Top 40 distributor Cimpress (asi/162149) reported May 5 that sales for its Vistaprint and National Pen divisions declined in the Ireland-headquartered corporation’s fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31.

Robert Keane, CEO, Cimpress

Vistaprint, a global ecommerce site selling promotional products and business marketing materials, saw quarterly revenue decline nearly 12% year over year to $316.3 million. EBITDA for Vistaprint was $67.44 million, a decline of 18% from the previous fiscal year’s Q3.

National Pen, a U.S.-based Top 40 promotional products distributor before Cimpress acquired the firm in 2016, experienced a fiscal Q3 year over year revenue decline of 14% to $68.36 million. For the third quarter, National Pen posted a pre-tax loss of $1.24 million.

The quarterly declines for Vistaprint and National Pen largely resulted from a sales crash that occurred during the final weeks of the quarter as shutdown measures tied to the coronavirus wiped out demand.

Distributors throughout the promo market dealt with the same devastating phenomenon, which led to a collective sales drop of nearly 5% for the industry in the calendar year’s first quarter.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted the small and medium businesses who constitute the vast majority of Cimpress' customers, and near-term demand for our products has fallen dramatically as a result,” said Cimpress CEO Robert Keane.

Cimpress reported that total global revenue across all its business segments declined 10% year over year to $598 million in Q3. Relatedly, Cimpress experienced a nearly $85 million loss, which translated to a loss per share of $3.26. Last year, Cimpress posted net income of $6.5 million in its third quarter.

In a letter to investors, Keane said he wasn’t sure how long the impacts of the pandemic will persist or exactly what the recovery path will look like.

Still, he felt that various measures Cimpress has taken, including securing a $300 million investment from New York-based private equity firm Apollo Global Management, will help the company weather the storm and emerge in a good position.

Over the long haul, Keane believes Cimpress will be able to again thrive.

“We serve our customers with a fundamentally more competitive business model than the highly-fragmented, sub-scale traditional suppliers,” he wrote in his letter. “Shelter-at-home experiences are making e-commerce and service-at-a-distance experiences like ours more mainstream…I am confident small and medium businesses will eventually get back to work, that we will still be standing side by side with them, and that Cimpress will have returned to the trajectory we were on prior to the pandemic.”

Cimpress ranks fourth on Counselor’s latest list of the largest distributors in the North American promotional products industry. The new rankings are due out in the summer.