Welcome everybody to the Midwest IDEAS Conference. I am Phillip Kupper with Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation comes from one of our investor relations clients, Herbalife. That is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HLF. Presenting for the company today are Samantha Holway, VP of Investor Relations, and Scott Schaefer, SVP of Finance and Incoming Chief Financial Officer. Scott. Or excuse me, Sam.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today, whether in person or via the webcast. I am Samantha Holway, Head of Investor Relations at Herbalife, and I am joined by Scott Schaefer, our Senior Vice President of Finance and Transformation, and Incoming CFO, who will lead the presentation. Before we begin, I would like to direct you to the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements on page two of our presentation, which is available under the investor relations section of Herbalife's website. This presentation includes a discussion of some of the more important factors that could cause results to differ from those expressed in any forward-looking statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. As is customary, the content of today's presentation will be governed by this language. In addition, during today's presentation, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures.
These non-GAAP financial measures exclude certain unusual or non-recurring items that management believes impact the comparability of the periods referenced. Please refer to our presentation materials for additional information regarding these non-GAAP financial measures and the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measure. With that, I will now turn it over to Scott to begin today's presentation.
Hello, everyone. My name is Scott Schaefer. Like Sam said, I will be the incoming CFO starting in January. Before I start, just a quick little background about Sam, because she is pretty incredible. She has been with the company now for a number of years, but has a finance background, has been through pricing, FP&A, but the last two years, she has actually led sales for North America business. If we get into Q&A, she is going to be a great person to help answer some of our questions about North America. About myself, and move forward while I am talking. Been with the company since November of last year. Prior to that, was 16 and a half years with zappos.com, online footwear, apparel, subsidiary of Amazon.
So part of the reason why I am joining, I think it is important to tell you is, I care about the purpose, a company with purpose, and this is a company with purpose. I think purpose in terms of helping our customers reach their health goals and health outcomes, as well as for our distributors creating great business opportunities, and we do that on a global scale. Then, again, the opportunity side, I think we, and we will get into some of the detail, we have a business that has amazing secular tailwinds, that is in 95 markets, that is super powered by 6.4 million people inside of our broader distributor network. Over two million that are active at this point in time. This represents growing market segments. Everything that we are in has TAMs that are in growing markets.
Again, I think we are in a great place, and again, I see both purpose and opportunity here, and I am excited to share some of the purpose and opportunity. Again, at a quick high level, some of the statistics here that I think are important to you is our distribution network, and we will get into some more details on that. We are in 95 markets. We are heavily concentrated in kind of the top 20 of them. No single market represents over 50% of our business, and I will give you some geography a little bit later. We have over 144 unique products that we sell across these 95 markets, covering everywhere from weight management to protein base to NAD+, to personalized supplementation. So a lot of different products that I think broaden a really good portfolio, and again, we will get into some more portfolio details later.
Last year, we did over $5 billion in net sales, generating $658 million in EBITDA, and we are now expecting full year growth for this year, and we can share full year guidance a little bit later. As well as we have had steady increase in what our EBITDA margins have been over the past couple of years. Herbalife is an incredible cash-generating business, even in some of the difficult times coming out of COVID, has always been strong in terms of our operating cash and free cash flow. So it is represented here in just what we have generated year -to -date, $147 million of operating cash. An important part of the journey that we have been on also, and I will carry you through this, is some of the debt that we have retired. We had a high debt balance, about $2.8 billion, coming 2021.
Since that time, we have paid down about $800 million of debt, and our goal is to get down to $1.4 billion of gross debt, $1 billion in net debt by 2028. So another $600 million that we expect to pay down through 2028. In terms of our business, the way that we go to market is we are a direct seller. We leverage an incredible distribution network, and the way that the distribution network works is that we have new people that come in, and they start learning the business, understanding the products, understanding what the opportunity is. Then we have kind of this base of existing people, but really the bottom of the funnel are what we call active sales leaders or sales leaders. These are the ones who have started to establish a business. They have a customer base that they are working with.
They start to become eligible for different levels of compensation and production bonuses. They are the ones who are doing the vast majority of the work. The retention of this group is extremely important. What we have seen is we have seen a growth of our average active sales leaders, the people that are producing, by about 4.3% in consecutive quarters now. On top of that, we will show it a little bit later too, our retention rate of this group is 70%. The U.S. actually leads that at 78%. We just went through a refi process where we refied our revolver and term loan as well as some of the senior debt. We went down from a 12 handle to a seven handle. Our senior debt is at 7 and 3 quarters. We have done a great job cleaning up the balance sheet.
In just this refi process, we now expect to save $45 million of interest savings just at that current balance. We are going to get even more savings as we continue our pay down journey. At a broad level, we have our new CEO who came in, Stephan Gratziani, who was our number two distributor for a long period of time. He was with the business for 32 and a half years. He understands this business, understands how we need to continue to move and evolve. The vision that we see up on the screen is the one that he helped us create, which is to be the world's premier health wellness company, community, and platform. One of the things that is different about us comparing against other direct sellers is we have a distribution channel that is incredible. It is our superpower.
Again, over two million people that are active as part of our sales channel. What that distribution network has done over the past 10 years, we have generated $50 billion in top line. A differentiator for us is nutrition clubs. It is not just the direct sales, if you are door to door, that is not really the models anymore. Different distributors have different ways that they go to market. The most common one, and the differentiator for us, is our nutrition clubs. The type of clubs, they vary by different regions. For the U.S., for instance, it is more of a single-serve consumption model. We work with our distributors. They are independent owners of these businesses, and what they do is, think of it as the Starbucks, right? You go in and you get your daily coffee or your daily tea.
A lot of customers come in as part of their health journey and have that meal replacement shake. We say, if we can replace a McDonald's meal with a shake the distributor has, right, we are helping people become healthier. Across the globe, we have 63,000 nutrition clubs. The U.S., we have 9,000. Additionally, these clubs generate roughly about 1/3 of the volume inside of the U.S., and about half in terms of what the nutrition club operator's business is in total. Across that, we have about 49 million transactions that occur annually across 3.7 million unique customers. Where is the growth coming from? We have now started to see consecutive quarters of growth, nine consecutive quarters of growth within our active sales leader, fourth consecutive quarter of growth for net sales.
So again, active non-sales leaders, this is kind of this middle bucket of the funnel, right? You have new people that are coming in, the existing base that is now starting to get their footing in. We have seen consecutive quarters of growth of this existing base. Then really these sales leaders, we are seeing 4.3% the one who are doing the majority of the volume. And seven quarter of that. In the latest quarter, 4%. Because distribution, not every market all goes in the same way. There are macroeconomic factors and geopolitical factors that vary. But because we are so geographically distributed, we do not necessarily have to have everybody going up at the same time for us to have a positive net sales. And usually it is a couple of them that are moving up and down.
Where we are seeing a lot of growth right now is actually within APAC. You can see APAC sales, net sales in Q2 was up 15.2%, India being a large leader in this, which was heavily driven by the tax change, the GST change that took place in September of last year. And with that, the fundamentals of that business continue to grow. As they had some price decreases that occurred from the government goods and services tax, they have been able to build on top of an already strong business. And so you can see that their sales leader growth has grown by a little over 12%. LATAM, which represents about 17% of the business, which includes Mexico, South America, and Central America, has continued to see sales growth also, 16% sales growth. North America kind of went through a bit of a journey, coming out of COVID.
The past couple of years, we have really focused on, one, bringing new people into the business, but then really the stability of that sales leader base. And so we are now starting to get to a point where the decline in our sales leaders are starting to get to be almost flat, and we expect to be about flat in that trend, end of year to early next year. And again, that is the group that is more productive. They are actually the ones that own most of the nutrition clubs.
So again, North America is now hitting this base of stabilization, which is one of the most important markets for us and also for the investment community. And then EMEA is in a bit of a rebuild. We kind of saw some weakness emerge coming out of the conflict that happened starting in February. We are working through the region on some different things. But I think that is one of the areas where we are not seeing the strongest growth, but we see a lot more opportunity and we are investing into it. Going, again, a little bit deeper into nutrition clubs, a little bit of background.
Will not spend too much time on it, but here you can see kind of some pictures of it, and highly recommend anyone who is interested in investing in Herbalife, it is important for you to go and visit a nutrition club. And they vary, and they are very different based on different markets. And reach out to us. We are happy to give you information on nutrition clubs near you. 9,000 in the U.S., so we can probably find one that is in your area. But again, they are done completely independently. They are not our stores.
Actually, the outsides of them don't have any branding on it. It's kind of this rule of protect the second sale. Someone might not want to join the business if they know that somebody's going to compete with them that has a store right off the bat. But the inside, they can put in whatever branding. None of them actually have an Herbalife name to it. It's area code and like 702 Nutrition Club or some really cool names. It's more of like kind of that Starbucks in the U.S., that single-serve consumption model. But in there are other go-to-market models that are employed. A lot of our distributors like to work with their customers in different ways of challenges and healthy active lifestyles. So weight loss challenges. Could be fit clubs, fit challenges. They use this as home base also.
For them to go to market and actually create a bit of community. It's a really important way of actually how we create community that is one of our differentiators and superpowers. Again, the difference between the U.S. and the single-serve consumption model is different than, call it, in India, where their model is different and not every club is physical. They actually have virtual clubs. Instead of selling a single-serve consumption, they actually sell a membership, a seven-day membership or a 30-day membership, where they bring you in, they give you product for that window, and either virtually or in the club on a daily basis, you go and you actually make the product together, and then from there have the conversation in the community, and it's done in this really incredible environment.
Again, the huge part of the distributor is they build this community and this network with their customers. I talked briefly already on our geographic distribution, but you can see it here displayed. North America, again, being one of our more important regions, is about 21% of the business. It's also where our headquarters is. We're headquartered in L.A., Downtown L.A. I'm from Las Vegas, so it's not in Las Vegas, although I recommend Vegas to anyone that wants to go visit. But Downtown L.A. is fantastic. That's where our corporate headquarters are. We also have another building in Torrance. We have three manufacturing facilities, so we own 100% of the formulas, and we'll talk about that later. But our three facilities are in Lake Forest, California, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then in Suzhou, China, which we produce China for China at this point in time.
When it comes to the actual products, for a long period of time, and currently, we are a leader in these spaces. We are a leader in the active lifestyle nutrition branch. We are a leader in weight management, and we have the number one protein shake in the world. As I referenced earlier, we've got some incredible secular tailwinds that they just don't go away. These are all things that are perpetual. For us, it helped us play inside these markets that are core to who we are. So from weight management, and you can see they're all markets that have expected growth coming from them, to targeted nutrition, to sports nutrition. Now we've just entered a new space, which is personalized nutrition with one of our acquisitions I'll tell you about called Bioniq.
As we look at it, I will show you the portfolio next, these are some of the areas where we are leaders or are starting to emerge. Weight management, and specifically the Formula 1 product, is what the company started with and was built on. That is why we are the number one protein shake in the world and number one in terms of weight management. Over time, our old CEO, Michael Johnson, he led us into this effort of a healthy, active lifestyle. We created the H24 brand, which is a very sports-focused brand, I think from a protein first look to branched-chain amino acids, creatine, really people that are into a deep sports lifestyle, and that is why we are number one within this category. We have now entered into new categories like healthy lifespan with our NAD+ product called Life I/O Baseline.
When you look and take a step back at what our broader portfolio is, and this is where I think that we are unique, is we get to hit a number of different segments that can be very unique or different in certain areas. I think from our core product of Formula 1 all the way through a vegan line where it is plants, it is called the Herbalife V Plant-Based Greens Booster. I do not know how many of you love to have broccoli on a daily basis. Probably not everybody here. Most people do not have their greens, and so we actually have created a supplement that you can put into your food that gives you your greens for the day. It actually tastes great. Life I/O, which is a new brand that we have launched, which is our healthy lifespan.
One of our acquisitions that we did last year, Prüvit, brought us into the exogenous ketone field. We just launched in North America in July two ketone SKUs, which is an energy-focused thing. Energy is actually one of the categories that is one of our fastest-growing right now, specifically inside the U.S. Bioniq was the acquisition that we completed in April, which is our first foray into the personalized vitamin and supplement space. When you think about our distributors, protein is one thing you can go to market with, but protein is available. Vitamins and supplements is actually how a lot of people think about Herbalife, but we actually do a very small business in vitamins and supplements because it is not really a differentiated product.
You can go to a CVS or go to a Costco and buy a multivitamin or a bottle of vitamin C if that is what you are interested in. For our distributors to bring that to our customers, it is not a lot of value that they can bring. It is not a lot of incrementality. What we did was we acquired a company out of the U.K. that does personalized nutrition, and Cristiano Ronaldo is actually a 20% owner in this business. What they do is through an online assessment, they understand more about you, your gender, your height, your weight, what are some of the goals that you are looking to achieve? Is it better sleep? Is it anxiety?
We take those inputs through an online questionnaire, and from there, you get one of 40 formulas that looks at 26 different vitamins and minerals, and the dosage will vary based on the formula that you get as part of that output through the questionnaire. It is now a foray into more personalized nutrition. I think this is exciting for us. I think we are going to see both a good direct benefit as well as an indirect benefit over time. We have not shared any results yet since we just launched it. Again, not much to share there outside of it is a new opportunity that we are bringing that we believe personalization is a place where we are going to plant our flag in the ground, where we believe it is something that we can own, and this is our first real foray and SKU into it.
We talked about the Herbalife24, H24, but we also have a good skincare line, too. Specifically, some of the ones that we have launched recently is inside of Europe and Africa, we launched HL/Skin, which is our Korean skincare line, and we are looking to bring that to North America in 2027, which presents kind of a differentiated opportunity as well if they want to go to market for skincare, great with aestheticians. An important point that we learned very early on is that we need to control the product and control the quality of the product. So we implemented our Seed to Feed program where we own basically the entire formula. Of this, we produce about 46% of our products directly through our manufacturing. This will vary a little bit based on geography and where things are produced.
Then we use top-tier contract manufacturers, and specifically, we create the formulas. Everything that we do is we own and create the formula, and we give it to them, and we actually have people that sit inside of those facilities to manage quality because quality matters more than anything. It is a big part of our credibility. Then from there, we move it to our distribution centers to get through our distributors. As we have been on this journey to be the world's premier health and wellness company, community, and platform, we have made some acquisitions to help us along the way. I will go into a little bit more detail on Pro2col on some of these, but when we look at the things that our distributors have been doing for 45 years, it is all about what to measure. For them, things have been analog for so long.
You come to a nutrition club or somewhere, and they are going to do your weights, they are going to do your measurements, but then they record it analog. Then from there, what to take. They have always done personalization, but they personally curate products that are going to meet your goals. What to do from there, they can help you create protocols of exercise regimens or things to meet your goals. Then, of course, the who to do it with, which is an important community. We are moving that from an analog world into a digital world, which is our investment into Pro2col, our personalized health operating system. Along with that, it was kind of a broad acquisition because of shared ownership. We bought Link BioSciences. When we talked about Bioniq, the actual format of that is a Swiss granule that coats the actual mineral.
This is a powder base. Gives us the ability to do N of one formulation and add in a number of different ingredients. We want to add like testosterone in there. We can create a really premium N of one product pending regulation. Then from there, Prüvit. This is our company that does exogenous ketones that we took the formula from. Then Bioniq. Bioniq LAB kind of being another component of this acquisition that we completed. It is being held outside in a call option for us to bring in. They are a research peptide company. Think of your BPC-157, TB-500, some of the things that are going through regulatory approvals right now. They are a distribution company for that and making investments if we ever want to get into it, regulatory environment gets into the right place.
Again, just gives us some additional optionality. Then CR7, which is Cristiano Ronaldo. He was an investor in Bioniq, so he is still incentivized to help with that business because there was an earn-out associated with that acquisition. Again, any incremental sales, he has earn-out potential. Then he is now an investor in Pro2col, and I will get into a little bit more of that detail. So will not spend too much time talking about Pro2col. It is still in beta. We have launched it in 11 European countries and also North America. North America kind of being the test, the big ground for it. Again, it is trying to bring things into a more digital environment. All the things that you use right now through your Apple Health, but then kind of aggregating it all together.
I like to think of it as like if you ever used Mint or Quicken Simplifi or Rocket Money, this aggregator instead of for your financial health, this being for your overall personal health and your goals. So it is going to have activity tracking, specific health metrics, wellness assessments, and it is all done through a distributor, and it connects in. It gives your distributor more opportunity to have deeper connections in a digital way than exist currently today. They could have access to the protocols that they have created and it being digital. Then from there, we have a lot of AI capabilities that we can put into the software to help them with next best actions or is somebody following their protocol. So enhanced follow-up opportunities, servicing them products, and then, of course, who to do it with and through this platform.
It is kind of our intelligence layer that we are bringing to our distributors. Everything we do is through our distributors, and they are the ones who are responsible for their customers. Then we talk about Cristiano Ronaldo, who the number one global sports athlete icon. He is the most followed person on Earth, 1 billion followers across all the platforms, and is also the most measured athlete. So his story with Herbalife, for a long time, he was actually a partner with us. We created a product line where he got a royalty. This is his first time actually being an investor in with us. So he is now in it with us. Being the most measured athlete, Pro2col makes a lot of sense for him because it is all about measuring where you are and that continuation of it and bettering yourself through this process.
He is a person that measures his biometrics before workout and exercise, during, and after. From there, what are the products that can help him get and exceed to the next level? For him, the investment is the continuation on the health journey with Herbalife. It was a $7.5 million investment for 5% and then additional 5% ownership in Pro2col for some services and sponsorship. To be credible in the sports world, obviously, we have to be deeply connected in with sports, and that is what we are. We are a proud sponsor of athletes across 35 different sports, 120 + different sponsorships, and we are actually the sponsor of five different Olympic committees. In the last Olympics, we had several of our sponsored athletes that were medalists, so we are pretty excited about. It is deep-rooted in our history of sports.
We are talking about the actual flow of the business, cash flow. Coming out of COVID was an interesting time where we saw some growth in the business from people coming in that did it as a quick side gig and it was not sustainable. We saw some declines come out of the business. You can see 2023 into 2024 was really the point in which we hit stabilization. Our top line being stable around that $5 billion. Last year, we did just above $5 billion. Trailing 12 months, we are at $5.2 billion. Again, we are happy to see that we are on this kind of stabilization and now starting slower growth trajectory.
With that too, as we exit COVID, you can see our EBITDA margins hit a bottom out at 11.3%, and we have now hit this continued drumbeat of making changes across where growth has been a lever, but margin expansion being a huge part. G&A restructuring played a huge part in it. It is going to continue to be an important part of how we move forward. Our goal is to get back to 15%. That was our pre-COVID number. Pre-COVID represents actually a really good comparison for us. If you exclude that COVID window, all of our metrics have continued to be on that same positive trend, specifically top line. Our goal is to get back to that 15% EBITDA margin. We have not put a specific time and a roadmap on it, but the steady drumbeat of margin expansion is our path forward.
You can see that our operating cash flow continues to be strong in all these periods. This is a really great cash-generating business, and I think that is an important part. A good example of this is our free cash flow yield is 23% right now. We are generating a lot compared to the value that we have currently. Our journey on debt has been an interesting one. We had to lever up to get Carl Icahn, who was the activist long investor, if you are familiar with the Ackman-Icahn saga that had occurred. If you are not, I recommend Google and some good videos. There is a great CNBC one where the two battle live. It is very interesting. Basically, as he exited, he forced us to lever up to get him out of his position.
It was about $1.9 billion that we had to buy back from Carl Icahn. $1.2 billion in the last tranche, where he took control of the board and forced this fast exit. Pre this, we did not really have a big debt balance. We looked at 2019 as a good optimal debt balance where we were, which was $1.4 billion gross, $1 billion net, and we have been on our journey to get back there coming out of this Icahn saga. Since that time, we have paid down $800 million of debt to get our debt from $2.8 billion down to $2 billion. You can see where we are right now, we just did a successful refinancing also, moving from our senior debt from that 12 handle down to a seven handle. That freed up about $45 million of interest savings.
You see our leverage ratio continues to be positive. This is our gross leverage ratio. Our net right now is about 2.2x. Our goal is to get down to at 2x or below by year-end. I think I told everything I meant to tell you on this slide and the previous slide, so I will not spend too much time. I think, again, when you are thinking about your models, this is not a business that needs a lot of debt. It is not a capital-intensive business. Our CapEx requirements, including SaaS capitalization for implementation, is about 1%-2% of sales. Again, not very capital-intensive, and we generate a lot more cash flow than typically we need, so we look at our capital allocation priorities. Once we get through our debt targets, we are looking at ways that we are going to invest.
We have been able to do that even along the way, right? As we have been on this journey, we have made two small M&A acquisitions. Again, we think that there is opportunity for us to continue to pay down our debt, to meet our targets. We feel very confident on that. If we did nothing else but pay down the remaining $600 million of debt on a $100 million share base, that is $6 a share. If we can see, we have excess cash that we generate on top of it. Our hierarchy of cash needs really is debt service, internal working capital and internal investments, external investments, and then rewarding shareholders. We are more focused on growth at this point, so we are more focused if we are going to do anything on a share repurchase.
Coming out of the refi that we just had and completed in April, and having to de-lever from the whole Icahn situation, we do not have an active share repurchase agreement yet. It is going to be an active conversation with the board as they get more comfortable for where we are in our growth and stability, as well as that we have now more time since the refi process. Again, something that is going to be a continual conversation with our board. Just do not want to put anything out there right now that we have anything in place, because we do not. I personally believe that we are intrinsically undervalued, but that is my own personal opinion based on models that I have created. Again, that speaks to the free cash flow yield.
We are going to continue to generate value as we grow the business, as we expand margins, and pay down debt as our core priorities at this moment in time. A quick run through our financial highlights. If you do not listen to our earnings calls, they are amazing. I highly recommend all of you listen to them. No, they are not that wild versus anyone else. I love them. In Q2, we generated $1.3 billion in net sales, up 5.4% year-over-year. What we did experience was about 40 basis points of FX headwinds. We were expecting some tailwinds coming into it, so our constant currency growth was actually at 5.8%. India was a significant driver of growth coming off of the GST change that happened in September of last year has really helped to boost that.
Stability of North America, where we were flat for this quarter, also helped out significantly too. LATAM is another one of our bigger growing markets. We generated $167 million of EBITDA. It is down year-over-year, but this quarter was planned down specifically because of some timing issues. We will not go into too much detail, but some of our sales events timing, we did them in this quarter versus prior quarter, so a little bit more G&A in this window, but it nets out for the year. A little bit in CapEx, $11 million in CapEx. When it comes to our actual net loss, we did have a net loss, and that was only because of an extraordinary event, which was the extinguishment on the debt refinancing that we did. When you adjust it out, our actual EPS was $0.51.
When you look at through the rest of the year, we continue to project growth. Not just in Q3, but for the full year. We actually took up our full year guidance for net sales. If you look at Q3, we are targeting between 0.5% and 4.5% top line reported on a constant currency basis because we do expect a little bit of currency headwind to continue to occur. Constant currency is 1.5% - 5.5%. Midpoint of EBITDA being $170 million, midpoints on a constant currency basis being $175 million. Again, all those being up on a year-over-year basis. Full year, we took up our full year reported and constant currency guidance, so you can see we are at 2.5% - 5.5%, and then prior guidance was 1.5% - 5.5%.
For EBITDA, constant currency EBITDA, we actually did take up on a reported basis because some of the FX headwinds that we saw, we did take the midpoint down by $10 million. Not really a material change in what that midpoint was, but just something we want to make sure that we are trying to hold true to forecast. When we forecast, because we are such a global company, I think this is important to know, we do not try and project rates when we do this process. What we do is we take the average of the first two weeks of the quarter and use that for our guidance for what our reported sales activity is going to be. If the currency moves a little bit on and off that will be the indicator of where things go.
Only other kind of big change I think is worth calling out, because we called it out in the last earnings report, was for this year, we are seeing a higher tax rate, our effective tax rate. We had planned to be at 30%, which is pretty normal for us. This year because of some, one, country mix, and then two, we have some discrete items, things like the debt service, caused us to be up a little bit. When we think about next year, we are still trying to target that 30%. There is 100-200 basis points of risk on that we are going to let people know about as we get a little bit further. We have an incredible tax team, and they are doing a lot of their tax planning and diligence to see where we are going to land so we can provide the best guidance.
We always guide based on the best information that we know. We do not want to overstate anything. If an area is not doing well, we are not going to bake it into guidance based on hope. We always present what we believe are achievable metrics for ourselves in terms of how we guide, and we continue to guide every quarter. That represents the bulk of it. I will not go into the appendix because that is boring. Why don't we open things up for Q&A? Yes, sir.
[I know but if you looked at like roughly what percentage of.]
The stat that we like to really share the most is our sales leaders. The ones who are doing the majority of the volume. Our sales leader retention is at 70% on a global basis. In the U.S., it is close to 78%.
Just quick interesting story of that, and it kind of tells a story of us focusing on customer first and not business opportunity first. In the late 1990s to early 2000s, our sales leader retention rate was in the 20s because it was all focused on the business opportunity and bringing people in for the business opportunity and not on the customer. I think early on distributors and us, we realized that is not a sustainable business model. We want to focus on customer first, otherwise this business wouldn't even be here today if we continued on that path. We flipped the model and basically said, "Okay, let's focus on customers." We created those great outcomes for customers.
As we did that and people got comfortable with the product portfolio and the go-to-market models, what they did was it was customer first, and if they were interested in the business opportunity, then they would come into the business. With that, they already understand the model. It became more replicatable and for how they go to market. From there, they also know the product portfolio and how they can create those health outcomes. Changing from business opportunity first to customer first for how our distributors go to market helped us get to the 70% level and has been pretty steady at the 70%. Again, U.S. leads at 78%. Hopefully that is helpful. The question was, do we publish a chart of the trend of active sales leaders in the distribution network?
What we do is we do publish in our supplementals, whatever it is called. Basically on our website every quarter, we publish those metrics on what are the actual numbers of average active sales leaders, average active non-sales leaders. I do not have it here, but we can follow up, and it is on part of our website. We do publish it quarterly. Overall, it is continued to trend up. We did show it a little bit earlier. The average sales leader is up 4.3%. I think we have it here in the presentation. Average active sales leader trend, seven consecutive quarters of growth, faster than each one, 4.3% growth.
Thank you, sir. You mentioned personalized user questionnaires for personalized. What works anything like that?
The answer is not yet, but that is on the roadmap.
Bioniq, when we acquired them, they did have two specific products, the Go product, which was the lower price point, easier entry, one which was online health questionnaire based. Their second one, Pro, which is a higher price point one, uses blood, and specifically blood biomarkers that you could influence through vitamin and mineral stacks. That is on the roadmap. Pro2col is going to be the ingestion point for it. We are already doing different blood testing also.
We are in beta with a smaller distributor group for the Tasso blood collection device, where we can have it, and then the results of the 11 blood biomarkers represent inside of Pro2col. From there, you can see how the products can impact those blood biomarkers through repeat testing. I think that is also an area we can help really build incremental value because it is not just a one-time how are you doing, it is a continual test how are you doing, what is working, what is not working, how is your personalized formula impacting these impactable biomarkers?
Think of it more as not necessarily the leverage target, but the actual debt level. The $1.4 billion of gross debt by 2028, $1 billion of net. It will put us in the ones. That is where we are going to be. Again, it is a very conservative number. I think it is a level that us and the board are comfortable with, knowing kind of the history that we have gone through is to get there. There are constant conversations of, is 2028 the right number? Do we have an opportunity to move that into 2029 as we think about our uses of cash?
As of right now, it continues to be there. We will be, I think it is in the mid ones for our leverage ratio, is that target by 2028. Yes. Again, I forgot. Apologies, I am doing a very poor job repeating the question here. The question of is high unemployment good for our business? What we have seen is during some recessionary periods that where people might get laid off, they look for different opportunities, and yes, we present as a good business opportunity. We do start to see more people come into the business during those windows. We do see it as that type of unfortunate headwind in the economy be a tailwind for us in bringing new people in. All right, great. Thank you all very much.