Rolling outages, war damage, a tripling import bill and copper at all-time highs: the grid crisis has a supply chain, and it starts in Sulaibiya.
Kuwait’s power system entered summer 2026 under more strain than at any point in its modern history. In March, falling debris from air defence interceptions took seven overheatransmission lines out of service, while strikes on power and water desalination facilities forced two generating units offline. In April, the Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy began phased outages across secondary substations to harden the network ahead of peak load. By May, the Civil Service Council had cut government working hours from seven to six a day to relieve the grid through the hottest months.
Behind the emergency sits a bill that has been accumulating for a decade. Installed generation capacity has been stuck near 20 gigawatts while summer consumption repeatedly pushes past 16,000 megawatts into the ministry’s red zone. Electricity imports through the GCC interconnection were planned to reach 1.5 gigawatts this year, triple the level drawn two summers ago, alongside reported plans for around 1,200 megawatts of emergency capacity additions and a regional interconnection expansion that could eventually feed Kuwait up to 3,500 megawatts. Every one of those megawatts, imported or generated, arrives at a socket through conductors, cables and joints. Kuwait is, in effect, committed to the largest transmission and distribution spend in its history, and the country has exactly one listed manufacturer of what that spend buys.
Gulf Cable and Electrical Industries Group, founded in 1975 and listed on Boursa Kuwait, produces the full range the crisis demands: medium and low voltage power cables, overhead line conductors, fire resistant cables and solar PV cable. In May, the group disclosed a contract award for the supply of copper conductors for overhead lines, the same class of infrastructure damaged in the March strikes. Days earlier, a group company booked a separate order for medium voltage cable. At its annual general assembly on 18 May, chaired by Vice Chairman Bader Nasser Al-Kharafi, shareholders went further, authorising donations of up to KD 500,000 to the ministry itself, alongside a 70 fils per share dividend for 2025.
The global market has moved in the same direction, violently. Copper set an all-time high of $14,527.50 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange in January and was still trading above $13,300 in late June, driven by grid investment, AI data centre construction, projected to consume some 500,000 tonnes of copper annually by 2030, and repeated disruptions at major mines. Analysts expect structural demand from power infrastructure to hold prices at historically elevated levels even as the market rebalances.
Record copper cuts both ways for a cable maker, since the metal is the input as well as the product. But two things tilt the equation toward domestic manufacturers. First, cable pricing in the industry broadly tracks the metal, so elevated copper flows through to contract values. Second, and more specific to this moment: the World Bank notes that rising shipping and insurance costs through the Strait of Hormuz are inflating the price of imported construction materials into Kuwait. Every escalation in freight risk widens the advantage of cable that never boards a ship. In a procurement environment where delivery certainty is now a national security variable, a factory in Sulaibiya is worth more than its output.
The market has been slow to reprice any of this. Gulf Cable shares trade below the all-time high of 2,360 fils set in April 2025, before the strikes, before the import escalation and before copper’s records, even as the demand backdrop for its core business has only hardened. The stock still changes hands largely as a dividend name in a sleepy industrial sector. The order flow of the past two months suggests the sector is anything but.
As the ministry works through its summer maintenance calendar and the state weighs long term generation investment, the near term reality is simpler. The grid gets rebuilt line by line, at the most expensive copper prices ever recorded, in a region where importing has never carried more risk. Much of that line is made in Kuwait, by one company.
