Falabella SA

SGO:FALABELLA

Earnings Call Transcript

[Operator]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Falabella earnings call. My name is Gigi, and I will be your coordinator for today. [Operator Instructions]

In the first part, Mr. Juan-Luis Carrasco, Head of Investor Relations, will present a summary of the consolidated results for the first quarter of 2021. Following this, Mr. Gaston Bottazzini, Chief Executive Officer, will share some highlights on the performance of the company. [Operator Instructions]

Now we'll start with the conference with Mr. Juan-Luis Carrasco.

[Juan-Luis Carrasco, executive]

Thank you, Gigi. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Falabella's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. Joining me on today's call are Gaston Bottazzini, our Chief Executive Officer; Alejandro Gonzalez, our Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Ashish Grover, our Chief Information Officer. I would like to remind you that numbers presented during the call will be stated in U.S. dollars and rounded to millions. Therefore, certain differences may arise with the published financial statements.

I will start the call by going over the key financial highlights of the period. Let us begin with Slide 4 to go over the results for the period. During the first quarter of 2021, the company's consolidated revenue reached $3,435 million, an increase of 10.7% year-over-year. This increase is mainly explained by the increase in revenue from the retail businesses in the region and partially offset by lower revenue from the banking and shopping center businesses.

The retail formats in Chile stand out: department stores with a 42% increase, home improvement with 38% growth and supermarkets with 20%. Banking business registered a 25.6% drop in revenue mainly explained by the 18% year-over-year contraction of the loan portfolio, generating lower revenue from interest and readjustments. The drop in shopping center revenue is explained by lower rental charges related to the nonoperated leasable area due to the prevailing sanitary restrictions resulting from the pandemic. Online sales across the region grew 142% on an FX-neutral basis, reaching $3.8 billion over the last 12 months.

Gross profit reached $1,239 million in the first quarter, increasing 17.5% year-over-year. This is mainly explained by higher contributions from home improvement in Chile, attributable to the increase in sales and improvement of over 200 basis points in margins. Department stores in Chile also increased and supermarkets as well as a result of the growth in sales and improvements in margins across the board. The higher margin in Chilean banking operations also contributed, explained by lower risk cost. The previous was partially offset by lower contributions from banking operations in Peru and lower contributions from the real estate business.

Moving on to the next slide. EBITDA reached $488 million during the quarter, representing an increase of 66.5% year-over-year, expanding margins over 400 points, mainly explained by greater contributions from the retail operations in Chile and from the banking businesses in that country as well. And it was partially offset by lower contributions from real estate business and banking operations in Colombia and Peru.

Net income reached $190 million during the first quarter, explained by higher contributions from profit home improvement in Chile, Banco Falabella in Chile and department stores in Chile as well. The latter was partially offset by losses in the real estate business and the banking businesses in Colombia and Peru.

I will now turn the call over to Gaston.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us. So in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to navigate a volatile situation in the region. Still in that context, we are very grateful and proud of how the team is confronting the situation in every part of the region and keeping operations as normal as possible. In that context, we have to report very strong performance that mostly is a result of the increased sales as we are reopening stores when this is happening with low cannibalization of our online sales.

Sodimac has been a very important engine of growth in this context, with very good levels of demand throughout the region and very healthy inventory levels. At the same time, risk levels in Banco Falabella Chile in particular were also very stable in part as a result of the extractions from pension funds. And lastly, we have also been able to capture many of the efficiencies and efforts that were made throughout 2020 to cut costs throughout the operation and centralize some of the services. All of these positive trends were partially offset mostly by our real estate business that continues to offer discounts to tenants that cannot have their stores open and also by some of the write-offs that we have to make as we close some of our stores in Argentina.

Beyond the short-term results, we continue to be very focused on the development and construction of our platforms for growth. In e-commerce, we are very happy to report a growth year-over-year of 142% of the combined marketplace and retail operation, totaling $3.8 billion in the last 12 months. In this business, we continue to work on the consolidation of all of our e-commerce and marketplace offerings under the umbrella of falabella.com, and that's going to be happening throughout the year. As a matter of fact, we are already consolidating assortment under falabella.com, and we will increasingly be doing that during the coming months.

In logistics, we have tripled the number of orders from a year ago to about 6 million orders, and we are happy to report that our service levels have improved substantially. In Chile, which was our more challenging situation about a year ago, we have been able to offer about 60% of our shipments in less than 48 hours and remain committed to putting that number beyond 70% by the end of the year.

In digital banking, we also have made substantial progress, and we can report in this first quarter that we opened 145,000 fully digital cards, which is 5x what we had opened in 2020. Also, about 50% of our loan origination is taking place digitally. Looking forward, we are launching our 100% digital account opening for current accounts as well as the 100% digital debit cards. As a result of this digitalization, we're also making some reductions in our branch network with about a 24% reduction over 12 months.

In payments, our other important engine for growth, we can report TPV of $2.8 billion in the last 12 months. And also, the good news is a good portion of the customers that are participating in Fpay are not from our cardholder base but from third-party issuers. About 33% of those customers are from third-party issuers, which gives us more visibility of customers throughout our network. Also going forward, we are launching our first POS -- fully internally developed POS, which is going to be enabled by Fpay.

In loyalty, we have reached about 11 million customers participating in the program, which is a 70% increase from where we were about a year ago, and that's giving us a lot more visibility into customer behavior throughout our ecosystem. We went from about 35%, 40% to about 70% visibility of transactions and ability to identify those transactions with actual customers throughout our ecosystem. And going forward, we're working on improving the ease of redemption as a result of that -- and mostly digital redemption and as a result of that, improving the customer engagement in our loyalty program.

In summary, we are very encouraged by the results of this first quarter. We remain very committed to the investments and the cultural transformation that needs to take place in order to build a physical and digital ecosystem and in order to build long-term and lasting relationships with our customers. Thank you.

[Juan-Luis Carrasco, executive]

Gigi, we can now open the line for Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Carolina Ratto from CrediCorp Capital.

[Carolina Ratto Mallie, analyst]

Congratulations on the results. I just wanted to ask you 2 things. The first one will be what are the main challenges around the digital transformation? And the second one will be, what have you achieved so far for integrating the e-commerce platform?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

So thank you, Carolina, for your question. So I will start to answer the end of your question, and then I will pass on to Ashish who will talk more about the digital and the technological aspect of it.

But in terms of the consolidation of all of our offer under falabella.com, as I said, this is an ongoing process. We started consolidating product from -- Sodimac product from both our internal and third-party sellers within falabella.com, and that's going to continue to happen over the next 4, 5 months. And that's when we think that transition is going to be complete in terms of assortment. At the same time, we are also already working under single logistics, our home delivery organization for the whole group, which is also part of making this falabella.com value proposition consistent regardless of what kind of category or format people are buying from.

So Ashish, please, if you can help me more with the technological aspect of this question.

[Ashish Grover, executive]

Sure. Thank you for the question. So from a technology perspective, actually, we started the journey a few years back to make sure we are modernizing some of our legacy systems of e-commerce. And thanks to that, when we saw this unprecedented growth in e-commerce, we were able to handle it with a lot of stability and, in fact, much better conversion rates. So we have actually moved out of our legacy systems of monolithic to more proprietary code, which we nicknamed [ Catalyst ] program, and we put a lot of our catalog and search engines and promotion and checkout process on there. Now with that foundation, it became much easier for us to start consolidating our offerings from multiple retail formats into single falabella.com channel. So we have been focused on that, and you will see that coming up very soon.

We have also been very, very focused on making a very frictionless payment process through Fpay and integrating with that. And also, as a result of all the foundational work and what we have done, we have increased our speed to market. I mean what we used to launch some feature in production once or twice a week, we are able to do 20 to 30 releases a day, 50x more times because of the technological changes we have been doing and we have been very focused on.

On logistics, we launched on-demand platform of Fazil, which is also going to add more capabilities. On marketplace, we have also enabled much smoother platform for our sellers and which will allow us to give a lot more value-added services, whether it is on the financial services or on the other analytical services to our sellers. So this is what has been happening on the e-commerce platform.

And your first part of the question was what are the challenges on the digital transformation. Is that right?

[Carolina Ratto Mallie, analyst]

Yes, that's right. What are the main challenges today?

[Ashish Grover, executive]

Sure. So I'll answer it more from a technology perspective of how I've been focusing on it. For me, one of the biggest challenges I've been trying to address is a very fine balance between how do you improve current customer pain points and improve current experiences with a set of systems that we already have and some of them are legacy; while doing that, how do you also modernize these systems to latest technology stack and make them cloud-native and highly scalable. So that is always a very fine balance.

I think the other part is how do you make sure our business and commercial teams get closer to our developers in a true hybrid and agile team model, which are kind of organized through customer journeys. And lastly, like everybody else, attracting new talent and upskilling current talent is always a most important priority and a challenge of any digital transformation we all are going through.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Emilio Acevedo from Santander.

[Emilio Acevedo Caro, analyst]

A question for Ashish. And particularly, I would like to have more -- if you can provide us with a high-level overview of development road map for the future.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Yes. So go ahead, Ashish.

[Ashish Grover, executive]

Sure, sure. So from the future perspective, there are 3, I would say, core platforms which are our engines of growth for Falabella, and I think Gaston did allude to them. So one is the payment part of it, Fpay, which we have launched, and how do we enhance its penetration and how do we make it a frictionless process in all of our physical and digital journeys.

The second growth engine that we are working on is the logistics. We have done good part of it. Because of which, you saw the number of 60% within 48 hours, but there is still a lot more work we need to do and provide more capabilities to be a lot more efficient and faster. So that's the second growth engine.

The third growth engine which we have been very, very focused on from a technology perspective is our marketplace. You already saw our marketplace penetration is pretty high and it's increasing. So how do we make sure the seller experience and the product experiences on the sites is smooth? We can have a bigger catalog, better customer service. At the same time, how do we provide more services to our seller side through a platform-centric approach?

While these are the 3 growth engines we are working on, we are also very focused on making -- strengthening our e-commerce experience, making it more personal; and also our digital banking experiences. And finally, we are very focused on the mobile app and how do we make more omnichannel experiences where we can use mobile app and more in-store experiences. Gaston kind of talked about the new digital POS that we are building. We have actually the first MVP already done, and we're going to launch it in Sodimac stores soon. And we're going to then start expanding it to other retail formats and countries and also the services part of marketplace that I already mentioned. So these are few of the top priorities we all are focused on.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Ruben from Morgan Stanley.

[Andrew Ruben, analyst]

And I appreciate all the color so far. My question's on Fpay. So it seems like you're continuing to make good progress on TPV. I'm curious if you can provide a bit more color on the rollout, specifically the plans to expand more off-platform with third-party retailers. Any sense of kind of the off-us split today and what the vision is there would be greatly appreciated.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Andrew, for your questions. So I -- in terms of the development of Fpay, we'll look at it as a set of layers that we build one on top of another. And the first layer and our main focus today is the on-us volume and making Fpay a very robust checkout for all transactions, both in our e-commerce platform and in our stores, right? And once we have that very positive experience, grow our customer base based on that, meaning the people who actually use the wallet. And the main source or the main selling point in terms of building an on-them base is basically that good experience and the customer base that you bring. That's why our -- that's our first focus.

Having said that, we are building alliances with third-party sellers. And in particular, we're focused on those that already work with us in the loyalty program as well as a set of smaller sellers just to try the solution and improve it. One example of those larger sellers is Ahumada, which is a pharmacy chain in Chile that we're working with, and that is a very good partnership in terms of allowing us to bring in a very high frequency retailer that already works with us in other aspects of the business and tailor the solution to a third party or to an on-them retailer. But as I said, this is the -- we are just piloting and testing and improving in order to make a more aggressive launch later in terms of third party.

In terms of the behavior of our actual customers, which I think was your second question, I think what we can see today is that the customers that have the Fpay solution and are active users of it have about 3x more visits and spending in our physical and digital channels. In general, they are a younger audience within our customer base. And I think the other good news is that about 1/3 of those users are not part of our cardholder base, and therefore, we are bringing younger people that maybe are customers of other banks, other financial institutions, that are adopting this solution as part of their suite of products.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Irma Sgarz from Goldman Sachs.

[Irma Sgarz, analyst]

I have a couple of follow-up questions. What do you see in terms of inflationary pressures across both product COGS as well as on the logistics side? And do you see room to pass it through to either your customers or offset it with -- either with mix shift and other efficiencies?

And then second question, in terms of the Fazil app or Fazil app, when should it reach breakeven? Correct me if I'm wrong, if it has already reached breakeven. I don't think so, but I'm not entirely sure how you sort of allocate the costs. And is it where you imagined it would be at this point in terms of scale? Or what do you think is sort of still -- sort of what are the puts and takes?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Irma, thank you for your question. I will let Alejandro take the first part of the question about cost pressures, and then I will talk a little bit more about Fazil.

[Alejandro Dale, executive]

Thank you, Irma, for your question. Related to product costs, we've seen some upward pressure across certain categories facing, I would say, major imbalance between supply and demand. We have the case that some producers have not been able to keep up with the demand growth, and this is seen more often across home improvement categories, which is similar to what we experienced during the fourth quarter last year.

Related to international logistics, I would say we have seen an upward pressure on freight prices, and this specifically has impacted us in some capacity and delays in specific routes. But this, in our view, is certainly on a path to recovery. Now given the strong demand that we've seen from customers, for example, in the case of home improvement, we have seen increased oversupply. And we continue to see this -- on one hand, this pressure on demand. But on the other hand, we see, I would say, some -- as I said before, some restriction on the supply of products that we can have.

So to your point and what we've seen during this quarter, we have been able to see some of this but not to the point in which it has reached the level not to pass this on to consumers. But this is something that we're certainly monitoring, but we're not expecting something that -- I mean, particularly, if you see the behavior that different currencies have had specifically in Chile, also supported by the copper price that we've seen, there has been some balance. So we haven't seen that much of inflationary pressures in Chile, in Peru and Colombia, but that's something that may have some reaction in the coming year.

Now to the question of Fazil, I will allow Gaston to take it.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Alejandro. So the objective of Fazil, I would describe it as being the on delivery -- or on-demand delivery engine for the group. So obviously, the first category where on-demand delivery is very relevant from the ones we offer as a group is grocery, and that's where we put the initial focus. But over time, Fazil is also becoming the express delivery for certain sets of products within Sodimac and within Falabella like, for example, beauty products or products that are more prone to be required in a period of, say, 90 minutes or so in a customer's home.

So it's an app or a solution that we'll be expanding over time and then eventually get to third parties. And it's integrating through open APIs with all of these different sellers. And today, you already have some assortment of Falabella and Sodimac product within Fazil.

Having said that, where it is today, which is at around 60,000 monthly orders in Peru and around 30,000 monthly orders in Chile, is actually on the -- I would say, on the optimistic side of our expectations in the sense that in particular in Peru, we think it's gaining a lot of traction. But also, this is driven, to a large degree, through the restrictions in mobility that have taken place both in Peru and to a certain degree, in Chile.

The positive side we see in particular in Chile is that it is becoming a mechanism for customer acquisition, given our low market share here. And in Chile -- in Peru, it's becoming a very important driver of sales. So today, we're much more focused on growth than on breakeven. The problem with the on delivery (sic) [ on-demand delivery ] solutions is the combination of the cost of picking and the cost of delivery and the critical mass you need to reach and the efficiency particularly in picking that, that critical mass allows you when you are able to basically build gray stores or dark stores that support this and therefore, give you a lot more efficiency. And also, you gain a lot of density and proximity in the route for delivery and the ability to deliver more than 1 order per delivery.

All of that is happening gradually. We don't really -- I wouldn't like to commit to a point of breakeven. It is not in breakeven today, but I'd say it's probably in the 2- to 3-year horizon where we would see that.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Antonio Hernández from Barclays.

[Antonio Hernández Vélez Leija, analyst]

Congrats on the results. Well, actually, 2 questions. The first one, in Chile, you performed very well. You got some of the tailwinds from the consumer environment, the withdrawal of pension funds that you mentioned earlier and all the healthy consumer environment. Where are you looking ahead? And maybe if you could tell us a little bit of what have you seen during the last couple of weeks or what are your expectations ahead.

And the follow-up would be on the rentals of shopping centers that have been -- that have decreased. Are you seeing a rebound on that? Or what are your expectations? How are your occupancy levels?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Andrew, for -- I'm sorry, Antonio, I'm sorry. Thank you, Antonio, for your question. So in terms of the good consumption dynamic that we had in the first quarter and how we see it going forward, the first part of the second quarter was actually more complex and difficult in terms of mobility restrictions. As, particularly in Chile, COVID vaccination increases, we are seeing a return to store openings and a lot more consumption. So we are actually quite optimistic.

Also, in terms of the impact of these pension fund disbursements, there is a third one coming. But beyond that, what we see -- what we have seen particularly in the first 2 disbursements is that about 1/3 of that goes to consumption but 2/3 remain in other types of savings. But what we see also is a lot of postponed expenditure. So in that sense, we are continuing to see strong demand particularly in home improvement but also in all other categories for the products.

And something very promising that we see also is that we -- as we open stores, we are being able to expand sales at the stores, and that, as I said before, is not cannibalizing the online sales. And in part, that has to do with the fact that a relevant proportion of online customers are newly acquired customers that are pure online customers. So that's -- those are at least 2 or 3 indicators that we -- that make us be optimistic for the, at least, short to medium term.

Regarding your question about shopping malls, the decrease in the rent income has mostly to do with discounts that we are giving to the tenants as a result of their inability to open or closures of some areas, some comunas in Chile, et cetera. However, occupancy has decreased by about 1%, which we don't see as something very relevant. And we have been able to renew contracts in the last few months for about 5% of the total GLA, which is also quite promising.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Nicolas Larrain from JPMorgan.

[Nicolas Larrain, analyst]

I had 2 questions, Gaston. First on trends. Looking at April, how are you seeing trends in Chile and in Peru maybe compared versus the highs in first quarter? Are you seeing acceleration, deceleration? If you could comment on that, please.

And also specifically in Chile, how are you seeing the inventory levels in the industry? It appears that because of the heightened demand, inventory appears to be low. But I wanted to understand what's your take on that improvement in department stores.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Nicolas, for your question. So in terms of how we -- post Q1, the consumption dynamic on the early part of April was actually lower just because we had more restrictions particularly in Chile, but also some more in Colombia. So in general, we've had an April that was -- that shows lower demand. And as we start opening again, we're starting to see that rebound. But in Peru and Colombia, I would say, in general terms, it remains flatter. It has been less volatile but flatter at a lower level.

And in terms of inventories, I would say, in general, we are in a very healthy position, if by healthy you mean we don't have excess inventories. In the case of home improvement in particular, and that refers to some of the problems that Irma was referring to in her question about availability of containers and other restrictions, actually, in home improvement, we are at lower inventory levels than we would like to be. And we see that coming to normal in the next few months. Actually, it's going to take a while to rebuild that inventory level in home improvement.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Rodrigo Echagaray from Scotiabank.

[Rodrigo Echagaray, analyst]

Thanks for the color on the delivery and the progress. Congrats on that. And on the back of that, I wanted to ask for some color on delivery in general. I guess 3 questions.

What changes allow you to deliver faster, especially in Chile? Also, if you can share any updates on free shipping initiatives and if you can also address trends overall in your shipping costs. And how do you see the percentage of total deliveries going forward? How much do you expect to ship from store versus from cross-docking versus large distribution centers? Any color on this will be greatly appreciated.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Rodrigo, for the question. So your first question is around what -- how we managed to improve the service levels in deliveries. And the reality is a very long list of initiatives. If I had to single out the most relevant ones, they have to do with increasing the capacity in some of the areas that were bottlenecks in our process. Probably the most relevant one is picking. We really improved the picking -- not picking, I'm sorry, packing. The packing process was really improved.

Another important improvement was the integration and the communication with sellers and giving sellers the tools to react faster and contact and deliver to the 3PLs faster in the case that we're using 3PLs and really a very long list of improvements around increasing capacity; increasing traceability; increasing certainty of delivery, so making sure that once we think something has been delivered, it actually has been delivered and getting customer confirmation of that and confirming to the customer as well. So a lot having to do with interaction with the seller, increasing our capacity and interaction with the customer.

In terms of the different mechanisms that we see going forward, we are really using, from the ones you've listed, all of the above. I'd say some of the more important changes or more structural changes that we're making is -- one is the construction of transfer centers. So instead of delivering from each one of our distribution centers, having transfer centers where we consolidate orders from different formats and from sellers, and that allows us to have a consolidated last mile. So we are in the process of building, throughout the region, a few tens of those transfer centers that will allow us to be more local and consolidate orders for the last mile.

Another important development that we're doing is developing technology to give the sellers, which actually is one important part and one where we have more volatility of service, giving the tools to them to have a -- and we're calling it [ Falabella Flex ], the ability for them to manage the delivery when they are close to the customer themselves or when they want to offer a better service but allow us to have visibility of how they're doing it.

I think a third one, and Ashish was referring to that in his description, has to do with building more modular solutions and decommissioning some of our legacy order management systems and tracking systems, et cetera. So we have a very important list of systems to be decommissioned over the next 12 to 18 months, which will be replaced by more modular, cloud-based and more modern stack solutions that will allow us better integration to our inventories, et cetera, integration to the sellers and visibility to the customer.

[Rodrigo Echagaray, analyst]

That's very useful. And so if I understand correctly, the pain points or the biggest challenges that you've had in the last few months were on -- with regards to the sellers and the 3P logistics. That was the most difficult part of the logistics puzzle in the last few quarters. Would that be fair to say?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

No, I would say that is one of the pain points. I think another of the pain points -- particularly last year when we had a lot of uncertainty of people being able to go to the -- for example, go to the distribution centers or whether we would have enough trucks showing up in the distribution centers, so I would say in the middle of last year, an important problem we had was overall capacity, both from the point of view of human resources and from the point of view of transportation resources. And we -- I think we worked on that problem a lot faster last year, and that is what made the 3P or the seller processes more of a challenge in the later part of last year.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Augusto Uribe from AIG.

[Augusto Uribe, analyst]

I have just a couple of quick questions. You still have a large balance of cash in your balance sheet. Do you think that will reduce over the course of 2021 or 2022? And do you have any comfortable cash level for operating needs?

And the second question has to do as well with cash burn. I think for some part of 2020, you were burning cash. And can you clarify if that is still the case? Or have you reached sort of a breakeven point or generating positive free cash flow?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

So Alejandro will answer your question, Augusto. Thank you.

[Alejandro Dale, executive]

Thank you, Augusto. I didn't clearly get the second part of the question, but let me address the first one and then you can probably rephrase that one. We -- you're absolutely right. We were actually holding today a little over $1 billion in cash. This was certainly built on a safety, I would say, strategy that we had without realizing how harsh it was going to be, the pandemic. We built this level of cash before the end of first quarter last year. That's why you don't see so much difference between the cash levels of last year and this one.

That said, we're certainly planning to basically start using that level because we're seeing a strong recovery on the different business, which is, by the way, what's presented in the financials that we have. And that is consistent also with the level of leverage that we're presenting. So as the different businesses have been able to strongly recover, we're certainly -- we will certainly start to deploy that cash in the coming quarters.

And to your question whether we have or not a safety cash level in our mind, let me tell you that basically, on every single month, given the nature of our retail business, usually, we handle in the range of, I don't know, $250 million, $300 million. So we think that's a level in which -- we've been obviously living with that level, and I would say the anomaly of last year is basically what made us build this incremental level of cash.

But we don't foresee -- it's sad that the pandemic has not ended yet, and certainly, we are basically in a moment in which it's relatively hard to forecast what the future is going to look like. Given the recovery -- the strong recovery that we've seen from the different businesses in all the countries in which we operate, we'll certainly -- in a timely manner, we'll go back to the level of cash that we had before.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Franco Dominichetti from Banchile.

[Franco Dominichetti, analyst]

I just wanted to ask you regarding the 3P and the marketplace. We have seen that since the second Q on 2020, you had a huge acceleration. And then you have stability level of about USD 200 million, USD 200-something million. But if we see between the first quarter and the fourth quarter, the acceleration quarter-over-quarter is lower than the one you had on 2020 related to 2019.

And I want to understand, looking forward, given the level of engagement of new sellers and new SKUs, what are you seeing like the pace you're going to keep growing in this category? And if you could comment a bit on your expectation of relevance regarding your wholesale of this business, the marketplace specific.

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Thank you, Franco, for your question. I think you're right, in the later months, particularly in 4Q and first Q, if you look at the growth of our 3P relative to our 1P, it wasn't as high as it had previously been. This is a result of several factors. One of them is that we're already comparing with a very high growth from the previous year, and actually, the 3P grew very fast in the first Q of last year.

Another reason is that as we are consolidating everything under falabella.com. We have been slowing down in seller uploads -- or in the sign-up of sellers and -- until we put together all of the improvements and have a more robust platform for them to join. So that goes also to your question about our forward-looking perspective. We see that acceleration taking place in the next couple of months as we are able to put in production the new global seller center and have a much easier and user-friendly onboarding experience. And as that happens, we expect the 3P to grow -- to regain growth rhythm.

Today, the 3P represents about 23% of our overall online sales, which considering that we bought Linio a little bit over 2 years ago with about $130 million in sales, that's a substantial expansion of that business. But we expect that to grow to higher levels of participation in the overall e-commerce.

[Franco Dominichetti, analyst]

Perfect. Very clear. I wanted to ask you just one follow-up question. At the moment, have you been more aggressive on your take rates than what you were before? And do you have a strategy into capturing more market through a lower take rate? Or at the end, you're going to capture through the capabilities you're going to give to your sellers and you're planning to keep a similar level of take rate into the future?

[Gaston Bottazzini, executive]

Yes. I would say our strategy is not around optimizing take rate but more around, I would say, other aspects. One is providing -- and I think Ashish mentioned that in part of what we are doing from a technology standpoint, which is providing value-added services to sellers like sponsored publications and things like that, also providing services around our financial capabilities, both in payments, financing, et cetera.

So the expansion of the business has more to do with expanding the relationship and the engagement of sellers; also, for example, offering fulfilled-by services. Those are the ways in which we want to expand that engagement rather than an increase in take rate. So we haven't been more aggressive in take rates lately, and we don't plan to be aggressive in take rates going forward because we think the way to expand the business is actually to provide better value. And we think that better value comes especially from a better quality of customer traffic and then from a better quality of value-added services.

[Operator]

Sir, we will now turn to Juan-Luis Carrasco for closing remarks.

[Juan-Luis Carrasco, executive]

We would like to thank everyone for joining us on Falabella's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. Our Investor Relations teams will remain available for any follow-up questions you may have. Thank you, and have a nice day.

[Operator]

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Good day.