Inno Instrument aims to turn a profit in 2020

Optical splicing company Inno Instrument aims to post an annual sales of 45 billion won in 2020 as well as turn a profit of around 3 billion won, the company said on Friday.

The South Korean company posted an operating loss of 4.9 billion won in 2018. Operating loss got steeper at 17.5 billion won in 2019.

A company spokesperson said its factory in China operated only for a month in the first quarter but returned to normal in the second quarter. Inno Instrument was hoping for a sales increase later this year from 5G network deployments in China, they said.

The company relies on the Chinese market for around half of its sales. It has factories in China and Malaysia.

Its main product is optical fiber fusion splicers which accounts for over 90% of its sales. A splicer when in in door areas such as data centers can last up to eight years but in outdoors it lasts only four years. 
 
They use motors to align the cores of the fibers they are fusing. The market for splicers are dominated by Japanese companies Fujikura, Sumitomo and Furukawa. Inno Instrument has around 5% of the global market share.

The company posted 24.5 billion won in operating profits and 88.4 billion won in 2016 and listed on KOSDAQ on 2017. This was due to the expansion of 4G LTE and fiber to the home in China at the time, the company spokesperson said.

China Mobile, the largest mobile carrier in China, said earlier this month that it has installed 188,000 5G base stations so far and aims to build 300,000 by the end of the year.