Company Profile
Company Overview
Looking for a career that will serve as an investment in your future? Consider Southwire.
When you choose Southwire, you are choosing a dynamic, aggressive company dedicated to its employees and customers. You're choosing an environment that's geared toward your success and profitability.
Southwire delivers power to millions of people around the world. Our utility cable and building wire carry electricity to wherever it is needed. One in three new homes built in the United States contains wire made by Southwire.
Southwire leads the industry with innovative products that simplify installation,saving our customers time and money. Southwire has the right wire and cable solution for any commercial, residential, industrial or utility application. If Southwire does not have the solution, we’ll design it and make it to order.
Our corporate structure centers around four distinct manufacturing segments—Energy, Electrical, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) and SCR® (Southwire Continuous Rod). Each focuses on a specific group of products and customers.
Our Energy Division sells a full line of low, medium and high-voltage cable products that move power from the generation source to buildings and homes. Customers include investor-owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, municipalities,
contractors and utility distributors.
Our Electrical Division products distribute power inside homes and buildings.
Whether it’s Romex® brand building wire, copper or aluminum MC, copper AC or flexible, metallic or liquidtight conduit, 600-volt or 24-kilovolt wire, our Electrical Division’s products move power exactly where it is needed.
Our OEM Division sells wire and rod to customers who manufacture such products as automobile wiring harnesses, insect screening, transformers, electric motors, HVAC equipment, appliances and industrial equipment.
Our SCR® Technologies Division has been the technological leader in continuous cast copper and aluminum rod manufacturing since the 1960s. More than half of the continuous-casting copper rod capacity in the world uses our technology—which means most of the world’s copper wire passes through technology provided by Southwire.
Company History
Our History... Our Story
When Roy Richards, Sr. founded a wire and cable manufacturing business to help bring electricity to rural Carroll County, Georgia, he had a particular customer in mind.
Fresh out of the U.S. Army, Richards sought to run power lines to his grandmother’s home. Getting the lines there was no problem. Richards owned a construction company that erected poles and ran wire for utilities. At the same time, funding from the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was bringing the promise and convenience of electricity to much of the South.
The trouble was finding enough wire. During a conversation with a wire manufacturer, Richards learned it would be three years before the company could deliver wire to western Georgia. A company representative asked why Richards was in such a hurry, joking that farms in the area had operated for hundreds of years without power.
Richards’ stern reply brought his vision into clear focus. "My grandmother is 85 years old, and she has never had the pleasure of sitting under an electric light in her own house,” he told the manufacturer. “She’s seen it two times she’s been to Atlanta, but she’s never had it."
That pivotal moment marks the start of Southwire Company.
Our roots extend to 1937, when Richards, then a young 25 years old, started a company to erect power poles. Two years earlier, he had graduated from Georgia Tech. While the promise of jobs paying $80 a month lured 90 percent of his classmates to New York, Richards chose to stay in Carroll County, a commitment he kept even after Southwire grew into a leading player in the wire and cable industry.
During its first two and a half years, Richards and Associates strung 3,500 miles of cable, becoming the nation’s second-largest REA contractor. As World War II halted all REA construction, Richards joined the U.S. Army, eventually reaching the rank of captain.
He returned home to find that power poles put up by his company often stood wireless for months because of post-war shortages in wire. Seeing that a market existed, he decided the only way to ensure a steady supply of wire was to make it himself.
On March 23, 1950, Southwire Company started producing wire with 12 employees and second-hand machinery. Since that time, we have introduced many new innovative products and processes. From our Southwire Continuous Rod® technology for continuously casting copper and aluminum rod to our work in the development of high-temperature superconducting power cables, Southwire has dramatically changed the way wire and cable are made.
It all started with one man’s desire to make life easier for his friends and neighbors. That commitment to technological innovation, customer service, employee empowerment and improving our communities remains the cornerstone of our company today.