Brits, North West Province — establishing South African copper cable manufacture
We are establishing South African manufacture of the copper communication, signalling, instrumentation and data cables that rail, mining, energy and telecommunications infrastructure depends on — drawn, insulated, laid up and tested under one roof.
Why local manufacture
Imported cable arrives when the vessel arrives. Manufacturing in South Africa changes the arithmetic of every project that depends on copper cable — on lead time, on specification, on compliance and on risk.
Cable leaves Brits on a truck. Replacement lengths for a failed section, an urgent tender award or a project variation do not wait for a vessel, a port or a customs clearance.
Core counts, conductor sizes, screening, sheath material, colour codes, drum lengths and printed legend are set by the order — not by what happened to be in a container.
Copper telecommunication cable is a designated product for local content in South African state procurement. Cable made at Brits supports the local production requirements in your bid.
Every drum is tested against the applicable specification before it ships, and every batch is traceable to the raw material that made it. Test certificates accompany delivery.
Products
Five product families, all produced at Brits. If the cable you need is not shown, send us the specification — the plant is set up for custom work.
Outside plant, indoor, PABX and high-frequency copper pair cable from 10 pair to 240 pair. Filled, armoured and aerial constructions.
Railway signalling, electrical signalling, steel wire armoured telecoms, utility control, fire alarm and fire-survival, blasting and solar plant cable.
Tray and direct-buried instrumentation cable, individually and collectively screened pairs and triads, thermocouple extension wire, multi-core control.
Category 5e, 6, 6A and 7 copper data cable in U/UTP, F/UTP, U/FTP and S/FTP constructions, with LSZH and outdoor sheath options.
High-density polyethylene duct and sub-duct for fibre and telecommunications routes, plain-bore or low-friction, in standard and custom coil lengths.
Send us a drawing, a datasheet or a description of the application. We will tell you what we can manufacture, to what standard and in what lead time.
Send a specification →Industries
Every sector below shares one requirement: the cable is not the expensive part of the installation, but it is the part that fails first if it was wrong for the application.
Signalling circuits, trackside communication, level crossing protection and depot systems. Rail specifications are unforgiving — the cable is buried or trackside, exposed to vibration, water, vermin and traction current interference, and it has to keep working.
Underground and surface communication, instrumentation and blasting circuits, shaft and plant control. Mining cable is specified for mechanical abuse, moisture and flame performance before anything else.
Substation control and protection wiring, SCADA and telecontrol links, generation plant instrumentation, and control and reticulation for solar and renewable plant. Utility procurement is standards-driven and audit-heavy — the test certificate matters as much as the cable.
Copper access network, exchange and node cabling, and the duct infrastructure fibre routes are blown into. Network operators buy on lead time and consistency as much as on price, because a build programme stalls on the missing item.
Plant automation, process instrumentation, machine control and industrial networking. Specification here is driven by the electromagnetic environment, temperature, chemical exposure and flexing.
Structured cabling backbone and horizontal distribution, and the fire and life-safety circuits that run alongside it. Building work is programme-driven, and cable that is three weeks late is three weeks of standing time.
Camera, access control, perimeter detection and alarm circuits — including the fire-survival cable that has to hold a circuit open while a building is evacuated.
Manufacturing
The Brits plant runs the complete cable-making process on one site. Copper rod and polymer arrive at one end; tested, certified, drummed cable leaves at the other. Nothing critical is subcontracted.
Copper rod is drawn through successive dies to the finished conductor diameter. Drawing in-house makes conductor size a production decision, not a purchasing constraint.
Drawn wire is annealed to restore ductility and achieve the required electrical resistance and mechanical properties.
Each conductor is insulated with the specified compound — solid or cellular PE, PVC, XLPE or LSZH — and colour coded to the applicable code.
Conductors are twisted into pairs, triads or quads at the lay length the specification requires. Lay length controls crosstalk and interference performance; it is set, not approximated.
Pairs and units are laid up into the finished core with fillers, binder tapes and, where required, a water-blocking arrangement.
Aluminium/polyester laminate, copper braid or a combination is applied per element, overall, or both, with drain wire continuity maintained throughout.
Galvanised steel wire or steel tape armour is applied where mechanical protection or rodent resistance is specified.
The outer sheath is extruded in the specified compound, then printed with customer legend, standard reference and sequential length marking.
Electrical and physical testing against the applicable specification, on every drum, in our own laboratory.
Cable is wound to ordered length, sealed, labelled and released with its test certificate.
Quality & standards
A cable specification is a promise about how the cable will behave in ten years — buried, in the dark, under load. The only way to keep that promise is to test the cable before it leaves, and to know exactly what went into it if a question arises later.
Cable is manufactured and tested to the standard you specify, within a framework of South African national standards (SANS), international standards (IEC), British standards (BS), and the customer- and utility-specific specifications issued by rail, energy and telecommunications operators.
[ Publish specific standard numbers and certification status only where a current test report or certificate exists. See section 10 of the content deck. ]
Local content
For any bid to a state organ, local production and content is not a preference. It is a threshold you have to clear, evidenced in the submission.
Electrical and telecommunication cables are designated products under South Africa's local content requirements. The dtic sets a minimum local production and content threshold of 90% for the designated cable categories, including copper telecommunication cables, and requires that bid invitations carry the designation so that local content is discharged on manufacturing activity.
The designation deliberately excludes the primary raw materials — copper, aluminium, PVC, XLPE, aramid yarn and optical fibre — from the calculation, so South African manufacturers can buy raw material at globally competitive prices without losing local content credit. The calculation rewards manufacturing here. That is exactly what we do.
Source: the dtic, Information on Electrical Cable Designation. Link the source document from this page.
About
South Africa has plenty of cable suppliers. It has very few plants still drawing copper, extruding insulation and laying up cable inside the country.
C20 Cable Industries has been formed to acquire and recapitalise an established specialist cable plant at Brits — equipment, process capability and, most importantly, the technical skill of the people who run it. That capability took decades to build and could not be quickly or cheaply rebuilt if it were lost.
Our approach is deliberately narrow to begin with. Rather than supplying every cable type in the market, we concentrate on copper communication and industrial cable — the products the plant makes well, where local manufacture is a genuine advantage to the customer, and where imported product is least able to compete on lead time and specification flexibility. Fibre optic and hybrid products follow once the copper operation is running to plan.
C20 Cable Industries is part of the C20 group, an industrial and infrastructure group with interests across ports, logistics and manufacturing. [ Confirm group description before publication. ]
Contact
The fastest route to a useful answer is the specification itself — a datasheet, a bill of quantities, a tender schedule, or a description of the application and the environment. We will come back with what we can manufacture, to what standard, in what lead time and at what price.