Assembly in Hickory, North Carolina

Hickory's CommScope headquarters and Corning's major operations have established the Catawba Valley as the undisputed global center of fiber optic cable design, manufacturing, and innovation. The fiber optic industry's concentration here—driven by decades of investment and the clustering of expertise, equipment suppliers, and specialized workforce—has created manufacturing capabilities in precision fiber optic assembly, cable management systems, and telecommunications equipment that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere at this density. Buyers in the telecommunications, data center, and networking equipment markets will find Hickory suppliers with the deepest fiber optic assembly expertise available anywhere in the world, supported by CommScope and Corning's ongoing presence and supplier development programs.

Hickory's strongest assembly identity is tied to the physical infrastructure of modern communications: fiber cable, terminations, enclosures, cable management, connectors, routing hardware, and network-support equipment. This is not generic electronics assembly. The Catawba Valley has a workforce and supplier base shaped by decades of handling optical fiber and communications products where cleanliness, bend radius, connector quality, and repeatable test results directly affect network performance. For buyers in broadband, data centers, utilities, transportation communications, or industrial networking, that local experience is meaningful. Fiber-related assemblies often require careful routing, labeling, strain relief, protective packaging, and inspection practices that differ from standard wire harness work. A supplier familiar with communications infrastructure is less likely to treat a fiber build like an ordinary cable job and more likely to understand field installation, serviceability, and test documentation. The same expertise can extend into cabinets, patch panels, rugged enclosures, small network devices, and installation kits. Hickory-area suppliers can be a fit when the buyer needs physical communication hardware assembled near a region that already understands telecom scale, outdoor service demands, and the pressure to keep infrastructure projects moving.

The Catawba Valley gives assembly buyers access to a manufacturing workforce that has worked through multiple industrial cycles. Furniture, textiles, fiber optics, and general industrial production have all left behind operators, technicians, supervisors, and maintenance people who understand plant-floor discipline. That matters for buyers seeking suppliers that can ramp practical assembly work without treating manufacturing as an abstract engineering exercise. Routing is another local advantage. Hickory's position on I-40 gives suppliers a direct lane east to Charlotte and west to Asheville, while the surrounding counties provide a dense base of small and mid-sized manufacturers. Components can move through machining, fabrication, finishing, kitting, and final assembly without relying entirely on a single large metro. That can help buyers balance cost, responsiveness, and access to specialized process vendors. For procurement teams, the region is often strongest when the assembly includes a mix of communications hardware, visible product quality, packaging, and regional distribution. Hickory is not just a single-industry town; it is a practical manufacturing valley with enough diversity to support both technology products and traditional material-handling work.