CS Wind Brand Guidelines: The ChoongSan Tower Maker That Took Over Pueblo

A heavy mountain that can endure every hardship.

CS Wind is a South Korean maker of wind-turbine towers. English and Korean Wikipedia say its name comes from “ChoongSan” (중산), a pen name meaning “a heavy mountain that can endure every hardship.” The business was built by Gim Seong-gon, who, according to Wikipedia, worked for a building-supply company in Saudi Arabia and in 1984 founded his own construction firm there. That firm grew into making construction materials and parts, and later chimneys for fossil-fuel power plants.

Sources give different dates for the early years. Wikipedia says CS Wind itself began in 1988, before it took its present name, and moved from chimneys to wind-turbine towers in 2003. The company’s own timeline starts in October 1984, records a Choong-san factory supplying Korean construction companies from 1989, sets up a Vietnamese subsidiary in December 2003 and dates its first wind-tower production to December 2004. It marked its 40th anniversary in October 2024 and, in March of that year, the 20th anniversary of its Vietnamese subsidiary.

The company says a Korean firm, ChoongSan Wind Power, was set up in 2006 and renamed CS WIND Corporation in 2007, the year it says it secured investment from Goldman Sachs, and that it also opened a tower business in China in 2006. It moved its headquarters to Cheonan in 2010, it says, and its website now gives a head office in Seoul’s Gangnam district.

A tower maker for many turbine brands.

CS Wind builds the steel towers on which turbines stand, and it works for several turbine makers rather than one. Its timeline lists first tower orders from GE in 2011 for the US market, from Acciona Windpower in 2013 for Chile and from Enercon in 2014 for Taiwan, and says that in 2015 it became the first Asian company to supply offshore towers to Siemens — a claim it makes about itself. Its website calls it the world’s number one wind-tower maker, again its own description.

Growth came through factories abroad and acquisitions. The company says it listed on the Korean stock exchange’s main KOSPI market in November 2014 and joined the KOSPI 200 index in 2020. It says it has since bought tower makers in Britain and Malaysia in 2016 and in Turkey in 2018, and the Portuguese company ASM in 2021. Wikipedia lists its manufacturing sites in China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Turkey, Portugal, the United States and Vietnam.

Its largest single step in America came from Vestas. On 3 June 2021 the Danish turbine maker announced that CS Wind would acquire its tower factory in Pueblo, Colorado, which Vestas said had been established in 2009 as the world’s largest tower-manufacturing facility and employed more than 500 people making over 3,000 tower segments a year. It was the last tower factory Vestas owned and ran itself. Vestas said it would secure an agreed volume of the factory’s output for North America, while CS Wind would also make towers for other turbine makers; Vestas called CS Wind a long-term partner. CS Wind says it held a ceremony to mark the takeover of the factory in August 2021, and that in March 2022 it signed an agreement with Vestas to set up a joint venture.

Blades, towers and the wind supply chain.

Wind turbine makers sell machines that few people ever see up close, so the pictures they publish do much of the work of a brand. The most familiar image is the finished turbine: a white tower and three blades on a ridge, across farmland or in a line out at sea, often shot at dawn or against a clear sky. Onshore and offshore are presented as two different worlds, one of fields and hills, the other of open water and service vessels.

The second set of images is about scale and movement. Makers like to show a single blade strapped to a long trailer on a country road, or rows of blades, towers and nacelles waiting on the quay of a port before being loaded onto ships. Port hubs and installation vessels have become a picture in their own right as offshore wind has grown.

Inside the factory, the pictures turn to process: nacelles lined up in high, bright halls, generators and hubs on assembly stands, and blade moulds the length of the building, with workers in overalls and helmets for scale. Service teams make up the last familiar scene, technicians clipped on at the top of a nacelle with the landscape far below, or descending a blade on ropes.

Behind the images is a heavy industry with a small number of large makers. BloombergNEF reported that 169 gigawatts of wind capacity were added worldwide in 2025, about 95 per cent of it onshore, and that Chinese makers took the top six places in its supplier ranking for the first time. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its turbines, blades and towers are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Towers onshore, foundations offshore.

The Pueblo plant soon drew national attention. On 29 November 2023 President Joe Biden spoke at the CS Wind America factory; in remarks published by the US government, he called it the largest wind-tower manufacturer in the world, with more than 870 employees, and said the company planned to expand it and double its production. He also thanked the company’s chairman, Gim, from the stage. In the same speech he said CS Wind had once made all its towers abroad before deciding to build them in America as well, and he linked the planned expansion, with 850 more jobs, to the incentives for American-made wind towers in the climate law he had signed.

Offshore work is the newer line. In 2023 CS Wind bought the Danish steel-structure maker Bladt Industries of Aalborg, founded in 1965 as Jørgen Bladt A/S, and in 2024 the business was renamed CS Wind Offshore, Danish Wikipedia says. The company is based at the port of Aalborg and also produces at Lindø, and it makes complex steel structures for wind energy, oil and gas, and construction. Bladt had built steel foundations for offshore wind farms including Horns Rev 2 and London Array, and offshore substations including those for Anholt and Hornsea One. CS Wind says it opened offshore-tower facilities in Vietnam and Portugal in 2024, and that in August 2025 it made its first delivery of substructure components to a Korean offshore wind farm, Anma. Its website also presents CS Bearing, a maker of slewing bearings for turbines, which it says listed on the KOSDAQ market in 2019.

For a design guide, CS Wind shows how a supplier that sits behind other companies’ names can build a recognisable industrial identity of its own. Compare Vestas, whose Pueblo factory it took over, and Siemens Gamesa, whose predecessor Siemens CS Wind says it supplied with offshore towers. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a tower white and a weathered steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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