China’s Hengtong recently commemorated a significant subsea power cable accomplishment that it reported represents an industry milestone.

A press release said that on Nov. 26, 2018, the "Hengtong Overseas 10,000 km Submarine Optical Cable Delivery Ceremony" was held in Changshu, Jiangsu Province. The event celebrated Hengtong’s manufacturing and delivering nearly 3,000 km of submarine optical cable. The cable was supplied for use in Chile’s Fibre Optic Austral (FOA) subsea cable system, which will run along the coast of Chile, connecting Puerto Montt with Puerto Williams, with two branches to Tortel and Punta Arenas. With that production, the company achieved accumulative overseas deliveries of 10,000 km of submarine optical cables.

"This ranks Hengtong first in the world in both capacity and delivery to the domestic submarine optical cable market," the release said. "This is a milestone in China’s submarine cable industry and highlights the ‘made in China’ drive in the field of international oceanic communications."

During the event, Qian Jianlin, executive president of Hengtong Group, said that Hengtong was committed to creating a submarine industry supply chain of integrating product, engineering and operation service to promote the implementation of the "One Belt and One Road" initiative and contribute to global connections.

In the past five years, Hengtong has built a global-leading submarine optical cable R&D production base, includ-ing a system integration, testing center and a dock cabling system, making Hengtong one of the leading submarine optical cable companies, both at home and abroad, the release said. It added that the company has also introduced a number of new products, including two-stage composite cables for application in marine disaster prevention pre-warning networks.

Hengtong notes that it now has 10 manufacturing facilities based in China, Europe, South America, South Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, with sales offices in more than 30 countries and regions that supply products and service to over 140 countries.