Electrolux Domestic Appliances

Appliance Manufacturer & Brand Information

Founded in 1910 as Elektromekaniska AB, and changed its name to Elektrolux after merging with Lux AB in 1919, the spelling was changed to Electrolux in 1957 under the leadership of Hans Werthon the Swedish company now known to all as Electrolux grew rapidly during the 1970s.

Electrolux is currently the second largest home appliance manufacturer in the world (07/2011) after Whirlpool Corporation selling more than 40 million products to customers in 150 countries every year. Electrolux products include refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and cookers sold under brands as below.

The company is a behemoth that produces appliances for every territory on the planet.

Current consumer brands owned by this massive corporation include the following:

AEG, Arthur Martin, Atlas, Castor, Chef, Corbert, Dimas, Dito, Dometic, Elektro Helios, Electrolux, Electrolux Laundry Systems, Electrolux Professional, Eureka, Faure, Flymo, Frigidaire, Gibson Appliance, Juno, Kelvinator, Lehel, Marynen/Marijnen, McCulloch, Molteni, Parkinson Cowan, Progress, REX-Electrolux, Rosenlew, Simpson, Tappan, Target, Therma, Tricity Bendix, Viking, Volta, Voss, Wascator, Westinghouse, White Westinghouse, Zanussi, Zanussi Professional, Zoppas

Many of these brands are regional and Electrolux have been known to hire or lease the names to other companies on a regional basis, for example White Westinghouse was actually supplied by Premium Appliance Brands in the UK and not manufactured by Electrolux, nor does that brand use Electrolux products. Likewise, Frigidaire is in the same position, the brand actually controlled in the UK by the HI Group, again nothing to do with Electrolux.

This is very hard to give obviously as the group is just massive and covers almost every area of the industry, but in the UK the ELectrolux brand name is firmly in the low to mid sector of the market and is generally reasonably well regarded.

Whilst in the UK Electrolux are particularly strong on floorcare they've never really cracked the major appliances other than by snapping up brands like Tricity, which became Tricity Bendix, Zanussi and many of the others mentioned above.

In recent times it appears that the Tricity Bendix branding, which was used as a budget brand, has been more or less dropped and it appears that the Zanussi brand is being moved in to take over from that position.

Electrolux will also produce appliances for third parties such as John Lewis in the UK for whom Electrolux produce most of their laundry, cooking and cooling ranges despite the retailer alluding to it's brand's German origins. They're not German.

AEG, another Electrolux owned brand, is used at the upper mid section of the market drawing on the AEG branding's German roots to justify the higher price tags in large part along with some of the more modern features and technologies and a "Germanic" type design. Little if any of the products are in fact made in Germany or would have ever been near any German based operation, even in design. Like most of the laundry products the actual internal workings are based largely on the same platform as all the other brands, the same goes for dishwashers, cooling products and cooking products, only the badge and cosmetic changes are made.

Interestingly late in 2010 we started to see Zanussi washing machines being imported that had been built by Midea in China who also build washing machines for others in the UK.