Gentlemen. Good day. Welcome to the Tejas Networks Limited Q1 FY 2027 earnings conference call hosted by ICICI Securities Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Mohit from ICICI Securities Limited. Thank you. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, Anushka. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining on the Q1 FY 2027 earnings conference call of Tejas Networks Limited. We have the management of Tejas Networks on this call represented by Mr. Arnob Roy, Managing Director and CEO, Mr. AVS Prasad, CFO, Dr. Kumar N. Sivarajan, CTO, and Mr. Sanjay Malik, Chief Strategy and Business Officer. I would now like to invite Mr. Arnob Roy to initiate with opening remarks, post which we will have a Q&A session. Thank you. Over to you, sir.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our earnings call presentation for Q1. I'll start with our revenues of Q1, which was INR 402 crores. A slight 20% growth over Q4. Profit after tax increased slightly. Same for order book, which has also saw a small growth. In terms of the revenue mix, it was evenly split between India and international. We'll add some color to that as we get along. From a closing order book, this quarter, most of our business wins were domestic. That's why India, at the end of the quarter, the order book was 93% domestic orders and 7% international. In terms of Q1 highlights, our revenues were driven largely by international shipments of 5G radios and domestic shipments of optical and FTTx products.
This international shipment was to a customer in Europe. This was one of our first significant customer win for 5G internationally. The other highlight was our first commercial end-to-end 5G network deployment win. A commercial win for our end-to-end 5G network deployment in South America. End-to-end basically means it's beyond the radios. It's also the baseband unit and the core. This represents a complete end-to-end Tejas technology stack for a 5G network deployment. The other highlight was we continued with our patent filings and filed 46 patents in Q1, taking our global count to 722. I'll now hand you over to our CFO, AVS Prasad, for walking you through the financial numbers.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Arnob. As indicated, revenue is around INR 402 crores, a 21% quarter-on-quarter increase compared to quarter four of FY 2026. At a PBT level, PBT is around negative INR 271 crores compared to INR 281 crores in quarter four. Coming to the balance sheet items. In terms of inventory, there is a reduction of inventory from the previous level of INR 2,438 crores to INR 2,358 crores. As we have been saying earlier, the high levels of inventory are on account of advanced procurements in terms of materials for addressing the add-on orders and preparedness to address the other customer requirements. At net receivable level, the net receivables after the customer advance adjustments currently stands at INR 2,232 crores compared to INR 1,905 crores, an increase in terms of net receivable, resulting in the working capital.
The net working capital increased mainly on account of the net trade receivables increase and also correspondingly increased scheduled payouts. The cash position compared to quarter four stands at INR 489 crores compared to INR 505 crores. On the debt side, the net debt increase is mainly as what I mentioned earlier in terms of net working capital increase as well as increased payouts. Also the company's focus in terms of continued investments in terms of CapEx. There's an increase in terms of the borrowings. The gross borrowings stands at INR 4,866 crores, and net borrowings at INR 4,277 crores.
Thanks, Prasad. I'll now take you to some more details about our business for Q1 as well as the outlook. To give you a little bit more color of what Q1, one of the highlights was, as I mentioned, the end-to-end 5G network win for an operator in South America. The supply of 5G Massive MIMO radios to a global customer in partnership with NEC. We were also selected by a global tier 1 telco for a joint R&D project in 5G. This is something of quite a lot of significance for us because successful execution over here, we expect will lead to future increase in our business engagement in terms of product shipments and so on. Lastly, we are still awaiting the expansion order for the BSNL 4G, that additional 26,000 sites.
There has been a lot of news items about this recently, and I can only comment that it's in the final stages of conclusion in terms of awarding of the order. There is a discussion with our system integration partners regarding the final T&Cs and so on. We expect that this thing will materialize very soon, probably in this quarter. As you can see from the first three items, the international traction for our wireless products and technology are increasing, which is a very encouraging sign for us. In terms of wireline, we continue to expand our market share and business with the tier 1 Indian telcos for optical as well as FTTx products. For tier 1 telco, we expanded our FTTx footprint for the pan-India residential broadband rollout.
For two other tier 1s, we supplied our optical equipment, 100 Gb, 400 Gb DWDM equipment for the 5G backhaul networks, for the enterprise services network, and also for hyperscaler data center connectivity. The utilities continue to be a strong sector for us, and we were selected as a vendor for the communication network modernization of a large power utility. This has been a very successful business for us, and we continue to win newer and newer business as the utilities keep modernizing their networks from the older TDM SDH network to a more IP-based network. Internationally, our optical products continued to win additional market share, and this was for an existing customer in Africa, a leading wholesale bandwidth provider. We did a lot of network expansion for him using our state-of-the-art 100 Gb, 400 Gb coherent DWDM equipment. A few other highlights.
Our newer product, which was announced recently, the TJ1600-D3, the data center interconnect product. It was selected as a global finalist among the top three at the prestigious Leading Lights Awards for 2026. This is indeed a recognition to be proud of because this is one of the most respected organizations in this field. The fact that they recognized us among the two other global OEMs as one of the most innovative products that were launched, this is actually a significant recognition of our R&D capabilities. We won the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce Award for manufacturing excellence. We signed MOUs with IIT Gandhinagar and MahaIT to catalyze and nurture the local innovation ecosystem for next-generation telecom. We increased our patent filing.
We filed 46 new patent applications, taking the count to 722, of which 380 have already been granted, and the rest are in the process of analysis and going through the next steps. We also successfully completed the field and lab trials, the demonstration of the D2M or our broadcast radio solution. This was also a significant milestone, which we also saw a lot of publicity where, along with Prasar Bharati and FreeStream, we were engaged in a field trial, an extensive field trial for our broadcast equipment. In terms of the key business drivers for our products today, one of the important trends that we see and that we highlighted was the expansion of 5G deployment in emerging markets. We expect the 5G rollouts to continue till 2030 and overtaking the 4G deployments at a very rapid pace.
Globally, 5G is also going to serve a lot of fixed broadband applications. The number of subscriptions are set to triple and reach 90 million globally by 2030, and this is going to be an important application of 5G as well, which we will serve. The other part of it, I talked about the expansion of existing 4G networks in India and emerging international markets. Of course, the BSNL 4G is one of the key opportunities over here. Apart from that, also we see engagements in a 4G network expansion in several emerging international markets. In the wireline segment, the rapid growth of data centers and connectivity is driving a lot of our business, especially for the optical. This is also resulting in the last-mile increase in the last-mile connectivity, both in terms of numbers as well as in terms of bandwidth.
We see the enterprise connectivity bandwidth going up significantly, that is leading to a lot of our equipment being purchased and deployed in those applications. We see a significant increase in residential broadband complexity, we have tier-one partners in India which are driving that growth with our FTTx equipment. As the wireless networks are expanding, the backhaul connectivity for those networks, those are also a significant part of our business. I highlighted the modernization of utility networks from the older TDM technology to IP-based networks, that also continues to be one of our key drivers. Looking forward, we see the rapid deployment and global adoption of AI as going to be one of the key drivers for our business. To walk you through the details of what that really means, I'll hand it over to our CTO, Dr. Kumar Sivarajan.
Thank you, Arnob. I'll take a few minutes to outline how AI is impacting the network, also what we are doing about it. All of us are using AI. AI has replaced search. All websites are using chatbots. We are doing a lot of image processing and great videos and everything with AI. All this has immediately increased the traffic within the internet. There's a lot more computing being added in data centers, which is of course, driving the growth of NVIDIA and the like. The central data centers have significant addition of computing capability for AI training. There's also computing being added at the edge for what is called AI inferencing. This introduction of AI for pretty much everything that we do today has led to significant growth in the traffic. AI has increased the traffic by 20x.
Immediately, the optical network is being built out, both between data centers. Data centers need to be interconnected with high bandwidth and low latency connections. The high bandwidth here is tens of terabits, the data centers could be 100 km or even 1,000 km apart. Consistent with that, we also need to increase the bandwidth in the aggregation and metro network, which connects the users to the core. This is what is happening in the network due to AI. If you look at the next slide on what we are doing about it. We are enhancing our portfolio, both wireless and optics. First, those network traffic requirements based on AI.
In term 6G, I use here broadly non-wireless and what the industry is also starting to do because 6G will impact both the wireless and the optical network. Starting from the left, with the introduction of AI, we will need 6G or 5G-Advanced to be able to address the new AI applications. This could go beyond phones to meta glasses and other devices in the next few years. This is for wireless users will access it through the 5G-Advanced or 6G radio access network. There is also increase in traffic going from homes and businesses. In homes, we are enhancing our portfolio of PON to go to 50 Gb PON from the current 10 Gb PON. Businesses will also be served with higher bandwidth in the access. Typically, it's 10, 100 Gb today, will go to about 800 Gb.
The same increase in traffic will carry through the rest of the network. At the core of the network today, we are at mostly 400 Gb wavelengths that will go to 1.2 Tb or even 1.6 Tb wavelengths. The WDM network, which typically operates on one pair of fibers and adding additional bands, used to operate in this conventional band or C-band. In the last few years, we've added another band, the L-band, but by 2030, we also expect to add a third band. We'll have three bands of WDM with 100 + wavelengths operating at speeds up to 1.6 Tbps . This is a future in the next few years.
By 2030, I think all of these products will have to be there, and we have a significant investment in R&D across both wireless and wireline to build out this portfolio so we can take advantage and address the products needed to build out this network to substitute AI. With that, I hand it back to Arnob to conclude this presentation.
Thank you, Kumar. In summary, some of the key takeaways or the key messages from our business in Q1 is, first of all, growing international traction for our wireless products, our new 5G wins in international regions and multiple other engagements with all operators. Our joint R&D partnership with global tier one telco is also an endorsement of that. A lot of our credibility is also coming from our network performance in the BSNL 4G network, which is an endorsement of our product scalability and reliability, and that has given us a lot of credibility when we engage with full customers, including the tier 1 telco that I'm referring to. In terms of wireless, wireline business has been seeing steady growth and driven by growth in data center connectivity, residential enterprise broadband. We have a very good incumbency in the Indian private telcos.
As their business grows, we see our business expanding and as well as we are increasing market share in those networks as well. Finally, we are well positioned for an AI-driven future. We have a lot of investments in 5G-Advanced and wireless and 6G for our wireless portfolio. The portfolio of products, also investments for building products, for building this end-to-end high bandwidth, low latency networks required for AI infrastructure and also user access. With this, I come to the conclusion of our presentation and open the floor for Q&A.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. We take the first question from the line of Tushar Khurana from Peace Wealth. Please proceed.
Yeah. Hi, thank you for the opportunity. Sir, my first question is regarding this BSNL receivables that we have. Since we are now in the final stage of getting this order for 26,000 sites, does that mean our receivables situation should also improve and we should start getting the payment from BSNL? Given that was subject to some acceptance tests that were left. Any comment on that?
I didn't get your last part of the statement. Your receivables, you added given the add on order or what is it?
There were some acceptance tests that were left for some of the sites-
Okay.
-after which you were able to get those payments, right?
Correct. That's okay. Acceptance test. Okay. Yeah, understood. Yeah, that's correct. I think the expansion orders, one of the part was also the completing of the acceptance and some of the pending features and all those kind of things. Those are also in a very advanced stage and coming to a closure. Yes, you're right. We expect a lot of the BSNL receivables to also get cleared during the quarter, as we move along for the expansion project.
That's wonderful, sir. Sir, my second question is regarding the international order wins that we have got on the wireless side for 5G radios and the one with the collaboration with NEC. I just want to understand, these order wins are mainly for the TSPs or enterprises. If you could quantify also the number of sites that we have begun with.
Yeah. These are all for TSPs. All of them are for TSPs, for mobile network services. See, I cannot quantify the number of sites because I don't have permission from the customers themselves, kind of a thing. More importantly, getting this incumbency, getting this reference, network deployments is really good, I think, for us. That's probably the most important thing. As their network deployment happens and expands, this should lead to not only more business from these existing TSPs, but serve as a really good reference for other customers in those regions.
Sir, this NEC, I was reading about this. NEC was actually restructuring their 5G RAN business. Does that mean are we going to be exclusive partner for them wherever there is NEC downfield expansion happening or even, say, greenfield, there we'll be the exclusive partner for NEC, where we'll be doing the manufacturing for them? How is it really placed for us Tejas Networks here?
Yeah. We are their partners for their 5G radios and beyond. Their focus is on the software side for the 5G network, on the vRAN and so on. For the varieties of radios, today's radios as well as the future ones, and in some cases 4G radios as well, we are their, kind of, you can say their exclusive partner. I think the preferred partner is probably the right word to use. Because we also have a deep partnership with them for the development and manufacturing of these products. Yes, with their international deployments, our radios are the ones that should actually be going along with their products.
Sir, can you also quantify what is the total market size for them right now? What kind of total business they were doing presently in the 5G RAN side?
Yeah, I don't have those numbers with me right now. I don't have those numbers with me right now. I know they have a significant business in Japan and a significant business in Europe. We are looking at this partnership of getting market traction in those markets along with them.
Okay. That's all from my side. Thank you so much, sir. All the best.
Thanks, Tushar. Yeah.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Janice Chayda from Kempen Family Office. Please proceed.
Good morning, sir. I'm audible?
Yes, you are.
Yeah. Sir, just one question from my side. Now, since in the BSNL there was a performance-linked payment that was there, are there similar condition in the international orders as well?
No. There are no such conditions because, for the international orders, especially the one in South America and then the other one also, the wins, the purchase orders came after an extensive POC. Our products were already proven in the POC network, after which these orders came. There is no payment linked to those performances. It is very important for us to have a really good performance in the network for any expansions and also further businesses, and them providing a good reference network for us.
What will be the payment cycle type for these supplies that you have made recently? Is it 60-90 days or longer?
No, it will be the regular payment cycle that we have for most customers. There is nothing exceptional over here. Or like BSNL, it is not like that. Most of them are our standard. It varies between 60 - 90 days, and this is also with the same terms.
Thank you so much, sir.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Raja Kumar from RK Invest. Please proceed.
Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity. The first question is, I just want to know, what is the path to profitability?
Of course, the first part is increasing our business and market share. As you know, we came off from a very successful FY 2025, FY 2026 results were not as expected because a lot of the deals we were expecting to close at the time didn't materialize. We kept on investing on R&D for future technology development. The first path to profitability is, of course, growing our business. With the momentum that we have and also getting the expansion order, that will give us a lot of tailwind in that direction. Apart from that, as a part of the growth of business, we have to leverage our partnerships with our global OEM partners, NEC and others, for growing our international business.
Finally, optimizing our operating expenses in line with our business and cost engineering for improving margins, working capital management to reduce finance costs over time. As you know, a lot of the inventory build-out that had been made for the expansion order. Now with this coming in, we expect a lot of that to go away, reducing our working capital requirements for the future. We also expect our receivables to come down with the completion of LOLB acceptances and delivering all the deferred features for BSNL. Overall, I would say, we are in a very positive direction, as you can see from our financial results from Q1 of FY 2026 to Q4 to Q1. The trajectory is positive, both in terms of revenue, PBT, inventory and so on. Maybe not to the scale at which we were expecting, but the positive trajectory is there.
As we continue to go along, we are growing our business. On all the parameters that I talked about, revenue, working capital, inventory, receivables, we should see a lot of positive progress on all of that, I believe we are on the path to profitability.
Okay. Thank you so much, sir. In terms of timeline, can we take it as anywhere between 12-18 months, we can see a positive bottom line?
I would say our first target will be positive EBITDA and EBIT, then going to PAT profitability as well. Yes, it will take some time. 12 - 18 months is a reasonable time to expect.
Thank you so much, sir. Sir, just one more question. Just on the receivable, I see that the receivable has moved from INR 1,900 to INR 2,232 crores. It's almost a INR 325 crore movement, and you have done revenues of about INR 400 crores this quarter. Which means almost whatever your revenue you have done, it's remaining in the AR only. I know that there is no BSNL order both in this current quarter and the previous quarter. Why we are seeing a sticky collection in even the non-BSNL segment also?
We had collections for the non-BSNL segment also. With this increase in revenue, I think whatever we have shipped, the increased shipments of this quarter have gone into the receivables. That's one of the reasons that you're seeing the receivables haven't gone up.
Okay, sir. Thank you so much.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Sugandhi from an individual investor. Please proceed.
Hello, we can't hear you, Sugandhi.
Yes, hi. Thank you for taking my question. A couple of things. If you could give us an idea about the warranty provision, and what is the internal policy that we follow for making these provisions? They have been a recurring item on the P&L for the last couple of quarters. In terms of what is the origin of these provisions, because they're sizable compared to the kind of business we used to do in the pre-BSNL order era. Just trying to also figure out how to look about profitability from a long-term perspective in terms of, I understand that the BSNL order is a big proof of concept for our execution in 5G, but in terms of how profitable, the kind of net profit that we make from the order against the kind of provisions that we make.
I'm just assuming here, most of them come from PSU businesses only. Could you give us an idea about that?
Yeah. I think your first question was about warranty costs, and they are usually determined by potential fault rates and repair requirements and anticipated claims during the warranty period, and is driven by our cumulative installed base. Right now, the distortion that you see in this increased warranty provision is because of this large BSNL network that was rolled out. As you've seen in our financial performance in the past, this was not a very big factor. In the future, we also don't see this going to happen. As the product stabilizes, which is what is happening, and the field experience matures, the warranty costs are expected to normalize. This has been a one-off case because of the large network deployment that has happened, and is going to stabilize and come down as we get along. Right? We're on the path to that.
The other part was your question about profitability and all this kind of thing. I kind of answered that question, that driven by revenue growth, international as well as domestic, and then managing of working capital and margin improvements that will come along with the international business and so on. I think that remains the same. While the BSNL business is there, as you can see, all our efforts and focus is on the private market, the private telco market, both in India as well as international. During the quarter, we have made significant progress in that direction, especially. The heartening thing to note is all our new technology investments in 5G, in optical, in FTTx, all of them are getting traction. Kind of the vision of how these technologies would evolve and how the market would adopt them is kind of playing out.
That's the positive part. The add-on order would be a really good tailwind for us in terms of cleaning up the inventory that was built, cleaning up the receivables, and really improving our working capital and all significantly. That's the good part of the add-on order when it comes in. From all other parameters in terms of new business wins and our international business growth, I think we are on a positive trajectory, and we hope to continue this going forward.
Sure. Sir, in terms of the add-on orders, the economics would be more or less on the same line as for the initial INR 1 lakh size?
That's correct. It's going to be on the same line as that.
If I'm not mistaken, there was some service revenue element which was supposed to last for a longer period. Do we accrue any revenue on account of services provided to BSNL on the existing base today?
Not yet. That's going to start. The AMCs are going to start after site acceptance and the warranty period getting over. It's going to start, so the significant amount of service revenue, the AMC revenues, that has not started yet.
Sorry, what is the timeline for that?
It's going to start in the next few quarters.
Sure. Okay. If you can give us a split of the current quarter's revenues between wireless and wireline.
Yeah. We don't get into those details in terms of more revenue split. I can definitely say there's a significant amount of wireless business, and that has also been mostly international. Right? It is a significant part, but I wouldn't like to give any numbers in terms of the wireless, wireline. We don't give that. We have said that India has been 50% and international 50%, right? International has been largely wireless and some wireline also for some of our existing customers.
That's encouraging. Sir, I noticed that you're not giving the order book anymore. That's a number you used to share previously. If you could just give us-
Yeah, we did that. I think I shared the number. At the end of my first slide, if you see, was INR 1,529 crore, which is a slight increase over Q4, which was INR 1,314 crore. We did win during the new orders during the quarter, which has increased our order book slightly.
Sure, sir. How much of that would be international?
If you see, I also mentioned it at the beginning of the presentation, that most of the new wins during the quarter has been for the domestic kind of thing, apart from the South American 5G network. That's why the split between current split of India international is more than 90%: 93% India and 7% international, and we hope to change that profile going forward.
I'm assuming there's no element of BSNL order in this at present.
The new add-on order is not part of this. Whatever the service revenue aims is, and all those kind of things for which we have POs, they would be in the backlog. Those are, you know, the products. No product shipment in that as yet. The add-on revenues are not part of the backlog as of yet, the order book.
The South American order is already included in this?
Yes, that is included in the order book.
Sir, is that like a pilot level of contract, or are we talking about a network rollout or just a testing sort of order that we're talking in South America?
Yes.
Is it within a strategy for new
Yeah. As I said, we went through an extensive POC for our products before we were given this order. This is the initial order for that network, because most international private operators build network in steps, right? There is nothing like a tendering process like BSNL, where they buy everything together and then slowly deploy over a period of time. Most of the operators buy some amount and deploy them, and then expand the network as they get more customers, as they get more territory, and so on. This is like that. We finished a POC successfully. We won the initial order, and on the success of this, we expect additional orders to come, which we are aware of. They have network expansion department, but this will keep happening over time, which is usually the way it happens for most private operators.
True. Sir, I noticed that after that initial increase in our employee accretion, which we saw from 2021 to 2025, we've had a sort of stable number last year. Any guidance that you can give us? Also, what you capitalize and expense, put together in your R&D, how much of that would be employee expenses?
The employee costs are more or less flat. We are managing our expenses. I said last year, we did a significant increase because even while the business was not panning out as expected, we wanted to make sure that product and technology-wise, we were up and current. That's what happened. Now that a lot of that is done, I think our employee expenses are expected to remain flat for some more time. That's going to happen.
Sure, sir. That's helpful. That's it from my side. I'll just get back in the queue. Thank you.
Sure. Thank you.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Pratap Maliwal from Mount Intra Finance. Please proceed.
Hi, am I audible?
Yes, you are.
Hi, sir. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to follow on from the point that you said that we expect the AMC orders to come in from this year. Could you just help us understand what could be the size of these contracts that we get. At the time of signing of the BSNL deal, I believe the management had pointed out that the initial 7,500 was for the supply of equipment, and then the AMCs will come in, which would also be to the tune of thousands of crores. Over what period would these revenues be recognized? Could you just help me on that part?
The AMC revenues would be recognized over a period of eight years when it starts. Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Just some detail around what could be the size of the AMC revenues.
Yeah.
Have the disclosures actually answered it?
Yeah. I think we have not yet shared the AMC numbers for the network. I think when that materializes, we are going to share that with you. Okay?
Okay. See, sir, my understanding is the AMC revenue would be higher margin. Is that a key component of our path to profitability, as the previous participant had asked? Is that something that we are factoring in? That's what I'm trying to gauge here.
Yeah. No. Yeah, that's correct. I think the AMC revenues come with a much higher margin, obviously. That's going to definitely help our profitability when it starts, and it's going to start in the next few quarters. That's going to start at the end of the deployment and acceptance and warranty period. You are right.
Understood.
Yeah, the AMCs will come with higher margin, and impact our financials very positively.
Okay, just one last detail. When these AMC orders come in, is it going to be one large kind of a lumpy contract like the supply of equipment was, or is it more nuanced as in which circle the equipment was deployed in that circle, AMC orders come in first or something like that, sir?
Yeah, mostly it is going to be like that. Mostly it's going to be like that. It's going to be circle by circle AMC POs that are going to come based on the timeline of the deployment and so on. That's how it's going to happen.
Oh, okay.
It will be a multi-year contract. It's not going to be year after year contract. It'll be a multi-year contract, but they'll come split into circles, and that's the way it will come.
Okay, sir. Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Shailesh from Invest Yadnya. Please proceed.
Yeah. Hello. I have a question about D2M. We got an approval of D2M in last quarter. How is this going to pan out? Are there any orders about D2M, or will there be any certainty about orders, any contracts or any particular revenue-
Yeah
would be there? I don't want guidance, how will be the trajectory for D2M? I want to understand that.
Yeah. I'll hand you over to our COO, Preetham, who's closely following the trial and the business, he can update.
Yeah. Hello. D2M, basically, we are waiting for the Prasar Bharati tender to happen. Once the tender is out, we will be partnering with one of the SI partners like FreeStream or anybody else who's participating, that process will take some time. At this point in time, there is no clarity on when exactly the tender happens. That is the path it will take for us to really get into the market. The tender has to come. We have to participate with the SI, after the selection, we see the revenue.
Yeah.
So I-
the trial that have happened is with our equipment, exclusively with our broadcast radios.
Yeah. I want to understand again one question about that also. Are there any other players who got that approval of D2M in India, specifically if you want to understand that.
There may be multiple SI partners who would participate in this tender. Like Arnob mentioned, the D2M equipment, we are uniquely positioned to be one of the only players who have that kind of equipment available as of today.
There hasn't been any other POC with anybody else's equipment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Only our equipment has been done proof of concept trials.
Do you have the numbers of total TAM for D2M? Is there any TAM or where we can get the understanding of market, how large that market is?
If the rollout happens nationwide to the scale at which we anticipate it to happen, it could be close to $1 billion of TAM. It really depends on the phase at which it is rolled out. The rollout might happen in phases, it may not be all of it will happen in one shot.
I think it's probably better to give the number of sites control directionally. Overall, if it is a nationwide rollout, we are talking about the number of sites which are very similar to what we have seen for BSNL. It all depends on.
It will be less than what BSNL.
Right. Probably less than that.
Well, the broadcast sites will be lower, so it will be lesser number of sites compared to the BSNL network.
Okay. One last question about that. I read the news about that TCS got the expansion deal for BSNL. Is that the same expansion that we were talking about, or is there another next phase of expansion is there for 4G?
No, this is the same expansion order that we're talking about for these 26,000 sites.
Yeah. That's it from my side.
Yeah.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Rajveer Singh from Vivek Investment Managers. Please proceed.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is on the R&D return. Tejas is investing heavily in R&D. Can you let me know which recent R&D investments are closest to commercialization, and when should investors expect meaningful revenue from them?
The R&D investments keeps happening on a continuous basis, and they are, a lot of it, are the evolution of the technology that we play in. For example, we started our wireless journey using 4G, right? As we were doing 4G, the natural evolution was investment in 5G, and that's what we have been investing in for the last more than 12 months. More than close to 24 months, we have been investing. As our 4G products were getting deployed, that investment had happened, and that is now leading to commercialization, the beginning of commercialization, and we are seeing the initial successes. While now we expect our growth in our 5G business, we have already started investing in 6G. 5G-Advanced and 6G as well. Right? It is not one single new product which there's investment will come out and get commercialized.
It's like a ongoing process and evolution of our technology, right? Similarly for optical, if you see, it's like the technology space is the same, say, optical transmission of high-capacity traffic. When we started optical, it was 100 Gb, 10 Gb moving to 100 Gb, then it moved to 200 Gb. Now we are supporting up to 1.2 Tb per channel. The major deployments are happening in 400 Gb and 800 Gb and so on. As that happens, as the technology, new innovations come in and we will be investing ahead of time before they get adopted. As and when the adoption of those technologies happen, we'll be commercializing it. The summary is that it's not really one new product which we are launching, for which we are going to see commercialization. It's like a evolution process of the technology and products that we have.
Understood. Okay. My second question is on the competitive position. Against global vendors like Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei, where does Tejas believe it has a strong technological edge today?
In terms of wireless, if you see, our radio technology is really standing out, right? That's why we get a lot of attention, especially the SN network performance has proven the kind of the maturity of our technology. In terms of the wide portfolio of RAN that we have or the radios that we have, that's where the global partnerships are also coming into play, right? From that point of view, I would say wireless, very efficient, high-performing radios, the macro radios that we have. Our entire solution with BBU has lot of differentiators in terms of being an integrated BBU with transport and all those kind of things.
First of all, I would say the equipment performance and secondly, the versatility of the equipment in terms of how it can be deployed in the network and reducing the overall OpEx and CapEx of the network. That's as far as wireless goes. Similarly, from our wireline point of view, there are many differentiators. One part of the access, we have a very strong portfolio in access where we can combine the FTTx and enterprise services and high bandwidth, low latency services in a single product using the convergence of all the technologies that we have. Our optical products are, again, absolutely state-of-the-art in terms of performance, power, density.
The reason that our data center product has been selected as a finalist is that we are absolutely leading in terms of power and density and the services and the capacity of the product in terms of the services it offers. I think, in a way, that's a minimum requirement if you want to grow in your international business as well as the Indian private telco business. In a nutshell, whenever we make these products, I think those differentiators are built in and designed and then the quality of your portfolio is what really matters in terms of being able to win over the competition that you're talking about.
It sounds great. My last question is on artificial intelligence. If AI infrastructure spending accelerates globally over the next five years-
existing Tejas products, do you think would benefit without requiring any additional R&D?
Clearly, increase in AI means increase in bandwidth, connecting data centers, and connecting users to the data center, which is the access. The current product sales will improve, but it's also required for us to develop higher capacity products, both in the access and in the core, right? That's what I outlined. Yes, there will be increase in our current product sales, but we also need higher capacity because networks will become higher capacity, and we are investing in that to evolve our products.
If you see the current round of investments are happening heavily in terms of building the central data centers, where Kumar talked about learning versus inference and so on. As this infrastructure gets built and then the AI adoption, I think we have probably really just kind of scratched the surface in terms of AI adoption across the world. When that really gets mainstream and everybody becomes a heavy user of AI, that's where the investments will move from the centralized data structures to the edge and then to the last mile, to the access, to the users as well, right? That's where Kumar talked about our 50 Gb PON, and then 6G and 5G-Advanced coming into play. As and when that matures, the different segments of our products will see a lot more business traction.
We are kind of continuing to invest in line with the vision of how the networks will evolve with that deployment.
Yeah. Sounds good. Thank you so much. Those were my questions.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We take the next question from the line of Vijay from Subhkam Ventures. Please proceed.
Morning, gentlemen. Thanks for this opportunity. Just wanted to check with you, sir. For the 1.60 DWDM platform, can you name the trials are going on with the India sector or international hyperscalers? What stage are we in in terms of trials? What specific technology gap that you foresee, and how quickly you think you can come closer to that? That's the first question. The second is, in your presentation, you talked a lot about the solutions that you give end-to-end. Could we have the timeline of those trials and launches possible? Thank you.
Yeah. When I talk about 1.60 WDM, if you see our current products which are getting deployed, also support up to 1.6 Tb per channel performance in WDM, and they are getting traction right now. What happens is that when you support up to 1.2 Tb, people actually based on their network requirement, they run the equipment at maybe 400 Gb per channel or 800 Gb per channel based on the capacity of the network, right? We are saying the capacity goes up to 1.2 Tb, and the customers have already tried it and seen it for the maximum performance, and then they buy it and deploy it for their requirements while they have tested for the peak performance. Similarly, the new DCI product, the DCI product is at the initial customer engagements right now. We are positioning it for field trials and all.
I think this year, we expect to go through several POCs and field trials, and maybe towards the end of the financial year or early financial year, this new product will also start seeing customer deployment and so on. We have already positioned it across several large opportunities, both in India as well as globally. The other one, we talked about end-to-end solutions. I think I referred to end-to-end network for a 5G WAN. In that end-to-end, what I referred to was the combination of our radios, our base band equipment, and the core which is a substantial amount of technology coming together completely from Tejas. That was the wireless end-to-end solution. Now, if you combine it, the other end-to-end part of it is when you combine the wireless with our wireline products.
Because this wireless network, right from the radio sites connecting to the core and so on, requires a wireline network, which runs over fiber. Even that network, and that's when I talk about 5G backhaul WANs that I talked about during the quarter, that's where our wireline equipment also comes into play. Yes, as of today, as a combination of wireline and wireless, we have all the products and technology that any operator can use to build a complete network. However, that's not how all major tier 1 operators always have multi-vendor networks across each and every technology kind of a thing. That's the way people purchase as well. Yeah, one of our strengths is the end-to-end solutions that we have for wireless and wireline.
My bad, sorry. I was referring to the end-to-end transformation with respect to AI native BBU all the way up to NG WDM.
Okay
we look at MIMO, you talked about CLS bands, C +L+ S band DWDM, you talked about 1.6. I'm just trying to understand, when do we see this coming into reality in the next to the forthcoming quarters? Do we see MIMO's first commercial wins on that side and then progressing ourselves to the 1.60 DWDM? How does that stack work? Just trying to understand how does the flow will come through.
6G will get commercialized only around 2030. Maybe 2029 will be the product. Okay?
Okay.
We'll gear up in stages for that. The 256T256R massive MIMO will want to happen. First, spectrum has to be allotted 7 GHz.
Correct.
Standards have to be finalized, right? The date from 3GPP for 6G is 2030. We expect to have product launches just before that, probably in 2029. We will have technology capability demonstrations and so on, starting next year, progressing towards a commercial product with full capability in that timeframe. The reason is not entirely with us. The reason is also the standards have to be finalized. The phone ecosystem, which may not be phones in 6G, it could be other kinds of user equipment. That has to mature, right? Again, in WDM, today it's mainly C + L band, so 1.6 Tb is there. The addition of the S-band will happen as the capacity crunch hits, right? That also will happen in the next two, three years.
S-band is already there, but the demand will pick up around the same timeframe when the traffic scales up, when 6G gets deployed, and a lot more of this virtual reality and all that happens at the edge of the network.
And on the-
That's 2029, 2030.
Yeah. Sure.
We are also running out of time now. We will have time for one last question. You can-
Sure.
Please go ahead.
I will just combine two questions in one, if you can help me answer that. AI edge router product, when we do testing, do we also have Saankhya's as the designed AI accelerator chip, or do we initially go with some of the AI accelerator chips that are available in the market? How do we do that, and what is the timeline for that? That is one. Second, on a broader basis, do we say that from FY 2027 all the way to 2030, 2031, we will have a consistent revenue growth unlike the past that we have had? Therefore, we have set of growth stages like D2M, plus you have AI, you have the DWDM AI, then AI hyperscaler business, plus the 6G coming in. Should we expect a consistent progressive revenue growth from 2027 to 2030, 2031? These are the two questions. Thank you.
Yeah. Maybe let me start with the second one. You're right. I think given the R&D investments and the products that we have, which are very relevant not only for the business opportunities today, not only for the networks of today, but also as AI deployment happens, Kumar kind of explained how they're going to be relevant. As that happens, yes, we expect to see more business wins, more market share, and more adoption of existing as well as the new products coming in. Yes, I think the goal is and the expectation is that next few years we should see business growth and as well as profitable growth, right? Coming off the back of this large BSNL orders, right? That is there. As far as the edge router you're talking about, yeah, it's more of a routing product.
It doesn't have any AI engine in them right now.
It is more towards enabling the scalability of edge networks. That's where a lot of the AI inferencing infrastructure and all will be connected to. This will provide the infrastructure for high bandwidth, low latency connectivity, connecting the end users to those inferencing sites. That's the main application.
Yeah.
The technology over here is basically providing high speed switching and low latency communication between the end user to the edge.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Once again, thank you very much for attending the earnings call, and if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out through our company website, and we will be happy to answer the questions as they come along. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we take that as the last question for the day and would now like to hand the conference over to the management for their closing comments.
Yeah. No, I think I made my management comments. Thanks to everyone for attending this, and I hope we have given a good picture of the business of Q1 and the progress that we have made from FY 2026. Looking forward, we are very bullish about our future. We are very bullish about all the investments that we have made over the past 12 months and the industry outlook that we see from our customer base and new customers, especially in the international market. Thank you for your continued partnership, and we hope to stay engaged with you as we make progress in our business. Thank you once again.
Thank you. On behalf of ICICI Securities Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.