Constellium Brand Guidelines: The Aluminium Maker Named After a Constellation

A carve-out from a mining group.

Constellium is a young name on old foundations. The company says its roots lie in three aluminium groups, Pechiney of France, Alcan of Canada and Alusuisse of Switzerland. Pechiney was an old French group; the sources used for this guide do not cover its history during the German occupation of France in 1940–44 or say whether forced labour was used at its plants in those years. French Wikipedia traces how they came together: Alcan merged with Alusuisse’s parent, Algroup, in 2000 and acquired Pechiney in 2003, and in 2007 the mining group Rio Tinto bought Alcan outright. Rio Tinto then decided to sell assets, including its packaging and engineered-products businesses, and in August 2010, French Wikipedia says, it grouped its rolled and extruded products into a new company, Alcan Engineered Products.

That company was sold at the start of 2011. On 4 January 2011, the trade publication SteelOrbis reported, Rio Tinto completed the divestment of 61% of Alcan Engineered Products to investment funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management and to France’s state-backed Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement (FSI). Apollo took 51% of a new holding company, the FSI 10%, and Rio Tinto kept 39%; the terms were not disclosed. Rio Tinto’s finance chief said the closing marked the group’s exit from substantially all of its downstream businesses.

The new company needed a name. In May 2011, French Wikipedia says, Alcan Engineered Products became Constellium, a word built from “constellation” and the “-ium” ending of aluminium, and took a new logo at the same time. Christel Bories, who had run the division since 2006, briefly became the first head of Constellium, French Wikipedia says.

Plate for aircraft, sheet for cans and cars.

Constellium makes semi-finished aluminium rather than primary metal: plate, sheet, coil, extrusions and finished structural parts. English Wikipedia describes it as a manufacturer and recycler of rolled products, extruded products and structural components, mainly for the aerospace, automotive and packaging industries, and the company reports its business through three segments.

Aerospace & Transportation makes plate, sheet and extrusions for aircraft, defence, space and transport, with plants at Issoire in France, Ravenswood in West Virginia and in Switzerland, English Wikipedia says. French Wikipedia says Issoire employs about 1,600 people and that a foundry there for low-density alloys was inaugurated on 26 March 2013. Those alloys are sold as Airware, an aluminium-lithium range that the company says is used in the Airbus A350 XWB, the Bombardier CSeries and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launcher.

Packaging & Automotive Rolled Products makes sheet and coil for beverage cans, food packaging and car bodies at Neuf-Brisach in Alsace, Muscle Shoals in Alabama, Bowling Green in Kentucky and Singen in Germany. French Wikipedia says Neuf-Brisach rolls about 470,000 tonnes a year, around three quarters of it for cans. Automotive Structures & Industry designs and makes extruded profiles and parts such as crash-management systems, body structures and battery enclosures.

Research is concentrated in three centres. The oldest, C-TEC at Voreppe near Grenoble, dates from 1967; Constellium added a partnership with Brunel University London and Jaguar Land Rover in 2013, extended in 2016, and a lightweighting centre at Plymouth, Michigan, in 2016, English Wikipedia says. Constellium was a founding member of the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative, and it reported a recycling capacity of more than 750,000 tonnes a year in 2025.

How aluminium companies present themselves.

Aluminium companies sell a grey metal that most people never see in its raw form, so their imagery leans on the moments when it glows. The potline, a long hall of electrolytic cells, and the casthouse, where molten metal is poured into ingots, slabs and billets, are the scenes that recur in annual reports and recruitment pages: orange light, heat-resistant suits and stacked bars of silver metal.

Further down the chain, the pictures change to finished forms. Rolling mills show coils of sheet and foil; marketing pages turn to beverage cans, window frames, aircraft panels and car bodies, the places where buyers meet the metal. Producers also photograph the smelter itself from a distance, sometimes beside the dam, hydro station or power plant that feeds it, since smelting is done by electrolysis and runs on a steady supply of electricity.

Over the past decade, low-carbon metal has become a brand category of its own. Producers give named labels to aluminium made with hydropower or other low-emission electricity and publish carbon figures alongside them; Rusal markets metal under the ALLOW name and Alcoa uses its Sustana family, the companies say. Recycling programmes, scrap collection and remelting are presented in the same frame, and sustainability reports, with their landscapes, maps and charts, have become one of the main design documents these companies publish.

For a designer, the category is a study in contrast: heavy industry, huge sites and molten metal on one side, and on the other a clean, technical language of labels, figures and finished products used to present it to buyers and the public.

A listed European company run from Paris.

Constellium went public on 23 May 2013, listing on the New York Stock Exchange and Euronext Paris under the ticker CSTM, according to French Wikipedia. Apollo sold the last of its shares in January 2014, and the French state investor, by then renamed Bpifrance, became the largest shareholder, French Wikipedia says. Constellium left Euronext Paris in February 2018 and kept its New York listing.

The company grew in North America through the purchase of Wise Metals, announced on 3 October 2014 according to French Wikipedia and completed in 2015, which English Wikipedia says expanded its North American rolled-products and automotive-sheet operations. In the meantime it sold or closed several former Pechiney sites in France: French Wikipedia lists the Gardanne plant, sold in 2012, the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne research centre, sold to Trimet in 2014, and the Dunkerque foundry, sold to Liberty House in 2018.

Its legal form changed too. In 2019 Constellium N.V., a Dutch public company, became Constellium SE, a European company, and in 2020 it moved its registered office from Amsterdam to Paris, French Wikipedia says. Today the company says it has about 11,500 employees, 23 manufacturing sites in Europe, North America and China, and three research centres, with its headquarters in Paris and corporate offices in Baltimore and Zurich. In 2024, French Wikipedia says, it inaugurated a new recycling centre at Neuf-Brisach. Its chief executive is Ingrid Joerg, according to the company’s third-quarter 2026 report.

For a design guide, Constellium shows how a new name can be drawn over inherited plants: a coined word, built from “constellation,” laid over plants and laboratories that trace back to three older aluminium groups. Compare Rio Tinto, which sold control of the business in 2011, and Novelis, another rolled-aluminium company carved out of Alcan. For this guide we use a night navy, a star blue and a coil silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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