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ABB makes industrial equipment and automation systems — robots, electric motors, factory controls, and power gear — that keep factories, power grids, and buildings running.
ABB is an industrial giant that sells the machines and brains inside factories, power grids, and big buildings. Its two main businesses are electrification — the gear that moves and controls electricity, from circuit breakers to charging systems — and automation, which includes factory robots, drives that control motors, and the software that ties a plant together. Customers are other businesses: carmakers, utilities, mines, food plants, data centers, and shipbuilders. They buy from ABB because the equipment is engineered to run for decades and the company can service it across the world.
The business is a bit like selling the nervous system and muscles of industry. When a car factory wants robots to weld a chassis, or a power company needs a switchgear room that won't fail, they call firms like ABB, Siemens, and Schneider Electric — though ABB is particularly strong in robots and heavy electrical gear. It also runs a large service arm, which matters because a broken robot or a failed breaker is an emergency, and maintenance contracts bring in steady money long after the hardware is sold. ABB's history is unusually messy. It was formed in 1988 when Sweden's ASEA and Switzerland's Brown Boveri merged, and the combined company spent decades as a sprawling conglomerate. In the 2010s it got into trouble over a bribery scandal in South Korea, and it later sold its power-grids division to Hitachi to shrink and focus. The turnaround culminated in 2024 when it spun off its robotics and discrete automation arm as a separate company called ABB Robotics, leaving ABB as a leaner electrification and process-automation business.
That slimming has been the story lately. ABB has been buying back shares aggressively — its 2024 buyback program covered roughly several percent of the shares annually — and paying a rising dividend, funded by solid free cash flow. The bet is that a simpler ABB can grow faster and earn better margins than the old conglomerate. The risk is that it now leans heavily on electrification, which is a good place to be as data centers and grids need more power, but it also competes with deep-pocketed rivals and is exposed to a slowdown in industrial spending.
Saved answer · last researched 26 Oct 2026