Press Release:

A letter from Firewire CEO Mark Price

Firewire has ended our exclusive sponsorship of Taj as he has decided to experiment with both FW and PU surfboards. At his specific request, Firewire will continue to build Taj cutting edge equipment and we are obviously stoked on everything we accomplished together over the past 5 years.

There is no doubt that during that period it is commonly acknowledged that Taj did some of his best surfing ever and certainly posted his best contest results in years, winning a number of WCT events including the Quiksilver Pro, the Billabong J-bay event and the Pipe Masters.

As always, we’ll remain glued to the CT webcasts and we hope that Taj claims that ultimate prize that has eluded him to date. We’re also confident that Firewire surfboards will remain an integral part of his equipment choices as he pursues that quest. While we would have obviously preferred that Taj remained exclusively on our tech, we firmly believe that this is simply the end of the first chapter in the long Firewire story yet to unfold.

Our global market share has never been stronger and there is no doubt that the vast majority of Firewire customers are basing their decisions on the performance of our product. Either through their own ‘demo’ experience, or through the positive word of mouth from their peers. In addition, Michel Bourez is rapidly ascending the ranks of the world’s elite surfers, and if the level of interest in our tech shown by the next generation of surfers is anything to go by, Firewire is destined to secure ongoing podium finishes across all levels of competition.

In fact, the recent World Junior Pro championship at Burleigh showed just how good our boards are when 16-year old Filipe Toledo blew away almost all of the competition to finish 3rd, displaying some of the most incredible surfing seen at any level of competition. A testimony to his enormous talent and our technology.

Furthermore, after converting to Firewire longboards, Taylor Jensen won the 2011 ASP Longboard World Championship, a further testimony to the hi performance characteristics of our boards. In closing, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing support and we look forward to further developing the strong relationships that we enjoy with our distributor and retail partners around the world.