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Not your parents' Charles Evans: EAG continues hegemonic acquisition strategy |
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Nov 27, 2007 at 11:59 PM |
Although it ranks as one of the more ambitious ongoing acquisitional gameplans, the parade of buyouts by Evans Analytical Group (EAG) has not exactly garnered above-the-fold microelectronics industry news coverage.
Yet in a little over a year and a half, the materials characterization, surface analysis, and failure analysis (FA)/reliability lab company has bought about a dozen independent labs, parts of labs, and sales/service/support operations in Europe, Asia, and the States.
EAG has also seen its business expand beyond its traditional semiconductor/microelectronics/industrial base. Executive VP Vince Franceschi told me in May that the company was experiencing a "marked increase in demand for analytical services from customers" in photovoltaics, MEMS/MOEMS, carbon nanotubes, and nanomaterials, all putting its expanded capabilities to good use.
The FA, reliability, circuit repair, and other test-engineering services purchases have created a formidable group in an area where the company previously had little or no play. Now that yet-another acquisition in that space has just closed (with DSL Labs), EAG may have reached its goal of becoming what it calls "the leading supplier of an integrated package of 'release to production' (RTP) services."
The term/acronym "RTP" is a relatively new one, first appearing in EAG's mid-November announcement about its purchase of Micro Electronic Failure Analysis Services, or MEFAS. It brings to mind the angler's phrase, "catch and release." RTP is also embedded in the semiconductor lexicon as the well-known shorthand for "rapid thermal processing," making it a curiouser and curiouser choice.
Then again, EAG is no stranger to the alphabet soup that comes with the instrumentation inherent in characterization lab territory. With the wave of acquisitions, the company's tool suite has added the x-ray-based acronyms XRD, XRF, and XRR (thanks to the AMIA Labs and other pickups); glow-discharge mass spec, or GDMS (courtesy of the Shiva Technologies buy); and transmission electron microscopy, or TEM and its scanning TEM cousin, STEM (via the AMER and MAS assimiliations). So what's another letter-jumble in the cause of corporate branding and market-segment definition?
EAG has attained hegemonic status--- or as DSL's CEO John Keyashian put it, "a single, well-capitalized supplier of the full range of failure analysis and reliability testing services on a worldwide basis"---and it's by no means done opening its wallet: "We...expect to announce further acquisitions in this area before the end of the fiscal year," said executive chairman David Lahar in the latest PR.
The question of whether customers believe that EAG's all-out acquisitional push---and the resultant consolidation--in the analytical, characterization, and reliability services space is healthy or troubling might be better discussed over a few pints in a pub near the corporation's recently established HQ in Dublin. Yes, that's right: your parents' Charles Evans is an Irish company gone global now.
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