Reports say that Chinese components firm Accelink has just obtained approval for an initial public offering on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

The IPO market has shut down tight in the West, with Source Photonics still waiting to spin out from parent company MRV, and ANDA Networks, which filed an S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last December, withdrawing its papers in April. However, over in China things are looking a lot rosier.

At the end of July, Accelink Technologies, one of China's largest components vendors, received permission from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) to go public, possibly as early as this September, according to industry reports.

Accelink's main product lines include erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFAs), fibre connectors, passive DWDM components, and test and measurement gear. The company counts China's leading equipment makers — Fiberhome, Huawei and ZTE — among its customers, and also sells into Europe and the US via distributors and OEM partners.

Accelink Technologies was formed in 2001 from the passive device division of Wuhan Research Institute of Post & Telecommunication (WRI), an organization whose heritage stretches back to 1974. Now Accelink claims to be the 11th largest optical component manufacturer in the world, with revenues last year of about CNY 487 million (€48 million), according to a translation provided by Jacques Liu of China Fiber Optics Online (CFOL).

WRI remains Accelink's largest shareholder; the second largest shareholder is Zhongtian, a publicly-owned fibre-optic cable manufacturer in China. Accelink plans to sell 40 million shares to raise up to CNY 300 million (€29.5 million) on the stock market.

Rumors suggest that after the IPO, Accelink might be looking to merge with sister company Wuhan Telecommunication Devices (WTD), an optical transceiver specialist that once boasted Corning as a shareholder (Corning later sold its share back to WRI when it quit the components business). This combination, which would bring both passive and active components together under one roof, would create the largest components vendor in China, and give the combined company a top ten position as a global supplier.

CFOL's Liu says that gossip about the merger of the two component companies from the Wuhan Research Institute has been circulating for years, but thinks that the cash generated from an IPO might be a deciding factor.

Source:fibresystems