Gong. Gong. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
The “gongs” sound from the big “$100,000” bell; the “dings,” from the smaller, “$10,000” bell. The two ship’s bells are mounted on the wall at Clearfield, Inc., and when someone grabs the cords and rings them, everyone in the office can hear the news: The company has just rung up another sale, this time for $250,000.
With the tolling of each bell, Clearfield makes a further inroad into the nation’s estimated $3 billion market for optical fiber used by small and midsize telecommunications companies. “I’ve got 97 percent of the U.S. fiber market still open to me,” says Cheri Beranek Podzimek, the company’s president and CEO. Clearfield, she adds, is “very early in a very high-growth market.”
Clearfield (Nasdaq: CLFD) is a $25 million company that designs and manufactures hardware for optical-fiber management, as well as fiber and copper-cable assemblies. Headquartered in Plymouth, it provides equipment for managing, maintaining, and delivering broadband service for Internet, voice, and TV.
Though Clearfield’s customers are mostly rural, Beranek prefers to use the term “independent” to describe them. These telcom providers, she says, are less stressed than the large ones. What’s more, the economic stimulus bill signed in February includes about $7.2 billion for underserved communities, which Beranek believes could give rural telecoms a significant boost.
For its latest fiscal year (which ended September 30), the company reported a $1 million profit, turning around a decades-long legacy of losing money. To be clear, Clearfield itself didn’t actually lose money; its parent, APA Enterprises, did. But last year, APA Enterprises shed all its operations except the one that became Clearfield. Now the former subsidiary is making money—and some noise.
Fiber to the Country
The telecommunications fiber management market has grown over the past decade as telecom service providers across the nation light up more and more optical fiber in their networks—extending it from their central offices (where they pick up Internet, satellite, and voice signals) out to distribution points in the field, and increasingly all the way to commercial buildings, multi-dwelling units (condos and apartment buildings) and houses. In telecom lingo, this is called taking “fiber to the X,” or FTTX, where X can be a distribution point (or node), commercial structure, or home.
