Sam,
I was shocked to see SDLI collapse today. I frankly don't know why it should crater, except that Wall Street hates it when your earnings go down like SDL's did. I own some also, so it really hurt to see it drop to 8!!
I can't speak as a financial maven, but on the technical front I have a lot of faith in SDL. They started as a research house working on contracts for ARPA and other agencies. Their speciality is high power laser diodes. This was originally a military/defense business (i.e. star wars stuff). Later, they became more commercial. In particular, they managed to utilize their expertise in high power lasers to make 980nm pump lasers for Er-doped fiber amplifiers, which (as you know) are used in telecom transmission systems. This is apparently their mainstay right now. Meanwhile, they are trying to get into high-speed transmitters for the telecom and datacom world. This is a briusing business to go into, but if any small American company can succeed in this world, SDL can.
As far as their competitors go, the 980nm pump laser business used to be owned by SDL and Lasertron. SDL made its own chips and packaged them, while Lasertron OEMed chips from IBM's laser enterprise, and then packaged and sold them. I suspect that with the sale of IBM's laser enterprise to UTP, Lasertron is in deep trouble, but SDL is still fine. In any event, it will take UTP some time to get up to speed, since the old IBM Laser Enterprise doesn't have packaging capabilities. Lucent's big order with SDL also suggests that SDL will be around for a while.
SDL has a lot of very smart people working for them. I know several of their PhDs personally, and have high regard for all of them. They are smart and effective people (as opposed to being academics). I have noticed a little turnover over the last few months, but I think that it is only the normal Silicon Valley job churn. Last year they managed to lure a department manager away from Bell Labs to become chief scientist. This was a major coup. The guy stayed at SDL for almost one year, and then returned to Bell to take a really high position. I hope/suspect that the SDL/Lucent ties were strengthened by this.
In any event, I will probably use this price dip to average down. *Waaay* down, unfortunately!
Stuart |
