Implenia Brand Guidelines: The 2006 Zschokke & Batigroup Merger Behind Alpine Tunnels

Zschokke, Batigroup and the firms behind them.

Implenia is a young name with old roots. English and German Wikipedia say the group was formed at the start of 2006 by merging Zschokke Holding, based in Geneva, with Batigroup Holding, based in Basel. The two companies announced their plan on 15 November 2005, and shareholders of both approved it at simultaneous meetings on 2 March 2006. A placeholder company set up for the purpose, ZB Didumos AG, had been renamed Implenia AG in 2005. Zschokke and Batigroup shares were delisted on 3 March 2006, and Implenia shares began trading on the Swiss exchange on 6 March 2006, with Zschokke holders taking 65 parts of the new company to Batigroup’s 35.

The older side of the family is Zschokke. Its starting point was the building firm Castor, Hersent et Zschokke, founded in 1872 in Aarau by the engineer Conrad Zschokke and turned into the joint-stock company Conrad Zschokke in 1909, German Wikipedia says. Implenia’s own history calls him its “founding father” and says he first made his name on harbour works abroad, in Genoa from 1886 to 1893, La Rochelle in 1888, Venice in 1909 and Marseille in 1911. Over the decades Zschokke absorbed other Swiss builders, including Ad. Schäfer, founded in 1870, Heinr. Hatt-Haller, founded in 1920 and taken over in 1982, and Locher, founded in 1830.

Batigroup was itself a merger. In mid-1997 three firms — Preiswerk, founded in 1862, the road and civil engineering company Stuag, founded in 1912, and Schmalz, founded in 1948 — combined to form it, with a focus on road building, poured asphalt, civil engineering, tunnelling and building work. Implenia describes the 2006 merger as creating the largest construction and real estate company in Switzerland at the time.

Dams, fortresses, tunnels and timber.

The predecessors left a long list of Swiss works. Implenia’s history says Heinrich Hatt-Haller built the Swiss National Bank’s headquarters in Zurich in 1921, the Parsennbahn in Davos in 1931 and the Säntis aerial cableway in 1934. Zschokke built the Sautet dam in France in 1935 and later worked on the Grande Dixence dam in Valais, whose 285-metre wall the company still calls the highest in Europe.

The war years are part of that record. In 1939 the Swiss Federal Council launched a large programme of national defence building, and Implenia’s history says its predecessors Zschokke, Hatt-Haller and Stuag built works for the Swiss Army. Hatt-Haller won the bid in October 1939 for the Magletsch artillery fort near Sargans, hollowed out of a hillside between 1939 and 1941, and Zschokke won a contract for a paved runway at the Saanen military airfield. Between 2007 and 2009 Implenia built the Swiss Army’s Eastern Combat Training Center on the same Sargans site.

Today the company presents itself as an integrated construction and real estate provider in Switzerland and Germany, with tunnelling in other markets. It is organised into three divisions — Buildings, Civil Engineering and Service Solutions — and its units include Implenia Holzbau for timber construction, Implenia Fassadentechnik for facades, BBV Systems for post-tensioning and the property services firm Wincasa, bought in May 2023. Its tunnel work includes the Brenner Base Tunnel between Innsbruck and Bolzano, the second tube of the Gotthard road tunnel, the Mont-Cenis base tunnel between Lyon and Turin, a section of Line 15 South of the Grand Paris Express, and, in a consortium, most of Norway’s Rogfast road tunnel, according to Wikipedia and the company.

Buildings are the other half. Implenia built Andrew’s Tower for the Swiss railways in 2016 and the Torre Intesa Sanpaolo in Turin, designed by Renzo Piano, and German Wikipedia names timber high-rises such as Projekt Pi in Zug and the Rocket tower in Winterthur. In November 2026 the Swiss financial site cash, carrying an AWP report, said Implenia had won the technical fit-out of a new Swiss data centre whose shell it had already built, covering about 33,000 square metres, with completion planned for 2028.

How construction groups present themselves.

Large construction groups present themselves less through products than through places. Their identities usually rest on a strong wordmark, often in a blue, a red or an orange, used across hoardings, site vehicles, workwear and reports, with the group name repeated in the names of its subsidiaries. Eiffage, for example, runs its business lines as Eiffage Construction, Eiffage Route, Eiffage Métal and so on, while Bouygues keeps separate names such as Colas alongside Bouygues Construction.

Photography does much of the work. Group websites tend to alternate pictures of active sites — cranes, tunnel-boring machines, road crews — with finished bridges, stadiums, towers and rail lines, and they organise their pages by activity: infrastructure, buildings, concessions such as motorways and airports, and energy works. Named landmark projects serve as the main proof of capability, from the Channel Tunnel to the Millau Viaduct.

Commitments are presented in a structured way. Groups describe their environmental and social aims through named programmes, plans and reports rather than slogans; Eiffage, for instance, publishes a climate report and a biodiversity action plan alongside its universal registration document. Values pages, codes of ethics and statements on site safety appear as standard sections, written in the language of programmes and targets.

Two other audiences shape these identities. Careers pages address the large numbers of engineers, site managers and trades staff the groups recruit each year, and many groups promote employee shareholding as part of their story. Investors and lenders read the annual and sustainability reports, where the identity system is often applied most completely, in charts, maps and project photographs. This guide sets out what can be checked about each group: who founded it, how it was formed, who owns it, and which projects dated sources connect to its name.

Growth abroad, then a narrower focus.

After the merger Implenia expanded outside Switzerland. It bought the Norwegian infrastructure specialist Betonmast Anlegg in 2010; in March 2015 it added Bilfinger Construction, with work in Germany, Austria and Sweden, later renamed Implenia Construction; and in 2016 it bought Bilfinger Hochbau, Wikipedia says. In May 2021 it completed the purchase of BAM Swiss, a Basel builder of hospitals and laboratories, taking over projects such as the new Aarau Cantonal Hospital.

The expansion was then cut back. On 27 October 2020 Implenia announced an accelerated restructuring from 2021, ending its push to internationalise, English Wikipedia says. It withdrew from loss-making activities in Sweden, Norway and Romania and concentrated on Switzerland and Germany, keeping tunnelling as its main business elsewhere in Europe. German Wikipedia adds that its Austrian business was sold to Zech Bau in September 2021, and that a portfolio of development projects was spun off in 2020 as Ina Invest, listed on the Swiss exchange that June. In 2026 Implenia bought Zigmo Engineering, a structural design firm in Frankenthal, in Germany.

Not every project went smoothly. Defects found in the steel girders of the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich, which Implenia completed for the 2008 European football championship, led to about ten years of legal proceedings with the city; the case ended in 2021 with a court settlement in which both sides waived all remaining claims, Wikipedia says. Among its awards, Implenia was named Tunnelling Contractor of the Year in 2014 for the Nant de Drance pumped-storage plant, according to German Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Implenia shows how a merged company can present one name while drawing on the history of many older firms. Compare Strabag, an Austrian construction group, and Hochtief, a German contractor. For this guide we use a granite green, a glacier grey and an ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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