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INTERVIEW: GROWTH STRATEGY
Organic development and future acquisitions key to Altechna’s growth strategy
Jérémy Picot-Clémente, EPIC’s Photonics Technologies Program Manager, learns how Antanas Laurutis, CEO of Lithuania laser optics manufacturer Altechna, plans to triple the firm’s revenue over the next five years
What led to your appointment as CEO at Altechna? In 2009, I started a BSc in Modern Technology Physics and Management at Vilnius University. The course was designed to give us some basic knowledge of physics, but also management and economics, because the University was aware that a lot of physics students ended up in industry and entrepreneurship. I specialised in lasers and, in the last year of the course I started working part-time as a sales engineer for Altechna, which was offering a part-time work and study programme. In 2013, to broaden my
knowledge of Altechna’s technology, I started an MSc in
Laser Technology that focussed on material processing. I did my Master’s thesis on radial polarisation converters creating nano structures inside glass with femtosecond pulse lasers and, in 2014, I was promoted to Senior Sales Engineer at Altechna. A year later, I became Regional Sales Manager and, from 2016, I worked in senior management as Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and from 2019, as Altechna’s CEO.
Did you have aspirations to become CEO when you started at the company? Not really. I was definitely ambitious, but what I wanted to do was engage with customers to understand their challenges
and solve their problems. I wanted to do the best I could and even though I thought that maybe one day I could become Head of Sales, I never imagined becoming CEO.
Altechna offers a range of custom solutions, involving prisms, waveplates and lenses for marekts such as medical and semicon
www.electrooptics.com
How has the company developed? Altechna was established in 1996 to focus on its core business of laser optics, particularly coatings, for research and industrial applications. Until quite recently, the business strategy was to work with a range of customers including research institutes, start-ups, smaller sized companies and a few of the big players. But when I became CSO in 2016, the company had decided to focus more on the major players, where there were a lot more possibilities for revenue growth – i.e., to have fewer customers but a better stream of revenue. Since then, our strategy has been to develop standard products for our key customers and to be able to move quickly from R&D to serial production. We’ve also had to broaden our offering to include integrated opto-mechanical subassemblies as a way of offering more added-value solutions. In November 2023, we acquired Alpine Research Optics, a US- based producer of high-quality laser optics, specialising in UV applications. Together with a subsidiary in Shenzhen, China, this acquisition has brought our workforce up to around 150 people and consolidated revenue for 2023
“In the next five years, we plan to triple our revenue via a growth strategy that’s partly organic and partly through further acquisitions”
will be around €23 million. Technology wise, we’re very
strong on in-house coatings in the areas of magnetron sputtering, ion beam sputtering, and ion-assisted e-beam coatings. We also offer a range of custom-designed assembly and manufacturing solutions, involving prisms, waveplates, and lenses, mounted on various types of metal mounts and housings. Last year, we also invested €8 million into new facilities in Vilnius, featuring a manufacturing area of ISO 8 and ISO 6 clean rooms for optical coatings production and optomechanical assembling. Our main markets are currently medical, semicon, defence, and laser-related applications for OEMs, such as micro machining, for customers in Europe, the United States and Japan.
What have been your main challenges since becoming CEO? When I started in 2012, the workforce was around 30, but we’re now more like a group of companies with five times the
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