Belimed Brand Guidelines: The Swiss Steriliser Maker Now Inside SteelcoBelimed

Stainless steel meets laundry technology.

Belimed is a Swiss maker of cleaning, disinfection and sterilisation equipment for hospitals, laboratories and drug makers, and since June 2024 it has been part of a larger company, SteelcoBelimed. Its history, as now told on the SteelcoBelimed website, dates the formal foundation of Belimed to 1990, when the company says it was set up in Switzerland by combining the stainless-steel expertise of Belinox with the laundry-technology know-how of Gehrig. The same history gives that first period a product: Belimed’s first range of cleaning and disinfection machines for flexible endoscopes.

The Gehrig side had deep local roots. The Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported in January 2015 that Belimed’s plant in Ballwil, in the canton of Lucerne, grew out of F. Gehrig AG, founded in the village in 1946, and that the plant was then the municipality’s largest employer. German Wikipedia’s article on the industrial group Metall Zug records that V-ZUG AG, the group’s appliance maker, took over F. Gehrig of Ballwil in 1988.

Metall Zug is the owner most closely tied to the name. Founded in Zug in 1887 as a metal-goods factory, it built its business on household appliances, and English Wikipedia, citing the group’s own history page, says it acquired Belimed in 1993. In the same year, the company says, Belimed began developing cleaning equipment for pharmaceutical production, its first step into what it calls life science.

The company also claims older roots through firms it bought later. SteelcoBelimed traces Belimed’s laboratory work to 1968, when Netzsch-Newamatic developed an automated washing machine for laboratory glassware, and its medical sterilisation work to 1977, when the Sauter Group produced its first steam steriliser. Both businesses joined Belimed in the late 1990s, which is why the company’s history page speaks of Belimed “since 1968” even though it dates the Belimed company itself to 1990.

A group assembled in the 1990s.

Belimed grew by acquisition. German Wikipedia lists the firms that Metall Zug, through V-ZUG AG, bought in the 1990s and later merged into the Belimed group: Kleindienst-Belimed of Augsburg in 1995, Avenatech of Miami in 1996, Netzsch Belimed of Waldkraiburg in Bavaria and Belimed of Grosuplje in Slovenia in 1997, and the Swiss Sauter group of Sulgen, in Thurgau, in 1999. In 2000, the same article says, the group began to present itself to the market under one name, and from 2005 it formed Metall Zug’s separate Infection Control business unit.

Its sites moved over the following decade. The company says it opened a new manufacturing facility in Slovenia in 2012 to meet growing production demand. In January 2015 Metall Zug announced that Belimed would close the Ballwil factory in stages by the end of 2016, SRF reported: about 130 people worked there, technical and administrative jobs were to move some 20 kilometres to Zug, and production was to go to Slovenia. At the time, SRF said, Belimed specialised in cleaning and sterilisation equipment for doctors’ practices, hospitals and laboratories and employed about 1,150 people in eleven countries. The company says its headquarters moved to Zug in 2015 and that it opened a training centre, the Belimed Academy, there the following year.

The range broadened beyond machines. In 2018, the company says, it introduced Belimed Protect, a line of cleaning chemistries for reprocessing medical devices, and German Wikipedia records that in July 2022 Belimed AG bought Amity Ltd of Barnsley, a British maker of specialist chemicals and detergents. A Portuguese sterilisation business, Sterifast, was acquired in 2017 and sold again in February 2020, according to the same article.

In 2019 the company was split in two. German Wikipedia says that until April 2019 all of the cleaning, disinfection and sterilisation work ran under Belimed AG; Metall Zug then separated the project-based pharmaceutical side as Belimed Life Science, leaving Belimed Infection Control to serve hospitals. The company says Belimed Life Science took its headquarters in Sulgen and serves pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, institutional, nutrition and cosmetics customers.

Design and documentation.

Sterilisation equipment is bought by hospital engineers, infection-control teams and the managers of sterile services departments — the rooms where used surgical instruments are washed, checked, packed and sterilised before they go back to the operating theatre. The makers describe their ranges in the order of that route. Getinge calls washer-disinfectors the first step in the reprocessing flow, then moves through sterilisers to the racks and trolleys that carry sterile goods back into the hospital.

The imagery of the category is practical rather than decorative: stainless-steel chambers, sliding or hinged chamber doors set into a wall, loading trolleys, wire baskets and instrument trays folded into blue sterilisation wrap. STERIS notes that its steam sterilisers are “often referred to as autoclaves” and sorts them by how many instrument trays fit in one load; Getinge groups its range into steam sterilisers, low-temperature sterilisers, loading equipment, and trays and baskets.

Many of the larger names grew by buying other companies, so their brands are layered. STERIS still sells steam sterilisers under the AMSCO name of the American Sterilizer Company, which it bought in 1996. Getinge folded Maquet, Atrium and other acquired names into a single Getinge brand in 2017, keeping some of them as product-family names. The makers in this set are based in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Israel and China.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. MEDICA, the medical-technology fair, is held in Düsseldorf. In Dubai, the show founded in 1975 as Arab Health now runs as World Health Expo Dubai, a new name announced at its 50th edition, TradeArabia reported; its 2026 edition moved to Expo City Dubai, Gulf News reported.

From a Metall Zug unit to a joint venture.

Belimed no longer stands on its own. In an ad hoc announcement on 10 June 2024, Metall Zug said its joint venture with Miele had closed on 7 June after the relevant authorities gave clearance. Metall Zug contributed its Infection Control business unit and the Belimed Life Science group; Miele contributed its Steelco group, an Italian maker of washer-disinfectors that the company says was founded in 2001 and joined the Miele group in 2017. Miele holds 67% and Metall Zug 33% of the new company, German Wikipedia and the announcement agree.

The announcement said the new company, based in Zug, would operate as SteelcoBelimed AG and “uniformly under this brand in the future.” Its products were to be made in an international network with sites at Riese Pio X and Cusano in Italy, Sulgen in Switzerland and Grosuplje in Slovenia, and the company’s own pages today describe production and research sites in those three countries. The old Belimed web address now leads to the SteelcoBelimed site, where Belimed Infection Control and Belimed Life Science appear as parts of the joint company’s history rather than as separate brands.

For a design guide, Belimed shows how an equipment name built up over three decades of mergers can end up inside a joint brand, carrying its stainless-steel, laboratory and hospital roots with it. Compare the Getinge and STERIS guides. For this guide we use a deep teal, ink and steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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