Ryan Napierski
Analyst · Steph Wissink from Jefferies. Your line is now open
Thanks Ritch. Good afternoon everyone. Let me first begin by reiterating comment -- Ritch's comments that we remain confident in our growth strategy as we adapt to changing environmental factors. We continue to focus on empowering sales leaders to grow their businesses by acquiring and retaining customers through engaging platforms, enabling products, and empowering programs. I also want to address some of the steps we are taking in response to the situation in China and the progress we are making in executing our overall growth strategy. First, regarding China. We are encouraged with our increasing ability to hold meetings which facilitates the building and training of our salesforce. In fact I was in Shanghai three weeks ago for our company's largest ever Mainland China sales event with more than 20,000 enthusiastic sales leaders in attendance. Their enthusiasm gives me confidence for our future in China. China remains our top priority as we continue to work to strengthen our business in the second half. We have three specific initiatives to accomplish this goal. First, the launch of our new a d-improved Galvanic Spa together with our new ageLOC Nutrial hair and scalp treatment system. Second, new business incentives intended to improve sales leader productivity; and third, initiatives focused on customer acquisition and retention including a new customer referral program. Next, let me mention a few of the highlights in our other regions. The Americas-specific segment generally performed as expected, but was negatively impacted by the hyper-inflationary environment in Argentina. The Pacific, Mexico, and Peru generated strong results and we look forward to the Discover the Best U.S. initiative in our home market which is a multifaceted campaign consisting of several platform, product, and program initiatives to energize our business in this critical market. We executed a similar campaign last year in Mexico where we have seen a -- where we have experienced improved performance. In South Korea, we continue to see signs of stabilization and an opportunity to return this market to growth with new product introductions and enhancements to our velocity sales compensation program. Southeast Asia generally performed as expected while comparing against the 31% growth in the prior year. We're seeing some good performance from several markets including high potential growth markets of Vietnam and Indonesia. In Japan, we are encouraged by two consecutive quarters of constant-currency growth as sales leaders align around our growth strategy, driven by Velocity and our beauty device systems. Taiwan performed well during the quarter with Hong Kong's comparisons impacted by significant sales from the prior year's Greater China convention which was held in the market. In addition, Hong Kong continues to face an unsettled political environment. Finally, EMEA performed well driving 5% constant currency growth. Globally, we continue to make progress in executing the various elements of our growth strategy. Regarding our engaging platforms, we will complete our technology migration to the cloud by the end of Q3. This gives us an agile and scalable technology infrastructure, enabling us to adapt and innovate more quickly and provide our customers with a better digital experience. It's also an important step in transforming our company into a more customer-obsessed, global and digital organization. With our enabling products as many of you know, we recently were named by Euromonitor as the world's number one at-home beauty device systems brand and we're working to further strengthen this position. To this end, we're excited about the introduction of our new-and-improved Galvanic Spa, one of our most successful customer acquisition devices. We believe this enhanced spa along with our new ageLOC Nutrial scalp and hair system will help fuel momentum in our business around the world. Beginning at Live! At our Live! Event in October, we will introduce several new products focused on empowering our sales leaders with a greater portfolio of socially shareable products. These introductions will roll out globally over the next several quarters. For example, you've heard us talk about our controlled environment agriculture initiative which includes in-door growing technology developed to provide seed-to-solution ingredients. We believe this technology will disrupt the nutrition and personal care industries as consumers increasingly demand clean, pure and sustainably-sourced products in an increasingly polluted and under-resourced planet. At LIVE! we're excited to introduce our first two products that leverage this vision and technology, a GreenShake and a facemask. Finally, regarding empowering programs, we continue to focus on optimizing Velocity, our enhanced sales compensation plan to drive sales-leader creation and productivity around the world. Velocity is designed to optimize sales-leader performance based on an individual market needs to promote a more flexible, fast and fulfilling business and attract and reward a broader range of entrepreneurs. We are seeing improvements in key metrics including customer acquisition, the number of people earning a commission and potential sales leaders in qualification. Additionally, we're in the early stages of rolling out an enhanced consumer loyalty program to further strengthen customer retention which began in Q2 in Taiwan and will roll out globally throughout 2020. In summary, we remain confident in our growth strategy as we learn and adapt to environmental factors and believe we have the right team and initiatives in place to grow our business. And with that I'll turn the time over to Mark.