While IPG’s continued success is a testament to its ability to
sell the value proposition behind fiber lasers, numerous oth-
er companies are benefiting from the fiber laser boom. But
could the boom lead to a bust? “Our 2014 revenue will in-
crease 30%, and we will ship two megawatts of pump diodes
to the fiber laser market,” says Louisa Chen, marketing direc-
tor at BWT Beijing (China). “It seems everybody is jumping
into the fiber laser market or building pump lasers by them-
selves without regard to cost structure or bottom-line finan-
cials. Just like fiber-laser-price pressures, our pump diodes are
also facing significant price pressure over the past few years,
and we are worried that the increasing entry of new fiber-la-
ser-related suppliers for materials processing will eventually
lead to a fiber laser bubble.”
“While overall sales grew 30% in 2014 on strong direct-di-
ode cladding and laser surface treatment as well as medical
and aesthetic applications, our diode laser pump source sales
for SSLs and fiber lasers actually declined a little due to strong
price competition,” says Focuslight Technologies (Xi’an, China)
president Xingsheng (Victor) Liu.
Other winners in the pump laser market in 2014 include
DILAS (Mainz, Germany). “Our 600 W/200 µm and 250
W/200 µm modules for fiber laser pumping, as well as pump
laser diodes from 25 W to 2 kW—and especially narrow
linewidth and wavelength-locked devices—are in high de-
mand for disk laser and end-pumped lasers, in addition to
high demand for our laser systems for direct-diode materi-
als processing applications,” says Joerg Neukum, DILAS
sales and marketing director. “We also started shipping our
fiber-coupled 25 W, 450 nm blue diodes for applications in
phosphor excitation, cinema projectors, and photodynamic
therapy applications.”
Fiber laser boom/bust possibilities aside, did any of the major
players in the laser industry have a down year? ROFIN-SINAR
(Plymouth, MI) saw a 5% revenue decrease from $560 million
in the 12 months ended September 30, 2013 to $530 million
for the same period in 2014. “Compared to FY 2013, weak-
er business levels during the first half of the year—in single
industries and specific regions such as China—were not fully
compensated in the second half,” says Gunther Braun, CEO
and president at ROFIN-SINAR. “However, our business
in China recovered well in the latter part of the year, Europe
is on a solid level, and North American shipments have im-
proved quarter by quarter. We are excited about the headway
we have made in high-power fiber lasers and ultrashort pulse
lasers as well as with the expansion of our applications port-
folio through innovative processes like our new SmartCleave
technology for the cutting of brittle materials.”
Coherent’s fiscal Q4 and year ended September 27, 2014
saw net sales of $794.6 million compared to $810.1 million
for the same period in 2013, attributing the sales decrease to
delays in the release of certain consumer electronics requir-
ing sapphire materials processing as well as “shifting fortunes
within the mobile display market.”
Indeed, signals are mixed within the semiconductor/display
industry about 2015 prospects. Despite IC Insights’ 2014 micro-
controller forecast for 5% growth after a flat 2013, Microchip
(Chandler, AZ), a provider of microcontroller and analog semi-
conductors, predicts a semiconductor slowdown based on in-
ventory buildups and weakness in China, calling itself a ca-
nary-in-the-coal-mine predictor based on its broad selling base
of 80,000 customers. And the SEMI (San Jose, CA) Silicon
Manufacturers Group (SMG) said that silicon wafer volume
shipment growth, which reached a record level of more than
7. 5 million inches in Q1-Q3 2014 (and 11% higher than the
same period in 2013), plateaued in Q3 2014.
And yet, “We see semiconductor equipment billings growing globally about 19% for 2014 and we are looking at 15%
for 2015,” says Dan Tracy, senior market analyst at SEMI.
“Despite the Microchip news, Intel had a record third quarter and Qualcomm reported that FY 2014 revenues were 7%
higher than the previous year. A number of other industry
analysts are discussing 8–10% revenue growth in 2014 and a
similar range for 2015.”
Strength in diversity
Those smaller and mid-sized companies that saw robust laser sales in 2014 share a common denominator: they have a
diverse portfolio of cutting-edge-performance laser products
and play in numerous industry sectors.
“For 2013 and 2014, we’ve seen overall growth of 15% each
year, although we are planning for a more moderate growth
scenario in 2015 due to political uncertainties,” says Wilhelm
Kaenders, president of ultrafast fiber and diode laser manufac-
turer TOP TICA Photonics (Munich, Germany and Rochester,
NY). Kaenders notes a few recent breakthroughs: “Two cas-
caded second-harmonic-generation [SHG] stages convert our
near-infrared diodes to deep-ultraviolet [DUV] 193 nm sourc-
es for semiconductor lithography applications that continue to
demand shorter wavelengths with improved spectral and in-
tensity stability, while our femtosecond “cold processing” fi-
ber lasers continue to make gains against nanosecond lasers
in microprocessing applications.” He adds, “Our easy-to-op-
erate multicolor solutions for biomedical instrumentation ap-
plications are a favorite among system integrators.”
Kaenders says deployment of its 20+ 2 W guide star lasers
confirms TOPTICA’s commitment to the astronomical in-
strumentation community. He is also proud of the 90 dB sig-
nal-to-noise ratio of the company’s terahertz radiation sourc-
es that extend layer thickness inspection parameters down to
20 µm in various materials science applications.
Laser diode and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)
