Our story
Nuestra Historia
1920
CALMELL was born as a family printing press, by the hand of the Calmell family, during the 1920s, in a small shop on Gran de Gràcia Street, in the city of Barcelona.
1970
Fifty years later, at the beginning of the year 1970, it was incorporated as a Limited Company and part of the workshop was moved to the ground floor of a building on Siracusa Street, also in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona. They began to manufacture the chips with magnetic strips used by the old computers, thus initiating the bet that Calmell has always maintained with innovation and technology and that has allowed him to evolve and renew his projects to the present.
1980
During the decade of the 70s the growth of the company accelerated and the partners decide to professionalize the management hiring external directors to the family that contribute a new vision and new ideas. In 1980, Calmell already occupies the four floors of the building on Siracusa Street and has left the old place where he was born. There is a change of shareholders, with the purchase of most of the shares to the Calmell family by the new management, which allows new initiatives, investments in machinery and new products to facilitate the growth and consolidation of the company. company. Following the objective of technically evolving, Calmell specializes in products that incorporate magnetic stripe: highway toll tickets, savings passbooks and magnetic cards for public transport. The company starts its internationalization.
1985
The first technological leap takes place at the hands of “La Caixa”, which takes the decision to provide 24-hour Customer Service through the “Automatic Teller Machines”. The technology comes from Japan (Fujistu) and Calmell manages to guarantee the manufacture in Europe of all the fungible used in the ATM, especially the savings book with magnetic stripe.
1990
Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) is also a pioneer, worldwide, in the use of highly coercive magnetic tickets in the public transport network and Calmell is once again a fundamental piece in guaranteeing the manufacture of these tickets with the required quality.
1993
Calmell was one of the six companies in the world that collaborated with the initial development of the Mifare Classic chip, with the company Mikron (period 1993-1995) who designed this chip before being bought by Philips (NXP). At the time of writing, more than 1,000 million units of this product have been manufactured based on contactless technology.
1994
AFFIX ELECTRÓNICA S.L is established, the first subsidiary, which has a clear technological aspect, focused on electronic engineering, and which will be – and still is today – a very important complement for Calmell’s products and evolution.
1996
The company moves to Montcada i Reixac, to a new ship, a fact that greatly facilitates the logistics and rationalization of production and that will allow a growth that would have been impossible in the old facilities. Even so, it soon becomes necessary a second ship, which will start operating in 2001, in Montornés del Vallès.
2000
Calmell makes one of its biggest technological leaps to date, starting in the manufacture of plastic cards, with and without a chip. This evolution allows us to accompany our public transport clients in their migrations from magnetic to contactless. Over time, cards have become our main product.
2010
Ten years later another important investment is made incorporating machinery for the manufacture of smart tickets (paper chip), becoming the first Spanish company that can offer this product, and thus completing our offer of ticketing solutions.
2020
In the year 2020, almost a century after it began to operate in that small workshop on Gran de Gracia Street, Calmell will celebrate its 50th anniversary as a public limited company. The culture, the laws, the technology and the market in general have evolved and been transformed throughout all these years and Calmell has been adapting to overcome all these changes.