Vancouver-based nLIGHT enjoyed a successful stock offering and a strong performance in 2018, giving CEO Scott Keeney a lot to talk about Monday when he addressed investors at the 40th annual Raymond James conference in Orlando, Fla.
“It was a real milestone year for nLIGHT,” he said. “Going public was a very positive experience for us.”
The company’s revenue grew by 38 percent in 2018, Keeney said, and by 37 percent the year before. nLIGHT has shown consistent growth since its launch in 2000, he said, driven by the rise of the laser market, which has grown into a $2 billion industry.
nLIGHT has become one of the leading producers in the field, an achievement which Keeney attributed to producing just two key products: semiconductor lasers and fiber lasers.
“We’re a very focused company,” he said. “This is all we do.”
The company’s own semiconductor lasers are used to manufacture fiber lasers, he said, and then both products are sold to an increasingly varied list of industrial sectors including aerospace defense, industrial fabrication and additive manufacturing.
nLIGHT lasers are being used in the industrial fabrication sector to cut metals, Keeney said, often replacing older cutting technologies such as mechanical blades and carbon dioxide lasers. They’re also replacing arc welders for welding metal together.
In microfabrication, the precision of the lasers allow them to play a role in the creation of products including consumer electronics, medical devices and automotive components. Microfabrication accounted for about 20 percent of nLIGHT’s growth last year, Keeney said.
Aerospace defense was the company’s fastest-growing sector in 2018, Keeney said, and he outlined aerospace uses for the company’s lasers, including guidance systems, directed energy weapons used by the U.S. Navy and space-based projects such as a satellite to measure the polar ice caps.
“The Mars Rover, Opportunity, that just turned off, that was one of our lasers on it,” he said. “It was supposed to last a year, (but) it lasted about 15 years, so for a bunch of engineers it was a really cool thing.”
Additive manufacturing is one of the newer applications for laser technology, Keeney said. The term refers to manufacturing processes such as 3D printing that build components by adding pieces of material instead of carving or cutting the components from larger pieces of material.
nLIGHT introduced a number of new products in 2018, including higher-power fiber lasers and a programmable semiconductor laser called Corona. Keeney said the company intends to continue to add to its lineup in 2019.
The company’s expanding product line helps it stay a step ahead of the competition, Keeney said, particularly with the addition of programmable lasers, which allow nLIGHT’s products to more readily replace carbon dioxide lasers and other older technologies.
He also attributed the company’s success to the reliability of its laser products and their designs, which are intended to make them easy to service in the field.
The company saw the greatest growth in the North American market in 2018, Keeney said. China was the second-largest market, although growth in China was a bit slower than expected due to the impact of the ongoing trade war, he added.
nLIGHT is considering additional expansion around the world, Keeney said, and expects to continue to see strong growth in the coming year.
“The markets that we saw when we started the company 20 years ago are really growing much faster than anybody expected,” he said.
Shares of nLIGHT traded on the Nasdaq as LASR rose on Monday afternoon and were up 3.13 percent at $22.11 at closing.
