STL Brand Guidelines: Sterlite Technologies, Aurangabad Fibre & a 2016 New Identity

A cable unit, then a fibre maker.

STL is the name Sterlite Technologies Limited uses for itself. The company is headquartered in Pune and listed on India’s Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia.

Its origins are told two ways. The company’s own history begins in 1988, when, it says, Anil Agarwal set up a copper cable manufacturing unit at Aurangabad in Maharashtra. English Wikipedia dates the present company to March 2000, when it was founded as Sterlite Telecom Systems to make telecommunication cables; by August 2000 it had become Sterlite Optical Technologies, and in 2007 it took the name Sterlite Technologies.

The company says it opened an optical fibre cable unit at Silvassa in 1993 and its first optical fibre plant at Aurangabad in 1995, followed by a data cable unit at Dadra in 2002. By 2023, Wikipedia records, its Indian plants included Aurangabad and Pune in Maharashtra, Silvassa in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Haridwar in Uttarakhand.

The company once also had a power business. On 24 May 2016 Sterlite Tech announced, in a release on PR Newswire, the demerger of its power business into Sterlite Power Transmission, approved by the High Court of Bombay in April 2016. In the same release it said it had implemented a new brand identity and a logo as it became a telecom-focused company. The release described the new Sterlite Tech as a vertically integrated maker of optical communication products, services and software, and said it would deliver “smarter networks.”

Glass, cable and connectivity.

STL’s core is optical fibre and cable. Wikipedia says its Aurangabad plants, at Waluj and Shendra, chiefly make single-mode optical fibre. The company says that in 2019 it began building an optical fibre preform plant at Aurangabad, and that in 2021 it expanded optical fibre cable capacity there.

It grew abroad by joint venture and purchase. The company says its first overseas plant opened in Haimen, China, in 2012, through a joint venture with Jiangsu Tongguang Communication, and that in 2013 it formed a joint venture with Conduspar in Curitiba, Brazil. English Wikipedia records the purchase of the Italian optical cable maker Metallurgica Bresciana in July 2018, of the British data-centre design firm Impact Data Solutions in September 2019, of the Italian optical interconnect company Optotec in November 2020, and of the British network integrator Clearcomm in June 2021. The company says it opened its first US cable plant in Kershaw County, South Carolina, in 2023; Wikipedia lists ten manufacturing locations in 2026, including Brescia and Origgio in Italy.

Software and services came and went. STL bought Elitecore Technologies in 2015, whose merger into the company was completed in 2016, according to the company’s May 2016 release, and in 2020 took a stake in the Israeli radio-network developer ASOCS, Wikipedia says. On 1 April 2025 Wire & Cable India reported that STL had completed the demerger of its Global Services Business into a separate company, STL Networks, under the brand name Invenia, leaving STL focused on optical networking. The same report named Rahul Puri as chief executive of STL’s optical networking business and Pankaj Malik as chief executive of STL Networks.

Research ties are part of its story too. In 2019, Wikipedia says, STL signed an agreement with the electrical engineering department of IIT Madras to fund a professorship in 5G research; the company says it opened a Centre for Smarter Networks at Gurgaon in 2017. Wikipedia adds that, as of March 2018, STL had two development centres and more than 20 sales and marketing offices worldwide, with a major presence in Australia, Brazil, China, Italy, the Middle East and the United States.

Light under the sea.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Patents, courts and a three-letter name.

Intellectual property has been a recurring theme. English Wikipedia records that in 2002 Fitel USA, a subsidiary of Furukawa Electric, sued the company over optical fibre patents, and that the case was settled in January 2010.

A later case went to a jury. On 14 August 2024 Cabling Installation & Maintenance reported that, after a three-week trial in South Carolina, a jury on 9 August 2024 found that Sterlite Technologies Inc., STL’s US company, had been unjustly enriched by taking trade secrets of Prysmian, the Italian cable group, and awarded damages against it. Prysmian had filed the suit in June 2021. Sterlite said it believed the verdict was not supported by the evidence and that it would appeal, and that it remained committed to the US market, where it pointed to more than 30 years of optical expertise and ten production facilities worldwide.

The identity itself is short. The company presents itself as STL on its website and in its own history, while the listed company keeps the legal name Sterlite Technologies Limited. Its 2016 release tied the new identity and logo to its change from a manufacturing business into a telecom products, services and software company.

For a design guide, STL shows an Indian cable maker using a short three-letter name across fibre, cable and connectivity businesses in several countries. Compare Corning, the American glass and fibre company, and Prysmian. For this guide we use dusk violet, night ink and a saffron accent with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep STL’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.