Everyone like a good graph (History of merge and acquisitions)

Retronetworking
1

Hi,

I’ve started to develop a graphical representation of the telecommunication and network manufacturers, it’s written in DOT and you can find the code and the rendering here: GitHub - lrizzi/vendor-history: Graph of the history of Telephone and Network vendors

I’ve got already some suggestions from IRC but I’m open to new ideas on how to improve the project.

Leo

2 Likes
2

Excellent project. I’d assume @8818freak might know of some more related companies/mergers/…

3

Excellent project, indeed!

Some ideas for additions:
Agfeo and Bosse Telekom

In the history of Poly, there were quite a number of acquisitions. An important ex-company is the Danish company KIRK.

Two further German manufactures of phones would be Fernmeldewerk Nordhausen (FMN) and Funke+Huster. FH acquired Fernsig.
FHF / Fernsig e.g. manufactured phones of type “ex-geschützt”, for (coal) mines and such.
FMN especially manufactured payphones.
Another company which also did public phones was Landis&Gyr.

Wilhelm Heibl Werke:

Heibl was one of the manufacturers of phones for the German federally owned telecom company (Bundespost).

Gigaset. Began as a brand of Siemens, then founded as a standalone company in 2008, went bankrupt in 2024 and then bought (asset deal) bei Vtech.

Then there is Snom, founded in 1997, then also bought by Vtech, in 2016:

Manufacturer of door phones, Telecom Behnke:

Some more (former) PBX vendors to add:
Panasonic closed its PBX division 31.03.2021: So geht es nach Panasonics Rückzug weiter

There is also Nitsuko, merged into a newly founded company “NEC Infrontia” in 2001:

The graph is missing Standard Elektrik Lorenz, the earliest roots dating back to 1880. Later owned by ITT, ITT sold SEL to 1986 an die French-based Compagnie générale d’électricité* (CGE), and named Alcatel SEL from 1992 on:

According to the graph, Alcatel was founded in 1970. But according to this page, there some more details in other dates:

1 Like
4

I really appreciate the feedback, I’ve made some update!

I know Agfeo because an Italian company name Fitre used to rebrand their PBX, can you tell me about the relationship with Bosse Telekom?

I need some help with this to lay down a timeline.

This, as usual, is more complicated because the same year Polycom acquired KIRK and Spectralink. As far as I know the KIRK assets and products are now branded as Spectralink but I don’t understand if the company is still owned by Poly or not.

Now it’s Toshiba (2011)

Done and done!

Added NEC still researching Nitsuko (I can’t find when it was founded)

I’ve found more from Lorenz:
MixGenest → Lorenz → SEG → SEL → CGE → Alcatel
and they also acquired Schaub in 1940
Still figuring out how to draw the ITT buy and sell operation

This is a conundrum Alcatel itself was founded in the 1970 but it’s a merge of 3 other companies. I started to add the bigger one.

Leo

1 Like
5

Agfeo manufactured phones and toll counters.
They wanted to start manufacturing PBXes as well, but the federal German post office had no interest in it.
At that time (like around ~1979), Bosse Telekom, a Berlin-based company, already was listed as a PBX manufacturer at that time and supplied the “Bundespost” with PBXes.
So Agfeo bought Bosse to get the chance to have their own developed PBX bought by Bundespost.

There you have some dates for F+H/FHF:

Regarding FMN:
VEB Fernmeldewerk Nordhausen – NordhausenWiki.

It started as a “Volkseigener Betrieb” (VEB) in the GDR. It was a legal form that existed in the GDR, where a company was owned by “the population”.
After GDR broke down, it was sold to a couple of employees who then (re-)founded it as a company in united Germany.
In 2008 they went bankrupt, in 2010 they were re-founded but went bankrupt again in 2014.
The assets for telecommunication were then bought by IMG Nordhausen:

1 Like