Lucent to Add 450 Southland Jobs, Build Plant
Three weeks after closing a deal to acquire an Alhambra-based maker of advanced communications lasers, Lucent Technologies said Thursday it will spend $40 million to expand its San Gabriel Valley operations and add about 450 new workers there over the next 18 months.
The expansion will involve building a 20,000-square-foot plant in Irwindale and renovating two existing facilities--a move that will boost Lucent’s laser work force in the area to about 1,100.
The company is expanding because it expects a 16-fold increase in production of the tiny lasers used by cable television and telecommunications companies to send voice, video and data over fiber optic lines. The new jobs will be primarily for skilled electronics manufacturing workers.
Lucent’s operations in the San Gabriel Valley stem from its acquisition of Ortel Corp. for $2.95 billion. The deal closed April 27.
Jeff Rittichier, Ortel’s former vice president of marketing and now general manager of access products for Lucent’s optoelectronics components division, said the $40-million expansion will allow the San Gabriel operation to not only ramp up production of existing products, but also increase the development of new types of components needed by the quickly spreading fiber networks.
Lucent estimated that the market for fiber optic communications components was about $5.5 billion in 1999, a 40% increase from the previous year. The company also said that its own optoelectronic business grew more than 80% last year.
Lucent’s expansion in the San Gabriel Valley follows the completion of a $30-million expansion of its optoelectronics operations in Pennsylvania. The company estimates that production at the Pennsylvania facility will quadruple this year and create about 500 jobs.
Ortel was founded in 1980 by Caltech professor Amnon Yariv and two of his former students, Nadav Bar-Chaim and Israel Ury.
Yariv’s specialty at Caltech was the development of lasers made out of semiconductor materials in a similar way to silicon microchips. The lasers were fast, cheap and relatively simple.
The company started by supplying lasers to the military for use in advanced optical communications networks, which sent information as fast pulses of laser light.
In the waning days of the Cold War, Ortel began branching out by selling its lasers to cable television companies, which used them to send digital video to subscribers over fiber optic lines.
The biggest boost for the company came in only the past two years as telecommunications companies began turning to fiber optics as a way of sending data over the Internet and other networks.
Ortel’s stock rocketed from $6 late last year to close at nearly $160 when Lucent agreed to buy the company. Ortel is now part of Lucent’s Microelectronics group.
Lucent stock closed Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange at $56.63, down $2.88.
* JDS UNIPHASE DEPARTURE: JDS Uniphase CEO Kevin Kalkhoven says he has retired. C3
