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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (50851)	8/20/2001 4:10:00 PM
From: michael97123	Respond to of 70976

OT JDSU watchers--a bit of good news At last, good news for Bookham Researchers say optical parts market is about to take off By Madeleine Acey, FTMarketWatch Last Update: 10:35 AM ET Aug. 20, 2001 LONDON (FTMW) - Bookham (UK:BHM: news, chart, profile) (BKHM: news, chart, profile) shareholders who decided to stay in for the long-term should be breathing at least a little sigh of relief on Monday as market researchers announced the company's market is about to take-off. CIR (Communications Industry Researchers) said demand for small, cheap components for building or upgrading certain types of telecoms network is kicking in - particularly metropolitan area networks. See previous column on promise from metro networks The market for integrated optical components - where several functions are put on one chip - is worth just $13.4 million this year, CIR said. But by 2005 it will reach $2.6 billion. This is just the kind of news companies like Bookham, Alcatel Optronics (FR:013015: news, chart, profile) and JDS Uniphase (JDSU: news, chart, profile) have been waiting for. Britain's Bookham, in particular, specialises in combining several components on single chips. Larger telecoms equipment makers including Nortel (NT: news, chart, profile) use Bookham to provide such parts for their systems. But all these companies have been in the wars as telecoms spending has been squeezed after the bottom fell out of the dotcom market - meaning fewer than expected business users of Internet services - and as many telcos spent billions on third generation mobile phone licences. One unwelcome point from CIR, for Bookham followers, was the claim that the industry was abandoning the "pure but hard-to-achieve" idea of packing lots of complicated components on to one massive chip and was instead looking at bonding single function chips together in one package. But Bookham's manufacturing experience and its high-yield production processes, based on the cheaper techniques of the silicon chip industry, should be major plusses. CIR pointed out that "...manufacturing yields for integrated optical components are extremely low," and "... the unit cost of producing integrated optical components is quite high. CIR predicts that achieving better yields will become a key way to gain a competitive advantage.... Significant yield improvements come only from lengthy manufacturing experience." CIR said transmitters and transceivers would be the components to take the largest slice of the pie - $1.6 billion. It mentioned Lucent's (LU: news, chart, profile) Agere (AGRA: news, chart, profile) as being the most promising player in this area. But none of the companies would see significant revenue from integrated components until 2003, CIR concluded. Bookham shares were down 1.8 percent at 165 pence in a slightly negative London tech market on Monday. Madeleine