Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, we'd like to welcome everyone to RD People, Health, and Wellbeing Conference Call to discuss its Q4 2022 results. The presentation can be found on RD's investor relations website, ir.rd.com.br, where the audio for this conference will later be made available. We inform that all participants will only be able to listen to the conference during the company's presentation. After the company's remarks are over, there will be a Q&A period. At that time, further instructions will be given. Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements are being made under the safe harbor of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1996. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of RD management and on information currently available to the company. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance.
They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they relate to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions and other operating factors could also affect the future results of RD and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Today with us are Eugênio de Zagottis, IR, Corporate Planning, and M&A Vice President, and Flavio de Moraes Correia, Director of IR, Corporate Affairs, and Strategy. I'll turn the conference over to Eugênio de Zagottis. Sir, you may begin your presentation.
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Raia Drogasil 2022 Annual Conference Call. I mean, this was a great year and in my view, a year that underscores the success of the strategy of digitalization that the company has been pursuing. I think that if you take a step back, just from looking at quarterly or looking at yearly numbers, I think it's important to understand where we started and where we are today. We ended this year with the same EBITDA margin, 7.3% that we had before digitalization, that we had in 2019 when our digital penetration was about 1% or slightly more than that. We were able to evolve from 1% to 12% yearly of digital penetration with stable margins, but while absolutely transforming the company inside out.
We had a G&A increase of 1.1% over that period, which is what I call acquisition of execution capacity, investing in technology, investing in management structure, investing in several enablers for us to really pursue this strategy the way we have been doing. The good news is that despite the fact that the G&A increased 1.1%, the contribution margin, sorry, they also increased 1.1%. This efficiency, this digitalization is already more than fully paying itself in the sense that we were able to sustain a very strong growth at our mature stores, way ahead of inflation, generating operating leverage and diluting our sales expenses. If you look on a percentage basis, we go back to where we started.
If we look on an absolute basis, we have today BRL 1 billion more in EBITDA than we had in the beginning. We have a 3.5 percentage points of ROIC higher than we had there. This is a year in which the success of this strategy becomes absolutely clear, I think, to everybody. I'll focus now in the year and then we come back to some more general statements about where we are and I think where we're heading. We ended the year with nearly 2,700 pharmacies. Sorry. Here. We ended the year with 2,700 pharmacies in operation, 260 openings, which is exactly the guidance that we had, 53 closures in the year. Our revenues increased to BRL 31 billion. For me, the most impressive figure is this one.
We have an absolute revenue addition in the year of BRL 5.3 billion. We added, in this year alone something like probably the size of the fourth largest player in Brazil. We increased 21% top line for a massive company this size, which is not easy. Especially because our expansion, in percentage terms is less meaningful today than it was in the past. We're increasing store base slightly below 10% now, but we still maintain a very strong top line growth. Obviously, there's some inflation here, but mostly a very robust growth at mature stores, 13.3% way ahead of inflation. This is the digital transformation affecting our execution. Market share increased to 15.1%. 100 basis points national increase gains in every single region.
Digital, we got to BRL 3.2 billion, 53% growth, achieving a retail penetration of 11.8%, coming from almost nothing in 2018. The contribution margin increased to a record 10.9, this is actually a joint record along with 2016 when I think we had a price cap increase of double digit, mid double digits or something like that. 70 basis points of contribution margin expansion in the year alone, plus some more in the previous years. 29% contribution margin increase. Adjusted EBITDA, BRL 2.26 billion. 7.3% EBITDA margin. 25% EBITDA growth. Same with net income, which grew 26%, reaching BRL 992 million of adjusted net income.
Free cash flow was basically neutral, only BRL -8 million here, meaning that this whole program of IT expansion, et cetera, has been fully financed by the company. When you look at cash consumption, we have BRL 650 million because of internal interest on capital, dividends, M&A relating to startups, but we still maintain a very good and healthy and stable leverage at 0.9. I take again a step back, I think when we look the company year after year, when you compare quarter on quarter, sometimes we forget the big picture. I think the big picture here is the capacity that this company has of compounding, of generating improvements every year. When you look over a certain time frame, the company is a completely different company.
Today we have 3x the store count we had at the merger. We're talking nearly 2,000 more stores that have been opened since the Raia Drogasil merger with huge success. We were back then less than BRL 5 billion company. We are BRL 31 billion company, 7x EBITDA. Sorry, 7x revenues and 8x EBITDA, BRL 2.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA. We see that every single year there is an increase here in absolute terms. Some years it has been slower because we may have lost margin here and there. In others, we recover margin and accelerated. I think this is compounding.
We have a unique capacity of compounding, not only in the Brazilian pharmacy market, but I would say maybe in the Brazilian stock market as a whole. When you look at what's happening in the market, this is market share breakdown over a longer period of time, it's very clear that we are the main winner here. We came in 2014 from slightly more than 9% of share, and we reached for the average of last year, 14.6%. In the Q4, it was already 15%. This is a very meaningful share growth. If you look what happened to the other top five chains, they lost share in the same period from 18.6% to 16.1%.
It's important to mention that in this in this basis here of Abrafarma 2-5. There is also Extrafarma, which is now part of Pague Menos, considered on a pro forma basis. it's take 16.1%. If you only looked what these guys have been doing organically, the number will be probably closer to low 15.2, 15.1, something like that. W hen you look at other chains that are below the top FIVE chains, they are melting from 22.5, actually slightly higher peaks of close to 25, all the way to less than 20%. There is a very clear winner here.
Then there is a separate fight in the small formats, in the popular areas, in small cities where generally we don't enter, in which we see a significant migration from the independents to the associations. This is a normal movement that happens all around the world. To some extent, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because some of the better independents, they join these associations to get stronger. You see this share shifting very quickly here, but this is almost like a separate battle from the one we have today. Talking here about our geographic presence, we ended the period with 2,700 pharmacies all over Brazil, present in every single state of Brazil. And some highlights we already have in the Northeast region, which is a relatively new frontier.
I think we started entering the Northeast maybe seven years ago, but we have today more than 400 stores in this area. Hugely successful operation. We are approaching the mark of 100 stores in Bahia and Pernambuco. We're having both more than 90. Even Ceará, which is a more crowded market. It's a market that is the native market of one of the leaders. We have 73 stores with amazing performance selling in all these markets way more than the local income itself and way more profitability than anyone has in all these markets. Same regards to the South. We already have more than 300 stores in the southern region, more than 100 in Rio Grande do Sul, and we have amazing stores. We sell in all these markets more than the local incumbents.
I think it's important to highlight here that we are opening this year three new DCs to complement the supply chain that we already have. Two traditional DCs. When I say traditional, it's mirrored in the existing formats, one in Cuiabá here in the Mato Grosso state, the other in Belém, the Greater Belém area in the Pará state. These are markets that, for example, Pará is a good example. This is a DC that will serve Pará, Maranhão and probably Piauí. Even if not Piauí and Pará and Maranhão, we're talking close to 90 stores and increase in the count. Same thing in the Midwest with Mato Grosso, for example. There is a new DC in Manaus, but this is a very interesting experiment because it's a completely different thing.
Manaus is a city that is like an island inside the Amazon. There is no roads that can serve Manaus, for example, from Belém, for example. The only way to serve Manaus is through here in a circular way, but this is very far away and very long delivery lead times by land. Today, we serve Manaus by air, but it's very expensive. We open the DC here. We will supply this DC either from here or from here. We will have a buffer of inventory in the city to allows us to deliver by land, which takes longer. With this buffer of inventory, we can maintain or even improve the service level of our stores.
We are proud to say that we have more than 80% of our pharmacies all over Brazil that receive merchandise six days a week. Growing the logistics is something natural to cope with the higher store addition, and also to the fact that we want to be closer to more and more stores to guarantee the best service level possible. In terms of our market share, our quarterly market share reached 15.1, 100 basis points margin expansion, significantly increase of 140 basis points in São Paulo. What's happening here is, again, this is a game of demand and supply. Demand grows every year because of the age of the population. GDP doesn't matter. Yeah, what matters is the age of the population because this is a very inelastic market. São Paulo, we are not opening many stores.
Our main competitor, who's the co-leader here, is not opening many stores. São Paulo has a huge entry barrier from players from outside who have tried in the past and failed miserably. There is demand growth like everybody else, but to less supply growth than we see in other markets. This is translating into higher share. Not to mention digitalization, for example, and other factors that we'll mention further down. We gain share in all the other markets. I would like to highlight Northeast. We already have more than 10%. We reached the double-digit figures here, and we're about to reach them in the South. The North is already moving the needle here with 7.5. At some point, all these markets will be low double digits.
Midwest and São Paulo is where we have more entrenched leadership positions, and I think structurally, they'll have higher market share going on. In terms of the expansion, we opened 260 stores, we closed 53 stores. Two stores were on offer, closed early in the year. 43 were mature closings. This is portfolio optimization. This is something that we're very happy to do because it improves margins and it improves returns. Because we're taking stores that with more, with the pace of expansion we have over time, sometimes they become redundant. We are able to redeploy a significant portion of sales while completely eliminating a full cost base and also redeploying fixed assets like gondolas, computers, et cetera, to other stores. This is a return maximizing strategy, and we're always looking for opportunities.
Finally, there are eight closings of maturing stores. These are expansion mistakes. They'll happen every year, and they represent 3% of the openings. This is a very healthy level, and we expect them to continue as such. Finally, we see that even though our top line still grows a lot, we're still talking about low 20s for a company our size, which is very unprecedented, I would say. The reality is that the stock portfolio is maturing. We had 70% here of mature stores. Today, we are close to 73% of mature stores. The expansion is still the same reliable diesel engine that helps us in our growth.
The reality is that for us to maintain the top line growth that we have, there is a new efficient electric engine helping here, which is the digitalization of the company that is bringing growth to mature stores and allowing us to sustain historic growth, even though the diesel engine is carrying a heavier boat than before. Finally, we are maintaining the guidance of 260 stores per year for the next three years, 78 new pharmacies in this period, same geographic and demographic segmentation, diversification, and the same 97% of assertiveness, which is related to 3% only of mistakes. The capillarity of the company has grown tremendously with our expansion. We are today in 540 cities in Brazil. This year alone, we have joined 55 new cities in the country.
For me, a figure that is not here, but it's very meaningful, is the fact that there are in Brazil 315 municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. We have stores or location signed for short-term opening in 301 of the 315, 95%. We are truly a national player, not because we planted one flag at least in every market, but because we are really, really close to the customer on a countrywide basis. We see the ongoing diversification of the expansion and also of the formats. We see São Paulo becoming only 20% of the total expansion. Today, we think about Raia Drogasil as a company from São Paulo, but São Paulo is only 42% of our footprint. All the rest is outside of São Paulo.
This figure is going down. We're not far from the day that São Paulo will be maybe 35% of one-third of the company. It's a truly national company and a company that serves A class but also B and C class, as this figure shows. Talking about revenue growth here, I think that this is for me, a staggering number, 21% annual growth for a company our size. We recognize we're talking about higher inflation, but obviously still on a real basis, this is tremendous growth for a gigantic company in Brazil with BRL 31 billion in revenues. In the Q4, this growth was higher than this. It was 21.9%. There's something more that we have to talk here, which is 4Bio. We bought 4Bio in 2015. It was a tiny company.
This year, 4Bio is selling 20x more than it sold in 2015. We're talking about a company that should sell this year it already sells more than BRL 2 billion. Why I'm saying this because 4Bio right now is growing more than 50%. There is the specialty pharmacy market is a more consolidated market than the retail market. There is a player in distress because it's over-leveraged because of the whole financial environment, and we are draining sales here. Obviously, not surprisingly, it's a player controlled by private equity once again. 4Bio growth matters because first it's good to see that happen, but it has a negative mix effect because the margin in specialty are lower than the normal margin. We are spending margin and absorbing a negative mix effect from 4Bio.
When we look at our sales mix, I would say is roughly uneventful here, is very flat. I think the only the difference probably only point worth mentioning is Q4, slightly less OTC because of COVID comp base Q4 last year, and very strong HPC performance all across the board. HPC was a challenging category at some point for us. We are flying here and here in some categories, we compete with marketplaces, platforms, and we are thriving against them and against our traditional competitors. When we break this revenue growth, for me, the important message is here. Our mature stores grew 13.3% in the year, and they grew 13.5% in the quarter.
Obviously, we're talking nearly 6% real growth. Of course, that we are carrying into the Q1 this year a CMED price increase of close to 11. This is still 2.6 percentage points higher than the CMED increase. This is really performance. This is really digitalization of the relationship with the customer, increasing loyalty, increasing spending. This is the competitive advantage of the company, the sheer scale that we have versus all the others. Our closest competitors, by the end of this year, may become one-third of our size. We have BRL 1.1 million in sales per mature stores. Everybody else is proud to have BRL 600- BRL 650. This is scale, this is efficiency, this is expense dilution, this means price competitivity, this means investment capacity. In the end, the answer is here.
This is driving our performance and generating very significant efficiency gains for us. Talking about digital. Digital in the quarter reached 11.8%, 54% of growth. It's stable versus the previous quarter, but when we look Q1 2023, the speed is already increasing again and increasing at a meaningful rate. Why this matters, again, because once the customer becomes digital, the customer will spend more than before because of higher loyalty and higher engagement. Doesn't matter how much comes in the channel. What matters is that the customer overall stores or digitally will spend more than before and will drive our comps and will drive efficiency. Not to mention that from 2019 to today, our digital penetration increased from 1% to 11% on a yearly basis.
I know no other company that has this much growth in digital penetration without suffering with the margins, which underscores the fact that our digital has tremendous overall. The channel has somewhat less margin than the stores, even though it's positive and well positive. The effect of omni-channel over the total, the effect that the digita is a tool towards loyalty, drives this kind of efficiency, being able to grow a lot a lower margin channel while maintaining overall margins and gaining a lot in absolute margins. The reason is here, it's the store. The store is the basis of everything we do. The store is the customer acquisition machine, is the digital onboarding machine.
Two-thirds of the downloads happen in the store, driven and assisted by our staff, and 94% of the deliveries are done out of the stores, 89% in up to four hours, of which 59% is click and collect with zero marginal delivery cost. This is the answer of why we grow so much digital without suffering on the margin side. Another highlight here is our app. Our app means 58% of our total digital sales. No other pharmacy even publishes these figures, given the edge that we have here. 89% of these digital sales come from modern and proprietary channels. We have 9% of super apps, which is modern, but it's not proprietary. We give the customer the option, but our aim is to be better than these guys for the customer not to go there.
It will happen, it will have to happen naturally. Finally, call center, which is like a Jurassic channel, is only 2% of our sales. For many of our competitors, it is 25% of what they call digital sales. The basis for everything that we're doing here, digital, stores, is the customer, is the customer satisfaction, is increasing our customer base, is making the customer into a more loyal customer. We ended the year with 47.5 million active customers who shopped with us during the year. This is a 5.2 million addition of customers. Of these, six million is what we call frequent customers, and the number of frequent customers grew 600,000 in the year. Why it matters?
Because a frequent customer, shops way more frequently though than what we call a casual customer, 21 x a year, 4 x more. Out of the 6 million frequent customers, 1.2 or 20% are already frequent and digital. The customers who are frequent and digital, instead of shopping 21 x a year, they shop from us 27 x a year. Not to mention that the average spend, the average ticket also goes up. This is the wheel of fortune for us. Historically, transforming a casual customer into a loyal customer more frequently, also transforming a loyal customer into a loyal digitalized customer. And obviously, when we do that, the experience of the customer is very important for us.
We have a benchmark NPS in our physical pharmacies of 89, this is also the ambition that we have in the digital channels. The digital channels are evolving still, this is the first time we bring the NPS metrics of digital. We break into two parts here. The first is how the customers evaluate our delivery or pickup. We started with 50 of NPS, we're now close to 80. The most important one is this here. We had in 2019, 42 only of NPS in our app. This is pure app experience. This is the robustness, the reliability, the UX, this is all about the app. It was 42. When we implemented the Magento platform, initially we suffered here.
This is normal, this is a pain, but now it's 62, and we want this number to be maybe close to 70 this year, and then year by year, catching up with this 89. It's clear that we're already providing a very good experience. It's not a state-of-the-art experience yet, but I think today we're providing a very good experience. We're very proud about this, and this reflects the maturation of our IT investments, of the productivity, the growth productivity, our squads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Finally, when we talk about this journey of loyalty and digitalization, I'd like to highlight the importance that Stix has for us. Stix is a loyalty coalition founded by Raia Drogasil in partnership with GPA, pharmacy and supermarkets are probably the two most relevant and highest frequency channels for a consumer.
We came together with a coalition with a single point scheme for us, for Raia, for Drogasil, for Pão de Açúcar, and for the Extra brand as well. Stix is already very important for us. Stix is part of the digitalization journey because the customer to participate in Stix has to enroll through the app. There are things related to the program like checking balance that they do in the app, it's important. We have a very uncomplicated experience in redeeming points in their purchase. They can do that in the checkout. The points count like cash, and they pay less in their next purchases if they have that.
What's very important is that Stix started only between Raia and GPA, and now Stix starting to grow. We recently had the entry of Sodimac, which is part of the Falabella Group, and it's an important player in Brazil in the construction segment, and also of Polishop with it's a local retailer of hard line products. We are also very proud because we just signed a very important new partnership in retailing. I can't disclose right now the name of the company. This will be made public very shortly. It's a national retailer in a complementary vertical which is very meaningful for Brazil. Yesterday, there's another partnership, and this one I am very happy to unveil here. We signed a partnership between Stix and Livelo.
Livelo belongs to Bradesco and Banco do Brasil, is their loyalty company and will have Livelo customers being able to exchange their points in Raia Drogasil, Pão de Açúcar, GPA through Stix. Livelo has 40 million members, in which in less than six years is the main loyalty program in Brazil, I think we are doing a very significant enhancement of Stix with this very meaningful partnership. Gross margin. We had an expansion of 40 basis points in the year. This was driven by the Q2 because the 10.9 CMED price increase drove a high gross margin, like it always happens when you have high price increases. On a quarterly basis, we have a 50 basis points pressure. This 50 basis points pressure, 10 basis points is retail, which is like a normal volatility, it to be in line with previous quarter.
There is 40 basis points, which is the negative mix effect from the fact that 4Bio was growing more than 50%. This is a headwind that we have for the quarter, and despite the headwind, we're expanding margins very significantly. Finally, cash cycle. 1.5 days higher than last year, which is exactly a higher level of safety inventories that we have been carrying in order to face the most complicated moment still in terms of supply chain disruptions happen around the world. In our case, we don't see any disruptions in our stores. In our view, supply chain is a combination between capital, IT, and management know-how, and I think we excel on those three items. We see competitors complaining about supply chain disruptions.
We don't see supply chain disruptions. We manage that with capital, technology, and people. Selling expense is another highlight of the year and of the quarter. Direct consequence of the operating leverage gain driven by the mature store growth, 40 basis points gain in the year and a very important gain in the quarter. It's important to mention that we have some tax effects here in the quarter that they fully relate to the years, that is in this quarter, a 50 basis points benefit referring to previous quarters. The selling expenses will be 17.6%, which still a very important dilution versus 18.4%. When we talk about the EBITDA, that's not affected because on the one hand it help, on the other we have the four margin headwind that kind of offset one another.
With this contribution margin, which 10.9% in the year and 10.9% in the quarter, very significant contribution margin gain. General and administrative expenses. Well, our challenge this year was to control G&A. Our G&A has been growing very fast from 2.4% in 2018 to 3.5% this year. This is acquisition of execution capacity. This was done on purpose, and with a long-term perspective, this is how we think. We're not concerned about the year, we're not concerned about the quarter, we're concerned about long-term value creation. We added this execution capacity in IT and management structure to be able to deliver our transformation.
The good news is that the same amount we spent in G&A over these four years, 2019-2023, came back in operating contribution margin due to gains in mature stores. When you look at the EBITDA margin, it's a 20 basis points expansion this year, and it's a 70 basis points expansion this quarter. This makes, in my view, a very strong quarter here. Net income. Similar dynamics increasing 10 basis points in the year, increased 60 basis points in the quarter. Something that is happening here is a higher tax efficiency. Because of high interest rates, we are able to pay more interest on capital, we have a tax benefit associated to that. This is helping our net margin grow in a meaningful way. Finally, cash flows.
Our free cash flow were neutral, BRL -8 million only. This means that all the CapEx in IT expansion, et cetera, that we're doing has been fully supported by our operations. When we put acquisition of startups, payment to shareholders in the form of interest on equity and dividends, interest that went up, then obviously, it's a BRL 650 million cash consumption. With the profitability growing, we're basically stable in leverage at 0.9, which is a very healthy level to have in an environment like this. We are entering a very difficult environment in Brazil, an environment maybe of recession, an environment with high interest, tightening credit, and we are very well prepared in this kind of environment is generally where we shine.
Not only we are from the start, very different from our competitors, much higher scale, much higher store efficiency, more aggressive prices, better operation, better execution. In a moment like this with this kind of balance sheet, we maintain the same expansion as before. We maintain our stores with the same inventory and people than before. While several players who are leveraged, and I'm not saying it's every player, we have other good competitors who are in good shape as well and will benefit as well. The guys who are leveraged will suffer a lot because they have a huge cash drain from interest expenses, they will have to reduce inventories, they will have to reduce people in the store. I see competitors bragging about store headcount going down.
I tell you something, if the store headcount goes down without efficiency, you are penalizing your customer and then the sales go down and the percentage goes up. We never brag about headcount reductions, and we want to support a headcount that is comfortable to the consumer. This is a service business. This is not only a price business. Our stock fell 2.4% last year, while the Ibovespa increased 4.7%. We're talking about a negative alpha of 7%. When we look the long-term picture since the merger or since the IPOs of Raia Drogasil , we're talking more than 20% annual total shareholder returns.
Finally, here to sum up the financial part of the presentation, I'll next pass to Flavio for him to highlight some of the executional elements of our strategy. This is a very important picture for us to take a step back from the quarter and even from the year and to see what's happening on the longer term. The green portion here of the bar, the green bar is EBITDA margin, the red bar and G&A. One plus the other is the contribution margin, meaning the store generates like 10.9%. You take 3.5% of G&A, we have 7.3% of EBITDA. This is how you read this chart.
The chart shows first and foremost, 110 basis points G&A increase over this period. Brutal increase in structure, in IT, in acquiring execution capacity. We have been saying this, it's funny because I think the market didn't take notice until we started saying that we had grown more than 100 basis points. What happened, and it started pretty soon, is that with this better execution, the contribution margin started growing. The contribution margin that was 9.8 grew the same 1.1, grew 10.9. Because mature stores are growing way above inflation here. We have today the same EBITDA margin that we had in 2019 when we started digitalization. The difference is, first, that there was 1% of digital penetration here, today is 12%.
There is a channel that on a standalone basis is less profitable, pressures negatively, but provides a completely different customer economics to the point that even with so much more of this less profitable channel, we have the same profitability as before. In absolute terms, however, it's BRL 1 billion higher EBITDA, BRL 2.3 billion versus BRL 1.3 billion, 68% absolute EBITDA growth. The return on invested capital is 3.5 percentage points increase. We have an asset turnover much more efficient today than we had back then. From any angle that we see, this is a year that in the end, it's a testament to the success of our strategy and to the quality of execution that we have been able to pursue.
To finalize, I think the best is coming ahead. Why? We have stabled the G&A and starting in 2023, G&A will go down. It will go down. At the same point, all these efficiency gains that are happening at the store level of 10.9% of contribution margin, I believe they will persist because we still grow much stores ahead of inflation. This is opening the space for us to increase our margin in the coming years. When we talk specifically about 2023, because of the peak margin of the Q2, I am not sure if we will see margin stability, margin expansion or what we'll see. The most important thing is that the structural margin goes up.
The structural margin goes up in 2023, even if the total margin may not, may or may not because of the Q2, but for the rest of the year, we will be better than next year, which will plant a very good 2024 and ahead. I'll now pass to Flavio for he to detail some of our execution aspects.
Thank you, Eugênio. Moving forward here and talking about our strategies. 2022 was a good year, focused on bringing new customers, improving their experience and satisfaction, and developing our omni-channel capabilities. As Eugênio mentioned, we were able to grow annual sales by 21% and EBITDA by 25%. We also reached 15% market share nationwide and expanded it in every region we are present. Main reason for this is our customer base made out of roughly one-fourth of the Brazilian population and who engages to us on average 7x a year. If we only consider our tier 1 digitalized customers, this frequency goes up to 27 x a year. Our building of the new pharmacy concept was assertive.
We count stores in 540 cities and in almost every city in Brazil with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Our stores NPS is 89. This is the base for our digitalization, which now represents 11.8% of total sales and is delivering goods as fast as one hour in 81% of the cases in main cities. Most importantly, with a sustainable and accretive profitability. On top of this, we started to create this additional layer of the marketplace, which now counts more than 170,000 items, as well as our health platform, who is integrating several startups to promote health and reduce the systematic healthcare costs. All these activities are poised by the development of our technology, with new systems and our way of doing things with a unique and integrated data lake and data science.
Also by our culture, more agile and flexible, and by our management model and governance, counting 13 new positions of directors who are experienced in the new business and activities we are tackling, but also with an extended board with new competencies. Looking forward, the opportunities and challenges for 2023 relates to accelerate the customer relationship digitalization, improving experience and delivery time, engaging customers, and improving our marketplace sellers' UX. All of this by increasing our squads' productivity and scaling data science and MarTech. Second focus is on improving our health platform, launching complete and integrated solutions to promote health, scaling Univers, our PBM, as well as the throughput of our invested startup.
Third is to develop our retail ads platform, maximizing the potential of our first-party data that counts with the identification of 97% of all our transactions online and offline. The installation of TV screens in our pharmacies will offer advertisers a broad selection of physical and digital channels with limitless audience segmentation and the possibility to personalize content. This will both better monetize advertisers' investments and offer more benefits to our customers. Fourth.
We will keep growing fast, gaining share, and start diluting expenses, combining scale, efficiency, and investment capability. I would just like to remind you that all of this is part of our ambition to be, by 2030, the group that contributes the most towards a healthier society. To address this ambition, we launched the Walking Together program, divided in three pillars, eight dimensions, and 35 goals. Our focus on 2022 was on improving the health of our employees, developing women leadership, and incentive our employees to advance in their studies, and to guarantee our stores as conscious disposal sites. We continue to be part of ISE, the corporate sustainability portfolio of B3, and moved one level in the MSCI index to BBB, and two levels in the CDP index, moving to B. Thank you.
Thank you, Flavio. Thank you, Eugênio. We'll now proceed to the Q&A session. We have one question from Lucas Dias from Aster Capital. Lucas, please go ahead.
Hello. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a few. First, if you could speak a bit about the Ads strategy. What are clients thinking of your service net? I know you have started to provide this service for a couple of months now for some big clients. How has the feedback been? That's the first question. The second one is regarding ROIC. You didn't provide this information before. Like, you didn't share in the release, and now it's, now you are giving more focus to it. It's at 18.5%. How do you see this number going forward?
Thinking of five, six years, what is the level that the ROIC could reach in the long term? If it's in the plans of the company to improve this number, or you will reinvest in prices in order to grow more instead of having an even higher ROIC, which is already really high at 18%. These two questions are more strategic. I have a couple of doubts regarding some recent developments. The first one, I know it's minor, but what was the rationale behind the share bonus proposal to shareholders? It's pretty minor, and it doesn't change much, it would be nice to understand why do it. Second is regarding tax efficiency. You talked a lot about that.
In theory, it's due to interest on capital, there were also other helpful effects, especially this quarter, but in the full year also. Do you see these effects as recurring going forward? Do you see your tax rate at below 20% in the coming years due to a higher tax efficiency, or maybe there were some one-off effects in 2022? These are the questions. Thank you.
Lucas, thank you for your question. I'll start with the more financial part and then leave the funny part, which is the ads part, to the end, okay? In terms of return on invested capital, I mean, this is a figure that we try to look on a yearly basis. When you are in the middle of a cycle of transformation, sometimes it can get convoluted because we are investing a lot and the return is not there. It's a figure that we always look internally and it's obvious the improvement that we have. This improvement also results from the fact that we're becoming a more mature company. We have less stores in maturation than before.
The CapEx in the expansion and probably the total CapEx as a % of sales is going down. The asset utilization, the asset turnover is improving a lot. We have an estimation in the company that if you forget any more economic gains that we can make in the future from new things and just consider the maturation of all the store portfolio. If we had a store mature, because a store that is still maturing, it means that we have the full CapEx already made, the full working capital already sitting there, the full expenses or nearly full expenses already priced in. We have sales and EBITDA that are below what they will be in the future.
Just if we apply the residual curve, and see where this would bring the company, this would bring the company very likely to what, mid-20s or higher in terms of ROIC. I'm not talking about general dilution, I'm not talking about contribution margin expansion because of new things. I'm not talking about ads. I am only talking about store maturity. There's something like 100 basis points of margin from residual maturation stores to be to be recovered over the long term, which will drive our returns to the very least to the mid-20s. This is a metric that we like, but at the same point, this is an accounting metric. The decision about passing something or not to the consumer is not because of the ROIC, because the ROIC is an accounting metric.
Let's say that we had a terrible past, but now we become the best company in the Universe. I wouldn't have a good ROIC because of the past, but that doesn't mean that we're doing good today. We have to look at ROIC as one metric in a big basket of KPIs and drive our strategy from there, not only from this figure. Increasing price or decreasing prices because of ROIC, in my view, doesn't make much sense. Thanks for the question about the share bonus. This is important to clarify. Under our bylaws, and I think also under law, we have a maximum limit for profit reserves. Once we exceed that profit reserve limit, we have to redistribute that reserve. There are two ways of distributing reserves, with cash and without cash.
With cash, the first is interest on capital. We already capped that. We already do the maximum allowed by law, so no way to do it. Could we have done it a dividend in cash? Yes. In our view, it doesn't make any sense to take BRL 1.5 billion from cash from the company with 0.9 net debt to EBITDA, which is very good, but in a time in which we have interest rates very high and et cetera. It was never the plan to distribute more than we already do. We have a payout around 50%. That's a very good payout. It doesn't make any sense today with the strategy we have to take BRL 1.5 billion from our cash reserves and pay back to shareholders. Forget any distribution with cash.
When you talk about without cash, we could simply redistribute from the social capital line, or we could do what we're doing, which is issuing a share bonus. The share bonus has the advantage of increasing the historical cost base of the shareholders. In the end of the day, this share bonus will generate a tax shield for our shareholders. It's minor, it's small, but it's good to have the opportunity to do it. I f we have to reduce the reserve, the best way to do it is in a way that creates value versus a sterile way that wouldn't create any value. This is almost like a free lunch to some extent. Regarding the tax efficiency, you're correct.
I think the main impact is interest on capital and interest on capital when the interest rates go down, for sure that efficiency goes down. There are other things as well that in terms of opportunities that we have. Brazil is a very complex country in terms of tax legislation. I talked during the presentation, Flavio also stressed the way we have changed our structure, invested in our structure. We have a management team today that is much bigger and much deeper and more qualified than we had before. Part of that, we have the tax area as well. We're looking for opportunities. We're always looking to jurisprudence is being generated, and we are very safe company in terms of tax appropriations.
I joke that we are the only company that has no recurring gains on a recurring basis because we are conservative. While everybody else generally takes advantage of any fiscal thesis, and then if they have a problem later, they become non-recurring expenses. We are very conservative. We generally have no recurring gains. Maintaining the same stance, we are able to find other opportunities that I think they are recurring. Obviously, the tax efficiency falls down every year because the interest on capital will be lower every year. Obviously, when the interest go down, the impact will be even higher than that. The other effects, they are structural, but it's normal that the tax efficiency should diminish every year.
Finally, the Ads strategy that you touched, I mean, it's important to give a perspective here. When you look the advertising market around the world, the first phenomenon is a huge shift from traditional media to digital media. The second point that is happening here, I know you guys understand very well, is the death of the unique customer identifiers. If you look, for example, at Apple, Apple doesn't provide any more unique customer identifiers because of privacy restrictions. Every media player who relied on third-party data and several of the big media digital media around the world, the unicorns, et cetera, they relied a ton on third-party data.
They have their own first-party data in their social apps, et cetera, but they had an ad network outside of third-party data, and all of a sudden that ad network is running dry. All the companies who rely on third-party data are losing signal and the companies who invest in advertising, they're losing returns on the investment. When we look, it's a big shift from third-party data to first-party data. You look at Raia Drogasil, we have a trove of first-party data. First of all, we are the number one retailer in our segment by far. We are reference player in beauty, personal care, et cetera, even if you include other platforms, supermarkets and other channels.
We are the only physical retailer in Brazil for sure and maybe around the world that has 97% demand visibility even in the physical stores. We have nearly the same customer visibility that Amazon has, that Mercado Libre has, and other that Alibaba has, et cetera, and full ability to segment these customers. We have a wide array of media channels, of digital media channels that include traditional stuff like paid search, like banners, like email, SMS pushes. We also do matching of our base with Facebook and Google, and we do posting on social medias. We have screens in the store that we're now adding more screens to the store. In the end of the day, if you think about the conversion funnel, we are in all the stages.
We have awareness media, we have conversion media, we have coupons that is really when the customer is already inside the store. We organize ourselves to tackle this opportunity. I believe this can be a huge driver of economics for the company in the future. We set a separate company named RD Ads. We are nominating in the coming weeks a CEO full-time for this company. There's a team full-time there. We are investing in technology. Part of the IT investment we did this year was on MarTech capabilities, and without MarTech capabilities, this is only a dream. We are the only pharma retailer today talking Brazil about digital advertising because we have the MarTech enablers in place.
All my competitors have a huge work to do before even being able to do that, not to mention capacity to finance that, demand visibility and all the other issues. This is very strategic. I mean, we have started to do things before, and we are gaining traction with our suppliers. I don't think this is a life-changing number for this year. It may help, but I don't think it's a life-changing number for this year. We have a lot of contracts secured. We are showing our suppliers that return on invested capital in our campaigns is better than in traditional digital media because, I mean, if you think about most digital media, it's behavior segmentation. I mean, in our case, we have the full visibility of the customer.
We know who buys what, who doesn't buy what, who stopped buying something. We can do things very targeted. We reach them when they are surfing the web. We also reach them inside the store, for example. This is a unique efficiency and maybe this can become a major value driver for the company going forward. Thanks for the question, Lucas.
Thank you.
The Q&A session is over. We now return the conference call to RD's executives for their final remarks. Gentlemen, you may proceed.
Okay. First and foremost, I'd like to thank you all for attending this conference call, and I'll try to sum up some of the things that in our view made this year and the quarter very good and very strong and very significant period in the company history in the implementation of our strategy. I think the first point here is that this year underscores the success of our digitalization strategy. We got back to the same EBITDA margin we had before, but with much higher absolute EBITDA, BRL 1 billion higher, with 3.5 additional percentage points in ROIC and with a very positive trend going forward of diluting G&A and continue to improve contribution margin, which should open the window for margin expansion going forward.
I'm not individualizing this year because with this year we have to deal with the Q2 in which we know we lose margins. Regardless of what happens on the average, if we lose margin in the Q2, but we gain margin every single quarter, for me, this is a better company. Our jobs as executives and as shareholders is not to make pretty numbers that compare neatly across a sequence. It's to create value, real value, and to make it a better company. If you are a better company, even if you had the headwind of the gross margin this year, this will make us for a better number next year, the other year and the other year.
The strategy is there, it's clear, the benefits are apparent, and for me, any doubts the market may have had in terms of the economics of what we're doing, I think at this point, they don't have any reason to exist, and the strategy is absolutely more than proven. There's a second element that I think it's interesting to highlight, and this is something that we say a lot, but I don't know if people fully grasp, which is the extent to which our company is a great inflationary hedge for an investor. We have a business model with an inflation hedge built into that. I'll start by remembering that the Q1 this year, or this year I mean the published year, 2022 , which is last year chronographically.
The Q1, 2022, was probably the most difficult quarter that I remember reporting since the merger of the two companies because we had an inflation lag. If you guys remember that our prices go in steps once a year. Our expenses go continuously like a ramp. If you zoom Q1 this year, we had high expenses that had grown, but we still have the prices of one year ago. Margin pressure. For me, it was never a surprise. Comes the Q2. Again, no surprise. We have the past inflation passed down to the prices. Nothing happens with demand because demand is inelastic. We generate this big one-time inflationary gain on inventories, which even pays for the Q1 and makes for a first semester that increased margin versus the first semester of the previous year.
Set a new price level in tandem with inflation, then inflation started going down and we even started to have an advantage on that regard, and we had a comp in the year much higher than before. This year underscores really clearly how this dynamic of inflation hedging pans out. This is a business insulated for inflation, and I think we proved that once again. Finally, and I think this is a very timely issue, is the resilience of the business. I say this time and time again, sometimes people don't believe, but this is a business that is not affected by GDP. When we do our budgeting, our forecasting, GDP, there is not a cell in our Excel for GDP. GDP doesn't affect our demand. What affect our demand is the aging of the population.
The fact that the senior population is growing every year, 3%-4% a year. This is driving pharmaceutical market to grow every year 4% ahead of inflation in average. If inflation is 10, it will grow 14. If inflation is six, it will grow 10. Give or take, this is what happens every year. This is a very resilient market. This resilience is not only for us, it's also for our competitors and for the whole market. This is a good thing about our segment. Having said that, there are things that are pretty unique to us. First, I mean, I think the level of scale advantage we have today is something we never enjoyed in the past.
I think by the end of this year, 2023, we may become 3x the size of the number two player in the market, and many times the size of all the guys that go below in the list. This scale gives us a lot of buying power. This scale gives us management depth, the capacity to have all this. But it doesn't end with the scale. We have efficiency. Our mature stores sell BRL 1.1 million per store per month. Our competitors are happy sometimes when they sell BRL 600- BRL 650. We have a level of sales expense dilution that nobody has.
This allows us to be, at the same time, the low cost provider percentage-wise, but on absolute terms, the service provider, because we have more people in the store, we have nicer stores, nicer location. We provide more service for the customer, which costs less for us because of this huge expense dilution. This allows us to be cheaper as well. Our gross margin is similar and even sometimes slightly lower than some of our competitors. Given our size, there is no doubt that we buy better than them. What happens is that we pass more to our consumers. We see that with digital coming from one to 11, we see that our with a margin that pressures gross margin.
The gross margin hasn't gone down because we have other things like private label, negotiation gains, et cetera, paying for that gross margin bill. Finally, the third element here is the balance sheet of the company. We have very low leverage, 0.9, at a moment in which inter-bank interest rates are, in theory, 13.75, but in practice with the credit tightening that is happening, it's very difficult to raise capital today by paying less than 14-15, by paying less than 16-18, depending on the company, even more than that. We are in a very resilient market, and we don't suffer with the credit tightening. We'll be maintaining the same expansion regardless of where the interest rates are.
We're maintaining the same inventory in the stores. We're maintaining the same people in the stores, while several of our competitors that are very leveraged will have to suffer, will have to cut on expansion, will have to reduce people in the stores, will have to work with less inventory, et cetera. We are very well-positioned for the kind of environment that we're seeing today in Brazil. This is the kind of environment where historically we shine. If you see an environment of 2% interest rate, this is an environment that anybody does well, anybody expands. Obviously, the bill from the bad expansion comes later. It's a tougher market for us because a market with more competition. This kind of market, this is where we shine.
In the end of the day, when you talk about the inflationary hedge and the resiliency, what I'm talking about is low beta. We have a beta of 0.6, for which I don't think we get adequate credit. I don't see the sell side using our beta in our cost of capital. We are the best diversification you can have because of this beta in the Brazilian capital market. Thank you all for attending the call. Thanks for all our long-term shareholders.
We're very happy to be able to show how a cycle like this is working out because we have several shareholders who have been with us since the merger, even before in the IPO of Drogasil and later in the IPO of Raia, and who have stayed with us during this cycle, have understood what we're doing, and have always maintained the focus on the long term, the same way we have. I also say that it's not the shareholder who chooses the company. It's the company who choose the shareholder. If you think about long-term returns and you're not concerned as much about the end of the quarter, you get a type of shareholder. If you think about quarters and doing things the way you can do in the short term, you get another type of shareholder.
I think we're very privileged and very grateful for the shareholders we have. Thank you very much.