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We've spun the wheel for the Europe bucket. The ticker has landed on a 190-year-old French industrial group that started life making steam locomotives, and today sells the electrical guts of every AI data centre being built on the planet.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1836 in Le Creusot, France. Headquartered in Rueil-Malmaison, near Paris.

Think about the last time you walked into a modern office, hospital, or hotel. Somewhere in the basement is a metal cabinet full of switches and circuit breakers, quietly making sure the electricity gets where it's needed without setting the place on fire. There's a decent chance a Schneider product is in that cabinet.

Now think about an AI data centre. Tens of megawatts of power coming in. Racks pulling more electricity than a small office block. Coolant pumped right to the chips to carry away the heat. None of which most people picture when they think "AI". They think of the chips. But the chips are a small fraction of what it costs to build one of these places. The electrical and cooling stuff around them is much, much more.

Schneider Electric is the world's largest seller of that stuff.

A few key facts:

Schneider Electric is older than the lightbulb. Older than the telephone, the typewriter, and the bicycle. In 1836, two brothers, Adolphe and Joseph-Eugène Schneider, took over a struggling iron foundry in the Burgundy town of Le Creusot. Two years later they built France's first steam locomotive.

For most of its history, Schneider was a heavy industrial group. Steel. Locomotives. Armour plating. Weapons. Shipyards. Even nuclear power plants in the 1970s. The kind of business that built a country in the 19th century and felt increasingly out of place by the 1980s.

The pivot started in 1981, when the founding family sold its stake. What followed over the next 30 years is one of the most patient corporate transformations in European business history. Three acquisitions reshaped the company:

None of these, on their own, was obviously a bet on AI. Together they built a company that, by 2025, had quietly become indispensable to it.

Two business halves, four end-markets.

Energy Management is the bigger half at 83% of revenue. Everything to do with moving electricity around safely.

Industrial Automation is the remaining 17%. Equipment and software for factories.

The four end-markets, by orders: Data Centers & Networks (30%), Buildings (29%), Industry (27%), Infrastructure (14%). Schneider holds the #1 market position in electrical distribution in all of them.

This is what is driving the share price right now.

A few editions back we covered ASMI, the Dutch company whose machines deposit material one atom at a time to build the chips. Schneider does something different but adjacent. ASMI helps make the chips. Schneider builds everything around the chip that lets it actually run.

Data centres are now 30% of Schneider's order book. In North America, Energy Management revenue grew 17% in 2025, almost entirely driven by AI buildouts. The €25 billion of orders sitting in the queue at year-end (up 18%) gives unusual visibility into the next couple of years. In February 2025, Schneider bought Motivair, an American specialist in liquid cooling, to strengthen its hand further.

The first quarter of 2026 picked up where 2025 left off. Group revenue was up 11% over the same quarter last year. North America was up 14%, China and East Asia up 14% too. Data centres grew strong double-digit on top of an already enormous prior year.

2025 was a record year. Revenue of €40.2 billion, the first time the company has crossed that level. Operating profit of €7.5 billion. Free cash flow of €4.6 billion. The proposed dividend of €4.20 per share will be the 16th annual increase in a row.

Headline net profit was actually down 2% to €4.16 billion, mainly because of a €388 million write-down on an investment in a US software company called Uplight, plus some restructuring costs. Strip those out and the underlying business grew nicely. Worth knowing if you look at the income statement and wonder why it went sideways in a record year.

The stock has compounded at around 19% per year over the past decade. €10,000 invested ten years ago would be worth roughly €60,000 today. Not in a tech company. In a French electrical equipment maker.

The shares are not cheap. They trade at more than 30 times earnings, almost double the long-term average. A lot of optimism about AI data centres is already in the price, so if the big cloud companies slow their building plans for any reason, the shares could fall back quickly.

Schneider has serious competitors too. Siemens of Germany, Switzerland's ABB, Eaton in the US, Vertiv in data centre power, Honeywell across many of the same categories. Schneider is the largest, not the only.

And a chunk of revenue still depends on Chinese and emerging-market customers, where local currencies have been weakening against the euro. That alone took 4% off reported revenue in 2025 and another 7% in the first quarter of 2026. Real money, even if the underlying business is fine.

Two centuries ago, Schneider built locomotives that pulled the French economy into the industrial age. A hundred years ago, it was making armour plating. Thirty years ago, it started quietly buying up the world's electrical equipment companies. Today it sells the racks, breakers, transformers and cooling systems that let AI exist as a physical thing rather than a concept.

If you own a European or world equity index fund, you almost certainly own Schneider Electric. And through Schneider, a small slice of what every AI data centre is physically made of.

Data and images sourced from Schneider Electric 2025 Annual Report and Schneider Electric Q1 2026 Revenues Release.

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Developed Asia-Pacific.