I am to report on some aspects of industrial lasers in Japan. Mostly centering on the market. In Japan, the history of laser developnent is rather profound. And long. Ever since the first invention of the laser in this country in 1960. This is partly because of the fact that in Japan the spectroscopic studies of the ruby was very popular in the late 1950's. Ever since niost of the work has been done in the research laboratories of the industry, not in the universities or not in the governmental laboratories. And since that time our first activity was mainly centering on the basic research, but after that time we have the evolution of the technology. One of the features in Japan is that the activity of developement and research of laser technology from the very basic phase up to the present commercialization has been done by the same group of people, including ine. We had a national project which ended about six years ago which was sponsored by MITI. MITI is Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan. And because of this national project, the effect of this project had a very enlightening effect in Japan. And after that our Japanese laser market became very flourishing.

When I agreed to give this talk I was with Prognos a market research company. Now I am with Trumpf Lasertechnik (Stuttgart, Germany) . So the data I'm going to present represents not only a Trumpf Lasertechnik view, but also the more general view of somebody that has done market studies on the whole laser market worldwide.

I may depart a little bit fron the previous agenda by the other speakers in that I'll share with you a perspective in terms of the U.S. market of trying to quantify it for you and give you a feel for the trends, but I would also like to give you a feel for some statistics about how the technology and where the technology is being used in U.S. metal working plants in comparison to other manufacturing processes. And then I'd like to kind of open up the discussion to the group, particularly the laser suppliers and laser systems suppliers who are in attendance to explore ways that we can help to expand the available market for the technology in the U.S. Dave Belforte has intimated that the U.S. is falling behind in the adoption of this technology and I think we need to turn our sights here in the U.S. on how we help expand that market at a much more rapid rate.

When I was invited two years ago to talk about low power lasers, Dave Belforte's emphasis was basically on 50 W lasers and below. At this time, he's expanded it to 500 W lasers and below, which to a certain extent is an indiction of how the low power sealed laser technology has gone, which I have been very much involved with over the last six or seven years. For the purposes of this talk, as I said, low power lasers is less than 500 W and specifically I'm going to focus in on lasers that are 250 W and less. I'm going to eniphasize again sealed laser systems which are, in terms of CO2 lasers, are those things that look much more like HeNes. They have no gas requirements, you basically plug them in the wall because they're higher power beasts, you put water in to them to cool them off and light comes out. There is a dramatic difference between those lasers and the flowing gas or the fast axial flow and so forth that people think of when they start talking about the high power lasers.

I've been asked to talk about the high powered CO2 market in the United States, which I've defined as being 500 W and greater. About ten days ago I received some inforraation from Production magazine with regards to their 1991-92 capital equipment survey. Several years ago iayself and other people coerced them to start asking questions about the laser industry and laser materials processing. The latest information won't be out for several months yet came to ne first. The results show that there were several interesting trend lines that are developing in the marketplace that I thought would be of value to this group. I think that you're going to see some trends in this survey of over three thousand respondents, representing about 10% of the questionnaires that Production sent out. The resulting information is pretty insightful in terms of what 1991 and 92 looks like and so what I'd like to do is relay that to you.

Figure 1 shows the world niarkets for Nd:YAG. 1990 is forecast, 1991 is projected and 1989 is the actuals. The information shown has been taken from Industrial Laser Review, the Industrial Laser Handbook, Laser Focus World and some independent studies which have been done within Lunionics, plus some views that we got from our friends at Prognos. The total systems numbers work out to be soruething around 330 inillion or so in 1990. It's our view that that is the average laser content is about 56 inillion dollars and the average laser price comes out to be somewhere about 45,000 dollars. This is lasers 50W and above.

I have to thank Industrial Laser Review for the invitation to update you on the exciiner laser market. Two years ago Lindsay Austin has given some examples of applications of use of industrial excimer laser in particular. I'm not going to repeat that because you can find them in the SPIE's proceedings of the last industrial laser market seniinar. As mentioned before this afternoon we have hardly heard anything about excimer lasers. It was only after until the presentation of Jim Rutt where he explicitly mentioned excimer lasers that triggered a few questions about excimer lasers. And one of the reasons for that is that it gets lost in the noise of the statistics and the uncertainties that we have heard this afternoon, and if I take then the exciraer figures they hardly play a role. If I compare, for instance, that I have heard something like 1000 CO2 and YAG laser units sold in the U.S. in 1990, then you can intagine that when we talk about industrial excirner lasers which are in the order of 80, less than 100, you're completely in the noise of the other figures.

My discussion here today will cover a couple of areas. It's basically to provide some understanding of the unit volunie of CO7 lasers sold here in the U.S., to be used in what we in the industry call the sheet metal bashing industry. There's really nothing that sophisticated about it. It's kind of a blood and guts industry that has tremendous competition already not only antong laser corapanies but in contpeting with other manufacturing alternatives many of which you saw here at the show. So we want to take a look at that. We want to see front a job shop perspective what factors are affecting the utilization of lasers in job shops today. What does our industry see as a reason for more utilization of lasers here in the U.S.? Perhaps in comparison to what other countries have been subjected to longer than we have.

While it's true that this is an exciting topic, it niay be more exciting than profitable, but it certainly has captured the attention of a lot of us laser folks, and it keeps growing almost because it wants to. First of all let me comment briefly with a word from our sponsor that GE Fanuc is one of the several ways the Fanuc laser product gets into the United States. We market it, GM Fanuc also markets it, and of course it shows up on Japanese machine tool built products. The information in this little presentation came from discussions with you folks wherever possible. In some cases I was unable to make contact with the horse's mouth as it were, but we got roundabout information so it's not gospel, but it's close. We've also had some updated information at the show here updated rumors maybe that suggest that some of the numbers may be high or low. I think in the aggregate it's not too far off.

Just a word of definition before we begin. This sounds a little bit esoteric and maybe it's marketing lingo but what I'd like to do is separate the markers by technology rather than by wavelength. Soiaeone said to me once there's two kinds of people in this world, those that divide things into two categories and those that don't. Well, I'm apparently in the first category. And the way I'd like to do that is divide the products by what we call focussed spot markers and image masked markers. In the past we've just simply said YAG and C02, but lately there's been a lot of crossover in the technology. It appears that it will continue.

For some time now, Industrial Laser Review has been tracking the job shop market. It's fascinated us because in the beginning we weren't sure how big it was and how many people participated in it. It wasn't until we began sending out our annual questionnaires and getting the answers back that the information becarae so significant that we started to talk about it more in each of the issues. As a matter of fact for two years now we've had a special job shop issue.