Natura &Co Holding S.A. (NYSE:NTCO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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João Paulo Ferreira: Hello. Good. Thanks. So I described what we are doing in terms of top-line, then I was developing — gross margin. I just mentioned our efforts to price up and recover gross margin, which has been a successful movement so far. And finally you know that we have a story of trimming down our G&A, capping it to a healthy level, which we continue to do, which will be easier now with Wave 2, right? And Guil just mentioned, a significant portion of the G&A in Q4 related to phasing of non-recurring items. So, just to say that we are pretty confident in our journey to recover profitability going forward. Guil?

Guilherme Castellan: And then on the leverage, Joe, we haven’t communicated basically what is the optimal level of capital structure for the company. Of course, the focus right now is to work on the capital structures to reduce leverage. And as Fábio mentioned right in the beginning, by doing that, allowing us to have the right firepower to invest in our priorities. So you can, of course, assume that we’ll continue to have to work on the two priorities that I mentioned, which are profitability and cash conversion, but also in structural items to improve the capital structure in the short-term. And once we are in that position, then we’ll communicate what is the optimal leverage for the company, the optimal capital structure for the company going forwards.

Joseph Giordano: And JP just a follow-up here. So you guys mentioned like both about like non-recurring G&A expenses, both at the perimeters of Latin America and Avon International. So can you help us quantifying that? So that’s like, really, really useful.

João Paulo Ferreira: Joe, you can assume that a significant portion of the G&A increase is coming by those non-recurring. So we’re not going to break down but you can assume that is the majority of the G&A increase in the quarter is coming from what we see here is non-recurring expenses. Again, part of that, they were again distribution of quarterly phases; part of that, they were tactical decisions that we decided to invest. But you can assume that most of those — most of the increase, or actually the decrease that we saw in EBITDA, and the increase that we saw SG&A in particular, for Avon international and Latam, they are non-recurring going forward. And as Guil mentioned, we’re confident in our plan to improve EBITDA margin this year.

Operator: Next question comes from Eric Huang of Santander.

Eric Huang: So from our side, we have seen these improvements in cash generation. So we would like to better understand if you could breakdown, how much of these improvements were related to seasonality and how much were structural? And going forward, what are the biggest opportunities for you to be captured in the cash profiles?

Guilherme Castellan: Thank you, Eric. I’m going to take that one. And again, needless for me to repeat the focus of the company in this particular item going forward, so I’m going to skip that. But when you look at the cash flow results that we had, especially in the second half of the year, right? You can see that the bulk of the improvement, even though EBITDA — EBITDA margin was compress, the bulk of that improvement comes from cash conversion items, right? And with that’s basically I mean, working capital, the net CapEx and the cash tax rate as well. The biggest item of improvement in the last quarter of the year, and in the second half in general and full year, was inventories, right, given where we were last year. And what we communicated again, that we wanted to be in the big focus on reducing inventories across the region, but with a strong focus in some Latam countries, right?

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