In my search for anything resembling a good market out there, look what I found. The figure shows the revenues for three biomedical equipment vendors over the last three years. I picked them because they are fairly representative for that business. Most opto customers show declines at lesat in the last quarter, and many declined over most of the year. But not these. Combined, they had about 15% growth in 2008.
Contrast that with the revenues of, say, semiconductor tool vendors like KLA or ESI, or laser manufacturer Cymer. Cymer makes million dollar excimer lasers for litho tools. If you take out service revenues, their system sales have fallen 44% between 2006 and 2008.
Cymer's lost some share to Gigaphoton, but the real problem is that the chip makers just aren't buying new litho tools these days.
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