Prysmian Group now has a combined R&D global footprint of 25 R&D Centres worldwide: 7 from legacy General Cable and 17 from legacy Prysmian Group and a combined portfolio of over 5,600 patents. General Cable adds a strong R&D presence to Prysmian in North America. Two key General Cable R&D Centres that have now been added to the footprint are the Indianapolis Technology Centre, which is a Centre of Excellence for Materials Innovation, and Marshall Technology Centre, a world class Electrical Testing Lab that our Power Distribution customers have been relying on for several decades.

 

“Prysmian and General Cable both have a very rich history of successful development and commercialization of flagship products and well recognized brands in the wire and cable industry,” explains Srini Siripurapu, Senior Vice President and Chief Research and Development Officer for the Prysmian Group. “We continue to invest in our R&D leadership in High Voltage, Submarine and Telecom Products and have already been sharing expertise in R&D for our standard insulated Low Voltage and Medium Voltage Energy Products. The combined company now has the broadest product portfolio in this space to service customers in any part of the world. Overall, this merger provides tremendous opportunity for our R&D team to learn from each other and adapt the very best of the R&D tools and practices to create an efficient collaborative ecosystem with our customers, partners and suppliers.”

 

“Thanks to the merger, we now have a comprehensive suite of materials, products and process wire and cable know-how. As the industry leader, we have the responsibility to shape the industry with innovations that will deliver on future energy and communication needs of our communities. We have a strong appetite to partner with our customers to identify and deliver on these innovations. Our focus is to be expanded from traditional product innovation to servitization and digital innovation. We have also launched ‘Corporate Hangar’: an Innovation Accelerator focused on open innovation.”

 

“People are at the heart of successful integrations. An inspired team with a clear sense of direction is vital as integrations involve a lot of effort on top of our daily jobs. We have developed a comprehensive R&D integration plan spanning over 10 different aspects of the R&D function. To name a few critical ones, we are benchmarking and adopting the very best Cable Design Systems and Innovation Processes. These will help us respond quickly to current and future customer needs. In the first 90 days post close, we held several brainstorming sessions in the three main regions with overlap North America, South Europe and Latin America. These sessions served to identify synergy opportunities and more importantly as team building events for the combined R&D team.”

 

“This merger carries a great deal of expectation from our customers, our investors and our team members. It is a long journey and maintaining the focus and balance of short term versus long term is a key challenge. We are pleased with the progress so far and our customers have been responding well.”