BSNL order has established Tejas as a reliable source

At the earning call, for Q4FY24, Arnob Roy, Chief Operating Officer and Whole-Time Director, Tejas Networks Limited having reported a strong Q4FY24 said the company is upbeat for FY25, “we scaled our business to achieve profitability and ended the year with a strong order book for execution in FY ’25 and beyond.”

“Apart from this, we also engaged with several other customers for our RAN products, and as of now, we have multiple ongoing proof of concepts, POC, with potential customers. So, we have started making business development progress beyond the immediate BSNL opportunity.

We have made good progress for our wireline business as well. I think one of the highlights was completing the supply of large quantities of IP/MPLS routers for BSNL’s MAAN network, which is the backhaul network for the 4G/5G wireless network. This is one of the largest deployments of indigenous IP/MPLS routers in India. There are close to 15,000 routers deployed in the BSNL network and we have completed the supplies, and the installation, commissioning and deployment is going on as we speak.

We also had several strategic wins for our WDM and our Switching/Routing products in the Critical infrastructure sector. We entered into a strategic partnership with Telecom Egypt for our FTTx GPON equipment, which includes, apart from local manufacturing and supplies, sharing the experience of BharatNet and NKN Network projects in India and also contributing to the training and manpower development in Egypt. There are also gateways to many countries in which they have a free trade agreement and there could be a potential gateway for supplies to many countries in Africa and Middle East.

Some of the other highlights are the approval of our PLI application and our PLI application and the grant of Rs 32.66 crores for the past year of FY ‘22-23 and also Saankhya Labs, our subsidiary, also got approved under the semiconductor PLI scheme and received the incentives as well,” he added.

On investment expected from Indian telcos
“So, looking forward to the future, beyond the overall market growth, we are looking at several high-scale opportunities, both in India as well as internationally. In India, we have several large projects. One part of it is, of course, the BSNL 4G/5G continued investment. There are going to be more investments in 4G saturation networks, for the pan-India 5G networks, and for their backhaul expansion.

For the private telcos, we see a lot more CapEx investments happening for the 4G/5G networks. And similarly, for the Crosshaul networks for the mobile applications. We also have the BharatNet Phase-3 project, the initial specifications and tender documents have come out and it’s in the process of getting finalized. And just the CAPEX that you see, which has been asked for, is more than $500 million. That’s the initial estimate, and it’s going to be more than that.

And the other part is that the broadband roll-outs in India continue to pick up steam, and we see in the plans of all the private operators and the 5G, where more than $600 million of investments are planned over the next few years,” added Roy.

CT Bureau