Coherent Announces Executive Leadership Changes

Santa Clara, CA., August 3, 2020 - Coherent’s (NASDAQ: COHR) President and Chief Executive Officer, Andy Mattes, today announced significant updates to the company’s senior leadership team. Mark Sobey EVP & Chief Operating Officer, now oversees both the ILS and OLS business units under his leadership to increase operational best practices sharing and create efficiencies. In addition Coherent announced the appointment of its first Chief Marketing Officer.

David Gee joins Coherent as SVP and CMO to help drive and support the company’s sales and go-to-market strategy and accelerate its digital transformation. David brings more than two decades of sales and marketing leadership experience in international technology companies. Most recently, he served as CMO at Imperva, a leading cyber security company and previously, as CMO of Zuora, Infoblox, and held senior marketing positions at Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and IBM.

The company is also announcing that Thomas Merk, Executive Vice President, ILS, will begin his retirement transition effective October, 2020. Mr. Merk joined the company as part of the acquisition of Rofin-Sinar, Inc., where he had been Chief Executive Officer.

“As we embark on our good-to-great journey, I am excited to welcome David to Coherent. We will benefit from his extensive digital marketing experiences in a world that has fundamentally changed. We recognized this shift early on in the COVID pandemic and are investing to build a better and more efficient Coherent,” said Andy Mattes. “Finally, on behalf of the entire Coherent family, I want to thank Thomas for his years of service and dedication to our company and wish him well in retirement.”

Founded in 1966, Coherent Inc. is one of the world’s leading providers of lasers and laser-based technology for scientific, commercial and industrial customers. Our common stock is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and is part of the Russell 1000 and Standard & Poor’s MidCap 400 Index. For more information about Coherent, visit the company's website at https://www.coherent.com for product and financial updates.