Vivara Participacoes SA
BOVESPA:VIVA3
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
Vivara Participacoes SA
The company is consciously reducing the allocation of capital in raw materials based on inventory projections, which might affect suppliers due to the correlated relationship. This strategic adjustment points towards improved capital efficiency and inventory management.
For the latter part of 2023 and into 2024, a focus on greater internationalization of Life products, exceeding 50%, is stated with confidence. This shift is expected to handle tax impacts previously mentioned. Gross margins are anticipated to peak during high seasonality periods such as Black Friday, indicating a nonlinear financial performance throughout the year.
Expansion efforts in the coming year will see 40-45% of new store openings in the first half and around 55-60% in the second half, with most contracts already secured. This distribution is expected to accommodate the operational lead time of approximately 120-130 days for new stores and should contribute positively to the company’s growth narrative.
Monthly disclosures are highlighted as a significant transparency measure to help stakeholders understand ongoing business developments. It will also assist in assessing quarter-to-quarter evolution, particularly important in the face of tax reclassification and operational readjustments that could temporarily impact margins.
Marketing expenditures, highly aligned with seasonality, aren't projected to change significantly as a percentage of total gross revenue. Meanwhile, the company sees potential for administrative expense reduction, especially with newer operations maturing, signaling a proactive approach to improving operational efficiency.
The Life brand stores, particularly those without a Vivara presence, are highlighted as highly profitable opportunities with rapid returns on investment and fruitful negotiations with shopping malls, often resulting in beneficial rental terms. These stores' performances have exceeded expectations, maturing at a commendable rate.
Lower production has led to less tax benefit exploitation, but the company is poised to normalize these rates in 2024. They expect the effective tax rate to align more closely with the cash rate, smoothing out tax impacts and improving the visibility of operational results.
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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the video conference for the results for the fourth quarter and for fiscal year 2023, Vivara. The company will make its initial comments and analysis of financial performance, and then we will go on for questions and answers.
For those of you who need simultaneous translation, just click on the globe on the bottom of the screen and choose interpretation. You could listen to Portuguese or English. For those of you listening in English, you have the option to mute original audio. For those who are sell-side analysts, you are invited to take part in person. [Operator Instructions]. If your question is not responded during this video conference Investor Relations team will contact you later to answer your questions.
From Vivara, we have Mr. Otavio Lyra, Financial Director; and Melina Rodrigues, Director of Investor Relations. Mr. Otavio Lyra will now talk about Vivara's financial performance for the fourth quarter 2023 and fiscal year 2023.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome once again for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 results. Before we get going and before we dive down into the details, and it's very important that we pay close attention. This week begs that we make some comments. There was a change in command at the company. We understand perfectly that changes can bring concerns and people are always anxious and I have lots of questions when things like this happen. You and the market, those of you listening to us today are pushing for greater visibility and transparency. And that is why I have some important messages, some confirmation. I want to talk about some of the characteristics of our business that never change, what we have always shared with you in terms of corporate strategy through all of these years as a listed company.
We continue with our primary channels and avenues for 2024. I will now focus on this short term, obviously, but we expect 70 to 80 new store openings this year. We are expecting a year of market growth, market share growth, corporate growth. Life continues to grow extensively including greater revenue share and lots of growth moving forward.
We have a lot of work to internationalize life and the manufacturing plant. We went to a new plant last year, so we had to stop production at 2 different points and moved the plant. So we had to push some of the sales to outside the company, and that reduced a little bit our internationalization focus. It's a huge mission that we have for this year to decrease imports and to increase profitability, and this is still on our radar very much so.
Even with tax challenges, our business model allows us to grow and to gain in terms of profitability. Our competitive advantages have not changed, and they won't change moving forward, and we will continue to capitalize on this, both next year and for the years to come. We expect to generate a lot of operating cash in the next few years.
We showed -- posted excellent results in this regard, and I'll talk about this a little bit later as we go deep down into the fourth quarter and the fiscal year. But in 2024, we always saw that this is going to be a turning point or an inflection point. Intense years of investment, years of new systems, digital stores, heavy investments in general, we see that the business is sustainable strong basis, and this is going to sustain accelerated growth that we expect to see in the next few years.
This cash generation is not just good for cash flow but it was excellent in the final quarter, and it's going to be great for 2024, and it's going to allow for greater -- to take better advantage of our fiscal assets. We got a special tax regime for our credits -- tax credits in Sao Paulo with the ICMS taxes, and this was excellent for our retail business. This is significant. We're talking about BRL 90 million when this new tax regime was passed.
We've seen some material advantages already at the end of the year as a result of this, and this will continue to generate positive results in 2024. Not just to be able to take advantage of what we generated in credit in the past and what we're going to do in terms of that credit, but this is also just going to be better for the fiscal regime when it comes to purchasing gold.
The credit formation cycle will be reduced vis-a-vis what it was before. And this leads to improvements, not just for the results in 2024, but profits in filing results in following years as well.
Finally, I think it's important that we take a break here to talk about our push to internationalize, the company has always desired to expand abroad to exploit this potential with a strong brand with wonderful characteristics and traits from other businesses that were successful outside of Brazil. We have a -- we're a high-margin retail, which means that we can be a little bit more courageous and bold as we do this. And we're looking at the challenges, but we know that the strategy, we know that the strategy -- we know that we're facing challenges, but we can't not push forward and take advantage of this opportunity moving forward.
We want to be able to sustain a growth cycle for longer and may have to be stronger. And if we don't start now, we won't be able to do it in the time that we need. We won't be able to sustain the business in the time line that we need. Because of this acceleration, this growth acceleration that all arrow's point to. This is the right time.
Our very first tests, our very first pilots into these foreign markets, we're going to start with pilots this year, there's going to be no material change for capital allocation for the company, but this is the right number, and now I'd like to talk about the quarter results. Once again, I'd like to invite all of you to really pay attention to these numbers. I think that's what we deserve.
The situation is extremely interesting, and you can see a lot of these changes reflected in these results, as I already mentioned, I'll try to make quicker comments so that there's time for questions and answers. I'm sure you all have lots of questions and Melina and I are here to answer every single one of them. So I'm not going to go through the entire presentation. I'm sure you've all seen it. I'm sure you've all reviewed it.
For those of you who haven't, please review the results. You can really see, look through the release, you can see the trends not just for the quarter, but for the year and moving forward. But I'm just going to go over the main highlights and make sure I touch upon them before we go into questions and answers.
Let's look at 2023, not the quarter. Let's look at 2023. I'm going to start with Slide 4. Again, year 2023. This was the year of deliveries. Just like in years past, this is a year that merits celebration. We continue to implement systems and innovation throughout the company. Again, it was a year of major changes so that we could really sustain all of this growth, it was a year of stock adjustments, inventory turnover, and a year of resilience, and I will show you this throughout the presentation, but it's a year of records.
When we're celebrating these records, BRL 1 billion in sales in just 1 quarter, Life as a record product, and it still continues to grow and continues to grow because of the new store openings that we expect, but also because we saw excellent performance as well as excellent maturity in our portfolio of current stores, 71 store openings this year, record.
We can see that we're continuing to expand as we communicated to you all as we've already disclosed. And once again, solid deliveries in this regard. We were never as organized as last year in our deliveries. It's going to be yet another year of many, many store openings. We've got all our ducks in a row for the first time. We've seen these excellent opening numbers earlier than we expected earlier in the year than even planned. So that reduced some of the risk in the second half of the year, especially in the last quarter.
You don't want to be opening stores right at the end of the year, right, so want everything ready to go. We are -- all the stores are ready to go. They're open, excellent customer service. We're headed in the right direction to continue with this accelerated growth.
Diving down again into the numbers. This is a year of strong growth, extraordinarily strong growth and especially in retail. We expanded our share. We consolidated quickly and 2.2 additional share -- market share, and it's going to continue significantly growing in the jewelry -- Brazilian jewelry market.
We only see additional capitalization on top of these changes that we've already implemented. We've got a strong brand, an efficient industry with greater penetration than ever before as well as well-executed retail, well-controlled retail, BRL 2.8 billion in gross revenue with 21.2% growth, same-store sales 12.4% versus 2022, because of Life and the opening of the stores, and the more recent openings in just the last 24 months, but they're already part of the metrics here, but this is also because of Vivara's healthy growth in and of itself, especially in the fourth quarter.
We saw this wonderful expansion of same-store sales just in the fourth quarter. So this is the big driver of these numbers, wonderful strategies for product strategies. It's not just a quarter. It's previous quarters excellent execution, which has led to these wonderful results. This growth is driven primarily by customers. We had 70% more active clients here in the company, and when we talk about new customers, 30.4% new customers, over 70,000 new customers and even more just in the last quarter of this year.
This is the advantage that we have when we look at seasonality, we've established scalability over decades, and we noticed this in seasonality. That's where we have our largest investments, and we really stretch out. We really take advantage of this competitive advantage that we have already. And this is only going to be growing moving forward, and we did this in a year of change, in the year of turnover efficiency, cash generation, when we increased our EBITDA margin, a margin of about 29% of adjusted EBITDA margin of nearly BRL 480 million. a 19.6% increase vis-a-vis 2024, strong growth, strong heavy investments, significant development in the pillars that is going to sustain this growth moving forward, and nevertheless, significant resilience in company results.
There was a significant reduction in inventory turnover, 26 day reduction. So -- and we delivered on those expectations that we set. It was a historic year. We were able to deliver and better improve the deliveries over the last 5, 6 years. I think that this year was actually no different from years prior and in the third quarter we saw excellent growth.
We saw excellent -- the company's excellent ability to -- for cash generation in this company, which better allowed us to allocate capital for our business. Nevertheless, the fourth quarter does deserve that we take a real specific look at it. There were some characteristics and there were some impacts, we've described in our last earnings calls, and it makes it very clear when we look at just this fourth quarter here at the end of the year. As I see it, this shows us our true operating performance and how we need to look at it, especially in this very importantly seasonal period after adjustments and accounting adjustments, has been happening since second quarter last year, and it's still very important.
You've seen the numbers for the fourth quarter, 24% growth in gross revenue compared to the fourth quarter of '22. Greater profitability, increase in same-store sales, Black Friday continues, it was very important for us. This really brought in excellent sales for us. It was really a boon. As I see it, our operating data disclosures in January meant that the market had a lot of expectations vis-a-vis our results.
They even had -- they had a really high bar set even more than we had set, and yet we still saw 15% same-store sales, 70% gross margin, 22 new store opening in the fourth quarter alone and an addition of BRL 87.3 million in free cash generation, and if you look at the release, you can see even more detailed information regarding all of these numbers here.
I said I'm not going to go through all the results. But give me just 2 more minutes here to quickly talk about something very, very important. This is, again, year-long results, not just the quarter, but this is super important. This is Slide 6 which has some of our KPIs, and our financial highlights. Note the first 2 lines, gross revenue net of returns. Note here how gross revenue has grown, there's a difference between gross and net.
This is lower presumed credit and also some of the changes in the company. When we look at Manaus, and e-commerce, the BRL 32 million for the year, and this is part of the deductions in 2022, 2023, we're still feeling the effects this year. These 2 effects lead to a slight difference in growth rates and do affect the company's operating results, and should be taken into account when we look at true operating performance, and you see a net margin pressure because of the characteristics already mentioned, because the tax rate was adjusted, as I mentioned before.
I hope that best explains some of the most important things, and I'm now just going to open up now for question and answers. I'm sure you've all read everything you need to read, but I'd rather just answer the questions live. So we will now start with questions and answers.
[Operator Instructions]
First question from Luiz Guanais, sell-side BTG Pactual.
Good morning, Otavio, Melina. Two questions on my side. First, expenses. Could you just jump into that a little bit, give some more details in the release this did affect margins because there was accelerated store growth and openings. I'd like you to talk about that, so how can -- what do we expect for expenses, specifically for labor moving forward in 2024? Second question, could you also talk a bit about the credit, what can we expect, the tax credit? What can we expect moving forward?
I'll start, Melina feel free to jump in. Part of the expenses pressures because of some of the difficulties that I mentioned before, even when we account for those, there are some increased expenses due to sales expenses. And labor, as you mentioned, labor with sales is often due to reclassification because we reclassified some of these expenses, we better -- this happened in the second quarter, and we've been discussing this actually over the last few results.
There's also a pressure from new stores. We have a bigger number this year also because of our omnichannel, it grew much faster, much faster than some of the other channels, and this brings a lot of penetration for us. There's also pressure in this fourth quarter, not in the rest, because of the benefit adjustments.
To address turnover, retail turnover, we made some major adjustments for benefits for sales, and we will see some compensation in this regard moving forward. There were some other effects as well, expenses pressure, expenses on third parties, primarily as this push -- this greater push towards digital -- digitalizing, and technological improvements.
We have links to all the stores, more speed when they do check out with, and there's obviously a consequence of this because it requires heavy investment, and also a little bit of store maintenance. So I think these were some of the main factors, and what can we expect moving forward? Part of these expenses for sales. We're going to continue to see them as in the business as we expand, the pace of expansion is going to continue throughout 2024. A lot of stores are still maturing, and we expect that to continue to benefit, adjustments that happened in November, and so this will be -- we'll see the effect of that this year, and we're normalizing some of the other impacts.
Omni is huge. I doubt it's going to be as equivalent in 2024, and we'll be able to smooth out some of the other effects. Again, there's the maturity of certain stores as well, and there's new scale, and now that we better understand how life functions, we have a better understanding of stores. So we do expect pressures in 2024, but nothing too exaggerated.
The presumed tax credit is very important as it was in 2023. We've been able to allocate capital, including -- especially for finished products across the company, working capital in general. Life is still rather new in a year that didn't have any -- or that's not going to have any changes in the plant, we're going to be able to offset some of these.
The meaning is that the plant despite the fact that we're going to move abroad with Life product, relatively speaking, we're still getting nonfavorable presumed tax credits vis-a-vis 2023. Now that doesn't mean that it's going to be of a great magnitude, and we had some excellent profitability, and wonderful opportunities also to review price, and then now that we have 2 -- 1 factory, not 2, things should be a little bit easier.
Gross margin, for example, we expect more gains moving forward specifically in '24, but we do expect that this presumed tax credit may affect profitability moving forward.
Next question from Victor Rogatis, sell-side analyst, Itau BBA.
I want to talk about gross margin. You just talked about the presumed tax credit. What about a decrease and increase in deductions with the ICMS tax in a lot of states throughout Brazil and the PIS/COFINS tax. That's my first question. If you could talk a little bit more about this tax, and then working capital, you said that it's going to affect stock, but not just in stock or inventories, but how should suppliers perform or what should suppliers be doing, can you just talk about both of those subjects?
The first point, in 2024, we do expect a slight gap, and there's still going to be some pressure on certain line items, we're going to continue to see this pressure. This is due against that presumed tax credit. In terms of expenses, we know for sale, this is going to affect gross revenue, not net revenue, but you know this already, this is nothing new. This pressure, we will still see it. But in '23, we looked at our fixed expenses and labor and looked for savings across the board.
The idea, as I mentioned early on is that despite these increases and these adjustments and these state tax adjustments, we can use this to our advantage, and we still expect a year of expansion, market consolidations, where we still be able to preserve our operating results, and our margins regardless of some of these tax changes. That's our objective for 2024.
Our business model allows us not to deliver on profitability despite these challenges. Well, we have to ensure this profitability unlike other sectors is not just repass, but is the internationalization of Life. And I think that few other companies have this to their advantage. So whether it's a credit or ICMS taxes or whatever it is, we still expect a year where we expect growth -- operating growth because of how we position ourselves, and you asked something about working capital, right.
I think we have a few advantages right now. When it comes to inventory, number one, expansion, Life is lighter when it comes to this regard, most of the 80 stores that we opened this year are Life. I think 80% are Life stores. So naturally, over the last 2 years that Life has been part of our business, this is going to lead to greater turnover and greater efficiencies. So we're going to see a reduction of cycle which we expect moving forward, and this is going to be positive for all of our metrics. Occasional coverage, reduction in gold jewelry, we believe in our potential to reach the same efficiency metrics that we -- in 2024 that we showed for 2023. We're not reducing coverage linearly. I think it was quite clear that over the year that we saw different cycles of investment in inventory over the years in the company. And we saw a very positive effect of this investment in Vivara, this investment for Vivara was excellent. It was very concentrated in gold inventory. We took advantage of this opportunity at a time where gold has doubled in value since 2019, and so now we're able to see a significant advance, we were a bit more cautious back in 2019, 2020.
So we're looking at all the bets that we placed over the last few years and advantages that we've -- opportunities that we've taken advantage. Obviously, we didn't -- not all of the bets were the right bets. Sometimes raw materials are an issue, fleets are an issue. Since the beginning of last year, we started to focus on this and reorganized so that we could be more efficient in our jewelry inventory. We see some benefits there.
We do expect some benefits this year, and suppliers are here to help us with this inventory reduction because this is some of -- this actually leads to a reduction in some of our agreed suppliers. We have longer terms with them. Sometimes it's 90 days, 120 days. So as we reduce allocation of capital in raw materials, because of the inventory projections we have moving forward, this will affect our suppliers. So this is an effect that it is completely correlated effect.
Good point, Melina. Over 2023, where we saw a slight reduction in this line, we concentrated on raw material in the second half of the year just before that Manaus shift, and then in December, we changed the gold line to the other factories, so purchases in the third quarter were even less than normal.
So again, a lot of these agreements were even less important, as Melina mentioned, these agreements with suppliers, with third-party suppliers.
Next question from Eric Huang, sell-side analyst Santander.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. Gross margin, what about this curve for internationalization of Life in 2024? What are the challenges? What should we be looking at as this plays out? And second question, looking at expansion, you mentioned this earlier, you expect expansion to be better distributed over the course of the year. I think it was in the release when you saw the number of openings. I don't remember how many store openings it was.
But anyway, but I want to understand what you mean by being more distributed. What do we expect in this regard? And you saw the weight of some of these expenses. And we saw a little bit of an impact in the fourth quarter because of labor expenses. Is this to be better distributed throughout the year. So when we look at the evolution of the margin, should it be a little more gradual, like how does it all fit together over 2024?
I'm going to talk about the internationalization late 2023, 40% internalization of Life, 40% came from our factory due to the transition. We expect this year and to deal with these tax impacts that we mentioned before, we expect to go up higher than 50-ish percent, which is what we said before.
This effect when we look at time line over the year, production is generally linear, we have specific amounts that we produce generally each month, but the effect in sales is -- depends on seasonality. And this -- obviously, this affects the 2 quarters with the greatest seasonality, second and fourth quarter.
But we look at volume produced all every year. We have our own time line here, lead time for production. We know what's going on every single day. We're looking at this every single day, to identify how this production and the product is going to be delivered, and what are the effects, delivery of new products, internalization of products. Well, we can -- what we expect, we've got early in the year that we've got Black Friday later in the year. We see greater margin in some -- in these 2 particular periods, expansion, Otavio, you want to talk about expansion, okay. When we look at expansion, we had a lot more in the first half of the year.
Again, we should this year, see 40% to 45% new store openings in the first half of the year and about 55-ish, 60% in the second half of the year. It takes about 120 to 130 days to get a store up and running, so it's natural that this takes a little bit longer, but we have a lot of contracts ready to go, signed, 80% of them have already been signed, and we've got this all set up on the time line, 45% of these openings should be in the first -- first half of the year.
I think the good thing -- the good news is that, again, we've got these disclosures every month. We disclose the numbers every single month. So you follow the first 2 months, you already understand, we're already 2, 3 months in. So you already know what's going to be happening with this quarter. You're already familiar with what's going on, the team is very well, did a very good job when they mapped out these contracts, and they mapped out opportunities as well, and they did an excellent job in that regard.
But we're ready to get everything up and ready and ready for the seasonality that Melina mentioned. You asked for trends in terms of expenses and trend and the pressures. In the following -- in this first quarter of the year, we are still seeing the effects of the tax reclassification and the line item reclassification.
Sadly, I have to say this again, but we have the same base, starting with the second quarter, it's going to be a lot easier. It's going to make it much more visible, much easier to understand. In the first quarter, the reclassifications affected the margin, millions of reals, so we need to look at this separately, and we're going to continue disclosing this information so that you can understand the impact, the true impact. The same thing is also going to happen with expenses, so they don't go on for too long. Please pay attention to the first quarter because it's going to require a more detailed review because of the readjustments, operating readjustments this past year. But again, we're looking to better show better or -- ensure better understanding and comprehension of our results. We want to be more consistent when we explain our results. So following the second quarter of the year, as of the second quarter of the year, it should be a lot clearer.
Next question is from Vinicius Strano, sell-side analyst, UBS.
Otavio and Melina. Thank you for the question. Our marketing expenses here, could you please give us some more details, where were your marketing expenses will be and expenses in general, could you just talk a little bit more about them, are there any other sources for more efficiencies to compensate for these larger labor expenses that you mentioned because of some of the adjustments that you mentioned.
And in terms of stores, Light, if you could talk a little bit about the performance of Life stores in shopping malls where there's no Vivara stores. And also a little bit about tax benefit. How can we exploit this, how can this be positive for us in terms of taxes.
Marketing expenses is one of the expenses that we pilot more, moving forward we don't expect this to change significantly as a percentage of our gross revenue. So there's obviously a little bit more marketing or less marketing depending on seasonality, and it will affect results. But it's generally -- it generally goes according to seasonality.
Where we see leverage to decrease some of our expenses in administrative, there was some -- because of the expansion, there was a lot of expenses, operating expenses. We had to mature some of the stores, but we do expect to see a reduction, a greater reduction in the short term, because that's where we see a bit of a leverage for operating Life where we don't have Vivara. We have 7 stores where that's the case.
These type of stores are great opportunities, these contracts include some extra special benefits with the shopping malls. Sometimes you get extra time with lower costs, et cetera, lower rents, and it's really positive. So this is excellent. It's even better than what we had projected for these particular stores, they mature faster -- a little bit slower because Life tends to -- because they depend on Vivara, but they're very profitable.
They are maturing as expected, and there is significant return on investment vis-a-vis what we expect from the shopping malls. A lot of them have excellent results. For '24 we have a few more stores that we expect to fit this category, which is Life stores where we don't have Vivara stores. And again, it tends to be places where we do have slightly slower revenue.
What was your last question? Exploitation income. The factory explains us revenue vis-a-vis income. All of the effects that we've seen can be explained by lower production, and that means lower exploitation because it depends on our factory. So when we change the results things are affected, new change.
You have a different tax effects on the subsidiary versus the main store. So this is obviously going to affect the main company. So this is going to affect us. So in 2023, this is because of lower production in Conipa and less effect of Conipa throughout the year. But now for 2024, we're going to still normalize this effective rate. It's not the effective rate normal effective rate for the company. There is a 10 for this to be the cash rate, and this is going to play out throughout the year and this is going to expect operations throughout the year -- results from operations throughout the year. I hope I answered your question.
Question-and-answer period is now drawing to close, the remaining questions will be answered by Investor Relations team from Vivara.
Thank you very much, and have a wonderful day.
Thank you, everybody, and have a wonderful day. We're here to answer any questions you may have. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]