Founded in 1994 as a French company, the current 3S PHOTONICS took its roots from a French research laboratory dedicated to photonics and created in the 1980's, which attracted the attention of the Alcatel group as early as 1991 to become Alcatel Optronics SA in 1994, a fully-owned subsidiary of the group. Listed on the stock exchange market in 2000, Alcatel Optronics enjoyed a phenomenal growth from 1999 to 2001, correlated with the fast expansion of the Internet.