IPG Photonics Corporation (IPG) develops, manufactures, and sells high-performance fiber lasers, fiber amplifiers, diode lasers and laser-based systems that are used for diverse applications in materials processing, medical and advanced applications.
Fiber lasers combine the advantages of semiconductor diodes, such as long life and high efficiency, with the high amplification and precise beam qualities of specialty optical fibers to deliver superior performance, reliability and usability.
The...
IPG Photonics Corporation (IPG) develops, manufactures, and sells high-performance fiber lasers, fiber amplifiers, diode lasers and laser-based systems that are used for diverse applications in materials processing, medical and advanced applications.
Fiber lasers combine the advantages of semiconductor diodes, such as long life and high efficiency, with the high amplification and precise beam qualities of specialty optical fibers to deliver superior performance, reliability and usability.
The company sells its products globally to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and end users. The company markets its products internationally, primarily through its direct sales force. The company’s major manufacturing facilities are in the United States and Germany. The company has sales service offices and applications laboratories worldwide.
The company is vertically integrated such that it designs and manufactures most of the key components used in its finished products, from semiconductor diodes to optical fiber preforms, finished fiber lasers and amplifiers. The company manufactures complementary products used with its lasers including optical delivery cables, fiber couplers, beam switches, optical processing heads, in-line sensors and chillers. The company’s vertically integrated operations allow it to control quality, rapidly develop and integrate advanced products and protect its proprietary technology.
Products
The company designs and manufactures a broad range of high-performance fiber lasers and amplifiers. The company also makes direct diode lasers, packaged semiconductor diodes, laser and non-laser systems and laser based medical systems. Many of the company’s products are designed to be used as general-purpose energy or light sources, making them useful in diverse applications and markets.
The company’s laser products are based on a common proprietary technology platform using many of the same core components, such as semiconductor diodes and specialty fibers, which it configures to its customers' specifications. The company’s engineers and scientists work closely with OEMs, system integrators and end users to develop and customize the company’s products for their needs. Because of its flexible and modular product architecture, the company offers products in different configurations according to the desired application, including modules, rack-mounted units and tabletop units. The company’s engineers and other technical experts work directly with the customer in its application and development centers to develop and configure the optimal solution for such customer's requirements. The company also manufactures certain complementary products that are used with its lasers, such as optical delivery cables, fiber couplers, beam switches, optical processing heads, process measuring and monitoring technologies and chillers.
Lasers
The company’s laser products include medium (1 to 999 watts) and high (1,000 watts and above) output power lasers from 0.3 to 5.2 microns in wavelength. These lasers may be CW, QCW or pulsed. The company’s pulsed line includes nanosecond, picosecond and femtosecond lasers. The company offers lasers with different gain mediums and wavelengths. The gain mediums are ytterbium, erbium and thulium, as well as Raman and hybrid fiber-solid state lasers using its crystal technology. The company produces hybrid fiber-solid state lasers at green and ultraviolet wavelengths for a range of micro processing applications and in the mid-IR spectrum for sensing, imaging and spectroscopy applications. It also sells fiber pigtailed packaged diodes as components for pumping applications, and fiber coupled direct diode laser systems that use semiconductor diodes rather than optical fibers as their gain medium. In addition, the company offers high-energy pulsed lasers, multi-wavelength lasers, tunable lasers, single-polarization and single-frequency lasers, as well as other versions of its products.
The company produces the highest power solid-state lasers in the industry. The company’s ytterbium fiber lasers reach power levels of up to 125,000 watts. The company also makes single-mode and low-mode output ytterbium fiber lasers with power levels of up to 20,000 watts and single-mode, erbium and thulium fiber lasers with power levels of up to 4,000 watts.
Accessories
The company manufactures and sells accessories that include high power optical fiber delivery cables, fiber couplers, beam switches, chillers and scanners for its fiber lasers. The company is expanding its line of cutting and welding optical processing heads for use with its fiber lasers and sell devices for in-line coherent monitoring for welding.
Systems
In addition to selling laser sources, the company offers integrated laser systems for geographic markets or custom-developed for a customer's manufacturing requirements. The company offers a LightWELD product line, which is a handheld laser welding system to provide fabricators a laser-based solution for welding. The company also offers 2D compact flat sheet cutter systems and multi-axis systems for fine welding, cutting and drilling. The company produces high precision laser systems for the medical technology industry. The company also offers a welding seam stepper and picker, which is an automated fiber laser welding tool providing customers increased processing speeds, better quality and the elimination of certain clamping tools. The company’s subsidiary Genesis Systems Group, LLC provides laser and non-laser robotic welding and automation solutions. IPG also develops and sells specialized fiber laser systems for unique material processing applications as requested by customers desiring complete laser-based solutions.
Markets
The company broadly classifies its principal end markets as material processing, medical procedures, advanced applications and communications.
Materials Processing
The most significant materials processing applications for fiber lasers are welding and brazing and cutting. Other applications include marking and engraving, cleaning, additive manufacturing, such as laser sintering and 3D printing, precision processing, drilling, heat treating, annealing and heating and drying.
Welding and Brazing Applications: Laser welding offers several important advantages compared to conventional welding technology as it is non-contact, precise, easy to automate, provides high process speed and results in narrow-seamed, high-quality welds that generally require little or no post-processing machining. The high beam quality of the company’s fiber lasers coupled with high CW power offer deep penetration welding as well as shallow conduction mode welding. Adjustable mode beam (AMB) lasers allow beam tunability for spatterless, precise high-quality welding required in electric vehicle battery manufacturing. In addition, fiber lasers enable remote welding on the fly, a flexible method of three-dimensional welding in which the laser beam is positioned by a robot-guided scanner. Remote welding stations equipped with fiber lasers are used for welding door panels, seat backs, spot and lap welds over the entire auto body frame (body-in-white) and tailor welded blanks for automotive applications. The company also offers a real-time weld monitoring system to determine weld quality in an integrated solution. The company’s LightWELD product line offers a handheld laser welding system that is easier to learn and operate than traditional solutions and offers high process consistency. The company’s products are used also for laser brazing of visible joints in automobiles such as tailgates, roof joints and columns. Brazing is a method of joining sheet metal by using a melted filler material similar to soldering but requiring higher temperatures.
Cutting Applications: Laser-based cutting technology has several advantages compared to alternative technologies. Laser cutting is fast, flexible and highly precise and can be used to cut complex contours on flat, tubular or three-dimensional materials. The laser source can be programmed to process many kinds of materials such as steel, aluminum, brass, copper, glass, ceramic and plastic at various thicknesses. Laser cutting technology is a non-contact process that is easy to integrate into an automated production line and is not subject to wear of the cutting medium. The company sells mid and high-power ytterbium fiber lasers for laser cutting. The company’s high power pulsed lasers are used in thin foil cutting applications in electric vehicle battery production. High electrical efficiency, low maintenance and operating cost, excellent beam quality, wide operating power range, power stability and small spot size are some of the qualities offered by IPG fiber lasers for many cutting applications, which enable customers to cut a variety of materials faster.
Medical Procedures
The company sells its commercial fiber and diode laser modules, subassemblies and complete systems to medical device manufacturers that incorporate its products into their devices. The company’s ultrafast, CW and QCW ytterbium, erbium, thulium fiber and hybrid lasers with average power from 1 to 200 watts, and diode laser systems can be used in various medical and biomedical applications. The company has also developed and is selling medical laser systems and consumable fibers for applications, including benign prostatic hyperplasia and lithotripsy, as an OEM and, in certain territories, as an IPG-branded product. Aesthetic applications addressed by IPG lasers include skin rejuvenation, hair removal, and treatment of pigmented and vascular lesions.
Advanced Applications
The company’s fiber lasers and amplifiers are utilized by commercial firms and by academic and government institutions worldwide for advanced and scientific applications. These markets may sell specialty products developed by the company or its commercial products. Representative applications include directed energy, spectroscopy, optical trapping, remote sensing, LIDAR and materials characterization.
Technology
The company products are based on its proprietary technology platform that tithas developed and refined since its formation. The following technologies are key elements in its products.
Specialty Optical Fibers
The company has extensive expertise in the disciplines and techniques that form the basis for the multi-clad active and passive optical fibers used in the company’s products. The company large portfolio of specialty active and passive optical fibers has a number of advantages as compared to other commercially available optical fibers. Using the company’s knowledge of optical fibers, it recently extended its product line by manufacturing fibers used as a consumable component with its proprietary medical laser systems.
Semiconductor Diode Laser Processing and Packaging Technologies
The company uses multiple multi-mode, or broad area, single-emitter diodes rather than diode bars or stacks as a pump source. The company developed advanced molecular beam epitaxy techniques to grow aluminum indium gallium arsenide wafers for its diodes. This method yields high-quality optoelectronic material for low-defect density and high uniformity of optoelectronic parameters. In addition, the company has developed numerous proprietary wafer processes and testing and qualification procedures in order to create a high energy output in a reliable and high-power diode. The company’s diode is packaged to dissipate heat produced by the diode and withstands vibration, shock, high temperature, humidity and other environmental conditions, enabling world-class reliability and efficiency of the products.
Specialty Components and Combining Techniques
The company developed a wide range of advanced optical components that are capable of handling high optical power levels and contribute to the superior performance, efficiency and reliability of its products. In addition to fibers and diodes, its optical component portfolio includes fiber gratings, couplers, isolators, combiners, and crystals. The company also developed special methods and expertise in splicing fibers together with low optical energy loss and on-line loss testing.
Side Pumping of Fibers and Fiber Block Technologies
The company’s technology platform allows it to efficiently combine a large number of multi-mode single-emitter semiconductor diodes with its active optical fibers that are used in all of its products. A key element of this technology is that the company pump its fiber lasers through the cladding surrounding the active core. The company splices its specialty active optical fibers with other optical components and package them in a sealed box, which the company calls a fiber block. The fiber blocks are compact and are designed to eliminate the risk of contamination or misalignment due to mechanical vibrations and shocks, as well as temperature or humidity variations. The company’s design is scalable and modular, permitting it to make products with high output power by coupling a large number of diodes with fiber blocks, which can be combined in parallel and serially.
High-Stress Testing
The company employs high-stress techniques in testing components and final products that help increase reliability and accelerate product development. For example, the company tests all of its diodes with high current and temperatures to identify and eliminate potentially unreliable diodes. The company also has builds a large database of diode test results that allows it to predict the estimated lifetime of its diodes.
Intellectual Property
IPG has used, registered or applied to register a number of trademark registrations in the United States and in other countries. As of December 31, 2024, the company had over 850 patents issued and over 350 pending patent applications worldwide.
Sales, and Marketing
The company markets its products internationally primarily through its direct sales force. The company’s direct sales force sells to end users, OEMs and systems integrators. Once the company’s fiber laser products are designed into an OEM system, the OEM's sales force markets its systems, allowing the company to leverage its sales capability through the OEM sales channels because the OEMs typically have several salespersons in locations other than where its sales offices are located. The company has sales and service offices and application development centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia. To a lesser extent, the company markets through agreements with independent sales representatives and distributors, but it does use such channels more widely for its LightWELD product.
In 2023, the company entered a strategic partnership with Miller Electric Mfg. LLC, a leading worldwide manufacturer of arc welding products, to further promote laser solutions for handheld welding applications. The company typically provides one to five-year parts and service warranties on lasers. Most of the company's sales offices provide support to customers in their respective geographic areas.
Customers
The company sells its products globally to OEMs, system integrators and end users in a wide range of diverse markets who have the in-house engineering capability to integrate its products into their own systems. The company also sells complete laser and non-laser solutions to end users for their production needs. The company has thousands of customers worldwide.
Competition
In the materials processing market, the company competes with makers of fiber lasers and other lasers, such as Coherent, Inc., Laserline GmbH, Lumentum Holdings Inc., Maxphotonics Co., Ltd., MKS Instruments, Inc., nLight, Inc., Trumpf GmbH + Co. KG and Wuhan Raycus Fiber Laser Technologies Co. Ltd., as well as other smaller competitors.
Research and Development
The company incurred research and development costs of approximately $109.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Seasonality
The company net sales can fluctuate from quarter to quarter with general economic trends, specific industry cycles, holidays in foreign countries such as Lunar New Year in the first quarter (year ended December 31, 2024) of the company’s fiscal year and the timing of capital expenditures by the company’s customers.
History
IPG Photonics Corporation was founded in 1990. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1998.
