Eumig

~ the goodbye ~

EUMIG is an acronym for Elektrizitäts- und Metallwaren-Industrie Gesellschaft, which tells you what it was for and nothing about what it became. Alois Handler and Karl Vockenhuber founded it in Vienna in 1919 making cigarette lighters out of spent cartridge cases, alongside fuse elements and lever switches. Adolf Halpern put up most of the starting money as a silent partner and was bought out in 1926.

Radios came next and stayed for a long time, from 1924 until 1962, more than three million sets in total, with the Eumigette of 1955 alone accounting for around half a million. The first projector, the P 1, arrived in 1931, and the first cine camera, the C1, in 1932, shooting 9.5 mm film. The C3 of 1937 was spring driven and sold about 300,000, and the C4 of the same year was the first amateur camera with an electric motor in it.

After 1960 the company dropped everything else and made only cameras and projectors. When Kodak introduced Super 8 in 1965, Eumig had a camera and two projectors ready for it, and it ended up the only manufacturer in Europe offering a complete Super 8 range. The P8 projector of 1954 had already been the first for home use with a 12 volt lighting system.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

By 1975 Eumig was the largest film projector manufacturer on the planet, turning out roughly 500,000 projectors a year with about 5,000 people. In 1977 it made something like 700,000 devices and described itself in print as the world's biggest maker of sound projectors. Staff peaked at 7,000 the following year. ORF puts the lifetime total across all its cine equipment at six million units, which for a country of seven and a half million people is a strange and specific kind of industrial dominance.

It built hi-fi as well, three-head cassette decks among them: the Metropolitan CCD in 1977 and the FL-1000uP in 1979. That second year also brought the Nautica, a Super 8 camera you could take underwater. Research and development ran at about 8 percent of turnover.

~ the bank ~

The cracks opened in 1978, when Polaroid stopped its orders and a thousand people were let go. Losses ran to 678 million schillings in 1979 and about 700 million in 1980. On 28 May 1980 Karl Vockenhuber and Raimund Hauser gave up both ownership and management, Hauser selling his share for a single schilling. ORF's account is that the Länderbank took the company for a symbolic two schillings and was left holding two billion schillings of debt.

What broke the market underneath all of this was video. At the end of the seventies nobody knew whether Video 2000 or VHS would win, and the uncertainty was enough to freeze large orders and cancel others. Eumig had worked during 1979 on a portable recorder built around BASF's longitudinal system and dropped it the same year. On 2 February 1981 there were 6,000 video cameras sitting unsold in its warehouses.

~ the day it died ~

At 17:50 on 10 August 1981 the notice came that the Länderbank was stopping payments. The next day there was a works meeting at Wiener Neudorf, and on ORF television that same day Franz Vranitzky said the bank could not carry Eumig's losses any longer. Bankruptcy proceedings were opened on 17 August. At twelve o'clock the following day a radio announcement told Austria that Eumig had filed. English Wikipedia says the bankruptcy happened in 1982; the company museum's own chronicle has it to the hour, and the hour is what this page uses.

~ what is left in wiener neudorf ~

Fürstenfeld, which had 1,800 people in 1978 and 861 by July 1981, was closed outright, and on 27 August the trustee instructed that everyone there be sent home. Three promised payments of 25 million schillings each were never made. A rescue company for Wiener Neudorf was registered on 31 August and began on 16 September with about 200 people, under the name Optik Elektronik und Metallwaren Industrie Gesellschaft. More than 3,000 people lost their jobs. ORF calls it the first large corporate collapse sitting that close to the federal government politically.

In 1982 the Eumig tower at Wiener Neudorf was sold to Palmers, and the name itself went to a Luxembourg holding company called Interbasic. Proceedings closed in October 1985 and the name was struck from the commercial register on 13 February 1986. Rothenberger of Frankfurt bought rights to it in 1989, and a firm trading as eumig industrie tv sells control technology under it today. The brand has now been somebody else's for longer than the company that earned it was alive.

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