Lynn Powers
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital
Thanks, Steve. We’re pleased by our first quarter results and confident in our performance for the balance of the year. We continue to focus our attention on growing our 3 core businesses: the Gaiam brand, distribution and licensing, and subscription services.
I’d like to start by reviewing our business segment, which I’m happy to say is up 30%, excluding any revenue from Vivendi, when compared to Q1 2011. The acquisition of Vivendi Entertainment from Universal Music Group not only brings additional sales volume of approximately 20 million units and expected net revenue and gross margin of approximately $25 million annually, it also provides the scale to position Gaiam Vivendi as the largest independent and third-largest overall media distributor in the United States for non-theatrical content, with over 7,000 titles and the only independent with direct relationships with Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart and all meaningful digital retailers.
This is important because as DVD volumes decline, operational efficiencies will help offset that top line headwind and become a crucial competitive differentiator. This acquisition will provide us with larger economies of scale from which to leverage our operating structure and increase the depth of many of our relationships with content creators and retail partners that will help us drive our Media Content Distribution business and the overall visibility of Gaiam. It will help us reduce third-party distribution costs, lower post-production and digital distribution costs, and to eliminate a significant amount of redundant overhead, replication, warehousing, and other costs.
We expect operating margins will benefit this year from operational synergies and I’m particularly pleased with the seamless integration between Gaiam and Vivendi Entertainment to date. The acquisition also gives us a unique position in market share. According to Nielsen’s Video Scan for the first quarter, Gaiam Vivendi remained at the top of the charts in fitness, with 40% market share, which is up from approximately 30% last year and 17 points higher than our nearest competitor.
Although we ended 2011 with the combined entity at #3 in non-theatrical market share, to date in 2002 (sic) [2012] we are actually #2 with only Warner Studios ahead of us. Also noteworthy is that the combined entity actually increased the number of units sold from Q1 2011 to Q1 2012, even as the overall market declined. The acquisition also positions us to leverage our unique, nontraditional distribution channels, like Direct Response TV, store-within-store relationships, category management, subscription services, and over 60,000 storefronts, to further drive revenue for the Gaiam Vivendi studio partners.
In addition, we made some significant progress across a number of initiatives that I’d like to comment on in a bit more detail. Starting with our goal of growing our media business, our recent launch of the media aggregator role at Target continued to contribute to revenue in the quarter and to bring on new distribution relationships, increasing from the 9 studios announced last quarter to 12 in the current quarter. We also saw broad-based improvements across a number of key product segments at Target, including Gaiam branded accessories, fitness media, and key brand relationships, such as the Reebok product line. This helped drive sales growth from our top 3 accounts from 20% to 50% plus.
In addition, we continued to invest in our digital asset management and delivery platform, signing new agreements with major digital players and further strengthening our media business to support a digital footprint. With regard to our fitness products, we saw great success from our Restore line of at-home rehabilitative and restorative accessories along with our Gaiam Sol premium yoga line, which launched in Q4 2011.
Our Restore products have been among the top performers in Target and other Gaiam stores and store locations. We will continue to expand this line of products during 2012. Gaiam Sol still has a lot of room to grow both in SKUs and placement across high-end sporting goods stores, natural grocery, and e-tailers. We also continued to expand our successful stores-in-stores concept and reach close to 15,000 doors during the quarter. We expect to utilize this strategy across our new categories, such as the Gaiam Restore brand as well as for our studio partners.
Turning to our Direct-to-Consumer business, which had a 19% internal growth, we followed up on the success of the Firm Express program on Direct Response television by launching 2012 with the early February airing of the Gaiam-branded Jillian Michaels Body Revolution product line, a 90-day fitness and weight loss program starring one of the most respected and recognized talents in the fitness world. We expect to continue to see strong growth from this product as we look for it to hit retail in the second half of the year.
We also expect a lot from our upcoming launch of the third and newest version of our healthy cooking product Platinum Express, and remain optimistic in our ability to develop and bring to market a line of skincare products as well as additional fitness programs, and potentially a branded media program with one of our studio partners for release in the second half of the year. During the quarter we continued the repositioning of our e-commerce business to shift towards proprietary branded products and apparel. We are also launching a new Web platform and creative look in the third quarter. We expect to begin to see the results from these efforts in the last half of the year.
Lastly, Gaiam TV, which we launched in beta version in September of 2011, is a fullfeature video streaming service boasting over 3,000 exclusive titles and offering viewers a unique selection of fitness and entertainment titles targeted at our Direct-to-Consumer customer. Available on the Web, across mobile devices, Roku box and Samsung smart TVs, Gaiam TV is quickly becoming a key part of our goal to build our brand in the digital world and to transition the availability of our content libraries and rights from physical DVDs to digital media. We believe our investment in digital, streaming, exclusive content and custom apps place us at the forefront in the low-cost [ph] industry.
In first quarter, our investment in Gaiam TV had a negative impact on our operating profit of approximately $1 million. With regard to the deconsolidation of Real Goods, we believe that this will make our business more understandable for investors and help bring focus to the performance and value of our core businesses -- the Gaiam brand, distribution and licensing, and subscription services.
In closing, we feel very comfortable with all 3 of our main businesses. We are confident about the opportunity inherent within our Gaiam brand and in our ability to develop that brand halo across additional product lines. We’re also very excited about being an aggregator that packages together an incredible set of content, provides a great value for consumers, and brings visibility to our brand partners.
And finally, we are pleased with our progress on some of our key initiatives for 2012 that we laid out in our 2011 year-end conference call, including the successful integration of the business of Vivendi Entertainment, leveraging our digital infrastructure, releasing branded direct-response products with mass retail potential, seeking broader placement of Gaiam branded products with the release of the Restore and Sol line, moving out of beta on Gaiam TV in July and achieving double digit organic revenue growth, to name a few.
With that I’d like to turn the call back over to the operator and take this opportunity to answer questions.