenues in the avenues of growth.
In 4Q, a movement that consolidates it all, BRL 887 million revenues, a very positive EBITDA of BRL 400 million, and net income, and Caio is going to talk a bit about our tax recovery, but we had BRL 196 million in our income. In capital structure, we also bring excellent news. We had two very important events. The first was the follow-on in the beginning of the year, BRL 354 million being brought to the company. Into this year, we issued the venture to extend our debt profile.
Excellent news. Going to the next page. A bit of a market overview that I mentioned before. Again, an explosion in the consumption of computers. Why is that? Because offices migrate to home. People are trying to find computers in their drawers, but they no longer performance much. Everyone in the family needs computers, children at school, parents that work. Everyone needs a computer because the single computer for a family is no longer enough for all the family members. Other computers have to be bought so that everyone have them.
Children to have classes online, parents to continue work. Everyone needs a computer. Computers go back to being personal computers, one computer per person. Home office, homeschooling, telemedicine, all these movements work together. More than that, it seems to be a movement that is here to stay. It does not look like something that is just during the pandemic. This is a movement that is going to stay, and therefore people will need more computers.
This migration to notebooks will also increase sales because the notebook life cycle is lower than a desktop. A desktop will last in a company five to seven years. A notebook, three to five years at the most, more towards three than five. So a longer life cycle. Hybrid work is to stay. Education at distance is to stay. Digitalization of education is huge and digitalization of society as a whole. So computers go back to being personal.
If you take a look at the next page number four, and you take a look at the growth chart, it is really amazing. All analysts start to say that growth is here to stay. That is, we are going to have a new level in computer consumption. It is not that we are going to increase the curve as is, but we are at a new level, which is very similar to what happened to the computer market in 2011, 340 million computers now being reviewed. IDC is to launch a new report mentioning 360 million as an estimate for 2021. Brazil does not react as fast.
Why not? Because of a lack of parts. There is really shortage of parts in the market. The market is buying everything that we and other multinational players bring to the country. There is also the Brazilian economic crisis. Brazil in the past accounted for 4.4% back in 2011, 2012, 2013. Now it accounts for 2% of the world market now with the forecast of 6.9 million. Although it is still growing from 5.8 million- 6.9 million. So it is growing a lot, but not as fast as the world market. So you have repressed demand in Brazil that is huge.
I do not think it is difficult to picture that Brazil should account for 3% of the world market. Well, 3% is a market of 10 million computers in Brazil, and this is what we believe is going to happen in the coming years. We believe the Brazilian market is going to outgrow the world market in the coming years. Now I am going to the next page. I already talked about the Brazilian market, but here you see quarter-on-quarter what happened last year. Quite interesting.
We started the year very well, 1,475,000 against 1,272,000. Then we go down in the beginning of the crisis. Everybody panics. Then we recover growth, and we outstand growth in 4Q with 2 million computers in the quarter. So you have the forecast of 6.9 million. It is still preliminary. It depends a lot more on supply than demand. Retailer inventories are really affected. We really sold very well January and February.
Again, explosive. Lots of lockdowns, and when there is a lockdown, we sell more. Not that we want it whatsoever, but this is the reality. So we have a lowering, an emptying of inventory. Again, inventory days in retail is below 30 days. Normal numbers are above 90 days. Quite impressive, and a lack of components in the world, especially LCD. It is very hard to buy. With that, we have delays and also quite substantial price increases.
Well, now going to page six. Well, we tried to shift the company structure. Well, not a little, in fact, a lot. The company now is organized on three major pillars: Consumer, that is consumer product. Then Corporate, that is everything that is sold to companies. Then Public Institution, everything that is bought by means of public bids. Well, in Consumer, what we sell in Consumer. Well, computers and mobiles and tablets, other peripherals, mouse and keyboards and cell phone covers, memory, extra batteries.
In the avenues of growth, we have projects in the consumer market to go to tier three retail. We were very good up to retail 100. Weak from 101 to 3,000, and now we are focusing on this segment, and expansion is doing very well. Intelligent Home , cameras, lamps, plugs, electronic lockers. A huge portfolio, very nice, that was really well accepted. Positivo- as- a- Service is still going from an eventual leasing of computers to consumers for a greater usage. In Corporate, again, computers, mobiles, tablets, peripherals, hardware as a service, intelligent home.
That is intelligent office for smaller companies, educational technology for private schools. Positivo- as- a- Service is growing for the leasing of computers. Everything is as a service today. This is a world trend that is changing from CapEx to OpEx, buying- as- a- service. With that, you have a series of advantages. Payment solutions that we're also doing very well. We had just one client, the largest acquirer, which is Cielo, and now we are selling to other players. We have a very robust project there. In Public Institutions, what do we mean by that?
It's Banco do Brasil, Caixa Econômica, Petrobras, state secretariats, ministries, direct and indirect administrations, public-owned companies, courts. Everyone that buys by means of public bids, and they are all in this division. Similarly to Corporates, they have the same products, and the electronic ballot box, which is the star of this year and next year because of a bid of the Electoral Court . The breakdown of our revenue is 55% Consumer, 21% Corporate, 21% Public Institutions.
So quite well-balanced. 54%, 55% Consumer, 46%, 44% to Corporate and Public Institutions. Computers are still accounting for 59% of revenues. Then servers with 15.8%, mobiles, tablets, both growing in a category that were not really growing, and services and others completing our revenues. A highlight is that we have huge investments in startups that are doing very well. Later on, I'm going to share some of the nice investments that we made.
We already have invested in 11 startups, and we have a venture capital fund in place. On the next page, we start to talk about each one of these divisions. In Consumers, the number of computers per home. While again, computers are personal, the number increases by home office, homeschooling, starting April 2020. We believe they are here to stay, not as they are today, but no longer as they were in the past. Hybrid work is probably going to be mandatory in most companies.
For that, you have to have a good computer at home, one at work, or a notebook that can come and go. Then you have distance education, higher education increasing. People realized that we can have classes at distance. Even those face-to-face courses have practical classes in person, but then theory classes online. Schools realized that there is no turning back.
Technology can be very advantageous in education. Telemedicine and so many other initiatives. The increased demand and limited supply make us increase prices, not only because of demand and supply, but because of the exchange rate. With that, the average ticket grew by 25% year-on-year. Later on, we are going to say that this is going to grow further 15%, 2021 against 2020. Even if we sell the same volume, revenue is going to be higher. But we don't think we are going to sell the same volume. We think we are going to grow in volume as well.
There is a movement of computers at the price the middle class can afford because prices are going up. Our ticket goes up to BRL 2,000. The entry level was BRL 1,400, now it's BRL 2,000. We have 17% share in this segment, which is growing the most. That is computers up to BRL 2,000. 65% of people are exchanging brands and stores for cheaper options. The gross revenues of the segment was BRL 1.4 billion in 2020.
In corporate, there was a delay of corporate investments, although there was that initial boom. But equipment has to be replaced. Companies started to react in the fourth quarter, and it's also showing to be quite appealing this year. IDC predicts a growth of 11% this year. As in the consumer, the ticket went up. Last year, there was a 20% increase year-on-year. They are buying cheaper brands, but still there is a 20% increase in the ticket, and we believe another impact of 15%-20% this year year-on-year in the corporate segment.
In public institutions, there is an initial uncertainty. We have no budget forecast, orders are canceled, contracts are not signed with bids already won because the government is afraid to buy. But towards the end of the year, things started to change. Those that had to buy started to buy. Lots state secretariats buying notebooks for public school students. Huge bids, some of which we won as the city secretariat of São Paulo, this year a lso in Ceará, two large projects. Just as comparison, at the same time, in 2019, we had a backlog of BRL 654 million, and now we have BRL 1.2 billion.
So we have a lot more orders than what we had last year. In addition, we have the electronic ballot boxes that are not included in this BRL 1.2 billion. Avenues of growth. We have seven avenues of growth. Servers, Positivo- as- a- Service, Intelligent Home , the electronic ballot box, payment solutions, small retail, and educational technology. Services are doing well, BRL 283 million, 29% growth year-on-year. Migration to hybrid clouds or private public clouds, but basically hybrid, is huge. Hyperconvergence is the name of the game.
People are talking about edge computing that needs servers everywhere. With that, the server market is growing a lot. Hardware- as- a- Service is doing very well and growing. Intelligent Home, the IoT, is really showing substantial growth. We see the number of users in our apps. We go from 12,000- 24,000. Lamps, remote controls, pods, intelligent cameras, and so on. A really expressive growth. The electronic ballot box. Lots of people are curious about that. Ballot boxes are safe. The rest assured Brazilian electoral process, it is very, very safe.
The electronic ballot boxes can print votes if that is necessary, although we do not think so. We already have 145,000 ballot boxes in contract. We are probably going to go to the 180,000, the full of them, but probably there is going to be an even another amendment. That is, we are already in our portfolio with BRL 650 million and should reach BRL 800 million. This contract should already take place in this year. We are in the process of validating each of the phase of the electronic ballot box with the Electoral Court.
Again, there is a shortage of components that provides a delay. We do not know if we are going to be able to deliver everything in 2021, but we believe that at least 40%, we will. I told you of some avenues. I talked about the small retail, educational technology that was more affected last year but should recover this year. Now, talking still about the avenues of growth, we hired the work of a huge strategic consulting company to consolidate our businesses. We have been working with them for five months now, and the work is going very well.
We have a very, very good work to be developed there. In CVC, the idea is to accelerate startups that have to do with us. It is not only our money that is important. I am not talking about funds that support management. We support operations. We are investing with big players. Some of the startups we have, Qualcomm, Monashees, Península, Endeavor. So we are very much followed. Our stars Hilab that is really doing very well because it sells decentralized COVID tests. The labs are adapted for COVID tests.
Instituto Butantan hires 2 million tests from Hilab. They can know in real time where the most cases are coming from because these equipment pieces are all 4G, so results are immediate and are transmitted to a center. So Hilab is doing very well. We have 38 people of ours that are helping in the production of 2 million tests. Hilab produce much less in terms of volume, and we are experiencing producing value, and we are helping them. That is why I am saying that it is not a management only, it is basically operations. Others, AgriSmart, @Tech , Eu Nerd.
These are maintenance technicians, 6,000 technicians. So very interesting things in our portfolio. Well, now, I am going to turn the call to our next speaker. I will come back later on. Now I am going to turn to Caio Moraes. Caio, well, it is a nice story. He was hired as our CFO in the middle of the pandemic. It was a distanced hire, and he is doing very well as our CFO. He is going to give you a bit more color about the numbers that I mentioned in the beginning. Okay.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Hélio. Let us talk a bit about our financials. I am on slide 17 of our presentation. I am going to start with net revenue. Hélio already mentioned a bit about the quarter. It was a very strong quarter. 40% of the year revenue was for this quarter, which is really a new level that we think is going to be kept for the year of 2021. So a growth of 59% quarter-on-quarter. Consumer, corporate, public institutions. Consumer, you see that is really the highlight because of the retail business, and fourth quarter was really good.
But also corporate and public institutions showing a recovery in 4Q, although it is still slightly lower than 2019 because of everything that Hélio mentioned. The schools closed and it is still the segments with a bit of a repression in terms of budget. Anyway, in terms of net revenue by product, you see computers, notebooks with 45%, but you see we have a very important mix for our revenue. If you go to the next slide, we are talking about our operating expenses and G&A, our general and administrative expenses.
You see that although there is a growth in volume in terms of commercial expenses, BRL 310 million against BRL 273 million, this is very much connected to the consumer segment performance. We spend more to support growth. In percentage-wise net revenues, there is a reduction. We are at 12.2% compared to 13.6% in 2019. Percentage-wise, there was a reduction, although nominally there was an increase. In general administrative expenses, we see an important reduction of 26%, very much connected obviously to the strong reduction of fixed costs that the company went through along the year, and also with warranties, technical assistance due to the better mix that we talked about.
If you go to the next slide, we will talk about our financial results, which is a very important slide. You see in the full year of 2019 compared to 2020, especially because of the exchange variation of 2020, we had gains of BRL 36 million compared to BRL 5 million in 2019. So we go from BRL 70 million- BRL 5 million. If you take a look at the fourth quarter, the fourth quarters are very similar. But obviously for 4Q 2020, because of the sudden valuation of real was very much depressed, and then it went back to the level of BRL 5.19. Along the beginning of 2021, it went up again.
Anyway, this valley in the year did jeopardize a bit our mark to market in terms of dollar. But this is a financial effect, and that is why we had this -24.3% in the 4Q 2020. But remember, the company has a very strict policy in terms of exchange hedging that protects our current and future purchase flow for our business units, so consumer, corporate, and public institutions. It is a very effective instrument for hedging. This is mark to market, so this is not operations, okay? Let us go to the next slide and let us talk about our net income. Hélio mentioned in the beginning that is perhaps the major highlight of the release.
We had net income of BRL 196 million, and here I tried to show what is the difference between the accounting net income and the adjusted accounting net income. That would be the operating income of the year, which is still 174% above 2019, BRL 57 million against BRL 20 million. But accounting is even more than that. We have three effects that together are important tax effects. The first, which is the most important, is the exclusion of the value-added tax on the calculation basis for excise tax and others. So this is something that was judged at the end of last year.
This is our best judgment. This goes back to 2005. We had very, very strong consulting work to support us, and this is our best estimate that we are accounting for in this result. In addition to this gain, we have an option that the company had to be part of a Curitiba tax recovery process, which reduced our penalties in six lawsuits. This is licenses taxes on educational licenses. We could reduce this impact, and we had a cash effect of BRL 18 million.
The third line, which is the impairment of deferred taxes. This is also a company choice of enjoy the basis of investments that we make. This is according to the law based on the legal opinion of law firms and basically referring to ICMS forecasted credits. We made this choice. You have the write-off of these assets. All together, if we exclude these effects, we get to adjusted accounting net income of BRL 57 million, which is 174% above that of 2019. It is very important to highlight this.
If we go back to the adjusted EBITDA slide growth, 4Q, significant growth, 142%, and EBITDA margin of 11% against 7% year-on-year. So very important. Here, obviously, growth of EBITDA is connected to three main factors, more activity in the period, better product mix, as we already mentioned, passing on costs of inputs and materials because of the increase in dollar, and also our cost controls in the company. That makes the differences that you see both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. The next slide, we talk about our cash positioning, indebtedness, and liability management actions.
With better profitability and capitalization of the BRL 350 million that Hélio mentioned in the first quarter, we get to a cash position of BRL 535 million in 4Q 2020 against BRL 456 million in 4Q 2019. With that, we decrease our leverage. We decrease our net debt from BRL 266 million- BRL 223 million quarter-on-quarter, our leverage 1.9x net debt to EBITDA ratio and to 1.4x. Another important mention is the liability management initiative that we started. It is really changing our indebtedness profile and reducing our debt costs nominally.
We are below 100% compared to more than 200% in 2019. Also, we had 85% of our debt in the short term in 2019, and we go to a breakdown of 45% in short term and 55% in long term. That is a subsequent event. We are talking about the simple debentures issuance that we had on March 10th, and these resources were used to amortize or to pay out higher cost debt with shorter terms. Of course, that shows the company going back to the capital market.
We were able to book this transaction with 15 investment funds, so the company is back to the capital markets with a sophistication of funding and debts that are cheaper and with longer tenure. Now I am going to turn back to Hélio to talk about a summary of the impacts of 2020 and our outlook for 2021. Sorry, Hélio, you were on mute. Oh, sorry. I am going to start again.
Well, just to add to what Caio was saying, it is very important to highlight that the BRL 218 million of taxes, minus the BRL 18 million that we paid in REFIC, that is BRL 200 million, reflect in our cash in the coming years. A pure cash generation for the next four years. Well, on page 24, I just would like to reinforce the outlooks that we have due to the impacts of 2020 and what can happen in 2021 and the following years. Well, consumer, we had BRL 1.5 billion revenues, BRL 900 million in computers.
The pandemic brought the need for more computers per home. The computers are back to being personal. That is 2020. Average ticket grew by 25% because of the exchange rate and increase of input costs. Computers up to BRL 2,000 gained momentum, and we have 70% share in this level. Tablets are very much sought for because of homeschooling. The Intelligent Homes. People were at home. They want the comfort to turn out their lamps from their bed, to have a plug to connect their coffee maker, their air conditioning, to have a security camera at home.
So Intelligent Homes products are really raising the interest of computers. The pilot of computers for those small tier retailers from 101 onwards is yielding very good results. Prospects for 2021, the pandemic is going to be extended, and people realize that home office and education digitalization are here to stay. More aggressive in the pandemic, but they are here to stay after the pandemic. Demand continues high, and due to a higher average exchange rate and new increases in input prices, we are probably going to have another increase of average tickets between 15%-20%.
Home automation will probably continue to grow at double-digit levels, and the extension of small retail is going to happen throughout the whole of Brazil. So no longer in the south, but everywhere. In corporate, revenue of BRL 550 million in 2020. Companies had first a peak to adapt to home office, and then they slowed down. In Q4, we start to see them resuming sales. Computers and servers, average ticket grew 20% year-on-year 2019.
Software-as- a- Service, Hardware- as- a-S ervice continues to grow. We see it is still low because of the educational segment, but in corporate, it is growing on, and it should grow further this year. In 2021, changing from desktops to notebooks because people want more mobility will bring optimistic projections. IDC says about 12.5% on average large companies, and 11% in the whole corporate segment. An increase of average ticket between 15%-20% has continued to grow and servers with a very heated market.
Remember migration to public-private clouds, but especially hybrid clouds. Public institutions. State-owned companies need to adapt to keep their productivity. Some have very old infrastructure. The uncertainty made them slow down, but in the fourth quarter, we saw a huge increase. The Ministry of Economics had a large bid, Caixa, Banco do Brasil, Petrobras, and the number of bids for notebooks and tablets for public school students is unbelievable. Everywhere, at state, city levels, everyone is trying to buy tablets, notebooks to their students.
So in February 2020, we had BRL 600 million in our backlog. Remember, the bids for the electronic ballot boxes, BRL 800 million. For 2021, we are still to see several bids. We are winning several. PRODESP, the State Secretariat of São Paulo, ETICE from Ceará, the city administration of Fortaleza. It is a coincidence because they are the city and state administration of important regions in Brazil. Our budget for Brazil increases in terms of investments of technology, and in February 2021, we had BRL 973 million in order backlog. So if you compare to 2020, very high.
Again, it's a pre-electoral year, so we are going to have loads of bids this year. The electronic ballot box, we already received BRL 147,000 or BRL 650 million confirmed, and we are going probably to deliver 40% of these still this year. This is what I had. We are very optimistic about the company. Very optimistic. Both because of our core business, especially, and the computer and tablet market that is really increasing. We believe this is here to stay. The world is really increasing in terms of computer usage. Brazil is not reacting as much, but it will.
Brazil is not going to keep as low as the world market. We believe we have a market for 10 million computers. The whole of the transformation by means of our avenues of growth starts to be significant. That's why we are very optimistic about 2021 and the future of the company. Thank you very much for attending, and we are ready for your questions.
Thank you, Hélio. We do have some. I'm going to ask one by one, and we'll answer them, okay? The first question comes from Sidney. Good morning. I have questions. The shortage of chips and other inputs, will that influence your production?
Yes, it will. It will influence in terms of costs, LCD, because of LCD chips that are really disputed by several industries, automotive, TVs. We all dispute the same chips from the same factory, and then it really changes level in terms of price. For you to have an idea, we would pay $55 for a screen, and sometimes now we are paying $52 in some occasions, $48 on average. In addition to cost, there is always the possibility of delays. It's not very easy.
We always had our orders closed. Now, things are more complicated and sometimes we have delays in our delivery. This is what's going on. There is a shortage and there is very strong demand. I think the Brazilian market could grow further, but it won't because of this limitation of supply. Still, we are going to be able to get to our forecasted numbers. We see that we are being able to buy with higher costs and with a bit more delays.
The same person, Sidney, is asking you a second question. In addition to Cielo, are there other acquirers buying your payment machines?
This is one of the avenues of growth that we have had. It's particularly this project to expand the sales of payment machines. We are just starting this movement. We are structuring it for the sale of other types of machines for other acquirers.
Okay. This is Sérgio Saraiva [inaudible]
Hilab is doing very well. Sorry. To answer your question I had another round of investments, huge investments. Then we have the expansion of drugstores. This is being very much valued in our portfolio. I don't know if you would like to add to that.
No, I think that's it. I think this is one of the stars of our portfolio. He also asked about another project, Super Drone Spray.
The Super Drone is one of the projects that is not going well. This is one of the companies that was not able to make the drone fly on time. The time was up, and we are going to have another round of investments, but we are not really very encouraged.
A question from Danniela from XP. How do you see the impact of the strong devaluation of real on your business? Here I am talking about the impact of demand once family's budget is pressured, but also volatility as you have prices in dollars.
We pass on our price in dollars. We cannot bear the exchange rate fluctuation. This is a common practice in the market. Everyone has a dollar component in their prices. If it were just one or another, that would be a problem, but it is not. Because it is the same for everyone, basically prices are passed on with the new dollar level to retailers.
We protect ourselves. When we get a public bid, we hedge the contract. That is why we have a very high amount of hedges that even affected us at the end of the year. I see no problems in terms of profitability. Profitability is much more a matter of demand and supply than the dollar exchange. Those products that are marked in reals are hedged.
Just to add, they ask if you have a hedge for the year. We have a very strict hedge policy for all business units, as Hélio mentioned. I have another question. Ricardo Peixinho from Tagus. Are you suffering with the lack of inputs and chips? It is basically the same question we have already answered.
Yes, we have already said. Yes, we are being affected. Sometimes you have to have a new layout of our computer plates to migrate to chips that are not so much in shortage. We try to use replacements, and we are quite fast to do that to minimize the lack of components.
Okay. Another question from Eleven Financial, also connected to supply chains. He talks about the capacity of delivery, and he believes that this is going to go back to normal.
Okay, this is a question. When are we going to go back to normal? That is the $1 million question. When we take a look at reports of American retailers, they say multinationals are going to normal in terms of American retail inventories. In November, it was just 20% of the regular amount. In February, now it is 50%. We think by May, June, things are going to go back to normal in the U.S., which is an indicator that in the second half of the year, we might have better supply with more balanced chains.
Although, again, the demand is growing hugely. This growth of demand was also affected by a lack in inventory. You have no inventory, it takes long for you to go back to normal, and when you go to normal, you have a repressed demand. Let us see what is going to go on.
Okay. One more question from Julio Cesar Coelho from [Latam Capital] Congratulations on your results. I would like to understand the margins for the electronic ballot box bid. Could you give us a bit more color on EBITDA?
Generally, we do not release the individual profitability of each business, but basically it is slightly higher than the regular computer business because it is a specific line of service.
A question from Victor Kertzman Jr., Positivo Intelligent Homes . Two questions. If you are going to have an IPO in the short, mid-term, the new releases, and if you are going to go into electronic locks.
Yes, we are almost ready to go. We have to have a universal lock because Brazil has some kinds of locks, squared and round. We are trying to have an electronic standardized product. IPO, this is a division inside Positivo Technology, so we do not have anything in mind to spin off the division. The area is doing very well.
A question from Eduardo Ribeiro from Fator. First, congratulation on results. Could you talk about retail sales in 2021? Talk about home office, homeschooling, and also bids in states and municipalities in education.
Hi, Eduardo. January and February with very high sales, much more than we expected, which also made inventories to go down. Products are being replaced and demand continues high. There is a strong relation between the sale of computers and people at home. So that should continue, and the same applies to bids. We won several bids, more or less at that level that we showed you. We had BRL 690 million in our backlog, and we had sales of BRL 550 million. We have BRL 1 billion in our backlog, which should translate in higher revenues, and we still continue to take part in bids.
A question from [inaudible] Marcelo. Congratulations for your results. I would like to know if Positivo wants to expand its share in game computing.
We have a brand, 2A.M., that is doing very well. Small volumes, so this is not an area that we gave too much emphasis. We have the gray market on the one hand and big brands on the other, so we were a bit squeezed. But we are doing well with the brand, and we do have a plan to expand it, yes.
Okay. These were the questions. We have no further questions, and I think we can close the call.
Well, thank you very much. Thanks for your attention. We are here for you even after the end of this conference call to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you very much.
We thank you, and goodbye.