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July 25, 2006 — FEI Co. of Hillsboro, Ore., announced on Monday that Don Kania has been named president, chief executive officer and a board member of the company. He is expected to start at FEI Co., which makes tools for nanoscale characterization and research, in mid August. The appointment marks the end of a search that began with the stepping down of previous CEO Vahe Sarkissian, who left FEI in April.
Kania, 51, was the president and chief operating officer of Woodbury, N.Y.-based Veeco Instruments Inc. Kania said on Tuesday that he was looking forward to moving west. He and his wife have wanted to settle on a small farm, he said, and Oregon is a good place for that.
For Kania, who had been with Veeco since 1998, nanotech offers its own version of fertile fields. “It’s early in its evolution and the promise of nanotechnology is that it will change how things work,” he said. “That is what is driving the convergence between the physicists’ view and the life scientists’ view of the world.”
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He sees FEI’s place in that future as “providing fundamental tools for exploring everything from the structure of molecules to creating structures on that [molecular] scale.”
Before moving to Veeco, Kania held technical and management positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics and engineering from the University of Michigan.
“Veeco is not planning on hiring a replacement, but will have the senior managers report directly to the CEO,” wrote W.R. Hambrecht analyst John Roy in a research note Tuesday morning.
FEI has been in merger or acquisition talks at least twice in recent years. At the end of 2002, a $1 billion deal to merge with Veeco fell through. More recently, FEI terminated discussions to be acquired by Carl Zeiss AG of Germany.
Both companies offer metrology equipment for measurement and imaging, but each focuses on different areas. Veeco specializes in atomic force microscopes for submicron surface profiling. FEI makes ion and electron beam tools for failure analysis, fab production process control and other tasks.
However, FEI does not seem to be on the block any longer. Roy, for one, wrote that he now expects the company to remain independent.
He and other analysts agree that now that the new CEO is in place, execution on the company’s plans is critical.
“As Kania knows the tool market well, we expect he will have no trouble relating to FEI Company’s customers,” Roy said. But, he added, “The role of CEO is something new to Dr. Kania, so it may take some time for him to begin running at full speed.”
For the full year 2006 he estimates $468 million in sales and earnings per share of 57 cents. The company reports earnings on Aug. 2.
New York-based JoAnne Feeney, a managing director and senior research analyst at FTN Midwest Securities Corp. said, “I think Don Kania helped Veeco overhaul Veeco operations. He’s likely to be a great asset to FEI as they move to operational effectiveness.”
As COO at Veeco, he had become quite familiar with the needs of execution to match technology but, surmised Feeney, perhaps he is more valuable at FEI. “He was likely to be underused at Veeco given the excellent capabilities of Veeco CEO Ed Braun,” she said.