Author Questions How Brass Eagle Flies

For the third year, Brass Eagle Inc., the Bentonville paintball company that can’t say “gun,” has made BusinessWeek magazine’s “Hot 100 List of Best Small Growth Companies.”

This is confusing to Zeke Ashton, a writer for The Motley Fool, a Web page devoted to business news and opinions, for a couple of reasons.

1. How can paintball support a publicly traded company?

and

2. If you invested $1,000 in Brass Eagle in 1998, it would be worth $479 today.

“Unless paintball becomes so popular that it becomes woven into the fabric of everyday life for most Americans, we’re dealing with a very small market that isn’t growing all that fast,” Ashton wrote in his June 19 column. “I played paintball once, and it’s a lot of fun, especially if you don’t get shot (those things hurt like $%^* when you get hit with them).”

But Brass Eagle has done well in spite of its limited scope, he said.

Brass Eagle’s net income was $8.2 million in 1998 and in 1999 and $8.7 million in 2000. Sales for those years were $75.1 million, $68.2 million, and $86.8 million, respectively.

And, one step ahead of The Motley Fool, the company has hinted that it will soon branch out to make accessories for other “extreme sports” such as BMX bicycling.

Brass Eagle caught Ashton’s attention because it is one of only 11 companies that made BusinessWeek’s Hot 100 in 1999 that remained on the list for 2001, a statistic that made him question the validity of BusinessWeek’s list.

Brass Eagle first appeared on the list in 1998 but was dropped in 2000. The company slipped from No. 2 in 1999 (when it had the nation’s top annual earnings growth of 1,620 percent) to No. 61 in 2001 (when earnings grew by a more meager 29 percent).