A Swedish company from 1883 and a Swiss one from 1891.

ABB’s three letters are a compressed company history. The A stands for ASEA, and the two Bs for Brown and Boveri. English Wikipedia explains that ASEA is short for Allmänna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget, which translates as General Swedish Electrical Company Limited, and that it was founded in 1883 in Västerås, Sweden, by Ludvig Fredholm, as a maker of electric lighting and generators. The Swedish name was already an abbreviation before the merger that produced ABB.

The other two letters come from people. English Wikipedia says Brown, Boveri & Cie, known as BBC, was formed in 1891 in Baden, near Zurich, by Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown and Walter Boveri, as a Swiss electrical engineering group producing motors, generators, steam turbines and transformers. swissinfo.ch gave the same founding year and place in a February 2004 report on the company’s legacy in Baden, written by Daniele Papacella.

That report described how closely the company and its town were tied. The historian Bruno Meier, editor of Baden’s cultural yearbook, told swissinfo.ch that “the past 100 years of Baden’s history are bound up with this mammoth company”. The report said BBC had employed both local people and immigrants since 1891, and that it ran recruitment offices in Switzerland and abroad. Workers came initially from Italy and later from Spain and Portugal; early on many lived in prefabricated huts near the works, and in the late 1960s the company put up large residential buildings with bathrooms in every apartment and green space nearby. The 2004 edition of the Badener Neujahrsblätter, the town’s yearbook, collected the experiences of those workers and their families.

ASEA’s home town was Västerås, BBC’s was Baden. The Swedish company carried its country in its own name, “Svenska”, while the Swiss company carried the surnames of its two founders, and each traded under those names until the merger of 1988.

Announced in August 1987, operating from January 1988.

The merger was announced on 10 August 1987. English Wikipedia says ASEA and BBC agreed to combine as ASEA Brown Boveri, shortened to ABB, with headquarters in both Zurich and Västerås and with each parent company holding half of the new business. The Finnish electrical company Strömberg, which ASEA had bought earlier that year, was included in the deal. ABB began operations on 5 January 1988. swissinfo.ch recorded the same year in its 2004 report: in 1988, it said, BBC merged with ASEA to form ABB.

In the new name, the Swedish partner, already known by an acronym, appears as one letter, and the Swiss partner, known by its founders’ surnames, appears as two. The full form, ASEA Brown Boveri, spells out all three, and the initials ABB are the form the company uses as its name today.

The merger changed Baden’s position. In the swissinfo.ch report, Bruno Meier said the creation of the merged industrial group had taken away the town’s pivotal role, and that while there were far fewer factory workers in Baden than in the 1960s, there were more service and engineering jobs, bringing new languages to the town, above all English.

For more than a decade the two parent companies stood behind ABB. English Wikipedia says that in 1999, as a final step in integrating the companies formerly known as ASEA and BBC, the directors approved a plan to create a single class of shares in the group. Today the company is incorporated in Switzerland as ABB Ltd and headquartered in Zurich, according to English Wikipedia, with listings on the SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich and Nasdaq Stockholm. swissinfo.ch, carrying a Keystone-SDA report in October 2025, called it the Swiss-Swedish technology group ABB, a description that still names both of the countries in its history.

Electrical group names and their marks.

European industrial identities tend to be built from plain materials. Many company names began as a founder’s surname, the name of a town or river, or an acronym left behind when two firms merged and kept a trace of each. Those names were rarely chosen for sound or meaning; they were registered, painted on a works gate and stamped into metal, and they stayed because changing them would have meant changing every plate, invoice and drawing at once.

That history shapes how the marks look today. A wordmark that has to be cast into a pump housing, etched onto a switch plate or printed on a shipping crate needs simple letterforms, generous spacing and a single colour that survives grime, paint and sunlight. Symbols are often abstract shapes or stylised initials rather than pictures, because they must read at the size of a thumbnail on a control panel and at the size of a building on a factory roof.

The brand surfaces are mostly physical: product plates, machine liveries, signage at plant gates, vehicle fleets, trade-fair stands and the technical manuals that travel with the equipment. Reviewing one of these identities means looking at where the mark is actually fixed, not only at the version on a screen.

Hitachi Energy, Accelleron and a robotics sale.

The ABB name has also been carried out of the company by businesses that left it. English Wikipedia records that ABB agreed in December 2018 to sell a majority stake in its Power Grids business to Hitachi. The Japanese group took control in July 2020, and the unit traded initially as Hitachi ABB Power Grids, keeping the old name in second place, before it was renamed Hitachi Energy in October 2021. Hitachi acquired the rest of the business from ABB in 2022, so the three letters dropped out of that name entirely.

A second business took a new name of its own. English Wikipedia says ABB spun off its turbocharging division to shareholders in October 2022, when it was listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange as Accelleron. The new company kept no part of the ABB name.

A third change followed in robotics. swissinfo.ch, carrying a Keystone-SDA report on 8 October 2025, said ABB was selling its robotics division to SoftBank Group, and that the earlier idea of spinning the business off as an independently listed company would not be pursued. The same report said the transaction was expected to close in mid to late 2026. Names have also moved the other way: English Wikipedia says ABB planned in 2025 to bring the residential electrical product lines it had acquired from GE under a single ABB ReliaHome brand, putting the three letters in front of a product name. Morten Wierod has been chief executive since August 2024, according to the same encyclopedia.

For a design guide, ABB shows how a merger name can be reduced to initials that point back to both partners, one letter for a Swedish acronym and two for a pair of Swiss founders, and how those initials can be lent to, or taken away from, the businesses that pass through the group. Compare Siemens, a German electrical group named after a founder, and Atlas Copco, another Swedish industrial company. For this guide we use signal red, brick and pale rose with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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