Case 5: Fisk Alloy Wire, Inc. and Percon C-61Wire was used to bear mechanical loads and to carry
electricity, telecommunications, and data signals. Fisk
Alloy’s focus on product and process improvement in
high-performance copper alloy wire has been driven by
the demands of the electronics industry, despite the fact
that this was a fairly small portion of the total demand
for copper. As estimated by Eric Fisk:
... in the copper alloy industry, strip is the big tonnage side
of the copper alloy business. To give you a frame of refer-
ence, around 2005, 4 billion pounds of copper were sold in
the world in strip or wire. 3.5 billion pounds of that was
copper wire for power distribution and building wire, and
the other 500 million pounds was strip. Maybe 1 percent of
that was copper alloy wire, so it is a very, very small market.Conductor wire was generally anything that was
stranded and insulated, with a broad range of complexity.
Building wire was a simple copper conductor wire. Light
cord was a prosaic copper conductor. The top end of the
conductor trade, such as in military, aerospace, electrical
and computer applications, consisted of highly engi-
neered products and used copper alloys. Here, the wire
was used for circuits, connectors and terminations and
in the operation of electrical components, for example,
head pins in computer printers or in the headphones and
wiring of Bose™ speakers. The miniaturization of compo-
nents in electrical, biomedical and telecommunications
applications, and the service requirements of aerospace
applications required stronger materials. The need to
carry more current and dissipate more heat in electrical
and computer applications required higher conductiv-
ity. In addition, the wire had to withstand movement or
vibration in the operating environment. Electric blan-
kets and the electrodes and the sensor cables used to
attached a patient to an ultrasound machine required
flexible copper alloys as raw materials. Wire perfor-
mance requirements, especially in ‘cannot-fail’ type sit-
uations, required high performance alloys. (see Exhibit 3
for FAC Sales by End Use.)
In February, 2003 the European Union (EU) passed
the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) direc-
tive, to be effective in 2006. It restricted the use of
specific contaminants, significantly cadmium (whose
threshold limit was ten times lower than other con-
taminants), making the development of Percon look
clairvoyant. Eric Fisk commented:
By the summer of 2004, people were beginning to be aware
of the RoHS issue. Six months after that, people were ask-
ing us how we knew to get rid of the cadmium. That’s liter-
ally what happened. They said, “you are brilliant, but howdid you know (to get rid of cadmium)?” People wanted
samples, people wanted to test it and try the product. This
was just in the European market, but it set in motion two
things: one, the awareness that cadmium was not a good
idea, and two, some of the big corporate names made the
corporate decision that it was good business for them to
sign onto this ruling early and get cadmium out of their
products, particularly those companies that had dual US/
European sales. They chose to support the standard rather
than support dual products.
Percon’s cadmium-free composition enabled U.S.
manufacturers to meet the more stringent environmen-
tal standards for applications in Europe and Asia at a
price that remained competitive with current cadmium
copper alloy products such as PD135 from Phelps Dodge.
As a multi-billion dollar corporation and one of the larg-
est copper mining companies in the world with opera-
tions in nineteen countries, Phelps Dodge concentrated
on copper and aluminum products and was the world’s
largest producer of molybdenum. It has been a major
supplier of wire and cable around the world. It had not
tried to come up with any cadmium-free product, since
the overall size of the alloy market was very small com-
pared to volume copper wire, Phelps Dodge’s primary
market.
By 2005, Fisk Alloy had developed and certified
Percon as a high performance copper alloy, and the
advent of the RoHS legislation might result in sig-
nificant future sales, but any increased demand could
create another problem. To add capacity, FAC needed
additional machinery to process stranded wire. Older
machines called tubular stranders worked well, but
were slow. New equipment ran at two to three times
the speed of the older stranders, but cost $250,000 per
machine and took a year to custom manufacture. Brian
Fisk noted that since stranding machines ran aboutExhibit 3 Fisk Alloy Conductor Total Pounds and Revenue Sold By
Sector 1/06–8/08End Use Volume (Lbs.) Revenue ($)
Aerospace 696,695 $20,228,851
Electronics 193,912 5,679,423
Medical 110,566 4,073,513
Military 23,444 1,148,182
Automotive 11,655 695,815
Jewelry 7,527 404,779
Misc. 874 8,129
Total 1,044,673 Lbs. $32,238,693