Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the webcast of Centauro, where we are going to discuss the earnings release of 2020 for Group SPF. I'm Preet Busanel. I'm CEO of Groupe SPF. I have here Jose Salazar, our CFO and IR Law Daniel Regenstein, our Director of Finance Corporate and Luna Rommel, who is our Manager of Investors Relations.
As you can see on slide 2, we are going to break into 3 parts today. 1st, we're going to let you know about the new cycle of SPF Group and our strategy. Then we are going to talk about the results of the quarter of the year 2020. And finally, we are going to go to the Q and A. Questions may be asked through this webcast platform, and they'll be answered after the presentation.
Let's go to slide 3 now. SPF is celebrating its 4th anniversary. It started with 1 first store of Centauru and since the beginning with the vision of building an emotional relation with the client, developing a unique experience in sport. We have always been in the vanguard, and we have always tried to grow and expand our frontiers. In recent years, with the result of technology and the update of our business visions, we got prepared to one more advanced the ecosystem of sport, creating a business which is centered on clients, not only trying to serve them, but also building it differently.
We can see that the year that finished, it's the beginning of a new cycle. Less than 2 years after having our IPO in V3, in addition to a number of operating advances at Centauro, we have taken solid strides toward developing an ecosystem of sports in December 'twenty. 1st, we concluded our transaction with Nike. So we operate Nike under the name of Fisia in Brazil. And then we signed the acquisition transaction of NWB, which was completed in February 2021.
Thanks to these acquisitions, we now have 3 different business units, which provide sports through different ways to our public. We have Centauro focused on distribution, and with the vocation of becoming a final destination for sports, the largest retailer of sport goods in Brazil. Then we have Fisia, focused on products and brand, exclusive representative of Nike in Brazil, the largest sport product, brand in the world. NWB, focused on content and engagement, is the largest digital media platform in Brazil, and it focus over 60,000,000 YouTube people and 80,000,000 of Instagram followers. These three business units will be the pillar for the progression of our sport ecosystem.
Each of them will keep on being developed individually to maximize its own vocation. But they are also going to be integrated so that the strengths of each and every one of them can be used to maximize the value proposition of the others. The value, in our understanding, is maximized by the plane that is sustained by these pillars. Let's go to slide 4 now. We are going to keep on working nonstop to offer at Centaro the best multi brand experience in sport retailer.
We want to move on with our platform so that it can be the final destination for choice and purchase of sport products in Brazil. Now let's go to slide 5. The first priority is to improve the experience of clients that buy through our digital channels. Bringing together physical and digital, we have strength and now it's time to invest in logistics and technology to serve better our customers. This will be the main driver of growth of Centauro.
It's important to say that the separation of channels is no longer necessary. Our customers' journey flows from physical stores to digital stores, but we have always to move ahead to having the best experience of sport purchase in Brazilian Internet. As you can see in Slide 6 now, we are going to keep on expanding our distribution capacity so that we can reach a broader share of consumers. We have over 200 points mapped for new G5 stores and of over 150 stores in the old model that are going to be renovated to adopt the new model. In addition to expanding our revenue, we are going to increase profitability by diluting our fixed costs, source our result centers and also critical points to speed up our digital operations.
They are hub where we people have contact with the brand, and they can fulfill their needs, and we can acquire new clients. We want to increase the number of stores and also bring together the 3 pillars of the role of our stores. Let's see now on Slide 7. The results of Santoro in 2020 was very much affected by the pandemic. Nevertheless, the Q4 2020 showed very significant recovery over the previous quarters.
Our gross margin, one of the most impacted financial indicators, was 3.5 percentage point below the Q4 2019, over 5.9 percentage point of decrease in the Q3 2020. The willingness to purchase Portgas still strong, and in the quarter, there was total growth of 10.9% in gross revenue, 67.4% growth in digital. Our digital platform is still a very important driver of growth, and this year, we have reached BRL 1,000,000,000 in GMV, 79% growth over 2019. Online sales represented 35.6 percent of our total sales, and out of the total volume, 48% was sales through the app. Of course, closed stores mean a lot to our results.
When they are opened, they really reflect and show the resilience of our business. During one of the worst episodes in history ever, no sport events, restriction to practicing exercise, but people still came to Outsource and October 2020 was a key month, the 1st month after 6 months of closed stores and we experienced 20% increase in sales. We expect the 1st term of 2021 to be difficult because of the increase in the new wave of the pandemic, but still believe in market consolidation through a nominal channel strategy, which has proved to be very successful. In slide 8, we can see that Fisium in 2020 had revenues of R2.4 billion dollars Historically, it's operating through 2 main channels, wholesale, with approximately 70% share of the business, and direct to consumer, with a share of approximately 30% of the business, 10% night.com.br and 20% from outlets. The main priority for Fisia is to boost the growth of its digital channel.
In addition to bringing the brand closer to the final consumer, the channel has profitability plus higher than the others. And we believe that the strength of Knight brand will provide to Fisio a very significant growth of its digital platform. Slide 9, we can see the main actions to deliver growth. The key ones are create an omnichannel platform with strategy with confirmed results at Centauro. We want to offer products in marketplace of other online players in the sports market, such as Centauro Increase the number of provided SKUs, invest in performance marketing in a very assertive fashion.
Another lever of value generation for Fizia is reducing the cost of operations. We have been working different actions towards this end, such as reducing the cost operations of stores, integrate systems, and also analyze potential gains of integrating our logistics between the formal signature of the agreement in February 2020 and closing the operation in December 2020 has provided a very seamless transition, no flows and very profitable since month 1. Now, on Slide 10, we can see our most recent acquisition, MWB. NWB is a pioneer company in daily production of sport focused content in its 6 proprietary channels and its broad range of affiliates. In its portfolio, it has one of the most important sports channel in the world called Tesen Pedibus.
It generates contents for sport, attracting organically high demand that grows constantly and may be monetized through different strategies, such as social marketing directed to sport, creation and production of advertising campaigns and sport marketing campaigns for different brands, and management of its different affiliate channels, influencers, and sport creators. And WB has a very set up growth, and we want to continue in this journey of new channels, just creating strategies and enhancing the number of affiliates through social commerce and also having the creation of more original content. We are very excited with the expansion and the new possibilities of NANDW being in our portfolio. Let's see now on Slide 12. Our dream is to build the largest and the best ecosystem of sport in the world, starting from Brazil.
We want to be a part of the journey of the sport journey of our customers with Brazilian and always monetizing that relation into a broader audience. The starting point is based on 3 So distribution through Centauro, a offer of products and brands with Fisia and also content and engagement with NWB. We started from 1,000,000,000 of revenues, 1,000,000,000 of sales, dozens of millions of clients and also dozens of millions of visitors in our digital platforms, in addition to source 200,000 square meters distributed in over 100 cities in 26 states of Brazil, and thousands of sport retailers in other cities also served through our model of wholesale. Now, on Slide 14, we can see that in the first phase of construction, the main monetization tool of the ecosystem will be by selling products. We expect the business units to generate value 1 to the other, producing a better customer lifetime value.
And we are going to focus on 2 points. One of them, reduction of the cost of client acquisition, using the production of content of NWP to generate leads to our business units, primarily through e commerce and social commerce projects. The other one is the increase of recurrence and average expense of ecosystem through a membership initiative. Now Slide 15, we can see that in addition to these initiatives, we are going to follow the path of growth and profitability of each business unit. Centauru has no reason why it wouldn't produce the same results as it produced before the pandemic, because of organic growth and also because of profitability.
Fisia will probably contribute also to increase profitability of the group, especially with expansion of penetration of direct access to consumers. We've also been working in generating synergy among our business, one of the strategic pillars, which is the most important one for Fisio and Centenroix to expand its digital channels. Using a unique platform for both businesses, we can maintain them independent according to the customer's vision, but we have one single structure of technology and logistics, which means a lot of potential and increasing growth and profitability of the group, especially considering that we can use the stores of Centauro as a physical hub of the omni channel strategy of Faizia. Another opportunity is to use the capillarity of Faesia Wholesale that reaches thousands of doors in the whole country. We want to use the commercial relations and also logistic routes to encourage more access to these point of sales, expanding the offer of products and also creating a wide range of services that can integrate these retailers to our ecosystem.
Now, let's go to slide 16. All these actions are already being worked at our group. In addition to them, we have thousands of experience under execution and business hypothesis being validated to keep on exploring the advantages and also going further in the contact with our clients. Of course, some of them will go wrong and generate learnings. Others will succeed.
And we are very committed with creating a better future for Brazilian sports and generating value for our shareholders through this strategy. We are going to boost sports in Brazil. And as a consequence, our staff every day gets up early in the morning knowing that they have a greater purpose in their lives. We are very proud to see the quality of our talents that we have trained and retained to help us build our vision. And we are honored to see the engagement of our strategic partners that share the same vision with whom we expect to collaborate for the building of this future.
We are very grateful to our clients, and we know we have a lot to improve to keep on deserving more space in this relationship that we have created throughout the past 40 years. We have a big dream, it has always been so, since the foundation of our company. We are very confident with our vision of the future, and we have a great clarity of how to obtain that. As we've done in recent months, we have closed a cycle in which we operated only a Centaurum, and now we are into a new cycle, building something bigger, an ecosystem named Group SPF. With that, as you can see on slide 17, from today on, we are no longer being negotiated at B2C as CNT-three, and now we are being negotiated under the code SBFG3.
Let me now hand it over to Salazar, who is going to go into details about the financial highlights of the quarter. Thank you.
Thank you, Pedro, and good morning, everyone. Before I start, I would like to remind you that again in this quarter, such as in the previous one, we had nonrecurring effects, both positive and negative. In our release, we present a table explaining all these effects. All the numbers and explanations I'm going to show in the next slides are related to the adjusted results. So results were adjusted by the non recurring effects and also excluding the IFRS 16 effects.
In addition to that, this quarter is the first one where we have the consolidation of fees in the results. So the results of 2020, I'm going to show include the month of December of fees and also the results of 2019 just include Centaro. The 4th quarter was a recovery quarter when compared to previous one. And we have some important figures to highlight before we move to explanations, as you can see on Slide 18. So even in this difficult environment and helped by Faizia, we reached a 31% growth in the revenue of the group this quarter.
The profit reached BRL64.6 million in the quarter, a reversal of the negative result that we had in the Q3 of 2020. The digital platform of Centauro reached BRL 1,000,000,000 of MGV this year. In our cash, even after the acquisition of Fisia, completed a year with over BRL 500,000,000, so a comfortable position considering the worsening of the pandemic in 2021. Now moving to Slide 19, I would like to explain the net revenue. With the new wave of the pandemic in the Q4, we once again had a growth in Centauro with a growth in revenue of about 10%, including same store sales of physical stores that were positive in October November.
In December, because of the new wave, the SSS was again negative, but the positive figures of October November show that especially in our market, consumers are willing to go back to stores when the uncertainty is reduced. The digital channels of both companies behaved very well in the quarter. GMV of the digital business of Centauro grew by 70% in the quarter, almost 80% in the year, while the digital revenue of Faizia in December reached almost 20% of the revenue. Including the outlet of Faizia DTC reached more than 50%. There's also significant seasonality factor in the case of Faizia, but even so we were pleased with these results.
Now looking at the overall revenue of the group, including Faizia, we grew by approximately 30% in the quarter and we ended the year with a drop in revenue of about 5%. On Slide 20, you can see a drop of 3.1 points in gross margin of Centaro in the quarter because of the promotional environment caused by the pandemic. Prices are becoming more stable now and the margins are moving towards their historical levels. Other relevant factors are the mix of channels with more representation of the digital platform that despite a similar EBITDA margin has a lower gross margin than physical stores. In terms of mix of products in the soccer category, the share is still below historical levels.
The gross margin of the 4th quarter showed recovery of 1.5 points when compared to the margins of the 3rd quarter and each month our margins are returning to closer to the average historical average of the company. So the margin of fees it was about 35%. When you took over the company, the inventory was still made up mainly of the merchandise that were acquired when we were subsidiary in the Knight Global. But when we took over operations, new products became to be purchased based on a distribution commercial agreement with higher prices than the subsidiaries. So we hope that the growth we believe that the gross margin will be reduced as we have new stocks.
On Slide 21, we see the sales expenses, sales generated administrative expenses that grew 7.6% in the quarter and the growth in digital sales increased variable expenses, especially because of freight and marketing. But the fixed expenses contention actions were responsible for the operational leveraging since the expenses grew less than revenues. We didn't open many stores in the 4th quarter because of this contention actions, but we had low CapEx that has a negative impact in the lines of other revenues. Including fees here, the total expenses of the group grew by 25% in the quarter, 7.4% in the year. Now on Slide 22, here is EBITDA.
The EBITDA margin of Centauro reached 10.1% in the quarter, a drop of 4 points visavis the Q4 of 2019 and improved visavishe3rdquarterof2020 that was close to 0. Here we see that in a milder pandemic scenario such as we had in the Q4 of 2020, the trend is to recover the margins and the drop in the EBITDA margin is because of the gross margin drop as we explained. So the EBITDA of the group was similar to the Q4 of 2019 of about BRL120 million. Let me remind you that the physio results is positively impacted because of the decrease in the inventory costs. So we don't expect the EBITDA margin this levels as we saw in December of 2020.
Now on Slide 23, operating expenses. Despite a drop in the margin that reached 5.9%, the net income adjusted in the quarter was similar to the Q4 of 2019, totaling about BRL65 1,000,000. Now on Slide 24, we had another quarter with good generation of operating cash, superior to the Q3 of 2019 because of the initiatives taken during the pandemic and the use of tax credits and cash generation of Faesia. The major impact of the quarter was the acquisition of Faesia that was purchased for over BRL 1,000,000,000. We had already reinforced the cash in previous quarter through follow on and also inputs from the market.
But even so, the end of the quarter, we ended the quarter with over SEK 500,000,000 in cash and the net debt, including advanced payments and installment of taxes of about BRL 250,000,000. Now we will open for questions that can be sent through the webcast and thank you for your participation. Let me take the first question that we received here from Elena Villares, BBA. She has 2 questions. Regarding some of the initiatives that we discussed during the IPO to improve the gross margin with e commerce and own brand.
So what are the perspectives related to that? And secondly, regarding Nike, on the release, you mentioned that in December, there was a favorable time. That accounted for 50% of sales. Could you give us more details about that, please? Thank you for your questions.
So let me start with the first ones. So the first honest question is that in the mix And of course, there were a lot of changes internally because of the pandemic variations in category, because of the category of soccer, for example, suffered more collective sports in general because practice was reduced. While categories such as materials so that you could practice at home grew disproportionately. 2020 is kind of a polluted year, so to speak. But having said that, we haven't stopped working.
So a part of this gain in margin has to do with a variation of mix with a trend in growth in categories with better margin, such as clothing. Clothing grows year over year more than other categories and the average margin is also higher because we don't need to have so much markdown and also because of the penetration of our own brand that accounts for about 30% of that category. That remained as well as other initiatives to increase the participation of products with higher margin in each category, such as through strategies of licensing. So we worked on this different work streams and this pool of products grew. So we hope that this will be reflected on results as soon as things become more normal.
But to be very honest, it's very difficult to indicate that in numbers in 2020 because of the variations we have experienced because of the pandemic. Regarding Nike, there were 2 aspects involved. Well, one part had to do with the pandemic, but the increase in direct to consumer was due with the pandemic. But there are also other results related to short term actions. Since we had a worse performance in the stores because of the pandemic, it's only natural that the digital channel will have a growth in its sales and disproportionately higher.
So this is why it was much higher in December in the last quarter. But there are also some actions we implemented. 1 with immediate effect was a change in the mindset, the way that we work with marketing in the digital channel thinking that marketing is a variable expense. And then by releasing more marketing expenses, we will use the ROI perspective instead of thinking of it as expenses. So with that, this leverages growth.
This has already been implemented immediately. So the more structuring projects for the growth of e commerce have not produced any fact yet, but we are working on them. Their effect is going to be perceived over 2021. But internally if you analyze it, we are confident not only with the results of Faizia, but also with our ability to develop and to grow the knight.com website. Thank you again for your question.
There is here a second question by Victor Xu from Santander. Physia, a positive surprise to us was the result of Physia. Could you please tell us more details about the numbers of the quarter? And how has it been performing the beginning of the year? Thank you very much for the question.
But no, we cannot share any information about the Q1 2021, but we can tell you about the Q4 '20. Well, first of all, there is part of part of the results were positively affected by lower cost of inventory because of lower interest, the low exchange rate of the dollars and so on, which is a non recurring effect. If we exclude all recurring effects, we end up getting to a positive result, a 2 low digit of absolute EBITDA, BRL 20,000,000 in one single result. This is in our opinion, a good result for 1 month, 1 month of operation only, which place us at a good position to deliver results above what we had planned for 2021. Of course, it's all subject to the new wave of the pandemic that has hit us in Brazil.
But under normal conditions, we expect good results and we are satisfied with what we have observed. But there are 2 effects to be considered here. First, there was some delay in hearing from the regulatory authorities, and it took us some time to have the formalization of the operations. But right from day 1, we could implement a number of things. So SG and A synergies, things like that have all been captured since the 1st day of the operation.
Secondly, we had the possibility of making adjustments to the operations of knight.com right from the beginning. So this time has helped us get organized here. So looking ahead, we are more comfortable and optimistic from the results of Faizia. The operations of the 1st 9 months had the results hedged and part of that also sold through wholesales. So we are very confident that Fisia will contribute significantly to the results in 2021.
Let me just read the next questions here to have them answered. Salazar, can you help me answering the next questions? I haven't read the question yet. Carlos Ihara from Condor and Fito Jun from Santander. The perspective of the Q1 2021, can you tell us about open stores and what level of revenue we can expect for the Q1 2021?
As it's coming to its end, what are the trends that we should expect for the period? We are starting the Q1 worse than last year in terms of restrictions in volumes. So how can it affect the results of the first half of the year? Well, a number of stores are closed. There are, yes, restrictions and lockdown in many regions of the country.
And we have a very similar situation to what we experienced last year. So closed stores mean more e commerce. E commerce is performing quite well. So I think we are going to go through very similar situations to what we had last year. So renegotiating the leases with the shopping malls for the stores, for example.
We are going to make some adjustments to our personnel, but just minor things because we strongly believe that the economy is going to pick up shortly. But for the upcoming months, of course, we're going to have more difficulties.
Okay. Next question from Felipe Casemiro, HSBC. Regarding Centauro, I would like to know if there's any chance of reducing the number of new stores in 2021? And if so, any chances of acceleration in the next 3 or 4 years to make up for that in 2022, for example. About the channels, could you please elaborate on the e commerce channel and what are the expectations of the contribution of this channel?
Thank you for your questions. Regarding your first question, we don't expect a delay in opening of new stores in 2021. We have contracts that have been signed in stores that we like and that seem to be good investments for us. Opening new stores to us means more than just opening a new sales channel. It also represents part of our digital strategy because it allows us getting closer to our consumers and also because it's a channel of acquisition of customers to sell on digital channels too.
So we're not with a comfortable cash position. So today's scenario, March 31st, is that we expect to maintain the same pace of opening of new stores. We have a lot of stores we expect to open, over 200 MapRed stores without even considering new models of stores. We believe that this pace of opening 50 new ones a year is a good pace and some of them are very big, some of them have a footprint of over 1500 square meters. And if we're talking about half of them, 25 stores, we are talking about 25,000 square meters in additional footprint.
And we will open them in the next years as well. We have made our IPO less than 2 years ago. And then we have so basically 2019 and then 2020 there was a pandemic. So we hope to keep the space in the next years. Regarding the channels you mentioned in your second question, This is a project that has already started, but it is a project.
We are testing new ways of leveraging the audience that is provided by NWB, for example, to use this sales force of digital media to sell products of Centauro and also to have a relationship with the community of influencers, personal trainers and so on. But this is yet a project. We don't think that we should make financial projections to it because it's a project we're experimenting with. But we have prepared a solid structure to invest on that, but I think it is too early to talk about figures related to this project. I think we should first experiment with it as a project and then we can determine the kind of potential it can have.
But we expect as out of the markets to have a good potential as we see in China. There is a question here from Sher Drew from Goldman Sachs. What is the percentage of GMV for 3P in Centau? 3P sales represented 10.6% of GMV in the year and 9% in the quarter. Our strategy here in marketplace is different from other players.
For us, the most important thing is how we see audience. We have reorganized Centauro to reorganize that based on categories and more senior leaders have thought about that as different categories of people who think about soccer and so on. And they are doing a multidisciplinary work to serve those consumers. So merchandise assortment, marketing should be strategies that will serve those consumers. This is how we start.
So what does what do consumers need to practice those categories, those sports modalities? We want to be relevant. We are a niche company. We need to want to be a curator. You want not only to have an entry brand, but also to be a niche company.
So marketplace plays a role, not only in terms of bringing more products, but having the right products available. So this is how we see market the marketplace. We are more connected to rather than retailers and we have about 20% of that time for that. And thank you for your question.
So, Hassan, can you answer the next one? What is the mix level of sales channel and e commerce in the stores that we can expect with the social restrictions and lockdown? What is the penetration that is expected from digital in companies' performance? And what are the inventory levels in the beginning of the year? Igloo Lima from Santander.
Is there any risk of breaks in your inventory levels? Well, the first question should be answered as such. Of course, e commerce is going to have a higher, share in our results. But at the same time, it's offset once the stores are reopened. When you say 1,000,000,000 of revenues from e commerce and that we are going to open 20 more stores, dollars 300,000,000 additional revenues, it probably means it tends to go more into the fiscal store.
So, post pandemic, when we were talking about 20%, 22%, we are probably going to we do something 30% to 40% of our sales of the company from digital, we feel think we need to mid and long term. And I'm speaking specifically about Centaur. For Feesya, we also expect to move towards 30%, 40%, considering that DTC is a goal that we have in our mind. It's the global strategy of Nike and e commerce channels has much better margins than the gross margin of wholesale. So probably there is going to be a natural and forced migration towards DTC for physia as well.
Now, considering the 2nd level and inventory levels, I should say we have the appropriate levels of inventory. If the pandemic takes too long, we might need some adjustments. And we might even have problems of delivery. But we do not believe we are going to have a shortage of products, and that applies to Faesia and to Sentaloro. Our inventory levels are quite appropriate to the growth expected by us.
If the pandemic takes longer than expected, we always have the possibility of them maybe not having products delivered. But honestly, we don't think we have any risks in terms of having any shortage of products. There is one question from, Wagner Salovey. Creating the sports ecosystem, as you are showing in the slides, does it entail other business units and other activities? Do you expect other M and A activities in the short and midterm?
Thank you, Wagner, for your question. Yes, in the midterm, probably yes, to be present in all the different parts of the customer's journey and get to the level we want to, we have to get connected with our customers through different channels and we there are different strategies to be put in place. We can do it through internal development, acquisition, partnerships, etcetera. So M and A is a valid strategy and we constantly analyze that. In the short term though, let's say during 2021, we do not envision any significant M and A operation.
Maybe something smaller would be okay. But our priority is to run the test of the synapse, so to speak, of the correlations between our business units to confirm the hypothesis of our ecosystem and then go into allocating resources where we generate the most value. We want to show that the leads, views and engagement of NWP audience generates more sales to Centauro and Faizia. And secondly, we want to promote a membership model in which clients would have greater recurrence and end up paying more because of cross selling opportunities in all our business units. This is our priority.
Said that, we are paying close attention to all of it, And we are going to have greater we are going to have news and more clarity on how we are going to work with startups in the industry, etcetera. So in a nutshell, M and A is part of our strategy, not the only one, but one strategy in the mid and long term. Yes, we plan to do it. And in the short term, only smaller acquisitions because our focus will be on connecting all the ends of the business units we currently have.
There is a question here from Francisco from FOPUS. What is the evolution of omnichannel in smaller cities? Well, this is one of the projects that we interrupted last year. We interrupted that in the beginning of the pandemic when we had the first wave. So we organized ourselves in a way that we would interrupt some projects.
In retrospect, this year, we are working differently. We have a more comfortable cash position, so we are no longer interrupting projects. We keep hiring. So this project was delayed. It was interrupted for a while.
Now we are resuming it. I don't have anything concrete to share with you. It's still a project. We have just tested that as products in 2 cities, but then we stopped this process and they will be resumed now. There is a question here from Rafael Desjeda.
I would like to better understand the expected level of gross margin in Faizia for new stock purchase and what do you expect in terms of EBITDA margin for FISI in this scenario? In the last event that we had 3 weeks ago, we explained what we believe to be the margins of this business in our understanding. The e commerce margin, the gross margin in this contract of distribution of just signed, it will be about 50%, 55% in e commerce, knife factories stored in the outlets about 30%, and wholesale will be about 20% of gross margin. The combined gross margin would be around 25%. Something in between 25%, 26%.
So that will be in our businesses this year under this new contract. In terms of EBITDA perspective, need to change the guidance. What we've been talking about is that we work with a positive EBITDA this year, relatively low, but positive. And as we implement the strategy of absorbing synergies and the strategy of migrating the channels and to depend less on the wholesale business and to focus more on DTC, we will be able to expand the gross margin of this business. So, something between 5% to 9% in the long term is what we believe that it will be feasible.
There is one question here, Felipe Brachette from Goldman, about the lease contracts. Thank you for the question. All of them are partners really. And similarly to what we experienced last year, we had to get together. We had to build solutions for all the problems we've been facing to avoid anything drastic in the market.
Most of the cases last year, we came up with joint solutions. There were 2 stores where we effectively had to close down because they were small players really. And the land the landowners were not the landlords were not really flexible, but that was an exception really. I would say most of them have been great partners and have understood the problem, the context, and we've come up with joint solutions. Of course, I cannot go into details of all the negotiations.
What I can tell you is, at large, we have had very good partnering result in this phase that nobody would like to be facing, right? Now there is a group of questions of different investors, individual investors. With a very important basis of our investors, and I'm going to try to collectively answer these questions. The main line of thought being addressed here is the following: How can we take and connect Centauro to arenas where people practice exercise and where sports are already present? Excellent question.
Something essential to Centauro in its strategy for 2021 is correlate things Centauro and sports. We want to be a destination for selecting products and buying products from us. So, if we are looking for a sport product, we want to have the best assortment, best communication, best content, best navigation experience. It really has to be different. And there is also a part to the world, how do we connect with potential customers, with people?
So we've been trying to come up with ways of expressing our brands in these different events. And we have a team thinking about a number of potential ideas on how to do it. And we are going to share them with you eventually on how we can connect the brand and sports. There is also another group of questions from some of our investors asking about NWP. How can we keep on managing those content creator channels from now on?
NWP is 100% owned by us, but it operates independently. And those who work there know what to do to engage and to create content and to attract more people, and they'll keep on doing as is. We have no intention whatsoever in interfering in the process, especially because we don't know much about it. What we are going to do is to provide the right instruments to NWB offering investment support technology so that they can expand their reach, maybe more channels, expand the network of affiliates, go into new areas, but we are going to offer infrastructure, support, much more than setting guides or interfering the way they've been doing things. And this is not neither our expertise nor our intention to do.
And finally, a third group of questions asking about the name of the changing name of our ticker. And the question is, didn't use to include Feesia and before CNT-three included Feesia in NWB, right? Yes, exactly. Nothing has changed, right? 100 percent Feesia, 100 percent Centara, 100 percent NWB.
The company has not changed. The same listed companies there, but we have just changed the name. It's like a symbolic. We used the name which was the most known at that time, Centauro. Now, as we have different business units, as Centauro does not represent 100 percent of our business, we are just renaming to have the name of the holding.
So of course, the listed company, results and assets are exactly the same. And it's good to have the opportunity to do that. It has always been SPF Group. So now we are just changing the name as a symbol of strategy and the change that we have made.
There is a question here from Antonio Rizzo from Interacao. Could you talk more about the dollar exchange rate variation and its impacts on the company and also a decrease in the purchasing power of the population and its impacts on sales, this was a part of the analysis document that we produced. While the impact is rather low in terms of the dollar exchange range. We purchased about BRL 130,000,000 a year of inputs that are imported directly that comes especially from China. And in our understanding, these inputs is something that we are working on to reduce our dependency on them and they account for a small amount of our inputs.
Most of them can be replaced with national domestic products, so we could replace them with a local supplier. So the impact on SANTARO in terms of our own brand is very low. In the case of Fisia, 70% of our purchases are imported and 30% is local. Actually, it's a 65%, 35% ratio. In the short term, specifically for the 2021 collection, I can say that everything is under control in the sense that we have already hedged all for collections for the year, starting as soon as we purchase the company.
So for this year in particular, we don't expect any impact of variations in the dollar exchange rate because our hedge was made at about 5.20, 5.23 of exchange rate. And the prices that we are using to sell the collections on the stores already have their gross margins guaranteed for this year. But for next year, first, we need to start working on increasing the share of domestic products in this equation. And that takes a while, obviously. It's not something that we could implement overnight.
But we want to increase this share. And in the short term, we can use the synergies that we can pursue. We want to gain we want synergies in mix and channels to gain productivity, also looking for replacement of products to replace with products with a better margin. So we will work specifically on that. And we can also leverage from price increase.
Of course, there may be flexibility in the demand, but we believe that Nike is a rather strong brand. What could happen is a replacement in the product. So maybe a product that became more expensive, maybe consumers will downgrade their options, but still purchase a Nike product, but at a lower price. And still, we would have positive return. So we have a long term project to depend less on imports.
And in the short term, we are guaranteed in terms of margins, but because we have hedged all of that in the beginning of the year. And specifically for next year, if dollar exchange rate is higher, we can work on the price leverages and the mix of products to make sure that we don't have a very wide range. That's basically the summary of my answer. We have more questions, but we want to stick to the time that was reserved for this meeting. I am sure that you're probably 2 minutes late for another meeting.
So we are going to wrap up the Q and A session, but our RI team is at your disposal to clarify any questions you may have. It is very good for us to keep this dialogue, and we want to be as transparent as possible in our communication. Thank you for participating in our call of financial statements. We know that creating an ecosystem like that is a major challenge. This keeps us humble and down to the ground.
And like in sports, we know that only with a lot of effort in preparation, we can reach accomplishments. And we are very humble to say that we are aiming