Fraba: Pioneering technological innovation with global expansion for over 100 years

The original Fraba logo from 1918

For more than a century, Fraba has remained a leading international supplier of industrial equipment, including groundbreaking motion-control solutions by POSITAL. From its humble beginnings in 1918, founded by entrepreneur Franz Baumgartner based on a patent for a “Petri switch”, the corporation has grown into a name businesses trust for innovative solutions.

This long, successful company history has encompassed many industry firsts, such as new types of POSITAL encoders and a unique business system.

Pioneer in electric control systems

For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, Baumgartner expanded it to employ 90 highly trained specialists who manufactured relays for customers across Europe. After World War II, Fraba became a strong participant in the German “Wirtschaftswunder” and continued pioneering work in electric and electronic systems. In 1960, Fraba diversified its portfolio with the world’s first mobile dialysis system for the medical sector, and three years later, it began supplying “brush” absolute rotary encoders.

Baumgartner retired at the age of 80 in 1968, but his company – now with 400 employees – continued under the watch of his two nephews. Two years later, Fraba sold its successful medical-systems division to Braun, Melsungen, and in 1973, introduced one of the world’s first optical absolute rotary encoders.

1993 was an eventful year, when Drs. Achim and Christian Leeser and Axel Wiemann took over Fraba. The new owners hired a new management team and completely restructured the corporation into a group of three independent companies, combined by the same Mission and Guiding Principles. Fraba launched the first Optical Safety Edges the following year. By 1998, 30 per cent of the company’s workforce were highly trained technical specialists or held Master’s degrees in electronics, physics, mechanical engineering, or business. Fraba’s first foreign subsidiary opened in Princeton, NJ in Aug. 2000.

Over the 21st Century so far, Fraba has expanded rapidly: it has opened facilities in Poland, Singapore, and Malaysia and launched the business system of Mass Customization, which offers customers encoders and other sensors that are tailored to meet their exact requirements, while remaining price-competitive with mass-produced devices. Technological breakthroughs have included battery-free magnetic kit encoders, high-precision magnetic and absolute encoders, and the world’s smallest multi-turn absolute encoders – with more to come.

For more information, contact POSITAL.

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