Truman Hunt
Analyst · D.A. Davidson
Thanks, Scott and good afternoon everyone. We appreciate you joining us on our call today. As you saw from our announcement this morning, we're off to a great start in 2012, posting another record quarter and exceeding guidance for both revenue and earnings. We generated revenue of $462 million for the quarter, which is a healthy 17% increase, and we also saw significant earnings per share improvement of 32%, when excluding charges related to last year's Japan custom's ruling. So given these solid results and our outlook for the remainder of the year, we're increasing our 2012 guidance which Ritch will touch on in a few minutes.
We're really pleased with our first quarter. Continued growth is a result of the phenomenal job that our sales leaders are doing in ageLOC product launches. You know that we've always felt that our scientific focus on the genetic sources of aging, which are addressed in our ageLOC product platform, gives us a very compelling product advantage. But these product innovations are really of limited value without a highly capable and motivated group of sales leaders to promote them. As indicated in our release, we're seeing very solid growth in active distributors, and in our executive distributor ranks, which is a reflection of the success of our sales leaders' efforts.
We're working hard to be better aligned with our sales leaders, and that effort is paying off as we see increasingly large impacts from our product launches. You'll remember that we had a very strong fourth quarter of last year when we introduced new ageLOC products at our global convention. Now these products are rolling out regionally, and we're duplicating that strong response with our local and our regional launches.
Historically, those local launches were sometimes as far out as 2-4 years from the product introduction in the United States, but our new approach has these products rolling out in close proximity to the U.S. launch and this is enabling us to capture a lot of energy that previously would have dissipated with time. So we remain optimistic about the remainder of the year, as we have significant product live launches in many of our markets yet to come.
In January, we launched a new ageLOC Galvanic Body Spa in the U.S. and Europe and we also introduced our first global age-lock supplement called R2. This is the product that helps provide sustained energy levels and also promotes cellular cleansing. Japan and Korea were the first markets to get the R2 product and we'll continue to global roll out of ageLOC products in the second quarter when we launch R2 as well as the Body Galvanic Spa in greater China, and R2 in south Asia pacific. So with the significant launches that we're having in both of our product categories it's nice to see double digit increases in both skin care and nutrition as well.
So let's spend a minute just looking at our regions individually. We're very encouraged by the positive trends that we've seen in the Americas. New product launches have been extremely well received by our distributors here, and frankly our regional management team is doing a great job to drive distributor productivity. So based on what we've seen here in our home market, we believe that the Americas will have a very solid year.
Taking a very quick look at North Asia. As our release indicated Japan was down about 5% for the quarter, which was a slight improvement over the prior quarter and in line with our expectation. We're now starting to lag out [ph] the impact of last year's natural disaster from Japan and do expect to see a modest spend improvement throughout 2012 and the fourth quarter, we look to be flat to slightly up in Japan. And at the same time, South Korea posted another solid quarter in the space of increasingly tough comps. That market has really been and all-star market for us in the past several years till now.
We also continue to grow at a very strong pace in our emerging markets. Mainland China, in particular, has posted gains of more than 57% in Q1 and we project a very strong Q2 as we begin to take orders for ageLOC R2 and Body Galvanic Spa next week in a stance of a large greater China regional distributor convention will be held in June. We also continue to see very strong growth in South Asia. The region posted a 54% year-over-year increase in Q1 with growth coming from virtually every market in the region. Now Q1 revenue includes about $15 million of products that were moved in Q1 from the fourth quarter convention orders. But even without this boost due to our revenue in Q1, South Asia is doing extremely well as you can see when we break at [ph] distributor account growing at 23% in the quarter. So we expect South Asia to continue to post very impressive results.
I also want to point out that we continue to make great strides in terms of overall profitability. Our operating margin's moving towards our 16% target. This was the target that we set our sights on about 18 months ago when we announced our intent to push to $4 of earnings per share, and we continue to track ahead of schedule in achieving that target. So with that, let me turn the time over to Ritch.