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The Company Continues to Try to Recover from the Crisis, and One of the Ways Found to Restructure Is by Reducing the Number of Units.
According to information from the newspaper “Folha de S. Paulo”, only this year, Americanas expects to close about 80 stores spread across Brazil.
In January 2023, Americanas entered bankruptcy protection due to a fraudulent accounting issue amounting to R$ 25 billion. Currently, the company has 1,680 stores, but by the end of the year, it intends to reduce to 1,600 units.
During an interview with the mentioned newspaper, the company’s president, Leonardo Coelho, stated that, despite the closures, the expectation is to open some units in strategically considered locations. “But we also believe in the company’s growth; we are studying to open ten new stores by the end of the year,” he said.
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Today, the company is undergoing a series of divestments to reallocate money to its new target audience: men and women from classes B and C. Because of this, the company has put the Natural da Terra hortifruti chain, Único (franchises of Puket and Imaginarium), and even the fintech Ame Digital up for sale.
Units of Americanas
In January of last year, Americanas had 1,880 points of sale – including all businesses. Currently, after the crisis, this number has fallen to 1,748, representing a 7% drop. This decrease also involves units of Local (convenience stores) and the Natural da Terra hortifruit.
Mathematically speaking, closing 132 points of sale over a year means one unit closed every three days. According to the company’s president, the units scheduled to cease operations this year “do not present a positive contribution to the company, especially the smaller ones.”
According to him, the Americanas of the next two years “will be much smaller than the one that existed before,” explaining that the shift in target audience to classes B and C, aged 18 and older, will change the company’s core products.
In this regard, he reports that electronics and appliances will be phased out of the stores, and snacks, hygiene and beauty items from popular brands, and everything considered “convenience” will gain more weight.
Items considered premium, on the other hand, can be found in the marketplace, offered by partner retailers (“sellers”). “In physical stores, we will not have iPhones or Samsung Galaxy models. But these models will be available on the website, while more competitively priced phones will be offered in stores,” explained the company’s president.
Furthermore, according to the company’s president, in physical stores, the idea will be to increasingly work on promotions at the point of sale, bringing to the front of the store, every day, the items that have the highest discounts compared to competitors.
According to him, the expectation is positive. This is because, while the crisis caused online sales to plummet by 77% in the first nine months of 2023, sales in physical stores only dropped by 4%. “This shows how strong the Americanas brand is and that it has a loyal audience,” he said, adding that the company lost “sellers in the marketplace, but those who remained are selling more and more.”
It Is Necessary to Wait for the Next Steps
Also in an interview with the cited newspaper, André Pimentel, a partner at the consultancy Performa Partners, warned that it is still necessary to wait for the next steps from the company. This is because, according to him, the evolution of expenses shows that Americanas has not yet cut enough.
According to data released by the company, there were R$ 4.1 billion in general and administrative sales costs (SG&A) in the first nine months of 2023, a decrease of 7.5% compared to the same period last year.
“It is far below what it should be,” he stated, reminding that, “considering only the selling expenses, the decline was 8.6%, while net revenue plummeted by 45%.” On the other hand, the operational loss for the first nine months of 2023 was R$ 2.4 billion, nearly the same as R$ 2.5 billion from the previous year. For the consultant, “this just shows that this operation cannot stand sustainably,” Pimentel said.
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