Rittal

What they do

Rittal makes the steel cabinets that house electrical controls in factories and the racks, cooling and power distribution systems that hold servers in data centres. It has about 9,600 employees, 10 production sites and 65 subsidiaries. Rittal is the largest company in the Friedhelm Loh Group, which also owns the engineering software firm Eplan and reported revenue of 3.1 billion euros in 2024.

Why it matters

Rittal describes itself as the world's leading system supplier for enclosures and says its solutions are used in more than 90 per cent of industrial sectors worldwide. Almost every automated production line needs control cabinets, and Rittal's are a standard in many plants. In IT it supplies racks, liquid cooling and complete modular data centres. At the 2025 Open Compute Project Global Summit it presented a rack for NVIDIA's MGX architecture, aimed at AI servers.

The two halves of the business share an engineering logic. In a factory, a control cabinet must protect drives, controllers and power electronics from dust, heat and vibration for decades, and must be wired quickly. In a data centre, a rack must carry ever denser and hotter servers while keeping air or liquid cooling efficient. Rittal sells both as modular systems with standard dimensions, accessories and climate control, which is why its cabinets appear in so many industrial plants, including those of the automotive and machinery suppliers profiled elsewhere on this site.

Products to know

• VX25 large enclosure system, winner of the German Innovation Award.
• Blue e+ cooling units for enclosures.
• IT racks, liquid cooling and modular data centres.
• Power distribution and busbar systems.

The German angle

Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Herborn in the Lahn-Dill district of Hesse, Rittal remains in private family hands under owner Friedhelm Loh. Its combination of sheet-steel manufacturing and engineering software through sister company Eplan is a characteristically German Mittelstand pairing of hardware and data.

Sources

• Rittal: Data, facts and figures
• Friedhelm Loh Group: Rittal
• finanzen.net: Rittal unveils MGX architecture rack at 2025 OCP Global Summit