Marconi Company
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The Marconi Company , formerly also known as General Electric Company (GEC) or English Electric and at the end as Marconi Corporation plc , was a formerly publicly traded British telecommunications equipment company based in London , which was merged into Telent in January 2006 . The Marconi brand was bought by Ericsson in the same year .
history
prehistory
The predecessor company was founded by Guglielmo Marconi , a pioneer of wireless telegraphy , in 1897 under the name "Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company". In 1900 the company changed to Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company . At the same time, the Marconi International Marine Communication Company was founded for the important area of communication at sea . John Ambrose Fleming , inventor of the tube diode ("two-electrode radio rectifier"), was a consultant for the Marconi Company. Henry Joseph Round improved at Marconi radio frequency - triode type V24. In 1912 the company received an order from the British government to set up radio stations in the widespread British Empire . This led to a political Marconi scandal , as members of the government were accused of having profited from the sharply rising share price by trading shares.
In 1946 the company was taken over by English Electric ("EE") and in 1968 English Electric merged with the General Electric Company (GEC), not to be confused with the US corporation General Electric . Two years later, the purchase was made the engine division of the American Locomotive Company by Studebaker .
Growth and decline
In 1999, the management formed an internationally active telecommunications group through acquisitions from GEC. After RELTEC Corporation, Fore Systems ( Pittsburgh , USA), which had a good position in the North American market for routers and switches , was also taken over in 1999 . With parts of the company GPT ( Coventry , England), Marconi SpA ( Genoa , Italy) and Bosch Telecom ( Backnang , Germany) a new large group was created. After a period of reorganization, during which the defense businesses were sold to British Aerospace , the company name was changed to Marconi Corporation plc in 1999 .
The purchase prices for the acquired companies, which were only partially financed by the armaments businesses sold, were far from economic reason in the context of the dot-com bubble . In May 2002, the company disclosed a loss of 9.1 billion euros for the past fiscal year. That was the biggest loss to any company in British history at the time. A bankruptcy could be averted by restructuring measures in which the shareholders were watered down in favor of the lending banks . In the years that followed, the company succeeded in reducing its losses, but despite massive downsizing, it never returned to profit.
Marconi could only develop a few new products and suffered a constant massive decline in orders. When Marconi also lost its home market with the major customer BT Group , which no longer renewed its supply contracts after expiry, it became a takeover candidate. On October 25, 2005, competitor Ericsson announced that it would acquire Marconi for 1.8 billion euros and take over the majority of the business areas. The acquisition was completed on January 23, 2006 with retroactive effect from January 1, 2006. The Marconi name will be retained as a brand within Ericsson. After Ericsson took over the lucrative business fields, the company was renamed telent plc, and the company divisions not taken over, including the pension entitlements of the former Marconi employees, remained with telent.
Company name
There are many companies that have Marconi in their company name (company), as the various restructurings have spun off branches of business without deleting the original name. For example, various defense industry partnerships use the name "Marconi" even though they have no relationship with Ericsson.
literature
- WJ Baker: A History of The Marconi Company . Routledge, 1970, ISBN 0-415-14624-0 .