EPCOS Brand Guidelines: The Siemens–Matsushita Components Name That TDK Absorbed

A 1989 joint venture that became a Munich listing.

EPCOS began as a joint venture between two electrical groups. In 1989 the German company Siemens and the Japanese electronics maker Matsushita, the company now called Panasonic, set up Siemens Matsushita Components, according to English and German Wikipedia and eeNews Europe. Ten years later the business was given a new name, EPCOS, and taken to the stock market.

The flotation was a double one. EPCOS AG shares opened on 15 October 1999 in Frankfurt and New York at the same time, German Wikipedia says, with Siemens and Matsushita each keeping a 12.5 per cent stake. The company had its head office in Munich. Apart from a spell in the DAX, Germany’s blue-chip index, from February 2000 to December 2002, its shares sat in the Nemax 50 technology index and its successor, the TecDAX.

The two founding parents then left. Siemens sold its shares in 2006, and in October 2006 Matsushita also sold its holding, both Wikipedia editions say; trading of the shares in New York ended in 2007, German Wikipedia adds.

The independent years were short. TDK, the Tokyo electronics group, agreed to acquire a controlling stake on 31 July 2008, English Wikipedia says. On 16 September 2008 Computerwoche reported that the European Commission had cleared the takeover, that the TecDAX company was to remain a listed German business, that both company brands were to be kept, and that TDK had promised to keep the Munich head office as one of the two operational centres of the combined business. EPCOS then had about 18,300 employees worldwide and, besides its German operations, European sites in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Spain, the report said. In the same report the company’s investor-relations head said EPCOS had built a strong presence in India and China but had lacked a foothold in Japan, the largest consumer-electronics market, while TDK was weaker in Europe and in automotive and industrial business; the acceptance period for TDK’s cash offer ran until 7 October 2008.

Capacitors, ferrites, filters and arresters.

EPCOS made the parts that sit around chips rather than the chips themselves. English Wikipedia lists the range as capacitors, ceramic components, EMC filters, inductors, non-linear resistors, surge arresters and ferrites. German Wikipedia is more specific: aluminium electrolytic and film capacitors, ferrites and inductors, piezo and protection components such as piezoceramics and surge arresters, EMC filters and sensors.

The business was spread across several continents. German Wikipedia gives production in Germany at Heidenheim an der Brenz, for capacitors and inductors, and in Berlin, for sensors and arresters, with further plants in Europe, the Americas and Asia, among them Brazil, India, Malaysia and China. English Wikipedia names Gravataí in Brazil, Málaga in Spain, Szombathely in Hungary, Deutschlandsberg in Austria and Šumperk in the Czech Republic among the sites, as well as Dallas in the United States.

One line of business left the group. Early in 2016, German Wikipedia says, TDK agreed a joint venture with Qualcomm called RF360, into which the EPCOS business in surface acoustic wave components, radio-frequency filters and modules, passed together with its production. The Munich factory for those parts moved into RF360 in February 2017, and in September 2019 the company sold its share of the venture to Qualcomm, the same article says.

Another line came in. In April 2018 the company, still called EPCOS, took a majority stake in Relyon Plasma, a research, development and manufacturing company for plasma technology in Regensburg, German Wikipedia says.

How passive-component makers present themselves.

Passive components are hard to photograph and harder to brand. A multilayer ceramic capacitor in the smallest sizes is a speck that sits like a grain of sand on a fingertip, and a scatter of chips on a fingertip is one way to show that scale. Resistors, inductors, filters and fuses look little different from one maker to the next, so the presentation leans on the company’s name, its colours and the way it pictures the work behind the part.

The pictures repeat across the trade. Reels of tape-and-reel parts, ready for pick-and-place machines, stand for volume. Through-hole resistors with their coloured bands, cut-away capacitors that open up the layers or the wound film inside, and close-ups of ceramic sheets being stacked stand for the craft. Automated inspection lines, with cameras checking each part, stand for consistency, and pictures of factories and laboratories often stand in for the end products the parts go into.

Trade shows are where these brands meet engineers in person. electronica in Munich and CEATEC in Japan are among the fairs where component makers take large stands, and some use them for showpieces that have little to do with a datasheet: Murata, for one, says it demonstrated its bicycle-riding Murata Boy robot at CEATEC JAPAN 2005.

Many of these companies began with a material rather than a product: ferrite, titanium oxide, barium titanate, tantalum or film. Several have changed hands or merged, so names, marks and owners do not always line up. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and where it says its parts are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A company name retired in 2018.

Two dates mark the end of EPCOS as a company. On 1 October 2009 EPCOS was combined with TDK’s own components business under TDK-EPC Corporation, founded in Japan; its listing on German exchanges ended in early November 2009, and TDK has held all of its shares since March 2010, German Wikipedia says. Its European sales organisation was moved, together with TDK’s, into TDK Europe GmbH.

The company name went next. On 1 October 2018 EPCOS AG became TDK Electronics AG. eeNews Europe reported the same day that all other EPCOS entities worldwide would also be renamed with TDK as part of their names, a process expected to take nine to twelve months, and that the change would have no effect on the product portfolio. EPCOS, the report said, would continue as a product brand for components, alongside InvenSense, Micronas, Tronics and the power-supply maker TDK-Lambda.

EPCOS therefore no longer exists as a company. The business trades as TDK Electronics, a maker of electronic components and systems with its seat in Munich, German Wikipedia says, and a subsidiary of the Japanese TDK Corporation, English Wikipedia says. Its portfolio still covers the families EPCOS was known for, capacitors, ferrites and inductors, EMC filters and protection components among them, and German Wikipedia gives its production and development sites as spread across Europe, the Americas and Asia, with Heidenheim and Berlin as the German plants.

For a design guide, EPCOS shows how a component name can outlive the company that carried it, kept on as a product mark after the company itself took its owner’s name. Compare TDK, the owner that absorbed it, and Panasonic Industry, the device business of the group that was once one of its two parents. For this guide we use a slate blue, a copper and a warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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