H&A
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | |
| Type | Industrial group |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2 May 1889, Amsterdam |
| Founders | Willem Haak; Marcel Andrieu |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam |
| Revenue | c. €480 billion (2019) |
| Employees | c. 1,600,000 (2019) |
| Divisions | Thermonuclear; Hyperbiology; Logistics; Food and Agriculture; Security and Containment |
| Slogan | "The best and last of humanity" |
H&A is an industrial group in the European Federation, founded in Amsterdam in 1889. Before 2020 it worked in power generation, industrial automation, healthcare technology, aerospace, defence, AI, transport and building systems, and it was valued at about €1.2 trillion at the end of 2019. Since 2022 it has been the Federation's primary operational contractor in the Second World War and against the parasites, under the EF Integration Agreement, and since the Kraków Accords of 2027 it has shared operational command of the Federation's forces in a joint H&A-EF command.
H&A's supervisory board last met on 30 January 2024, and the group no longer operates as a company in the legal sense; it is run by its executive Directorate.
History
Founding
H&A was founded in Amsterdam on 2 May 1889 by two engineers, Willem Haak (1859–1931), a Dutchman trained at the Delft Polytechnic, and Marcel Andrieu (1857–1934), from Lille, who had met as exhibitors' engineers at the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris in 1881. The company was registered under the name H&A, and began in a workshop on the north bank of the IJ making dynamos, switchgear and transformers. Haak ran the works and Andrieu the finances and sales. In the 1890s and 1900s it electrified tramways in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Lille and Cologne, built municipal power stations and supplied harbour cranes and lighting in the Dutch East Indies. It had 4,000 employees in 1900 and 21,000 in 1913.
1914–1939
The Netherlands stayed neutral in the First World War, and H&A sold generators, transformers and field-telephone equipment to both sides through Swiss and Swedish intermediaries. After the war it bought a turbine works at Mannheim and a cable works at Cologne during the German inflation of 1923, and a turbine works at Pilsen beside the Škoda works in 1927. Its heavy-haul rail and shipping department, H&A Transport, founded in 1921 to move turbines and transformers, was the origin of H&A Logistics. In 1934 it built most of the high-voltage lines and substations that connected the French, Belgian, German and Dutch power grids. From 1937 it made coastal radar, naval fire control, and motors and batteries for submarines. In 1939 it had about 210,000 employees and was the largest electrical company in Europe after Siemens and AEG.
First Euro-American War
When American forces approached Amsterdam in 1942, H&A's management moved to Pilsen, and in June 1943 to Brno; it returned to Amsterdam in May 1945. Its registered office remained in Amsterdam. Its works at Amsterdam-Noord, Rotterdam, Liège, Lyon, Mannheim and Cologne were taken intact and run for the United States by the American Alien Property Custodian until 1945; fourteen engineers at Amsterdam-Noord were shot by the occupation authorities in 1944 for slowing production, and their names are on the works gate. For the Federation, H&A built radar for coastal defence and fighter direction, electrified railways for war transport, moved the Škoda machine shops east by rail in 1943, and built the electric drives and batteries of the fast submarines that won the Atlantic campaign of 1944.
Federal champion
H&A had 290,000 employees in 1950 and 620,000 in 1970. The Federal Industry Charter of 1952 made the support of large "federal champions" an aim of the Federation's policy, and the Federation had no effective competition law until 1999. H&A built the Federation's first power reactor in 1956 and much of its nuclear power fleet, the early-warning radars at Thule and Keflavík (1951), the power supply and signalling of the Channel Tunnel (1964), high-speed trains and lines from the 1960s, the power station at the Kourou launch site, and the guidance and electrical systems of the Somnium lunar landers. In Labrador it built the iron-ore railway of 1954–1959 and the Churchill Falls hydroelectric station (1967–1974), which supplied most of eastern Canada's electricity. H&A Thermonuclear, which builds the Federation's nuclear weapons, became a division in 1958, with its main site in galleries under the hills north of Lyon.
Conglomerate
Between 1968 and 2000 H&A bought about 140 companies. It merged two airframe makers into H&A Aerospace (1971) and two shipyards into H&A Naval (1972), and added H&A Land Systems (1985) and H&A Ordnance (1991), as well as building systems, signalling and rolling stock. H&A Logistics was formed in 1987 as a contract logistics business, and moved into container shipping and port terminals. The size of H&A was debated in every Parliament from the 1970s: left-federalist parties proposed breaking it up, and sovereigntist parties returning its businesses to national ownership.
2000–2019
H&A was the lead industrial partner in the consortium that built the European Thermonuclear Energy Reactor (2009–2017) and developed a compact tokamak for industrial sites and cities, the first commercial fusion reactor, offered for sale in 2020. H&A Aerospace's reusable spaceplane first flew on 14 March 2016 and entered service as a satellite launcher in 2018; American tariffs on fourteen categories of its components in April 2018 were among the first measures of the deterioration in Euro-American relations. By 2019 H&A Logistics operated about 160 ships, 40,000 rail wagons and 30 port terminals. At the end of 2019 H&A had revenues of about €480 billion and about 1.6 million employees, and its shares, listed in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, were valued at about €1.2 trillion, the highest valuation of any company in the world, much of it on the expected value of its fusion business. Its slogan began as a 1959 advertisement for its turbines, "The best, and the last you'll need", and took its current form in a campaign of 2014.
Sulfur hexafluoride lawsuit
After the Iris arrived in 2020, the Federation's judicial authority sued H&A over anomalous concentrations of sulfur hexafluoride in several Federation territories, which it attributed to H&A's manufacturing. The areas matched the sites of Beckon clusters. To contest the suit, H&A set up its Hyperbiology division, whose research identified Beckons as a major biological source of the gas. The Federation answered with subpoenaed H&A records, and the science remained disputed. The case went to open session, and Hyperbiology's data became the first scientific record of the parasites.
Contractor to the Federation
In 2022 H&A became the Federation's primary operational contractor under the EF Integration Agreement, a contracting framework that left command with the Federation. H&A also began developing RTG weapons that year.
In 2026 internal Hyperbiology documents describing liaison with the Vagrants in asset-management terms were made public, in what became known as the Hyperbiology Leak.
H&A's shares were the most traded in the Federation. They stood at about €300 at the end of 2019, fell to about €280 in the marine insurance crisis of 2021, and recovered as H&A Logistics kept its ships sailing. After the EF Integration Agreement they rose steadily to a peak of €2,598 on 2 May 2024, giving the company a value of about €10 trillion, and fell by a fifth later that month when H&A announced that its board had not met since January.
The Kraków Accords of 2 March 2027, a series of operational memoranda between the Federation's military command and H&A, gave H&A operational military authority and gave the Federation guarantees of logistics, and created the joint H&A-EF command in Amsterdam. Neither party describes them as a formal agreement. The Federation's chief negotiator, Mikael Ostrowski, retired three months after signing them. The Amsterdam exchange delisted H&A the same day, at a last price of €1,214.50.
AI models
H&A developed AI models before 2020. Its public-facing models were shut down by the Federation in March 2023, on grounds of safety, and it has not offered AI products to the public since. It continues to run internal models for its own divisions and for the Federation.
Divisions
Thermonuclear
H&A Thermonuclear builds nuclear weapons and RTG weapons, and makes the recommendations for nuclear strikes on proto-Supreme Beckons. The 2025 strike on Hiroshima was authorised at one of its facilities, near Lyon.
Hyperbiology
H&A Hyperbiology, based in Frankfurt and directed by Ashley Woods, studies the parasites. It began as an annex to the sulfur hexafluoride lawsuit, presented as environmental science, and its first survey made the first systematic measurement of sulfur hexafluoride emitted by biological sources. As of 2028 it is a directorate of its own. Its work includes the dissection of parasite organisms and the chemistry of Beckon blueprints, and its findings go into field equipment without passing through ordinary procurement. Its products include pheromone countermeasures that make infantry harder for organisms to locate. In 2024 it established contact with the 2nd and 3rd Vagrants. The division has the highest rate of cognitive strain leave in H&A.[1]
Logistics
H&A Logistics runs scavenging and distribution. It operates from ports and existing logistics hubs, and moves goods by kilometre-long trains and by container ships carrying thousands of containers, which sail under escort by the Federation's navy. Its main constraint is the supply of uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons and RTG rounds.
Food and Agriculture
H&A Food and Agriculture works on rebuilding food production in damaged soil, under changed seasons and an elliptical orbit. It researches crops that can be grown in soil next to infested ground.
Security and Containment
H&A Security and Containment handles internal threats, infected personnel and the security of Vagrant liaison. H&A's public assessments of outbreaks in cities appear under the name H&A Containment.
Defence manufacturing
H&A's defence businesses build equipment for the Federation's armed forces, alongside other European contractors.
- H&A Land Systems designs and builds main battle tanks.
- H&A Naval builds carriers, submarines and destroyer escorts. Its escort designs carry sensors meant to detect parasites before they reach convoy lanes.
- H&A Aerospace builds fighters, ground-attack aircraft and strategic bombers, and has a sensor programme derived from mapping Beckon patterns.
- H&A Ordnance makes artillery, anti-armour and anti-aircraft weapons and infantry arms.
Records
The H&A Records Division moved from calendar dates to day counts in 2027, when the length of the year began to change.
Products
- RTG penetrator rounds release heat a few microseconds before impact, which stops the membrane gel of parasite organisms from hardening.
- Clearsoil tablets purify water near infested zones. They are distributed free.
- Amber rations are preserved food that ages at about a third of the normal rate.
See also
References
- ^ Woods, Ashley (8 February 2021). "Biogenic sulfur hexafluoride from Primitive Beckons at four sites in the southern Federation". H&A Hyperbiology Division. arXiv:2102.03317. (PDF)