Fortum Brand Guidelines: Imatra’s Rapids, a 1998 Merger and the Uniper Years

A waterfall, a state company and a merger.

Fortum is a young name with an older company inside it. The Finnish group was formed in 1998 by merging two companies in which the Finnish state was the majority owner, the power producer Imatran Voima and the oil company Neste, Finnish Wikipedia says; the new company listed on the Helsinki stock exchange in December that year. Its head office is at Keilaniemi in Espoo, next to Helsinki, and Finnish Wikipedia gives the state’s holding in April 2026 as about 51 percent, held through the Prime Minister’s Office. It is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki.

The older half of the story begins with a waterfall. Finland’s parliament approved the harnessing of the Imatrankoski rapids on the Vuoksi river in 1921, and construction began in 1922 under the engineer Hugo Malmi, with a workforce of about 1,000, Finnish Wikipedia says. The plant was inaugurated on 25 May 1929 before a crowd of about 5,000, when every gate of the regulating dam was closed for a few minutes and the rapids fell silent for the first time. In May 1932 the government decided to set up Imatran Voima Osakeyhtiö, known as IVO, to run the plant, and Malmi, who had designed and built it, became its first managing director.

The plant was bombed during the Second World War, Finnish Wikipedia records, and because it was important the damage was repaired straight away; its seventh and last generating unit was finished in 1951. Over the following decades IVO added the hydro plants of the Oulujoki river, coal-fired plants at Inkoo and Naantali and the Loviisa nuclear power plant, English Wikipedia says. Neste, the other partner, had been founded in 1948 to refine oil for Finland.

From Neste Oil to Uniper.

The years after the merger were spent splitting and selling. The oil business was separated as Neste Oil — in 2004 by Finnish Wikipedia’s date, in 2005 by English Wikipedia’s — and Fortum kept power and heat. It moved into Russia, buying a stake in the generator TGK-10, later called OAO Fortum, in 2008, and over 2014 and 2015 sold its electricity distribution networks in Finland and Sweden, according to both Wikipedias.

Its largest step was German. In September 2017 Fortum announced that it would buy E.ON’s 47 percent stake in Uniper, the German gas and power company, English Wikipedia says, and E.ON accepted the offer in January 2018. After Russian authorities gave their approval in February 2020, Fortum raised its holding to about 70.5 percent, and Uniper became its subsidiary that year — in March according to English Wikipedia, and in November, when the holding passed 75 percent, according to Finnish Wikipedia.

Then came 2022. With Russia cutting gas supplies to Germany, Uniper had to buy expensive replacement gas, Yle News reported, and in July the German government agreed to take 30 percent of the company. On 21 September 2022 Fortum agreed to sell its whole stake, then 56 percent, to the German state, which would own about 98.5 percent of Uniper afterwards, Yle reported that day. Fortum’s chief executive, Markus Rauramo, said in the company’s release that the role of gas in Europe had “irrevocably changed.” Finland’s ownership-steering minister told Yle the sale would let Fortum concentrate on its core business in the Nordic energy market. The final agreements were signed on 19 December 2022, and on 21 December 2022 Fortum announced that it had completed the sale.

Its Russian business ended differently. In May 2022 Fortum said it would stop using the Fortum brand in Russia, Finnish Wikipedia says; in April 2023 its Russian assets were placed under external management by decree of the Russian president, and Fortum wrote them off and removed them from its group accounts. Russia renamed the business Forward Energo in July 2023, and in February 2024 Fortum began arbitration proceedings against Russia, English Wikipedia says.

How utilities present themselves.

Many of Europe’s big electricity and gas groups began as something narrower: a regional hydro company, a national gas board, a coal-fired generator, a city lighting firm. Many of today’s names were assembled through mergers, nationalisations and privatisations, and their identities often had to stand for several older companies at once. A single short name and a simple symbol became the usual answer.

The pictures these groups choose tell the same story. Offshore wind farms standing in grey northern seas, hydro dams in mountain valleys, solar fields and transmission lines now carry more of the visual weight than power stations and chimneys. Colour often follows: greens and blues, sometimes with a warm accent for the sun, are common in the sector’s newer identities. Iberdrola’s three leaves, introduced in 2002 when it tied its brand to renewable energy, and Engie’s rising sun, adopted with the new name in 2015, are two examples.

Much of the brand now lives on screens rather than letterheads. Customers meet these companies through smart-home energy apps, online accounts and the electric-car charging points that carry their names on streets and motorways. Iberdrola, for example, redrew its logo in 2023 for digital use, with solid colours and a custom typeface shared by the companies it owns in other countries.

The sector also presents itself through long annual sustainability reports, sponsorship and industry gatherings such as Eurelectric’s Power Summit and the WindEurope annual event. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it came from, who owns it, and how its name and symbol changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Hydro, nuclear and a rapids show.

Fortum now presents itself as a Nordic clean-power company. Its strategy of March 2023 put Nordic hydro and nuclear power at the centre, Finnish Wikipedia says, and English Wikipedia counts more than 150 hydro plants owned or co-owned in Finland and Sweden in 2025, on rivers including the Dalälven, Indalsälven, Oulujoki and Vuoksi. It owns the Loviisa nuclear plant, whose licence the Finnish government extended to 2050 in February 2023, and holds stakes in Sweden’s Oskarshamn and Forsmark plants and in Teollisuuden Voima, which runs Olkiluoto. In 2024 it sold its recycling and waste business to Summa Equity. English Wikipedia also says that in 2023 Fortum became the first business headquartered in Finland to receive Fair Tax Mark certification.

Its oldest site still works as a stage. On set days the city of Imatra orders a “rapids show,” in which water is released into the old riverbed below the dam to music from Sibelius’s Karelia suite, Finnish Wikipedia says. The idea goes back to 1937, when a tourist association in Vyborg proposed letting people see the rapids as they had been; showings were held at Christmas, New Year and Easter in 1938 and 1939, and the city began buying regular shows from the company in the early 1970s. The Imatra plant, which Finnish Wikipedia calls the country’s largest hydro plant, remains in Fortum’s hands.

For a design guide, Fortum shows how a merged state utility can carry its history through one place: a dammed waterfall that still draws a crowd. Compare Vattenfall, the Swedish state power company, and Statkraft, Norway’s state hydro producer. For this guide we use a lake blue and a moss green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fortum’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.