Element Materials Technology Brand Guidelines: A 2010 Stork Buyout Built on Lab Testing

A Dutch engineering group’s testing arm, bought out in 2010.

Element Materials Technology, which trades simply as Element, was formed in 2010 through a management buyout of the testing business of the Netherlands-based engineering group Stork, backed by the British investment company 3i, the company’s history page says. English Wikipedia dates the founding to November 2010 and describes the business bought out as Stork’s materials and testing group. The company says the new group started with 860 people in 27 laboratories, while its board page gives 20 locations in five countries at the time of the buyout. Element is headquartered in London, according to English Wikipedia.

The company describes its work in three parts. Testing means analysing materials and products in its laboratories against technical requirements and regulatory and industry standards before they are released to market. Inspection means examining manufacturing processes, facilities, materials and products to check quality and compliance. Certification means formal third-party confirmation that products meet the required standards. Its homepage presents Element as a provider of lab-based testing, inspection and certification for “highly-regulated industries”, and says it carries out destructive and non-destructive testing of metals and non-metals.

From the start the business grew by buying laboratories. The company says it has acquired more than 45 businesses since 2011, and its acquisitions page counts a November 2023 purchase as the 50th in its short history. Its website is now published in several languages, among them German, Spanish, French, Korean and Swedish.

Bridgepoint, Exova and Temasek.

Ownership passed between investors. Bridgepoint bought Element from 3i in 2015, English Wikipedia says, and the pace of purchases rose. In 2016 Element bought Northwest EMC, a United States product-qualification testing company, and DNV GL’s German materials testing laboratories in Hamburg, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Herne and the Stuttgart area. The largest step came on 29 June 2017, when it acquired Exova Group plc, a laboratory-based testing group, according to the company’s acquisitions page. English Wikipedia says Exova had itself bought several firms and was sold by a group of shareholders led by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.

Further purchases took Element into connected technologies and life sciences. It bought PCTEST Engineering Laboratory, a connected-technologies testing business, in January 2020, then a run of pharmaceutical and analytical laboratories: Analytical Lab Group in 2020, and Avomeen, Arch Sciences Group and Impact Analytical in 2021, with JMI Laboratories in November 2021, according to its acquisitions page. English Wikipedia gives February 2021 for Impact Analytical and January 2022 for JMI Laboratories.

The Singapore investment company Temasek took a minority stake in 2019, English Wikipedia says, and in 2022 it bought the company from Bridgepoint; Element’s board page refers to “the successful buyout by Temasek in 2022”, and a Temasek executive sits on its board. English Wikipedia also notes that in 2020 Element was ranked 15th in the Sunday Times Top Track 250, a list of private mid-market growth companies in the UK.

Under Temasek the buying continued. In 2022 Element added Energy Assurance, for battery testing, Singapore Test Services and National Technical Systems (NTS), which the company says strengthened its telecoms, connected-automotive, medical-device and battery testing in North America. In 2023 it bought two South Korean firms, the battery tester NCT and the connected-technology tester CTK, and in October 2024 ISS Inspection Services, a group of non-destructive testing businesses.

Several purchases were in Germany. After the DNV GL laboratories, which the company says employed more than seventy engineers in materials testing, metallurgy and failure analysis, Element bought vohtec in July 2018 for testing in the European transportation sector, the product tester EMV Testhaus in December 2019 for the German automotive and medical markets, and the calibration and measurement specialist Kalibrierdienst Kopp in March 2021.

How testing firms present themselves.

Testing, inspection and certification companies sell work that customers rarely see in full: a laboratory report, an inspector’s visit, a certificate. Their websites lean on a small set of visual and verbal devices to make that work visible. Service catalogues are often organised by industry rather than by technique, so a visitor looking for vehicle inspection, battery testing or management-system certification finds it under automotive, energy or certification headings, as the Applus+ and Element sites show.

Accreditation pages carry much of the weight. Firms list the standards their laboratories and certification bodies are accredited to, such as ISO/IEC 17025 for testing and calibration laboratories, and some publish counts of their accreditations and approvals; Element’s website, for example, gives a figure of more than 1,000. Certification marks and logos appear as the companies publish them, usually beside the scheme or standard they belong to.

Photography on these sites commonly shows people at work: technicians at laboratory benches, inspectors on site, engineers beside test rigs and proving grounds. Corporate pages add brand promises and value statements, such as the “Together beyond standards” promise Applus+ publishes, and history pages that trace how a group was assembled, often through long runs of acquisitions.

Investor and sustainability pages complete the picture. Applus+ keeps the records of its shareholder meetings online, including those of 2024, the year it left the stock market, and both Applus+ and Element publish sustainability or ESG sections beside their codes of ethics and corporate responsibility policies. The guides in this set describe each brand from those published materials and from dated independent sources; the colours and typefaces shown here are unofficial interpretations, not the companies’ own.

A short name over a long technical register.

In 2026 Element sold part of the business. Eurofins Scientific announced on 20 July 2026 that it would buy Element’s Life Sciences Testing Services business in North America, and said the deal closed on 1 October 2026. Eurofins described the unit as offering biopharma product, environmental and food testing through 27 laboratories and facilities, with about 750 staff.

The company today describes itself largely through numbers and accreditations. Its website says it has more than 8,500 employees in over 270 laboratories, 50,000 customers and more than 1,000 accreditations and approvals, naming among them ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/IEC 17020, ISO/IEC 17065 and ISO 9001. The sectors it lists include energy, connected technologies, construction and medical devices. In 2018 it adopted a corporate responsibility policy, and in 2022, the company says, it relaunched its business purpose alongside three values chosen by its staff: integrity, care and progress. Since then, it says, it has worked to embed those values across its operations.

The name works in the same plain way. A single common noun, Element, stands in front of a longer legal name that records the group’s origins in materials testing, and the website’s page titles pair it with the line “Experts in Testing, Inspection & Certification”.

For a design guide, Element shows how a laboratory group built from dozens of acquisitions can present one short name over a long technical register. Compare Eurofins, which bought its North American life sciences testing laboratories, and Intertek, another testing, inspection and certification group. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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