The German radio manufacturer has a long tradition of manufacturing tube-equipped domestic radios. After the introduction of the Globetrotter in 1965, it became one of the important German manufacturers of world band receivers. The developers missed the transition to digital technology and Nordmende lost a lot of favour with shortwave listeners with its still analogue shortwave radios.

In November 1923, after the German hyperinflation and monetary reform, Otto Hermann Mende and Rudolf Müller founded Radio H. Mende & Co. and in 1925 Martin Mende joined his uncle's company. Production changed from radio components to receivers and soon Mende became one of the major German radio manufacturers. With Ulrich Günther joining the company and taking over the radio production of Koch & Sterzel, production was massively expanded. The plants of the third-largest manufacturer of radio equipment in the pre-war years in Dresden were dismantled by the Soviets after the Second World War, and the successor company became VEB Funkwerk Dresden.

Martin Mende moved to Bremen and resumed the productions of radios after the monetary reform of 1948, under the new brand Nordmende, to avoid disputes about the brand name with the authorities in Eastern Germany.

The Norddeutsche Mende Rundfunk KG resumed radio production in 1950 and launched the „Mambo“, a successful travel transistor set, in 1958. Nordmende stayed with the concept of solid state superheterodyne world band receivers and sold the „Globetrotter“ in large numbers in several variants until the end of the 1960s.

In 1977, the company was sold to the French Thomson-Brandt, but the decline could not be stopped. At the end of the eighties, the brand „Nordmende“ disappeared and the sets continued to be sold under „Thomson“ brand.

• Nordmende on the website of www.radiomuseum.org