Aksh Optifibre Reports Stellar Financial Results for FY18, Delivering 68% Increase In Net Profit.

Aksh Optifibre Limited [BSE: 532351 | NSE: AKSHOPTFBR], the leading Indian manufacturer of Optical Fibre, Optical Fibre Cables, Fibre Reinforced Composites and a major e-Governance & Turnkey service provider reported its Financial Year 2018 financial results.
Aksh Optifibre finished an excellent FY2018 with strong financial numbers. During the year company achieved its highest ever standalone turnover of Rs 594 Crore, as compared to Rs 484 Crore in the preceding financial year, registering a growth of 23%. EBITDA margins at 12% also witnessed improvement, as against 11% in the previous year. Standalone PAT at Rs 23 Crore reported a significant increase of 68% as against Rs 14 Crore in the previous financial year.

With Silvassa and Mauritius’s OFC capacity coming on stream in June 2018, company’s total OFC production capacity will stand at 10.7 Mn FKM. Ground breaking for Dubai Optical fibre manufacturing facility has also commenced and construction activities at the site are going on at the full swing. Construction work at company’s FRP production plant in China is also on track, and it is expected to start the commercial production in September 2018. Also, company’s Opthalmic Lens division has successfully rolled out its first batch of its finest quality lenses into the market.Board of Directors of the company has recommended dividend of Rs 0.30/- per share (i.e 6%), subject to shareholders’ approval.

Mr. Satyendra Gupta, Deputy Managing Director at Aksh Optifibre Limited, commented, “With immense pleasure I would like to state that investments made by the Company in the previous years has lead FY2018 to be an outstanding growth year. We exited the financial year by running at optimal capacity utilization in most of our product segments, onus of this success goes to the committed customer demand that supported our capacity expansion initiatives. We also expect to see the incremental benefits of our capacity expansion initiatives in the financial year 2019 and beyond, going forward this will also pave the way for sustainable growth for the company.

Industry Outlook

With over 4 billion people around the world using the internet, much of this year’s growth in internet users was driven by more affordable smartphones, wearable internet devices and mobile data plans. More than 200 million people got their first mobile device in 2017, and two-thirds of the world’s 7.6 billion inhabitants now have a mobile phone. The number of mobile phone users in 2018 stood at 5.135 billion, up by 4 percent year-on-year. On the back of ~ 520 million fibre-km bare fibre getting consumed across the globe in 2017, the world fibre demand continues to be unabated; with parallel strengthening of Optical Fibre prices the outlook for the industry appears to be optimistic going forward. In conjunction with the buoyant China’s demand for Optical Fibre, the key factors that will play a major role in driving the trajectory for optical fibre demand will be 5G internet mobile telephony rollout, which will further enhance the fibre demand by manifold times. Also, major traction in data demand can be attributed to the forthcoming data wave that will be ignited by block chain technology.
On the domestic front also, the outlook appears to be encouraging with Government laying special emphasis for accomplishing Bharat Net II project through Optical fibre network, this too shall get accomplished before the scheduled timeline of December 2018. In conjunction with Niti Ayog projecting 9% GDP by 2022, backbone of strong and dense optical fibre network will be imperative to achieve the projected scale and growth for the Indian economy.