Fiber Optics

Most of the electricity moving through Europe's power grids travels along cables made by a company most consumers have never heard of: Prysmian. The world's largest cable maker, spun off from Pirelli in 2005 but tracing its roots to 1879, supplies everything from high-voltage submarine interconnectors to the fiber optics behind broadband networks. The group's engineering sweet spot is extreme environments. Its long-distance HVDC submarine cable projects link offshore wind farms to mainland grids, while its aerospace and automotive divisions make lightweight wiring harnesses for planes and electric vehicles. Prysmian operates more than 100 plants across 50 countries, employs roughly 30,000 people, and booked about €15 billion in sales in 2023 — a scale that lets it take on turnkey power-grid projects most rivals cannot finance alone. For industrial buyers, the practical value is qualification: Prysmian's cable systems carry type-testing to IEC and other international standards, which shortens the compliance cycle for projects where a failed cable is not an option. Around 150 million kilometers of its cables have been installed worldwide — enough to circle the Earth several thousand times — and its acquisition of General Cable in 2018 made it the clear number one in North America as well.

Nokia began in 1865 as a pulp mill on the banks of a Finnish river, spent a century making rubber boots and cables, then reinvented itself as a mobile phone giant — and after that phone business was sold in 2014, reinvented itself again as one of the world's largest telecom network equipment makers. Today's Nokia, headquartered in Espoo, employs about 86,000 people and generates roughly €22 billion in annual revenue from 5G radio networks, optical transport, IP routing, and fixed broadband. The 2014 transformation is the most instructive part of the story: rather than chase the consumer hardware it lost, Nokia doubled down on patent-led R&D, licensing its 5G essential patents to virtually every smartphone maker, and now sells network equipment to hundreds of service providers worldwide. Buyers in the carrier and enterprise space choose Nokia for one of two reasons: multi-vendor interoperability — its equipment is designed to coexist with rivals' networks — and the durability of a company that has survived more corporate near-death experiences than almost any tech firm on earth.