Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of laser technologist Coherent
So what: The company just reported a terrific first quarter of fiscal year 2011, with 49% revenue growth year-over-year and more than four times the year-ago earnings, plus an even stronger outlook for sales through the rest of 2011. Coherent is raking in lots of orders for lasers used to manufacture LCD and OLED panels.
Now what: Though Universal Display provides the most obvious path to investing in OLED technology, Coherent obviously benefits from OLED factory construction, as well. And CFO Helene Simonet notes that "under normal circumstances, everyone would be dancing" around the numbers delivered by Coherent's instrumentations and materials processing divisions, if the flat-panel tech orders weren't hogging all of the spotlight.
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