Finance History|Nasdaq MarketSite — Six Fifty to Seven Fifty for Infrared Glass

People treat Coherent as a Saxonburg photonics house that always printed COHR on the New York tape.

The 1987 issuer was II-VI Incorporated, a zinc-selenide optics shop named for groups II and VI of the periodic table.

The Pittsburgh Business Times of 31 August 1987, as later summarized in the International Directory of Company Histories, recorded that the company had filed to sell one million shares at between 6.50 and 7.50 dollars each.

The filing hoped to raise about 8 million dollars in 1987 currency for plant and research.

Sales that year were nearly 10 million dollars, about 40 percent of them overseas, into more than 960 laser makers.

The offering completed in 1987 on the Nasdaq under IIVI.

Market-data services that track the surviving line date first trade to October 1987.

Carl Johnson still held about 31 percent after the sale.

In 2022 II-VI acquired the Palo Alto laser firm Coherent, Inc., and took that name.

On 23 February 2023 the common stock left Nasdaq and opened on the New York Stock Exchange as COHR. The preferred line kept IIVI.

The mechanism is a materials listing that outlived its ticker. Holders in 1987 bought infrared lenses and reflectors, not a transceiver book.

Nasdaq MarketSite at 4 Times Square opened in 2000, thirteen years after this print. The pin is that public facade, the later face of the electronic market that took the 1987 order. Interior studios are not a visitor floor.

Photo: Luca Marfe, June 2015, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Nasdaq MarketSite.