STURM RUGER REPORTS ANOTHER BOOM YEAR
Pandemic or no pandemic, people are still buying loads of guns, particularly from Sturm Ruger & Co.
The Connecticut-based manufacturer with a major production facility in Newport reported $730.7 million in sales in 2021, up from $558.9 million in 2020 and $410.5 million in 2019. Profits also continue to skyrocket. They nearly tripled in 2020, and then rose 73 percent more last year, to nearly $156 million.
That translates to diluted earnings per share of $5.09 for the year, about $2.14 in the fourth quarter. Shareholders will get a quarterly dividend of 86 cents a share.
In 2021, it wasn’t so much the surge in demand fed by tensions over Black Lives Matter protests and a contentious election or the Covid anxiety that predominated in 2020. This was more a surge of production to meet demand as well as the previous year’s backlog. The gunmaker was nearly out of guns at the end of 2020. It was down to 48,000 units compared to 338,000 the year before.
“We entered the year with virtually no finished goods inventory, so all of the firearms sold in 2021 had to be manufactured in 2021. Our 28 percent increase in sales would not have been possible without the 30 percent increase in production at our factories. And this 30 percent increase was achieved with a manpower increase of less than 10 percent,” said CEO Chris Killoy in a Feb. 24 earnings call. The company was able to pull it off despite a labor shortage aggravated by the Covid surge in the fourth quarter as well as supply chain issues.
The sales growth was in terms of dollars, which was helped by a 3 percent across-the-board price hike. The number of actual guns sold increased 3.5 percent from 2020.
One sour note during the earnings call was a question about the $73 million settlement with Remington reached by some of the families of 20 first-graders and six adults killed with the company’s AR-15 style rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Analysts consider the settlement, the largest payout by a gun manufacturer, as a possible turning point following years of futile litigation against the industry. The suit was leveled in state court, rendering the usual federal liability shields moot, and the settlement stipulated that thousands of pages of internal documents have to be released, which could be used as evidence in other lawsuits.
While Ruger bought its Marlin brand from Remington, it didn’t assume the company’s liabilities, said Killoy.
NOVOCURE WINS OK FOR NEW DOWNTOWN PORTSMOUTH HEADQUARTERS
The Portsmouth City Council has unanimously approved a temporary construction license with Novocure Inc. as the company continues work on what will be its new corporate headquarters in downtown Portsmouth.
The property — which is adjacent to the city’s Vaughan Mall and Worth parking lot — will provide space for Novocure’s “growing employee base” in Portsmouth, and “house a world-class training and development center, where physicians and partners from around the world can come to learn more about Novocure’s tumor-treating fields technology,” the company stated previously.
The purchase price of the property was $9.5 million, according to the Portsmouth Herald.
William Doyle, Novocure’s executive chairman, said the company made “a conscious decision to make Portsmouth our flagship location.”
“We will be emphasizing Portsmouth and there will be people moving from our other facilities,” he said in December. “Over time, this is going to be the focal point for our U.S. workforce.”
