Albuquerque Journal..
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Emcore Foresees Its Sunniest Years
By Andrew Webb
Journal Staff Writer
In the last four years, Emcore Corp. has recovered from the telecom bust of the late 1990s.
But thanks to growing concerns about fossil fuels and the world's growing thirst for energy, this 24-year-old Albuquerque firm's sunniest years may yet be ahead of it.
The company, which recently began adapting solar cell technology it developed for satellites for use by Earth-bound electric utilities, reported the highest revenue growth among companies earning more than $10 million annually in this year's Flying 40.
“Our photovoltaic division has tripled its revenues since 2003, and now that we're moving to terrestrial systems, we see a $1 billion opportunity for Emcore,” said David Danzilio, company vice president and general manager of its photovoltaic division.
Emcore, which officially moved its headquarters from New Jersey to Albuquerque in 2006, reported revenues of just under $170 million in 2007, up 181 percent from $60 million in 2003.
About 500 of its 725 employees work in Albuquerque, where the semiconductor company makes photovoltaic cells and assemblies, as well as optical communications devices. It is the city's largest publicly traded company, valued at nearly $600 million.
On a hot early summer day, Danzilio leads a tour that begins at two massive rectangular boxes, mounted on rotating, tilting stands that keep them aimed at the sun.
The humming devices, each roughly half the length of a school bus, are 25 kilowatt concentrated photovoltaic, or CPV, power generators — which will likely be one of many renewable energy solutions expected to come online in the coming decades.
“We expect solar to be part of the mix — between 5 and 15 percent by 2020 — of total power generation,” Danzilio said.
They use special lenses to concentrate the sun's energy on photovoltaic cells, a process that reduces the number of expensive cells used and can convert energy at the lowest per-kilowatt cost of any existing technology, Danzilio says.
They are based on gallium arsenide-based multijunction photovoltaic cell technology Emcore designed for long-term use in the brutal environments of space, and are especially suited to concentrated sunlight.
Emcore announced early this year that it will begin supplying components and complete, turnkey CPV systems for several Spanish and Chinese power generation projects in the coming year, and has reached agreements for future such projects in the southwestern U.S. and elsewhere.
Most of Emcore's products are manufactured in highly-automated, capital intensive processes similar to those used by computer chip makers. The company just completed a nearly $9 million investment in new equipment here, and produces some 60,000 solar cells, in two sizes, per day Danzilio said.
Because of the diversity of its products, “our production staff has to be very versatile,” he said.
Emcore's business has shifted over the years.
Semiconductor companies, such as Intel, use various processes that literally “grow” crystalline material on substrates, such as silicon, and Emcore was originally in the business of building and selling equipment used for such processes — a business it completely exited when it sold that division in 2003.
The company got its start in Albuquerque with the purchase, in 1997, of Micro Optical Devices, or MODE, a Sandia National Laboratories spinout that made communications switching devices based on a proprietary laser technology. It eventually became a major producer of optical data transmission and storage products.
But the dot-com meltdown at the turn of the millennium left many firms, including Emcore, with scant business as the building of broadband infrastructure came to a halt.
“Through 2001, Emcore was investing heavily in fiber products,” Danzilio says. “All signs were that market was going straight to the moon in terms of demand. Like lots of tech companies, we were caught in the downdraft, but we survived, and came out of it in 2004 and 2005.”
That was largely, he says, because of Emcore's commitment to diversity — such as photovoltaics and analog cable television products.
Today, communications remains a major part of Emcore's business — it has made several strategic recent acquisitions of telecom divisions from other companies, such as Intel, to add to its portfolio of products.
The satellite power business is also poised for a rebound. Launches, which reached nearly 40 a year by 1999, but had trickled to only a handful by 2004, exceeded 30 again by 2007, especially in emerging countries where the cost and complexity of building underground telecommunications infrastructure would be prohibitive.
Furthermore, Danzilio says, “a lot of the assets launched in the 1990s are reaching the end of their lives, and will need replacing in the 2010 to 2015 time frame.” |
