Roy Richards founded Southwire Company, LLC in 1950, manufacturing wire with three second-hand machines and only a dozen employees. Today, half the world’s copper is processed through a Southwire Continuous Rod (SCR) system, which the company created in 1963 to continuously cast copper and aluminum rods.
Before Southwire, Richards started Carrollton, Georgia-based company Richards & Associates (R&A) as a 25-year-old, recent graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology. He founded the company in 1937, putting up power poles so his grandmother’s house could have electric light. In R&A’s first two years, workers strung 3,500 miles of cable.
R&A’s progress stopped when Richards was called to the U.S. Army during World War II. Though he eventually became a captain overseas, when Richards returned home, he found his power poles stripped of the wire that was needed in post-war shortages.
Richards saw the void in the wire and cable markets and knew the only way he could get a steady supply was by making it himself. He founded Southwire in 1950, constructing the first plant dedicated to building wire by 1966.
After Richards passed in 1985, his son became Southwire’s president, and later, CEO. The first leadership outside the family was Stuart Thorn, named president in 2001 and CEO a year later when Roy Richards Jr. retired.
Though Southwire is still owned by the Richards family, Rich Stinson became Southwire’s president and CEO in 2016. A year later, the company unveiled the Thorn Customer Solutions Center, a training building named after Southwire’s previous president.
Southwire now has more than 7,000 employees serving customers in renewable power generation, mass transit, oil and gas, healthcare, and automotive industries. Southwire operates a copper rod mill in Carrollton, Georgia, that produces 54 metric tons of product per hour and has an annual rod production over 380,000 metric tons.
Recognized Southwire product lines include 2008’s SIMpullSolutions, designed to improve contractors’ wire pulls, and 2010’s Proof Positive Copper with a unique identification code on a strand in its center to address the industry’s increasing issue with copper theft. In 2013, Southwire launched its electrician’s line of hand tools, meters and testers.
When Southwire is not working with the U.S. Department of Energy on the next generation of power lines, it involves company employees with community work like Project GIFT, which implements fundraising and beautification projects.
