AKVA group Brand Guidelines: The 2006 Pen and Feed-System Merger Behind Polarcirkel

Plastic pens, a feeding system and two mergers.

AKVA group is a Norwegian supplier of equipment and services for fish farming, at sea and on land, and its name is the product of mergers rather than a single founding. The company’s own history page sets out the line. It starts with plastic pens in 1974, a feeding system in 1980 and steel pens in 1985. In 2000 three businesses, Akva, Superia Systems and Aquasmart International, merged to form AKVAsmart. In 2006 AKVAsmart merged with Helgeland Plast, Wavemaster Chile and Wavemaster Canada, and the combined business took the name AKVA group and was listed on the stock exchange the same year. Norwegian Wikipedia gives 2006 as the year the company was established.

The 1974 date belongs to the plastic pen that the company still sells. In a news release of 2 November 2026, AKVA group said it had kept developing its Polarcirkel floating collars ever since the first circular floating collar in high-density polyethylene was delivered to the fish farmer Lovund Sjøprodukter in 1974, and spoke of more than fifty years of experience with Polarcirkel pens.

For most of its listed life the company was based at Bryne on Jæren, in Rogaland. A Norwegian competition-authority filing of December 2012 still gives AKVA Group ASA a Bryne address. Norwegian Wikipedia records that in 2019 the group moved from its premises at Bryne to the Kverneland business park in Klepp municipality, and the company’s website now lists its head office at Klepp stasjon. The shares trade on Oslo Børs under the ticker AKVA.

Pens, feed, land-based farms and software.

AKVA group divides its work into four areas on its website: Sea Based, Land Based, Digital and Service & Support. At sea it sells plastic and steel pens, deep-farming and lice-control equipment and precision feeding systems; on land it offers turn-key fish-farming plants, technology and advisory work; its digital side covers feeding assistance, process and production control. The company says it has offices in Norway, Denmark, Scotland, Lithuania, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Chile, Canada, China and Australia.

Much of the range arrived by acquisition, as the company’s own timeline lists it. In 2007 it bought Maritech, UNIAqua and Idema Aqua, and in 2012 it sold Maritech’s operations in Norway. Plastsveis followed in 2013, YES Maritime in 2014, Aquatec Solutions in 2015, and AD Offshore and Sperre in 2016; the timeline also notes that AD Offshore was merged with YES Maritime to form AKVA Marine Services. In 2018 it bought the net maker Egersund Net; in 2020, Newfoundland Aqua Service and Austevoll Rørteknikk. It took a 33.7 per cent stake in Observe Technologies in 2021 and full ownership in 2024, and a 51 per cent stake in Submerged in 2023. The website lists Egersund Net, Egersund Trading, Helgeland Plast and Sperre among the group’s companies.

The Polarcirkel line remains the clearest single product name. The Polarcirkel 560SB, announced in November 2026 with the first unit due to be installed at sea in December, has flotation pipes 560 millimetres across and comes in circumferences from 140 to 200 metres. AKVA group says the letters SB stand for Storm Bay in Tasmania, whose weather and sea conditions prompted the reinforced model, and that, like its other Polarcirkel collars, it contains no expanded polystyrene, with flotation pipes divided into several watertight chambers. A Polarcirkel 560 without the reinforced mooring bracket is offered for sites with lower loads, and the company says both can be adapted for conventional and deep farming.

How aquaculture suppliers present themselves.

Aquaculture suppliers sell to fish farmers and other professional buyers, and their brands are shaped by the places their equipment works. The pictures that recur across the sector are aerial views of circular pens floating in a fjord or a sheltered bay, rows of plastic rings linked by mooring lines, and a feed barge moored beside them. Seen from above, a fish farm is a set of simple shapes on dark water, and many suppliers lean on that geometry in their photography and graphics.

Closer in, the imagery turns to working detail: net cages lifted at the edge of a pen, feed pellets and silos, hoses carrying feed out to the rings, cameras and sensors lowered into the water, and divers or remotely operated vehicles inspecting nets below the surface. Land-based farming adds a different picture, of tanks, pipes and filtration halls indoors. Service boats and workboats appear in many catalogues, because service and maintenance at sea are part of what these suppliers sell.

In many identities colour follows the setting: blues, greens and greys stand in for sea and coast, and a brighter accent, often orange or yellow, echoes the buoys, floats and safety gear that make equipment visible on the water. Type is often a plain sans, chosen for technical documents, product sheets and dashboards as much as for advertising.

Trade fairs remain an important stage for these brands. Aqua Nor in Trondheim and conferences such as AquaVision bring farmers, feed makers and equipment suppliers together, and stands there carry the same mix of pen models, barge cut-aways and screens of feeding software. The guides in this series look at how individual suppliers present themselves within that shared visual language.

A listed company with a majority owner.

AKVA group has been controlled by Egersund Group, whose filings give an address at Egersund in Rogaland, since December 2012. A filing to the Norwegian Competition Authority dated 6 December 2012 sets out the steps: on 3 December Egersund Group agreed to buy 21.57 per cent of AKVA Group ASA from Kontrari AS, adding to the 28.42 per cent it already held, and then bought further shares on Oslo Børs to take its holding to just over half, which obliged it to make a mandatory offer for the remaining shares. AKVA group stayed listed. The company’s shareholder register, last updated in October 2026, shows Egersund Group with 51.0 per cent and Israel Corporation with 18.0 per cent, followed by Norwegian funds and nominee accounts.

The identity the company presents is built around a single line, “Pioneering a Better Future”, which its about page calls “the AKVA group spirit.” The same page lists four values, customer focus, aquaculture knowledge, reliability and enthusiasm, and describes the company as a global supplier of solutions and services to aquaculture, by its own account the largest; its history page presents it as a leading supplier of both plastic and steel pens. Those are the company’s own descriptions. The name is written with capitals for AKVA and a lower-case “group” on the website and in its legal name, AKVA group ASA. No typeface or colour specification has been published.

For a design guide, AKVA group shows how a supplier assembled from many acquired firms keeps one product name, Polarcirkel, alive for more than fifty years. Compare Egersund Net, the net maker it has owned since 2018, and ScaleAQ, another Norwegian pen and feed-barge group. For this guide we use a fjord navy, a sea mist and a buoy orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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