Gunmaker sales fall with GOP in control
Without fear of gun laws, urgency to buy firearms recedes.
Firearms companies face declining sales, falling stock prices and tremendous debt. Gunmaker American Outdoor Brands Corp., formerly known as Smith & Wesson, has seen its stock plummet by almost half, compared with 2017. On Monday, Remington Outdoor Co., an iconic, 200-year-old American firearms manufacturer, announced it’s planning to file for bankruptcy.
With Republicans in control of Washington, there’s little chance of firearms regulation — even in the face of Wednesday’s massacre in Florida. When Barack Obama was president or Democrats controlled Congress, gun sales would generally rise after a mass shooting for fear of more restrictive laws. The gun lobby pushed these worries despite a lack of significant legislative effort by the Obama administration. Now that Donald Trump is in the Oval Office, fear of new gun laws has receded, industry executives said. And so have sales, hurting both retailers and manufacturers such as Remington.
In December, James Debney, chief executive officer of American Outdoor, said “fear-based” buying of firearms had stopped. According to data collected by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a barometer for firearms sales, January 2018 was the slowest in gun purchases since 2012. Even on Thursday, after gunmaker stocks rose in pre-market trading, the shares headed back down by afternoon. (The assault rifle used in the Parkland high school attack was a Smith & Wesson AR-15, police said.)
Following gun stores and manufacturers, the next victim of the industry’s political success could be distributors. Because most are privately owned, earnings data is hard to come by. Still, company debt can offer a glimpse into their financial health. The declining performance of a $140 million loan to distributor United Sporting Cos., for example, suggests there may be a problem.
United is a private equity-owned holding company whose subsidiaries include Ellett Brothers and Jerry’s Sports Center, two gun distributors who work with over 30,000 independent retailers across all 50 states (Sturm Ruger & Co. says 15 percent of its sales are to the two subsidiaries). They distribute hunting and shooting sports products, including handguns, ammunition, silencers and holsters. Jerry’s was named “distributor of the year” by Marlin Firearms, a company owned by Remington.
A $140 million loan extended to United fell to less than half of its face value last year, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings by the loan’s holder, the business development company Prospect Capital Corp.
Since Prospect makes loans to private companies but has issued shares to the public, it’s required to disclose its financials, even when the companies on the hook for the loan are not. In Prospect’s annual report for 2017, the company said a fair value of its loan to United was almost $47 million-around 33 percent of its face value. That was down from 94 percent in its report for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.