With Atkore, Prysmian now sells both the cable and what it runs through

Prysmian completed its acquisition of Atkore on October 19, 2026, paying $95 per share in cash in a deal with an implied enterprise value of about $3.8 billion (€3.3 billion). Reuters calls Prysmian the world's largest cablemaker. It now owns a U.S. maker of conduits, cable management systems and metal framing. Atkore is a wholly owned subsidiary, and its shares no longer trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

The deal raises a practical question for anyone buying electrical infrastructure for a data center, a utility job or a plant expansion. What changes when the company that makes the wire also makes everything the wire runs through?

One catalog from wire to strut

Prysmian describes its own pitch as service: product availability, fast delivery and vertical integration. Atkore supplies the hardware around the cable. Put together, Prysmian says, it will cover a larger share of what customers in data centers, utilities and commercial and industrial construction need. It also plans integrated products meant to improve job-site productivity, installer safety and infrastructure reliability.

CEO Massimo Battaini told analysts, Reuters reported, that because the two companies sell complementary products to the same customers, a bundled offer gives Prysmian a better chance of winning them. Atkore's own deal announcement went further, describing the combination as a one-stop shop in North America for electrification and data center rollouts. Battaini's completion statement frames the deal as another step in Prysmian's shift from cable manufacturer to full electrical solutions provider.

That 40% North American share helps explain why the U.S. sits at the center of the pitch. On the August analyst call, Battaini said Atkore matches Prysmian's plan to gain relevance in the United States, a market where the deal will make the group larger and give it a more complete offering. For a company already that exposed to one region, a deal that widens what it can sell there looks like a bet on depth over geographic spread.

The site count carries the most weight for buyers. Prysmian says the local footprint, together with Atkore's existing distribution relationships, lets it offer locally produced products and responsive delivery. For contractors who already buy Atkore conduit or strut through a distributor, nothing has to change to keep ordering. The difference is that the supplier behind those lines now also makes the cable on the same job.

Aimed at the data hall

Atkore calls itself a manufacturer of electrical products for commercial, industrial, data center and solar applications. In Reuters' description, it supplies data centers, utilities including renewables, and transportation projects such as railways. That customer list lines up closely with the buyers Prysmian names for the combined business, which is the overlap Battaini's bundling argument depends on.

The data center push did not start with Atkore. Just weeks before the Atkore agreement, Reuters reported, Prysmian signed a long-term agreement worth up to €5.5 billion with Molex, a U.S. electronics company in the Koch group, to supply fibre optic cables for data centres. Taken together, those moves could put more of a data hall's cable and electrical parts list under one supplier, for operators who want to buy that way. Battaini tied the deal to demand from electrification and AI-driven data centers when it was announced, and said the U.S. opportunity in particular is large.

His completion statement made the schedule argument explicit: Atkore will "help customers deliver their projects faster and more efficiently, including rapidly expanding data center construction." Citybiz, in its account of the close, reported that Prysmian identified data center construction as a particularly important growth opportunity and expects the expanded portfolio to help customers source complementary products for those projects. For an operator racing to energize capacity, that framing suggests the bundle will be sold on speed and coordination at least as much as on price.

What Prysmian paid for the fuller catalog

The $95 price was a premium of about 30% to Atkore's $72.96 close on July 31, 2026, according to Atkore's deal announcement. It was about 57% above the $60.69 close on September 29, 2025, the last trading day before Atkore announced its strategic review. Reuters reported that Prysmian secured Atkore after a competitive process.

Atkore chairman Michael V. Schrock called the sale "the culmination of our comprehensive strategic review process." He said the combination would create "a stronger platform with greater scale and a more comprehensive portfolio of solutions to better serve customers." The seller, in other words, made the same customer-facing case as the buyer.

Roughly 20% of the purchase would come from equity, which could include selling treasury shares, with hybrid instruments covering more than 20% and debt making up the remaining 60%, Chief Financial Officer Pier Francesco Facchini said. Atkore's announcement said the mix targets preserving Prysmian's investment grade profile. Investors were not sold on day one: Prysmian shares opened 3% higher on August 3 before trading 3% lower by 0950 GMT.

The integration clock

The path to close ran ahead of plan. The merger agreement was signed August 2, and the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period expired September 14, clearing the deal for U.S. antitrust purposes. It closed October 19, well before the year-end 2026 target set at signing.

Prysmian will include Atkore in its financial results from November 2026. The company has restated the goal it announced at signing, which is roughly $150 million a year in pretax benefits within three years after the deal closes. In the first full year, before counting those benefits, it expects the deal to add a high single-digit percentage to earnings per share. It expects that accretion to reach double digits once the benefits are achieved.

A footnote to the completion release says those accretion estimates exclude potential effects of the purchase price allocation under International Financial Reporting Standards. The size of the benefit target is easier to judge next to Atkore's own earnings: Reuters put its 2025 EBITDA at $386 million. Against that base, $150 million a year is substantial, and the three-year integration period is when it would have to be earned.

Prysmian says its 2025 revenues came to approximately €20 billion. It employs 34,000 people and runs 109 production facilities and 30 R&D centers across more than 50 countries. Reuters reported that on a pro forma basis, the combined companies would have generated about €22 billion in 2025 revenue and €2.7 billion in adjusted core earnings.

Prysmian says the integration will build on its track record with General Cable, Encore Wire and Channell. Contractors who bought from Encore Wire or Channell before and after those deals already have a reference point for how Prysmian runs an acquired U.S. business.

For buyers, the three-year window is the period to watch. Any changes to how cable and raceway are quoted, stocked or shipped together would most likely come as the businesses integrate, not on day one. Procurement teams planning large data center or utility programs could be negotiating while that integration is still underway.

Where the bundle matters less

A one-stop offer helps most where the buyer wants fewer vendors and has a schedule that rewards one point of accountability, which is the data center case Battaini keeps coming back to. It matters less where engineers specify cable and raceway separately, or where contractors buy line by line through distributors on price. In those cases, the bundle has to beat the separate quotes on cost or delivery. Prysmian has said Atkore's established distribution relationships strengthen its ability to serve customers, which suggests the distributor channel will stay important.

Citybiz's account adds that those relationships give Prysmian additional channels for reaching electrical contractors, installers and infrastructure customers. It also notes that utility and commercial and industrial distribution systems require cables, conduits, support structures and related installation products, and that Prysmian aims to simplify procurement and improve coordination across such projects. For utility and plant buyers, that points to the same pitch as the data hall, delivered mostly through the distributors they already use.

Battaini told analysts in August that the company would look for similar acquisitions in other regions and was already evaluating more. Buyers could watch for whether Prysmian brings combined cable-and-raceway offers to U.S. data center work.