Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the video conference for the results for the fourth quarter and for fiscal year 2023, Vivara. The company will make its initial comments and analysis of financial performance, and then we will go on for questions and answers. For those of you who need simultaneous translation, just click on the globe on the bottom of the screen and choose Interpretation. You can listen to Portuguese or English. For those of you listening in English, you have the option to mute original audio. For those who are sell-side analysts, you are invited to take part in person. Just include your name and the company in the Q&A icon on the bottom of the platform, and we will let you talk. This will be, you will be invited to then use your audio and video turned on to ask your question.
Just click on the button on the bottom of your screen. For other participants, please send your questions through the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen. If your question is not responded to during this video conference, investor relations team will contact you later to answer your questions. From Vivara, we have Mr. Otávio Lyra, Financial Director, and Mellina Paiva, Director of Investor Relations. Mr. Otávio Lyra will now talk about Vivara's financial performance for the fourth quarter 2023 and fiscal year 2023. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome once again for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 results. Before we get going, and before we dive down into the details, it's very important that we pay close attention. This week begs that we make some comments. There was a change in command of the company.
We understand perfectly that changes can bring concerns, and people are always anxious and have lots of questions when things like this happen. You and the market, those of you listening to us today, are pushing for greater visibility and transparency, and that is why I have some important messages, some, some confirmations. I wanna talk about, about some of the characteristics of our business that never change. What we have always shared with you in terms of corporate strategy throughout all of these years as a listed company. We continue with our primary channels and avenues for 2024. I will now focus on this short term, obviously, but we expect 70-80 new store openings this year. We are expecting a year of market growth, market share growth, corporate growth.
Life continues to grow extensively, including the greater revenue share and lots of growth moving forward. We have a lot of work to internationalize Life and the manufacturing plant. We went to a new plant last year, so we had to stop production at two different points and move the plant. So, we had to push some of the sales to outside the company, and that reduced a little bit our internationalization focus. It's a huge mission that we have for this year, to decrease imports and to increase profitability. And this is still on our radar, very much so. Even with tax challenges, our business model allows us to grow and to gain in terms of profitability. Our competitive advantages have not changed, and they won't change moving forward.
We will continue to capitalize on this, both next year and for the years to come. We expect to generate a lot of operating cash in the next few years. We showed, posted excellent results in this regard, and I'll talk about this, a little bit, a little bit later as we go deep down into the fourth quarter and the fiscal year. But in 2024, we always saw that this was gonna be a, a turning point or an inflection point. Intense years of investment, years of new systems, digital stores, heavy investments in general. We see that the business is sustainable, strong basis, and this is gonna sustain accelerated growth that we expect to see in the next few years.
This cash generation is not just good for cash flow, but it was excellent in the final quarter, and it's gonna be great for 2024, and it's gonna allow for greater to take better advantage of our physical assets. We got a special tax regime for our credits, tax credits in São Paulo with the ICMS taxes. And this was excellent for our retail business. This is significant. We're talking about BRL 90 million when this new tax regime was passed. We've seen some material advantages already at the end of the year as a result of this, and this will continue to generate positive results in 2024.
Not just to be able to take advantage of what we generated in credit in the past, and what we're gonna do in terms of tax credit, but this is also just gonna be better for the fiscal regime when it comes to purchasing gold. The credit formation cycle will be reduced, vis-à-vis what it was before, and this leads to improvements, not just for the results in 2024, but profits in follow, and results in following years as well. Finally, I think it's important that we take a break here to talk about our push to internationalize. The company has always desired to expand abroad, to exploit this potential with a strong brand, with wonderful characteristics and traits from other businesses that were successful outside of Brazil.
We're a high margin retail, which means that we can be a little bit more courageous and bolder as we do this. And we're looking at the challenges, but we know that we're facing challenges, but we can't not push forward and take advantage of this opportunity moving forward. We want to be able to sustain a growth cycle for longer, and maybe be stronger. And if we don't start now, we won't be able to do it in the time that we need. We won't be able to sustain the business in the timeline that we need. Because of this, this acceleration, this growth acceleration, that all arrows point to, this is the right time. Our very first tests, our very first pilots into these foreign markets.
We're gonna, again, we're gonna start with pilots this year. There's gonna be no material change or capital allocations for the company, but this is the right moment. Now, I'd like to talk about the quarter results. Once again, I'd like to invite all of you to really pay attention to these numbers. I think that's what we deserve. The situation is extremely interesting, and you can see a lot of these changes reflected in these results, as I already mentioned. I'll try to make quicker comments so that there's time for questions and answers. I'm sure you all have lots of questions, and Mellina and I are here to answer every single one of them. I'm not gonna go through the entire presentation. I'm sure you've all seen it. I'm sure you've all reviewed it.
For those of you who haven't, please review the results. You can really see... Look through the release, you can see the trends, not just for the quarter, but for the year and moving forward. I'm just gonna go over the main highlights and, and make sure I touch upon them before we go into questions and answers. Let's look at 2023. N ot the quarter. Let's look at 2023. I'm gonna start with slide 4. Again, year 2023. This was the year of deliveries. Just like in years past, this is a year that merits celebration. We continued to implement systems and innovation throughout the company. Again, it was a year of major changes so that we could really sustain all of this growth. It was a year of stock adjustments, inventory turnover, and a year of resilience.
I will show you this throughout the presentation. It's a year of records when we're celebrating these records. BRL 1 billion in sales in just one quarter. Life as a record, as products, and it still continues to grow, and continues to grow because of the new store openings that we expect, but also because we saw excellent performance, as well as excellent maturity in our portfolio of current stores. 71 store openings this year, record. We can see that we're continuing to expand, as we communicated to you all, as we've already disclosed. Once again, solid deliveries in this regard. We were never as organized as last year in our deliveries. It's gonna be yet another year of many, many store openings. We've got all our ducks in a row for the first time.
We've seen these excellent opening numbers earlier than we expected, earlier in the year than even planned. So, that reduced some of the risk in the second half of the year, especially in the last quarter. You don't want to be opening stores right at the end of the year, right? So, you got to want everything ready to go. So, we are—all the stores are ready to go. They're open, excellent customer service. We're headed in the right direction to continue with this accelerated growth. Diving down again into the numbers, this was a year of strong growth, extraordinarily strong growth, and especially in retail. We expanded our share, we consolidated quickly, and 2.2 additional share, market share, and it's gonna continue significantly growing in the jewelry, Brazilian jewelry market.
We only see additional capitalization on top of these changes that we've already implemented. We've got a strong brand, an efficient industry, with greater penetration than ever before, as well as well-executed retail, well-controlled retail. BRL 2.8 billion in gross revenue, with 21.2% growth. Same store sales, 12.4% versus 2022 because of Life and the opening of the stores and the more recent openings in just the last 24 months. But they're already part of the metrics here. But this is also because of Vivara's healthy growth in and of itself, especially in the fourth quarter. We saw this wonderful expansion of same-store sales just in the fourth quarter. So this is the big driver of these numbers. Wonderful strategies for product strategies.
It's not just the quarter, it's the previous quarters, excellent execution, which has led to these wonderful results. This growth is driven primarily by customers. We had 70% more active clients here in the company. And when we talk about new customers, 30.4% new customers. Over 70,000 new customers, and even more just in the last quarter of this year. This is the advantage that we have. When we look at seasonality, we've established this scalability over decades, and, and, we notice this in seasonality. That's where we have our largest investments, and we really stretch out, we really take advantage of this competitive advantage that we have already. And this is only gonna be growing moving forward.
And we did this in a year of change and a year of turnover efficiency, cash generation, when we said we increased our EBITDA margin. A margin of 29% of adjusted EBITDA margin, nearly BRL 480 million, 19.6% increase vis-à-vis 2024. Strong growth, strong heavy investment, significant development in the pillars that is going to sustain this growth moving forward, and nevertheless, significant resilience in the company results. There was a significant reduction in inventory turnover, 26-day reduction. So, and we delivered on those expectations that we set. It was a historic year. We were able to deliver and better improve those deliveries over the last five, six years. I see that this year was actually no different from years prior.
In the third quarter, we saw an excellent growth. We saw the company's excellent ability to generate cash in this company, which better allowed us to allocate capital for our business. Nevertheless, the fourth quarter does deserve that we take a real specific look at it. There were some characteristics and there were some impacts we've described in our last earnings calls. It makes it very clear when we look at just this fourth quarter here at the end of the year. As I see it, this shows us our true operating performance and how we need to look at it, especially in this very important seasonal period, after adjustments and accounting adjustments, and has been happening since the second quarter last year, and it's still very clear, still very important.
You've seen the numbers for the fourth quarter. 24% growth in gross revenue compared to the fourth quarter of 2022. Greater profitability, increase in same store sales. Black Friday continues, was very important for us. This really brought in excellent sales for us. It was really a boon. As I see it, our operating data disclosures in January meant that the market had a lot of expectations vis-à-vis our results. They were, they even had. They had a really high bar set. Even more than we had said, and yet we still saw 15% same store sales, 70% gross margin, 22 new store openings in the fourth quarter alone, and an addition of BRL 87.3 million in free cash generation. And if you look at the release, you can see even more details, information regarding all of these numbers here.
I said I'm not gonna go through all the results, but give me just two more minutes here to quickly talk about something very, very important. This is, again, year-long results, not just the quarter, but this is super, super important. This is slide six, which has some of our KPIs and our financial highlights. Note the first two lines, gross revenue, net of returns. Note here, note here how gross revenue has grown. There's a difference between gross and net. This is the lower presumed credit, and also some of the changes in the company. When we look at Manaus and e-commerce, that's BRL 32 million for the year, and this is part of the deductions in 2022, 2023. We're still feeling the effects this year.
These two effects lead to a slight difference in growth rates, and do affect the company's operating results, and should be taken into account when we look at true operating performance. You see a net margin pressure because of the characteristics already mentioned, because the tax rate was adjusted, as I mentioned before. I hope that best explains some of the most important things. I'm now just gonna open up now for question and answers. I'm sure you've all read it, read everything you need to read, but I'd rather just answer the questions live. We will now start with questions and answers. Please keep in mind to ask a question, just use the Q&A option at the bottom of the screen. First question from Luiz Guanais, sell-side, BTG Pactual. If you'd like to use your camera and microphone, go ahead.
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Good morning, Otávio, Mellina. Two questions on my side. First, expenses. Could you just jump into that a little bit, give some more details? In the release, this did affect margins because there was accelerated store growth and openings. I'd like you to talk a lot about what do we expect for expenses, specifically for labor, moving forward in 2024? Second question: could you also talk a bit about the credit, what can we expect, the tax credit, what can we expect moving forward? I'll start. Mellina, feel free to jump in. Part of the expenses pressure is because of some of the difficulties that I mentioned before. Even when we account for those, there are some increased expenses due to sales expenses.
Labor, as you mentioned, labor with sales, is often due to reclassification, because we reclassified some of these expenses. This happened in the second quarter, and we've been discussing this actually over the last few results. There's also a pressure from new stores. We have a bigger number this year, also because of our omni-channel. It grew much faster, much faster than some of the other channels, and this brings a lot of greater penetration for us. There's also pressure in this fourth quarter, not in the rest, because of the benefit adjustments. To address turnover, retail turnover, we made some major adjustments for benefits for sales, and we will see some compensation mo- in this regard moving forward. There were some other effects as well.
Expense pressure, expenses on third parties, primarily as this push, this greater push towards digital, digitalizing and technological improvements. We have links to all the stores, more speed when they do checkout with... And there's obviously a consequence to this because it requires heavy investment, and also a little bit of store maintenance. So, I think these are some of the main factors. And now, what can we expect moving forward? Part of these expenses for sales... We're gonna continue to see them as in the business. As we expand, with our expansion, the pace of expansion is going to continue throughout 2024. A lot of stores are still maturing, and we expect that to continue. Benefit adjustments that happened in November, and so this will be it.
We'll see the effects of that this year, and we're normalizing some of the other impacts. Omni is huge. I doubt it's gonna be as equivalent in 2024, and we'll be able to smooth out some of the other ebffects. Again, there's the maturation, maturity of certain stores as well. So, in this new scale, and now that we better understand how Life functions, we have a better understanding of stores. We do expect pressures in 2024, but nothing too exaggerated. The presumed tax credit is very important, as it was in 2023. We've been able to allocate capital, including, especially for finished products across the company, working capital in general. Life is still rather new. In a year that didn't have any, or that's not gonna have any changes in the plant, we're gonna be able to offset some of these.
The meaning is that the plant, despite the fact that we're going to move abroad with Life product, relatively speaking, we're still getting non-favorable presumed tax credits vis-à-vis 2023. Now that doesn't mean that it's gonna be of a great magnitude, and we had some excellent profitability. A wonderful opportunity is also to review price. Now that we have one factory not two, things should be a little bit easier. Gross margin, for example, we expect more gains moving forward, specifically in 2024. But we do expect that this presumed tax credit may affect profitability moving forward. Thank you very much, Otávio.
Thank you. Next question from Victor Rogatis, sell-side analyst, Itaú BBA. Please turn on your mic and camera.
So, I guarantee you. Okay, Victor. Thank you. I want to talk about gross margin. You just talked about the Presumed Tax Credit. What about a decrease, an increase in deductions with the ICMS tax in a lot of states throughout Brazil, and the PIS/COFINS tax? That's my first question. If you could talk a little bit more about this tax. And then working capital, you said that it's going to affect stock, but not just in stock or inventories, but how should suppliers perform, or in... What should suppliers be doing? Can you just talk about both of those, both those subjects? Thank you very much. The first one, in 2024, we do expect a slight gap, and there's still gonna be some pressure on certain lines, line items. We're gonna continue to see this pressure.
This is due, again, to that presumed tax credit. In terms of expenses, we know. For sale, this is gonna affect gross revenue, not net revenue. But you know this already. This is nothing new. This pressure, we will still see it, but in 2023, we looked at our fixed expenses and labor and looked for savings across the boards. The idea, as I mentioned early on, is that despite these increases and these adjustments and these state tax adjustments, we can use this to our advantage. And we still expect a year of expansion, market consolidation, where we still be able to preserve our operating results and our margins, regardless of some of these tax changes. That's our objective for 2024. Our business model allows us not just to deliver on profitability despite these challenges.
What we have to ensure this profitability, unlike other sectors, is not just repass, but is the internationalization of Life. I think that few other companies have this to their advantage. So whether it's a credit, IR, ICMS taxes, or whatever it is, we still expect a year where we expect growth, operating growth, because of how we position ourselves. And you asked something about working capital, right? I think we have a few advantages right now. When it comes to inventory, number 1, expansion. Life is lighter when it comes to this regard. Most of the 80 stores that we opened this year are Life. I think 80% are Life stores. So naturally, over the last 2 years, that Life's been part of our business, this is gonna lead to greater turnover and greater efficiency.
So, we're gonna see a reduction of cycle, which we expect moving forward, and this is gonna be positive for all of our metrics. Occasional coverage reduction in gold jewelry; we believe in our potential to reach the same efficiency metrics that we in 2024 that we showed for 2023. We're not reducing, reducing coverage linearly. I think it was quite clear that over the year, that we saw different cycles of investment in inventory over the years in the company. And we saw a very positive effect of this investment in Vivara. This investment for Vivara was excellent. It was very concentrated in gold inventory. We took advantage of this opportunity, a time where gold has doubled in value since 2019, and so now we're able to see a significant advance.
Yeah, we were a bit, a little bit more cautious back in 2019, 2020. So we're, we're looking at all the bets that we placed over the last few years and the advantages that we've, opportunities that we've taken advantage. Obviously, we didn't... not all of the bets were the right bets. Sometimes raw materials are an issue, fleets are an issue. Since the beginning of last year, we started to focus on this and reorganize, reorganize so that we could be more efficient in our jewelry inventory. We see some benefits there. We do expect some benefits in that regard this year. And suppliers are here to help us with this inventory reduction. Because this is some of it, this actually leads to a reduction of some of our agreed suppliers.
We have longer terms with them, sometimes it's 90 days, 120 days. So as we reduce allocation capital in raw materials, because of the inventory projections we have moving forward, this will affect our suppliers. So, this is an effect that is completely correlated effect. Good point, Mellina. Over 2023, where we saw a slight reduction in this line, we concentrated on raw material in the second half of the year, just before that Manaus shift. And then in December, we changed the gold line to the other factory. So, purchases in the third quarter were even less than normal. So again, a lot of these agreements were even less important, as Mellina mentioned, these agreement suppliers are third-party suppliers. Next question from Eric Huang, sell-side analyst, Santander. Please turn on your camera and your mic. Oi, pessoal. Vocês me escutam agora?
Can you hear me now? Great. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. Gross margin, what about this curve for internationalization of Life in 2024? What are the challenges? What should we be looking at as this plays out? And second question, looking at expansion, you mentioned this earlier, you expect expansion to be better distributed over the course of the year. I think it was in the release when you saw the number of openings. I don't remember how many store openings it was, but anyway. But I wanna understand what you mean by being more distributed. What do we expect in this regard? And you saw the weight of some of these expenses, and we saw a little bit of an impact in the fourth quarter because of labor expenses.
Is this going to be better distributed throughout the year? So, when we look at this evolution of the margin, should it be a little more gradual? Like, how does it all fit together over 2024? I'm gonna talk about the internationalization. Late 2023, 40% internationalization of Life, 40% came from our factory due to the transition. We expect this year, and to deal with these tax impacts that we mentioned before. We expect to go up higher than 50-ish%, which is what we said before. This effect, when we look at timeline over the year, production is generally linear. We have specific amounts that we produce generally each month, but the effect in sales is, it depends on seasonality. And this, obviously, this affects the two quarters with the greatest seasonality, second and fourth quarter.
But we look at volume produced every year. We have our own timeline here, lead time for production. We know what's going on every single day. We're looking at this every single day to identify how this production and the product is gonna be delivered, and what are the effects, delivery of new products, internalization of products. Well, what we expect, we've got early in the year, then we've got Black Friday later in the year. We see greater margin in some of these two particular periods. Expansion. Otávio, you want to talk about expansion? Okay. When we look at expansion, we had a lot more in the first half of the year.
Again, we should this year see 40%-45% new store openings in the first half of the year, and about 55-ish-60% in the second half of the year. It takes about 120-130 days to get a store up and running, so it's natural that this takes a little bit longer. But we have a lot of contracts ready to go, signed. 80% of them have already been signed, and we've got this all set up on the timeline. 40%-45% of these openings should be in the first semester, first half of the year. I think the good thing, the good news is that, again, we've got these disclosures every month. We disclose these numbers every single month. So you know, you followed the first two months.
You already understand, we're already, you know, we're already two, three months in, so you already know what's gonna be happening with this quarter. You're already familiar with what's going on. The team is very well when... Did a very good job when they mapped out these contracts, and they mapped out opportunities as well, and they did an excellent job in that regard. So, we're ready to get everything up and ready, and, and ready for the seasonality that Mellina mentioned. You asked for trends in terms of expenses and trend, and these pressures. In the following, in this first quarter of the year, we are still seeing the effects of the tax reclassifications and the line item reclassifications. Sadly, I have to say this again, but, but we have the same base starting with the second quarter. It's gonna be a lot easier.
It's gonna make it much more visible, much easier to understand. In the first quarter, the reclassifications affected the margin, BRL millions, so we need to look at this separately. And we're gonna continue disclosing this information so that you can understand the impact, the true impact. The same thing is also gonna happen with expenses. So, I don't go on for too long. Please pay attention to the first quarter, because it's gonna require a more detailed review because of the readjustments, operating readjustments this past year. But again, we're looking to ensure better understanding and comprehension of our results. We want to be more consistent when we explain our results. So, following the second quarter of the year, as of the second quarter of the year, it should be a lot clearer.
Thank you so much, obrigada, Otávio and Mellina, for answering my questions. It's very clear.
Next question from Vinicius Strano, sell-side analyst, UBS. Please turn on your mic and camera.
Good day. Good day, Otavio. Good day, Mellina. Good morning, Otavio and Mellina. Thank you for the question. Our marketing expenses here, could you please give us some more details? Where were your marketing expenses will be? And expenses in general, could you just talk a little bit more about them? Are there any other sources for more efficiencies to compensate for these larger or labor expenses that you mentioned because of some of the adjustments that you mentioned earlier? And in terms of Life, if you could talk a little bit about the performance of Life stores in shopping malls where there's no Vivara stores. And also a little bit about tax benefits. How can we exploit this? How can this, how can this be positive for us in terms of taxes?
Marketing expenses is one of the expenses that we pilot more. Moving forward, we don't expect this to change significantly as a percentage of our gross revenue. But there's obviously a little bit more marketing or less marketing in, depending on seasonality, and it'll affect results. But it's generally, it generally goes according to seasonality. Where we see leverage to decrease to decrease some of our expenses in administrative. There was some because of the expansion, there was a lot of expenses, operating expenses. We had to mature some of the stores, but we do expect to see a reduction, a greater reduction, in the short term, that's where we see a bit of a leverage for operating. Life versus Life where we don't have Vivara. We have seven stores where that's the case. These type of stores are great opportunities.
These contracts include some extra special benefits with the shopping malls. Sometimes we get extra, extra time with lower costs, et cetera, lower rents, and it's really positive. So this is excellent. It's even better than what we had projected for these particular stores. They mature faster. A little bit slower, because Life tends to they, they, because they depend on Vivara, but they're very profitable, they're maturing as expected, and there is significant return on investment vis-à-vis what we expect from the shopping malls. A lot of them have excellent, excellent results. For 2024, we have a few more stores that we expect to fit this category, which is Life stores, where we don't have Vivara stores. And again, it tends to be places where we do have slightly slower revenue. What was your last question? Exploitation income.
The factory explains us revenue vis-à-vis income. All of the effects that we've seen can be explained by lower production, and that means lower exploitation, because it depends on our factory. So, when we change the results, things are affected. You have a different tax effects on the subsidiary versus the main store. So, this is obviously gonna affect the main company, so this is going to affect us. So, in 2023, this is because of lower production in Conip and less effect of Conip throughout the year. But now for 2024, we're gonna still normalize this effective rate. It's not the effective rate, normal effective rate for the company. There's a 10 for this to be the cash rate, and this is gonna play out throughout the year.
This is going to expect operations throughout the year, results from operations throughout the year. Perfect. That's what we said. I hope I answered your question. Thank you, Otávio. Thank you, Mellina. Thank you, Victor. Next question. Question and answers period is now drawing to a close. The remaining questions will be answered by Investor Relations team from Vivara. Thank you very much, and have a wonderful day. Thank you, everybody, and have a wonderful day. We're here to answer any questions you may have.