SCIENCE / TECHNOLOGY : Advanced Logic Research Expects Big Impact From Magazine Award
If Gene Lu has his way, Orange County’s biggest personal computer maker in the 1990s will be headquartered in Irvine and have a name that starts with “A” and ends with “Research.”
But he’s not talking about AST Research.
Lu is the founder and president of Advanced Logic Research, a 4-year-old personal-computer maker whose products have won an impressive string of favorable industry reviews in recent months.
Last week, PC Magazine named ALR’s FlexCache 25386 model the winner of its annual award for technical excellence. In the desktop computer category, the small Irvine firm’s machine beat out offerings from such industry titans as International Business Machines and Compaq Computer.
“ALR is a young company that keeps coming on strong by providing the PC industry with a steady flow of advances in the state of the art, delivered at amazingly low prices,” wrote the editors of PC Magazine in announcing the award at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas last week.
Lu believes that the PC Magazine award will have a “tremendous” impact on the company. “It will let people know that there is more than one computer company in Orange County,” the 34-year-old engineer said.
The “other” computer company, of course, is AST Research, a $400-million-a-year firm that is one of the leading PC manufacturers in the United States. ALR has more in common with AST than a similar name and Irvine headquarters. Like AST co-founders Safi Qureshey and Thomas Yuen, Lu designed computers at Computer Automation in Irvine in the late 1970s.
Lu acknowledges a friendly rivalry with his former colleagues and says one of his goals is for ALR to someday surpass AST as the county’s largest PC maker.
ALR has a long way to go.
With sales of $40 million in the year ended Sept. 30, ALR is one-tenth the size of AST. But Lu notes that sales are growing fast (up from $5 million 2 years ago), and he cites several reasons why ALR should hit $100 million this year.
ALR, which is 60% owned by Singapore-based Wearnes Brothers Ltd., is negotiating the purchase of its Singapore marketing operation from Wearnes. If the unit’s $20 million in sales are included, ALR’s sales last year would have been $60 million.
Moreover, Lu believes that the company’s new products will significantly boost revenue. ALR is counting heavily on the success of a high-powered model that will compete with IBM’s PS/2 Model 70. Like the IBM machine, ALR’s MicroFlex 7000 incorporates an advanced communications architecture known as Micro Channel and developed by IBM. ALR is one of the first computer makers to license the patented Micro Channel technology from IBM.
To finance its growth, ALR hopes to complete an initial public stock offering within the next year, Lu said. The investment firm Dean Witter Reynolds has committed to underwrite the offering when and if “the market conditions are right,” he said.
