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17 Jun 2002
Since emerging from parent company TuiLaser in 1998, Toptica Photonics has grown from a tiny start-up to a firm with 45 employees. Michael Hatcher visited Munich to discover how the company with two presidents has always stayed in the black.
From Opto & Laser Europe November 2001
On the outskirts of Germany's Bavarian capital Munich, in a small block within a business park, two employees share an office. Not exactly an unusual scenario, you might think, but Wilhelm Kaenders and Thomas Weber are no ordinary co-workers - the pair are joint presidents of Toptica Photonics, a manufacturer of customized diode-laser systems.
The unusual structure of the
company is reflected in the way in which Kaenders and Weber each
take responsibility for different projects. Kaenders is more
academically inclined, and was a postdoctoral researcher at
Hanover's Institute of Quantum Optics before joining Toptica.
Weber, who holds a spectroscopy PhD, looks after the financial side
of the operation and leads Toptica's efforts in the optical data-storage
market. On this basis, Toptica has been
profitable since its inception. The company began life in 1995 at
parent company TuiLaser, an excimer-laser specialist. TuiLaser's
chiefs wanted to get a foothold in the emerging market of diode-laser
systems and the Munich-based company had close ties with optics
guru Ted Hänsch at the nearby Max-Planck Institute for Quantum
Optics. With Hänsch's help and backing from the Federal
Ministry for Education and Research, the company took on a handful
of engineering staff and began to develop diode-laser systems for
atom cooling and trapping. This resulted in its first commercial
product - a stabilized, tunable source with singlemode operation.
Kaenders was lured over from Hanover to develop the system,
which used a Littrow grating for tuning the output laser
frequency. In 1998 the fledgling company was spun out under
the name TuiOptics. Last June, however, the company held a
cocktail party at the Laser 2001 show to announce a new name that
reflected its growing independence from TuiLaser: "We had already
decided to change our corporate structure from a limited to a public
company. This makes it easier to exchange shares and therefore
easier for us give share options to our employees, who have
contributed so much to our success. At the same time we thought
we should change our name to reflect our progress. After a
democratic vote by the workforce, we became
Toptica." Weber and Kaenders describe Toptica as a company
with four "legs", by which they mean core business activities. The
first leg, which accounts for around 50% of revenue, is from sales of
tunable systems for research scientists in university labs - a direct
spin-off from Hänsch's work. The second leg (producing 20%
of revenue) emerged when Masud Mansuripur, a world leader in the
optical data storage research field at the University of Arizona, US,
was looking for a company with which to commercialize his
optical-disk testing equipment. During a conference, he found himself
seated next to a physics professor from the University of Munich,
who happened to know the founder of TuiLaser and told Mansuripur
of Toptica's expertise. Mansuripur contacted TuiLaser and the
company subsequently developed a line of disk testers to be used for
checking CD and DVD manufacture - a niche in the market that,
says Weber, is currently unfilled by the large drive
manufacturers. These
three legs have each contributed to Toptica's steadily increasing
revenues in the past. Weber and Kaenders are now hoping to start
exploiting their technologies in an increasing range of applications.
For the first time, they are looking to break into the medical and
industrial sectors. In general, according to Kaenders, the
high-performance nature of Toptica's systems precludes their use in
medical applications, because photodynamic therapy and
fluorescence imaging do not require high beam quality or singlemode
operation. However, he is now working with an Israeli firm on a
customized diode-laser system that exploits high-value beam
attributes to monitor the vitality of body tissues, with a view to
aiding neurosurgery, organ transplantation and open heart
surgery. Along with Raman spectroscopy for process
monitoring, the most promising candidate for industrial success looks
to be violet systems for the printing industry. "There is an emerging
philosophy in printing called computer-to-plate," said Weber. "The
feeling is that two technologies will survive in the long run. One of
these uses infrared sources and the other uses violet laser diodes. It
just so happened that when we were working on violet sources for
optical-disk testing a printing company came along and said 'We
need the same thing!'." Kaenders feels that violet sources have
the advantage of being the cheaper technology compared with
infrared, and says that within a year the prospects for such printing
systems will become much clearer. So will the printing market
become as strong a leg as Toptica's existing three? "It's already a
strong leg - it's just small," said Kanders. "It is a market that we can
grow into without losing control of what we do." Kaenders agreed: "We
were very reluctant to ride the telecoms wave - we know about the
problems involved. So far, the downturn hasn't affected us at
all." Conversely, the optical communications boom has been
very beneficial to Toptica. To achieve the revenue growth demanded
by investors wanting big returns, companies such as Spectra Diode
Labs and New Focus have been forced to focus on their core
business units. This has meant that they have largely dropped their
endeavours in the scientific market, leaving the field clear for Toptica,
which has a monopoly in some application areas. "Companies like
New Focus have forgotten the traditional fields they once served,"
said Kaenders. Weber says that any sectors that look likely to
take off in the future will be dealt with cautiously: "The scientific
field provides the real basis for the existence of our company and
everything that comes in the future [for us] will be based on a
scientific application. If something industrial like printing took off and
we were asked to make 100 000 systems, we would spin off a
subsidiary company to focus on that deal." Meanwhile, all of
Toptica's sectors are enjoying steady growth, and turnover is
currently at about DEM 12 million. A three- or four-fold increase in
turnover is planned by 2005. "If we wanted to become a billion
dollar company the scientific market is not practical, but we could
still become a 50 million dollar company and stick to this market,"
said Weber. Some 80% of Toptica's revenue is made outside of
Germany and publicly funded applications account for the same
proportion. A large number of PhD-level scientists and
engineers work at Toptica; around 25 of the 45-strong workforce fall
into this category. A handful of PhD students can always be found
pursuing projects at the company, and Weber says that many have
joined the firm upon completion of their studies - a good sign of a
happy workforce. Hänsch has maintained his close links with
Toptica - he is a member of its scientific advisory board, which
meets annually to discuss developments in research and new
applications for Toptica products. Kaenders describes his own
scientific backround as "absolutely crucial" to the company's
successful start. Pointing across the office to where he and Weber sit,
he said: "When I arrived from university, I put my wooden box full
of address cards on that table and started calling my former
colleagues to ask them if they wanted to buy a laser. That was the
beginning of TuiOptics." The box is still there, and so are many of
the contacts, providing a solid grounding for Toptica's future.
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