Ryan S. Napierski - Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc.
Management
Thanks, Ritch. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm also very excited about our business potential around the world. As Ritch mentioned, we are acutely focused on customer and sales leader acquisition. We believe that this is key to driving growth in 2017 and sustaining that growth moving forward. Let me address some first quarter highlights, as well as our plans to generate growth and improvements throughout the world. In Mainland China, we generated 33% local currency revenue growth in the first quarter. We were encouraged by a significant year-over-year increase in customer growth, as well as the sequential increase from Q4 to Q1. Typically, we see a sequential seasonal decline in customers in the first quarter. We initiated the product launch of ageLOC Me in China at the end of the quarter, which is proving to be a strong product for both attracting and retaining customers. We continue to leverage business incentives and quarterly expos in the market. These initiatives introduce our products and business opportunity to many potential customers and drive sales leader productivity. And we're working towards a strong LumiSpa introduction in the fourth quarter. Japan and Korea continue to be challenging markets for us. While the economic and political environments are difficult in both markets, we believe our key to improving these markets is to increase our focus on customer acquisition through social selling and other mediums. I just returned from visiting both of these markets last week, where I spent time with our management teams, as well as key leaders in the area, who remain optimistic despite the challenging environment. In Japan, we executed a successful convention, which is helpful in aligning our sales leaders with the company's direction. Over the next several quarters, we will focus our initiatives around social selling and customer-focused promotions, while training and preparing these markets as well for a successful LumiSpa introduction in the fourth quarter. While we don't expect to see immediate improvements, we anticipate that our initiatives will begin positively impacting these markets later this year. Let me briefly speak about social selling, as it is becoming a powerful platform for us around the world. Generally, our sales leaders are introducing new customers to many of our differentiated products through their social media outlets. We're seeing strong trial and customer acquisition through the social business model. Social selling has become a powerful business driver in many of our markets in EMEA, South Asia-Pacific, and most recently in the Americas. Our efforts to enable social selling include providing differentiated products positioned for a broader demographic, including millennials, enhancing the platforms that empower our sales leaders to build their businesses, and providing programs that increase the velocity of our business. Lastly, we look forward to meeting with our top sales leaders from around the globe in two weeks, as we continue to partner with them to grow our business. We feel contagious excitement that will help us accelerate the pace of growth moving forward. I'll now turn the time over to Mark.