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Company Interview Excerpt
KENNETH BRIZEL - LIGHTPATH TECHNOLOGIES INC (LPTH)


Full article published: 4/21/2003


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TWST: Could we begin with a brief historical sketch of LightPath and an overview of things as they are now?
Mr. Brizel: LightPath was founded 17 years ago with the development of Gradium glass, graded index glass, originally developed for the solar energy market. Over the years, Gradium was introduced as a technology useful in a broad range of markets including industrial, defense, medical, instrumentation and communications products. In 1996, LightPath Technologies, Inc., went public on that premise. Later into the 1990s LightPath introduced a fused collimator technology for communications products. Early in 2000, LightPath continued to diversify through the acquisition of two different companies, Horizon Photonics, Inc., and Geltech, Inc., two leaders in the automated production of optical components. Horizon Photonics was well-known in the communications industry for delivering highly integrated optical isolator components using advanced manufacturing technologies. Geltech was recognized in the optics industry for their precision molded optical lens technologies and custom optic designs. The new LightPath Technologies combined these capabilities with its own technologies, bringing a wealth of expertise to solving complex optical problems for the entire optics industry. GelTech, I'll go back in time with little history on that, had acquired Corning's precision molded glass lens business back in 1994. Corning had been developing the technology for over 10 years. the molded glass business in addition to Geltech's SolGel products were useful in every optical market worldwide. In addition, Geltech was well known for their high performance custom lens designs. Horizon Photonics, founded in 1996 in Walnut, California, was a newer upstart in the communications business, building isolator technologies and higher-level assemblies. Horizon was the highest volume supplier of isolators in telecommunications applications during the telecommunications boom. Then, of course, as the telecom industry went, so did a lot of what was going on in the isolator market for telecommunications. Over the course of the last few years, isolators have made inroads into all communications applications requiring higher signal to noise, like Hybrid Fiber Coax and Datacom applications. Over the last nine months that I've been on board with the company, we have relocated our corporate headquarters from Albuquerque to Orlando. We have consolidated the business from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Orlando and we're in the process right now of consolidating the business from Walnut, California, to the Orlando location. Going forward, all LightPath manufacturing will be out of Orlando, Florida. The revenue in the last fiscal year was $12 million with no debt. We're a public company, so you can see every quarter that we've been fairly flat, which I guess for these times, is something to be proud of. The business has moved from a focus in telecommunications over the last few years back to more traditional optics. The nice part about our company is that we have had hundreds of customers for many years, and those customers are in a broad range of markets requiring our optics products. It was just during the telecom boom times that we were spending a lot of time and effort in telecommunications product technology developments. Only more recently, in the last nine months, have we really refocused the whole business back toward all the traditional optics customers and products that we had been dealing with for so many years. So that's a summary of where we were then and where we are now, in a nutshell.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: LPTH

 

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