Brightpoint Inc. not only survived a neardeath experience-it rebounded to become one of the top-performing Indiana stocks in 2003.

As recently as October 2002, shares of the Plainfield-based distributor of wireless phones traded for just $2, and the price would have been an even-more-lowly 29 cents per share were it not for a one-for-seven-reverse stock split engineered earlier that year.

But those bleak days seem like years ago. The company restructured, zeroing in on its most profitable markets across the globe, and bought back bonds at a discount, eliminating most of its debt.

Like a Jack-in-the-box, the stock sprung as high as $30 this October. It has since retreated and recently was trading at about $17.50, still up nearly 400 percent for the year.

"I think my motivation during the darkest hour of investor 'nonbelief' was to recover my personal credibility and prove the cynics wrong," said CEO Bob Laikin, who founded the company in 1989.

Investors had bailed last year, fearing the company would be unable to disarm a financial time bomb set to go off in March 2003, the five-year anniversary of 20year bonds Brightpoint had issued in 1998.

Holders on that anniversary had the right to sell the bonds back to Brightpoint, with the company electing to pay in cash or stock. Bondholders were sure to cash in, investors fretted, since the wireless-phone industry had slid into a tailspin, leaving Brightpoint's survival in doubt.

Yet Brightpoint had neither the cash nor the borrowing capacity to buy back all the bonds at the previously agreed-to price of $552 apiece, or a total of $140 million. And because Brightpoint's shares had fallen so low, satisfying the obligation with stock would have wiped out existing shareholders.

But Laikin was able to avert calamity through compromise, cutting deals with bondholders under which they accepted $35 million less than they would have otherwise been due.

Those who jumped in to the stock during the darkest days piled up millions

of dollars in paper profits. Among them: Indianapolis businessman Tim Durham, who now ranks as the company's largest shareholder.