Hellenic Cables Wins the Entire €1.5bn Corinth–Kos HVDC Job. On Europe's Biggest Capex Wave, the Cable Maker Is Now the Main Contractor

On 13 August a cable factory won a €1.5 billion construction contract. That sentence would have read oddly five years ago. It is now the clearest signal of where bargaining power sits in Europe's grid build-out.

Cenergy Holdings told the market that Hellenic Cables, through its wholly owned subsidiary Fulgor S.A., had been awarded a turnkey contract by Greece's transmission system operator IPTO for the 320kV HVDC electrical interconnection between Corinth and the island of Kos, at a total value of approximately €1.5 billion. The scope runs converter station to converter station: engineering, procurement, construction and installation, roughly 1,260 km of submarine cable and 30 km of underground cable, 1 GW of transfer capacity, works starting in Q4 2026 and completion scheduled for 2030. Fulgor will manufacture the HVDC cable at its own plants in Corinth and Thiva. Signing remains subject to customary statutory conditions and approvals.

The figure to notice is not the €1.5 billion. It is the word turnkey.

The manufacturer took the delivery risk, and the margin came with it

On a project of this shape the conventional split gives the cable maker a supply contract and hands installation, marine works, civils and interface management to a marine contractor or an EPC group. IPTO collapsed that structure into a single counterparty. Fulgor now carries end-to-end delivery on a link that runs 1,260 km of cable through open water.

Vertical integration of this kind happens when the buyer decides the factory is the scarce asset. It is. Prysmian, NKT and Nexans between them hold roughly €38.4 billion of confirmed backlog, and Prysmian alone reported about €17 billion of transmission orders at Q2 2026. High-voltage subsea production slots are booked out through the end of the decade. When the plant is the bottleneck, the owner of the plant writes the contract.

Greece is running the experiment first

IPTO has moved faster than most European transmission operators because its island problem forced the pace. The European Investment Bank signed a €1.9 billion facility with the operator on 5 February 2026 for the Dodecanese interconnection, against a total project cost of about €2.5 billion. The operator then completed a €1 billion share capital increase that attracted roughly €3.5 billion of demand, with the Greek State's participation part-funded from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the EU's post-pandemic investment fund. That equity underpins a 2026–2029 plan of about €6 billion covering the Dodecanese and North Aegean island links, mainland reinforcement and a second interconnection with Italy.

The commercial case on the islands is unusually clean. Kos, Rhodes and Karpathos still run on oil and diesel plant. Every kilowatt-hour delivered by cable instead of fuel oil is a cost the tariff base stops paying, which is why both lenders and equity investors were willing to fund a cable route longer than most national grids.

The buyer is spreading its bets across two factories

IPTO has not handed everything to one supplier. Prysmian holds a €910 million framework covering Lot B of the Dodecanese and North Aegean programme, seven projects and more than 900 km of high-voltage alternating current cable running to 2033. Hellenic Cables separately signed a €1.15 billion frame agreement for North and East Aegean connections, close to 700 km of submarine and 230 km of land cable, which lifted the group's cables backlog to a record €3.4 billion. Cenergy reported H1 2026 revenue of €1.15 billion, up 13%, operational profitability of €216 million, up 26%, and raised full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance to €390–420 million.

Two suppliers, several lots, one operator. IPTO is buying factory capacity the way an airline buys delivery slots.

What European contractors just lost

Grid capital expenditure is the fastest-growing pool in European infrastructure. TenneT Germany put €4.1 billion into transmission in the first half of 2026 alone, up 14% year on year. Iberdrola lifted networks investment 42% to nearly €4.4 billion over the same period, close to two thirds of group capex, with its UK regulated asset base up 11%. Construction groups have spent three years repositioning for that wave. On Corinth–Kos the wave went straight past them.

The reason is qualification rather than price. A contractor can charter cable-lay tonnage and hire marine crews. It cannot qualify a 320kV insulation system, and it cannot conjure a factory slot in 2027. Where the scarce input sits inside a manufacturer, that manufacturer can bid the whole job and price the interface risk it already controls.

What to watch next

Three things. First, whether IPTO's peers copy the structure. A second Italy link, the German and Baltic programmes and Ofgem-approved UK spend all face the same slot scarcity. Second, whether manufacturers can carry construction risk to programme. Fulgor now owns weather windows, seabed conditions and marine spread availability out to 2030, and a cable maker's balance sheet absorbs liquidated damages differently from a contractor's. Third, pricing. If turnkey awards become routine, EPC margin migrates permanently into the cable P&L, and the listed cable names will be valued as infrastructure contractors instead of industrial suppliers.

For contractors the practical response is to stop bidding against the factory and start selling to it. Marine spreads, converter-station civils, trenching, landfall works and horizontal directional drilling all still need doing, and Fulgor will subcontract them. The margin is thinner in that seat. It is also the part of the job that is still open.