Veeco Opens New Technology Center in Taiwan

PLAINVIEW, N.Y. & HSINCHU, Taiwan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: VECO), a leading supplier of metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) equipment used to make light emitting diodes (LEDs), celebrated the opening of its new Taiwan Technology Center (TTC) today in Hsinchu, Taiwan to provide process support for the rapidly growing LED industry. Several of Veeco’s key customers in Greater China and important local government officials were among Veeco’s honored guests.

“We are committed to satisfying our customers and helping them to accelerate their production. Our goal is to be the preferred supplier with the best products on the market, as well as having a local presence to expedite our customers’ time-to-market.”

At the opening ceremony, John R. Peeler, Veeco’s Chief Executive Officer, commented, “Our goal is to ensure customer collaboration and enhanced responsiveness to build a long-term strategic partnership with our key Greater China customers. We selected Hsinchu as the location for our new Taiwan Technology Center because of its strong history of LED industry leadership and the large number of local LED manufacturers. This center provides excellent access to some of the world’s best technology and engineering talent, and is strategically located for convenient access by other Asian customers.”

Peter Collingwood, Veeco’s Senior Vice President, Sales & Service, added, “By opening the TTC, we are bringing Veeco’s leading technology closer to our customers. While we have always supported this region around the clock, this new site takes our commitment to the next level. We are able to easily demonstrate our latest technology and newest MOCVD systems to help our customers to ramp their production of high efficiency, low cost LEDs.”

The TTC site, which has approximately 40 Veeco employees, is equipped to conduct process demonstrations, arrange rapid start programs to transfer best known methods (BKM), provide early access to evaluate system upgrades, and support joint technology development programs. The TTC is equipped with Veeco’s marketing-leading MOCVD systems, including a multi-chamber TurboDisc® MaxBright™ MOCVD System.

Justin K. Wang, General Manager, Veeco Greater China region, added, “We are committed to satisfying our customers and helping them to accelerate their production. Our goal is to be the preferred supplier with the best products on the market, as well as having a local presence to expedite our customers’ time-to-market.”

According to Mr. Peeler, “The TTC is the newest part of our significant expansion in Asia that we announced last fall. Veeco will invest over $30 million to dramatically expand our Asia footprint to help customers continue to accelerate the pace of adoption of LEDs for consumer electronics and solid-state lighting, including additional new R&D/demo and process support sites in Shanghai, China (opened May 2011) and Seoul, Korea (opening in 2012).”

About Veeco

Veeco makes equipment to develop and manufacture LEDs, solar panels, hard disk drives, and other devices. We support our customers through product development, manufacturing, sales and service sites in the U.S., Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Japan, Europe and other locations. Please visit us at www.veeco.com.

To the extent that this news release discusses expectations about the future, such statements are forward-looking and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. These factors include the risks discussed in the Business Description and Management's Discussion and Analysis sections of Veeco's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2010 and in our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and press releases. Veeco does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances after the date of such statements.