Urmet, a company born in Piedmont, grown in Italy and with a consolidated presence at the international level, is officially recognised and celebrated with the entry in the Special Register of Historical Trademarks of National Interest: we are in fact one of the companies that have characterised the entrepreneurial history of our country, with its iconic products and its international patents.
Founded in Turin in 1937 as a Public Limited Company for the "Use and Recovery of Electro-Telephone Material", today Urmet is a multinational company with an entirely Italian capital, the main company of the Urmet Group, a worldwide company with about 2,500 employees.
Protagonist of technological progress
Urmet has always stood out for its ability to interpret the historical change of markets and to be the protagonist of the technological revolutions that have taken place over the decades: this is demonstrated by the numerous products, some even patented, decidedly "pop" and epochal.
The BCA analogue telephone of 1949, allowing entire families to stay in touch with each other, paved the way for a more connected world; the first intercom of 1958, which was followed by large-scale production, and the first video intercom in 1965 marked the beginning of the so-called "home telephony" to control the entrances of a building, introducing the concept of "residential security".
Iconic products
"Iconic" products are the first public telephone, introduced in 1964 and used by millions of Italians for urban and long-distance calls. Practical and robust, with the characteristic hazelnut-coloured hammered paint, it was token operated (Urmet patent) and helped to radically change the telephone habits of Italian families. With technological progress, telephone tokens were progressively replaced by coins and later by the prepaid card, another Urmet patent from 1982, which represents a milestone in the history of telecommunications.
Special Register of Historical Trademarks of National Interest
The Special Register of Historical Trademarks of National Interest was established by the Growth Decree of 2019, converted into law with amendments in June of the same year. It establishes that the owners or exclusive licensees of trademarks registered for at least fifty years, used for the marketing of products or services made in a production company of excellence historically connected to the national territory, can obtain the registration of the trademark in the Register of Historical Trademarks of National Interest, established at the Italian Patent and Trademark Office.
Currently, the historical brands registered in the Register are 778, of which 318 are related to the food sector: from recent research developed by Cribis, it appears that Italian companies established for at least 50 years are over 77,000, of which almost 40% are located in the North West of Italy (24.7% in Lombardy, 10.8% in Piedmont, the rest divided between Liguria and Valle d'Aosta) and only 2.85% established in the decade 1931-1940.