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Company type | Public |
---|---|
Industry | Electronics, Semiconductor, Laser |
Founded | 1970 |
Founder | Alan Buchanan, Gordon Mauchel, Alan Crawford |
Defunct | 2002 |
Fate | Absorbed |
Headquarters | Kanata North Business Park |
Key people | Robert Atkinson, Scott Nix |
Products | on the Wayback Machine |
Revenue | $374 million US (2000) |
Number of employees | 1,550 (2000) |
Website | www.lumonics.com (on the Wayback Machine) |
Lumonics was a global laser manufacturing company based in the Kanata North Business Park region of Ottawa.
Founded in 1970,[1] it was the first venture capital (VC) financed high tech company of the ones that based themselves there,[2] thus clearing the path (started by Computing Devices from nearby Bells Corners back in 1948) for the subsequent VC and start-up fueled growth that led to the region later becoming known as “Silicon Valley North”.
With an average sales growth of almost 89% per year over its first decade, in 1980 the company went public.[1] After its acquisition of JK Lasers in 1982, it became “the third largest laser company in the world”.[3] Following a period of private ownership by the Japanese firm Sumitomo Heavy Industries Ltd. starting in 1989,[4] it once again went public in 1995 and went on to merge with Massachusetts-based General Scanning Inc. in 1998/99, to become GSI Lumonics, “the largest producer of laser-based manufacturing equipment in the world".[5]
With most of its employees now in the US,[6] despite subsequent growth from the dot-com boom, the Canadian workforce was scaled back down again after the 2001 recession and, in 2002, the original Canadian headquarters was finally “boarded up”[7][8] and control shifted to the U.S. operations.[9]
The company's name was changed to GSI Group in 2005,[10] then finally Novanta, its current name, in 2016.[11]
The original Impact, LaserMark, and excimer laser product lines of Lumonics were sold by GSI Group in 2008/2009 to LightMachinery[12] in the Nepean region of Ottawa, many of whose employees originally started out at Lumonics in Kanata.[13]