NKT Brand Guidelines: H.P. Prior’s 1891 Copenhagen Cable Works, Now All Power Cable

An engineer, a cable shop and a wire works.

NKT began in Copenhagen in 1891. Danish Wikipedia, drawing on the company histories written for its centenary, says the engineer Hans Peter Prior opened a factory for electric cables and wires on 1 September 1891 under the name Nordisk Kabelfabrik; English Wikipedia and Lex, the Danish encyclopedia formerly Den Store Danske, give the first name as Nordisk Elektrisk Ledningstraad- og Kabelfabrik. Lex describes Prior as an engineer and later Denmark’s trade minister, and says the business grew with financial backing from Landmandsbanken as electricity spread through Danish society.

The initials come from the company formed on 21 February 1898, when Prior’s factory became the limited company Nordiske Kabel- og Traadfabriker, “Nordic Cable and Wire Works”; Danish Wikipedia says the shares have been listed since that year. A wire works opened at Middelfart on Funen in April 1899 to make the copper wire the cable plant had been importing, and nails, barbed wire and springs followed. In 1907 the company took over the old Frederiksværk rolling mill and moved it to Amager, where it made sheet, tube and profiles from 1909.

The cable works itself moved twice: to Ryesgade in 1893 and then to La Cours Vej in Frederiksberg, where building was decided in 1906. Danish Wikipedia says the administration building there, put up in 1938–39, still stands, while the factory was demolished in 1987. The sources read for this guide say nothing about the company’s work during the German occupation of Denmark from 1940 to 1945. After the Second World War, Lex says, NKT built a large plant at Brøndbyøster between 1951 and 1954 with Marshall Plan support, and expanded abroad through new production and sales companies.

A conglomerate narrows to cable.

For much of the twentieth century NKT was a broad Danish industrial group. English Wikipedia lists glass, aluminium, steel, nails and fasteners among its businesses, mainly for the home market. Lex says the company put growing weight on research from the late 1970s, including optical fibres for cables and electronic communications equipment, sold its semi-finished metals business in 1983, and bought Fisker & Nielsen, later Nilfisk, in 1989 and the electrical-equipment maker Lauritz Knudsen in 1990.

The narrowing began in the 1990s. English Wikipedia says the holding structure dates from 1990 and that NKT sold Lauritz Knudsen to Schneider in 1999, the semiconductor firm GIGA to Intel in 2000 and NKT Flexibles in 2012. In 1999 it bought the German cable maker Felten & Guilleaume, which English Wikipedia says doubled its production capacity. The company says it opened a new high-voltage cable plant in Cologne in 2010 and bought Ericsson’s power cable operations in Sweden in 2013.

The decisive step came in 2017. NKT bought ABB HV Cables, including the high-voltage plant at Karlskrona in Sweden and the cable-laying vessel NKT Victoria, and in October that year Nilfisk was split off as a separate listed company, Danish Wikipedia records. On 31 May 2024 NKT announced that it had completed the sale of NKT Photonics to Hamamatsu Photonics of Japan, calling it the final step in focusing the company fully on power cable solutions. English Wikipedia adds that NKT bought the Portuguese power cable maker SolidAl in 2024, and the company says it bought the UK fire-resistant cable maker Ventcroft in 2022.

Design and documentation.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Power to life since 1891.

Today NKT A/S, formerly NKT Holding, is listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen. English Wikipedia says it has production in ten European countries and is best known for offshore high-voltage direct current cables that link offshore wind farms to onshore grids; it organises the business into solutions for HVDC and HVAC interconnectors, offshore wind and power-from-shore projects, applications such as building wire and low- and medium-voltage cable, accessories, and service and installation.

Its own history page, headed “Power to life since 1891,” is a short list of milestones. It lists 1954 as the year of the world’s first HVDC mass-impregnated submarine cable, linking Gotland with the Swedish mainland; English Wikipedia records that the Gotland link entered service that year and credits the Swedish company ASEA with building it, and NKT’s Karlskrona high-voltage plant came to it with ABB’s cable business in 2017. The page also lists PVC- and halogen-free cables in 1995, a superconducting cable in 2001 that the company calls the first, orders in 2020 for 525 kV cable systems for Germany’s “Corridor” projects, and a 2020 commitment to net-zero emissions under the Science Based Targets initiative.

Where the cables are made follows the acquisitions. The company’s own timeline names its high-voltage plants at Cologne in Germany and Karlskrona in Sweden; English Wikipedia says the Felten & Guilleaume purchase added businesses in the Czech Republic, China and Austria, and that SolidAl added medium- and high-voltage capacity in Portugal. NKT’s investor pages speak of production facilities in Europe and sales offices around the world.

For a design guide, NKT shows how an old industrial name can be narrowed to a single, technical business while keeping its initials. Compare Prysmian and Nexans, the other European groups in power and submarine cable. For this guide we use a copper red, a dark brown and a linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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