Panasonic (National / Matsushita) 🇯🇵

Konosuke Matsushita founded the company in Osaka in 1918 that for decades sold its appliances under the brand «National» in Japan and, since the sixties, «Panasonic». In March 1958 the Kadoma appliance division began producing a cooling device and in May put it on sale as «Home Cooler»: it was the first mass‑market domestic air conditioner from the Japanese industry. Until then the units were large machines for businesses; the National one was lightweight, relatively inexpensive and could be installed in the window or on the wall of a room, whether Western‑style or Japanese‑style. With it, air conditioning entered the wish list of Japanese families, alongside the car and color television, the «three C» of the sixties.

Matsushita launched its first inverter units in 1983, just two years after Toshiba's pioneer, and began developing the scroll compressor in 1985, which in 1990 resulted in the world's first compact scroll air conditioner, quieter and more efficient than the rotary type. In 2003 it created “nanoe”, the charged water particles that purify the air, and later the presence sensor “Econavi”. According to the company itself, in 1975 it was the first Japanese air‑conditioning manufacturer with activity in Europe. In 2008 the corporation unified all its brands under the name Panasonic and the historic “National” disappeared.

The next jump was Sanyo: after a public offer in December 2009, Sanyo was fully integrated in April 2011, and with it came absorption chillers, gas heat pumps (GHP) and the VRF systems that now make up Panasonic’s commercial catalogue. In 2009 Panasonic had created in Europe a specific HVAC sales company (PHAAE) and since then it has grown with the Aquarea aerothermal system, the Etherea split and the conversion of the entire range to the R32 refrigerant. An R&D centre in Malaysia, inaugurated at the end of 2023, develops the equipment for ASEAN and Europe.

In Spain the heating and air‑conditioning division grew strongly in the 2010s: when celebrating the company's centenary in 2018 and the 60th anniversary of that first Home Cooler, Panasonic highlighted that its Spanish operation had increased by 60 % in three years and that the firm had already manufactured 100 million compressors.

In Spain

National was the name under which Matsushita —now Panasonic— sold its appliances outside Japan until the early 2000s, and in Spain it entered by buying a company with almost a century of history. In 1973 Matsushita acquired 80 % of the shares of Anglo-Española de Electricidad, S.A., the Barcelona firm on Gran Vía 525 that manufactured Anglo radios, televisions and refrigerators and that in 1966 had been the distributor of Admiral air conditioners. The Japanese company pledged to keep local production, but “the Anglo appliances ended up disappearing from the market” and the Eduard Ferrés building became the headquarters of National Panasonic in Spain until its demolition in 1994.

Through that route the National air conditioners of the 1980s arrived: window units and the first Japanese wall‑mounted splits that many installers installed in place of the old Crolls, Carrier and Fedders. A technician recounted it in 2009 from the perspective of someone who had already taken them apart again: “to install other brands that today are also dead like National, Edesa, Mepamsa, President, Philco, Electrolux and Westinghouse.” National had not actually died: in 2008 Matsushita unified all its brands under Panasonic, and today Panasonic Heating & Cooling is one of the major players in the Spanish market, with a European heat‑pump factory in the Czech Republic.

For the enthusiast, an 80s National with the red typography of the logo is the piece that marks the change of era: the moment when Japanese brands stopped being exotic imports and became the standard, while first‑generation American and Spanish ones disappeared.

The purchase of Anglo-Española de Electricidad by Matsushita in 1973 (80 % of the shares, commitment to maintain production, disappearance of the Anglo appliances, National Panasonic headquarters and demolition of the building in 1994) is documented on the Barcelofilia blog and in the Radiomuseum entry about the company. The mention of National as an air‑conditioning brand installed and later removed in Spain comes from ELEUTERIO’s testimony on elaireacondicionado.com (2009). In todocoleccion we have not found Spanish advertisements for National air conditioners; however, old Panasonic units are abundant on second‑hand portals. The Anglo entry in this encyclopedia expands the history of the Barcelona‑based company.

The intersection of both sources allows a new reading: the same house on Gran Vía that in the ’40s manufactured AEESA refrigeration compressors, in the ’60s sold compact Anglo water‑cooled conditioners and distributed the Admiral heat pump, became in the ’70s and ’80s the headquarters from which Japanese Nationals were distributed. It is the complete sequence of air‑conditioning in Spain—local manufacturing, American import, Japanese import—experienced in a single building. And the 2009 testimony, by listing National among the “dead” brands that were dismantled to make way for others, marks the end of that stage: in the first decade of the 2000s the 1980s Nationals were already being replaced by inverter splits, many of them Panasonic.

Pending verification

What exactly does Panasonic's claim of being "the first Japanese air‑conditioning manufacturer in Europe" in 1975 mean (factory or commercial subsidiary?) and the year its split units arrived in Spain.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.