The Pay Less () renewed in this quarter gains in the main lines of its balance. The only drop was on the gross margin, compressed by the strategy of growth in prescription drug sales, while revenue, net profit and margin Ebitda underwent robust growth.
In the first three months of 2025, the company wrote a net profit of $ 13 million, reversing a loss of $ 23 million in the same period of 2024. In the revenue line, the growth was 17.1%, when compared to last year, to $ 3.62 billion.
“Our question last year was to maintain a growth level above 15%, at least, despite the poor external environment,” says Pague CEO, Jonas Marques, to Infomoney. The strategy was based on continuous care customers and underwent investments in people, execution, commercial strength and marketing.
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Continuous care customers consume more medications, especially those who need prescription. The participation of brand drugs grew 2.3% over the same quarter as last year to 41.6%.
“Growing two points in a category that already represents 40% of the company’s total sales is a lot. It means that the person with a chronic demand is going more often in our store, being well served, finding the assortment they seek,” says CFO da Pague Lesso, Luiz Novaes, Infomoney. “This carries the growth of all other company categories.”
He attributes to improvement in drug sales to continuous care customers gains in lines such as EBITDA margin, which grew 1% in comparison year by year, to 4.1%. She was also responsible for pressuring the company’s gross margin, which retracted 0.5% in the quarter when compared to the same period of 2024, as the medicines in the category usually have smaller margins.
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Pague Less gained market share in all regions of Brazil, especially Northeast, where it won 0.8% market and Midwest, where it grew 0.4%.
Renewed digital channel
Digital channel sales increased 4.2% per year in the first quarter of 2025 and 53.6% against the previous quarter. With R $ 639 million in sales, the channel represents 17.6% of total sales.
Since the beginning of the last year, the company realized that its app had problems related to delivery time, discount authorization and delay in loading research. The company has allocated a budget for application improvements and dedicated a team to solve problems.
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“There is still a gap to close if we compare with some benchmarks. What we are doing is close the alligator’s mouth,” says Marques. “We are accelerating what we can accelerate from our omnicanality strategy,” he says.
Leverage
Since his arrival at Pay Less in January 2024, Marques has been reducing leverage as one of his priorities. Considering the anticipation of receivables, the company’s indebtedness is 2.77x the EBITDA of the last 12 months, a reduction of 1.09x compared to the first trimester of 2024.
Although it does not provide guidancethe company intends to continue reducing the indicator and trusts a leaner number of opening of new stores compared to the market, from something close to 50%. “You don’t have to open much more to grow what we are already growing,” he says.
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It is the way even to face the increase in money capture cost in Brazil. Pague Less works with interest at 15% in Brazil by the end of the year and even with the reduction of disruption there is still pressure on financial expenses.
In the first quarter of this year, the financial expense was $ 7 million higher than in the first quarter of 2024. It means that interest rates “took” this value of the company’s operational result.
Today, Pague Less works at a Selic +1.7%equivalent cost cost. The company has been taking advantage of the disagreement to renegotiate contracts and roll its debt – the spread has become 2.1%. “There are possibilities to bring it to 1.5% of contract renewal spread,” says Novaes.
