MILSIG Industries

Sep 092009

We all know those MILSIG Milsim Paintball markers. Welcome Nelson Lau, CEO of MILSIG Industries Canada. For those unaware, MILSIG stands for Military Special Interest Group. Whil still relatively new in the paintball industry, MILSIG is quickly becoming recognized due to a very innovative and rapidly expanding line of products. MILSIG is perhaps best known for their line of innovative magazine fed 68 caliber milsim paintball markers and high quality accessories. MILSIG also offers a line of Less Lethal Launchers for Law Enforcement use, not to mention specialty equipment used for Military Training, Tactical Gear and other accessories.

MILSIG Industries Canada based in Vancouver BC, Canada is the headquarters MILSIG marker of MILSIG and houses MILSIG’s sales and distribution office among other things. A secondary company, Hann-Ma Enterprises Corporation of Taipei, Taiwan is also tied in with the MILSIG industries. The MILSIG brand was founded by Nelson Lau and his business partner Chao-Hsiung Cho; in Taiwan. Hann-Ma Enterprises is responsible for research and development and production, all else is handled by MILSIG Paintball Canada. Cho is the President and Chief Engineer of Hann-Ma while Lau is its CEO. Lau is also the CEO of MILSIG Paintball Canada, a company he founded with his two long time friends, Jacky Chan, and Stanley Lam. MILSIG Europe is based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Nelson Lau spent 12 yrs in airsoft, and was an avid real steel shooter as well, so he always tries to put that “flair” into all of the MILSIG products. Cho is the chief engineer, he’s actually the guy that came up with the mag fed design. He was an engineer in the Taiwanese army and developed artillery systems when he was in the service. After leaving the military, he started making air gun parts and he is a well known air gun designer in Asia. He spent 10 years making airsoft products before making the switch over to paintball.

When asked about the paintball industry, Nelson shared his thoughts with the Catshack Reports…

“I think like everything else in life, things go through cycles. Paintball started in the woods, became politically incorrect and too “militant”, turned into a sport, and now for various reasons is going back to the woods. Speedball promotes elitism, where you have these professional athletes competing against other professional athletes. Then we expect the avg. joe paintballer to emulate them, and that just doesn’t work. With the economy the way it is, speedball doesn’t work b/c of the high costs. In order to compete you have to shoot cases and cases of paint, then there are the logistical costs. It’s easy for the sponsored tourney player to do it when everything is given to them for free, but when one has to finance their hobby from their own pockets during these dire times, speedball becomes more and more out of reach. As all the big corporations are feeling the financial pain with lowered sales, sponsorship is running dry, and this glutton we know as speedball is slowly starving away as the bigs can no longer sustain it. I think speedball will always be around as there will always be those that like the competition, but it won’t be at the scale it once was, and it’ll keep declining as more players turn to woodsball.

I think this turn around is just natural progression as woodsball is a lot less competitive, cheaper, and just more fun. You don’t have to be rich or a super athlete to have a good time, and more and more players are realizing it. Woodsball is how 90% of us start playing paintball, and it is thru this lower entry barrier that we’ll be able to attract new players and sustain the industry as a whole.

In my humble opinion, woods / scenario / milsim paintball will only get stronger in the next few years. We’ll have more staying power before we go into the next cycle.”

Nelson Lau