The company specialising in electro-automatic switchgear was founded in 1924 by businessman Eduard Metzenauer and engineer Siegfried Jung.
By 1975—besides its own factories—the firm operated more than 100 technical offices and agencies worldwide, exporting nearly 60 % of its output. Around 3 000 employees worked for Metzenauer & Jung at that time.
In 1980 subsidiaries were established in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Brazil. Although several takeover bids had been declined up to 1981, that year 95 % of the share capital was sold to the US conglomerate Westinghouse in order to secure access to the American market during a difficult economic period. In 1999 FANAL was acquired by the Entrelec Group, which was later integrated into the ABB Group.
After more than twenty years in senior roles within switchgear panel engineering, Franz Appel took over the still-active commercial agency for FANAL switchgear in 1986. Decades of experience with products from every stage of FANAL’s history mean we are intimately familiar with switchgear not only from FANAL itself but also from Schiele, Entrelec and ABB.
Today we supply customers around the globe with switchgear and other electrotechnical products. Our core business remains the sourcing and distribution of original FANAL equipment and compatible successor products from other leading European manufacturers.