News Article
Emcore flood recovery operations on schedule
Emcore expects to fully recover from the Thailand floods and achieve pre-flood production levels by October 2012
Reconstruction of Emcore's Thailand-based primary contract manufacturing operations is running to plan, reports the US-based semiconductor components developer, with some lines operating at pre-flood run-rates.
In October 2011, Emcore announced that flood waters had severely impacted the inventory and production operations of it's Thailand manufacturing, damaging product lines from its Telecom and Cable Television (CATV) market segments. The Photovoltaics segment remained unaffected.
Emcore has since shifted manufacturing to alternative locations, including an alternate facility of its contract manufacturer in Thailand as well as its own manufacturing facilities in China and the US.
The production line for integrable tunable laser assemblies for 40 and 100 Gb/s coherent telecom applications has been up and running since March in Thailand, while production line qualification has been completed and most customers successfully completed full-line audits and started taking shipments in April.
As of this quarter, the integrable tunable laser line is operating at pre-flood capacity run-rates while the CATV laser module and transmitter production lines in China reached pre-flood capacity levels in mid-July.
Emcore expects the Tunable XFP transceiver line at its contract manufacturer in Thailand to reach volume production levels by October 2012. In the meantime, this manufacturing is continuing in the company's own Newark, California facility.
"We are very appreciative of our customers' understanding, cooperation, and support during the rebuild of impacted production lines the past 9 months," said Jaime Reloj, vice president of business development, Emcore. "Based on the strong demand for certain product lines, such as integrable tunable laser assemblies, we are increasing production capacity to exceed pre-flood levels to support orders for 40 and 100 Gb/s coherent applications."
Emcore now expects increased shipments for its fiber optics segment in the coming quarters as manufacturing volume ramps to normal levels.
