ABB bought an American boilermaker and inherited its asbestos bill
In its first two years, the newly merged Swedish-Swiss engineering group ABB snapped up dozens of companies, among them Combustion Engineering of Connecticut. That purchase quietly carried claims over asbestos products sold long before, and in 2001 they pushed a company used to steady profits into its first annual loss.
ABB grew out of two nineteenth-century electrical pioneers. ASEA was founded in Vasteras, Sweden, in 1883 by Ludvig Fredholm to make electric lighting and generators, while Charles Brown and Walter Boveri set up Brown, Boveri and Cie near Zurich in 1891, building motors, turbines and transformers. The two announced their merger in August 1987, and the combined company opened for business on 5 January 1988 with about 160,000 employees and revenue of roughly 15 billion dollars.
It went shopping at once. Around 15 acquisitions came in year one, and another 40 in 1989, including Westinghouse's transmission and distribution assets and an agreement to buy Combustion Engineering. The asbestos claims attached to that firm's earlier products surfaced a decade later. ABB doubled its settlement provisions from 470 million to 940 million dollars, producing a net loss of 691 million for 2001, and the board even sought partial refunds of pensions paid to two former chief executives. The liabilities were finally settled in 2006 for 1.43 billion dollars.
Its engineering record is more flattering. ASEA was the first company to put a microprocessor into an industrial robot, and helped develop the Azipod, a ship propulsion unit mounted outside the hull for better manoeuvring. The miniature circuit breaker, invented by Hugo Stotz and now found in almost every home, also belongs to ABB's lineage. In 1991 it introduced the IRB 6000, the first modular robot, which could be reconfigured for different jobs.
Through the 2010s the group leaned hard into robotics and automation, buying Baldor Electric for 4.2 billion dollars and later General Electric's electrification arm. It sold its big power grids business to Hitachi in 2020, having until then been Switzerland's largest industrial employer, and became title partner of the all-electric Formula E championship in 2018.
Source: ABB
