JDS Uniphase is a company that manufactures and designs products for fiber optic communication and test equipment. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA.
JDS Uniphase was formed by the 1999 merger between two fiber optic companies, JDS FITEL and Uniphase Corporation. In 1981, JDS Optics was founded by Jozef Straus, Philip Garel-Jones, Gary Duck, and Bill Sinclair. The "JDS" is short for Jones, Duck and Sinclair. JDS Uniphase formerly had two corporate headquarters, one at 3000 Merivale Road, Ottawa, Ontario and the other one in San Jose, California. With the downturn in the telecom business that started in 2000, it closed its Canadian co-headquarters and now has only the California headquarters.
JDS Uniphase stock is a former high-flyer tech stock investor favorite. Its stock price doubled three times and three stock splits of 2:1 occurred roughly every 90 days during the last half of 1999 through early 2000, making millionaires of many employees who were stock option holders, and further enabling JDS Uniphase to go on an acquisition and merger binge. After the telecom downturn, JDS Uniphase announced in late July 2001 the largest (up to then) write-down of goodwill and business losses in business history: $45 billion. Employment soon dropped as part of the Global Realignment Program from nearly 29,000 to approximately 5,300, many of its factories and facilities were closed around the world, and the stock price dropped from $153 per share to less than $2 per share. Especially hard-hit were the R&D activities and researcher jobs related to producing new OC-768 (40 Gb/s) and OC-192 (10 Gb/s) products, which were largely terminated in light of the shift in market interest to continuing with legacy OC-48 (2.5 Gb/s) data rate products. Today [2004], the stock typically hovers between $2.50 to $3.00 per share, although recently [February 2005], the price dipped below $2.00 per share once again coincident with the resignation of the Chief Financial Officer, Ron Foster. One of the first of JDS Uniphase's facilities to see cuts was the former Philips source-laser facility in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, near the epicenter of an earlier Tulip Mania bubble. See Tulipomania and Internet_bubble.
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