OK, I'll bite.
I own 100 shares so I'm only a small shareholder. However, I work in the area of fiber optics ("photonics"), and know Newport very well as a customer. They are one of the two big suppliers of photonic products to the research optics industry; the other big name is Melles-Griot. Their original area of business was laboratory optics for researchers: i.e. mirrors, lenses, beamsplitters, fine positioning equipment, optical instruments, etc. Basically, if you do research in physics or optics, you use a lot of Newport stuff. Although this may sound like high-tech, it's not the kind of high-tech stuff that grows at 100%/yr, so don't buy NEWP for this reason. For example, the little laser company you mentioned in one of your posts is a "researchy" laser company, and isn't going to take off like a rocket in the marketplace.
Recently, Newport (like Melles Griot) has been using its expertise in laboratory optics to try to get into what is loosely called "photonics" -- i.e. fiber optics. What I find particularly interesting is that they have used the 1992 aquisition of a French company called MicroControlle to get into the automated micropositioning world. This aquisition cost Newport a lot of money, and hurt the stock price for a couple of years. However, with this purchase they got technology which they are now using to make machines capable of positioning optical fibers to e.g. semiconductor lasers with sub-micron tolerances. (This is the AutoAlign machine.) This is a crucial technology for the coming battle to mass produce optical components cheaply, so that photonic devices will become as ubiquitous as electronic devices are today. In the future, Newport will (hopefully) be a manufacturer of equipment used in photonic device packaging, sort of like Kulike & Soffa is in the electronics world today.
However, I don't think that you're gonna see any big moves in Newport for a long time. It's not a good vehicle for trading, but rather somethign to buy and hold for the next ten years.
Good luck,
Stuart
p.s. If you are interested in photonics plays, buy SDL Inc. (SDLI) or Ortel (I forgot the ticker symbol). They are both high-tech semiconductor laser manufacturers who are growing like crazy, and are becoming important players in the telecommunications area. They'll both move up a lot faster than NEWP, IMHO. |
