The Fraba Group is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding with a year of growth in sales and profitability. In fiscal 2017 turnover increased by 21 percent over the previous year, with total sales revenues of €31.5 million. According to Fraba, growth was driven by strong performance of the group’s two product-oriented business units: Posital and Vitector. Fraba now has 220 employees, located at offices in Europe, Asia and the USA.
The group's largest area of advance was in the production of compact Wiegand devices for energy harvesting. In 2017, production of these 'mini-power plants,' which convert rotary motion into electrical energy through a magnetic process, more than doubled. Fraba, which is the exclusive producer of Wigand wire, makes use of this technology in its self-powered rotation counters for multi-turn encoders. It also supplies Wiegand modules, packaged as surface-mountable devices, to manufacturers of gas and water meters. Here, the energy harvesting capability is used to eliminate the need for external power or batteries. There are now more than 500,000 Wiegand devices in use worldwide.
The company’s 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June in Cologne/ Germany. This is where Fraba was founded in 1918 as 'Franz Baumgartner electrical apparatus GmbH' and is still the home of Posital Europe.
