Empreendimentos Pague Menos SA
BOVESPA:PGMN3
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Empreendimentos Pague Menos SA
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Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Pague Menos conference call to discuss the results of quarter 3 2023. This conference call is being recorded, and the replay will be available at the company's website, ri.paguemenos.com.br, where the presentation will also be available for download.
[Operator Instructions]. The presentation will be projected in Portuguese and the English version is available for download at ri.paguemenos.com.br.
Before proceeding, let me mention that any forward-looking statements made during this conference call are based on the premises and beliefs of Pague Menos and information currently available to the company.
These forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties since they refer to future events and therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. -- investors, analysts and journalists should understand that events related to the macroeconomic environment to the industry and other factors may lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements.
We have here with us today Mr. Mario Queiros, CEO, Jose Vasquez, COO; and Luiz Novais, CFO and Investor Relations Director of the company.
Now I'd like to hand the conference over to Mr. Mario Queiros to start his presentation. Mr. Queiros, you may proceed.
Welcome to our conference call to announce the results of quarter 3 2023. This quarter was marked by a reduction in the company's leverage resulting from the increase in the private capital, which took place in September 2023 and also a record-breaking cash generation of approximately BRL 180 million.
We also saw a growth of more than 41% in the consolidated EBITDA of the company, mainly due to a strong expense control and increased productivity, both at our stores and also at the company's headquarters.
Our digital channels grew by nearly 40% on and exceeded 12% share in our consolidated numbers, and the most interesting point is that Extrafarma has already reached a 9% share and Vasquez will show you that for all KPIs, we are seeing a convergence between the brands. So Extrafarma is closing the gap in relation to Pague Menos, which shows that the integration is very successful so far.
Now I'd like to hand the conference over to Novais, and he's going to share with you more details about the quarter.
Thank you, Mario. Before I start my presentation, I'd just like to share with you that we have ex IFRS 16 numbers starting this quarter to facilitate the comparison with other publicly traded companies in our industry and the consolidation and the information about the rules is in our release.
So let's start with the highlights of the quarter. You already heard some of them from Mario. We had a positive combination of increased EBITDA, cash generation and incremental market share for Pague Menos organically in our core regions. So here we have the 6 highlights of the quarter. In sales, we had a 16.1% increase in the consolidated numbers and 11.5% in Pague Menos stand-alone, even without considering the new -- even without new openings. For the EBITDA in the quarter 3, there was a 41.4% increase consolidated and 16.4% in Pague Menos stand-alone.
Operating cash generation, as we highlighted in the start of this call, BRL 176 million in the quarter, record-breaking numbers. Market share, it's the third consecutive quarter with an organic growth of our market share. Even without new openings, we had organic growth of Pague Menos in our core regions. -- Extrafarma synergies, we are advancing really well in the capture of the synergies. We're going to hear more about this later. And the company's indebtedness, due to the improved EBITDA and improved cash generation and the increase in capital that in the end of the quarter, we had a major reduction in our indebtedness from 3.1 to 2.4x the net debt-EBITDA ratio.
On Chart 5, we have our sales -- we have been improving our same-store performance for Pague Menos -- we finished this quarter at 6.5% same-store sales, and 11.5% increase in total. Even without new openings in our mature stores, we exceeded BRL 700,000 per month per store, a 5.7% increase. The 220 stores that we inaugurated between -- in 2021, '22 and '23, have been showing good performance. The older stores, 2-year-old stores reached 80% of their potential sales.
The contribution margin coming from these stores has been performing better than the prior portfolio. So when these stores finally reach their maturation point, we will see a relevant increment in the contribution margin for the company as a whole. And the growth promoters in this quarter were mainly our digital channels, which grew by nearly 40% stock out. We are at our lowest level in the past 2 years. Store maturation, as I just talked about, and an important growth in our customer base.
On Chart 6, we have the Extrafarma sales. Same-store sales in this quarter was 3.4%. Here, we have a very strong comparison base compared with quarter 3 last year, where we grew nearly 14% in same-store sales. So when the accumulated for the 2 years, the growth is 19%. So on the top right, we show that in this evolution, looking at a longer term of 2 years, we are evolving really well.
We are at a much better level in terms of Extrafarma operations in terms of assortment, stock outs, digital and private label, but we are still recovering in terms of number of customers. We have been taking on some CRM actions, some rent conversion actions that Vasquez is going to give you more details about. We have already reached an average sales per store of about 500,000, but we are still in this transition process of incorporating and growing the company's base.
On Chart 7, we have our sales mix. Here, the highlights are what we highlighted in the past few quarters, generics, hygiene and beauty are gaining share, which is good for us and is a result of some improvements that we have been implementing in assortment execution and pricing. This is a movement that favors our gross margin. So we have good news on this chart.
On Page 8, our digital channels, we saw a 39% increase year-over-year. And for the consolidated company, 12.1% share in Extrafarma, we already reached 9.1%, 3x higher than what we had in quarter 3 2022, which is the result of a very well done work of integration of the sales platform of the company digitally between Pague Menos and Extrafarma using the 1,600 stores as points of delivery. E-commerce, on the right, we see that the share of our subchannels grew by 46%, reaching 55% driven by the good performance of our app and the improvements that have been made for our app.
And on the bottom right, we see that when we add a click and collect and deliveries in up to 2 hours, we have 85% of all orders made on our digital channels delivered in less than 2 hours. And we are improving more and more our operations, and this allowed us to achieve the RA 1000 stamp for our 2 brands. So we have a very good reputation on our digital channels with increased profitability. Since the beginning of this year, we have been improving the EBITDA margin of the channel. The EBITDA margin of the channel is already close to the total EBITDA margin of the brick-and-mortar stores. So this means healthy growth.
On Page 9, the market share, as we highlighted in Pague Menos stand-alone, even without new openings in this quarter, we were able to gain market share in the North and Northeast, and we also give highlights to the Midwest, where we have been showing excellent performance, both in same stores and new stores. We are growing twice as much as the market. So this is a new growth frontier which will be very important and profitable. On the right side, we see a slight reduction in our market share, which is basically explained by the reduction of 35 stores of Extrafarma, 8 due to CAD medications, the investments and some stores that were closed out.
Income and gross margin, we maintained the margin of 29.3%, close to the numbers of the same quarter last year. In Pague Menos we had an 80 bps reduction, which is similar to what we saw in quarter 2, and this is much explained by the low inflationary gain and increase of the share of our digital channels. In Extrafarma, we had excellent performance. We grew by 300 bps on year-over-year, reaching 31.2% margin. And this is a result of the synergy capture and all the-- work that we did incremental work that we did in fiscal topics, private label among other elements. So we see there's a very good evolution in the extra farming gross margin.
On Chart 11, we see our selling expenses in Pague Menos. We had a significant reduction of 50 bps. We went from 22% to 21.5% and this is due mainly to the continuous productivity improvement that we're making in our stores. We reduced about 0.5 employee per store compared with quarter 3 last year. We have also been able to grow our sales above inflation, which also helps us dilute our expenses. The phasing of the marketing expenses, as we have been highlighting since quarter 1 this year. We are concentrating our marketing expenses more in the start of the year. So now we have lower marketing expenses, which also helps us dilute our expenses, and new openings are now maturing, and this also helps us decrease the proportion of selling expenses over the company's total sales. We will keep working to further decrease these expenses. We still have room to improve these expenses further and improve the contribution margin, as you can see on the next chart.
So for Pague Menos, we had a 30 bp reduction going from 107 million to 104 mainly due to the reduction in the gross margin, as you heard in the previous slides, compensated by the expense dilution that I just explained. And for Extrafarma, we had a major evolution. Here, we don't have the information for Extrafarma stand-alone, but we reached 5% contribution margin for Extrafarma, and Vasquez is going to give you more details. 200-point increase year-over-year. And so we continue to close the gap of the contribution margin between Pague Menos and Extrafarma. There's still room to improve. We should complete the integration and synergy capture in the end of next year.
And for the consolidated numbers, we were able to maintain the contribution margin at 7%. -- which is a good performance for Extrafarma. Here we have our G&A expenses on Page 13. One of the main points of the quarter. We are evolving really well in the reduction of our G&A expenses. It doesn't really make sense to look at the stand-alone for Pague Menos but we keep the chart here just for the purposes of keeping the standard of the presentation.
So we look at the consolidated numbers because we already have one single administrative structure for the entire company. So we reached 2.5%, an important reduction, which is due to the work that we did to unify administrative structures, control expenses and gain productivity.
On Chart 14, our adjusted EBITDA, here one of the main news of this quarter. Look at the 41% growth in the consolidated EBITDA of the company, an important advancement, we went from BRL 102 million in quarter 3 last year to BRL 144 million of nominal EBITDA, very good evolution, indeed. In Pague Menos on the left, we see an important evolution of 30 bps in the EBITDA margin of 5.0% to 5.3%.
Despite the pressure on our gross margin, we were able to evolve in decreasing our expenses. So we continue to see an improvement in our EBITDA margin, both for Pague Menos stand-alone and for the consolidated. And for the consolidated, we reached 4.7% EBITDA margin for the company as a whole. Despite Extrafarma still being much below its potential, but we have a consolidated EBITDA margin close to 5%, which is very good news.
On Chart 15, the adjusted net result despite the operational improvement that we just heard in our EBITDA, we're still suffering with our financial expenses, which consumed practically all the financial results of the year.
So the net result was 0.4%. And when we isolate the sales effect and the margin effect that the margin effect contributed positively by the increment of BRL 53 million of financial expenses in Pague Menos and a little bit more in Extrafarma consumed the results.
But we have good news here as well. As you're going to hear later, when we normalize the cash cycle and if our EBITDA keeps growing relevantly as it has been capturing the Extrafarma synergies and with the increase in capital that we completed in quarter 3 and the decrease in the interest rates, we have a very good prospect, a better prospect in terms of our net results for the upcoming quarters.
On Chart 16, we see our cash cycle.
We completed the normalization of the average stock time by concentrating the integration process in the start of the year in quarter 1. But we had already been investing in stock in the end of the year. So we went from 129 days to 114 days average stock time, which is a relevant improvement and normalization. There's still room to further decrease this average stock time but it is already at a reasonable level and the average payment and customer payment and supplier payment times, we tend to see a better position in these 2 indicators in the upcoming quarters.
The cash flow on Page 17 and the company's indebtedness. This, combined with the EBITDA is the most important piece of news of the quarter. We had record-breaking operating cash generation in quarter 3. This is due to the major improvement in our EBITDA with an improvement in our average stock time.
And on the right side, we see a significant reduction in the company's leverage. We went from 3.1x to 2.4x the net debt over EBITDA ratio. So these 2 points combined increased capital, improved EBITDA. -- and the improved operational generation and the synergy capture among other elements led to these good results. So we continue in our trajectory to reduce our lever. We are still at a level that is above what's ideal in our opinion. We will continue to focus on reducing the company's indebtedness, and this should continue until the end of next year. So, this is the end of my part.
And now I'd like to hand it over to Vasquez and he's going to talk about Extrafarma.
Thank you, Novais. So moving on to Page 19. So let me talk about the rationale of this -- of the transaction and the reasons that led us to 14 months ago to decide to acquire Extrafarma to accelerate our expansion. So with Extrafarma, we accelerated our expansion by about 3 years, which is very relevant for us. The synergies--there is an entire package of potential synergies that is being captured and I'm going to give you more material information later about this. And another significant point is that the tier projected for this transaction and although we have a very solid organic expansion, the projected tier for Extrafarma is actually higher than that of our organic expansion.
On Page 20, here we see our integration plan and how it's progressing since August last year, we have some significant milestones of this integration. For example, technology, both at DCs and also the conversion of Extrafarma stores into the Pague Menos system. Novais talked about this, but our organizational structure, our back office and operations structure is now servicing the 2 brands, and we have all the impacts of this integration of the 2 companies.
On the next chart, Page 21, we talk about our next steps. So as I said, the first 15 months, we're very successful in terms of the promises that we delivered both to our DCs and our stores. We are advancing some states with the conversions between the brands, and I'm going to give you more visibility about this later on. Novais talked about some stores that were shut down, and we continue to study our possibilities with our stores when it makes sense to close our stores. But today, it is a much more selective process than before.
We are also recovering the dropouts of the Extrafarma brand. It was a brand that for a long period, had a challenge in terms of pricing or stock outs. And today, through CRM actions, we are recovering these dropout customers, we are also taking new steps to redefine and improve the assortment. We're still making some adjustments in the prices, and we are also be adjusting the stock levels for some units or some regions. In November, we started redefining the store teams and the supervisors in the past 14 months, we are already doing that with the operations, directors and more senior managers. And now in November, we started to integrate the store teams, including store managers, operators, pharmacists. And this all will help us improve our sales and dilute our expenses.
Another point that we have been working on is to reduce our expenses with rentals. So in some of the marketplaces where we operate and we have Pague Menos stores and Extrafarma stores very close to each other, we detected that the cost of rental per square meter for Extrafarma is slightly higher. So we are renegotiating in these markets, which will give us further opportunities to improve our expenses.
On Chart 22, as we heard from Mario and also from Novais, these indicators are very important. The 6 operational convergency indicators. So in the past months, we have been seeing a decrease in the gap between the 2 brands. So we -- there's an approximation between Pague Menos and Extrafarma for these indicators.
For example, the contribution margin, as we already heard, we know that the curves are coming closer for digital channels, the capillarity and the share of digital channels and Extrafarma is approaching the numbers of Pague Menos. Of course, considering its regional characteristics, also the NPS or the customers' view is increased -- it has increased from 66% to 75%, to nearly 10 points, getting closer to Pague Menos numbers private labels, which helps not only our sales but also our profitability.
So, the share of private labels is growing significantly in Extrafarma. And as I mentioned before, Extrafarma had a major challenge with stock-outs -- and they were able to decrease their stock out level to levels -- unprecedented levels in terms of product availability to customers. And agreements and partnerships, there was also an increase to very strong levels and very similar to the levels of Pague Menos.
On Page 23, we see the capture of synergies -- we are expecting to capture synergies through revenue, logistics, gross margin and SG&A and also store expenses. And we see that the numbers are higher than what was planned--higher than expected. Today, we are at about BRL 113 million in an annual basis for these 4 levers. And on the bottom right, you see that there is an important impact coming from revenue from the increase in sales but also from the other growth levers. So, the summary here is that what we had planned a little over 12 months ago is now materializing in the capture of synergies with the Extrafarma brand.
On Page 24 -- this is better shown and better reflected on the Extrafarma EBITDA. We were coming from a historical negative EBITDA, an important negative impact on the Extrafarma EBITDA, and we moved from 2.5%--negative 2.5% to a positive 2.5% in quarter 2 and a positive 1.8% in quarter 3. So it's an increase of more than 400 basis points year-over-year for the Extrafarma brand. And this brand today is contributing to generate cash for the company and reduce the company's leverage, which was also explained before.
On Page 25, we talk about our brand conversions. Pague Menos is very strong in the North and Northeast as you probably know well. And we recently started in January this year a pilot project to convert 11 stores from the Extrafarma brand to the Pague Menos brand. The results are very exciting with significant increases in sales per store with a relatively low CapEx required. So this made us really excited. And in October, we started to roll out to another 44 conversions from the Extrafarma brand to the Pague Menos brand, particularly in the states of Rio Grande do Norte and Pernambuco.
And why is that? -- because of the strength of the brand, as you can see here on the bottom right, we show the strength of the brand, the 2 brands in these markets, and we're very excited that we will see similar results to that of our pilot project for these 44 conversions that we are rolling out as of October. Now we can open the floor for questions. We will now open the floor for questions.
We will take questions from investors and analysts. [Operator Instructions] The first question is from Clara Lustosa.
What's really striking to us is the positive improvement in your stock out levels not just with the closing of the gap between Safari Pague Menos but for Extrafarma standalone as well -- for Pague Menos stand-alone as well. So thinking of Pague Menos Stand-alone, do you think you have already reached ideal levels? And we know that your logistics is now integrated, but what were the main factors for this improvement?
Thank you for your question. I can say that we're very close to what we would call the ideal stock out level. We had reached that ideal level last year. But then due to some steps in the integration, there was some mismatch.
We mentioned last year that we had an operational problem in DC1, which is our main DC Fortaleza, but this was normalized in the end of quarter 1 or the start of quarter 2 this year. There's still potential to improve stock out levels, but that would be what we call fine-tuning. So we are already working at a level that is very close to what would be ideal for the 2 brands.
This was excellent work performed by the commercial team, the supply team and also the IT team with the integration of the systems and also logistics and supply.
I have a comment -- an additional comment. One of the main factors to that helped us reduce our stock out levels were the DCs. We went from 5 DCs to 9 DCs. And as you heard from Mario, there was an integration and the redefinition of the logistics system of the company, which is now much more in line with the DCs that we incorporated from Extrafarma.
So this truly helped us in addition to all the other work that the supply team did to improve the algorithm to add suppliers to our supplier base, but the 9 DCs that we have today were really helpful.
The next question is from Gabriela Ferrante, Safra.
You said that your stock out levels are good, but there's still room to improve. So what would be the ideal level that you see for 2024? And also about your leverage, you said that there's still room to improve. So what would be the ideal level for your leverage?
Thank you for your question, Gabriela. So still about stock out, just to give you clearer numbers, the market works with between 3% to 5% stock out. We're working at 3.5%, and we have already seen levels of 2.5%.
So, as I said, we're very close to what's ideal and we just need some fine-tuning to get closer to the 2.5% because under 2.5 would just be a reasonable effort and also investments in stock and then the trade-off wouldn't make sense, considering we have so many stores.
So, if we don't have a certain product in a store, we have other stores, and we also have the infinite aisle system, the customers can pay for a product at a store where the product is not available when we see the product at home.
So we're very close to it, as I said. And regarding our leverage, we disclosed the guidance of 1.7x until the end of next year. So that's our focus. That's our target. We had the increase in capital that took place in September and with our good expense control and a record break in cash generation, this will all help decrease our leverage, and this is one of our main focuses.
Just one follow-up question. What is the sales dynamic in the start of quarter 4? Can you share something with us about that? Last case, can you talk about our sales performance.
Yes. October was slightly more challenging for us but November started better. We just extracted the data from the start of November. And the good news, Gabriela is availability. We have been servicing our customers really well. Our NPS is increasing. So, the prospect, particularly with the strong start of November, the prospect is very good for the closing of the year.
The next question is from Guilherme Vilela, JPMorgan.
I want to talk about your stores that were closed. You talked about 4 stores being closed in the last quarter. So are you going to close down more stores in the coming quarters?
And my next question is about your brand conversion. You talked about 11 brand conversions and that you can roll out more conversions if your productivity increases. So, what is the productivity response to these conversions? Can you share some of your KPIs with us?
Thank you, Guilhem, for your questions. About the close down of our stores, we are at what we would call a natural level about 2 stores per month, 5 stores per quarter. This is what we consider natural levels because some stores do not perform as well as we would expect. So this is a natural part of the expansion and also some mature stores that they eventually undergo a change in the street traffic or maybe a competitor that is more aggressive at that same site or maybe negotiations relative to rental. Sometimes rental becomes feasible, and we have to close down a store.
For Extrafarma, we had 35 close downs in the past 12 months. And since the acquisition, we already knew that these were stores that were not worth the investment. And now 12 to 14 months later, with all the integration after integrating our systems after improving product availability and with the new pricing, if these stores are still not responding, I think we have about 20 stores that we will need to close down in the coming months.
So, we acquired 400, 8 of them were closed down because of the cut remediation. And we are closing another 20 in the upcoming months. We think these are -- this is still within natural -- what's natural for such an acquisition. For 100 stores, we will keep 360. But what we are planning is another 20 stores to be closed down in the coming months. And about the brand conversion, -- of course, Vasquez can add something if you want, but we had 11 initial conversions to fill the waters, some in Fortaleza, others in Sao Paulo and Bali.
And now with a more in-depth study, we are rolling out in 2 important states, ogres do North in Pernambuco. These are states where the brand strength of Pague Menos is much higher than that of Extrafarma. And I don't know if you remember the chart, but there's a clear preference -- there's a clear preference towards Extrafarma in these states. So, we ran a lot of analyses and studies with these conversions, the performance in most of these stores is 40% higher then when compared with those that still keep the Extrafarma brand.
And we have other states where we're going to roll out these conversions in 2024. So these 44 stores will be converted by the end of December. So we will see the results of these conversions this year. And there are other states that are -- that we know very clearly that we will need to convert stores in other states, particularly Ciara, Marino, Parana, we know that Extrafarma, according to our study, Extrafarma is similarly strong. So for those states, this -- they will require more studies and more analysis before we can go for these conversions.
Next question is from Gustavo Senday.
Still talking about conversions, can you share some of the economics Vasquez showed during his presentation, the sales uplift, but can you show the 4-wall EBITDA margin of these converted stores and also your mid- to long-term prospects.
Do you see more stores with this potential for conversion? And the second point is about your leverage. I want to understand the levers that you mentioned in your release to look for some guidance for next year, what we can expect in terms of CapEx for new openings next year and monetization of the credits, as you talked about in your release. So these are my 2 questions.
Thank you, Gustavo. Well, in respect to the economics, Novais, can you share more?
The margin -- we already talked about the margin, but what other numbers can we expect from these conversions? This sales increment that we showed during our presentation. Since we improved the gross margin of these Extrafarma stores with the sales increment, we were able to reverse the situation of some stores that had a negative EBITDA and now have a positive EBITDA. And the total of the company, the total EBITDA margin, the 4-wall EBITDA is 5%, so 5% contribution margin.
So it's an evolution of at least 3 points of 400 points in our EBITDA margin in stores. And those with the brand conversion showed even higher increments. So that's why we're very positive with the 44 new rollouts--the 44 new conversions. And if they perform as well as the first conversions, we will study further conversion so that by the end of next year, we can have the same for all margin of Pague Menos which is 7.4%. This is our target. And about the deleveraging. This is a strong focus for us.
We work with health and the financial health of the company is also one of our goals. So in 2023, we reduced our guidance to 20 stores in the first half of the year. We have a guidance for 120 stores next year, which is still under analysis. We haven't really changed anything, but this is still under evaluation because we want to maintain a very healthy indebtedness level of 1.7, which is what we disclosed in the market.
And this requires improvements in our EBITDA improvements in our sales, in our margin, expense control and our CapEx, except for some corporate projects. A great part of the CapEx is in new openings. So this is still under analysis. The number of stores are still under analysis. That's why we haven't disclosed anything for 2024. The $1.7 million that we communicated for the end of next year, as Mario said, is operational generation, so continue to grow our EBITDA.
There's also room to improve the average payment term as we showed in our cash cycle. There's also options to monetize credit. We have been monetizing at a more -- at a faster pace this year, and we have projects to further increase these monetizations in the coming year. So these are the main levers. And 1.7, I would say, well, we could even go for a lower level, but that would be in the mid- to long term. So this is our focus right now, as we already said.
The next question is from Vitor Fuziharo, Santander.
We have 2 questions here at Santander. The first one is about the performance of your mature stores -- in this quarter and in quarter 2, the numbers are in line with what was expected. So how do you expect the same-store sales evolution for mature stores looking forward? And what are the drivers or the store productivity factors. And I want to know about the dynamics of your gross margin in quarter 3, particularly for Pague Menos Stand-alone. Can you give some color about what would be a stand-alone impact of medication price readjustment, digital channels and other factors that may have impacted your numbers?
Vitor, thank you for your questions. Novais, do you talk about the gross margin, please?
Yes, sure. So let me start with your second question, Vito. I would say that the 80 bps reduction in Pague Menos stand-alone. I think that 1 point comes from the increased share of our digital channels and the reduction in inflationary gains with a 20 bp reduction due to the improved performance in generics and private labels. So this is more or less the scenario. This year, we should have a considerably lower gross margin compared to last year.
So Pague Menos stand alone, it was 30.2% last year. But we have been able to neutralize this effect and even gain EBITDA margin with -- by reducing our expenses. Next year, just to give you some color, the level of price readjustment of drugs will be lower than this year, closer to 4%. So this will also be a challenge next year. But we have some levers that will allow us to improve our margin. Vasquez is now leading the commercial area. We have some opportunities in pricing, assortment and other levers that can help us improve our margins.
So it should be stable 24 compared with 23. About our mature stores, I don't know if as this is anything to add, but we are growing in line with the inflation rate -- but this is the floor that we should at least be in line with inflation in mature stores, but we have opportunities in digital channels, which are helping us increase our customer base. We still have opportunities. We are close to ideal levels in terms of stock out, but there is still room to improve our stock out levels. We have space to improve in assortment, private label and other levers -- so we will continue to work towards a higher growth level, but in line with inflation.
The question-and-answer session is now closed. And now I'd like to hand the conference back to Mr. Mario Queiros for his final remarks.
As you heard, one of the greatest highlights this quarter was the company's deleveraging. So we're focusing on the company's financial health, financial soundness. We brought the company's indebtedness to 2.4x the net debt over EBITDA ratio. It was a quarter where we saw record-breaking cash generation and very strict expense control.
We also showed that 1 year after the acquisition of Extrafarma, we can see our main KPIs, strong evolution and most of them reaching the same level of excellence of Pague Menos and the Extrafarma EBITDA went from a negative 2.5% to nearly 2.5% positive. And the synergy capture curve is in line with what was planned and expected, which points to better results in the future. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for attending, and we'll see you in the next quarter. Thank you.
Pague Menos conference call is now closed. Thank you all for attending, and have a great day.