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Nexans makes the cables that carry electricity and data around the world, from power grids to factories to your internet connection.
Nexans is a cable maker. Not the little charging cord for your phone — the heavy-duty stuff. It makes the power cables that string between electricity pylons and bury under city streets, the ones connecting offshore wind farms to the grid, and the industrial cables that keep factories and trains running. If electricity or data needs to travel a long way, there is a decent chance a Nexans cable is involved.
The company has two main parts. The bigger one, by sales, is called PWR-GRID — it sells cables to power utilities and grid operators. These are the customers building the giant connector networks that carry electricity across countries and from wind farms at sea. The other part, PWR-CONNECT, sells to industry: cables for railways, oil rigs, data centers, and building projects. Nexans also sells copper and fiber optic cable for telecoms. It is one of the world's largest cable makers, alongside Italy's Prysmian and a handful of Asian players. Here is the simple problem Nexans solves. Electricity is being generated more and more in places far from where people live — offshore wind farms, desert solar parks. You cannot move that power with trucks. You need thousands of kilometers of specialized cable, and someone has to make it, lay it, and connect it. This is slow, capital-hungry work, and there are only a few companies in the world who can do it at scale. That scarcity is why Nexans can charge real prices and why its order book has been full.
In the late 1800s, electricity and the telephone were brand new, and the wires carrying them had a basic problem: water got in and ruined everything. A Swiss engineer and a businessman solved it with a cable wrapped in tarred paper and sealed in lead, and they set up a company to sell it. That company is the seed of Nexans, and its business — moving electricity safely from place to place — is still the heart of the story more than 140 years later.
As France's electricity business boomed, the big power company CGE bought a majority of the cable maker, tying the cables to its own power plants and grids. The cable business now had a wealthy parent with a reason to keep it busy.
Decades later, CGE merged with Alcatel, and the cable operations grew inside the combined group. The cables were now one piece of a much larger machine.
By 2000, Alcatel wanted to focus on telecoms, so it split off its cables activity and gave it a new name: Nexans. A business that had spent a century inside other companies finally had its own identity — and its own problems to solve.
The newly independent company listed its shares in Paris, giving it direct access to public investors. It was a clean break from Alcatel, but standing alone also meant standing on its own balance sheet.
The timing could hardly have been worse. Soon after the listing, the telecom bubble burst, and Nexans' telecom cable division — a meaningful slice of sales — swung into losses, with restructuring bills still to come. The stock roughly halved in a year and the company headed for a full-year loss. The new independence was turning into a test of survival.
Then came the massive blackout on the US East Coast, which woke governments up to how neglected their power grids were. Money started pouring into energy networks, and Nexans, with a tough plan of cost cuts, restructuring and debt control, caught the wave. The share price climbed from around 10 euros to around 80 — a comeback few would have predicted during the telecom crash.
Years later, a new CEO, Christopher Guérin, launched a plan to change how the company made money: value over volume. Instead of chasing sales for their own sake, Nexans would focus on the work that actually paid. A fresh management team pointed the whole company back at electrification.
The next strategic plan made the goal explicit: become a pure player in electrification. Nexans opened a high-voltage subsea cable plant in Charleston — the only one of its kind in the US — and launched its own cable-laying ship, the Nexans Aurora. It wasn't just making cables anymore; it was building the ships and factories that install them.
Nexans won a record-breaking contract to link the power grids of Greece and Cyprus, a huge vote of confidence in its high-voltage subsea business. Around the same time, it sold its Telecom Systems business, closing the door on telecoms and data for good. The company was getting narrower on purpose.
The refocusing continued on two fronts at once: Nexans sold Lynxeo, its industrial cable division, to Latour Capital, and it bought Cables RCT in Spain to strengthen its electrification lineup. Out with what didn't fit, in with what did.
In October 2025, the board appointed Julien Hueber as CEO and parted ways with Christopher Guérin, effective immediately. Hueber was no outsider — he had been at Nexans since 2002 and on the executive committee since 2018 — and he was picked to lead the next phase.
Nexans agreed to buy all of Republic Wire, an American maker of low-voltage copper and aluminum wire, giving it a bigger stake in a US market worth roughly 12 billion euros. Alongside its Canadian business, the deal built an integrated North American platform aimed at fast-growing areas like data centers.
With the sale of its Autoelectric wiring harness business, Nexans completed the transformation it started back in 2021: it is now a pure electrification player. CEO Julien Hueber called it the final step, one that sharpens where capital goes and leaves the group ready to seize the opportunities of the energy transition.
The company's big bet is on electrification. In 2023 it sold its smaller, messier businesses — things like cables for cars and appliances — to focus on grids and industrial cables. Revenue was about €4.3 billion in 2023, and it has been growing. It also owns a majority stake in a cable-laying ship business that helps it install offshore wind connections, which gives it a rare end-to-end offering. The risks are real: copper prices swing its costs, big projects get delayed, and the whole business is cyclical, tied to how fast governments and utilities build out power networks. But right now, that tide is strong.
Saved answer · last researched 29 Oct 2026