Southwire Plans to Add Jobs at Recently Purchased Huntersville Cable Plant

Southwire last month bought the ABB cable plant in Huntersville and is already talking about growing.  Southwire Co. of Carrollton, Ga., plans to add another 20 or so employees to the 65-member staff at the facility within the next two years, says Charlie Murrah, president of the Southwire energy division.

"We bought this plant to grow this facility," Murrah said, speaking to a crowd of about 150 at an open house Thursday morning at the facility in northern Mecklenburg County. The event was live-streamed to other Southwire plants and the Georgia headquarters, says Jim Perdue, plant manager for the local operation.

On July 31, Southwire closed the deal to buy the 240,000-square-foot plant from Swiss-owned ABB Inc. Less than two months after the closing, Southwire has changed the signs on the plant, a move that's important to the company, Murrah says.. "We wanted to show our culture from the first day," he says.

Southwire, with 2014 revenue of $5.4 billion, is North America's largest electrical wire manufacturer. It's No. 3 in the world, the company says. Southwire makes a range of wire and cable from the high-tension overhead and underground cables to the wire used behind the walls in homes.

The $90 million high-voltage cable plant, located in the Commerce Station Business Park about 15 miles north of uptown Charlotte, opened three years ago. It has a distinctive 430-foot tower that's used to uniformly cool insulation on cable.

The Huntersville plant will serve as a sister facility to a Southwire high-voltage cable plant in Heflin, Ala., Murrah says. That means some products will be made in both plants as support for the sister facility.

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