Yes. Whenever you guys are ready. It's 30 now, whenever you're ready. Pretty good? Oh. Good morning, everyone. Our first presenting company today is Nature's Sunshine Products, which is traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol NATR. Quick background: Nature's Sunshine is a global natural health and wellness company that manufactures and distributes nutritional and personal care products in over 40 countries. Here to tell you more about the company is the company's CEO, Terrence Moorehead, and CFO, Shane Jones. Terrence and Shane, wanna come on up? Yeah, you as well.
Yes, thanks. Morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Again, my name's Terrence Moorehead. I'm the CEO for Nature's Sunshine. I wanna briefly walk you through a little bit of background on the company. Skip that. 'Cause it really does have a powerful brand with a powerful story and fifty-two years of history in this space. So again, we're a global natural health and wellness company, and founded in 1972. A true success story founded around a couple, Gene and Kristine Hughes's kitchen table, filling capsules by hand. So we were actually the first company to encapsulate herbs, again, by the Gene and Kristine Hughes, just trying to serve their own health needs.
They kind of branched out, starting with themselves and then sharing the healing power of nature with other people, friends, family, colleagues, and spread it ultimately in 40 countries around the world. We have a very large and robust product line, over 800 products in our portfolio, so we literally have something for everyone and something for every ailment. We're a vertically integrated model. We produce our products end to end, so we do our own R&D, we do the testing, we do the sourcing, and we manufacture our products. That's actually quite rare, and that's one of our really one of our competitive advantages and something that truly differentiates us in the marketplace. We use advanced digital tools and selling techniques to drive our products in the market.
We also have a very passionate and well-trained, dedicated sales force that distributes our products through specialty retail, health practitioners, et cetera, and then we have a tremendous growth opportunity in digital alone, and so we'll talk about each one of these things in a little bit more detail. Just by way of overview of the market, it's a large market, the supplement industry, growing at over 6% annually. Depending on what segment you look at, you'll see different growth rates, so in the botanical and herbs section, you might see slightly higher growth rates in the 8%-9%. Sports nutrition, little higher growth rates there, but it's a strong, robust market. It's a global industry as well.
North America is actually the largest market in the world, followed by Asia, Europe, and then Latin America. In terms of our business, again, we operate in 40 markets around the world. You can see in the highlighted areas, that's where we do business today. Great news about our particular geographic footprint. Every single one of the markets that we do business in is growing, and I believe we're under-penetrated in every single one of those markets as well, which just speaks to the opportunity that lies ahead of us. In terms of our regional distribution of our sales, Asia Pacific is actually our largest region, with about 45% of our sales coming out of the region. Largest markets there would be Taiwan, Korea, and Japan for us.
North America represents about a third of our business, followed by Europe and Latin America. When I look at the consumers that are buying our products, we really focus on a premium consumer. We like to call them prosumers. They're people and consumers that really care about the ingredients, they care about where the products are made, how they're made. They care about results. They care about the testing that's done. It's really a highly engaged consumer that's looking for results, that's looking for performance, and willing to pay a higher price for their products as well. We have a highly specialized product line designed to address those consumers' needs.
And then we also sell through what we would call kind of pro sellers as well, people who can meet the needs of those prosumers and really kind of deliver against kind of what their needs are. So you're not gonna find Nature's Sunshine Products at big box mass stores. That's not our consumer, that's not our marketplace. We really are going after a very different consumer that is. It's a large segment, it's a dynamic and growing segment, and they're both young. So that would include millennials, Gen Zs, all the way up to boomers as well. In terms of our product portfolio, again, it's a very diverse portfolio. Again, with over 800 products, you might imagine that. One of our largest segments is gut health and digestive products. That's about 23% of the line.
General health, which would include things for managing your blood sugar, cellular health, joint health, et cetera. That's about 36% of the line. Cardiovascular, almost 20%. And then immune, sports, and energy, kind of fitness products and weight management hover in that 7%-8% range for our portfolio. So again, most of the, kind of what we do and sell focuses on gut health and then just general health and cardiovascular. One of the things I mentioned earlier was the fact that we manufacture our own products. And really, it's more than just manufacturing for us because, yes, that's where the end result comes together and the magic really happens. But it starts with our sourcing product.
We actually build relationships with farmers and producers and processors to ensure that we're getting products that we're looking for, that our consumers would demand. We do our own in-house testing. We perform over 600 tests. Our testing operations are led by PhDs, so it's a very sophisticated operation. We can do things that, quite frankly, other supplement companies cannot when it comes to making certain that we're getting the right type of ingredient, we're getting the kind of right level of potency and the purity of our products. We can test for all of those things, and we do test it. A lot of other companies just don't think it's necessary. We tend to do them, again, because of the prosumers that we're selling to, they would demand that.
We have strict compliance with FDA standards, but obviously, we go beyond that with our certifications. We have one of the broadest range of certifications in the industry. Of course, we're NSF and GMP certified, which are the basics, but we go well beyond that to include things like TGA certification, which is essentially, think of that as pharmaceutical-grade testing for supplements. We have ISO 9001 quality testing, ISO 17025, the highest level of kosher testing, the highest level of halal testing. Our facility is USDA organic certified. So again, I go through all this just to stress to you the level of quality that goes into our products, again, that our consumers would really appreciate and demand.
When they find out the difference between a Nature's Sunshine product versus what else is on the out there on the marketplace, it really does make a difference to them. We have our own manufacturing facility, our own 270,000 sq ft manufacturing facility located in Utah. It produces about 80% of the products that we make worldwide, so it's a very sophisticated facility. We produce liquids, capsules, tablets, stick packs, powders out of that facility. So almost every single form of delivery system that you can think of, with the exception of things like gummies. We don't do gummies. That's not really an effective delivery form for us, and then again, we have our own R&D team that's led by PhDs as well. So it's a real competitive advantage for us.
About 90% of the companies that do business in the supplement space are just using third-party manufacturers. So when people tell you, "Oh, aren't all supplements the same?" Well, about 90% of them are the same. Nature's Sunshine truly is different because, again, we do our own R&D, we do our own sourcing, we do our own testing, and our own manufacturing at a level that, quite frankly, other companies just don't do, and it shows in the results of our products. In terms of how we go to market, we have a very unique omni-channel approach. Our research tells us that consumers want to shop and buy through at least two to three different channels at any point in time. That's just how prosumers are shopping. So in North America, just as an example, about a third of our business comes through our specialty retail stores.
When I say specialty retail, I want you to think about local independents, those herb shops that you might see, kind of the natural food grocers. Those would be the specialty stores that I'm talking about. We also have health practitioners are about 25% of our business. Those would be naturopaths, herbalists, dieticians, et cetera, that are seeing clients, making recommendations about their health, and then recommending supplements to improve their health. About 25% of our business comes through our direct-to-consumer digital operations, which includes our company-owned website and Amazon businesses. So there, we're reaching out directly to consumers through your traditional e-commerce customer acquisition techniques, using CRM to build the relationships with folks, keeping them coming back to us on an ongoing basis.
And then the balance of the business, about 20%, are influencers and other kind of business builders that are kind of involved with the brand and kind of sharing it through their social networks. So that's, generally speaking, how we go to market. It's a very powerful omni-channel approach, and it's served us well and will continue to, we believe, going forward. Our company is driven by and our business is driven by three basic strategies. First strategy is we call it Digital First, and that's just using digital platform to drive customer acquisition and customer activation. Field Energy is our second strategy, and that's all about, again, leveraging our specialty retailers, making sure that they have the tools and our health practitioners, making sure that they have the tools and techniques and that they're motivated.
And we're constantly trying to look for kind of new, the next generation of specialty retailers, that next generation of health practitioners, in order to drive our business going forward. And then finally, our last strategy is something we call Brand Power, and that really is just making sure that we're building out our brand and having the right set of products in the marketplace to attract that next generation of prosumers in the market. I'll talk about each one of those very briefly. And there's no mystery behind our, you know, kind of our digital strategy. Again, as I had mentioned, a large piece of this and the main focus with our digital strategy right now is in North America.
We've built out a digital platform, a digital ecosystem, whereby consumers can come to our website to shop and buy our products, as you might expect, but we're also having a fairly aggressive customer acquisition initiative designed to draw new consumers into the business, and then our CRM activation activities drive activation on an ongoing basis. Our approach to this is to do this profitably, and that's really the key here. You have a lot of companies out there that are just kind of buying customers, and we believe we're doing this the right way by making certain that the business is profitable for us. So digital is actually our most profitable area of our company. Just an example of one of the things that we do to drive digital activation is we have a subscription program.
We call it Subscribe and Thrive. You know, when it comes to nutritional supplements, the only way you're gonna get healthy is by taking them on an ongoing basis. So we've tried to make this kind of brick-to-the-forehead obvious for consumers. It's the best offer that we have, free shipping, and the products come regularly on an ongoing basis. We wanna make it. We also wanna make it easy for consumers to cancel, pause, change the frequency if they like. Again, we're not trying to trick them into kind of staying with us. We really just want people to get healthy, and this is the only way you're gonna get healthy is if you're taking the products on an ongoing basis. So we wanted to make it affordable, easy, attractive as possible.
Right now, our Subscribe and Thrive in North America, just as an example, is about 26-27% of our business, but digitally, it's about 42-45% of the business. It kind of fluctuates depending on kind of where you are at any point in time. It's a very powerful strategy, a very powerful tool, and it's a win-win both for the company and for our customers as well. Our second strategy, again, is something we call Field Energy. Field Energy is all about managing the details of the business, making certain that our sales force, like, whether they be health practitioners or specialty retailers, have the tools that they need in order to be successful.
Our main focus is just on, you know, kind of basic field fundamentals, but it's also on kind of recruiting and finding that next generation of, of specialty retailers, that next generation of health practitioners. They're gonna allow us to keep continuing to grow and penetrate the market further. Just an example of, you know, kind of Field Energy in action, two of our markets, Taiwan and Japan, if you look at them over the last five years, when we've really focused on driving Field Energy through the business, you know, Taiwan's grown 141% in the last five years. Japan has grown 23% for us. And just as a note, for those of you who know anything about, you know, doing business in Japan, nothing grows at 23% in Japan. So absolutely phenomenal results.
This is a very powerful strategy when you can, again, tap into the market potential through your distribution channel. That's exactly what this is, is really all about. Finally, our last strategy, we call it Brand Power, and again, it's just about creating great brands that consumers would love and kinda wanna do business with. A perfect example of this is our Power line. It's a line of products that we launched last year and basically focused on foundational nutrition, designed for everybody to take every single day. Greens product, probably the best greens product in the market, quite honestly. Some of you might be familiar with a product like AG1, a market leader.
And I hope you like AG1 because you'd have to take three glasses of AG1 to equal one glass of our product. So really, these are breakthrough products. Everything we do tries to be, you know, kind of breakthrough and focus on delivering products that will deliver results you'll feel. So our greens product is probably the best product in the greens product you'll find in the marketplace. Power Meal is an exceptional meal replacement product. Just to give you a flavor of kind of what I'm talking about, like, why it would be so special and where the breakthrough is, most meal replacements, you're getting your calories from things like sugars and starches. In Power Meal, you're getting your...
The calories are being delivered by things like whole grain, excuse me, whole foods, whole roots, things like that. So just the choice, do you want to get your calories from starches and sugars, or would you like to get your calories from food? I prefer, and we believe food is better, and so that's how we've built this product. It's a big difference when it comes to maintaining your nutrition on an ongoing basis, and then Power Beets is an incredible product that we've launched last year. It is, it's great for cardiovascular health, cardiopulmonary health. Gives you great energy. If you're an athlete, if you're kind of an active, if you wanna stay active, Power Beets is the product for you. Personally, I'm a big skier.
I live in the mountains, and I won't go out without taking Power Beets because it just helps you perform, so again, three products designed to support your foundational nutrition. Everybody needs greens, everybody needs protein, everybody needs good cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary support. Take these three products every single day, you're gonna be feeling great, and it will dramatically improve your metabolic performance, so we have kind of full launch campaigns, both digitally, print, sampling, et cetera, to drive this line forward. It's actually a tremendously successful launch in North America. It was the best launch in the history of the company in Europe, so really powerful products, and again, you can see how we're trying to promote the products in general. This is our management team, and I'm not gonna go through kind of each individual on the management team.
You can see myself and Shane, who's right here in the front row with me. But we have a management team that's dedicated, it's focused. They really know what they're doing. They're experienced as well. But most importantly, what you should be kind of the takeaway is, this team is dedicated to driving the business forward and building shareholder value on an ongoing basis. In terms of our capital allocation plan, we have strong cash flow, and that's gonna allow us to continue to invest in our strategies. You know, we don't have any debt to speak of on the books. Our business tends to generate a fair amount of cash, so cash falls to the bottom line fairly quickly. We do have a share repurchase program in place.
We've spent about almost $8 million repurchasing shares so far this year. We have about almost $10 million left on that share repurchase program. I think, believe it was originally a $30 million program, so we have about $10 million out of the original $30 million left. We are investing in our supply chain. So, again, before I mentioned, you know, that's one. We believe that's one of our kind of main competitive advantages. So we'll continue to invest in upgrading our ability to improve efficiency, to improve throughput, to drive down cost per unit, to drive down, you know, kind of pick per unit because we do our own fulfillment as well. So we are making investments in our supply chain capabilities, and then we're making ongoing investments in driving organic opportunities like digital.
We just replatformed our digital business in North America, and we'll continue to expand our digital capabilities around the world. We would be interested, potentially, in strategic M&A. Anything that would align with our business, help us accelerate our strategies, help us, you know, kind of penetrate any of these markets more effectively. You know, we would certainly entertain a strategic M&A for the right opportunity at the right price and the right time. In terms of our performance over the past five years, on the left side, you can see our revenue. Revenue's grown at about 6%, roughly, outpacing the market in most of our markets where we play. We feel really good about that.
We're stealing share across the board, especially over the last three years. EBITDA also on strong growth from about $31 million in 2019 to over $40 million in 2023. So strong growth, strong performance on top line and bottom line, and a lot more opportunities lie ahead. In terms of our guidance for 2024, sales guidance is from $436-$445 million, and EBITDA guidance is $39-$42 million. That's the guidance we've provided for the year. So finally, just to wrap up, 'cause I wanna leave some time for questions, you know, why Nature's Sunshine? We really have an expansive product platform, truly powerful line of products that are really differentiated in the marketplace for consumers that are in the know.
We have an enormous market opportunity with what we're doing and focusing on consumer trends and where consumers are going right now. This whole prosumer market, you know, people care much more today about how their products are made, where the ingredients come from. You know, a lot of people spend a lot more time on the back of the bottle, reviewing ingredients, reviewing and kind of learning about the companies and the type of company that they're buying from than they did in the past. So this is a really growing segment that we're focused on. Our brand repositioning, doing things like, you know, kind of building out the Power line, are really helping us attract a new generation of younger consumers, but also serving our kind of older consumers, boomers and such, very well also.
We've got three very meaningful, very powerful growth strategies, and we're well-positioned financially. Again, significant cash position, healthy EBITDA, and virtually no debt. So that's Nature's Sunshine. At this time, I'd like to leave us a couple of minutes for questions. Yeah.
Does anyone have any questions in the audience?
Thank you. Are you seeing... I mean, it seems like from your guidance, there is, there are volume and sales trends, or there's a slight decline year on year. Is that pricing, or is that volume-related? And then I have a follow-on question on-
Yeah, it's actually right now, it's just some things that are going on in China. You know, kind of, it's only about 10% of our business, and it's a volume issue.
Pricing has stayed still?
We've actually taken the opportunity to take price increases pretty much in every geography around the world. The price increases have been accepted, I'd say, very well. So that hasn't been a challenge for us.
'Cause I was talking to one of the largest protein bar manufacturers last week-
Mm.
Have you stayed away from the protein bar segment for a particular reason? Is that very competitive?
Yeah, it's been very competitive. It's not a great growth segment right now. Protein drinks are actually much more popular.
Right.
They're kind of really doing quite well. Some of the clear protein drinks, that's another opportunity for us, so we don't even have any of those right now. We will be launching some in the future. So it's just a better segment for us, better delivery form, for us right now.
Hey, Terrence. What would be, if you were to do some more M&A, what would be missing from the portfolio that you guys currently have? What would you like to add if you could wave your magic wand and add a new category or new product?
Yeah, I don't know if it would necessarily be a new category, but certainly anything that would help us drive our digital penetration, that would be attractive. You know, we don't have a large footprint in kind of the sports nutrition area, and I'm not sure if we would go too far, you know, kind of down the muscle builder kind of area of sports nutrition. But active nutrition, great growth, you know, has tremendous consumer appeal. So maybe something in that space, you know, kind of we would certainly entertain. Anything that might help us penetrate a geography, we might, again, entertain. So, but those would be kind of things that we might look at.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm. Any other questions?
That ends our Q&A session. We're all good. Thank you, Terrence.
Okay. Thank you very much.