Smart Movers

Smart movers

With Modi’s call for developing 100 Smart cities, there are some players which would likely benefit most as they would cater to the high-tech infrastructure requirements which form the building blocks of these cities.

At the moment 100 cities remains a tentative figure, with much still to be pinned down. The budget speech only officially identified cities along the Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Master Plan, which covers seven states. Although they weren't named in the budget, seven cities have also been named along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, some which would overlap with the Amritsar-Kolkata plan.

Officially, the budget only pointed out three cities in the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor: Ponneri in Tamil Nadu, Krishnapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Tumkur in Karnataka.

So what would be the companies that would benefit from this move? Here’s my take:

Sterlite Technologies (ST):- This is a leading global provider of Telecom (Optic Fibre and Cables) and Power Conductors, from Anil Agarwal’s Vedanta stable. These products and solutions would typically form the backbone of any other components that would make up the smart cities. As things stand today, not many cities are geared up for this sort of thing yet. And if things have to be built from scratch, there would be a huge surge in demand for optical fibre and transmission lines which are ST’s forte.

D-Link: - This company is household name in networking items such as routers, switches and wireless products (in fact they have a near monopoly with MTNL’s broadband service). These products would also be a key component of Smart cities from a technology infrastructure perspective. Again, Smart cities would be a boost for this company due to its critical products.

These are 2 of the most obvious choices which come to mind. Of course there would be other firms such as those in construction industry (IRB, L&T) which also would greatly benefit from this initiative.