Company Interview Excerpt
ARTHUR ZAFIROPOULO - ULTRATECH INC (UTEK)
Full article published: 11/10/2003
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Mr. Zafiropoulo: The company was founded in 1979 and was acquired by a Fortune 500 company, General Signal. It owned Ultratech through a management buyout in March 1993. We went public at the end of 1993 on NASDAQ under the symbol UTEK, and have had a very successful program as a public company. Our company manufactures two major important technology products. The one the company is noted for is photolithography equipment, which is physically quite large. The footprint is about six feet by six feet, about six feet high and weighs about 4,000 pounds. Very simply, the system is a very high-technology camera. It is used to print images on semiconductor wafers, data storage disk drive heads and other microelectro-mechanical assemblies. We are driven to be number one in each of our focused lithography served markets. We have been successful identifying important niche markets. We try not to compete with the other three major companies, ASML in Holland, Canon and Nikon in Japan. Our strategy has been to select markets that have significant technical advantages for our company, and therefore increasing our gross margins. We also have invested considerable amounts of money in a new enabling technology, laser processing. This technology is used to manufacture very advanced transistors, and in the future it will be used to provide increased performance and yield of advanced devices. We have spent almost 10 years in this enabling technology and have invested over $80 million. We have about 60 patents and applications to date and more on the way. We will be revenuing our first production tool this quarter (Q403). We believe the potential of this technology is a 'business home run,' in that we can visualize that within the next 10 years this market has the potential to exceed probably $2 billion per year. In the lithography area we focus on bump interconnect technology for packaging. We have about 90% world market share in that area. Currently, only 7% of the devices packaged are by bumping or flip-chip technology. We expect that this will increase to over 60% in the next 10 years or so. We expect to continue in maintaining our dominance in this important market based on our advanced technology and continued R&D investments. A future technology described as 'mix-and-match' is a strategy to reduce the cost of building or expanding new factories that cost about $3 billion each. We feel this 'mix-and-match' strategy will be very effective beginning the end of next year.
Tickers included in this excerpt: UTEK
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