Business briefs

23 Jan 2004

Including news from Coherent, Kodak, Lumenis, Photonic Products and more.

•  Coherent, US, has acquired more than 95% of the shares in its German subsidiary Lambda Physik. The US firm will now look to invoke a squeeze-out resolution which, under German law, will permit Coherent to acquire all of the remaining shares in Lambda. Coherent then plans to convert Lambda from a stock corporation into a limited liability company.

•  Kodak is axing its global workforce by 20%, some 15 000 employees, over the next three years. The plans, which also include consolidating facilities, are expected to generate full-year continued savings of $800 million to $1 billion by 2007. “These plans are the consequence of market realities,” said Kodak’s president Antonio Perez. “They are absolutely required for Kodak to succeed in traditional markets as well as the digital markets to which our businesses are rapidly shifting.”

•  Medical laser makers Lumenis and Syneron Medical have settled their long-running litigation. Under the terms of the agreement, Lumenis has given Syneron unlimited, non-exclusive worldwide licenses for Lumenis patents covering the use of incoherent light in aesthetic and medical applications. Syneron will also pay Lumenis royalties and an upfront payment of $1.5 million.

•  Photonic Products has extended its distribution agreement with Sanyo Semiconductor Europe to include Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The UK-based distributor, which already sells Sanyo’s full range of laser diode products in the UK and Eire, now plans to open a sales center in Germany to support its customers.

•  The French Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA) has awarded SAGEM a follow-on contract worth EURO 200 million. The contract will see SAGEM design and implement the laser beam lines of the Megajoule Laser, a facility being built to perform inertial confinement fusion. SAGEM says the contract excludes the amplifiers used in the laser beam lines.

•  Actuality Systems has installed one of its Perspecta 3D visualization systems at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethsada, US. Researchers will use the system to visualize the exact location of tumors in a patient’s liver. It will also be used to compare tumor and treatment locations during radiofrequency ablation procedures.