How are energy investors positioned?
On Thursday, 20 March 2025, USANA Health Sciences (NYSE: USNA) presented at the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference, outlining its strategy for growth and recent acquisition of Hiya Health. While emphasizing its strong financial position and focus on innovation, the company acknowledged challenges in the global market, particularly in China.
Key Takeaways
- USANA’s acquisition of Hiya Health aims to leverage its manufacturing and distribution expertise.
- The company maintains a strong balance sheet with $182 million in cash.
- China remains a significant market, contributing 54% of sales.
- USANA is reorganizing into agile teams to boost product innovation.
- The company remains open to strategic acquisitions that align with its health focus.
Financial Results
USANA ended the year with a robust cash position of $182 million, following the acquisition of Hiya Health, which was financed with cash and $23 million in debt. Despite a decline in free cash flow, the company emphasized its continued strength and commitment to capital allocation priorities, including organic investment, strategic acquisitions, and share repurchases.
Operational Updates
USANA has undergone organizational restructuring, forming agile teams focused on Nutritionals, Foods, and Skin & Personal Care. This reorganization aims to accelerate product development and better serve changing demographics. Brent Nidec has been appointed as Chief Commercial Officer, overseeing global sales and marketing.
Future Outlook
USANA is optimistic about the future, particularly in the Chinese market, which it views as a long-term growth opportunity despite current economic challenges. The company plans to support Hiya Health’s expansion into new geographies and distribution channels, potentially including retail and Amazon. USANA remains open to future acquisitions that align with its strategic focus on health and wellness.
Q&A Highlights
During the Q&A session, USANA reiterated its belief in China’s entrepreneurial environment and the consumer interest in supplementation. The company noted that the agile work teams have expedited product development, allowing for tailored local and regional offerings. While synergies with Hiya were not the primary acquisition driver, USANA is well-positioned to support Hiya’s growth with its expertise in manufacturing, distribution, and regulatory compliance.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights into USANA’s strategic plans and financial performance.
Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: So, thank you, everyone, for your patience. My name is Anthony Libyjinski.
I’m the research analyst that covers USANA Health Sciences, ticker symbol USNA. It is my pleasure to introduce Doug Hekking, the CFO and Andrew Masuda, Director of Investor Relations. The format will be a presentation for the first fifteen or so minutes, and then we’ll take some questions from the audience. If you do have a question, you could type it into the Zoom screen in the Q and A function, and I’ll read the questions out loud. So with no further delay, Doug, the floor is yours.
Doug?
Unidentified speaker: Star six to unmute your line.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Anthony, are you good
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Doug, I heard you for a couple of seconds.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: K. Can you hear me now?
Unidentified speaker: Yes.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: I can hear you.
Unidentified speaker: You keep going to mute, though. You you come on for a second, then you re mute yourself.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: So the the system keeps, muting me after I unmute myself, so I don’t know how long it’s gonna last.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. Right now, you’re not muted.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Alright. Let’s go with this, and you can let me know if you stop being able to hear me. Alright. Anthony, you’re gonna be navigating the slideshow?
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Yeah. Let me just pull it up here. Let me, yeah. So so why don’t you start, and I’ll try to see if I can get this.
Unidentified speaker: You just share the screen, Anthony.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Feels like COVID all over again. It’s great learnings.
Unidentified speaker: Sorry, everyone, for these delays. We will, let this go a little bit over to make up for the time lost.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Sure. Yes. I’m just gonna yes. So so so, Doug, let’s see if you could, you know, let let me see if I could just figure out how to how to share this here.
Unidentified speaker: The green share screen button and Yeah.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: I I just have lots of windows open here. And then just Okay. Okay. Here we go. Okay.
Are are you able to see that?
Unidentified speaker: It’s still populating, but it should be there in a second. Yep. Yep. You’re in good shape.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Okay. Sorry about that. Okay. All right. So, here’s the safe harbor language.
I’m sure everyone knows this. So, Doug, yeah, please go ahead.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Yeah. Since we’ve had a few technical difficulties, we’ll move through this fairly quick and allow as much time for questions at the end as possible. So on slide three, Anthony, we’ve been in business, USANA has been in business for more than thirty years now, founded by a world renowned virologist and immunologist who really had an expertise and continues to go back and be invested in the field of kind of nutritional science. So our product mix is really emblematic of kind of the emphasis we’ve had from our founder with nearly 90% of our product portfolio coming into nutritionals or BDS space. From a geographic mix perspective, you can see that we really are a meaningful player in the Greater China area.
About 50% of that 54% is in Mainland China. And it’s been a great market. We entered China via an acquisition in August of twenty ten. And since that point, we’ve really grown pretty meaningfully in that region of the world and it’s been a great market for us. Go ahead, next slide, Anthony.
As far as the investments, we’re a high quality, high potency, good choice of raws as far as absorbability and efficacy, Really differentiated approach from how we develop our products and how we put it out there. I’m very confident in the efficacy of our products. Our business model is very low capital intensity. Even though we manufacture 69% of what we sell, we’re spending about 1% to 1.5% on CapEx on an annual basis. We have a very strong balance sheet at year end.
We had about $182,000,000 in cash and $23,000,000 in debt. And that’s after having a pretty meaningful acquisition at the end of the year on December 23 of roughly $2.00 $5,000,000 in a kind of majority stake in a children’s health and wellness company called Hyatt, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. We have presence in attractive markets really around the world. We’re in 25 markets around the world and positioned to grow quite a bit from kind of the really kind of the awareness of the consumer regarding the health and wellness and kind of their stake in their own personal health. Next slide, Anthony.
So what we’ve done is we’ve broken the slide deck, which is a bit of a change for us following the acquisition in two buckets. So it’s more easily understood. One would be direct sales, which has been our legacy business and where we’ve always kind of performed our business. And then we’ll touch a little bit more on the Haia acquisition and what we think that means to us going forward. Slide six, Anthony.
Within the direct selling business, we think we’re positioned and kind of optimally located to be able to go back and be primed for long term and profitable growth. Really, the key to our growth is the number of consumers that are actively buying our products on a regular basis. We use the direct selling model, which is kind of a person to person introduction to the company and we compensate independent sales reps for helping to go back and connect that and make the introduction. It really is a pay for performance business, which helps us go back and create a profitable model. I mentioned the in house manufacturing near 70% of what we sell.
Product innovation and quality has always been kind of at the forefront of what we do. We take a great deal of pride in that. And we continue to go back and build out kind of new markets. Most recently, India, we opened up at the tail end of 2023, and we indicated that’s going to be a longer term play and we’re still very optimistic for that market. Lots of penetration in the Asia Pacific market as well as The Americas and Europe.
So next slide, Anthony. As we’ve talked about kind of the customers that are actively buying from the company on a regular basis, we have two primary customer categories. We have associates or distributors, and these are individuals that have come into the business and indicated that they have some indication that they want to do this as a business opportunity. We also have preferred customers, and those are customers who say, hey, we love your product, we just we’re not interested in marketing or selling, we just want to consume the product. Those two combined represent what we call an active customer.
Any customer or unique customer was purchased in the most recent three month period. Next slide, please. You know, as we’ve talked about and alluded to a little bit, is pretty low cost of acquiring new customers and is primarily built into the operating model with our pay of associate incentives or commissions. Ability to expand into most international markets was pretty moderate investment levels. And a business model that is pretty accretive from a cash generation perspective, and that’s really been the story for quite some years.
Next slide. As we’ve mentioned already that we manufacture a meaningful portion of what we sell, but a lot of this and a lot of the design of this and the company’s preference to manufacture as much of its own products as possible is really the strong quality cycle and the ability to go back and respond to a changing environment. We saw this and we perceive this to be very beneficial during the COVID lockdowns and stuff where we’re able to go back and obviously prioritize our products and execute what we could to get those products out the door in a timely manner. We’re subject to the quality standards of many jurisdictions from around the world, and we think that just has made us a better and better company over the years and it continues to be really kind of a forefront consideration as we think about anything with our business is the quality and efficacy of our products. Next slide, Anthony.
So we have a robust R and D staff and a robust facility on staff and to be able to go back and kind of navigate both the development, the ongoing testing and kind of just blue sky and a bunch of investigations to see what we think there’s some opportunity for to improve the health and wellness of individuals around the world. We’re very cognizant not only of the composition of our product, but also the raw materials that we use and looking for things that we think provide the biggest health benefit and has the most bioavailability from a sourcing standpoint. Next slide. In our channel, in the direct selling channel, the bulk of our dollars for sales and marketing are directed towards commissions or incentives to the sales force. And so we have to be somewhat creative with how we try to broaden out the funnel to attract new customers and to build belief in the differentiation of the company.
One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve broadened out and we’ve had more than 5,000 professional Olympic level athletes that we sponsor on a regular basis primarily through product sponsorships, and this has been a really creative way to go back and get the name out there. Athletes want to have products they can trust and understand they’re safe to take the products, and so we take a great deal of pride in that relationship and how we foster that and build that over time. And a lot of this is localized at the local market level, so it allows us to really appeal to the local market as well. Next slide, please. As we’ve talked about expanding our international presence, I think the intent of this presentation on this slide is to really go back and show kind of the geographic mix that we’ve had in our products over a period of time.
And so what you can see is kind of that Greater China region, which is the bottom of that stacked bar chart has grown from something that was 29% the year that we did the acquisition of Baby Care, our China operating unit, to around 54% in the most recently completed 2024 fiscal year. Been a great market for us and we see ethnic Chinese being really strong and industrious and really passionate believers of the products, not only in China, but we see the ethnic Chinese population base in many of the other markets where we do business. So it’s really been a great thing for us and grateful to have that relationship. You can see how the other regions have done well, but really the story over the last decade or so has really been kind of the performance of Mainland China. As we move on to the next slide, really kind of the key aspects of growth.
When we’ve grown historically, the growth has really been manifested relative to the number of customers we have buying our products on a regular basis. So that growth in active customers, the engagement of those customers, the longevity of those customers is a meaningful focus point. The building out of our international footprint, both from building up existing markets on a global basis, but also exploring new markets is a key part of our growth strategy going forward. And we continue to go back and evaluate and look at many strategic collaborations. And as I mentioned earlier, that we just got a pretty meaningful acquisition done for where Yoosan is at.
So we think we can go back and pursue this growth strategy and see growth in sales and profitability along the way. So next slide, Anthony. As we’ve kind of got over the last year and a half or so, we’ve had a planned succession strategy. We brought on a new CEO in Jim Brown and Jim had kind of changed the mix up a little bit. And so we’ve had a couple of reorganizations of some key teams within the company.
One is on the science and product side and how we approach that. And we’ve gone from more functional lines to these agile teams that are really able to go back and focus in a great deal of detail and be pretty agile as far as being flexible to go back and pivot. We see each of those for our Nutritionals, our Foods team and our Skin and Personal Care teams. And then we’ve also reorganized the commercial team where Brent Nidec had formerly been our head of our China operation. He now oversees global sales and marketing under the tagline of our Chief Commercial Officer and he’s doing a great job.
As we look at the active customers here and we talk about how do we broaden out, how do we really focus on that, how do we serve these customers, it is really through the types of products that we provide and we really with these agile teams, we want to increase the cadence of innovation and rolling out these new products and continue our high standard and what we expect from ourselves and what we want to deliver to our incredible associates and our consumers. There’s also an opportunity story here is how do we pivot, how do we adjust to go back and meet the needs of the changing demographic and support our existing sales force at the same time. And so that’s an active consideration. And then because we have so much faith and confidence in how we deal with some of the stuff as an organization, We’re in the process of finding ways to tell a more compelling and more differentiated story. All the components are there.
All the pieces are there. We’re just trying to go back and use different tools and enable our associate leaders to really convey that story to new customers and new associates as they interact with them in their day to day lives. Next one is just I’ll scan through this one real quick. We still see a lot of growth in the health and wellness space, I think particularly as it comes from kind of that BDS category continues to go back and grow and so we think that’s a great opportunity for us. And then strategic on the next slide, strategic collaborations And then, strategic on the next slide, strategic collaborations, acquisitions.
And I think with that said, we have several things that act as gating mechanisms. It’s got to be a health and wellness company. It’s got to have a holistic approach. Where we can vertically integrate to make products and kind of control that quality cycle, we’ll do it. Really broaden out our product and our core competency and bring in talent onto the team.
Geographic expansion like we did in China’s consideration and really broadening out kind of where we operate within different distribution channels. I think with that, let’s talk a little bit about this acquisition of Hyatt Health products. And Anthony, if you go to Slide 18, that would be great. And so Hyatt is a children’s health and wellness company. Probably the biggest seller they have is a multivitamin, multi mineral chewable tablet that’s very thoughtfully formulated, no sugars added, very intentional, and it’s done on a subscription basis.
And they’ve really done a great job of kind of marrying the experience for the kids and delivering kind of the efficacy that parents want to see to create more engagement and more compliance with taking products that we think that will go and end up benefiting their health. We believe this acquisition strengthens our profile and it presents an opportunity to accelerate growth and enhance profitability by leveraging synergies down the road between both USANA and Haia. And they are primarily and the vast majority of what they do is domestic and so it provides a great opportunity to go back and build that domestic business as well. Let’s talk about the kind of the vision that this Hyatt team has. I think from a company standpoint, we’re very aligned as far as creating the healthiest family on earth.
High quality premium products, both companies are committed to that. It’s a wonderful management team over at Hyatt. We’re very excited about that. Very health focused customer base and it allows us to go back and broaden out the number of customers we’re touching and kind of leave that resonance on the consumer’s mind, be willing to share who we are as a company. And right now, USANA’s footprint in children’s health and wellness is less than 1% of sales and literally, Hiya comes in and if it were part of our direct selling business, would be the number two market size out there.
And so we’re quite optimistic. It’s a young company, but it’s grown very rapidly and we’re quite excited about that. Slide 20, Anthony. So one of the things, as we mentioned, they have some sustainability aspects of what they do is they send out a beautiful glass jar along with some stickers and then the chewable tablets. And they send sticker sets out for these kids to go back and have this experience with the product.
And they’ve coined this their kidsperience and allows them to decorate the bottles, be engaged in the process. And then the refills are done by just sending the chewable tablets in a convenient gusset or sachet pouch for them to go back and just refill their jar. And on their subscription refills, they get sent games and activities they can go back and do to continue to build that engagement as it goes along. So there had been very good demand. Hiya came out with a new product in August, I think, August of twenty four, which is a greens drink for kids that’s fortified with a lot of different greens.
And when you put a mix it with milk or soy or or some type of almond milk or something, it it tastes like chocolate milk and it creates a great experience for the kids and a much easier job for the parent to have their kids help consume that. Next slide, please. One one of the wonderful things that Hiya brings to the table is a very, very different approach to how they market and sell and engage the consumers relative to what we do as a business. And we think there’s a lot of crossover benefit here. But they have a very diversified approach to their marketing with touching on influencers and collaborators and platforms like TikTok and Meta and Google.
And so they really take a different approach and they’ve done a great job about getting the message out there and engaging the consumers. And they’ve really done a fantastic job about acquiring new customers and building out that customer funnel to bring more customers into the business. Next slide, Anthony. Haia is a subscription model. So as they send this stuff out, many of these initial orders that Haia has, they’re discounting the initial order, they’re providing the glass jar, and so it’s an investment in the consumer.
And one of those investments is really kind of conveying the message and what’s in there, but it’s also providing a platform for them to engage. What they’ve seen in the past is predictable revenue, a pretty robust customer lifetime value, strong relationships with our customers through these different advertising channels and how they reach out to their consumers. As they’ve grown, they’ve shown the ability to really leverage their business and generate a greater level of profitability with the growth they’ve seen. And I think the operational benefits with behaviors, different personalized offerings and really data driven type response to the consumer, I think, has been very additive to their business. As we look forward, next slide, Anthony, on the future of Haia, is continue to do a lot of what they’re doing, but they also have the ability to go back and broaden out their product profile and their portfolio, which is what their that’s ongoing, that’s a heavy emphasis in 2025.
They’re also going to be looking to expand their distribution models, not just DTC, but maybe get into some retail outlets and some different platforms, pursuing and investigating Amazon as a platform. And then expanding geographies, like I said, they’re the vast nearly all of their sales are in The U. S. Right now. And so expanding geographies where we think USANA can play an additive role to supporting Hiya, there’s some great opportunity there as well.
Let’s look at a few financial Slide 25, Anthony. Cash at the end of the year was $182,000,000 and this is after the acquisition. So we financed the acquisition essentially with cash and a little bit of debt, roughly $23,000,000 in debt. And so we’re well positioned and have been very mindful with the capital structure of the company. As we move to the next slide, you see even though we’ve seen a little bit of drop in our free cash flow, it continues to be very strong and robust as far as what we’re generating on an annual basis.
We see some real opportunities there on how we integrate with Haia and some of the opportunities to go back and broaden that out further. Next slide, Anthony. As we look at our capital allocation priorities, it’s been fairly consistent and this hasn’t changed. We’re always going to go back and look to invest organically into our business. We think when we get the greatest returns there, we think we can support our consumer base in a very meaningful way.
When we see opportunities similar to what we did with Hyatt, we’d like to go back and look at opportunities to diversify, build out core competencies and create some opportunity for an environment where we can build some synergies. We’ve also repurchased shares on a pretty regular basis. And so those are the in order of priority, those are our capital allocations. And so I think with that, Anthony, I know we’ve been on a little bit compressed time frame because we’re a little bit behind because of technical difficulties. Let’s turn it over for Q and A.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Well, thank you very much, Doug, certainly. And thank you also, everyone, for listening in as well. I know we already have a few questions here in the queue. So I’ll get to as many as I can here. So I guess, you know, first thing, obviously, over the years, you guys have done very well growing in China, although lately there’s lots of geopolitical issues there.
How do you guys think about your China market as far as the opportunities and challenges going forward here?
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Yes, I think China is still an incredible opportunity. Over the years, I think what we’ve learned is you have a very entrepreneurial mindset. You have a demographic that really believes in supplementation. And I think the China economy has been a little bit rough lately and we’ve seem to weather the storm. We’ve got a great management team over there.
So I’m bullish on China and I think you got to play the long term game in China as you’re approaching it. And you have to be very intentional and mindful with how you’re operating in that market, but it’s been a very good market to us and a lot of confidence in both our associate base, our management team and the belief in supplementation by the consumer base in China.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Got you. Okay. And then so one of your growth initiatives has been to have more new product launches and improvements to existing products. Can you talk about how this strategy is different now versus what you had been doing previously? And also, maybe just talk about the timeline for product development until it goes to actually being, you guys being able to sell.
I know there are different regulations in different countries, but just so investors have a better understanding of that process and also just again, just as far as your new product development strategy, how that’s changed here recently?
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Yes. The primary differentiation is having these product groups and these efforts, which have historically been really aligned on functional boundaries within the organization to be more agile work teams that are dedicated to that. And so without a doubt internally, we’ve seen that speed up. We’ve seen a little bit of disruption we think is wonderful in how those teams operate. And so we’re pretty excited about some of the activity we’re seeing and starting to see the initial fruits of that effort.
And we’ll see at our international convention this year, you’ll see quite a few reformulations and new products rollout this year. And we’ll continue to go back and build on that. As you indicated, Anthony, doing this in The U. S. Is fairly straightforward and we can move fairly quick.
Many of these other markets, there’s registrations and timelines you have to go back and deal with. So you have to go back and get it in the pipeline and that’s what the team’s been doing. I think these agile work teams have really been able to go back and look at local and regional offerings as well, which we think will be very added to kind of that robust product portfolio moving forward as well.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Got you. Got it. Okay. And just in terms of thinking about Hyatt Health, obviously, it looks like a terrific opportunity for you guys to be associated with a rapidly growing direct to consumer brand. How do you guys think about it as far as synergies from that acquisition, near term versus kind of longer term opportunities?
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Yes. I would say the business rationale around acquisition did really not consider synergies as a primary factor in the decision to go back and acquire Hyatt. Without a doubt, with our focus on quality, with our focus on manufacturing and distribution and knowledge of the regulatory cycles and international expansion. I think we have a lot that we can go back and support the Hyatt team. We have some integration just kind of taking a company who hasn’t been public to be in public this year, And it’s going to take some time as we move throughout the year.
And they have a really good management team over there. And we’re moving very quick. And so quite optimistic about what we’ve seen, but we definitely see opportunities from both sides of how we could benefit, mutually benefit from each other moving forward. But the focus this year will be a lot on integration and there’s already a lot of these synergy type activities that are underway, but we’re going to do everything we can not to disrupt what they’ve been doing with their business and really support the ongoing growth.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Got you. Okay. And then last question given the time constraints that we have here. So obviously, you guys still have a very, very strong balance sheet even after paying over $200,000,000 in cash for Hyatt Health, so still plenty of cash on the balance sheet. How do you guys think about future acquisitions or future capital allocation opportunities going forward?
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Yes. I think one of the real strengths and one of the foundational things that we’ve done is we’ve enabled ourselves to go back and have some optionality with how we look at our business even in times where you have the cost of capital being a little bit higher. I think we’re well positioned if we see an opportunity. I think the immediate focus is on Haia and supporting them and helping to get some of the integration things going forward. But we continue to go back and have meetings and evaluate different opportunities.
And so we’re definitely open to evaluating a number of opportunities, but there is a lot of focus right now on high end there will be for probably throughout ’twenty five.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Got it. Well, thank you very much. We’ll need to wrap it up here. Again, sorry about all the technical difficulties, and thank you for your patience. So we will wrap it up here, and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you very much.
Doug Hekking, CFO, USANA Health Sciences: Thank you.
Anthony Libyjinski, Research Analyst: Thank you.
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