SIGARMS

SIG Sauer

Type	Private
Industry	Firearms, Sporting Goods
Founded	Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Headquarters	SIG Sauer Inc., Newington, New Hampshire and Exeter, NH SIG Sauer, GmbH, Eckenforde, Germany, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Handguns, rifles, ammunition, electro-optics, airguns, suppressors, shooting accessories
Services	Gunsmithing, training
Owner	Lüke & Ortmeier Holding Gruppe
Number of employees	>750
Parent	L & O Holding Gruppe
Website	SIG Sauer, Inc. SIG Sauer, GmbH

There are two SIG Sauer companies. The original company, SIG Sauer GmbH, is a firearms manufacturer and importer. It had been formed as a partnership between Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft of Switzerland and J.P. Sauer & Sohn of Germany. It is a subsidiary of Lüke & Ortmeier Gruppe (L&O Holding), which also owns Swiss Arms AG.

A separate company was founded in the US in 1985 with the name Sigarms (until October 2007) to import and distribute SIG Sauer firearms into the United States. Since 2000 SIG Sauer Inc. has been organizationally separate from manufacturer SIG Sauer GmbH.

SIG (now known as SIG Holding, AG) no longer has any firearms business. This last was sold to of Emsdetten, Germany and was renamed Swiss Arms.

The origins of the SIG Sauer company lie in the company named Schweizerische Waggon Fabrik or Swiss Wagon Factory (in English) which was founded in 1853 by Friedrich Peyer im Hof, Heinrich Moser and Johann Conrad Neher. In 1860, a state-of-the-art rifle of their creation won a competition by Switzerland's Federal Ministry of Defense, resulting in the award of a contract to produce 30,000 Prelaz-Burnand rifles. The Prélaz-Burnand 1859 was invented by gunsmith Jean-Louis Joseph Prélaz and an army officer Edouard Burnand and adopted as rifle M1863 (15,566 made by SIG).

Upon receiving the contract to produce rifles the company name was changed to Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft (SIG), German for "Swiss Industrial Company" (in French regions of Switzerland was known as Société Industrielle Suisse). reflecting the new emphasis on their production.

The SIG P210 pistol was developed in 1937 based on the French Model 1935 pistol (The Petter-Browning Design was licensed). It was adopted by the Swiss military in 1949 as the "Pistole 49". This single-action semi-automatic P210 brought SIG much acclaim, due to the precision manufacturing processes employed in its manufacture and its resultant accuracy and reliability. The P210 frame design incorporates external rails that fit closely with the slide, thus eliminating play in the mechanism during firing. The P210 was noted for its extreme accuracy. The Petter-Browning patent which was a refinement of the Browning Hi-Power (P35) which was John Moses Browning's last design which was created for, but not adopted, the French 1935 pistol.