Socomec Brand Guidelines: A 1922 Benfeld Switch Maker Still in Family Hands

A textile engineer, two partners and eleven people in Alsace.

Socomec began in 1922 in Benfeld, a small town in central Alsace, in the Bas-Rhin department. French Wikipedia says its founder was Joseph Siat, an engineer from the textile industry, who set up the company with two partners, Aloyse Pfeiffer and Alfred Menzler, under the long name Société des Ateliers de Constructions Électromécaniques du Bas-Rhin. It had eleven people. Its first products, the same article says, were lever switches, strip fuses, porcelain insulators and doorbells: a mixed range of electrical components sold across France, with a few contracts abroad.

The company has stayed with one family. The sources read for this guide do not describe how the company operated while Alsace was annexed by Germany between 1940 and 1944. From 1945, French Wikipedia says, Joseph Siat’s sons Pierre and Maurice Siat ran it. A third generation followed — Benoît and Jacques Siat, and Bernard Steyert, who took over the management — and under Steyert, Wikipedia says, Socomec moved into equipment for distributing and protecting electrical power, and in particular into uninterruptible power supplies, known in French as onduleurs or ASI.

A 2016 profile of Benoît Siat published on the Alsace Monde website gives a sense of that growth: it says he became managing director in 1981 and later chairman and chief executive of the holding company, that the workforce grew from 180 people in 1973 to nearly 4,000 by 2016, and that from 1991 he personally led a project to set up in India through a technology partnership.

The fourth generation now leads. French Wikipedia names Ivan Steyert, a descendant of the founder, as chairman and chief executive and calls the group independent; Le Journal des Entreprises wrote in June 2026 that he has run Socomec since 2010, and calls it a family group.

Cutting, measuring and converting power.

French Wikipedia sorts Socomec’s business into four fields. Critical power covers uninterruptible power supplies, high-availability switching between sources, equipment monitoring and energy storage. Power control covers load-break and changeover switches, insulation monitoring and fuse protection. A third field covers meters and software for measuring energy use in buildings, and the fourth is services, from maintenance to training.

Ivan Steyert put it more simply to Le Journal des Entreprises in June 2026: Socomec specialises in three things, cutting, measuring and converting electrical energy. The paper explained that its static transfer switches move a load from one power source to another within milliseconds, and that its UPS units condition the current before batteries take over in an outage — “a washing machine for current,” in Steyert’s words. Data centres accounted for 30 to 35 percent of the group’s activity, the paper reported, and it described tests under way in a laboratory at Benfeld that the company calls the Tesla Power Lab.

Benfeld is still where much of the making happens. In March 2026 Le Journal des Entreprises reported that Socomec would build a new 16,000-square-metre plant on a five-hectare plot just north of its existing site, dedicated to power-conversion equipment such as UPS systems, with work starting in June 2026 and production due to begin at the end of 2027. The same report described robotic cells, new hybrid presses and autonomous mobile robots in the existing workshops, and an electronics unit that assembled 180,000 products in 2024 and 195,000 in 2025, with a target of 350,000 for 2026. Of more than 4,800 employees worldwide, about 1,400 work in Alsace, and despite expanding abroad since the 1980s the company still keeps a large share of its production in the region, the paper said.

Power, cooling and the data hall.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Producing close to the markets, managed from Alsace.

The group has spread its factories well beyond Alsace. In June 2026 Le Journal des Entreprises counted 14 plants worldwide: an 18,000-square-metre site at Suwanee, near Atlanta, operating since March 2026 and making static transfer switches and UPS systems for North American data centres; three plants in Canada, where the company has added capacity around Toronto; two in India; a Chinese operation run through a local partnership; and a 3,000-square-metre extension in preparation in Italy. North America accounted for about a quarter of activity, Asia a fifth and Europe and the Middle East the rest, the paper reported.

Steyert explained the strategy in one line: “To succeed in the United States, you have to be American. To succeed in China, you have to be Chinese.” Producing locally, he told the paper, shortens delivery times and avoids customs duties on goods made in the United States. Benfeld keeps the head-office functions — management, innovation, finance, information systems, legal and human resources — and Steyert called Alsace “the beating heart of the company.” French Wikipedia lists subsidiaries including Boltswitch in Canada and Powersmiths, and says the company designs, makes and sells its own products.

For a design guide, Socomec shows a family industrial brand that has kept its name and its home town for more than a century while its products moved from doorbells and porcelain insulators to data-centre power. Compare Legrand, another French electrical maker, which began in a Limoges porcelain works, and Schneider Electric, the French power-management group. For this guide we use a navy, a steel grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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