ABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ERICSSON COMPANY

Potted History

1903 - British L. M. Ericsson Manufacturer Company formed.  This was a joint venture between L. M. Ericsson of Sweden and the National telephone Company (NTC).

1912 - The GPO (who had taken over NTC) relinquish control to L. M. Ericsson.

1926 - L. M. Ericsson reduces it's share of the company and the Ericsson Telephone Company (ETL) is formed.

1948 - L. M. Ericsson sell their share of the company completely.

1961 - Plessey acquire ETL.

1988 - Plessey and GEC form a joint venture company called GEC Plessey Telecommunications.

1991 - Siemens acquires the Plessey part of the joint venture and the company name changes to GPT.

1998 - Siemens increase their share of the company and the name changes to Siemens GEC Communications.

1999 - The name changes to Siemens Communications Ltd, when Siemens buys the GEC telephony side of the company.

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Extracts from £L M Ericsson 100 Years' a history of LME produced for the centenary in 1976 & other sources

L. M. Ericsson's foremost sales agent in the 1880's and 1890's was named Bell, Charles Bell.  Although he was not related to Alexander Graham, he was bound by duty to the name.

Charles Bell certainly lived up to the expectations that his name may have created. By the late 1880's, his sales of L. M. Ericsson products established the Swedish company outside the Nordic region.  The markets for which he was responsible were Great Britain and Russia.

After the partnership between L. M. Ericsson and Charles Bell ended in 1896, L. M. Ericsson began manufacturing in Russia the following year.  A sales office was opened in London in 1898, and in 1903, the company established a manufacturing plant in Beeston, England.

The company was founded as British L. M. Ericsson Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 1903 as a joint-venture between the National Telephone Company (NTC) and L. M. Ericsson of Sweden (Telefonaktiebolaget L. M. Ericsson).

The National Telephone Company had established a factory in Beeston, Nottinghamshire.  in 1901, and from 1903 this became the companies manufacturing site.

After the National Telephone Company's operations were taken over by the General Post Office in 1912, the company became solely owned by L. M. Ericsson.

During the 1920s, the largest foreign manufacturing unit in the Ericsson Group was the factory in Beeston.  This was run by the British L. M. Ericsson Manufacturing Co. Ltd., but from 30th March 1926 was called Ericsson Telephones Ltd.  The company, initially formed in 1903, with L. M. Ericsson owning half the shares; in 1911 L. M. Ericsson had bought out its partner, the operating company National Telephone Co., whose repair and experimental workshop was the origin of the Beeston factory.  In 1925 the share capital of the expanding company was increased from £200,000 to £500,000.  L. M. Ericsson still owned the majority shareholding.

The Beeston factory's field of operations was Great Britain, Ireland and certain parts of the British colonies and trust territories.  The most important of the latter was the Union of South Africa.  The range of production was comparatively large, including all kinds of equipment for telephony and telegraphy.  Totalisator equipment and a large quantity of electrical and precision tools were also manufactured.  The total value of the British company's sales and the proportion bought by the British Post Office are shown in the attached table.

Practically all Group sales to Great Britain were from the British factory; sales direct from Sweden or with the British company as middlemen were on a very small scale.  The most important operation to be carried out during the second half of the 1920s was the automation of the British telephone network.  Just as the Beeston factory had already been compelled to produce telephones of a foreign type during the early 1920s, so later it became necessary to build telephone exchanges in accordance with the Strowger system which had been adopted as standard by the Post Office before L. M. Ericsson was able to compete in the field of automation.  However, Ericsson Telephones was also allocated its quota of equipment for automatic telephony on the cartelised British market and continued to make a very steady profit for the Parent Company.  

From 1929 onwards a further product appeared alongside the telephone sector, the automatic Totalisator for race courses.  The background to this special aspect of production was the Racecourse Betting Act of 1928, which permitted installations previously prohibited in Britain.  Immediately there was a great demand.  A company called Automatic Totalisators Ltd.  held the patent rights in the automatic Totalisator, and set up a factory in Ealing outside London to execute the large orders placed.  These orders came from the Racecourse Betting Control Board, which supervised the purchase, installation and running of the Totalisators on race courses.  From the beginning, Ericsson Telephones Ltd. supplied parts to the factory in Ealing, which was more or less an assembly plant.  In 1930, the Ericsson company bought out its customer, closed down the factory and continued to manufacture Totalisators at its own factory in Beeston.  In 1931 it also began to sell installations for trotting tracks and dog tracks.  In that year a special company was formed for the dog tracks, Electric Totalisators Limited, which, in collaboration with course owners, operated installations purchased from the parent company, Automatic Totalisators Ltd.  The production of Totalisators was of some importance for Ericsson Telephones Ltd; in 1929, 1930 and 1931, sales were made to the value of £12,408, £194,000 and £37,000 respectively.

Throughout the 1930s, Ericsson Telephones Ltd. in Beeston, England, continued to be L. M. Ericsson's most important manufacturing company abroad.  In the middle of the decade, invoicing at the Beeston factory was on the same scale as at the telephone factory in Stockholm.  Towards the end of the decade sales amounted to 23 million Kronor, having doubled in less than ten years.  Elektrisk Bureau in Oslo was second in size, with an invoicing at the same point in time of about 13 million Swedish Kronor, an even more rapid expansion than had taken place in Britain.

Relations with the British subsidiary Ericsson Telephones Ltd. (ETL) were also complicated to a certain extent by the second world war.  The Swedish owned company in Britain was threatened with seizure under the Trading with the Enemy Act, 1939 in the event of Sweden being invaded by German troops.  To guard against such a development, L. M. Ericsson sold 20,000 shares in ETL in 1940 for a total of £30,000, or roughly 0.5 million Kronor, thus bringing its share in the British company below 49 per cent.  The Swedish representatives on ETL's board, M. Wallenberg Jr. and H. Th. Holm, had to accept their exclusion from it.  The British referred to the company's numerous secret contracts and the measure was motivated politically; reference was made, for example, in discussions to the passage of German troops in transit through Sweden.  One result of the war was thus further to accentuate the tendency which the British subsidiary had already shown to act more and more independently of its Swedish Parent Company.  An agreement between the companies on matters of principle, signed in 1903, had restricted the British company's sales to Britain and her Crown Colonies.  This ETL felt to be a burden, particularly during the 1930s when the Beeston factory was at times as large as LME's Stockholm factory.  During the war, ETL also established contact with foreign markets outside the Crown Colonies, and immediately peace was signed the agreements between the Swedish and the British companies were reviewed; as a result, the British company's greater independence found expression also in a considerably expanded international field of operations.

During the war years, about 85 per cent of ETL's work was for the armed forces.  Its most important customer was the Royal Air Force which bought large quantities of radio equipment for ground operations, as well as for its aircraft.  The factory's resources were also used to repair telephone exchanges and other equipment damaged during the Battle of Britain.  In 1941 the number of workers employed was 4,850, most of them women, and at the end of the war 5,500.  Labour and raw materials were allocated to the company on an adequate scale owing to its importance for the war effort.