Sep 22 2010
The Japanese company, Sumitomo Electric Industries has constructed a new factory for the manufacture of fiber-optic cables in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The company will soon begin the base material’s mass-production. Sumitomo and its partner, Futong Group, a China-based optical cables manufacturer, will operate the facility.
In 2009, Sumitomo Electric controlled 14 percent of the global market of fibre-optic cables
The investment from Sumitomo Electric in the project is estimated to be around 15 billion yen. The company’s project includes construction of a fibre-optic cable plant in Tianjin, which will be unveiled in October 2010. So far, the assembling of fibre-optics was done using the imported base materials from Japan, at the optic cable factories of Sumitomo Electric in Chengdu and Shenzhen.
According to Nikkei, a Japanese business daily, to avoid technology drain, the leading manufacturers in the US and Japan were unwilling to make glass base materials in China. Glass base material is a major fiber-optic material. Transparent glass is essential for producing glass base materials for fiber-optics for loss-less light transmission.
Only some companies in Japan such as Hitachi Cable, Furukawa Electric, Fujikura, and Sumitomo Electric are capable of manufacturing glass base materials, as advanced technology is needed to produce these materials. Draka, a Dutch firm, is assumed to be the only company to manufacture base materials in China.