Business briefs

30 Jan 2004

Including news from Finisar, Cymer, Lucent, SPI and Corning among others.

•  Finisar, the provider of optical datacoms equipment, has purchased Honeywell's VCSEL business for $75 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2004. During 2003, the VCSEL business, which is based in Richardson, Texas, generated a revenue of approximately $36 million.

•  Cymer, the maker of ultraviolet lasers, has been granted $20 million in funding from Intel to push forward development of an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source for microchip lithography. “Accelerating EUV technology development to enable its successful implementation in high-volume manufacturing for the 32 nm node in 2009 is a critical mission at Intel,” said Peter Silverman, director of Intel’s Lithography Capital Equipment Development.

•  Lucent Technologies, US, has reported a rise in revenue and profit for the first quarter of fiscal 2004. For the three months ended December 31 2003, Lucent achieved a revenue of $2.26 billion and a net income of $338 million. This compares with a revenue of $2.08 million and a net income of $99 million for the preceding quarter.

•  Southampton Photonics (SPI), the UK developer of high-power fiber lasers, is delivering a kilowatt class fiber laser to the University of Cambridge, UK. The University’s Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre will use the laser to explore advanced methods of materials processing. The financial details of the deal and the power of the laser were not disclosed.

•  Corning, the US glass specialist, pulled in $820 million in sales for the fourth quarter of 2003. Although this exceeded its guidance figure of $740 to $765 million, the company still incurred a net loss of $29 million for the period. Corning says that sequential sales of glass for liquid crystal glass grew 39 percent in the quarter.

•  Ion Optics, a Massachusetts-based developer of photonic crystal technology, has received $4.0 million in a C-round of venture-capital financing. The firm says that the cash will allow it to develop the device packaging that it needs to move its SensorChip technology into high volume markets. The SensorChip is a compact infrared gas sensor that combines MEMS and photonic crystal technology.

•  DALSA, the Canadian camera maker, says that its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2003 grew 10% year-on-year to reach CAD 37.7 million. Net income for Q4 was CAD 4.2 million, up 26% over the same period in 2002.

•  Thorlabs, the US supplier of photonics equipment, has acquired Radians Innova of Sweden. Radians Innova makes compact tunable lasers for applications in telecoms, sensing and spectroscopy. The Swedish firm will remain at is headquarters in Gothenburg and act as a Thorlabs R&D center. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.