Fabrinet filed to go public in 2007 and did not price its shares until June 2010. In between, the financial crisis shut the door on new listings. The company makes optical components on contract in Thailand: lasers, lenses and modules that turn electrical signals into light for fiber networks. Its founder, Tom Mitchell, had co-founded the disk drive maker Seagate. Fabrinet began life in a former Seagate factory outside Bangkok.

A Disk Drive Plant Turns to Optics

Mitchell set up Fabrinet in the Cayman Islands in 1999. On January 2, 2000, it bought Seagate's Chokchai campus in Thailand and began building parts for Seagate's hard drives. He believed the same precision skills could serve the booming market for optical networking. Fabrinet shifted toward optics as the Seagate work wound down. Companies that designed lasers and fiber modules sent it their hardest jobs, and it also made its own glass, crystals, prisms and lenses.

A Cut Price, a Long Climb

Fabrinet priced 8.5 million shares at $10 in June 2010, below its range of $12 to $14, and raised $85 million. It listed on the NYSE under the ticker FN. The discount aged well. Demand for fast links inside data centers grew, and then the artificial intelligence boom made optical parts scarce. In fiscal 2026 Cisco supplied 19.9 percent of Fabrinet's revenue and Nvidia 16.3 percent. The company employs more than 20,000 people and still trades on the NYSE.

Cover: Fishermen of Chioggia, Donald Shaw MacLaughlan. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for fishermen hauling a net (Fabrinet, fabric and net).