AB Atlas in 1873, Nya AB Atlas in 1890 and Atlas Diesel in 1917.

Atlas Copco began with a different name and a different product. Compressed Air Best Practices and Powder Bulk Solids both reported on 21 February 2023 that the group was founded in Stockholm on 21 February 1873, and that it initially delivered equipment for the construction of the Swedish railroad system. English Wikipedia gives the original name as AB Atlas and names its founder as Edvard Fränckel, an industrialist and a senior official at the Swedish State Railways. The same encyclopedia lists André O. Wallenberg and David O. Francke among the early investors, and says Johan W. Arnberg, Carl G. Cervin and Fredrik Didron also helped to set the company up.

The early factories made railway equipment, including carriages, in Stockholm and Södertälje. English Wikipedia says that a recession in the 1880s brought heavy losses and pushed the business into steel and iron parts for general construction, marine steam engines and boilers, with manufacturing gradually gathered in Stockholm. In 1890 the company was reconstructed as Nya AB Atlas, the New Atlas company, with the Wallenberg family as its principal owner. Its range by then included steam engines, locomotives, machine tools and parts for central heating.

The second half of the later name came from a merger of two Wallenberg businesses. English Wikipedia records that in 1898 the family founded AB Diesels Motorer to build engines based on Rudolf Diesel’s patent, and that the two companies worked together from early on. In 1917 Nya Atlas and Diesels Motorer merged to form AB Atlas Diesel. By then the Atlas side had already moved towards oil-driven engines, pneumatic machinery and compressors, and the merged company sold its factory space in central Stockholm and moved the production of pneumatic equipment to the diesel engine factory in the suburb of Sickla.

Compressed air became the core of the business. English Wikipedia describes a drilling system introduced in 1936 that became known as the “Swedish method”: lightweight pusher-leg rock drills fitted with tungsten-carbide bits, so that one worker could operate one machine. It was used at full scale in a Stockholm tunnel in 1945–46. The carbide came from a neighbour in the Swedish steel industry; English Wikipedia’s article on Sandvik says that in 1947 Sandvik became the exclusive supplier of cemented carbide rock drill steels to Atlas Diesel. In 1948 the diesel engine division was sold, and the company kept the name Atlas Diesel for several more years even though it no longer built diesel engines.

Copco: a Belgian trading abbreviation becomes half the name.

The name the company carries today dates from 1956. English Wikipedia says that in that year the company bought the Belgian compressor maker Arpic Engineering NV, and changed its name to Atlas Copco AB. The word Copco was taken from Compagnie Pneumatique Commerciale, a Belgian subsidiary whose shortened name had already been used in several countries. The result joined the Stockholm company’s original single word to a French-language trading abbreviation, and replaced a name that described a product the company had stopped making.

Under the new name the company grew by buying businesses that kept their own names. English Wikipedia lists factories acquired in several countries in the 1960s, the Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company in 1987, the British vacuum company Edwards in 2014 and the German vacuum company Leybold, founded in 1850, in 2016. Compressed Air Best Practices reported in November 2023 that Edwards, Isra, Leybold, LEWA and Chicago Pneumatic each have their own distinct identity within the group. The pattern is a house name above a set of separately named product brands.

In 2018 part of the business left under a new name. English Wikipedia says Atlas Copco announced in 2017 that it planned to move its rock excavation, drilling and demolition equipment for the mining and infrastructure sectors into a separate listed company whose shares would go to Atlas Copco shareholders, and that the new company was named Epiroc. KHL’s Thomas Allen reported on 19 June 2018 that Epiroc had started trading on Nasdaq Stockholm, marking its start as a fully independent company following its separation from Atlas Copco. Allen wrote that Atlas Copco’s annual general meeting in April had decided to distribute all Epiroc shares to Atlas Copco’s shareholders, who received one Epiroc share for each Atlas Copco share. Epiroc’s president and chief executive, Per Lindberg, told the publication the company was proud of its heritage in the Atlas Copco group.

After the split, English Wikipedia says, Atlas Copco has been organised around four business areas: Compressor technique, Vacuum technique, Industrial technique and Power technique. The head office is in Nacka, near central Stockholm, on a site where the company’s main factory used to stand, and its A and B shares are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. The rock drills that defined the mid-century business now carry the Epiroc name, while the Atlas Copco name stays with compressors, vacuum equipment, tools and power equipment.

Industrial group names and their marks.

European industrial identities tend to be built from plain materials. Many company names began as a founder’s surname, the name of a town or river, or an acronym left behind when two firms merged and kept a trace of each. Those names were rarely chosen for sound or meaning; they were registered, painted on a works gate and stamped into metal, and they stayed because changing them would have meant changing every plate, invoice and drawing at once.

That history shapes how the marks look today. A wordmark that has to be cast into a pump housing, etched onto a switch plate or printed on a shipping crate needs simple letterforms, generous spacing and a single colour that survives grime, paint and sunlight. Symbols are often abstract shapes or stylised initials rather than pictures, because they must read at the size of a thumbnail on a control panel and at the size of a building on a factory roof.

The brand surfaces are mostly physical: product plates, machine liveries, signage at plant gates, vehicle fleets, trade-fair stands and the technical manuals that travel with the equipment. Reviewing one of these identities means looking at where the mark is actually fixed, not only at the version on a screen.

November 2023: the word Group joins the name.

The company marked the date of its founding in public. Powder Bulk Solids reported on 21 February 2023 that members of the Atlas Copco team rang the opening bell at Nasdaq in New York City that morning to celebrate the anniversary. The president and chief executive, Mats Rahmström, was quoted in the same report: “Much has changed since 1873 when we were a small local start-up.” English Wikipedia also records the bell-ringing ceremony as the anniversary event.

Later the same year the group changed how its name appears. Compressed Air Best Practices reported on 16 November 2023 that the Atlas Copco Group had launched a new identity, including a new Group logo, a new visual identity and a new Group message, “Technology that transforms the future.” The publication said the current blue and white Atlas Copco brand and logo would continue to be used on products and services, in the same way as the group’s other brands use their own logos. Rahmström was quoted as saying that the new Atlas Copco Group brand becomes the umbrella for all brands in the group, including Atlas Copco itself, so that brands can keep their individuality while the group draws attention to being part of something larger.

English Wikipedia describes the same change in visual terms: in November 2023 the identity of the business group was separated from the appearance of products sold under the Atlas Copco brand by introducing a new and visually distinct logotype that includes the word Group. The result is two marks built on one name. The blue and white Atlas Copco logo stays on products and services, while the Group logo sits above Atlas Copco, Edwards, Leybold, Chicago Pneumatic and the rest, in the role a holding name plays for a family of product brands.

The name has changed less than the company. AB Atlas became Nya AB Atlas, then Atlas Diesel, then Atlas Copco, and each change kept the original word in front. Epiroc took a new name when the rock drilling business left in 2018; the remaining company kept the 1956 one and, in 2023, added a single word to it for the group above.

For a design guide, Atlas Copco shows how a company can keep one product logo for its equipment and draw a second, separate mark for the group that owns it, while the name itself carries a 19th-century Swedish word and a Belgian abbreviation. Compare Sandvik, the Swedish steel company that supplied carbide drill steels to Atlas Diesel from 1947 and redrew its own logotype in 2023, and ABB, another industrial group whose name was built from earlier company names. For this guide we use Copco blue, steel ink and pale frost with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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