The UK arm of a Japanese electrical and electronic engineering group, with its UK headquarters in Hatfield and a factory in Livingston, Scotland, that makes air conditioning units and heat pumps.
Mitsubishi Electric UK is the British branch of Mitsubishi Electric Europe, part of the Japanese engineering group. Its best-known UK products are air conditioning units and heat pumps, which heat and cool homes and buildings. Beyond that it is involved in factory automation, power systems and software. Its UK history page says it acquired Smarter Grid Solutions in 2021, a company working on smart electricity networks, and ICONICS UK in 2023, a software business that makes tools for monitoring and controlling industrial sites.
The UK history page does not give a mission statement, but the group's tagline on the page is "Changes for the Better". The UK story starts in 1969 with a first office in London, and Mitsubishi Electric UK was established in 1972. A sales, distribution and service centre opened in Watford in 1978, an office in Croydon followed in 1980, and a European Purchasing Centre in London in 1982. In 1996 the UK operation became a branch of Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V., and in 2021 the Power Systems Group joined that UK branch.
The company has two main UK bases. The UK headquarters has been at Hatfield in Hertfordshire since 1988, and the page says solar panels were added there in 2009. In Scotland, the Livingston factory was established in 1983, began making air conditioning in 1994 and opened a Mitsubishi Electric research and development centre in 1995. Cooling Post reported in July 2023 that the Livingston plant celebrated its 30th anniversary, with 1,840 employees, and had made its five-millionth product, an Ecodan R290 air source heat pump. It was described as the largest heat pump manufacturer in the UK, and a £15.3m investment in 2021 was reported.
The sources say little about day-to-day culture, so we have not guessed. The 2023 event was attended by a Scottish government minister, the local MP for Livingston and the Japanese consul general in Edinburgh, which shows how closely the factory is linked with local and national communities. Heat pump production has been under way at Livingston since 2009, so staff there have watched the shift from air conditioning to home heating that matters for the UK's move away from gas boilers.
A company with a factory, a research centre, a sales operation and a software arm employs many types of people. They include production operators, maintenance and test engineers, product designers, researchers, software developers working on grid and automation tools, service engineers, sales and marketing staff, and finance and logistics teams. Engineering, physics, maths and computing all lead here, and the Livingston site shows that large-scale heat pump making happens in Scotland.
Website: gb.mitsubishielectric.com
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