The investment in the South Carolina manufacturing plant is part of STL's (Sterlite Technologies Limited) capex plan of Rs 350 crore this year, said its managing director Ankit Agarwal.
STL on September 8 launched a manufacturing facility in South Carolina with an investment of $56 million. They also recently announced they've partnered with TruVista for rural US broadband services.
“Since 2021, Sterlite Technologies has been providing its products like Nova A1, a high-performance fibre optic cable with exceptional bending properties and optical connectors such as MST Optoblaze to TruVista. We are now working towards growing this partnership further to continue deployment of ‘fibre to the home’ in rural South Carolina and beyond,” the company said in a regulatory filing.
In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Agarwal spoke about the capex plans, details about the US plant and more.
"US is one of the largest market globally for optical fibre, they're right in the midst of a multi-year network buildout in terms of 5G fibre," he said.
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Speaking on return on assets, he said, "This year we're looking at the capex of around Rs 350 crore, typically we look at our return on our assets and investments in three years. In the past, we have seen faster returns on cable than fibre as the latter sometimes take a little bit longer."
Giving more details on recent partnerships, Agarwal said, "We recently launched two partnerships. One was Windstream which is in the midst of a $2 billion network rollout across 18 states. The other is TruVista which is looking at providing broadband solutions and various applications in the region."
"This is our strategy to come in top 3 globally," Agarwal added.
Speaking about other markets, he said that not just US, STL is bullish on other markets too such as Europe and India. "Our Italy and India factories are doing well so our priority will be to reposition some of our sales in these markets," he added.
In its results for the April-June quarter, the company reported a 2.35 percent year-on-year (YoY) rise in revenue from operations at Rs 1,522 crore. Net profit for the quarter was at Rs 52 crore against a loss of Rs 24 crore reported in the same period previous year.
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