From a back alley workshop to the Olympus of household appliances: the rise of Balay

A ham shop and a flight attendant academy flank the entrance to San José de Calasanz Street in Zaragoza. As you walk up it, you immediately see that it's a secondary street: short, quiet, and a lonely spot. Despite branching off San José Avenue, a thoroughfare lined with shops, the scene here is radically different. Old garage doors and rusty shutters protect the ground floors where, decades before, all kinds of workshops had been located. In 1947, Esteban Bayona and José María Lairla set up shop in one of these premises. They were determined to launch a business manufacturing electrical components, at a time when the electronics sector was on the verge of collapse. In fact, that same year, Bell Labs produced the first consumer transistor.

Bayona and Lairla initially specialized in the production of components such as voltmeters and gearboxes. They began selling them under the brand name Balay, a combination of the initial syllables of their first surnames. Today, it's one of the five heavyweights that make up the BSH Group, which also includes the brands Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau, and Neff. In 2024, they had a turnover of €15.3 billion. How did they do it?

In the first two years, they focused on expanding their market, and they succeeded. By 1949, they abandoned their original workshop for new premises on Pradilla Street and a new product: the manufacture of ballasts for fluorescent tubes. They grew from four to seventeen employees. In 1951, Bayona and Lairla partnered with a third company, Alfredo Sarto Pina, and formally incorporated as a public limited company under the name Industrias Radioeléctricas Balay. They were about to enter the decade that would revolutionize their business. From making electronic components, they moved on to making their first household appliances. They debuted with electric ovens that were very well received and continued with the first washing machines. With this step forward, they expanded their workforce to nearly fifty workers and moved to a new 3,000-square-meter production center. In 1957, the three entrepreneurs realized that the future lay not in the production of components but in the manufacturing of entire household appliances.

The great expansion

Business was booming. They had more and more orders, and the machinery was running nonstop. "Automatic," the company recalls. By 1969, Balay was already looking outward, specifically at the European and Latin American markets. In 1970, they ventured into dishwashers and continued developing new models of washing machines, an appliance that was conquering homes across the country.

The 1980s saw the invention that became the company's trademark: the induction hob. It was patented in 1985, after extensive testing. But these were also the years in which Balay underwent a significant change: it became part of the BSH group's portfolio, then comprised of Bosch and Siemens. The acquisition of the third-largest Spanish manufacturer was closed for 140 German marks at the time, according to the specialized magazine. IndustriemagazinIn 1990, with the support of the University of Zaragoza, it launched its first induction cooktop.

Since then, Balay has continued to grow within this corporate giant, which is number 1 in Europe, with 39 factories worldwide—four of them in Spain—and 57,000 employees. In Spain, it has a 26% market share, according to the newspaper. ExpansionTen years after purchasing Balay, the multinational itself acquired another historic firm in the Spanish sector: Ufesa. However, in this case, it held onto the company until 2018, when it sold the brand and its only remaining plant to the Catalan firm B&B Trends. The BSH group made headlines at the end of last year for its intention to close its plant in Navarra, which employed 655 people.