Good morning, everyone. Let's get started with SBF Group's First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Thank you all for joining us. I'm here joined by Salazar, our CFO, and Victoria, our IRO. This is the agenda for today's earnings call. I'll start by giving you the main highlights of the quarter, and then I'll turn the floor over to Salazar, who will give you further details about the group's financial performance in the first quarter of 2025, and then finally we'll open for questions. On this slide, you can see the main takeaway messages of the quarter. The results of the first quarter of 2025 demonstrate the continuity of the strategy that we have been implementing in recent quarters.
We have been focusing on working capital, maintenance of prices in our direct channels, and Centauro continues in its LB growth strategy, and even focusing on LB margins and a very strong baseline last year. The company has once again been able to achieve growth in its revenue, gross income, and mainly net income lines. We closed the first quarter with an all-time record net revenue of BRL 1.6 billion, a 4% increase year- over- year, gross profit of BRL 772 million, up 5.8%, and gross margins of 49.7%, up 0.9 percentage points against the first quarter of 2024. The main highlight of the quarter was the net income expansion that we achieved. We closed the first quarter with net profit of BRL 74 million and net margin of 4.8%, an increase of 40.6% and 1.3 percentage points year -over- year, respectively.
A main point of our strategy in recent years was to keep a balanced capital structure, and in recent years we were very diligent in managing our working capital. Once again, this quarter we improved our financial cycle by 19 days, and the highlight of this quarter was a seven-day reduction in inventories at Fisia. We are very comfortable with our current leverage level as well as the debt level at the end of the first quarter. This quarter marks the beginning of a new phase at our company in which we resume investment in strategic initiatives that are key to sustain our medium-term growth. Now, on this slide, you can see some of the figures that are showing our performance this quarter. It's worth mentioning that we had improvement in all indicators except for EBITDA because of an operational deleveraging that Salazar will explain later on.
I don't want to be repetitive, but anyway, I will go over the main indicators once again. Net revenue for the quarter closed at BRL 1.6 billion, up almost 4%, gross profit of BRL 772 million, up 5.8%, and gross margins of 49.7%, 0.9 percentage points above last quarter's or last year's. EBITDA of BRL 144 million, down 9.2% against the first quarter of 2024, and EBITDA margin of 9.3%, so 1.3 percentage points lower than the first quarter of 2024. In spite of that, our net profit grew by 40.6%, closing the quarter at BRL 74.2 million. The management of our financial cycle and working capital can be clearly seen here in the last indicators on this slide.
We improved our financial cycle by 19 days this quarter, a decrease of 13.3%, and we reduced our net debt by 45%, closing the quarter at BRL 378 million, and our leverage was reduced by 0.7 percentage points against the first quarter of 2024, closing the quarter at 0.61 x. You can also see our LTM figures. These figures are important to enable us to dilute or exclude some seasonal events that may impact some indicators, such as EBITDA, for example. We closed the last 12 months with net revenue of BRL 7.2 billion, up 2.8%. EBITDA closed at BRL 757 million, up 19.8%, and net profit closed the quarter, closed the last 12 months at BRL 439 million, up 66.5% versus the previous last 12 months, which shows consistency in the results that we have delivered in recent quarters. On this slide, you can see the highlights for Centauro.
Centauro was the main positive highlight for the quarter. We closed with net revenue of BRL 821 million, a growth of 11.2% against the first quarter of 2024, and we reached the same-store sales of 13.2%. Both channels did really well. The digital performance, just like in the last quarter of 2024, was very robust, and the digital performance continues to make the most of the migration of our technological platform, which increased our effective rate, and we had a more accurate marketing strategy and rebalancing of inventory, which enabled us to have the main products available at the distribution centers in order to serve our customers. Digital net revenue reached BRL 177 million this quarter, an increase of 24.5%, and GMV expanded by 20.4% year-over-year.
The brick-and-mortar store also did really well, reverting a slight drop in the last quarter of 2024, and achieved 8% growth in net revenue, totaling BRL 644 million in the first quarter. The growth in brick-and-mortar stores continued to be sustained by the operational adjustments that we did in stores in order to maximize the number of items per coupon. This quarter, we also saw improvement in flow and conversion, which boosted the results of our brick-and-mortar stores in the quarter. Margin was also a highlight of the quarter. We closed the quarter with gross margins of 50.7%, an expansion of 1.3 percentage points year-over-year. This is a result of a continuous initiative to have more rational markdowns and better inventory control. We have better levels of old inventory, especially in January.
This quarter was also marked by a strengthening of our presence in Brazilian soccer, sponsoring Paulistão and Copinha Championships. Now, on this slide, you see the highlights for Fisia. Just like we expected, this quarter, our channels had completely different dynamics here. In an aggregated manner, Fisia closed the quarter with net revenue of BRL 825 million, a decrease of 5.9% impacted by a 19% drop in wholesale. It is worth highlighting that the revenue of the wholesale channel this quarter is actually reflecting the sales captured in the first half of last year. At that time, the markdowns dynamic was completely different from the current markdown dynamic. Ever since then, our strategy to maintain prices in our direct channels has become much clearer, and retailers are now placing more robust purchase orders that will be materialized in the coming quarters of 2025.
Now, our Fisia direct channels, even with a very robust baseline, Fisia was able to expand its revenue by 1.5%, with a highlight being the one-piece segment of the digital channel, which grew by 5.8% versus the first quarter of 2024. Gross margins make it clear what the strategy is. The combined direct channels closed with margins of 52%, an increase of 1.6 percentage points against the first quarter of 2024. Combined, all channels together delivered gross profit of BRL 360 million and gross margins of 43.7%, slightly above the numbers delivered last year. A main pillar of Fisia's strategy in recent years was disciplined working capital management. In the last one to two years, we have accumulated improvements of 76 days in working capital. This quarter, the highlight was the reduction of inventory days by seven days.
This quarter was also marked by the launch of the new Nike's running strategy. They want to reformulate the portfolio into three categories: responsiveness, stability, and comfort to improve communication and the experience of runners. Now, I'd like to turn the floor over to Salazar, who will give you further details about our financial performance this quarter.
Thank you, Gustavo. Good morning, everyone. Okay, I will give you an overview of our results. I think that the main takeaway here about revenue, and I know I'm being a bit repetitive because Gustavo has already mentioned this, but we are now closing a cycle. We believe that prices have gone back to the right level, so we have recovered our gross margins quite a lot. As a result, we had a growth of around 4%, which reflects a strong discipline in not generating additional revenue with inappropriate margins.
We believe that we have been able to resume the right pricing level and the right discount level. We can see the reflex of this strategy bearing fruit in the last 12 months. Our focus has been on recovering gross margins and recovering the company's profitability. We can see the evolution of gross profit and gross margins. We can clearly see that that's the direction we're taking with significant growth of gross margins going back to our historical levels, and we keep on growing this indicator quarter- on- quarter. The motto of the last 12 months, or even the last 24 months, has been recover of gross margins, right discount levels, right pricing levels, as well as right inventory levels in order to normalize our prices from now on. Okay, now let's move on to expenses.
We worked really hard to reduce expenses, particularly back in 2023, and we kept the good work throughout 2024. Now, in the first quarter of 2025, I'll try to shed some light into this topic. Most of the growth in expenses in terms of revenue percentage this quarter was due to the fact that wholesale dropped by 19%, as Gustavo mentioned earlier. Wholesale is a channel with a fixed cost structure that is a bit heavier. We have to believe that this market is not going to recover to make any adjustments in expenses to resume profitability in this channel. Since we believe that this was an isolated situation and that started in the second quarter with the movement and the new orders that are being placed, we believe this revenue will come back, and the fixed costs will be diluted once again.
I believe that a major step of this operating deleverage because of the fixed costs of wholesales will likely not happen starting the second half of the year because we will have orders that are at a more appropriate size, considering the magnitude of this market. We just wanted to make that clear. Now, a second point. When we say that there has been an increase in marketing expenses, we're talking about performance marketing, basically. With both channels combined, we had an expansion of almost 14%, especially for Centauro. There's no question that part of this growth came due to the strong investment in performance marketing with an appropriate ROI. If we were to break this down by channel, we would see that the growth has brought good sales and good profitability for the company.
We are not concerned about the growth in performance marketing because this is connected to greater sales, and this is bringing positive results for the company. These expenses are a bit hidden within the operational deleveraging that happened because of the fixed cost structure, as I explained earlier, in the wholesale channel. A third factor here that impacted the numbers can be broken down into two parts. The growth in logistics expenses is one of them. We also have an issue related to variable costs here. Centauro is growing both in brick-and-mortar stores and in digital sales, and we have been using our logistics to ship the products to our stores and to our customers. Once again, this variable cost is related to growth in revenue, especially at Centauro.
The second point that is impacting this number here is the temporary expenses related to the migrations to get the remainder of the tax incentives at Fisia. Back in March 2023, in late March 2023, we got this tax incentive for Fisia's brick-and-mortar stores, which we did not have previously. During the migration, we had extra expenses. These expenses are more than offset by the results that we will be able to achieve with the tax incentives. Just as a reminder for our timeline, here at the end of March, we started with tax incentives for brick-and-mortar stores. In the second quarter, we are going to work with the tax incentives throughout the full quarter.
In the third quarter, we will also have tax incentives for wholesale that are going to generate extra results for the company, which will more than offset the foreign exchange rate effects, but that will generate some additional expenses because of some logistics operations that have to be added so that you can benefit from such incentive. Overall, if we exclude the variable costs of performance marketing and if we exclude the extra costs of logistics because of the higher volume at Centauro and because of the new tax incentives, the main issue here was the operational deleveraging of wholesale. In nominal terms, we continue controlling expenses really well. The operational leverage will pick up as the wholesale channel recovers. I think that is the main takeaway of our operating expenses. EBITDA, once again, was impacted by the operational deleveraging.
This happened twice because we did not have the revenue when we had the operational deleveraging. As the wholesale market normalizes, the revenue will come back. We are going to have extra gross income with that additional revenue, and we will dilute the expenses, increasing the company's profitability. Once again, we believe this is an issue happening in wholesale, and it is an isolated effect. Things will go back to normal in the second half of the year in our view. This is a conclusion based on the orders that we have received in the first quarter of the year. In net profit, financial expenses were much lower than last year. I just want to emphasize what Gustavo mentioned in terms of discipline for working capital management and discipline in reducing our debt costs and the deleveraging that we were able to achieve in the last 18 months.
This is reflex of a lower debt level. Now, moving on to the next slide, our cash flow is at an interesting level. The first and second quarters of the year, historically, are quarters that burn a bit more operational cash flow because we are preparing and creating inventory to prepare for the third and fourth quarters, which are typically stronger in terms of sales because of the season. In the last two years, we had an operating cash flow that was positive this quarter, which is not the case if we look at our historical numbers. We have been working really hard to improve our cash position, and we have seen positive results this quarter. Investment flow was pretty much in line with what we had last year, and we have been generating cash to pay out our debt and using the cash we have in-house.
We have been using this cash to buy back shares as well. Like we announced back in December, we bought back about BRL 100 million. With the payout of our debts and the buyback of our shares, we had a negative cash flow of around BRL 193 million, which is comparable to the negative cash flow of BRL 430 million last year. The main issue here is the positive operating cash flow in the first quarter of 2025, which, historically speaking, is not expected for first quarters. Just to emphasize what Gustavo mentioned, once again, we have great discipline in managing our financial cycle, reducing to 124 days, and we have a normalization of our accounts payable now. We have normalized Fisia's procurement in line with our revenue, not using our inventories to generate sales. We have normalized this indicator at around 120 days, actually 110 days.
PNR, we worked really hard to reduce this indicator in the last two years, and I believe that we have now achieved a very satisfactory level. It is now just about fine-tuning our management of the different regions in Brazil and payment terms and minimal installments to adapt these to the specificities of each region in Brazil. Our inventory is working hard in Fisia in order to try and improve our efficiencies. We are already at the inventory levels we want. We think that we can improve our operational efficiency, but this is pretty much going to be done by managing our processes and improving our processes. Finally, our last slide, as Gustavo already mentioned, but I want to emphasize at a time with high interest rates and difficult economy, our capital structure makes us feel comfortable to continue with our strategy moving forward.
From now on, we can focus more on growth. Our capital structure is very comfortable, and it will enable us to start this new phase that Gustavo mentioned in the beginning of his presentation. This is a new phase in which we are going to focus on generating growth. That is all. Now, I would like to open for questions, and thank you once again for your attention.
Okay, we will now start the question and answer session. To submit your question, please click on the raise your hand button. If at any point in time your question is answered, you can remove your name from the queue by clicking on lower your hand. Now, our first question is from Victor Rogatis from Itaú BBA.
Hello, Gustavo, Salazar, Vic, and the whole SBF team. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions on my side.
The first is about the physical stores of Centauro. When we look at the store performance, we understand that the main driver was the 7% improvement in your indicator. My first question is to understand if the same strategy will continue in the coming quarter and if the 7% increase will be maintained in the coming quarters. That's my first question. My second question about expenses. Salazar's explanation was quite clear. I just want to follow up on the selling as well as marketing and advertising expenses. When we look at the headcount at Fisia and Centauro, I'd like to understand if that headcount increase was already completed in the first quarter and it will be maintained in the coming quarters, or if the headcount will still be expanded in April and May?
Now, when it comes to marketing and advertising, can we expect great investments for the remainder of the year? He talked about wholesale deleveraging, but all this investment in marketing and advertising has been bringing in more sales, right? Do you expect to maintain the same levels of investment in marketing?
Thank you for your question, Victor. I will try to answer the first and the third part, and then I'll turn over to Salazar. The first question is about the [item] per coupon indicator. This has become a mantra in our stores. In the last 18 months, we've been developing a training playbook to make sure there are no gaps among our sales team. When we look at our team, we always find gaps.
We're working really hard and insisting on this in all of our meetings with the sales team about the importance of sustaining this indicator. We always look at the people with the best indicators to see what they're doing differently and so that we can teach the rest of the team. We continue focusing on that playbook, but that's not the only thing that we've been doing to increase our brick-and-mortar sales. We've been systematically improving the way we allocate products. Centauro is a national and very democratic network, and stores have different needs of types of products depending on the location they are at. We're working to cluster the stores in the best possible way so that they can get a more accurate assortment, both in terms of shoes and other items. This has a great impact on conversion.
Another thing that we are careful about is the technological platform that we have installed for shoes in order to manage the salespeople queue. We manage this queue, and we can also collect data about the service the salespeople provide. This helps us improve the conversion of each salesperson, and it gives us like a people analytics. We can see the spread of each salesperson, not only sales, but also NPS and all other metrics. This is also something that requires continuous work of focusing on best practices. To wrap up, also exposure. We have developed a 365 project, which is for continuous improvement. All of these metrics may impact one quarter a bit more than the other, but the playbook remains the same.
Rest assured that when you get into a Centauro store, you will be approached with the same improved script from our sales team, which will increase; it aims to increase the number of items per ticket. You also asked about the marketing investments in the coming quarters. We always have to break this down into performance marketing and funnel market. Performance market is considered a variable cost. Every month, we'll look at the marginal contribution of every dollar invested to see if it makes sense to continue investing in performance marketing. We've been able to increase our investments, keeping the desired profitability. When it comes to top-of-the-funnel marketing, what we've been doing is to redirect our investments to focus on two key categories, both for Centauro and Fisia, running and soccer. In Q1 2025, we sponsored Copinha and Paulistão Championships.
There was a mismatch of investments. That does not mean that we have increased or decreased our marketing budget, but that was a type of sponsorship that we did not do in the past and that we decided to do right now. We will continue focusing our marketing investment in these two categories. I would like to turn over to Salazar to answer the second part of your question.
Victor, you asked about the distribution center, right? If we draw a parallel to the third part of your question that Gustavo already answered, if we continue with good same-store sales at Centauro, of course, we are going to increase logistics because we will have to ship more products to the stores because the stores are selling more, right? That is an important point because everything in this case is variable cost, which is completely related to revenue.
Now, about migration. When we start distribution to our brick-and-mortar stores within the SBF Group and no longer through our logistics partner, we have to deal with two issues. First, we have the personnel additional, which in the medium term will be cheaper than what we paid previously to our logistics partner. In addition to that, we also have the new tax incentives coming in. Yes, structurally speaking, I think we are going to expand our headcount, but we are going to have the tax incentives benefits. This more than offsets those increases. We believe that with the tax incentives, we will be able to offset the foreign exchange rate fluctuations this year. In the short term, we may have duplicate costs, but they will not be significant because we are doing the transition and bringing this in-house, structuring the tax incentives for wholesale as well.
We're going to have this extra expense in order to make the migration, but all of that tends to be offset. Like we said earlier, the foreign exchange rate impact will be offset by the tax incentive. We're talking about the net impact of this tax incentive, everything that we have been generating in terms of benefits against all the extra expenses we've had in order to obtain the tax incentive. I don't know if I was clear, but that's pretty much your answer.
Okay, thank you, Gustavo and Salazar.
Our next question comes from Danny Eiger from XP. Please proceed, Danny.
Hi everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I actually have two questions on my side. The first is about demand and growth prospects.
In your release, you talked about a more stable scenario of prices from your competitors, and we see a more favorable scenario in terms of consumption and price acceptance on the side of consumers and demand. Can you tell us about the price pass-through dynamics? You said that you're planning to use tax benefits to mitigate price pressure, but can you also use the price lever here or even your mix because you're launching a new product with Nike? Can you give us an update on the demand/growth dynamics? My second question is about the working capital dynamics. We see sales picking up on the side of suppliers, but can you tell us about the type of products at Centauro and how we can think about the evolution of this line going forward and if this reduction in the receivables term is structural or not?
Hi, Danny.
Thank you for your question. I will answer the first part, and if Salazar wants, I can also tell you a bit about the inventory part. We are happy with the consumption trends that we saw in the first quarter, and we are analyzing the pricing strategy, especially in our summer collection. Price maintenance was quite important together with other strategies that we adopted in wholesale to recover the performance of this channel in the near future. There is a specificity here. Centauro is the main wholesale customer of Fisia, so that gives us an advantage because we can capture the full margin of the chain, but we are also looking at the price movements from our competitors because we want to remain competitive.
We have to be careful when we pass through the prices because we have to protect profitability and at the same time maintain our products at a competitive level. I think that we can achieve the right balance in this equation. Now, about inventory, you're asking whether Centauro's inventory has grown and the quality of this inventory. Yes, indeed, we have had inventory growth. In Q1, we had an 11% growth in inventory, and we are doing inventory recomposition when we have a better idea of how the coming months will be like. We are very disciplined about two things. The first, the percentage of older inventory that we have in-house and the levels of older inventory that we saw in the first quarter was very healthy and how this inventory is distributed in our distribution centers and stores.
We are also quite disciplined to make sure that we have the right inventory level in our distribution centers to do inventory recomposition as the items are sold rather than just sending everything to the stores, which is what happened in the first quarter of last year. We changed inventory allocation, which favored our performance in the first quarter of 2025. This higher inventory level is a reflex of the increase in sales that we have been seeing in digital and in brick-and-mortar stores.
Let me just add something here, Danny. Although I'm being a bit repetitive, once we see greater growth and we have robust same-store sales, especially at Centauro, the first thing we have to do is, if you believe this is going to be maintained as such, is to acquire, to buy more. Inventory increase is related to our performance of operations.
Having said that, although this was not your question specifically, I think we should talk about Fisia. Historically speaking, in our mind, we should have a difference of around 30 days of inventory between Fisia and Centauro, and we have not yet addressed that ideal gap. I think that in the next two years, we are going to change processes and implement other initiatives because there is no silver bullet, but little by little, we will be able to gain inventory days without affecting our sales, which is an important point. Now, about accounts receivable, which was the last part of your question, it is structural. Nevertheless, it can still fluctuate a bit because Brazil is quite diverse. Maybe in a city in the countryside of Bahia, we need longer payment terms than in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.
This is about fine-tuning our accounts receivable to the demographic characteristics of each region of the country. I'm sure that some places in the countryside or the hinterlands of Bahia is completely different from the capital city of the state of São Paulo. Having said that, we believe there will be fluctuations in this number, but it's now a bit of science and a bit of art. There is science behind, of course, but there is also a bit of art to adapt to each region of Brazil. Thank you.
That was very clear. Thank you for your answers.
Our next question comes from Felipe Rached at Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please proceed.
Hi everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I would like to get further details about the dynamics at Fisia in the last quarter.
The multi-brand strategy was quite clear, but now can we expect a similar trend at Fisia in the coming quarter or only in the second half of the year? More importantly, in spite of the drop in sales in your multi-brand, we did not see growth in DTC. What are the dynamics impacting here? DTC and multi-brand have different dynamics, or are they somehow related? Do you see a yellow light there? Can you please give us some more color into this topic? Thank you very much.
Hi, Felipe. Okay, let me try to paraphrase your question to make sure I understand it. You want us to give you some more color into Fisia's results and wholesale had different dynamics, and you want us to explore a bit more Fisia's own store's potential and how this compares to a multi-brand store?
Yes, that's right.
Because in a way, with multi-brand stores performing worse, we could expect DTC to offset that somehow, except the assortments are completely different at the points of sale. So can you tell us about this relationship?
Okay, multi-brand and Nike stores are not necessarily part of the same trading zone. There are some stores in outlet malls and others in regular malls. In malls, we should see some kind of similarity, but the outlet mall behavior is quite different from that of other stores, depending on the season of the year as well as markdown strategy for different days of the week. At Fisia, the comparison this quarter is a bit distorted because of the baseline of the markdown strategy for Nike's products last year. The brick-and-mortar channel grew by 29% last year, if I'm not mistaken.
It was only expected that this growth be less significant this year. This quarter, we struggled with a shortage of supply in January because the sales during the holiday seasons were really strong, and we had a shortage of supply of the main franchisees of the base of the running pyramid. Fisia had a weaker performance in January because of that, but it recovered in the following months. Yes, we can draw a parallel between multi-brand stores and NVS stores in the same trading zones with similar products, but we cannot draw a parallel of the multi-brand stores within DIS because the portfolios are completely different. At the end, [BIS], what impacted the most was the big three performance, and the outlet mall performance is a whole different world depending on the markdown policies and other factors. Would you like to add anything, Salazar?
Yes, let me just add one comment about the digital channel at Fisia. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Felipe, but I think you also asked about digital, right? When it comes to digital, I mean, right now, the wholesale decision takes nine months to a year to materialize. When we're selling in wholesale now, it's a decision that we made a year ago, and digital had huge discounts, and then they did not want to buy because they thought they would not be able to sell at those prices. They purchased less, and the digital has a very strong baseline to compare with because we were starting to remove the discounts. In 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, we still had major discounts.
Right now, digital has a strong comparison base, and wholesale has just started buying now, believing that we would keep our sales and promotions under control. The timings do not match. You have digital selling, as you know, in real life with much higher prices than the previous year, and you have wholesale that purchased a year in advance, and now they believe in the company once again, but believing in the company is something that will only see materialize in the second half of the year. I think that we have a timing dynamic here impacting this. Now, going back to your original question, we believe that the wholesale recovery will happen gradually. We believe that the second quarter will be better than the first, and then starting in Q3 and Q4, we will start to see a positive result in wholesale. Okay?
I hope I was clear.
Yes, yes, you were very clear. That's exactly what I wanted to understand, if it was a matter of timing or a matter of demand. So it's more a matter of timing, as you said, right? It's quite clear. Thank you very much.
Our next question is from Vinícius Estrano at UBS. Please, Vinícius, go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. I want to explore the drivers that led to gross margin improvements at Centauro. What were the factors here? Assortment, and what are your expectations for gross margins at Centauro from now on? A question about Nike. Can you tell us about the competitive landscape for Nike today? Thank you very much.
Hi, Vinícius. Thank you for your question. First, let's talk about the margins at Centauro in the first quarter of 2025.
There were a few factors here driving these numbers. For some time now, we've been sophisticating our markdowns. With systems deployment and recently with the use of algorithms, we were able to determine the prices that we should be practicing for different groups of products in different stores. This makes sure that we can sell older inventory at better margins than we had previously. It's no use doing this if you have a very high level of older inventory. This quarter, we had a healthy margin percentage. Our strategy was to make sure that we'd start off the year with our products available at our distribution center, which enabled us to decrease our discounts in the stores because we were sending carryover products to the stores. This helped maintain the margins.
The maintenance of Fisia prices, particularly in the digital channel, also has a positive impact on Centauro's margin. We will keep on tracking these metrics to make sure we continue capturing this margin expansion throughout the year. Of course, the gap is smaller, but we are being more sophisticated in our strategy here. Your second question was about the competitive landscape for Nike in Brazil. Is that right?
Yes, that's right.
Okay, good. I think that the main challenge here in Brazil, I mean, Nike is experiencing challenges worldwide. They had a channel management problem. They got away from retailers abroad more than in Brazil, and they also had a franchise management problem that stuffed the market with the big three. They also had a problem of product innovation, especially in the running category. They also took a step back from soccer worldwide.
They have created a global strategy to address those four things. When we look at the soccer offensive, historically speaking, Nike was not well represented in Brazilian soccer. We had a partnership with Corinthians that had been there for 22 years, and once every four years, we had a strong brand presence during the World Cup. Also, the American Cup, but mostly once every four years. We started focusing on soccer, and Nike will probably be present in other clubs in the near future because we continue working to expand the brand footprint in the soccer category. When it comes to product innovation, particularly in the running category, which is a very relevant category here in Brazil, Nike did a reset. ASICS is really strong, and other brands that are hurting Nike abroad are still quite incipient in Brazil.
Nike still has a very relevant share in the running category. Nike's revolution is the basis of the running pyramid. Nevertheless, Nike did a reset in their strategy, and they now have a much more straightforward communication to capture the sales not only at the basis of the pyramid in which Nike has been a leader, but also in the middle and at the top of the pyramid. For product innovation in running and soccer, this is something that we've been addressing. When it comes to lifestyle, this is an industry with a more pendular dynamic. Nike flew high for certain years, but then it cooled down, and we're very confident that we're going to go back to previous levels.
Now, a specificity of Brazil when compared to other countries is that our industry is more resistant at the basis of the pyramid, and that creates pressure to increase the percentage of products made in Brazil. This is a conversation that is constantly happening. All brands are looking into this, and I'm sure that we are also going to keep up with that. Did I answer your question?
Yes, you did. Thank you.
I think his audio was chopping up, but I think he said yes.
Yes, yes, you did. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question is from Vitor Fuziharo at Santander. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi, Gustavo. Hi, Salazar. Thank you for taking my questions. My first question is about the profitability of the company from now on. We see this growth being resumed.
What are some of the opportunities that we want to explore, and how are you going to balance growth and margins? My second question, even with the cooling down of this discussion in recent days, we see the effect of the global change. Do you expect any novelty in terms of supply for Fisia for the rest of the year?
Thank you for your questions, Victor. I'll start by talking about the tariffs. We're in close contact with Nike, and we're paying close attention to that, but I can tell you that up until now, nothing has changed. We are actually more optimistic than we were a week ago, like everyone else, right? We do not anticipate any type of disruption. Our imports come through Vietnam, and they do not do any type of triangulation. 50% comes from Vietnam.
The other 50% is local, and we have no other concern about disruptions in this chain. Now, the first part of your question was about our growth avenues and how to maintain good margins as we grow. Let's start with the long term, then medium term, and finally short term. In the long term, our growth avenues continue the ones that we have been sharing with you for a long time now. I have to be careful with the numbers I share. I always look at Victoria and Salazar just to make sure they won't scold me. We talked about our IPO, 600 malls in Brazil. We have 237 or 227 malls with Centauro. We have some malls where we can expand Centauro's presence.
When it comes to Fisia, we see an important growth opportunity here, especially with in-line stores because our penetration is still very low in this area. With ROICs, just like the rest of the network and healthy margins, this is always going to be under our radar. In the medium term, we believe that we can still extract a lot of juice from the existing Centauro boxes. This year, we're going to pay close attention to extract more growth from the Centauro boxes. We still have 104 stores that are in the older generation. When we look at the growth profile of stores throughout the year, this is not a linear growth profile. When we look at the histogram, we see great opportunities for growth.
Overall, what we see is good performance in more modern stores, stores with a better social income, and we have worse performance in older generation stores with worse assortment as well. We have to pay due attention in same-store sales, Centauro stores. In the short term, I do not see a scenario in which the digital will not be a growth lever. I think that we have defined a clear vision for digital, which is based on three pillars that have been working really well. The first pillar is to have a robust tech platform with the main market leaders, and that is what we did in the last two years. Centauro and Fisia today have a good technological platform, but we still have many features that can be introduced, so there is a growth lever here.
The second channel is the multi-channel approach, which distinguishes us from the other players in the market. Last year, we rolled out this feature that enables any product that you buy on the website can be picked up, returned, or exchanged in stores. Now we also deliver other products at the stores. Finally, the last pillar is that we now have a platform to buy sporting products. Any sporting product can be best purchased at Centauro than anywhere else. We believe this is going to continue to be a growth lever with healthy margins. We're working hard to decrease the margin spread between the digital world and the physical world, and Fisia is a driver for that. The strategy of going to 3P and to work on the online segment is helping us, but we can still improve the digital margins here.
Considering all of the growth levers, I'd say we have opportunities in the short, medium, and long terms. This can have an impact on G&A. For example, if we talk about renovating a store, you have a CapEx associated, and you have to hire people, train them to finally be able to extract value from these employees. We're confident that we have great growth opportunities there as well.
Great. Thank you very much.
Okay, everyone. This concludes our Q&A session. Once again, I would like to thank you all for joining us and for your interest in our company. Now, in August, we'll hold our next call. See you then. Bye-bye.