Notes From the CEO

Greetings Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I’m very pleased to announce our new optical substrate fabrication capability. Our new optical shop is aimed at rapid turn prototyping and will be capable of producing highly parallel substrates to support our filter business as well as wedging, edging, beveling, etc. The goal of the shop is to enable shorter lead times, reduce costs, and to better understand the dynamics of the coating/substrate interface.

Though our hearts are still with those affected by this disaster, as of Oct 16th, Alluxa has resumed full operations and expects no further impact to production as a result of the California Wine Country fires.

Our thoughts go out to our friends, family and colleagues who were personally impacted by the devastating fires attacking our community. The factory has suffered no damage and was under no real threat, although it has been down for two full days without power. We are back online, though still expecting periodic power outages and staffing shortages over the next few weeks, and we will schedule accordingly.

Thanks again to all those who have contacted us with notes of support. Tough times like these always bring out the best in people.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I’m pleased to announce that Alluxa achieved another record-breaking revenue in Q1 2017. This is our fourth record quarter in a row, with 16 of our past 17 quarters also breaking revenue records. Once again, on-time delivery was over 99%.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I'm pleased to announce that Alluxa has achieved our third consecutive quarterly record revenue, our 15th out of the last 16 quarters. Yearly revenue for 2016 set a record as well, marking our tenth year of expansion in a row. On time delivery for 2016 came in at 99%, measured against promise date.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

Over the past few years, our SIRRUS™ Plasma Deposition Process has routinely created optical bandpass, edge, dichroic, and notch filters that have outstripped the measurement capabilities of even the highest-performance spectrophotometers and grating based measurement solutions. With that in mind, we embarked on the development of a new industry-leading spectrophotometric measurement system, and I'm pleased to announce that we achieved our goal.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I'm pleased to announce our latest addition to the SIRRUS™ Plasma Deposition family, affectionately called the "Warthog" by our team.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

Photonics West 2016 has come and gone, and it was the best show to date. The number of booth visitors, inquiries, and interesting discussions and concepts were at an all-time high. During the show we again hosted our annual “win a free coating run party”, now in its third year, and we had a lot of fun enjoying Sonoma County beers and wines among our friends and colleagues. Per the title of the party, we raffled off a free coating run and our winner was Giacomo Vacca at Kinetic River. I’m looking forward to seeing what type of coating he dreams up.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

The fourth quarter is complete, and I’m pleased to announce that Alluxa has achieved our 12th consecutive quarterly record revenue. On time delivery came in with a mark of 99%.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

The third quarter is complete, and I’m pleased to announce that Alluxa has achieved an 11th consecutive quarterly revenue record. We are able to also record a record on-time delivery of 99.6%.

Alluxa will be in the news a bit in the coming quarter with two new articles and a presentation at the AIA show in San Diego.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

The second quarter is complete, and it’s a pleasure to announce that our team achieved a record on-time delivery rate of greater than 99% (99.4% to be exact), and managed to again ship a new record in revenue, marking our 10th consecutive quarterly revenue record.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I’m pleased to announce an extension of our ultra-narrow capability both deeper into the UV and even narrower in the VIS/NIR. (details) We continue to develop new products for our Ultra Series line and we are very excited about the UV additions. In an effort to keep up with demand and increase our production capabilities we are expanding our facility here in Santa Rosa, CA.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I’m pleased to announce the opportunity to purchase our unique and industry leading Ultra-Narrowband filters through our new online catalog. All of our flat-top, hard-coated Ultra-Narrowband filters feature the industry's best temperature stability, highest transmission, filter "squareness" and out of band blocking. Most of the filters also offer the narrowest bandwidth available in multi-cavity flat top hard coatings.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

Our second annual drawing to win a free lot of custom optical filters is again happening this year at Phonics West at our wine and beer party. Like last year we are raffling off an entire lot of custom optical filters of any type, be it a short pass, long pass, dichroic, multi-chroic, band pass, ultra-narrow, excitation or emission, or a mirror. Just pick something and we will make it. For those who don’t win, you can console yourself by enjoying some amazing wine from Sonoma County and beers from our local micro-breweries.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

September 30th marked the end of another great quarter for Alluxa. Our Q3 not only set a new revenue record by more than 10%, making it our 7th consecutive quarterly record, it also achieved a new on-time delivery record at 98.7%.  This on-time delivery level was accomplished while also delivering a large number of expedites, special custom projects, and short lead time projects.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I would like to introduce two new members of our Business Development team; Ruth Gorham Houle and Amber Czajowski. Ruth joins us as our Director of Sales and Marketing and has over 20 years of experience working directly with optical filters. She is known and respected by many in our industry from her years in the field and we are delighted to have her join our team. Ruth has already taken the lead putting together several trade shows this year giving Alluxa added exposure to new markets and opportunities and she will continue to do so in the future.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

Thanks to all who came out and participated in our Free Coating Run Contest and microbrew tasting at Photonics West. The grand prize drawn was a free custom coating run of virtually anything we can make. Filter type, substrate, and nearly all the specifications were completely up to the winner to determine. We only asked that it obey our laws of physics.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

At Photonics West this year we have decided to try something new. At our annual wine and beer tasting event, we are holding a drawing to win a free lot of custom optical filters.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

I’m pleased to offer a sneak preview of our new Ultra line of fluorescence optical bandpass filters. These filters offer significant improvements in performance as compared to prior industry standards in a number of features including center wavelength control, in-band transmission, and out of band blocking. I’m confident that they will enable new levels of system performance at little or no increase in cost. As with the rest of our filters, our Ultra’s are deposited with our Advanced Plasma Deposition (APD) process using hard refractory oxide films that are environmentally stable.

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Customers of Alluxa,

At Alluxa, we are proud of our ability to ship volume quantities of the industry’s most aggressively priced precision thin film optical filters. However, we also work on many one-off R&D oriented projects which require challenging the accepted performance limits of thin film technology. Our company is structured to accept both of these types of challenges from our customers and both require innovation, extreme precision, and the dynamism of unconventional thinking.

I am excited to provide the first of a periodic letter updating on our innovations and developments with thin film optical filters, as well as the general happenings at Alluxa, and perhaps provide a few musings on the state of the optical coatings industry and optics industry in general.