Mid-Year Laser Market Update--2011 is a new peak

I just aggregated numbers from the public companies making and buying lasers, slicing and dicing for acquisitions and all that and guess what? The final 2010 numbers beat the previous peak of 2008, and 2011 is almost certain to beat that. The market would have to drop by 1/3 for Q3 and Q4 to go downward from 2010.

Moreover, 2011 may amount to a 5-year CAGR of about 6%, which isn't bad for a $7 billion industry. Depending on where you start counting, that's a growth rate a bit above overall economic growth. So in that way, 2011 is looking pretty good. In the figure below, you can see that it was a V-shaped recession, with only one down year.

It depends where you start your fiscal year. You get a very different look if you group the quarters by fiscal years from July-June, instead of calendar years of January-December. The figure below shows what you get in the shifted calendar. The market looks like it's just recovering in 2011 after a U-shaped two-year recession. And what growth in the last 12 months! About 40% over the previous 12.

The last figure shows the aggregated company data by quarter. Here it is clear that it was V-shaped at that scale.

This is company data, not the full market. I emphasize that this is just public data, and heavily weighted toward industrial lasers and telecom components. The missing revenues are heavily in medical lasers, R&D, instruments, and optical storage.