Landis+Gyr Brand Guidelines: The 1896 Zug Meter Maker From Theiler & Co. to the SIX

A meter workshop in central Switzerland.

Landis+Gyr began in Zug, in central Switzerland, in 1896. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, the Swiss national historical dictionary, says the designer Richard Theiler and the entrepreneur Adelrich Gyr founded Theiler & Co. that year to make electricity meters developed by Theiler; German Wikipedia adds that the firm also made telephone inductors and phonographs. In 1904 the engineer Heinrich Landis took over the business, and in 1905 he brought in Karl Heinrich Gyr as a partner, the lexicon says; the firm then traded as Landis & Gyr.

Demand for meters grew with the electrical industry. The lexicon records a sales office in Berlin in 1908 and a meter factory in Alsace in 1912, and the company’s own history names its first foreign subsidiaries, in London, Vienna and Frankfurt, in 1912. When it became a joint-stock company in 1914 it had more than 800 employees and was the largest employer in the canton of Zug. After 1918 it introduced rationalisation measures; in the 1920s it opened branches in the United States and Australia — the company dates its New York and Melbourne offices to 1924 — built further factories abroad and bought competitors.

From the 1930s Landis & Gyr broadened into telemetry, remote control and heating controls, the lexicon says. German Wikipedia dates a heat-engineering laboratory to 1940 and calls it the root of the later Building Control division, which became part of Siemens Building Technologies in 1998. In 1956 heirs led by Andreas Brunner and Gottfried Straub took over the management after a power struggle, reorganised its finances and turned it into a holding company, the lexicon says; German Wikipedia adds that its shares were by then traded on the Zurich exchange.

Payphones, Kinegrams and a long line of owners.

By around 1970 the group employed about 14,000 people, 5,200 of them in Zug, the lexicon says, and it had added vending machines and air-conditioning and ventilation products. In 1976 it bought Duncan Electric of Lafayette, Indiana, a maker of meters for the American market, according to English and German Wikipedia. Through its Geneva subsidiary SODECO it made public payphones that took both coins and cards, German Wikipedia says, and English Wikipedia says its optical phone cards were used in countries including Switzerland, Belgium and Israel until 2006. It also developed the Kinegram, an optical security feature used on official documents and banknotes, including the euro, according to German Wikipedia; the payphone and Kinegram businesses were sold shortly before the Siemens takeover.

From the mid-1970s, and especially after Brunner and Straub stepped down in 1984, the group was repeatedly restructured and reduced, the lexicon says. In 1987 the Gyr heirs sold their shares to the industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny, who sold his majority to the Swiss holding company Elektrowatt in 1995; with that, the stock-market listing ended and the firm lost its independence, German Wikipedia says. The company archive for 1896 to 1998 is held by the Archiv für Zeitgeschichte at ETH Zurich.

In 1998 Elektrowatt’s industrial businesses passed to Siemens, which merged its own meter business with that of Landis & Gyr as Siemens Metering AG in Zug. German Wikipedia says the merged business had about 6,500 staff and 24 factories, and that restructuring later cut it to under 4,000 employees. In 2002 Siemens sold it to an American investor, which ran it under the name Landis+Gyr, the lexicon says; German Wikipedia names the buyer as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Meters, networks and dashboards.

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 private equity to the SIX, and out of Europe.

In 2004 an Australian group, Bayard Capital, took over, the lexicon says. German Wikipedia describes a buy-and-build strategy that added network and communications businesses; English Wikipedia lists the Finnish Enermet group and the American firms Hunt Technologies and Cellnet in 2006, while the company dates those purchases to 2007. In 2008 Bayard became Landis+Gyr Holdings and moved its seat from Sydney to Zug, German Wikipedia says. In 2011 Toshiba bought the group together with the state-backed Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, taking 60 and 40 percent. On 21 July 2017 Landis+Gyr listed its shares on the SIX Swiss Exchange.

Manufacturing has moved with ownership. In April 2015 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that meter assembly in Zug would end and move to the company’s factory in Corinth, Greece, which had made meters for the European market since 1973; Zug kept the group headquarters, sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and development. The group is now based in neighbouring Cham.

In 2026 it sold its business in its home region. On 9 April 2026 Landis+Gyr announced that it had completed the sale of its Europe, Middle East and Africa business to the private equity investor AURELIUS, with economic effect from 31 March; the buyer took the region’s metering for electricity, gas, heat and water, the related software and services, five production sites and about 2,800 employees, according to the release and the law firm Homburger. Chief executive Peter Mainz said the company would now focus on the Americas and Asia Pacific. Its utility systems are sold under the Gridstream name, German Wikipedia says, and the company says more than 3,500 utilities use its products.

For a design guide, Landis+Gyr shows a 130-year-old name that has outlived many owners, carried since 2002 with a plus sign in place of the old ampersand. Compare Siemens, which owned the meter business from 1998 to 2002, and Itron, another meter maker built by acquisition. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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