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Conference · 2026-08-12
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Okay, good morning, everyone. Thanks for attending our conference. I'm Susan Anderson, one of Canaccord's analysts in the consumer space, and we're very excited to have Nature's Sunshine here, and in particular, our CEO, Ken Ramonzi. Nature's Sunshine is a leading natural health and wellness company and the number one herbal and botanical company in the world. With that, I'll turn it over to you, Ken, to give us some more information on Nature's Sunshine.
Thank you, Susan. I was told I need to show a safe harbor statement. You've always seen those before, so I don't think I have to read this. I was also told that people don't like video, but I do. So I'm going to, this one-minute video will explain Nature Sunshine better than I can myself.
Who is Nature Sunshine? We are the herbal experts since 1972, sharing the healing power of nature. We harness the pure and the potent, the trusted and the proven from forests, fields, and farms, from stems, seas, and soils, from mountain faces and exotic places, from watersheds and riverbeds, to you. Over the course of decades, innovating, proving, building a dependable legacy of quality, our love of health and nature has attracted a community, a tribe that we are driven to serve a global family that cares for each other shares with each other and dares to make a difference for the world we reward the achievers affiliates and ambassadors of nature sunshine those that help us reach our common goal to share the healing power of nature and to preserve its gifts for the next generation we are nature sunshine we invite you to be a force of nature
so nature sunshine was founded in 1972 by gene and christine hughes of provo utah gene suffered from gut health problems and he ingested capsicum for its natural healing properties now capsicum is cayenne pepper. And so you imagine it was quite a difficult process for Gene. So his wife one day said, why don't we figure out how to encapsulate the pepper to make it a little bit easier for you to ingest? So at their kitchen table, they actually invented the process of encapsulating herbs. Gene and Christine's vision was to elevate people's lives through the power of nature. And they were going to elevate people's lives through the power of nature in two ways. One, improve their health through the natural healing properties that nature offers with hundreds of ingredients from around the world that have been used for thousands of years, and with a line of nutritional supplements. The other way they were going to improve their lives is to give them economic opportunity for people to run their own business selling natural supplements. It really started in the United States with herbal practitioners, little shops, herbalists, apothecaries, things of that nature, where people would go for more natural remedies, And they would prescribe nature sunshine products and if certainly they're in a commission off the selling of those products But more importantly they felt that they were healers and they began in little shops like this all around the country Today nature sunshine markets through an army of independent consultants this is a picture of me with our top leader in Asia, mr. Wong and 4,000 of our top leaders in Asia These are just the top leaders that earn incentives to go to a big Asian summit every year. This happened to be in southern Japan We have tens of thousands of these independent consultants selling our products each and every day around the world They sell two powerful brands one is Nature Sunshine the other one is Synergy Synergy joined Nature Sunshine as a result of an acquisition 25 years ago We sell those brands in over 40 countries around the world We sell nature's sunshine in the Americas, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Baltic states, and in China. And Synergy we sell in the rest of Asia, Western Europe, and we sell a bit in the U.S. It's very small, but it's actually a place where we think there's tremendous growth opportunity for our second brand here in the U.S. We manufacture over 90 percent of our products in our own manufacturing facility under the strictest of quality standards. And we achieve all the most important certifications around the world, including the toughest in the world, the TGA, out of Australia. In 2025, we did $480 million in sales, and we did 10% in EBITDA margin. And over the past four years, we significantly have outperformed our peers in the direct selling industry with a top-line annual growth rate of 4% and EBITDA annual growth rate of 16% versus declines in the peer group. We have a rock-solid balance sheet with nearly $100 million in cash, and we have no debt. And we've delivered total shareholder return more than two times the Russell 2000 index versus just since 2023. So who am I and why am I here? I mean, the business is doing pretty well. Well, my name is Ken Romanzi, and I'm a 44-year veteran of the consumer pack of goods and food and beverage industry. I started my career in marketing at Frito-Lay. I ran sales and distribution for the large Nabisco selling and distribution system. I was the chief operating officer for Ocean Spray for 11 years through a dramatic period of growth. And I was the CEO of B&G Foods, a public food company based in New Jersey, from 2017 through COVID in 2020. I was recruited to Nature Sunshine by an old colleague of mine, Heidi Wissmiller, the recently appointed chair of Nature Sunshine. And she was the former chief growth officer of Rodanum Fields a great success story in skin care And I was charged by the board to do one thing One of our board members Rob Strauss is sitting in the back of the room as well as our chief accounting officer John Illinois And the one thing they said is hey listen, we've been growing. Okay, but we think there's room for acceleration of growth So can you get get this get this thing growing faster? So our leadership team is now made up of both industry veterans and company veterans as well as newcomers And we've got our leadership pretty much set. Let me introduce you Bryant Yates and Daniel on the bottom left and center They are 25 plus year veterans of this company and experts in the industry Bryant Yates runs a massive amount of geography Central, Eastern, Western Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Baltic states. He also runs Latin America He's fluent, not only in English, of course, but Russian, Ukrainian. He gets by in Poland pretty well as well and speaks a little bit of broken Spanish. Totally invaluable in our business there. Dan Norman was the past president of Synergy and now runs our Asia-Pacific business, which is 40% of our sales. When I got there, I immediately recorded, front, center, on the top, Eric Fritz, who's a longtime colleague of mine and a best-in-class operations supply chain executive with me at Nabisco, Ocean Sprite, and B&G Foods. Most recently, we brought in Janine Weber, lower right, to run our North American business. Janine's a 25-year veteran of the direct selling industry, worked with Heidi Wissmiller at Rodanum Fields, helping make that a billion-dollar brand and the number one skincare company at the time in the United States. And lastly, last week, we just announced Ruth Perkins will join us September 1st as our Chief Financial Officer. Ruth brings a tremendous amount of excellent financial leadership experience in global consumer product companies like Ford, most recently Estee Lauder, and nearly 20 years at PepsiCo, which is really an academic company that just pumps out CFO candidates. Our team has an aggressive vision for growth. We want to double sales to a billion dollars and want to improve our EBITDA margin of 15% through scale and leverage. We believe we'll do that by staying true to the mission of Gene and Christine Hughes, continuing to elevate lives through the power of nature, helping people improve their health through natural remedies, as well as improve their economic stature by giving them a business to run independently with our support and by executing four strategic growth drivers. The first is geographic penetration. more business than the countries we're in, plus new countries, digital channel expansion, superior marketing, and then lastly, M&A. We have a lot of opportunity to look at strategic M&A that's complementary to our business. We have excess manufacturing capacity, and we can fold in incremental business pretty simply with little to no incremental fixed costs. This is kind of a roadmap to our billion dollars. We believe that we can get more business out of our existing business. We think there's opportunity to, again, double our digital growth, our digital business. New geographies will add business. New channels will add business. And then to put us over the top, M&A. We believe there's room in this very large growing market. This is our vision of how we're going to increase our EBITDA margins. We'll get leverage through gross margin expansion as we put more volume through our manufacturing facilities. We'll get leverage on our G&A. And then lastly, our modeling shows that with a bolt-on acquisition, we can add a point or two of EBITDA margin to the bottom line. And as I said, we believe there's a lot of opportunity in this market. It's a trillion dollars. We've been keeping pace with the market, roughly growing about 4%. But all the industry experts believe that the growth rate's going to increase to higher single digits, and we intend to accelerate right along with it. We'll accelerate, as I mentioned, through these four strategic growth drivers. So let me just comment on a few of them in my closing. The first is geographic penetration. This is a great example. This is Japan. Yes, we're in Japan, but we're a Tokyo-centric business. Recently, we've opened up a new office in southern Japan in the city of Fukuoka and that has drove driven momentum in the business next year We'll open another city in a few years another city So there's opportunities to establish more footprint in a country. We were already doing about 45 million dollars worth of annual business, but we're really Tokyo-centric we have other markets like that in Seoul in Korea. We're a Seoul centric business There are other cities we can expand to. In China, we're a Shanghai and Shenzhen-centered business, and there's a huge amount of urban concentration there where we can expand our business. The next example is expanding into new markets. Earlier this year, we expanded into Germany, the largest supplement market in Europe and the largest direct selling market in Europe. Now, it'll be small to start, but our experience is after a few years of startup, It starts to ramp very quickly. So it we expect it to be a very significant contributor to our business Also next year we're planning a yet-to-be-named Country in Asia And we're not sharing the name because we're waiting for government approvals But we do have our powerful agent synergy system that is looking to expand to contiguous geography And last but not least synergy actually we sell a little bit of synergy in the United States It's less than ten million dollars in revenue But we believe there's tremendous opportunity to treat the U.S. as a brand new country for synergy and think it has tremendous growth potential. And the only market in the world where we'll plan to market both synergy and nature sunshine together in separate systems. Regarding channel expansion, the retail and digital channels are the largest and fastest growing channels and supplements. Yet we're hardly in them. We do direct selling through independent consultants. We plan to expand on both. We've already expanded into the digital channel. In just five years, we built a business that delivered $40 million in revenue last year. It's profitable. And it's on track to do $50 million this year. This is the place where we're really going to put the pedal to the metal and continue to expand our direct-to-consumer digital business. Now, in the U.S. versus the rest of the world, we're already a multi-channel business. We sell through independent consultants. We sell direct-to-consumer, as I just showed you, now on track to do $50 million in sales. Our heritage is health practitioners. And we do do some specialty retail, but they're small mom-and-pop shops. There's no chain stores. So our intent is to test our way into larger retail chains, particularly in the natural food channel, where we believe our brand fits very, very well with their brand and their customer. Turning to marketing, we plan to really sharpen our brand positioning and focus and share that with consumers. We believe we're the leader and the only one that really takes all of these unbelievable botanical ingredients from around the world, blend them with science for efficacious products to restore the body and the mind and people's health. And there are, as you might have noticed, in the supplement business, there are a fair amount of brands with the word nature in it. So to differentiate ourselves, there's no brand other than ours that has the sunshine in its name. So we'll be unveiling a new campaign called Live on the Bright Side, celebrating the sun, which is really the source of everything good in nature, to really differentiate our brand. And like I said, we'll be unveiling that mostly digitally in the fall of this year. And we'll continue to build through our extensive product portfolio. This kind of shows the the the breakout of our business by by health area We're big in digestive health general health and cardiovascular and then we have a fair fairly long tail of other products But in the United States gut health is really art is really how we were founded way back from from when gene Hughes was ingesting capsicum back to gut health So it's a major portion of our business here and we're looking to expand our new product pipeline in these areas One is continued innovation in gut health. It's a big category. It's a huge concern. It affects about 75% of Americans. It's one of the number one reasons why people actually visit a doctor, some type of gastrointestinal distress. We're also working on what we call GLP-1 support products. We're not going into GLP weight loss. We're not going to try to compete with the big pharmaceutical companies. We are developing products that will naturally offer benefits to the side effects of GLP-1 support naturally to people on their weight loss journey. We're developing products specific to women's health. While men and women are equal, they're not the same. Women's health is different than men's health. So women's health is one that is a fast-growing market, and we're developing products there. And we've already launched into skincare as a totally adjacent business in our Asian markets. 85 percent of our consultants in asia are young women and korean skin care is a very very hot topic around the world and so they're embracing skin care as a whole nother business line it's very small as a percentage of our sales now but it's a it's a product category that we expand we tend to expand greatly in our asian markets and with success in our building a strong subscription program we do this in all of our businesses in all of our regions here's just a small example of how subscription sales has ramped up 40 percent of our sales in Japan 23 percent in Taiwan it's now over 35 percent last year was 2025 in 2025 in our digital sales but this is a terrific way to generate recurring revenue and increase in the lifetime value of our customers and last but not least as I said we're on the hunt for creative acquisitions complementary to our business something we can fold into our supply chain and improve our margins literally overnight, and diversify our revenue mix. So in summary, we're planning to take our 50-year heritage of elevating lives through the power of nature with a trillion dollar, a huge market with terrific growth, continue our strong financial performance through our army of consultants with an aggressive vision for growth to expanding our geographies and our channels, already seeing some traction in expanding our channel diversity with a deep and passionate leadership team ready to deliver and have you all come join us and live on the bright side. So with that, I'd be happy to answer questions and engage in discussion about Nature Sunshine, Synergy, and what we have going on at the company. Yes?
Yeah, so can you maybe talk about, in the U.S., how you've had a pretty successful e-commerce business, continues to grow double digits, and then so maybe talk about the transition into e-commerce or more direct DTC versus direct selling? And then also if you can maybe give the audience an idea of the direct selling business in the U.S., which I think is a little bit different because it's sold through a lot of mom-and-pop shops, et cetera.
So that's a great question. So number one, around the world, we go through independent consultants. We are pure direct selling, direct marketing. Some people call it multi-level marketing, very pure. Although we do have outlets around the world, they're not necessarily for you and I as a consumer to walk into. In the United States, the business was built in a very, very different way. It was built through health practitioners, whether it be someone you go and they have clients where they would then give health advice, or someone who has a shop, someone who does both. We also have people that are resellers. So we have people that buy products and they run their own websites. So this company decided to get into direct-to-consumer with a strong brand because quite frankly our direct selling business in the United States Wasn't doing well for quite some time a lot of our health practitioners that Jean and Christine Hughes brought on the business 50 years ago We're aging out. So the company went into direct-to-consumer now We're one of the only companies that are really doing that effectively because if you're an independent consultant selling your product They see that that's possibly the company competing with them And so there was a fair amount of channel conflict when we rolled out when the company rolled out direct-to-consumer But our plans now is to expand and differentiate by product So our independent consultants will have special products that they will sell that you and I won't be able to find on our website And our and amazon.com and and tick-tock and so so forth as we expand our digital prisons We'll start pulling the brand apart from a product offering So we'll have a bunch of products for the consumers to buy directly, but we'll also have special products for our independent consultants to continue to push, like this new gut initiative we're working on. We have to differentiate in somewhat if we want to do channels in both. The one thing to understand about direct selling, and the reason why we believe there's such an opportunity in direct-to-consumer and retail, is because in direct selling, unlike my experience in consumer packaged goods, when you're constantly innovating with new products all the time, like annually, Direct selling they do very well with a simplified product line That can be repeated over and over and over again and recruiting more people to do the same thing. So for instance in Asia Most of our Asian business is centered around a Kit of three packages that are really good for your cardiovascular or metabolic health They've been selling that same kit for the same last 12 years and as they enter new countries in Asia And as they keep expanding in the United States, they're planning to sell that kit. Now, they've got about 30 products in total. But those three products in one kit, that's the predominant thing of their business. That's how they get new people to keep it very, very simple. Barraging a direct selling business with a lot of innovation, they can't handle it all. It diffuses their focus. Replicating selling the same thing over and over again really does well. It's actually not this similar to my experience at Nabisco. You know, when everybody wanted new products, we just said, sell more Oreo. Get more Oreo and more distribution. And back when I was at Nabisco in the 90s, you couldn't find Oreo in every place in the world. Travel around the world today, and in any convenience store, you'll see our Oreo. That's the best new product you can actually imagine, your best-selling product in more points of distribution. And it's particularly important in direct selling. Having said that, we have such a prolific sourcing and product development group that we have more new products than our direct selling business can handle. So that's why we believe we can expand channels very aggressively and really grow both businesses.
I'll add one more. So I guess just on the M&A front, I know you're looking for something that you can put into your supply chain, but maybe talk a little bit more about geographies. Are you looking for here in the U.S. globally? And then also, is this something, are you looking for more of a DTC-type product or direct selling?
We are very focused on, number one, something we can fold into our manufacturing. So that's the first priority because that's really what drives most of the synergies. Number two, we'd like it to be diversifying our revenue mix. So we'd like it to be a direct-to-consumer slash retail channel business. It could be anywhere. We're really, you know, we're focused more on the U.S. than anything else. But we manufacture for the world. Other than in China, we produce for China. We produce for the rest of the world in Utah. So, you know, we're agnostic to the geography. If we can expand our business anywhere, we'd look at it. Although we'd probably have a better chance of folding it in successfully with the U.S. business. There are a lot of smaller supplement companies that don't do their own manufacturing. So we see the integration of a business that doesn't have their own manufacturing as relative, you know, nothing simple, but relatively easy to do because we wouldn't have to decommission someone's manufacturing system. We could just take in product from a co-packer or a co-manufacturer. And so it's something that Eric Fritz, our head of supply chain, and I have a lot of experience with. We've done several acquisitions, just bolt-on. And we've modeled $75 million to $125 million in sales. We're not talking about doubling the size of the company through acquisition. We're not going to overreach. We looked at something like we make 16.5 million units in our Utah facility. We looked at a model of a candidate, an acquisition opportunity that would put in a million and a half incremental units in our business overnight in product forms that we have excess capacity. That's a relatively easily folded, but that's not the only thing that we're looking at. We don't want to buy a falling knife, meaning we'll have a nice surge in volume the first year, and then it's going to be declining. So we do want to look at something that has some growth potential in a channel or in a product category that we're underdeveloped so that we can add to our growth profile as well as the immediate synergistic first-year savings that we can drive. Yeah. Great. Thank you. So we got to be able to make it simply It's diversify our revenue mix and it's got to have some potential or else we will be very disciplined We're not going to do something. That's that doesn't meet those criteria. We're going to be pretty picky anything else Well, thanks for your attention today. If anybody wants to ask any questions one-on-one. I'm happy to happy to stick around. Thank you