The Plain Dealer
September 05, 2006

After half-century, Sawyer starts anew

Industry woes force quartz crystal grower to diversify

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Thomas W. Gerdel

Plain Dealer Reporter

After 50 years of riding the ups and downs of the fast-changing electronics and consumer technologies - from citizens band radios, quartz watches, personal computers and cell phones - quartz crystal grower Sawyer Technical Materials LLC wants to reshape its niche business around new products and markets.

A 2004 corporate restructuring has left 34 employees at the small Eastlake manufacturer, which is operating at about 50 percent capacity.

Officials said the downsizing took an even greater human toll on the firm's wafer cutting and polishing operations in Conroe, Texas, where employment now stands at 75, down from as high as 300 in 1999. Its plant in Texas takes quartz crystals grown in Eastlake and processes them into wafers that are sold to manufacturers in the electronics and other industries.

The company also has a manufacturing operation in Shanghai, China.

Industry conditions, especially in the wireless communications market including cell phones, took a nosedive beginning around 2000 and 2001, after rapid growth in the late 1990s.

"Customers had too much inventory and found that their industry was not growing as fast as it had been projected to grow," Mark Polster, general manager of Sawyer's Eastlake operations and vice president of new products, said last week. .

In response to the decline, Sawyer now is focusing on diversification, experimenting with new materials such as powders it can grow in its 10-foot-tall pressure cookers, called autoclaves, that look like cannon barrels. "We're trying to leverage our technical base so we can get into new technical materials," said Jame Fang, who represents a major Sawyer shareholder in Taiwan called ForeAsia.

In late July, Fang traveled from Taiwan to join Sawyer employees and their families in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the company's founding.

Established in 1956 in Eastlake, the company was the world's first commercial producer of cultured quartz crystal for electronic purposes. Its roots go back to research efforts at Cleveland's Brush Development Co. in the late 1940s and early 1950s with support from the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

The company was named after Charles B. Sawyer, a company co-founder who led the commercialization of quartz crystal manufacturing as an alternative to hard-to-obtain natural crystal quartz.

Man-made quartz, grown under high heat and pressure in Sawyer's autoclaves, was more machinable and had fewer flaws and impurities than natural quartz. Still, it was a struggle for the fledgling company to gain acceptance in the marketplace, officials recalled.

"In the early days of Sawyer, it was hard to get people to realize that cultural quartz could be just as good as natural quartz," Sawyer President Kelley Scott told employees and others at the 50th anniversary gathering that included Baldwin Sawyer, a company co-founder and retired official of the firm.

Since then, the company's quartz has been used in watches, computers, cell phones and other electronic products to filter radio wave frequencies and as timing or tuning devices as in the old "crystal sets." Early CB radios, for example, had 40 crystals, one for each channel, while a quartz watch contained a crystal in the shape of a miniature tuning fork, whose vibrations helped the watch keep accurate time. Officials have likened the crystals in a computer, for example, to a metronome in an orchestra -- something that keeps everybody playing the same tune at the right time.

At one time, during the early cell phone boom, Sawyer -- one of the biggest consumers of electric power in Lake County -- supplied half the market for quartz, doubling its capacity every year. But the company has seen business melt away as customers adopted alternative materials or technologies.

Today, while Sawyer's share of the total quartz cell phone market remains about the same, overall volume has declined because of competing technologies such as direct conversions -- a silicon-based technology that has replaced a lot of the quartz filters in cell phones.

"It's been 50 years of turmoil," Scott said in an interview in Eastlake, talking about Sawyer's ups and downs. "It's been feast or famine -- not just for our company but for our industry."

In the early 1980s, for example, Sawyer supplied about 30 percent of the world's quartz crystal production and employed about 137 people in Lake County.

Some changes were felt quickly, such as when the 40 crystals in early CB model radios went down to four or five. "That happened in one month," Scott said.

Sawyer also was quickly impacted by new developments in quartz watch manufacturing.

"The Japanese came out with a small tuning fork, which was cheaper to produce," Scott said. "We had made a million of them in one month, and none the following," he said. "We never made another one."

In addition, as electronic products shrank in size, so did the size of quartz parts.

"Because of miniaturization, they can make a larger number of parts from the same size quartz wafer," Scott said. "From a 100-mm (4-inch) wafer that we make, they may have gotten 500 parts five years ago. Now they can get several thousand."

One promising new growth market for Sawyer's quartz is its use as sensors in electronic vehicle stability systems that are increasingly finding their way into new cars and trucks. Sawyer currently provides quartz material for the quartz rate sensor, or gyro-chip, for vehicle stability -- a double-ended tuning fork that is micromachined from Sawyer's quartz wafers and sold to braking companies to prevent rollovers in some sport utility vehicles. That automotive business actually evolved from the firm's earlier role as a supplier of high-end quartz for guided missile systems.

In its efforts to remake itself, Sawyer is focusing on all-around operational excellence -- reducing costs and assuring high-quality standards -- while exploring new products and markets and encouraging a work culture more likely to be seen at a young startup firm than at a 50-year-old organization, said Polster, the vice president of new products.

Polster cited potential new materials such as powders with unique properties that could be produced at the company's operations in Eastlake, where many of its autoclaves now sit idle.

He said Sawyer's technology is well suited to manufacturing tiny crystalline powders, controlling their shape and size. He said the firm is evaluating opportunities for making additives for the personal care market and powders used to form industrial catalysts.

"We need to add more legs to our stool," Polster said. "We have underutilized assets here."