Talk about par value. When your business is based on your customers' prospects for achieving par on the golf course, there sometimes is little margin between billion-dollar birdie and billion-dollar bogey. Assuming par is $1 billion in market capitalization, Carlsbad's Callaway Golf Co. is just making the cut.

At presstime, Callaway (NYSE:ELY — as in Ely Callaway, the company’s 80-year-old founder and CEO) was trading at $12.13, pushing Callaway's market cap down to $922.4 million. The stock has been up and down — up as recently as December at just above $18; down in August 1999 at $9.31.

Callaway founded the company in 1982. It went public in February 1992 at $2.50 a share. Since then, the stock has split three times, benefiting from golf's unprecedented boom with superior drivers and wedging through the rough of 1998. After recording record sales of $843 million in 1997, Callaway suffered 1998's triple bogey of the Asian economic crisis, El Niño rains in the U.S. Sunbelt and the USGA's new regulations on clubhead size. All resulted in what the company calls a significant downturn. Callaway's groomed successor left the company — and so did 700 employees, one-fourth of the workforce, in layoffs late that year.

Still, 1999 revenue topped $700 million, equal to Callaway's four nearest competitors combined, a company spokesperson reports. That's a huge chunk of what one trade publication estimates is the $2 billion golf equipment industry. And Callaway has just added the perfect accessory to any of its Big Bertha drivers, woods, wedges and putters — Callaway golf balls. The dimpled spheres were rolled out at last month's PGA Show in Orlando.

Callaway Golf Ball Co. a subsidiary of Callaway Golf Co., is headed by Charles Yash (previously of archrival and Carlsbad neighbor Taylor-Made Golf), who has been named to succeed Callaway as CEO by the end of the year. With the launch of golf ball manufacturing, employment has increased by 500 over the last quarter to 2,700 at Callaway's nine-building facility in Carlsbad.

— Terence J. Burke