Thorlabs Completes New Facility

Thorlabs has completed its new three-story, 120,000-sq-ft facility in Newton, which will act as the central hub for the company’s sales, service, R&D and manufacturing operations, it announced.

Subsequent construction phases are planned for the next seven to 10 years and will ultimately expand the company’s space to approximately 300,000 sq ft.

The new three-story, 120,000-sq-ft facility located in Newton, N.J. (Image: Thorlabs)

Privately held Thorlabs has experienced double-digit growth since its founding in 1989. The company has expanded geographically over the years to include 12 sales, manufacturing and R&D offices in eight countries. During that same time, the need for more space led the company to expand its footprint in New Jersey by purchasing 87,800 sq ft of space spread out over five different locations.

“With the addition of the new building, Thorlabs intends to expand its machine shop at its 40,000-sq-ft facility located two miles away from the new site on state Route 206 in Andover Township,” said Alex Cable, founder and CEO of the company. “Currently, the same equipment is shared for prototyping and production. By expanding our machine shop’s footprint, we will be able to allocate specific resources and equipment to the creation of prototypes.”

The expansion will also support faster turnaround on special customer requests for small modifications to the company’s stocked products, he said.

Thorlabs manufactures equipment for the photonics industry, including optics, laser diodes, tunable lasers, fiber optics, optical detectors, motion control equipment, optomechanics and vibration isolations systems.

For more information, visit: www.thorlabs.com