
At the recent Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar, Dr. Bo Gu, President of BOS Photonics, reported that the Chinese laser market had a strong rebound after essentially shutting down for the first quarter last year. He said China’s laser market achieved 10% growth in 2020, and for the first time exceeded $10 billion. He also noted that the U.S. and China have entered long-term strategic competition, and that the old world-is-flat globalization model has collapsed. He described what’s replacing it as a new kind of multimodal global economic structure with three regional centers: Europe, Asia, and America.
Then, we discussed the implications of this trend for the laser markets, as well as other topics such as the rate at which Chinese laser companies are entering overseas markets, and where. No worries if you couldn’t join us for the live event held virtually in coordination with SPIE Photonics West. We recorded every session, and it can be viewed on-demand until the end of March. Some other sessions that were particularly interesting were Laser Analyst Allen Nogee’s global laser market insights and forecasts presentation, a conversation with Coherent CEO Andy Mattes, a discussion on global photonics stock indices and what they reveal, and the impact of COVID-19 on the biophotonics instrumentation markets.
I hope you’ll take the time to participate in Laser Focus World’s 33rd Annual Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar, the pre-eminent industry event for networking with senior-level executives, technology directors, and business managers from technology companies around the world. Our digital event platform offers all the capabilities to ensure you can network, connect, direct message, and request 1-on-1 meetings with other attendees through the month of March. So please, take a more in-depth look at our lineup of speakers and register today.
John Lewis | Editor in Chief (2018-2021)
John Lewis served as Editor in Chief of Laser Focus World from August 2018 through October 2021, after having served as the Editor in Chief of Vision Systems Design from 2016 to 2018. He has technical, industry, and journalistic qualifications, with more than 13 years of progressive content development experience working at Cognex Corporation. Prior to Cognex where his articles on machine vision were published in dozens of trade journals, he was a technical editor for Design News, covering automation, machine vision, and other engineering topics, for over six years.