JAKKS Pacific, Inc. Aktie

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the JAKKS Pacific Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call with management who will review financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. JAKKS issued its earnings press release earlier today. The earnings release and presentation slides related to today's call are available on the company's website in the Investors section.

On the call this afternoon are Stephen Berman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and John Kimble, Chief Financial Officer. Stephen will first provide an overview of the quarter and year-to-date along with highlights of recent performance and current business trends. Then, John will provide some additional comments around JAKKS Pacific financial and operational results. Mr. Berman will then return with comments about the balance of the year and beyond prior to opening up the call for questions. [Operator Instructions]

Before we begin, the company would like to point out that any comments made about JAKKS Pacific future performance, events or circumstances, including the estimate of sales, margins, earnings and our adjusted EBITDA in 2026 and beyond as well as any other forward-looking statements concerning 2026 and beyond are subject to safe harbor protection under federal securities laws. These statements reflect the company's best judgment based on current market trends and conditions today and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements.

For details concerning these and other such risks and uncertainties, you should consult JAKKS' most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC as well as the company's other reports subsequently filed with the SEC from time to time. In addition, today's comments by management will refer to non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share. Unless stated otherwise, the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics have been reconciled to the associated non-GAAP financial measure within the company's earnings press release issued today or previously. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Stephen Berman.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Our Q2 financial results were modestly better than our expectations and an improvement over the same quarter a year ago. Globally, our net sales finished at $139.2 million in Q2, a 17% increase compared to prior year when the sudden implementation of massive tariffs dramatically reduced customer orders. Year-to-date, our sales are 6% ahead of prior year at $245.9 million, our best first half since 2023. North America led the improved results, growing 20% year-over-year in Q2 and 3% for the first half. Our international business reflected smaller year-over-year growth of 3%, led by Europe, but is up 20% for the first half of the year.

Overall, this is the highest level of international first half shipping in JAKKS history in over 10 years at $53 million. Keeping the focus on the first half, our Toys/Consumer Products business was up 5%. Those results were driven by the Action Play & Collectibles division, which was up as we supported the extremely successful second Super Mario Bros. film release in April, led by an array of 5-inch figures developed specifically for the film. Our product line also featured play sets, Diorama and Plush and was very well received with solid sell-throughs.

Building on that, we have another wave of new product introductions shipping now for fall planogram sets and promotional spaces, some of which are already on shelf. As retailers knew we had a solid opportunity with this film, through the first 3 quarters of shipping, we have sold in more movie branded products than what we did for the first film, which is great, especially given the consumer reaction. Fans can also look forward to a lot more focus on Donkey Kong in the second half with a feature play set shipping along with a new figure multipack. Our Dolls, Role Play/Dress-Up business was up 12% in Q2 despite a lack of new entertainment support compared to the prior year.

Of note, we have been steadily expanding our Frozen product line over the past 18 months, offering new role play patterns and refreshing key products. Although Frozen has been a cornerstone of our business dating back to the original film release, the business is up for the first half of this year versus prior year. In the fall, we have a strong retailer exclusive placed that will add more energy to this aisle as we build towards the Frozen 3 theatrical event in fall 2027.

Retail pricing of our Disney Princess Style Collection assortments were heavily impacted by tariffs most of last year. And those price shocks have unwound over recent months, we see some customers bringing retail prices down closer to where they were pre-tariff, although admittedly, not across the entire product line. In general, it is true for the lower price points. We feel lower retails are contributing to improved velocity as consumers discover some of the strong innovative items we launched last fall as well as this spring. We're also seeing expanded listings and resulting in positive point-of-sale results. The [ Baby Bath Doll ] line launched in fall continues to sell extremely well, and our refreshed 6-inch Princess doll line with a sub-$10 price point has been a strong performer as well.

Retail toy and consumer products POS at the top 2 U.S. accounts was positive in the first half, accelerating to double-digit levels in Q2. Our Disguise business also performed well, up 8% in the quarter and 9% in the first half. The popularity of Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Bros. films are positive contributors to our business this year as well as our launch of K-pop Demon Hunter's costumes. Our outdoor seasonal business, which includes everything from activity tables and chairs to ball pits to ride-ons to skateboards and Hula Hoops, among other products, remained a slight drag on the results this quarter. We see this as a structural headwind rather than a transitory one.

Retailers continue to reallocate in-store space away from large box items, and these bulky formats are poorly suited to the low-cost home delivery model that increasingly is shaping retail economics. We are not waiting this out. We are managing this business with a multiyear lens and a clear plan on 2 levers: partnering with retailers to defend and recapture shelf space and lost sales and reengineering packaging and product design to shrink box sizes and improve delivery economics. We are already advancing on both fronts. And while these investments will take time to fully show up in the numbers, we are extremely confident they position this business for sustainable, profitable growth as the category continues to shift. We like where we are headed. But for the quarter, we were down 12% and down 17% year-to-date to $11.1 million in sales.

Gross margins held up very well in the quarter at 32.3%, slightly lower than last year's at 32.8%. Tight management of sales, marketing and overhead costs led to a slight operating loss of $142,000 in the quarter compared to a $2.8 million loss in Q2 of last year. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $5.4 million compared to $2.3 million in Q2 last year. That increases our 12-month trailing adjusted EBITDA to $37.8 million.

I will now pass it over to John for some comments, after which I will come back and discuss some product initiatives and areas of focus moving forward. John?

Thank you, Stephen, and hello, everybody. This has been a solid quarter, wrapping up a solid first half of the year. As Stephen has pointed out, everything has been going pretty much in line with our expectations, which is a plus when that actually happens. Our FOB-centric business model is alive and well. Our first half shipments were over 75% FOB, reaching as high of a level as we've seen this decade. From a seasonality point of view, we have planned this year as a bit more front weighted than normal given the strength of Super Mario and since we do not have any new toy introductions in the second half supporting holiday theatrical releases. And so far, that outlook is holding up. As I look at our financial results, I'm focused on seeing gross margin dollars increase 3% in the first half to a little over $80 million. That's a pretty good outcome and reflects solid execution against what we saw as the opportunity, a bit better than the last 2 years and a couple of million dollars short of where we were in 2023.

Ultimately, as a company, I want to see us optimizing for margin dollars and not margin percentages. As we do the extra work to identify incremental business outside of the traditional U.S. mass market, I believe that is going to require more complexity and financial creativity in how we assess new opportunities, which is something we're in progress on working through. But establishing more annuity like evergreen revenue streams while continuing to thoughtfully manage overhead should create another flow of long-term bottom line profitability, which I feel we're only starting to wrap our heads around. As the majority of our overhead costs are fixed, I think we have an opportunity in this area given our momentum over the past couple of years, but it will admittedly take some time to build and prove out.

To that end, we managed a bit of leverage in both selling and G&A in the first half, offsetting gross margin percentage being down slightly. That led to a slight operating loss in the quarter and a $5.7 million operating loss in the first half improved over the $6.5 million loss last year in the same time period. Working our way down the P&L, that leads us to the topic of IEEPA tariff refunds. As mentioned last quarter, we applied for refunds for tariffs we paid under the regulations, which the Supreme Court ultimately struck down. We're pleased to share that we've had essentially all of those funds refunded to us as of the second quarter close. We don't anticipate any more refunds going forward.

In the quarter, we took the opportunity to revalue on-hand inventory that was still burdened by those tariffs to essentially undo the excess carrying cost that the tariffs generated upon import, thereby reducing the value on the balance sheet. The remainder of funds received, we have recognized in the P&L this quarter as nonoperating other income of $6.8 million. These refunds have raised our projection for pretax net income for the year, so our Q2 tax estimate has been adjusted accordingly. We have opted to back this gain out of our published non-GAAP projections of adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share. With that said, adjusted EPS for the quarter was $0.25 and $0.09 for the first half of the year. That compares favorably to $0.03 of earnings in Q2 last year and being breakeven year-to-date EPS at the same time last year.

From a balance sheet perspective, we finished the quarter at $60.6 million in restricted and unrestricted cash compared to $43.1 million at the same time last year. That increase is largely driven by stronger operating results and the aforementioned tariff refunds. As of July 17, the comparable cash on hand number was $47.1 million to give you an extra bit of context to remind you of the seasonality in our working capital. Our inventory level at the end of the quarter was $58.3 million, down from $71.8 million at this time last year and up a bit from $52.9 million last quarter.

Finally, the Board has approved our sixth consecutive quarterly cash dividend of $0.25 per share. The dividend will be payable to shareholders of record as of August 28 and will be payable on September 28. And now back to Stephen for some more discussion of what's ahead.

Thank you, John. Midyear is always an exciting time in the business as we get closer to all the energy and excitement around Halloween and the fourth quarter holiday season, while also seeing the full lineup for the following year, solidifying and receiving positive feedback from customers around the world. And as much as we've mentioned before, I cannot emphasize enough the traction we are getting, elevating our level of focus and performance outside of the U.S. We are increasingly working with key existing accounts in Europe on exclusive launches while listening to our customer needs and curating new offerings to open new accounts on the strength of our broad brand portfolios. We are additionally working with more distributors to specifically reach additional accounts in more fragmented markets.

Our evergreen brands and categories with global appeal create a platform where products designed toward lower price points can reach a very wide audience when we can form the right partnership between our vendors in Asia, the licensors and the right distribution partner to reach smaller accounts around the world. We have recently added 3 senior sales professionals to our global organization to further drive our business to higher levels, in addition to opening our first office in South America with an eye towards longer-term growth there. Turning back to the near term. I want to highlight some of the exciting areas as we move into the second half of the year. Our Disney Darlings line continues to expand both in the U.S. and in Europe with broader listings, which earned great sell-through success so far this year. The Snuggly Stars Doll sub-segment has recently launched in the U.S. in-store and online and selected accounts with rapid sell-throughs.

You will see a much broader Disney Darlings assortment on shelf later this year, supported by a 360 marketing campaign across regions as our baby dolls continue to be the happiest baby dolls you will find in the marketplace. There is no cringe at JAKKS, and there is no cringe in the Disney Darling line of products. In Disney Princess, our ages and stages strategy is introducing new core large dolls and matching dresses. Our 2 featured items will be Grow and Style Rapunzel Doll and our interactive dance with Me Bell. The Bell Doll will be featured out of aisle at key U.S. accounts as our must-have Princess toy this holiday season.

With Disney ILY, we are introducing a new range with lower price points to further expand the product portfolio. We are also investing with a focus on the serious Disney fan who has proven to be the most enthusiastic ILY consumer. We see an opportunity by increasing our reach to more of them, especially given the current breadth and depth of this line. Moving to our Sonic business. This fall, we're launching Giant Metal Sonic, the biggest, most sophisticated feature, large-scale action figure we've ever released as part of our Sonic the Hedgehog product line, inspired by the metal Sonic from the Sonic Superstars video game. At over 20 inches tall, it recreates the ultimate Boss battle as Metal Sonic faces off with a 2.5-inch Sonic figure, which is also included.

With anime light-up eyes, sounds and slashing arm action, it comes in the 35th anniversary packaging, and we believe will top many holiday wish lists. These large-scale toys have always been well received by the Sonic fan base, and we secured strong retail support and placement this fall. Also this fall inspired by the DC Sonic crossover series, we have more new product arriving for the fall that we plan to announce soon.

As I mentioned, fans should look forward to the new Super Mario-inspired film product in fall with a mix of core items and strong retail exclusives. They'll also see our continued support and innovation within our evergreen Nintendo business, including a number of items themed to Super Mario Wonder Game. This past quarter, we also launched as a retail exclusive, a new collector doll line of DC Comics characters, featuring Poison Ivy, Catwomen and fan favorite Harley Quinn. We saw a nice presale engagement and these dolls continue to sell through well. In the fall, we will be mixing in a range of other classic Warner Bros. characters that fans love and haven't been able to get in these products' executions.

In our disguise costume business, beyond the properties already mentioned, our product line this year features other new entertainment releases, including Disney's Descendants 5, Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie and Minions & Monsters, just to name a few. We remain on track to deliver a strong year of results in 2026, both financially and achieving potentially exceeding our initial plans, but more importantly, making substantial progress in building this business for growth in 2027, '28 and beyond.

In 2027, we have 2 top-tier theatrical releases from Sonic the Hedgehog and Disney Frozen franchises lined up for Q1 and Q4, respectively. But beyond that, there are a number of additional initiatives, some entertainment-led, some working with our key customers on private label opportunities and some opportunities just classic new toy lines with innovation driven by creativity of our design and marketing teams. In addition, we and the trade are extremely excited to launch our anime, Manga and WEBTOON digital entertainment initiatives in 2027 and beyond. We're opening up brand-new distribution channels while working differently with our well-established current distribution partners to bring a lot of different offerings to the market that we will discuss in more detail later in the year and throughout 2027.

And now we will take a couple of questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions]

And our first question comes from the line of Eric Beder of Small Cap Consumer Research.

I want to ask a question about the domestic market here. So we went through this shock. We're coming back out of it. How do you see the market changed? And I guess, what are the opportunities from that, that you can take advantage of?

Well, first, thank you very much. One of the things that we've seen versus last year is that the market adapted to the price changes that occurred throughout the industry with prices being raised where appropriate due to the tariffs and also the volatility of the cost of petroleum with regards to resins as well as container costs. So I believe, at least for us, we have mandated and have achieved what we needed to going into this year, which is reducing costs in various products to achieve bringing back the price points to the correct price points that we see more volume in. Those are the price points during usually the spring and summer under $30 retail. So we've done that, adapted to it very quickly.

In addition, we've dove very deep in with the value trade and the specialty trade such as the T.J. Maxx's, the Ross's and so on as well as our strong major customers like Target, Walmart and Amazon going into the Five Below, the dollar trade and so on. So we became very diversified through this, both on an FOB basis and slightly on a domestic basis. So we're also seeing the appetite at retail that the POS is quite strong during the spring versus last spring. So the appetite is there for the right product at the right price points.

Okay. So basically, you can -- you've kind of matched kind of taken your advantage and set the prices where they would need to be and still maintain kind of the margins that we're seeing right now?

Yes and plus, yes.

Okay. Now you mentioned about the chain in international, a great opportunity. Some of these markets are as concentrated as we are in the U.S. What does that mean for kind of the level of FOB you see internationally and the potential for margins going forward on that?

The great thing about international is it's growing in a great path in EMEA, Latin America, South America and Southeast Asia. So we're growing with, one, our product categories and lines are really more appropriate today than they were 5 years ago for the international markets. That's one. Two, we have the majority of the licensing rights that work in the territories. We have the right ones that are correct for our company. That being said, there are certain properties that work well in U.K., Germany and France that don't work well in Italy or Spain. So we really are very quick to market with the right product at the right country at the right level. The same goes for Latin America, South America and Southeast Asia.

In addition, we have the FOB structure that we started since inception that is very much a footprint internationally. So primarily, the majority of our sales internationally are on an FOB basis, which helps us then enhance our own margins internally, giving also a lower price to the customer, which they can enhance their margin as a customer and also then have a lower price for the consumer, which gives them a great price point to have.

So all of those combinations on top of great product, great licenses and strong momentum in all of our different categories, it's allowing us to grow pretty rapidly. And going forward for the next 2, 3 years, we see strong growth diversification in various countries and just some really strong initiatives that we see going forward.

Okay. And final question. What are you seeing in terms of potentially either for new licenses, M&A, you keep on piling up more cash. How should we be thinking about that kind of potential, I guess, near and longer term?

Thank you for that question. One thing is we are a strong healthy balance sheet, which gives us a lot of strength going forward and looking at different opportunities. But the first part of the question, we have a lot of licenses in which we have not been able to announce yet because some of them are under contract. But our license portfolio is diversifying very strongly in each of our categories of business, the 5 different segments that we focus on. We are focused -- we are a toy company. We are a kids consumer product company. So while a lot of companies are focused on the kidult, which we are heavily focused on in the anime segmentation that we're moving into, and we are into that in certain other areas.

We are truly a toy kids consumer product company, and we don't forget about kids at the young age that will never change from that age group from birth to 6, 7 years old. So that's the key focus that a lot of companies are moving out of, and that's a key focus that we're diving deeper in with the understanding of kidult is a great market, and we've been in it since we did WEF decades ago and Nintendo and Sonic and the Simpsons. There's kidult involved, but the anime segmentation, Manga, VTubers and digital entertainers are truly kidult and above. So we are in all the areas of business. But I do think it's interesting to hear people focusing on more in the kidult area and that's the true toy business where we're focused on.

So we're focused on that acquiring licenses. If there's an opportunity in the acquisition area in a segment that would benefit the company and our shareholders, we have been looking. We are speaking to bankers and so on and so forth. So if an opportunity arose, we have the cash, we have the availability with banking to be able to get additional capital if needed. So that's on our platform. And going into this year, we're looking at going into the 2027 and '28, which we feel very strong and confident about. And we will be sitting with the Board of Directors looking at different capital allocation initiatives. But going through the first half of the year, having a strong performance and then looking at what happened in the last year back and so on and so forth, we're just really focused on shoring up our business, taking market share and then looking to grow in the future.

Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Forte of Maxim Group.

Stephen and John, congrats on a great quarter. I have 3 questions. I apologize, they're kind of on the boring side. So there are points of clarification. So the first point of clarification, John, can you clarify that there was no benefit to your gross margin in the quarter from the tariff refunds?

Correct.

Second, Stephen, the pace of your anime-related efforts, is it the same as you expected last quarter?

Yes. Yes. We are extremely focused and extremely aggressively putting the initiatives together in these various segments that I brought up, the anime, the Manga, the VTubers and digital entertainers. And the way that we're launching this is a really grassroots marketing with the specific retailers that are focused in this [ genre ] at first and then a wide distribution initiative in the fall 2027 with major of the main retailers that we know that we work with today on top of the actual anime, call it, Asian pop culture distribution retail channels.

And then the same place, things goes for international in France and Latin America. There's very strong initiatives in anime. So we are very much on path, very strong with it. and very excited about it, but it's a very methodical initiative and launch and long-term expectations are still as strong as we were before.

Great. So Stephen, as a quick follow-up there. So there's nothing expected for '26 revenue from the anime-related efforts?

Correct.

Okay. And then lastly, the media landscape, even by the media landscape standards seems to be a little more cloudy. Pixar had layoffs even the Toy Story 5 is on pace for $1 billion. The Paramount and Warner Bros. deal seems to be in a holding pattern. Is this creating any additional opportunities or presenting any additional challenges for you?

Not challenges. I mean, all in all, in the business environment, you see with The Walt Disney Company is doing with Pixar and so on and so forth. Those are just common business practices that you go into and look for efficiencies and so on. The Paramount and Warner Bros. deal, it's still business as normal with all the, call it, licensors and entertainment holders. Nothing's changed in the direction of where we're at as a company. We see a lot of opportunity right now just because of the traction that we have in the various segments that we're in.

And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, as we are focused in the kids area of business, a lot of companies are focused on a kidult. We see a huge opportunity in growth in our normal segments in addition to the kidult areas that we talked about, our cosplay in our disguise division, our Halloween division. We just see things very strong moving forward and really looking forward to this year and going into '27. We are very comfortable with the initiatives we're undertaking. Our private label initiative that we've done with some major retailers is picking up very strongly. So we just diversified our company in a very healthy platform going forward.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll now turn it back to Stephen Berman, CEO, for final remarks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time today, and we look forward to speaking to investors after these calls today and tomorrow and looking forward to our third quarter conference call and getting on the road. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you for participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the JAKKS Pacific First Quarter Earnings Conference Call with management. who will review financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2026. JAKKS issued its earnings press release earlier today. The earnings release and presentation slides related to today's call are available on the company's website in the Investors section.

On the call this afternoon are Stephen Berman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and John Kimball, Chief Financial Officer. Stephen will first provide an overview of the quarter and full fiscal year, along with highlights of recent performance and current business trends. Then Jeff will provision from a focus surround Jack specifics financials and operational results.

Mr. Berman will then return with additional comments and some closing remarks prior to opening up the call for questions. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, the company would like to point out that any comments made about JAKKS Pacific's future performance, events or circumstances, including the estimates of sales, margins, earnings and/or adjusted EBITDA in 2026 and as well as any other forward-looking statements concerning 2026 and beyond are subject to safe harbor protection under federal security laws.

These statements reflect the company's best judgment based on current market trends and conditions today and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements.

For details concerning these and other such risks and uncertainties, you should consult JAKKS most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC as well as the company's other reports subsequently filed with the SEC from time to time.

In addition, today's comments by management will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share. Unless stated otherwise, the most directly comparable GAAP financial metric has been reconciled to the action associated non-GAAP financial measure within the company's earnings press release issued today or previously. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to Stephen Berman.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Our Q1 financial results were roughly in line with our expectations and comparable to our strong Q1 2025 results. And our near-term outlook is better than it was 12 months ago. We continue to see a degree of caution from U.S. accounts. I would characterize many of them as somewhat tentative about the year, many becoming more accustomed to the volatility we've been experiencing. .

They are, among other things, trying to forecast consumer health. Our industry continues to closely monitor higher oil prices given the implications for resins and transportation costs. As I said before, these are dynamics that come with running a global company.

We have dealt with these sort of challenges before, and I'm confident we will successfully navigate our way forward in 2026 and beyond. We continue to invest significantly time, effort and financially on some exciting new initiatives coming together for 2027 and '28 while also executing in the year on our plan and pursuing late incremental opportunities.

Globally, our net sales finished at $107 million in Q1, comparable to our first quarter results over the past several years, but down 6% from prior year. Toy and Consumer Products net sales were down 7%, with costumes up in 1 of the smaller quarters. The decline was caused by lower results in North America at $78 million.

It was down $15 million or 16% and with both our domestic and FOB business decreasing for the quarter. Roughly 1/4 of that decline was due to reduction in low-margin closeout sales related to our lower level of U.S. imports last year. Demand for our FRB model remains extremely strong with over 70% of our Q1 North American business shipped FOB. As betted above, we see the U.S. retailers remaining somewhat cautious to to recalibrate cost pressures, pricing resilience and ultimately, consumer behavior.

Our international business grew nicely in the quarter, reaching $29 million, a 38% increase versus the prior year. We saw healthy growth in both our domestic business as well as our FOB orders, Latin America declined slightly in the quarter but grew margin dollars. Although slightly down from last year, we finished the quarter with a very strong gross margin of 33.4% and reflective of our robust product margins from new product introductions and reduced closeout sales in the quarter.

SG&A expenses were down 4% in the quarter, offsetting some of the drop in margin dollars but not enough to avoid a quarterly adjusted EBITDA loss of $371,000 versus a gain of $354,000 recorded at the end of Q1 2025. I will now pass it over to John for some comments, after which I will come back and discuss some product initiatives and areas of focus moving forward. John?

Thank you, Stephen, and hi, everybody. The first quarter did not distinguish itself dramatically to the positive or the negative, which is all that 1 can really ask for in the first quarter in the toy industry. .

Some of our drop in revenues was attributable to a new dress-up initiative last year, not carrying forward in addition to some softness in our private label business. We're happy to see our gross margin percentage holding up at 33.4% and in it is down 100 basis points from the exuberant 34.4% from this time last year.

Deconstructing gross margin prompts the issue of tariffs. Your accounting teaser of the day, U.S. domestic products sold in the quarter would have reflected tariff expense related to when the product entered the country when those sales in the year ago quarter did not have that issue.

As to whether Q1 2026 product was imported in Q1 or in previous quarters is a level of precision that we don't aspire to. I can tell you we paid $1 million to $2 million in U.S. tariffs in the quarter where we paid less than $100,000 in the year ago quarter. That gives you a sense for order of magnitude of the numbers here in the quarter and as they relate to prior year.

This is also a fine place to mention that we have filed for tariff refunds that we feel are eligible for reclaiming as a result of the relevant Supreme Court decision. We do not intend to go deeper on that topic until we have a much higher degree of confidence the refunds are forthcoming and have figured out any related implications. It would be nice to get some of this money back, but frankly, it's 1 of the least interesting things to talk about in the business today.

So we're moving on. Back to the numbers in Q1 gross profit, although down 9% from last year, but it's still a very robust number for our business. So we're happy to have that on the scoreboard as we exit the quarter. Our selling expenses were flat from a margin perspective in the quarter, primarily due to favorable timing.

On a full year basis, we would expect this area to grow at minimum in tandem with sales particularly as we restricted spending against some marketing initiatives last year given revenue shortfalls. That projection does not anticipate downside scenarios reflective of higher shipping costs due to higher diesel costs.

G&A delevered slightly but also benefited from some timing elements. We are aiming to hold G&A spending to no more than revenue growth on a full year basis while also making the necessary expenditures to support new 2027 launches. Slightly softer results reduced our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA down by 2% to $34.6 million. On an adjusted per share basis, the quarterly loss of $0.17 is lower than the loss of $0.03 per share from this time last year.

The diluted share count is based on roughly 11.4 million shares. Turning to the balance sheet. We finished the quarter with $64 million in cash, up a bit from $59 million last year. Inventory was flattish at $53 million, essentially unchanged from last year. As mentioned in our release, the Board approved a Q2 payment of $0.25 per common share payable at the end of Q1.

The record date for the dividend is May 29, and the payable date will be June 29. And back to Stephen for some more comments about the year ahead.

Thank you, John. As first quarter is always the quietest quarter for us. I'd like to update you on what we see as some of our big drivers from a product and revenue perspective on the year. We are certainly thrilled with the positive reaction theatric release of the Supra Morial Galaxy movie has received. .

The success of the first film took some retailers by surprise. But this time, all accounts are ready and on board, allowing us to secure significant out-of-aisle and promotional space starting in early March. The film has created a lot of excitement in Europe as well with Smith being a big supporter. The excitement continues with the Mario product line, and we look forward to the streaming announcement and launch later this year.

The Sonic DC crossover product has been expanded to all accounts this spring after being an account exclusive at launch. A new comic book in the series is dropping this quarter to keep the energy around this initiative fresh and then top of mind. As we mentioned last quarter, SEG is recreating a lot of excitement around Sonic 35th year anniversary, and we continue to work with them very closely as their anchor toy partner worldwide.

One example of a new collaboration we are doing with Saga is adding the Sonic into our outdoor seasonal business as we reposition that segment into our active and early play segment which is really a better description of what that team focuses on and the products we market there.

The speed and energy central to Sonic DNA makes it a natural choice for products in this area and we've been excited to share this range with customers this month during our spring 2027 line reviews. We'll have more details about some of the key items launching in this segment in the months to come.

We are seeing nice support for our Disney Princess Style Collection, Ely and frozen lines, with sell-throughs in these segments continue to be very strong. These are evergreen brands and play patterns for young children. We nonetheless are constantly introducing new items to the line and ensure we are earning our place in retail assortments every season.

Our 6-inch doll line has been to refresh this spring and is selling extremely well. We've also seen positive reaction to some of our new roleplay introductions in the style collection line. We have strong coverage here at both the below $10 and below $20 retail prices, which are great values and also work especially well given the time of the year. We continue to steadily expand our ActionSports portfolio where we see additional opportunities.

We are happy to share with you that we recently have added the almost darker and duster brands to our skateboard portfolio. In our Disguise business, we announced our launch of K-Pop Demon Hunter during the past quarter. We're happy to be able to deliver authentic customers for that enthusiastic fan base.

The success of the Mario Galaxy film is generating more demand for these costumes. We're also seeing a lot of energy behind Pokemon, which is celebrating its 30-year anniversary this year with significant marketing programs. Our European business for costumes continues to grow steadily. We are shipping several new customers in the U.K. as we have transitioned in as a vendor for some accounts who were previously relying on their in-house sourcing teams.

And at last but not certainly least, since our last call, we have announced our new initiative to capitalize on what we see as a significant opportunity in the world of anime. As we expressed earlier this quarter, JAKKS Pacific is launching a large-scale next-generation anime, manga and digital creator cultural platform, one of our company's most ambitious strategically significant initiatives. Developed more than 2 years, this multifaceted investment positions JAKKS at the forefront of 1 of the fastest-growing segments in global entertainment.

Anchored by Premier Anime partners and top-tier collaborators, the platform creates a strong foundation for sustained global growth, enhanced monetization and long-term shareholder value. Through this initiative, JAKs will design, manufacture, and market a broad portfolio of premium collectibles, figures, plush, tech accessories, costumes and roleplay products while expanding into high-growth live event and influencer-driven merchandise opportunities.

Supporting this effort is a next-generation global distribution infrastructure spending to direct-to-consumer, specialty and experiential retail and promotional channels designed to accelerate speed to market and deepen consumer reach worldwide.

The objective is clear, to lead this category at scale. This platform expands our global footprint, accelerates revenue opportunities and strengthens our connection with highly engaged fans that are shaping the future of pop culture. We're not simply entering a category. We are building a durable, repeatable platform designed to deliver sustained multiyear value.

Building on its legacy of successfully commercializing leading entertainment properties. JAKKS will continue to roll out our partnerships and product lines through 2026 with the initial loss expected in 2027. We are only 1/3 of the way through the year. And although it continues to be very dynamic, we feel confident we are still on track to achieve our goals for this year, inclusive of setting up for an even better and stronger 2027 and beyond. And with that, we will take a couple of questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Thomas Forte of Maxim Group.

Steve and I'll limit myself to 3, and I'll go 1 at a time. So Stephen, the Anime product line sounds amazing. Can you give just high-level comments on what success could look like, including the relative gross margin and contribution margin for that product versus your other efforts? .

So firstly, this initiative that we undertook has been well over 2 years working with many of these companies that are in Japan. And the way that the companies oversee their IP is very stringent and very strict. So we went to them to various large enterprises, Aniplex, which is Demonslayer, Viz media, Naruto, Codanta, which is a tactive Titans and several others from Cover Corp and Crucerole.

It's been a long process of making sure that when you create products in this genre, it has a very strong fan base that you got to really focus on and cannot bear from. So we have put together a plan. We hired across the board, a very young passionate group in the anime Manga and called digital marketers. And we put together a plan of products from collectibles to kid adults, which is very strong to somewhat of some of the other properties to tech accessories areas that the fan base really likes.

And in fact, for the V tubers and digital marketers, we created light sticks for them to use that concerts, but all with the at authenticity of the actual IP and directed towards the fan. So the launch itself is starting in 2027, we will get some of it shipped in '26. And it's a very broad launch to various initiatives. -- of retail basis. So think of mini, so GameStop, independent retailers as well as venue sales.

A lot of these concerts, movies and initiatives are done in venues and there's never been real authentic merchandise at the venue. So we have structured and working with several different partners to do the venue sales. That's what you would see at concerts like at a Taylor Swift concert or a Kenema where you have the merchandise that go straight to the consumer.

So all these initiatives are all being really launched together at one time at various segmentations and with various collective initiatives with each of the IP holders, but inclusive, you will see a broad array of product of totality of all the strong anime, Manga and B2P and on segmentation at retail instead of having one license or do on IP and another one, we've collectively worked with these IP holders to make sure that they were present and they were present and focused together so the consumer knows where to buy them.

On the part of margin enhancement, because they're somewhat more focused on kid adult, the price print will be slightly higher and the margin in our area for JAK specific will be slightly higher.

Excellent. All right. So then second of 3, I recognize a lot of your product releases are coinciding with movie premieres, but was wondering for your other SKUs, how should we think about the timing of new product rollouts and if you're holding anything back given the current market challenges.

First, the market challenges, as we mentioned in our prerecorded is we're used to these challenges. It happens is happening JAKKS has been public 30 years. We've been around 31 years. So you have to kind of work through them, work with manufacturers, container companies work with the retailers and work very closely and very entrepreneurial to get through these different times.

But with these different times, there's also a very strong opportunity. So as we mentioned in our call, the Super Mario movie itself has done phenomenally well. The product line as expansive as the sell-throughs are great. We will have the forthcoming or upcoming streaming release whenever Nintendo and Universal announced it.

So that will have its legs and continue with big tailwinds behind it. Then there's a lot of different initiatives that happened in our called the Skis business. You have the Super Mario movie, Toy Story 5, Descendants 5, PAW Patrol movie, Minions movie, and Demons, which is the anime that we mentioned, which is from Aniplex.

So in each of our segments, we have great excitement, but at the same time, some of our basic evergreen business is what's doing extremely well. At our Disney area, our Disney Darling, our Disney Style Collection, our Disney business has seen sell-through strong and profit dollars up.

So that's exciting. Then you go into going into the year, we also have various other movies that are coming out that we have a nice product behind, which is Bojana Live Action, Commins and other IP that's coming out. But that on top of our Evergreen business is really what's keeping us going and strong.

And we start building throughout the year and going into '27 and '28, our lineup, I couldn't be more proud of as CEO, a co-founder, it is so strong in the majority of all of our categories from our seasonal business with ABG, which we have elements and Roxy Quicksilver, which is now just starting to take some drill traction getting out to the spring and summer retailers.

It's a really exciting time. But at the same time, it's a cautious time because of oil prices and things that are just unknowns. But those unknowns to us is just part and parcel of our business. But we're really excited. I'm really excited to get through the year. This is a quiet first quarter, I even mentioned that John -- it's a very quiet period to talk about because there are so many things that are happened through the year. But as the year goes by, we will be going on the road speaking with retailers, investors. It's really an exciting time at JAKKS.

Excellent. All right. And then last one. So another high-level question. So there are some people who believe that AI will lead to an explosion in video content, which could materially increase your opportunity set for licensing I would appreciate your thoughts on that.

With our IP holders, our licensors, many of them are obviously very strong and very focused in the, call it, what AI could do in the, call it the production, the, call it, the quickest to market for digital animetion and various initiatives. So I think it's going to be very much pick and choose by each of the, call it, large-scale entertainment companies, whether it's the Walt Disney Company, Netflix, Amazon, we're there to help them out in what they do. .

And the one thing that we've seen because these things are coming quick to market now because of the time it takes to develop is much less than in the past. The one thing that JAKKS as great as to go to market and doing things very quickly. And I think that's where we're going to be hit working with these companies to get things into the market quicker than a normal company can just based on our scale and what our DNA is.

Our next question comes from the line of Eric Beder of Small Cap Consumer Research.

When you look at it in terms of a consumer in terms of normalizing in the U.S., how should we think about kind of how the flows are going to happen here, when will we know kind of what is going to be the new market? Or what is the market we're going to see post all the disruptions we had last year in the U.S.

I think at the end of the day, product is king. So if you have the right product and you have the right price points, the consumer will be there, especially in our area of business to where -- whether it's a holiday, whether it's a birthday, people and parents and grandparents are relative spend on children spend on toys.

But in this environment, I think price points are very much a focus during the first 9 months of the year and then ensuring that we have the right price points and the majority of our products are in the $10 to $30 range. And then during the fall period in the holiday period, you need to have that the WOW IP, the WOW item, the WOW product to get that bigger purchase.

And I think we have all that a custom in the majority of our divisions. Remember, primarily, we are an FOB company, so we planned very far ahead differently than a real domestic company. So we have things in line with all of our major retailers worldwide to enhance whether it's exclusivity on products and categories so they could actually enhance their margin dollars and also market those products directly to consumers, at the same time, not having price comparisons done by other retailers.

So that's a very big enhancement. I don't know if I mentioned earlier, but we had our best EMA quarter since 2015. And and our best ups in France and Spain at over 15 years. So we're talking in the U.S., and I'm talking worldwide, we see growth international as we're expanding with more IP that goes appropriately in specific territories and countries both in EMEA, Latin America and now really focused on Asia Pacific for the next few years.

So that's great. And in the U.S., you just have to make sure you have the right product for the consumer at the right price point, and we monitor that very, very closely on a week-by-week basis.

You kind of hinted at this, how do you look upon this animeting thing too in terms of international? Are you getting worldwide rights for most of these players how can that help drive international even further?

So for the -- IP is really selective by each territory in country. So in the animeted I'm speaking broadly and Manga and then the tubers and digital entertainers. Each country is vastly different.

So for instance, in EMEA, France is #1 for anime. It's known throughout the world as they have such a huge fan base in France. So then it goes in Italy and then goes U.K. And after France, actually, it's Latin America. Mexico is very big. So you have to really pick and choose.

You can't just think that each of these IPs are going to work in all these territories. So we look at the fan base, we speak to the content holder, the IP holder, and we work closely with them as they have such decades and decades of information of where their fans are, where they're growing.

And we follow what they say is they know their IP better than anyone and then we take our team and really cultivate it per the market and what's appropriate, price point-wise, itemize and content-wise because some of the items that we make for America may not be appropriate for Europe or for Latin America and vice versa.

So we really are focused in each of these areas and segmentations the right product, the right territory, the right IP.

Great. And when you look at international, it keeps it growing as a percentage of the business. I believe Q1 it was about 30%. Longer term, what should we be thinking of the goal for international versus U.S. penetration?

Well, the goal is growth, but the growth is -- it won't keep up at that 30%, 40% always going. It's growing for each of the areas. The reason why EMA has grown significantly. We opened up 5 different distribution centers in various territories to allow us to hit much more and penetrate into the retail market. It's much smaller accounts throughout Europe than it is in America.

So you need this distribution platform. Our domestic business has grown internationally because we have to have backup inventory for all these smaller customers. So we are looking for growth. We're looking for growth in market share. also garnishing, new IP that's appropriate for the marketplace.

So it's a combination and each of these countries will have different growth than the others because of certain IPs work great in the U.K. For instance, France is very, very strong and anime. U.K. is strong, but not as strong. So you'll see a much faster growth in Anmein France, and you'll see a much stronger growth in our general toy business in U.K. versus France just because of the size and shape.

So it's a really dissected approach by each of the countries, territories and the correct IP. But you'll see that enhance the growth, but not all throughout Europe because some of the IP does not work in Europe.

Okay. And last question. You paid out a dollar day last year and cash continues to rise. How do you leverage that? And how do we should look upon that as you may take competitive advantage in being able to spend capital when you want to?

So with capital allocation, we bring this up during our Board meeting, in fact, we just had 1 and something that we review. And based on the environment where cash is king right now in this kind of environment.

And we are investing capital more than normal in -- with regards to the anime initiatives, the tooling, all these new initiatives, it's costing us capital, not material but it does cost us capital.

And with that, we're going to be doing much more marketing, more influential marketing to the consumer in some of these areas. And we have some very surprising new initiatives that we'll announce later in the year that will cost capital, but nothing to where it's a huge expenditure, but it's more than we normally spend in tooling, marketing and overhead for these areas and new initiatives.

That being said, we will look at what we generate in cash through the year and look at what's appropriate. We are seeing opportunities on the acquisition front. We're getting more inbound calls of companies that are looking to sell. So there's a really nice good opportunity out there. We just want to make sure when we utilize our cash, we utilize it on an accretive basis and not just to use the cash to use it.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Stephen Berman for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. I'm sorry for the brief call and also my voice during the prerecorded I had a cold but we're looking forward to speaking shortly and getting on the road and seeing some of the investors throughout the summer and going right into fall. So thank you very much. .

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the JAKKS Pacific Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call with management, who will review financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2025. JAKKS issued its earnings press release earlier today. The earnings release and presentation slides related to today's call are available on the company's website in the Investors section.

On the call this afternoon are Stephen Berman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and John Kimble, Chief Financial Officer. Stephen will first provide an overview of the quarter and full fiscal year, along with highlights of recent performance and current business trends. Then John will provide some additional comments around JAKKS Pacific's financial and operational results. Mr. Berman will then return with additional comments and some closing remarks prior to opening up the call for questions. [Operator Instructions]

Before we begin, the company would like to point out that any comments made about JAKKS Pacific's future performance, events or circumstances, including the estimates of sales, margins, earnings and/or adjusted EBITDA in 2026 as well as any other forward-looking statements concerning 2026 and beyond are subject to safe harbor protection under federal securities laws. These statements reflect the company's best judgment based on current market trends and conditions today and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements.

For details concerning these and other such risks and uncertainties, you should consult JAKKS' most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC as well as the company's other reports subsequently filed with the SEC from time to time.

In addition, today's comments by management will refer to non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share. Unless stated otherwise, the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics has been reconciled to the associated non-GAAP financial measure within the company's earnings press release issued today or previously. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Stephen Berman.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. As 2025 draws to a close, we were proud of what the organization has accomplished and what we ultimately viewed as a defining year in our company's history. While tariff policy created visible pressure on near-term financial performance, we remain disciplined and focused on long-term value creation. Beneath the surface volatility, we made meaningful progress across the areas that matter most, deepening and broadening our relationships with the key factories, licensors and retail partners through a truly global lens while also expanding our strategic relationship portfolio in preparation for a significant new initiatives launching in 2027.

Importantly, we maintain transparency with our shareholders regarding market dynamics and the challenges we faced, and we delivered on our commitments, refusing to pursue short-term top line growth at the expense of bottom line margin integrity. At the same time, we completed our first full year as a cash dividend payer returning $1 per share back to shareholders while preserving our debt-free balance sheet. We exit 2025 stronger, more resilient and better positioned than we entered it, and we are energized by the opportunities ahead in 2026 and beyond.

Globally, our toy and consumer product net sales were roughly flat in fourth quarter and $118 million, down 0.2% from the prior year and down 0.7% from 2023. Costs were down, although in one of its smaller quarters of the year, but have to bring the total company sales down 2.8% from prior year to $127.1 million or roughly flat to our 2023 fourth quarter sales of $127.4 million. Our fourth quarter U.S. business in total was down 7.8% to $86.2 million. Our domestic sales were down, which we attribute to higher tariff burden retail prices resulted in slower second half sell-throughs and by extension, lower fourth quarter replenishment.

Fourth quarter FOB sales to the U.S. were positive versus prior year to somewhat offset the downside. In the rest of the world, our fourth quarter sales were up 9.9% to $41 million. Europe was roughly flat in the quarter, and Latin America was up significantly making up the lost ground from Q3. On a full year basis, our total Rest of World business was $154.1 million, up 5.5% from prior year and slightly ahead of 2023, led by a 14% increase in Europe to $81.4 million.

For the full year, our toy and consumer products business was down 19% as our Evergreen action play, Dolls and Role Play business, in particular, suffered from tariff impacts on customer order patterns and higher consumer prices. All 3 of our Toy and Consumer Products division were down ranging 9% to 23% on a full year basis.

Our custom business was down 10% for the full year with a slight increase in international offsetting the U.S. results. Syndicated data suggests both retail dollars and units were down compared to the prior year, while average prices increased for both children's and adult costumes. Although Halloween is always a holiday with a surge of the last-minute shoppers, we felt that the surge was even later this year to the benefit of brick-and-mortar customers more than online. We did maintain and, in fact, extended our market leadership position for the season.

This past month, we proudly debuted our first fully integrated JAKKS and showroom at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, marked a significant milestone in how we present our global portfolio to the marketplace. The response from customers and partners was overwhelmingly positive as they experience firsthand the full breadth, depth and quality of our offerings, powered by best-in-class licensing relationships from around the world. This successful debut reinforces our confidence in the strength of our strategy and our ability to win across multiple categories and regions.

We see a substantial runway for integrated growth across Europe with particularly strong momentum as we expand further into Eastern Europe and the Middle East. With a unified go-to-market approach, deep retail partnerships and a world-class product pipeline, we are well positioned to build sustained leadership and capture meaningful share in these high-growth markets throughout the season and beyond.

2025 has certainly been a disappointing year when we think of what could have been but I remain pleased by how we adapted, evaluated and reacted without overreacting to a volatile operating environment. We executed in a year and perhaps more importantly, at the same time, remain focused on creating new growth opportunities for the company.

We protected our core business by not chasing top line at the expense of margin, while prudently controlling discretionary spending. We finished the full fiscal year with a gross margin of 32.4%, our highest full year level in over 15 years. Our gross margin dollars were up in fourth quarter year-over-year through a combination of better costing from our factories and improved inventory management. On a full year basis, our SG&A expenses were down 1%.

This is a business where upfront investments are made over 12 to 18 months with the goal of future sales volumes and scaling driving larger profits. Although volumes were not as originally planned for the year, we nonetheless managed to reduce our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA loss to $3.8 million versus $10.2 million in the same quarter last year. That increased our trailing 12 months EBITDA to $35.4 million for the full year of 2025, down from $59.3 million in the prior year when we generated $120 million more in sales.

I will now pass it over to John for some comments, after which I will come back and share a bit more about where we're focused moving forward. John?

Thank you, Stephen, and hello, everyone. A decent quarter here to wrap up a mostly in decent year from a financial perspective. As Stephen mentioned, sales stabilized a bit with the tariff shocks of Q2 and Q3 behind us. Q4 benefited from FOB shipment of our product for the Super Mario Galaxy film, which led our action play and collectibles business to a 19% year-over-year increase with growth from both North America and international. Beyond that, I'd say that most of Q4 sales results ended up being the squeeze from whatever happened or didn't happen in Q3 and didn't really suggest any meaningful change in trend or customer behavior.

Gross margin dollars grew by 11% versus prior year, driven by a slightly better margin percentage. This result is a good outcome and generally consistent with prior quarters in 2025. Full year gross margin ended at 32.4%, better than last year's 30.8% and a bit more consistent with 2023's 31.4%.

Product costs were held in check through persistent and consistent collaboration with our long-term factory network, along with tighter management of inventory, reducing our obsolescence expense. Royalty expenses crept up a bit. Significant sales reductions have driven some minimum unearned royalty payments along with some mix impact. We paid roughly $12 million in U.S. tariffs in 2025, which we feel we recovered through increased pricing. Higher price accompanied by a 1:1 cost addition has the math impact of a lower margin percentage, but that amount was not really material on an enterprise level.

Tariffs were far more impactful in reducing sales. We estimate that our U.S. FOB customers paid nearly $50 million in tariffs on JAKKS product in 2025. We feel that $50 million would have otherwise been allocated towards more actual product and by extension, generate more JAKs revenue in any other year. That amount would be in addition to the additional reduction in units sold compared with our original plans as customers understandably derisk their year. That gives you a bit of insight into the financial implications of last year's actions on our company, although it may not be readily apparent simply looking at the financial statements.

Moving on to more controllable parts of the P&L. Q4 benefited from our actions taken earlier in the year to keep SG&A spending on a tighter leash. Selling expense ended the year down 8% and G&A roughly flat. With the strength and flexibility of our balance sheet, we did this without handicapping any of the product development or new initiatives we have been working on for 2026 and 2027.

Our operating loss and adjusted EBITDA for the quarter were both improvements versus prior year, but not enough to overcome the financial carnage of Q2 and Q3. Full year operating margin dropped to 2.5%, down from 5.7% last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 6.2%, down from 8.6%. It is a significant focus as we start the new year to revisit our processes to continue gross margin expansion while containing SG&A. We know we have the potential to do better from a margin perspective without relying on top line improvement. The ambition would be to do both, which would, by extension, generate meaningful value.

A moral, if not economic victory of note, to offset our margin challenges, calendar year 2025 was the first year our interest income exceeded our interest expense for a very long time. Remembering that in 2020, we paid $21.6 million in interest expense with a full year adjusted EBITDA of $28.1 million helps to put 2025 in context a bit. These results all tally to an adjusted quarterly loss of $0.18 per share, an improvement from a $0.67 loss in Q4 2024, but nonetheless, still dragging down our full year adjusted EPS to $1.62, down from $3.79 for full year 2024. The diluted share count is based on roughly 11.5 million shares.

Turning to the balance sheet. We finished the year with $54 million in cash, down from $70 million last year, obviously impacted by the drop in sales. Our inventory was up slightly at a bit less than $60 million, up from $53 million last year. That change is driven by our expanded distribution footprint in Europe and Mexico. Our U.S. held inventory was actually down 18% year-over-year to the lowest level we finished a year in over 10 years.

Inventory management remains a focus and opportunity for us. Broadly speaking, we feel we read the second half of the year in the U.S. about as well as we could have hoped in terms of forecasting consumer and customer behavior. The hottest of product continue to move fast as hot products do with the bar essentially raised for everything else with more loop warm results. We don't feel we missed sales in Q4, and we feel good about our U.S. inventory on hand. We also obviously feel good that imported product from China is now taxed to 20% compared to the 30% we were paying for a lot of the year, and we didn't have to import any more of that higher cost than we did.

The company remains committed to the path of being a meaningful and consistent dividend payer. Despite a somewhat soft year financially, we did manage to generate over $8 million in cash flow from operations while also funding $11.2 million in common dividend payments. As mentioned in our release, the Board approved a Q1 payment of $0.25 per common share, payable at the end of Q1. The record date is February 27, and the payable date will be March 30.

I think the pressures of the past year have pushed us to find new areas for incremental improvement, and that will be a lot of our focus this year to see what we can figure out. In a company of our size, we have the ability to make decisions faster and by extension capture opportunities sooner, so that's what I hope we can do.

And now back to Stephen for some more comments about the year ahead.

Thank you, John. The biggest story for us at the start of this year is certainly the lease of the Super Mario Galaxy movie from illumination. We are extremely excited for this new product launch, which will be available for purchase late February. The best-selling 5 and scale figures are back in line along with new scale of many figures, new play sets, plush and more. The film releases April 1, and our line gives fans of all ages the chance to recreate their favorite film moments in the movie. This is a follow-up to the Super Mario Brothers movie, which went on to generate the largest theatrical box office of 2023. So you could imagine we're beyond thrilled to be back in the mix again here supporting this launch. .

Our Sonic DC crossover product launch received a great response in fourth quarter with exclusive retailer launches in both the U.S. and in Europe. Distribution of that line is going wide in the new year with new items like the DC Sonic Batmobile being added at key retailers. Sega is celebrating the 35th anniversary of Sonic all year with various activations. We are participating by launching special packaging, commemorating this event along with some exclusive items. We have other exciting news and plans around Sonic in 2026, but we're not ready to share those today, but stay tuned.

Moving over to our Disney doll business, we'll leave the holiday season and toy first season with solid momentum behind Disney darlings, our latest homegrown Disney IP and the strong position of Style Collection and Disney's Eli. For those of you unfamiliar with Disney Darling, our launch in the Nutrien doll category, similar to our Ilyline, these are caricatures in figural form, but an approach we've developed in a partnership with Disney to bring new and innovative ways for our consumers to engage with the Disney brand. The intent is to spark the emotional response consumers feel when engaging with Disney. The joy and happiness with engaging experiences a bit of the Disney magic.

These are truly beautiful dollars delivered with premium quality. And what's even more magical is that unlike other baby dolls, they are 100% joyful and happy, and there's no tears and no crying. Our soft launch of this line sold through well in fall, leading us to expand listings in the U.S. this year as well as a lot of interest and commitments internationally coming out of this past month, Toy Fair. We've seen enough positive feedback to feel that we have a winner here that can steadily build this year and into the next and to being another solid foundational piece of business for us. Congratulations to the team on this one.

We're also supporting the live-action theatrical release of Moana in early July this year. Moana has been a steady part of our business for over the past 10 years going back to the original animated release in 2026. We're happy to be able to bring back some of the most popular toys we've created over the years as a new audience engages with the story this summer. Our focus items include Moana's necklace, all the more aspirational with The Rock repricing his role to the film, our the screaming chicken and our super popular Moana large dolls. We also have a couple of additional exciting developments coming on our Disney Doll front later this year.

In the other part of our doll division, we continually steady build our private label business with major retailers in the U.S. and expanding into Europe. It's an extremely broad array of dolls, Role Play toys and related subcategories that allow the retailers to make additional margin while the consumers get a high-quality, on-trend design product at a much lower price. In this area, we have several new launches that we will discuss in the following quarters that will be launched during the fall holiday season.

In 2025, the company saw momentum across its action sports portfolio with Element emerging as a powerful growth engine in the second half of the year, expanded distribution and deepened retail partnerships most notably with Walmart, Amazon and Academy Sports and outdoors, significantly increased brand visibility, strengthened shelf presence, and drove meaningful gains in sell-through during the critical holiday period. These results reflect the company's disciplined execution, strategic product innovation, and unwavering focus on aligning with leading retail partners to deliver compelling value within the active and early play category.

Looking ahead, we are highly encouraged by rising retail confidence and growing consumer engagement across acesports as the industry builds towards the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. Skateboard sales trends are once again approaching elevated levels seen in 2020 and '21, figuring the renewed demand and sustained category momentum. This strengthening trajectory across skateboards and the adjacent Action Sports segment positions the company to further accelerate investment in innovation, expand strategic partnerships and drive durable long-term brand growth and shareholder value.

With our Disguise business we supported a wide range of new theatrical releases, we're excited to support Toy Story 5, which debuts in late June as each installment of this franchise has been great for the costume business. Also from Disney will be the Moana release and the latest Essendant's installment, Wicked Wonderland.

The second half of this year also has new movies coming from Minions as well as PAW Patrol. We will have some exciting new additions to the lineup coming from some new licensor relationships we've been busy establishing. So keep an eye out for these announcements coming soon.

Finally, Halloween is once again on the weekend in 2026, Saturday, to be specific. So ideally that drives more energy and activity beyond traditional tricker treating.

Those give you some highlights we're seeing coming into the market in the first half of the year. We remain very focused on some additional launches that we will have more in 2027 impact. Even if we can drop in some initial exclusives before the end of this year. Although a lot has changed in the past 12 months, we feel we are stronger in position today with more paths to grow than a year ago. Currently, we see this year as a low to mid-single-digit top line growth year with a continued focus on expanding margins, while we set up to maximize the potential of several potentially impactful new launches in 2027. There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm pleased with our progress to date and been able to share more publicly about some of the exciting things we've been working on.

And with that, we'll take a couple of questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Eric Beder of Small Cap Consumer Research LLC.

A lot going on here. Let's talk a little bit about the whole FOB model. When you look -- obviously, that got disrupted last year with the tariffs and other pieces and ramping it back up. When you look at that model and your retailers are seeing for '26 and beyond, is it back to the way the model was? And what kind of tweaks are you doing if not and it's not what kind of tweaks are there being done in the model in terms of how the retailers and yourselves are handling the FOB model?

Firstly, thank you, Eric. We're continuing to focus on an FOB first business that's been since inception. Last year, we stayed very focused on it as well, but we had to adapt based on where we manufactured, whether it was in China, Indonesia, so on and so forth in Southeast Asia. So we had a slight decrease in FOB, but not materially. Back into 2026 and '27, we will be moving forward again on an FOB first basis. At the same time, a lot of the major retailers in the U.S. have a first cost of sale program that we work with them to have the impact of the therapy, the less of an impact to them and ourselves at the same time. So we're working through some of the major customers and secondary customers on a first sale basis. So we've learned a lot through this tariff, call it, congestion and confusion throughout last year, but we have a pretty good handle on it with our retail partners who we've worked extremely closely with. And our sales teams that are really entwined with our major retailers have worked very hand-in-hand with the buyers as well as the financial side of our retailers. To make sure that we stay focused on an FOB basis because it behooves both the retail for them to make more margin, Balloons JAKKS as a sense of cost of capital, and it allows hopefully, the consumer to have a little bit lower price and bringing it in on a domestic basis.

How should we be thinking about the international opportunity with FOB? I know that you mentioned the inventory rose a little bit, primarily because of the international players. And some of them aren't, I guess, physically -- or physically big enough to do this. What's kind of the thought process there?

Again, as a company and whole, not just in, call it, North America, but worldwide, we are a primarily focused FOB company. But in order for us to expand and see the growth that we are achieving, both in Latin America, the EMEA and now new focuses -- additional focus is Southeast Asia. We do need to have distribution centers across strategic areas in order for us to achieve the customer base that is less the size of the major retailers that you see. In Europe, there's a lot of smaller customers that make up a lot of the business. So we have a mix on an FOB basis. First and then follow up with domestic inventory in order for us to achieve growth as required in those territories. Many of the customers are not large enough to do an FOB and order a container or so on and so forth. So we adapt to that and work with them by each of the segments in which we're in, whether it's the Disney segment, the boys segment, seasonal and so on. So where appropriate, we work correctly with the retailer on the size of the product, pricing of the product and the bulk of the item in order to have the best shipping cost for them and price points to them.

So we have warehouses of 5 different parts of the EMEA. We have been in Latin America. And we've now, as you see, at the end of this year, we brought in inventory to help us grow those areas with an FOB first basis as well as the backup inventory on a domestic basis.

Okay. Obviously, this year was tough for the entire toy industry. You guys managed to maintain your cash -- no debt basis, lots of cash. How have you -- have you been able to lever that? It sounds like you have based on '27, how are you able to deliver that in terms of adding new licenses, expanding the relationship and kind of moving up the ladder in terms of kind of the licensee of choice going forward?

Being healthy and clean and have a strong balance sheet. The licensors appreciate it very much. There are always in companies that have financial issues, and they don't want to take the risk of someone to ruining their opportunities within their owned IP. So we, with that, have been very focused, not giving away top line revenue and to erode our profit, we took what was the right approach with retail, retail inventory and our own inventory to not push for higher sales and have that erode margin. We focused on margin with healthy sales. And as you can see, I think we were up 380 basis points for the year -- for the quarter, as for -- I'll go back to give you the exact numbers. But we focused on the margin enhancement and retailers and licensors like that. At the same time, we've done an expansive amount of traveling worldwide, working on new initiatives, and we have some really exciting initiatives coming forward, and we'll be excited to talk about as soon as some of these deals get all accomplished. But during this period of time, we have focused on building 26 and 27 aggressively and licensors have all fallen in line with us and are very supportive.

Okay. I know you don't give financial guidance, but just conceptually, Q1 last year was an extremely strong quarter. It was also a quarter, I believe, where you had a significant amount of product that was shipped early because people wanted to get in front of tariffs. How should we be thinking given that the flows in the quarters are so up and down last year, just conceptually in terms of how this year is going to go?

Yes, I'll jump in on that a little bit. To your point, Q1 was a really robust quarter for us. this year -- this past year. And on 1 hand, we have some momentum, shipping product for Pemario/Galaxy as we pointed out in the call. But at the same time, too, is long-time listeners know, Q1 is always our smallest quarter. And so I've made the comment in the past. Q1 for us or maybe for everyone in the industry is like a Q1 of a basketball game, don't get 3 files at the end of the first quarter, and you'll kind of be okay. So really, we're probably thinking more first half, second half. And as to where the line gets drawn at the end of Q1, to be honest, we're not really overly fixating on it.

And our next question comes from Derek Johnson of Seaport Research Partners.

So one on POS. What was that in the quarter? How did a trend and evolve through the quarter? And then inventory at retail, what does yours look like? But also more broadly, the industry, is there any pockets of inventory that could clutter and you affect the industry that way?

Yes. So I'll take the first part of that, and Stephen can circle back on the inventory piece. From a POS point of view, you can read into the fact that we weren't bragging about it. It is that we weren't thrilled with it. But as we mentioned on the call, the super hot, like new launch items blew through in a way that we were happy to see and gave us confidence that broadly what we're doing. But I think broadly speaking, with where we saw higher retailer prices, that slowed down POS for those segments. So notwithstanding all the other kind of hair on the topic of POS in terms of what is the underlying margin for that POS I think that's kind of what we'd have on that. From a retail inventory point of view, Stephen is a little bit closer to that. I'll let him...

So I'll go through some of the two major retailers in the U.S. We're down. And one of them, down 21% year-over-year and down about 4% on another. So our inventory at retail is very tight for us, which is good. We did -- again, as I said earlier, in the Eric asked the question, is we did not want to chase top line and worry about the inventory levels after the holiday season. So we really focused on shipping what was appropriate and focusing on profitability.

And to answer what I did, I mentioned earlier, I just want to make sure I clarify. We were 380 basis points higher in margin for fourth quarter than the year prior. I just want to make sure I got that out there.

Yes. No, that's impressive. And so how would you describe the promotional activity and perhaps sales allowances in the fourth quarter?

For us, they were quite normal or a little bit less than normal for I think a lot of the major -- our competitors put a lot of heavy in discounting and promotional. But to me, looking at what we've seen throughout the year, it was a very cautionary year because of the tariffs and not knowing what the consumer kind of appetite was. So again, we're pretty close to what we do. We sit with the factories, we sit with the retailers. So we did hear there's a lot of promotion activity that was done heavily in November, December. But for us, there wasn't much.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn it back to Stephen Berman for closing remarks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for today and finalizing and finishing 2025, and we are extremely excited for '26 and '27 and look forward to our next call. Thank you again.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to JAKKS Pacific Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call with Management, who will review financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. JAKKS issued its earnings press release earlier today. The earnings release and presentation slides related to today's call are available on the company's website in the Investors section.

On the call this afternoon are Stephen Berman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and John Kimble, Chief Financial Officer. Stephen will first provide an overview of the quarter and full fiscal year, along with highlights of recent performance and current business trends. Then John will provide some additional comments around JAKKS Pacific financial and operational results. Mr. Berman will then return with additional comments and some closing remarks prior to opening up the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Before we begin, the company would like to point out that any comments made about JAKKS Pacific future performance, events or circumstances, including the estimates of sales, margins, earnings and/or adjusted EBITDA in 2025 as well as any other forward-looking statements concerning 2025 and beyond are subject to safe harbor projection under federal securities law. These statements reflect the company's best judgment based on current market trends and conditions today and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements.

For details concerning these and other such risks and uncertainties, you should consult JAKKS' most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC as well as the company's other reports subsequently filed with the SEC in time and time.

In addition, today's comments by management will refer to non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share. Unless stated otherwise, the most direct comparable GAAP financial metric has been reconciled to the associated non-GAAP financial measure within the company's earnings press release issued today or previously. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Stephen Berman, the floor is yours.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. As we reflect on our year-to-date results and think about the year coming to an end, the tariff levels have varied significantly, starting at 10% and then ranging from approximately 30% to over 140% depending on source and origin, creating added uncertainty for retailers and manufacturers alike. This has continued to delay holiday purchase orders with many seasonal programs shifting from August to October.

In response, we have taken a deliberate and conservative approach for the current fiscal year, prioritizing margins, applying careful pricing discipline, maintain tight cost controls and emphasize the most profitable product opportunities. Lean inventory management, target lower inventory levels and accelerate sell-through across markets to maintain balance sheet strength. Future forecast product strategy, invest in a robust and innovative 2026, '27 product pipeline designed to resonate with global consumers and support long-term brand growth across a broader category of assortments. Direct import FOB orders, the foundation of our business since inception. They are placed months in advance to ensure factory scheduling and retailer logistics.

However, major U.S. retailers pushed back their Halloween and fall toy set dates by nearly 2 months, effectively removing two of the most important selling months from the calendar. This shift combined sharply with higher product costs, drove a significant reduction in Q3 sales orders, extending the softness we saw in Q2.

The impact cascades across the full year. Without August and September sales, retailers lose the early read they traditionally rely on to chase winning products ahead of the holiday season. Now reorders will happen when retailers and wholesalers step in, commit inventory and bet confidently on the right products at the right price.

That has never been our approach to the business. We are not changing now. Although we always selectively support a limited number of high confidence SKUs for backup inventory, with product currently tariffed at 30% of cost upon import, we have chosen to be even more selective of how much of that we want to do.

Our worldwide inventory was around $72 million at the end of Q3, inclusive of some tariff expense. Although that number is higher than the $64 million from this time last year, the driver is our international expansion as our high U.S.-held inventory is actually lower compared with this time last year. We are not going to build domestic inventory in the U.S. this year on the premise that retailers will suddenly want the product they were unwilling to buy in Q3.

Year-to-date, net sales in our overall business are down 21% versus last year, 24% in Toys/Consumer Products and 8% in Costumes. For the quarter, Toys and Consumer Products was down 41% to $156.1 million, our lowest Q3 in a very long time. Costumes were only down 4% to $55.1 million as we scramble to recover some of the lost sales from Q2 while also continuing to steadily grow this business internationally.

We talked about this year being an exercise in patience, and I think that continues to be the case. We continue to partner closely with our China-based factory network, which I just returned from another trip to Asia to personally share growth initiatives we have in the works for 2026 and '27 and gain alignment around our shared businesses.

Many of our largest factories are continuing their expansion in other Southeast Asian countries, and we will continue to work with them to ensure we have the maximum flexibility to adapt changing conditions and restrictions. We are moving forward with the presumption that products will be burdened with a 30% cost upcharge from the levels we would normally expect. This is reflective of whether the product is coming from the established, efficient China supply chain and tariffed at 30% or whether it's coming from the more in-progress, higher cost, but currently approximately 20% in Southeast Asian territories.

This is now enhancing our product development decisions for 2026 and beyond. It is obviously something we couldn't plan for in 2025. In addition, we believe retailers will learn from the holiday selling season what level of price increases consumers are willing to bear, which should give them more confidence in placing orders that are consistent with the FOB product ordering time line.

Since this disruption started back in early February, we have been clear on our financial objective to avoid panic, preserve cash and navigate to safer clear waters. To that end, although our top line has dropped, we are pricing for tariffs, as we said we would, and our gross margin percentages has held reasonably well accordingly. At 32% in the quarter, it is down from last year, 33.8%, but we still feel is a strong result as inevitably, the addition of tariff costs erodes a percentage even if it's 100% recouped by higher selling prices.

Moving down the P&L, we have looked to reduce spending and delay or cancel projects and initiatives without clear near-term payback. Lower sales have also meant less work in our U.S. warehouse, providing additional savings. Overall, SG&A in the quarter was down 6% and is flat on a year-to-date basis.

The cumulative impact was an adjusted EBITDA of $36.5 million in the quarter, down from $74.4 million in the same quarter last year and reduced our trailing 12-month EBITDA to $29 million.

I will now pass it over to John for some more details on the financials, and then I will come back to further discuss some things we are doing this holiday season and have in the works for 2026 and beyond. John?

Thank you, Stephen, and hi, everybody. Starting with an additional bit of cleanup on sales. Stephen explained some of the details about how FOB sales were particularly challenged this quarter. To add a bit more context around that, 93% of the year-over-year drop in sales came from FOB shipments. That number was actually over 100% in Q2. Uncertainty really isn't the friend of buying larger quantities of product with a longer lead time.

Separately, as regular listeners know, our international business was booming earlier in the year, reflective of a multiyear effort to elevate our performance outside the U.S. As we mentioned last quarter, we knew that it would slow down a bit in Q3, and in fact, it did. As those in our industry know, the dividing line between Q2 and Q3 from an FOB sale perspective is always a bit arbitrary, yet another reason why we are always talking about full year results. So there's nothing material happening that changes the story when it comes to international. This is more the reality that looking at quarterly results in a seasonal business will often give you lumpy results.

Year-to-date, international as reported is roughly flat, minus 0.3%. If we liberated Canada from our North America reported numbers, we'd be up 4% year-to-date for the non-U.S. markets. Overall, we're still very bullish about what's happening with international. We are steadily dialing up the sophistication level of how we're approaching a wide range of markets, following a walk-before-you-run approach.

To make this a bit clearer, we see the U.K., Western Europe and Mexico at one level of maturity. Eastern Europe, Central and South America are beginning to take shape behind them. And from there, you can contemplate the Middle East and revisiting our approach across Asia. But we feel all these markets have a line of sight to grow faster than the U.S. in the years ahead, particularly when it comes to our core business. You can hopefully see why we continue to talk about the meaningful international opportunity for us.

From a forecasting perspective, the challenge is that the European business, in particular, is more domestic replenishment-centric as it scales up, which leaves us in the more traditional we'll-know-when-we-get-there camp, planning for weekly replenishment as we approach the holidays, with added complexity around inventory management.

Through the lens of the various product divisions, the macro situation is smothering most bursts of goodness that are trying to fight through and be heard. Sell-in for Disney's Moana 2 has been a favorable comparison year-to-date versus prior year. Saga's Sonic continues to do tremendous business and has had great weekly sell-through all year and the DC-Sonic mashup we teased last quarter is flying off the shelf this month as well.

We do not have any toy rights to significant second half of 2025 film releases, which always makes for a challenging comparison. Many of our newer owned brand or private label launches were derisked by the retailers and by extension, have suffered from delayed planogram sets. These are essentially downgraded to fall soft launches and ideally, we'll get enough traction to reset in the new year.

Touching briefly on POS and building on Stephen's comments on timing. Frankly, some of the key accounts in Q3 were representing a product line that looked more like a greatest hits of things from spring that didn't sell, more than a lineup that was particularly inspiring. Everyone has been pushing forward stock on hand that was landed prior to tariffs and customers have been scrambling to adapt their 6- to 12-month rolling outlook as the rules have moved around.

When it comes to pricing direct import product that shipped immediately after the 100-plus percent window closed, many customers had to deal with paying the tariff on top of their cost of product, which would include the profit margin for a company like us, and in the case of licensed goods, also include the licensor's royalty share. This snowballs the hurdle rate that the retailer is then looking to mark up from, which is why you've seen some retail prices out in the marketplace that are 20%, 30% or 40% more than what you might have seen pre-tariff regime.

Most retailers are trying to protect the lowest retail price points while balancing the product line architecture and feeling out where consumer price sensitivity reaches a breaking point. We feel it's a mixed bag as to how they're doing on this front with room for improvement.

We are continuing to work with all our U.S. accounts to make sure they understand the various Customs programs that exist to minimize their tariff exposure. Although these are tedious bureaucratic processes, we are supporting them to enable the lowest consumer prices and we can continue to support our retailers with the margins they expect from their direct import business.

We are also engaging licensors to recalibrate royalty rates for newly relevant selling methods especially where the customer is still buying FOB, but we are paying the tariff on their behalf. We need the licensors to recalibrate rates here to ensure we are not paying a royalty on the tariff value because if we are, we will have to further move up price which exacerbates the increase in consumer prices. That math is already unfortunately baked into any tariff-increased domestic prices and is another reason why we will continue to move customers away from domestic ordering whenever we can.

With that being said, in the quarter, U.S. POS at our top three accounts tended to be relatively subpar from a dollar perspective and worse from a unit perspective. On a year-to-date basis, in aggregate, we're down mid-single digits with retail inventory up mid-single digits. Keep in mind, however, when retail changes price on product, it revalues all the inventory in their system. So I can't really give you an apples-to-apples read on year-over-year retail inventory based on the information that flows back to us.

With a similar bit of logic, from an industry data perspective, we feel while there continue to be pockets of exuberance around trading cards and construction toys originating from Denmark. But for the most part, any other comments about dollars being up is more pricing than unit-driven consumer demand.

Turning back to our P&L. Gross margin was a respectable 32% in the quarter and is 32.8% year-to-date. Cash spent on tariffs this year totaled around $8 million through the end of the quarter. Some of that amount has flowed through the P&L and some is balance sheet inventory value. Belt-tightening SG&A resulted in a good quarter, but clearly, we have lost a lot of scale with this level of top line drop. Things like interest income year-to-date have been outpacing interest expense associated with tapping our credit line, which we did some of this quarter.

Adjusted diluted EPS for the quarter was $1.80, down from $4.79 this time last year. On a year-to-date basis, we're at $1.79 compared to $4.50 for the first 9 months of last year. We finished the quarter with $27.8 million in cash, up from $22.3 million last year. Understandably, our AR is down substantially. We are nonetheless comfortable with our flight path here on the cash front.

One final piece of housekeeping. This month, our S-3, also known as a shelf registration, was expiring as it is now 3 years old despite never having a reason to use it, in order to maintain as much flexibility as we can over the next 3 years, we renewed that registration, although we have no immediate plans for its use. I'm also happy to share that the Board has approved the Q4 cash dividend of $0.25 per share, payable on December 29 to shareholders of record as of November 28.

And now I'll pass things back to Stephen.

Thank you, John. Since tomorrow is Halloween, we want to give you a more detailed update there. As a reminder, the Costume business essentially stopped when tariffs surged to over 100% in Q2. The team did an excellent job weeks later trying to patch up volume back once the 100% tariff period had passed. And some of that business was recovered with a bit of it shipping this quarter. But ultimately, this is not the Costume year we envisioned when we started the year, although we were pleased with our progress outside the U.S.

At retail, we've seen larger accounts increasing retail prices significantly. Some opening price points are being held to pre-tariff levels, but we've seen a large portion of our line with retails increasing 15%, 20%, up to 40% in some accounts. Unfortunately, this has negatively impacted unit sell-throughs. Syndicated market data seems to confirm that this is widespread with all the leading manufacturers showing double-digit declines in dollars during the first 5 weeks of the season compared to last year with worse numbers in terms of units.

Although we are happy to maintain our market leadership position according to the same data, this is obviously troubling trend. We know this is a business that traditionally happens very late, so we hope that the accounts have a great week this week and of course, wish everyone a safe and fun Halloween weekend.

Looking forward, it's predictable and uninteresting for toy companies in October to reference that all-important holiday season. Nonetheless, we think it's appropriate to point out there is a much wider range of possible outcomes for the next 2 months than recent years. We could not know with any certainty what retailers would do from a pricing and promotional perspective or how consumers will respond. Retailers may be motivated to adjust their plans based off consumer behavior, and that loop will essentially continue every week through the end of the year.

Longer term, I would like to highlight two separate areas that teams have been swarming over this year and particularly over the past 10 months. The first area is partnership work we do with our global licensors to grow our mutual businesses, which often involves myself and leadership of all of our different areas to make these things happen and make them happen quickly. Market by market, property by property, customer by customer, we are steadily asking ourselves and our retail partners what we are missing. Where is the next opportunity for us to pursue.

The Disney Darling baby doll line we mentioned last quarter is an example of this type of work. There's no new entertainment driving that product line, but the collaboration by our two teams have brought a great product line to market to address an opportunity that we see. And so far, the initial sell-throughs and reaction has been terrific. We recently shared 2026 plans with retailers for how we see the product line expanding in the new year, and the feedback has been extremely positive.

It's difficult to get into the details of some of these projects for confidentiality and competitive reasons. But to paint a bit of a picture, there are markets in Europe where we're challenging the local teams to stretch to more outlandish goals for key items and recharacterizing what role JAKKS can play for some of the largest European toy retailers, 12 months per year, not just the peak holiday season, again, market by market, account by account.

In the U.S., we are redoubling our efforts in private label space, pitching for significant programs that could be meaningful value creators for us and the relevant retailers. Our Target role-play business, in particular, has continued to be an exceptional performer for us and Target this year and we look forward to that business continuing in the years ahead.

As a broader theme, we have been finalizing several extensions to our most substantial licensing agreements for the next several years. Inclusive of the new entertainment releases that licensors have slated during that time. We are often constrained about what we can say on that front and when we can say it. As an example, we are happy to begin our FOB shipping for some new movie tie-in product this quarter with on-shelf date in the middle of Q1, and we'll be excited to tell you more details about it ideally on our year-end conference call.

On a different note, we began making a concentrated effort to build out our new business pillar for us from a licensor and intellectual property perspective. Outside of what you've seen us do historically, but certainly informed by it, we aren't ready to get into the details, but we see this initiative as a meaningful market opportunity for us. We have been talking to a very wide range of companies to secure the necessary rights to get us started. This has been in the works for a very long time. We are not ready to get into the details yet, but we see this initiative as a meaningful market opportunity for us.

We've been talking to a very wide range of companies worldwide to secure the necessary rights. We see it leveraging most of our existing strengths but also extending our product line into other hardline and softline areas which aren't necessarily toys in the classic sense. But nonetheless, we feel the appeal is extremely passionate to a major fan base of consumers alike. We think this effort can extend our presence into other aisles at retail, in addition to opening different doors from a customer perspective. So we're extremely excited and plan to share more in the coming months ahead.

We would envision a small amount of this product to ship in the second half of 2026 with a much broader line launching for spring 2027. And again, we hope we can start talking about that more in bits and pieces in the weeks ahead and months ahead as soon as agreements and plans are finalized.

And with that, we'll take a couple of questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Eric Beder from Small Cap.

I want to kind of -- so there's so many things going on here. I just want to step it back a little bit. When we step back and look at what, in theory, the new normal is, and I know we're trying to figure that out right now in the midst of what is the biggest season for toys. What do you look at as the drivers, the key drivers for your business model that lets you move around this and lets you succeed to levels you've done in prior pieces?

I know the FOB piece is going to probably be, to some extent, problematic here given what some of the other retailers are doing, but I fully respect what you're doing with it. But how should we be thinking about longer term, pick whatever period you want and where you can kind of take it from where it...

Eric, Stephen Berman. Just so you know, I apologize in advance. I've had a brief cold, and my voice is a little bit here and there.

But to answer the question, first and foremost, [indiscernible] and certainly is what's required at retail. That's what they're looking for, and that's kind of where we stand today. Up until today, when we just heard the recent fentanyl tariff being dropped by 10%, which -- waiting for a Custom documentation, which would bring new tariffs in our world to approximately 20% from the China market. This is the new norm. So retailers are kind of just adjusting to it and adapting to it.

To jump into what you just said about the FOB topic, now going back to the FOB business, when this just occurred, retailers will be scrambling to jump back in on an FOB basis because they know what the tariff is now currently and where we stand today. So we're happy with that news.

The business itself, and again, I'm sorry, for my voice, now has more certainty because throughout this year, you've had retailers cancel orders because of the tariffs, retailers push their August set dates to October, and that's done now. So going into next year, the new norm -- it's the new norm, and I think it will be back to what it is the following years past.

So for JAKKS, we are so conservative in our approach and want to be reality to our shareholders, our retailers and licensors. That's why from what we've gone out to retail in North America and Asia, we see sales higher because of the higher sales price, but lower in unit dollars -- in unit volume, excuse me. And we don't see that really changing through the year, and we hear other commentary. So we're taking a very solid approach about building cash, keeping overhead low and building '26 and '27 aggressively.

There's no reason for us to try to be heroes this year and push out inventory to try to make numbers. We want to make sure that the retailers have low inventory of our product, and we want to be low in inventory for JAKKS going into 2026, so we can have a strong year across the board.

As I said, we have a lot of things that we haven't announced that we will be forward-looking to announcement. For competitive reasons, we need to hold off and [ wait until ] these agreements and plans are put in place. But that being said, this is a year that has had such uncertainty. And as JAKKS, we played it very much close to the vest and make sure that we ran our business like we should for our shareholders to make sure that we have the years to come with solid growth.

Okay. Switching gears, I guess, to the near term, you have the Super Mario Bros. movie coming out, how should we be thinking about that as an opportunity here, it's coming out -- I know it's coming out end of Q1 or early Q2. How should we be thinking about that as a potential kind of first time that shows a little bit of normalization going on here.

We're excited for it, the retailers are excited for it worldwide. Our factories across Southeast Asia have been prepared for it. There's been -- Nintendo itself has a great track record as a classic evergreen product line. And with the enhancement of the Super Mario movie that you mentioned, it will just bring much more excitement to an area that has not had much real excitement, a toyrific platform this year. There hasn't been really any major toyrific excitement that's happened this year.

So going into '26, it's one of the first major exciting initiatives that's going to be in theaters and for consumers and retailers. So we, our retailers, Nintendo and Universal are very excited about it.

Okay. And I want to conserve your voice, so I'll just throw one more in here. This DC collaboration, it's unique. I'm sure it's bringing toy excitement to people here even with all the things going on here. How -- this kind of, I guess, mash-up, how should we be thinking about this as opportunities going forward to do more of these kind of pieces that work great as toys, but they're also work great for the adult collector who does this kind of stuff.

Well, the Sonic team that sells Sonic itself has continued to outperform, I think, everyone's expectations worldwide. And when they worked with DC due to the cross collaboration, it just enhanced the awareness of Sonic and as well as DC. So what it did is brought the older age group from the DC era into the younger age group of Sonic, which actually has a young fan, a kidult fan and a collector fan.

So it's bringing a much larger collaboration and just bringing new eyeballs and new excitement without having any theatrical release behind it, it just brought two great iconic IPs together. And what we see with how Saga worked with DC and vice versa, the collaboration has been extremely strong and looking very much forward to more collaborations like that.

Our next question comes from Thomas Forte of Maxim Group.

So Stephen, I have a novel approach. I have three questions. And then I'll ask the question, answer the question, and then you can use as little voice as possible to see how I did with the answer.

So first on -- so the first one is, how should we think about normalization? Stated differently, can you briefly recap to help us compare and contrast your first quarter, second quarter and third quarter tariff-related impact?

Now my answer would be, if I oversimplify, it seems to me that the first quarter was a little-to-no impact, then the second quarter was a meaningful impact, but the third quarter is where it had the most impact.

Okay. Great. Tom, thank you. First off, you're correct. First quarter had nominal impact. It had a scare effect, but had no impact to what was shipped at retail at sell-throughs. Second quarter in Halloween was a debacle because we had material cancellations because of the impact going from Liberation Day to the 145% approximate tariff. We had more cancellations than I think in the history of our company in Halloween during that period. Then -- so that had the cancellations, not major impact of tariffs at retail yet with price points.

Going to third quarter, for Halloween, we retracted and scrambled and got more business. But at the same time, the tariff impact had a material impact on the sell-through and unit sales. So as I mentioned in the pre-recorded script, the product prices have gone from 15% up to 40% at retail, which truly affected the sell-throughs, and you're seeing it through the circular data that's out in the market.

That being said, we are still #1 leaders in that space, but all the people in our industry have been affected double digits. So we're not the only ones out there, but we are still in the best position.

Going to -- now to where we stand today, the impact of tariffs have gone across the board to all retailers in U.S. to where you've seen some retailers have kept prices to try to bring customers in and have them as loss leaders. But if you go out and you do store checks, and we've had all of our salespeople go out, the price points have risen quite substantially across the board.

So we -- what our approach is, is we don't want to take risks having inventory at the year-end and hurting our 2026 year. And we don't want to hurt ourselves having inventory in our warehouse waiting for orders to come. So we, collectively, as a management took an approach, let's build international, where things are going well, let's be conservative in America. We still have everything doing strong for us, but it's just not exciting. So Sonic, Nintendo, Disney Princess, ily, private label all these areas of businesses, these all are doing very nice, but it's just not an exciting year because of all the uncertainty.

That being said, uncertainly going into 2026 will be a lot less. And I think based off what we gather in road shows with retailers, we, JAKKS, because of the diversification and all the newness that we have coming out, are excited for next year and beyond excited for '27 as well. We have a tremendous amount of new IP for Halloween on top of our current great IP. We have a lot of theatrical releases happening. We have a lot of new announcements and extensions that we're working on. A lot of new private label initiatives. So we've gotten through the worst this year and are just looking forward to '26 and are gearing up.

I've been in Asia, I think, four times this year with our partners, working with them across Southeast Asia, primarily China as well as Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. But that being said, China is still the main part of where we are going to manufacture for safety reasons, quality, quickness and partnerships. But the factories that we work with in China are also in these [ epic ] territories to where -- if and when we need to move, we move with them because they are our partners.

So we are just really getting through this year, keeping cash is king, inventory low, G&A low and getting prepared for just a great 2026 compared to what 2025 has been.

Excellent. And I failed in getting you to conserve your voice, right? So the second one is, when thinking about your sales in '25 versus '24, how should we think about the impact of tariffs versus the impact of tough licensing comparisons? Is it 50-50, 75-25, meaning 75% tariffs, 25% tough comparisons.

I don't know if we can answer that right now. It's a very good question. I'd like to spend time digesting it. I think the tariff result, let's call it, 20%, 30%, it is what it is, and that's the new norm. And everyone will take a hit from the factories to ourselves, to the retailers and the consumers. I just can't compare '24, I have not thought about what it was. We had Moana and some other theatrical initiatives. But we have so many new initiatives happening at '26, that it's too hard for me to compare them right now. And if you just give us time, we can go off-line, in a day or so and get back to you.

Okay. So last one, current thoughts on strategic M&A, including your opportunities for accretive acquisitions, seems like you would have a lot of great opportunities given company's potential desire to exit now that they've gone through both COVID and tariffs.

Great question. We're seeing quite a few various opportunities that are coming to us. I'm sure there's many other companies as well. But at this time, we just want to get through this year and see where these companies lie after the year-end because I think many of these companies that we've been reviewing, looking and discussing are having such a difficult time. I think things will be cheaper going into '26 because of cash needs, licenses. The licensors are very uncomfortable with companies that are not healthy.

So there's a lot of opportunities, not just acquiring companies, but they're acquiring areas of businesses, of licenses that the licensors don't want to work with because of uncertainty. So there's a lot of really good opportunities. But even with all that, we look at '26 as a strong year for JAKKS and '27. As where we stand today, we've gotten through the worst, and we're looking for the best now.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Stephen Berman, CEO, for closing remarks.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time today. Looking forward to the year-end fourth quarter call to go through our 2026 year excitement and hope we'll have much more good and positive moves to come. Thank you very much.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.