The premises cabling market grew over 30 percent, on account of hectic buying in the IT, banking and finance, and government sectors. We estimate the total size of the structured cabling market at manufacturers sales to be Rs 225 crore for the passing fiscal. Further, like in the previous fiscal, there was an increased activity in the reseller market.

In fact, all the players, who have been in the market, have consolidated their base and increased their presence. While there were no new entrants in the scene, we saw Finolex entering the market aggressively through a MoU with Leviton. The two most dominant players in the industry still remain Avaya (the spin-off of Lucent, which today has the structured cabling business); and Tyco (formerly AMP) with total sales revenue of Rs 95 crore and Rs 48 crore respectively. The two jointly accounted for over 60 percent of the total market. Though Avaya continues to have the largest market share and revenue, integrators and distributors all feel that Tyco enjoyed the topnotch mindshare. The others who enjoyed the top-of-the-mind recall in projects include Panduit, Krone and Molex. While for Lucent and Tyco, the visibility was very high on account of their total solutions product portfolio, Panduit found its place because of its cable manager solutions.

The real winner of FY 1999-2000, D-Link continued to harness its stranglehold of the last fiscal too. D-Link, through its aggressive pricing strategy and strong retailer network, did Rs 30 crore of sales. Krone, Molex, and TVS Net too consolidated their hold on the market after the global restructuring. In a market dominated by Avaya and Lucent, the above mentioned players discovered new avenues in the sub-250 node networks and the upcountry markets.

Interestingly, all players have looked at adding more distributors and tying up with more integrators on one hand, while on the other, they looked at training and certification. Molex for example, has added two national distributors, Krone entered into partnership with ITI and Nebula, Deltafull and Duratube added more distributors, etc. In other words, the principals clearly found out that the integrators are no more aligned with a single vendor. The SIs provide anything that the customer demands.

Among the solutions, Enhanced Cat5 solutions have been the choice for the middle and upper segments of the market. In fact, the market has settled down on this. Proposed Cat6 solutions, however, are popular in software segments. As far as fiber is concerned, 50/125-multimode fiber and composite fiber cables found acceptance in the market. Like the previous year, the biggest buyers have been software development centers, government, manufacturing, and banking and financing sectors. Tyco, for example, grew by 180 percent in the IT sector. Similarly, all the others have also seen this as a key sector. This year, however, we could see the IT sector spending coming down to about 40 percent, due to the US economy sneeze effect. However, the government sector spending is likely to race ahead.