On today's call, comments will be made that include some forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those discussed or anticipated. Please refer to the 10-K we filed today and our other SEC filings for a complete discussion of these risks. Also, during the call, certain financial numbers will be discussed that differ from comparable numbers obtained in our financial statements. We believe these non-GAAP financial numbers assist in comparing period-to-period results in a more consistent manner. Please refer to our investor relations website, ir.nuskin.com, for any required reconciliations of non-GAAP numbers.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Nu Skin Investor Day 2022. We wish we were hosting you in person on this beautiful winter day from our headquarters here in Provo, Utah. Since that's not possible this year, we're hoping to bring a bit of Nu Skin to you wherever you are. I'm Ruth Todd, SVP and Chief Reputation Officer with Nu Skin. Come inside. For those of us who work at the company, and for our affiliates all around the world, we share an intense pride in the name Nu Skin. This company started with some entrepreneurs fresh out of college who had a great idea for a new approach to skincare. Now, nearly 38 years later, Nu Skin has grown into a global brand with incredible beauty and wellness products. Yet we still run into people who aren't sure who we are.
Nu Skin has a rich heritage in beauty and wellness. The company was founded upon our all of the good, none of the bad philosophy. Over time, we became known more for our distribution channel than our innovative products. As we move forward, we're going to index more on our identity as an integrated beauty and wellness company powered by a dynamic affiliate opportunity platform. Our products and the great results they deliver are how new customers will discover Nu Skin on social platforms. That is exactly what's happening right now with this, the LumiSpa. It's part of our beauty device systems, which have been named by Euromonitor as number one in the world for the past four years. We believe we achieved this distinction because of the scientific rigor that goes into both our devices and their associated products.
Together, they deliver a refreshing spa-like experience from the convenience of your own home. When we developed and launched the LumiSpa, we knew we had something special. Consumers said it was like having a luxury facial at home, that it was relaxing and made their skin look and feel softer and smoother after just one use. Our affiliates also loved it and embraced the opportunity to share their experience using the product on social platforms and showing off their results. We know the power of person-to-person selling. It's in our DNA. It's a better way for people to discover and buy innovative new products, particularly beauty devices, which benefit from a personalized demonstration. When it comes to beauty systems like the LumiSpa that consumers have never experienced before, trusted recommendations and a personalized coach make all the difference.
What's next for Nu Skin and our great products like the LumiSpa? We're really excited to tell you about that today. Along with this refocus on our beauty and wellness, we'll also continue to build upon one of the foundational pieces that our founders set in place decades ago, and that's being a company with purpose in every part of our business. We're committed to achieving our expanded sustainability commitments in our packaging, ingredients, and carbon footprint. We'll keep lifting children around the world with initiatives that improve their health and wellness, making our planet a better place for future generations. We're proud of the inclusive and innovative culture we've created here. Nu Skin was recently recognized by Forbes as one of the world's top female-friendly companies, as well as one of America's best employers in 2022.
Being a force for good has always been at the heart of our mission. Okay, our day will go like this. We'll begin with a company overview with our vision and strategy from our new CEO, Ryan Napierski. Then we'll get an update on our markets, our product plans, social commerce, and digital initiatives, followed by a financial update and 2022 guidance. We'll finish up the day by taking your questions. Let's go upstairs where we will find Ryan Napierski in his office. Ryan, hello.
Well, thanks, Ruth, and hello, everyone, and welcome to our 2022 Nu Skin Investor Day. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to join us virtually. I wish we could be together in person as we envision Nu Skin's future. However, circumstances continue to make it difficult. Throughout the pandemic, we've all had to become more creative to build stronger connections remotely. We've had to develop more patience and persistence as we permanently altered the way we live, work, and shop. Today, we're more digitally connected, we're more remote in the way we work, and we're more flexible in how we shop for everything from automobiles to beauty and wellness products.
I'm so proud of our employees and affiliates around the world who have worked tirelessly over the past couple of years to positively impact the lives of our millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of affiliate partners around the globe. Their passion and enthusiasm for our mission are at the core of the Nu Skin brand and what makes our platform so incredibly powerful. I'm grateful for the ongoing commitment of this incredible team. 2021 was yet another unprecedented year of lingering challenges related to COVID and its impact on government policy, the economy, and global supply chain constraints. Yet we were able to grow 4% year-over-year atop an already encouraging 2020 and up 11% over 2019. Globally, we've continued to diversify our revenue footprint to a more evenly balanced portfolio of markets.
Our Western business continued to grow in 2021 with the U.S. up 32% on top of 37% in 2020, and EMEA up 23% on top of 38% the prior year. This was driven largely by the adoption of our emerging social commerce business model as well as the introduction of new products like Beauty Focus Collagen+. China and Southeast Asia continue to be constrained by macro environmental restrictions related to COVID variants and ongoing disruptions to sales events and promotional activities. However, we are seeing positive signs in these markets due in part to recent product launches of ageLOC Meta, which performed well in various markets around the globe. South Korea also had an exceptional quarter with the introduction of Meta, which resulted in 8% year-over-year local currency growth for the quarter.
We were pleased to continue to build upon the momentum that began in 2020 and look forward to a new year ahead as we lean further into our Nu Vision 2025 that I'll talk about in just a moment. Before getting into that, I'd like to provide some context for how we view the world and what informs our new vision. Returning to headquarters in 2017 to become the company's president after nearly 15 years living in Europe and Asia, I realized that the economic tectonic plates were shifting around the globe in a manner that favored our business in a newly imagined state. First, digital connectivity has been in our lives since the invention of the smartphone, which has enabled a host of new products and entertainment mediums to enter the consumer market. Internet of Things connectivity touches just about every industry and consumer vertical.
Communications, transportation, fitness, even oral care are all being disrupted by connected devices. A recent McKinsey IoT report forecasts that by 2030, between $5 trillion and $12 trillion of economic value will be realized as consumers are connected with the services that provide them with greater insights and value. The beauty and wellness industries are on the cusp of transformation by this disruptive technology. Next, workforce dynamics also began to shift as millennials and Gen Zs entered the workforce and sought more flexibility in the way they work and live. New gig companies like Uber, Airbnb, Didi, and Grab provide people with the ability to rethink the way they work and play. This emerging gig economy allows anyone to have a side hustle and become a nano-entrepreneur. Who would have thought that just a few years ago, a global pandemic would elevate the demand for these kinds of opportunities?
What I believe to be the contributing factor to what is now being called the Great Resignation. Third, social media has evolved from communications and networking platforms into social marketplaces with companies like Pinterest, Etsy, and Shopify leaning in to build out a social commerce infrastructure that began to enable influencers to connect and transact with customers socially. Influencer marketing is reshaping the way brands reach consumers in a more effective manner. Social commerce is now disrupting traditional e-commerce at scale, the way that e-commerce disrupted retail in the '90s and 2000s. Grand View Research estimates that social commerce will reach nearly $3.4 trillion by 2028, roughly half of all e-commerce sales. Virtually every major consumer brand is now trying to leverage the power of social commerce to promote their brands and connect directly with consumers.
To take advantage of these emerging macro trends, we have redefined our vision to become the world's leading integrated beauty and wellness company, powered by our dynamic affiliate opportunity platform. This is our answer to providing the world with what it needs. We've established a roadmap and a timeline called Nu Vision 2025, which consists of three key strategic imperatives that will shape the new Nu Skin. First, integrated beauty and wellness. Today's consumers are interested in holistic beauty and wellness and understand that the skin is the body's largest organ. What we put on our skin and take into our bodies are mutually symbiotic or detrimental to one another. External pollutants or toxins have internal effects on the body, as do internal toxins that manifest externally.
Nu Skin's integrated approach to beauty and wellness and our balanced inside out portfolio is truly unique from other companies who specialize in either beauty or wellness. Our integrated gene science research and development with ageLOC, propelled by our acquisition of LifeGen a decade ago and recent investments in LifeDNA, are unparalleled in both beauty and wellness industry sectors. We have been acknowledged by Euromonitor as the world's leading beauty device systems brand for four consecutive years, which is another manifestation of our integrated approach of pairing topical products with our devices to improve the delivery and efficacy. With our next big innovation, EmpowerMe, our personalized beauty and wellness strategy, we will be able to further integrate our beauty and wellness solutions by adding IoT connectivity to our devices to help us and our brand affiliates even better meet the unique needs of individual consumers.
Something that only Nu Skin can achieve with our strong beauty device systems portfolio. In 2022, we plan to introduce our first two IoT-connected beauty devices, LumiSpa iO and ageLOC Body iO. These IoT devices are designed with the unique ability to provide consumers with deeper insights into their own personal skin care and body care needs by gathering user data that is paired with preference and purchasing data made available through our digital apps. Deeper consumer insights will lead to better understanding of our customers' needs and will enable the company to then serve those needs through personalized product and content curation. Establishing these deeper and more meaningful relationships will translate to greater recurring revenue as we apply our unique subscription and loyalty rewards programs, which presently make up approximately 50% of the company's annual revenues, excluding China. Another key differentiator for us.
Connecting more intimately with our customers on a personal basis through EmpowerMe and our world's leading beauty device systems truly positions Nu Skin to transform the beauty and wellness industries like no other company. I believe that our iO connected device strategy is as pivotal to us as the shift Netflix made from selling DVDs to persona-driven content curation. It's that significant. You'll hear more about EmpowerMe strategy and our 2022 product plans from our Chief Product Officer, Steve Hatchett, in just a few minutes. Next, for nearly 40 years, Nu Skin has relied upon the authentic power of word-of-mouth advertising to demonstrate and share our innovative beauty and wellness products. We have always believed that our best advertising is our customers and their individual experiences.
With the introduction of influencer and affiliate marketing, Nu Skin has continued to lead out in evolving the power of word of mouth with the scale and reach of social media through our own micro and nano influencers who share our products with consumers who are seeking authentic product recommendations from people they trust. We have been exploring this new model for the past few years with the introduction of our sales compensation program, Velocity. Velocity was a meaningful business model innovation enabling us to embrace a younger, socially inclined demographic of micro and nano influencers who desire to utilize their personal brands to share products that they love socially.
With the disruptions over the past two years of the way people shop for beauty and wellness products online and work remotely, this business model has enabled accelerated growth in the West for the markets that leaned into this new social commerce business model. We anticipate additional changes to our socially enabled business model to motivate even greater customer acquisition and retention for our affiliates as they grow their businesses. While retail shopping and return to work trends evolve, we believe that the broader shopping and work shifts are here to stay, and we see even greater upside for our affiliate-powered social commerce business as we expand it throughout the remainder of our markets over the next few years. We see great interest from our markets and sales force around the world who are eagerly learning and adopting new approaches to grow via social.
Forecasts predict that Asia will be nearly 70% of the broader social commerce industry by 2028. We see a bright future there as well. You'll hear more about our growth strategy and market plans from Connie Tang, our Chief Growth and Customer Experience Officer, in just a few minutes. Third, as we began to build our capabilities to scale our integrated product and social commerce strategies, we recognized the need to have greater influence over our complete value chain, starting with the addition of manufacturing capabilities and more recently with digital services in 2021. We will continue to add additional capabilities that we believe will enable us to scale our business more effectively over time. We've been engaged with Amazon Web Services over the past several years to expand the scale and capabilities of our technology stack to enable better customer and affiliate experiences.
We've invested in new technologies like Mavely to help empower our affiliates to build their social businesses more effectively with features like one-click post and share capabilities, which are under development now. In early 2022, we will be rolling out two key apps that have been in beta since Q4: Vera, our consumer app, and Stela, our affiliate app. We're building upon our learnings from our Vera skin consultation tool, a comprehensive consumer experience app that leverages AI, machine learning, and augmented reality to deliver a more holistic consumer experience. Stela is a new affiliate app that combines multiple distinct digital capabilities into a seamless digital experience. Both tools will be available in English markets from Q2 of this year, with other languages to follow.
We have also invested heavily in China's digital footprint to explore new avenues to market with our Tencent partnership, opening our WeShop marketplace in late 2021. Adding MyShop capabilities for our sales force in 2022. We anticipate spending over $500 million to enable Nu Vision 2025 to fully re-engineer our technology stack to provide end-to-end seamless digital experiences across our digital ecosystem. We're engaging with Infosys, a global leader in digital and mobile commerce, to accomplish this work for our enterprise services platform. In summary, Nu Vision 2025 is our roadmap for how we will transform Nu Skin from our rich heritage as a global direct selling company to the world's leading integrated beauty and wellness company that's powered by our dynamic affiliate opportunity platform.
This transformation will enable us to take further advantage of the powerful macroenvironmental forces of digital connectivity, social, and the gig or empowerment economy to accelerate growth as we apply our key strategic imperatives. We anticipate this multi-year transformation of both our integrated beauty and wellness product strategy and our affiliate-powered social commerce business model will produce low to moderate growth over the next 1-2 years, followed by accelerated growth thereafter. Social commerce, which is taking root in our Western markets now, is one of the key drivers of our future business success, but still represents a relatively small portion of our global business today. By 2025, our goal is for affiliate-powered social commerce to represent more than 50% of our global business, which we believe will translate to accelerated high single-digit to low double-digit top-line growth.
We also believe it will enable increased bottom-line performance as we digitally scale our global operations. There are areas of our business that may require operational adjustments along the way as we reallocate resources to more effectively support our emerging business around the globe. Throughout this transformation, we are committed to continuing improvements in our operational performance on our way to our stated 13% operating income target. With any business transformation, the from-to can be unpredictable, with ebbs and flows as the business evolves. We're committed to providing additional perspectives as we go by providing additional data that will help you better understand our business value drivers along the way. We'll begin sharing some additional perspectives around our three key performance metrics, including total active customers.
In addition to providing the total number of all purchasers in a given period of time, we anticipate providing additional insights into the various types of product purchasers, including end consumers. We'll be providing greater insights into areas like customer lifetime value as we deepen our relationships via EmpowerMe, IoT, connected devices, and our Vera consumer app. Total sales leaders. Also, in addition to reporting the total number of sales leaders, we'll begin to provide a broader data point representing all brand affiliates who are actively sharing products with end consumers. With social commerce, this expanding segment of business builders provides further insight into developing sales leaders. Revenue. As we transform our business from traditional direct selling to social commerce, we're evaluating better ways to represent revenue between these different business model approaches.
We also anticipate sharing more insights into revenue by product division and new versus existing product lines. We further anticipate providing greater perspective into both subscription and loyalty revenue, as well as digital direct revenue. These increasing insights along the way will help you better interpret the transformational journey as we move through our Nu Vision 2025 roadmap. With all the exciting changes underway, our Nu Skin team is acutely focused on our mission of being a force for good by empowering people to improve their lives. These are not words on paper. This is a principle that we strive to apply to all aspects of our business. One of the things I am most proud of is our Force for Good efforts, focusing on building a better place for children around the world.
Over the years, Nu Skin and our partners have generated millions of dollars for causes that enrich the lives of those less fortunate, including life-saving heart surgeries for more than 26,000 children in Greater China and Southeast Asia, educating thousands of farmers in Malawi, Africa on sustainable farming techniques to improve their economic circumstances. Nourish the Children program, a social entrepreneurship venture which encourages our affiliates, customers, and employees to donate meals. We feed about 120,000 children every single day, and so far, we have served more than 750 million meals around the world. In 2019, we announced to the world our commitment to sustainability and laid out our goals that focus on continuously improving our contribution to the planet. I'm pleased to report that we are on track to hit those commitments. Last year, we made sustainable changes to the packaging of our top 20 products.
We will complete the scoring and assessment of all of our products by 2023. Last year, our environmental efforts also saved 131 tons of plastic and over 34 tons of paper. We were the first beauty company to launch the Eco-Pak, an innovative bioplastic that uses sugarcane. We use the sustainable packaging on our Epoch line and Nu Colour product lines, and we're seeing other companies follow our lead. By 2030, all of the product packaging will become recycled, recyclable, reusable, reduced, or renewable. We are just getting started in our commitment to sustainability and our impact on people, products, and the planet. Purpose is why we exist, and our purpose is what we're most passionate about.
In summary, Nu Vision 2025 is about how we will take all of the good of Nu Skin's rich heritage and realign these assets, capabilities, and resources to reach millions more beauty and wellness consumers and hundreds of thousands of brand affiliates as we scale our business in a digital-first, socially enabled go-to-market model. We will accomplish this vision via our three key strategic imperatives. First, introducing EmpowerMe, our personalized beauty and wellness strategy, beginning with the rollout of two new IoT connected devices in 2022. Second, accelerate the proliferation of affiliate-powered social commerce throughout Asia and the rest of the world via continued enhancements to our business model in 2022 and beyond. Third, continue to invest in our enterprise services platform with the formal launch of Vera, our consumer app, and Stela, our affiliate app, beginning in the first half of 2022.
Today, you are going to hear from several key leaders on our team about how we are bringing Nu Vision 2025 to life. Let's go to our Chief Product Officer, Steve Hatchett, who is in our product store to learn more about our product strategy. Steve?
Thank you, Ryan. There is no question that Nu Skin is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the current and future macro trends in beauty and wellness. We are in the right space at the right time with the right products and services. Global beauty and wellness markets continue to grow and are currently estimated to exceed $1 trillion annually, according to Euromonitor. Statista estimates the value of the global beauty and wellness markets worldwide to grow past $6 trillion by 2025. Nu Skin is perfectly suited to address this market need with EmpowerMe. EmpowerMe is our connected and personalized beauty and wellness strategy that delivers smarter products and better results. Nu Skin traditionally has focused on its key strengths around scientifically advanced beauty and wellness products.
The new EmpowerMe strategy puts customer engagement at the core of our business, ensuring our customer needs and customer satisfaction are our top focus. Ultimately, this leads to improved lifetime value and happy, raving fans. EmpowerMe addresses the critical questions of what makes our affiliates and customers excited. What are they passionate about? What gets them up in the morning? EmpowerMe is all about smarter products and smarter results. We'll do this in three ways. One, by attracting people with our world-class products that is focused on difference demonstrated. Two, digitally connecting the world with Nu Skin products and our global Nu Skin community. Moving to the cloud gives us access to digitally enabled tools and social commerce platforms that we previously did not have access to. We can now connect to people virtually anytime and anywhere. This enables easier access and sharing of our products and business opportunity.
Third, by making the experience so easy, so frictionless, and fun, we will nurture and organically expand our affiliate and customer relationships in a more powerful way. We are also working diligently on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality to personalize our product recommendations, which we believe will customize the experience and improve the results and engagement. By attracting and connecting more customers while increasing product consumption from existing customers, this will lead to nurturing a greater customer experience, which will reduce churn and increase retention, and ultimately, lifetime value. If we look at EmpowerMe as a more connected and personalized approach, we can gain better insights and understand individual customer needs through advanced assessments, and provide just the right support to help them and elevate their beauty, wellness, and overall quality of life in an easy, fun, and engaging way. Ultimately, our goals are very simple.
One, to empower affiliates to attract, connect, and nurture additional customers. Two, increase product consumption from our existing customers through education and discovery of additional products that make a real difference in their lives. Three, attracting additional new affiliates and customers. Four, decrease churn. Five, increase our annual recurring revenue. Six, increase lifetime value. Now, technology plays such a key role in our EmpowerMe strategy. I'd like to bring out Joe Sueper, a good friend, colleague, and also our Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Joe, let's have a seat and have a chat.
Okay.
Thanks, Steve. It's great to be here and talk through our technology and digital capabilities.
It's great to be with you, Joe. Now, you have been involved in technology, data, and digital for the majority of your career. What can you tell us about connected devices and why you believe the EmpowerMe strategy is so meaningful?
We are working on making our beauty devices smarter by providing a digital at the edge experience. Connected devices will provide data that will enable richer insights and offerings for our affiliates and their customers.
With device data combined with customer data, it opens a myriad of opportunities for our customers to personalize their beauty and wellness journeys that are powered by data. Device data can help customers understand and track treatment regimens, and by combining Nu Skin beauty and wellness products, this will allow customers to personalize according to their daily lifestyle routines, helping drive a better product experience. From product recommendations to simple lifestyle subscriptions, connected devices can enable greater brand awareness, product affinity, and retention. Every user today wants to understand how a product performs or understand the reviews of a product. By giving immediate data to the user and allowing them to take selfies and track through digital skin assessments, we can offer a personalized product interaction. By connecting our beauty devices, we enable product recommendations that integrate into each customer's daily routine.
Those connections are so important. Joe, can you share how you see these technologies will benefit Nu Skin and its affiliates over the next several years, and how does this change the business for the better?
The key point here is data, and that data will enable better experience for our affiliate and the customer. Nu Skin, along with our affiliates and their customers, will have increased access to data at the right time to drive meaningful interactions, and improved insights to personalize their experience and treatment options. Connected devices will enable data-driven insights to help our affiliates grow their businesses and build stronger relationships with their customers. Device combined with customer data will allow customers and affiliates to control and personalize their interactions and experiences, connecting them with extended portfolio of hundreds of beauty and wellness products that fit into their lifestyle. This data will inform and enable simple subscriptions, reorder reminders, and product recommendations, increasing the overall customer experience and lifetime value. Now these insights don't end with only our customers and affiliates.
The increased product usage and device data can also be used to help drive intelligent automation and operational improvements. Our goal here is to enable greater affinity and trust. These new insights will help enhance supply chain visibility and product availability.
That's really exciting. Joe, it's clear that investing in digital is critical to our short and long-term success. What are some of the additional ways Nu Skin's accelerating its digital capabilities over the next two, three years?
Great question. As you know, Nu Skin migrated to the cloud and has been modernizing its core infrastructure and making operational changes to increase efficiency and resiliency. Over the past two years, we've mapped out our business capabilities and began rationalizing our application portfolio to focus our investments. This includes assessing and optimizing our IT talent, along with building our data platform, cyber, and user privacy programs to enable the seamless digital touchpoints that are going to be unveiled this year. We're now investing over the next few years to expand and revamp our global e-commerce capabilities with cloud-native architectures, APIs, and microservices. Our current e-commerce platform continues to serve our needs, but in an accelerated digital and social commerce world, we are ensuring that our experiences scale across multiple touchpoints, from web to mobile and now smart connected devices.
Through these series of investments, we're creating best-in-class architecture foundations that will power the digital experiences well into the future.
Joe, I'm so excited you're leading this amazing technology effort that we're doing here at Nu Skin. Now, the social commerce economy continues to expand at a significant rate. Can you shed some light on the specific ways Nu Skin is enabling social commerce?
Great question, Steve, and it's one area we're accelerating with the recent acquisition of Mavely, which has core digital components that easily integrate into the expanding global social platforms where Millennials and Gen Zs participate daily. Today, users want to transact in the social media they use, and the global social commerce market has the potential to reach nearly $3.4 trillion by 2028. With this acquisition, we plan to enable our affiliates and their customers the ability to share, transact, and create endless connections on the social platforms they use today. With that, we're excited to announce the launch of our new mobile app, Vera, beginning Q2. It will enable customers to personalize their integrated beauty and wellness journeys through personalized regimens, product recommendations, skin assessments, shade finder, and connecting their Nu Skin beauty devices.
It will enable them to easily purchase and share their experiences and favorite products on social platforms, all from the power of their mobile phone. In addition, we're excited to announce the launch of our new mobile app, Stela, beginning Q2. It will provide our affiliates with the digital tools to run their businesses where they are, on their terms, and in the palm of their hands. With Stela, affiliates will be able to scale and track their downline with intelligent actions and set business goals and targets. Emily Evangelista, our VP of Global Digital, will walk us through these apps in greater detail shortly. To help us accelerate our digital capabilities, we are engaging with AWS, Tencent, and Infosys Limited, a global leader in digital.
We have a huge opportunity with these new digital tools, along with connected device and customer data that will supercharge our affiliates' businesses and their customers' integrated beauty and wellness journeys.
We look forward to sharing these experiences with everyone in the coming months. Thanks, Joe. It's so good to have you at the leadership role in our technology. Now, turning to our product strategy, I'd like to introduce somebody I get the privilege of working with every single day and who is a dear friend of mine, Yoko Little, our Vice President of Product Marketing. Hi, Yoko.
Hi, Steve.
Great to be with you. Now Yoko, we recently introduced two new products, ageLOC Meta and Beauty Focus Collagen+. Can you first tell us about Meta and the results of those previews?
Yeah, I'd love to. Last year, we had an ageLOC Meta limited leadership preview in Asia, and it exceeded all of our expectations. Our Pharmanex scientists produced some amazing wellness products in the past. You remember them, TR90, ageLOC Youth, LifePak, all with advanced science and clinically validated results. ageLOC Meta also features Nu Skin's advanced science with a unique approach for our modern lifestyle. Let me explain. We have stress, erratic work hours, poor sleeping habits, and we eat on the run. So the way we live today is throwing our body chemistry out of sync. In fact, there's a scientific study that says only one in eight of us is metabolically healthy. That's a very alarming statistic. 90% of consumers also agree that today's lifestyle negatively impacts our bodies.
To effectively target this unhealthy lifestyle, our team of Nu Skin scientists spent seven years to research what we are missing. The research showed something interesting. When we put together the right blend of anthocyanins, it helps to create a shift towards a healthier lifestyle. You know what? We're not the only ones who love this concept. Looking at how the markets reacted to the product, it's clear that there was a pent-up demand and high expectation for the latest Pharmanex science. Let's talk business. We had sold-out previews with our global affiliates in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Southeast Asia, Japan. Our initial market previews far exceeded our forecast by more than 220% in Korea. We know the excitement is building throughout the world through these limited previews, and now we're getting ready for the global consumer launch.
It will start in Asia, but also continues to roll out in the U.S. later in the year.
Wow. It appears that ageLOC Meta is going to be another flagship Pharmanex product similar to LifePak and ageLOC Youth.
Yeah, definitely. Meta features unique advanced ageLOC science, and it is designed to help us really stay healthy in our busy lives.
Yoko, the Meta preview was simply amazing. There's been a lot of buzz, though, about another product called Beauty Focus Collagen+. What can you tell us about this product and why you believe this is the right product at the right time?
Yeah. Beauty Focus Collagen+ was another great product introduced in 2021. The U.S. led the launch last year, and it quickly became the number 2 product following LumiSpa. The global beauty supplement market is growing, and it is expected to reach nearly $70 billion by 2026. Our channel is actually driving the highest revenue share. How do we stand out in this growth segment? With an integrated beauty and wellness approach. First, we are talking about a more advanced form of collagen than what you typically see, combined with lutein and phytoceramides. These are unique ingredients that are not commonly found in collagen supplements.
As our Chief Scientific Officer, Joe Chang says, this is really not our mother's collagen.
Exactly. That's right. Beauty Focus Collagen+ is scientifically proven to boost collagen and elastin production. What that means is it can visibly reduce your fine lines and wrinkles and support hydration for skin radiance. Now, there's also something else that we're excited about. A third-party clinical study showed that when you use Beauty Focus Collagen+ with ageLOC LumiSpa together, we're seeing even better results, including skin texture, radiance, and overall appearance. This is a perfect example of integrated beauty and wellness approach to deliver the best results.
I love it. Now let's discuss what Nu Skin is focusing on now and why you're so excited about the product pipeline that's coming.
Yeah. There's another exciting category, TR90. Let's talk about Nu Skin's strength in the weight management and fitness category. In Southeast Asia, Nu Skin was named number 1 weight management and wellness brand by Euromonitor. In Korea, we have seen double-digit growth in the weight management category over the past 5 consecutive years. Momentum is building, and we're ready to grow this category globally with a fresh new approach. Let me explain. TRMe is our first personalized approach to enhanced lifestyle based on your personal needs. It will complement the TR90 program that has been scientifically validated and so successful. It starts with a wellness and lifestyle assessment and your health and fitness goals to provide this personalized regimen, including a digital tool, supplement program, and great lifestyle tips.
TRMe is really designed to take away the guesswork and provide just the right help to meet your goals so you can manage your weight, you can stay active, and stay fit. It's a program that's customized for you just the way you want it.
I love it. Thank you, Yoko. The future of Nu Skin is truly bright.
Thank you, Steve.
Which brings me back to EmpowerMe. Our goal is to help our affiliates and customers succeed with Nu Skin's broad portfolio of innovative products and digital tools. Our focus is to create an ecosystem to drive customer engagement, and product sales will follow as a result of it, along with improved retention, subscription, and lifetime value. Nu Skin will continue to maintain its strength to innovate with advanced science, integrated beauty, and wellness with smarter, connected, and more personalized approach. In fact, perhaps the most exciting innovation of all is the devices themselves becoming connected and smarter. Earlier, Joe talked about our approach from technology. Think of these exciting features, personalized treatment options, tracking results with selfies so you can see the improvements over time, allowing customers to connect better with their friends and connect them to our unique portfolio of beauty and wellness products.
Recognizing the increase in demand of social selling products, we have developed a new agile pipeline of products that capitalize on these opportunities. Expect to see more products that fit this dynamic and rapidly growing market. We're also acutely aware that each market may have their own unique and special needs. Our local product initiative model enables us to support these local market opportunities, which positively impacts their monthly, quarterly, and annual Fusion Calendars. We are extremely excited about our 2022 product pipeline. In the first half of 2022, we'll be officially launching ageLOC Meta and Beauty Focus Collagen+ globally. In the second half of 2022, we will preview our new smart devices, LumiSpa iO, RenuSpa iO, and our personalized weight management program, TRMe.
All this is happening in 2022 in collaboration with the global rollout of both Vera and Stela applications to support our loyal affiliates and millions of customers worldwide. No doubt, 2022 will be an exciting and pivotal year for Nu Skin, with revenue coming from our top revenue-generating brands like LumiSpa, TR90, and Nutricentials, unique selling social products, and those localized product promotions, and of course, new product launches and previews. Ryan, 2022 is truly going to be a busy but exciting year.
Thanks, Steve. This EmpowerMe strategy and the work to connect our devices will not only open up new product development possibilities, but also allows us to create richer experiences with many favorite products in our current portfolio. I believe this will be a key part of driving customer acquisition and fueling customer engagement and loyalty, translating to a greater lifetime value of the customer. Now, let's turn to our strategy for how we are making it easier than ever for consumers to discover our amazing products through affiliate-powered social commerce. For that, and an overview of our market performance, let's go to Connie Tang, our Chief Global Growth and Customer Experience Officer. Connie?
Thanks, Ryan. It's great to be here with everyone today. I would like to take a minute to add a little more color to Ryan's recap of 2021 with some commentary on each of our reporting regions. Despite difficult comps in the second half of 2021, I'm pleased with the 4% year-over-year revenue growth and 11% growth compared to 2019. I'm very pleased with the rebalancing of global revenue distribution as a result of the further strengthening of our Western businesses. Our Americas segment increased revenue 20% in constant currency due to strong product sales through our social commerce business model. The social commerce success, led by the U.S. with 32% revenue growth in 2021, was somewhat offset by economic challenges in Latin America. We expect the Americas will continue its growth trend and will grow by 6%-12% this year.
EMEA had another very strong year, which can be attributed to further adoption of social sharing, with some softening later in the year due to prolonged vacations as we discussed last quarter. Overall, this segment grew another 18% in constant currency in 2021, on top of strong growth in 2020. We see EMEA continuing to grow between 8%-13% in 2022. South Korea, which has made the most progress in social commerce adoption in our East markets, grew 6% in local currency in 2021. This is due in large part to successful product promotions, particularly for TR90 and the fourth quarter launch of ageLOC Meta, which led to 8% growth in local currency. This year, we expect South Korea to deliver revenue growth in the range of 2%-6%. Japan was essentially even in 2021 in local currency.
This market is traditionally more dependent on in-person connections and lost some of its recent momentum with greater COVID-19 restrictions in the second half of the year. Japan's revenue is expected to range from a 1% decline to 4% growth this year. Mainland China was down 26% in the fourth quarter year-over-year, and 15% for the year in local currency. Following early signs of improvement in quarter four 2020 and quarter one of 2021, the Delta variant led to the government's strict zero-COVID policy and continues to negatively impact our selling and promotional activities, such as in-person product expos, qualified training events, and incentive trips. We anticipate the first half of the year will remain challenging as we work to stabilize the market.
We believe China will return to growth in the second half of the year, particularly fueled by the launch of connected devices in this traditionally strong beauty device market. We continue to believe in this market and are investing in tools and programs to support our social model and ongoing efforts to help sales leaders set up their own personalized shops and make our products available through the WeChat platform. We anticipate 2022 China revenue will range from 5% down to 5% up for the year. Despite a slower start in the first half of 2021, our Hong Kong, Taiwan segment delivered constant currency growth of 3% in Q4. We believe we are gaining traction in this market and have momentum going into 2022 following a successful preview of ageLOC Meta, and with the introduction of social selling initiatives to promote ongoing social commerce adoption.
We believe Hong Kong and Taiwan revenue will range from a 5% decline to 5% growth in 2022. Our Southeast Asia and Pacific region continues to be heavily impacted by the COVID-19 related government restrictions. While this presents ongoing challenges, we did have a successful preview of ageLOC Meta in Singapore. We look forward to the full launch of Meta throughout the region in the first half and connected devices, as well as a brand extension of the top-selling TR90 in the second half. We expect revenue in Southeast Asia and the Pacific to be down 5%-10% this year. Now, moving on to social commerce. As Ryan shared, several macro trends accelerated the transformation of our business model, and we are placing a renewed emphasis on digital investments and operational changes that support expansion of this model to all our global markets.
In 2022, we will enable affiliate-powered social commerce around the world through global campaigns to drive new customer acquisition, connection, and retention, as well as affiliate engagement. Further refinements of our business model with learnings from the Velocity program that will help attract new affiliates to broaden our affiliate base. The introduction of Fusion Calendars, which will deliver a cadence of annual, quarterly, and monthly product focus and energy. At Nu Skin, we have always been a people-to-people business that is built on trusted personal recommendations of world-class products. Social commerce is a vehicle to take what we have always done really well as a company through high touch and amplifying it now at a much larger scale, enabled by high-tech digital tools.
As we develop the social commerce platform, our customer experience team is gathering and synthesizing data to give us insights into consumer needs and preferences to inform our business programming and decisions. This coincides with perhaps one of the biggest shifts in our approach at Nu Skin. In the past, we have typically pushed the company and product out to consumers, and we are now focused on bringing consumers to the product by meeting them where they are. To put this simply, we are laser-focused on attracting, connecting, and nurturing customers and those relationships. We will do this by giving them a better way to discover and experience products.
This includes providing an authentic experience, making it easy for them to explore products they want to try, and opting in through intelligent digital tools, giving them personalized paths to self-navigate through product discovery, and complementing all of this with a personal touch an affiliate provides. This all happens through the power of our affiliates, a large force of loyal brand ambassadors and advocates who already use and love the products and are well-equipped to help guide customers on their journey. In fact, let's take a quick look at what that journey might look like. Now our affiliates use and love Nu Skin products as they always have. Yet their journey is a bit different than a customer as they start to build their business by sharing their favorite products with their friends, and perhaps that even leads to building a team.
They're learning how to be more effective and what works best for them, how to manage customers, and how to run a small business, and are being rewarded in ways that build their confidence along their journey. Let's take a quick look at what that journey might look like for them. With so many markets around the world, we know the model is not one size fits all, but there is a global framework that can be adapted for all. We're building out best practices, testing, and applying them in each of our markets for effective adaptation. It is moving at different speeds, and we expect some ups and downs along the way, but adoption is continuing to evolve globally with progress in key regions. Let me just touch on a few.
As I mentioned earlier, outside of our West markets, South Korea has made the most progress in social commerce adoption. Much of this has been fueled by our TR90 weight management system, where we have been able to build a very engaged fitness and wellness community that shares tips, insights, favorite products, and much more with each other, an optimal environment to attract, connect, and nurture new and existing customers and affiliate relationships. We remain very excited about the potential for social commerce in China as the largest global economy and most digital market. It is also quite different from our other markets with a different model, and the pervasive role of WeChat requires our tools to be fully integrated with the social platform. Last quarter, I talked about our partnership with Tencent that provides a platform for us to introduce select products to the wide WeChat audience.
We will also expand our presence as we roll out My Shop, where our leaders will establish their own personal shops on WeChat, ensuring that Nu Skin and our products can now be found on the primary commerce platform in China. We're now building upon what we learned from our mini campaign to launch a full program. For example, our test program successfully drove customer acquisition, and we now need to ensure we have the programs in place to build on that acquisition for retention and loyalty, which includes an annual calendar and cadence of product focus and energy to connect frequently with new customers. In addition, we are learning our way into new tools that provide live shopping shows and online shopping experiences.
The Zero-COVID policy is currently slowing leader training and adoption, but we are focused on building confidence in social commerce as the best model for our sales leaders in China post-pandemic for growth and expansion. Most of our other eastern markets are in the early adoption phase, and we will draw on our learnings from our other markets as we move forward. I definitely need to give a shout-out to EMEA as well, which is where social commerce really started for us. It continues to be strong in EMEA, fueled by integrated sales and product promotions, compelling social content, and engagement. Our leaders in EMEA continue to grow their skills in creating, curating, and amplifying content to attract and connect with new customers.
Now, I would like to dive a little deeper into how one particular market has experienced meaningful success on its path to adopting a social commerce model. One of the markets furthest along in its adoption is the U.S. market, led by Justin Keisel, President, Americas. He's here today to share with us some of the progress and results his team has been able to achieve. Hey, welcome, Justin.
What's up, Connie?
How's it going?
Excellent. How are you?
I'm doing great. Well, I have to say, congratulations on an incredible year, particularly with the continued increase in social commerce adoption. Can you start by sharing what you feel was most important in driving social commerce and the success you had last year?
Yeah. Thank you, Connie. You bet. There really are several factors that have come together in just the right way. I think the biggest has been empowering our affiliates and our sales leaders. We've empowered them with enhanced tools, with programs that have really provided a retail opportunity to build a stronger customer base. I don't think it's a secret or a surprise to anybody that we're in a time where consumers are increasingly online. Anybody that's been to the shopping mall recently will see that retail traffic is declining.
That's right.
Our personalized approach to the customer experience has given us a real competitive advantage. In fact, our affiliates have really strong relationships with their customers, and that enables them to provide a warm and a customized experience. Something I think the big beauty brands and retail outlets are really trying to have, but they don't yet have, and they're trying to create this in a new digital environment. By empowering our affiliates to more effectively share products to attract and retain new customers, we've been able to increase the number of affiliates and expand our customer base like never before.
That's really interesting and pretty phenomenal. Can you give us an example of a program where you applied that?
Sure. I think the perfect example is our launch of Beauty Focus Collagen+. Before we launched Collagen+, we set a big goal. We wanted this to be a massive product launch. In collaboration with our sales leaders, we created a fully integrated sales and marketing program for our brand affiliates, which included leaderboards and trackers to be able to recognize the top sellers, and it also enabled them to attract new and existing customers and provide the personalized experience that we just talked about. This program not only drove consumer acquisition but also grew our affiliate base as many of those customers had such a positive experience with Collagen+ that they ended up wanting to share the product themselves and thus became affiliates. We also significantly improved customer retention by providing them with attractive subscription options.
I'm excited to say, over the past six months, we achieved our big goal. The key to this record success was total alignment of people, products, and of programs, of course, in partnership with our affiliates, and I must say, along with effective execution by our internal team. It was a true team effort.
That it was. I would love for you to share some of the key results. Come on, brag a little.
If I must.
for that Collagen+ launch program.
Well, the results were amazing, and we're grateful for that. We doubled our preview revenue goal, which happened last July, and that was exciting. In our full September launch, we had more people sign up for a monthly subscription of this product than ever before. The best part of that is the subscription order has 15 times more lifetime value than an order from an occasional purchaser, so that was big for us. Subscription orders have continued to grow since the September launch. To reiterate, Connie, this model gives us a framework now. A framework for how to launch products more effectively in the future, and we plan to implement the exact same principles with every product we launch this year and beyond. Again, social commerce was the key. It gives us the ability to expand the reach of our affiliates and scale growth.
We continue to invest in and develop tools that will help them be even more efficient in providing this personalized customer experience, in addition to providing programs that reward our affiliates, delight our customers, and nurture those relationships.
Well, high five to that one. I mean, come on. Thanks, Justin.
Thank you.
... for joining us and sharing the example of the great things you and your team and affiliates are doing in your region with customer acquisition and increasing lifetime value of the customers. Congratulations again. Thank you.
Thank you.
You just heard about how we're building mobile tools to support customer attraction, connection, and retention as drivers to help affiliates power their business development. I want to send it over to Emily Evangelista, our Vice President of Global Digital. She joins us to talk about investing in digital tools and what strategies to support the social commerce model.
Hey, welcome Emily. Hey. Can you share a little about how your work enables and supports our social commerce model for both customers and affiliates?
Thanks, Connie, and it's great to be here. I love what you talked about earlier with how we are helping our affiliates to attract, connect, and nurture customers, and the digital tools we are building are designed to do just that. We are weeks away from launching two new apps, one for customers and one for affiliates. Our consumer app, called Vera, comes from the Latin word Vera, which for us means your truth. But rather than just talk about it, Connie, let me show you how we are helping affiliates attract, connect, and nurture consumers by using the Vera app to help guide them through a beauty and wellness journey. Based on our competitive analysis of more than 50 beauty and wellness apps, we realized a lot of those apps are just focused on purchasing products.
In addition to optimizing the product purchase journey similar to those other apps, our objective in developing Vera was to add tools that help affiliates coach consumers on their beauty and wellness journey. Through Vera, affiliates can help customers identify and discover products to meet their skincare needs and preferences. It also guides them through how best to use the products and how to know that they are getting the desired results. Affiliates can send a link to download the Vera app to customers who are ready to go deeper with our products. As soon as you come into the app, you're prompted to do a skin consultation. This marries AI face-scanning technology with a lifestyle-focused assessment so that we offer personalized product recommendations based on their concerns, such as fine lines, pigmentation, texture, and so on.
From there, the customer can directly purchase and subscribe to those personalized product recommendations. There is also a connection point between the customer and affiliate here, where the affiliate can see that they've completed their skin assessment, what products were recommended, and if the customer has purchased the products. This gives the affiliate a very personal and actionable way to follow up and nurture their customer. Once we have our connected beauty devices, consumers will be prompted in this next section to connect their device, follow routines, and they can use the app to track usage and learn how to achieve optimal results. Okay. This next section is so interesting, and we've been blown away by the excitement for this feature. A selfie timeline allows customers to track changes in their skin over time and share them out to their friends on social.
Next, we have our shade finder tool, which supports our BB+ Foundation launch and allows you to do a virtual try-on to find your perfect match. Once you find your right match, you can purchase it directly from the recommendation screen. Last of all, you can discover, purchase, and subscribe to new products, and this is just the beginning. In the future, we'll be adding educational content and wellness features. Okay. Now let's switch over to Stela, our app that helps affiliates build, run, and grow their business all from one place. We've integrated several existing tools and enhanced them with new features, all to help affiliates connect with their customers in meaningful ways and to really guide affiliates on their next best actions to grow their business.
We've heard from affiliate focus groups that they need a mobile solution that makes it super easy for them to set business goals and targets, coach their teams, and do their critical tasks. They can get on with their day and spend more time focused on their customers. Let me walk you through a few of the features in the Stela app. On the home screen, they get an intuitive dashboard of their business. They see their earned sales compensation and bonuses and can even click "Pay me now," giving them more control over when and how they get paid. From there, they can dive into their team view and explore their top team members, see who is close to qualifying, and identify those who may need some help.
Affiliates will also be able to see the order histories of their registered customers, allowing them to better understand and meet their needs. One of the features I'm most excited about is our new social share feature. From the products page, I can share a link with affiliate attribution to social or really to any messaging platform in a matter of 2 clicks. This significantly simplifies how our affiliates are selling on social commerce today. This feature is going to enable new affiliates to come into the business and start sharing products in a matter of minutes. As exciting as all of that is, by far the number one requested feature is a mobile CRM tool that helps them do their business on the go.
With Stela, they will now be able to use Nu Skin Connect, which is a smart CRM or customer relationship management tool, where affiliates will be able to personalize and track their goals and more easily engage with customers. It utilizes AI to coach affiliates on their next best action and gives them daily tasks to help them stay connected with customers and drive their next sale. Our early data indicates that affiliates using the Connect tasks have had a significant increase in the number of orders. That is huge, not just for the current sale, but in building customer loyalty and affiliate retention. There you have a quick look at what will be available to consumers and affiliates. Back to you, Connie.
Thank you so much, Emily, for showing us these new incredible digital tools. I know your team is just getting started. With that, let's go back to Ryan.
That's fantastic, Connie. That was a great overview of how we'll expand our affiliate-powered social commerce around the world through global campaigns that attract, connect, and nurture new customers, digital tools for engaging and retaining affiliates, and a regular cadence of promotions and launches that provide product energy. Now, before we gather our team to take questions, let's go to our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Lawrence, who is just down the hall for a financial report and discussion of 2022 guidance. Mark?
Thank you, Ryan, and thank you to each of you for joining us today. I want to start by expressing my thanks to our sales leaders, affiliates, customers, and employees globally, who continue to impress us in a world filled with change and uncertainty. Today, I look forward to sharing with you details regarding our fourth quarter and full year 2021, and then provide guidance for Q1 and the full year 2022, after which we'll take questions from our virtual audience. Before I dive into our recent financial results, let me first provide some color into our Rhyz strategic investment arm, which grew 16% this year and is comprised of our manufacturing and technology investments, and formerly our Grow Tech segment, which I'll address momentarily. Our main goal in acquiring these manufacturing entities was to shore up the supply chain for our core Nu Skin business, which has certainly proven successful.
We believed an investment in manufacturing would increase our innovation capability, enhance our speed to market, and generate helpful U.S. profit. I don't believe any of us realized at the time the importance of controlling our own supply chain throughout the pandemic and helping keep products in stock while maintaining and expanding gross margins. We look forward in 2022 to further expanding our RISE capabilities and our customer base. In 2021, these businesses made up 6% of our total revenue, and we believe we can continue to generate meaningful growth in this segment. Please recognize that a reported RISE revenue only reflects sales to non-Nu Skin entities. Therefore, we anticipate revenue fluctuations in this segment, depending on the percentage of capacity that we use to support our core Nu Skin business.
Let me also provide a quick comment regarding our Grow Tech business that we exited during the fourth quarter with a financial impact reflected in our Q4 and 2021 GAAP results. We came to this difficult decision as we considered the investment requirements of our core Nu Skin business, as well as our evaluation of the prospects for value creation for the Grow Tech segment. We recognized the resources being invested in Grow Tech were better served supporting the core. We took a one-time pre-tax charge of $58.5 million and anticipate that substantially all of the non-cash charges were incurred in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our 2022 outlook indicates that we plan to reinvest the bulk of the savings into technology that will further support our affiliates and drive long-term growth. I will now move on to the highlights of our fourth quarter and full year 2021.
For additional detail and support materials, I refer you to our earnings release and the supplemental information found on our investor relations website. In order to provide a better comparison, I will be providing adjusted Q4 and 2021 numbers, which exclude restructuring and impairment charges associated with the exit of Grow Tech. Fourth quarter revenue was $673.4 million at the high end of our guidance range and included a -2% foreign currency impact. Fourth quarter adjusted gross margin was 75.2%, compared to 74% in the prior year. The 120 basis point gross margin improvement was driven by our strategic investments in inventory, product mix, and supply chain efficiencies. Our adjusted operating margin was 11.7%, compared with 11.9% in the prior year quarter, while adjusted earnings per share were $1.11 compared to $1.40 in Q4 2020. As a reminder, our fourth quarter 2020 results were benefited by a 19.6% tax rate.
Shifting now to the full year, revenue increased 4% to $2.7 billion, or 11% growth when compared to 2019. 2021 full year revenue benefited 2% from foreign currency fluctuations. Our 2021 adjusted gross margin was 75.2%, compared to 74.5% in the prior year. The annual adjusted operating margin was 10.9%, compared to 10% in the prior year. I'm very pleased with this 90 basis point improvement on our way to our midterm goal of a 13% operating margin. Adjusted earnings per share were $4.14, compared to $3.63 in 2020, and $3.10 in 2019. Our balance sheet remains strong. During the year, we repurchased $80.4 million of our stock, or 3% of our outstanding shares, strategically invested in inventory, and generated $142 million of cash from operations.
Let me now provide Q1 and 2022 annual guidance ranges for revenue and EPS and give some more detail regarding our P&L and balance sheet. As Ryan mentioned, we are on a multi-year path to transform our business with our Nu Vision 2025, and we continue to operate in a very uncertain world due to the impact of the global pandemic. For 2022, we are projecting revenue of $2.66-$2.77 billion, which is a -1% to +3% for the year, and includes a 1%-2% unfavorable foreign currency impact. Our new product introductions, which you heard about earlier today, will largely begin in late Q2 and throughout the second half of the year. We are expecting earnings per share to be between $4.05-$4.45, with operating margin improvement of 10 to 50 basis points and a tax rate estimate of 25%-30%.
For Q1 2022, our seasonally softest quarter, our revenue guidance is $560 million-$590 million, including a negative 2%-3% FX impact. Our projection reflects continued COVID impact in the East, as Connie mentioned, while lapping a very strong Q1 from last year. Our Q1 EPS guidance is $0.65-$0.75, with a projected Q1 tax rate of 21%-25%. While we face a challenging first quarter for the aforementioned reasons, I believe we will be able to demonstrate, throughout 2022, progress toward our Nu Vision 2025. I will now walk you through several of our projected 2022 P&L and balance sheet line items, beginning with gross margin. We project 2022 gross margin to be in the range of 75%-76%.
We will face inflationary pressures like most other companies globally, but we believe with our strategic investments in manufacturing, continued focus on cost and supply chain efficiencies, that we can maintain and potentially expand our gross margin. We anticipate that selling expense will remain in the 39%-40% range. We expect general and administrative expenses to be in the 24%-25% range for the year, as we will continue to invest in technology, emerging markets, and new product innovations to drive our transformation. This leads us to operating margin, where we are projecting our 2022 operating margin to be in the 11%-11.5% range, another step closer to our midterm goal of 13%. Other income expense, which includes interest expense, foreign currency gains and losses, and gains and losses on investments, can fluctuate significantly.
We are modeling $2 million-$6 million of expense in this line item for the year. We are projecting our 2022 tax rate to be in the 25%-30% range. Our tax rate will fluctuate depending on where profit is earned geographically. Our EPS guidance for 2022 is $4.05-$4.45. As Ryan highlighted, we remain focused on our commitment to increasing shareholder value through EPS growth. From a use of cash perspective, our number one priority remains investing to grow our business. We will continue to invest in our digital initiatives, emerging growth markets, and our manufacturing capacity. We plan to continue to pay a dividend, and we announced today an increase of our dividend for the 21st consecutive year. We evaluate the balance of our excess cash between repurchasing our stock and paying down our debt.
We project cash from operations of $250-$300 million. Depreciation and amortization will be approximately $80 million. Capital expense will be between $70-$90 million. We also expect to incur an additional $15 million spend for the final phase of construction on our new factory in China. As Ryan discussed earlier, Nu Vision 2025 is all about how we will transform our business from a traditional direct selling business into an integrated beauty and wellness opportunity platform. While our near-term targets are modest, we believe that the future opportunities to accelerate our business will expand as we invest in our key strategic imperatives of EmpowerMe, affiliate-powered social commerce, and our enterprise services platform. We are committed to continuing our operational improvements along the way to our stated 13% operating income target. Our strong balance sheet gives me further confidence in our ability to navigate this journey effectively.
With that, we will move on to the Q&A portion. I'm going to join the rest of the team gathered to answer your questions. You can submit your questions online and we'll take as many as possible.
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. We are all together. Mark, you're really fast. Glad to have this is the good part of our executive team here at Nu Skin, and we're so glad that you joined the call today. Hope you've gotten a good overview of our vision going forward. Okay, we're ready to take your questions now. We're going to start with an online question, and it is right here. This is the first time we have heard the company talk about a longer term plan. The question is, why do you think this is an important time and message to share with the Street, Ryan?
Yeah, Ruth. This is something that we've been talking about internally now for the past year, as we've prepared for, as a new leadership team, to take this vision forward and move this company forward. We've talked a lot over the past little while about the power of Nu Skin's traditional business, but we are in a transformation state. We see the tea leaves shifting around the globe. We're seeing this inclination to move towards personalization in beauty and wellness. We're seeing beauty device category grow significantly. We're seeing the model of social commerce emerge at a macro level, and the power of influencer and affiliate marketing happening. These are all capabilities we've had internally for quite some time. It is our responsibility to transform and take advantage of digital scale and reach of social to now transform the business.
What we're trying to do here with Nu Vision 2025 is to bring our analysts and our investors along this journey, because it is transformational. It will take time. There are puts and takes along the way, but we see this as a very significant evolution of our business and something that will propel us moving forward at an accelerated rate as we transform the business.
All right. We have Mark Astrachan from Stifel on the line. Mark, go ahead with your question.
Can you guys hear me?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we can hear you.
Yeah, we can hear you.
Great. Hey, everyone. I guess maybe just to start, can you talk a bit about your retention of the sales leaders and customers as you head through 2022, and what you think your expectations are there, especially in markets like the Americas and EMEA, where growth was really strong in 2021? How do you think about progression of those two metrics in some of the other geographies as we head through the year as well, those that have been a bit more challenging for going on?
Yeah, great question, Mark. Maybe I'll high level hit it and maybe have Connie comment as well, as she's working directly with the markets. There's no question, the last two years has been a very interesting time for us as we've seen our business accelerate, in the West, particularly the Americas and North America and EMEA. We've also seen the challenges in Asia of ongoing COVID, Delta variants and the like. What we are seeing with our retention, specifically around customers and sales leaders, is that as they engage with us, as they take advantage of our subscription and loyalty programs, we see significant improvements in their retention. The surges that we've seen in our business in the West, throughout COVID, we've been happy that we've been able to sustain those levels, especially off of the 2019 and 2020 levels.
We expect to continue to see those gains progress along the way. Connie, anything you would add around that?
I would say we're completely confident in those metrics continuing to grow because we are purposefully targeting programs as well as incentives and products that all come together to help continue to not only attract new, but keep more of those that we have, retain them, and also incentivize the, I would say, the loyalty through content, through engagement, through all the interactions that they will be able to experience as part of a customer journey. We do see that as a continuing metric that will be important going forward globally, and we're very pleased with the progress that's already made in the EMEA markets as well as the Americas.
I think, Mark, just to finally capstone that point, around EmpowerMe, and you heard Steve and Yoko talking about that, in 2022 and beyond, we see the capability of the company to really engage at a deeper level with our customers, to significantly improve our ability to retain them and drive lifetime value as well. We think the strategy plays really well into the retention of our customers.
All right. Thanks, Mark. Our next question is from Doug Lane of Lane Research. Hi, Doug.
Not hearing from Doug.
All right.
Oh, we have it typed in.
This is a different one. We're going to go to an online question while we get established with Doug. We have another online question that came in, and that question is: How do you see personalization and connection of products and devices evolving? And have you considered other product categories that may fit in this space?
Yeah. Maybe I'll comment, and Steve, then you can dive deep into this as you're leading EmpowerMe. Again, this is a very significant pivot for us. We have always been, or at least for the last four years, according to Euromonitor, we've-
Devices evolving.
Oh, we're having some feedback problems here. For the last four years, we've been identified by Euromonitor as being the world's leading beauty device systems brand, and we've built a fairly significant business with that. Utilizing IoT connectivity and connecting these devices now beginning in 2022, we see this as a big game changer for our product strategy moving forward and our customer engagement. I think I mentioned earlier that I see this as being as significant as Netflix switching from DVD via mail to content curation through persona-driven mapping digitally, and I think that will be the same in our business as we engage deeper with the customers. Steve, can you add to that?
Well, I agree, Ryan. The customer and the affiliate is the direct center for our product portfolio and how we're going to evolve our products. Personalization has resoundingly been the key attribute that we hear time and time again, we want a more personalized approach. We feel EmpowerMe really provides that type of what we call a more smarter approach, and we like the approach because it really resonates with the distributors, the consumers, and everyone who's connected with beauty and wellness in a more integrated way. We're really excited about that and the opportunities that are therein.
Yeah, I think the one other thing to add to this is that this product curation process is enabled through the vast portfolio of both beauty and wellness products that we have. We have a vast portfolio, and there are very few companies in the beauty or wellness space that have both sides of the equation. We see this holistic or integrated approach as being critical because we see that millennials and Gen Zs are really looking for those holistic solutions. In any case, let's go to the next question.
Okay. I think we're going to go back and see if we can get established with Doug Lane of Lane Research. Doug, can you hear us?
Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me okay?
We can. Go ahead with your questions.
Okay, great. This is a multi-year transition transformation you're talking about. It's all very exciting, but can you go over what are the transitory issues, if you will? Why do you think growth will be a little bit slower in the near term, and what is actually transitioning that you think? Is it just a question of a gradual phase-in of the new tools, or is there actually a transition going on here that's going to be some sort of execution risk here?
Yeah, great question, Doug. So I think, when we talk about the puts and the takes on the transformation itself, we are really evolving all three core value drivers of our business from the product strategy that we just talked about with EmpowerMe, connecting through these devices and really building our portfolio differently that way. The transformation of our business model itself from all of these good elements of a traditional direct selling model that leverages word of mouth, and then building that social commerce capability or the scale and reach of social media, and the adoption of that model, being critical. That third element of building out our digital ecosystem and shifting from a traditional distributor model, where products are bought at wholesale and resold. This model now works more effectively through a digital first where over 90% of our revenue flows that way.
All three elements of our business are in a transitory state, and it's all about how do we gauge each market by market, the adoption of those elements. I think one of the key components of the adoption, maybe Connie, you can speak to this a little bit better, is the business model itself. Shifting to social commerce from traditional direct selling, leveraging the capabilities of the direct selling model that we have, but then turbocharging members with this social commerce model does have a disruptive component to it in the business. Maybe you can speak about kind of the West versus what we're seeing in the East.
Absolutely. It is a shift. The transition, in fact, is the time for us to incorporate operationally all the programs, all the products, all the services into the model and then execute on it. What we're seeing is there are different, I would say, cadences of adoption rate as we can see in the results between the West markets and the East markets. Primarily it is also upskilling and changing the manner in which we attract consumers as well as retain them. What happens in this transition is we intensify and accelerate not only our capabilities, but also the learnings from which we're gathering the data that now we have access to in terms of learning so much more about meeting consumers where they are, that helps us make faster decisions, more agile developments to maintain those connections and continue to nurture those relationships for increased lifetime value.
Which for an affiliate and an affiliate business opportunity becomes critically important for foundational, sustainable, opportunity where they can actually build a business that comes through true, engaged consumer interactions and transactions.
I think, Doug, you had asked about the executional risk. I think this is why we are so careful in how we transition the business. As we've seen, and Justin spoke about it earlier, and is here as well, the West, our oldest market, the U.S., which has been in business almost 38 years now, was one of the first markets to adopt this new model because in part, the sales force was really eager to find it and to build that. In Asia, where our business has traditionally been dominant, those leaders were very successful in a traditional model and are now having to learn a new way. It's what's taking a little bit longer in Asia than it has in some of our Western markets, EMEA being a newer surge as well.
The reason that we're optimistic about this model though for Asia is that Asia, as we all know, from a digital-first perspective, society is very digitally inclined. It has some of the highest digital adoption rates anywhere in the world. As our sales force understands and adopts the model, we see much greater upside in those markets as well. We just have to be very careful to what we always say.
Mm-hmm.
To keep the plane flying while we're changing out the prop engines to jet engines, and eventually to put the boosters to go to space, we've got to do that right. We're very careful in how we transition that.
Okay.
Okay, that's helpful. Now, it sounds like your target is to really go to almost 100% direct ship to your end consumer. Is that right? And where are you with that now? What percent of your products now get shipped directly to the end user? And is the goal to get that to 100%?
Yeah, some of the data we've talked about in the past is over 90% of all of our transactions happen digital first. We still have a good portion of our business that runs through a more traditional model. This one we talked about, the traditional versus the social commerce. We still see that there is a role and a place for that that ability to build. We increasingly, however, see and are looking to enable, per Connie's point, to enable greater interactions directly with customers. We're not trying to overtly shift it. What I will also say is that the reason we call this affiliate-powered social commerce is our affiliates play a central role in connecting the customer and in interacting with that customer along the way, so that this is a bi-directional supported model between the affiliate-powered and then the company-supported or enabled model.
I think, in our view, it works much better bidirectionally, where most beauty brands today will have to solely rely upon the company engaging directly with the customer. That is not as powerful from a longer-term lifetime value creation equation. We're going to enable both models into the foreseeable future.
May I add?
Yeah.
Doug, I just wanted to add, direct shipping for us is a logistical question in terms of efficiencies and also creating great customer experiences, right? The delivery and the service that can come from direct shipping certainly is one method that we think is really important for delivering delightful customer experiences. In no way does that change the fact that we understand and certainly rely and believe. We have. Ryan calls it the superpower of having an engaged, loyal base of affiliates who are not only ambassadors and users of product, but advocates to provide that high touch experience, coupled with now what we can provide from the backside and the back end is a digital experience. You kind of marry the best of self-service and self-discovery with personalized interactions and relationships that still come through our affiliates.
Okay, that makes sense. Just one last one from me on the markets where you're more advanced in the social commerce, the U.S. and EMEA, have you seen a change in your selling expense ratio in those markets? Or do you expect it to remain in this 39%-40%, even as you undergo this transition?
Yeah, maybe I'll comment, and Mark can substantiate it. I'm the sales guy. Mark's the finance guy. We're a good team. Yeah. Generally speaking, Doug, whenever a market is in a higher growth state, we do see moderate increases in selling expenses. It's not really model-driven so much as it's the state of the business and the growth there. Maybe in terms of what we're expecting, Mark.
Yeah. Thanks, Ryan, and Doug, I think you can look at the charts that we provided, and it'll show that our selling expenses maintained itself relatively stable, and we anticipate that going forward. It'll move maybe a point up or down, depending on if a market is in rapid growth or not. Otherwise, it should stay in that 39%-40% range.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Doug.
Thank you, Doug. All right. We've got Stephanie Wissink from Jefferies online. Hi, Steph. Thanks for joining us today.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking our questions. I think this first one might be best for Ryan or Connie, but I'm hoping you can help bridge, Ryan, your comments on low single-digit growth in the near term. I think what I heard you say was high single to low double-digit potential growth in some of the out years. I'm just wondering how much of that growth acceleration do you think is realized from the existing tools and products you have in place today versus what is still to come, backed by some of the investment spend that you laid out?
Yeah. Absolutely, Steph. Thanks for the question. This is probably one of the most important questions, I think, from this Investor Day. As we talk about this transformation, we have that traditional business that we continue to invest but at a moderated level, where the majority of our new investment is going into this affiliate-powered social commerce model. Those investments will take time to play through. Where we look at the low single-digit growth, it's really based upon the adoption of social commerce and what we see happening around the globe, coupled with EmpowerMe really getting out and rolling forward towards the second half of this year. To your question of how much is new versus how much is existing, I'd say they're complementary components.
The way we look at it is what portion of our business is a traditionally driven model versus social commerce, and what portion is traditional portfolio growth versus EmpowerMe growth, and that's how we're kind of gauging it. This EmpowerMe push is going to be really critical. Those are kind of the puts and takes along the path. I will say, in the next couple of years, those trade-offs are greater. As the adoption of both EmpowerMe and of social commerce occur and a greater portion of our businesses around the globe adopt those models, we see accelerated growth potential there. Mark, maybe, was there anything you would add to that?
Nope, I think you covered it all.
Yeah.
If I could, Ryan, just as a follow-up. One of the things that surprised us today, just in your prepared remarks, was the degree of subscription attach rate that you saw, I think it was in the U.S. market that you mentioned it, between the Collagen Plus, and I think you also cited some efficacy superiority when you're combining with LumiSpa. I'm hoping you can help us think about the benefits of that combination effect. If we're thinking about the new state model, which is average order size, LTV driven, is it a strategy that you think can work around the world? The U.S. is just a proxy case for what is to unfold in this kind of combination osmosis power effect of your two business models using Collagen Plus as a proxy.
Yeah. I think although Collagen Plus was launched before EmpowerMe really hit the stage, I think what we really like about EmpowerMe is precisely what you're describing, Steph, that a customer will come in through a single product experience, and then she will be nurtured through her engagement across the portfolio with the devices, and we'll be able to leverage the data to further enhance the opportunities and the synergies across our portfolio. When you think about, for example, the Collagen and the LumiSpa together that you're asking about. You're going to see a lot more complementary benefits across the portfolio of our products because of our integrated R&D approach to that. I would say, yeah, Collagen Plus and the subscription model is kind of a foray into learning that approach. We're going to see more and more of this as EmpowerMe unfolds.
You're going to see more synergies across both beauty and wellness moving forward. Maybe something Steve or Yoko or Justin, that you may all be able to comment on.
Yeah
... is the success of Collagen+ and why you felt that went so well, and what is important to LumiSpa. Justin, maybe you can comment on that.
Yeah, happy to, and thank you for the question. We're excited about what we're seeing with this because we have gone with a very deliberate focus on subscription with respect to this product, and you saw the results in the chart. To answer your question, does this model transfer outside the United States? I'm really excited to see what we're already seeing in Latin America with the collagen. Historically, it's not been a strong subscription market for us as credit cards aren't widely accepted and it's more cash-based. We saw a significant increase in subscription through this collagen, the same collagen focus, as we rolled that product out. We are seeing it transfer into other markets, and the stickiness is the thing that gets us the most excited. We touched on the 15 times more lifetime value that comes from a subscription.
We're really excited to see this going from the United States into other markets and seeing similar results.
We will, Connie, this is really Connie's role as global growth officer. She has our region president team that is really building on and sharing success practices. Maybe you can describe that.
Absolutely
how we take something out of one market and take it around the globe.
For sure. Stephanie, when you asked that question, I was jumping out of my seat wanting to answer.
She cut me off.
It's okay. I'm so excited because I have to tell you that this focus on customer attraction, nurturing, and retention is critical and foundational to how we are operationalizing and enabling social commerce adoption. With the data that we have today and more to come, we understand our customers' behaviors, buying tendencies, the frequencies, and average cart size better than we ever have before. That gives us information from which we can develop very exciting merchandising, marketing in a way that we haven't done before directly to our consumers that allows for that continued build and, I would say, productivity growth in the cart frequency as well as loyalty.
The focus that we had and the early success, and I would say it's early success in the West because it hasn't been something that we, let's call it, operationally worked on building, which is tactics and programs to bring value to a customer, and also for us to realize long-term value. The programs that we're doing are actually global. You heard me earlier talking about a Fusion Calendar. That is the first time that we are all globally aligned to execute on programs with intentional purpose to drive attraction, nurturing, and retention, and to improve, in each market's position, their conversion rates. More frequent orders, larger basket sizes, and also higher levels of conversion and staying power and retention of those who are subscribing.
Very helpful. Mark, if I could just throw one quick question out. It's a question we're getting inbound from investors. Just to unpack the $500 million of investment over the next 4 years, how much is in the P&L versus CapEx? Any large buckets that are worth calling out? I think folks are just trying to connect that investment in potentially a near-term burden on your operating margins in the P&L. It may help us think about that 13% midterm goal, is some of that the realization of near-term investments as you apply revenue against those investments in the out years? Thank you.
Sure. Thank you, Steph. I'll touch on this briefly. We plan our capital spend to be slightly above where we have been over the last couple of years as we continue to invest significantly into technology to deliver all of the great things which you heard about today. We believe that's the right thing to do. Ryan and I debated a lot about the $500 million number, but I came to that comfort level very quickly because this is our future. If we're going to transition our company from where we have been to where we need to be, it's going to require a significant amount of investment. It will be balanced between capital and expense, but we remain committed to two things. One, we're going to get to 13% operating margin near-term.
You saw us expand our operating margin 90 basis points this year, and our forecast next year calls for roughly an additional 50 basis points improvement in operating margin. Then we're going to continue to be careful with our cash. We tend to be a relative cash to debt neutral company, and we don't have many plans to change that. It'll ebb and flow quarter to quarter, but in general, we're going to be careful with the cash, and we're going to focus our investments where they need to be.
Steph, I'd just add to what Mark said. Mark talked about this in the prepared remarks, that we are making trade-off decisions, and we are making strategic investments to support the core and how to accelerate that core. A lot of the trade-offs we're talking about, to Mark's point, we'll be able to do within our financial framework because of those trade-off decisions.
Very helpful. Thank you, entire panel.
Thanks, Steph.
Thank you.
Thanks, Steph.
Okay, we have Jason Bednar on the phone from Citi. Jason, go ahead.
Jason may be on mute. I don't know. If not.
Okay, we're going to try to establish contact with Jason. In the meantime, let's take a question that came in online. Oh, is he there? Oh, all right. We're going to go back to Jason. Jason, can you hear us now?
Yep.
Okay.
I can hear you.
Jason, go ahead with your questions.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys, and for the presentation today. We heard a lot about some of the big innovation that you had between Meta and Collagen, and I think in the past, you've talked about moving through more regular innovation cadence. I guess I was just hoping to hear a little bit more about what you have planned for 2022, especially in context of moving more to this personalized model with the Nu Vision 2025 plan. Thanks.
Yes. I think, Jason, on the product side of things, we'll continue to focus on Beauty Focus Collagen+, Meta roll-outs. As Steve mentioned, we'll be introducing 2 new connected device systems later in the year, second half. That's really the major innovations. Steve mentioned as well earlier, local product initiatives and other product activities along the way. You're going to be seeing a myriad of product innovations hitting the market beyond just those 4 critical products. It will support what Connie described more around the annual, quarterly, and monthly product cadences. There's going to be a pretty significant increase in product innovations hitting the market around the globe.
Good. Thanks.
Thanks, Jason.
Okay. All right. Before we end the question and answer, we did want to take that one question that is online, and that is talking about the apps that were demonstrated today. Any anecdotal feedback from your customers and leaders about how you're thinking about additional apps moving forward?
Well, I'll comment, and then I'm going to turn to Emily and Joe because they're really driving the effort here and doing an exceptional job. By the way, Emily is very young-looking. I will.
I mean, she is young.
She is.
She is young and brilliant, and I want you to know she's as smart as well, and she's doing an amazing job. Emily, please prepare to comment here.
Sure
on this. We have, when I say we, I mean our technology team has worked vigilantly over the past few years to actually simplify and streamline our digital footprint around the globe. Having too many digital products or digital properties around the globe proves very difficult to manage. This team has cut from over 300 disparate digital experiences down now to a focus of really three core experiences in our dot-com and then these two apps, Stela, our consumer app, and Vera, our affiliate app. That amount of compressed focus is going to enable us to invest more smartly, more smarter and better.
More smartly.
... in our digital spend there to enable those experiences. Emily, Joe, why don't you guys talk about the feedback and what we're seeing as we're in beta still?
Yeah. I want to go back to actually one of the questions that was asked earlier about the transformation. Every single feature that you're going to start seeing come into the apps and the dot-com is directly informed from listening exercises that we did with affiliates, as well as customer interviews. There's literally been thousands of testers in these experiences telling us what's working and what's not. The number one thing we heard from customers is they want to understand what products to use for their unique situation. They might see an influencer on Instagram using something, but quickly recognize she's half my age, she doesn't have my skin concerns. How do I know the product's going to work for me? That was the first point of feedback from customers.
From affiliates, they have been very vocal about the need to do things on the go from their phone. They'll tell us consistently, we want one app to do everything. Having something like the CRM, where they can track all these customers that they're connecting with on social, and then be prompted on what's the next thing I should do with that person, and most importantly, that the affiliate can meet the customer where they are. You'll see a lot of apps out there where you have to go download the app to communicate. What I love about our CRM is they can send that message to Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat. Wherever they need to send it to meet the customer, then they're doing that.
Yeah.
Lastly, in terms of roadmap, we have lots of ideas, but all of them are informed by our beta testers telling us, "Hey, this is great, but I'd love to see this next." We've been working really closely with Yoko and Steve and their groups, and you'll start to see more features coming in around wellness, around integrated across the portfolio. How do our products play together? Stay tuned because the roadmap is vibrant. Joe, what else would you add?
No, I think just to touch on what you said, Ryan, is that we rationalized our application portfolio from going from more than 300 down to the 3 and the fourth experience that we look to unveil this year. There's a lot of anticipated energy around these apps and what we're doing to energize our affiliates and our consumers. We really look forward to focusing our investments and with the $500 million that we've been talking about here and really supercharging what we can do for our affiliates and our customers.
Great.
Okay, and I think that wraps up our Q&A portion. Ryan, send us home. Oh, wait, we're home.
We are home.
We want you to come to our home next, but.
We would. We'd love to invite you all here. Our campus is up and running. We're very socially distanced and friendly, despite the proximity of how we're sitting today, but please come out and visit us. I want to tell you how proud I am of this leadership team. This is what I call an aspiring A team. We have pulled talent from around the globe from multiple industries to assemble a team that can take us into Nu Vision 2025, and they are all as committed as I am to make this change. It's hard to believe that for more than half of my life, I've been engaged in this mission of empowering people to improve lives through the products that we sell, the empowerment opportunities that we have, and that unique culture of community that connects us all and binds us together.
Today feels like a new day here at Nu Skin. Today is all about bringing forward our Nu Vision 2025. The landscape is evolving. It's changing. We're seeing people connecting in different ways. They're shopping socially. They're looking for products that have real proven results, and all of this is now setting us up to really succeed moving forward. Nu Vision 2025 is all about how we take the capabilities and the assets of this amazing heritage of over 38 years of Nu Skin Enterprises and leverage those assets and the strength of the balance sheet that Mark talked about to then transform this business into something that is even more vibrant, more relevant for the decades to come. I can't think of a more exciting work to be involved in.
We're truly passionate, and I hope that you, as our analysts and our investors, will come along this Nu Vision 2025 journey. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to always be great quarter by quarter, but I hope you can see that we have a roadmap with very clear milestones and deliverables along the way to help bring you along in that journey. If you have questions, please reach out to Scott Pond and our investor relations team. Reach out to Mark, myself. We are here to talk at any point in time. We want to make sure that you are with us on this journey, that your questions are answered along the way, and that together, we really truly go out to empower people to improve lives. Being a force for good, as our mission states.
With that, I want to thank you for being here. Please come on out and see us here in Utah. Take care.