Hickory-area fiber-optic company expansions to total $54M

A Hickory-area fiber-optic cable plant is combining on paper a couple of recent expansions to add 100 jobs and spend almost $75 million on its huge facility in Catawba County.

The move by Italian energy and telecom cable company Prysmian Group, which already has about 500 working at its Claremont facility, will mean the company can qualify for additional local corporate incentives, eco-devo officials say.

“Given the scope of this project, we felt it warranted additional consideration for incentives by the city and county,” writes Nathan Huret, director of existing industry services at the Catawba County Economic Development Corp., in an email to the Charlotte Business Journal.

Last fall, Prysmian announced its plans to spend about $54 million there and add 50 jobs. A year earlier, the company was granted incentives for a $20 million project that added an initial 50 jobs. But Prysmian had not started collecting those incentives.

When economic-development folks looked over the two existing requests, they decided the projects are best combined to bring Prysmian the most incentives. However, a total of what those incentives are worth wasn’t immediately available.

The plant, located off U.S. Highway 70 on the south side of Claremont, is one of 13 Prysmian facilities in North America. Its North American headquarters is located in Lexington, S.C.

The Claremont plant is spread across 1.5 million square feet. Inside, workers produce the strands of fiber optics and then combine them into cables.

The entire company has 21,000 employees and operates in 50 countries.

American City Business Journals