US group Nedia Fiber landing in LatAm market supplied by India

Nedia Fiber is launching in Latin America with plans to capture a share of the competitive cabling and optical products market.

The company is currently finalizing the opening of an office in São Paulo where it will have direct operations and two warehouses for product storage, Nedia Fiber COO Luiz Fuschini told BNamericas.

The company is also expected to establish an operation soon in Buenos Aires, while moving towards building up a distribution hub in Colombia.

Nedia Fiber is a unit of Nedia Enterprises, which operates primarily in bioengineering, with services centered on erosion control.

"Our end customers are ISPs, telecom operators, EPCs, integrators, resellers. We consider ourselves suppliers. We prevail as white labels. We are not installers," he said.

Brazilian-born Fuschini, who has lived in the US for the past 30 years and has expertise in subsea cable design and projecting, joined Nedia Fiber in January with the goal of structuring the operations Americas-wide.

Competitive market

In Brazil, Nedia Fiber's local and South American operation will be led by SVP Aloysio Bleyer.

Bleyer has past experience at Lucent and spent 24 years at the Telefónica group, initially as director of wholesale sales and marketing and later as commercial VP for the Americas.

Nedia Fiber has already filed for fiber product registration with Brazil's telecom regulator , said Fuschini, and is awaiting certification of the equipment to begin sales. He expects this to come by the end of September.

He did not reveal how much is being invested in the operation, but said the market has been thoroughly studied and evaluated for both its opportunities and supply deficiencies.

According to Fuschini, there are discussions and interest from large incumbent telcos in Brazil to diversify their fiber suppliers, traditionally tier 1 players such as Lightera, Prysmian or Commscope.

"In the US, telcos like and , which used Corning and Commscope, began to optimize their budgets and costs, and without sacrificing quality, bringing Nedia Fiber into a very interesting vendor platform pool," he said.

Despite that, Nedia intends to position itself primarily as a "tier 2" provider, he said.

That is, to be a fiber supplier for telcos and well-established ISPs, offering support, a level of service, and quality that "tier 3" providers, which would be Asian manufacturers, especially Chinese ones, cannot offer, in their view.

Ultimately, however, Nedia Fiber will compete in a fiber market that Lightera, Prysmian and Corning, among others, claim to be characterized by unfair competition and dumping of Chinese fiber.

Latin America

In addition to Brazil and Argentina, Nedia Fiber is establishing a base in Colombia.

Other markets being worked on by Nedia Fiber include Belize, Costa Rica and Panama, where the company will operate primarily through distributors.

One of the key goals is to reduce lead times.

Tariffs

Asked about the impact of import tariffs imposed by the US on India, as well as on the new rates imposed by Brazil on all optical fiber imports, Fuschini said that Nedia keeps evaluating the scenario.

He said that all the planning for the operations in the US and even in Brazil was done before the tariffs, but that Nedia Fiber believes in its business model and expects a reversal of the rates.

"Indian products are being taxed at 25%, plus penalties. There's a whole process of what we've already committed to in terms of inventory, what's in stock, which is in high demand and still isn't subject to tariff surcharges," he said of the US operation.

Regarding Brazil, Fuschini said the country's warmer ties with India could benefit the company. He also believes there is a chance of an import tariff exemption for fiber under the BRICS context – even though China is also a BRICS member.

"I think that all the economic planning we did in terms of investment was very well rooted, by all the support that exists between Brazil and India. We're not talking about dumping like the Asian market, the Chinese market."

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