After a hacker attack started on Saturday (19), which continues until this Monday (21), the websites and applications Americanas.com and Submarino, both of the Americanas group, are offline. As a result, the company has lost about R$220 million in sales so far.
The estimate was made by retail specialists at the request of sheet, based on the company’s third-quarter sales data, the most recent released so far by the publicly traded company. In the third quarter, Americanas reached R$ 9.9 billion in gross volume of goods sold on the internet (digital GMV), including its own and third-party products. As a result, the average daily sale on the group’s portals in the period was R$ 110 million.
The third quarter of 2021 was the first after the combination of assets that resulted in the formation of Americanas SA, from the merger between Lojas Americanas and B2W, until then owner of Americanas.com, Submarino and Shoptime. As a result, sales on the group’s digital platform, which used to represent around 60% of the total, jumped to 77% of GMV in the period.
Americanas shares led the declines in this Monday’s trading session. Around 12 noon, the shares retreated 4.18%, to R$ 32.30. The company reported that sales in stores were not harmed.
In a report released earlier this month, the bank Goldman Sachs estimates that the group’s digital sales should total BRL 39.8 billion in 2021 and, this year, BRL 52.9 billion. With this, the representation of digital in total sales would increase from 75% to 77%, respectively. In other words, it does not matter so much that sales in stores are occurring normally, because Americanas has become an essentially digital operation.
THE sheet found that the hacker attack began on Saturday morning, and the company sought to take down the website and application of Americanas.com and Submarino in order to try to keep customer data safe. The attack was designed for a moment of high exposure for Americanas: the brand promoted a night of celebration on Globo’s reality show Big Brother Brasil, with a show by singer Thiaguinho.
On social media this weekend, many users complained that they could not access the offers advertised on the show because both the website and the app were down. Many were also unable to track their scheduled deliveries.
On the morning of this Monday, Americanas released a statement to those who access its page: “The company informs that, for security reasons, it has proactively suspended part of the servers in the e-commerce environment and works with technical and specialist resources to normalize safely as soon as possible. The physical stores have not had their activities interrupted and remain operating”. Submarino also released a similar statement as of this morning. Until then, those who tried to access the site, found a message of service unavailable.
“The episode takes away some of the confidence of consumers, and some of them may not want to go shopping on the site again”, says retail consultant Eugênio Foganholo, from Mixxer Desenvolvimento Empresarial. “Once again, the need to adopt increasingly sophisticated technological security processes to eliminate or at least minimize this risk is demonstrated.”
This type of attack has been happening with increasing frequency, in the opinion of consultant Alberto Serrentino, from Varese Retail. “There is no such thing as an inviolable company anymore,” he says. “All are vulnerable and need to have a combat plan.”
The size of the damage will depend on the time it takes the company to control the attack. Serrentino recalls the case of the Fleury laboratory, targeted by hackers in June of last year and which took a week to restore service. “As for the attack on Renner, in August, the damage was more limited,” he says. “They must be making a brutal effort to face it, but it’s not a simple thing to solve, unfortunately.”
Americanas is the third largest e-commerce platform in the country, after Mercado Livre and Magalu, according to Goldman Sachs. According to the document, the company had been experiencing an increasing number of downloads of its app since the beginning of the year.
The group as a whole earned BRL 37 billion in the first nine months of 2021, with a net profit of BRL 241 million in the period.
In a report signed by analysts Danniela Eiger, Gustavo Senday and Thiago Suedt, released this Monday, XP reports that it sees “the news as marginally negative, since the online channel represents approximately 60% of the company’s revenues.”
“However, it is important to monitor to see how long it will take to normalize operations and thus better understand the potential impact on the company’s results”, informs the text. The house maintains a neutral recommendation to buy the shares, with a target price of R$ 40 per share.
Collaborated with Clayton Castelani
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