From Sant Hipòlit de Voltregà to Parliaments and banks around the world

The Parliament of Qatar, the National Bank of Kuwait, the Senate of Mexico, the European Commission and the Supreme Court of Nigeria. They are decision-making scenarios of the highest level and, often, of global scope that emerge from endless meetings in millimeter security rooms. For several years now, they have all had the stamp of a company from Sant Hipòlit de Voltregà. Monitors, loudspeakers, microphones and motorized security cameras that are designed and manufactured in this municipality of Osona have been the eyes, ears and voices of all these spaces for years.

“We have equipped the meeting rooms of Samsung, Mitsubishi and HP – monitor manufacturers –. They all have Arthur Holm products in their meeting rooms,” the company’s manager and international sales director explains to this newspaper, Montse Romero, a few minutes before the start of the third day of the ISE congress, which is being held this week in Barcelona. The Catalan company presents its latest innovations: motorized 360-degree cameras that come out of the table and allow you to capture all the people in a meeting; and some motorized speakers that are hidden and seek to improve the acoustics of the room. “Our mission is to inspire the people who make decisions in the meeting rooms: to come in and receive an inspiring effect,” Romero adds, recalling that once, at a meeting in New York, Mitsubishi executives in the United States they started clapping when they saw Arthur Holm’s monitors and microphones.

Motorized technology

The company was born nearly half a century ago under the name of Electronic Albiral to manufacture monitors for the general public, but after 20 years the company changed to Albiral Display Solutions. “It was very difficult to compete with the Asian manufacturers,” says Romero, so they went from making a standard consumer product to making a professional product. “We specialized in a niche industrial market, in which quality and after-sales service were much more important: we made industrial monitors for transport stations, trains and shopping centers, and for the dissemination of advertising,” he adds. A decade later, well into the 2000s, an innovation of our own led to another rethinking of the business: “We generated the patent for a motorized monitor and realized we couldn’t go with an industrial brand. The customers who they were asking for it, they were from the audiovisual sector,” continues Romero.

In the end, what we did was move from an industrial product to a design one

That’s when Arthur Holm was born, a design brand named after a relative of one of the company’s partners, a Danish furniture designer from the 1950s. From that moment, at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, his business begins to expand thanks to the prescription of design professionals: architects, interior designers and furniture designers. “In the end, what we did was go from an industrial product to a design one,” explains Romero. Now the company has two brands: Albiral, for industrial monitors, and Arthur Holm. The latter, beyond Parliaments and banks around the world, is also starting to expand into hotels and ships. Last year the brand launched a range of water-resistant products for luxury boats: motorized speakers that are placed on the deck of boats and that hide and pop out at the touch of a button.

Gold products

“Now we have just made monitors that are hidden for the Parliament of Qatar. They have asked us to finish them in gold, with an integrated camera and their logo. It is an example of personalization,” explains Romero. Its clients also include NATO, the Council of the EU, the Bank of Spain, the Government of Ukraine and even the King of Saudi Arabia, as well as the boardrooms of administration of CaixaBank and Banco Santander, among other banks.

“We have competitors on a European scale, especially in Germany, but it is the Chinese who are nipping at our heels. We differ from them because we manufacture very small and customized series. We make the customer’s logo, we make the monitors in gold and bronze for countries in the Middle East… We think of each meeting room differently. We customize a lot. They are very small production runs and this allows us to manufacture in Sant Hipòlit,” explains Romero. The company, with a workforce of 40 workers, registered a turnover of nine million euros in 2022 and is present in 42 countries.