Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us for our second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining us are André Farber, our CEO, who will provide the opening remarks, Miguel Colquhoun, our CFO, who joined the company in May, and he will comment on our results, and Francisco Santos, the head of midway Financeira. They will all be available for the Q&A session after the company's presentation. Should you wish to pose a question during the Q&A session, please click on the Q&A icon on the bottom of your screen, write your name to enter the queue, and wait for your name to be called. You can also send us your questions in writing by clicking on that same icon. This event is being recorded and simultaneously translated into English.
The slides shared are in Portuguese, but the English version is available for download on our IR website. Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements that may be made during this conference related to the company's business perspectives and projections are based on the beliefs and assumptions of the company and are no guarantee of performance. These are all the housekeeping remarks, and now I turn the floor over to our CEO, André.
Thank you, Isa. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very happy to be here with you today. You saw Rebeca's picture. We're very proud of her, the greatest medalist in our history, sponsored by Riachuelo for five years now. And we think that this is quite significant because we've been showing very robust results, so we're happy twice.
Happy with where we're at, these results, and all the support that we've been given to Brazil and to Brazilian sport. Here on this slide, you can see some of the athletes that we sponsor and support. Gymnastics, they got the bronze medal. Guilherme Costa, swimmer. So Riachuelo is a Brazilian company with national capital, and we're really proud of this. Our mission is to generate positive impact and create opportunities in Brazil. Having sponsored the uniforms and having supported the Brazilian Olympic Committee and the athletes is just part of our DNA. We've been doing that since our foundation. We've been one of the supporters of Ayrton Senna, and this is part of our DNA. We support Brazil, and we develop our whole productive chain. Now, let's move on to our results. As I said earlier, we're very proud of the results we achieved.
I've been heading the company for a year and three months now, and we have been delivering consistent results and increasingly better results as well, grounded but aiming high. We've been able to show robust results, even with changes in the team and the evolution of the company. Miguel joined the team recently. This is his first call, so welcome, Miguel. The results don't always come this fast. I am surprised myself. The results actually came earlier than I projected, and what is ahead is even better. I'm very optimistic and very happy with what we've been doing and the results we have obtained up until now. Here on this slide, I'd like to remind you of our focus. This is what we've been working on in the last 12 months and what we'll continue to work on in the near future.
Of course, we're always evolving with our initiatives, but we continue focusing on these four dimensions. The first is product obsession. We're focused on improving our core categories, improving quality, investing in our teams, improving our collections, and improving our service level to the stores. Product availability makes all the difference when it comes to consumer experience, and we continue with laser focus on this, making change. We see clear levers to improve our products and sales, and we've been working on that last year, and we'll continue improving this front. The second dimension is the democratization of access to fashion. Brazil is quite a complex and large country. We have continental dimensions, and we need to understand the dynamics of each region, so we've been clustering our stores better and better, and delivering differentiated assortment.
This strategy worked really well in recent quarters, and we are also getting the entry-level products prices right, and we've been very attractive to our consumers. This has generated great demand, and we're very happy about that. We are a company that have always invested a lot. We believe in our business, we believe in Brazil, so we have valuable assets. From the beginning, I've been telling you in our earnings calls that we can extract even more value. We're using our industrial plant better. We have now larger volumes, and this gives us better responsiveness, and we can also lower prices and sustain margins, and even get some margin gains, as you'll see in our results. In my humble opinion, we have the best financial company in the market, midway Financeira. Our systems are operating well. We have a very mature team in our management.
We have a large customer base, 7 million cards. We have been granting credit with great discipline, and by doing so, we've been able to improve, midway's management overall and extract more value from this asset. So as you'll see in further details later on, we have invested a lot in technology in recent years, and we have been slowing down in the investments right now, but we want to extract the most from those investments. We are outperforming the market, growing with profitability. We believe that the future is multi-channel with strong brick-and-mortar presence, but also with the support of digital. We are providing great experience in e-commerce. Consumers are responding, and we have growth in e-commerce, 15, 20, 14, with very sound margins, getting close to the profitability levels of the store channel.
This makes me very happy and confident, reassured that we'll continue to invest in this multi-channel experience. Last but not least, we continue to look at our operational efficiency with great care and caution. We do invest because we believe in the future, but with discipline. We will not deny funds to projects that will put us in a better position in the long run, but we do capital allocation with a lot of discipline, and we continue with our work of inventory optimization. We have decreased 25 days of inventory in our inventory as compared to last quarter, and we have grown above inflation rates with good cost control. We're improving our profitability. Finally, we have many levers in our cash generation business. We continue generating cash and deleveraging the company, which is another great accomplishment by our team.
We're getting close to leverage levels of 0.7x. We have advanced some debt payments this first half of the year, and we continue working on deleveraging the company, which will lead to an increase in EBITDA and greater profit generation. This would create a very sound company with great muscle to dream and aim higher and higher. This is a summary of our strategic priorities. I would also like to summarize our main results now. I know there is a lot on this slide, but starting with the upper left, we have grown our revenue by 10.5% and 9% in same-store sales. We have had 18% volume growth, which is even more important.
For me, this is quite significant because it shows how our business model is attractive to consumers, and we have 18% more items and 14% more tickets, I mean, an increase in tickets. Once we adjust our value propositions, consumers do come. We have made changes to have a more sustainable model in the long term, and this shows that we're right. Although there is competition from international marketplaces with unfair tax regulations, consumers continue feeling attracted to our value proposition. And even though our e-commerce is growing, brick-and-mortar stores continue to have a key role in fashion. You know, people wanna go and try on the items, and it's also, you know, an opportunity to socialize.
People go to the mall, you know, fashion is part of people's everyday lives, and with the improvements we have made in recent quarters, we see that consumers are responding really well. Our revenue has grown by 10.5%, and our volumes have grown by 18%. That has led to a decrease in average value. This is also part of our initiative to democratize fashion. This is one of our pillars that we have shared with you ever since last year. We were wondering whether we would be able to protect our margins, and we told you a while ago that, yes, we had levers to protect our margin in spite of the drop in average prices, and these levers were related to better utilization of our assets, better pricing, better inventory management.
So here, once again, you can see that even though the average prices are going down, there has been an increase in our gross margins. And I don't think we have reached our full potential when it comes to margin gains. There is still work to be done. We don't know exactly where. This is a continuous work. We can talk about that during our Q&A, but we know that we still have opportunity here. And this leads to an impact on our EBITDA, that has achieved a margin of 14.4%. We're very happy to see the profitability increasing, and we might think that the results of a quarter may be impacted by some quarters that are offset the following quarter. But when we look at the first quarter of the year, we have had a 75% increase in EBITDA.
In Q1, it was BRL 600 million in EBITDA. So we're very happy now with this increase, and we know that we still have the second half of the year, which is even more important for us, and it will come strong, and we are happy to continue with this positive trend. I have commented on this, we have been reducing inventory ever since I joined the company. The inventory reduction started in June last year, so it's been happening in a very consistent way for 14 months now. We've been able to reduce inventory by 24 days. This was a hard work by all of our team that frees up cash, which is one of the items that we're going to show you today.
midway Financeira has achieved phenomenal results, one of the best profitabilities of this type of company in the market, and that is due to our consistency, to our discipline, better operations, better offers, that enable us to extract a lot of value from this asset, with an experience that strengthens retail, but at the right risk level. This is a very positive moment for midway, working closer and closer to retail, helping our retail grow, but also with very solid results. We're very happy, and we expect even better results. Result of that is the income, BRL 57 million in net income. We know that we still have a leverage level, but we have been de-leveraging the company, and of course, as we de-leverage the company, we expected net income to grow.
As a result of all of the initiatives that we have implemented, we have seen improvements in cash flow generation. The first half of last year, we had BRL 178 million-BRL 334 million in cash generation now. I'm very happy to free up cash so that we can invest this, these proceeds better or pay out dividends, whatever we want. We reduced our leverage to 0.7x, coming from 1.8x last year, so great reduction. The way we've been managing the company, we even see room to reduce leverage even more. All of our indicators are quite positive. As the CEO, I firmly believe that we're still midway through this process, and we'll continue to work on many other levers.
So this is not a type of result that we'll see during two quarters only. We will keep these results and surprise you positively in the future. I'm very happy with our team. I'm very thankful for them. And that was all. I'll be back for the Q&A session, and now I turn the floor over to Miguel, who will give you further details about our results.
Good afternoon, everyone. I would like to thank André and all of you for joining us today. We're very confident about our strategy. The results that we have achieved have been quite consistent and sound. So we want to share further details with you now. Yet another quarter with a very consistent performance, showing that this is not a one-off thing, but this is a very well-implemented strategy. Starting on slide number seven, our consolidated operational performance.
Consolidated net revenue reached BRL 2.3 billion this quarter, up 8.2% quarter-over-quarter. This was boosted mainly by retail, with a two-digit growth, 10.5% growth. We had 18% growth in volumes as well, as you saw earlier. So this is a growth supported by attractiveness and by our value proposition. midway has grown 2.3% this quarter, especially the ratio of portfolio over revenue, which is now giving support to our retail operations. André talked about expansion of growth margins. But I would like to emphasize that growth numbers, margin numbers are not all, but also the way we've been advancing in these indicators. We've been doing that with consistency, reinforcing our value proposition, our strategy, and so we have seen yet another quarter of volumes going up, margins going up, as well as revenue.
We have had a 51% growth in our EBITDA, reaching BRL 360 million this quarter. This is a record for the quarter. We had BRL 571 million of consolidated EBITDA this first half of the year, much greater than last year. That shows the strength of our business, you know, industrial, retail, and financeira, delivering great results together. So now let's talk about the retail segment. On Slide 10, you can see our retail segment performance. There has been an acceleration of our growth ever since last year. Looking at the first half of the year, it was almost, I mean, the first quarter was almost stable, but then we see now in the first half of 2024, against the first half of 2023, an 11% growth.
This is the fifth semester in a row with sales performance that is over the average of the apparel market in Brazil, with market share gains. Our value proposition, the efficient management of our categories, have led to that 10% growth of net revenue. And once again, our volume has gone up by 18%, and our tickets have gone up by 14%. So although we had an impact with the higher temperatures, that was unexpected, we were able to use our integrated model, our push and pull logistics, and our footprint that is well balanced throughout Brazil, to react fast and to show great performance for the third semester in a row. We are way outperforming the rest of the market.
Now, on the next slide, let's talk about retail gross profit, yet another quarter of margin expansion, both in apparel and other retail as a whole. You can see our value proposition and our integrated chain making a difference here in retail. So we have had growth in volume, in tickets, as well as gross margins, reinforcing that our strategy to democratize fashion and delivering more value to the company is right. Now, on the next slide, you can see our finished goods inventory. We see a continuity of our work and discipline of work and capital. 24 days reduction in inventory year-over-year. That contributes to the optimization and reduction of the operating cash of the company, so we are at now more robust levels to continue operating our business.
Now, retail EBITDA has reached BRL 248 million, a 27% growth year-over-year. We have reached the highest level of retail EBITDA for a second quarter, with a margin of 14.4%, almost 2.2 percentage points increase in retail EBITDA margins as compared to the same quarter last year. It shows that our core business is delivering more and more value. This gives us great consistency for yet another quarter. Now, let's talk about midway Financeira. We continue with a very efficient and responsible portfolio management. We can see that our portfolio has had a quarter-on-quarter reduction in losses, so this is a responsible recovery of the portfolio.
But in addition to the reduction in losses, of 0.6% this quarter as compared to last quarter, or the same quarter last year, this quarter, we have evolved and increased the revenue of the Financeira over the portfolio by 12%. This shows an increasingly efficient performance that is delivering more and more value to the whole business. On slide 16, we reinforce the good management of our business with a reduction in delinquency ratios, both for cards and personal loans. This shows the maturity of the operation, the high penetration that our cards have in retail sales. This provides us with customer base growth and a good control of the delinquency ratio. Here you can see midway Financeira's EBITDA reaching almost 90 million, 90 million BRL, the second quarter of 2024, much higher than the same quarter last year.
That shows how robust we are here in our call to support retail, but also in generating value and contributing to the business as a whole. Now on slide 19, you can see our free cash flow. We have talked about that in the highlights of the quarter, but we want to give you now an accumulated view of the first half of the year. BRL 334 million in the first half of 2024 in free cash flow, improved capital allocation and investments, BRL 155 million better than the first half of 2023. That reinforces how disciplined we've been to deleverage the company and to generate cash to make the company lighter and more scalable. Now, on this slide, you can see our leverage. Yet another quarter of leverage reduction and debt reduction.
We went from a level of almost two times of leverage midway last year to less than one now. It's actually at 0.7 now. And on the right-hand side, you can see the robustness of our cash position with sufficient cash for the next 2.5 years of debt maturity. We'll see more deleveraging and debt reduction in the coming quarters. We have reduced our gross debt in over BRL 1 billion since last year, BRL 700 million with early payments of the ventures that were issued, and we expect to continue reducing leverage and debt in the future. We believe that we still have room to continue deleveraging the company and paying some of the debts earlier so that we can become lighter and more efficient, and so that we can continue accelerating growth.
Here, once again, we'd like to emphasize our discipline in cash allocation and investments. Yet another quarter of reduction in investments in around 11%, almost 13% for the whole first half of the year. We'll maintain this discipline. We're not going to stop investments that will lead to returns, but we'll continue deleveraging the company so that our operating model can be more efficient. Now, I turn the floor over to Isa, so that we can open for questions.
Thank you, Miguel. Okay, let's get started with our Q&A session. The first question is by Clara Lustosa, an analyst at Itaú BBA. Hi, Clara, you have the floor. Clara, can you hear us? Let's move on to the next person, and then if Clara can hear us, she'll be back later. Now, let's hear from Daniela from XP. Hi, Daniela, you have the floor.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for taking my question, and congratulations on your results. I actually have two questions on my side. The first is about credit, an issue that has been concerning the industry as a whole. midway has had consistent results with noticeable improvement, but you talked about a more responsible portfolio and credit granting operation from now on. What is your appetite for granting credit now? What do you see there in the industry in terms of quality of consumers? Just want to understand how this can boost growth for you and how - if you're willing to increase your credit granting appetite or not. Now, my second question is about demand. I would like to hear from you, how have you been seeing these consumers in terms of robustness and interest?
I see that you've been reinforcing your entry-level products, and this is being done not only by you, but by other players as well, because of this more challenging scenario in terms of equity... and, you know, tax levels for one player or another, or because of the macro conditions. So I wanna hear from you, what do you see for the second half of the year? Do you see any signs of improvement for the whole? Thank you very much.
Hi, Danny. I will start by your question about credit granting. We don't see any reasons to change our appetite. The scenario is improving, but within the same level of appetite, we've been working with better customers. We see a mix of better customers now, and this has enabled us to resume this gradual growth in our portfolios.
With our cards, we keep a high level of approval, and the private label portfolio has been growing. In our last call, I talked about the branded card growth, and we have been experimenting with new audiences. We're not increasing the risk of the portfolio, and that's what puts us in this comfortable position. And finally, the loans. In recent months, we've seen a better performance, so we expect to see the same effect that we saw in cards also in the personal loans business, in which we have very good profitability. We still see people with a high debt level, and we expect more consistent results to talk about changing in our credit appetite. But with our current credit appetite level, we see space to work, and that is already bringing increases in our top line.
From the perspective of demand, I cannot talk about the market as a whole, but for us, I see that consumers have been responding quite positively to our improvements in value proposition, and we believe that we can keep this great consumer base, because we've been mastering the levers better and better, and all the work that we do in entry-level products or improving brands, we see that consumers have been responding positively to all of that. So we, at Riachuelo, don't see a pessimistic scenario for consumers. Quite the opposite, we're very optimistic.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you, Danny.
Now, our next question is by Clara Lustosa, Itaú analyst. Let's see if you can hear us now, Clara.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me now?
Yes, we can.
Okay, sorry about the technical difficulties, and thank you for taking my question again.
Congratulations on your deliveries, your results. My first question is about the better utilization of your industrial plant. You talked about that in your earnings release and your presentation, and this has contributed to your gross margin gains. Can you break down the components of these gains? Was that for cost dilution at the plants because you now have greater volumes or the profitability levels that are better now? I just want to understand also where you're at in this journey compared to your initial plan and the opportunities you see now, how much room you still have on this front. André said he sees room for margin gains, so I just want to understand how much opportunity you still have there in your industrial plant. Now, a follow-up question about the credit scenario.
You just said there has been no major change in appetite, but you have been prioritizing private label, and you have talked about recovering your branded card. So can you tell us how you work on this balanced relationship between the co-branding card or the private label card? Do you plan to boost retail through your private label, or... I just want to understand how you work on that equation. Thank you very much.
I'll start with your question about midway, okay? We have not changed the strategy of our private label and branded card. We always start our relationship with a customer through the private label. This has not changed. We prioritize starting a relationship with the customer, with our private label to get to know the customer, and then we see if we have appetite to give some credit for the customer to spend elsewhere.
We have started studying the possibility of, okay, if this customer spends on the card elsewhere, we can also give them possibilities to spend more in our stores. So our focus is always on prioritizing this relationship between the retail and midway. So this strategy has not changed. But now we see customers paying better with a more appropriate risk level, so that enables us to experiment on the process of bringing these customers to the branded card. But the strategy is the same, starting the relationship with the private label so that we can get to know this customer better. About the plant, I think we are on our way there. We haven't gotten there yet. I think there is still a lot of opportunity to be captured.
Last year, we were able to understand what our plant does well, and we were able to bring more volumes to the plant, and most of this volume growth comes from this better utilization of our plants, and this has brought margin gains and more scale. So this is an ongoing process. Now, looking ahead, we still have a long way to go to improve our reactiveness and to improve some areas at the plant that can do better what they already do. So some types of fabrics or things that we can do better there, and to coordinate our reactivity processes better so that we are better prepared to be faster in our turnover, to have more sales, less disruption, fewer markdowns, and things like that. The plant has been a great supplier of basic items for us.
We are now able to serve the market with consistency and volume, protecting prices. And this has given us a competitive advantage, but I think there are other competitive advantages yet to be captured.
Thank you. That was very clear. Thank you again, and congratulations on your results. And, nice to meet you, Miguel. Welcome.
Nice to meet you, too. Thank you.
Thank you, Clara. Our next question is from Ruben Couto, from Santander. You have the floor, Ruben.
Hi, guys. I wanna hear a bit about the evolution of sales per square meter. You've been evolving for three consecutive quarters. We have better integration with the plant and thinking about your assortment strategy, can you tell us a bit more about what has helped you increase volumes?
Is that better conversion in stores, in addition to the topics related to the better integration with the plant that you already mentioned? I just want to understand in what phase you are of these gains. Should we expect a continuation of those gains in the near future?
Thank you for your question. The plant is a very relevant supplier we have, but not the only supplier. So what I would say is that we can serve well and protect margins, but the volume gains are related to a better interpretation of consumers and then an offer of a more appropriate product, either in terms of quality or of price. And product adjustments is, you know, are constant. We improve one thing here, one thing there. So we focused a lot on women's and men's, and now we see opportunities in other relevant categories, such as kids.
We haven't yet explored all of these improvements, opportunities of product adjustments. Even in women's apparel, we did really well in the summer basic items, but not that well in the winter items. Our product portfolio is very broad. We have hundreds of thousands of SKUs, so acting on everything is quite complex and time-consuming, and once we finish acting on everything, then you start seeing opportunity again in, the areas that you adjusted a year ago. Yes, this is a type of continuous improvement process, but yes, we have room to improve this more and more. Still talking about our pillar of democratizing access to fashion, we've been doing this for a while now, which is to position the right product at the right store.
Thus, we are more affordable to entry-level audiences with basic products that are supplied by the plant, but that also gives us better margins in other types of stores. So we have different types of stores in terms of audience and size, but we also have a very well-balanced regional footprint, which enables us to be very precise in the supply and assortment of each store. And that boosts access to fashion, and it also boosts gains in other stores that can capture more margins and better sales per square meter as a consequence....
Great! Another question. The leverage level of your last quarter drew my attention here. Can you give us an update of the possibility of expanding this in Riachuelo stores, mainly?
Sure. I think that what we have been showing you with our four pillars, our focus is on improving our offer and strengthening our core.
For now, we've been looking less at expansion, but we believe that the time will come for us to focus on expansion. This is a transition phase. We have been improving the offer of the company, we've been fine-tuning our offer, our brand positioning, and the way we want to improve customer experience, and while we do all that, we strengthen our balance sheet. So we wanna be able to reposition stores and extract more value of the assets that are already there, so the stores that are already operating, but with a better performance in stores, then we'll think about expansion. But we're still at an earlier phase of the game, improving offer. And do we have room for growth right now? Yes, we do, but we are very much focused on improving our offer and improving our value proposition for consumers in order to accelerate growth later.
So our balance is already strong, but it, it will be even better once we fine-tune our value proposition. And this fits really well into a last wave of our deleveraging process. We believe that, yes, there is room for this. We have gone through important debt payment waves, getting close to 700 million BRL in debt reduction. So in parallel to all of the improvements, we'll continue reducing the burden of debt and resuming our net income levels to better position the company on this front as well. And since we are undergoing this very intense process of change and improvement in results, the growth allied with better margins will make the projects much more attractive. So we're going through a phase in which we had margin compression and revenue growing very little, so it was hard to approve projects for new stores.
But now things are changing. So your question is very good, because once we adjust our value proposition and improve revenue and margins, then a whole new growth horizon opens up for us.
That makes perfect sense. Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Our next question is by Pedro Tinoco, an analyst at Safra. Hi, Pedro, you have the floor.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I actually have two questions. The first question is about retail for the second half of the year. The winter was warmer. You talked about how you reacted to improve sales during the second quarter, and we saw the impacts on the numbers, but the product that were purchased for the winter season, what is the inventory like right now?
We still have a few days to go in the winter season, so you're now—what is the status right now as you enter the third quarter? And on the side of midway, you have had portfolio improvements in the first and second quarter. What do you expect for the third and fourth quarter? Strong revenue, although there has been a decrease in the total portfolio year-over-year.
Hi, Pedro. Thank you for your question. Well, we were saying that we were getting ready to look at top line more from now on, and in the second quarter, while we managed the portfolio and decreased the risk, we saw that there was risk for a more intelligent pricing, improving the journey of buying credit products, and that offset the reduction in the portfolio.
When we look at market benchmarks, we still see room to evolve in this area, and there are some important levers that we can work on. But for Q3 and Q4, we also expect growth in spending in the cards and more credit granting. So the top line should come now from a different composition. It was coming more from penetration, and now we'll start to see portfolio growth with higher card spending and credit granting, which will help the top line to grow. Now, about inventory, we were expecting... a winter season that wouldn't be as cold as that of 2022. 2023 already had mild temperatures during the winter season, so we were prepared for a more mild winter. We expected more sales and margins, of course, but as you said, we were able to react quite well.
Since we prepared differently for this winter season, we do not have a very large inventory right now. We have a very well-controlled winter inventory at the moment, that we are holding for one or another week of a colder temperatures in the coming quarters. But we have had collections, not only winter collections, but collections in general, that have been very well received by our consumers. So we believe that the quality of the inventory that is left is great, and we intend to carry part of it, 'cause that's going to benefit the business more than trying to accelerate this margin burn. So we're very confident about the quality of those items. The next two quarters, we expect to continue to see margin gains.
In the third quarter of last year, we worked really hard to improve working capital and reduce inventory so that we could improve the profitability of the company using the inventory we had in-house. So we forced inventory turn by sacrificing margins, but now we are at a better level, and we don't expect to see an effort to bring more sales. We are at a better level now, in spite of that 24-day reduction in inventory that we have shared with you this quarter as compared to last year.
Great. That was very clear. Thank you.
Our next question is by João Andrade from Bradesco. João Andrade from Bradesco, you have the floor.
Hi, everyone. Congratulations on your results. Thank you for taking my question. My first question is more qualitative: At what point of this value proposition improvement journey you're at right now?
You have advanced a lot, but there are many things yet to happen. So what can we expect in terms of positioning price or products? Can you give us some more color on the initiatives that you've been implementing? And in terms of working capital, wow, your inventory results have been great. So what other type of initiative can we expect? Efficiency, plant reactivity, category management, anything you can tell us will be helpful. Thank you.
I can start with your second question. Working capital, we've been wondering how much we can improve there. We have had great improvement year-over-year, and now I think we only need to make some fine-tuning. This great improvement from last year to this year will not be seen again, we believe. But the maturity of the management can bring some gains.
Of course, we don't want to create any type of problem for our operations. Now, about our journey, where we're at, I think you're right. I see that in spite of the great results, this is only the beginning of the journey. It's almost as if we were on day one. There is a lot to be done, many initiatives that are ongoing that will improve our value proposition, our competitiveness, and the company's indicators. What do we have in mind now? We expect the Riachuelo brand to evolve a lot in the coming years. We see where the brand is now and where we want to get, but this is more a long-term process. We have to understand who we are and where we want to go.
This is kind of like a therapy session, and this work will be reflected in the design of our stores, what our stores will look like in the future, but that's more a medium-term process. In terms of category management, I'd say that this year, we have had great category management that has brought great results, adjusting pricing, adjusting basic problems, and that led to great growth. There is still a lot of value to be created in the different categories: women's, men's, kids, shoes, beauty. And we can still evolve our value proposition, the role of our products, how to add more technology, how to add more quality, how to add more design... And this is a deep type of process that should happen throughout the years.
That product obsession pillar is related to design improvements, technology improvements, and that will all reflect on customers' perception about Riachuelo and will boost sales. But we still don't know how fast that's going to happen. This is a multi-year journey, and we're only in the beginning of all of it, but I'm very optimistic. Of course, cautiously optimistic, I'd say, because Brazil is a complex country. We have many challenges, but we've been able to show that by working on the levers and adjusting the team, focusing on product and looking at consumers, the results will come. We have already achieved part of those, those results, but there's a lot more to come. Just a bit more color about working capital. I think that we have done very important work last year, repositioning our inventory levels. We're now at healthier and lighter inventory levels.
And of course, now we're only going to fine-tune that. And we were also looking at the other working capital lines. So we accelerated the work of improving customer journeys at the payment process. We have had a 10% increase in the front payment levels, and we have improved our accounts payable and worked on the payment terms with our suppliers. So all of that helped, and this will bring another wave of evolution and working capital efficiency, not at the same magnitude that we had in the second half of last year, but there is still gains to be achieved.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session. I would like to thank you all for joining us, and say that our investor relations team is available, should you have any additional questions. Have a great afternoon. Thank you all.