Okay. Good evening, dear analysts and investors. We are pleased to welcome you to our year-end results for 2022. We hope you have all managed to download our investors presentation on our website. Now I invite you to have a look at our annual results together. We will first look at our highlights for the year. Our top figures are, our net sales have been more than doubled to TRY 147.7 billion, which is close to upper end of our yearly guidance. Our EBITDA increased by 80% year-on-year, TRY 11.9 billion. While EBITDA margin is at 8%.
CapEx was TRY 5.1 billion, which corresponds to 3.5% of our sales, which was above our guidance of 3.2%. The net income was TRY 8.2 billion, which corresponding to 5.5% margin. Deferred tax income both boosted our net income in 2022, especially in fourth quarter, as we will be provide some details on the following pages about this. We have added to our store network of 1,021 new stores across all our operations, that brings us to 11,510 consolidated stores by the year end. The high inflationary environment affected both customers and companies in 2022. Consumers trade down, and they shift to private labels somewhat.
We have believe we have benefited from this environment with our high quality private label range. Our FMCG market share for the year has increased substantially to 1.1%, reaching 16.8% in Turkish modern retail market. For now, let us have a look at the 2022 guidance versus the actuals. Due to rising inflation, we revised our sales growth guidance twice last year. At the end of the year, we have reached almost higher end of our latest sales growth guidance, which is 109%. On the other hand, our EBITDA margin was also this time at the lower end of our guidance, but still within range despite rising costs in this high inflationary environment.
Our annual CapEx guidance was 2.2% of sales, while the execution was slightly higher than this, which is 3.5%. Now let us look at the operational performance. Starting with like-for-like sales slide. Like-for-like annual sales increased by 92% from previous year. On a quarterly basis, increase was 106%. Our annual average internal inflation was 100%, while it is 120% on the quarterly average. In February 2023, internal inflation is progressing almost 100% this flat. Like-for-like annual basket size increased by 77%, on quarterly basis, 104%. Rising inflation boosted our basket growth, whereas customers deterioration purchasing power had a negative effect on our spendings.
Customer traffic increased by 9% on an annual basis, along with our rising market share. Quarterly basis customer traffic was 1%. On the store side, we have maintained the opening pace. We have opened 204 new BIM stores and 10 File stores in Turkey, and 17 stores in Morocco, and 5 stores in Egypt in the fourth quarter. In total, we had 11,510 stores by the end of the Q4, including Morocco and Egypt. In 12 months period, we have opened 919 BIM stores in Turkey, 42 File stores in Turkey. Please note that number of new design stores have reached to 3,600 approximately.
We are increasing our new modern design stores day by day, and we believe in 5 years times, almost all our stores will be in the new format. Number of mini stores which have 100- 150 square meter selling space and lower SKU range, reached to 165 as a store number in the end of fourth quarter 2022. Number of foreign operations stores has increased slightly with 49 new stores in Morocco and 11 new stores in Egypt last year. Moving to CapEx slide. Our annual CapEx in 2022 was TRY 5.1 billion, which is corresponding to 3.5% of our sales, as I said before.
We have added 4 new warehouses in 2022, all of which one of them, for our rice packaging company, which is GDP as a subsidiary. On the quarterly level, CapEx was TRY 1.9 billion, which corresponds to 4.1% of our net sales. The CapEx of the stores increased because of the high inflation and the expenditures made in your store-based equipments. In addition, ongoing construction of our biscuits and chocolate factory increased our CapEx slightly. In March 2023, we have opened our Elazığ warehouse, but it's temporarily a replace of Malatya warehouse, which was damaged at the earthquake. For now, there are 2 warehouses under construction, and one is in Istanbul, and the other is in Morocco, Marrakech region.
A factory warehouse or factory building is being built for biscuit and chocolate factory in Eskişehir. In terms of, we summarize in the next page our sustainable efforts. We have been investing on solar power plants for 2 years and currently installed power on our roofs of our warehouses. This reached to 15 MW, and we plan to increase this number to 40 MW until the end of this year. We estimate that annualized electricity production from our sustainable sources will roughly correspond to 10% of our consumption at the end of the year. We continue to work for efficiency improvements on packaging. As a result of our efforts, we prevented 519 tons of plastic and 146 tons of paper in 2022.
As you already know, we have a target to reduce our greenhouse gas intensity by 20% by 2026 versus 2019. That is 7 years. We are working hard to outperform our target, which is 3 years left for this. Customer satisfaction is one of the key metrics for sustainable growth in the future, and I am proud to declare that we have the highest Net Promoter Score within food retailers in Turkey. We recently published our diversity and inclusion policy, where we have set a target of woman member or members in the board in coming years. The share of woman employees increased to 44% in 2022 versus 42% in previous years. We have an increase on the woman percentage of employees.
As a result of our sustainable efforts, we are included in the several local and international sustainable indexes. We recently were included to FTSE4Good emerging and FTSE Emerging ESG indexes. We are also a member of BIST Sustainability and BIST Sustainability 25 indexes. Going forward, we aim to be included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index as well. Now moving on to look at our financial performance. Starting with sales progression. As shown at the beginning, we have reached our upper end of our latest sales target for the full year, resulting in TRY 148 billion for the whole year or 109% on year-on-year growth. On quarterly basis, sales grew by 120% in Q4, reaching TRY 45 billion. Gross profit and gross margin progression.
Our annual gross profit has increased by 99% year-on-year, and our annual gross margin reached 18.1%. On quarterly basis, gross profit has increased to TRY 8.3 billion with an 18.4% gross margin, which corresponds to an improvement compared with the previous quarter. When looking at the revenue breakdown by format and geography, BIM Turkey forms 90% of total sales, while File shares in consolidated revenues increase to 4% now, 4.2%. The remaining 6% is coming from our foreign operations. In Turkey, we can see that our private label share has slightly increased to 65% due to the improvement in the last year.
In our foreign operations and File, we can say that there's a steady private label share in File, which is 33%. In 2022, private label share slightly declined to 24% in Morocco, whereas it is increased to 15% in Egypt. On the next slide, we provide evolution of operating expenses on quarterly basis. Despite the negative impact of utility expenses for the quarter, particularly electricity operating leverage aspect helped OpEx to sales ratio to be lower in the Q4 versus the previous year, same quarter.
If you look at the annual OpEx letter and the same metric, we see the personnel expenses had no negative impact on margins in 2022 as an annual basis, despite the double minimum wage increases happened in the beginning of the year. Utility expenses and fuel were two negative factors for profitability throughout the year. We are mainly being affected by the utility expenses and fuel. Overall, with the savings of the other cost figures, we can compensate this. As a follow-up on the OpEx issue, the next slide shows quarterly and annual trends. In the quarter of minimum wage hikes, OpEx to sales ratio temporarily rises. However, operating leverage aspect works afterwards as inflation boosts our top line as well.
Let's have a look at the annual and quarterly EBITDA and EBIT figures. The annual EBITDA was TRY 11.9 billion with 80% year-on-year increase. Annual EBIT was TRY 9.3 billion with 94% year-on-year increase. Q4 EBITDA was TRY 3.85 billion and the margin of 8.5%. Following three consecutive quarters of contraction in EBITDA margin, it is improved by quarter, Q4, thanks to operating leverage aspect, as well as our actions taken to improve the gross margin. Quarterly EBIT was TRY 3.1 billion and the margin of 6.8%. Moving to net income slide.
Our annual net income was TRY 8.2 billion, which is much higher compared to last year, 178%. Corresponding annual net income margin is 5.5%. In addition to low base of the last year due to the one-off provision for the competition fine, deferred tax boosted net income this year. Excluding deferred tax income, our net income would be TRY 7.3 billion in 2022. On the quarterly basis, net income was TRY 3.4 billion versus TRY 639 million in Q4 last year. We benefit from this TRY 837 million deferred tax income in Q4 2022.
Whereas one of provision, you know, TRY 718 million fine had a negative impact at the bottom line for the last year. There's that major base effect. Moving on to quarterly free cash flow. On this slide, we wanted to show a more detailed picture of the cash flow movements in Q4. Cash generation from operations more than offset cash outflows from dividend, CapEx and rents. Rent expenses to sales ratio is close to historic lows at the moment now. In Q4 2022, rent to expense to sales ratio was 1.5%, while it was 2.2% same quarter last year. Please also note that there's a slight improvement in net working capital since the last quarter. Let's look at the File results.
We have opened 42 new File stores on 2022, and the number of File stores exceeded 200, reaching 202 stores. We plan to open the fourth warehouse nearby Izmir, and the process is ongoing. With the new warehouse, we will be able to accelerate our expansion in western part of Turkey, in medium term, let's say. For the year 2023, we plan to open at least 40 new stores for File. File's online sales has reached 4% for the last year. The last quarter, that's almost 5%. File is planning to open now dark stores, a few.
One dark store is already converted from an existing old store, and there will be a fully planned and designed new dark store, which will be opened in March this year. If you look at the foreign operations, Morocco is continuing to contribute to our net income now. We have opened 49 new stores last year in Morocco, and our total number of stores reached to 627 in this market. 4th warehouse of BIM Morocco will be opened in Marrakech in June, possibly. We are also working to find new warehouses, the 5th warehouse in the north of the country. In Egypt, we started to open new stores. We opened 11 new stores in 2022, and the number of stores in this country reached 211.
The operational improvement going on in Egypt, we have experienced operational profitability in Egypt lately, especially in the last three months, I can say, we have a positive, let's say, profits in Egyptian operation. We believe this accelerating performance in Egypt will continue in 2023. The impact of the earthquakes. Sorry. The foreign operations is another slide for foreign operations. The foreign revenue contribution of foreign operations was 8.7 billion TRY, which is 6% of our total sales. While EBITDA contribution was 529 million TRY in 2022, which is 4.5% of our total EBITDA. Now, the impact of the earthquakes. Unfortunately, we...
As you all know, we had a terrible disaster in Turkey recently. The twin earthquakes impacted an important part of Turkey. In this slide, we try to provide some clarifications on how BIM is impacted from the situation. First of all, we have lost 27 of our colleagues in the earthquakes in the region. Many stores in the region were affected from the earthquakes, we have an estimate of 250 of them, which will be permanently be closed possibly. We have plans to compensate the loss of stores in the region. Therefore, we expect no major impact on our revenue growth in the year for 2023. However, inventories in these stores will have a one-off negative effect on our margins.
We also decided to provide an extra relief to our employees in the region in the short term, giving our full of our supports and that feel that being with them and with their families now in these difficult times. All in all, we estimate the impact of the earthquake on our 2023 EBITDA margin to be 25 bps. We have opened a new warehouse in Elazig and all operations of Malatya warehouse which were damaged, now has replaced by Elazig warehouse, and all the operations is going well. Now, the guidance for 2023. Despite the high base of 2022, another inflationary year is likely in 2023. Therefore, we estimate a 75% top-line growth in 2023.
In our estimates, we assume to maintain our new store opening trend in for the year. Considering the minimum wage increase and one-off impact of the earthquake, we prefer to be on safe side on profitability at this stage. Early retirement, there's an important topic of early retirement scheme, which will possibly be most often realized in March. This will put some pressure on the cash flow and margins for the year 2023, as more than 2,000 employees will possibly benefit from this scheme, but it will be one-off. We expect roughly TRY 500 million cash outflow in 2023, due to the early re-retirement scheme of the government-declared early retirement scheme.
However, the impact on income statement as well as margins will be limited, as the majority of the severance and notice pay expenses already were provisioned before. Income statement impact would be around TRY 50 million at most. Accordingly, we estimate a 7%-7.5% EBITDA margin for the whole year. We estimate our CapEx to sales ratio to be at 3.5%, which is above the historic averages. This is mainly due to the increased construction costs in Turkey and unchanged store opening pace, and recovery of the earthquake zone, and also investment for our biscuits and chocolate factories.
As the strategy overview, in 2023, we will give priority to the earthquake zone, and we will be opening new stores to have access to basic needs of people and have economic recovery of the region. In 2023, we plan to increase our SKU to 900, instead of 850 now. There's an increase in our SKUs in the stores. Our new stores usually is bigger than our old stores compared to 10 years ago. This gives us more room to increase our SKUs further. High quality of private labels is an important factor as usual of our sustainable market share improvement, and we will keep our quality focus, keep our quality focus in the future as well. Esqube is our biscuits and chocolate company.
It will start production in the end of, let's say, fourth quarter this year. This facility will contribute to our quality focus and differentiate our positioning in the market, especially in the private label products. We have been testing mini stores for a while, and we decided to increase the expansion of mini stores going forward. You will possibly be seeing in Turkey more and more mini Bim stores. We have further plans to improve our ESG practices. We plan further transparency, tier three GHG emission, greenhouse emission enhancement, integrating reporting kind of, and other new projects. We will continue to invest on sustainable energy sources. We estimate that analyzed electricity production from sustainable sources will be roughly correspond to 10% of our consumption at the end of the year 2023.
Now, I think we're all. Now we can go for the questions, if you have any. You can raise your hands if you have a question, please. Alexander? Cemal? Cemal Bey, we are listening to you.
Thank you for the presentation. Congratulations for the good results.
Thank you.
My first question is about the traffic sites. We see slower traffic like-for-like growth in third, in fourth quarter. It looks like you lost some market share compared to some other listed peers. When we look at the growth, in the, you know, top line, you have 120%, and the others have 135%. I would like to understand the market conditions, how things are going forward and the competition and maybe in the first quarter, what are the indications about the traffic side? Because the base periods was strong, so after 1.1%, could we assume positive or is there a risk of going back to negative traffic? That's my, you know, long but first question. The second question is rather technical question.
You made some asset revaluation, and we see significant increase on the asset side. Of course, on the liability side, you have in the revaluation fund. I would like to understand how the accounting of the depreciation will change going forward. In fourth quarter we see increase, but because of one-time revaluation, could we assume even higher appreciation levels for 2023? Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you very much. In terms of the accounting, the revaluation is recorded at the equity, not as profit as you know, but the deferred tax and income coming from the increased base is, of course, recorded on the fourth quarter as an income, as I have stated this. About the traffic, yes, we have a decline in the last quarter, and especially in the first quarter this year, because there's a high base effect in the Q1 2022. There was an 11% growth on the traffic.
There might be, because our base is high, there might be some kind of a flat, continuing on the Q-Q, Q1 this year. As you know, there are other effects around in Turkey. We believe, these things, the perception-wise kind of things, is temporary. It will try to start to pick up on coming quarters.
Haluk Dortluoğlu if we assume a flat kind of, traffic, and you mentioned that your price, inflation is around 100%, then could we just assume, you know, around 100% growth in the first quarter year-over-year or, you know, is that wrong, assumption? Thank you.
Uh, ninety to ninety-five percent.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Haluk Dortluoğlu.
You're welcome. Okay. Anybody can raise. Hanzade Aksu. Hanzade Aksu, I think, floor is yours.
Haluk Dortluoğlu, thank you very much for the presentation. I want to make a follow-up on the margin pressure that you are forecasting for this year. I mean, can you please go over the details a bit, a bit in detail? Because you are only looking for around 70%-80% revenue growth, which is actually, close to the minimum wage increase. Those staff costs cannot create a major, I think, cost pressure, margin pressure in 2023. What could be... 25 basis points will come from the earthquake, that is clear. Are you very conservative in the margin estimates? I mean, I couldn't really find the rest of the margin pressure here.
I mean, you're talking about gross margin?
No, EBITDA margin. You are looking for around 50- 100 BPS headwind in 2023.
Uh-huh.
You mentioned that 25 BPS is related to the earthquake, which is.
Yeah.
to the inventory. That's fine. You are looking for extra 25-75 basis points margin headwind in 2023.
Okay.
I mean, where is this margin pressure coming? Because your labor cost is, I mean, behaving nicely and your top line growth is parallel to the minimum wage increase. That shouldn't create a margin pressure, I presume. I'm trying to understand what could be the other drivers behind the margin headwind.
Okay. It increased, and 50%, 55%, as minimum wage hike. As you know, also in July, there was an increase last year in minimum wage hike. This has a compound effect. We expect this minimum wage hike might affect us in the first six months. Plus, there is a low base in the first six months of the year last year. This may have a pressure on the cost side, but, as you know, we are trying to always be conservative on our projections and try our performance to be better than this.
If there is, there is some, let's say gains from the utility, gains from the personal expenses or that the inflation will be higher than expected, things will be different.
Okay. This TRY 50 million P&L impact from the early retirement scheme is also going to be reflected in the OpEx, right?
Sure. Sure.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Any question? Okay. Cemal, You rate, first, then if you have a question, you can go ahead.
Thank you. About the dividend sides, what are your plans on that? Could we expect a regular dividend terms?
Because of this earthquake and the let's say early retirement scheme things, we have we need to clarify our cash position. What I can tell you, there are some uncertainties around, but I can tell you that we will be making dividend as high as possible as we did all in our whole history. There will be dividends, possibly in 2 installments, and we will do our highest dividend payment possible according to our possible cash flow.
Thank you.
I think there's a question from Rajat. Rajat Suri.
Yes. Hi. I just wanted to ask you, what are the inflation expectations that are embedded in your guidance, number 1. 2, could you just help us understand, obviously, the gross margin was a material improvement in Q4. It seems like you can almost solve whatever gross margin you want, but what are the actions that you took to improve that?
60%. Roughly 50%, 60% is the expectation and the gross margin. Sorry, in inflation. This is the general expectation in the market, in general speaking. What we did in the last quarter for the work on the gross margin Was that your question?
Yes. Yes.
Okay. Of course, let's say if, you know, the year-end, year-end negotiations and the year-end income, plus, better, negotiation conditions, to increase our gross margin, that's what we did, in general speaking.
Okay. Mainly sort of on the supply chain and working with the suppliers.
Yeah. Especially actually working better in better terms with the suppliers. Mm-hmm.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Question or there's no more question? There's no hand raising. If there is no further hand raising, we will be closing the session. Thank you all for joining us today. We hope to meet you in our coming quarterly conference calls. Thank you all, for joining us today. We started the year with some sorrow in Turkey. Tens of thousands of people have been lost and their families are suffering. I hope this be the last incident that we have lived in Turkey and will not happen again.
We want to look for the future more optimistic as a country, and we will, as BIM, we will do our best for, to, let's say, reconstruction or the being with the people, with our people, with the people of the region, how to improve their life as soon as possible and compensate the sorrows they have lived through. Thank you very much for all, for joining us, our conference call today.