Legrand

Legrand traces its origins to a Limoges porcelain workshop founded in 1865 — porcelain because the new industry of electrical wiring needed an insulator that did not burn, and Limoges had been making porcelain for the French nobility since the eighteenth century. Frédéric Legrand bought the workshop in 1904 and gave it his name; a 1919 partnership with the Exideuil switch-maker Jean Mondot moved the firm into the manufacture of electrical switches; and in 1949, after a factory fire forced a strategic reckoning, the firm decided to specialise exclusively in electrical wiring devices. From that decision Legrand became, across the next seventy-five years and through more than a hundred acquisitions, one of the largest manufacturers of electrical and digital building infrastructure in the world.

The firm designs and manufactures the wiring devices, switchgear, cabling, racks, and power-distribution equipment that constitute the electrical and data infrastructure of modern buildings — switches and sockets, circuit breakers, lighting controls, structured cabling systems, data-centre power-distribution units, audiovisual infrastructure, and the protective and connectivity hardware adjacent to all of those. The catalogue runs to more than three hundred thousand product items distributed in nearly every country. Legrand North America, headquartered in Reno, operates the firm’s largest American footprint and is the corporate home of Server Technology, the Reno-founded brand whose intelligent power-distribution units have been a fixture of the data-centre industry since the 1980s and now form the data, power, and control division of the parent group.

What distinguishes Legrand in its sector is the combination of category specialisation and acquisition discipline. The firm has been narrowly focused on electrical and digital building infrastructure since the 1949 specialisation decision, and the more than one hundred acquisitions it has completed since have all been within that frame. Most building-systems manufacturers of comparable scale are diversified across heating, cooling, security, and electrical; Legrand has remained the firm whose principal subject is the electrical infrastructure of the building itself — and the Reno operation, through Server Technology, has anchored the firm’s data-centre power-distribution capability.

The practice has worked with Legrand at the Reno operation on Lean process implementation across operations.