Dynapac Brand Guidelines: The Stockholm Vibration Firm That Went Back to Red

A Stockholm company built on vibration.

Dynapac began in Stockholm in 1934 as AB Vibro-Betong, a date and name given by both English Wikipedia and the Canadian trade paper Daily Commercial News in 2018. “Betong” is the Swedish word for concrete. English Wikipedia names three founders, Donovan Werner, Stig Giertz-Hedström and Ivar Strömberg.

Its subject from the start was vibration. English Wikipedia says a vibratory compactor was developed in 1936 by the mechanical engineer Hilding Svenson, and Daily Commercial News credits the company as the first to bring such a machine to market. The name changed to AB Vibro-Verken in 1940. Swedish Wikipedia says the first factory opened at Ljungby in 1941 and that production began in the United States in 1946, the year Daily Commercial News also gives for an American factory.

The post-war years set out the product line. In 1947 the company launched a vibratory plate compactor weighing 1.5 tonnes, nicknamed “the frog,” and in 1948 it opened a research laboratory. English Wikipedia dates the first vibratory road roller to 1953. The site at Karlskrona, in southern Sweden, opened in 1960 to make heavy rollers and to house the technical centre, and in 1970 came the CA 25 road roller, which English Wikipedia describes as the world’s leading compaction roller of its time. A later single-drum roller, the CA3500D, carries the same prefix.

In 1973 the business took the name Dynapac Maskin AB. English Wikipedia says the product range then expanded rapidly. Purchases abroad followed.

From rollers to pavers and planers.

Dynapac added its other product lines by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists Salco of Sweden in 1978, Vibratechniques of France in 1979 and Watanabe of Japan in 1981. Daily Commercial News says what each one brought: bitumen sprayers and chip spreaders from Salco, poker vibrators for concrete from Vibratechniques, and rollers from Watanabe. The same report names Hoes of Germany as the source of asphalt pavers, and mentions a joint venture with Hitachi in the 1990s to build its presence in Japan.

The larger paver step came in 1995, when Dynapac bought Demag Schrader of Germany, according to English Wikipedia. Daily Commercial News reported in 2018 that those pavers developed into what the company calls its SD series. English Wikipedia names Karlskrona and Wardenburg, in Germany, as the company’s main sites.

The range today covers rollers, pavers, mobile feeders and planers. When Fayat took over, the first new machine in the new livery was the CC1100/CC1200 generation VI, a small asphalt tandem roller with a cross-mounted engine, as KHL and Daily Commercial News reported.

At bauma 2025 in Munich, Dynapac’s own announcements presented new SD and XD highway pavers under the heading “Paving the Future,” along with electric machines including the SD25 80C e paver and the CA1300D e soil roller.

Its manufacturing footprint has been reported several ways. At the 2017 sale, KHL counted production units in four countries, Sweden, Germany, Brazil and China, plus a production partnership in India. English Wikipedia lists the plants as Karlskrona, Wardenburg, Tianjin in China and Sorocaba in Brazil, and places the Indian site at Pune; Swedish Wikipedia says Nashik, and adds Garland in the United States.

How the category presents itself.

Road and concrete machinery rarely sits still for a portrait, so its makers tend to photograph it at work. Catalogues and trade-press images return to a few scenes: a paver laying a black mat at dusk under its own lights, a line of tandem rollers working in formation behind it, a milling drum shown in close-up with its picks exposed, a screed drawn in cutaway so the parts that shape the surface can be seen. The subject is the finished road as much as the machine that lays it.

Concrete makers have their own set pieces. A truck-mounted pump is shown with its boom unfolded over a high-rise site, section by section, so that the vehicle reads as a piece of the building work. Truck mixers are lined up in brand colours, and the drum becomes a large painted surface for a maker’s colours.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma, now held in Munich, dates from 1949 and last opened in April 2025; CONEXPO-CON/AGG and World of Concrete both meet in Las Vegas, and INTERMAT in Paris has run under that name since 1988. Machines are launched at these shows, and a fair can date a whole generation of a range: Vögele, for one, presented its “Dash 2” pavers at Bauma 2007.

Behind that shared visual language, ownership has changed. Family firms have been bought and brought together, and several of the names in this guide now belong to larger groups, and each entry sets out who founded the brand, who owns it today, where it says its machines are made and what can be documented about how it looks.

Atlas Copco yellow out, red back in.

Dynapac has had several owners in two decades. Rental Equipment Register reported in June 2004 that Metso had agreed to sell the business to the Nordic private equity investor Altor; Swedish Wikipedia confirms the sale that year. On 5 February 2007 Atlas Copco announced an agreement with the Altor 2003 Fund to buy Dynapac AB, whose head office was then in Malmö. Dynapac now sits at Karlskrona, according to English and Swedish Wikipedia.

Ten years later the brand moved again. Rental Equipment Register reported on 20 January 2017 that France’s Fayat had agreed to buy Atlas Copco’s Road Construction Equipment Division, and noted that Fayat already held Bomag and Marini among its road-equipment companies. KHL reported that the division had been officially owned by Fayat since 4 October 2017, and that it would continue as an autonomous manufacturer under the Dynapac name. Roads & Bridges carried the same terms that month.

That sale produced the brand’s best-documented design decision. KHL reported that, coinciding with the acquisition, Dynapac revealed a new visual identity with its products painted in red, white and grey. Daily Commercial News described the change as dropping the Atlas Copco yellow and reintroducing red, a colour it said had marked Dynapac machines before Atlas Copco. The North American team used the line “Dynapac is back” and, in April 2018, opened a regional headquarters at Fort Mill, South Carolina.

In November 2026 dynapac.com was a holding page announcing that “a new Dynapac website is on its way,” stating that the company “remains fully operational,” and carrying the line “Your partner on the road ahead.”

For a design guide, Dynapac shows how a change of owner can be read straight off the paint. Compare Atlas Copco, its owner for ten years, and BOMAG, its stablemate in the Fayat group. For this guide we use a red, a white and a drum grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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