Russia has sharply increased its purchase of optical fibre from China in 2025. This has led to a 2.5-4-fold increase in prices for Russian buyers, Vedomosti reported.
Today Russia has practically no own production of optical fibre. The only core enterprise, JSC Optical Fibre Systems in Saransk, was shut down after a series of drone attacks in the spring of 2025. Since then, according to the newspaper’s interlocutors, Russia has been completely dependent on imports of fibre optics from China.
Analysts at the research centre for fibre optic cables at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications estimate that Russia will buy about 10.5% of all fibre optics produced in the world in 2025. In previous years, its share in Chinese exports did not exceed 1%. In absolute terms, consumption has reached almost 60 million kilometres.
The publication notes that the growth in demand is due to several factors at once, in particular, in 2025 Russia and Ukraine began to actively use fibre optics in FPV drones – such drones are more difficult to detect and impossible to suppress by means of electronic warfare. In addition, data centres developing for artificial intelligence tasks have become a new major consumer.
China provides more than 60% of the world’s fibre optic production, and Russian customers buy it at Chinese market prices. Against the backdrop of a sharp increase in demand, the cost of products has increased markedly: while at the beginning of 2025, optical fibre used in communication networks cost about 16 yuan per kilometre, by January 2026 the price had risen to 40 yuan per kilometre.
Media: Russia has sharply increased its purchase of optical fibre from China