Ctt Correios Portgl Sa

microphones will be disabled. However, analysts will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. To do so, simply click on the button to raise your hand and we will give you access to the microphone. If you are dialing from a phone line, press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute yourself. I will now turn the call over to Mr. João Bento, CEO.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2024 results conference call. It's been a great year that we chose to qualify from transformation to growth. So starting with slide number four. Guidance was accomplished with 85 million recurrent debits, but most important than that with 71 million euros or 38% growth year on year for the PAC, logistics and bank. Logistics, we refer to logistics to the combination of mail and express. It was also a year of very strong cashflow with operating cashflow growing 6.7% to 70 million euros. and a year that enables us to keep a very balanced balance sheet flexibility, a very flexible balance sheet with a 1.6 net debt to EBITDA ratio, which is well below our own financial policy, which is in itself already conservative. So very good news in that sense too. It was a special year given the M&A transactions that we have disclosed at the end on the 18th and 19th of December. I'm referring to the acquisition of CASEZA and the joint venture with EHL, which enable further diversification and will fuel further growth in Iberia towards we want and we expect Iberian leadership. And the final initial comments to share all the remuneration, given that we decided to remain within our stated policy, so with the predictable dividend policy, which accounts for 70 cents to be paid, and we remain with the ongoing 25 million euros share buyback. Moving to slide number five, a more detailed description of these results. While I would highlight 38% growth on recurring debit for the logistics and bank, the business areas that we fully control, which beats our own guidance, given a very strong performance on parcels and the bank, and where we've seen a 17% growth on this logistics plus bank. a package that converts to a 38 growth on EBIT on the backdrop of a strong fourth quarter. We've also observed in this last quarter, for a long time we didn't see this, a public debt placement normalizing to levels that we have seen before. Moving to slide number six. And starting with a bit more detail on the express and parcels business area, we've seen record volumes in peak season, again, sustaining revenue growth throughout the year. And with a 30.9% quarter-on-quarter, that converted to a 33.7% growth on EBIT. which suggests, of course, that we can grow and having the margin also growing. We expect that 2025 will be another record year in line with what we have been achieving. Moving to slide number seven. and going into further detail regarding the margin, we've observed significant margin expansion due to operational leverage, a statement that we are confirming consistently. You might observe that looking at the chart on the left, the line with the quarterly growth, you might observe a slight decline in the fourth quarter from 8.7% to 8.1% of the percentage EBIT, which is a common trend for the fourth quarter. Given the intensity of activities and operations, there are always purses of inefficiency in the peak season quarter. But here, the decline is clearly better than the one observed in the fourth quarter of last year. Having said so, a huge improvement in the in EBIT generated in the quarter. So quarter on quarter, fourth quarter on fourth quarter with a 57% growth. And if you move to the right hand side, the chart on the right, and looking at the yearly improvement, We came from 20 million euros of EBIT in this business area to 36, an 83% improvement. But interestingly enough, the 16 additional... million euros of revenue are might be seen as a combination of the additional revenues and the additional costs so the detailed chart we have on the on the top right part of the slide illustrates that the 138 additional revenues combined with the additional 88.2 million euros of costs computed, the 16 million euros of new average generated, or an 11.8% margin. So this drove a yearly overall margin of 5.8% in 2023 to 7.5%. percent in this year. But more importantly is that it somehow demonstrates that we can keep growing while expanding operating margin. So very good news in our view for the parcels business. It was also an year moving to slide number eight, as I said, with these important steps regarding Cassias and DHL. And the slide basically attempts to illustrate several of the advantages that we have. So it accelerates our leadership, Iberian leadership ambition, because it expands our offer and strengthens our customer relationships. It diversifies risk, particularly in what regards much higher exposure to B2B, given the contributions of DHL and the wider presence in the value chain, because it expands, I would say, hugely expands our presence in the customs clearance part of the value chain, which is very important, especially for out of Europe e-commerce, which is, as we're going to see in the next slide, a very important part of e-commerce expansion. It also effectively attacks our, allow us to attack international segment, given that we have not only an international presence with CASEZA but also the contribution of the DHL network for both inbound to Iberia and outbound from Iberia, and finally enhances future opportunities given the incorporation of these new skills. Slide number nine, it's a very interesting slide, given that it illustrates the relevance of e-commerce, cross-border e-commerce coming to Europe from Asia. 19% of the global e-commerce is cross-border from Asia to Europe. But more interesting than that is that it also illustrates that the intra-European cross-border e-commerce is of the same dimension, 17%. according to the most recent data. And this is very interesting in the sense that it shows the complementarity of the deals that we have announced at year end. On the one hand, given the Asia to Europe, our strong foothold on cross-border becomes reinforced by the acquisition of CACESE. And of course, given the European cross-border e-commerce, DHL, which is simply the largest operator in Europe, also differentiates our presence, given their ability to bring new flows to Iberia, given the quality and price that we allow them to have. And also, it enables and promotes outbound exports of e-commerce from Iberia to Europe, given their ability to place them at very high efficiency rates. Moving to slide number 10, a quick word on our activities regarding strengthening our portfolio in e-commerce logistics. It was a very important year in terms of standardizing our AB offer in all sorts of aspects, operationally, commercially, pricing, user experience, and so on. It was also a near important for out of home delivery since that we started deploying higher than 20,000 PUDOs. for our clients in Iberia, of which in Portugal already includes more than 1,000 lockers. And we are now expanding and started last year in 24 expanding to Spain, also the deployment of lockers. And of course, because of the organic growth that I've referred. multiple times. For 2025, the priorities remain somehow the same or associated with this, given that we will keep expanding the PUDUs and especially the lockers network in Spain. We, of course, have a huge commitment to execute the synergies that these operations, M&A acquisitions have allow us to grow, it will be a very important year to keep growing organically as we've done so significantly in recent years, and also a year where we are aiming at improving profitability in parcels as we have been doing in a consistent way in the last years. And with this, we would move to the male business areas, and I will ask João Sousa to join us and guide us through the male and retail areas.

Thank you, João. Good morning, everyone. As you can see in slide 11, we saw good news after the third quarter where we felt the impact of some clients' backlog, mainly in the government. We saw a recovery in the fourth quarter, and this combined with more business days had a positive impact on the volumes of Key4. We also saw an increase in the average value per item all the year in 24, considering the price increase you have done and also the product mix during this year. And as you already know, this year we already implemented in February the price increase of 6.9% in mail. On slide 12, you saw the results of these. So we had a solid revenue performance in address mail in the fourth quarter. When you saw the fourth quarter comparing with the last year, we seen increasing on 4.1%, achieving 92.8 million euros. And we can say that was the second best quarter in 24. And if you take the elections on the first quarter, you even can say that the first quarter was the best quarter of the year. And with these, we see in the last semester of 24, revenue per business day growing during the second half. On slide 13. We see strong revenues in Q4 in mail and others with a good performance also in business solutions and payments that helps also the performance in mail. Constantly we achieve a night margin of 4.4%. We can say that it was the highest margin with size 2022. uh through increasing the traffic this comes from the increasing of traffic we see the better cosmetic measures and also uh like ron bent was saying before an improvement of public there uh we saw in this in this last quarter of uh 34. on slide 14 We maintain our focus on cost cutting strategic to protect the margin in mild, because as you can see, even the cost reduction we have done in 24 only offset the impact of inflation. So we still maintain this focus on cost cutting and always maintain the quality in mild, but we are doing a lot of things in operations to have this cost cutting. But seeing this, with this impact of the inflection we saw, the margin decline in 24 for 8.2 million euros in the year. On slide 15, we have the path in 24 and also we're going to continue to do it in 25. to significant improvements in quality of service, but also new services to our customers. We have, as you know, after a few years of discussion about the quality indicators, we have a change of the quality indicators. And also we design new product that we call traceability mail, that we have new services and bring the elevated service to our customers in mail. We still maintain a reorganization of the network that improves quality at the same time we felt a cost cutting in this area of business. And for 2025, we're still promoting digital alternatives because as you know, the main computer in mail is digital and what we have is creating digital offers to our customers. and we're going to continue in 2025 to do additional operational efficiencies, like I told you before, for this focus on cost cutting and also retention in our customers. On slide 16, now coming for financial services and retail, in Q4, we saw a strong recovery in the public placement debt driven by the adjust of the cap. As you remember, during the calls we had in 24, We talked and we said that the cap was a problem to sell more public debt. After the government changed this in October, we saw a strong recovery. However, with the challenge we had in the three first quarters on 24, we had designed a lot of advertising campaigns and also implementing the Foro Digital that was bringing the subscription of public debt to digital, and these allow us to become more strong. And when we saw the change of the cap, we saw a recovery of public debt placement, but also now the city be more strong to sell these. Why I say this? We saw a lot of new aforistas, if I can say it in this way, go for digital. So I think we opened the public debt for new segments and we see a very strong trend, a positive trend for digital. And as you saw also in the numbers of January, we see a positive outlook for 2025 in public debt placements. On the slide 17, As you know, we also are implementing a new strategy for our retail network, launching new services for citizens and also for SMEs that enable us to have different services in our stores, in our retail network, that also bring us new revenue streams and predicted revenue streams. We launched insurance that is running pretty well, but also these healthcare plans, as you can see, with an increasing of 740% against 2023. And we have also a very, very positive outlook for 2025 because we see the market like this kind of services and well-connected to what is the retail network of CPP for these. On the slide 18, we are taking a lot of actions in our retail network. We are investing and expanding new layout services. We already launched these new stores in Cascais, in Maya, in the last quarter of 24, and we're going to still maintain these in 25. This is a co-investment also with the Bank of CDP. because this new layout helps to sell more services for HTTP but also in the bank. We are investing and we are investing in 24 in a new customer data platform. So know better the customers help us to retain and sell better and more in our retail network. And we are training ourselves persons in the stores to sell these new services to suggest better service to our customers. On this, we are also working on Omnichannel. And like I told you before, this for digital was a good example what we have done to have also our physical retail, but also digital working together and continue to expand the services portfolio for this network. Saying this, now I pass to Yves Pacheque, my colleague, to talk about the bank.

Thank you, Joel, and good morning. On slide 19, we can see the strong progress the bank made on number of accounts. We increased 5.3% the number of accounts with another year adding clients. The bank continues to be one of the top preferences to change bank in Portugal, and this shows through the numbers. On the right part of the slide, we can see Also, a very strong progress on business volumes, growing 20.9% and achieving the target of more than 7 billion euros that we set back in 2022 for the year 2025, so anticipating one year that number. The bank continues to focus on increasing the engagement In slide 20, we can see a strong gain on market share. The bank continues to grow its deposit space very significantly, growing 30.8% vis-à-vis the industry that only grew 7.2%. on loan on the credit books very very steady progress in auto loans of nine percent and also ten percent on mortgages the bank is on this on this phase of investment to improve client engagement we aim to double of our client engagement, investing in commercial capabilities, be it digital or physical, in order to continue to gain traction in the market. On slide 21, we see strong progress on revenues also, if we exclude the end of the Universal Credit Card partnership with Sonai. the revenues grew 11.8% despite some net interest margin compression of 2.6% to 2.2%. So that growth coupled with lower cost of risk on the year of 2024 led to a strong progress in profit before taxes that grew 25.9%. in 2024. Our return on tangible equity also progressed well to 13% and entered the interval that we committed also back in 2022. So another target that was anticipated one year. In slide 22, we can see that the bank will continue to focus its strategy on growing volumes. We have been able to manage well the interest rate cycle and gain significant share. We aim to continue to do so, excelling in savings. It's what our brand caters to. And the Generali partnerships have a significant contribution on this strategy, with its wide range of products that will continue to help the bank grow. growing its balance sheet. While we will continue to invest in upgrading our core and the digital channels and these branches specialization in order to grow the client engagement. We chose to include a slide to show our progress on the ESG front. with significant progress in alignment and eligibility of revenues in CAPEX, showing the strategic bet on this kind of product. On the right part of the slide, you can see also strong progress on our green fleet. We are clearly in line to meet our target of 50% of last mile on fleet of green vehicles. Last year we closed the year with 35% of the fleet already green. Our carbon emissions grew despite of all these efforts because of lack of traction on having the same movements on third party providers. On slide 25, we see our key financial indicators, where we can see a very impressive quarter of very strong growth on the revenue side with 16.8%. Our recurring EBIT also progressed significantly, 56.5%, reaching more than 30 million in the quarter. and our cash flow grew also 82%, 54.3 million in the first quarter. In the full year, our revenues exceeded 1 billion for the first time, 1.1 actually, growing 12.4%. Our EBIT declines slightly, 2.7% because of of these headwinds on the financial services after a record year in 2023. But as we all shared, a very strong progress on the normalized EBIT, if you want, with 38% growth in logistics and bank and free cash flow, sorry, net profit in the year reaching 45.5 million euros with a decline of 24.7%. In slide 26, we can see our revenue bridge with a strong contribution of express and parcels, where we continue to see volumes growing more than 30% with market share gains in Iberia. Our unit prices also increased, and we saw more contribution of value-added services that helped the revenues to grow more than the volumes. um in the in the in the mail another division uh 5.5 percent increase with the price lever and the mix effect contracting the the decline on volumes that decline 4.5 percent in the quarter um on the financial services we also saw strong progress with 47.5 percent growth uh or 2.3 million This quarter placed more than 1 billion in public debt, returning to what we think is a normalised level. Since then, we continue to see strong placements in public debt, so we are fully confident that this division will enter on this normalized path that we guided the market since the end of last year. Bank with a slight decline following the end of Universal Partnership that would grow if we exclude that effect. Just to highlight that for the first time we see Express segment being our business segment with highest contribution to the overall top line that we think it marks the a strong step on the transformation of the profile of this company. And that is now more skewed to growth than before. On slide 27, we can see our operating costs that grew 13.7%. mainly driven by express and parcels. This is mostly activity, although some increase in unit costs. It's important to highlight that the last quarter of the year is a quarter with very strong growth on volumes. And as such, we need to account for extra capacity. And that comes with a slight increase in prices. But overall, a strong expansion year on year on the margin, so nothing to highlight here. Mail growing 2.9% in terms of basically wage inflation and inflation in the cost base, namely on transports. Financial services also with some... growth of 0.8 million in line, fully in line with activity and the bank with a strong decline of 2.6. This is mainly driven by impairments or our cost of risk decline from 1.5% to 0.5% this quarter. So good news on that front. We can move to slide 28, where we see a record quarter in terms of EBIT generation with 56.5% growth and 9.7% margin with a strong expansion of margin in excess and parcels driven by the growth and value-added services. Male and other also with a strong recovery in volumes that we are seeing softer declines in the fourth quarter as we guided. to affect the number of days and recovery of backlogs from government. And the financial services also contributing 1.6 million euros with the normalization of the placements of the debt. We think this will be a trend that will stay during 2025. and the bank also with a strong expansion of 1.7 million euros in EBIT, mainly driven by the lower cost of risk that I already commented. In the year the financial services division with a strong negative comparison effect. But we always highlighted that 2023 was an abnormally high year. So we now see this division stabilizing and improving a bit going forward. On the slide 29, we can see our consolidated cash flow that reached 93.9 million euros. Our capex picked up to 46.4 million. This is mainly driven by investments in capacity. we always said that we should be on the highest part of the guidance range in terms of CapEx to sustain capacity or to expand capacity, sorry. And that's what happened. Free cash flow stood at 62.8 million. Our net cash position is now of 68.1 million euros, On slide 30, we can see mostly the same vision, but having the bank accounted in the equity method, so operational cash flow growing 6.7%. the free cash flow stood at 39 million euros in 2024. And on the right part of the slide, you can see our leverage that is still very low and steady between what we've evolved from 1.4 to 1.6 times EBITDA. with a net debt of 206 million euros in the end of 2024. And with that, I will pass to João for his final remarks.

Thank you, Guy. So on slide number 32, the gears aim at signifying that we are actually with every single line for another growth year. And if you follow me from the left to right, we are, we believe, very well positioned to be the most relevant e-commerce logistics player in Iberia, not only because we kept and will keep expanding our market share, Based on not only commercial productivity, but mostly quality and also service differentiation in the sense that we are providing more and more services along the value chain. And in that respect, the acquisitions of Casas and DHL and the DHL deal will fuel this further growth on experts and persons. Moving to the lower gear, we do keep leveraging on a Synergic Mail operation, especially so on the retail network because it is shared. and rightly so with the bank, financial services, mail, parcel, insurance, and that is in a way also a winning move. We then have seen and will see the bank affirming itself as the fastest growing retail bank in Portugal with growing business volumes with an expanding client base and now with the significant steps to increase engagement with clients and with this we see the bank growing very healthy and as was already stressed by João and Gui we are now within a normalized financial services placement period and therefore financial services and retail in general will remain as a significant profitability and answer with this normalized debt placements but also the new services that we are deploying. All in all, this allowed us during 2024 to achieve the guidance that was given to the market. And indeed, in terms of revenues, we have already exceeded the, I'm sorry, we have already reached the guidance for 2025 that was provided in the Capital Markets Day back in 2022. and we are guiding 2025 as a recurring habit from organic growth, so without the contributions yet of CASEZA and DHL of over more than 100 million euros, which again is very much in line with what was the ambition set in our capital markets today in 2022. And a final word to the dividend per share of 17 cents. We decided to remain consistent with our dividend policy. And this corresponds to a 52% payout and a 30.1% return. yield. And with this we believe it was a great year that positioned CDD very well to a continuing growing story and we remain available for your questions.

So as a reminder, analysts that wish to place a question should click on the button to raise your hands and we will give you access to the microphone. And with dialing from online, she pressed star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute yourself. We will take our first question from John Sapphire from Santander. Please go ahead. Your microphone is enabled.

Good morning, guys. Hopefully, you can hear me. I have three questions. The first on CACESA and DHL, just a reminder of the timings here and if anything changed versus what... I mean, were the timings that you mentioned back in when you announced these two transactions, and particularly the fact that the DHL transaction didn't include the Casillas deal, and so what would be the timings for that to be sorted out? So that would be my first question. The second question, is on the working capital. So this year we've seen quite a volatile working capital in terms of by quarters. And obviously you've recovered that in the fourth quarter of the year. My question is, it's mainly this is something that we we should see also in 2025 uh or it was mainly just one thing that that happened in 2024 and so you don't you don't see that happening again in the next in the next couple of years if you could give us a bit of a of some color there and then the the last question on um uh on the digital sorry on financial services on on on your digital offer of Well, now that you have the subscription in your platform, if you can give us the percentage of placements that are being done online through CDD. Thank you.

Thank you as well. Questions for the three of us. So I'll start with the first one. There are indeed no differences regarding our expectation on the Casillas and DHL. What we have is that both processes evolved and as expected. And indeed, we had the preliminary approval by the Spanish Competition Authority that enabled us to submit the final formal filing. And we are expecting that to be cleared between the end of this month and the beginning of April. As for DHL, timing is again the same. We are... Fully in line with all the submissions and our expectation is that if it doesn't go for an enhanced investigation, clearance should arrive around September. If it goes for an enhanced investigation, then that should... come by the end of the year. The inclusion of the Casieza deal is something that was duly resolved and it remains, so expectation from both parties is that the deal in the end will include the HL's involvement in Casieza, provided everything goes along with the expectations. I will then ask Guy to address the working capital.

Thank you, João. Working capital, in fact, it was very volatile. We need to take into consideration two dynamics going forward. First, the first quarter of our consolidated working capital is typically negative, and this has to be is linked specially with dynamics in the banking with 3 to 1 credit and the way incentives are paid in the distribution network that are cash paid in the beginning of the year and then this is accrued throughout the year and that because it's a significant amount it renders typically negative the first quarter and we have been growing a lot in Express and Parcels that has a collection profile that is highly different from, for instance, financial services where you collect immediately. You actually withdraw your remuneration from the amounts that you place in the market. So, in a way, our payment receiving terms are increasing because of this shift of profile. And as this decisionality negative on the first quarter, that's normally normalised throughout the year. What I'm trying to say with all of this is that we should expect some investment in working capital given this underlying dynamic of shifting the profile of revenues to express and parcels and then becoming the most contributor to the overall revenues. But nothing dramatically and hopefully this year will be more predictable the working capital than we saw before. On financial services, maybe João Sousa can... Yeah, so thank you Gui, thank you very much João for your question.

So what we saw right now, the digital HAP, it counts 5% of the value and almost 10% of the of the subscriptions. Because like I told you in the presentation, what we are feeling or felt in the app is we are bringing new guys, new segments, more young to the app. In that way, we see 5% of the share in value and 10% in subscriptions. Saying this, we don't have already the open, the customer cannot open the account in the app. We felt that we're going to have that in the coming weeks, and we're going to see an increasing of the app after we have also the service in F. Perfect.

Thank you very much.

Okay, we will now take our next question from Joaquín García Quiroz from JV Capital. Please go ahead, your microphone is enabled.

Yes, hello, thank you for taking my question. Just sorry to come back on working capital, just to see if I understood it correctly. We saw a very big reversal in the fourth quarter of the year, more than that you previously guided. Before, I remember in a previous call, you guided to end around negative 10 million for the year. You ended close to 30 million positive. So we shouldn't see any reversal during this year, right? This is just now normalized levels and we should see just a small working capital consumption in line with what we were previously expecting due to the growth of the business, right? Just that. And then on the Cathesa deal, you said everything was going in track. So my question here is regarding guidance. The more than 100 million at the recurring EBIT, I assume that's without Cathesa or DHL. Is it safe to assume that without those deals, the guidance is more towards the low end of the range of the 100 to 120? and then more towards the mid to high end of the range once we include Cathesa. Thank you.

I will start with working capital. What I tried to explain, it was the dynamics. We are expecting some investment, not a reversal, but some investment in working capital as we continue to grow with some meaning. The express and parcels division, that has a different profile in terms of collections. In terms of guidance, I don't know, João, if you want.

Yes, I would confirm your assumption, Joaquim. In fact, somehow you are suggesting a guidance for the Casillas contribution. But yes, overall, that is a good assumption. Provided that we will have the deal approved according to our expectation.

Perfect, thank you.

We will now our next question from Philip Lloyds from VPI. Please go ahead. Your microphone is enabled.

Yes, good morning. So I have three questions, if I may. First one, if you can confirm what will be the mail price increase for this year and if it was already applied. The second one on CapEx, just to confirm if you are reiterating your expectations in terms of CapEx for this year of between 40 and 45 million. And last one is related with profitability of experts and partners. Because you mentioned that you are expecting some margin expansion for this unit with expected volume increase. My question is, if you can detail from your current organic recurring EBIT guidance of more than 100 million, what the levels of EBIT margin that you are targeting or assuming in this guidance for EMP? Or perhaps if you can guide us at last year from this target, from this guidance, what should be the contribution of financial services and what should be the contribution of logistic and the bank? Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Philippe. I can start with the mug pricing. It is actually in the press release. But yes, they have been already applied from the 1st of February. And they are overall of 6.9%. Then this is an overall regarding a volume distribution expectation. Then it is applied to our product list, meaning that some products have higher prices, some others have lower. so that the expected combination provides a 6.9%, but yes, they have been already applied from the 1st of February.

Regarding CAPEX, our guidance is the 40 to 45%. because we continue to grow a lot and we need to invest in capacity, it will be skewed to the high end because it's for good reasons, but with the growth on revenues that we saw about 40% in express and parcels last year, and obviously with the underlying volume growth, We continue to invest in our network, in capacity, namely on mechanization of centers, and that will continue throughout this year in order to be able to cope with volumes in the end of the year that we expect that high seasonality that we saw. In terms of guidance and margins, What I can share is the above 100 million organic. It's driven by expressing parcels and financial services, mainly. We continue to see the bank and the mail contributing also to growth, but in a lower scale, if you want. Expressing parcels We stick to our guidance of high single-digit margins. It's what we saw. We expect that with the seasonality of the year to continue to expand, although there is some seasonality that you can observe on past years. And obviously excluding Casseza, because Casseza has another kind of margins. that will contribute positively to to the overall business unit but i single digit on financial services we are not guiding uh for for a specific uh target what we can share is we are expecting uh placements to be on the on the 4.5 to 5 billion euros range that is the what we consider normality that we saw on the last quarter of last year, but that was not there for the beginning of 2024. And on the opposite side, it was exploding on 2023. So we see the the business segment, resuming the kind of profile it had in 2021. The bank will continue its path of growth, although it's a year of investment in capacity, both in CAPEX and in OPEX, to reinforce commercial capabilities that, in our view, will fund a next wave of growth throughout the next years. On mail, we see some small upside and we're recovering some profitability. with the declines between 6% and 8% that we consider it's the normal rate of decline for this division, coupled with the endless process that we have in that division of finding more efficiency and continuing with cost-cutting measures. All of that should contribute to the growth that we see are guiding, then you need to have your own assumptions on the closing of the deals, that we see things aligned to the commitments in terms of timing that we shared, but it's something obviously not in our full control.

As a reminder, analysts that wish to place a question should click on the button to raise your hand and we will give you access to the microphone. We'll take our next question from Antonio Saladas from AS Independent Research. Please go ahead, your microphone is enabled. Antonio, you are still in mute.

Sorry, sorry about this. Your performance on expressing parcels has been very, very strong. So I don't know if you can share with us how you are performing. So I think you mainly explained that where we are outperforming. So in terms of market share, if you can provide some color on this. And I noticed that the blended prices per item has been stable, which is interesting. So I guess that is mainly outside Europe e-commerce that is providing your growth. So I don't know what you can share about it with us to understand the reasons of your performance.

So, Antonio, thank you very much for your question. What we are seeing is a growth in Spain, like you say, but also in Portugal, because like we have been saying in the last years, Iberia is one of the areas that e-commerce is growing more. And fortunately for us, when we are winning these customers, these big customers, we are winning for Iberia, not just for Spain and Portugal. What happened is Spain is bigger. So in that way, we see in our market share over there is not so big like we have in Portugal. We are not seeing this path of growth, but we are growing in both geographies. For the pricing, fortunately, In a tough job, we are trying to maintain our pricings, but we also are doing value added service. As you know, we have customers clearance in Spain for package that comes from out of Europe for Portugal and Spain. And that way also help us to maintain our pricing. We see a positive outlook and maintaining these customers, growing in the same customers, but also grabbing new ones. And in a nutshell, I think that is the resume that we are seeing here in the expression part.

You don't want to mention your market share in Spain, for instance. I think in the past you mentioned it. I guess that because the market is not growing so fast as you are growing. So I guess that you are taking market share. How is the competitive environment? From where are you gaining market share? I don't know if you can provide more color on this, please. Thank you for that.

Let's see. As always, the numbers on these markets, because it's mainly a B2B market, there is not a lot of data out there. But our estimates that in B2C, that is where we focus more. We are just under the 9% market share in Spain and above 45% in Portugal. For us, it's increasingly more difficult to follow the split of the markets as our customers are moving more to Iberia. The big customers, even volumes delivered in Lisbon are given to us in Spain. That's why we stopped splitting the markets because in the end, it's more a mathematical exercise than other thing. The competitive dynamic... Obviously, we capture a trend that we use very well in terms of cross-border dynamics. It's a volume that we are very suited in terms of operations to serve more than our customers that are mainly focused on B2B, so multi-parcel heavy stuff to networks. But obviously this kind of growth has some increased appetite from our competitors, although we didn't see any crazy movements, but we see some competition during this year in terms of pricing. We have been able to complement our unit prices with value-added services, namely custom clearance. And as such, that's where we see Casas acquisition playing a significant role in order to differentiate ourselves in terms of services, quality, and also complementing our pricing scheme.

But the feeling we have, and because of the feedback of the customer, because after every peak season, we do a... feedback meetings with the customers. We know that our competitors try to grab this kind of traffic, but the customer is locked in with us because of the quality, because of this value proposition for Iberia, and also because of this value added service. In fact, some of them already are challenging us even for more volumes for the next big season. So in that way, we know that the competitor is going to try to grab a big part of this traffic, but I think we are in a good role to maintain the customers and even with this profile, grabbing the new ones that try to work in Iberia.

Just to confirm, you mentioned 9% in Spain, yes? It's right?

B2C market share. Yeah, B2C market share. And more than 45% in Portugal.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And as there are no further questions at this time, I would like to hand the call back over to Mr. João Bento, CEO, for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you. Well, I will just thank you again for coming to our results webcast. We remain available through our IR team to offer the qualifications that you might need. I would conclude, as I started, by stating that this was a great year, very much in line with our equity story and our ambition to become market leaders for e-commerce logistics in Iberia. Thank you for coming. Good morning.