Sterlite Technologies, part of the Vedanta Group, is upbeat on the prospects in telecom and power sectors following the government initiatives for smart cities and increased focus on power transmission. The company is a telecom and power transmission solutions provider. In a chat with BusinessLine , Anand Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer, said the current Defence order for optical fibre cabling in J&K threw up a host of opportunities in integration, besides newer projects that could come by in the setting up of smart cities and industrial corridors. Excerpts:

Over the last few months, you have won orders in the telecom space. How many more do you expect moving forward?

We have bagged a long-term order and that is why the order book has gone up to ₹4,500 crore. The big one is the Defence order prior to which we got the national optical fibre network (BSNL) contract. This is essentially phase one of the current Plan and lot of these orders were on hold for quite some time. In the next couple of years, we will be executing them.

The Defence order is a direct win from the Government. However, there are people who won similar orders.

L&T has won one and Idea Cellular another. They will be ordering cables and some of these requirements will come to us. In some other zones, people who make cables themselves will order fibre from us.

The other part is that the Defence has ordered only the cable part for the network.

Over the next 12-18 months, the cables will be laid. Then, the active part of the network – the transmission and system integration – will come up for bidding.

The revenues expected from the tender you bagged and the offshoot from the orders, which you will get…

Currently, what we got is worth about ₹2,000 crore. For the fibre and cable requirement from others, it would be about ₹700 crore. The system integration is yet to come. The total requirement should be ₹4,000-5,000 crore for all zones. Essentially, we get about ₹600-700 crore orders every quarter.

The 4G rollout and the opportunities you see for yourself. Are you hiking production?

We have increased our production of optical fibre cable. A couple of years ago, we were doing about 4 million km. Last year we did 5.5 million km. Last quarter, we had a run rate of 2 million km. In India, 90 per cent of the towers work on microwaves. For 4G, every single tower has to talk to each other on fibre. Reliance Jio Infocomm and Bharti Airtel are rolling out 4G, which means additional fibre.

We are looking at smart cities for both power and telecom work simultaneously. We are the only ones in the country who do that.

Today, service providers own city infrastructure. For the new cities, the government is thinking the city owning the infrastructure and leasing it out to the service providers.

Your capex for the year?

The macro portion is completed. Now, we are spending about ₹40-50 crore annually on production line improvement.