Mr. Lindley: Nu Skin began as a privately held company 15 years ago, founded by Blake Roney and his sister Nedra, who started a skin care business with the idea of using only beneficial ingredients without any harmful fillers in the products. Creating high-quality products with only beneficial features for the skin was a very unique concept at that time. Because Blake and Nedra started with very little capital, they chose direct selling as a method of distribution. It doesn't take a lot of initial money to sell products directly to consumers, it just takes a high-quality product, a great story and a sales approach. They didn't want their products to compete on store shelves because the perception is that high-quality products have a hard time competing in the mass market where people's first impression is based on price, or you are competing for shelf space, or you only have a 30-second television commercial, or a quick ad to sell your product. It is very difficult to explain the complex beneficial features of a product in the mass market channel. With Nu Skin's unique product line, Blake and Nedra chose direct selling and it has been very successful since. We grew to where we were generating several hundred million dollars annually, expanded internationally and have essentially become a billion-dollar company over the past 15 years. We went public four years ago with just the Asian piece of our business under the name Nu Skin Asia Pacific. In the past four years, we've consolidated all of our operations into the public company and we renamed the public company Nu Skin Enterprises. About seven or eight years ago we began to expand beyond personal care, cosmetics and skin care products. We entered the nutritional market with a line of high-end vitamin and mineral supplement products. We did this under the concept of beauty from the inside out. We realized that to really improve people's lives, we needed to improve their health as well as their appearance. We have developed our nutrition business and made some strategic acquisitions that we folded into our existing business. Today we sell our nutritional products under the name of Pharmanex. Our Nu Skin personal care division did just over $500 million in sales last year and Pharmanex did about $380 million in sales. A year or two ago we started a third division under Nu Skin Enterprises that sells technology products and services. This technology division, called Big Planet, is focused on getting people connected to the Internet. We are currently marketing this division through our US direct sales force, and we will eventually utilize our global sales force to sell Internet service and other technology products such as Internet protocol telephony service, e-commerce and so on around the world. We operate these three distinct divisions under Nu Skin Enterprises. While we have operations in more than 30 countries, the majority of our sales are in Asia, where we have a very large and profitable business.
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