What’s Going on with Wire?

Recently Chris Sokoll (from DISC) and I were talking about copper, which led to a discussing the wire / cable market.

We all know some of the dynamics:

• Raw material cost fluctuations, which have resulted in an increase.
• Tariff dynamics over the past year and change.
• Copper supply which gets impacted by supply chain issues, labor and environmental issues and capacity.
• Financial market “machinations.”
• The increased sales of EVs, which have more copper in them than combustion engines.
• And the usage of wire / cable, and more broadly copper due to motors and transformers, in data centers

And, at the same time, non-data center, non-residential construction is down as is residential construction (which impacts some utility spend for the development of new housing developments.)

I took a look at the price of copper and aluminum over the past 12 months and compared that to the non-residential construction market. As material pricing has increased … construction market has declined. Is the difference solely data centers?

The wire and cable market, historically, has been a significant percentage of distributor sales. Typically ranking #2 or #3 within the industry after lighting (and sometimes switchgear) for most distributors (it’s a little different for those in the industrial space due to automation.)

Over the past 5-7 years we’ve twice surveyed distributors to understand what the percentage was … and it grew during that time frame, presumably driven by increasing cost of copper and aluminum rather than overall market growth.

We’ve also seen changes in the marketplace:

• Encore acquired by Prysmian, which also then brought change to General Cable
• Nexans entering the market with its acquisition of Republic Wire
• American Wire Group and Classic Wire were acquired by a PE firm
• Growth of Alan Wire and Cerro

And, at the same time, “rising tides have helped all on the top line” (and hopefully on the bottom line.)

Given this, and our interest to learn more, and share, insights with responding distributors, we’re launching a wire and cable market survey. All input is being aggregated, so no company specific information is being shared.

Some of the questions relate to:

• % of wire / cable vs overall sales (be it branch, company, region, etc)
• Stock vs project
• Resi vs C&I construction
• What differentiates companies (at a macro level)?

Essentially, we wanted to help distributors with some benchmark data.

The survey is only for distributors, and respondents can request a copy of the report.

The survey is short and should only take two (2) minutes to talk.

Click here to take the survey.

Other than data centers, what is driving the wire / cable business?