Italian cable producer Prysmian to invest EUR 30 mln in new factories in Romania

Italian company Prysmian will invest about EUR 30 million to develop two cable manufacturing units in Romania. The group will build a new plant that will produce energy transport cables and will expand the optical cable factory that it already has in Slatina. Prysmian Romania also has an electrical cables factory in Slatina. “Romania represents an important pillar for the development of our group growth strategy in fast growing countries and high-tech business and products”, said Valerio Battista, CEO of Prysmian Group. “We expect Europe to re-launch investments plans for the upgrade and development of power grids and communication network and Romania can play a fundamental role also thanks to these new facilities.” The optical cable factory, which will employ 300 people, was built in 2013, following a EUR 20 million investment. Prysmian wants to triple the factory’s capacity by 2020, from 2.5 million km of cables a year to some 8 million km of cables. The new plant will be able to produce the full range of new generation optical fibre cables. The new energy cables factory will produce high voltage cables for underground power transmission lines. The new facility will serve both the internal market, supporting the infrastructural energy development project in Romania, and the export market. Prysmian expects to finish the project and start production in July 2015. The group didn’t say how many people it will employ for this new factory. Romania’s Transelectrica and Prysmian sign agreement for submarine cable The Italian group started its investments in Romania in 1999 and since then it has invested some EUR 100 million. At first, the company was part of Italian industrial group Pirelli. Pirelli externalised in 2005 its energy and telecommunications cables division to a new company called Prysmian. Prysmian’s Romanian subsidiary had a turnover of EUR 98 million and a net profit of EUR 2.35 million, in 2013. It had 254 employees, according to official data from the Finance Ministry. Prysmian Group had sales of EUR 7 billion in 2013 and about 19,000 employees in 50 countries. editor@romania-insider.com