Operator
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Nature's Sunshine's financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2026. Joining us today are Nature's Sunshine CEO, Ken Romanze, CFO, Ruth Perkins, and General Counsel, Nate Brower. Following the remarks, we'll open the call for analyst questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Brower as he reads the company's Safe Harbor Statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Nate, please go ahead.
Thank you, Marissa. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining our conference call to discuss our third quarter 2026 financial results. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is available for replay via telephonic dial-in through November 18th and via a live webcast that will be posted in the investor relations portion of our website at ir.naturesunshine.com. The information on this call contains forward-looking statements. These statements are often characterized by terminologies such as hope, may, anticipate, expect, Will, and other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and the actual results may be materially different from the results implied by forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause results to differ materially from those implied herein include, but are not limited to, those factors disclosed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K, Quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, our earnings release issued today, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The information on this call speaks only as of today's date, and the company disclaims any duty to update the information provided herein. Now I would like to turn the call over to the CEO of Nature Sunshine, Ken Ramonzi. Ken?
Thank you, Nate, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our third quarter earnings call.
Simply put, we had a poor quarter that fell well short of our expectations.
Nature Sunshine is a company built for growth with the tailwinds of the natural supplement category to fuel us. And as I celebrate my first year anniversary with the company, I am convinced now more than ever that we can accelerate our growth well into the future. But our business declined in the quarter. Primarily due to soft performance in two areas that have historically been growth for us, Asia and North America, and it will take a few quarters to work our way through these issues. Asia declined primarily due to weakness in China, where the unexpected passing of two of our key leaders in one region earlier this year had a greater and more lasting impact than we initially anticipated. In addition, the actions we took in the second quarter To address certain distributor sales practices that were inconsistent with our policies, disrupted recruiting and business building activity among portions of our consultant leadership base. We expect the impact to continue as our consultants adjust their business building practices and work to rebuild our productive base. Despite this, our long-term outlook in China is positive. China is a very large direct selling and supplement market, and we've had great success building the business there to $40 million in revenue in 2025 with an effective consultant base. And with China's burgeoning middle class and expanding focus on health and wellness, we see a significant opportunity to continue to build our business there. Asia was also down due to softness in Taiwan, which has been declining over the last two years after rapid growth the previous six years. Recent Taiwan performance has been masked by exceptional performance in Japan and Korea. However, the performance in these two regions just could not offset Taiwan's weakness in this last quarter. Our issues in Taiwan stem from a declining consulting base, which we're addressing through new recruiting efforts. In North America, our growth stalled due to our digital business normalizing following several years of exceptional growth, creating a more challenging comparison as we work to establish its next phase of growth. Our digital business has grown over the past few years from zero in 2021 to $40 million in 2025, peaking in the first quarter of this year. Now, this was the first quarter our digital business has experienced a decline due to more normalized comparisons in a TikTok business and mapping the results of a product that went viral in 2025. But despite this challenging quarter, we remain and expect our digital business to grow for the year, and we remain bullish on the business long term. But to really make North America a key growth engine for us again is to not only grow our digital business, but also to grow our core U.S. direct selling business, a business that has been soft for years. Today, our strategy in the U.S. is an AND strategy, A-N-D strategy, meaning we expect to grow both our direct selling business and our digital e-commerce business. I'll share a bit more detail of this on our plans later on the call. But for now, I'd like to turn the call over to our new Chief Financial Officer, Ruth Perkins, to discuss our third quarter performance in more detail. Ruth has been at Nature Sunshine for only two months, but she already has a terrific command of our business and is adding all the value I hoped for as the last piece of the puzzle to our executive leadership team. I'm delighted Ruth is on our team and confident she will help us steer our company back to profitable growth. Ruth?
Thank you, Ken, and good afternoon, everyone. It is a privilege to join you for the first time as Nature Sunshine Chief Financial Officer. I also want to thank John Lennoy, our Chief Accounting Officer, for his leadership and partnership throughout the transition. Over the past two months, I have had the opportunity to meet with our teams and gain a deeper understanding of our business. What I have seen reinforces my belief that Nature's Sunshine has significant strengths, including trusted brands, a 50-year heritage of herbal expertise, and a high-quality, vertically integrated manufacturing platform. While our third quarter performance was disappointing and below expectations, it does not change my view of the quality of the business or the long-term opportunity ahead. Let me now turn to our third quarter results. Net sales in the third quarter were 116.6 million, a 7% decline versus prior year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange rates. Unfavorable foreign exchange reduced reported net sales by an additional two percentage points, resulting in a 9% decline versus the year-ago quarter. While the decline was measured against a record third quarter in 2025, and absolute net sales remained generally consistent with second quarter levels, these results were below our expectations. The shortfall in the quarter was driven primarily by the factors Ken discussed, most notably the continued challenges in China and slower growth in our digital business. Turning to our individual markets, total Asia-Pacific third-quarter sales were $55 million, down 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Unfavorable foreign exchange reduced sales by an additional 4 percentage points, resulting in a reported decline of 15%. China accounted for the majority of the decline, with sales down 52% in constant currency year over year, due primarily to the challenges discussed earlier. As our consultant leadership base adapts to the changes we have implemented, and we work to rebuild momentum, we expect China to remain a headwind into 2027. Outside of China, weakness in Taiwan was partially offset by continued growth in Japan. In North America, third-quarter sales declined 6% year-over-year to 34 million. Digital sales declined 1% versus the prior year after several quarters of strong growth, reflecting more challenging comparisons as we lapped the rapid expansion of our social commerce business. Despite the slower growth, subscription auto-ship trends remained strong. Auto-ship represented 40% of total digital sales compared to 30% last year. Within social commerce, Autoship accounted for 53% of revenue, up from 9% a year ago, helping build a larger recurring revenue base. Our North America direct selling trends also remained soft during the quarter, consistent with the longer-term trends in the business. In Europe, third-quarter sales increased 1% on constant currency basis year-over-year to $22.1 million. Growth of 7% in Eastern Europe was largely offset by softer results in Central Europe. We also continue to make progress in Germany, where our market launch remains on track. Turning to growth margin. We continue to make progress on initiatives designed to improve supply chain efficiency. Third quarter gross margin was 72.9%, down slightly versus last year's levels of 73.3%, primarily due to unfavorable foreign exchange. For the fourth quarter, we expect gross margin to be in the low 72% range, slightly below the prior year, primarily due to continued unfavorable foreign exchange. Selling general and administrative expenses during the third quarter were $42.3 million compared to $45.7 million a year ago. The decrease in SG&A dollars was primarily driven by lower variable costs and disciplined expense management across the organization as we responded to softer sales trends. Adjusted EBITDA, as defined in our earnings release, was $11.1 million compared to $15.2 million in the prior year, primarily due to lower revenue. Our balance sheet remains strong, with cash and cash equivalents of $89.4 million and no debt. Net cash provided by operating activities during the quarter was $10.8 million. Compared to $18.5 million in the prior year, during the quarter, we repurchased 232,000 shares for approximately $3.5 million, or $15.27 per share, leaving $11.3 million remaining under our share repurchase authorization, which we intend to use as market conditions warrant. Reflecting on our third quarter performance and updated expectations for the balance of the year, we are lowering our full year 2026 outlook. We now expect net sales of $460 to $470 million and adjusted EBITDA of $44 to $48 million. That compares with the ranges we gave in August of $490 to $500 million and $48 to $52 million. The major drivers of this lowered outlook are continued year-over-year declines expected in China, ongoing weakness in Taiwan, and more normalized comparisons in our digital business. While we are taking actions to improve performance, we expect these factors to continue affecting results in the near term. While our third quarter results were disappointing, and we have adjusted our outlook accordingly, We are taking action to address the issues affecting performance and remain focused on strengthening the business for the long term. And with that, I'll turn the call back to Ken.
Thank you, Ruth. Despite softness in our business in the short term, we still have very strong conviction in our vision for growth. While we expect the challenges in China to continue in 2027, We believe the actions we're taking are important to position that business for sustainable, long-term growth. At the same time, we remain focused on advancing our digital growth initiatives and executing all the strategies behind our vision for growth that we developed earlier this year. As a reminder, even with a soft quarter, the goals of our vision for growth are to double the size of this company to $1 billion in sales and improve our EBITDA margin to 15% over time. The four key growth drivers of our vision for growth will be, number one, continued digital expansion. We're planning to increase investment in marketing and SaaS tools in our digital business to improve our search, merchandising, and subscription capabilities of our digital storefront. Number two, geographic penetration and expansion. We'll continue to build out our newest market, Germany, and we'll open a third consultant base in Japan in 2027. And in the U.S., our largest market, we will be introducing a reimagined direct sales program by mid-2027 featuring a new product lineup, a new compensation plan, and new recruiting and incentive programs. And lastly, as we've shared before, we are preparing to launch another Asian country, awaiting only government licensing approval. So timing is still yet to be determined. Number three, superior marketing product innovation. This month, we'll begin the launch of a women's health product called Lunaya across our entire Synergy system in Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. And in the U.S., we're planning the launch of a new gut health product lineup in 2027 as part of the relaunch of our U.S. direct selling business. And number four, last but not least, we still plan to use M&A to help drive us to our billion-dollar goal, but as I've mentioned in previous calls, we can't predict when we'll execute an acquisition. We'll expand further on our 2027 business plans against these strategies when we share our fourth quarter results. In summary, we are very disappointed in our third quarter performance and do not underestimate the work we have in front of us to get our business back on the growth track over the next few quarters. But I could not be happier with the leadership team we built at Nature Sunshine, nor more enthusiastic with the opportunities to accelerate our growth globally.
Thank you for your time and attention today and for your continued support of Nature Sunshine.
I would now like to turn the call back to the operator for questions. Operator?
Operator
Thank you, Mr. Romanzi. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touch tone phone. Should you wish to remove your hand from the queue, please press star followed by two. And if you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Just a moment for your first question. Your first question comes from Susan Anderson with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess maybe just a follow-up on the digital business. Maybe if you could talk about in North America, particularly, I guess, you know, what kind of drove the slowdown? I know it had been really strong and there was some tough compares, but, you know, kind of what changed that trajectory? And then I guess in China, maybe if you could talk about the operational disruptions that you mentioned a little bit more detail and when you think that'll be resolved. Thanks.
Um, thanks, Susan. Thanks for joining us. So first of all, in our digital business, that business, as you know, has been growing dramatically over the last few years, last few quarters, you know, 20 and 30 and 40%. And last year, we entered a whole new channel in TikTok. So we're starting to overlap that as well as a product that went viral, that has settled back down to much higher levels before the product went viral, but settled back down. So TikTok is now doing consistent business. It's just the growth versus year goes a lot less. And then, in addition, we have seen, like many companies have seen, that paid search. And in the digital business is not working quite as effectively given the new AI agents that are out there. So we're investing in, as I mentioned in the script, we're investing in SaaS tools to be able to deal with these AI agents so that we get back to having our paid search and agentic search be more effective. So traffic had slowed down a little bit. We've identified what those areas are and it's altering our plans to be able to boost traffic back up, not just on our own website, but on a large portion of our business, Amazon. So, you know, the fundamentals of our digital business is strong, and we expect to continue to grow that business going into the future. In terms of China, again, to be clear, as we mentioned, as we discussed last quarter, there was really two bases in China that were significantly affected. One was the unfortunate passing of two leaders in charge of one base. Um, it's going to take time to build up that leadership base without the people that were running that, um, that facility. Um, and then lastly, the second area was we have intentionally, um, uh, tightened up the selling practices of another consultant base. Um, quite frankly, because, uh, we always want to do business the right way as Nature Sunshine. We want to make sure all of our independent consultants are compliant. And we basically curtailed some of the more aggressive practices that they were pursuing, which does hurt near-term sales. But it doesn't really create the core function of what they do. They just have to build back their distributor base in a more systematic and more compliant way. And when we faced this in the last quarter, we said, hey, this just started, and we don't know really what the net effect is. And we're seeing kind of the flesh out of that in the last quarter. And we now need to rebuild from a lower base. But the market's still very attractive. We just have to make sure our independent consultant base is doing it in the way that we've prided ourselves in doing it the right way globally over the past 50 years.
Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, no, that's helpful. And I guess just on the M&A front, I guess, what are you guys seeing out there? Are you seeing any attractive valuations, any opportunities? You know, that would fit with your portfolio or, I guess, you know, I guess how, you know, how long do you think it's going to take to find something that, you know, could potentially make sense for you?
Well, Susan, as you know, you can't predict when something's going to come along that's attractive. I will say that we did enter in the last quarter a period of due diligence with an opportunity. We had a 90-day exclusive, and after 30 days, we shut it down. Good news, bad news. The good news was it fit the profile of what we were looking for, as we discussed several times, that fit the profile of cost synergies that could be adopted into our facility. So we kind of proved out that the model could really work. The reason why we didn't pursue it, we were very concerned about their revenue profile. The revenue profile was shaky. And even though we could have bought the business and incurred a lot of cost synergies to pay for it, we didn't want to inherit another falling knife, so to speak. So we uncertain with the revenue, you know, we're not just going to do something to have a short term, we want to do something that has some growth potential to it. And we just got we were not satisfied with the with the details of the revenue makeup, there was too much going on. And we just didn't want to buy into that type of risk. Yeah. Having said that, you know, with the new CFO, it's not like we've been that aggressive, but now that Ruth's got her feet on the ground, we're going to step up the outreach. To date, we've only looked at things that have crossed our desk. We need to put a little bit more of a strategic plan together for us to go out and search for potential candidates, because quite frankly, all we've done right now is evaluate things that have come across our desk. But we know we want to produce something, get something that provides us enough scale that will drive cost synergies that will actually have a good impact on our P&L. So there's a lot of smaller stuff out there. Call it, you know, $20 to $50 million in revenue. That really doesn't help us all that much. It's a lot of work. It takes as much work to buy a $20 million business than it does to buy a $100 million business. So there's a lot of small stuff. We just need to find things that are big enough that will have a good impact on our P&L that will give us revenue diversity and growth potential.
Got it. Okay, great. That sounds good. Thanks so much for all the details. Good luck the rest of the year.
Operator
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one. Your next question comes from Andrew Tompkins with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.
Hey, this is Andrew from GA on for Matt. I just had a question about Japan. Given the strength you've been seeing, how should we think about a more normalized rate of growth going forward? And as you kind of move into 2027, do you think that the bigger opportunity for expansion is within Japan or potentially increasing productivity in other markets?
Thank you. Well, Japan had an outsized quarter in the second quarter. I think we were up something like 50% in the second quarter. So we can't expect that ongoing. This quarter, it still grew nicely. And so we expect continued growth in Japan. It's been growing for several years. And with this new leadership base that we'll be establishing, we talk about geographic expansion and penetration. Expansion could be a new country like Germany. But in Japan, we historically were a Tokyo-based market. And a few years ago, we introduced a second. base in southern Japan, a city called Fukuoka, and that's been fueling growth. And we just made an agreement to open up a third location in the city of Osaka. It's kind of just north of Tokyo. And so within the country, we can continue to expand, which allows us to expand our consultant base, which is really what drives the business. So we're going to expect Japan to be a growth engine. It just didn't grow enough to offset weaknesses in Taiwan. Taiwan's a little smaller market, right? It's not quite as large as Japan in terms of size, but it has done actually sales that are outsized for that market. And now we need to reach a new growth plan there because Taiwan is a very, very developed market, which is why we've kind of like softened over the last couple of years. But we still believe there's potential. We're certainly not saturated in the market yet.
Got it. That makes sense. And then regarding innovation, looking ahead, can you just give us a sense of what the innovation pipeline looks like?
Well, as I mentioned on our call, you know, in order to achieve the growth expectations of the Asia Synergy System, which I mentioned is Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, the new Women's Health product, along with their recently launched skincare line, are initiatives for them to keep driving and getting new consultants on board to continue to build the business. So those new products will only be successful if they can attract new consultants to keep driving the business forward. So in Asia, we're pretty much set for a while with continued opportunity for the skincare line, which is totally incremental to our supplement line in terms of consumer use. That is still only single digit percentages, depending on the country you look at in terms of the overall business. So we wanted to have that skincare line be a double digit percentage of their business. And now that this new women's healthcare product, they have another new product to sell to continue to build out productive consultants basis. So we hope that these help fuel the growth that we will expect in the synergy system, Japan, Taiwan, Korea in 2027. In terms of the U.S. direct selling business, it's a total relaunch across the business that's centered around a new product bundle that's designed for a direct selling business only. Um, around gut health, which is a very big issue these days in consumer health. Um, it's actually gut health products are actually our top selling category in the United States and in many areas around the world. Um, so we've got new products as well as some reposition older products to, to, to, to have a new consultant base, take our new U S direct selling business to another way. So it's not innovation just for the consumer. It's innovation to get our consultants to help recruit new people to get more consumers involved with our business over time. So those are really the two major new product news that we were going to rely on at least for the next 18 months. In the direct selling world, we can't overload them with too many new products because they've got to focus on kind of simple product news one at a time. And we hope that these are going to be a growth engine for us for 18 months or so.
And I add, when you look at, you know, the world of consumer health, gut health and women's health are two really big, big growing areas of opportunity and of consumer concern. And we have a right to play in both of those areas with really terrific products.
Operator
At this time, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Romanzi for closing remarks.
Thank you, Operator. I just want to say thank you for everybody's engagement and time and attention, and we look forward to continuing to report on our progress going forward. Appreciate it.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.
