Prysmian, the Milan-based company that is the world’s largest cablemaker, agreed Monday to buy Atkore for $95 a share in cash — an enterprise value of roughly $3.8 billion. Atkore makes the least glamorous products in the entire AI supply chain: steel conduit, PVC pipe, and the cable trays that hold wiring off the floor in data centers, factories, and utility projects.
The price is a 30% premium to Friday’s close and 57% above where Atkore traded before it launched a strategic review in September 2025. Shares jumped about 27% Monday morning toward the offer. The Illinois-based company generated $2.85 billion in revenue and $386 million of EBITDA in fiscal 2025 with roughly 5,400 employees.
Prysmian’s pitch: the deal makes it a “one-stop shop” for electrification and AI-driven infrastructure — the cable plus everything the cable runs through — and deepens a North American footprint that companies like Eaton and IES Holdings have been printing record numbers on for a year.
The multiple is the story
Prysmian is paying 9.8x Atkore’s fiscal-2025 EBITDA — 7.1x if the $150 million in annual synergies it expects within three years actually show up. That is an industrial-cyclical price for a company whose end markets are data centers, grid upgrades, and reshored factories. Compare the layers of the AI trade: chipmakers are priced in multiples of revenue, power and cooling names have re-rated hard, and the metal that physically connects it all still trades like it’s 2019.
The funding mix says as much as the multiple. Prysmian is covering roughly 60% of the deal with debt, about 20% with equity, and the rest with hybrid instruments. You don’t lever a $3.8 billion all-cash offer at that ratio for demand you think lasts one cycle.
Our take: The AI buildout has three layers — compute, power, and the hardware that connects them — and the third layer is still the cheapest way in. When the biggest cable company on earth pays cash, at single-digit EBITDA multiples, for steel pipe, it’s telling you it believes data-center demand is a decade-long story, not a spike. The other lesson is for sellers: Atkore’s board sat through an 11-month strategic review and exited 57% above where it started. Patience, not the first bid, got paid.
What to watch
- The close. The companies expect to complete the deal by the end of 2026, pending a majority vote of Atkore shareholders and regulatory clearances — a foreign buyer of U.S. electrical-infrastructure supply will get a look, even a friendly one.
- The read-across. Atkore just got marked up 30% overnight. Watch whether other single-digit-multiple electrical suppliers re-rate as buyers hunt the next cheap piece of the buildout.
- Prysmian’s balance sheet. Sixty percent debt funding on top of its 2024 Encore Wire purchase makes the next leg of this strategy dependent on the cycle staying hot.
M&A is suddenly the theme of the week: hours earlier, reports surfaced that AstraZeneca explored the biggest pharma takeover ever. The difference is the market’s verdict — that one cost the buyer 7% of its value. This one cost Prysmian nothing yet.