VALOR APPOINTS ITS FIRST VP MARKETING &
A NEW PRESIDENT OF EUROPEAN OPERATIONS

"These appointments are as a result of Valor’s plans to further invest in sales and marketing for the PCB layout design, PCB assembly and contract manufacturing markets. Valor revenue grew by 30% during 1998, and by continuously monitoring, reviewing and refining our business strategy we aim to continue this growth throughout 1999," said Schmil Dolberg, C.E.O. of Valor.

Coates, 41, reporting to Dolberg, assumes responsibility for Valor product positioning, pricing and promotion, and corporate marketing communications. Coates has been with Valor virtually since it was established, in 1992, and has over 16 years sales and senior management experience, working in the PCB design and manufacturing industry.

"For many years the PCB industry has been striving towards an efficient design to manufacture process. The bedrock of Valor’s business strategy is to seamlessly integrate PCB design, fabrication and assembly, and the challenge for me is to ensure EDA vendors and OEMs recognise the full power of the Valor DFM concept. Through intelligent data (ODB++) and a balanced offering of high-level tools, Valor will change the way the industry is structured, and can bring fundamental advantages to all industry players in terms of cost and time to market reduction, and product quality assurance", said Coates.

Uri Lotan joins Valor as President of Valor’s European operations, reporting to Dolberg. This senior management position involves responsibilities for customer satisfaction and support, and the sales and marketing of Valor’s DFM and pre-production engineering software products: Enterprise-3000 and Trilogy-5000 in Europe. Specific challenges for Lotan include the continuous penetration and growth of Valor within Europe, in addition to the increased adoption of ODB++ – Valor’s intelligent and open DFM data exchange format – which is quickly becoming the de facto standard in PCB CAD-to-CAM data exchange.

Lotan joins Valor with over 16 years experience in a range of senior managerial roles, including business development, sales and marketing, in hi-tech companies such as Scitex and Orbotech Europe – of which he became President, and in 1993 achieved revenues of over $30M.

More recently Lotan has been involved with several successful start-up companies as director, investor and promoter. He holds a B.Sc. in Industrial & Management Engineering, from the Technion, Israel.

Valor is a global leader in CAD/CAM software providing more intelligent data for pre-production engineering. Its powerful solutions address the critical needs of PCB fabricators, assembly contractors and electronic OEMs. Serving as an interface for driving production equipment, Valor’s systems ensure that manufacturing uses only optimised data, resulting in accessible, coherent planning resources and improvements in tooling efficiencies. The bottom line is shortened cycle time driven by a significant boost in productivity and quality.

Any open-system supplier interested in working with ODB++ can download the format specification from Valor’s website (http://www.valor.com) and users can view stored information with the free Valor Universal Viewer (VUV), available upon request via the web.