Sterlite Technologies Delivers Superlative Growth with a Strong Future Outlook

Sterlite Technologies Ltd, a global data network solutions company, reported another year of solid financial performance. The company’s steady growth over the last several quarters is a result of its strategic focus on offering data network solutions to an expanding global market of telcos, cloud companies, citizen networks and large enterprises.

As cloud companies intensified network build, telcos increased fibre deployment with high-impact solutions, defence modernised its networks, and rural and urban broadband accelerated, FY’19 was a transformative year for STL. It acquired new customers and launched end-to-end solutions, on the back of accelerated innovation, an agile supply chain and best-in-class talent.

• 35 new customers: The company won customers across all its customer segments, prominent ones being two of the world’s top cloud companies; several tier one telcos, including partnership for network creation for one of the world’s largest greenfield rollouts of 4G; and modernising the Indian Navy’s digital communications network. With this, India, Europe and LATAM now account for more than 90% of the company’s revenues.
• Six new solutions and several partnerships: With its unique silicon-to-software capability, the company designed and launched several network solutions. Some notable launches included FTTx Mantra (fully integrated, ready to implement FTTx solution) and TruRibbon (high-density optical fibre cable for high-capacity networks). The company partnered with industry leaders for some of these, including several partnerships for the Defence, and with open-source consortiums such as O-RAN and TIP.
• 271 patents: The company filed its highest-ever patents in a single year, taking its global patent filing count to 271. These filings protect the company’s deep technology investment in strategic areas. It also launched SPEL – India’s first technology lab for structured networking solutions. This is in addition to its two earlier labs – Centre of Excellence for broadband research and Centre for Smarter Networks for next-generation network applications.
• Capacity expansion and agile delivery: With the acquisition of Metallurgica Bresciana in Italy, the company strengthened its position in Europe and acquired new product and customer portfolios. Meanwhile, its planned expansion with new Industry 4.0 plant at Aurangabad is ready to come online with 50 million fkm fibre capacity by June 2019, while it is on track to deliver its doubled fibre cable capacity of 33 million fkm by June 2020.
• Best-in-class talent: The company continued to strengthen its technology expertise with hiring key talent for optical fibre research, software defined networks, converged networks, connectivity solutions and data science.
• Environment, sustainability and governance: The company’s commitment to the environment won its optical fibre cable plant in Silvassa, India the prestigious Intertek Zero Waste to Landfill Certification. It also became a signatory to United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest forum on corporate sustainability.

Consolidated Financials – All-time high

This focus on deep customer engagement, solutions build for hyper-scale networks, ongoing innovation, agile supply and key talent contributed to the company’s excellent financial performance.

Q4 FY’19 Financial Highlights

• Highest quarterly Revenues at Rs 1,791 crore
• Highest quarterly EBITDA at Rs 328 crore, up 38% YoY
• Highest quarterly PAT at Rs 165 crore, up 47% YoY

FY’19 Financial Highlights

The company’s financials have continued to show superlative growth. Key metrics are:

• Open order book at Rs 10,516 crore, 2.1 times the annual revenue
• Revenues at Rs 5,087 crore, up 59% YoY
• EBITDA at Rs 1,164 crore, up 48% YoY
• PAT at Rs 563 crore, up 68% YoY
• ROCE at all-time-high of 34%

The company continues to stay committed to deliver PAT of US$ 100 million in FY’20.

With these strong numbers, the Board of Directors has recommended Final Dividend of 175%

at Rs 3.5 per equity share for FY’19.