Lithuania's Laser Industry Makes Its First Major Acquisition

There is a city in northeastern Europe that, for reasons most of the photonics world cannot fully explain, produces an extraordinary concentration of ultrafast laser expertise. Vilnius, Lithuania, home to roughly half a million people and a physics faculty that has punched far above its weight for decades, is now home to one of the clearest strategic moves the laser industry has seen in years. On May 20, 2026, Light Conversion announced the acquisition of Class 5 Photonics, a Hamburg-based developer of high-performance femtosecond laser systems. The deal is modest by semiconductor industry standards. In the world of ultrafast lasers, it is significant.

Light Conversion is not a household name outside photonics. Inside it, the company is known for the PHAROS and CARBIDE series of industrial femtosecond lasers, and above all for the ORPHEUS family of optical parametric amplifiers. These are instruments that researchers at synchrotrons, attoscience labs, and semiconductor inspection facilities use when they need to go places that fixed-wavelength lasers cannot reach. The company's 2024 revenues came in at EUR 135.1 million, with a net profit of EUR 43.5 million. For a company with 789 employees based in a city most industry analysts would not place on a photonics map, those are remarkable numbers.

Class 5 Photonics is a younger company, founded out of the research environment at DESY and the University of Hamburg. Its product line sits in the high-end research segment: few-cycle pulse sources, carrier-envelope-phase stable systems, and laser architectures designed to push the boundaries of time-resolved spectroscopy and strong-field physics. These are not volume products. They are instruments that appear in Nature papers. Dr. Robertas Riedel, Class 5 CEO and co-founder, noted that the most demanding science requires laser technology pairing state-of-the-art parameters with reliability and scalability. That combination, he argued, now becomes achievable by merging the best solutions from both companies.

What makes this pairing logical is not just product overlap but shared cultural DNA. Both companies emerged from academic physics environments. Both built their commercial identities around close collaboration with the research community. Both have resisted the typical photonics-industry trajectory of being absorbed into a diversified industrial conglomerate. The acquisition announcement notes that the two companies spent years as alternating partners and competitors across various projects. That kind of relationship, in a market as small and interconnected as ultrafast lasers, builds a quality of institutional knowledge that cannot be replicated through financial due diligence alone.

The deal runs in two directions. For Light Conversion, the Hamburg operation adds a credible European foothold in the academic high-energy physics market, a segment where Class 5 has established relationships that take years to build. For Class 5, integration into Light Conversion's global sales and service network solves a chronic problem for small high-tech companies: building the commercial infrastructure to match scientific ambition. Class 5 will continue operating in Hamburg and maintain existing customer projects and partnerships. The structure is acquisition, not absorption.

Lithuania’s laser industry is not accidental. Its origin is a single building: the Laser Research Centre at Vilnius University, where the physics department has trained laser scientists since the Soviet era and where, in 1994, a group of researchers led by Professor Algis Petras Piskarskas spun out the first commercial company from the department. That company was Light Conversion. Three decades on, the building in the photo above still stands, still full of PhD students and laser physicists, still generating the next generation of founders and engineers who will staff the cluster for another generation. The Lithuanian Laser Association, which coordinates the ecosystem today, counts over 60 member companies and institutions employing more than 2,250 people and generating annual sector revenues of around EUR 345 million. Its membership list reads like a who’s who of specialist photonics: Ekspla, Altechna, Femtika, Integrated Optics, Workshop of Photonics, OPTOMAN, and Light Conversion among them, each occupying a distinct niche in the global supply chain.

Whether this signals the beginning of a consolidation wave in the European ultrafast laser segment is too early to say. The market is too fragmented, and the companies within it too founder-led, for that process to move quickly. But the direction of travel is now visible. When the most profitable independent femtosecond laser company in the world starts acquiring rather than simply growing, the rest of the segment pays attention. Class 5 will not be the last call Light Conversion makes