SiliconBeat

LeRoy Kopp and his Minnesota-based Kopp Investment Advisor funds disclosed holding 11.2 million shares, or about 6 percent, of Oclaro, the San Jose fiber-optics equipment company formed out of the April merger of Bookham and Avanex. The investment cost Read the rest of this entry »

Oclaro, the San Jose fiber optics component supplier formed by the April merger of Bookham and Avanex has a new largest shareholder: LeRoy Kopp. According to a regulatory filing Tuesday, Kopp and his Minnesota investment firm, Kopp Investment Advisors, have acquired 9.3 million shares of Oclaro, or about 5 percent of its outstanding shares.

As of May 26, Kopp and his firm owned about Read the rest of this entry »

Avanex, the Fremont fiber optics company that announced its acceptance in January of a deal to merge with rival Bookham of San Jose, has evidently reached a settlement with two shareholders who sued the company over the proposed merger, claiming it fails to “maximize stockholder value.”

The shareholders allege that the proxy Avanex sent to shareholders about the deal Read the rest of this entry »

Two local optical components rivals — Bookham of San Jose and Avanex of Fremont — announced today they have reached an agreement to merge  into a single company, name yet to be determined, and subject to the approval of their respective shareholders.

Avanex shareholders will receive about Read the rest of this entry »

Avanex, the Fremont fiber optics company, said today that last Tuesday it “implemented a world-wide reduction in force that will result in the termination” by the end of this month of about 47 employees, or about 8 percent of the work force it had at the end of June. The move is to “reduce costs, streamline operations, and improve cost structure.” Fewer people doing more work, we suspect, which we know something about here in newspaper land.

The company will also close its Melbourne, Florida facility by the end of this month and transfer the product lines, inventory and fixed assets to Read the rest of this entry »

A week after reverse splitting its shares so that stockholders were given one share in exchange for every 15 they already owned, Avanex approved new restricted stock grants, including a grant for42,000 48,000 shares to its interim chief executive officer, Giovanni Barbarossa, and 28,000 shares to each of Bradley Kolb, senior vice president of operations, and Scott Parker, senior vice president of sales, according to a regulatory filing made Friday. Half of the shares in the grants, which were adopted as part of an “employee retention program”, vest after Read the rest of this entry »