Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to the conference for Q3. We'll present or deliver our presentation briefly. I'm here with Vice President Łukasz.
Good afternoon.
Q3 is not a clear picture of our business because August is usually worse in terms of the sales. Then we went into September where sales started very good. Back to school in early days was very promising, 15% sales up on a very good margin. The beginning of September, when we were comparing it with the previous year, it was very warm, and this had an adverse impact on for like sales. October had perfect weather. We had good results. We went back to the path that we wanted to follow. If we look at the quarterly results, PLN 3 billion sales revenue, up 7%.
Please remember that when we talk about selling area, this is the retail sales area. This is slightly more than half, and this is calculated at the end of the period, so at the end of October. We opened a large number of stores in October this year. That is what happened. The like-for-like sales for the group were negative, was - 5% with negative traffic of 4%. Let me mention that our group, even though it is preparing for greater sales of apparel, 72% is still in—72% of sales is still in footwear. This gives us a big exposure to weather sensitivity. I was not supposed to talk about that, but with a September like this, it is hard not to talk about this. The entire year was such that we did not have a spring for a long time. Then we did not have summer.
Now we've entered the season. It's hard to explain that we didn't have a spring or summer period because of global warming. Having in mind the weather turmoil, we can say that we had footfall, which was down by 4%. Traffic was—we're talking about the traffic in footwear stores, not in shopping galleries. The things were different in Half Price. Let me give you an example. This shows you the breakdown from last year, and we had a lot of growth in September. We had a sharp uptick in sales, which was much higher than in 2023. Now, if we compare September to September, we had a decline against that September. If we look at the last two years, we can say that we're up by 4% and Half Price is up by 3%.
Half Price is less sensitive, as you can see, because it was only -4%, and it was less sensitive because weather has a lesser impact on apparel or clothing. Let me show you—let me talk a little bit about cannibalization, which will be a page later. This is an example of one of the cities. This is Bratislava in Central Europe. We're talking about our focus on Central Europe when we only had one store, which generated EUR 29 million in three quarters. Now, I don't—there's the year. The network in Bratislava did EUR 26 million over a 12-month period. Now we want to have EUR 45 million. On top of the stores in the downtown area of the city, it's a very nicely structured city. We have three stores now there in Bratislava. Our expansion and Half Price is going very well.
Sometimes you have the cannibalization effect because it's a decline of 11% in the Bratislava store. We might not have EUR 3.5 million, but we'll have EUR 2.5 million. In total, we'll probably have EUR 6 million in earnings. We're saying that the like-for-like can fall because we're opening a store not far away. If we look at the total return on a city, we're going to generate more. This is a very important stage in the history of the company that stores above 2,000 square meters are hard to acquire in shopping centers, the ones where we want to be and not ones that are there by happenstance. Let me give you an example of Warsaw and this surrounding area. We started in 2021. We had a single store at the Warszawa shopping gallery. We had the Half Price.
We had stores that were quite large, too large for CCC alone. This shows you what has happened over the last three years. We have 14 stores in Warsaw and around Warsaw. Here you have written down what sort of facilities those are. We had Piaseczno and Wołomin customers. Customers that lived in those communities were driving to Warsaw. We still have a store in Warsaw. If we look at the amount of money that we are earning in Warsaw, it is several times more today. Our plan is next year to have four new attractive locations. We are in the process of signing those contracts. I cannot divulge what we are talking about, but we are going to have a similar situation here in terms of the growth. If we look at the maturation of sales density and looking at stores, we had 470.
What we are at now is more than PLN 600 in Half Price per square meter. If we look at all of the stores that are opened and they are generating at least PLN 470, there is a large number of those stores, and that slightly decreases our like-for-like performance. Everything is good, working well with the model because stores that have been open for a sufficient number of quarters, we continue to grow per square meter. The model continues to mature. We have new business partners, and this is going to affect our margin performance. We are going to have more and more branded products. Let me talk about the short-term cannibalization effect. I say short-term or ephemeral. We are opening Half Price with a lot of pomp and circumstance. We have accessories and footwear. We have another 200 and somewhat meters. 70% of that is shoes.
20% of the wear sold in Worldbox is shoes. It says 15%-17% in Half Price. It depends on how much we're putting pressure on selling shoes in Half Price. This is an additional 300 sq m of space with footwear if we add all those figures together. Their neighbor is CCC. In the long term, we're fighting for, running for the market, a position on the market, let me say bitterly. Somebody has to lose for us to sell more. That's what we're doing. We're fighting for greater market share. Please understand that with such a massive amount of expansion, we're going to have some short-term or ephemeral turmoil. If we look at the quarterly results in CCC, and then we have the investments linked to achieving our goals, this is the overall group. We have 14% EBITDA.
This is a defeat. We were counting on much more. We had a lot of costs linked to opening stores. We opened a large number of stores in this quarter, and the weather was not spoiling us. This was a result of some inefficient or unsuccessful attempts of selling things. You can see that we've been able to lower our inventories. So we're fighting with our inventories. We're fighting with our results. And not all of the campaigns that we tried to do in September produced the outcomes, especially in Half Price. Basically, we can say that discounted wear in Half Price, it just leads to only giving or surrendering our margin. It doesn't generate more traffic. This is a repeat of what happened two years ago. We had an EBITDA of 1% because we went a little bit overboard.
Nothing bad is happening with Half Price. We can show you the results in October. That is the entire group, what you have seen on the screen. We have three different months here. If we look at October, we are coming back to an EBITDA performance closer to what we wanted to achieve. We have also enhanced substantially our margin performance. We have also improved our EBITDA. Here we come back. This is what I said in the press. We are very happy with the back to school campaign. We had very good sales performance, up 15%, 11% like-for-like in Half Price. It was up 15%. We could say that we are very pleased with the sales performance. After several days, the sales ebbed off.
I don't want to invoke other circumstances, but on the 10th of September, that's when the drones fell into Poland on the Polish soil. This affects people's mentality in terms of their consumer behavior. I remember that when the Pope died, the sales performance fell by 40% because we also had a 35% decline in sales performance in April 2010 when the Smolensk aircraft accident took place. Basically, traffic had fallen for 30%. It was very difficult to make up that. If we look at the margin that we've generated, we have a very high margin of 67%. I think our business is generated by lower costs and high margins. We've not gotten to the level of total sales that we want to achieve. We're talking about Reebok here. This is a good margin.
The question about whether Reebok is a good investment, it's in fact the best investment we could have made in the most recent period. That's the end of my portion, or at least the first portion.
I'll take the floor now at this time. Now we'll walk through the results of the various brands. We'll start with CCC, which continues to be our biggest brand in sales volume, which is responsible for more than 40% of the business. If we look at the EBITDA margin in Q3, we're at 17%, as the CEO said. This does not reflect our ambitions. It's down by 5% year on year. I'll discuss that in detail, what led to that. What's important here is that we're looking at our business not through the prism of a single quarter.
A 12-month margin is stable above the 20% watermark. This is good or a very good level, robust level in terms of our EBITDA performance in the footwear industry. With this type of weather, of course, yes. Having in mind, in particular, the costs of new store openings, this is fully transparent in this quarter, but in sales, the sales performance has not been entirely realized because a number of the store openings took place at the end of the quarter, at the tail end of the quarter. We had a little bit of the cannibalization that was discussed a moment ago. In terms of breaking down the results into the individual constituent parts in CCC, we have Schuppeks and Footriders. Here we can see an increase in sales of 5% with sales area up by 7%.
Like-for-like in Q3 under the CCC brand is negative. It's - 4%. We ascribe that on one hand to weather-related factors and on the other hand to the record-breaking expansion in the history of CCC. What is positive in terms of these ambiguous results is that the gross margin in omnichannel, this is the margin which is the result of selling in our core business through retail sales, including e-commerce sales. This margin is growing. It's up by 70 basis points year on year. It's coming up to 62%. This shows that the potential to generate high gross margins on a year-on-year basis exists. Even though the reported gross margin by CCC is lower, and we'll discuss that in detail on the next slide, the lower margin is derived from a number of side factors and to a large extent, it's derived from one-offs.
If we look at the quarters, multiple quarters of decline, we can see that it's up by 2% in terms of sales. It's only slightly less than 2%. It's 1.9%. This growth is due to the newly opened stores. Of course, one has to prepare in advance for new store openings. We have rental expenses, costs of putting together the logistics, marketing, and opening the stores. The costs are incurred previously. We didn't have so many openings in a single quarter. This affected the mass of our business in this quarter. As I've said in the past, we have a record-breaking pace of new store openings. That level of costs surprised us a bit. Over time, this will dissipate or disappear.
The sales performance will, of course, be fully released if we look at the margins. What's also important is that on top of the retail margin, we're also improving our e-commerce margin in CCC. We have a higher percentage of licensed brands, and it's up by some four percentage points. Here we go. We have a technical difficulty, but now we're at the next slide. We can do a gross margin analysis. Despite the fact that the omnichannel margin trended up in CCC, we're reporting a lower margin year on year. Now we want to explain why that is the case.
If we start with last year's margin, which is very good and a positive, and this is something that we continue to work on, is increasing the first margin by one percentage point, which is a result of the work on products and negotiating purchasing prices. Also, to have a higher percentage of licensed goods in our sales offering. Then licensing costs are representing a higher percentage. This is reducing the reported margin by one percentage point. We have a 1.3% decrease in terms of a temporal impact of franchisee sales as well as wholesale sales. Of course, the margin there is lower. It has a smaller impact, but we have costs linked to those types of sales. They're minute. At the EBITDA level, we're not actually diluting the EBITDA at all. At the level of the gross margin, this effect is visible.
As I said a moment ago, in CCC, we also incorporate Schuppeks, which we acquired this year. The size of these businesses is very small. It is not treated as a separate segment, but it, as a result of its nature, has a slower margin. It is around 40%. They are expensive shoes. That means that the margin itself is diluted. It dilutes the reported gross margin. The last important factor is gift cards. As you know, in the spring of this year, we have had gift cards for a while, but their importance is growing in order to loyalize customers. We wanted to reflect their impact properly. We had a provision set up for those gift cards that were purchased but have not been utilized yet. That is roughly 1.6% of the margin.
It's a non-cash impact, which means that when those gift cards are going to be cashed in, this will have a negative impact on the margin being limited because we've already incorporated it in the result. We have other smaller effects under 1%, which are basically differences in inventory levels. That's more or less it in terms of the gross margin. Let's look at the results of the Half Price brand. Half Price continues its development. We opened 17 new stores in the last quarter. We've now opened 56 stores this year. In the near future, we will cross the threshold of 200 stores. Not too long ago, we talked about crossing the 100-store threshold. We're growing dynamically, and this dynamic growth like in CCC, but it's actually at a bigger scale.
This means that the cost related to opening new stores, which I talked about—preparing goods, marketing for opening, training staff, rental costs sometimes during the renovation period—they burden the P&L from the very beginning. Profitability is suppressed for the opening of new stores over a 12-month period. With respect to the industry, it is very good. We have a 16% performance. This is not something in terms of the profitability at EBITDA that satisfies us. Our goal is to move in the direction of 20%. This is something that we continue to work on in terms of achieving that objective. Let me drill down on the Half Price results. Revenue is up by 25% with a 49% increase year on year of selling area. At the end of the quarter, we measure it at the end of the quarter.
It is not the case that the entire number of square meters operated for the full quarter. We had an accumulative effect at the end or towards the tail end of the quarter. If we look at the growth or the growth rate, it was slightly negative, - 1%. We can say it was basically flat, which on one hand is not something that's satisfying, but on the other hand, having in mind the dynamic expansion we're orchestrating and the acceleration that's taking place in Half Price, we can say that this result is relatively decent. Having in mind we're not losing on any of the existing stores and all of the new stores from the day of opening are starting to add something to the pie. What we're working on is the gross margin, looking at previous results.
I know some of you were a little bit disenchanted with the margins generated by Half Price. We can say that Half Price is revisiting margins of 50% or above 50% because if we take a look at the results of October alone, we can say that we're nearly at 56%. It is up by 3% year on year across the quarter. It is a little bit burdened by some of the sales efforts taken in August and in September. These errors will not be repeated, as was said. We are going to be much more sparing in terms of our promotional activities, price discounts. We can say that that margin of 50% is something that we want to achieve on a long-standing basis.
If we look at the cost ratio, just like in CCC, but even at a bigger stage because the newer stores, newly opened stores have a bigger impact. The cost ratio is up by 7 percentage points year on year. This effect will flatten over time, and the growth in the size of the network across the period will grow. This will be fully in line with expansion. We do not have any above-average price hikes or cost hikes.
Can I add something here?
Yes.
Here you see a picture about selling area up by 49%, and it says sales volume is up by 25%, and we have a -1 like-for-like.
One could conclude that the 49% increase was basically they were opened at the end of the period while the costs on the right side, 7.5%, is the result of preparing these stores to operate in the season. The best season for us is November and December. We're doing twice as much, a little bit like a jeweler in Half Price. We wanted to do all of the openings on a timely basis for this season. We have the marketing cost, the preparation of these stores, the logistics cost. It's not a matter of just sending the products. We also have to make sure that it fits Half Price in our semi-automatic fashion. This is roughly 2% of the margin. It's a big 4% of the cost. We have to accept it. We have to put tags.
We have to put new tags, use certain languages for it, add instructions. All of those things we have to do. Everything has to be flagged and put aside. We have it ready now for the next openings that will take place up until the end of the year because this is generally the costs of staff, payroll costs. You have training. Sometimes it is one month or two months. We are preparing staff to work on another store. These are costs that we have had to incur. If you were to take a look at this, we are well prepared, well poised for Half Price to generate a very decent EBITDA in Q4. I think we probably have 220 stores at the end of January.
I really wouldn't worry too much about the cannibalization effect because it's a normal thing in our approach. Today we're taking space for the off-price business model in Poland. In the United States, it represents 15%-18%. We're thinking that it might be as much as 10%. We don't have much competition, whereas in Central Europe, we don't have any competition whatsoever. That's why we're moving forward so swiftly in this business. The margin's at 56%, which is a very good watermark. We believe that we don't have to do price discounts, that we don't have to drop from half price to quarter prices because that doesn't do anything. In a discount, is it discounted or is it cheap? We will not do any type of discounts in Half Price.
We do discounts in the first price stores. 10% cashback is a wonderful thing in this form of sales, and that's enough. We made some, committed some errors. Perhaps this was more a matter of panic. Maybe we had promised or overpromised. October is proof positive that 56% margin in off-price, that's a world record. Nobody in off-price has that type of margin. You can read it from various reports. Most of the companies are listed on the stock exchange, and you can read what the margins they generate. The margin won't dip because we have more and more production of our own. This is part of our model. It's more than 20% of the production is done through licensed products, and we have a higher margin than on average. That's one thing. The next thing is we're building a logistics warehouse. It's basically ready.
The shell is ready. It's going to take a few more months in order to automate that. The costs will fall by half in terms of preparing goods. We'll have 50% of products prepared by ourselves for off-price. We'll bring our costs down to zero. We'll be able to move forward in terms of our costs. That's what's going to happen. In total, we think that we'll be able to improve our gross margin by 2%. You're calculating margins. I'm seeing the future. That's exactly right. Thank you very much for that addition. For all of you to understand why are things moving forward so swiftly, 7% in costs is a tragedy. This is not the cost of rent. This is the cost of different people, of additional people, of marketing.
There are other investment-related costs that cannot be in CapEx, but they have to be put into OpEx. Billboards, advertising, things like that, there is quite a bit. That was a little bit terrifying, but we have a very large scale of openings. I will explain it on the next slide so I can tell you what could happen in terms of openings. Next slide. Now let me say a few words about Modivo. EBITDA in Q3 was 9%. It is stable year on year across a 12-month period. It is 11%. Of course, our ambitions are greater as we promised, and that is the direction we are moving in. We want to have the most profitable e-commerce on the market, but we have to say justly that this 11% profitability margin versus the market is pretty decent, but we will not dwell on that. We want to continue improving our margins.
If we look at the results of Modivo, sales are up by 1%, pretty stable year on year. The margin is down by 3 percentage points. On one hand, this is a matter of optimizing inventories, but we tweaked our approach in terms of the tools we're utilizing. We're strictly limiting performance marketing. The costs of performance marketing are down by 3 percentage points. As a result, we had to work with the margin. We had to invest in price discounts. Despite those price discounts, having made savings on costs, not only with respect to performance marketing, but also general expenses overhead. The reported margin is flat.
Can I say a few words about business itself? I can tell you this is the last time we're going to have such a low margin. We're checking and double-checking our suppliers, our partners.
Our model has to generate money. If we're not earning money with somebody, that's the end of our relationship with that person. We've been talking about this for six months now. We have certain purchase orders that were submitted six months ago. It'll probably take us a full year to complete this process. I've got a, what's the name of the campaign that we did yesterday? Simple Days. 30% of our products were sold at a higher margin, and as a percentage, it was even higher. We're improving our product mix. We were preparing ourselves to do for product segmentation. So EOBV is up to 500 and GNOS up to 300, and we want to be able to generate higher margins. This is something that's gradually working out for us.
We do not want to engage in raises in terms of what is happening in Modivo in terms of the size of the business. We want to improve margins above all. We think this is something we will be able to launch seriously next year. Modivo will be the most profitable e-commerce business in the region. This is something that we can confirm, even though it is still flat. I think we even said not just in Europe, but across the world, step by step, we are moving forward.
Thank you very much for that addition. This is something that we can confirm. This is not just a philosophy. If 50% of our products, our brands, our licenses are going to be sold, nobody else has that type of weaponry.
The second thing, the Modivo fees for meeting members of that club will be accrued to Modivo cashback 10%. That's always better than giving a 30% discount on products. This is something that should work on its own. We have the stores that we're opening. We've revamped some 60 stores. It took more time than I had anticipated. We had to get new permits and approvals. We had to invite the fire brigade in next time. We had to get some checks. The costs we had to incur in terms of payroll and rents during that renovation period, everything's basically been completed. We'll have a new product with a new segmentation next year.
Today, eFootwear is not entirely, its image is not entirely clear, but you'll see the difference between eFootwear and CCC next year, and that will translate into a higher margin. That's more or less it in terms of the results of individual brands. Let me talk about the operating cash flow. That has been improved substantially, and this is a result of activities that we've been undertaking over the last several quarters, over the first nine months of this financial year. We generated cash of more than PLN 800 million more than in the comparable period of the previous year in 2024. This is a result, above all, of our work on inventories one year ago. That inventory was growing strongly. Now we've stabilized the inventory level, and in fact, we've reduced the level of inventories, and we'll speak to that in just a moment.
The cash was not consumed as a result. Actually, we've added improvements in EBITDA in the year up to Q3 of this year. We're working on an unwavering basis on our payables. We have reverse factoring limits, which we have the ability to use, and we're also renegotiating payment terms. We have more and more financing from suppliers. As I said, we've improved our operating cash flow by nearly two and a half times year on year. If we look at the operating cash flow, we're not dealing with special growth in terms of receivables growing strongly. Over the three quarters of the year, we see an increase, and it's similar to the growth we saw over the first three quarters of 2024.
In terms of factoring, we will have reverse factoring limits used to a greater extent to negotiate with our suppliers to have supplier credit. Supplier financing, which would finance our purchases of merchandise, so 50% of the volume will be financed through the factoring limits, the reverse factoring limits. The other 50%, we should have a 180-day period for making payments in terms of payment. I'm responsible for that exactly. That's the agreement we had with the CEO. He calculates and I arrange the terms with our partners. Coming back to 180 days, let me talk about inventory. We're falling within the 180-day period in the period. This is a good ratio. We have the products on the sea for some 60 days, so 180-day period is pretty good since we're producing those goods ourselves.
We're continuing to grow, so we probably won't improve that much. If the inventories are going to represent one quarter of our revenue, then we'll be in a pretty good situation. We'll get back to some of the positive elements in this quarter. We want to draw your attention to that. We've optimized inventories. Looking at the results of the previous quarter, we said that we had a peak at the end of Q2. This is a result of previous planned start of the season in 2025. You can see this looking quarter on quarter. We have a difference of PLN 300 million nearly. Quarter on quarter, that's a decline of almost 7 percentage points. We believe at the end of this year, we're going to be able to reduce inventories by at least 12% to around PLN 3.6 billion.
Roughly by PLN 500,000,000 with respect to the mid-year point. Maybe we'll be able to add something here, but we do not want to overpromise. At the same time, we want to grow our revenue. We're frequently asked, what's the optimum level of inventory? We would probably say this is somewhere between PLN 3,000,000,000 and PLN 3,500,000,000 because when we think about our projected sales, we divide that by four, assuming that we have an average margin of 50% for the group and the turnover period of 180 days where we have good logistics in terms of being on the seas. This gives us more or less that level of activity. Quite a bit has been done. We're very close to completing this process to be able to fall within that 180-day period. We're looking at the various brands, especially for CCC.
is a certain amount of distortion or disruption in terms of the reported inventories for CCC. On one hand, we incorporate Showpack's inventories and other smaller businesses. This is roughly PLN 80 million at the end of Q3. We also have licensed products for other brands. This is nearly PLN 60 million because CCC is operating, or their warehouses are the warehouses for licensed goods for other brands. This is something you should have in mind as you analyze the level of inventories. Optimizing inventories pertains to all of our brands, especially Modivo, where quarter or year on year, we reduced inventories by 9%. Now, as I gradually wrap up the financial portion on cash flow, we wanted to alert your attention to the current financial structure of the group and where we have come from.
As you can remember, our balance sheets in the past and the reports and presentations, we were financing ourselves with net debt, which is called traditional net debt. It is in their EMEX report where we are monitoring our liabilities. This is financial debt, so loans, RCFs, as well as there was not very much factoring there. The financial debt was quite extensive. Now you can see that we have an extreme reversal. We have factoring being the largest portion of that. Then we had PLN 1.2 billion, where more than half, PLN 660 million of the debt, was Modivo, was newly taken out debt under SoftBank for financing the inventory. The path that we blazed in the past, we want to move in the direction of reverse factoring. This is something that does not cost us anything.
We want to move in the direction of guarantees, which have a low cost and stimulate the extension of trade credit. That is the direction we want to follow on an unwavering basis. We've not said our last word. The financial debt will continue to be reduced, and we will increase the volumes of factoring that are available. We do not want to be, of course, entirely dependent on factoring. We're working with some of the suppliers. We want to have a policy of 50-50 with our suppliers, that 50% of the supplies are delivered on a factoring basis, and you have trade credit for the other 50% for 180 days. The Chinese suppliers can utilize their own insurers in China. That is starting to look nicer and nicer. Now we have the CEO's portion.
Okay, thank you. Let me talk about our expansion a little more.
320,000 sq m. We'll achieve that, contrary to various opinions. In the red circle, that's 125,000 sq m, which we will open in Q4. A number of the costs were incurred in this quarter, and we've opened quite a few stores. This is a historical moment. We're opening more stores in a given quarter than we've done in the past in a full year. This is a major extension or a major undertaking for us. Very few people or very few entities are capable of doing that. This is something that we can be proud of, that the entire company was capable of beating these expectations. Somebody might allege that we're going too fast. You could have done things more slowly. Of course, that's true, but we're getting very good offerings because we're working as a whole group. We have board writers.
We have Modivo, CCC, Half Price. We have 20-30 new stores for our image in Poland. We are a very good customer for shopping galleries. Nobody is developing. If we look at countries outside of Poland, there is no network that is growing as quickly as we are. Many of these developers are starting with their commercialization of parks with us. We have a big percentage of the total number of square meters. We are getting very good conditions with fit-out. OCR. We have a large number of our new contracts with OCR. 40%. This OCR, we pay basically rent. It is 12% max. If there is no revenue, then we do not have to pay anything. It was totally different in COVID. We got rid of Switzerland and Germany.
It was very difficult with German funds to talk about changing the rents. And I just tried and did not do very well. They wrote in the press that they were stealing from German retirees. That is why they had to reverse their approach. We have 50% of our costs are OCR. The new things, there are countries where we have 90% of our rents are OCR, like in Bulgaria. This is not something we will stop doing. We want to expand our profitable stores. That is a certainty in our group. We are learning less in e-commerce or Modivo. Modivo is still like a limping child. We want to improve things there. The Half Price, the CCC businesses are going to be able to generate extensive added value. We have the economies of scale, the marketing impact. All these stores are much more efficient.
We'll achieve that 125,000 additional square meters watermark. We're going to be able to exceed the plan. If we talk about the other plan that I've indicated, it's enough to have flat like-for-like and add 250,000 square meters per year. We'll be able to achieve that PLN 25 billion watermark that we promised you. There's a lot of business growth here. The EBITDA store is 38%. That's the pure store EBITDA. That's very high margin. We have the unwavering growth in licensing brands share. We'll reach 50% watermark next year. Is this better than private label? Not entirely. Private label, we also have high margins, so Lasocki, Gino Rossi, Badura, Berandi, but they certainly help us in terms of having recognizable stores like in Serbia, Bulgaria, where Lasocki doesn't mean anything.
Here we start with brands like May West and G-STAR. These are well-known brands in Romania where they had single-brand stores. We also had a license with GUESS, GUESS Kids, GUESS Jeans, and many other nice things. 35% in Q3. Next year, we should exceed the 50% watermark for the percentage of branded sales. This is what we want to achieve in the CCC brand. We do not have such strong brands for our franchise, WORLD BOX. There is no Lasowski. There will not be GINA ROSSI there. This will represent some 80% of the sales in apparel. Let me talk about wholesale sales and franchise sales. There was a lot of emotion triggered. We did not like you in Q2. We did not think it was material. As you see, the sales here are only 2% of our revenue.
We have to split between wholesale and franchise. For us, these are two totally different departments. Wholesale is to individual customers. We have 70 customers. These are markets like Lidl, Biedronka. I do not want to betray the information who we are selling to. We also have individual clients, small stores that want to buy Reebok, Quiksilver, or other brands from our portfolio. We have 70 customers. This is 2% of our revenue. This is PLN 300 million in sales over the last five quarters. This is only 2% across the group. This is a separate department. They have their own calendar. They have their own patterns. There is a big discussion in China whether or not we should deal with this because it absorbs a lot of time contracting. Customers want to see samples.
They want to see things earlier because they want to understand the budgeting. They want to do budgeting for their own networks. This is three or four months in advance. We're not always ready with the collection because we're ordering in a different calendar, having in mind our retail sales network. In franchisee network, this is their main calendar. They follow the same diary we have. That's the difference between wholesale and retail and franchise network. It is somehow within our brands, whereas wholesale is outside of our brands. I'm not sure if everybody understood. These are two totally different viewpoints. Wholesale, we have a duty as a license holder. We have Element or Quiksilver, Billy Bobber, whatever. They'll give the license to somebody else if we don't offer these products on a wholesale basis. We have to do it by license conditions.
We're not going to sell it. We have May West across Europe, G-STAR across Europe. We have many brands across Europe. This is a topic, I can't sleep. Should we continue this or not? On one hand, if we're doing wholesales and it turns out that we're opening a large number of stores in the region, then the wholesalers might say, "Take those goods because you've been doing a campaign." I have the same problem with my own suppliers. If I have products in the store, it's a little bit a sensitive issue. This is slightly, it's at odds with the idea of being a retailer who's a license holder. Then you have maker. There's a bit of truth there. Our final margin in these operations is 13%, 13% in this quarter. Since August, we're utilizing a slightly lower margin.
It was twice as high in the past. As this cooperation is working together, we have a 13% margin. A 13% margin will not allow you to do the full business, having in mind the logistics and having the payment terms. Please believe me that you can generate a financial result having those kinds of terms and conditions for there to be total clarity amongst us. We will continue to develop our franchise operation in markets where we are not interested in them having a direct foothold, our presence, because they are smaller markets and we are growing on the bigger markets at present. This model is very attractive. We are ready with the Half Price and CCC in order to move forward with them because those are models that have been ironed out with our risk models.
We would only generate basically the margin derived from wholesale sales, and also in franchise margin. Let me tell you a little bit more about MKRI. What was this done for? What we were guided by. We are taking market share. With this network, MKRI was generating PLN 200 million in revenue. We wanted to take that. There are 150 KSRs. These were small stores, on average, 180 sq m. They had better results than CCC and Half Price. They were doing PLN 370 per sq m. There were years when they were generating even higher sales. Why? Because they had a smaller number of square metre. The second thing, there was a bigger range of products. The Worldbox, which we are creating today, it's a new concept, has apparel. It has coats and undergarments and bags and basically dressing gowns or nightgowns.
These are all things that you can sell under a licensed brand. We do not want to have everything as if it were a Christmas tree, but apparel is three times bigger business than footwear. It is less sensitive, and some people say it generates higher margins. Today, Worldbox does not have better results per square meter because it is marketing. It is all new. It was established recently. In terms of clients, we are able to extract more from a customer coming into a Worldbox store because they are buying two products per ticket, while in CCC, there is one and a half. We are selling footwear, and sometimes we are adding a bag when we are selling things in CCC. Sometimes we might have discounted socks, and we are not able to do much more because people are coming in to buy footwear.
In Worldbox, the smaller communities and the people who live there, on top of the discounts which show up in these strip malls, we're going to be the only people who have products where we have apparel with a slightly higher price point. This would be branded products. This is something we're going to be able to generate quickly. This was a way in which we could use this to achieve the licenses from the license holders. When we talk to Reebok, we'd like to add your Half Price wasn't attractive to Reebok, for example, in terms of us selling shoes, and then suddenly wanted to add apparel because there were stocks, SMU, special collections. Now we're doing things on our own. The effect or the outcome is as follows: that we're producing apparel ourselves on a license.
This is going to be 80% of our business in Worldbox using very high margins. An additional bit of success is that Half Price is utilizing these very same licenses. Half Price is producing products under these licenses. We have higher margins. It is well prepared. It enters the warehouse, and it is a cross-dock that moves into the store. It is a very simple operation. It is a type of off-price, but done according to our principles. What is clear here is all of those off-price companies across the world do not have licenses. They are utilizing the services of other entities. We are starting one floor above. I thought they had maybe turned my microphone on. Not yet. Off. Not yet. The result we reported in October can be repeated, and this will guarantee big expense. We have also acquired some skills and competencies from people.
It's best to do work with the services of somebody else, people say. This is more or less it, what we can say about the Worldbox. We have the consent of the Office of Consumer and Competition Protection, so we can acquire E-Books or Worldbox, and we're going to be able to then consolidate the results next year. We have a small technical problem to change slides. Okay, it's been solved. Do we have the number of stores? Okay, if you can put up here the number of stores. I think this is the number. I don't see it. Let me tell you what we have in mind. MKRI today, that's the owner of 109 stores or 103 stores. There was 120 in the past. We reduced that because Worldbox was being open in the city, then it's closed. Today there's 96 stores, Worldbox stores.
This is 199 stores. This year, over three months, we'll add another 65 stores. Take a look at that pace. We'll wrap up next year. You're supposed to write 120 here. 120 new stores next year because we know more or less what's being prepared. We'll wrap up 2026 with 400 stores. This is going to be like Martes Sport. If you take a look at the landscape in Polish business, Smyk has fewer stores or Martes Sport. Having 400 stores that will be set up in the course of 18 months, our expansion is going forward very quickly. We have good terms and conditions, and then we'll add our own margin to that. If we can take a look at the slide with the brands we're going to have. It's not in the presentation on purpose.
Can you show it on the slide? No, we can't show it on the slide right now. Let me read you. We'll have four partnership brands: Puma, Nike, Adidas, and Prosto, which is a Polish brand which is enjoying a lot of popularity. We've talked with Sokol. We'll have a license for the shoes as well. I didn't know who that was, but they played one song, and it seems that all the people know that. It is selling well. I'm not sure why, but it is selling. We're going to have four partnership brands, and we're going to have a license for the shoes. We have our own brand, so Jenny Americanos. We're going to finally use it. It's Brandy and goes off to this as a new brand, which is doing very well. That's it.
That's 10% of own brands and the rest are partnership brands. Most of this is going to be produced on license brands. Reebok, Kappa, Roxy, Hunter, Champion, Spider, Shark, DC, Nautica, which is a very nice logo, Beverly Hills Polo Club, Millbunk, Guess Jeans, Element, Quiksilver, Guess Kids, Lucas, and Joyce Culture and Disney. These are licenses that we've secured for production. This is all the work we've done over this last year. I can tell you quite immodestly that nobody else has something that would even parallel that. This is what we're going to start with in the spring of next year. If you look at the margins, if you could show the margins, Wojtek, why is the MKRI business not being profitable? Here you have a table with margins.
Today, MKRI has 80% of products from other partners, so large brands. Those are brands which we do not need in the future. I do not want to mention that publicly and officially, but the margin is only 30%, and that is 80% of the product volume. Twenty-one percent of the products are from us now. That is footwear, which we are producing. The margin will be at 36% at the end of the day. I can tell you this is what the margin looks like. This is what the margin would look like if we were to be consolidated. We are going to use our hands, and that means that person is going to have less than 30%. He is not able to earn money. Basically, he is losing. He is burning money. A 28% margin with a cost of 40%, then basically he is losing ground.
Those stores aren't as good as the Worldbox stores. He's burning even more money. What's happening in 2026? 56% of the products. I can't see, I have to say. Do we have that cheat sheet? I don't want to say something stupid for somebody to remember later. I don't think we have that cheat sheet. 56% is our own goods in the spring. This would be the licenses, the licensed goods. Let me turn around. Now I can see it. These are the statistics. Why am I talking about that? We've already ordered the products. It's all in the catalogs. We know when the products are going to show up, what margins are going to be utilized. We have all that information. 56% of the brands will be partnership brands in the spring on a 57% margin.
The final margin is 40-somewhat percent. Our own licenses or private licenses is 10%. The final margin in the group will be 53%. The margin in the fall, in the autumn period, when we would have more of our own brands, so I have a lower margin for us. It is 74%-75% here, but for we use 80%, then the dollar is hedged at PLN 3.6, and we have really good prices for transportation. We are going to have 8,000 containers. That is a very big impact with the price we are achieving. That is why I am saying it is going to be profitable immediately because we are going to have high-margin products. If we look this year, that store is selling brands that do not fit our image. He is selling that off.
If you take a look at what's going to happen in 2026, we'll have a margin of 58%. This network should generate profitability at the store level of 28%. Thirty percent would be costs. We can talk about the revenue because everything's going to depend on revenue. Most of our contracts are OCR. That's 12%. The payroll is matched to that at 12%. Thirty percent are the store costs. We have some depreciation. We'll have a margin of 50-somewhat percent. In the next season, we should have a 62% margin. Basically, this will be the CCC model in apparel. When we talk about the scale, Worldbox is going to be bigger because it's a more complete store because it also has shoes.
If we have to choose something, if the city's too small, we'll choose Worldbox in a given city because Worldbox is more efficient. We'll have 25% of the stores. 25% of the products in the Worldbox store would be footwear, and it can go up as high as 40%. We can always add footwear to that concept. I think we'll be specialists in producing apparel, and I'm quite proud of these products. You can sell, you can build, or you can actually produce these T-shirts, nice T-shirts for, let's say, PLN 2 and sell them for PLN 49.59. I'm pretty confident that we're going to be successful. Let's revisit the standard flow of the presentation, Wojtek. We talked, did we already talk about the acquisition? I think you started to talk about, I got lost a little bit.
You already talked about the acquisition or the consent from the Office of Consumer and Competition Protection. We're going to do the full due diligence. We'll acquire the majority stake, and then we'll do full consolidation. The full consolidation will begin at a maximum of, say, three months. Yes, three months. We already have that stage behind us where we were considering whether we would acquire or not. We already have the consent. We had to get some responses to questions. We have an unconditional consent for the acquisition. This is something we'll continue. There are questions about what that means for our financial statements, for our consolidated financial statements in terms of our P&L consolidation will take place. The external revenue and cost will be incorporated in terms of the balance sheet.
We'll get rid of the reciprocal receivables, but assets and liabilities and equity will be measured at fair market value and be put in the balance sheet of the group. We're talking about non-current assets. CapEx, which is around PLN 100-120 million, that's what we estimate at present. The right to use these lease contracts and inventory, this is around PLN 200-220 million. The cash receivables, and these are VAT receivables that are then settled in the subsequent period. We have payables and provisions with respect to third parties. The specific amounts that will be incorporated will depend on the exercise done on the acquisition date. We'll allocate the purchase price. That's more or less the overall material, the overlook of what the impact is going to be on our financial statements.
As I mentioned to you, through margin, through our expansion, Worldbox will have a positive impact on the group's results. I am not worried about this. I know which products we are going to have. We will have a high margin and greater synergy in the group. Also in terms of marketing, Worldbox or MKRI or Worldbox will be part of our club. We will be able to talk to our customers about Worldbox. We are selling footwear. We will send out text messages, 30% discount in Worldbox just because you have purchased shoes for a 14-day period. Things were growing by 100% or doubling because we were able to explain to people on our traffic that you can buy something attractively elsewhere. We are confident that we are going to be able to deliver on that. I think that is something we have already discussed.
This is what happens if you deviate from the main flow of the presentation. Let me wrap up Worldbox, and then we can talk about another really nice initiative, which is the Modivo Club. Please imagine that some 5,000 people per day are signing up to the Gold Club, and they're paying us PLN 60. That is something that is happening every day. We have 820,000 members. We have other markets, Slovakia, Czech Republic. More people are signing up there than in Poland, but the pace is twice as high. We are going to launch Romania in December. We are launching Spain. All of the major markets will be in the network. We should have maybe 10,000 people entering the Gold program every day. That could translate into 3 million per annum. I presented these figures previously, and I was not wrong about the numbers of people.
We will give this discount back, this rebate back to the customers, but we will give it back with our margin. We will return that one-third. What is important is the customers are buying much more. They have 30 as what is on the card, but they will spend another 170. We want to bring people into the store more quickly, not wait until they have 200, but bring them in once they have 50. It got started in May. It has been successful. I was not wrong. This is the sole loyalty program of its sort in the world where we have decided to treat different customer segments and put them into a single loyalty club or program. That is very important in a large organization like ours. We have multiple brands.
They try to maintain separation, so not to show that the premium channel is linked to the inexpensive channel. We've done a platform of benefits as a single platform. You've got cash back, you've got benefits, and you've got basically a free bag in the store, I mean, in terms of a sack. These benefits give us more and more information about customers. We have 14 million club members in Modivo Club. Fourteen in Modivo Club and then 21 in total. We can actually take a bet. We'll write this down. We can take a bet, for example, that we'll reach that 3 million watermark. This is something that's been done very nicely at the cash register. We're signing people up immediately. There's a competition or contest in each store. There are the rules and regulations that's working very nicely.
If you sign up in CCC, it works for Half Price. If you sign up elsewhere, it works everywhere. This is something that's really attractive. What's next? Let me tell you the results of 2025 are below our expectations, your expectations, my expectations. We'll probably not achieve what we had promised. We'll certainly not achieve what we promised. We will certainly not achieve what we had promised. The results will be closer to what we've written down here, PLN 1.8 billion and not PLN 2.4 billion. We didn't need to because in an EBITDA of 20%, that's not a major problem to achieve that, to deliver that. We've experienced some turbulence. This is a single stage. We're preparing to participate in the Olympics. We're an athlete who wants to win the Olympics in 2030. That's going to be in the winter period.
It is not really linked to what I like, but in any case, we are going to be an Olympic athlete. People are preparing to achieve an outcome in five years. This quarterly period is basically the start of the race. We are still doing and adding the square meters of selling area. We are signing these licensing agreements. This is very important. Mr. Reebok across the region, not everybody is aware of that, but this is a strong brand. This is, in fact, a strong brand. We are opening the Half Price stores. We are launching new initiatives where we have CCC in the apparel world through Worldbox. We are improving, and we are adding the Modivo Club as the sole club of its type, loyalty club of its type across the world. We will have an EBITDA of 24%. I think an EBITDA of 20% is a problem for us to achieve.
We're still selling enough brands or rotating them in Modivo to the extent that we would like to. Costs in the stores will grow. We're anticipating that our results quarter on quarter will continue to improve. Here's the best summary. The cannibalization period, I explained to you that it exists, but it's basically a price we pay for, like, Rossmann and other networks, and they're opening store by store. I can see that in my shopping galleries. There's basically a decline of 10%, and then it grows, and then Hebet shows up, and then it continues to grow. Somebody's less organized, less organized, bigger costs. We continue to win share there. What's the most important thing here is the off-price market. This is the strength and the powerhouse. We're going to have 250 stores quickly in Poland. That's the amount of space there is.
I think it'll take us another two years to do that. Then we're going to be a very strong leader in this Half Price, and this applies to other markets in Central Europe. Things are going very well. Everybody wants to have this off-price. They want to have our Half Price store. I don't want to brag and talk about the visualizations and how things—it's a wonderful thing. If the margin is aligned to what I said, I said 50% margin is not a problem to achieve in Half Price. It's not a problem for us to achieve that. I think it's going to be—we'll exceed that. That's more or less it about the results. You can say the results are soft. We've been in the pack and without a successful outcome, but we're well prepared to continue.
The assumptions for next year, for 2026, we have 70,000 sq m more of selling area. We will have licensed brands representing a larger % of our sales, Half Price, e-footwear, Worldbox. This is just the beginning of the race for our licensed goods, licensed products. What is a brand? If you take a look, I frequently think about whether or not Leselski is a brand because it is just footwear. If we look at others, in some cases, it is just something—it is just a logo on shoes like Polano Radoskur. This was just a name on the shoes. If it is not advertised, it does not have advertising. It is only a single product group. Here, when we advertise Reebok and we show shoes, nobody will be able to sell apparel because I also hold Reebok for apparel, then home, and then sporting goods is also me.
We have bags, and then we'll have apparel, we'll have perfumes, and then we'll have glasses. We are moving very strongly to invest in marketing. We can get to the next slide. The next slide. This is May West. If we go to the next slide, I think we should do some—here we have Badura. Maybe that's not the best example because Badura is not going to be present in apparel. Here's the next one. Just one slide before that one. Here you have Gina Rossi. Gina Rossi, today, shoes and bags. We are adding perfumes and apparel. Of course, we'll have this in Worldbox, and there's going to be a lot of Modivo with a high margin. There are a number of things we're going to be able to do. We can have kids' shoes.
We can have in our Half Price offering. We can have nightgowns. We can have pajamas. We will have the billboards. We are going to do a lot in marketing because we are well prepared to do that. Bus stops. I think it is going to represent 2% next year. That is nearly PLN 300 million. You can imagine the scale we are talking about. We have to earn money on that. I assume that we will earn it. We are not doing a lot of marketing today, but please imagine that on one slide, we are talking about Modivo Club, and then everybody is thinking about the Modivo e-commerce. Then we are talking about the brand and the climate, and we are talking about cash back, and we are going to talk about where that cash back is operating.
We're selling a lot of synergies in a single marketing approach and one contact or one point of interest. Of course, I'm enthusiastically aligned to this concept because I was the one who thought up this concept. Okay, let's continue. Perhaps I'm speaking too much at too great lengths. We're not going to let Half Price go because we have a large number of square meters. Two hundred fifty stores times 2,000 square meters, that's 500,000 square meters. Very few networks have that many square meters because the effect is measured per square meter. Once we will have—why is Coca-Cola doing marketing? For other people not to do marketing because they're capable of doing more, so they can afford more. It will make it much more expensive for others. That's the similar effect that we want to achieve. We can continue the execution of our long-term goals.
We want to show you that it's not 38% more. We're assuming that e-commerce will be flat. Growing by 38% doesn't mean that we're going to grow sales revenue by 38%. We're not going to spend money on performance. Basically, this is one of the things that we want to do. We want to have a low level of like-for-like. We don't want to basically—we want to have flat e-commerce, and that should give us PLN 13 billion-PLN 14 billion in revenue next year. If we look at the margins, if we're able to increase our margins from between 17%-19%, because that's a realistic approach, having in mind these new things, then the EBITDA would come out. These are internal plans. This is what we're thinking. This is not a forecast, but this is something that we can give some guidance on.
We continue to thank the entire team that were involved in the Olympic track plan for 2030. I wanted to show you what my objective is here and what program I'm following to achieve that. For the major, by 2030, maybe earlier, we want to achieve the results that we've laid out, including the EBITDA. That's the major obligation or the major goal for our organization. I don't want to make conclusions and pull out my hair because of the results in a single quarter. This is basically a race. Sometimes along the way, you have mistakes. It's not always our fault. It was cold or the weather was bad. Somebody might explain, "Well, I had a flat tire along the way. It was cold. It was windy. He was driving more slowly.
There were black clouds. I'm not trying to say that this quarter has been lost because we've done quite a bit. We've moved forward strongly in terms of our expansion. As I sum up our business model, we've created the most effective business model in the industry. Perhaps not everybody's aware of that, but nobody has this model like ours, where we would have a full-price store, a strong e-commerce. Either you're usually strong in retail or e-commerce. It's hard to blend those skills. We have our own production. 80% of the products will be produced ourselves. Then we have strong brands, in-house brands, Lasocki, Gino Rossi, Badura. These are very strong brands. We have wonderful licenses. We have our own sales channels. We're not asking anybody to sell products for us. We have our strong e-commerce.
We have an off-price channel, which is a nice safety valve. This has enabled us after COVID to manage our difficulties. These are things that will enable us to achieve success. All of this has been built. If we look historically, following COVID, we have been able to act as a leverage for the company. We have talked about—we are talking about all the things that we have been able to achieve with the exception of the resulting Q3. We have brought the company out of the crisis. Basically, we have been able to refinance the group with the banks and others. The banks have trusted us in terms of the results. We have improved the model of CCC where everybody said that it was not working very well. We have opened up the new Half Price model. The skeptics said that we would never be successful.
We're on a good path to repeating the success achieved by other American networks. I think this is something that's also quite important. There's no threat to this model at all. I see the premises we're renting. I'm seeing the products that we're producing and what we're selling. There's no threat to us. Modivo is the next stage. We've basically straightened out the path of the Modivo brand. We have Modivo Club as the next successful undertaking. Now Worldbox over the next two quarters to show you that this business works well. We've cleaned house in terms of finance. We've cleaned house in terms of our inventories. All of these things are happening. One cannot say that we haven't done anything. Next year, we've secured the entire spring. 80% of our exposure, we've hedged the dollar.
We've secured products for spring. We have another handicap of 2%. We have freight surrounds. We were paying PLN 4,000 not too long ago for freight. Now we're PLN 2,000. We have everything in place to deliver good results next quarter. What's also important, we have segmentation. We've completed segmentation. It's quite important that we have these products. We won't do dumb promotions in Half Price. We won't make that stupid mistake like in September. We'll generate better results next period. Anything else?
I don't think so. I think that's it.
You don't have anything else to add?
I don't have anything else to add. I think we've exhausted what we wanted to say. Perhaps now we could see what sort of questions you might have to us in order to—some people say that we're not really that transparent.
We want to—I like your questions.
I'm from Bosch. My first question is about your forecast for Q4. We have the forecast for how much wholesale, what's the cost of openings, and should Half Price effectively work in a—because it's a different season, or is it going to be a high base effect? Is it going to be overstated?
We won't have any more costs because we've already incurred the bulk of the cost. We'll have some costs. We'll have the standard costs. Half Price is very well prepared for this quarter, and we should have a harvest period. The scale is very big, the scale of the business, and in the best period. Things should be pretty good. What else were you asking about?
Why do you have the assumption that the EBITDA will be flat?
I don't think we're assuming that.
We're saying 500 million-600 million. We're not assuming that's going to be flat. It was below 500 million in the fourth quarter last year. We do not want to overstate the expectations or inflate the expectations. We believe that we're going to be on a pretty clear plus or even more than a clear plus. We're not going to be flat.
Thank you very much. The second question that's bothering me. Will customers get lost in your platform of benefits, the Modivo Club, if I understand you correctly?
The customer understands pretty well, and it will not get lost between the price points and the brands. I think customers could get a little bit lost, but we assume that CCC is—I can give you an example. CCC will be shoes up until 300. It will not be 299.
Generosity is above that because you have to have price points, but eFoot where you want to have a good quality. It is up to PLN 500, maybe PLN 600, but different quality so you can see the quality. There is leather. It is a totally different sole, totally different top. We want to show that segmentation very clearly. I do not know if you have seen the eFootwear. It is not really a boutique. It is more self-service. It has to be—I cannot scare people away. We have PLN 300-PLN 500 range for products. We are going to do segmentation. If we are going to have Generosity for PLN 1,000, then we will come back to e-commerce. We will probably discount it by 30%, but then we will earn quite a bit of money on that.
Is this not the reason why everybody wants to treat private brands, private labels, and other brands separate from one another?
We're going to have stores of 400, 500. You don't have boutiques of that size. We believe that everything should be a multi-brand approach. If something's not working, then we're going to be able to change it very quickly. If it's a single brand store, the single brand stores aren't earning money anymore. Even the best aren't earning money. They have monobrand stores in order to sell multi-brands because multi-brands is more beneficial. If you have seven sporting brands, then two or three will bring people into the doors. One or two do really well, then two or three are doing very well, and the other ones are wondering whether or not to retain them.
Should the store even retain those other brands, the last two?
Our model is to have a multi-brand. We do not do monobrand stores. We could do a monobrand for Generosity, but then there are 100 sq m stores, and I can use 30 sq m of an eFootwear store. I am thinking that in the same club, you have CCC, Worldbox in the future. I am just wondering whether or not once we teach the customer, then the customer will not make any missteps. We are at the beginning of the path. You are not going to buy a rucksack for PLN 100. You are going to have to pay PLN 300 for a backpack.
What about the marketing spend? It is PLN 300 million. Is that what I heard? I was just mentioning it is 2% of sales revenue. What is it going to be this year? It is more or less closer to 1%.
We have come to a point in time where we have the size, we have segmentation, we have wonderful licenses, and we can start talking about that. People do not know about these shoes, us having these shoes.
My final question. What is going to be the inventory in MKRI when we do the consolidation?
I think I stated the amount according to the Q3 level. It is around PLN 200 million. That is in Q3. We will see how much can be sold. I do not think it is going to deviate strongly.
Let me explain. We have a picture here. MKRI, as a warehouse, external warehouse in Gdańsk, is taking care of our stores in Worldbox. Please remember that its inventory has sixty-five new openings that are in Gdańsk. We have the history there that with that type of expansion, you have to invest in product and merchandise.
If we have PLN 100 million in renovations in the Worldbox, please remember this is 96 stores. That's PLN 100 million gross because this is a label. On a net basis, that's PLN 80 million after you deduct the VAT tax. And so this is EUR 270 per square meter. That's too small. These are not big numbers. For EUR 270, you can do some furniture for a store for that price and not an entire store. Everything is really consistent, internally consistent. Somebody might say, "Oh, you spent PLN 100 million for furniture." Everything's consistent. You have to look at the numbers and understand the business, what it looks like. That was in Q3. Today, we have another opening. We're opening four stores every day. This is something that's being prepared to do much more quickly. Recently, the Polish FSA was talking about the aging of inventory.
It's one day because we're selling to Worldbox apparel that we haven't ordered. We're just an intermediary, a middleman. We have put a guarantee. We are present in these factories. We have a guarantor receipt. This is just basically the sale of apparel that we're not talking because MKRI is responsible for apparel, for the entire apparel business. These are some things that you can extract. Maybe these absurd conclusions can be drawn as a result. We're not dealing with some sort of excessive inventory. We don't assume that this is going to have a major impact on the inventories that we talked about.
Okay, thank you very much.
We've just sold inventory that we're not even, so apparel that we're not even producing. It's good that people were asking. It's good that the Polish FSA was asking about the aging of inventory.
I'm from mBank. I want to ask, what's your plan for CapEx next year and how much of that will be for Worldbox since you're going to consolidate the entirety?
Can I tell you? Maybe it would sound stupid if I were to say, "I don't know." We're in the pace or in a period of such strong expansion. We don't have a specific plan. We've assumed, if you want to have a precise response, probably a couple hundred million. Once again, every store earns money from day one. Even the smallest stores have a 20% EBITDA performance in the store. This is what I'm certain of. We can't let go if we have an OCR and a partial fit-out from the owner.
How much will be done?
Nobody knows about it. It's PLN 500 million-PLN 600 million for next year.
If it's going to be PLN 800 million, we'll also survive that because that means there's a lot of nice opportunities to open up new stores.
How do you intend to finance that? I'm thinking here about you're not going to have 100% in MKRI. Will this be in exchange for equity, or how would that be solved?
In terms of the financing, it's a commercial transaction. MKRI will finance that through payment of receivables, just as up until now. We financed as a result of the contracts that we've entered into with the suppliers and with the landlords with respect to lease contracts. We'll reinvoice that, and we'll have much better control over the payment of receivables. We'll have full monitoring of how the business is developing, and we'll be able to adapt the pace of expansion and monitor the payment of receivables.
That seems to be the most effective. I would also say that Worldbox is a partner only in Poland. Abroad, those companies would be wholly owned by us.
The second question, you suggested that the gift cards was one of the reasons. It was not basically the provision for future utilization of the gift card. Could you remind us how you are booking gift cards when a customer buys a gift card?
A customer buys a gift card, and then we have the revenue of sales, which is the amount that is actually paid by the customer. When we issue the card, we also book a provision, a percentage of that.
We make an estimate in terms of what percentage of customers come back after what amount of time, and then we have a provision against the margin in terms of the future utilization of the benefit derived from that gift card. That is one of the estimates we make. Every month, we update that estimate. When the customer comes in and utilizes that gift card, we do not charge the margin. We utilize the margin that was set up. We utilize the provision that was set up when the gift card was purchased.
In your results, you showed gross margin in CCC brand and the omnichannel profit before tax. It is lower than in the omnichannel. In CCC, this is not so obvious. What is the cause?
The mix can affect the percentage margin, but this would suggest that the impact of other elements is bigger. It's not a negative margin in some areas of operation. We might have a smaller margin, a lower margin. We had a few slides that explained that.
What caused that year on year?
That in CCC, we have showbacks, we have Footriders, and we have the gift cards. We have wholesale. There were several contributing factors where we have a lower gross margin. Then we blend that together. We have franchise, we have wholesale. MKR is one of the franchises. We have the consolidation that will no longer exist as an impact. We will not show the franchise margin, but we will show the full margin generated by the business. The pure CCC margin has grown at the store level. The first retail margin has grown. It is 67%. This is something that we have never achieved any time in history.
We will have the wholesale where we have 13%. This has to reduce the total blended margin.
Okay, thank you very much.
I think we have to show that for everybody to understand that because we are talking about the marketplace. We are starting to have better and better results. We might have PLN 200 million. We are going to have to show you how that works. We will have the marketplace, and then we are going to have only a commission. We are going to have to show how that works to make sure that we do not have those types of anomalies that, when you are reading our financial statements, you are going to say that our margin, the core margin, our core business has fallen. This is something we have to show. We are going to show that through channels, through retail, e-commerce, marketplace, wholesale, franchise, retail, off-price.
There's quite a bit of variety here.
Next year, let me add that we have a model that each company is operating on that module, is selling all of the e-commerce across the group for you to be aware. Then we have Modivo EU will do purchasing for the entire group. We will have a single purchasing hub, and then we distribute to various channels, even through that segmentation. As you know, one Modivo Club will be responsible for the entire loyalty activity. All of the countries abroad are called Modivo in Czech Republic, Slovenia, where we had a problem recently. We have the permit there after the court's resistance. We will have CCC SA and then Modivo SA because today, with such broad channels, I can't imagine that CCC is going to be used as the name abroad in Portlanders.
Each channel, there's going to be a single company that would be responsible for handling the entirety. We've gotten rid of all of those structures, and the organization will be straighter, more straightforward. It will be Modivo everywhere.
Okay, can I ask a question? I had a couple of questions. You mentioned the franchise. You said that CCC and Half Price are concepts to go abroad. If they're ready, when at the earliest can the Half Price franchise show up abroad, which countries? Which country are we talking about? What sort of scale?
I said, "I'm going to try it."
You're already talking about this scale. If you're trying to enter, you're not going to start with two stores.
It's a matter of putting your leg in the water. You have some controversial and small and big.
You have Israel, but the war is underway there. We're thinking about how to approach that. We have other countries. We had some people from a big partner from the Balkans, a very big partner, the largest partner there, which has shopping or commercial parks and shopping galleries. There are smaller countries like Moldova, Georgia. Over the last year, a lot has come forward. The world has talked about the great success we've achieved. They're heralding that. Partners are coming forward. We're not able to focus on small countries. We have 2 million people in the Baltic States. We don't want to focus on small countries. We want to focus on the markets where we're present. We're developing our position in Ukraine during the war, and we're doing pretty well. The business is earning.
We have low lease rates. That's probably not going to be the case once the war comes to an end. We're trying to work across a number of planes. I'm not going to talk about where we want to begin with the franchise operations. We're at the initial stage. Something will be successful there somehow.
The second thing is general expansion. How much of the expansion, what is contracted here in Poland and in Spain, Italy, and what's happening with those positions?
You're not going to be able to do as much everywhere because you have Half Price, because you have two or three Half Price and CCC are ready-made concepts. Worldbox, EU, Boulevier, Board Writers are not ready concepts. In a year or two, we'll be ready once we'll have an EBITDA of 40% like in CCC.
We'll develop in other markets because then we're in a safe position. CCC, now we're trying in Spain, Italy, and we have some offerings in terms of locations. They're not inexpensive, but they're in the best possible locations, venues. In Italy, one is doing pretty okay. We have another top venue. In the Western countries, I think it'll work even better. We're selling in euros, and the prices don't seem to be expensive there, but we're purchasing everything at the same prices. These payroll costs are a little bit higher, but you can sell everything at a 10% higher price. Everything's done. If you're asking me about the plan, where we're going to operate next year, I can't tell you. There's still a lot happening, and it's showing up suddenly.
They've been asking for the CEO came up to me and wanted to open something. There is a lot in the market, like in Italy. We have large-scale grocery stores that want to reduce their footprint, and they're willing to turn over half of their space. You have France. I'm not even sure what the form may be. It would have to be an agent almost there because social affairs and what to do with those people, how to deal with that. They want to earn money, but they don't want to work. Every country is distinct. You have to find a partner in order to, because selling through a franchise and having a franchise margin is pretty good. In Half Price, we have a 25% margin. We always have, without incurring any costs, a certain profit for ourselves.
This is a nice way to accelerate our expansion. These are things that are sufficiently mature. This is something we can do. Do not catch me with, by this statement or others, there was a lot of people who were interested in the wholesales and were purchasing goods at good prices. As I look at the time perspective, I am not sure that this is the correct thing because expansion has sped up. This suggested that we are going to be everywhere. With CCC and Worldbox, it is hard to sell to somebody who has a small store. We have major consolidation, and only the biggest players are doing well. The market is changing. We have a big success with Amazon, Allegro. We are number one in footwear with Allegro.
We're number one across the board because we have the biggest selection of shoes. Nobody else has that extent of offering. We're across the portfolio and Amazon. Things are going okay. I forgot the names, but we're going to be everywhere. The marketplace is a big thing. It's another. We are not treating this as competition, this marketplace. This is the sales channels for our products. We're worried about brand and products and not about we're changing our philosophy. The Allegro client is a different customer than a customer from Modivo or Zolanto. It's more a matter of just buying shoes. It doesn't have to be fashion. We have these types of shoes. The results of these marketplaces are quite surprising. I don't see a reason for us not to do that.
If you're asking me, we have PLN 150 million-PLN 200 million sales next year, and you're going to have to report that because otherwise people are going to lose their results.
Are there any legal activities in terms of this research company? You had made some statements about the efforts or the steps you were going to take. Thank you very much.
To sum up, we're focusing on operating activities in our business. This was a mix-up about the freedom of speech. We didn't have an impact on that. As we show you, everything has been stated, legal steps. We have our major lawyer, Portland's exhibit. We issued a notification about a crime being committed, basically a suspicion of manipulated shares price. We're thinking now about a group of advisors, how to continue this case.
How should we say, Bogdan?
I do not want to say too little or too much. We are considering further legal steps.
That sounds better.
It is clear that a lot of energy. It is going to cost a lot of energy. That is why we are considering it. What else can we do? If these things are allowed, then we have to do it as a company. It is not allowed, but. We have the decision of the Office of Consumer Protection. That is about it. The focus and concentration is on something else. Okay. I already said that we were not going to let things go. Now I have to bite my tongue.
I wanted to ask a question. I am from BDM, Brokerage House. I wanted to ask about Half Price. Then we can talk about the costs of opening that have already been incurred.
You wrote that for the renovation stage, you're also paying rental fees. That's normal. How long?
That was just an overstatement. That's not such a normal thing. It's not always the case. We're not paying rents. I wasn't going to pay a rent without being able to trade. Perhaps that's what I understood from your. The problem was with EU, and it was difficult to discuss. Basically, we had to renegotiate things, and nothing has ever happened that we paid those rents. We're not paying. This is the direction that's going in. These costs are linked primarily to the fact that we had to deliver the goods, marketing expenses, and these are personal expenses, payroll expenses. We have 100 people, and then you have to pay for one and a half months to train them for other stores.
This is a big expense. It is 100 people. This is all in a single month. Later, we have personal costs, payroll costs is like 9% or 10%, like in Half Price. Today, we have 5,000% costs because there is no sales, but there is a cost to be borne. The same is true when we do not have revenue, but you have to basically put price tags and change the labeling of products. When you have the new warehouse, we have a business plan. It will come back. The investment we paid back of PLN 250 million will be paid back over a four-year period. It is fully automated because I do not find enough people in Polkowice to deliver all that. I have to automate.
Thank you very much.