M. Truman Hunt
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thanks, Scott, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. As you know, this is a big week at Nu Skin. We're hosting more than 15,000 people from over 50 countries to our global sales convention in Salt Lake City this week. And we'll officially begin that event with the ribbon cutting of our new innovation center at our corporate headquarters in Provo tomorrow morning. This is an absolutely beautiful state-of-the-art facility that will be the home of our anti-aging research and development center. This facility really reflects our commitment to continue to innovate in our product line, as well as within our direct selling channel. We would invite any of you who happen to visit Utah in the upcoming weeks and months to stop by and see the new facility first-hand. And we're also very pleased with our third quarter results. We posted record revenue of $928 million, an impressive 76% improvement over the prior year. And even more impressive when you consider that our largest revenue quarter prior to this was $683 million. Additionally, our earnings grew by 107%, reaching $1.80 per share. And as strong a quarter as this was, we remain optimistic about what lies ahead, as reflected in the significant increase in our guidance for the year. Ritch is going to touch on the details of the increased guidance in a few minutes. Of course, a highlight for the third quarter was the very strong start we had with the global LTO of our new weight management system which we call ageLOC TR90. Beginning in September, we made TR90 available in portions of Greater China and in the South Asia/Pacific regions, with sales totaling about $205 million. We're continuing the LTO in the remainder of our regions in the fourth quarter, and based on what we've seen so far this month, we would expect the LTO to generate revenue in the range of $550 million or so. As you may remember, we will follow this fall's global LTO with regional sales windows throughout the year in 2014. In the past, our regional launches have generated sales levels considerably higher than our global LTO, which we expect to remain the case next year. These significant sales events not only drive revenue growth but they also give us a healthy lift in the number of actives and in our sales leader count. We now have more than 360,000 more consumers and sales leaders than we did at this same time last year. Geographically, we were particularly pleased with the strong growth in the Greater China and South Asia/Pacific regions, as well as in South Korea and in the Americas. We remain optimistic about the potential of Mainland China, which continues to be a growing market for the direct selling industry as a whole. We're still a relatively small player in the market and we think that the market's potential justifies the investment to continue to sustain growth in a market that one really cannot afford to ignore. We've spoken previously about our plans to accelerate the build-out of our business in China and look forward to sharing an update and more details of this plan in November at our Analyst Day. I would also note that the other markets in the Greater China region also performed extremely well this quarter, with a 79% improvement in Taiwan, 68% improvement in Hong Kong. Some of you will remember that about 3 years ago, we put in place an incentive for Greater China to reach $1 billion in sales by the end of 2014, which is our 30th anniversary year. That objective, when we initiated it, it seemed quite aspirational at the time. But we will announce this week at our convention that Greater China actually achieved that sales objective for the year earlier in the month of October. So we're really pleased with what's happening there, and that achievement is a tribute to our management team and our sales leaders who are working really hard to execute in a high growth environment. North Asia also had a strong quarter, on a continued growth at South Korea, in particular, which is a long-term all-star market for us, and which posted a 71% gain in the quarter in local currency. Japan slipped a bit in local currency in the quarter, but we expect it to be flat to slightly modest growth for the year as we introduce TR90 and continue to execute our plans there. From an operating standpoint, our operating margin reached its highest level ever in the third quarter at just over 18%. This speaks to the power of the business model as we leverage G&A on strong product sales. At our Analyst Day in November, we'll talk about where we expect operating margin to be as we continue to grow. Our business model puts us in the enviable position of being able to invest in growth initiatives and still maintain healthy operating margins. Overall, we hoped that our shareholders will recognize that good things are happening at Nu Skin Enterprises. We have, I think, a rare opportunity to grow at rates that few companies in the consumer products world do. We're really pleased with our product pipeline, and we can see a powerful and steady stream of products continuing to fuel our growth going forward. Fourth quarter will be our first ever $1 billion quarter, at least we expect it to be so. And we also expect regional sales of TR90 to surpass our global LTO sales this year. And looking forward, even another year, we believe that our next global launch in 2015 will be a very significant launch, perhaps even our first ever $1 billion product launch. We're likely to give the shareholders a glimpse of the products and the pipeline for 2015 at our Analyst Day in November. So we have some lofty goals here at Nu Skin and we have confidence in our sales force and in our management team. They're a talented and motivated group of leaders who are truly passionate about Nu Skin and about what they're doing. So with that, I'll turn the time over to Ritch.