With so many brands of home appliances in the market, it can be hard to know which washing machine or oven to go for. Looking up and down the idle, they all seem to look the same and all seem to do the same thing. So does it actually matter which one you go for? Do the brands even mean anything?
It might be helpful to know that many brands are actually owned by, or controlled by, what is called a parent company. For example, the company Whirlpool Corporation markets and controls 13 staple brand names, along with 4 other brands. So they have a total of 19 brands under their belt.
This might be shocking but many companies operate like this, and it could be done for a multitude of reasons. One of the companies which Whirlpool Corporation owns is Indesit, an Italian company that manufactures and distributes cookers, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, freezers, ovens, hobs, and washing machines.
This happened in 2014 when Whirlpool Corporation paid 758 million euros to own a 60% stake in the company. This is a large amount of money, and a deserved amount of money seeing as Indesit is a market leader in its home country of Italy, but also the United Kingdom and Russia.
Whirlpool Corporation’s aim was to use this large reaching market leader to expand their reach in the United States of America.
Where is Indesit made?
Indesit is a massive company, which also owns a lot of other companies too, like Hotpoint for example. Originally Indesit, as an Italian company, held their base of operations in Italy, Fabriano, Ancona province.
This continues to be the case, however, the company has grown so large, that they have needed to make eight production sites around the world. As their numbers keep growing this figure might be out of date by the time you read it, but they are currently employing over 16 thousand employees!
Three of Indesit’s production sites are still in Italy, specifically, they are in Fabriano, Comunanza, and Caserta, but the other five were built to be closer to the counties that Indesit sells to. These aboard production sites are in Poland, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Turkey. In Poland, you would find two production sites as their demand is that high.
Did Indesit cause the Grenfell Tower Fire?
The deadliest structural fire to hit the United Kingdom since 1988 was when a 24 story block of flats caught alight. This happened on 14 June 2017 to a block of flats called Grenfell Tower. This disaster caused the death of 74 people, 72 of whom died at the scene. More than 70 were injured by the blaze and 223 people managed to escape.
There were a handful of reasons for the tower’s terrible collapse, the biggest two being the building’s failed fire safety standards (including incorrect insolations, insufficient cavity barriers, and cheap windows) and a faulty fridge freezer.
The fridge freezer’s model, named FF175BP was produced under the brand Hotpoint. Hotpoint is owned by Indesit, and Indesit is owned by Whirlpool Corporation.
This meant that when the civil lawsuit came around, it was the American based manufacturer, Whirlpool Corporation, that was named as a defendant in the case which angered the United Kingdom.
The grounds for the lawsuit was that the refrigerator contained materials which are liable to catch fire. At the time the investigation concluded that the design had met all the legal safety requirements and that Whirlpool had done nothing wrong. Because of this Hotpoint did not ask for the model to be recalled due to safety concerns.
Once again this caused an outcry by the British public, and the consumer group Which? stated that the legal requirements which the fridge passed were inadequate.
During the investigation, the investigating engineer J. Duncan Glover compared the United States and United Kingdom safety standards and explained that the United States required a steel back on the back of their fridges to contain a fire if one ever broke out.
The United Kingdom fridges were allowed to have plastic as their backing material. This would not stop a fire and resulted in the 74 deaths of this horrific blaze.
Because of this deadly event, the law in the United Kingdom has changed. It is no longer legal to make plastic backed fridges and freezers, however, existing stock isn’t included in this change. This means that businesses are still legally able to sell these dangerous appliances.
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