Airlan 🇪🇸

Airlan is the story of a distributor that became a manufacturer. It was created in Bilbao in 1989 as the exclusive distributor for Spain of the Italian Aermec, the Verona-based manufacturer of chillers and fan coils, at the moment when the Spanish market was fully opening to European and Japanese equipment. With branches in La Coruña, Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia, Palma and Tenerife, the Basque company grew so quickly that in 1999 it decided to embark on its own path and start designing and manufacturing air‑conditioning equipment under the Airlan brand, without stopping the commercialization of the Italian line: in 2005 it re‑incorporated Aermec chillers and fan coils into its catalogue.

Its own product focuses on air handling units, heat recoverers and high‑efficiency ventilation equipment, a field where Spanish indoor air quality regulations created a market that Japanese multinationals did not cover. Airlan is the parent company of a small group based in Bilbao and, since the 2010s, with sales offices in Peru, Panama, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, a rather unusual case of a Spanish HVAC manufacturer exporting to Latin America.

The circle was completed when the owner of Aermec acquired its former Spanish distributor, integrating it into the Italian group, as the international industry press reported. For Frostalgia, Airlan is the example of the second generation of Spanish brands: born already in democracy, without American licenses and with Italy, not the United States, as a technological reference. Their equipment is not collector's items, but an Aermec fan coil with an Airlan sticker in a 1990s hotel in Bilbao tells, in a small way, how Spanish air‑conditioning changed its accent.

Pending verification

Exact date of the acquisition by the owner of Aermec and the location of Airlan's own factory.

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