Customers lined up in front of Lojas Americanas, in Salvador Shopping — Photo: Disclosure
The Americanas retail chain, which emerged from judicial recovery in October, recorded a net loss of R$352 million in the third quarter of 2026, according to a balance sheet released this Wednesday (11). In the same period last year, the company had recorded a profit of R$367 million.
The operating result measured by adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) fell from R$558 million to R$52 million in the annual comparison.
Despite the loss, the company's net revenue grew 10% in the quarter, to R$2.97 billion. Same-store sales, an indicator that considers units in operation for at least a year, increased 7.3%.
In the accumulated period from January to September, Americanas attributed the worsening of the result mainly to the absence of extraordinary gains that had benefited the 2025 balance sheet, especially of a tax nature, both in the operational and financial results.
Remember the accounting scandal at Americanas
The Americanas scandal came to light on January 11, 2023, when Americanas released a material fact stating that "inconsistencies in accounting entries" had been identified in the corporate balance sheets, initially estimated at around R$20 billion.
According to the company, the values for the first nine months of 2022 and previous years had not been properly recorded.
At the time, then president Sergio Rial left office just nine days after taking office, as did financial director André Covre.
At the time, the company reported that it had detected purchase financing operations in amounts of the same order of magnitude, in which it was a debtor to financial institutions, but which were not adequately reflected in the financial statements.
The following day, January 12, the revelation caused severe turmoil in the financial market. Financial institutions placed Americanas' shares under review, while B3 even put the company's shares up for auction in the face of volatility.
At the end of the trading session, the shares had accumulated a drop of 77.33%, one of the biggest daily losses ever recorded by a publicly traded company in Brazil.
At that time, Sergio Rial stated that the problem did not refer to non-existent values, but rather to accounting records made inappropriately over the years. He also explained that the origin of the inconsistencies was in the risk transactions taken.
🔎 Drawdown risk is a common modality in retail in which a financial institution advances payment due to suppliers and becomes the company's creditor. In the case of Americanas, these obligations did not appear correctly on the balance sheets, which artificially reduced the company's debt.
The investigations also point to irregularities involving cooperative advertising funds (VPCs), commercial incentives granted by suppliers to retailers.
On January 13, 2023, the Rio de Janeiro Court granted a precautionary measure protecting Americanas against the early maturity of debts, temporarily suspending collections while the company evaluated a possible request for judicial recovery.
The decision sought to prevent creditors from quickly depleting the company's assets and preserving its economic activity.
At the same time, information also came to light that executives had sold approximately R$212 million in company shares during the second half of 2022, raising suspicions of the use of privileged information.
The request for judicial recovery came just eight days after the accounting inconsistencies were revealed, on January 19, 2023. At the time, the company reported having only R$800 million in cash, a value much lower than the R$8.6 billion disclosed in the balance sheet for the third quarter of 2022, making its financial situation unsustainable.
Subsequently, the judicial recovery became one of the largest in Brazilian business history, involving debts exceeding R$50 billion.
In March 2026, the company reported that it had fulfilled the obligations set out in the judicial recovery plan due up to two years after its approval and filed the request to close the process. The court accepted the closure, marking the company's formal exit from judicial recovery.
*With information from Reuters news agency.
