ACU

Good day, and welcome to the Acme United First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Call. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Walter Johnsen, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Welcome to the First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call for Acme United Corporation. I am Walter C. Johnsen, Chairman and CEO. With me is Paul Driscoll, our Chief Financial Officer, who will first read a safe harbor statement. Paul?

Forward-looking statements in this conference call, including, without limitation, statements related to the company's plans, strategies, objectives, expectations, intentions and adequacy of capital and other resources are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, among others, those arising as a result of a challenging global macroeconomic environment characterized by continued high inflation, high interest rates and the imposition of new tariffs or changes in existing tariff rates. In addition, we have experienced supply chain disruptions in the past, and we may experience these disruptions in the future. We are also subject to additional risks and uncertainties as described in our periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in our current earnings release.

Thank you, Paul. Acme United had a difficult first quarter of 2026. While our net sales increased 14% to $52.3 million, our net income was $985,000 compared to $1.6 million last year, and earnings per share were $0.24 compared to $0.41 last year. As you may remember, we purchased My Medic for $18.6 million during the first quarter of 2026. The company sells directly to consumers and is cyclical with most of the profits generated in the fourth quarter of the year. It also generates high gross margins, which it spends on advertising, promotions, new product development and customer support. Our sales increase of 14% in the first quarter of 2026 includes approximately 8% from My Medic, which was at breakeven in P&L. Revenues, excluding My Medic, increased 6%. The company's gross margins in the first quarter of 2026 were 39.7% compared to 39% last year. When the impact of the high gross margins at My Medic are removed, the core gross margins declined due to higher costs and tariffs. We turn our inventory about twice per year. So the costs reflected in the first quarter were from products made and purchased when the tariffs were at their peak. We expect to run through these items during the second quarter with a return to normal levels in the third quarter. Shortly after the war in Iran began, we started purchasing higher-than-normal quantities of raw materials and finished goods inventory. So far, we have purchased approximately $10 million of incremental inventory. While we hope for a quick end to the war, we are planning and acting to be prepared for increasing costs and shortages. Operationally, we are working to increase the revenues of My Medic by expanding its retail distribution and building a strong core of nonseasonal business. Our teams are integrating product lines, leveraging our purchasing strengths and reducing duplicate expenses with the goal of generating significant profits throughout the year. The project is well underway. We are completing the move into our new Spill Magic facility in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. Production has begun there even as additional equipment is being installed. Orders for the business are strong, and we are experiencing record growth. In Europe, sales increased 19% in local currency to EUR 4 million. Our growth there includes the acquisition last November of Schmiedeglut, a small direct-to-consumer company, which is exceeding expectations. Our First Aid business in Europe had record performance, and we continue to expand its product line and sales team. The Westcott cutting tool business overcame market headwinds and increased 10% in Europe. In Canada, First Aid Central had a strong quarter and the cutting segment also grew. Overall, our Canadian business increased 16% compared to the first quarter of 2025. I will now turn the call to Paul.

Acme's net sales for the first quarter of 2026 were $52.3 million compared to $46 million in 2025, a 14% increase. Excluding My Medic sales increased 6%. Net sales in the U.S. segment increased 12% in the quarter, driven by higher sales of first aid and medical products, including My Medic products. Net sales in Europe for the first quarter of 2026 increased 19% in local currency compared to the first quarter of 2025 due mainly to the new line of cutting and sharpening tools. The base business had a good performance with a sales increase of 12%. Net sales in Canada for the first quarter of 2026 increased 11% in local currency due to higher sales of first aid products. The gross margin was 39.7% in the first quarter of 2026 versus 39% in the first quarter of 2025. The favorable mix from higher-margin direct-to-consumer My Medic products was mostly offset by the impact of increased tariffs. SG&A expenses for the first quarter of 2026 were $19 million or 36% of net sales compared with $15.5 million or 34% of net sales for the same period of 2025. The higher SG&A was primarily due to the addition of the My Medic business. The higher percentage of sales was due to the higher amount of advertising needed for the direct-to-consumer My Medic business. Net income for the first quarter of 2026 was $1 million or $0.24 per diluted share compared to net income of $1.7 million or $0.41 per diluted share for the same period of 2025, a decrease of 40% in net income. The decline in net income was primarily due to the higher tariff and Med-Nap costs we experienced in the first quarter of this year. The higher tariff spending commenced in July of 2025. However, the costs were capitalized into inventory, and we started to realize the full impact to earnings as the high-cost products were sold in the first quarter of 2026. We expect the tariff impact to gradually lessen over the next 3 quarters as the tariff rate declined in November 2025 and again in February 2026. Additionally, the incremental cost to enhance the quality assurance protocols at the Med-Nap facility will not repeat in the second quarter of 2026. Now to the balance sheet. Net debt increased from $27.2 million at March 31, 2025, to $38.6 million at March 31, 2026. During the 12-month period ended March 31, 2026, we paid $14.6 million for the acquisition of the assets of My Medic, distributed approximately $2.4 million in dividends and purchased the cutting and sharpening line of products in Germany for $1.6 million. Additionally, we generated approximately $14.2 million in free cash flow before the purchase of a new $6 million manufacturing and distribution facility in Tennessee in July 2025 to expand our Spill Magic business.

Thank you, Paul. I will now open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Richard Dearnley with Longport Partners.

Could you put a dollar amount or a rough dollar amount on what the quality assurance protocols are involving?

Sure. So just some background on that. Last March, the FDA inspected our facility in Brooksville, Florida, and we make alcohol prep pads and BZK wipes and lens wipes there. And they found a number of deficiencies in mostly our documentation of good manufacturing practices, our documentation of some of the equipment being qualified. And it's a lot of work to get it to be the state it needs to be to address the U.S. hospital market, and that is our goal. So we hired a consulting firm to work with us to upgrade in response to the FDA audit, which was very helpful to upgrade the entire facility. So last year, Paul, was it about $1.2 million?

$1 million.

About $1 million we spent last year in consulting. And that's in addition to some equipment that we purchased. For example, we've upgraded a microbiology lab that we really didn't have before. And we've upgraded the chemical laboratory for testing. But it was about $1 million in consulting. In the first quarter of this year, it was about $250,000?

$300,000.

About $300,000. So Dick, it was about $300,000. So far, we've done, I think in total, it's about $1.250 million or $1.3 million.

Correct.

Right. And that's all aimed at qualifying the Med-Nap products for hospital use? It's getting approval?

Yes. Well, it's not getting approval. We could sell them now, but you want to have it done right. And in fact, our products do get sold into hospitals now. But when we get done with the project, and we're about 3 quarters done, we'll have a facility that will be very proud to take major distributors in the United States to visit and do their own audits, and we'll have confidence that we've really done the best job we can for the quality of the products that will go out. So we're 3 quarters through, and I think it's all expensed, but we've been doing it. And I view it as an investment.

Right. Yes. And your comment -- I mean that tags along to the comment about investing in automation in everywhere or whatever the phrase was. Could you size the other investments? I mean last year, you were talking about $2 million. And I believe the year before was $2 million. Is that the current run rate? Because those investments tend to have large productivity payoffs.

Yes. You're addressing something that is important to us. The automation that we've been doing over the past few years has been with robotics. And one of the big projects is taking the bulk product, for example, bulk BZK wipes that we produce at Med-Nap and putting them automatically in packages that then go into the refills in our first aid kits. And as you know, the refill business is an important part of our company. And by automating it, we're reducing cost on a product line that is very consistent and growing. Some of the projects we're doing right now relate to automating the in the Spill Magic facility, automating the packaging of the Spill Magic powder and putting them into different sized packages. And that has a pretty big payback. Honestly, I don't remember the number that we put in there, but it's -- maybe it's $0.5 million. But it's an important one because we've got business that will keep that machine going. Another area is in our Rocky Mount facility. And I wouldn't call this automation, but we've reconfigured the entire process flow so that we have less people but we have some small automation that we've just put in. For example, there's drones that are doing daily cycle counts. And so you can imagine when we're doing our numbers, we tend to have high confidence that in fact, the cycle counts hold. And when we do physical audits at the end of the year, it speeds up the time we're down while we're doing them. So that's some automation that just went in. There's other things. You may have seen robotics that can vacuum your floor in a home, but there are industrial ones like that, that scrub the floor in our 370,000- or 340,000-square-foot facility in Rocky Mount so that it is a production site, and it's a very clean warehouse handling a lot of medical items. So it's very clean. It's now done with some robots. Those are some examples of them, Dick. There's another robot machine that we're working on in Brooksville, Florida that's already been purchased. And we've got some business that is for lens wipes. And there, the repetitive loading into the boxes can be done with robotics, with sight sensors, and that's being worked on and should be online by June. Those are some examples.

Yes. That's good. And the My Medic's DTC business, is does any of their expertise in DTC translate over into either your First Aid or Westcott business somehow?

So our last 2 acquisitions, the small Schmiedeglut acquisition in Germany and My Medic are both direct-to-consumer. And so as you may know, that means you're using social media as a selling tool and you're putting ads in places like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Of course, it's Google Search. And there's a consistent pattern of video that is delivered on to the site. And the purchases are coming directly off the website. In the case of My Medic, that's our first step in the United States to do direct-to-consumer. And it lends itself to selling things like craft items, again, because you can demonstrate there's a lot of differentiation in the product. And when we do new product introductions, you have a ready platform of potential customers who are following you. The benefit of My Medic is we're not establishing a social media base. We have 0.5 million social media followers today. And we put out videos every 2 days. Sometimes it's how to use first aid kits. Sometimes it's success stories and life-saving stories on what the use of a bleed control kit did and how it saved somebody's life. In other cases, it's for training or new products. So the answer is, as we get experience with it, I hope that we do broaden the amount that we bring of our other product lines. And I think in the Westcott line, that would be in the craft area.

Our next question comes from the line of Tim Call with Capital Management Corporation.

Congratulations on so many accomplishments within just 2 quarters.

Well, Tim, you try so hard to have your accomplishments. And then when you get a setback because of a tariff or changes that you aren't priced for, it's frustrating. But you ride it out the best you can. And as I hope we laid out, as we're looking through the coming quarters, the impact of the tariffs will be less, and we're hedging by buying $10 million of inventory for potential shortages or price increases out in the -- as a result of the war in Iran. Hopefully, that is just extra inventory and we sell it over due course. But we're looking at and preparing ourselves in case this is an extended conflict.

You can handle the short-term volatility in the long term, you've completed 2 complementary acquisitions. You've consolidated facilities, you've expanded capacity, allowed for future capacity expansion and immediately expensed upgrades in technology and automation. Do you see all of these achievements made within the last 6 months adding to your long-term sales, margins and earnings growth over many years?

Tim, yes, we certainly do. As an example, we spent $6 million to buy the facility in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee for Spill Magic. And Spill Magic now has room to grow. And for those that may need a refresher, the products that we sell there are used to clean up oily spills, bodily fluids and blood. And the opportunity to create some new products and hit them in scale and do it in that facility is exciting. We are out of the Smyrna facility at the end of this month, that's Smyrna, Tennessee. And so Spill Magic will be fully operational, and it's basically there now in Mt. Pleasant. As I mentioned earlier, the automation that we're putting in is -- it's expensive, it's heavy, and you want to do it once. And now we have a home to be able to place it properly. I wouldn't say this is a trend, but we've been having very, very good success with Spill Magic since we purchased the property. It's almost like it's willed itself to say, hey, we've got room to grow, so let's do it. But it is. And this quarter, this past quarter, it was up, I think, over -- was it over 30%, Paul?

Yes.

Yes. So it's a good quarter. It's making progress.

With these 2 new acquisitions, your past acquisitions have benefited from cross-selling and your wider geographic footprint. They're getting new retail channels and distribution networks. How long could it take these 2 recent acquisitions to experience sales growth from these different avenues?

Well, I was just on the phone with First Aid Central, our Canadian subsidiary, literally an hour ago. And we were talking about My Medic and its product line. We would produce them in Canada, meeting Health Canada specifications. But we're very excited about launching that way sooner than we expected. But the reason is because the name recognition is actually carrying over into Canada, and we had no idea. So you've got a name recognition, you've got 0.5 million followers. And when we put the products into production in Canada, we're expecting some growth, and that would be happening this year. As an aside, having spoken to our Canadian team literally today, we're about to add another 30% capacity to our operation in Laval outside of Montreal, and it's because of growth.

Looking forward to the long-term growth of the company.

Our next question comes from the line of Georgy Vashchenko with Freedom Broker.

My question is about cutting and sharpening segment. It was under pressure in 2025. What was the revenue trends in Q1? Did they recover?

Yes. So the cutting and sharpening area last year was impacted when the tariffs were instituted in April. You may remember it was called Liberation Day, and it was April 2, which is the day I remember. And at that point, the tariffs stopped a lot of things that would have been going forward as promotions because you couldn't price product when there were costs as high as 145% in tariffs. The retailers couldn't price. So the promotional activity for things in the summer, in the fall, and the winter were basically stalled. And that was one of the reasons that Westcott in particular, was not able to -- it had a decline. And Paul, what was the decline last year? It was about 13%?

10%...

10%. So I mean, Westcott was down about 10%, and that was the promotional activity. So in the first quarter, you're going up against comparables without the tariffs having been put in place. And Westcott was down, what, about 8% or 10%?

This first quarter? No, I think it was, fairly, a couple of points, maybe.

Westcott was down 2%. So it's come back, but the big part coming back is really second, third, fourth quarters where last year, we had no promotions this year, unless something happens dramatically with the war, we're expecting good promotional activity. And in fact, we're actively quoting. So that's a roundabout way of saying, I think we have easy comparisons coming in, in the second, third, and fourth quarter for the cutting and tool measuring area, and we should be showing growth. It was a good question.

Our next question comes from the line of Jake Patterson with Talanta Investment Group.

Just a couple of quick ones because most of them got answered already. But the SG&A number, I know you said there was like $300,000 of one-time expenses in there. So call it, like $18.7 million. Is that kind of a fair run rate to look at for the rest of fiscal '26? I know you said you had some savings you could pull out of My Medic, but just curious on that.

You're referring to a number of 18.7%. It's more like...

Well, that would be your 19 minus your $300,000 of...

In terms of percentage, it's probably like 33%.

For the full year, that's like the target 3% of revenue?

Yes.

Okay. Got you. And then I know you said the gross margin in the legacy business was down. Is there any way you can give a number for that? Or is it up?

Well, I think we can give you a number. It's probably 2%.

I would say it's about 200 basis points, really driven by tariffs.

And then CapEx for '26, I know you mentioned some automation investments, Canada expansion. I was kind of curious if you guys had any range for CapEx expectations?

I think we're looking at about $6 million -- probably $7 million.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Johnsen for any final comments.

I'd like to thank the audience for asking some very probing questions. Having hopefully given some very thoughtful answers, this call is complete, and I'd like to thank you for joining us. Goodbye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to the Acme United Q4 and Year-End 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Walter Johnsen, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter and Year-end 2026 (sic) [ 2025 ] Earnings Conference Call for Acme United Corporation. I'm Walter C. Johnsen, Chairman and CEO. With me is Paul Driscoll, our Chief Financial Officer, who will first read the safe harbor statement. Paul?

Forward-looking statements in this conference call, including, without limitation, statements related to the company's plans, strategies, objectives, expectations, intentions and adequacy of capital and other resources are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, among others, those arising as a result of a challenging global macroeconomic environment characterized by continued high inflation, high interest rates and the imposition of new tariffs or changes in existing tariff rates. In addition, we've experienced supply chain disruptions, and we may experience these disruptions in the future. We are also subject to additional risks and uncertainties as described in our periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in our current earnings release.

Thank you, Paul. Acme United delivered record sales and earnings in 2025. It was not easy, but we did better than we ever have. Our net sales were $196.5 million. Net income was $10.2 million, and earnings per share were $2.49. When high global tariffs were announced in April 2025, our customers scrambled. They delayed and canceled retail promotions, opted to have no stock rather than import items for losses and searched for new lower-cost sources. We have purchased extra inventory at the end of 2024 in anticipation of some increased tariff levels and supplied our regular customers with their planned orders. Our team in the United States and Asia reacted quickly. When the Chinese tariffs for our products were reduced from 145% to 30% in late April 2025, we put over 50 containers on the water within days. We worked with our suppliers to open new factories in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. We increased our production in India and Egypt. We negotiated cost reductions from our suppliers, obtained lower freight rates, generated productivity from savings in our domestic plants and increased prices very modestly. Our team supported our customers, and they delivered. There were many highlights in 2025. Our first aid team introduced a patented automatic replenishment system for refills. This product sensors components that were used, lost or became obsolete in an industrial first aid kit, and automatically generates replenishment orders. A typical customer will save 30% to 50% and sometimes more over traditional van-based delivery. The Westcott team expanded our market share of cutting tools, particularly in the craft market. We used our patented nonstick technology to develop differentiated products to work with tapes, glues and sticky substances. We also increased our line of ceramic tools to safely cut and open boxes, and increased sales of our industrial cutting tools. We invested in robotics in 3 sites in the United States to assemble refills of first aid components. These investments in the recurring portion of our first aid business are generating savings and improving product quality. We installed new software to optimize inventory placement in our large warehouse in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. We then streamlined the process flow of inventory and purchased drones to nightly do inventory reconciliation. Acme United purchased a 78,000 square foot plant on 12 acres in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee for approximately $6 million. This facility will expand production of our Spill Magic cleanup products, bodily fluid kits and blood-borne pathogen kits. We are moving into the facility in the first quarter of 2026, and we have just purchased new automated processing equipment. We continue to purchase advanced production equipment for our Med-Nap facility in Brooksville, Florida to produce medical-grade alcohol prep pads, antiseptic wipes, and other items used in our first aid kits. We are building a microbiology lab, expanding our quality assurance team and preparing our documentation and controls to be a serious domestic supplier to the broader U.S. medical market. In January 2026, we purchased My Medic, which is the leading direct-to-consumer supplier of advanced first aid and bleed control products in the United States. And it has over 500,000 social media followers and a product line that we hope to expand. The company had revenues of approximately $19 million in 2025, and the purchase price was $18.7 million. Our first aid business in Canada grew strongly. We gained share in the industrial and retail sectors and continued expansion of our e-commerce business. And sales of Hawktree Solutions, which was acquired out of bankruptcy in late 2023, exceeded our expectations. In Europe, we expanded our market share in cutting despite an overall weak economy. We acquired a direct-to-consumer supplier of cutting and sharpening tools in October 2025. Annual sales were approximately $2 million for this acquisition, and the purchase price was $1.6 million. In our first aid segment in Europe, we expanded the marketing and sales team, improved product sourcing costs and began to expand aggressively. As we move into 2026, we see growth in our first aid and medical segments and a return to more normal merchandising and promotion in the retail market. We are excited about the investments we have made in domestic production and our expanded international sourcing. And we believe we are very well positioned as we enter 2026. I will now turn the call to Paul.

Acme's net sales for the fourth quarter were $47.5 million compared to $45.9 million in 2024, an increase of 3%. Sales for the year ended December 31, 2025, were $196.5 million compared to $194.5 million in 2024, an increase of 1%. Net sales in the U.S. segment in the fourth quarter were constant compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. U.S. sales declined 1% for the year ended December 31. Sales of first aid and medical products were strong. However, sales of school and office products were lower mainly due to the cancellation of customer orders as a result of tariff uncertainty. Net sales in Europe increased 22% in local currency for the quarter. Sales for the year ended December 31, 2025, increased 4% compared to 2024. The sales increase for both the quarter and the year was mainly due to additional sales from the line of cutting and sharpening tools acquired on October 1, 2025. Net sales in Canada increased 14% in local currency for the quarter. Sales for the year ended December 31, 2025, increased 16% compared to 2024. Sales of first aid products were strong. However, there was a decline in sales of school and office products. The gross margin was 38.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to 38.7% in 2024. The gross margin for the year was 39.4% compared to 39.3% in 2024. SG&A expenses for the fourth quarter of 2025 were $15.2 million or 32% of sales compared with $15.5 million or 34% of sales for the same period of 2024. SG&A expenses for the 12 months of 2025 were $62.7 million or 32% of sales compared with $62.2 million or 32% of sales in 2024. Operating profit in the fourth quarter of 2025 increased 27% compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. Interest expense for the year went from $1.9 million in 2024 to $1.6 million in 2025. The decline in interest expense was due to a combination of lower debt and lower interest rates. Net income for the fourth quarter of 2025 was $1.9 million or $0.46 per diluted share compared to $1.7 million or $0.41 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2024, an increase of 10% in net income and 12% in diluted earnings per share. Net income for the year ended December 31, 2025, was $10.2 million or $2.49 per diluted share compared to $10 million or $2.45 per diluted share in 2024, an increase of 2% in both net income and diluted earnings per share. The company's bank debt less cash on December 31, 2025, was $18.5 million compared to $21.5 million on December 31, 2024. During the 12-month period, we paid $2.3 million in dividends, purchased the line of cutting and sharpening products in Germany for $1.6 million and generated $13 million in free cash flow before the $6 million purchase of our new facility in Tennessee.

Thank you, Paul. I will now open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today is coming from Jim Marrone from Singular Research.

Walter, nice quarter. I had a couple of questions on the acquisition. So as far as the integration, if you could just kind of share a little bit on how you plan on integrating My Medic? Is it going to be part of the first aid offering to the same customers or something completely different? If you could speak to that? And before you answer that, just a couple of more questions with regards to that acquisition. The revenues are approximately $19 million and you purchased it for $19 million. Do you have an idea of what the multiple is on that as far as maybe an EV or EBITDA multiple? And was it acquired using all cash or a combination of other things?

Okay. So the acquisition of My Medic we think is a pretty meaningful acquisition for the company. It's got 0.5 million social media followers. And to put that in perspective, when we were at the SHOT Show, which is a very, very large military gun and hunting show in Las Vegas a week later after we purchased My Medic, I felt like we had one of the leading brands on the SHOT Show floor, it was just amazing to see the people that were coming in. One moment, I'd be looking at the Israeli military, another SEAL team and then hunters and outdoorsmen and police departments and security personnel. So that acquisition gives us a direct-to-consumer business that we hope to expand. And we intend to do that by differentiating some of the products within first aid to be able to be going into selected retail, not broad retail, selected retail where it complements the sale of direct-to-consumer, perhaps with different products. It will all be part of the first aid offering, and we'll be able -- we hope to be able to broaden the direct-to-consumer sales of other items that we carry within the Acme first aid and medical area. For example, we have Safety Made, which personalizes medical products, including first aid kits. It's a very, very simple step for us to be able to do personalization for the L.A. police department, for example, or one of the military units that comes by, and we can do that domestically and quickly. Sales were $19 million, and the EBITDA was somewhere between $1 million and $1.5 million. So you can figure out the EBITDA from that. The purchase price, while it was $18.6 million, there was $1 million, which was an earn-out for hitting some growth objectives during the next 2 years. And then there was a holdback of about $3 million for various potential contingent liabilities. So the net out-of-pocket was about $4 million less than the $18.6 million purchase price. We're excited about it, and we're careful because the team built something special, and we want to keep it. But we have sourcing capabilities that are, we believe, unsurpassed in the first aid area given our scale and our operations globally. And we have a broad product line that we think we can help them supplement and a direct-to-consumer, I mean, a direct sales force to retail. So all in all, it's a great platform with wonderful people. And our job is to integrate but carefully.

Right. Great. Just as a follow-up. So when you say select retailers, we assume that it will be the same retailers that you sell the cutting tools to? Or would it be a different distribution?

We sell to almost every retailer in North America. And so we have a pretty broad choice of where we do that, but we wanted to be selective. And that list is still being developed. But I hope we're successful and we're able to tell you where that has distribution in the coming quarters.

Right. And as far as looking forward, and you mentioned that there may be further acquisitions down the road. Will it be -- will it continue in first aid and medical? Or could it possibly be in the cutting tools segment? Where do you see the acquisitions going forward?

Well, acquisitions are opportunistic, of course, but we also self-generate most of the deals. And we're looking to expand both our horizontal distribution, in other words, buying competitors and taking a half step away from some of the core current first aid items to be able to expand how we can address pre-hospital emergencies. And that's a very broad market. My belief is we'll probably find an acquisition that either does that in first aid or medical, or it's a supplier of components, for example like Med-Nap that made the alcohol prep pads that go into first aid kits. So it might be a vertical acquisition as well. But that's the primary area we're looking.

[Operator Instructions] We reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over for any further or closing comments.

Well if there are no further questions, this call is complete. I look forward to delivering good results in the first quarter and the rest of the year. And I look forward also to speaking with you at the end of the first quarter. Thank you for joining us. Goodbye.

Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.