Insulated Wire and Cable: Three Distinct Downstream Markets
Executive summary
Insulated wire and cable is an intermediate-goods category serving building wiring, automotive wire harnesses, and data-center cabling. These markets differ in how value is created: building wire is a high-volume product sold through electrical distributors; automotive wire passes through a harness-assembly step and spans low-voltage to 60–800 V high-voltage applications; data-center copper cabling competes on bandwidth and standards such as Power over Ethernet.
The key evidence limitation is that company disclosures often identify materials only as copper, aluminum, steel, or polymer compounds. That does not establish the exact intermediate form purchased or made in-house. Encore Wire reported copper at 80.8% of raw-material value in 2023, but its disclosure does not prove the use of a particular stranded or rope-shaped steel input.
Supply chain and use cases
Encore Wire describes using copper cathode and scrap and making building wire with copper or aluminum conductors at its Texas campus. Nexans describes copper rod as an input for cable production, including by cable producers without vertical integration. PVC and XLPE compounds are documented insulation materials; ENEOS NUC reports XLPE use in high-voltage cable insulation, including a Tokyo underground AC 500 kV cable application. PT Setia Pratama Lestari lists PVC and XLPE compound lines with stated annual capacity of 30,000 tonnes, although the cited company page does not specify a reference year or operating date.
Building-wire maker Encore Wire sells through electrical distributors. Broader cable producer Nexans describes more than 60 manufacturing plants and products for transmission, distribution, buildings, and EV charging, but does not disclose capacity by plant.
For automotive applications, Lear describes buying extruded and insulated wire and cable for harness assembly, including high-voltage harnesses rated from 60 to 800 V. The cable is not simply installed as-is: harness assembly is an additional manufacturing stage. For data centers, Corning offers shielded twisted-pair copper links for switch-to-server connections, including 25GBASE-T/40GBASE-T and PoE++ products. This is distinct from fiber-optic cable.
Standards and recycling
UL 83 covers 600 V single-conductor thermoplastic-insulated wire and cable. IEC 60502-1 and -2 cover specified fixed-installation power cables at low and medium voltages. These standards define requirements; the cited standards material does not show that any particular product is certified.
The U.S. EPA lifecycle assessment describes copper recovery from used cable as common because of its value, with mixed plastic residues sometimes separated after cable chopping or stripping. Nexans announced a planned copper production and recycling facility in Lens, France, with investment of €90 million and planned capacity of up to 80,000 tonnes per year by 2026. This was a plan, not confirmed operating capacity. Nexans reported 880 tonnes collected through CableLoop in 2025, a much smaller realized collection figure.