History

Two young men who wanted to be entrepreneurs, Launo Laakkonen and Erkki Nykvist, founded a company in 1953 called Teräs- ja Metallityöt Oy manufacturing school gymnastics equipment and various kinds of transport devices. However, the superfluous letters were soon dropped from the name and Temet Oy was born.

Pressure on the Finnish government to modernize civil defence arrangements lead to a new civil defence law being passed in the Parliament in October 1958. This was the start of the building of civil defence shelters in Finland. Temet participated as a shelter equipment supplier from the very beginning. As the demand for the other product groups fell, the success of civil defense shelter equipment grew strongly. By 1963, the share of these products in Temet's production was already 85%, and the company had become the market leader in Finland.

Strong technology and product development opened the way for Temet to international markets in the beginning of the 1970’s. Exports began with the Swedish market and widened to the Middle East and South East Asia through the sister company Temet USA established in the United States in the early 1980’s

Since the end of the 1980’s, Temet has actively sought new technologies to complete its shelter business. Today, Temet Oy belongs to a group of high-tech companies owned by the group holding company Finntemet Oy. Temet’s sister companies within the group are: Environics Oy which specializes in chemical detection and detection systems and TVI Vision Oy, an expert in high-end line scan cameras used in demanding industrial machine vision applications.