Among all the earnings announcements that have come out recently in the semiconductor manufacturing sector---most of them good earnings too, I might add (...OK, maybe Intel wasn't too thrilled with its results)---one set of financials in particular brought a nostalgic shimmer to my eyes. Soitec, the French company who dominates the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer market, announced that its year-to-year sales had grown a whopping 89%, to €262.8 million for its recently completed fiscal year. The company showed a real turnaround at the bottom of the bottom line too, posting a net income of €22.5 million compared to a net loss of €18.4 million in the previous fiscal year.

I remember visiting LETI in Grenoble back in the early 1990s and meeting with a teeny-tiny company starting up and producing the first of these wacky "wafer sandwiches" they said would be very popular one day. The charming leader of this small band of eccentric entrepreneurs was Andre Auberton-Herve, who showed me their little corner of the LETI fab and explained to me what they hoped to accomplish. They have long since gone on to build their first factory, then expand with a second one, with a third one on tap for the near future. For all the start-ups and early-stage companies that couldn't cut it or were gobbled up by a bigger outfit or just fell off the radar, it's nice to know that there are also the Soitecs of the industry who took a good idea and learned how to make a successful business out of it.

A votre sante, Soitec!