Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. is a Japanese electric and electronics equipment company. The company was founded by Furukawa Ichibei in 1884 in Yokohama when a copper-smelting facility and a wire manufacturing factory were established. Furukawa was a Japanese businessman who founded one of the fifteen largest industrial conglomerates in Japan, called Furukawa zaibatsu, to which Furukawa Electric belongs to this day. The company is listed on the Tokyo stock Exchange and is constituent of the Nikkei 225 stock index. Furukawa Electric aids CERN’s experiments on the search for the Higgs boson with its superconducting magnet wires. The company’s products also include superconductivity cables. As of July 2013 the company has 137 subsidiaries and affiliate companies across Japan, Europe, North and South America.