The growth story of the Indian structured cabling industry continued during the last fiscal. The growth in bandwidth requirement and need to run multiple applications are fueling the growth of the cabling industry in India. The overall market grew from Rs 827 crore in FY 07 to Rs 1,172 crore in FY 08, registering a 41.8% growth.

Market Trends
There was an increased acceptance and deployment of 10 Gb over UTP following its ratification by the IEEE and also due to bandwidth requirements. Cat 6 continued to be the dominant cabling solution across all industry verticals enjoying a market share close to 70%. Following its ratification by the ISO and the EIA, Cat 6a is also expected to gain momentum. It saw good acceptance by data centers, as cabling solution of choice apart from backbone cabling.

What also gained momentum during the last financial year was the increase in awareness of creating a quality IT infrastructure within the enterprise. This has come a long way since the time structured cabling was treated as unstructured cabling with little attention being paid to this important aspect of networking. Cabling as the foundation of the IT infrastructure got increased recognition from the enterprises. The deployment of the latest technologies like Cat 6a, Cat 7, and fiber along with intelligent infrastructure also saw increased adoption. Cat 5e continued its journey in the very small/SOHO segment. In fact, there are reports of Cat 5e cabling entering the home segment, and being preferred over the traditional telephone two-pair cable. Some leading real estate companies started looking at building network automation. A trend toward shielded technologies on cabling due to parameters like Alien Cross Talk was also witnessed. The market also saw acceptance of transmission of higher data rate through copper infrastructure apart from fiber, even on single mode, to reach to newer customer base of FTTH application.

Increasingly, vendors are gearing up to move from providing vanilla cabling to software driven real-time management of the physical layer, which enables immediate troubleshooting of problems, if any, besides optimum utilization and efficiency. This new intelligent structured cabling is capable of tracking IP-based devices in such a way that it enables the network manager to access, control, and manage them from one central location. The distributed nature of computing apart from shortage of professional cabling professionals has made this an important issue.

Progress Report
Tyco Electronics AMP NetConnect topped the slot by achieving an estimated growth of Rs 299.5 crore in FY 08, which is a 28% growth from Rs 234 crore in FY 07. Though this growth is less than last fiscal, the companys contribution is the single largest to the Rs 1,172.7 crore mark.

Much in sync with the overall market growth, which has witnessed a decline this year, Tyco also saw a decline in its growth rate this year. It registered a 28% growth in FY 08 compared to a 42.7% growth in FY 07. Systimax CommScope clocked revenues of Rs 221 crore in FY 08, registering an 18.2% growth rate.

D-Link, on the other hand, has clocked Rs 180 crore revenue in FY 08 from Rs 146 crore in FY 07, a 23.3% growth. Molex made Rs 98 crore in FY 08, registering a 40% growth. ADC Krone has clocked Rs 52.4 crore in FY 08, as compared to Rs 36 crore in FY 07, a 45.6% growth.

The volatility of global copper pricing and duplicates from unscrupulous local manufacturers were major concerns. Nevertheless, the structured cabling market witnessed an impressive 42% growth

A noticeable trend is companies in the middle order continued to register higher growth rates than that of the top order ones. R&M (Reichle & De-Massari) India has registered an impressive growth of 120% in FY 08 over the previous fiscal. It clocked revenue of Rs 55 crore in FY 08 as compared to Rs 25 crore in FY 07.

Nexans Cabling was not more than a single-digit company in terms of revenue in crore. On similar lines, CDT Belden has grown tremendously, from revenue of Rs 15 crore in FY 07 to Rs 41 crore in FY 08.

To continue its growth in the coming years, and retain the leadership position, Tyco intends to have more focus on its partner programs, and is working toward enhancing the current ones. An important part of its strategy was to increase its reach in smaller cities through new alliances with system integrators, resellers, etc. In a bid to aggressively market itself in smaller cities, the company enhanced its geographical reach by adding offices in Ahmedabad and Pune, and has forged newer alliances with system integrators in other B & C class cities.

Systimax retained its position in the top order this year as well, clocking revenue of Rs 221 crore in FY 08, an 18% increase over the last fiscal that stood at Rs 187 crore, a 19.9% y-o-y growth.

The company launched new solutions in 2008 including CommScope Enterprise Solutions with 6A and Class EA standards. Early this year, CommScope completed the acquisition of Andrew, which, it claims, further enhances its last mile offering with its end-to-end wireless solutions.

D-Link scaled up its operations with an impressive growth of 23.3% and revenue for FY 08 at Rs 180 crore. In the last fiscal, the growth rate was 32.7% at Rs 146 crore.

D-Link has been able to maintain its leadership position, thanks to its strengthlocal manufacturing coupled with other networking product portfolio apart from traditionally being a price warrior.

Page(s)   1  2