Multilevel marketing (MLM) supplement giants Usana and Herbalife recently reported promising year-end earnings that beg the question of whether the network marketing sector is emerging from the gradual decline of recent years.
Herbalife, by far the bigger of the two, reported fourth quarter earnings of $1.3 billion, which was up 6.3% from the same period the previous year.
For the full year, the company — regarded as the world’s largest MLM devoted solely to the sale of nutritional products — recorded $5 billion in revenue, which was about flat in absolute terms (up less than 1% year over year) but represented a 2.5% gain on a constant currency basis.
Herbalife also announced a major investment from international soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo, who has been an Herbalife brand partner for many years, invested $7.5 million to acquire a 10% stake in Herbalife’s recently acquired subsidiary, Pro2Col Health, a proprietary software platform designed to provide AI-enabled health recommendations to consumers.
Usana, for its part, delivered a strong fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial performance. For Q4, net sales came in at $226 million, or about a 6% year-over-year gain. For the full year, the company recorded $925 million in net sales, which represented about 8% year-over-year growth.
Evidence of MLMs falling behind
The nutritional end of the network marketing industry has been contracting in recent years, after decades of mostly steady growth. The top 5 MLMs devoted largely or solely to the sale of nutrition products (Amway, Herbalife, NuSkin, Usana and Nature’s Sunshine) brought in a combined $17.2 billion in annual revenue in 2019, according to the industry publication Direct Selling News, which publishes an annual “Global 100” list of the world’s top MLMs in all industries.
By contrast, those same five companies brought in a combined $15.4 billion in annual revenue in 2024, according to the DSN figures. In the same time frame the world GDP grew from $87.5 trillion in 2019 to $107.8 trillion in 2024, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. If those companies’ annual sales growth had matched the growth in global GDP, their combined annual revenue for 2024 would have been about $21 billion.
Is the MLM swoon finally ending?
There are conflicting data points relating to long-term trends in the MLM industry.
The recent positive results from Herbalife, Usana and Nature’s Sunshine (which is due to report its year-end results in early March, but recorded a strong third quarter) indicate the sector’s long swoon may be ending.
However, much of Usana’s recent sales gains are attributable to direct-to-consumer supplement subsidiaries that lie outside the MLM realm. The company’s core MLM business has shown stagnant growth.
And NuSkin’s recent results have been disappointing, with its 2025 full year revenue coming in more than 16% below what it recorded in 2024.
Amway is privately held but has been in the habit of releasing an annual earnings statement, usually in mid-March. Those statements have shown a pattern of a steady erosion of earnings. For 2024, the company’s annual revenue was about $7.4 billion, which was a 3% decline from 2023. The company once brought in almost $12 billion a year, according to the DSN Global 100 list.
