Now it’s time to take a close look at a small but competitive business making a difference for the Korean economy. This week’s episode is the second installment of the three-part series about the companies that stood out at Semicon Korea 2016. The company to be featured this week is EO Technics, No.1 name in the global market for laser markers, which lasers in manufacturer names or logos on semiconductor chips. Here’s EO Technics Executive Director Choi In-seok to tell us more about the company.

The company was founded on April 1, 1989. We manufacture an array of laser equipment and have the source technology for laser development. The most important process is vertical integration. Other laser companies just make laser equipment or components. But we make laser diodes, the basic element of laser equipment, as well as all sorts of lasers and optical equipment with those laser diodes to produce various laser application systems for marking, cutting, and drilling. Not only that, we are the world’s only company that has an all-in-one system in place that can mechanically operate all these different machineries.




EO Technics is involved in a gamut of laser-related processes, from making laser diodes to equipment automation. This leading company in the field of laser processing equipment focuses on manufacturing semiconductor laser markers and laser cutting and drilling machines. In particular, EO Technics is the world’s number one maker of laser markers for semiconductors, with 95% of the Korean market share and 50% of the overseas market. The unapproachable status of EO Technics is the hard-won reward for its daring ventures attempted at the time when the concept of laser was unfamiliar to the business world.

There wasn’t a laser industry to speak of in 1989. At the time the company president moved from one rented place to another to start this business. Back then even science and engineering majors like myself didn’t get to learn about laser technology in school or through books. But there was a saying that laser is going to start the fourth industrial revolution. So we thought laser would become a pillar of a new market in the future and we staked our youth in this market.

EO Technics CEO Sung Kyu-dong성규동, who majored in electrical engineering at Seoul National University and worked at the technology institute of Daewoo Heavy Industries, founded the company in a residential area with two co-workers in 1989. Dreaming of building the world’s best laser processing company, the young men took the acronym of Electro-Optics to name their new establishment. But Korea was practically a wasteland of laser technology. EO Technics could not sell its products even if it succeeded in making them. Then the company comes across a critical opportunity in the early 1990s.

When we took part in a trade show in the early 1990s, we were approached by Anam Semiconductors, today’s Amkor Technology Korea, to attempt making laser marking equipment locally. We told them it’s possible if they helped us. So we worked really hard for almost six months to make home-grown laser marker. Ever since we supplied our laser markers to Anam Semiconductors, other semiconductor makers such as SK Hynix and Hyundai Electronics started making inquiries about us. We even got calls from Samsung Electronics and Motorola. They were all semiconductor companies, but had different specification demands. We had to work nights and weekends with the few workers we had, but we finally met their demands. Before we made locally-developed laser equipment, it cost more than 300,000 dollars per machine, but the price fell down to the low 100,000-dollar level since localization. We are proud to say that we helped save a lot of money in laser machinery imports.





In the 1990s Korean electronics companies worked furiously to locally produce machine parts. EO Technics finally got chance to prove its competence and succeeded in releasing Korean-made laser markers in less than a year. The laser marker industry is technologically difficult to enter, because it requires precision control and laser application technologies. But EO Technics gained industry attention when this Korean startup company successfully developed a laser machine with its own technology. EO Technics continued to enjoy success. In 1993 the company developed the world’s first pen-type laser marker capable of etching in 1,000 characters per second. In 2007 EO Technics came up with another innovative machine – the world’s first multi-beam laser marker capable of separating a laser into up to four beams. This amazing equipment boosted productive by 8 folds, propelling EO Technics to the top spot in the industry. Even today, the company allocates more than a third of its manpower to technology development and invests up to 20% of its revenue back into R&D. As a result, EO Technics applies for more than 150 patents in Korea and abroad annually. Such R&D capacity provides the basis for the company’s new product development and continued growth.

I think the current laser marking market is fairly saturated. So we have to create new markets. Mobile phones have already reached a critical limit, but users keep demanding new technologies. That’s why smartphone makers are incorporating fingerprint recognition or high-resolution iris identification technology into their products to fulfill market demands. We also cater to market demands by making laser machines capable of drilling, firming or patterning per customer specifications. Another emerging industry is electric vehicles. It’s projected that the demands for automotive batteries are certain to spike, as about 30% of the global automobile market will be taken up by electric cars by 2020. Batteries for automobiles also require lots of laser welding, cutting, and drilling, so we’re focusing on broadening our presence in that new market.

Steady investments in technology have put EO Technics at the top of the industry. Thanks to their business acumen and technological capacity, the future of Korea’s laser industry has become much brighter.