Southwire Company

Southwire Company is a family-owned wire and cable manufacturer based in Carrollton, Georgia. Roy Richards founded it in 1950 with three used machines and 12 employees, and the company now reports more than 9,000 employees worldwide. Its building wire, utility cable, metal-clad cable and electrical tools go into residential, commercial, industrial and utility work. Southwire runs plants in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana and Mississippi, plus operations in Canada, Mexico and Honduras. In Starkville, Mississippi, it’s adding roughly 380,000 square feet to a cable plant that has run since 1979, and the plant keeps producing while the expansion goes up.

Beyond the plants and the headcount, what distinguishes Southwire from a pure commodity cable supplier is how much of the catalogue sits outside wire itself. The product lines run from building wire, bare copper and bare aluminium overhead transmission and distribution through armoured power cable, high voltage underground systems, flexible conduit and cord, and covered aerial medium-voltage systems. Then they keep going: electrical tools and equipment, power management, temporary jobsite lighting, lamps and luminaires, electrical components, and the company’s own SCR rod and cable technologies.

Southwire also sells labour, not just material. A Contractor Solutions Team is described explicitly as not a sales team, positioned instead as a jobsite-facing service group that helps crews apply the products on site. Separately, a factory-certified High Voltage Installation Team handles cable pulling, splicing, terminating, sheath bonding and grounding – work most distributors would hand straight back to the contractor. Southwire University rounds it out with digital and hands-on training for contractors, distributors and apprenticeship programs across North America, aimed at safe and productive cable installation.

The company publishes live COMEX copper and aluminium settlement prices on its own homepage, which is an unusual degree of transparency for a manufacturer whose input costs move daily, and a useful tell for anyone trying to understand why a cable quote moved between Monday and Thursday.

Southwire runs regional storefronts for the United States, Canada and Mexico, with English, French and Spanish site versions, and groups its markets by utility, contractor, industrial and distributor audiences. Its stated operating framework, which it calls Deliver Power Responsibly, runs on five tenets: Growing Green, Living Well, Giving Back, Doing Right and Building Worth.

Community spend is visible rather than abstract. In October 2026 the company recognised 22 educators through its My Favorite Teacher Contest, awarding classroom grants in the communities where it operates, and it has partnered with Aunt Flow to install free menstrual product dispensers across company locations. Warranty information is published per product line, which is where specifiers should start rather than with a general claim.