Amway reports "challenging year" in North America
Despite a massive nationwide advertising and public relations campaign for 2008, Amway North America still had a "challenging year" according to Doug Devos in an interview with The Grand Rapids Press.  Yes, Amway global had a good year as it exploited new markets in China and Russia,  they can't help but not to grow there.    The business is too young in these countries, to be spoiled like in older markets such as the UK and the USA.   Despite the problems in North America, Amway did manage to report a healthy growth of 15% in 2008 from a $7.1 to $8.2 billion.   It would be interesting to know how much of that increase was just due to positive currency translations. Up until July of 2008, the dollar was falling, which would make the sales in US dollars look even better.  The Chinese Yuan increased alone about 12% from 2007 to 2008. 

I'm sure if the North American market had been up 10%, then Amway would be crowing about their success and reporting the number.  But, true to Amway's standards of "high integrity" and need to only give positive truthful information and hide the negative truthful information, we will not hear anything about Amway's most likely drop in sales in the North American market for 2008. At least to Amway's credit they stopped reporting the bogus "estimated retail sales" years ago.   Although they had only dropped the bogus and inflated numbers after several publicly traded companies got caught cooking their books and reporting inflated numbers as well.   Since it was the "in thing" to become honest about financial matters, Amway dropped their deceptive sales number.  

I'm sure the tapped out American consumer, and the flight of thousands of distributors to other MLM's  had much to do with Amway's "challenging year" in North America.   Consumers were unable to tap into home equity loans to finance their unprofitable Amway businesses as they did in the go-go years of Quixtar.  This I am sure put a big dent in the Line of Affiliation  (LOA) tools businesses as well.    The typical US consumer just does not have the extra $3,000 per year or so of cash flow needed  to drop into the Amway business, when they are on full system.   Although after years of criticism on the internet, the company is trying to reform the business.   It is a tough job since without the cult like systems of the LOA's, they will have much fewer sales of their overpriced products. 

It was nice that Quixtar reported their sales in the past, but it was to be expected that when times got tough and they actually would have had a drop in sales, they they would suspend the reporting of their sales.  So much for transparency from Amway Global.