ABB Ltd.
Industrial Robots
ABB was born from one of the boldest mergers in industrial history: in 1988, Sweden's ASEA and Switzerland's Brown, Boveri & Cie — two century-old electrical engineering rivals — combined to form ASEA Brown Boveri, creating a company that could serve utilities and industry on both sides of the Atlantic with a single product range. The merger became a template for cross-border consolidation that the rest of European industry would copy for decades.
Today ABB is organized around electrification, motion, process automation, and robotics & discrete automation. Its product range is enormous: switchgear and distribution equipment that keep power grids stable, motors and drives that run pumps and conveyors, the industrial robots that assemble cars and electronics, and the process control systems that run chemical plants and mines. The company's ACS drives and IRB robot lines are industry standards.
With about 105,000 employees and annual revenue near US$32 billion, ABB has restructured repeatedly — selling its power grid business to Hitachi in 2020 to sharpen focus on automation and electrification. For industrial buyers, ABB's strength is breadth with integration: motors, drives, robots, and software from one vendor, engineered to work together, backed by a service network that spans over 100 countries.
