FRABA Group reports a profitable and eventful year for 2022

Christian Leeser, Fraba's chief executive officer

An internationally renowned leader in industrial position sensors, The FRABA Group is coming off a successful year. Over 2022, the corporation earned €45 million in sales worldwide, a decrease from the previous year, due to the divestiture of the VITECTOR division, but a 13 per cent increase for the remaining brands.

According to FRABA CEO and majority shareholder Christian Leeser, the sale of VITECTOR has allowed the company to focus on its other divisions, such as POSITAL and UBITO.

New manufacturing plant in Malaysia

“While ongoing supply-chain difficulties have hampered growth,” Leeser has said, “we are pleased to have made progress towards our strategic goals, including the launch of exciting new NeXtGen sensor products.” Currently, the organization manufactures motion and position sensors through POSITAL and Wiegand sensors through UBITO.

Last year, FRABA opened a new manufacturing plant in Malaysia. Designed for high-volume production of kit encoders, Wiegand sensors, and other components, the new facility will employ up to 60 people. (FRABA now globally employs a full-time staff of 360, up from 320 in the previous year.) The factory will complement the FRABA plant in Poland, which is optimized for high-mix, low-volume production of mass-customized industrial sensors. It will also help the corporation meet the growing demand in the Asian market.

Another major development last year: FRABA technical specialists and university scientists conducted and completed two significant research and development programs. The German Ministry for Education and Technology provided financial support. The first program developed fully automated processes for the mass production of Wiegand sensors, while the second focused on developing a new “Wiegand harvester”, which can capture more than 100 times as much electrical energy from a moving magnetic field as previous Wiegand devices have achieved.

To demonstrate the potential of Wiegand technology – which FRABA is developing and commercializing under the UBITO brand – these researchers built an autonomous sensor that could transmit information over a distance of 50 metres with no external power sources. This is a vital step towards realizing the dream of self-powered sensor nodes for a wireless Industry 4.0.

For more information, contact FRABA.

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