Egis Brand Guidelines: A Caisse des Dépôts Engineering Holding Renamed in 1998

A public institution’s engineering stakes under one name.

Egis is a French engineering, consulting and operating group with its head office at Guyancourt, west of Paris, according to English Wikipedia. The company says its roots go back to before the Second World War and that the group has evolved over some 90 years into transport, infrastructure and building engineering. The sources used for this guide do not say how Egis’s predecessors operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

The Egis name is more recent. French Wikipedia says that on 17 February 1998 the shareholders of “Groupe Scetauroute” renamed it Egis, and that Egis served as the holding for the engineering and consulting stakes of the Caisse des Dépôts, the French public financial institution, among them Scetauroute and BCEOM. Regional infrastructure engineers, one of them created in 1960 within the SCET, merged on 1 June 2007 as Egis Aménagement, the same source says.

From 2007 the holding brought its businesses together into one company. French Wikipedia says Scetauroute became Egis Route, the rail engineer Semaly became Egis Rail and Isis became Egis Mobilité, alongside BCEOM. The environmental engineers Guigues joined in 2010 and the building and nuclear civil-engineering group Iosis in 2011, when a quarter of the capital was opened to managers and staff.

Designing infrastructure, and running it.

Egis describes itself as an architecture, consulting, construction engineering, operations and mobility services firm, with about 23,500 employees in more than 70 countries, working across transport, cities and buildings, water, energy and the environment. It also runs infrastructure: the company says it operates 31 road companies in more than 25 countries and 18 airports on four continents. French Wikipedia lists among those airports Larnaca and Paphos in Cyprus, Beauvais and Pau in France, and Tahiti Faa’a in French Polynesia.

Named projects in French Wikipedia include design and project management of the Pont Citadelle in Strasbourg, which won France’s Grand Prix National de l’Ingénierie in 2016; infrastructure and systems design for lines 15 East and 16 of the Grand Paris Express; the extension of Lyon metro line B; and full project management of line B of the Rennes metro. The same source lists operation of the Osman Gazi bridge in Turkey and, in the Middle East, the 2021 purchase that raised Egis’s holding in the Kuwaiti project managers Projacs to just over 95%. English Wikipedia notes that in 2018, after the liquidation of Carillion, Egis took over a 30-year contract to operate and maintain the M40 motorway in England.

Growth has come through purchases. English Wikipedia lists the Hong Kong engineers Inhabit in 2019, the British rail project managers CPMS in 2021 and the London architects Weston Williamson + Partners in 2022. In the United States, Egis merged with the Chicago engineering firm H.W. Lochner on 23 July 2025; in August 2026 Lochner rebranded as Egis, the company announced through PR Newswire, putting a US workforce of more than 1,500 in some 70 offices under one name. The release describes Lochner as a public-infrastructure firm with more than 80 years of experience.

The record includes one court matter. On 10 December 2019, Atlasinfo reported from AFP, Egis Avia, an Egis subsidiary, agreed a judicial public-interest agreement, known in France as a CJIP, negotiated with the national financial prosecutor and approved at a Paris court hearing. It ended proceedings for corruption of a foreign public official linked to a 2008 contract to modernise and equip the air terminal at Oran, Algeria.

How engineering consultancies present themselves.

Engineering and infrastructure consultancies sell expertise rather than objects, so their identities have to stand in for work that is often invisible once it is finished: a tunnel, a water network or a power connection. Most of them present themselves with restraint. Their wordmarks tend to be short, set in a clean sans, and many are acronyms, founders’ surnames or invented names left over from mergers. Colour is usually limited to one strong tone, often a blue, an orange or a green, used against plenty of white space.

The pictures do much of the talking. Websites and reports in this field lean on project photography of bridges, rail lines and stations, water and wastewater works, energy plants and city districts, often taken wide and from the air so that the scale of the work is clear. People appear as teams on site or in the studio rather than as models, and diagrams, maps and drawings sit beside the photographs.

The structure of the websites is similar from firm to firm. Pages are commonly organised by sector, such as transport, water, energy, buildings and industry, and by service, such as design, engineering, project management and advisory work. Sustainability usually has a section of its own, and careers pages carry a large share of the message, since these businesses depend on recruiting architects, engineers and other specialists.

Much of the brand also lives in documents. Listed consultancies publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and many put out technical papers, research reports, indexes and case studies on individual projects. Typography in those documents is usually plain and functional, with charts and tables carrying the detail, so the identity has to work as well on a page of figures as on a hoarding around a building site.

From public holding to investor-led group.

For most of its history Egis was controlled by the Caisse des Dépôts. In January 2022 the investment firm Tikehau Capital acquired a 40% stake from the Caisse des Dépôts, which had been the majority shareholder, English Wikipedia says; French Wikipedia adds that the Caisse des Dépôts kept 34% and managers and staff 26%. Tikehau itself describes the position it bought as a controlling one, Europa Press reported in July 2025.

That same month Tikehau announced a new capital raise to back Egis’s next phase of growth, drawing on the second fund of its decarbonisation private-equity strategy, with Apollo S3, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Neuberger Berman as co-investors, Europa Press reported; Egis said it aimed to double in size by 2028. The company’s own “Our Group” page now lists Tikehau Capital with 43%, through its decarbonisation fund, the Caisse des Dépôts with 34%, and partners, managers and employees with 23%.

The company writes its name with a single capital, Egis, and uses it across subsidiaries that once traded under other names, from Egis Rail to the former Lochner offices in the United States. Its pages are organised into sector and service menus, with white papers, an awards list and a careers section.

For a design guide, Egis shows how a group assembled from public engineering firms uses one short name across design, consulting and operating businesses. Compare SYSTRA, another French transport engineer, and Arup, a founder-named consultancy. For this guide we use estuary teal, slate and survey lime with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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