Amphenol Corporation APH

The business

Amphenol makes the connector. The plug at the end of a cable, the socket it goes into, the antenna, the sensor, the bit of copper or fibre that carries a signal from one board to another. Tens of thousands of part numbers across automotive, aerospace, defence, industrial, mobile devices and, above all now, the data centre.

It is a roll-up by design. Amphenol buys family-owned connector businesses, keeps their engineering, applies its own operating discipline, and repeats. In January it closed on the connectivity and cable business of CommScope, which is why the revenue line has stopped being comparable to anything.