Japan's leading optical fiber company Fujikura: Will continue to raise prices, orders come from nearly all major U.S. cloud giants
The global wave of AI infrastructure construction is driving continued tight supply and demand for optical fiber cables. Japanese optical fiber cable manufacturer Fujikura is taking advantage of this window to launch a new round of price increases.
According to Bloomberg on Tuesday, Fujikura CEO Naoki Okada said in an interview that orders from U.S. hyperscale cloud computing companies cover almost all major customers, and the strong demand is causing ongoing supply shortages. Some customers have already agreed to pay higher prices for the company's high-end products.
“We will raise prices again,” said Okada. He also stated that business this quarter is strong: “I believe we will surpass our planned targets.”
This statement provided the market with some basis for sentiment recovery. Fujikura’s annual and three-year profit forecasts released in May were far below analysts’ average expectations, triggering investor concerns about capacity bottlenecks, intensified competition, and supply chain interruption risks. Since the historic high in May, the stock price has fallen more than 40%, triggering a broad sell-off in Japan’s tech sector. Okada’s public remarks mark the first time the company’s management has offered a clear forward-looking guide on performance trends.
Hot Demand for AI Data Centers, Using Price Increases to Compensate Capacity Bottlenecks
AI services require processing massive amounts of data, and the optical fiber cables needed by AI data centers far exceed those used by traditional cloud computing facilities—optical fiber cables transmit data via glass filaments in the form of light pulses and are the core infrastructure for data center interconnection.
This wave of demand has boosted the entire industry. Japanese peers such as Sumitomo Electric Industries and Furukawa Electric have also benefited from this trend. U.S. optical fiber giant Corning has signed supply agreements with Meta Platforms Inc. and reached a $500 million equity deal with Nvidia.
On June 8, local time, Amazon announced it signed a multi-billion dollar agreement with Corning to purchase optical fiber, cables, and connection solutions to support its nationwide data center expansion, with the deal expected to create over a thousand new jobs at Corning’s North Carolina factory.
In the interview, Okada clearly outlined Fujikura’s core coping logic: In the context of limited capacity expansion, increasing unit prices is used to offset the drag of supply bottlenecks on revenue.
“We offer valuable products,” Okada said, noting that the company can use higher unit prices to compensate for capacity constraints. The current tight market situation has prompted some customers to accept price increases, especially for Fujikura’s high-end product lines.
Okada added that if the price increase plans and the expansion of other businesses such as optical components progress smoothly, “the results will be very positive.” This means Fujikura’s growth path does not rely solely on increasing production, but on improving profitability through product structure upgrades and price restructuring.
Okada also said, “We have always set conservative forecasts.” The company has factored in worst-case scenarios such as hydrogen shortages: “There’s no way we won't achieve our annual forecast targets.”
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