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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK - Board members of MCNC have begun examining the future of the 20-year-old research consortium in the wake of the multimillion dollar windfall it received from the sale of its spinoff, Cronos Integrated Microsystems.
MCNC owned about a third of Cronos, which was acquired by San Jose, Calif.-based JDS Uniphase in April in a stock deal initially valued at $750 million.
MCNC, founded as the state-supported Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, ended up with 2.38 million JDS shares. Since April, MCNC records show, the organization has sold 80 percent of its holdings, or 1.87 million shares, at an average sale price of $89.91 a share. That produced a windfall of about $168.22 million.
The private, nonprofit group continues to hold 509,909 JDS shares and has no immediate plans to sell , board members and MCNC staffers say. At JDS's Aug. 23 closing price of $123, the remaining shares are worth $62.7 million.
For an organization that was...