ULVAC Technologies, Inc. (UTECH)

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UTECH as an Antenna for Technology

Foundry-1
Process Lab or Manufacturing

The United States has always been one of the world’s centers for leading edge research and development of new technologies and innovative products. Boston, Massachusetts is well known for its Universities, Colleges, and Medical Centers. UTECH’s Headquarters was strategically located within close proximity to access these institutions.
One of UTECH’s missions is to be an antenna for discovering new technologies and innovative applications that are being developed here in Massachusetts as well as across the United States and Canada. Some recent areas of successful business development include non-volatile memory technologies, electro-chromatic glass, and solid state thin film battery applications. The key to successfully developing these businesses include: (1) keeping close communications with the responsible ULVAC Equipment Division in Japan; (2) focusing on applications that play into ULVAC’s strengths and technical advantages; and (3) investigating applications and technologies that are in line with the technology focus of ULVAC. By focusing on the right applications and armed with ULVAC’s Global Engineering and Manufacturing strength, UTECH has been able to successfully develop businesses that will extend into the future.
Many of UTECH’s customers are Universities, R&D centers, and venture companies because the United States continues to develop new technologies, applications, and products. As an antenna for these areas of business, UTECH has successfully landed customers that eventually will grow from R&D to full scale manufacturing. UTECH first attracts and then cultivates these types of customers. With ULVAC’s engineering ability to transfer processes from R&D systems to manufacturing systems, the customer knows that they can depend on ULVAC to take them from R&D to volume manufacturing and to “scale” with the customer’s requirements. Should the customer decide to build manufacturing facilities in regions outside of the United States, ULVAC’s global network will support those customers even if they expand into places such as China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia or even India.

Strategies to Strengthen UTECH and Stimulate Growth

President Anderson explained that UTECH has adopted (3) fundamental policies to strengthen and grow our business. Let’s explore each policy one-by-one:
1) Sales and Marketing Policy: We must continue to find new customers while continuing to provide excellent support to our existing customers. This will be achieved through the broadening and strengthening of our sales and marketing organization utilizing a combination of direct and representative resources. In addition, we will continue to expand our marketing efforts including A) the introduction of a new, more informative, easily navigated web-site B) increased trade show exhibitions and C) expansion of product advertisement efforts. Each marketing activity will be monitored for success level in an effort to ensure continuous improvement. Our hope is that by effectively implementing our sales and marketing strategies, we will strengthen ourselves through diversifying sources of revenues (i.e. industries where UTECH is active), profits and customer base to avoid the “all eggs in one basket” effect which can prove dangerous when markets pull-back.
2) UTECH Operations Policy: We must continue to take the necessary steps to strengthen our bottom line condition. The most significant step includes the expansion of our domestic manufacturing portfolio beyond our ENVIRO ashing family of products to now include the NE-550EXa Etcher, the NLD-570 Etcher, the CS-S Compact Sputter System, Automatic Leak Test Systems and others that are a good “fit” within our markets. By manufacturing more products locally, we expect to be able to offer more competitive pricing while yielding substantially increased gross margins over comparable import products. To maximize this effect, it is important for us to maintain strong supplier relationships with those offering the highest quality and most favorable pricing.
In addition, we have recently upgraded our Customer Service organization to improve responsiveness and to introduce a more aggressive approach to the pursuit of service contracts, spare parts business and customer training programs. The resulting business has mutual benefits to both our customer in the form of better tool performance/productivity and to UTECH in the form of strengthened financial results.
3) Technology Focus Policy: We must continue to serve as an “antenna” for ULVAC for technology trends as the US continues to be a center of R&D as well as a breeding ground for technology venture companies. Many of our customers are developing products for markets that are still in a very early (infancy) stage that may proliferate to world-wide, high volume manufacturing needs, as market demands increase. We see growth in areas related to energy and environment including LED/OLED, power device, solar, fuel cell, and solid state batteries. In the semiconductor market, emerging memory and logic technologies should serve as an area of growth and new business potential. And similarly, we expect new markets to emerge within the automobile industry. In summary, the involvement and success of ULVAC that can be demonstrated at the R&D stage puts us in a favorable position for new business when higher volume manufacturing needs arise.

A Look Forward

We continue to see the trend of slow but steady economic recovery in the United States. This trend has resulted in a gradual “return to buying” for many Americans. Positive economic indicators such as sales of new homes, automobiles, electronic devices, home appliances, etc. are all on the increase. Fortunately, vacuum based technologies are quite prevalent in the supply chain of these markets through the fabrication of memory and logic devices, MEMS devices, power devices, TFB’s, automobile components and others. The economic recovery coupled with the trend of returning manufacturing to the US will likely yield increases in business opportunities for ULVAC products, technologies and services. We expect that our continued aggressive, focused business development and marketing campaigns will allow us to capitalize on these new opportunities and continue to fuel the growth of UTECH in the future.

Shared Vision – Hisaharu Obinata President and CEO ULVAC, Inc.

In 1975, I participated in the establishment of the ULVAC North America Corporation (UNAC) as its first representative stationed in the United States at only 25 years of age. I am still proud of my participation in founding UNAC.
Fortunately, immediately after it was established, we received a large order from IBM for the world’s first computer-controlled vapor deposition system. We also received orders for the world’s most advanced devices one after another, such as a roll coater for film formation as a device ordered by the Bank of Canada to prevent use of counterfeit bills and an inline spattering system for magnetic disk production from Komag Inc.(As of 2007)
We had hard times during certain periods such as the Buy American movement triggered by trade friction as well as simultaneous terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. However, we overcame those hard times and are now continuing to provide advanced systems such as cutting edge semiconductor production systems and TFB production systems.
The United States is a place that is constantly creating advanced technologies and at the same time is the world’s largest market. I expect UTECH serve function as an antenna for advanced technologies and play role as the significant in the ULVAC group.

*This article was released in “PR Magazine No.64 published in April, 2014”

ULVAC Technologies, Inc. web site