ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997 TAG: 9703120056
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS THE ROANOKE TIMES
The chairman said the firm is awaiting a vote by Big Board administrators to move its common stock from the Nasdaq to the NYSE.
Bob Kopstein, chairman and president of Optical Cable Corp. of Roanoke, was looking pleased with the way his company's first shareholders' meeting had gone Tuesday morning as he chatted with a few departing stragglers.
That's despite shareholders who barraged him with questions about the fiber-optic cable manufacturer, which sold its shares to the public last spring for the first time. Kopstein patiently provided answers for about an hour, sometimes in intricate detail.
"I was very impressed with their friendly and sincere interest in the individual investor," said Marie Grady, a stockholder from Blacksburg. "I thought it was wonderful," she said of the meeting.
Grady's comments were characteristic of those of other stockholders who accounted for roughly 40 of the 56 people attending the meeting at Hotel Roanoke.
Because this was the company's first public stockholders meeting, Kopstein said he'd had no idea if just two people would show up or whether he should have rented a bigger room.
The questions ran the gamut of the company's business.
One person wanted to know if a merger or sale might be in the company's future.
"You never know what's going to develop," Kopstein replied. His company wants to be a fixture in the global marketplace and, in working toward that goal, develops relationships and partnerships with a variety of other companies, he said.
Another asked whether a competitor could copy Optical Cable's products and cut into the company's business.
Technology that the company uses would be costly to duplicate, Kopstein said; but, more importantly, the company's expertise in making its rugged, tight-buffered cables rises as a barrier to would-be competitors.
Kopstein told a shareholder who was interested in the company's proposal to move trading of its common stock from the Nasdaq stock market to the New York Stock Exchange that the company is awaiting a vote by administrators of the Big Board.
Kopstein said the company has been gaining market share on its competitors for more than two years but one of the company's biggest challenges is getting name recognition.
He related an anecdote about a sales call on Microsoft, the computer software giant, which had never heard of Optical Cable. Now, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has some of Optical Cable's product strung on his yacht, he said.
Last summer, Optical Cable stock climbed from its original price of $10 per share to $136 per share before settling back down. Currently, after two stock splits, it's selling for about $14 per share. That makes the original shares worth more than five times the price at which they first were offered.
On Tuesday, the stock closed at $13.75 a share, down 50 cents from Monday.
"It's nice to see a company like this in the Roanoke Valley," said Bill Wilcher, a shareholder from Craig County. "Their job at this point," he said, "is to make information available to the public, and [Kopstein] certainly tried to do that today."
Kopstein and Robert Thompson, both former engineers at ITT Electro-Optical Products Division in Roanoke County, formed Optical Cable in 1983 with the help of local financial backers. Kopstein bought out Thompson and the others in 1989. He sold 760,000 shares of the company to the public last March, while retaining 9 million shares.
The company reported 1996 earnings of $9.2 million on sales of $45.2 million. Earnings for the quarter ended Jan. 31 were $2.1 million, a 21.7 percent increase over the same period last year. Sales for the quarter were $12.5 million, up about 21 percent from a year earlier.
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Bob Kopstein, presidentby CNBand CEO of Optical Cable Corp., fields questions by stockholders at
the Hotel Roanoke on Tuesday. After the meeting, several investors
said they were impressed with the company's friendly and sincere
interest in their concerns. 2. Elvin Ingram, center, was one of
about 40 investors who showed up to find out how Optical Cable Corp.
is doing. 3. Officials said the company's expertise in making its
rugged, tight-buffered optical cables (photo at left) serves as a
barrier to would-be competitors. color.