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Chicago Miniature Lamp purchases Pacific Scientific's Solium technology

Feb. 1, 2003
Chicago Miniature Lamp, Inc., (CML) Canton, Mass., took another step in its quest to build a major, vertically integrated lighting company, with the purchase

Chicago Miniature Lamp, Inc., (CML) Canton, Mass., took another step in its quest to build a major, vertically integrated lighting company, with the purchase of the assets and the license for financially troubled Solium, Inc.'s electronic fluorescent lamp ballast technology.

Buying Solium should enable CML to produce improved and new products involving ballasts, and lamps produced by its Sylvania Lighting International (SLI) subsidiary in Geneva, Switzerland, said Frank Ward, CML chairman and chief executive officer. The acquisition fits into Ward's strategy to expand the company's automated, vertically integrated manufacturing capacity and ballast lines, he said.

"We're not a ballast company. We are not a lamp company. We are a lighting system company, and that is the whole logic of the acquisition of Solium's automation and intellectual property.Integrated with our own disciplines, (CML) will bring forward a full fixture-ballast lighting system," Ward said.

CML bought Solium's inventory, assets, 18 patents and designs from Pacific Scientific Co., Newport Beach, Calif., for an undisclosed sum. In April, Pacific put the money-losing Solium unit up for sale because the company could not afford the cost to gain market share.

How soon Solium technology will reach the market in CML products remains unclear.

About the Author

Doug Chandler | Senior Staff Writer

Doug has been reporting and writing on the electrical industry for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing since 1992 and still finds the industry’s evolution and the characters who inhabit its companies endlessly fascinating. That was true even before e-commerce, LED lighting and distributed generation began to disrupt so many of the electrical industry’s traditional practices.

Doug earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Kansas after spending a few years in KU’s William Allen White School of Journalism, then deciding he absolutely did not want to be a journalist. In the company of his wife, two kids, two dogs and two cats, he spends a lot of time in the garden and the kitchen – growing food, cooking, brewing beer – and helping to run the family coffee shop.

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