Exitech put up for sale

20 Oct 2006

Laser manufacturer Exitech has been put into administration following cash flow difficulties.

Exitech, a UK-based supplier of lasers for micro- and nanofabrication applications, passed into the hands of adminstrators at PwC on 12 October, according to a report in Financial Director. The first task of joint administrators David Bennett and Mike Jarvis was to make 31 employees redundant in an effort to ensure that trading could continue while a buyer is sought.

"Exitech Limited is a well established company at the forefront of technology and this has resulted in a number of enquiries from overseas companies which we are currently exploring," commented Bennett. "We are continuing to look for a buyer for the business as a going concern and these redundancies have been made in order to allow us to do so."

Exitech specializes in the use of lasers for micro and nanofabrication applications in industry, and has become a leading supplier of pulsed laser-processing systems that combine the laser source with beam delivery, diagnostics, parts handling, alignment and machine control. The tools are used for materials processing tasks such as photolithography, micromachining, microdrilling, and surface treatment, in both production and R&D.

The company also supplies deep-UV and extreme-UV microstepper tools to the semiconductor industry. Exitech, which was founded in 1984, operated a 56,000 ft² in Oxford, UK, and had offices in Florida, USA, and Tokyo, Japan.