2. Hoover´s Handbook

Overview
ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. doesn't fight the power: it produces it. The Zurich-based engineering firm, made up of 1,000 companies in more than 100 countries around the world, is a leader in power generation, transmission, and distribution, as well as industrial and building systems.
It is also involved in rail transportation through a 50% joint venture with Daimler-Benz and operates a financial services unit to support its many construction and engineering projects. The company is jointly owned by ABB AB (formerly ASEA AB) of Sweden and ABB AG (formerly BBC Brown Boveri) of Switzerland.
The Wallenberg family's Investor AB controls 50% of the firm. Swedish chairman and former CEO Percy Barnevik has been a driving force in the continuing globalization of the company. He describes ABB as a "multidomestic" corporation with a decentralized structure, where national subsidiaries remain closely linked to their local customers and labor force. ABB is investing heavily in emerging areas such as China, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, where infrastructure and energy plant construction, as well as modernization, is booming. ABB is stepping up its investment in China to more than $1 billion and hopes to double its sales in that area by 2002.

When
Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) was formed in 1988 when two lackluster giants, ASEA AB of Sweden and BBC Brown Boveri of Switzerland, combined their electrical engineering and equipment businesses. Percy Barnevik, head of ASEA, became CEO of the new company. Ludwig Fredholm founded ASEA in Stockholm in 1883 as Electriska Aktiebolaget to make engineer Jonas Wenstrom's electric dynamo. In 1890 he merged his company with Wenstrom's brother's to form Allmanna Svenska Electriska Aktiebolaget (ASEA), a pioneer in industrial electrification.
Early in the 1900s ASEA participated in its first railway electrification project; by the 1920s and 1930s it provided locomotives and other equipment for Sweden's national railway. ASEA became one of Sweden's largest electric equipment makers by buying its rival, Elektromekano, in 1933. It entered the US market in 1947, and in 1962 it bought 20% of electric appliance maker Electrolux and formed Scandinavian Glasfiber with Owens-Corning Fiberglas (US). ASEA created the nuclear power venture ASEA-ATOM with the Swedish government in 1968, buying full control in 1982.
BBC Brown Boveri had been formed as a partnership, Brown, Boveri, and Company, by Charles Brown and Walter Boveri in Baden, Switzerland, in 1891 to make electrical generation equipment. It produced the first steam turbines in Europe in 1900. BBC established companies in Germany (1893), France (1894), and Italy (1903) to produce and distribute its steam and gas turbine equipment. After WWII it diversified into nuclear power generating equipment.
Electrical machinery production expanded with the purchase of Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (1967), a Swis company that manufactured electrical equipment in France and Spain. In 1979 BBC formed a joint venture with Gould (US) to produce electrical equipment. In an unusual merger, both ASEA and BBC withheld certain assets from the combination, such as ASEA' s holdings in Electrolux. Each company continues as a separate entity, sharing equal ownership of ABB. ABB formed two joint ventures with Westinghouse in 1988: one to produce turbines and generators and the other to make electrical transmission equipment. In 1989 it bought Westinghouse's half of the transmission joint venture as well as Combustion Engineering for a total exceeding $2 billion. The purchase of Cincinnati Milacron in 1990 enhanced ABB' s industry automation and environmental control systems segments. An ABB-led consortium was awarded a $1.25 billion contract in 1992 to build one of the world's largest hydroelectric plants, in Iran. The company merged its transportation segment into ADtranz a joint venture with Daimler-Benz that is the world's #1 maker of trains in 1995. That year it added contracts in Colombia, Italy, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. ABB continued to confirm its global presence in 1996, winning contracts to expand Manila's light rail system and to build power plants in Thailand and Turkey, and an oil refinery in India. In 1997 ABB' s involvement in a $5.7 billion hydroelectric dam in Malaysia was threatened when it failed to settle contractual disputes with its partner in the project, Ekran Bhd.