Sendas Distribuidora S.A. (NYSE:ASAI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

We still have some sales ramp up space that we want to search for. And it could be a little premature still. When we get into some regions where they are part of, I think there is some room for this. So, we were even criticized due to changes in our business model, but people are throwing sticks and stones. But we know that any model needs to evolve and there is evolution, modifications, and these models that were kind of left — they’re operated in our sector and they kind of kept the same model and the needs, the customers have also changed. Customers want to have the best purchase experience. And if it’s possible to do keeping low cost, we must do so. Sometimes, we can expand this. Some of the people that we never imagine would buy in a wholesale operation, they’re going to be surprised level of experience in the product and service level that they find.

So, of course, there are retail company that works with thousands of employees and millions of customers, besides this positioning commercially, there is also when you look at this. So, this has been a big concern in the company and the numbers have been proving with this consistently. So, now I’ll pass the floor to Danny to talk about capitalized interest.

Daniela Sabbag: Okay. Hi, Marcella. To answer your question here, a bit of what we’ve been discussing on this topic. So, the first highlight is that the capitalization, as Belmiro mentioned, follows the accounting guidelines and this is not a new practice in the company. We always have been disclosing our CapEx and we always take a look at the capitalized interest where — when the companies — when the store is under construction, you have the capitalization. But this is, of course, something that’s more significant due to the volumes of stores this year, and we had a reduction in this line that was about 100 million, that’s in the explanatory notes, so you can see. So, of course, this follows the schedule for store openings.

We concentrated a little more on the end of the period. So, we have a reasonable amount. But it should reduce a lot. As this takes place, it’s not something a new practice for us. It’s an accounting guideline we follow. So, it’s within our best practices.

Marcella Recchia: So, if I can have a quick follow-up just about this — the tax line. So, we’ve seen some volatility that’s very significant in this line, and we received a bit of the — we lost a bit of the reference of what this effective tax line would be after some of the ICMS exemptions you started to consider as a benefit. Is there some visibility on what we can take on or expect as something recurrent from this year onwards at a more-adjusted basis?

Daniela Sabbag: So, just to round it up a bit, we had about BRL70 million with an effective tax rate of about 8.6%. And in the previous quarter, we had published about BRL60 million. So, we can give you some more details to be able to help balance this out. But there’s always going to be some kind of a variation with regards to this. And this is connected to the ICMS. So, it’s really going to depend on the sales mix for the different states and exempt categories. And so, we always going to have to hold on to that, depending on the way in the region it’s in and that makes you sell. But we can balance this out and think of a way to communicate this to give you some better guidance. And this variation — this is always going to have some kind of a variation, not a fixed number.