Herbalife Dying - Part 2

This post continues from Part 1.

So what's so bad about Herbalife? Obviously not every Nutrition Club is gonna make money and not everyone would benefit from nutrition drinks. Isn't it a case of buyers beware? I guess every argument can always be framed on a spectrum. On one hand, Herbalife gives everyone an opportunity to become financially free, and while they are at it, drink lots of overpriced nutritional shakes and sells that to a dozen friends and help them lose weight as well. That's win-win-win for everyone, and that's Herbalife's value proposition.

On the other hand, it's scam that does more harm than good overall as it improvishes a lot more poor people to help a handful of rich people get richer. Yeah, meaning rob the poor and help the rich. But which argument is true?

Every argument always boils down to percentages and probabilities. Type A personalities will have great difficulties understanding this hence they are always arguing over why they are 100% right and others are wrong. We must understand that this world is not digital and the truth always lies in between black and white.

Here's the stats, 99% of all Herbalife members will earn less than the minimum wage (like $3 an hour) Less than 1% will make decent income and about 0.1% of all Herbalife members makes six figure income annually. So what Herbalife promised is technically not impossible. Just seriously difficult. The financial freedom, save your friends, save the world, nutrition for better life blah blah, is a mere 0.1% chance that one could actually make it happen. One in a thousand. It's harder than getting into Harvard University. So to get rich via this scheme? Why not try applying for Harvard instead?

What's more, Herbalife does more damage than just promising an empty dream, it is selling overpriced useless shakes to lots and lots of people. It is estimated that over the next 10 years, consumers will lose $2-4 billion dollars through Herbalife.

These no.s are from http://www.factsaboutherbalife.com/

Needless to say, Herbalife argues that the stats are wrong, they have more members and distributors earning more money. The arguments really get into percentages, probabilities and convoluted counter-arguments. But what stood out was that Herbalife does not like to disclose how much their promoters actually earned. Not the average amount earned, nor median salary, nor any statistics that would show mathematically the probability of making good money. What's also interesting, Herbalife goes out of the way to state their "facts" against misrepresentations:  

Herbalife's version of misrepresentations and facts

Now, the way I understood the word fact was that it should be something quite indisputable, like IBM generated more than 10 billion dollars of free cashflow or IBM's CEO is a lady called Ginni Rometty or IBM has been in existence for more than a hundred years. So let's take a quick look at the 5 facts that Herbalife stated. Well, none of them really stood up to this indisputability test, do they? Is high quality product a fact? Maybe #2 on millions of consumers in and out of network could pass off as one fact. But then again, what's in and out of network?

So here's a firm that couldn't differentiate between what's fact and what's not claiming that it is saving the world by lifting people out of poverty, empowering them to sell great nutritional products and solving the world's obesity issue all at once. That's some firm! Go fly kite IBM.

Alas, we know that's too good to be true. Rather than making nutrition for a better world, there were evidence that Herbalife did real harm. The firm was sued in the past for misrepresentation and also some of products contained hazardous ingredients that have caused people to experience liver failure after consumption. Of course, Herbalife always managed to settle these issues out of court, never admitting to any wrongdoings.

Some might ask, if Herbalife was really such a scam, how did it earn over a few billion dollars in revenue annually with significant net profit over all these years. Its products are also sold globally and a lot of people have heard about it, or even consumed some of these products and found them beneficial. Well, I would say that scam could go on for a long, long time before it gets unravelled. Madoff was at it for 30 years, Enron also cooked its books for decades. Sometimes, some of these would never be uncovered. Sadly only in Disney movies would the bad guys ever get punished and the hero and his princess live happily ever after.

Having said all that, nothing is ever 100%, it is always between 1-99%. We cannot know for sure that Herbalife is 100% fraud and another Enron in the making. Everything lies on a spectrum and we can only say that maybe Herbalife is closer to the dark side ie it subtracted rather than add value to our world. One of the real time vindication would also be the stock price. The chart below showed how it roller-coastered over the past 2 years, rising up and down from $20 to $80 and now crashing its way to its multi-year lows.

Herbalife's 2 year stock price

Sad to say, the crash was actually brought about by slowdown in its emerging market sales leading to profit warnings and not because its scams were uncovered in a big way despite the SEC investigating it. In many parts of the world, it's business as usual. Herbalife stuffing its inventories into poor families and gullible people. They in turn living an empty dream that they would be financially free selling nutritional products to others.

Ironically, Herbalife dying and disappearing from existence would save some of these families. In other words, it would be Herbalife's death that is really nutrition for a better world. ;)

Part 1

Herbalife Dying - Part 1

We have to digress from Genting a bit given that this story is probably worth telling. We shall get back to Genting soon, hopefully the stock stays low! 

Ok, Herbalife, as most people would know, is an MLM scheme. MLM stand for multi-level marketing which is a legalized form of pyramid or ponzi scheme. We shall get into this in more detail later. Back to Herbalife. Herbalife sells some nutrition stuff by recruiting people to sell to their friends and their friends hopefully sell to even more friends. Herbalife claims that its products are healthy, very good for the body and apparently also help with weight management! What's more, the seller can make impressive passive income by become a distributor selling Herbalife products to others. It has operations all over the world, including Singapore and it has made huge monies. In recent years, revenue is close to USD 5 billion and net profit of USD 500 million. So this is no small fry!

Herbalife logo

Now MLM while disgusting, is quite legal. Many companies use MLM rather than traditional distribution (like via NTUC or internet) to sell stuff. In a ponzi scheme, which is illegal, there is no product involved. A person pays say $100 to join the ponzi scheme and benefits when he can recruit more downline (say 5 friends each pay $100 to their original upline friend). He takes a cut from his friends and if his friends recruit more people then he earns more. This obviously is unsustainable and hence outlawed in many countries when it became well known how the trickery works some 80 years ago.

However, MLM introduces a product (usually something qualitative with intangible benefits like health products, cosmetics etc) and if the value of the product exceeds 50% of the transaction, then it becomes legal! Now this makes things quite tricky because numbers can always be played around. Of course not all MLM are bad. Insurance works on the MLM concept and Tupperware was originally sold via MLM. But I would say that majority of MLM out there are dodgy and it is best to avoid them wholesale.

Ok, back to Herbalife.

The story begins when a famous hedge fund manager Bill Ackman uncovered the atrocities that Herbalife committed. Herbalife years ago started out selling to rich overweight people who can afford their overpriced health drinks but as it would, growth ran out. In order to continue growing, Herbalife in recent years started targeting low income and less educated sellers to help generate more earnings for their upline. The master salespeople dangled carrots of nutrition, weight loss, huge passive income and managed to con tons of these people. 

Here's how things work. A successful upline guy would usually invite a friend or two to one of Herbalife's health supplement party where they get to sample herbalife products. There will be lots of people at these parties but mostly already Herbalife people and everyone appears happy and chatty and it's easy to get sucked in and buy some of these overpriced stuff. Maybe like $200 for a week's worth. I believe in the a very short term, the product could have some visible health benefits, so people get hooked.

As time goes by, these people get persuaded to setup their own party or as Herbalife calls it: Nutrition Club to get more downline, sell more Herbalife products to their friends and earn passive income! Alas, most people cannot fork out $200 every week so 90% of these Nutrition Club owners see their life savings get sucked into buying inventories and inventories of Herbalife products. Some of these clubs become the neighbourhood childcare centre as the other low income mums and dads put their kids there while they go to work. There were sob stories of how families were ruined as they got conned into a promise of strong passive income for life but ended up broke with truckloads of unsold Herbalife inventories.

Due to some legalities around MLM, Herbalife cannot put up its logo and sell its products outright so Nutrition Clubs are not discernible from the outside. Usually, the interior is also pretty badly done up since most of these owners would not have money to invest in capex. The nice parties that they went to were akin to "mock" setups that doesn't represent most real nutrition clubs.

Supposedly a Herbalife Nutrition Club

In short, Herbalife was a con job, according to Bill Ackman, who uncovered most of these stuff in a 300+ page presentation a few months back. In fact he started shorting Herbalife about 2 years ago and repeatedly reported that it was a mega ponzi scheme waiting to blow up. However, given Herbalife's strong earnings growth, nobody believed him. Most unfortunate for Bill, another richer and more well known hedge fund manager Icahn bought Herbalife and squeezed up the stock price. Herbalife went from $40 to $80 and Bill Ackman lost a billion dollars at its peak. They went on TV and got into a vicious "gladiator fight show" with the media. It was bloody. 

Meanwhile Herbalife itself was feeling some heat from Bill and decided to launch its own fightback. It retorted some of Ackman's claim point by point in its investors' day presentation. Reading some of the slides reminded me of this famous Chinese story about a guy who duck a hole and buried some gold, but he was afraid that somebody might take it and hence he wrote,"there is no gold underneath this soil" and stuck it exactly where he buried the gold. Now if Herbalife is doing a legit business and making honest money, why does it need to make a big fuss over some hedge fund manager's claim?

Was it more than meets the eye? Stay tuned for Part 2!