ABB is a technology group founded in 1988 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, active in electrification, automation, motion and robotics. The company was formed by the merger of Sweden's ASEA and Switzerland's BBC Brown Boveri; according to Wikipedia the combined group had revenue of roughly US$15 billion and 160,000 employees at the time of the merger. Today ABB is one of the world's leading providers of industrial automation.
Four business areas
ABB is organized into four divisions: Electrification (products and services "from substation to socket", according to Wikipedia the world's number 2 following the 2018 acquisition of GE Industrial Solutions), Motion (electric motors, generators, drives and digital powertrain technology, cited by Wikipedia as the global market leader), Process Automation (automation and digital offerings for process, hybrid and maritime industries) and Robotics & Discrete Automation.
Robotics
The robotics division spans classic industrial robots, collaborative robots (cobots) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Milestones cited by Wikipedia include the IRB 6000 (1991, ABB's first modular robot, for spot welding), the FlexPicker delta robot (1998, for picking and packing) and the YuMi cobot (2014, a collaborative dual-arm robot). In 2021 ABB added the GoFa (up to 5kg payload, 950mm reach, up to 2.2 m/s) and SWIFTI (up to 4kg payload, up to 5 m/s, based on the IRB 1100) cobot families. With the 2021 acquisition of Spain's ASTI Mobile Robotics Group (Burgos) for around US$190 million, ABB entered the AMR market; its Flexley Tug line tows carts for intralogistics. According to Wikipedia, ABB has installed over 300,000 robots worldwide.
Sale of the robotics division to SoftBank
In October 2025, ABB agreed to sell its entire Robotics division to Japan's SoftBank Group for approximately US$5.375 billion. The division employs about 7,000 people and generated roughly US$2.28 billion in revenue in 2024 (about 7% of group revenue). Closing is expected in mid-to-late 2026, subject to regulatory approvals in the EU, China and the United States. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son described the deal as a step toward "Physical AI"; ABB CEO Morten Wierod called SoftBank "an excellent new home" for the business and its employees. Once completed, ABB will continue as a pure electrification, motion and process-automation supplier without its own robotics arm.
Key figures
Wikipedia cites ABB's employee count at about 112,000, revenue of roughly US$33.2 billion, net income of about US$3.93 billion and operating income of about US$5.07 billion. The chief executive is Morten Wierod (since August 2024), and Peter Voser chairs the board. The shares are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ABBN, ISIN CH0012221716) and on Nasdaq Stockholm, and are an SMI component.
Trend toward flexible manufacturing
The group positions itself around the trend toward more flexible, software-driven production: robot hardware is combined with control software, simulation (RobotStudio) and partly AI-based functions to reconfigure lines faster and inspect quality automatically. As a global industrial company, ABB depends on customers' investment cycles, on the economy and on supply chains; automation demand is often linked to labor shortages and the reshoring of production.
This profile is a neutral description and is not investment advice.