Thank you very much for joining us. I'm Phillip Blee. I'm the consumer analyst here at William Blair, covering SharkNinja. As a reminder, for full disclosures, please visit our website. I'm, you know, thrilled to have the SharkNinja team here with me today. They've been one of my favorite companies to follow since they went, entered the public markets last summer, and unsurprisingly, they've become, a lot of my favorite products back at home. So, I'm very excited to have the team here. I'm going to introduce Arvind Bhatia. He's going to kick us off. But please, Arvind, go ahead.
Thanks, Phillip. All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are really excited to be here. My name is Arvind Bhatia. I'm the company's Head of Investor Relations. Before we kick it off, let me draw your attention to the most exciting page in that, this later page. So our presenters today, Mark Barrocas, CEO and a member of our board of directors. Mark has been with SharkNinja for the past 16 years, during which time, the company has grown at a CAGR of 20%. Our second presenter is Patrick Regan. He's our CFO. Patrick joined us recently from Nike, where he was the CFO of the company's Asia- Pac and Latin America segments. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mark.
Great. Okay, thanks, Arvind, and good morning. Thanks for joining us. So as Arvind said, I, I've been leading the company for the last 16 years, and, you know, if I take you back, you know, to 2008, you know, we were a small company just outside of Boston. You know, we had one brand called the Shark brand. Our business at the time was called Euro-Pro.
You know, over the course of the last 16 years, I think we've really carved out a business that is highly unique, highly innovative, and I think at first blush, you could say, "Well, hey, we're in the small household appliance industry." But I think as you get to know us more and more, what you'll realize is we've really built a consumer problem-solving engine, a company that's able to identify known or unknown consumer problems, and an incredible global innovation team that's able to solve those problems for consumers around the world. You know, we decided to come to the U.S. public markets last July because we thought we had an incredible story to tell. It's a story of scale. We finished last year with revenue over $4.3 billion.
We are incredibly profitable business, you know, both, you know, in our gross margin side, you know, as well as our net income line. We've got an amazing track record of organic growth. As I said, back in 2008, you know, our business did about $150 million. Last year, we did $4.3 billion, and we've never acquired a dollar of revenue in the company's history, okay? Every dollar has been created organically, and we've done that really through our three-pillar growth strategy, which is gaining share in the existing categories that we're in. We've expanded into new categories. Today, we're in 33 different product categories, and we'll talk about why diversification is so important to us as a business. We're in 26 countries around the world, and our business is becoming increasingly more and more global.
This was a business that, for the first time, sold outside of North America in 2015. Last year, we finished with revenue over $1 billion, and we're growing it at a very, very double-digit, significant pace beyond that. The company has a tremendous IP portfolio of over 4,500 patents, and that really gets generated from over 900 engineers that the business has around the world, based in Boston, London, and China, and we can go into that in more detail. We also have, I think, a very unique way of approaching the consumer, where in every market that we're in, we take this omni-channel approach, and the view and the lens that we take is that we want to be relevant wherever the consumer chooses to shop for our products. We offer no exclusivities.
In the United States, we sell everyone from Walmart all the way up to Sephora and everyone in between. The model is really about, you know, we want to be relevant for the consumer, and we want to work with partners that, you know, the consumer wants to shop with. So again, you know, we go to market under two multi-billion dollar brands that we've created from scratch, the Shark brand and the Ninja brand. Shark is a market leader in cleaning, home environment. It's also the fastest beauty brand, hair tools brand in the world right now. Under the Shark brand, we have 13 different subcategories, everything ranging from cordless vacuums to robots, to corded vacuums, to hand vacs, to hair stylers, to air purifiers. There are lots and lots of things within the Shark business.
We ended last year at a little bit over $2.2 billion. The Ninja brand is in 18 different subcategories, everything from motorized kitchen appliances to coffee, to beverage, to heated cooking appliances. We went outdoors with our Ninja brand, and we're the fastest-growing outdoor cooking company. We just launched into the cooler space. We've got a large cookware business, cutlery business, so we're in lots and lots of different categories, and that's, you know, just over a $2 billion business for us. SharkNinja, over the last 16 years, has grown 15 out of the last 16 years, and we've grown at a CAGR of 20% a year during that period of time. I think investors kind of hear about consumer companies, and they want to understand, you know, well, what's the impact from COVID?
I think as you think about our business and you look at 2008 to 2020, our business grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 19% during that period of time. And if you look at the period of time from 2020 until today, the business has grown at 20% during that period of time. So, you know, we've had, you know, growth significantly before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID. So from a diversification standpoint, we break our business down into four major subcategories: cleaning, motor, food prep, heated cooking, and a category that we call other.
We got to come up with a better name for it, but when we created it, it was very small, and now it's become a very sizable part of our business with things like home environment and beauty. In fact, if you go into the market right now, and you look at a product called the Shark FlexBreeze, it's an indoor-outdoor cooling system. It's a product that is really scaled tremendously on social media, and it's doing fantastic. Diversification is something that we feel is the most compelling part of the business over the last 16 years and something that we've driven as a leadership team. We don't think that you could be a successful consumer products company in one category. We think it's just too challenging. We think there's too much opportunity for disruption.
When you think about our business, 2 multi-billion dollar brands, 26 countries, 33 different product categories, 150 different retail partners that we work with, there's lots and lots of diversification that has been built into the business. Again, you know, we've talked about kind of the scale of diversification, you know, the geography piece. You know, our international business, as I said, last year, it grew 60%. We finished just over $1 billion. You know, we grew the business, you know, in excess of 40% in our first quarter of this year. We think there's tremendous white space within the international markets. Europe, Latin America, Middle East are the main focused areas. So who do we serve?
In 2009, I wrote a mission statement about the company, which was positively impacting people's lives every day in every home around the world. I think in a lot of companies, that kind of goes on a wall, and it never gets touched or addressed. I think everything we do within SharkNinja is maniacally focused on the consumer, and it starts with this discerning and educated consumer. You know, the consumer today has so much power. I mean, if you think about back to 2008, you know, we were a company, and everyone looked at us and said, "Well, how are you going to compete with all these companies that have been around for, you know, 50, 60, 70 years?" And we felt like the great equalizer at the time was the five-star review.
Okay, it sounds trivial today, but I remember sitting in front of a large U.S. retailer in 2009, and they said, "Mark, no one's going to write five-star reviews about your products. You're in a low engagement industry, a low engagement category. Who's going to write a five-star review about a vacuum or a blender?" Well, you go online, and truly, SharkNinja has built its business one five-star review at a time by delivering for the consumer incredible performance, but also being able to do it with high quality, reliably, and at extraordinary value, and we'll talk more about that. And our consumers really have become our ambassadors. You know, from 2008 to 2014, that was on online reviews. In 2014, you know, to 2018, that was on Facebook posts and, you know, group chats and things like that.
Today, you know, we are the most watched brands on social media by a factor of five in our space. That's TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, all of those places, and a majority of that content is organic, user-generated content. It's not content that we're developing, it's content that our consumers are generating and putting online. So what do I think we do better than everyone else, particularly from a product standpoint that makes us stand out? The first is speed to market. You know, we operate on a 24/7 product development cycle. We have engineers in Boston, London, and China. When Boston engineers go to sleep, the CAD gets passed to China. It gets worked in China.
When they go to sleep, the CAD gets passed to London, they work on it, and that cycle happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It allows us to get products to market in as quickly as 9-12 months, and we think we do that, you know, faster and better than anyone else in the industry. The second is kind of market-leading performance. I mean, our, our products deliver extraordinary performance, whether that is, you know, the ability to be able to make frozen drinks at home or the ability to have pans that are non-stick, you know, or the ability to have robots in the way that we develop them or hair care products. We do that across all the 33 categories that we're in. High quality, reliable products. Really making sure that our products are not designed for a lab.
But, you know, if you come into our test facilities, we have 6 test facilities around the world, you know, you'll find people dropping spoons into blenders. You know, you'll find people throwing vacuum cleaners downstairs. I mean, doing things that the normal average consumer is gonna do with our products and how they're built to stand up to that. And then lastly, you know, is this sense of we want to deliver extraordinary value. We're not the highest priced products in the market. We're not the lowest priced products, but we think that SharkNinja is able to attract the largest socioeconomic group and the largest demographic group of any company in our industry. We move the opening price consumer up into our price point bands, but we're also the brand of choice for premium consumers.
I think if you look at online reviews, what you'll hear from consumers is, is that they made the right buying decision by buying a Shark or Ninja product. You know, the delighting of consumers, you know, comes in all these different ways, and, you know, I won't go through them individually, but in the end, you know, it's all focused on being able to identify known or unknown consumer problems that drive our, you know, product development and innovation pipeline. I mean, people said to me, "We just launched a product in the outdoor cooler space." They said, "You know, well, before we came out with coolers," they said, "Well, what's going to be new in coolers?
I mean, coolers have been around for 100 years." I mean, all that's happened to them is that, you know, the ice retention goes from six days to seven days to eight days. And we found a real nugget of an opportunity, and that nugget of an opportunity is that, you know, coolers are nothing more than ice baths. And while it's great for beverages, when you put food in them, you know, invariably, your Ziploc bag opens up, your food gets wet and soggy, and you've got to throw it away. And so, you know, with that nugget, you know, we were able to go to our engineers and kind of think about: How do we develop a cooler that has cold, dry storage for days? They looked at things like motors and batteries.
We have cordless technology, we have fan and motor technology, we have coolant technology, but all of that would have cost $700, $800, $900 for a consumer to buy a cooler. Consumer's not gonna pay that. Okay, so we said, "We've got 25 pounds of ice, 30 pounds of ice in the cooler. How do we use that? How do we transfer that cold to an area to make cold, dry storage for the consumer?" And we came out with a product called the Ninja FrostVault, and since we've launched it 90 days ago, you haven't been able to buy it in the marketplace 'cause it's been continued to be sold out.
It's just an example of SharkNinja finding the white space or finding the consumer problem that comes from some insight, and then having the engineering and the innovation wherewithal to be able to turn that into a marketable product for the consumer. What are four things that I think we do better than anyone else, and what's the moat? I mean, it starts with disruptive innovation. It's taking those insights and turning it into highly desired consumer products. The second is we have an incredibly high-quality, fast-turn, low-cost supply chain in Asia. Third is we invest more than any of our competitors in advertising and marketing. We spend about 9.5% of sales on advertising. You know, that compares to competitors that might spend 1% of sales on advertising.
We do that because we have outsized gross margins, and so those gross margins allow us to be able to invest 6% of sales in R&D and 9.5% of sales in marketing. Then fourth is this omni-channel strategy. I mean, we're the most searched brands on Amazon in our space. We're in every major brick-and-mortar retailer in all the markets that we're in, and we've got a robust direct-to-consumer business. I talked about kind of the disruptive innovation, you know, how that comes to life across categories like beauty and blending, and we developed an at-home beverage maker called the Ninja Thirsti. We just entered into the carpet cleaning and carpet extraction, spot cleaning business with a product called the Shark CarpetXpert. Our FrostVault, you know, our Shark FlexBreeze.
We develop 25 ground-up products from scratch that we launch into the market every year. Twenty-five brand-new products. You know, from a supply chain standpoint, I mean, prior to about five, six years ago, all of our product was manufactured in China. You know, today, we have a highly diversified supply chain outside of China and Southeast Asia. You know, if tariffs do go back into effect in June, you know, or whenever they do, the majority of that product is all able to be sourced outside of China and will have a minimal impact on our overall business. By the end of 2025, all of our U.S. product will be able to be sourced outside of China. That's primarily in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia are the key markets. This always-on 360 marketing approach that we take, it's through everything.
If you go back 15 years ago, we were the company that did long-form TV infomercials. You'd sit up at 1:00 A.M., you know, you'd see my partner pick up a bowling ball with our vacuum cleaner. But, you know, every company needs to kind of find its way of being able to connect with the consumer. At the time, we didn't have any money, and so we had to use things like infomercials to be able to sell product through those infomercials, generate gross margin, and be able to pay for the advertising. But over time, our advertising strategy got highly diversified, and like I said, today, you know, it's everything from short-form TV to experiential events, to being by far, you know, the most watched and most engaged brand on social media platforms all across the world.
The omni-channel distribution strategy I talked about, you know, brick-and-mortar, direct-to-consumer. We have a robust direct-to-consumer business globally. You know, and Amazon, we apply that playbook to every market that we're in. That doesn't just apply to the U.S. or Canada. We have that same playbook in the U.K., in Germany, in France, in Spain, in Italy, and Mexico. And that really is a model that we've stayed true to over the years. As certain brands have, you know, ebbed and flowed between all direct-to-consumer, you know, or all brick-and-mortar, you know, we've stayed with this kind of omni-channel strategy, and we think it's the right one for us. We grow our business based on this, what we call our three-pillar growth strategy. We have a demonstrated track record of gaining share in the existing categories that we're in.
As Shark or Ninja matures in any category, we've been able to generate anywhere from 20%-40% market share in the category. We're number one or number two market share in nearly every category that we're in, after having been in that market for anywhere from 3-4 years. So we've got this great track record of being able to gain share in the existing categories. We have an incredible ability to be able to enter white spaces of new and adjacent categories. You know, I think over the years, people have said, "Well, yeah, it's great that you've grown, but, like, what's next?" And what's next is that, you know, brands sometimes have a very hard time moving out of what either the consumer or the retailer thinks they should be in.
Fortunately for us, you know, we've been able to take the Shark brand into lots of different places inside the home and outside the home, but we've been able to do that as well with the Ninja brand, both inside and outside the home, and we believe there's still a tremendous amount more places for our brands to be able to expand into. Third is international expansion. I mean, we tried a lot of things. You know, when we first launched internationally in 2014, we failed at a lot of things, but the company has this tremendous learning culture, and we kind of got it right, and it really started clicking for us in 2018, 2019, 2020. And now, you know, we believe we have the right product for the global consumer. We believe we have the right marketing message for the global consumer.
You know, retailers around the world are really supporting us in a bigger and bigger way to drive that international business. I talked about gaining share. You know, this is just demonstrating between 2020 and 2023, we've gained share in nearly every product category that we're in, both in the United States and in the U.K. Our ability to enter new categories, we entered a category in 2020, the end of 2021. The ice cream category, the market in the U.S. was $50 million. There was a large U.S. retailer that said: Why would you even mess around with this category? Even if you get 50% market share, you'll only have a $25 million business. Today, we'll have over a $200 million business today.
We have 80% market share, and the market's a $230 million business in the U.S. So SharkNinja has this tremendous ability not to be able to just enter a category and take share, but to be able to enter a category and grow the overall size of that category, and we've done that across all these markets. Outdoor cooking is an interesting one. You know, we entered outdoor cooking in 2022, at a time when, you know, everyone was saying, "Why would you enter the outdoor cooking business? You know, the market is terrible. Competitors are all doing terrible." And we felt like we had a really unique white space for us to focus on, which was electric outdoor products that would not only fit on your patio, but also on your terrace and apartments.
They didn't need to use propane or wood chips, you know, but also be able to be portable and used in RVs and campers and tailgates and things like that. You know, lots of other exciting innovation that we've done, you know, in 2023. As I said, carpet extraction, you know, in-home beverage products with our Ninja Thirsti product. You know, we entered into two new categories already this year, and we plan to enter into new categories in the second half of this year. One was coolers, and the other is, you know, indoor-outdoor cooling systems or the Shark FlexBreeze. And then, you know, we look at the consumer...
You know, if you would have talked to SharkNinja four or five years ago, we would say there's lots more places to go in the home, but we believe there's a lot more places for us to also go outside of the home, you know, in the yard, in the patio, away from the home for consumers, and it's only gating or limited by our ability to be able to find the next consumer problem. We think we've got the engineering capability to be able to solve those, and we think the consumer and the retailer has been willing to go on that journey with us, you know, of entering into these new categories and offering consumers something new and exciting. New geographies, again, you know, we talked about high growth in the international markets.
You know, we think there's a huge amount of white space for us in Continental Europe, which is a big focused area for us. Germany and France, you know, we believe are $2 billion markets individually for us. Our UK business is fast approaching $1 billion, but the Middle East and Latin America, you know, also presents great opportunity. And then, you know, from a mindset standpoint, I mean, I think if you, you know, look under the hood at SharkNinja, you know, we're really driven by kind of these five core success driver principles. I mean, rarely satisfied, and that's not meant to say that we wake up every morning and say we're never satisfied.
But when you bring a product to the consumer, you know, the consumer now expectation is set, and the only way you're gonna get the consumer to put that product into retirement before its usable life is to do something extraordinarily better than that. And so there's no resting on our laurels. I mean, if we took our products and we only were able to have a replacement cycle business, consumer would come back and buy from us every three or four years. Consumers buy from us multiple products a year because of the innovation and because of their ability to have a great experience with one SharkNinja product and then be able to buy it, you know, cross-category. And then, you know, look, we think we're just getting started.
You know, we've had this long demonstrated track record of organic growth, and we think that there is a tremendous amount more white space for us to be able to expand the business into. So, Patrick?
... Okay, thanks, Mark. So after being on the road for the last few weeks with Mark, what I've found is that we've got a great story to tell, and so I'm gonna take what he had, and in the next three or four minutes or so, just try to synthesize that. So, you know, we think that we've got a really compelling financial picture, and it all starts at the top of our P&L. But even before that, from a growth standpoint, where it really begins is with our product and our consumer. And so for me, coming in and spending the last few months here at SharkNinja, what I've been particularly impressed by is just how much maniacal focus we as a company give to our consumer and solving consumer problems.
What that does then is that helps us drive our growth engine. And you've heard Mark talk about, in terms of profitability and the deep relationships that we have with our supply chain partners, that allows us to first, price value for our consumer, but then harvest gross margins that then allow us to reinvest back into the business, whether that's continued product development or into the flywheel of robust innovation. So we feel like we've got a really compelling, robust model in this space.
From a driver of strong growth perspective, you heard Mark talk about the three pillars of growth, which underlies all that we do, but a slight variation on this in terms of where our growth comes from is that we really see ourselves as leaders in the ability to rapidly innovate and take share. And you saw that in evidence in the category slide that Mark showed a bit earlier. The other component of this is, and one of my favorite slides that we have in this deck is the picture of the home. And so you also heard Mark talk about how we go into folks' homes, both within home and outside of home. That really drives our product into adjacent categories that allows us to drive our business.
And then, the final component of our growth is, as we continue to put the consumer first in terms of who we are and what we do, we talk all the time about being in the consumer's path, being in the consumer's way. And so we don't see ourselves as a DTC business or a retail business. We are. We see ourselves as a consumer business first in terms of helping to serve our consumers and solve problems. From a gross margin driving standpoint, you heard me talk a little bit earlier about the leverage that we get from our supply chain and our ability to price, for our consumer. And we feel like we've got ongoing advantages and tailwinds in this space as well.
Then the final thing that I would say, coming in, to the organization that has also been particularly impressive is we've got deep, deep relationships with our retail partners, and we have real-time and near real-time data in terms of how our inventory, how our products are performing, within our retail partners, which gives us a competitive advantage in the space that we play. Okay, we hit this a little bit earlier, so I'm just gonna hit really one quick highlight, and that's on the net sales page. So you heard Mark talk about our 20% CAGR over the last 15, 16 years or so.
Over the last three years coming out of COVID, that was closer to about 7%, but we saw re-acceleration in that as we got into our 2023 year, and that continued into the first quarter of 2024. From a gross profit standpoint, really proud in terms of what we've been doing in this space in 2022-2023. You can see we increased gross profit by nearly 700 basis points and EBITDA by roughly 300 basis points. We just announced our Q1 results about 5-6 weeks ago. Super strong quarter to start the year. Sales up 28% in Q1. We had gross profit growth of over 30% and adjusted EBITDA growth of roughly 30% as well.
So we've started off the year in a strong position, and that has really given us the confidence to update our guidance and outlooks for the year. So if you let your eyes wander to the right-hand side of the page, we've taken adjusted net sales up from high single digits to low to mid double digits for the outlook for this year. And corresponding, as you go down the P&L, we've adjusted other measure, measures as well. The one additional that I would highlight on this page is that we've also made a decision to increase our CapEx on a year-over-year basis to $160 million-$180 million.
This gets back to what Mark was talking about earlier, is just continuing to fuel our innovation and our growth, as that primarily goes into product development. Last slide I'll hit on here, and then I'll turn us all loose, but we feel like we're very well-positioned from a balance sheet standpoint as well. We've got good cash position, good strong debt position. So we've had roughly about $800 million of debt on the balance sheet. That's been stable since we've spun out. We can see from some of the ratios that we're, you know, well-capitalized, which gives us significant flexibility from a financial and capital structure standpoint as we continue to invest and run the business.
Hopefully, this was a crash course, power tour de force in terms of who we are, from both a product, a consumer, and a financial standpoint, and it was a pleasure to be with you all here today. Thanks for coming.