From MicroSCADA to Mitsubishi: How ABB Is Redrawing Its Grid Map

Over the past six years ABB has sold off the grid business it built in Finland, then started buying its way back in, this time on its own terms. Two things happened in 2026 that show where it’s going. ABB bought Finnish grid automation company Netcontrol, and it announced a joint venture with Mitsubishi Electric aimed at Asia. To see why these deals matter, start with what ABB gave up.

The Big Exit: Power Grids Goes to Hitachi (2020–2022)

In 2020 ABB completed the multi-billion-dollar sale of its global Power Grids division to Hitachi. The business first operated as Hitachi ABB Power Grids. Hitachi bought out ABB’s remaining share in 2022, and the company is now Hitachi Energy.

The deal took a lot of Finnish industrial history with it. High-voltage power transmission, large-scale utility infrastructure and grid automation software all left ABB:

• The transformer factory in Vaasa: This large, historic plant designs and builds specialized transformers for power grids, wind farms and heavy industry. Transformers have been made industrially in Finland for over 110 years.
• The MicroSCADA product line: The whole R&D team and ownership of the product went too.
• Grid automation and systems: The engineering, service and project delivery units for high-voltage substations and utility-scale systems also moved.

MicroSCADA: A Finnish Success Story Changes Owners

MicroSCADA probably has the deepest Finnish roots of anything in the deal. The Finnish electrotechnical company Strömberg Oy created it in Vaasa in the early 1980s, and Strömberg later became part of ABB. Over four decades, MicroSCADA grew into a widely used system for monitoring and controlling power networks and substations.

MicroSCADA had always been a core Power Grids product. So when that division went to Hitachi, ABB didn’t really choose to sell MicroSCADA on its own. It went along with the rest of the division.

One thing stayed the same: Vaasa. The main global R&D and product development center for MicroSCADA is still there. It now belongs entirely to Hitachi Energy Finland Oy, and the product turned 40 in 2023 under its new owner.

What ABB Kept

ABB didn’t leave Finland, and it didn’t stop doing electrification. It narrowed its focus to electrification and industrial technology, the products that sit closer to factories, buildings and the distribution grid:

• Distribution Solutions (Smart Power & Electrification): This is ABB’s large unit in Vaasa. It designs and makes medium-voltage switchgear, protection relays such as the Relion series, and smart grid components.
• Motors and Generators: Finnish factories and engineering teams build heavy-duty industrial motors and generators.
• Drive Products: These teams work on low- and medium-voltage variable speed drives, which make industry more energy efficient.

In short, ABB kept the medium-voltage and industrial side of electrification. Hitachi Energy got the high-voltage transmission side. ABB also has ABB’s Symphony SCADA and distributed control system (DCS) lineage.

Back to SCADA in Finland: The Netcontrol Acquisition (2026)

You might have expected ABB to stay out of utility SCADA after selling MicroSCADA. It hasn’t. In May 2026 ABB completed its acquisition of Netcontrol, a Northern European company started in Finland that sells grid automation solutions to energy companies. Netcontrol has SCADA software, SCADA RTUs and utility communications solutions.

Netcontrol was founded in 1991 and has about 100 employees. It is headquartered in Helsinki, and also has offices in Sweden, Norway and the UK. Before the sale it was owned by the Swedish private equity firm Procuritas Partners.

Netcontrol’s customers are mostly network operators. They include electricity distribution companies, district heating companies, power producers and energy-intensive industry.

Netcontrol’s business rests on the Netcon product family. It covers the whole automation chain, from field devices up to the control room:

• Netcon 3000 SCADA: This is the main platform for supervising and controlling power networks. It is built to handle distributed energy resources such as solar, wind and storage, which have made distribution grids much harder to run.
• Netcon RTUs and substation devices: These remote terminal units and gateways collect data from substations and secondary substations, and carry out control commands sent from the SCADA system. Netcon 5000 is sold under the ABB brand.
• Medium- and low-voltage network monitoring: Products such as Netcon 100 were developed to monitor and control medium-voltage networks and to monitor low-voltage networks. Netcon 200 is already sold under the ABB brand as a medium-voltage grid component.
• Engineering services. Netcontrol also designs, integrates and commissions complete automation systems.

Finland’s power automation scene is small, and for decades two domestic SCADA products shared it. MicroSCADA came from Strömberg’s Vaasa tradition and grew into a global product under ABB. Netcontrol, founded in Helsinki in the early 1990s, took a different path. It focused on the needs of Nordic distribution companies and offered a complete package of SCADA, RTUs and engineering from one supplier.

That focus let Netcontrol win against much bigger international suppliers. It grew from Finland into Sweden, Norway and then the UK. In 2025, Vattenfall’s UK independent distribution network business, Vattenfall IDNO, chose Netcontrol for network automation. Vattenfall hosts Netcon 3000 in its own secure industrial cloud, and Netcon RTUs connect its sites to it. The goal is faster fault detection, less downtime and better service continuity.

Developed by Netcontrol, Netcon 3000 is a prominent Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and energy management software platform widely deployed across power generation and distribution networks, particularly in the Nordic region. It is engineered to provide robust real-time process visualization, comprehensive alarm handling, and detailed event history tracking for electrical power systems. While the foundational software architecture was built on the core iFIX realtime database engine and SCADA framework, Netcontrol extensively reworked and replaced major subsystems over several generations of development. Through companion hardware like Netcon gateways running Netcon NFE software, the system supports conversion across more than 50 serial and IP-based telecontrol protocols, ensuring smooth integration with legacy RTUs and modern IEC 61850 substations.

This creates a twist. In 2020, MicroSCADA, the system ABB had owned and developed for decades, went to Hitachi Energy. Six years later, ABB owns the competitor that had been bidding against MicroSCADA for Nordic utility contracts all along. In Finland, the two Finnish SCADA systems now compete under two global brands, one Japanese-owned and one Swiss-Swedish.

The reasoning is clear, though. Distribution networks are getting more complicated because of renewables, EV charging and electrified heating, and utilities want automation software that works with the switchgear and relays ABB already makes. With Netcontrol, ABB can again offer a software and systems layer to go with its hardware.

Heading East: The Mitsubishi Electric Joint Venture

ABB’s newest move is outside Europe. On the back of record Q3 orders, driven largely by surging data centre demand], ABB announced a joint venture with Mitsubishi Electric to grow in the Asia-Pacific region.

The terms, according to reports:

- ABB’s Japanese unit will buy 51% of Mitsubishi Electric’s power distribution and control equipment business for about ¥82.4 billion (approximately €467.62 million Euros)
- Mitsubishi Electric will keep 49%.
- Completion is planned for October 2027, pending antitrust and other approvals.

The joint venture fits the same pattern. ABB isn’t buying back high-voltage transmission. It’s adding to the distribution and electrification business, which is growing fast because of data centres and electrification in general.

The Bigger Picture

Put all this together and you get a company that is cleanly splitting its business:

2020–2022: Power Grids sold to Hitachi (incl. MicroSCADA, Vaasa transformers) – Leave high-voltage transmission, Keep distribution, motors, drives in Finland, Focus on electrification and industry
May 2026: Acquire Netcontrol – Add grid automation software to distribution
2026–2027: Mitsubishi Electric JV (51%) – Grow distribution in Asia-Pacific

Vaasa is an unusual case. It’s now home to two global companies whose grid businesses have the same origins. Hitachi Energy builds transformers and develops MicroSCADA there. A short distance away, ABB makes switchgear and protection relays. Both businesses come out of the same Strömberg engineering tradition (Strömberg became part of ABB in 1988), which still shapes how the world’s electricity grids are run.

Over the next few years we’ll see whether ABB’s strategy of staying medium-voltage while adding software and growing in Asia pays off. With electrification and data centre demand accelerating, its timing looks good.

About the Author: A View from Inside Netcontrol

This article isn’t written from the outside. Its editor, Tomi Engdahl, worked at Netcontrol for twenty years, from 2003 to 2023. During that time he worked on several parts of the Netcon product family described above:

• NFE (Network Front End): He has been a developer Netcontrol’s NFE software, which works as a SCADA front end, a protocol converter, and an RTU communications concentrator or gateway.
• SCADA components: He has built software components for Netcontrol’s SCADA systems.
• Netcon 100: He was the system architect for Netcon 100, a system for monitoring and controlling medium-voltage networks and monitoring low-voltage networks.
• Netcon 200: He was also the system architect for Netcon 200, which ABB now sells under its own brand as a medium-voltage grid component.
• Netcon 500: He has been one of the center persons in developing GW502 processor module running a hardened, long-term support Linux kernel. The Netcon 500 is a cybersecure, modular Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) and substation automation gateway designed primarily for primary power distribution substations, industrial grids, and utility automation.

He left Netcontrol in 2023, two years before ABB announced the acquisition, so he played no part in the deal. He did see the years and contributed to products that made Netcontrol worth buying. Over those two decades it grew from a Finnish company into a supplier for utilities in Sweden, Norway and the UK. Distribution networks also changed in that time, from basic remote control of substations to real-time monitoring all the way down to the low-voltage grid.

That background shapes how he sees this story. When MicroSCADA left ABB for Hitachi Energy, it was business news. When ABB bought Netcontrol, it was more personal. Products he designed as system architect now carry the ABB name and will be sold worldwide, while their old rival from Vaasa continues under Hitachi Energy.

Many Finnish engineers built their careers on one side of this rivalry or the other. Equipment from both companies keeps power networks running in Finland and beyond. This article has tried to cover both sides fairly. Readers should know the author spent twenty years on the Netcontrol side.