OP-ED: Can Fibre Optic Manufacturing Joint Ventures Like YOA Cable Drive Africa’s Next Industrial Wave?

Despite the AI-fuelled headlines and promises of satellite connectivity, Africa's digital transformation still depends heavily on physical infrastructure: optical fibre cables.

As global discussions increasingly focus on novel technologies, it's the unglamorous fibre networks snaking beneath our urban and peri-urban centres that silently determine which economies will thrive in the coming decade.

Pieter E. Viljoen, CEO of Yangtze Optics Africa Cable (YOA Cable), offers perspective on this critical but overlooked sector. With a master's degree in semiconductor physics rather than the more typical chartered accountancy background of South African chief executives, Viljoen brings systematic innovation to both technical manufacturing and strategic leadership.

Breaking traditional patterns

When I mistakenly referenced Viljoen's engineering background, during a recent conversation, he offered a telling distinction: "Physicists, we have to think out of the box the whole time. Rather than following a set pattern like engineers, we tend to innovate around first principles." Shots fired.

This duality drives YOA Cable's unconventional talent strategy. The results appear compelling. His production planner previously worked in a bakery. His operations director came from Denel, South Africa's state-owned defence corporation, bringing systems thinking from the explosives industry.

These lateral hires have enabled YOA Cable to adapt fibre products for uniquely African conditions, from township installations to accounting for South Africa's harsh UV exposure, which accelerates cable degradation three times faster than in Europe.

Mundane yet transformative

Fibre infrastructure exists in a curious paradox. Seemingly mundane from a deployment perspective but undoubtedly transformative in its impact. "When you look at it from an infrastructure perspective, it's relatively boring. But if you really think about what you can do across optical fibre, it becomes cutting edge," Viljoen acknowledges.

The capacity evolution is dramatic. In the mid-1990s, South Africa's entire international connectivity relied on a single submarine cable with four strands of optical fibre. Each strand could simultaneously carry 12 million voice calls, compared to copper's one signal per strand.

Today, transmission distances have increased from 60 to 400 kilometres without amplification. Multi-core fibres pack multiple transmission paths into a single strand. Meanwhile, prices have fallen by over 90% in two decades.

What's particularly illuminating is how fibre underpins technologies most consumers perceive as wireless. "Cellphone operators like Vodacom, MTN and Telkom in South Africa—90% of their network is fibre," Viljoen reveals.

This dependency only increases with each generation. "For 5G, the demand for fibre is orders of magnitude higher. You're going to have smaller towers picking up 10 customers each rather than 100, but that means more towers. And all of those small cells have to be connected by fibre."

Strategic positioning and competition

YOA Cable's establishment in the Dube TradePort Special Economic Zone in 2016 wasn't coincidental. The location offers strategic benefits that have proven crucial to the venture's sustainability. These include reduced corporate tax rates, customs-controlled areas, employment incentives, and building allowances.

Though Viljoen doesn't speak directly about tax advantages, he acknowledges that the SEZ partnership has been "very strong" and was a significant factor in deciding to expand operations there rather than relocating to Johannesburg or Cape Town, despite most customers being based in those regions.

After the initial R150 million (~USD 8.28 million) investment, Viljoen says the company funded roughly R20 million (~USD 1.1 million) in additional investments between 2016 and 2023 entirely from its own revenues. The latest expansion represents another R150 million (~USD 8.28 million) investment, tripling production capacity to over three million fibre kilometres annually.

As a joint venture between China's YOFC (listed on both the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Exchanges) and South Africa's JSE-listed Mustek Limited, YOA Cable blends Chinese manufacturing expertise with local market access. "The partnership brings the powers of China in terms of manufacturing—that smart manufacturing and scalability to South Africa. On Mustek's side, it's having access to the ICT market and the telecommunications market as a whole," Viljoen explains.

The competitive landscape is increasingly complex. Domestically, AM Hengtong Africa Telecoms leverages its parentage from the Chinese Hengtong Group and Aberdare Cables. Regionally, Egypt's Benya Cables aims to reach 60,000 km of production capacity by 2030. Globally, industry titans like Prysmian Group and Corning Incorporated—the latter being where Viljoen began his career in 1996—bring seemingly boundless R&D resources

YOA Cable's oft-stated advantage is its emphasis on regional specificity. Products designed for Chinese or European deployment simply don't withstand South Africa's harsh UV conditions or accommodate township infrastructure realities. Viljoen holds that this adaptation to local conditions offers competitive advantages that imported solutions struggle to match.

Precision, scale and quality imperatives

For perspective, according to Viljoen, last year alone YOA Cable produced 1.2 million core fibre kilometres for the South African market—a volume that underscores both local demand and quality control challenges.

"We're accountable for every single metre," Viljoen notes. "If the optical fibre cable gets deployed in a network—I might supply to Dark Fibre Africa, but the JSE might be one of the customers requiring a link between a data centre and the JSE, where all trading happens across it. If my product is defective and that link goes down..." He leaves the implications hanging.

YOA Cable manufactures approximately 300 unique products tailored to different customer requirements, from home connections to specialised applications for mining houses. "Openserve's requirement is different from Dark Fibre Africa, which is different from, say, a FrogFoot, a smaller fibre network owner in South Africa," Viljoen points out. This diversity requires both manufacturing versatility and technical precision that purely imported solutions often can't provide.

Competing without protectionism

"The telecommunications sector in South Africa is a very open, competitive sector. Eighty percent of all investment is private, so the typical South African B-BBEE preferential procurement barriers to entry are not there," Viljoen states candidly. "I have to compete against manufacturers from India, China, Europe, and the US on equal footing. There's nothing protecting me."

This reality poses challenging questions for African manufacturing ambitions. Can joint ventures like YOA Cable provide templates for sustainable African manufacturing, or do they remain exceptional cases rather than viable models for broader industrialisation?

Pandemic inflection point

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unexpected boom period for YOA Cable, validating the critical nature of their product. "During COVID and directly after COVID, there was very strong growth in the telecommunications sector as people realised—I think for the first time in my history at least—you could really see there was an appreciation of having a broadband connection at home," Viljoen recounts. "It was the only time I've seen that during my career in this industry."

While market conditions have been challenging over the past two years, this validation supported their expansion investment. When securing financing, Viljoen positioned it as long-term infrastructure development: "Typically the question is, 'How sustainable is this?' I'd say, 'Well, I'm building a factory for the next 20 years.'"

As data consumption patterns evolve rapidly—from basic applications to streaming, social media, and now AI—fibre capacity demands only increase. "A 55-inch 4K TV streaming live requires at minimum 20 megabits up and 20 megabits down. That's just for the TV, not for your son or daughter being online," Viljoen notes. Enterprise applications demand substantially more, with companies like Discovery said to routinely process >150,000 data points per customer across millions of customers.

Digital inclusivity and skills development

Beyond business fundamentals, Viljoen frames affordable connectivity as both ethical and pragmatic. "Data is becoming a natural resource, a basic human right. You cannot expect everybody in society to be equal if some have access to affordable data and others don't."

This extends to skills development. "Out of our 155 employees, roughly 30 are either interns or learnership participants," he notes. The company provides upskilling not just internally but to the industry. "We're the experts in how to manufacture optical fibre cable, but we're also the experts in how to handle and install it."

This investment serves a long-term vision. "If you take that out, where's the next generation? In 10-15 years, we've got all these nice fibre networks, but who's going to fix them? Are we going to get consultants from overseas, or are we going to have people in South Africa who can fix it?"

Cautionary tale of lost capacity

Viljoen shared an instructive example about optical ground wire cable production for Eskom that was discontinued in a previous role. When later asked by the Department of Trade and Industry, now the Department of Trade Industry and Competition (DTIC), about restarting production in 2014, his feasibility study revealed a stark reality: local manufacturing would cost three times less than the imported products that replaced it.

"Local manufacturing typically in South Africa is seen as being expensive. The DTIC, when they localise or have policies to protect local industries, it's typically seen as a negative. However, the real negative for me is when we have industries and consumers in South Africa that are so fixated on cost that they can forsake a whole manufacturing industry. And the more you de-industrialise, the more you actually lose."

Geopolitical question mark

What remains unaddressed is whether the YOA Cable model—dependent on Chinese manufacturing expertise and capital—represents a viable path for African industrial self-reliance, especially as the US-China trade war intensifies. With South Africa's exports to the US now potentially facing significantly higher tariffs, joint ventures with Chinese state-affiliated enterprises may face new challenges.

The vision Viljoen articulates transcends quarterly results but depends on geopolitical stability that increasingly appears uncertain. "The legacy I want to see and leave behind is that the day I retire and my internet connection is gone, there's a South African who will be able to fix it."

It's a worthy aspiration, but one that sits at the intersection of industrial policy, geopolitics, and economic reality. As Africa contemplates its manufacturing future, the question remains whether targeted partnerships like YOA Cable represent viable models for growth or merely exceptions that prove a difficult rule: that bringing manufacturing capabilities to the continent remains challenging even in strategic sectors where the case for local production seems strongest.

Editorial Note: An abridged version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 20 May 2025.