Indeco S.A.

What it is

Indeco’s core job is manufacturing and selling all kinds of electrical conductors, communication cables, and related articles — everything from the thin wire in a household socket to the heavy-duty cable buried in a copper mine. Its products run through major infrastructure projects in electricity and telecommunications, civil construction, and the mining and oil sectors.

The company’s four product lines are construction cable, energy cable, bare conductors, and other industrial wires. All of them ride the same upstream input: copper, whose price swings can move Indeco’s revenues sharply without any change in the volume it ships.

Who owns it

Indeco is an indirect subsidiary of Nexans France S.A.S. — the French group that is the ultimate controlling shareholder — through its Chilean holding company Invercable S.A., which holds 100% of Indeco’s common shares.

Public investors can buy only the investment shares (acciones de inversión) listed on the Lima stock exchange, which carry no voting rights.

In 2008, MADECO — then a regional leader in electrical conductors — sold all its cable operations to Nexans of France, the world’s largest cable-manufacturing group. Since that year, Indeco has operated as a Nexans company.

Who runs it

Alex Gustavo García Ramírez serves as Gerente General (CEO), and Alex Jesús Pacheco Rivera is the Contador General (CFO equivalent), both signing the company’s official annual declarations to the regulator. García Ramírez is listed on LinkedIn as CEO and Country Manager of INDECO by Nexans.

García Ramírez joined Nexans in 2009 as plant manager, was promoted to VP Industrial for South America, and later served as director of business transformation for South America before taking on Peru country leadership. He is a career Nexans insider who knows the factory floor as well as the boardroom.

The money, in plain words

Indeco reports in US dollars, reflecting the fact that copper — its main raw material and the main driver of its sale prices — is a dollar-denominated commodity globally. At the latest reported quarter, total assets were US$239.9M and total liabilities US$156.5M, leaving equity of about US$83.4M (our calculation) — a moderately leveraged balance sheet for a manufacturer tied to volatile raw-material prices.

The trailing net profit margin is 4.90% — meaning Indeco keeps roughly five cents of profit from every dollar of cable it sells, which is thin but typical for a company where the main cost, copper, is priced by the world market and not by management. The return on investment is cited at 33%, suggesting the underlying business earns well relative to its asset base once the copper-price pass-through is stripped away.

The company has never paid a dividend and does not plan to.

What it is doing now

At end-2024, Indeco reclassified a plot of land it bought in the Chilca district in 2019 for US$10.8M — originally earmarked for a new cable factory — from fixed assets to investment property, citing the uncertain political environment in Peru as having dimmed near-term prospects for that factory relocation. The Chilca land sits idle; the existing Lima plant on Av.

Universitaria remains the sole production site.

As of May 2023, the company counted more than 380 employees, and management has been publicly flagging investment plans to expand production capacity and upgrade client solutions, tied to Peru’s broader electrification agenda. The energy-transition pipeline — renewables, rural electrification, grid upgrades — is the structural demand story that Nexans is banking on across its Andean operations.

What to watch

• Copper price: Indeco’s revenue moves almost mechanically with copper. A sustained rise inflates the top line but compresses the margin unless selling prices keep pace.
• The Chilca factory decision: If Peru’s political climate stabilises and infrastructure spending accelerates, the board may finally greenlight the new plant — a multi-million-dollar step up in capacity and a key signal of long-term confidence.
• Peru infrastructure spend: Public-sector electrification and mining-expansion projects are Indeco’s largest demand driver. Any fiscal tightening or project delays in Lima feed directly into order volumes.
• Free-float liquidity: With 100% of common shares locked inside Nexans/Invercable, only the investment shares trade — thinly. Price discovery is limited, and any minority investor must accept low liquidity as the price of entry.

This is news, not investment advice.