Finisar

Finisar was a company offering fiber optic subsystems and components enabling high-speed voice, video, and data communications for networking, storage, wireless, and cable TV applications. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company had R&D, manufacturing sites, and sales offices around the world. Finisar's products facilitated high-speed communications for networking and storage applications over Gigabit Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs), Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs), and Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), using both IP and SONET/SDH-based protocols. On September 25th, 2019, Optoelectronics company II-IV Incorporated completed a $3.2B acquisition of Finisar.

In 1998, the company was founded in Menlo Park, California by Frank Levinson and Jerry Rawls, with the goal of building cost-effective optical transceivers for high-speed computer networks. In 1992, Finisar’s proposal for gigabit multimode optics was adopted by the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) committee as the basis for the Fibre Channel Standard and later by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) as the Gigabit Ethernet Standard. In 1999, Finisar went public, raising $149.3M. At the point of the IPO, Finisar had roughly 200 employees.

Key Finisar milestones from 1988 to 2015.

On November 9th, 2018, global engineered material and optoelectronics company II-VI Incorporated and Finisar announced they had entered into a definitive merger agreement, in which II-VI would acquire Finisar in a cash and stock transaction with an equity value of approximately $3.2 billion.

On September 25th, 2019, II-VI completed the acquisition of Finisar. II-VI financed the acquisition partly through $1.9 billion in cash from two new loans, stating it planned to save an annual $150 million through post-merger cost-cutting and estimated it would take three years to complete. The merger created one of the world's largest optics and photonics companies, with a combined annual revenue of roughly $2.5B. The post-merger company was projected to have around 25,000 employees at seventy locations around the world (including 12,000 in China alone) and five gallium arsenide (GaAs) fabrication facilities. At the time of the merger, Finisar shareholders owned approximately 32 percent of the combined company.