II-VI, Inc. (IIVI)

The following comments are not based on a financial analysis of II-VI, but offer the perspective of an end-user of laser and optical products.





I'm an optical physicist at one of the DOE weapons laboratories, primarily an experimenter, with 15 years experience in applications of lasers, nonlinear optics, and atomic physics. In general, US-based speciality laser and optics manufacturers concern me as investments because it's a high equipment cost, high labor cost, difficult industry with lots of highly motivated upstart foreign competition. For example, II-VI bought VLOC, a high-quality supplier of laser and nonlinear optical crystals, but there are lots of foreign producers of laser and NLO crystals such as Fujian Castech in China and Ekspla in Lithuania, just two of many examples. In recent years foreign crystal growers have taken over the market for standard NLO crystals such as KTP, KTA, BBO, and LBO (there's a Chinese-owned US patent on LBO, but other countries can grow it and sell it - I've bought LBO from the French VLOC affiliate Cristal Laser) so the VLOC portfolio of II-VI by no means has that segment of the market to themselves.





II-VI may offer some unique capabilities through their traditional IR materials product lines, ZnSe and so forth, but there is lots of competition right here at home. One potential strength for US-based companies is military contracts, which may be the case for II-VI.





Anyway, just thought I'd add my $0.02 worth.