Turn Around Series: Jerry Rawls, Finisar (Part 11)
Check other articles in the series...After undertaking significant changes, cost cutting and other strategic moves, Finisar has emerged as a company poised for increased market growth.
SM: And your stock went from under a dollar to quite a bit higher now? JR: Our stock is quite volatile, and always has been. It went from less than a dollar to, I think the low was .40, .46 maybe, and then it went up to $4 or $5, and it’s dropped down and then back up and now is in the range of $3. So we have a market cap today of about a billion dollars.
SM: How do you go from where you are at today to the next level of growth, shareholder value, and all of that stuff that you experienced once in your previous incarnation? How do you reinvent that history? JR: Well, it is a little different now, and as you can tell from the story that I told. In the early days of Finisar we were building a company, and then we were growing at this explosive rate. It was an amazing thing about trying to pedal as fast as you could and hire people as fast as you could and maintain your culture and get new suppliers; just trying to grow that fast without exploding.
Then with the downturn it was a totally different job of rebuilding the company. Just changing everything, challenging everything we had done before. Was it optimal? Could we optimize? Now, we have made a lot of changes, and now yes we will continue to challenge every decision we have made and we will try to continue to improve, but we are on a track now where we are growing, increasing our level of profitability, and now it is a matter of trying to do some expansion in terms of the markets and products that we serve; trying to do R&D in an intelligent and effective way. We are back in a growth mode.
SM: It seems that the optics market is coming alive again … the acquisitions, IPOs are all returning. Online Video is putting some juice back into the bandwidth demands.
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