Americanas loses more than R$ 2 billion in market value with offline websites

Americanas shares plummeted last Monday (21), affected by the deactivation of the group’s e-commerce sites, after the company’s systems were targeted by a digital attack over the weekend.

The main websites of the company’s marketplace, Lojas Americanas and Submarino, were offline throughout this Monday, and the company suffered a loss of market value of more than R$ 2 billion, according to data from Refinitiv.

The company said it had suspended part of its e-commerce platform’s servers after identifying risks of “unauthorized access” over the weekend, but did not elaborate on the nature of the attack.

In the first quarter of last year, the company had online sales of R$ 5.594 billion, corresponding to an average of R$ 62.2 million per day.

Sought on Monday after the market closed, the company said it “works with technical resources and experts to assess the extent of the event and safely normalize the e-commerce environment as quickly as possible.”

Americanas reiterated that the physical stores did not have their activities interrupted and that they remain operating.

The Americanas marketplace operation accounted for 64.4% of gross sales in the first quarter of 2021.

The digital attack on one of the country’s largest e-commerce platforms follows a series of other attacks in the past year against companies in the country.

The tour operator CVC, for example, was out of business for 12 days in October because of a hacker attack on its systems.

At the time, CVC reported that it was an attack with ransomware, software that encodes information on a system, effectively “hijacking” access to it until the victim complies with what the hacker charges to return data.

Americanas shares closed this session down 6.6%, while the Ibovespa dropped 1.02%.