Morning, ladies, and gentlemen. Welcome to Eurocash 2022 Financial Results Presentation. My name is Adam Kucza. I'm the Head of Investor Relations for the company. With me, the main guest of today, the CEO, Paweł Surówka, and the CFO, Jacek Owczarek. We're going to present the financial results with the slides, and then we'll have a Q&A session here with the group in the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw, as well as with our more than 90 participants online. Yeah. Paweł, go ahead.
Thank you very much. Should I take the mic?
No.
I have the mic, sorry. Yeah. Good morning, everybody. Very nice to meet you, and thank you very much for showing up. Thank you for those who are with us in person, and thank you very much for those who have connected online. Yes, ladies, and gentlemen, we are speaking about 2022, and as you can imagine, we are pretty proud of this year. We believe that those results reflect the hard work we have put into achieving them. Also they reflect better the potential of Eurocash than the very difficult years that we came out of during the COVID time.
We wanted to start off by just reminding everybody of what were the quite ambitious goals that we have set ourselves for the last time that we met in this setting, which is when we announced the strategy for the company. Let me already say that we believe the very strong results for 2022 really are very good fundament for us to go ahead, and we believe achieving those goals that we have set ourselves for 2025. Just for making sure that we haven't forgotten about what we committed to, we're putting them out again. When we met last time in this very setting, we set forth and said, okay, first of all, let us simplify of what Eurocash is all about.
You know, a lot of activities, you know, a lot of companies and projects, but let's simplify it to three building blocks. Eurocash is an omnichannel wholesaler. It's a data platform that is working more and more on technology, and it is a franchise organizer that starts to work more and more as a retail company. We have committed to quite ambitious goals linked to cost synergies and also market shares that we have set forth. Maybe, you know, to go through them very quickly and to remind everybody what the strategy was about. When it comes down to the omnichannel wholesaler, what we said is most important part is we want to integrate all the wholesale companies in Eurocash. We have not only announced it's starting to be a reality.
The project of integrating all the wholesale companies into one is ongoing as we speak. As a matter of fact, the company will look completely different at the end of this year, 2023, than it looks now. We believe that at the change of 2023, 2024, we will already have merged the first two biggest units, ECD Distribution and Cash & Carry. That should leave us with a much more simple organization, an organization that will be more effective, not only from a cost point of view, but also from an operational point of view. We want to merge, for example, our buying departments, our marketing departments.
That should strengthen our possibility to negotiate with suppliers, to address clients' needs, to really use all our assets optimally, be it from a logistical point of view, be it from an operational point of view, and that will liberate a lot of results. I know I will get a lot of questions from you about how we see macro environment, and obviously, nobody's got the glass ball and everybody's trying to guess, you know, what's inflation going to be this year. My point is we're looking at a company that is now producing PLN 330 billion of sales, you know, generating some PLN 800 million in cash. Whatever we do, you know, even minor efficiency gains that we can look at and, you know, reusing the cost base. What we're talking about here, these are not minor changes.
These are things that will really unleash a lot of incremental EBITDA in the coming years. We believe these are things that are completely in our hands and that we don't have to depend on macro environment. We have set at least PLN 100 million of cost synergies. We want to double our exposure in six, from PLN 6 billion - PLN 16 billion in terms of the, you know, sales that are generated for our eurocash.pl platform, and we want to build aggressively market share. I see us very well on that platform, on that scale to go there. On the data platform, we said we want to have 12,000 stores integrated to our POS system. I will come to that in a second.
We want to be one of the leading loyalty programs in Poland. We want to achieve PLN 1 billion of revenue in Frisco. We want to be a certain data warehouse for our clients. When we announced this, it again looked quite ambitious. I think something that you have seen in the process, in the last month, we have announced the deal to make a joint venture with Comp, our technological partner that is the biggest provider of POS systems in our part of the market. That greatly enhanced our possibility to roll out those systems. Today we are about a already committed amount of over 5,000 stores that already have shown interest in connect our POS system. You can see we're almost halfway into achieving this connection.
And, you know, we actually only have just begun with the rollout in serious with our partner. We can see very tangible results and benefits from having those POS systems in place. As a matter of fact, we've just launched our fourth wave of retail promotions to the stores that are connected, where that's the first time that Eurocash negotiates a promotion with the supplier, feeds it through its wholesale network, and programs it into the POS system of the store directly. It's a end-to-end retail promotion that dramatically cuts the cost because it's all happening automatically and online. We don't need any sales representatives, neither from us nor from the suppliers, to come to the stores and set those prices. We can, you know, guarantee and document the execution because we have data from the POS systems.
That has allowed us to have promotions that have never been seen before in the traditional market. You know, we're bringing some of the promotions to discount level. This is, the cooperation that we have set with Comp, and we are quite optimistic that this is a model for us to even continue thinking more about being more and more of a technological provider for those almost, you know, for those 50,000 stores that we are working together with. Frisco, we will come there to a moment, very, high growth numbers, even after COVID, so very well on track. On the franchise, network, we have really, separated Delikatesy Centrum and what we now call Eurocash Sieci Partnerskie, our partnerships networks, into a distinct organization that is not linked to wholesale, that really works as a retail organization.
We work more and more, for example, it is Sieci Partnerskie that set out those promotions that have been done through the POS system. POS is the tool. Sieci Partnerskie, the retail network, has been the one setting the promotions and organizing this in those stores, something we haven't been able to do before. Really act as a retail organizer in this space. We would really like you, as our investors, to look and more and more on this part of Eurocash as really a retailer. We will try to prove you with every quarter that Eurocash is not only a wholesaler, it actually has a retail arm that should be viewed as such.
We will try to show that we can, you know, we are on our way to our biggest ambition, which is to become the second retail organization in this country. Maybe we can go forward. You know, obviously, what everybody we didn't even put on the slide because everybody has it in mind. We said we want to achieve Once we've achieved all of those operational goals, our biggest target is to get to PLN 1 billion pre-IFRS EBITDA by 2025. A lot of you have kindly commented that it is a nice goal, but very ambitious, and some of you have pointed to the high execution risk that you see in achieving this target.
I think, you know, with achieving over PLN 570 million of EBITDA this year, we've set a good foundation to really get there. We've shown that the company has incredible earnings power, I think that we've only just begun to really transforming the top line that we have in this very strong bottom line. You know, everybody knows it, but really for the first time, we've broken this glass ceiling of PLN 500 million EBITDA in our history, and that is a very encouraging amount. That's not only inflation, that's inflation paired with the fact that simply top line grew faster than our cost of goods sold and our cost structure, and that has strongly increased our operational lever.
Another thing that, you know, is, you know, we're very proud about and is really the achievement of Jacek Owc zarek, our CFO, is the tremendous deleveraging of the company. I think, you know, we have reduced the leverage of the company by PLN 800 million over the last year. I think that when we announced in August that we want to come below 1.5 debt-to-EBITDA by the end of the year, also, that was treated as quite an ambitious goal. We've now come to 1.2, and we further want to make sure that we control it, not because the leverage would be high. I think 1.2, all of you would agree, for a trade company like us is a very conservative level. Obviously, interest rates are what they are.
We want to make sure that we control financial costs and that our nice top-line growth is also feeding accordingly to the bottom line. as I'm already mentioned, we have started, officially started the integration of our wholesale companies and actually synergies, I believe, will surprise us to the upside when it comes down to our target. We've also started to really work with those stores. What is the most important element, and a lot of you covering companies that undergo integration will know, one of the first things that you have to deal with when you merge couple of companies is to align data and to make sure that you have clean data sets that you work on, that you have one database. That is something that is happening here as well. We had different definitions of clients. That often is the case.
We also had to clean our database, really focusing on active selling stores that are actively in participation with us. Doesn't change the top line at all. The sales is still the same, but we've just made sure that we really identify our clients and segment them in a way that we can work with them in our new CRM system that we want to set up. That's why you can see that we have some fluctuations in the numbers of the actual stores that we are working with. You know, the result, again, I think all of you now have seen it. We've pretty much changed the sign in front of our net income from -PLN 89 million to +PLN 89 million. Almost PLN 200 million swing from one year to the other.
Obviously, a big achievement. Not our highest net income yet, but still a very big difference between one year and the other, and particularly, a very healthy, you know, top sales growth, higher than inflation, higher in every single segment that we are having and participating in that growth of income that we have. You know, our commitment for the next year is to make sure that we maintain the trend of improving the bottom line of our company. You know, as I said, we are committed to the PLN 1 billion EBITDA goal for 2025. That means every single year that we have now officially started with 2023, 2024, 2025 should bring improvement of the bottom line. This year will be no exception.
We want to significantly improve our bottom line in the next 4 quarters. I think with that, I leave you in the capable hands of our CFO, Jacek Owczarek, who will take us through the minor.
Okay. Let me finish with the financial results of 2022. EBITDA was growing 40%, and as you can see, it's also the highest in the history of the company, and it's rounded to PLN 1 billion. That's not our target because it's supposed to be higher. We still have work to do, but the fact is that you know that we are on the good path. I think what's worth to mentioning, it's on the right-hand side, you can see that we are improving consequently, not only across segments in terms of projects, which I will talk about in a second regarding the projects. Also the cost of developing quite under control. Other, it's mostly bonus for employees.
As you can see, you know, we had the record results, so of course, we are paying higher bonuses to our employees, and that's the result of mostly other. The comparison of first quarter of 2022 by segment, I will go into the details, but generally speaking, the message here is that really we are growing in all segments altogether. The benefit, like Paweł said, it's on both sides, on top line, which helped us with not only inflation and influx of new customers from Ukraine, but also from simple fact that as you will see in the following slides, the segment of small stores was behaving better based on some estimations of somehow consumer after the COVID, somehow was coming back.
Of course, we are not fulfilling the same missions like discounters. It's more connected with impulse products or top-up missions or daily products and buying for a weekend, but for the full week. The fact is that the consumer was there. It's also reflected in retail. In retail results, I will point out that that was the first year of consolidation of Arhelan joint venture. The result of Arhelan, it's more or less PLN 500 million sales and around PLN 27 million EBITDA. You know, if you would like to have a comparison, that should be somehow reflected in your calculations and the project we will talk about the most, the two most important in few minutes.
Just summarizing Q4, because the rest of the presentation is more about the full year results, but also I would like to point out that Q4 was also, you know, from the single historical perspective, the highest result we had and the margins at 3.8, and we're growing result by 14%. As I said, in all segments, in reality, we are growing sales. Net debt, as it was mentioned by Paweł. Thank you very much. The fact is that, you know, that's our bank covenant, so classical net debt, which is below 1.2. What we're mentioning this almost PLN 800 million reduction is connected with the fact that we reduced our usage of factoring clients. In reality, we rebuilt our reverse factoring clients.
In fact, we rebuilt our balance sheet towards more conservative. Right now, you know, if you are looking at on one hand, rotation of payables, they're a little bit lower than last year. On the other hand, you know, we reduced the debt which also help us to manage the interest rate in the quarters and will help this year. We are far below the covenants. Also maybe it's worth to mention because part of you are following us on quite a closely basis, the fact is that we are at the end of refinancing process. I think the next current report is going to be for refinancing, we are on the good track to deliver this as well.
The market data, which I was mentioning, you know, usual slide, which we are showing based on the Nielsen. The fact is, as you can see, that the small format was growing 12.2%, so more or less with the, with the consumer inflation. Taking into consideration the mix of sales, which as you know in our segment is more driven, for example, by tobacco than, you know, other segments. Of course the inflation on tobacco was lower than on the dry food, like especially basic products, oil, you know, sugar and this kind of products which we are reading in newspapers. The fact is that we are really developing together with the inflation.
The only segment which we are pointing out for also I think for quite long, which is under the stress, it's really small sales for this quarter. Whatever you are reading about the disappearing stores, they are mostly from this segment, and we are not expecting that, you know, it will change in future. However, on the presentation we will try to show you, present for you what's the size per store, based on our estimation and how it was changing before COVID and right now. Let's go into the few details. The wholesale segment as I said, that was the segment which was driving our profitability, and profitability is at the level of PLN 800 million. Here it's only size driven.
As you can see, you know, of course we are growing unit size 16%, but the operational leverage is higher, so the profitability is growing faster. Mostly it's coming from the perspective that as you may imagine, our logistical network is set and we are not needing any new warehouses. In reality, what helps us is really to on one hand dilute fixed cost. I mean, this logistical network cost. Value of pallet was bigger due to inflation of top line. On the other hand, of course, our sales force is moved, which I will show on the next slide more and more into eurocash.pl, not to the physical presence to the stores.
This electronic sales, it's another source of diluting the cost base on the wholesale side, and that's the clear benefit of 2022. On the next slide, as I said, we have the eurocash.pl data. One remark here. When we start to present to you the development of eurocash.pl, we're showing the number of clients who signed to the platform. I think the platform, we think the platform is right now quite mature, so we'll change this and we'll report to you the number of clients who are really using this, buying every month.
Not occasional clients or you know, small purchases, but really try to show you I think indicator which is much more e-commerce than the project indicator like it was in past when I think the reach of the platform was the most important from our perspective to introduce as many clients as we can. Right now it's more about how to use it effectively and how to sell it more to them. As I said, you know, percentage of cost doesn't change, so we reach around PLN 8 billion sales on electronic platform, which I think it's also very nice achievement of last year.
The stores, we as Paweł said, we created as a part of our strategy the special operational structure which is dealing with the loose franchise systems. There's one remark again that we decided to reduce number of ABCs. We clean the database and again, the same logic like in eurocash.pl. It's not enough to have the brand on the store, you need to buy. That's the final clean, I think. That's the number which, you know, based on the strategy we set, we start to report. Please strip the number which is going down in case of ABC as really cleaning of database, and that's it. That's the new starting point.
As I said, you know, what we can observe from the historical perspective that sometimes, you know, also on our side, I have the tendency to talk about very short-term results. The fact is that if you are looking from a little bit longer concept and look what happened between 2017 and 2022, so five years perspective, somehow in the middle we have this COVID event. The fact is that the number of the number of stores are, as we said, you know, it's going down. However, the stores are selling much, much more.
We are selling much more and if you would recalculate number of stores against the segment which we are giving you in Nielsen, you will also see that the stores who stayed in so-called traditional trade or independent trade, how we call it, they are selling much more than in 2017. That's the grow- I would say, gross effect of changes on the market which are happening here. Let's go shortly into the retail. As I said, you know, we had a very good result. The 2021 was somehow influenced by write-off, which we did. We cleaned the less profitable stores in 2021, and the rest of the network was performing much better. In 2022, the own stores were at the breakeven as a segment.
The franchise business is developing quite steadily and nicely. Also, I already told you about the impact of consolidation of Arhelan, which we point out on the left-hand side graph for you to have the real impact in the segment calculated. The projects. We keep the projects to invest in future. The two most important ones which I'd like to talk about are Frisco and Duży Ben. On the next slide. Thank you. On the next slide, you can see the most important one. E-commerce B2C, Frisco. Frisco was growing last year 32%, so very well above the inflation.
I think that's, that was also answering a little bit the doubt part of the investors is bringing to us whether the model is sustainable or that's the model only for the COVID. We do believe that we find the way to have the sustainable model here for the big cities in Poland. We keep developing other cities than Warsaw only. The fact is that we are not going to, you know, enlarge the geographic coverage short-term. Rather, we want to really increase the size in the current places where we are and try to repeat exactly the story of Warsaw. You know, when you have the fixed cost base, you are diluting prices. More or less the same story like in wholesale. Warsaw, it's at the breakeven at EBIT level.
That's, that's the reality of e-commerce we have. Duży Ben is growing very fast. As you can see, it's almost PLN 300 million size. 300 stores, so coincidence. We want to keep opening Duży Bens. We do believe that that's the way also long-term for our franchises to specialize when they are fighting door-to-door with discounters. That could be one of the reasons how they could be protecting their business, being much more specialized than, you know, general grocery, but also as a concept itself, we do believe big potential here. We will increase the number of stores steadily. The last information which we have on the slides, which also Paweł was mentioning, is very crucial part of our strategy.
We know it's small bar, but very important for us. It's number of POSs implemented by us. As it was said, we do believe that this joint venture with technological partners should really increase our penetration here. Here, the big game is really about the data on one hand, but on the other hand, about these loyalty programs and how to increase the size of... to consumers from the perspective of independent stores. That was briefly the last year. Thank you very much, and I think we can go to Q&A, and Adam will lead us through this section.
Thank you for the presentation. We have now time for questions, both from the room here and online. We have 121 participants there. If you have any questions, you can type them down into the chat. That's how we are going to accept them and then answer them live. Do we have any questions in the room? Please raise your hand, state your name, and the microphone is there.
Hi, it's Janusz Pięta from mBank. Could you give us a bit more color on current trading regarding wholesale and retail segments? A bit more on working capital? What do you see when it comes to payment terms to suppliers? Thanks.
Did I hear right, current trends?
Current trading trends.
Current-
Yeah. Current trends, yeah.
Yeah. I would maybe take the trends, maybe Jacek, if you give the working capital. In terms of the trends, I mean, what we can see is obviously still top line growing. As you have probably already heard from our competitors that have reported before us, we do confirm the observation that we hear from both market surveys and our competitors that there is a softening of consumer behavior. Consumers do not just simply buy the inflation. We see that there's definitely, you know, trading down. We can also see that consumers are buying less, we can see it in the volumes. That, you know, we can see it both in our retail and in our wholesale segment in terms of the volume.
It seems to be really a market reality that consumers, you know, have started to feel the prices and have adapted their behavior accordingly. That is, you know, noticeable, but just as much, not surprisingly, right? I mean, people have certain budgets and for the time being, you know, it is clear that price sensitivity is prevailing.
Our goal and our job is to adapt to this changing consumer behavior. We are currently, you know, making sure that we have much more aggressive promotions. We are also investing heavily in our own brands, capacities and having very, you know, how to say, honest and tough negotiations with our suppliers to make sure that we always stay ahead of the curve in terms of all the cost trends. You have probably seen, we do have inflation overall, but on some product categories there's actually deflation, or at least prices are coming down. Particularly those categories like fats, which were more a question of, you know, a function both of energy prices and then of energy demand and supply.
Here we can see a lot of those trends that prevailed over the last year unwinding. We did our job to make sure that prices come down where they can. Having said that, you know, again, our job is to make sure that we manage top line and cost of goods sold and cost structure, and making sure that, you know, even in this market environment where, clearly, you know, inflation is not feeding through into sales the way it did, in the last year, we maintain profitability. We actually grow profitability like we committed to, in our strategy. Maybe Jacek you should say something about.
When it comes to the working capital, we don't see any, you know, big changes in the trend. The fact is, as well on the other hand that the Q1 is the weakest from the perspective of our releasing of cash. The fact is that that's the quarter when we need the most net debt, and also the less a little bit working capital, because then we need more working capital during the summer when we have peak of sales. The fact is that from the net debt perspective, that's the quarter when we'll have higher usage of debt on average than in Q4. If you are comparing with last year, you will see PLN few hundred million less. That's. Nothing is happening there.
In terms of disputes with suppliers, I'm not recalling really big disputes with suppliers right now. It's business as usual. We are not negotiating big contracts. We don't have, you know, big disputes. Normal operational, you know, discussion about what level of promotion or how to finance deal, whatever, but nothing really extra.
Yes, cash conversion is where it is. I would even say it's slightly improving.
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
On year-on-year basis.
Yes.
Do we have any questions in the room?
Yes.
I have a question for the effective tax rate, because that's been one of the weakest points of the company for a couple of years. Recently, like 65%, 50%. In the fourth quarter was 28%. Where is the goal? Where are you heading to?
The fact is that the tax rate is high, and mostly it's high due to the fact that we're having, you know, the discussion with regarding the strategic options review. Part of the options was offloading the part of the operations which were having negative tax impact on our tax rate, so having tax loss. It will change from the next year because we created maybe... If you recall, in December, we signed the tax group as a full year occasion. We had the current report about this, so we'll be calculating all profits and losses all together. The tax rate should be much closer to 20% in 2022, I think, generally speaking, because you have some exclusions.
It's not accounting profit, you know, per se, but around 20%+.
Another questions we have in the room? Do we have the mic? No. Okay. We have a question online from Grzegorz Kujawski. I guess we already shared some color on the Q1 trading, but Grzegorz is also asking about higher pressure on volumes in Q1, and how about exceeding year-on-year Q1 2022 EBITDA? Is it challenging or not? How do you perceive that?
First of all, just to restate what Jacek said, I mean Q1 is traditionally and seasonally our weakest quarter, and this is where we, you know, normally, you know, then the quarter that we kind of make up with and the fourth quarter being normally one of the best. I would like to point your attention to the fact that this year, you know, we would have a base effect in the last quarter, being given the very unusual events that we have witnessed last year.
Last year, obviously, you had the beginning of the war and what you had is, you know, after the first days of shock, after 24th of February, you had, first of all, a big influx of consumers rushing into the stores to buy goods to provide them to refugees or bring them to the border. In our Cash & Carry stores, in our stores, we've seen that a lot. People really buying stocks and not for their own use, but rather to bring it for humanitarian goods. You know, this year we don't have that. You have, obviously, you know, the kicking in of inflation and the spiking of energy that resulted after as a result of the war.
Obviously, the influx of refugees who, at this time of last year started to come en masse. First of all, in the eastern part of Poland and then settled into the big agglomerations. You have sometimes overseen the fact that in the border regions to the eastern frontier, there was a law allowing stores to open on Sunday for that purpose. So, you know, again, we will have to adjust for that base effect. Having said that, we have not kind of forgotten our goal to improve results year-on-year because we have to, you know, near ourselves to the PLN 1 billion. So it is our ambition to improve results every year and every quarter, year-on-year, and that is also true for this quarter.
The second part of the question was about cash conversion cycle, which has been improved a lot last year in terms of freeing up this PLN 800 million of net debt and reverse factoring. Grzegorz's question goes to into the future. What about this year? Do we expect it at least to be stable with the, with the cash conversion, with the payables and then receivables?
No, we budgeted the full year more or less with stable cash conversion, so we are not planning to have here the big movements. We have some seasonality. For example, you know, during the summer, we have higher sales of tobacco and beer. Of course, we are using a little bit bigger line, so we can use accounts receivable line to now support the working capital. We have some seasonality here, but it's kind of plus one day, minus one day between the lines, historically as well. The, the current conversion ratio around 18, 19 days, I think should stay.
Mm-hmm. Third part of the question from Grzegorz is about Frisco and Duży Ben. Their growth, Ben is keeping fast pace of rollout indeed. Grzegorz is asking about Frisco, how fast it is growing. We've shown in the, in the slide, we've seen the number of customers as well, as well as sales, growing quite nicely. I guess we don't have here the percentage growth. Let me check on that.
32%.
Yeah.
32%.
32% in fourth quarter alone and 38% in the whole year. That's still, in our opinion, a healthy growth after the pandemic times, I guess, right?
Yes. maybe two words to add to that. on the first hand, Frisco is a little bit adapting now their consumer promise because as we said, you know, it has really grown from a relatively niche service provider in Warsaw to, first of all, a service that is now, you know, accessible to most of the big Polish cities, so one-fourth of Polish households. as such, you know, they want to reposition themselves as being perceived not as a premium player, but really as a, you know, mass market service that actually is also a good way, a smart way to save. we will communicate about that more and more because actually their price positioning is below supermarkets. It is somewhere between high, you know, it is getting closer to discounters.
Obviously, for most clients, their delivery service is for free. We will, you know, try to communicate more and more to the market that actually it's a way to save time, to save fuel, and as a matter of fact, also to simply save on prices. What is very important this year in Frisco is that we will open our second automated warehouse in Warsaw, that will open a lot of additional capacity in Warsaw. As a matter of fact, we believe that this market is mostly driven by supply, you know, kind of availability. We believe that the demand side can be much bigger. You know, we have actually, Frisco in Warsaw has been limited for the time being by its abilities for around, you know, season, holidays, etc.
We could really see the current setup in Warsaw coming to its limits. We had to extend the automated warehouse in Warsaw with a manual hybrid addition just to make sure we keep up with demand. With the new warehouse, we will be able to serve a bigger volume and so be more aggressive in marketing this. Again, the idea of Frisco mostly is not to take market share of eGrocery market, but to expand the eGrocery market, to bring this to people who have not been buying food online yet. We see that, you know, we believe that this will come more and more. The second thing is it will happen much more efficiently.
What we are now also looking at is changing the logistical model a bit using the automated warehouse in Warsaw also to deliver other cities, which should enable us to bring down cost again on a fixed variable mix, which is beneficial for Frisco. Again, growth, very healthy, ongoing, even after COVID, and we are on our way to achieve our target for 2025, which is PLN 1 billion sales. Particularly, we believe that by 2025, Frisco as a company will be a profitable company. We will have no longer cash burn. You know, we will take the Warsaw model, expand it to all of Poland, and the company will be cash generating.
When it comes to Duży Ben, I can only say this really starts to be a retail model that we will want to really build on, and it will be a very big pillar of our retail, of our identity as a retailer. It is really a format and a concept that has the potential to go nationwide. You know, you see it in the like for likes. They have been showing like for likes in the 20s over the last quarters, and this is ongoing. It is a concept that is very well adapted to the Polish consumer. It is a very innovative concept. The young team, they're on Global, they're using all kinds of, you know, the post boxes and everything.
It's, it's really a modern, innovative concept appealing to consumers in all age brackets and in all social clusters. For us, it's just a question of pacing their growth. As a matter of fact, the target for the team this year is we want by the end of the year them to reach break-even point as a company. We want Duży Ben to become profitable at the latest for the wholly of next year. That's big developments in the projects here, yeah.
We have a following question on the project segment. Anna Kupniewska and Przemysław Staniszewski, they reminded us of Contigo and what are our plans concerning Contigo as a company, their future and their results.
Yeah. Contigo, you know, we clearly see it as a less strategic asset because we have focused our core growth right now on, you know, really the grocery market, the wholesale market. Our goal is, first of all, to make sure that Contigo starts to be a loss-making company. What we have seen, though, and that is quite nice to see, is that Contigo has really changed their business model from being an offline model based around stores in malls, selling cosmetics in malls, to an online store. We've actually seen very good, very healthy, very promising sales numbers in the online store.
We believe that one way to stabilize the business and get it to profitability is to really turn it into an online store with maybe some flagship stores with it. It turns the way of the entire concept a little bit around. It used to be an offline company with an online store. Now it looks more like an online store with an offline presence. Our ambition here is to make sure that we get them to, you know, we stop the cash burn, we get them to be positive. Again, it is not a strategic project in the sense that I cannot promise you that they will be in our portfolio forever.
You know, for the time being, we are very happy with the team, what they are showing us in terms of numbers, and we want to support them together with the break-even line and then see what strategic options we have.
Another question from Anna Kupniewska is about the number of stores. In the strategy for the year 2023, 2025, we had the goal that you probably mentioned, 500 net stores to be added to the network. How is it going? How will it look like, especially considering the drop in ABC shops in the fourth quarter?
Like Jacek said, I would regard this a little bit independently. It is what I alluded to in the beginning. When you integrate companies like we do, we integrated distribution, Active Distribution, which is actually the wholesaler serving brands like Groszek, Lewiatan, Eurosklep, Gama, and Cash & Carry, which is serving the ABC clients. What happens is that they have different definitions of clients.
For us, it was important that we have a common definition of client, one we can actually work with, particularly as the new model of the integrated wholesalers to really be very client-centric, to have a CRM system that allows us to really work on our client base to increase loyalty in a very strategic manner to, you know, analyze loyalty, to understand what our clients don't buy from us, how we can make a better job in increasing our market share with our clients. It was extremely important for us to have a clean and active database. We do not have any dummy records and stuff like that quite honestly haven't been that important for Cash & Carry in the past.
They just, you know, had a number of stores, but what was important was people coming into the stores, not so much the stores that they were serving. Obviously, the ABC is a very loose franchise model. You know, you get a banner, you can use it. Some people use several banners. What was important for us at that end then, and that's actually, you know, that, that cleaning of the database, as you can see, is actually a sign that we've really started the integration. That's the first step you always wanna take, is you wanna compare apples to apples. We, we have taken the same client definition to ABC as we've done. What we have as active distribution, like Jacek said, we want to have active clients, not only records.
We want stores of which we know that they exist, that clients come and buy from our stores. The same approach as we have with eurocash.pl. We don't want just somebody who has logged into eurocash.pl once. We want active users because this allows us to work. When you look at the sales numbers for ABC, they have not changed. It just looks that in the past, the number of stores that was associated with that sales was probably inflated because maybe clients said they have three stores and then they ended up having two. That means that sales per store is actually bigger than we thought. But this database now, you know, this base of clients now, is something that we've really audited, looked through, and that should be stable.
Again, it does not change the sales. We would now take this client number as the new base, obviously the 500 stores is nothing, is not really comparable because the stores that we have kind of now disappeared from the database are stores that quite frankly have never existed. The stores, the net plus 500 that we have stated here, these are really the difference between stores that have actively closed or ended their relationship with us versus the stores that we have opened or gained to our networks. Here there's, you know, every month, every quarter, we have, obviously, on the one hand side, some stores closing, but always more stores coming in.
I would say that, for 2023, we maintain our goal to have those 500 stores and we see we're on track.
Mm-hmm. I guess Eurocash Partner and then Duży Ben, these are the key models to deliver on that 500, right? Like, Duży Ben delivered more than 100 stores in this year, 2022.
Yes. I think Delikatesy Centrum will also, you know, they will also contribute on their franchise model to expand like the other banners.
Do we have any questions still in the room? There are no questions online now.
I think we...
It seems that's enough for the 2022 results that we have to announce. Paweł, any final words on the good year?
No, again, it was a tough year. It was a good year. I hope very much that we will surprise you in 2023 like we surprised you this year. Thank you very much.
Thank you.