In August 1989, Laserex Ltd was liquidated due to company losses and three employees of Laserex; Norman Jones, Paul Wardill and Boris Balin, bought the necessary assests from the receiver and started Coherent Scientific and in turn, became the directors' of the company. Key suppliers, customers and order backlog were transferred and the company achieved $2million sales in their first year.

Annual sales growth has been in excess of 20% compound since then. Growth has been achieved mainly by expanding in to new (ie. non-physical science) markets with the same core technologies. That expansion has been funded purely by retained profit.

We have had to acquire new suppliers along the way to adequately address the new markets we tackled, to which we have done quite successfully. In addition, we have had to continually develop our infrastructure and administrative group as our sales have grown from $2m to $20m.

The original strategy for the company was that we would run a profitable business selling lasers and other optical equipment to researchers in the physical sciences. A significant potential obstacle in launching was to convince suppliers and customers that we were credible - ie. to draw a distinction in their minds between our roles as former employees of a failed organisation (Laserex Ltd), and as owners/managers of the new organisation. We were able to overcome these hurdles by a combination of working very hard to establish our new company and the credibility issue was made easier by the many personal relationships we had established within our customer and suppliers organisations.

Coherent soon achieved major market share in our narrow market segment and had to proactively pursue other markets to achieve growth. To do this, we have established 4 divisions (Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, FibreComms and Industrial), each with their own division manager, business and identity.

We soon outgrew our rented premises, and acquired/developed our own (current) premises. This premises is now also at capacity and we will need to move to larger premises in the next year or two.

One of the things that makes this business exciting is the diverse nature and high quality of the work undertaken by our customers. We have customers who are at the cutting edge of research in telecommunications, physics, chemistry, engineering, ophthalmology, fertility, etc.

As a company, we participate in professional organisations, eg, The Australian Optical Society, The Austalian/New Zealand Institute of Physics, The APCRC, etc.

Lasers are perhaps unusual in the broad range of applications they have, eg. physics/engineering research, communications, entertainment, life sciences, defence, medical, manufacturing. We have been succesful (to varying extents) in all of these diverse markets, with a clear focus on the core technologies of lasers and optics.

Our Staff

All of the sales division managers, all of the Field Service Engineers, and some other staff have chosen to buy shares in the company. The company invests heavily in training (internal, external and overseas). We tend to hire PhD level sales people, which enables us to interact with our customers at a higher level technically than many of our competitors. We currently have sales people who hold PhD's in physics, chemistry and biology.

Click here to meet our employees.