Semperit Brand Guidelines: Vienna Rubber Since 1824, Sempermed Gloves and an Industrial Turn

A tailor’s waterproof cloth and a Latin slogan.

Semperit counts its history from 1824, when, the company says, the tailor Johann Nepomuk Reithoffer took out a patent for waterproof fabrics in Vienna. German Wikipedia says Reithoffer later moved production to Wimpassing im Schwarzatale in Lower Austria, where he built a works in 1850; that plant is still described as the group’s parent works. The company says that by 1872 about 800 people worked there, making shoes, combs, coats and technical rubber goods.

The name came from elsewhere. German Wikipedia says the Hungarian businessman Josef Miskolczy founded a rubber goods factory at Traiskirchen in 1898, began using the brand Semperit in 1906 — from the Latin semper it, “it always goes” — and renamed the firm Semperit Gummiwerke in 1909. The Österreichisch-Amerikanische Gummifabrik, a Vienna company formed in 1889 with backing from the Wiener Bankverein and Continental of Hanover, bought it in 1910–1912 and took the Semperit name; in 1923 it bought Reithoffer’s old Wimpassing works. The company says its shares were listed in Vienna in 1890, and that by 1926 it was Austria’s second-largest industrial group, with 9,000 staff and nine factories. Tyres became its largest line by 1929.

The Nazi years are part of that record. In a 2021 study in the journal Geschichte und Region, the historian Andrea Komlosy writes that after the 1938 Anschluss Semperit was fitted into the German war economy and, working closely with Continental, took control of rubber firms across eastern and south-eastern Europe; in May 1941 it was declared the first “National Socialist model enterprise” in annexed Austria. Komlosy notes that even the company’s own 190th-anniversary history records the use of forced labourers in its Lower Austrian works, while academic research judges the period more harshly than that book. Semperit’s website now says plainly that “forced labourers are employed” in those years. Its general director, Franz Josef Messner, also worked with a resistance group from 1942; he was arrested by the regime in 1944, German Wikipedia says.

From Wimpassing to Thailand and Malaysia.

Gloves were an old line. Semperit says they have been made at Wimpassing since the 19th century. After the oil crisis of the 1970s hit its tyre business, the company sold the tyre division to Continental in 1985, and German Wikipedia says Continental still holds the rights to the Semperit name for tyres — so a Semperit tyre today is a Continental product, not one from the Vienna group.

The slimmer company, it says, concentrated on gloves, hoses, moulded goods and conveyor belts. In 1989 it opened its first glove factory in Thailand with the joint-venture partner Sri Trang, as Siam Sempermed; Komlosy records the joint venture’s founding that year and a second plant in 1997, with examination gloves made in Thailand while surgical gloves stayed at Wimpassing, packed in Hungary and sterilised in Germany. The company says annual output reached 2.6 billion examination and protective gloves by the end of 1998. The medical business traded as Sempermed.

Malaysia came next. In October 2012 Semperit agreed to buy a large stake in Latexx Partners, a latex and nitrile glove maker at Kamunting, and by mid-2013 it held more than 95 percent, German Wikipedia says, citing ORF and a company statement. Komlosy writes that the new glove factory built at Kamunting two years later was the largest organic investment in the company’s history.

Then Semperit changed course. In January 2020 it announced that it would leave the medical business altogether, German Wikipedia says, citing ORF; Komlosy notes that strong pandemic demand delayed the plan. The sale to the South-East Asian glove maker Harps Global was signed in December 2022. The first closing, on 31 August 2023, covered the Malaysian examination-glove plants, the porcelain hand-formers made there and the worldwide sales units, the company announced; the surgical-glove plant at Wimpassing and a packing company at Sopron in Hungary went to Harps with effect from 30 June 2024, when Semperit said it had “exited the glove business completely.”

Gloves, rubber and the record.

Disposable gloves are among the most anonymous products in healthcare. They arrive in plain dispenser boxes, are worn for minutes and are thrown away, and most of the companies that make them sell to distributors, hospital buyers and other brands rather than to the public. Their visual identities are therefore built less around the product in use and more around the factory, the material and the scale of output.

The pictures repeat across the category. A gloved hand in blue or purple nitrile is held against a white ground; long dipping lines carry rows of ceramic hand-shaped formers through tanks of latex or nitrile; finished gloves are stripped, stacked and boxed; and dispenser boxes are piled into walls of colour, each size and material given its own shade. Cleanroom and hospital scenes supply the setting, with gowned staff, stainless steel and soft, even light.

Geography is part of the story. Malaysia and Thailand, both rubber-growing countries, are home to many of the makers in this series, and corporate material from the region often opens with aerial views of factory complexes, rows of long white sheds, alongside figures for lines, plants and annual capacity. Makers in China, Europe and elsewhere use the same vocabulary of automation, testing laboratories and certificates.

Trade fairs are where many of these brands meet their buyers. Stands at MEDICA in Düsseldorf and at the Dubai healthcare show long known as Arab Health tend to show stacked boxes, glove samples and product walls, with a company name in a clean sans and a colour that can carry from carton to booth. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle that shared language.

An elastomer specialist with a two-century name.

Today Semperit AG Holding, based in Vienna, describes itself as a maker of elastomer products for industrial customers, organised in two divisions. Semperit Industrial Applications makes hydraulic and industrial hoses and profiles; Semperit Engineered Applications makes escalator handrails, conveyor belts and the rubber rings used on cable cars, and includes the Rico Group, a liquid-silicone and mould-making business the company bought in 2023. In 2024 it gave its workforce as about 4,300 people at 16 production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, with plants including Odry in the Czech Republic and Bełchatów in Poland.

Its ownership has tightened. On 18 March 2026 B&C Holding Österreich, part of the B&C group that already held a majority, announced a voluntary public takeover bid for all the shares it did not own The offer raised B&C’s stake from 57.3 to 63.4 percent, a NuWays research note reported on 17 June 2026.

The name now points in three directions. Semperit the group no longer makes tyres or gloves; Semperit tyres belong to Continental; and Sempermed gloves belong to Harps Global. Anyone searching the brand should check which of the three a page means.

For a design guide, Semperit shows how a name can outlast the products it was built on: a Latin slogan from a tyre-and-rubber firm that now sits on hoses, belts and handrails. Compare Sri Trang Gloves, which carries the name of its former joint-venture partner in Thailand, and Ansell. For this guide we use a deep blue, a dark slate and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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