New Age Beverages Corporation (NBEV) Q1 2019 Earnings Call Transcript

Beyond the new relationship with East West Bank and other financial progress, we also significantly strengthened the quality of our financial resources in-house and expect to continue to do so throughout the year. We added a new head of our audit committee at the Board in Amy Kuzdowicz, the former Head of Finance at Panera and a number of other world class firms. And with that, I'd like to hand the call back over to Brent.

Brent D. Willis -- Chief Executive Officer

Great job, Greg and thank you. Well done on all the governance aspects and public company filing requirements. It kind of goes under-noticed and definitely goes under-appreciated, but it is a testament to the quality work that you guys are doing behind the scenes, well done. As usual at New Age, we have a lot going on and this quarter is no exception. We have a lot to update you on and our balance is always one of delivering short term results while emplacing the building blocks to be in or the industry leader in this sector that we have defined that we expect to lead, healthy beverages and lifestyle products. I've always said we have never come here and we never did come here to build a $5, $10 or $20 stock or a successful small beverage company and in this sector, anything less than $1 billion is small. We have very different aspirations and this is why everything we have ever done is strategic and is a building block for where we are headed first on our initial road map and now on our new road map.

The challenge however as a public company with now almost 25,000 valued shareholders in New Age is you can't just build for that longer term success and return. In pub cos, investors just don't have the patience frankly with any company or management team to wait and just build for the long term. So you have to drive that short-term performance and Greg just talked about that short term performance for the quarter. What I want to talk about today and really why we own and all of us own this stock is about our progress on our strategic drivers and what is going on behind the scenes. One major reason we all own New Age is even as a small firm, we now have an infrastructure that gives us access to 60 markets around the world including some of the fastest growing beverage geographies on the planet and not only does Morinda's integration put us over the $300 million scale mark and provides and supports the profitability and cash flow hurdles typically associated with small caps in this sector, but it gives us the platform and the world class people to drive all of our growth initiatives through.

As I mentioned on our last investor conference call, I felt that the Morinda integration was so far so good. Not perfect by any means and nothing ever is especially when you have a global business. In global businesses, you have both the value and the diversity of a global business in both developed markets and developing markets. That's the positive, but on the other side of the equation, you also get to manage and lead across both developed and developing markets and it has a significant degree of complexity. Some countries always taking off or conversely having issues and now New Age has the benefit of both those opportunities and complexities, which we love by the way because we've got the experience and the track record of leading multi-billion dollar multinationals and we know what we can do with this globally established infrastructure that is now New Age.

My perspective was and is so far so good, but that's just my perspective. I thought it would be helpful for our investors to hear directly from one of the leaders at Morinda, and not just any leader, one of the founders, Kelly Olson, the guy who led Morinda to success and the architect of Tahitian Noni, the original superfruit and one of the most respected leaders in the entire direct to consumer industry. Kelly is now driving our expansion as the new integrated Global Chief Marketing Officer for the entire Company. So versus just hearing from me on my perspective on how it's going, I thought it would be valuable for our investors to hear it directly from one of the key leaders on the front lines from Kelly. Kelly?

Kelly Olsen -- Chief Marketing Officer

Thanks, Brent. I'm really happy to make a contribution to this call today. I think it's an understatement when you say so far so good. I think I understand what you mean. I've been at Morinda since the beginning more than 20 years ago when we started kind of similar to New Age I think we were the fastest growing company in our industry. Our growth rate actually became legendary and drove our competitors crazy because they could not follow the path that we had laid out. Morinda was a true start-up. We began with literally nothing but a warehouse full of our flagship product, Tahitian Noni Juice and then the science and the history of that product drove our sales and literally took us global.

So now if you fast forward to what happened on December 21st of last year when we decided to merge with New Age. Truthfully, there was a lot of apprehension worldwide especially in Asia among some of our senior leaders and influencers that don't particularly like change and I had a certain amount of apprehension myself, but that's really when I hear you say so far so good, I think it's an understatement because to me, since that time in December, it's been so far so amazing. Truthfully, I'm as excited now as I was when we started our business Morinda in 1996 because back then, we had nothing and now we have almost 1,000 trained dedicated associates who are seasoned and very, very good at what they do and all with a common goal and purpose.

We've established infrastructure in 60 countries. We have the science, facts, studies, patents behind Tahitian Noni and we have successfully expanded on that product base with Noni+Collagen, which is a phenomenal new product and a whole range of cosmetics and skin care that our Tahitian Noni base under our TeMana line that is so successfully differentiated and really no one can follow that path either. What I realized quickly is that all we had built over the last 20 years actually was preparing us for our association with New Age and that's where my vision really kind of began as this process unfolded and now expands our reach and vision for everyone involved. We have a chance now for everyone to earn stock and be a fellow owner and that is huge, a chance to sell all the New Age beverages in traditional retail in our markets and our new income streams, a chance to build the first omni-channel business direct to consumer like Morinda's but also direct store door, traditional retail, e-commerce, and medical channels and a chance to be globally first with CBD, which we just launched, which is so huge right now and driving so much excitement and energy, but also all the other products coming from the Health Sciences division that we believe will also be breakthrough products.

In the direct to consumer industry, New Age Morinda is hot news. In our industry, creating separation from the competition is difficult, yet so important and we are achieving separation. Why? Well, we are the only company in the industry where distributors can become shareowners. We are the first major company in the direct to consumer industry to launch CBD, the only one to provide income streams from multiple channels. This is this is unheard of, yet we are -- this is in our -- within our reach to do this. This is why great leaders or emerging leaders in our entire industry want to be part of this opportunity. Why we are raising eyebrows literally throughout our industry because they don't have any of these things in their current company.