Manufacturing AUTOMATION is celebrating its 40-year anniversary in 2026, but we are not alone in hitting a major milestone. Automation and interconnection technology provider WAGO is celebrating 75 years of operation, and, in an exclusive press event with Manufacturing AUTOMATION and Annex Business Media, shared insights about their history and their strategy for the next chapter of WAGO’s growth.
WAGO was founded over a Berlin card game in 1951, when brothers-in-law Heinrich Nagel and Friedrich Hohorst heard about the patent for leaf spring clamps, leading them to purchase the rights and found WAGO Klemmenwerk, named so for the original patent owners Wagner and Obrich.
What followed was three-quarters of a decade of innovation, with products including the Superfix series for hydro applications, the first rail-mountable terminal block and the invention of the CAGE CLAMP, which remains their signature technology to this day.
“The 80s is when the CAGE CLAMP starts to conquer the market,” said Juliano Matias, general manager, Canada for WAGO. “We really expand the line on the CAGE CLAMP on the thermal block line.”
Tyrone Visser, head of smart industries – automation Americas for WAGO, highlighted the flexibility of that original product, which is now being used in ways that could not be imagined when the patent was originally filed in 1977. “If you look at the CSA spec on a spring cage connection… the torque spec says not applicable because it doesn’t need to be torqued. It’s a set it and forget it,” Visser said.
By the 1980s, the CAGE CLAMP was one of the predominant technologies available on the market, and paved the way for additional product innovations including the introduction of front-entry wiring, something still being adapted to this very day.
The 1990s saw WAGO in earnest begin their entry into the automation market with the introduction of their modular, fieldbus-independent I/O system in 1995. “Our DNA has been open,” Visser said. “From 1995 our goal was the first fieldbus independent remote I/O system,” which they achieved with the 750 Series, a product line sold to this day.
Milestones continued to be set through the next 30 years of WAGO, including reaching 1 billion euros in sales in 2021 and nearly doubling their business in a 10-year period, the creation of the Solutions business unit for customized deliverables and the founding of WAGO Canada in 2018.
Looking forward, the company wants to continue to cement itself as a vendor-agnostic provider across multiple industry sectors, notably including data centres.
“Globally, we are having a lot of growth in data centres,” Visser said, highlighting the company’s CAGE CLAMP connection eliminating the need to retorque in the field, maximizing reliability for customers, and their vendor independence allowing for significant scalability.
“One of the things that’s come out recently that’s nice about CODESYS is, as data center companies are looking to scale, they’re looking for something more vendor independent,” he said. “They don’t want to be locked into one vendor where they have to be… stuck with all of their operations teams… only being able to use one basically one programming suite.”
In addition, WAGO is continuing to focus on the importance of sustainability with the release of their 221 Series Green Range, which is made from partially bio-circular and recycled plastics to support eco-friendly production.
“WAGO creates connections, and when we say connections, we don’t only mean electrical connections, but we also mean connections with our customers, with our partners, with our distributors and with our employees.” Mattias said. “WAGO is the backbone of a sustainable and smart connected world.”
To learn more about WAGO and their 75-year history in the industry, click here.
