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Optical Cable Corporation

Nasdaq symbol..."OCCF"
The Roanoke Times
Business Section Cover Story - March 12, 1997
Investors seek answers at first public shareholders' meeting.
Optical Cable Clarifies Big Picture
The chairman said the firm is awaiting a vote
by Big Board adminstrators to move its common stock
from the NASDAQ to the NYSE.
by Greg Edwards - The Roanoke Times.

Bob Kopstein, President and CEO of Optical Cable Corp.,
fields questions by stockholders at the Hotel Roanoke on Tuesday, March 12, 1997.
After the meeting, several investors said they were impressed
with the company's friendly and sincere interest in their concerns.
Bob Kopstein, Chairman and President of Optical Cable Corp. of Roanoke, was looking pleased with the way his company's first shareholders' meeting had gone Tuesday morning, as he chatted with a few departing stragglers.
That's despite shareholders who barraged him with questions about the fiber-optic cable manfacturer, which sold its shares to the public last spring for the first time. Kopstein patiently provided answers for about an hour, sometimes in intricate detail.
"I was very impressed with their friendly and sincere interest in the individual investor,"
said Marie Grady, a stockholder from Blacksburg. "I thought it was wonderful," she said of the meeting.

Elvin Ingram, center, was one of about 40 investors who showed up to find out how Optical Cable Corp. is doing. Officials said the company's expertise in making its rugged, tight-buffered optical cables serves as a barrier to would-be competitors. |
Grady's comments were characteristic of those of other stockholders who accounted for roughly 40 of the 56 people attending the meeting at Hotel Roanoke.
Because this was the company's first public stockholders meeting, Kopstein said he'd had no idea if just two people would show up or whether he should have rented a bigger room.
The questions ran the gamut
of the company's business.
One person wanted to know if
a merger or sale might be in the
company's future.
"You never know what's going
to develop," Kopstein replied. His
company wants to be a fixture in
the global marketplace and, in
working toward that goal, develops relationships and partnerships
with a variety of other companies,
he said.
Another asked whether a
competitor could copy Optical
Cable's products and cut into the
company's business.
Technology that the company
uses would be costly to duplicate,
Kopstein said; but, more importantly, the company's expertise in
making its rugged, tight-buffered
cables rises as a barrier to would-be
competitors.
Kopstein told a shareholder
who was interested in the
company's proposal to move trading of its common stock from the
NASDAQ stock market to the New
York Stock Exchange that the
company is awaiting a vote by administrators of the Big Board.
Kopstein said the company
has been gaining market share on
its competitors for more than two
years, but one of the company's
biggest challenges is getting name
recognition.
He related an anecdote about
a sales call on Microsoft, the computer software giant, which had
never heard of Optical Cable.

Optical Cable Corp.'s tight-buffered optical cable |
Now, Bill Gates, Microsoft's
Chairman, has some of Optical
Cable's product strung on his
yacht, he said.
Last summer, Optical Cable
stock climbed from its original
price of $10 per share to $136 per
share before settling back down.
Currently, after two stock splits,
it's selling for about $14 per
share. That makes the original
shares worth more than five times
the price at which they first were
offered.
On Tuesday, the stock closed
at $13.75 a share, down 50 cents
from Monday.
"It's nice to see a company
like this in the Roanoke Valley,"
said Bill Wilcher, a shareholder
from Craig County. "Their job at
this point," he said, "is to make
information available to the public, and [Kopstein] certainly tried
to do that today."
Kopstein and Robert Thompson, both former engineers at ITT
Electro-Optical Products Division
in Roanoke County, formed Optical Cable in 1983 with the help of
local financial backers. Kopstein
bought out Thompson and the
others in 1989. He sold 760,000
shares of the company to the public last March, while retaining 9
million shares.
The company reported 1996
earnings of $9.2 million on sales
of $45.2 million. Earnings for the
quarter ended Jan. 31 were $2.1
million, a 21.7 percent increase
over the same period last year.
Sales for the quarter were $12.5
million, up about 21 percent from
a year earlier.
* See The 100 Best Performing Stocks in 1996 ! *

E-Mail:
Ken Harber, VP Finance - kharber@occfiber.com
Robert Kopstein, President/CEO - kopstein@occfiber.com