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As of January, St. Petersburg is one company richer, but there are certainly a lot of similar faces and a familiar name.
Struggling with recent sales declines and a tough financial picture, Swiss technology company Oerlikon began a restructuring to cut costs. This led four Oerlikon Systems division managers in the St. Petersburg etching office — Abdul Lateef, Jim Pollock, Russell Westerman and Edward Ostan — to negotiate a management buyout of the division in January and re-adopt the Plasma-Therm name. Plasma Therm Inc., was the name of the formerly publically traded St. Petersburg manufacturer, which Oerlikon-Buhrle Holding AG acquired in late 1999.
The company, which generates average annual revenue of $35 million to $40 million, designs, manufactures and sells machines that etch thin layers of film to create nano- or micro-sized devices for use in technologies such as hard drives, light-emitting diodes or wireless equipment.
The company currently employs 75 people, including 60 from a 57,369-square-foot light manufacturing building on 16th Street, the new company purchased from Oerlikon USA Inc. for $4.7 million. Oerlikon sold a nearby smaller 41,000-square-foot office building that had housed a portion of the division to Charles Stark Draper Laboratories for $7.75 million earlier this year.
“Now, we're focused on putting the sales channels in place,” says Pollock, Plasma-Therm's chief operating officer.
Pollack describes the purchase agreement with its former parent as very amicable and says that Oerlikon's U.S. office plans to lease a small office in the St. Petersburg building from Plasma-Therm.
The timing of the deal could prove very fortunate for the returning company. Pollack reports that after several slow months, the company has, since March, started seeing more orders and inquirers from a number of customers in Taiwan.
“February was the bottom for them,” Pollack says. “It seems to be a pretty consistent message. We've seen a couple of purchase orders recently. For a company that only sells 30 to 40 machines a year, a purchase order is pretty big for us. We're still being very cautious, but there are definitely positive signs.”
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