C&A Modas SA

BOVESPA:CEAB3

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Operator]

Good morning, and welcome to C&A's conference call to discuss the results of quarter 1, 2023. Today, we have with us Mr. Paulo Correa, CEO; Mr. Milton Lucato, CFO; Mr. Fernando Brossi, VP for Operations and Financial Services and Donatti, Commercial VP.

This slide presentation and the results release are available on the Results Center of the IR website of C&A. We also inform that this call is being recorded and simultaneously translated into English to access the English version, click on the button Interpretation.

The replay will also be available on our IR website. [Operator Instructions] Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements made during this conference call relative to the company's perspective, projections, operational and financial targets are based on beliefs and assumptions of the company's management as well as information currently available to C&A.

These forward-looking statements are no guarantee of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and premises. They refer to future events and therefore depend on the circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors and analysts should understand that general conditions, industry conditions and operating factors may affect the future results of C&A and may lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.

Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Paulo Correa to start his presentation. Mr. Correa, you may proceed.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Good morning. We'll now start our presentation for the quarter 1, 2023. I'd like to start this presentation on the first slide, showing the highlights of the quarter. I think the results of this quarter show yet another very consistent moment of operational evolution for our company. And I will start by talking about increase in our total net revenue, an increase of 3.6% and apparel was up 6.1%, specifically.

And this all considering a continuous evolution of our gross margins. For yet another quarter, we saw an evolution of our gross margin of practically 3 percentage points, both the total margin and the margin for apparel. So our adjusted EBITDA reached BRL 76 million with an EBITDA margin of 6.2%.

It's also important to highlight that our personal credit card C&A Pay is also advancing and growing. And C&A Pay's share in our sales increased by 3 percentage points, reaching 18% of our total sales. Another highlight is that we published our integrated report for 2023. And our leadership is -- has all their goals linked with ESG goals currently.

Next page. A while ago, we announced these 3 main pillars that are guiding our work in the past few quarters. We know that the macroeconomic scenario is still very challenging and impacting our consumers. For example, Brazil had a record-breaking 79% of families in debt, and this certainly impacts their consumption power and consumers today have to make choices.

A recent survey by Locomotiva shows that 76% of the families declared to have reduced the purchase of some type of products and services. And in this context, we are dedicating ourselves to better understanding our consumers to make sure we can service them well. Cash management continues to be a top priority for us, and this is something we're doing efficiently and diligently considering all the uncertainties relative to the interest rates in Brazil looking forward.

We will continue to focus on continuous operational improvement, advancing our gross margin, evolving our assisted sales, increasing the productivity of our current assets and supporting the growth of C&A Pay to ensure our investments that we made in the past few years can be fully captured looking forward.

And we want to be closer and closer to our consumers. We want to better understand them to offer -- to be able to provide them with more assertive, more relevant offers. And for this purpose, we are continuously evolving our models to improve the analytic management of our customer base with more customized and personalized solutions to increase customer loyalty and the value created for our customers.

On the next page, I'll give you more color about these 3 levers. These 3 important strategic drivers for us in the past few quarters. One of them is very efficient and diligent cash management. As you have been hearing from us, this is yet another quarter where we were able to show an evolution in our cash management.

And if we look at this, I mentioned, if we look at inventory, we see that our inventory was up only 2.3% year-over-year. And more importantly, it grew with quality. It's a newer inventory, more assertive and healthier looking forward.

Also, we made a lot of investments to improve the assertiveness of our distribution in our stores using the push-pull technology, and this has been contributing greatly to reduce our levels of inventory and improve our levels of service. And another important element for our cash management was the management of our supplier base, which is now fully migrated into new payment terms and new conditions for future negotiations.

Also in respect to our payment cycles, the minimum installments for installment purchases were maintained, and this has been an important strategy so that we can capture this positive impact on our cash that we have been showing and that we showed this quarter. On the next chart, I want to go into more details about the operational improvement that we were able to achieve. We will continue to capture and implement the returns of the investments that we made in the past few years. And this assertiveness has been allowing situations like the following situation.

We see an increase in the share of omnichannel sales in our total sales, reaching more than 20%. We are also strengthening with a lot of innovation and technology. The concept of assisted sales both in our brick-and-mortar stores and also virtual sales.

This is another element that is helping us evolve our gross margin for apparel. The support that we offer today with our artificial intelligence algorithms to help managing the pricing strategy that we have that we call dynamic pricing. These have been absolutely vital for the evolution of our margin.

And both for inventory management, the distribution model and the pricing models, these elements have been critical for this advancement in our gross margin. Also, we are focusing on managing our expenses and costs, and this is contributing to improve our operational leverage, and Milton is going to give you more color about this later on. Also, since the end of last year, we have a dedicated team working on opportunities to increase the sales per square meter of our brick-and-mortar stores.

The idea here is to be able to take full advantage of all the opportunities that we have and to progressively advance in our volume of sales per square meter. Also, it's worth noting the important contribution of C&A Pay to our sales. C&A Pay is becoming more and more relevant, more and more important allowing us to expand ancillary services such as insurance, installment payments and so on.

On the next chart, I think this is something that is very clear for everyone who works here at C&A. We know that the COVID pandemic brought some very deep-rooted changes in consumer behavior. This has been causing some important transformations in the shape, content and the pricing of the products we offer.

The first point I want to mention in some is that our consumers are now more demanding in more criteria because considering that we're going through a macroeconomic crisis, their salaries, their income needs to be well invested. And apparel is more and more seen as an investment. They want items that they can wear for a long time. That's why we see the growing importance of the dimensions of versatility and quality.

They want to be used -- to be able to wear the items for a long time, and dated fashion is now less valuable in the customer's perception. Also, because of the increase in online sales, something that was exacerbated during the COVID pandemic and will continue to be present in everybody's reality.

There's a constant expectation for some type of advantage when purchasing apparel or any other types of products. They want to have some sort of advantage of promotion, discount, something that will offer them some advantage. For example, cashback is a good strategy. And this is a strategy that we're using right now for our Mother's Day campaign as a reaction to this new consumption dynamics that we're seeing in the market.

The third element, regardless of all the technology or despite all the technology that we implemented and despite the strong presence of technology in the lives of our customers, our customers are still valuing a more humanized trajectory. So they want to have a more humanized contact with companies, and this is something that we have been seeing constantly and repeatedly in the feedback that we get from our consumers.

They want to be assisted in their purchases, particularly through WhatsApp. So this is a reason for pride for us. This format has been very successful so far. Element number 4 here, after all this behavioral change, this requires good communication, and this requires deeper and longer relationships with our customer base of 60 million active customers.

This is how we have been able to work on with a higher engagement levels, higher retention levels and a higher average ticket. And the fifth point here on this chart is that we now see that the stores have gained an extra level of complexity and differentiation. So the segmentation of our stores by the type of customer and being able to offer more assertive collections and a more appropriate assortment in each of our stores and also the way we present these products to our customers at the point of sale. This is all part of an important change and a higher level of focus and attention that we're dedicated to these aspects right now.

So these were my comments. And now I'd like to turn the conference over to our CFO, Milton, and he's going to go over the quarter results.

[Milton Filho, executive]

Thank you, Paulo. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you here attending our conference call for quarter 1, 2023. On this first chart, the highlight is to the increase in our apparel revenue -- our merchandise revenue, focusing on apparel. There was a 2.9% increase year-over-year. And the great highlight here was the 6.1% increase for apparel. This is due to the success of our collections and despite the impact that we still see on the traffic in our stores, particularly in February because in 2022, this impact was lower than in 2023.

So we had a lower traffic in our stores during the Carnival Festival this year in February, but still we could see an important evolution in apparel sales. Now in respect to Fashiontronics and Beauty, as you have been hearing for a few quarters now, the demand for smartphones is low. And despite the growth in Beauty, which is also part of Fashiontronics, the consolidated results for Fashiontronics was a negative 10.7% year-over-year.

We are monitoring all the movements and behaviors in the segment of smartphones and cell phones. And we understand that there is a portion of this market, which is slightly more stable, the portion that refers to premium products. But so far, we have not been participating in this segment.

And now we are enhancing and improving our assortment to also compete at this price level -- the premium price level. So we are working towards positioning ourselves and starting to sell these products, and we expect to -- this to have a positive impact on our sales looking forward.

As for Beauty, this category should continue to gain relevance both in terms of sales increase and also the expansion of the consolidated margin for Fashiontronics. Another important point here is the gross margin for merchandise, as you heard in Paulo's initial highlights.

We understand that capturing the benefits of the different investments that we made in the past few years. For example, investments we made in developing in our dynamic pricing strategy, the push-pull technology for better distribution in our stores and also other strategies, all of them based on technologies and innovations. This led to an increase of 2.1 percentage points in the apparel gross margin for the quarter.

And it's worth noting that this is the fifth consistent -- the fifth consecutive quarter that we see an increase in our gross margin. In quarter 1, we also saw a 3.3 percentage point increase in Fashiontronics and Beauty. And in addition to the fact that the comparison basis for 2022 was below normal.

This can also be justified by the higher sales in Beauty with better margins. So this ends up improving our consolidated numbers. And also, we were able to achieve better negotiations with our suppliers because the more we buy, the more we gain in terms of discounts and scale.

Another important element is how diligently we have been treating our investments. We will talk about CapEx shortly, but let's start with our expenses. For operating expenses, the main takeaway here is that we are continuing to improve our sales percentage and G&A indicator, the G&A and sales percentage over the total net revenue.

And looking forward, we understand that this improvement in our operational leverage will continue. And there's no reason for it to be different looking forward. And if we disconsider the line others and provisions for bad debt, our operating expenses had a decrease of 11.3% year-over-year, and this is still a result of the efficiency plans to reduce expenses and costs that we announced last year.

Now as for our bottom line, our adjusted EBITDA post IFRS 16 was BRL 76.9 million in quarter 1, with a margin increase of 6.2 percentage points. We continue to see a very clear recovery after the impact of the COVID pandemic, and we are focused on recovering the company's profitability, and we will go beyond that and we will continue to reap the fruit of the investments that we made and that transformed the company's operation in different fronts.

Today, C&A is a much stronger company, much better prepared than the C&A that we had pre-IPO. We are very confident about the foundations that we have built so far. Now in respect to financial services, we have been talking after quarter after quarter, we have been talking about the good performance of C&A Pay, our personal credit card product. In quarter 1, the C&A Pay revenues reached BRL 69 million, a relevant increase that shows the evolution of the recently launched product.

It is a young product that is under development, under formation. We are now building our cohorts of customers. Our portfolio closed the quarter at BRL 568 million and nearly 3 million credit cards issued. This also shows how successful C&A Pay has been and how it's helping the sales in our stores.

We continue to improve the engagement of the customer base that we already have. And one of the initiatives was to increase the credit limit for certain groups, very responsibly. So with this, our average credit limit today is at BRL 877.

And finally, one indicator that requires very firm management and a lot of diligence in the current scenario. And we are very knowledgeable about this subject. Here, we're talking about our over 90 or our receivables that are past due more than 90 days. So our over 90 was 18.6% with a provision coverage of 77%.

So we are also treating our overdue portfolio very diligently. We're very happy with the evolution of C&A Pay. And we understand that this product is vital in order to promote our retail sales. We already talked about this, but C&A Pay's vocation is to foster retail sales and then, of course, bring better profitability to the company.

In quarter 1 '23, C&A Pay at a share of 18% of our sales, and our ambition is to continue to close the gap that we have in terms of the share of our credit products when we compare ourselves with our direct competitors. And we are clearly moving in the right direction.

Another element here that's important to mention when we talk about cash management is our CapEx. So in quarter 1, we invested nearly BRL 50 million, 10% less year-over-year. And of this total digital and technology added up to BRL 37 million, and this has to do with the capitalization and the consulting firms that we hired for the development of algorithms, pricing, technologies and licenses.

So this is directly linked with strategies that will bring us good returns in the short term. And now before we wrap up, we have these 2 charts about our cash management. One, shows the last 12 months and the other one shows quarter 1, 2023. The first chart shows all the movements that we saw in the past 12 months.

And it is clear here that the operating cash generation, as you can see here in the blue -- in the green bar, BRL 964 million, the consumption of our investment activities reflect our CapEx. And in financing, we had a generation of nearly BRL 200 million. This is due to the fundraisings that we had in 2022 and the payments, the debt that we paid in the past 12 months.

And on the bottom chart, we show the numbers for quarter 1. Here, we can see the impact of the retail seasonality in our operating activities, and this is something inherent to our industry. The cash position in the end of the quarter and in the end of the quarter 1, was BRL 1.5 billion. Last year, it was BRL 1.7 billion and in 2023, BRL 1.5 billion.

So I stop here, this at the end of our presentation. And now I will hand the conference over to Carlo so that we can open the floor for questions. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Danniela Eiger, XP Investimentos.

[Danniela Eiger, analyst]

I have 2 questions. My first question, something that was striking to me. You were the only company that talked about a more challenging environment due to the very aggressive international player that we have operating in the country right now. So you talk about this pressure and increasing competitiveness in the first quarter that can be explained by this issue.

So how do you see the competitive scenario looking forward, considering the latest announcements that we had from the government, from this international player that they will start to establish partnerships in Brazil and maybe having a local structure?

So how are you adjusting your strategy to face that? And my second question, I think it was really striking to see the control of costs, both in terms of operating expenses and also capital costs per your CapEx. So is this a discretionary situation that may be something that you will revisit when you have a more favorable scenario in the future? And how much room do you still have to change the situation without compromising your business?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

I'll answer your first question that has to do with competitiveness. And then I will ask Milton to talk about cost control. Now as for the competitiveness and the competition, I think that the tone that we use in our results release, this has to do with the constant monitoring that we're always conducting to understand the preferences and interests of our consumers. And looking forward, what we see is that, first, we have an important discussion taking place right now in respect to fair competition processes and fair competition.

And of course, this will allow for a fair pricing and better similarity between the different offers. But I think that -- most importantly, we have to see how the macroeconomic scenario will evolve. So the prospects that we have in terms of reduction of the interest rates and how this could lead to increased consumption, I think this is the key aspect here, and this is something that as of now, we're not seeing -- we don't have very good prospects. We don't see that happening, at least not very relevantly in 2023.

So that's why we are being very conservative and very cautious. We don't think that we will have -- we can count on this macroeconomic boost of this macroeconomic support in the short term. But there are 2 important elements here that we have to highlight.

The first element has to do with C&A's particular perspective. So the work that we are doing to evolve our management as a whole, both in terms of improving our assortment, or improving the way we price our products or the intelligence that we're using to ensure a good churn and a good level of sales for our inventory. This also makes us very confident that we'll have a second half better than the first half this year.

And the second element of this equation has to do with the baselines. For example, here, we're talking of a quarter 2 with a very high baseline compared with last year. The climate dimension was very unique last year, and it really helped the results at that time. And now the comparison basis is very high for 2023. But in the second half, I think the opposite may happen. The comparison basis perhaps will be favorable to us, if we think of the results projected for the second half of 2023.

So we're always looking at the whole year. That's how we go about our planning and design and looking at this year as a whole, we have positive prospects in terms of growth, not that fast, but consistent growth, and we will be carrying on with our management strategy as we have been doing since quarter 2 last year in terms of management of our cash and Milton is going to give you more details.

[Milton Filho, executive]

Thank you, Paulo. Dannie, in the middle of last year, we kicked off a very strong efficiency program that was based on 3 fundamental pillars. One was expenses. The second one was management of our working capital. And the third one was CapEx investments.

We implemented a very diligent and responsible program. We already started seeing the results in 2022. This allowed us to close the year 2022 at BRL 1.7 billion in cash. And what's important is that those were not one-off measures. So to answer your question, if there is a risk that this will be different looking forward, the answer is no.

The actions that we took were sustainable actions. We worked on our inventories very diligently. So you could even compare with our inventory turns in quarter 3. You see that relatively it shows the same efficiency that we showed last year when we look at the back half as well. So we are treating this very seriously. We know of the importance of this issue. We know that we need to improve our conversion of EBITDA into net income.

And one of the strategies for that is financial expenses. So we need to decrease the cash disbursement of the company. So this is the position that we're at right now. And I don't see any reason for us to act differently in 2023.

[Operator]

The next question is from Eric Huang, Santander.

[Eric Huang, analyst]

I have a question about the gross margin. And the first quarter, you delivered a very healthy gross margin despite a challenging macroeconomic context. And considering all the initiatives and investments in the past few years, I want to better understand what you see in terms of prospects and opportunities for expansion of this gross margin looking forward. And also now focusing more on inventory management. We saw indeed an improvement in your inventories in the quarter 1.

So it's still about investments. What can we expect in terms of additional improvements? And what are the main opportunities that you're seeing? And also, relative to your working capital, do you see any other lines of opportunity to more improvements in the future?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

I'll start answering it, and then we'll listen to Milton. He will talk about working capital. So you talked about the gross margin and we are very cautiously working to -- we're consciously working when we -- however, since we started building our strategy in our IPO, we understood that there was a clear opportunity to improve our margins. Using a more assertive distribution model and a more well-structured distribution model.

So there was the need for some investments that we had to make in our distribution models, our DCs and our systems, particularly the systems that supported the distribution model. This has been allowing for a much better assertiveness level in all our distribution-related decisions.

The push-pull technology is a reality today within C&A. We closed last year with more than 20% share of the push-pull technology, and we will see these numbers increasing this year. So we still have some room to continue to improve in this direction.

We also invested in a lot of technologies to ensure the possibility of making more assertive pricing decisions. So today, our dynamic pricing algorithm allows us to mark our products at a more appropriate price according to the needs and expectations of our consumers and also manage the life cycle of this product in terms of price with much better assertiveness and even scientifically.

So not just commercially because we always had a very good commercial strategy, but we were able to add technology and science in order to improve the decision-making process. The combination of these 2 elements has been giving us the possibility to progress to advance our gross margins. And -- but of course, the competitive scenario that I was talking about is also one of the factors in this equation.

And of course, the way we see the competitive scenario evolving in the next few months, this may require some adjustment on our part, but structurally, the truth is that we are at a different level now. And I don't see -- I don't expect to take any steps back. It's actually the opposite.

We expect to take even more steps forward because the algorithms are constantly learning and evolving and they are becoming stronger and stronger. So considering the 2 dimensions, both algorithms and distribution models, I'd say we are still evolving. We are in a process of evolving. We have not reached the top. We still have room to advance and improve.

However, the competitive scenario, of course, also has an impact on this equation as a whole. And of course, we will be trying to adjust or to match the evolution of our gross margin to the level of competitiveness of C&A according to the perception of our consumers.

So the idea here is to continue to be able to advance to improve the profitability of the company as a whole. However, without creating any temporary barriers for consumption by using a specific target.

[Milton Filho, executive]

And Eric, about the working capital. Working capital was also an element of the program that I just described when Dannie asked questions. We reduced our conversion to cash cycle. And how did we do that? We prolonged our payment terms -- supplier payment terms and we saw the results of this prolonged payment terms to suppliers because this was done in a very balanced way in negotiation with our suppliers either direct or indirect suppliers or service and suppliers.

So we evolved in the dialogues and negotiations to reach a consensus for longer payment terms with our suppliers. So this was 100% implemented, and we will continue to reap the sow or reap the fruit of this initiative, and we do not intend to change anything in the sense looking forward.

Now when we talk about our payment cycles, when we implemented C&A Pay, we knew that there will be a higher demand for working capital because there could be some cannibalization because of the number of installments that was limited to 3 and in C&A Pay, it's limited to 5 installments, with no interest.

So this would lead to a higher consumption. So what we did was we established a minimal installment through the pilot test -- through a pilot test to understand the impact and this minimum installment was also implemented. And this shortened our payment cycle, the consumer payment cycle and also inventory management, both for the consumption of working capital. So a younger and faster inventory and healthier inventory. This also helps with our margin because it decreases the need for markdown, which can be another detractor of our cash.

These measures was -- were designed and implemented in the past few months. They are effective as of now, and there's no reason for us to change anything related to that looking forward.

[Operator]

Now we have a question from [ Felipe Reboredo, ] Citibank.

[Felipe Reboredo, analyst]

This is along the lines of what Milton said in terms of cash generation and financial expenses, you have a relevant portion of your debt maturing in 2023. So I want to understand what your strategy is, maybe to roll out this debt? What is the company's strategy in terms of cash management and cash generation during the year because these 2 points are connected?

[Milton Filho, executive]

Felipe, the starting point to answer your question, is the diligent management of our expenses of our CapEx and our working capital in our inventory. So that's what allowed us to close the year at BRL 1.7 billion. We closed the year 2022 at BRL 1.7 billion. That size of the cash gives us the confidence that we need to advance with the commitments that we made for 2023.

Now putting this into perspective, what I talked about conversion of EBITDA into net income, one of the detractors is financial expenses. So in order to improve this rationale, we necessarily need to improve our financial expenses. And this is not through interest rates right now. So it has to do through the size of our debt. It has to be through the size of our debt. So the debts that are maturing now in 2023, they are being paid. We already did this in April, and we are paying close attention to any opportunity that could help with this equation. So any choices that we make will be to improve the net income and you talked about the rolling debt, maybe yes, maybe not, depending on the opportunities that we find. But the relevant information is that we have sufficient cash to pay all the debts that are maturing in 2023 and also to promote the company's growth through a higher demand for working capital.

[Operator]

The next question is from Andrew Ruben, Morgan Stanley.

[Andrew Ruben, analyst]

Two items, please. First, on physical stores. How are you thinking about the potential for openings as we look out to 2024? And then second on Fashiontronics. Could you talk a bit more about the breakdown in sales trends between beauty versus cell phones? And how big you think the beauty and watches segment could be over time?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Let me ask Brossi to talk about the brick-and-mortar stores and the prospects for 2024. And then Donatti will talk about the Fashiontronics category.

[Fernando Brossi, executive]

In respect to the new openings, we are paying close attention and trying to understand where are our greatest opportunities considering the current interest rates, our projects will be much more criteria right now. So this is something that we're paying a lot of attention to in our decisions.

We already have some projects in our pipeline. But for 2024, we should be talking about 5 to 10 new stores, and we will only execute this plan if the project makes sense to us according to the equation that we were talking about.

[Francislei Donatti, executive]

And in respect to smartphones and beauty, in smartphones, we are still feeling a retraction of the market for the sales of smartphones, but we have also been identified some opportunities. One of these opportunities is the decrease of the participation of some important players in this business. So this ends up opening some windows of opportunity for us and also the desire of the customers for more premium devices.

They have a demand for more premium devices with higher speeds and more features and new launches. We are testing, adding these devices to our portfolio in some stores and the first test that we made were very promising. We need to be careful with this category because it has a smaller share in our plans. And this is something we're seeing year after year, maybe we can direct our efforts to other categories where we have a good performance. And now let me talk about Beauty.

Beauty is a category that is still making us very happy. Today, we have Beauty in 270 of our stores with increasing performance. We are also learning more and more how to work with this category and connect to the desires and demands of our consumers.

In Beauty, we have body, and we have makeup. We launched our makeup line, which has had very good acceptance among our customers and is allowing to work close to work with higher margins within the category. The beauty category is also very interlinked with the fashion category. So in addition to the benefits to our results, it also increases our connection to our customers.

So this is a category that we believe that will evolve in the long term, and we should continue to advance and even make more investments.

[Milton Filho, executive]

Andrew, on top of what my 2 colleagues said, I think it's important to, first, we need to -- for example, the structural opportunity in the long term, the opportunity for expansion continues to be very strong for us. However, the current scenario does not justify these investments in the short term.

Now in respect to smartphones and beauty. There is clearly a possibility to progressively increase the share of the beauty category in our business. And this is something that we are already seeing happen. So the prospects are very good, very positive in this sense.

[Operator]

The next question is from João Andrade, Bradesco BBI.

[João Paulo Dias Andrade, analyst]

Congratulations on your results. My question is about C&A Pay. I want to understand what is the expected trend that you see after this phase of maturation, both in terms of revenue and improvements. Can we continue to expect sequential improvements like we saw this quarter? And a follow-up question about -- and another follow-up about inventory. Can we expect any relevant inventory gains with the developments in the push and pull technology looking forward?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you for the question. I will ask Brossi to talk about C&A Pay and then Donatti can talk about inventory.

[Fernando Brossi, executive]

C&A Pay, as you all know, is a product that was launched in late 2021. So it's a young portfolio that has been performing within that context, the context of a young portfolio that is being created now. So all the design that we made was already considering this.

And what we see is that we are performing above what was expected in some dimensions. For example, the growth of the asset. So this is above expectations, which has also been bringing us some retail-related benefits. So the main objective of C&A Pay is to foster retail sales. So that's why we're offering this digital credit card to our consumers.

Now from the standpoint revenues, we launched different assisted sales products to improve profitability and to be able to absorb the debt of a product like this, and this strategy has had good acceptance, and we're also growing above expectations.

In respect to bad debt, we have implemented a lot of measures, as I said, since this is a new portfolio, we resorted to market products, but we customize these products, and we have been achieving a good balance between the approvals -- the credit approvals that we have in stores.

And maintaining bad debt within acceptable levels. So in general lines, what I can say about C&A Pay is that we will continue to work diligently. We have a very experienced team that is focused on making C&A Pay happen and we will continue working towards the expansion and growth of this product.

We reached nearly 3 million cards issued in a little more than 1 year. So this is an important lever in our business. And from the standpoint of new products, then you have to consider the current context. And in the current context, we postponed our intention to launch new products such as the private card. So we're not doing this, this year. However, it's worth noting that C&A has the potential flow of consumers to create this economic opportunity. And as soon as possible, we will also capture this opportunity.

And here, we're talking about 2025 and on.

[Francislei Donatti, executive]

Now regarding inventory, we are paying maximum attention to inventory levels and investing a lot of energy to improve inventory levels, and we have been working and seeing consistent results in the past few years.

In quarter 1, the inventory levels are totally aligned with the growth of our sales, and we are working with a stock coverage below the average of the other players in our industry. So this is an area where we're very diligent. So how have we been going about the work with inventories?

First, we have been working strongly with our suppliers to improve the speed. So fast response to any new developments and scale-up of the products that are working well. So when we reach -- by doing this work to improve speed, we will always be committed in the mid- to long term. So we make this -- actually, we are making decisions closer and closer to their inclusion in the stores, so they're entering the store. So this is allowing us to be more assertive. We're not working in the medium long term, we're working in the short term.

So we are also creating tools. We're working with tools and technologies. We already talked about dynamic pricing as an example. So these are technologies that allow us to accelerate the prices of the products that are working well whereas we can correct the price of the products that are not doing well and adjust our inventory accordingly.

And the other one is the push-pull technology that is allowing for much shorter coverages of these products with lower stock up levels. We are not yet fully using push-pull. We have push-full in about 28% of our sales currently, but we committed to reach the end of this year at 40%. So inventory is a very important subject for us. We invest a lot of energy to improve our intensity, and we have been seeing consistent results in the past few periods.

[Operator]

Next question is by [ Irma Sgarz, ] Goldman Sachs. She sent her question in writing. So I'm going to read it out now. I want to know what you're thinking in respect to the pricing strategy for the next quarters, considering the strong inflation in our industry last year, and the current decrease of some raw materials. Do you see room for passing on this last point to your prices?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

I think more than just the strategy itself, we have also been working on bringing algorithms that can help us understand what is the turn dynamics of each of our products. So this is at the micro level. At the macro level, we are monitoring and we are serving our consumers to understand what would be the fair price for our consumers.

So the perception of a fair price for each category and also how this evolves over time. So in our mind, as I already said in one of the previous answers that I gave, the competitive scenario is more aggressive now, and this is normal when we have more challenging macroeconomic scenarios like the one we're going through right now.

So -- and also, the drop in some raw materials could lead to -- the drop in the price of some raw materials could lead to the decrease in prices. This is a good way to improve volumes in some cases, and that could be very positive for the entire value chain. So yes, we are working with our suppliers on the main commodities, the main categories to design our pricing strategies for the second half of the year, always based not just on the short-term response of our consumers in respect to the products that are already in our stores, but also the possibilities that this drop in price of some raw materials would bring in terms of the possibility to start some discussions, some negotiations and be able to have even more competitive prices, even more appealing prices that could improve our volumes.

[Operator]

This is the end of this question-and-answer session. Now I turn it back to Paulo -- Mr. Paulo Correa for his final remarks.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

I'd like to thank you all for attending our call. I think that it is important to stress once again that over the last quarters, we have been seeing very consistent results, a very consistent strategy, a very consistent evolution. This year so far has been a very important year in terms of the continuity of the evolution of our gross margins, the continuity of our consistent and diligent growth and very diligent cash control as well.

So comparing with the Q4 results last year, I think we can clearly see that we have consistent results. We have a consistent direction that we're following. And in the next quarters, we should see results -- very similar results along the same lines of execution. So we're very confident about C&A's strategy looking forward. Thank you very much for attending, and have a great day.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]