Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to everybody. My name is Dariusz Miłek. I'm the CEO of the group. If you don't know me, or if you don't remember me, having in mind the conference of CCC Group, I want to say a few words about the results. I won't take a lot of time here. The results are the results. This is now the history. I would like to talk more about the future. We will recap the 2024 results. I have three slides, in fact. We have record-breaking sales. Our ambitions were a little bit higher, but this is what happened. We exceeded the PLN 10 billion watermark. The challenge for this year is PLN 12 billion plus. We have a record-breaking EBITDA at the annual level, PLN 1.6 billion, and we have a record-breaking net profit of PLN 1 billion.
That is it in terms of 2024. I'll talk a little bit about wholesale sales, and then we can look at the Q1 2025 results. Also, we have a few slides here. As you know, the driving force in our business, having in mind softer weather, we have slightly softer results. I'm saying we had higher ambitions for like-for-like sales. We had 28% over the last couple of years if we looked at the most recent quarters. We are down by two compared to the record-breaking like-for-like sales figures. We can say this is a pretty good result. Of course, the rest of the industry is doing worse. We are saying that our business changes as a result of footwear, but footwear changes just like tires as a result of weather. We are a brand group now with accessories and fashion.
I should say that the like-for-like sales figures are okay. If we look at costs, we also generated a result thanks to our cost discipline. Things can be done on the cost side of business. We have our own ideas. We will clearly drop below 40% cost ratio. Maybe in the future, we'll be able to drop down to some 35% naturally. That will depend on the magnitude of our expansion since I do not want to embellish the cost base. The costs that we would have would be in the management of stores. No element of the business is underwater in our overall business. Everything's going in line with our plan outside of the weather. As people say, weather supports better people. We've got better contracts, better terms and conditions. In premium brands, things are pretty soft.
There was a lot to be done in the negotiations in Modivo. This is something that's happening. We're thinking about conditions for next spring as opposed to the autumn. Autumn is pretty much contracted. Maybe we'll be able to squeeze something. We have longer terms of payment. We have better terms of payment. Everything I've been saying about Modivo is starting to happen for the future. As we grow by 20% in terms of the number of square meters, then of course, the costs of the head office should fall. This is 40% year to date, right? If we were to have better revenue in Q1, then we would have had even a lower level of cost ratio. We can say we were able to reduce costs, 1.5% across the group. It was 45.5.
Now it's 44. So we had a lower level of revenue in this period. We were able to reduce these percentage points, but in margin. It's a total of four percentage points. In CCC, we also reduced costs, even though we had negative like-for-like. In Modivo, we were able to reduce costs substantially. Costs grew in HalfPrice, but that's not disquieting at all for a number of reasons. One, we're opening a large number of new stores. These are logistics costs and preparing products. We're also doing training for our employees, and we have two new areas in Spain and Italy. These are costs. All of this is under control. In the upcoming quarters, this will balance out and will revert to profitability under the HalfPrice brand as we've generated in the past. We're also improving our margin.
We have improved by nearly three percentage points in Q1. If we look at the individual quarters, things look pretty good. Let's say this quarter has not been bad. PLN 376 million EBITDA, that's 16%. If we compare that to the previous quarters, you can see that Q1 in our industry is the softest of the quarters. We had periods in which Q1 had PLN 100 million loss. Now we have a very nice result. I think there is no obstacle for us to continue this trend for subsequent quarters to become even better. Let me mention what is happening across the brands. In CCC, it is 21%. This is 1% better. The stability of profitability is in CCC. We can say this is a mature model. Will things get better?
They should get better, having in mind the new licenses, attractiveness, and quality of commodities, of products. This is all translating into a better result. Q1 showed what we've been able to do. Here we have HalfPrice, and here EBITDA is down by two percentage points year to year. This is what I explained. This is a huge undertaking, basically, to bring in new goods, purchase them, deliver them to open new stores. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of product ranges, a large number of categories, even just to go buy, pick it up, deliver it to the warehouse, plus all of the store operations. We have double teams that are being trained for rolling out new stores. We'll have at least 85 new HalfPrice stores this year. We'll show you in just a moment how that all breaks down.
We have Modivo. Last year, we had a 7% EBITDA figure. Q1 is usually the worst, and we have been able to generate a 10% return in Q1. That is a good portent of what awaits us. This is not a process that lasts one month. It is when we talk about the next round of purchase orders. Spring of next year, we also have some inventories that we have to sell off, less profitable brands, other brands that we have discarded entirely. That is why we had the six percentage points. We are reducing costs, and we are improving EBITDA. You can look at the competitive market and think about what is happening with e-commerce in Q1 of this year with other players. Things are looking pretty good.
The real synergies are what we're going to be able to derive in the future through the Modivo club, through servicing all of the channels. I'm confident this is going to be the most profitable e-commerce business in Europe. Multi-brand e-commerce, I don't want to compare myself to IKEA or Zara because they also are doing very well. As you can see, you can earn money on e-commerce, and we're going to do that as well. That's it about the results. I think if Wojciech were up here, he would talk for an hour. If you have any questions to Wojciech, we'll ask you to pose those questions at the end. I wanted to talk to you and converse with you about the gigantic amount of work we've done as a team and what sort of reconstruction we're in the process of doing under this model.
I had promised you 250,000 sq. m. I said we will add 250,000 sq. m. I said that is going to be an additional PLN 2.5 billion in revenue, but we are actually going to deliver more. I am also calm in terms about 2026 because we already have a large number of contracts. That is not expansion just to go out there and expand that we have made a bet with somebody. Basically, the sq m are looking for us. We are not looking for sq. m., s q. m. are looking for us. We have twice as many offers as we are signing, and we are choosing what we think is the best with a good fit out. Sometimes it is turnkey stores. Above all, with an OCR approach, it is a very safe model. If we do not generate revenue, we do not pay rental fees at all. This expansion is very safe.
As you can see, we have four brands. It's easier to negotiate. We have a large amount of synergy in our negotiations. We have 85 HalfPrice stores we want to add this year, 100 CCC, 165 WorldB oxes, and 20 eFootwear. Ev erybody's interested in WorldB ox. It's a blank map. CCC is a mature network. It's a little more difficult to find a new store location than it is for WorldB ox. We'll have 36% more store openings year on year. We're not talking about refit outs or anything like that, renovations, because we have to basically do designs. We have to get all of the permitting in place with the fire brigade and the health service and so on and so forth. We've been doing quite well here. Here's the table that I had in mind.
This plan is achievable, having in mind recent successes in Spain and Italy. We will have another 60,000 sq. m. in Spain alone. This is not a major challenge since each store has 2,000-2,500 sq. m. As I can show you, we have 56% of the expansion in 85 stores because we are talking about the total number of sq. m. The stores on average have more than 2,000 sq. m. It is not the case that these stores are waiting for us. We have to basically acquire them, seize them, everybody. It is quite easy for us because we have been successful. People see our success. Basically, people are looking for us, and they want to be part of the success. We are just basically getting started in terms of ramping up our product and sales.
If we look at this graph, we can say the things look pretty good, perhaps too good, perhaps too aggressive, but there's no reason for us to wait. Every store is earning money, and we have to utilize that chance today. We have to seize that chance today. We have 200,000 sq. m. of HalfPrice, and then WorldBo x 94, 56 CCC, eFootwear it's a little softer. B asically, all of our stores are going through lifting, refit out. Physical sales of products, it's working better. I wasn't wrong. I'll present that information, what's happened with the first stores since we made those retooling or re-engineering. Here's the breakdown in thousands of sq m in terms of our expansion.
It's usually the case that 10% of the venues are pushed back to the spring, but we've secured that because we have new venues coming in this year. I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to deliver that 250,000. This is broken down by thousands of sq. m. When we talk about earning money in our expansion, the 80,000, perhaps it might be at the end of July when we open that. They really will not work for the entire second quarter, just like the 35,000 did not work because we did not for the whole quarter because we did not start on the 1st of February. We've been doing a lot of renovations. This is the softest quarter. That's when we do our renovations because we usually get the fit out for a new concept.
We have to renegotiate the contract, just like with HalfPrice. It is a combined deal. We take advantage of that because, just, well, 40% of our exhibition space is because of metal shelving. It takes us a bit of time. We can say that the square meters were basically flat. You will see the effect because I want to get to PLN 12 billion, so plus four. All of these things are going to be transpiring in Q3 and Q4 as they add up the additive impact. At the end of the year, we will have 1,200 stores. Some of them are going to be quite large. If we look at the HalfPrice expansion in Southern Europe, I said that we are going to try out in Spain. We started in Zaragoza. We opened Madrid.
On Friday, we opened Italy in Milan. I was there. It was Thursday, 120 renters. How you could put products into 5,000 sq m. We have a full number of offers. We have not even ended the day of Monday. We had a wonderful store opening. Basically, everybody came in to see us, and we did PLN 2 million in revenue in three days. It was a record-breaking result. We were four times higher than elsewhere. We are thinking about that Italian, rich Italian customer is going to visit us because they are saying outlet and full prices and off-price. I had to explain to people what off-price was. There are two, three brands, one brand. People are looking at Versace and Prada and so on and so forth. Here we have all of the brands.
Beer and batteries, toys and everything's at half price. Even when we sent some film clips because it was for VIPs on Thursday, VIPs bought stuff for PLN 200,000 when I sent the video clips. They were asking what sort of discount we were giving for the opening. It was 50%. The margin was 64%. It's a wonderful outcome in such a model. Basically, people were buying a wide range of products in their basket. After those two openings, we have a large number of offers. We'll open 19 stores. We've been doing this for 30 years, so we know what we're doing. We have very good venues as well as very good terms and conditions. It's EUR 13 in Spain. We're paying EUR 14 in Italy all in. We had a big fit out for the stores.
In Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, it's EUR 50. The stores are still making money. I had anticipated that it was going to be more expensive when we went there. They believed in our model. We believe that we're going to be the anchor, that they need us more than we need them. That's the way we're playing things. Here you can see some pictures from Madrid, big store, more than 4,000 sq. m. If we don't have enough revenue, then we don't pay any rental fee. We have very good results at the end of the period. Here's a little bit of a propaganda film clip for you to see what was happening there. We can go on. This is Italy. Oh, here we go. It looks a little bit like propaganda.
Perhaps they put in my video clips as well. Maybe it was a little amateurish. We're thinking about the customers. The fact is that we had a large number of people who came in because the film, the video clip we made prior to the store opening. Here you can see the large number of customers who were in the stores. Inside the store, we had a line of 150 meters. The bridge, Northern Italian customer. Of course, the biggest fear is whether or not the concept will be embraced. I go in to HalfPrice, and I want to leave immediately. I'm not the main customer. I don't really understand. I don't grasp it. The question, who doesn't want to buy things less expensively? My wife, my son, Wojciech, you go there as well? Constantly.
I had understood no at the beginning. His position in the management team would have been at risk had he not said that. Customers embrace this. This is the greatest value. This is fresh information, new information from Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We have got the adrenaline. We have got the power. The first day, it is not the big Friday, it is not the beginning of the weekend, really. We can say that the sales were a little bit under what we had in Spain. If you compare Warsaw, Warsaw, and the figures to Milan, of course, the figures will come down. We understand that it will taper off because this was the opening. We did not spend as much money for the marketing. The question now is to do a bigger network. This is the jumping-off point and continue to expand.
There are no off-prices in Spain and Italy. If we do this well from the very first store, we're going to be the leader in that market. If you can see Madrid, during the week, it was not amongst the top 10, but in the weekend, it's doing just as much as Praha Diamond in Prague. Some of you were there during the investors that you saw how big that store is. I'm paying EUR 50 in Prague. Those are flagship stores. In Madrid, I'm paying EUR 13. I have to tell you one interesting tidbit, in Spain, and I can say that in Milan. They wanted to understand, the owners of those galleries in Italy and Spain, they visited Prague to see how you could actually put product on 5,000 sq. m.
We were in the midst of signing the contracts. Here is WorldB ox. This is a concept I believe in a lot. This is going to be a better project than CCC. We have to give it a little bit of time. This is a design where we'll sell our own production, licensed production. This will really begin in spring of 2026. Now we have other partners, brands. These are basically ends of collections and things like that. Accidental things. We're going to have 20 licensed brands. Basically, on all of our brands, we have licenses that I can produce also apparel and accessories. This is going to be a big thing because we have a higher margin on apparel, on clothing. If we have apparel, accessories, and footwear, I think my ticket is going to be higher.
It's going to be a broader concept, a store that's more comprehensive. Hats, socks, and coats, anything that you can buy in a casual sports casual assortment. This is a very interesting concept. We're opening this. We will await the results and the high profits starting next year. The beginning is never easy, but we're going to be able to achieve a synergetic effect very quickly. We're inexpensively renting out this space, according to me, but of course, it's at market price. We'll have WorldB ox, CCC, and HalfPrice. It'll make it easier to do the expansion. We have the Modivo World Club. The cashback, this will be available also in World Box. We started with the eobuwie, eFootwear with the campaign on the 5th of May. eFootwear is also a big thing. Physically converting this into a brick-and-mortar store.
We have four stores that have been converted. We have another 15 or so that are in the process of construction. It is not just a matter of switching out furniture. You have to have permits and consents from the fire brigade, the health service, and others. This is taking a little bit more time. By the end of July, we should complete the conversion process of all of the stores. By August, we should have a full offering in the stores. In the autumn, the segmentation that we are working on will be visible. Basically, as of the spring, we will not have any shoes that will be replicated. We are going to make sure that people, consumers, can understand the concept. There is going to be a price differential.
The cost, and there are going to be brands there that will never be seen in CCC. Calvin Klein here and there, that would not work. We can go on to Modivo Club, and that's our group's new loyalty scheme. We had the new campaign. We had the technical start in May. For people to understand what's happening. We're starting to blow on this a little harder. 10% cashback. That doesn't mean I'm going to give back the 60s. What is, I'm only going to give 40%. That's the cost of the purchase. We're going to give the customer back 24s. What is, to people understand, that's what we're retaining. This customer is more loyal. The customer is spending more, coming back.
This benefit is going to be bigger, and this might make that consumer more loyal because he'll buy more. Because you can buy in Modivo, eFootwear, CCC, WorldB ox, HalfPrice, WS. We're going to take that over by the end of May. By the end of May, we're going to consolidate with WS, which is basically the basketball players and the runner stores. Everybody wants to be across the segmentation. We'll have the full range of segmentation in Central and Eastern Europe. This is quite a big accomplishment. Nobody else had thought this up. We were the only ones who thought this up. This tells you here we're on the Modivo website. A customer can buy concepts, can buy brands, Modivo Gold. You can see what's happening with your money. Later we'll say this is in Europe.
You have a platform of benefits, a special offer for club members. Check out the details on the Modivo Club website. Here's Modivo Club Gold. You'll get back 10% on your purchasing card, cashback on everything. We have new brands and special offers for club members. Set up your account with Modivo Club Gold. There are going to be more and more benefits, privileges. What's this type of sales code? Modivo deals. We'll have things about brands, first purchases, returns, packaging. That's for a fee, not for a fee. We want to make sure that the customers have benefits and they can participate in special deals on a pioneer basis. We have quite a few people who are signing, around 6,000-8,000 people per day who are signing up. Basically, 36 what is?
That's probably covering all of the costs of the loans. Of course, we're going to give that back to people in a smaller pool. So 40% of that. So our cost of purchasing the products will be given back. Of course, we're counting on people buying more. People on HalfPrice are signing up many fewer than in CCC. This is the map of where people are signing in. WorldB ox doesn't have scale yet, doesn't have that magnitudes. As I said, we want to achieve a target of 3 million per year, maybe not the first year. Once people understand the benefits, if we communicate well with them. Here is your benefit as a result of the card. People are going to go ahead and want to extend their membership. We can talk a little bit about Spain and these stores.
Here we have Poland, Spain, and Czech Republic. We have to remember that in Spain and Italy, they're open on Sundays, whereas the store in Warsaw is closed on Sunday, where we have PLN 200,000 per day of revenue. Those stores, so we have PLN 5 million per store. That's PLN 2.5 million margin. That's frequently sufficient to pay for the rental fee. We made some comparisons. The traffic is quite good. The average value of the ticket is higher. The average ticket is higher. The items per ticket is higher, and the gross margin is higher. We're selling our products more expensively abroad. I'm not sure if this is a good tactic or not, but we're selling at a higher price in euro. If that continues to work, we'll do that. Otherwise, we can always diminish the prices.
There is a difference between ourselves and the competitors by 14%. We are able to sell this with a good margin because I remind you that we also have a second margin. Now, let's go on. When I talk about the eFootwear stores, these are the ones. We only have a sample of three stores. Even though their space has been reduced, it's sort of like HalfPrice, close to the HalfPrice. Traffic is up by 128%. Revenue is up by 121%. Revenue net of returns is up 55%. The gross margin is higher by 8 percentage points. We are selling 18%. Here we want to sell 50% of our products. With Modivo, we will be able to pump up that margin, but we are going to need several months or maybe several quarters, maybe two.
We will be able to achieve our targets. If we look at the WorldB ox stores, with a higher average store area, revenue per square meter is up by 22%. Traffic is up by 11%. Conversion is up by 5 percentage points. These are also 22% as revenue. This is not a source of satisfaction because there is more product. We have to be calm. When our products are going to be delivered and when we are going to produce our own caps for $2.15, perhaps the dollars have weakened, and we are going to be able to sell that with an 80% margin. Maybe we will come in at 70%. Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. Let me show you another example. If we look at wholesale case study, why is it a profitable endeavor for us to use a wholesale case?
The last time I'm going to explain, I have to explain why we have such a high margin of wholesale. Other people are bragging about it. If we're buying a pair of shoes for PLN 22, what is—so at PLN 120 retail price, we have a 78% margin. At the final stage, we have 65%. It's like 68% for licensed shoes. There are discounts, clubs, sales. If we have in mind what's happening here. Of course, in our own retail, it's most profitable for us to sell here because we have a 78% revenue. If we look at the wholesale impact, let me tell you how somebody else's is. If we talk about the competition, if there's a distributor, brand owner, all this sort of stuff, you have two agents on the way. Or intermediaries, I'm not sure.
I would call them by a different term because I got rid of all of those intermediaries. Let's say each one of them wants 20% to take. Basically, the markup is 25. Each one has to generate a margin. That's PLN 5. They're taking a dollar or something like that. You're building the negative price from the very beginning. Basically, it's coming out of China at PLN 34. You have a distributor, somebody who has a license or somebody who has a brand. That person also has to have a margin. That person adds a 50% markup, which gives us a 33% margin. Wojciech , you always do a good calculation. Is that correct?
Yes.
Basically, the price at this point, the input price is PLN 50.6 . I'm looking at my price. I'm always less expensive.
I assume that they're selling at PLN 110. The retailer has to have a 50%-54% margin. Otherwise, he'll die. Because then he'll end up at 45%. Because if you sell off collections, stuff like that, you're going to come down below 40%. The distributor is going to see what's at the bottom. PLN 16. That's nothing. Do you want to do? I wouldn't want to be a distributor for PLN 16 because you have to have good attenders. I have to visit customers. I have customers who don't want to pay. I also have customers who are still complaining they haven't sold things. I've got a group of people who have to visit these customers. There's just too many costs. PLN 16 is not a lot. We're looking at the margin as 33% because we calculate the market markup from the bottom price.
I give my customers the final price of PLN 100. I assume that the customer wants a margin. This is a new environment. I have to give them a 60% margin. Maybe I give them 120- or 150-day payment terms. Usually, it is 60-90 days. The person calls up at 90 days or 60 days and says, "Where is my money?" Even though only 20-30% of the goods or maybe the season has not even started, you already have to pay. That is very inconvenient for the end customer here. They have to utilize cash that they do not have to make those payments. Since it is for me a new market, I can give them a longer payment term. I give them better margin. I know what margin means.
I understand why there has to be a margin because once he starts to earn money, he'll come back to me. How much comes back at the end of the day? I'm selling at PLN 40. I get to 45% margin. There are no thieves along the way because we're working directly with a factory. I keep PLN 18. Is that satisfactory? No. I'm not happy with that 45% because I prefer to sell it for half. I would have to prefer to have a 400% markup, a 70% margin with PLN 78 for myself because I have to do that. In almost all the contracts I have, I have to have a wholesale network. If I have a license for a region, I can't sell only through my own channels.
I have to do it even if I don't want to do that. I'm not sure where the end game is because I'm going to have my own stores nearly everywhere. The wholesale I'm building, the question is, will it survive? On the other hand, there's always going to be a market next to me where they're going to be selling Umbro, Fila. I'm not talking about Adidas and Nike and Puma because they don't have franchisee stores or anything like that. I'm talking about the smaller segment here. I should trade with markets, normal stores, and other channels to make sure that the brand is the brand. It shouldn't just be a brand for my own channel because then your brand dwindles and dies away.
If we talk about the marketing synergies, if I'm advertising Reebok and I'm distributing Reebok, basically I have to do it anyway. The advertising does not cost anything for other things. My marketing becomes less expensive as I do this spread and it's more competitive across the marketplace. Has everybody understood the concept? All those people who understand the difference between margins and markups. It's PLN 18 per pair. Basically, this is less expensive money or inexpensive money. This is costing me, looking at the purchase price, 3%, PLN 0.50. Then you have the logistics costs and then moving it through the warehouse. Then there are buyers who are buying new collections. There's a lot of synergies here. Teams, we have a small wholesale team, which is doing the settlements, doing the accounts.
It is maybe 10 people who are active in that. Basically, this is going to grow for wholesales. Now, a summary of the key strategic initiatives. As you have seen, a lot of things are happening. Do not look at us and do not judge us based only on what has happened in the last quarter. Think about the future. This is the bet. We have talked about the 25 billion revenue and 20% EBITDA. So Medieval Club, which is the group's common loyalty scheme, that has begun. HalfPrice expansion in Southern European markets. I discussed that briefly, and I am very proud of how this is working. Sometimes when things begin well, they end poorly. We are doing everything we can to make sure it does not end poorly. We are not talking about the German-speaking countries. We are talking about more dynamic. They will see Guess or any other brand, and they are quite happy.
The bigger the brand logo, the more important it is. We have the fast pace of World Box development. This is very important. This is another link in our chain, which will continue to expand. Scaling up the eFootwear store chain in a new format is happening. The rapid growth of the share of licensed brands in the group's offering is also important. You did not show how many brands we have. It is 30%. 30% in CCC is of licensed brands. We want to get up to 50%. They have a faster turnover. They have better brand recognition. It is easier to penetrate basically international markets with branded products. This would not be possible with Gina Rossi or Lasocki. It is with the branded products in Bulgaria, Romania, and so on and so forth. We have the product segmentation in our sales channels.
This is something that's very important to us. Segmentation. All of our buyers have separate collections for World Box and Medieval Club and something like that. Bigger, smaller, different colors, different prices, but everywhere. I want you to understand that synergy will show up because the licensing is 3%. The products will be coming in the near future. We are going to generalize them. Of course, HalfPrice has to have brands. We are not going to have only licensed products. We are not going to have our own brand for toys or, let's say, dog food. We are going to have a wide range of products. We are going to look at those things that can actually generate a higher margin for us. We have started to build a logistics warehouse. This is something that will help us.
We have a lot of costs because we're handling things manually. We want to make sure that people aren't touching. There's no manual operations. It's going to be coming in, going out automatically. Automation will help us greatly to make sure that we're going to have cost savings here. We want to achieve the maximum level of synergy within the group. We're not talking about the channel any longer. We're talking about the brand. Nobody in the company has the right to talk about channels. We're talking about brands. If we're selling individual brands in all of our sales channels, it doesn't matter if we're talking about one brand or another. We're selling it basically in eFootwearl. We want to sell it in CCC, Modivo, markdown, sell it in HalfPrice.
Marketplace is also a sales channel, is a sales place. It's not competition. E-commerce is not going to be a competition for us. Basically, our products will be sold across the marketplaces. The most important thing for people to accept are brands, our prices, and our markdowns. We have wholesale, franchise, and marketplace development. I've already talked a little bit about marketplace. In footwear, we're number one in Allegro after the first month. Why? Because we have a large amount of product. Adidas has only Adidas, Boss only has Boss. We have 60 brands, which we can offer on high margins. We're opening up these channels. This takes a little bit of time. Corporations. I used to do that in one day or one week, but this is going to take a few months.
Basically, everybody wants to have our products. We're very attractive in terms of the offering we have. We are going to enter marketplaces. Marketplaces can be a big business in the future. For now, they've not been developing. It's not growing for others either. We'll be present in that segment. We have franchise in Europe. I don't want to have any franchises, but there are countries, small countries, where they would like to have franchise. I have pilgrims. I have to open a list of a journal. We are doing, people are coming in across the world in terms of visiting us to try to do sales. Some smaller countries like Albania, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, perhaps these are areas where we'd be willing to set up franchises. I don't want to have just one, two, or three stores.
I want to have much bigger expansion. We have to do it, it's not to have one store. We have to have a big store. It has to be a big footprint. HalfPrice and World Box, because it's always either if everything's together, then you have put a customer down on the map, because if somebody's going to have enough stores, it's going to be easier to plan if there's a sizable chunk of the market there that would be held. In terms of wholesale sales, in the report, we made an adjustment in terms of wholesale sales because wholesale sales took place jointly with the auditor. We came to the conclusion that it will be better to account for it once the payments are made. A portion has been booked. We have payment terms that are rather lengthy, 120-150 days.
Basically, this will be booked in Q2. We're not backing away from wholesale sales. We're going to show segments. That's what we said because nobody understands this. Ultimately, we want to change the method of presenting segments. It's not going to be by brands. We're not going to say CCC. We're going to say full price, retail, off price, wholesale sales, and e-commerce sales. Now we're thinking about whether or not the marketplace should be treated as an external channel and wholesale, or should it be somehow subsumed under e-commerce. We're not going to say that we've sold 300 units of Logan Field to get a license in different channels. This is a matter of the near future. Then the presentation will be easier to understand, easier to grasp. I don't know if you remember our bet.
We talked about my five-year presence in the company, that I'm working free of charge. The resolutions have been adopted. I don't get any salary. My woman is paying the bills. This is what our plan is for you. If this plan is achieved, it's in terms of the square meters and the profitability of 20%. I'm not going to allow us to do things that are unprofitable, so I'm delisting things that don't earn money. This is a process. It seems that it's very realistic that our share prices will improve in the future. I don't want to hear questions. What's happening in May? That's not why I came here to ask. Talk about what's happening in May. Is it a good question? We're selling sneakers.
We're selling sneakers, which is not usually what we'd sell at the time of the year, but in this summer, the price is down by 50%. Now we have, it was minus three when I got up. We have these semi-finished with these half shoes up to the ankle. There are things. We have this type of weather in May. We're not going to complain about the weather. Different types of shoes are being sold as a result of the weather. I feel very good in these types of conditions, in difficult conditions. Why? Because now is the time to expand. Now it's time to set up the conditions of cooperating with partners. Now we have to get the best possible conditions for the company.
After my visit to Italy for two days, I’ve got better conditions in 10 companies that I’ve been working with. The rebates, discounts, previously they didn’t want to sell products to the HalfPrice because there’s a lot of premium brands. I’m not sure if people don’t want to buy anymore, or they want to buy less expensive. They’re not too interested in wearing branded goods. Things are going very well. There’s a selection under taking place. Once the customer gets stronger, then we’re going to be the winning part, just like we won in COVID. We took advantage. We leveraged COVID. We reduced stores that weren’t working. We got rid of certain factories. We shed sports, and then we opened HalfPrice, and we renegotiated the commercial terms with all of our shopping galleries, with the owners.
We even tried to negotiate with the banks, but that was not a good time to negotiate with the banks. That is something we have all done in the past. That is the past. I am not going to go back to it. This is the program that I presented to you, and this is something that I am pursuing very strongly. Here we are talking about our declarations. We want to have a 20% EBITDA in 2025. We have got a less expensive dollar. We have very inexpensive freight, $2,000-$2,500. Depends on who you are talking to. The dollar is secured or hedged at a low price. So it is 3.8 in terms. We were at 4.1, but we hedged a little earlier. So we are up by like two percentage points in terms of the dollar. The freight goods are getting better and better. Our licenses are starting to function.
I have a very optimistic mindset looking into the future and then opening up, having opened Spain and Italy. There are 48 million people who live in Spain and 58 million in Italy. That means we have 106 million. We can add it or round off to 105 million. Then you have some people who do not have passports. Let's say it is 110 million people. As you can see, the customers who visit our stores vary greatly. We have people who are more wealthy than in Romania and Bulgaria. This is happening in two different markets. We are not going to expand our business in Kosovo or Albania, where there are 1 million or 2 million customers. We are going to leave that to basically franchisees. Thank you very much. We have Wojciech Latocha, Michał Ryś, and myself. Are there any questions that you would like to pose?
Maybe you have some questions that you want to pose to Karol.
This is a little bit of a surprise, an Easter egg. Hello. My question is to Karol in terms of Modivo. Has this problem been resolved? Where the press?
He just took over this position. Come on, Karol, you can speak. Go ahead and try to give some explanations.
Maybe I can give you a few words of explanation. There is a lot of demand from consumers. There are things that we changed in our systems. The third thing is that we are cooperating with one of the suppliers. Those three factors contributed to us having some turmoil in terms of fulfilling a large number of orders. This work week, we should complete that. All of those customers who had to wait for a longer period of time.
Individually, we're apologizing to them and we're giving them some compensation. Of course, we understand that people weren't happy. We're very sensitive to that. We want them to stay with us, and we're offering them some incentives to do that. We're counting on that we're going to be able to extract ourselves from this situation in the near future. In the future, every company, e-commerce company, every now and again faces some technology changes. We don't differ in this respect. In terms of what happened, this is also a lesson for us. We're going to learn from this lesson and react more quickly to these types of challenges. This is not about Modivo Club. This was an external supplier. The three factors I had in mind. The club is totally different.
This did not have an impact or did not contribute to the situation that I talked about.
Thank you very much. I have a follow-up question in terms of wholesale. I understand that in Q1, we had PLN 40 million EBITDA because of wholesale, which theoretically took place in Q4. Plus, we had the positive gains on FX translation. That would suggest that there was a lot of pressure. Does that mean we are missing a quarter to achieve this year's targets, especially since we have inventories? Sales are below expectations, if I understand things correctly?
I think this is a question more to me. Q1, PLN 35 million sales revenue in Q1. There was PLN 15 million or so in profit. If the FX translations are positive or negative, we just report what is happening. We hope that we will always be ahead of the game in terms of FX translation.
The inventories, this is the tall bar that you showed in the dynamics of opening up new stores. It's not a major burden. This is linked rather to the pace of growing or opening up new stores in Q3 and Q4. In the second half of this year, this is when we're going to achieve this year's results. The first quarter is always the softest quarter. Now we're moving up to nearly PLN 400 million. I would give a different commentary. Ever since I came back to be the CEO, things changed in Modivo. Products are delivered on time. The history was that we received products in the middle of the summer. By the end of this year, we'll clean things up with inventory. You'll see we'll reduce our inventory by some 20-25%. That's the plan in the company.
Last year, we didn't do so well in the winter. We stopped panicking because we have a loan that is 10 times less expensive than the valuation of these shoes. We're going to purchase 35% less in this winter. Trappers or so, nothing's going to happen with some of these winter shoes. If it's resorted, repackaged, it's going to be quite okay. This is going to be a much more beneficial undertaking than marking things down. Basically, we want to move into a cycle. Basically, we have to sell as much as possible at first prices. We should have spring in February. Today, we don't have the spring collection until the 15th of November. We want to be the first on the market. There's going to be a point in time when products are going to be showing up a little faster.
We're going to say that 31st of January, you'll see a much market improvement in terms of the product. The shoes will be sold off, and they're going to be ordering much more reasonably for the summer period. All of these declarations for this year, the key thing is profitability. Of course, inventory is very important. We're incurring costs. Banks look at the inventories. We have to drop down that level of inventories. We're not talking about financial expenses. We're talking about refinancing because we have another good piece of news. Probably, I hope that we'll have the committee meeting this week. They're going to be able to reduce the cost of the credit and SoftBank. We're not talking about replacing factoring. We want the supplier to pay for the costs. I had a table, but I didn't want to talk about that.
I don't want to say today what I'm going to say in Q2. We're talking about PLN 330 million financial expenses in the COVID period. We want to drop down the financial expenses across the group, and we want to drop to one-third that. I mean, the group is going to be much bigger. We're going to move in the direction of PLN 12 billion revenue. Actually, we're working in every element since we're trying to connect all of the dots. If you don't see something today in our results, you'll see that in the results in the near future. You think I'm not pained by the inventory? We're pained by the inventory because we pay for warehousing space. Additional costs of roughly PLN 100 million per annum. We have to clean up this topic.
Thank you very much for your responses.
Okay, next questions.
I'm from mBank, Janusz Pięta. My question is about investment, so capital expenditures, CapEx. We have targets that are higher in terms of the rollout. What sort of CapEx do you anticipate this year?
I'm not calculating it at all. Łukasz is calculating it. You're calculating that. I'm saying for them not to calculate it. Basically, what should we calculate? Every store basically generates enough revenue to pay it back in the course of a year. If the stores are earning money, then it would be a big problem if we were to cease and desist from opening stores. We're earning too much to worry too much about CapEx. Most of our stores are turnkey stores or with a large fit-out. What we have to pay for is furniture. The factoring is there for 180 days.
We can actually earn enough money to pay for the furniture before we actually have to pay for the furniture. I'm not calculating. Of course, the controlling department is calculating that. Our stores are earning money. If the stores do not, if they stop earning money, then we'll slow down the pace. There won't be any problem whatsoever. Okay, thank you very much. I guess I made a big statement. The controlling department is calculating. That's why I said we actually are making those calculations. The question is, what's the name of this committee? It's Kickoff. We had 12 people coming down to the Kickoff committee. They said they had some calculations that I wasn't invited to the committee meeting. Basically, stores are now earning PLN 4 million a year. There's no reason to calculate it because people calculate these things in corporations.
This is not a corporation. If I feel that I earn money, I'm jumping into that topic and start earning the money. That's my instinctive reaction. Spain, Italy, two big markets where you want to build a strong position. The question is, is there any other market? Greece and Portugal. These are the most spontaneous markets and countries where there's no competition. In off-price, there's no competition. In footwear, it's a tragedy. I have so many inquiries, requests for CCC to show up. This is a problem. Is it not too early for that? We can do some pilots. I don't need a pilot, but I'm sure we're going to earn money. Let's say we have 4,000 sq m for HalfPrice, and then we can do 100 sq m or something like for CCC. That's a bit of a problem.
I would have stores made available for like the HalfPrice conditions. Basically, OCR. Basically, retail. There is no network that could compete with us. We have a good level of our stores. We have great brands and high-margin brands. I know that basically these are distributors, intermediaries. The footwear networks have big problems. This is also the problem of markets. We can say there is no footwear store. It is a wonderful gallery there in Milan, but they do not have a footwear store at all. I think JD is there. These mono brands where they have 10 or 12 shoes basically look like warehouses, and they do not fit the model of that shopping gallery. This is where there is an opportunity for us to appear and emerge. That is why I am talking about it, because HalfPrice without Modivo is basically HalfPrice joint with Modivo.
I'm talking about the loyalty club. We're talking about synergy. If the loyalty club works for us, and if it's going to work well, and I believe it will, then we don't need anything else than to reduce the number of countries. We have to catch the synergies by having the proper brands in terms of rents, operations, products, marketing, the loyalty club. We think about synergy. Synergy is the name of the game. How advanced? Portugal doesn't have any locations, venues, very small number of markets. They're all occupied, and the rents are higher. The thing is, the worst with Portugal and Greece as well, you have most of the stores that are on the streets. There's no shopping galleries. Italy and Spain, there's a large number of markets. Don't treat this seriously. This is so basically, I don't want to scare everybody away.
Okay, thank you. On the other hand, our model is for us to defend ourselves. The CCC model would do well in Germany, but we're not doing that. For three years, I'm not going to do anything in Germany. We can have that arrangement. I can sign a contract with you on that, but it's a very demanding market. Italy, a very spontaneous market. It's a CCC, so I'm going to pull back a little bit in terms of CCC showing up in Italy, but we're going to observe what's happening with HalfPrice. HalfPrice is doing well in Spain, in Italy, shoes. EFootwear is selling very well. The Spanish networks are doing quite well in apparel, but not so well in the eFootwear. For us, it's going very well. Any other questions? Wojciech, no questions?
We have several questions from online.
Maybe I'll read out the questions. The first question, the pace of expansion, which is aggressive. Will it not dilute your margin and get rid of the?
As of now, we're not making any of the mistakes from the past. Expansion for us is a matter of synergy. I was trying to explain how much the stores are earning. So the stores generate more EBITDA than the head office. If we don't add costs, maybe a little bit, but we will not have the same pace of growth. Then we'll be one to two percentage points ahead of the game in terms of our EBITDA performance.
This is a question. There was a graph, five years of growth, and now today people are worried? They have fear in their eyes. The next question then, you already partly responded to this question, but I'll read it anyway.
What are your plans in terms of paying down or refinancing the liabilities of Modivo to SoftBank? Can you roll out a rights offering?
There will be no rights offering of CCC. We preclude that. And we've got the free financing for less expensive debt at SoftBank. I don't know if you know. We pay interest, contractual interest. If some sort of period transpires, we haven't gone on to, we haven't gone public. We're going to be able to pay millions less per annum than we're paying right now because of the step-up cost. There's a major difference there. That's why we're, and it'll be a five-year period. We'll have a five-year payback period. Some sort of bonds or something of the sort. I think a loan would be, or a credit facility would be less expensive.
What level of inventory does the management team consider to be optimum, having in mind the expansion of the sales?
So inventory at the end of the year has to be down by 20% with three major expansions.
Next question. To what extent is the cold May affecting your sales?
I did not come here to explain what is happening because of 11 days in May. Because when we talk about revenue, we do not have margin or cost here. Our sales is up 4%. EBITDA is up 25%. That is making the difference. I do not want to explain because of 11 days of May. I do not think I am going to make any explanations for that sort of reason. I would like for our reporting to be more understandable, graspable, wholesale, off-price, retail, e-commerce, marketplaces, and for us to match that to our costs and to our margins.
At the end of the day, then you'll see the result.
Could you give a comment on the most recent changes to the management team of CCC?
Maybe Karol can give a comment. Karol?
Can I speak?
Yes.
Listen, these changes were needed in terms of the point of the group. This is about focusing in terms of the value and the results. I left CCC and we talked to the boss that Modivo is the expansion that we need. We've agreed what's going to happen there. From my point of view, I'm happy that most of my time, I'm happy not to be in the management team, that I can dedicate myself to a very highly prolific thing, which is Modivo. Not so much administration, but there are a lot of things that can be improved.
I strongly believe in the plan that we put forward on this screen. I am going to focus on delivering that plan. The benefit to the group is the most important thing here.
We also talk about Easter. Something that was supposed to happen on Thursday took place on Sunday. Sorry, but Karol is the last guy from the old management team who has run away. He wanted to get off. He wanted to get out of people's sights. He wanted to hide himself in a daughter company. It does not really matter. We are all laughing. It is a lowering of my position. Basically, you are going to be able to rule there and reign over the people there. There are two people who have already been ruling that. Your results have to be and defend your positions. I will walk off the stage at this point.
Thank you very much for your questions.
We're talking a little bit here in jest. This place is a little bit dangerous. People in this position are changed quite frequently. You know what you're playing for. You know what your point, your end game is. It's synergy. Synergy is the name of the game. Things have been cleaned up. You can't ruin things. It's more a matter of managing customers, CRMs, the campaigns, the payable traffic. We have better products. We have much more products at a higher margin. Now we want to make sure that we sell even more products. It's not just a matter of having a higher margin or a high margin. We want to have Deezer, Nine West, Reebok. We want to achieve the volume.
For our products to be sold because we have the highest margin and our partners will earn as much as they deserve if there's a margin. We're the only ones who have the brand, but we're not trading that. We want to change the proportions. We want to sell more of what we're actually generating or contributing to our profit. Even when we talk about reporting, because wholesale sales is going to be e-commerce, sales revenue might fall by 20% because of the shift to wholesale. E-commerce is e-commerce. It'll be more profitable. CCC customers will be able to buy a shirt or a blouse in e-commerce or can do it in Modivo. The benefit we have is e-commerce and CCC. It's like 90% is buying in the store. 90% are making the returns in the stores.
It's enough just to start charging for the returns. If a return is made to the store, it's packed in 20 units and then sent back to the head office, or it's basically the customer contact. 35% of the customers who make returns are buying right away. Otherwise, if they weren't doing that, they would go somewhere else. These are important synergies. We're looking how we can earn money. PLN 2.4 billion. That's what we're trying to earn. Having such a soft result in Q1 2025, in quotation marks. In second quarter, we have much better results than we have the synergies in the US dollar in freight costs. We have 6,000 containers. It's enough just to multiply that. That's more than $150 million savings on freight alone. We're going to calculate all that. Also, the returns to the, so PLN 600 million.
I was trying to explain that we're making returns through the benefit card. We're not losing our margin. We were losing that margin because the customer would get the money back in cash and then spend it with the competition. The customer has, the question is whether or not people would accept this. People have accepted they're going to get their money back through the card. This is something that we should do. I'd like to thank you very much for your attention. There are no other questions. It's time to have some lunch. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm going to be here for another few moments. If somebody has some follow-up questions, I would invite you to join me. We can talk a little bit.