Secure Meters Brand Guidelines: The Family-Run Electricity Meter Maker From Udaipur

An electronic meter business born in Udaipur.

Secure Meters is an Indian maker of electricity meters and energy-management products based in Udaipur, Rajasthan, the city the company calls “the City of Lakes.” The company says it began life in 1987, “at the advent of the electronic age,” and that the idea of entering the electricity metering business was first conceived two years earlier, in 1985. Its own timeline describes the start as a fusion of Indian and British engineers, and records a technical collaboration signed in 1987 with Polymeters around a technology it calls CALMU, in which the money spent on electricity was shown on an in-home display that could also be used to control load and make payment.

The company credits Sanjaya Singhal with founding Secure and with a pioneering role in introducing electronic metering to Indian utilities, to address tampering, fraud and poor data quality. The Singhal family still runs it. Secure describes itself as “a family owned and managed business” whose mandate is to grow a business “that endures for generations,” and its leadership pages list Suket Singhal as Group CEO and Ananya Singhal as Joint Managing Director, with other members of the family on the board.

The early years, as the company tells them, moved quickly. In 1988 it received what it describes as India’s first order for electronic electricity meters, from the Ahmedabad Electricity Company. Product assembly began in 1989, alongside the first branch offices in Mumbai and Delhi and a portable meter-testing set called Accuchek, designed for checking meters on site. In 1993 Secure moved into a purpose-built manufacturing unit in Udaipur, and in 1995 it received a Government of India award for research and development in the electrical sector, according to its timeline. A second plant followed in Himachal Pradesh in 2002. The company also says, on its own site, that it created the first commercially viable meter of its kind.

From grid points to the household.

Secure’s products follow electricity from the power station to the home. At the grid end, the company’s timeline lists Apex, a grid-metering system launched in 1998 for bulk transfer points, and later the Prometer 100 for power-transfer points, launched in 2015. For distribution networks it made Prodigy, a distribution-transformer metering unit launched in 2005, whose thread-through design the company says was meant to make tampering harder. At the household end there are smart and prepayment electricity meters and, from 2015, a compact single-phase meter named Saral, which Secure describes as the smallest single-phase meter in the world.

Prepayment runs through the company’s story. Its timeline says that in 1999 it launched an online prepayment vending system under a contract with Northern Ireland Electricity, built around a system called Liberty, and that the Liberty approach was later used in Manipur in north-east India, where the company says more than 150,000 people now buy their electricity in advance. Secure also lists prepayment for gas and heat, along with heat meters, panel meters, current transformers and data-acquisition systems for industrial and commercial sites.

Beyond meters, Secure sells heating controls and services. Its Beanbag family includes Beanbag Heat, an app-controlled home heating product the company dates to 2017, and the group offers energy auditing, meter-data analysis and installation. In 2012 it launched Censeo, a system for monitoring the performance of pumps, blowers and turbines. Secure says more than 60 million of its products have been deployed, that more than 22 million are connected and send data daily, and that its products are installed in over 70 countries.

Metering as identity.

Utility meters are everywhere and rarely looked at. They sit in cupboards and basements, in pits under the pavement and in boxes on outside walls, and today they are read far more often by machines than by people. The makers in this guide build electricity, water, gas and heat meters, and increasingly the radio networks and software that collect and manage their readings.

Their imagery follows that shift. Factory photographs show rows of grey and white meters clamped into test rigs, brass water-meter bodies waiting for assembly and the dials of mechanical registers. Newer material shows small digital displays and communication modules, and control-room screens where a utility follows consumption, outages and the state of its network across a town or a region. Product shots tend to sit on plain light backgrounds, close in spirit to the technical drawings of a catalogue.

People appear mostly as installers and operators: field engineers beside liveried utility vans, technicians opening a meter cabinet or lifting the lid of a water-meter pit, staff in front of dashboards. Trade fairs such as Enlit, where the power industry meets, and national utility shows are where these companies present themselves to their customers, and their stands lean on the same mix of hardware, maps and screens.

Ownership in the sector has changed often, with listed groups, private equity investors and family firms buying and selling meter businesses across borders. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Udaipur to ten countries.

Secure grew outside India through new offices and acquisitions. Its timeline records the start of Australian operations in 2004, the purchase of the Swedish metering company Cewe Instrument in 2005 and of the British company Horstmann Controls in 2007, the step that took Secure into home controls and energy management. Another company page dates the arrival in Sweden to 2007, so the year of the Cewe deal differs between the company’s own pages. Both names survive as brands of the group: securemeters.com lists Cewe Instrument and Horstmann as “our brands.” In Australia, the company says it won its first smart-metering order from the state of Victoria in 2008, and its timeline records a Queen’s Award for international business in the United Kingdom in 2006.

The most recent documented purchase came in 2021. In November that year Venture Intelligence, citing Business Line and a press release, reported that Udaipur-based Secure Meters had acquired all of Adaptricity, a smart-grid company in Zurich, Switzerland, which had been majority-owned by the German wire and cable group Leoni; Adaptricity was to operate as a subsidiary of the Secure Meters Group. Secure remains privately owned and headquartered in Udaipur. It says more than 7,200 people work for it across ten countries: India, Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

For a design guide, Secure Meters shows a family-run Udaipur engineering company carrying one short, plain name across meters, heating controls and services in ten countries. Compare Landis+Gyr and Itron, two other makers of electricity meters and metering networks. For this guide we use a deep Udaipur teal, warm sandstone and lake blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Secure Meters’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.