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NEWS In brief


German laser system integrator 4Jet Technologies has transferred its micromachining business to an independent entity, 4Jet Microtech. The micromachining business develops solutions for processing glass and solar cells.


The ninth Stuttgart Laser Technology Forum (SLT) will be held from 31 May to 1 June, in conjunction with Lasys, the laser material processing trade fair. The SLT, organised by the Institute for Beam Tools at the University of Stuttgart along with Messe Stuttgart, will present innovations from the industrial application of laser technology.


ROFIN ROW WITH SHAREHOLDER CONTINUES


The dispute between Rofin-Sinar Technologies and its shareholder Silver Arrow Capital Advisors has escalated, with Silver Arrow responding to a letter Rofin released in January, in which it rejected two of three members that Silver Arrow wanted to add to Rofin’s board of directors. In the most recent letter posted on its website, Silver


Arrow urges shareholders to vote for Silver Arrow’s proposals to elect members to Rofin’s board. The public row began when investment firm Silver


Arrow, which owns nine per cent of Rofin, released an open letter in October 2015 criticising Rofin’s management strategy as a reason for what Silver Arrow felt was underperformance in Rofin’s stock over the past five years. Silver Arrow intended to nominate three individuals for


Dilas merges with M2k-Laser


Rofin has announced the merger of two of its wholly-owned subsidiaries, Dilas (Mainz, Germany) and M2k-Laser (Freiburg, Germany). The combined unit will be headquartered in Mainz and operated under the Dilas brand. Dilas manufactures high-power


diode laser components and systems in a range of output powers and wavelengths, including fibre-coupled, direct beam and integrated solutions. The company celebrated its 10-year anniversary in October 2015. M2k-Laser designs, develops


and manufactures high-power and high-brightness diode lasers, which are being used globally in the fields of medical treatment, materials processing, spectroscopy and metrology. Although the new combined


company will be headquartered in Mainz, Germany, the site in Freiburg will be transformed into a business unit of Dilas Diodenlaser, called Dilas Semiconductor. With design and epitaxial service


on diode laser chip level from Freiburg, and diode laser packaging, beam shaping, and systems technology from Mainz, the two sites provide complementary technologies. According to Rofin, the merger is a strategic and logical consequence of the long-term cooperation between both sites.


election to the Rofin board of directors at the 2016 Rofin annual meeting of shareholders. These would replace three of Rofin’s directors standing for re-election. In a letter published in January, Rofin offered to appoint


one of Silver Arrow’s three proposed candidates, Gebhard Rainer, but rejected the other two candidates. In the January letter, Rofin stated that


one of Silver Arrow’s candidates would be unsuitable for appointment to the board because of ‘a lack of any meaningful business experience’, while the other proposed nominee had ‘a questionable track record of focusing on short-term results at the expense of sustainable value creation, and an unwillingness to provide requested professional references from his prior employers’. However, in its most recent response, Silver Arrow


business development for Laser Mechanisms, a firm supplying laser beam delivery components. Silver Arrow released a statement in response to the


appointment, saying the investment firm was ‘extremely disappointed’ that Bunis had been appointed. ‘We have strong concerns with Rofin’s corporate


governance, in addition to our previous noted concerns with strategy, performance and capital allocation,’ Silver Arrow’s Statement read. The investment firm questioned the decision to appoint Thomas Merk as CEO – Merk took over from Günther Braun in July 2015 – and now Bunis, without them running for election until 2018. ‘We believe proper corporate governance would require


both of these individuals to be elected by stockholders at the earliest opportunity, in this case the 2016 annual meeting of stockholders,’ Silver Arrow said. Rofin stated in its letter in January that Silver Arrow


responded to the laser company’s settlement offer ‘with a series of demands, legal threats and a “take-it-or-leave-it” offer that demonstrates that it [Silver Arrow] has no interest in reaching a mutually acceptable settlement’. Silver Arrow also insists on the retirement


prefer to avoid a disruptive and costly proxy contest


We continue to


argued that the Rofin nominating committee did not follow a proper process for reviewing the Silver Arrow proposals. Rofin appointed Jenifer Bunis to the company’s board


of directors in December 2015. Bunis has 30 years’ experience in the laser industry, working for Synrad for 20 years and, most recently, serving as vice president of


of all three of Rofin’s directors up for re-election at the upcoming annual meeting, according to Rofin. ‘We are disappointed that Silver Arrow


has rejected our constructive settlement offer and, in effect, refused to continue dialogue,’ Rofin’s statement read. ‘The


company [Rofin] believes adding one of Silver Arrow’s proposed candidates, Mr Rainer, to the board is a reasonable and acceptable way to add an individual that both Silver Arrow and Rofin deem suitable. We continue to prefer to avoid a disruptive and costly proxy contest and to instead stay focused on executing on our business plan.’ Rofin’s net sales for the last three months of 2015 were


down eight per cent on the same period the previous year, at $112.5 million.


Prism Awards recognise industrial lasers at Photonics West


Three laser companies, Coherent, LightFab, and Onefive, have been nominated in the industrial laser category of the Prism Awards, which recognises commercial products at SPIE Photonics West. The awards ceremony took place on 17 February at the photonics and optics trade fair held in San Francisco. Coherent was nominated for its Diamond


J-3 5µm CO laser, a high power carbon monoxide operating at 5µm wavelength. The laser is designed for cutting and drilling in glass, ceramics and certain plastic films, as well as some of the dielectric materials


and copper oxides used in printed circuit boards. There is low absorption at 5µm in chalcogenide fibres, opening up the potential for fibre delivery. The CO laser can also be focused to a spot two times smaller than a CO2


laser because of the shorter


wavelength, meaning smaller holes and features can be produced. German firm LightFab was nominated


for an award for its 3D printer, a tabletop machine for direct laser writing of transparent materials. The system is suitable for creating micro-fluidic and micro-mechanical structures, or other


applications requiring high precision 3D micro-structures. The third company up for an award is


ultrafast laser company Onefive for its Katana-06 HP picosecond laser. The device can deliver short pulses from 70ps to 10ns in the 556-660nm spectral range, and up to 1W of average power. The repetition rate can be adjusted from single pulse up to 100MHz. The system is an industrial-grade laser module; it is alignment-free, compact, and robust. The laser has been primarily developed to enhance the performance of STED super-resolution microscopy.


6


LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 30 • SPRING 2016


@lasersystemsmag | www.lasersystemseurope.com


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