Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our third quarter 2020 sales call. This morning I am with Laurent Delabarre, our Group Chief Financial Officer, and we will take you through the different aspects. First of all, let me wish each of you a healthy condition in this very fragile sanitary environment. We are very glad to have you on the call, which is a good sign in any case. We continue to operate in a very volatile environment. As you will see, Rexel has shown its ability to adjust, to demonstrate its resilience, to deliver on its priorities, and while almost weekly adapting to an evolving situation. It's new to all of us, but now we have learned since March how to get things done.
Q3 brought further confirmation that the investments we have made over the past three years in people, in inventories, the branch openings, the IT and digital aspects of all has proven to be relevant and contributed to transform Rexel into a robust but also agile company able to navigate the current turmoil without compromising on our medium-term ambition. Beyond these words, we will demonstrate to you today that this is a daily reality. I will start by focusing on key highlights, then I will take you through our geographical performance, and Laurent will do so, and touch on profitability and cash also. Then I will come back for concluding remarks before we move to the Q&A session.
Now, if we go to the key highlights, and when you see on page three, when you run 23 countries and 10 entities in the U.S., regions being an entity or a sister company being one. Every week, you adapt to new conditions, the COVID regularly, but also the fires, the hurricanes, and all the different aspects of social life. Every week since March, we managed to, first, ensure healthy conditions to employee and to customers. Second, assure the business continuity. We never have let a customer without being delivered, without having access to an inventory, without having access to the needed product. Never. We did that with a high level of service.
The other dimension was to make sure that throughout the turmoil, we would keep our customer base very active and healthy from both the sanitary aspect but also the financial aspect, so that they could pay us in time and in full, and therefore, we were even helping them on their front. Every week, we managed to adjust inventories and receivables despite some headwinds, disruptions in certain supply chain, so that we had to find replacement products and so on, but we always manage through this very changing environment.
Every week we manage to use, overuse I should say, and rely on our digital tools and still continuing to get the adoption of our digital transformation initiated before. This is what the adaptation has been throughout since March and continue to be and will continue to be. On the page four, there are strategic decisions which translate into performance.
First of all, by having a real good service level, we were able to stabilize sales at good level in Europe and positive trends in our most profitable countries. It was essential for the company, for the investment, for all of us. Asia Pac posted organic growth by good underlying internal demand in China. This was already immediately when the pandemic started in Europe, that China was showing a comeback, and it has stayed like that since that moment. In North America, even if it's lagging behind the other geographies, even if it's very contrasted by regions, it's improving sequentially month after month. Therefore, we feel confident about the global group performance on a sales standpoint, and we have today same day sales growth evolution, by in the quarter three, that ended up with -4.2% despite a drop of 17.7% in Q2.
You know, all of this was really reached because customer always found in Rexel a solution to their needs, because our employee always promoted Rexel as a solution to the customers. Whether it was digitally connected, whether it was through the phone, I would say physically connected, or whether it was to come to a place in order to get a product. We managed to keep and to value the best-in-class customer service in this very volatile environment. Why do I talk with you about this here this morning? It's because the recipe for success is made of good, efficient people, intensive training. Therefore, you could see 785 modules versus 35 available in March 2020. The second recipe for success is excellent offer availability despite all kind of headwinds, as I have said before, look, 97.5% stock availability back to the pre-crisis level.
The recipe for success is also the customer satisfaction feedback. In this very unstable environment, customer needs to be sure there is somebody, predictability is there, resilience is there. They don't want to spend time in looking around and not finding what their needs are. Therefore, the Net Promoter Score is key in order to judge about our complete capability to satisfy their needs. This Net Promoter Score grew. If you compare to end of 2019 and July 2020, just immediately after the confinement in France, our Net Promoter Score grew by 12 points. Last but not least, certain adoption on tools in order to really get the customer stickiness, understanding in what and how do they need us for.
This is, for example, the CRM adoption in the U.S. with 96% of adoption by our teams, compared to only 75%, 76% at the end of 2019. It's the adoption of tools, and we are working, which has always also created the best-in-class customer service. At the same time, you know, very often you asked me in the past, digital adoption, digital leverage, digital effect, when do we see something and so on. Allow me that we are, with this chart on page six, we are one of the leading multi-channel operator in this business. Yes, we have the physical footprint. We have, for example, take one, 80%, roughly, Q4 expectations for European sales followed by track and trace. 80% of European orders could be track and trace followed directly by the customer, "Where is my product?" Take another element of this pie.
One single web and one data platform in the U.S., one single web and one data platform in Europe. The one in the U.S., which allow now to deploy this month a one web for all, a one CRM for all, one track and trace for all. This is what's going on and, you know, the investments of the past are now highly proving their efficiency. Not to underestimate, for example, in France, 46% of connected customer. It does not mean 46% of our sales, but they come to the site, they do their quotation, they look for product availability. They use it for something daily, 46%, which is 550 basis points higher than in December 2019. This has been a quantum leap in the use of our tools, and obviously customer stickiness and obviously, the fact that we could capture the demand by week when it was coming back.
Plus 62% improvement versus last year on transactions done on mobile in France. We enrich this mobile approach because the more people have to work by distancing from each other, by not coming to places again, they use a mobile very intensively. We have adjusted to it. This is elements just to demonstrate how important it is. Some of the AI investment, quite expensive investment at the beginning before it could prove to have an efficiency on the company profitability. 74% of customer churn adoption versus 66% in January 2020 in Europe, excluding France. This is quite a feat. The sales force sitting far away from coming to the customer site or buildings were able to have immediately 75% on alert of which customer could have a tendency to churn, which allows us to be highly reactive and a lot of anticipation.
On page seven, allow me to tell you that the action plan in place to make step changes in our digital journey. The key thing is that, thank God, we have started early on the data, Power BI, CRM, and now we have a uniform customer segmentation, which allow to be even more reactive and even more solid because this is a driver by which we can run all kind of different programs digitally or physically. This is with the second transaction, web EDI platform, track and trace, email to EDI, digital customer invoicing, and so on. Other things like pricing that you find under predictive, all is workable because the data and the platforms are now well-structured, global, uniform. More and more, it will allow in the coming weeks and months to continue to have the predictive modules helping us coming throughout this very fast-changing environment.
Rollout or branch assortment, it may change within a month. The churn, customer leaving, customer staying, customer having a tendency not to do well and so on, quite critical in this changing environment. It's being reactivated. Why reactivated? Because the data stream were polluted by the confinement. At the end of the day, you need to retrain the algo. We also learn that an algo can be retrained, is being retrained, and is being efficient. Like a sportsman. Next best offer to be deployed, and also pricing module. I wanted to tell you that nothing of the past has proven not to be efficient. Nothing of the past is now kind of obsolete to the opposite. Everything we have done is a help too, plus the quality of our people and the training to them, high level of service.
This has been our Q3 recipe for the results that you see here. I will now hand over to Laurent, who will give you more color on the sales of your Q3.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Patrick, good morning to everybody. I will go take you through our geographical performance and touch on profitability and cash. First on the sales review on slide nine. You can see our Q3 sales performance, which sharply improved sequentially versus Q2. At EUR 3.16 billion, our sales were down 7.7% on a reported basis and down 4.2% on a same day basis. In the quarter, currency had an unfavorable impact of 2.3%, mainly as a result of the depreciation of the U.S. and Canadian dollar against the euro. We now anticipate the full year 2020 currency impact to be circa -0.9%, assuming, as usual, spot rates remain unchanged. Scopes stood at -1.7% as a result of the disposal of Gexpro Services in February 2020.
Conversely, we had a positive calendar effect of 0.4% and more important, a favorable corporate effect of +0.5% in the quarter after six quarters of negative copper contributions. Slide 10 illustrates the persistent volatile environment in which we are operating. As you see, we were ups and downs in all regions across the quarter, which can be explained by a series of factors, notably the catch-up effect to complete projects that were interrupted, changing customer habits regarding vacation amid the pandemic, and differing restriction from geography to geography. As you can notice, compared to other publications, we did not produce any exit rate for October. In fact, October is better than our Q3 evolution. Based on the volatile environment, we believe it's a bit early to draw a line on all of Q4.
By geography, you see that Europe has returned to broadly stable sales versus last year, but still very volatile across countries. Pacific has recently recovered after being impacted by partial lockdown, both in New Zealand and Australia in August. As far as Asia is concerned, the region has benefited from a strong recovery, notably in China. It's not shown on the graph as we exclude Asia because the business is more volatile on a weekly basis as it is largely project driven. North America, while showing signs of improvement in October, continued to lag with very divergent trends between regions. On slide 11, we turn to Europe, where we have seen a recovery in Q3 in large majority of countries. The exception are in the U.K. and Southern Europe, which are clearly outliers as shown on the graph.
In slide 12, we look more closely at our performance in Europe. Overall sales in our biggest regions to that EUR 1.79 billion in the quarter, up 0.3% on a same day basis. In our home market of France, which accounts for close to 40% of European sales, our revenue rose 3.9% after dropping 25% in Q2. This growth was driven by a high level of service and business continuity, as well as strong demand in the residential and HVAC businesses. Sales in Scandinavia were up 0.7%, with positive momentum in Norway at 3.2%, mainly driven by price increases to offset the impact of the Norwegian kroner's devaluation on imports. Sweden was down 4% due to the lower demand from medium and large contractors.
Benelux grew by 2.3%, with good momentum in the photovoltaic business in Belgium, while the Netherlands were broadly flat with a positive residential market offsetting lower renewable energy. Sales in Germany posted a strong 9.4% growth thanks to positive trend in our proximity business and less negative demand in automotive compared to 2020. In the U.K., sales dropped by 17%, mainly due to a difficult commercial project market, while proximity is progressing well, as illustrated by our robust performance in our Denmans banner, up 3.6%. Note that this performance marks an improvement over Q2 when sales were down 41.7% in the U.K. With the new management put in place recently, we are accelerating our repositioning on the proximity market with a focus on our digital offering deployment. On slide 13, you see a very contrasting situation by region and market in North America.
As shown on the graph, Canada has been clearly improving since August, while the US has seen very sharp swings. Slide 14 focus on the reasons behind the volatility we have seen in North America with both strong headwinds and strong tailwinds. The pandemic has led us to face a combination of unfavorable impacts. These include cancellation of projects, notably in commercial end markets such as hotels, entertainment, airports, lower demand in heavy industries such as automotive, metal, mining, and, of course, oil and gas, limited allocation of product due to production capacity constraint at supplier level, especially from Mexico, adaptation needed to manage fires and hurricanes that forced temporary closures. On the other hand, we benefited from incremental demand in the residential market. In the face of these contrasting trends, Rexel has demonstrated agility to win new business, notably through customer service and our diversified positioning.
We benefit in the U.S. from our three banners that allow us to distribute different suppliers and overcome local availability constraints. In addition, our more recent reorganization in the Northeast allowed us to regain market share in the region. Lastly, and as already mentioned, we have successfully launched one single web and data platform in the U.S. that is now common to all banners, region, and customers. We consider this, as pointed out already by Patrick, as a quantum leap in our digital transformation and a strong enabler for our business. Slide 15 focus more specifically on the U.S. and shows the very uneven recovery path by region, with sales evolutions ranging from -37% to +0.6%. Very clearly, we can identify two blocks of regions.
On one hand, four regions showing strong resilience: California, Northwest, Mountain Plains around Denver, and Florida, driven by strong positioning in proximity business and market share gains in regions where we have invested, notably in sales force and branch openings in the past. On the other hand, another block of four regions that are facing more challenging situations: the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and, of course, Gulf Central, which are impacted by their exposure to heavy industry and oil and gas. On slide 16, we turn to Asia Pacific, where we also see contrasting trends between China, which has sharply improved, and the Pacific countries, which are just emerging from partial lockdowns. Slide 17 shows this in greater details. In the Pacific, sales were down 3% on a constant and same day basis.
In Australia, sales were down 1.2%, thanks to good resilience in the proximity business, broadly offset by the loss of some industrial contracts and the partial lockdown in Victoria state. Excluding those effects, the underlying trend is closer to 4%. New Zealand sales dropped by 10.7%, impacted by a depressed market before election and partial lockdown in Auckland in Q3, with an impact of -2.7%. In Asia, sales posted solid 7.6% growth on a constant and same day basis. In China, sales grew by 11.2%, mainly driven by our value added in the growing automation segment and by governmental spending in infrastructure and automation. India grew by 5.4%, showing a recovery, although the virus remain active in this country. Also, we are on a sales call.
We thought it was important, given the current context, to remind you of the levers that we have to manage sales volatility in order to protect both profitability and cash. As you see on slide 19, we have several levers. First of all, we are very focused on customer service and business selectivity in order to support our growth margin. Second, we can reactivate temporarily unemployment measures in countries that impose new lockdown measures. Third, let me remind you that we are enforced hiring freeze in certain countries and certain functions and have a natural turnover of around 5% on group employees, excluding sales and digital force. Fourth, we have further local reorganization on the way where necessary, that could lead to a charge up to EUR 30 million for restructuring in 2020, which will mostly be booked in H2.
Fifth, we continue to be very selective in all type of overhead, including our full travel and expense, without compromising our digital and customer service. On slide 20, we reemphasize that cash flow generation is, by definition, a key focus for us. We continue to work hard to maintain healthy receivable collection, and we have an improvement in DSO to 50.6 days at the end of September from 53.5 days one year ago. Days of inventory also improving to 56.9 days from 58.5 days a year ago. With this, following the cash generation in H1, we confirm that we anticipate robust free cash flow generation for the full year 2020. This has contributed to the confirmation of our long- and short-term ratings during the crisis.
You should note that following a change in commercial policy at Moody's, we have asked the rating agency to withdraw the short-term Not Prime rating. Indeed, this short-term rating does not differentiate between non-investment grade companies, and Moody's has recently changed its commercial policy, asking for an additional fee for this service. The standard press release should be issued by the rating agency in the coming days. With this, let me hand back to Patrick for his concluding remarks.
Thank you, Laurent. I will conclude with slide 22. Obviously, it's a balance between short-term aspects and medium-term drivers, and some of them materializing already. Obviously, there is a number of uncertainties which we will permanently have to adapt to like we did in the last six months. What we notice on one end is to have a continued economic impact of key industries, which was low, remain low, and have not picked up. Aerospace, entertainment businesses, leisure, hotels, office buildings, they are what they were since May, June, and remain in the similar pattern. Only one has changed a little bit and makes a beginning of a comeback, it's the automotive world, especially in Germany where we see the production has restarted, and we see a little bit of an improvement. Partial lockdowns and new restriction linked to a second wave of the pandemic.
This is with daily, whether it was Merkel yesterday or the day before in Germany, Macron yesterday night in France. It's in the U.K., it's Belgium, even Switzerland closing all the borders of any kind, even within the different cantons and so on. Okay? We have to adapt to this, and we do, and obviously we privilege the local business in that case, but we also have to adapt to which could be missing because of all of this. There are uncertainties. U.K. post-Brexit, which kind of a Brexit and whether it's post-Brexit or not post-Brexit. You have the U.S. around the election. We are close to the elections, but every account and, what will be after the election, nobody knows. We see all of this as elements to which we need to adapt some time to anticipate.
Brexit, for example, we need to anticipate if there would be any issue with the supply chain. Therefore, we are ready. We have taken our measures already to be sure that our customer in the U.K. will not be missing critical products if there would be supply chain issues. On the other end, we see medium-term drivers, and the first one start to become real. The first is our, obviously, ability to act as one company so that we can provide best solutions, experienced solutions, solid solutions to our customer. That's a key thing. What we propose is the assortment of first class and the availability of first class. Second, we see opportunities in residential, in Datacom, food and beverage, wastewater treatments, just to name a few which are really solid. Obviously, on the little bit medium-term, Green Deal and energy efficiency solutions.
Fact is, I have to recognize that Green Deal, we still don't know exactly how it would materialize and when it will materialize, but it's obvious that the longer this pandemic lasts, the more this Green Deal will become something real that needs to flow down to our customers. On the other hand, the energy efficiency solutions, because it becomes really on the front line, we see demand, and we participate, too. For example, I can tell you we just endorsed yesterday a full energy efficiency solution subsection on the webshop. That if people want to know what is an absolute most efficient energy efficiency solution, it will be made available on the webshop in a special portfolio segmentation. Fourth, we should see, even if today it's not a main driver yet, an ensuring of industrial activity in the U.S. and in Europe.
Short-term, which is the fifth point, we notice a real high level of backlog in construction. The backlog in construction is giving us quite confidence for the coming months. Now, obviously, the shape of recovery remain uncertain. The medium-term drivers to the opposite makes it very attractive, and we see the first of the medium-term, which are becoming a bit more real. This volatile context with the plus and the minus and not exactly knowing how and when, how deep each of them will contribute to, does not allow us to provide guidance for the rest of the year, because the short-term is really something that change every day. I cannot read between the lines. In line with our H1 results, we will continue to focus on best-in-class customer service. We will capitalize and do more of our digital transformation.
We adjust our OPEX. OPEX management is becoming weekly adjustments. Free cash flow generation remain the underlying priorities that everybody is working at. What we have seen in the Q3 will continue to be the main drivers how to manage through the Q4. In fullness, we look at the future with a lot of realism. It's changing. It might be tough. There is opportunities. Let's focus on our strengths and opportunities and make the best out of it, and adjust for the rest. It's realism about today's situation, but highly confident about the future. Thank you for your attention. Now, let's take your question, and thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please standby as while we compile the Q&A queue. This will only take a few moments. If you wish to cancel your request, press the hash key. Once again, please press star one if you wish to ask a question. The first question comes from the line of Lucie Carrier. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen, and thanks for taking my question. I have three question, and I will go one at a time. I understand from Laurent that you were indicating that October had been tracking at a better level than the overall third quarter. I was just hoping if you could maybe help us understand how it compares division by division in terms of that current trading. Obviously, on the back of the announcement of new national lockdown in France and in Germany yesterday, how do you compare those with what you have faced in the spring? Do you think you can derail that sequential improvement that you seem to be still seeing in October?
Before we go to the regions, allow me to say, for example, North America, I have no clue idea what the election could mean. On the other end, we have been through fires. There was a week where I had 47 branches closed. We have been through three hurricanes. There was three times a week where I had half of a region completely down for a week or two, under water. The numbers of our Q3 already have a lot of adverse component. How much of this could be if, in North America, there would be a little bit of social problems after the election? The underlying demand, at the end of the day, is more affected by the fires and the water and the hurricanes and the destruction, because we cannot deliver, we cannot sell, they cannot contract.
The rest so far have very little impact on our demand. Therefore, I'm hesitant about North America to give you something for the balance of the year, because I don't know. It's an unknown for me, the election story. Otherwise, they improve every day. They continue to come back. They are not at the level of Europe, which came back faster. I don't expect worsening, if not for these unknown of the election. The lockdown in France, the key thing for me was schools, and schools remain open. When the lockdown was decided in March, we could see how much demand collapsed when people having to work from home and school being closed and people having to take care of the schools of their kids, were really changing the ability for people to go to work.
Second, Le Bâtiment or the construction was closed. Yesterday, what has been said, construction should remain open and school remain open. Now it's one week of school holidays, but next Monday it restarts, and people will bring their kids to school. Now, I think the country from an economic standpoint, especially for us being related to construction and maintenance and all these things, will suffer far less than in spring. At least that's the approach I take. This morning just before the call, we had, obviously, with the French team, business continuity, yes. Health and safety, yes. What do we have to deliver in the coming weeks? We know the kind of backlog we need to deliver. We are calling every single customer. They all confirm for the few I could see this morning, they will maintain their activity. Transportation is between the logistics centers and the customer locations.
There is absolutely no issue so far. It's only the entertainment business which worries me a lot, but it was down already before. It's more the shops and this kind of demand in the retail shops for the non-essential, which will be closed. In full fairness, we all know that the last quarter, because of Christmas shopping and coming close to Christmas, was not a place where people were making a lot of modifications for us. Other segments will suffer more. Other probably activities will suffer much more this than we will do. I cannot tell you how much. We will continue to adjust. We will continue to make sure we take the most of what will be available. I see that far less impacting on us. I'm not saying on the rest, on us, than it was in spring. Same story in Germany.
They didn't stop anything of the industry yesterday. It's all the entertainment business. It's all the schools. This is the sports, this is all the things. In Germany, Merkel, everything she has announced allow us to continue, and the construction will continue. Residential demand is strong. Automotive is coming back. We will do the best we can in order to grab even more market share than ever before, but so far. It's not the case in the U.K. In the U.K., there is a double effect, re-confinement and Brexit ahead of us. As I said, Brexit, we got prepared for, we are prepared for, without knowing exactly what will come out. We are pretty sure there will be supply chain disruptions more, by the way, in January, February than before, but we need to get prepared now.
All the essential components, we will have on inventory in order to overcome any disruptions before Christmas or after Christmas, whatever happens there. The reconfinement is really locking down more people at home. That could create a lower demand. Here again, we have adjusted heavily, if need be, we will continue to adjust heavily. It will not be an easy journey. It was not an easy journey in Europe, neither in the U.S. since March. Up, downs, adjustment, assortment, availability, customer being sure they will pay us and things like that. This is the entire company going after all the positive things to do and avoiding all the negative rocks that are in the middle of the road. So far, so good. Q4, no guidance, Q4, so far, on the ramp-up of Q3 further.
Thank you, Patrick. My second question was around the profitability, and you've kind of tried to give us some maybe insight in terms of how you want to manage that in the second half. I guess what I was curious to know is you have seen a very strong rebound in some countries in Europe, France included, or Benelux. Scandinavia was positive as well. We know historically that those geographies tend to be a little bit higher margin than the rest of the group. I'm just trying to understand if the rebound you have seen needed additional investment or additional cost, or whether you feel that you could preserve what I would call kind of stable margin in those geography compared to history.
No, Lucie. We are extremely cautious on our cost structure. Through the recovery, we applied a few management rules, which, if you remember, I had given already a color in the previous call when I was saying we wait for margin to be back before we add cost and we ask people to come back or not. If there is not delta growth in gross margin, there is not a delta growth in the staffing. We are people-related in our business for 50% of our OpEx. Our gross margin is in SG&A cost, therefore, we always manage the ratio. Margin generated absolute value versus SG&A. This is one thing. There was not an explosion of other costs like transportation. We still maintain a low level of OpEx on other non-essential costs. Some were easy like travel. No need to tell you.
If there is one guy who is frustrated of not traveling, it's me. Not to say that I was the most expensive. I participate to the savings. Joke aside. By the way, We are looking at every penny. Distribution is a low-margin business anyway. Therefore, we look at pennies, but it works, and it's a cultural thing, and so far so good. For the profitability levers, it give us, so far, very sound construction. We have a balance between temporary measures that we can continue to activate where necessary and more structural measure that we put in place where necessary as well. That help us to protect the cost structure, because the top line is recovering, but it's not yet at the level before the crisis by definition.
Thank you. My last question, if I may, it's a bit more long-term. You mentioned the EU Green Deal. Of course, we know we are still awaiting a lot of details in terms of implementation and so on. Maybe could you help us understand or give us a range, maybe how much you think your European business is exposed to building renovation as part of the division, and which type of segment do you think could benefit the most as part of your product portfolio, could benefit the most from the EU Green Deal?
The Green Deal, there are different aspects to it. First of all, we do not expect anything before 2022 to materialize in real life. By the way, I think there is enough of backlog to go deep into 2021. The second is, my worry is more on if money is coming down, the people available, which was already a shortage before of skilled people, could become one in the future. On the other hand, the one thing I see is that it will have a direct impact on HVAC and cooling systems. It's favorable to electricity because of CO2 reduction targets that have been given to many. On the other hand, the HVAC people, through the regulations, could be also beneficiaries, because if they regulate existing configuration is cheaper than moving to a full electricity. It's unknown yet how much will be chosen by whom, for what.
The impact for Rexel is an unknown to me. It's unknown because when I try to find product range, I don't see a major product range being so far identified. I see more the electricity need, which will be really positive, should, by the way, be electrical generation be sufficient. If everything come at the same time, more electrical and hybrid cars, more electrical engines, even is very efficient and less of thermal engines, not just in the car business, but in the industry, in the forklifts, in all of that, the demand for electrical needs will be high. Will the generation of electricity be sufficient? I don't know. The Green Deal contains elements of limitations if it would be heavily favorable to electrical solutions. There is enough so that we see that as a very good underlying driver for a company like Rexel. Very good.
Just maybe if I can ask, how much do you think, roughly, your business in Europe is exposed to renovation or retrofit? Are you able to give us maybe a range or a value for that?
Retrofit, definitely we always benefited from, because it's local everywhere, and therefore the proximity business is great. To your question, it's probably 50%.
Thank you very much. Stay safe.
Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Iris Seng. Please go ahead. Iris Seng.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I've got two from my side. I will go one by one. The first one is on digital profitability. Appreciate that.
Oh, you get cut. Hello?
Hello?
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Oh, sorry about that. I.
We cannot get your question, I'm sorry. We don't hear you.
Sorry about that.
Arthur, can we move to the next question, please? Sorry about that.
Yeah, sure.
Let's move to the next and come back if it works better.
Okay, no problem. Next question comes from the line of Alfred Glaser. Please go ahead. Iris, please, if you can press so that we can get your question on the queue. Alfred, go ahead.
Yes. Hello. I was wondering, could you be maybe a bit more specific of how you manage the investment costs in digital, in particular? What kind of adjustments are you doing, and how do you put this in sync with the low visibility you have on business in the current context?
Obviously, we review all our digital investment under the light of how much transformation we can get and the kind of leverage we could expect out of it, more by object and by nature than in the past. Even more selectively in the number of countries that will adopt. The adoption rate by different countries is a driver for the priorities. Globally speaking, if you compare 2020 to 2019, I have not reduced the intensity. It has not increased, but I have not reduced the intensity. I have no intention to reduce the intensity. It's more the appropriate choice for the country to adopt and to transform.
What do you mean exactly by intensity of your investment?
Amount of dollar and euro.
As percentage of revenues or in absolute numbers?
In absolute numbers.
Okay. Thank you.
It's a conscious choice and not as a proportion of revenue. Hello?
Yeah. Thank you very much. That was very clear.
Thank you. Can we take the next question?
Once again, if you have any questions, please press star one and wait for your name to be announced.
I think we lost the person who couldn't come through.
If she can press star one again, please, Iris.
Once.
Oh, yep, we've got her line back.
Okay.
Okay.
Her line's open now. Great.
Hi, gentlemen. Thank you for giving me a second chance. Hopefully you can hear me now. Yeah. I've just got a few questions. One is on the profitability of digital. I remember that you've mentioned before that 40% is kind of a threshold that you look at to get the business to be profitable. Given that the business is growing very well and that you are not increasing or decreasing the investment around it, can you give us maybe a bit color on the evolution of the digital business margin and, when you think it's going to be profitable, basically, on the outlook?
Making a customer a multi-channel customer is not short-term. Having the payback of the digital, it's simply having more SKUs, better service. Now we enter into the phase, and we got the benefit during the COVID because we accelerated the productivity gains that we could get out of our digital transformation. Whether it's sales force productivity, because the churn is making every sales rep more efficient, whether it's another branch assortment tool to help getting a better assortment and a better availability, so that we have resisted pretty well during the COVID, and we have such a short, fast comeback at by a week when at a sudden, the market is reopening. These are the benefits I could measure. In giving you a specific profitability on digital, I will be frank, I cannot because it's not isolated as such.
It's the number of customers that becomes digital, which increase their sales, and by the moment they add one order line on every order or every second order, obviously, this is an improvement. I think we would have been in much more difficult, troubled waters without our digital journey. Difficult to isolate, but the one thing I know, at the worst time in the April journey, that was really down the first two weeks, we saw the digital interface to our customer that exploded. That we maintained the link digitally. We maintained our turnover digitally through digital tools. We maintained the vision and the assortment, including with our suppliers, through digital tools in order to better assess on a weekly base what could be missing they should deliver us for, given the change in demand. Meaning these reactivity capabilities without the digital tools, we would have totally missed.
It was impossible to do without that. Now, I have not calculated the gap because it's difficult to imagine Rexel without our digital tools. I feel extremely confident to tell you that this is part of our resilience and the comeback.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Another one is, maybe do you have any indications of views on the non-residential market in the U.S. going into 2021?
No. I will be frank. We are in the budget process. We make our own assumptions. Non-residential. They are contrasted by region. Industry is rather stable these days, and we expect it to remain stable at the level it is of today, the U.S. industry. The uncertainty is on the project side, which stopped heavily, I have to admit, during the many months behind us, have not really reopened, therefore, the level of today should remain the one. How much of the money will be reinjected post-election into the system, and how will be the driver for reopening on that certain project?
On the other hand, we were able to be agile enough, for example, to offset in Florida the missing revenue from the entertainment business of Universal Studios and all the entertainment in Miami by taking projects which we started three, four years ago around SpaceX and the activity for the space industry north of Orlando. We have been able to do this kind of thing and with a lot of changes in the assortment, in the people, in the skills and so on. We started before.
We were lucky enough not to be dependent on one sector, not being only residential, only commercial, only industrial, but having the three, which by the way, we were rich over our multiplied banner approach of the past, so that we had access to different suppliers, and we had the skills internally that we were able, I can tell you here very effectively, more than would I have thought three years ago, we were able to get a switch from one sector down, fully stopped, like I mentioned, the entertainment in this Disneyland and Disney Parks and Universal Studios Park, and moved to more industry around SpaceX and sub-suppliers. We are very glad of having been able to do that.
Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you. I guess no one really have the crystal ball. Thank you for the additional color.
Thank you.
Sorry. There are no more questions at this time. Please continue.
Well, ladies and gentlemen thank you a lot for having joined this call this morning. Obviously, the next moment we will meet together will be in February, when we will present the full year results and a little bit more color on 2021, obviously. In the meantime, there will be a lot of adaptation that we will be going through, and we will always be happy to stay in contact with you at any moment, and Ludovic will always be happy to take your calls. Thanks a lot for being with us. Rexel is doing fine. Thank you.