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Company name | ABB Ltd. |
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Company logo | |
Company type | Publicly-traded limited company (, , ) |
Foundation | 1988 through merger of ASEA (1883) of Sweden and Brown, Boveri & Cie (1891) of Switzerland |
Location | Zürich, Switzerland |
Key people | Joe Hogan (CEO), Hubertus von Grünberg (Chairman) |
Area served | Worldwide |
Industry | Power technology, Industrial automation |
Revenue | US $31.59 billion (2010) |
Operating income | US $3.818 billion (2010) |homepage = www.abb.com |
Intl | yes |
ABB is a Swiss-Swedish multinational corporation headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, operating mainly in the power and automation technology areas. It ranked 143rd in Forbes Ranking (2010).
ABB is one of the largest engineering companies as well as one of the largest conglomerates in the world. ABB has operations in around 100 countries, with approximately 124,000 employees,
ABB's history goes back to the late nineteenth century. ASEA was incorporated by Ludwig Fredholm in 1883 and Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) was formed in 1891 in Baden, Switzerland, by Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown and Walter Boveri as a Swiss group of electrical companies producing AC and DC motors, generators, steam turbines and transformers.
ABB bought International Combustion Ltd from Rolls-Royce in 1997.
ABB's boiler and fossil fuel businesses were purchased by Alstom in 2000, and its nuclear business was purchased by Westinghouse Electric Company also in 2000.
In 2000, ABB signed a contract for the delivery of equipment and services for two North Korean nuclear powerplants to be supplied under an agreement with the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), a consortium formed in 1995 by the governments of the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Union. Also in 2000, ABB formally divested from a joint venture named ABB-Alstom Power and sold its interest in conventional power generation systems to Alstom Power. ABB's nuclear business was sold to BNFL and merged into Westinghouse Electric Company.
In 2001, ABB was ranked as number one on the Dow Jones corporate sustainability index for the third year in a row.
In 2002 ABB asked Lindahl, the company's former chief executive, to return some of his $50 million retirement pay, which its board called excessive. ABB also asked its former chairman Percy Barnevik to pay back part of his $87 million pension package. The size of the pensions was disclosed at the same time as ABB's $691 million net loss for 2001 made headlines and drew sharp criticism in Switzerland and Sweden.
ABB's Building Systems business unit was sold off in 2004 to Capvis, a Swiss private equity company, as part of ABB's strategy to focus on power and automation technologies. ABB's building systems businesses in Australia and Hong Kong were sold off the year before in May 2003 to Downer EDI Limited. Building Systems provided services for building facilities encompassing indoor air quality, building automation as well as power distribution and management.
Financial debt and lingering asbestos liability brought ABB to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s. In 2006, ABB returned to financial health by settling its asbestos liability regarding claims that were filed against ABB's U.S. subsidiaries, Combustion Engineering and Lummus Global. In August 2007, Lummus Global was sold to CB&I;.
In 2009, ABB realigned its automation divisions to enhance growth opportunities. As of January 1, 2010, the business units in the Automation Products and Robotics divisions were regrouped into two new divisions – Discrete Automation and Motion, and Low Voltage Products. The Process Automation division remained unchanged except for the addition of the instrumentation business from the Automation Products division.
In 2011 ABB accrued Baldor Electric USA for $4.2 billion in an all-cash transaction
Former CEOs:
Chairman of the Board
The Board of Directors is chaired by Hubertus von Grünberg. He took over the position in May 2007, following the retirement of Jürgen Dormann, who had chaired the board since 2002.
Former Board Members:
Category:ABB Asea Brown Boveri Category:Companies of Sweden Category:Companies of Switzerland Category:Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange Category:Companies listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange Category:Industrial machine manufacturers Category:Robotics companies Category:Companies related to the Wallenberg family Category:Companies formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange Category:Orphan initialisms Category:Electrical engineering companies Category:Organisations based in Zurich
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