Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004200906
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: BUS1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In late March, Kopstein peddled his wares - glass-fiber cable for data communications networks - at a high-tech trade fair in Hanover, West Germany. His products drew significant interest from potential customers and distributors from Europe, the Middle East and the Orient, he said.
Kopstein's was one of six businesses represented at a booth sponsored by the Virginia Department of World Trade and among a total of 4,000 exhibitors at the fair.
He plans trading trips to Singapore at the end of May and to Japan in July. Last October, he was part of a trade mission to Moscow, where he met Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
"There's a tremendous interest in our product all over Europe," Kopstein said. His company, Optical Cable Corp., has a reputation for making a strong, high-quality cable, some of which is in use at the Charles DeGaulle Airport near Paris.
You'll find Kopstein's cable in some other interesting places, too. It carries images from the U.S. Senate chamber that are seen on C-Span cable television channel; it also provides data links at a Strategic Air Command base in Thule, Greenland, where the wind blows 200 mph and the temperature drops to minus 80 degrees Celsius, or minus 112 Fahrenheit.
Optical Cable is doing so well that Kopstein is preparing to move the business into a new 74,000 square-foot plant on 6.5 acres of land in the Valleypointe Industrial Park in Roanoke County. The Roanoke County Industrial Development Authority has set a hearing for May 3 on a request by the company and developer Alan Lingerfelt of Richmond to issue up to $6.5 million in revenue bonds to finance the project.
Only 3 1/2 years ago Optical Cable moved from its first 4,000-square-foot home on Harrison Avenue in Salem into a new 22,500-square-foot buildling nearby. The new building will more than triple the company's current space.
Years ago, in the days before he was a globe-trotting entrepreneur, Kopstein, a tall, trim man with the look of a scholar, was an electrical engineer at the ITT plant on Plantation Road in Roanoke County.
Kopstein liked the creative environment at ITT and he enjoyed the relationship that his department - responsible for developing optical cable for the military - had with other ITT units. But he didn't care for the way ITT managed its people.
It was a negative experience that led, in part, to Optical Cable's cooperative management approach, in which Kopstein takes a great deal of pride.
In 1981, Kopstein, who had been with ITT for about two years, quit. His friend and co-worker Robert Thompson left the same day. Kopstein moved to New Hampshire to help another company set up a fiber optics division. Thompson, also an engineer, stayed in the Roanoke Valley and started a consulting business.
At Christmastime 1982, Kopstein and Thompson began to talk about going into cable manufacturing for themselves.
In 1983, with some financial help from two other Roanoke Valley residents, they launched Optical Cable in a small building across from the Virginia Highway Department shop on Harrison Avenue in Salem.
Last June, Kopstein bought out Thompson and his other two partners and is now Optical Cable's sole stockholder. He expects the company to do roughly $18 million in business this year and says it has the potential to reach $100 million in sales within four years.
Optical Cable is one of several businesses based on the science of fiber optics that have grown up in and around the Roanoke Valley. It all began in 1973 when ITT located its Electro-Optical Products division at its plant on Plantation Road in Roanoke County.
Fiber optics represents a revolution in communication technology. A hair-fine optical fiber is capable of handling as many as 10,000 telephone conversations simultaneously and of transmitting the entire contents of the Bible in one second.
Charles Kao, who lived in the valley from 1974 through 1982 and was chief scientist, director of engineering and a vice president at the ITT plant, was one of the fathers of fiber-optic technology. In 1966 while working at an ITT laboratory in London, England, Kao wrote the first research paper explaining how optical communication through glass fibers might work.
ITT continues to make night-vision goggles for the military at its Roanoke County plant. In the fall of 1987, however, ITT joined as a minority partner with Compagnie Generale d'Electricite, a French company, to form Alcatel Cable Systems. Alcatel, in which ITT has a 37 percent stake, now owns the former ITT cable operation here, employing roughly 160 people.
In 1982, three other former ITT employees started FiberCom, a company that makes the electronic equipment for hooking up computer terminals to optical cable. Current employment at FiberCom is 190 and and sales are $20 million a year.
In the New River Valley, Litton Industries and Electro-Tec in Blacksburg and Force in Christiansburg make fiber-based testing equipment.
Virginia Tech has a fiber-optics research and development center. A recent survey by the Optical Society of America shows Tech has more students enrolled in optics and fiber-optics programs than any other U.S. university.
Researchers at Tech have been studying ways to put fiber-optic nerves into the hulls of submarines and airplanes. A submarine equipped with these sensors could "feel" its own stresses, strains and vibrations and adjust itself to run quieter.
Tech scientists have also developed a fiber sensor that will work in the extremely hot environment of a jet engine. This research could lead to jets that can tune themselves to run cleaner and quieter.
The concentration of fiber-optics companies around Roanoke provides a selling point for local business recruiters. When talking to a high-tech prospect, Brian Wishneff, Roanoke's economic-development director, uses fiber optics as an example of a high-tech industry that has been able to grow here and attract employees.
Fiber-optic cable may never replace all of the copper wire used in communications, but its use in a variety of applications is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years. When the fight between the cable TV companies and the telephone companies over who should furnish television and other services to the home is finally settled in Congress, the residential use of optical cable should grow dramatically.
Homes equipped with optical cable will enjoy the possibility of hundreds of additional television channels, facsimile transmissions, two-way video, and services like home shopping and banking all through a single hookup. Experiments with such systems are already under way around the country.
The sale of optical cable for data communications - linking computers together - is expected to grow by roughly 30 percent a year through at least 1994, says Richard Mack, a senior analyst with Kessler Market Intelligence, a Newport, R.I., firm that publishes a newsletter and reports and does consulting work for the fiber optics industry.
Last year, 200,000 kilometers of the data communication fiber, like that used in Optical Cable Corp.'s cables, were sold, up from 130,000 kilometers in 1986, Mack said. This year, data communication fiber sales are expected to total 260,000 kilometers.
Industry giants such as AT&T, Alcatel, and Siecor, a joint venture between the German company Siemens and Corning Glass, make cable for both the telecommunications and data communications markets. The distinction between the two types of cable is in the types of optical fiber that are used in them.
Kessler Market Intelligence ranks the Salem company among the top three companies selling data communications cable behind AT&T and Siecor. The two other companies that are similar in size to Optical Cable are Chromatic Technologies of Franklin, Mass., and Berktek of New Holland, Pa., Mack said.
Kopstein agrees that AT&T is leading the data communications cable market with 60 percent of the business, but he places his own company, which made 100 million feet of cable last year, in a second-place tie with Siecor, which he says is selling more of its cable for telecommunications uses.
"OCC has a reputation for doing specialty cables and military contracts that others couldn't address," Mack said. One of Optical Cable's strengths, he said, is that it has been very responsive to requests by customers for specialty products.
"No matter what the customer's application, we'll make a product for it," Kopstein said. And whatever that job is he believes he can deliver faster than his competitors. "We feel we can produce a product four to eight times faster than . . . anyone else in the world can produce a similar product," he said.
"My biggest challenge is to beat the big guys at their own game," Kopstein said. A small group of people encouraged to do their best will always outperform the big companies because they thrive on the challenge, he said.
Kopstein, 40, is a 1973 graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Following college, he worked for Underwriters' Laboratory in Northbrook, Ill.
From there he moved to Culpeper to work for the Rochester Corp., a maker of specialty cables used by the oil industry. He got his first experience with fiber-optic cable at Rochester in a project for the Navy. He moved to ITT in 1979.
Kopstein said he's made it a practice to learn as much as he can from everyone he comes in contact with. The process that leads to new technological developments is basically like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, he said.
Kopstein says he believes in treating his employees well. All 40 workers at Optical Cable, with the exception of Kopstein, are eligible for the company's profit-sharing and bonus plan, which is based on the company's sales, performance and productivity.
Most production line workers at Optical Cable make an annual wage over $20,000. Employees also have a health care plan, including full dental coverage, paid for by the company.
Kopstein projects Optical Cable's work force could grow to 100 within two years.
Kopstein said he's had no problem finding the labor he needs in the area. He said he looks for workers who want to be challenged and be part of an organization that does superior work. A worker's background is not as important as having a caring and meticulous attitude in his or her work, he said.
Careful work is important at Optical Cable because mistakes can be expensive. The glass fiber used in the company's cables is as costly as gold but, unlike gold, can't be reused, Kopstein said. When you make a mistake with glass you put it all in a dumpster, he said.
Optical Cable is the No. 1 customer for fiber produced at Corning's Wilmington, N.C., plant, Kopstein said. He said his company keeps more fiber on hand than any other cable maker.
by CNB