Sales of new manufacturing systems are also dependent on obsolescence and replacement of the installed base of our customers’ existing equipment with newer, more capable equipment. If upgrades are developed that extend the useful life of the installed base of systems, then we tend to sell more upgrade products and fewer new systems, which can significantly reduce total revenue.
Our 200 Lean HDD customers also experience competition from companies that produce alternative storage technologies like flash memory, which offer smaller size, lower power consumption and more rugged designs. These storage technologies are being used increasingly in enterprise applications and smaller form factors such as tablets, smart-phones, ultra-books, and notebook PCs instead of hard disk drives. Tablet computing devices and smart-phones have never contained, nor are they likely in the future to contain, a disk drive. Products using alternative technologies, such as flash memory, optical storage and other storage technologies are becoming increasingly common and could become a significant source of competition to particular applications of the products of our 200 Lean HDD customers, which could adversely affect our results of operations. If alternative technologies, such as flash memory, replace hard disk drives as a significant method of digital storage, then demand for our hard disk manufacturing products would decrease.
The Photonics business is also subject to long sales cycles because many of its products, such as our military imaging products, often must be designed into the customers’ end products, which are often complexstate-of-the-art products. These development cycles are typically multi-year, and our sales are contingent on our customers successfully integrating our product into their product, completing development of their product and then obtaining production orders for their product from the U.S. government or its allies.
We operate in an intensely competitive marketplace, and our competitors have greater resources than we do.
In the market for our disk sputtering systems, we experience competition primarily from Canon Anelva, which has sold a substantial number of systems worldwide. In the PV equipment market, Intevac faces competition from large established competitors including Applied Materials, Centrotherm Photovoltaics, Amtech, Jusung and Von Ardenne. In the market for our military imaging products we experience competition from companies such as Harris Corporation andL-3 Communications. Some of our competitors have substantially greater financial, technical, marketing, manufacturing and other resources than we do, especially in the DCP and PV equipment markets. Our competitors may develop enhancements to, or future generations of, competitive products that offer superior price or performance features, and new competitors may enter our markets and develop such enhanced products. Moreover, competition for our customers is intense, and our competitors have historically offered substantial pricing concessions and incentives to attract our customers or retain their existing customers.
Our growth depends on development of technically advanced new products and processes.
We have invested heavily, and continue to invest, in the development of new products, such as our 200 Lean HDD and other PVD systems, our coating systems for DCP, our solar systems for PV applications, our digital night-vision products and ournear-eye display products. Our success in developing and selling new products depends upon a variety of factors, including our ability to: predict future customer requirements; make technological advances; achieve a low total cost of ownership for our products; introduce new products on schedule; manufacture products cost-effectively including transitioning production to volume manufacturing; commercialize and attain customer acceptance of our products; and achieve acceptable and reliable performance of our new products in the field. Our new product decisions and development commitments must anticipate continuously evolving industry requirements significantly in advance of sales. In addition, we are attempting to expand into new or related markets, including the PV and display cover glass markets. Our expansion into the PV and cover glass markets is dependent upon the success of our customers’ development plans. To date we have not recognized material revenue from such products. Failure to correctly assess the size of the markets, to successfully develop cost effective products to address the markets or to establish effective sales and support of the new products would have a material adverse effect on future revenues and profits. In addition, if we invest in products for which the market does not develop as anticipated, we may incur significant charges related to such investments.
Rapid technological change in our served markets requires us to rapidly develop new technically advanced products. Our future success depends in part on our ability to develop and offer new products with improved capabilities and to continue to enhance our existing products. If new products have reliability or quality problems, our performance may be impacted by reduced orders, higher manufacturing costs, delays in acceptance and payment for new products and additional service and warranty expenses.
We are exposed to risks associated with a highly concentrated customer base.
Historically, a significant portion of our revenue in any particular period has been attributable to sales of our disk sputtering systems to a limited number of customers. This concentration of customers, when combined with changes in the customers’ specific capacity plans and market share shifts can lead to extreme variability in our revenue and financial results from period to period.
The concentration of our customer base may enable our customers to demand pricing and other terms unfavorable to Intevac, and makes us more vulnerable to changes in demand by or issues with a given customer. Orders from a relatively limited number of manufacturers have accounted for, and will likely continue to account for, a substantial portion of our revenues. The loss of one of these large customers, or delays in purchasing by them, could have a material and adverse effect on our revenues.
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