Finisar Malaysia Celebrates 10 Years

This week’s blog post comes from KW Hoo, the Vice President of Operations at Finisar Malaysia.
Yes! The magic number! Perfect 10!

Ipoh – a city in the state of Perak, Malaysia houses the biggest Finisar entity with more than 5,000 employees.

Finisar Malaysia is set on twenty acres of land with 640,000 square feet of manufacturing space. About one third of this space is suitable for clean room operations.

It all began when Finisar Corporation decided to transfer most of its manufacturing processes from a contractor to our very own facility to enable greater control of internal quality, intellectual property and cost-effectiveness. Finisar Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. was registered as a legal entity in 2001 and started operations with a pioneer batch of 47 employees.

The rest is history. By fiscal year 2007, Finisar Malaysia had become the largest transceiver manufacturing facility in the world and a major contributing factor to the overall success of the company. Today, we are shipping more than 16 million modules per year and continuing to grow.

Ipoh is proud to have such an energetic and talented team of employees from many different countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Kampuchea, India and Czech Republic. We speak English, Malay, Chinese, Tagalog, Myanmar, Khmer, Tamil and Urdu.

We are proud to be part of Finisar and look forward to another 10 years!

Reflecting on 2010 in the Optical Communications Industry

Happy New Year to our blog readers! Before we get our feet wet in 2011, I’d like to recap the amazing year we had in 2010 – from product launches to tradeshows to trips around the world (Finisar Australia, ECOC in Italy). The past year has flown by faster than the speed of light through an optical fiber.

Finisar hit many exciting milestones over the last twelve months, including the one year anniversary of the Lightspeed blog. As we reflect on 2010 and what has happened in the fiber optics industry, we wanted to share with you a few of Finisar’s accomplishments.

2010 Key Finisar Accomplishments:

• Finisar Achieves Record Revenues and Profitability
• Infonetics Report Names Finisar the leader in the ROADM Component (WSS) Market
• Australia Office Expands to Support Growing WSS ROADM Market
• Finisar Named Public Company of the Year
• Finisar Receives Brocade’s Customer Focus Award
• Finisar Achieves Industry Milestone: 100 Million VCSELs Shipped and Counting

Thanks for reading along as we welcome in 2011 and what we hope will be another exciting year in the optical communications industry.

Finisar Achieves Industry Milestone: 100 Million VCSELs Shipped and Counting

I am very excited to announce an industry milestone for Finisar: the shipment of our 100 millionth Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser, or VCSEL. Finisar’s VCSELs are semiconductor lasers used by some of the world’s largest companies to power high-speed fiber optic data communications. I can proudly state that we have been an industry leader in high-volume VCSEL technology since our first commercial introduction in 1996. Shipping 100 million VCSEL products clearly demonstrates the viability of this technology in many applications and is a testament to our continued focus on innovation and execution.

None of this has been possible without the support of our customers whom represent the industry’s leading storage and network system manufacturers, telecommunication carriers, and enterprises operating major data centers. In addition, in recent years, we have also started to see new applications for VCSELs outside of our core communications markets. We are now shipping VCSELs into consumer, medical, industrial and sensing applications. While these applications are currently low volume relative to our core communications markets, we believe over time the number of applications for VCSELs will likely grow and the size of some of these new markets can become significant for our VCSEL products.

Fifteen years ago, a small team in Texas started shipping their first VCSEL and the business has grown tremendously since then. Today, Finisar is recognized as the gold standard of VCSELs and has many patents on VCSEL design structure and processing techniques used to manufacture them. Our VCSEL fab in Allen, Texas is considered one of the most advanced VCSEL fabs in the world and has received high praise from many customers who have performed audits. Our VCSEL team has gone on to create the gold standard VCSEL for performance, reliability and delivery in the industry.

The growing demand for VCSELs has been fueled by several factors, including the success of Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel. Ultimately, we owe our success to our customers, who are working hard to champion the explosive growth in the data center and telecommunications market.