Anglo Belgian Corporation Brand Guidelines: Ghent’s 1912 Medium-Speed Engine Works

Nine investors, a notary and a Diesel licence.

Anglo Belgian Corporation, usually shortened to ABC, builds medium-speed engines in Ghent. The company dates its founding to 26 October 1912, when, it says, nine industrial investors met at the office of a Ghent notary to set up a firm to build semi-diesel internal combustion engines. Dutch-language Wikipedia names Georges Carels as chairman and the brothers Marcel and Richard Drory among the founders. Carels came from the Ghent engine works of Carels Brothers, which, the company says, had built engines under Rudolf Diesel’s licence since about 1899 and brought that licence into the new firm.

The original name was Anglo Belgian Company. The company says the founders expected part of the capital to come from England; the First World War meant that money never arrived, but the name stayed, and people shortened it to “Anglo” or “ABC.” Its first workshop, according to Dutch-language Wikipedia, was the former works of the gas-engine maker Onghena on what was then the Nijverheidskaai, and the company says it showed three engines at the Ghent international exhibition of 1913.

The war stopped the young business. Dutch-language Wikipedia says the plant’s machinery was confiscated in February 1918 and moved to Germany, halting production; the company adds that the German army occupied the factory and that young workers were made to work behind the lines for it. After the armistice most machines came back and new equipment was bought in the United States, the company says. Between the wars ABC sold widely to Belgian coastal fishermen and inland-barge owners, and took a licence from Paxman Ricardo of London for faster engines running at 1,500 rpm.

The two accounts of the Second World War differ in detail. Dutch-language Wikipedia says machines and finished engines sent by train towards France in 1940 were intercepted by German forces at Mouscron and shipped to Hamburg, then bought back, after which ABC built tractors for farming and transport during the war and supplied its workers with food and coal. The company’s own history says production stayed low, that it kept supplying the fishing fleet and river transport, and that the spare time went into design work: two prototype four-stroke engines, with two and three cylinders, were ready by the end of the war and became the base of the DU (“Diesel Universal”) line.

From DU to DZC, and a new name in 1980.

After 1945 the DU grew into a family. The company’s history traces a turbocharged DUS, a naturally aspirated DX and turbocharged DXS running at 750 rpm instead of 600, and the intercooled DXC, which it says doubled the output of the same cylinder. In 1973 ABC took a licence from the French firm SEMT Pielstick for the PA4 range, and it developed a new engine of its own, the DZC, running at 1,000 rpm and able to burn heavy fuel, the company says.

Ownership changed as the business struggled in the 1970s. Dutch-language Wikipedia dates a restart to 27 March 1980, when the firm became Anglo Belgian Corporation, keeping the ABC initials. The company names the new shareholders as the transformer maker Pauwels, the construction company Batibo and the Belgian Shipbuilder Corporation, with the state investment company GIMV joining later. After Pauwels and GIMV left in 1984, the Luxembourg holding Ogepar took the company over on 7 December 1985, according to Dutch-language Wikipedia, which describes ABC as part of the Ogepar Group.

Under Ogepar the DZC became the main product. The company says both its engine ranges were adapted to run as dual-fuel engines, and that in 1997 it began designing V versions of the DZ with 12 and 16 cylinders, doubling the range to about 5,000 hp; it says more than 1,200 of these V engines have left the Ghent factory. A further engine, developed with the Austrian engineering firm AVL, needed a new 5,000-square-metre assembly hall, which the company says was started in 2011.

Today the company describes itself as a maker of medium-speed engines between 600 and 10,400 kW, for ship propulsion and onboard generating sets, diesel-electric and diesel-hydraulic locomotives, power stations, floating cranes, pump sets and emergency generators for nuclear power plants, and says more than 90 per cent of its output is exported. Its marine pages list coasters, ferries, dredgers, fishing vessels, inland barges, offshore vessels and tugboats, and say the engines can be adapted to run on heavy fuel oil, compressed or liquefied natural gas and biofuels. Dutch-language Wikipedia lists uses including the Belgian railways’ series 77 locomotives and emergency generators for EDF.

Design and documentation.

Marine engine makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and ship managers rather than to the public, and their websites read like technical catalogues. The core of most is an engine range sorted by bore and output. WinGD names its two-stroke engines by cylinder bore in centimetres, from the X52 to the X92, while Everllence gives its four-stroke engines bore-and-stroke numbers such as 32/44 and 49/60. Letters added to those numbers mark the fuel, the generation or the version.

The pictures follow the product. These companies publish cutaway renderings that open an engine to show its cylinders, pistons and crankshaft, alongside photographs of finished engines on test beds and in engine rooms. Model names, cylinder counts and output figures sit beside the images, so a page often reads more like a data sheet than an advertisement.

Fuel has become one of the main ways these makers describe themselves. Their websites sort engines by fuel type as well as by vessel type, with pages for liquefied natural gas, methanol, ammonia and LPG; WinGD adds ethanol, and Everllence marks its alternative-fuel two-stroke engines with a suffix for each fuel. Dual-fuel engines, which run on gas or on liquid fuel, are presented through type designations and technical descriptions in the companies’ own terms.

Two other features recur. Service network maps and location finders show where parts and field engineers can be found; Everllence speaks of more than 140 service locations, and WinGD runs a lifecycle-support arm under its own name. Heritage timelines, meanwhile, tie current engines to Rudolf Diesel, whose engine was developed with MAN in Augsburg in the 1890s and licensed to Sulzer in Winterthur, giving the oldest names in the field more than a century of dates to show.

Evolve, hydrogen and a Ghent award.

The newest platform is called Evolve. In September 2026 ABC presented the 16EV23, which it says completes the Evolve V-engine range as a fuel-flexible platform; its chief executive said in October 2026 that Evolve is designed to run on fuels including hydrogen, methanol and ethanol. Hydrogen work also runs through BeHydro, which its website describes as a joint venture between ABC and the Belgian shipping group CMB, offering dual-fuel and pure-hydrogen versions of the 6, 8, 12 and 16-cylinder DZ engines for marine, rail and power use.

Recognition in 2026 was regional and maritime. On 8 October 2026 the company reported that it had won the Industry category of the first HITT Awards from Voka Oost-Vlaanderen, the East Flanders chamber of commerce, with the jury citing robotics investment at its Vynckier site and work with the UGent Racing student team. In November it noted that the commissioning service operation vessel Windcat Rotterdam, named Ship of the Year 2026 by KNVTS in the Netherlands, uses one 12DZC and two 8DZC engines in its hybrid propulsion system.

ABC presents itself as an engineering works rather than a consumer brand: three initials, the line “We power your future” on its news posts, and a website organised by market — marine propulsion and auxiliary gensets, land-based power generation, engines for traction and special applications.

For a design guide, Anglo Belgian Corporation shows how a century-old works can carry its initials through name changes, owners and fuels. Compare Wärtsilä, another European maker of medium-speed engines, and Bergen Engines. For this guide we use an engine-room blue, quay grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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