12 Power Cable Stocks for the Energy Transition

Prysmian (PRY.MI)

HQ 🇮🇹 Italy · Market cap $40B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Transmission order backlog of approximately €17 billion as of Q2 2026, with a further €2 billion of awarded orders not yet booked.⁶

Prysmian Group (PRY) is the world’s largest cable manufacturer by revenue, reporting FY2025 sales of EUR 19,650 million across 109 plants in more than 50 countries.⁷ Listed on Borsa Italiana, it reached that scale through a run of acquisitions from Draka to Encore Wire and Channell. In August 2026 it agreed to acquire Atkore, a US maker of electrical conduit and cable management systems, at an enterprise value of about $3.8 billion, a further step toward cable-adjacent products.⁸ The energy transition exposure sits in one segment, Transmission: a minority of group revenue, but its highest-margin business, covering HVDC submarine cable, land interconnectors and offshore wind export cable. The segment’s adjusted EBITDA margin reached 21.2% of sales in Q2 2026, its best yet.⁶

Prysmian installs what it makes. It runs its own fleet of seven cable-laying vessels, with an eighth due in service by early 2027,⁹ making it one of very few suppliers able to deliver the largest interconnector and offshore wind awards turnkey rather than as a component supplier.² The Eastern Green Link 4 contract, signed in February 2026 at over EUR 2.3 billion to link Fife in Scotland with Norfolk in England, is representative of the scale involved.¹⁰ The IEA puts the European manufacturers, Prysmian alongside Nexans and NKT, at around two-thirds of the global HVDC market, with capacity slots booked until 2030.⁴

For exposure to the HVDC and offshore wind build-out, Prysmian offers the deepest contracted order book and the most complete submarine capability in the listed universe, and a cable-laying fleet takes years and heavy capital to replicate. Transmission is still a minority of sales, though; the balance is building wire, distribution cable and industrial specialties with their own drivers and cycles. Investors are buying optionality on the grid build-out inside a diversified industrial group, not a pure play.

Nexans (NEX.PA)

HQ 🇫🇷 France · Market cap $6.5B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

PWR-Transmission adjusted order book of €7.7 billion as of 30 June 2026, essentially flat versus December 2025, subsea-driven with visibility to 2028.¹¹

Nexans (NEX) is a Paris-listed cable manufacturer that has spent five years rotating its portfolio toward electrification, divesting its telecom business, AmerCable and Lynxeo, and completing the sale of its Autoelectric harness unit in July 2026.¹² It reported FY2025 sales of EUR 6.1 billion at standard metal prices,¹³ and all three continuing segments are electrification-linked: HVDC transmission, medium and high-voltage grid cable, and low-voltage connection.

Nexans manufactures and installs cable. Its three-vessel fleet includes the Nexans Electra, formally handed over in May 2026, whose three turntables provide a combined cable capacity of 13,500 tonnes and allow it to bundle-lay up to four cables simultaneously.¹⁴ Subsea manufacturing centres on an expanded Halden plant in Norway. On the Tyrrhenian Link the company laid 500 kV HVDC cable at 2,150 metres, which it describes as a world-first installation depth for a cable of that type.¹⁵

Nexans remains more concentrated in electrification than Prysmian, with the rotation out of telecom, harnesses and automotive now complete, although its completed acquisition of Republic Wire, an Ohio low-voltage building wire maker bought in June 2026 at an enterprise value of about EUR 680 million, adds a meaningful building-wire business alongside the transmission story.¹¹ Its order book is roughly half Prysmian’s and its fleet is smaller, so it competes for the largest turnkey awards without dominating them. Treat Nexans as a major Western submarine cable specialist with a broadening low-voltage base.

NKT (NKT.CO)

HQ 🇩🇰 Denmark · Market cap $7.3B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

High-voltage order backlog of €13.5 billion as of Q1 2026, around 95% of it contracted with European transmission system operators.³

NKT A/S (NKT) is a Danish pure-play power cable manufacturer listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen, making and installing high-, medium- and low-voltage cable systems across 13 production facilities in Europe.¹⁷ Its business mix is more concentrated than either Prysmian’s or Nexans’. The Transmission segment, renamed from Solutions in January 2026, accounted for roughly 60% of revenue in FY2025 and covers the design, manufacture and installation of extra-high-voltage AC and DC cable systems for offshore wind, long-distance interconnectors and onshore HVDC corridors.¹⁷

NKT installs its own cable too, with the smallest fleet of the three European majors: one vessel working today, the NKT Victoria, and a second, the NKT Eleonora, due to enter service in 2027. The larger constraint is factory capacity, and two expansions address it. The Karlskrona site in Sweden, designated the first European Strategic Net Zero project under the Net-Zero Industry Act, is being enlarged to become the world’s largest high-voltage offshore cable factory,¹⁸ and a roughly EUR 100 million expansion at Cologne, tied to onshore awards from the German grid operator Amprion, runs alongside it, with both coming online in 2027.¹⁹ The largest single project award in NKT’s history is Eastern Green Link 3, the 525 kV Scotland to England interconnector signed in March 2026 at over EUR 2.2 billion.²⁰

Among Prysmian, Nexans and NKT, it is NKT that has no large building-wire or industrial cable business sitting alongside transmission, and its backlog offers multi-year visibility against a named set of European transmission system operators.³ In exchange, an investor accepts an investment phase before an earnings phase: capacity, vessel and factory spending land years ahead of the revenue they unlock, the company runs a single cable-laying vessel until the Eleonora joins it, and NKT is smaller and less liquid than Prysmian. Most of the current backlog was won from 2023 onward, though, so as it is delivered it displaces work priced in an earlier and weaker cycle.

Cenergy Holdings (CENER.BR)

HQ 🇧🇪 Belgium · Market cap $5.4B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Hellenic Cables order backlog of €2.88 billion as of 31 December 2025, from a cables business contributing roughly 71% of group revenue.²¹

Cenergy Holdings (CENER.BR) is an industrial holding company listed on both Euronext Brussels and the Athens Exchange, formed in 2016 to combine two long-established Viohalco businesses: Hellenic Cables, its power and data cable maker, and Corinth Pipeworks, a steel-pipe manufacturer. It reported FY2025 group revenue of EUR 2.06 billion, with cables the larger engine at roughly 71% of revenue and 69% of EBITDA that year.²¹ The steel-pipe segment is a separate business alongside the cable story, though it is itself shifting toward CO2 transport, hydrogen and offshore energy infrastructure.

Hellenic Cables is an established tier-two supplier of high-voltage and extra-high-voltage land cable and of submarine export and inter-array cable for offshore wind, manufacturing at Corinth and Thiva in Greece with further capacity at Eleonas and in Bucharest. It sits behind Prysmian, Nexans and NKT in scale but wins European grid and offshore wind work consistently. It was the sole inter-array cable supplier across all three phases of Dogger Bank, the world’s largest offshore wind farm,²² and it holds an HVDC framework agreement with the UK’s National Grid, signed alongside the installer Jan De Nul.²³

For a Western investor, Cenergy is a listed route into the European offshore wind and grid interconnection cycle outside Prysmian, Nexans and NKT: quoted on two European exchanges, with cables the larger of its two segments, and carrying a US growth option the bigger players are also pursuing. That option is an approximately $200 million first-phase land-cable plant at Wagner’s Point in South Baltimore, Maryland, under construction since Q2 2025 and scheduled to begin operations around the end of 2027, with the 38-acre waterfront site retaining optionality for later offshore-cable expansion.²⁴²⁵ Hellenic Cables owns no cable-laying fleet, though: it supplies cable and partners with specialist installers such as Jan De Nul, DEME and Asso.subsea. That keeps capital intensity low but cedes leverage on the largest turnkey supply-and-install awards, where an owned fleet is a qualifying advantage. Cenergy is a challenger riding the same demand as the leaders, not one of them.

Sumitomo Electric (5802.T)

HQ 🇯🇵 Japan · Market cap $41B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Contracted for 140 km of HVDC cable on National Grid’s Sea Link project in December 2025²⁶ and a long-term HVDC subsea framework with SSEN Transmission in July 2026.²⁷

Sumitomo Electric Industries is a diversified Japanese industrial group listed in Tokyo, with businesses spanning automotive wiring harnesses, electronics, optical communications and infrastructure. Power cable sits inside its Environment and Energy segment, one line among several rather than the centre of the group. This is not a cable pure play, and none of what follows should be read as if it were.

Its recent awards nonetheless place it alongside the European specialists rather than behind them. In December 2025 National Grid Electricity Transmission contracted Sumitomo Electric to supply and install 140 km of HVDC cable for the Sea Link project between Kent and Suffolk,²⁶ and in July 2026 it signed a long-term framework agreement with SSEN Transmission, in consortium with the marine contractor Van Oord, covering engineering, supply, transport and installation of HVDC subsea cable systems in the north of Scotland.²⁷ To serve that work it is building a submarine cable factory at the Port of Nigg in Scotland, the UK’s first production facility for HVDC subsea cable, where 525 kV manufacturing for the Shetland 2 link is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.²⁷

Sumitomo Electric is among the suppliers based outside Europe competing for 525 kV HVDC work in the UK and North Sea market, and it is doing so with local manufacturing under construction rather than from export capacity alone. Cable is a small part of the whole: high-voltage cable sits within Environment and Energy, a segment that is itself one of several in the group, and earnings are driven more by automotive and electronics cycles than by grid investment. Buying the shares means buying the group: the cable business adds a structural long-term tailwind without defining the shares, the way cable does at Prysmian, where it is essentially the whole company, or NKT, where transmission alone is the majority of revenue.

LS Corp (006260.KS)

HQ 🇰🇷 South Korea · Market cap $5.3B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Holds part of TenneT’s 525 kV HVDC framework²⁸ and is building a roughly KRW 1 trillion (about $700 million) submarine cable plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, with operations scheduled from Q1 2028.²⁹

LS Corp is the Seoul-listed holding company of the LS Group, and it provides indirect exposure to LS Cable & System, the group’s unlisted, majority-owned cable manufacturer. The group is also the parent of the separately listed LS Electric, alongside LPG distribution and industrial materials. Group revenue was KRW 32 trillion (about $23 billion) in FY2025. As with Sumitomo Electric, this is a diversified industrial holding company rather than a cable pure play. One naming trap is worth flagging: the similarly named LS Cable & System Asia (229640.KS) is also Seoul-listed, but it is a subsidiary holding the group’s Vietnamese cable operations, floated in September 2016, not a route into the HVDC and submarine cable business described here.³⁰

LS Cable & System is nonetheless one of a small number of manufacturers qualified for the highest-voltage subsea work. It has moved 525 kV HVDC cable into mass production,³¹ and it holds part of TenneT’s 525 kV HVDC framework alongside the offshore contractors Jan De Nul and Denys, covering offshore grid connections in Germany and an onshore corridor.²⁸ It is also the only Asian supplier on this page building submarine cable manufacturing in the United States: a plant at Chesapeake, Virginia, through its LS GreenLink subsidiary, begun in April 2025 at a cost of around KRW 1 trillion (about $700 million), with operations scheduled from the first quarter of 2028.²⁹

That combination of 525 kV capability and US manufacturing under construction matters because American grid and offshore wind procurement increasingly favours domestic content, though it is not a monopoly position: Nexans already serves the US market from its subsea cable plant in Charleston, South Carolina.³² LS Corp remains a holding company whose revenue is many times that of the cable business, spanning electrical equipment, LPG distribution and industrial materials, so shareholders get cable exposure only in proportion. Anyone who wants the cable business on its own will end up at the European specialists.

Taihan Cable (001440.KS)

HQ 🇰🇷 South Korea · Market cap $3.1B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Order backlog of KRW 4.06 trillion (about $2.9 billion) at the end of Q2 2026, above KRW 4 trillion for the first time and larger than FY2025 revenue of KRW 3.64 trillion.³³

Taihan Cable & Solution is a Seoul-listed cable manufacturer controlled by the Hoban Group, and cable is its whole business rather than a segment of a conglomerate. Its order backlog reached KRW 4.06 trillion (about $2.9 billion) at the end of Q2 2026, above KRW 4 trillion for the first time and larger than FY2025 revenue of KRW 3.64 trillion (about $2.6 billion),³³ having grown more than four times over from the KRW 945.5 billion it carried at the end of 2020.³⁴

The energy transition case rests on a deliberate move up the voltage curve. Taihan has developed a 525 kV class HVDC submarine cable, showcased at WindEurope 2026 and designed for Korea’s West Coast Energy Highway project,³⁵ and its second submarine cable plant, built for 640 kV class HVDC production with more than five times the capacity of its first, broke ground in September 2025 and is scheduled to begin operations in 2027.³⁶ It has also built installation capability, which manufacturers of its size usually lack: it operates the PALOS cable-laying vessel and in May 2026 acquired the 10,000-tonne Skandi Connector, a vessel with some 27 projects and roughly 1,300 km of submarine cable installation behind it, giving Taihan both inter-array and export cable installation capacity for offshore wind.³⁷

That makes Taihan a more concentrated position in the HVDC and offshore wind cable cycle than the other Asian names on this page, and the vessels let it bid supply-and-install scopes that cable-only manufacturers cannot, which is precisely the constraint limiting Hellenic Cables. Set against that, it is a fraction of the size of Prysmian or Sumitomo Electric, its 525 kV credentials are newer than theirs, and it reaches the largest HVDC packages through consortium partners rather than on its own balance sheet.

Riyadh Cables Group (4142.SR)

HQ 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · Market cap $4.1B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Confirmed order backlog of SAR 5.5 billion (about $1.5 billion), around 143,000 tonnes, as of Q1 2026, with manufacturing capacity utilisation at 94%.³⁸

Riyadh Cables Group is among the largest cable manufacturers in Saudi Arabia, supplying power cable from low-voltage distribution through to extra-high-voltage transmission. Listed on Tadawul, it is a direct beneficiary of the Saudi Vision 2030 infrastructure programme: the domestic market accounted for 73% of FY2025 revenue, with exports across the Gulf, Iraq, Egypt and Central Asia led by the UAE at roughly 21% of group revenue that year.³⁹ FY2025 revenue was SAR 10.67 billion (about $2.8 billion).⁴⁰

Power cable is the entire business, which cannot be said of most companies its size, and it runs close to capacity. A notable feature is the commodity hedging programme: futures and forward contracts on copper, aluminium and lead, accounted for as cash flow hedges, are designed to protect gross profit per tonne from metal price swings.³⁹ That gives the business a degree of margin predictability unusual for a materials-intensive manufacturer, where peers more often pass metal costs through contract by contract. Beyond the Gulf, it took a 51% stake in Uzbekistan’s Artikul Aziya Kabel effective November 2025 and signed an 18-year staged agreement in January 2026 to rehabilitate and operate Syrian Modern Cables Company.³⁹

The result is a pure-play on one country’s investment cycle with unit margins actively defended, no conglomerate parent and nothing else alongside the cable business. Set against that, international diversification is early and receivables quality bears watching: the credit loss provision more than doubled in FY2025 to SAR 263 million (about $70 million), with the overdue bucket growing over the same period.³⁹ The shares also trade on Tadawul, which is less straightforward for international investors than the European or Indian listings elsewhere in this list.

KEI Industries (KEI.NS)

HQ 🇮🇳 India · Market cap $5.0B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

FY2026 revenue of ₹117.5 billion (about $1.3 billion), up 20.7% year on year, from a cables and wires business that contributes the large majority of group sales.⁴¹

KEI Industries is one of India’s leading wires and cables manufacturers, producing extra-high-voltage cable rated up to 400 kV alongside high-tension and low-tension power cable, control and instrumentation cable, and special-purpose cable.⁴² Group revenue reached ₹117.5 billion (about $1.3 billion) in FY2026, up 20.7% year on year, with cables and wires contributing the large majority and smaller EPC and stainless steel wire businesses making up the balance.⁴¹

The extra-high-voltage capability is the part of the portfolio tied most directly to transmission investment, and it is what puts KEI on this page rather than in the general building-wire category. Growth has come from India’s electricity boom: power distribution and grid upgrade programmes, infrastructure projects and, more recently, data centre cabling. To take on more of that demand, KEI opened the first phase of its Sanand plant in Gujarat in December 2025, making low- and high-tension cable, with extra-high-voltage output from the site to follow.⁴³

Among listed Indian cable makers, KEI is Polycab’s closest peer, at roughly two-fifths of its revenue. It is also the more concentrated of the two, with most sales coming from institutional and project-led demand and only a small consumer business alongside. That cuts both ways: purer exposure to Indian grid and transmission spending, and less cushion when project cycles turn. With international sales still a small share of revenue, KEI is a play on India’s build-out rather than on global grid spending.

Polycab India (POLYCAB.NS)

HQ 🇮🇳 India · Market cap $14B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

FY2026 revenue of ₹289 billion (about $3.2 billion), up 29% year on year, with around 30% of India’s organised wires and cables market.⁴⁴

Polycab India is the largest integrated wires and cables manufacturer in India, holding roughly 30% of the organised domestic market in FY2026.⁴⁴ Its range runs from building wire and low- and medium-voltage power cable through extra-high-voltage, solar, EV charging and optical-fibre cable, alongside a consumer-facing fast-moving electrical goods segment covering solar inverters, fans, lighting and switches. Group revenue reached ₹289 billion (about $3.2 billion) in FY2026, up 29% year on year, with wires and cables growing faster than the group and the consumer segment growing more slowly.⁴⁵

India’s grid expansion, renewable capacity build-out, EV charging rollout and the government’s RDSS power distribution upgrade programme all pull demand across Polycab’s cable range at once. Project Spring, the company’s five-year strategic roadmap running through FY2029-30, commits capital spending of ₹60 to 80 billion funded from internal accruals, aimed at growing wires and cables at 1.5 to 2 times the industry rate.⁴⁴ Polycab carries net cash and minimal debt, which is what allows a capital programme of that size to be self-funded.

Polycab is the largest incumbent in the Indian cable market at a point when that market is expanding, and its scale, backward integration and brand position make it a primary beneficiary of India’s electrification cycle. That it funds its own growth from internal accruals is unusual in this list. Margins are exposed to copper, though: its price movements reach customers with a lag rather than immediately, so sharp metal moves compress margin temporarily regardless of demand. And almost all of it is Indian demand: international sales were about 5% of FY2026 revenue, with a distribution model in the United States still being rebuilt.⁴⁵

ZTT (600522.SS)

HQ 🇨🇳 China · Market cap $14B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Jiangsu Zhongtian Technology, which trades as ZTT, is a Shanghai-listed Chinese manufacturer whose businesses span power cable, submarine cable, optical fibre and new energy products.⁴⁶ Its submarine cable arm supplies export and inter-array cable for offshore wind, anchored in China’s domestic build-out.⁴⁷ That home market is the point: the IEA notes that China’s cable manufacturers primarily serve domestic demand, keeping supply adequate for the country’s renewable energy projects while limited capacity and surging demand cause bottlenecks in Europe and the United States.⁴

Submarine cable is one segment of a diversified group, and the practical obstacles sit with the shares rather than the business: an A-share listing, English-language disclosure too thin to verify the order book or technology standing independently, and domestic-content and supply-chain-security rules in several Western markets that any Chinese supplier must navigate.

Hengtong (600487.SS)

HQ 🇨🇳 China · Market cap $17B · Yahoo Finance ↗ · Investor Relations ↗

Hengtong Optic-Electric is a Shanghai-listed Chinese group spanning optical fibre and cable, power cable, submarine communications and marine energy infrastructure.⁴⁸ Its marine division manufactures submarine power and communications cable and, per the company’s own disclosures, undertakes offshore installation work.

The marine division reports submarine power cable together with optical fibre and communications revenue, and only part of that is a grid business, so a growing marine number is not by itself evidence of growing grid exposure. The same access obstacles apply as at ZTT: an A-share listing, limited English disclosure, and the domestic-content rules several Western markets now apply to grid procurement. An investor who wants the offshore cable theme itself will find the European and Korean names on this page express it far more directly.

Risks

Offshore wind installation timelines are highly sensitive to cable supply constraints. A single delayed cable vessel or late submarine cable delivery can push a project commissioning date out by a year or more, creating revenue and contract risk for developers and, indirectly, reputational risk for cable suppliers named in force-majeure disputes.

Raw material price volatility is structural to the sector. Copper and aluminium are the dominant input costs in power cable manufacturing, and a sustained move higher in copper prices compresses margins unless contracts include metal price pass-through clauses, which vary widely by customer and region. The IEA estimates that copper accounts for around 10-15% of power-cable prices.⁴⁹ With copper prices in May 2026 about 66% above their 2023 average, that implies an increase of roughly 7-10% in cable costs, all else equal.

Execution risk on large submarine projects is concentrated. The most technically demanding HVDC projects, long-distance submarine interconnectors, are built to bespoke specifications and require specialised installation vessels. Cost overruns and schedule slippage on individual contracts can have a disproportionate impact on annual profits, particularly for smaller operators.

Scale and access vary widely across this list. Several names here are tied to single domestic infrastructure cycles and can be harder for international investors to access on their home exchanges: Riyadh Cables, KEI Industries and Polycab India, and more acutely the A-share listed ZTT and Hengtong, where English-language disclosure is limited and Western procurement restrictions can cap the addressable market. Among the European names, challengers without their own installation fleets, such as Hellenic Cables, depend on third-party vessel operators and can be crowded out of the largest turnkey HVDC awards by the bigger, vertically integrated players.

Capacity expansion carries financing risk. Prysmian, Nexans, NKT and Hellenic Cables are each investing in new submarine cable factories or vessel capacity, in programmes running over several years. Cost inflation, permitting delays, or a demand slowdown before new capacity comes online could pressure returns on invested capital.

Conclusion

The 12 companies profiled here span the global power cable market, from the Milan-listed market leader to India-focused manufacturers riding a domestic infrastructure wave. What unites them is exposure to the same structural demand driver: the physical rewiring of electricity systems that was largely built in the mid-20th century and is now being extended, reinforced, and in many cases replaced to carry renewable power. The IEA estimates about 50 million km of the world’s roughly 80 million km of grid lines need replacing by 2050.⁵⁰

The supply shortage for HVDC submarine cables has shifted pricing power toward manufacturers, and the European players, Prysmian, Nexans, NKT and the smaller challenger Hellenic Cables, are the primary beneficiaries, each carrying a multi-year contracted order book. How far that visibility extends differs by company and is set out in the sections above. The Asian manufacturers add a second axis: Sumitomo Electric, LS Corp and Taihan Cable & Solution compete directly for the largest HVDC awards, while ZTT and Hengtong are scaling submarine capability from a domestic base. The emerging-market manufacturers, Riyadh Cables, KEI Industries and Polycab India, are in a different phase again, driven by domestic transmission and electrification investment, not offshore-wind export markets, but growing rapidly from large installed customer bases. Investors tracking the demand side of the same build-out may prefer our wind stocks list, which covers the turbine makers and offshore developers these cables connect.

The things worth tracking from here are the ones this article has kept returning to: HVDC order intake, because it sets the medium-term revenue pipeline; copper prices and contract pass-through terms, because they drive near-term margins; and factory and vessel capacity expansions, because they will decide whether the current supply shortage is extended or resolved by the late 2020s.