Michael J. Degen, President and CEO of Nortech Systems, Inc. (NSYS), talked to The Wall Street Transcript about his company.Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: Let’s begin with a brief overview of Nortech.

Mr. Degen: Nortech Systems dates back to the early 1980s. It was born out of a spin-off from Control Data Corporation back in 1982. It operated then as Digigraphic Systems from 1982 to 1990 when they filed a reorganization plan, chapter 11, in April of 1990. They emerged from that plan in October and became Nortech Systems in a reverse stock split, one for 10. Since 1990, we’ve operated as Nortech Systems and been publicly traded on Nasdaq. Back in 1990, our revenues were about $6 million and we did $100 million in 2010, so we’ve grown significantly. And we’ve grown from one location to nine, if you count our corporate headquarters. Our business is electronics contract manufacturing or electronics manufacturing services. We specialize in wire harnesses, cables, printed circuit board assemblies, electronic box builds, medical device assembly and test. Our market niche is low-volume, high-mix, highly engineered products that require a lot of customer and engineering support.

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Robert E. Matthiessen, CEO, President and Director of inTEST Coporation (INTT), talked to The Wall Street Transcript about his company. Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: Please begin with a brief overview of inTEST Corporation.

Mr. Matthiessen:inTEST designs, manufactures and markets products that are primarily used by semiconductor manufacturers to test their integrated circuits and wafer products. Our product lines include test head manipulators, docking hardware, tester interfaces and thermal test systems. And as a matter of fact, we are 30 years old this year. We were founded in 1981 and conducted our IPO in 1997. Since 1997, we’ve made five acquisitions, three significant ones. We have traditionally participated in the back-end test segment in the semiconductor business, so we supply capital equipment to the test areas of semiconductor manufacturers. This equipment is not the testers themselves nor the handling equipment itself, but those components that make it possible for the testers to be connected to the handling equipment, which ultimately makes our equipment mission critical. In addition, in recent years we’ve diversified our product suite into markets outside of semiconductors to help mitigate the semiconductor capital equipment curve. These markets include new growth industries, such as aerospace/defense, automotive, telecommunications and medical/pharmaceutical.

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John J. Pollock, President, CEO and Director of Aetrium Inc. (ATRM), talked to The Wall Street Transcript about his company. Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: What is Aetrium Inc.?

Mr. Pollock:Aetrium is a leading provider of test and handling solutions to the world’s semiconductor and electronic component industries. To meet the industry’s growing demand for increased test efficiencies and new testing capabilities, we design and manufacture production-based test handlers and reliability testers used by the semiconductor industry to test integrated circuits, or ICs, MEMs and other electronic components. Our first product is our Gravity Test Handler, which automates the process of testing computer chips and is ideally suited for parallel testing of analog devices, which are typically used in automotive, computer, laptops, cell phones and television applications. It has historically represented approximately 65% of our annual revenues. Our Gravity Handlers give us a competitive advantage with the world’s shortest index time for gravity handlers, coupled with significantly improved uptime. We’ve increased our customers’ productivity by evolving from single-site testing to eight-site testing, and we continue to provide this productivity while addressing the changes in semiconductor device packaging technology.

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David L. Dutton, President and CEO of Mattson Technology, Inc. (MTSN), talked to The Wall Street Transcript about his company. Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: What is Mattson Technology?

Mr. Dutton:We are a semiconductor capital equipment company. Specifically, we design, manufacture and market semiconductor wafer-processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits. Our equipment is used for applications in dry photoresist strip and rapid thermal processing, otherwise known as RTP. Additionally, we have entered the etch market with our proprietary inductively coupled plasma technology. Plasma stripping and RTP are our core markets, which we have been in for a number of years, and we are one of the global leaders in both markets. Etch is a new emerging market for us, and one that we are very excited about, as it more than doubles our served available market and allows us to expand and grow at a very strong rate above the industry.

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Steven Laub, President and CEO of Atmel Corporation (ATML), talked to the Wall Street Transcript about his company Atmel Corporation  Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: Please begin with a brief historical sketch of Atmel Corporation and a summary of what’s going on now.

Mr. Laub: Historically, Atmel® was focused primarily on memory products, particularly flash memory. Its growth from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s was primarily from memory products. The company began a very substantial business and product diversification as it pursued new growth drivers. I joined the company as President and CEO in August of 2006, and we dramatically changed our strategy at that time to focus on a few core product lines. Specifically, we began to focus on microcontroller and microcontroller-related technologies as the core business for the company. This led us to exit approximately 15 different businesses and product lines between early 2007 and the current time frame. We have also moved away from commodity markets and are now focused on more proprietary product markets to raise the growth rate and profitability of the company. A major impact of that is now being demonstrated in our financial results, as illustrated in the Q2 2010 financials that were just published on Aug. 4, 2010.

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Peter A. Michel, President and CEO of iSECUREtrac Corporation (ISEC), talked to the Wall Street Transcript about his company iSECUREtrac Corporation  Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: Give our readers a thumbnail sketch of iSECUREtrac. What is the company’s mission? 

Mr. Michel: iSECUREtrac Corp. (ISEC) provides a suite of electronic monitoring systems, including GPS tracking, remote alcohol monitoring, house arrest systems and biometric voice verification, as well as client management software and intense monitoring services for use in community supervision. The data provided by the company’s equipment and software concerning a client’s location and status better enables effective compliance management and positive behavior modification. So at a high level, we are in the business of assisting our public agency customers in their community corrections activities. But at a macro level, we help individuals make better choices about their behavior and significantly reduce the cost to society of overall community supervision, both of which have a very positive impact on society.

TWST: You mentioned saturation in the market. Are we at market saturation in this sector?

Mr. King: Certainly these segments themselves are still growing, but growth has slowed significantly over the last several years. From an industrywide perspective, wireless net adds have fallen off by several million from their peak on an annual basis. You have carriers like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) that continue to do well. But more and more, they are doing it at the expense of carriers like Sprint (S) that continue to lose postpaid subscribers. So from an industry standpoint, there is still growth, but it’s certainly much slower growth than it has been in the past.

CHRISTOPHER C. KING is a Senior Telecom Services Analyst and Principal at Stifel Nicolaus, where he covers telecommunications and cable services firms. His current coverage universe consists of rural local exchange carriers (RLECs) as well as Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), in addition to a focus on Latin American and national independent wireless carriers. Mr. King joined the Legg Mason telecommunications equity research team in January 2001. He was an Equities Trader and fixed-income Analyst with Wachovia Bank and Allfirst Bank. Five years prior to joining Legg Mason/Stifel, Mr. King was a Financial Analyst with Allfirst in the company’s brokerage and capital markets groups. Mr. King has a bachelor’s degree in politics and economics from Wake Forest University and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Maryland.

Read more of the interview with Mr. King and other Telecom sector analysts.

The title says it all. In a recent interview with Colby Synesael Senior Analyst Kaufman Bros., L.P.  as part of our Data Hosting & Data Storage Services Report. Here is his take on the group;

Mr. Synesael: I’m positive on the group. Out of the four subsectors I cover within telecom and data ser­vices, the two that I’m most favorable on are neutral co-location providers like Equinix (EQIX) and Switch & Data (SDXC), as well as managed hosting providers like Savvis (SVVS) and Terremark (TMRK). In terms of why I’m positive, from a modeling perspective, I like the fact that they’re recurring revenue-based models. I think that that gives a lot of visibility for shareholders.

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Our current Semiconductor report contains a roundtable discussion with Dan K. Scovel of Tokeneke Research LLC,  Kevin D. Vassily of Pacific Crest Securities and Patrick Wang of Wedbush Morgan Securities. According to Patrick Wang the top of his list is MPWR;

Mr. Wang: When I think about best-of-breed technology, I think about a company called Monolithic Power. It’s my favorite small cap name. Hopefully it’ll graduate to mid-cap sometime soon. It[s one where these guys have just a very, very compelling, very cost competitive and performance competitive process technology, which allows them to essentially build chips that are cheaper, smaller and faster than a lot of the competitors out there.

Other companies mention in the rountable include: Intel (INTC); Micron (MU); Microsemi (MSCC); STEC (STEC); National Semiconductor (NSM);Texas Instruments (TXN); ON Semiconductor (ONNN); Linear Technology Corporation (LLTC)

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As part of our Application Software Report we spoke with Aaron Schwartz, Senior Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. thinks software stocks , have gotten a little ahead of fundamentals, and he expects the group to trade sideways into the fourth quarter . He does like Avocent (AVCT) on the long side:

Mr. Schwartz:”…It’s a company that’s a mix of hardware and software. To me, this is a company in sort of a turnaround story, it’s a non-consensus call. They’ve had a new CEO in there for about a year and he started to influence some change in the company, but they’re going to see their software mix increase as a percent of total. I think that they are a derivative play on the Windows 7 release – that’s the desktop operating system release that will be out in Octo­ber. They should see some pretty strong margin and earnings leverage into next year, and the valuation is at about a little less than 10 times earnings. To us, it is very attractive for a company that’s continuing to see things improve.”

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