Jim Gaynor
President and CEO
I think LightPath has been in the molded aspheric optics business for many years, and what we really are bringing to market is a low cost manufacturing method for aspheric lenses, and what we have been able to do, by setting up our operations in Asia, we have been able to nearly, even substantially reduce our costs. So we can be price competitive with spherical solutions and offering a higher performance lens in an asphere, and that's one of the reasons that we are winning a number of these good type of business in this industrial tools segment, which is growing quite rapidly. Historically LightPath has been very well connected into the telecom business and with the growth in the mobile internet and the bandwidth demand that that's creating, which is stimulating these service providers to expand their optical networks, that is also creating a very large market for us. So we are selling for the equipment manufacturers, the guys, JDSUs, the Holloways, Finisar, Emcores, those type of people. So we see a very robust market in that area, and we believe that will continue for quite some time, given this mobile internet phenomena that's occurring. So I think from that standpoint, on the visible side, we have very large market opportunity in front of us. If you look at all the metrics on the mobile internet stuff, I mean, they are just phenomenal things going on. Everybody has gotten more than one [sticker], predicting 1.4 mobile devices for every man, woman and child on the planet by 2016. The internet is growing, and the video content on internet is growing, and all of this stuff requires more and more bandwidth, which requires larger networks and more capacity to be put in place, and we can play in that market segment and that theme. On the infrared side, what we are bringing to market is a lower cost infrared optic by using molding and so we believe what we have here is an enabling technology for the further commercialization of thermal imaging type devices, and so there is a lot of activity in the marketplace to make low cost thermal imaging devices, and we can participate in that, and as the expenses in these devices comes down, the technology shift that came out with uncooled microbarometers and focal plane arrays, that lowered the most expensive component in these devices, and then the optics are another area that has never been cost reduced. Positional manufacturing methods use high end CMP type operations, single point diamond turning to make aspheric lenses. It's a more expensive process, using a more expensive material, and once you get more than 1,000 pieces of demand for a particular product, molding becomes very effective, and we believe we can offer a lower cost solution by as much as 30% to 40%. So that's how we are going to bring that to market, and in the areas that we can play.