Separately, we are going deeper than we would otherwise in our 2025 and 2026 projections to give us the best view of liquidity and the related sensitivities. As that work is ongoing, there are four areas that are floating to the surface as key considerations, which I’ll run through you without a rank order of importance. Working capital is clearly one. You’ve heard us talk about ramping up our international footprint. We know that sales outside of North America are a meaningful opportunity. The breadth and depth of our current product portfolio and the proof point around sales in the U.S. position us well to re-engage key international markets to ensure we are on shelf year round in all the key categories and at all the key accounts. We are moving people around, rejuggling organizations, questioning why we do things the way we’ve always done them and all of those fun things.
A secondary is M&A. As many of you know, JAKKS was built on M&A over the years and walking through the showroom, you can see how our company today is really in many ways the accumulation of those acquisitions, well over 50% of our total sales volume. That said, we do not anticipate anything changing from an investment thesis perspective. It would have to be the right assets, importantly priced at the right level that clearly fit in our go-to-markets today. We are not looking to diversify our business model or extend into services or anything like that. One of the first questions we always ask is, could we see JAKKS successfully selling this product line? To give you some insight as to how we view this topic. Third is acquiring new licenses.
We have found over time that securing the right license is a less risky, less expensive way to enter new categories than M&A, even if it might mean a slower build. Nonetheless, it does tend to require our investing cash ahead of revenue between satisfying the license or ensuring we have the right internal resources to be successful and the associated product development work. Fourth on the list is capital return. We know that return of capital to shareholders is an important consideration for investors when a company is not in hyper growth mode. It was a key consideration in the retirement of the preferred shares. Some of these uses of capital are more lasting and visible than others. So we are being rigorous in our assessment of how those balance out as you would hope us to be.
Finally, as some of you know, the world of sell side equity research has undergone a lot of change over the past 20 years and continues to do so. Recently, the lead analyst covering our stock moved on to a new role. So we wish him well with that. With that in mind, we’re probably not going to have any questions at the end of the prepared remarks this quarter, just so you know why. But if you want to send something in to investors at jakks.net email address during the call, we’ll see if we can work it in. Or if there are questions or observations you wish were being surfaced in our quarterly narratives, feel free to funnel them through that address, which is also tagged to our earnings release. And we’ll add it to the consideration set going forward.
Or we can try to work you into the list of follow up investor calls that we conduct regularly. And now I’ll pass things back to Stephen.
Stephen Berman: Thank you, John. As we have expressed over the past years, our main goals for JAKKS were getting JAKKS into a strong financial position, which we have achieved. In addition to building an evergreen portfolio of products and categories, which we can build upon year after year for stable cash flows and growth across the categories. At the same time, we have been working to secure some exciting new IP and areas of new businesses that leverage our expertise and create new avenues for growth to add to our portfolio of products and categories. As we move into a new year, we will benefit from new products supported by upcoming movies and evergreen IP, such as Moana 2, Sonic 3, The Simpsons, and the ABG brand portfolio.
These additions of strong IP help strengthen the brick to brick methodology of how we have built our businesses over the years. These new businesses are why we are looking forward to the latter part of the year and how we see these new areas developing into 2025 and beyond. As expressed in our fourth quarter year-end conference call, we said the first half of this year would be less than exciting as we had two blockbuster films launched in the first half of last year with the accompanying products for the Super Mario Brothers movie and the Little Mermaid movie, both in toy, in Halloween, and role play and dress up. So looking into the second half of 2024, from a content perspective, we were delighted that Disney plans to release Moana 2 in theaters this holiday season.
The film tells the next chapter in the world of Moana, their successful 2016 film. We chased a band when the original Moana film exceeded commercial expectations and it has been a constant seller for us ever since. We’ll have a broader array of products and a new focus line of products inspired by the film on shelf in Q4. And as a reminder, we are enjoying three new pieces of entertainment in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog. Season three of Sonic Prime, which released in mid-January on Netflix, in addition to Knuckles, something of a prequel to the third film launching in December. Our friends at SEGA are doing an exceptional job managing the Sonic franchise as you really will see Sonic in more places and resonating with more and more kids.
We have made great progress on sharing our new Simpsons line with retailers across our major markets. We are now just starting to tease out the product to consumers and the reaction has been extremely strong. And the going forward retail commitments occurring this fall are exciting, which we hope will build into 2025 and beyond for the strong evergreen property and brand. I wanted to highlight that our Disney ILY business continues to steadily build. Our original 18 inch install line continues to perform well with new waves of assortment, allowing consumers to engage with their favorite characters. We launched the Fashion Doll Scale last fall and have seen great sell-through then and this spring. The Inspired Stitch Doll continues to be top seller week after week.
