General Cable

General Cable--one company with the broadest product and global reach in the wire and cable industry. It's a new power, built upon diverse resources that are ready to serve a global market. It's about new ideas sketched on all four hemispheres. And it's about the world ... connected. Key Dates: Oldest of General Cable companies, Standard Underground Cable, is established by George Westinghouse. Penn Central spins off wire and cable assets to reform General Cable with corporate headquarters in Kentucky. General Cable acquires energy cable business of BICC Plc for $440 million. General Cable Corporation, with its headquarters located in Highland Heights, Kentucky, is the third largest wire and cable manufacturer in the world, and the largest in the United States, with sales approaching $3 billion a year. General Cable designs, manufactures, and distributes products for the communications, energy, and electrical markets. Its communications' wire and cable, including fiber optics, is used in a variety of voice, data, and video applications. Its energy cables are used for power transmission either suspended in the air, or laid underground or underwater. General Cable's electrical wire and cable products are used in the wiring of buildings as well as in common consumer goods. Its more recognizable brand names include Romex, Carol, Aniconda, BICC, and Brand Rex. The company operates a total of 38 manufacturing facilities in nine different countries. General Cable has undergone a number of name changes and ownership arrangements over the years. The original corporation dates back to the 1920s when a dozen cable and wire manufacturers were combined, many of which could boast rich histories of their own. The oldest was the Standard Underground Cable Company, founded by the prolific American inventor George Westinghouse in 1882. In that year, Thomas Edison ushered in the age of electricity when he built the Pearl Street generating station to distribute power to the Wall Street district of Manhattan. Edison relied on direct current, which could travel only short distances, thus requiring a large number of power generating plants. Westinghouse, on the other hand, focused on alternating current, which could be transmitted long distances, required fewer power plants, and could be located in less populated areas. As he did with most of his inventions, Westinghouse formed companies to supply the necessary support products, such as cables in the case of his power generating enterprise. Westinghouse would lose control over most of his companies during the financial panic of 1907. General Cable came together in two phases. First in 1925 Safety Insulated Wire & Cable Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey, acquired two smaller companies to create Safety Cable Co. After further acquiring two Chicago companies, Safety Cable in 1927 was then combined with Standard Underground Cable and several other companies in a deal executed by the banking firm of Kissel, Kinnicutt & Co. to form the General Cable Corporation. One of the acquisitions was a copper sheet mill that would be unloaded the following year, when the new corporation would also bring yet another cable company into its fold. In essence, this merger of a dozen companies was a banker's attempt at vertical integration, a move reminiscent of J.P. Morgan's creation of United Steel. This was a different era, however, and the benefits of combining so many assets in the cable and wire industry were not as apparent. The many transactions left General Cable saddled with a great deal of debt. Many of its 22 manufacturing plants, spread across 14 different locations, were out of date and virtually worthless, serving only to falsely inflate the corporation's worth. The integration of a number of operations held some promise for General Cable, which had become one of only six companies with the capability of producing wire from start to finish; but whatever benefits it might derive were offset by a top-heavy ma