Top 40 promotional products distributor 4imprint (asi/197045) announced Thursday, Jan. 21 that preliminary results show that its full-year global revenue total for 2020 was $560 million, a decrease of 35% from 2019.

With its business negatively affected by economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, 4imprint’s annual figure represents a marked departure from the firm’s 17% five-year average annual growth rate through 2019.

Kevin Lyons-Tarr, CEO, 4imprint

Nonetheless, the bottom-line figure shows that 4imprint engineered improvement throughout 2020, following a sales crash in the spring. In early April last year, as societal shutdowns wiped out business for the promo products industry, 4imprint revealed that its order count was down 80%. By the final two months of 2020, order count rebounded to be down about 30% from the prior year – a 50-percentage point recovery.

4imprint didn’t release figures on profit in announcing the preliminary sales results. It did note that underlying profit before tax is expected to be in line with the company’s expectations.

For perspective, 4imprint reported basic earnings per share (EPS) of $0.07 on an after-tax profit of $21,000 for the first six months of 2020. In 2019, during the comparative first-half-of-the-year time frame, 4imprint’s basic EPS was $0.5481 on an after-tax profit of $15.36 million.

According to company executives, 4imprint remains in a strong financial position with ample liquidity. The unaudited net cash balance at the 2020 year end was around $39.8 million, down a little more than $1 million from 2019.

“Although pandemic-related uncertainty remains a challenge, the board is proud of the resilience and flexibility demonstrated by the group’s people and business operations,” 4imprint said in a statement.

4imprint is headquartered in London, but its main center of operations is in Oshkosh, WI. The company generates most of its revenue in North America. In 2019, that North American revenue tally was $839.3 million; total revenue was $860.8 million, with additional sales occurring in the U.K. and Ireland.

4imprint’s North American revenue total in 2019 was good enough to earn the distributorship the top spot on Counselor’s most-recent ranking of the 40 largest distributors in the industry. However, depending on how other leading distributors fared, 4imprint’s sales erosion in 2020 could drop the firm down the rankings in 2021’s Top 40, which is due out this summer.

Consider: Last year, the industry’s third-largest distributor, Staples Promotional Products (asi/120601), claimed that ranking on estimated North American promo revenue of $601.6 million, while the fourth largest distributor, Proforma (asi/300094), made that top five slot on sales of $501 million.

North American promo revenue in the range of $500 million to $550 million would drop 4imprint to fourth, if the other top firms held at current levels or retreated only slightly.

Of course, while such hypotheticals are interesting, it ultimately remains to be seen how reality will play out, as every company in promo contended with the challenges of the pandemic, some adapting better than others. 4imprint, a publicly traded company, expects to release its finalized full-year sales and profit results on Tuesday, March 16.