C&A Modas SA

BOVESPA:CEAB3

Earnings Call Analysis

Q4 2023: A Strong Finish with Significant Growth

The fourth quarter of 2023 was a period of notable achievements for the company, marked by robust sales and margin growth, and disciplined expense management. Apparel same-store sales surged by 18.5%, while adjusted EBITDA soared by 37.7%, leading to an impressive EBITDA margin of 21.9%. The adjusted net income nearly doubled from the previous year, reaching over BRL 144 million.

Sustainability and Transparency at the Forefront

As part of its commitment to responsible and sustainable fashion, the company achieved leadership in the fashion transparency index and performed admirably in the Great Place to Work ranking, exemplifying its dedication to corporate social responsibility.

Strategic Technology Adoption and Consumer Relations

Technological advancements, like the push-pull technology now covering 38% of sales, have bolstered stock turnover efficiency and customer engagement. The company's strategy is further amplified by C&A Pay, which has not only expanded to 5 million issued cards but also achieved more assertive credit intelligence, resulting in a sizable credit portfolio with lower-than-expected default levels.

Financial Milestones and Improved Credit Management

This quarter, the C&A Pay revenue climbed to BRL 92.4 million with a total portfolio value of BRL 963 million. The company recorded a decline in overdue payments to 20.1% and an improvement in net losses to 6.7%, affirming its commitment to rigorous credit management.

Prudent Capital Expenditures and Strong Cash Position

In alignment with its strategic focus, the company reduced its capital expenditures by 43% year-over-year to BRL 63 million, targeting key technological improvements. Such fiscal discipline, coupled with effective cash management, resulted in a quarter-end cash balance of BRL 1.3 billion, sufficient for all 2024 obligations.

Significant Debt Reduction and Leverage Improvement

The company triumphed in decreasing its total net debt by 26.4%, achieving a leverage ratio of 1.5x, a stark contrast to the previous year's 3.9x, indicating a healthy financial posture and enhanced ability to handle obligations.

Looking Ahead to 2024 with Optimism

With a solid performance in Q4 and prospects of a favorable economic climate, including lower interest rates to spur consumption, the company envisions growth by leveraging its extensive store network and customer base. The focus will be on optimizing sales per square meter through targeted initiatives, extending the push-pull distribution model, and remaining steadfast in cash management practices, while planning to divulge more details on future strategies at the upcoming Investor Day.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Carolina Martins, executive]

Good morning. Welcome to C&A's earnings call for Quarter 4 2023. Today, we have with us Paulo Correa, C&A CEO; Laurence Beltrao Gomes, CFO and Investor Relations Director, Fernando Brossi, VP for Operations and Financial Services, Donatti, Commercial VP; and Carolina Borghesi, VP Director for People, Culture and ESG.

The slide presentation and the earnings release can be accessed at the results center on C&A's IR website. We would like to inform that this conference call is being recorded and simultaneously translated into English. To listen to the audio in English, please click on the interpretation button. The replay will be available on the company's IR website after the call. [Operator Instructions]

Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements that are made during this conference call are based on the beliefs and assumptions of C&A's management and on information currently available to the company. These forward-looking statements are no guarantee of performance. They involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to future events and therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that conditions related to the macroeconomic scenario, the industry and other factors could also cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.

Now I would like to hand the conference over to Mr. Paulo to start his presentation.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Carol. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to start by saying that we are very proud of sharing with you C&A's results for quarter 4, 2023. Quarter 4 was marked by different highlights. And the numbers show the consistent evolution of our performance. Once again, our results demonstrate the relevance of our strategic choices since our IPO in 2019, as well as the consistent execution of our transformation initiatives and the capture of the impacts of the returns of the investments that were made in the past few years.

So moving on to the numbers. This quarter, our apparel same-store sales grew by 18.5%, and for the eighth consecutive quarter, we were able to grow our gross margin for apparel. This healthy combination of growth with a higher margin, combined with a very disciplined expense management led to a growth of 37.7% in our adjusted EBITDA with an EBITDA margin reaching 21.9% in quarter 4. The adjusted net income practically doubled year-over-year, reaching more than BRL 144 million. So we had one more quarter of good cash generation, which allowed us to reduce in the past 12 months, our net debt over EBITDA from 3.9x to 1.5x., going back to normality in terms of our debt level.

On the next page, we have a few other achievements and evolutions that happened in quarter 4. In ESG, we became part of the easy portfolio of B3. Once again, we were leaders in the fashion transparency index, and we were the fashion retail company with the best performance in the Great Place to Work ranking. We are a fashion company that is increasingly responsible and sustainable. Our consumers were impacted by our holidays -- end-of-year holiday campaign with very joyful colors and songs, full of energy and with beautiful items for the entire family with the DNA and the face of C&A.

In our different stores, they had more intuitive journeys to identify our collections, which were better segmented according to the store profile. They also found our collections better organized with a higher level of availability of items and very versatile collections. And they could also use our pay app to pay for their items.

On the next slide, I'd like to explore the foundations that allowed us to reach the results of this quarter. First, we had the assertiveness of our collections which were developed based on the behavior and trend insights, which brought the desired versatility with a clear evolution in the perception of value and quality, which was further proven by the increased conversion rates at our stores. At the same time, we are evolving in our capacity to offer a more connected assortment connected to the different construction profiles of each store.

And here, we give highlights to our stores with profile of consumers in higher classes, with growth rates over -- above the average of C&A, and we gained share in these micro regions. The relevance and attractiveness of our collections also results from the continuous work of coming closer and more connected to our consumers and improving our processes, which led to a reduction in the product development cycle, which improved our capacity to test new products and increase their scale very fast and with fast resupply of higher demand products.

Our distribution models, particularly with the extension of the push-pull technology, which has now reached 38% of our sales, are advancing integratedly with our suppliers, integratedly with our distribution center, integratedly with our stores. So that we can make decisions that are more and more assertive. And a clear evidence of this evolution is in our stock turnover. We closed the year with an increase of only 3% versus 2022, while our sales increased 19%.

The relationship with our customers is intensified by C&A Pay, which continues to expand and has reached the mark of more than 5 million cards issued and has reached 25% share in our sales. And this is based on robust credit intelligence, which is providing for an expansion of our portfolio with a lower default level than what was planned for this ramp up initially.

And last but not least, the strength of our intelligence hub, where consumer data, product data and store performance data are processed despite proprietary algorithms, which help us make more assertive decisions in terms of how much to procure, when to procure, how to price our products and how to manage our stocks? And this is all aiming to provide a more relevant experience where consumers impacting both sales and gross margin.

In this endless pursuit of having the right product at the right time at the right location with a fair price and with the best value perception, I believe that we are taking very important steps in this direction. And our recent market surveys show a clear evolution of C&A and consumer perception in this last quarter.

With this, I would now hand over the conference to our CFO, Laurence, to present the results for the quarter.

[Laurence Gomes, executive]

Thank you, Paulo, and good morning, everyone. Here on this page, we have our merchandise revenue with highlight to the increase in the Apparel revenue, up 18.8% year-over-year. And also the increase in the same-store sales for Apparel, an increase of 18.5% year-over-year. Here among the main factors that explain this performance, we can mention; first, the good performance of our high summer collection with highlight to the increase in women's and men's items.

The management of our assortment, combined with efficient supply and resupply of products to our store network, also a more accelerated sales performance in stores located where we have a higher concentration of AB class consumers, and also the basic execution and operation where we implemented the disciplined operations efficiency in all our stores in Brazil in quarter 4, particularly in the month of December when we had a high traffic level in our stores. And finally, it's important to highlight that the growth we saw in quarter 4 was driven by volume because our average price was below inflation.

On the next slide, we will explore our gross margin. Here, the Apparel gross margin indicator reached 56.5%, which is the highest historical level of gross margin in the company with an extension of 1.2 percentage points comparing to quarter 4 last year. Now this was the eighth consecutive quarter of continuous expansion in this indicator. And here, the assertiveness and the good acceptance of our collections was what led to a greater stock turnover and a lower need for markdowns, and we ended the year with good stock levels. There's -- the constant market survey and the monitoring of our prices was another point that contributed to this performance dynamic pricing, which allows for better entry prices and better price, faster price corrections during the product life cycle and the continuous capture of the benefits of push and pull distribution.

On the next slide, we see our operating expenses. This was an important year for our operating expenses. We continue to work towards preserving the work that we started in 2022. We reviewed all our processes and services called -- we used the right resources, which allowed us to improve our selling and administrative expenses over the net revenue. In quarter 4, we were able to decrease 2.5 percentage points in this indicator compared to quarter 4, 2022, reaching a level that was nearly the same as what we had in quarter 4, 2019. The increase in expenses in quarter 4 was 8.3%, whereas the total net revenue for merchandise grew 16%. In the year 2023, our operating expenses decreased from 1.7% -- had a 1.7% decrease with a dilution of 3.5 percentage points in the SG&A HOC ratio.

On the next slide, we have our adjusted EBITDA post IFRS 16 reaching BRL 501.5 million, a nearly 38% increase year-over-year, with an EBITDA margin expansion of 3.2 percentage points. For the year, the expansion of the adjusted EBITDA was 39.7%. And this is explained by the strong increase in our revenue, the expansion of the gross margin combined with the decreased expenses which explain the expansion in this indicator.

On the next slide, we show the evolution of C&A Pay. C&A Pay is a private label card offered by C&A, 100% digital and 100% focus on sales or the sales that were formed in our own channels. C&A Pay was designed as an innovative and simple and easy experience for our consumers, supported by a modern, flexible platform combined with very strong credit governance, or credit management governance, based on continuous improvement with constant evolution of the credit granting models, maintenance and credit recovery models.

And here, it's also important to mention that we believe that a fluid credit experiencing -- smoothness, nearly visible credit experience will increase recurrence, customer loyalty and have a positive impact on the quality of our credit portfolio. In quarter 4, the C&A Pay revenue reached BRL 92.4 million and the portfolio closed the quarter at BRL 963 million, 5 million of digital cards issued, accounting for 25% of our sales.

On the next page, we have a few indicators of delinquency. It's important to highlight that C&A Pay completed 2 years of operation in December 2023, and it has been very adherent to the initial planning and to the initial business plan in terms of volume, revenue and default. In quarter 4, we saw an improvement in the payment rollouts, in all our rollout indicators and an improvement in our client cohorts, which points to a prospective improvement in our default levels in the coming months. But nevertheless, we will continue to firmly and diligently manage the credit granting, credit maintenance and credit recovery processes that we have for C&A Pay.

The overdue payments were at 20.1%, 4 percentage points lower than quarter 3, 2023. We also had an improvement in the net losses, reaching 6.7%, an improvement compared with quarter 3 last year. We reached -- we ended the period with enough provisions to cover 95.1% of the overdue payments in Stage 3. So over 90 and an increase in the coverage, a 4 percentage point increase. The coverage index for over 90 reached 102%. So once again, it's important to highlight that we believe that a simple and effective journey will reflect on the quality of credit.

On the next page, we have the investment in the CapEx for '23. It's important to stress that over the course of 2023, we prioritized and focused on the collection of the benefits -- reaping the benefits coming from the investments that we made in the past few years, particularly in 2021. So that is why the CapEx of the quarter was BRL 63 million, a 43% decrease year-over-year. Investments were focused on technology solutions targeted at improving the main business processes in Apparel retail. So allocation, distribution and product acquisition, dynamic pricing, and greater insight and knowledge about the behavior and desires of our consumers. And finally, we focused on solutions for a better integration of all these work fronts.

On the next page, we show our cash generation and free cash flow. The final cash balance of the quarter increased 227% -- he corrects himself, BRL 227 million compared with September 2023. Operating activities generated BRL 335 million in this last quarter and end of year, which did not perform any operations to anticipate receivables differently from what we did in the quarter for 2022 when we anticipated BRL 260 million in receivables in this dimension here.

Here, it's also important to highlight that considering -- on the next slide, we'll talk about reducing our leverage. But talking about reducing our operating cash, we believe that we will no longer need to anticipate receivables looking forward. Investments totaled 51 -- BRL 53.4 million, and our financing activities consumed BRL 94 million. This means we closed the quarter and the year 2023 with a cash of BRL 1.3 billion. And this cash balance is sufficient to meet all the obligations that we have for 2024.

The next slide is about our financial leverage and indebtedness. Here, it's also important to make a disclaimer. Because in our gross debt, we considered the amount relative to the commitment to -- of the purchase commitment to offer credit with Bradescard which ends in 2025. And then we adjusted based on nonrecurring effects. So the operational evolution of the business, combined with structural actions relative to the working capital created the conditions for us to have a significant decrease in our total net debt, a 26.4% decrease which combined with the EBITDA generation led us to a leverage level of 1.5x versus 3.9x that we had last year.

I stop here. This is the end of this presentation. Now I hand it back to Paulo and he is going to talk about our priorities for 2024.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Laurence. The evolution that we saw in quarter 4, 2023 was very solid. And when we look to 2024, we have a very positive outlook, both in terms of the economic situation, we will continue to see decreases in interest rate, which should positively impact consumption. But particularly, due to the prospect of our operating evolution and our capacity to execute the strategy that we designed. In 2024, we will be quite focused on increasing the sales per square meter. Our analysis show that we have plenty of opportunities for that. And the foundation here is that we have an excellent portfolio of brick-and-mortar stores and channels and a very broad and robust customer base.

So by intensifying the proximity and relationship with our customer base, we will prioritize different initiatives aimed at increasing the assertiveness of our assortment, particularly in the categories that are more important and relevant for our consumers. At the same time, we will be perfecting and enhancing the purchase journey of our customers in all our channels with aiming at creating more relevance, more easiness and a greater proceed value for them.

Our distribution model based on push and pull will continue to evolve and will be expanded to a greater range of products which will bring us more possibilities of improving our assertiveness in our distribution with an even greater service level, which will lead to higher sales. And just as important, we will be doing this by maintaining our rigor and discipline in our cash management with the same consistency that we have been showing in the past few quarters. This means we will continue to work on the most important foundations of our segment based on the expectations, the needs of our consumers strengthening the C&A brand and the value perceptions of our collections before our clients.

We are also carefully organizing an Investor Day for you, which will take place shortly in the future, where we'll -- and we will give more information about our future plans. This is the end of our results presentation. And I would like to hand the presentation to Carol to open for questions.

[Carolina Martins, executive]

Thank you, Paulo. [Operator Instructions] The first question is from Gustavo Senday, XP.

[Gustavo Senday, analyst]

Thank you for the presentation and for answering my question. I have 2 questions. First one is about profitability, which was the main highlight of quarter 4 2023. I want to understand what we can expect looking forward in terms of evolution of your gross margin and EBITDA. And maybe if you can give more visibility in terms of what you still expect in terms of margin gain with your internal actions, push-pull, dynamic pricing? And what part of this gain of your gross margin could be invested for SG&A?

And the second question is about the assertiveness and acceptance of your new collections. You have been saying that this has been an important factor for the increase in sales. So what is behind this greater surge as you talk about the -- reacted this in your supply chain and the assertiveness in your assortment. But was there any structural change in the development of these collections, which could explain this improvement?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you for your question. Let me start by explaining how much we can still evolve in our gross margin. And our opinion about this topic is that we have actually captured a great part of this, but the dynamic of our gross margin has a few explanation, which is the more granular distribution capacity. And this more granular distribution still has room for advancing in terms of share. It has already reached 38% when we see more room for growth this year. So this is one of the dimensions. And the other dimension is the capacity to manage prices like we have been doing. I think we have advanced greatly in this sense, but the algorithm has to be continuously perfect, and we can still improve this. We have captured a great part of this increased profitability relative to the structural changes that we made, but we still see an opportunity in 2024 to further advance in our gross margin.

Now as for our expenses and how this will be reflected on our EBITDA margin, in our mind, what we see is we have to focus on increasing our sales per square meter. By increasing our sales per square meter, this will allow us to dilute our expenses. And at the same time, we will open room for the new initiatives that we are starting, and we plan to advance over the course of the year. So we will keep pursuing an evolution in the percentage EBITDA margin as well.

And your second question was about our collections and the versatility of our collections. I will start answering, and then I'll pass the floor to Donatti. But let me just stress once again that we are constantly monitoring what's happening in terms of the behavior of our clients and trends. We identified that at a very important time that Apparel became a form of investment. The financial crisis hit all of us during the pandemic. So this increased the relevance of buying clothes. And this investment clearly connects with the dynamic of versatility. You need to be able to wear that item more frequently. You need to have more occasions to wear that item. And this is a process.

And as we internalize this concept, and we evolved in this discussion in terms of developing our collections, we learned the lessons that we needed to learn about what works better. And when this is combined with the work that we have been doing for some years now to develop our supply chain with more proximity, more speed and more reactiveness. This allows us to understand and respond more assertively to the market. You can test, trial and learn with what has worked and what has not worked and then scale up with speed and agility.

This is something I see very clearly. I think that in the end of last year, I always like to give an example, which is the dynamic of versatility. If you visited our stores in December, you would see an assortment of a trend, which was linen much more assertively than any other player. And this occurred because this was something that we tested in the end of the winter season and the start of the fall season, and we saw -- and we were able to have the strength and the speed to expand this with a lot of security and assertiveness. So this is the type of example that we used to say that we still have a lot to evolve and advance in this sense, but I think that we are being able to quickly connect the insights that come from our consumers with very fast -- very clear, very connected execution at the point of sale.

Donatti, would you like to add anything?

[Francislei Cassio Donatti, executive]

No, I think your answer was very complete. But I always try to draw a time line when we talk about our collections. This is a work that we started 3 years ago. When we made the decision to build more versatile collections and collections that were fashion connected with the consumer and not just fashion according to our perception. So we made some investments in our supply chain so that they could build this capacity to understand what was happening at the same time as we were understanding what was happening and offering a very fast response and very fast reactiveness during those seasons.

We used to use the word bet a lot here. But now we reduced the frequency of the use of this word, and we changed the way we work. Today, with our suppliers, we can test the products with a very high speed with the data and technology capacity that we have, we can read the performances and very quickly, we can react and advance with the products that show the best performance. Another very important point, which is greatly connected with this capacity to develop and deliver consumer connected collections is the subject of our stocks. We are managing our stocks very intelligently. We're always open for procuring. We're always hearing about receiving novelties in our store, new items in our store. We're always conveying the message that something new is happening at C&A. So we have this easiness with our suppliers and this creates this perception of freshness and fresh collections at all times in our stores.

[Operator]

Next question is from Eric Huang, Santander.

[Eric Huang, analyst]

Congratulations on your results. I heard you talked in your release about the improved performance in your stores, particularly where the AB classes are concentrated. So how do you see the evolution both in these stores and also stores positioned at the -- at a lower income level. And we are starting to see cross-border e-commerce stores. And how do you see this movement on their part and also with global peers trying to bring more accessible brands, trying to compete more with these cross-border brands. So I'd like to hear your vision for Brazil and also globally, what is the trend for cross-border commerce and what is your positioning in relation to that?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Eric. In respect to our sales performance at higher income level stores, what is behind this. Of course, there is a macroeconomic aspect of a lower debt level in these segments. But the greatest opportunity here, the greatest opportunity here is in our capacity to segment the assortment for this type of store. We have been able to bring extensions of assortment for these stores with higher average prices and the turnover capacity of these products is very high. And what's behind this, which is our thesis, our explanation for this is that each micro region somehow has an opportunity in respect to the assortment. And when you have a more granular assortment and more adequate to each of these regions, your chance of converting increases drastically.

So what's behind this dynamic in the AB class focused stores is exactly what I just said. And also in lower income classes, it's the same explanation because at the end of the day, our growth in this segment of stores were very strong -- was very strong in the month of December. We understand that the consumption capacity increased with the 13th salary for these locations. But the learnings that we have when we understand the type of assortment that works better for each type of income segment helps us better compose this segment and increase the attractiveness for that micro region. This is our understanding of our performance in this type of store.

In the marketplace, it's what you were saying, we still lack some isonomy relative to the cross-border format. This is something that is still being widely discussed, still very unstable as a mid- to long-term strategy. And we are also identifying in our research, a small reduction in the level of interest of consumers in this type of modality. I understand that some of them are undertaking some movement in that direction, but we have a spectacular portfolio of stores. Our channels are very strong and very well defined. We're very focused on working with these channels and this portfolio before doing anything relative to cross-border or anything like that.

[Eric Huang, analyst]

Thank you, Paulo. Just a follow-up with your first question, I think -- you talked about the reasons for your better performance. But how do you see the evolution in the start of this year? If you could give us some more light about that.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

The year started really well. We had a good month of January, and we are having a good February, slightly above what we had initially planned. But the month of March is very important in the quarter. It is the month when we transition our collections. There's a temperature transition and the temperature dynamic has a greater influence in the short term. So it's important to look at the whole picture, not just a snapshot, but the snapshot so far has been really interesting this year.

[Operator]

Next question is from Victor Rogatis, Itaú Corretora de.

[Victor Rogatis Trevisan, analyst]

The first one is about C&A Pay, your selling expenses have dropped nominally year-over-year. So I want to understand what is the explanation for that decrease? And how will this line evolve nominally in the coming quarters? And my second question is about the improvement in the percentage points for the NPL for the over 90. So what explains this improvement? And is this somehow impacting the way you will grant credit looking forward and also the speed of the increase in penetration of C&A Pay.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Victor, for your questions, and I will ask Brossi to answer.

[Fernando Brossi, executive]

The first question about expenses in 2023 -- 2022, we received the reimbursement of our partnership with Bradesco. And in '22, this was considered a revenue. And in 2023, we reclassified the reimbursement of these expenses as a credit in our expense line. So this is what led to this effect in 2023, and it should become recurrent looking forward. Now as for your second question and the default levels, it's important to give more context about C&A Pay. When we designed C&A Pay and what we wanted for it, there were 3 main levers.

First, what was the product that was being designed, how we were planning to sell this with our sales force. And the third lever was -- which would be our credit policy. And our decision was that the product has to be differentiated. That's why it's 100% digital. It's quick. There's no plastic. There's no bill, paper bill. It's based on biometry. So it's very fluid. And it makes it much easier for the sales force to sell and the adoption levels are very good by our consumers. So we have been hearing very positive feedback and the 5 million cards over 2 years has everything to do with the first 2 points.

Now when we design the credit leverage, we made a decision, and we set our approval rate at about 80% of the peers. So we started with an approval rate, which was lower than what we have in the market. And 2 months later, we moved on to 70%, so we reduced further and then we kept on maintaining this credit. So our initial policy was a more moderate policy in terms of credit, and what we are seeing now in quarter 4 is -- comes from the design of this decision. Also into '22 and '23, we evolved our credit models and this started reflecting in the new cohort. So part of the Q4 is explained by the better cohort of consumers and also the advancement in our charging policies.

Today, our charging policy is nearly 100% digital. We have been in close contact with the client, and this has been proving effective. So in quarter 4, we had an impact of these 2 factors, the improvement in our credit granting policy and also an improvement in our efficiency. And we saw this because all our rollout indicators improved showing the effectiveness of our charging policy.

And finally, also, we saw an improvement of our indicators in the market as a whole. And this was also helpful. Now looking forward, we understand that we still -- there's still room to keep expanding and increasing credit penetration in our sales. So operating between 30% and 35% is the way to go, but we will maintain our level of diligence, credit control, discipline and using a product is really well accepted by our sales force as levers for this strategy.

[Operator]

Now the next question is from Felipe Reboredo, Citi bank.

[Felipe Reboredo, analyst]

Congratulations on your results, and thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. We have 2 points that we want to explore. We want to better understand your sales dynamic. You mentioned that the growth comes basically from volume. Because your price was below inflation. So how do you see this for 2024? I know this is a recurring subject the level of price that the consumers accept in terms of increase in 2023 and how you see this in 2024?

And the second question, you know that credit is very important. And for 2024, this should be -- this should continue to be an engine for growth? Or should we expect a normalization in the acceleration of the numbers of your customer base and customers with cards issued. So these are the 2 main points.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Felipe, for your questions. So let me answer about pricing volume first. Well, our premise is the following. In the long term, we want to grow at the same proportion of inflation. So this is our macro directive. And in the end of 2023, what we saw was an acceleration which was greater than the acceleration in the average price. And this was not because we changed the average price or -- lowered the average price of anything. It was purely because of the mix. And this has everything to do with the products where we had better performance through push and pull, which are basic products, products that are at their entry price.

So the level of conversion and assertiveness of these products at the store ended up bringing higher conversion and a higher share of these products. At the same time, more people are using C&A at this very moment, which is also very nice because it's the market share for Apparel. So looking forward, so just to make it clear, the idea is to grow in a balanced fashion, both in terms of price, closer to the inflation rates and also volume by gaining market share.

Now as for your question about credit in 2024, I will hand it to Brossi.

[Fernando Brossi, executive]

So we want to keep expanding our customer base. We will continue to expand and to increase our penetration of credit in our sales this year. Of course, the acceleration rate will be lower because it was at the start of [indiscernible] pay reached 25% penetration, and we are trying to reach market levels of 35%, and then we will discuss where we are going. But we will have credit as a lever for 2024 as well. And at the end, [indiscernible] in addition to improving the viability of the commercial transaction, the commercial operation, it also has an important role of intensifying the relationship with our customers. Credit gives us the chance of maintaining close contact with the consumers and learning about the preferences of the individual consumers and the consumer base. And this allows us to make more relevant offers to this customer base.

So in addition to the dynamic of fostering direct sales through credit offering. Credit also has a very strategic role because we have very intelligence analytics, and we are able to offer and foster this relationship. The annual spending of a customer with C&A Pay and without C&A Pay significantly higher and also the number of purchases over one year. So these are the evidences that reinforce that not only accelerate sales, but also it helps us build relationship with our consumers.

[Operator]

Next question is from João Paulo Dias Andrade, Bradesco BBI.

[João Paulo Dias Andrade, analyst]

Congratulations for your great results, and thank you for answering my question. About your mix between Fashiontronics, Apparel and Beauty. You've talked about the closing down of kiosks, then focusing more on beauty. Can we expect this to be a continuous movement? Less Fashiontronics and more Beauty and Apparel in the future? And what are the impacts that this should have on your gross margin?

And my second question, if you allow me, you mentioned your conversion rate, a better conversion rate this quarter, which we usually associate with a more assertive collection and better products. Can you please classify the -- how you expect to see an increase in the flow and how flow and conversion, how do you see flow and conversion, looking forward and how the stores and products are converging in your 2024 strategy?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, João. Let me start with your second question, and then I'll pass it to Donatti to talk about the mix. The impact of the conversion rate versus flow in the end of the year, I would say that it's 90% conversion rate and 10% flow. Flow actually had the benefit of comparability with 2022, when we had the elections and the World Cup in quarter 4. So somehow -- of course, it's a small part of the results, but a small part of the results have to do with this comparability, which impacted the flow. What we see evolving more significantly is the conversion rate. And looking forward, in 2024, I think we have a more normalized fees in terms of comparison and the idea here is to advance in the 2 dimensions, both in flow and the dynamics of the brand and a more intense relationship with our consumers and at the same time, better assortment and more targeted categories -- more targeted at each micro region so that we can better advance with this conversion rate.

And Donatti is going to talk about beauty.

[Francislei Cassio Donatti, executive]

So let's start with smartphones and technology. This continues to be a difficult market. 2024, we will continue to see the difficulties that we have been facing. The market has been facing. So it's going to be a difficult year. The decision we made was to exit with the stores that had low profitability in this category. But most importantly, and we already closed down the kiosks in 27 stores last year. We closed kiosks in 38 stores in February, and we're closing another 63 in March, for a total of 128 stores. And the most important and interesting is how we are closing down the kiosks in these stores. We have been talking all the time, it's only an obsession when we talk about testing and learning.

So we closed the kiosks in some stores. We understood the impact this was causing. And then we understood what was the category or product that could replace this category and occupy this space in our stores. So this is what we learned, and this is how we transformed something that could be a negative impact in our result in something positive. So we are conducting this transition with no impact or even better with positive impacts. And this is something we design based on continuous discussion. This discussion will continue, and we'll be looking at the profitability of our business continuously and the profitability of the category continuously.

Another comment that I have is about Beauty. Beauty is a strategic subject for C&A. First, because it's totally connected with fashion and totally connected with our consumers. And it also has a significantly higher margin than Fashiontronics, for example. So this is a category where we are evolving consistently and fast and we will continue to focus on this in 2024 and the upcoming years. We believe this category is fully -- is totally connected with our consumers.

[Operator]

Now we received a question in writing. So let us start with the questions sent by Andrew Ruben, Morgan Stanley.

The first question is about your sales performance in your higher income stores, but I think this question was already answered. So let me move on to his second question. Second question is, can we talk more about the investments expected for 2024, either by quantifying them or explaining if we will maintain a lower level of investment like we saw in '23 or which are the areas where we are planning to accelerate these investments?

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Andrew, thank you for your question. Laurence will answer it.

[Laurence Gomes, executive]

All right. So the expectation for 2024 is to continue completing and extracting the benefits of the investments made in the past few years, particularly in our core business so the allocation distribution, resupply, replenishment and pricing. In 2024, we will continue to intensify this focus and bringing more solutions to improve these tools. So we will see more investments in technology and digitization of our processes. We will also see investments focusing on the enhancement of the customer journey on our brick-and-mortar and digital channels. So this will indeed lead to a CapEx higher than what we saw in 2023, but it will still be within the average if we exclude 2021. So the CapEx will be higher, but it will still be considered moderate.

And also in 2024, we will prioritize our sales per square meter. We will prioritize extracting more sales per square meter and improving the footprint of our stores. So we see that is an opportunity here, and this is evidence that we saw during quarter 4, particularly in December, but we have opportunities to further increase our sales per square meter. So we will continue to keep our focus on that. So it's more of the same. And we will continue to intensify the levers that were very important in 2023. But not only will we enhance them and intensify them, but also we will have a greater integration of these work fronts in our business.

[Operator]

Next question was also sent in writing by Victor [indiscernible] Investment.

Can you explain how push and pull contributed to the expansion in the sale of basic products because basic products usually do not require that level of dynamism.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

Thank you, Victor, for your question. Push and pull, one of the main impacts of the push-and-pull technology is on sales. And I always give this example. Particularly in the end of the year if you go into a store and you see an item that you like, I like that black T, for example, the black T-shirt. And then you ask someone, do you have in a medium? And very often, you'll hear a no. Particularly in December, you hear a no, no, we're out. And this is the beauty of push and pull. Your ability to forecast what will be the level of consumption of that specific SKU in each of the stores and then through your systems, you can replenish your stores at a very targeted way. So you send that specific SKU to that specific store at the right time. This will decrease the stock out of certain SKUs and by reducing the stock out, you convert more and this will lead to an increase in sales.

[Operator]

All right. So this is the end of the question-and-answer session. And now I hand it back to Paulo for his final remarks.

[Paulo Correa, executive]

I would like to thank you all for attending our conference call and I'd like to once again stress the level of confidence that we have that we will continue to build and execute in C&A that is increasingly relevant and strong for our consumers. And this will allow us to also create value for our stakeholders. And finally, I'd like to congratulate our leadership team and our more than 15,000 employees for the results that we had in 2023 and in quarter 4, 2023. And for the very hard work, the beautiful work that they realize, your contribution has been the greatest differentiator in the market. So we love you. Thank you, and have a great day, everyone.

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