http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-finance-2014-company-of-the-year--under-armour-192915499.html
Not in favor of it or anything. Just interesting tidbit... that is all.
"It started 18 years ago with one man hawking one shirt, a guy trying to persuade elite football players that it was simply better – that it would make them better.
Today, Under Armour (UA) is a $15.2 billion company run by that same guy, stalking the legacy giants of athletic gear, a made-in-America global brand that boasts one of the fastest growth records in consumer products and among the best stock performance in the market.
For these distinctions and how they were achieved -- and for the way the company has turned potential setbacks into wins in 2014 -- Under Armour is the Yahoo Finance Company of the Year.
The squishy retail sales trends of 2014 were a mere rumor for Under Armour, whose revenue and operating profit are on track to climb more than 30%, accelerating from their 2013 pace. Its share price has soared 62.5% this year. And Under Armour’s strong branding efforts, deeply rooted in its sports-performance heritage, earned it Marketer of the Year honors from Advertising Age magazine.
CEO Kevin Plank, that guy who came up with that shirt in 1996 that stayed dry under football pads, says, “These things don’t happen out of nowhere. There were a lot of years preparing for this.”
Speaking in a model retail store on Under Armour’s six-building industrial-urban campus on the Baltimore waterfront, Plank recalls: “Sporting goods, which is where we entered, was this pie – and there was no room in the pie. So we decided, in order to break in, we would make our own pie.”
After finding takers for his pioneering moisture-wicking shirt among some college and pro football players, he expanded in a methodical but ambitious way into other performance garments – ones that kept an athlete warm, or cool, or feeling strong thanks to their compression fabric.
The company took two years to enter the shoe business, starting with football cleats and adding one sport category per year for five years. Its women’s line, once an afterthought, has expanded impressively from almost nothing in 2004 to more than $500 million this year. Total full-year company revenue will top $3 billion for the first time in 2014.
Over the past four-and-a-half years, Under Armour is one of only four companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 to post at least 20% sales growth in each quarter. Since coming public in late 2005, revenue and earnings growth have averaged more than 30%, marking one of the elite growth stories of the past decade.... (click on the link for more).