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Technology Stocks : SDL, Inc. [Nasdaq: SDLI] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3751)	1/10/2001 11:15:58 AM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 3951

Frank -- Thanks for the link to fiber Bragg gratings. Since it's readily available I'll share it with the thread: oemagazine.com Pat

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3751)	1/11/2001 3:44:08 AM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 3951

SDLI's new home-page is fun to sort through. If you check out "customers," you'll find you can click on any product and download pdf files. From their FAQ: sdli.com How many square feet of facilities does SDL have? SDL occupied approximately 400,000 square feet as of September 2000 and is currently in the process of adding over 130,000 square feet by the end of calendar year 2000. If you listened to James Cramer, you'd have to conclude SDL's planning a lot of barn dances to use all that space. Turning to other reading, this from SPIE's OEmagazine, January 2001: "I don't think the bubble is ready to burst," says Stephen Montgomery of ElectroniCast Corp. (San Mateo, CA). What's happening, he says, is that companies are experiencing trouble keeping up with demand for their products, some of which now have a lead time of up to two years. In recent months, Nortel, for instance, has had a difficult time delivering on the promised shipments, and Lucent Technologies ran into similar troubles about a year back. When companies miss revenue targets, the market is unforgiving. In part, the delays are a result of shortages of some of the materials needed for optical components. Even more problematic, Montgomery says, is a shortage of skilled manufacturing personnel and of automation systems necessary to streamline production. Although major players like Nortel and Lucent have automated large segments of their manufacturing processes, many of the smaller companies build components by hand and consequently suffer from low yield. In addition, while active components based on semiconductors benefit from the chip-making industry's experience with pick-and-place robotics, systems for automating production of newer passive components have not yet been developed. Nonetheless, ElectroniCast sees the market continuing to grow. It projects that the global market for fiber-optic cable will increase from $24.5 billion in 2000 to $38.4 billion in 2005. Active components will jump from $9.0 billion to $15.2 billion over the same period, passive components will more than double from $2.4 billion to $6.7 billion, and other components such as dispersion compensators, planar waveguides, and optoelectronic integrated circuits will grow from $4.4 billion to $5.8 billion. . . . What investors have to realize, he says, is that because of the nature of telecommunications, with its vast legacy infrastructure, change comes relatively slowly. "In the computer industry, real change can take place in six months," Lutkowitz says. "In the telecom market, particularly the consumer telecom market, the transition can take five years." . . . Erik Kreifeldt, an analyst for RHK, Inc. (San Francisco. CA), says that the main goal of optics in the past was to increase the capacity of networks, but the emphasis is shifting. "More recently you've seen efforts to manage that bandwidth at an optical level," he says. . . . RHK says the North American optical transport market, which includes shipments of DWDM, synchronous optical networking (SONET), and digital cross-connect system equipment, grew 67% in 2000 and will reach $29.3 billion in 2001 and $45 billion in 2004. . . .