Epiroc Brand Guidelines: Atlas Copco’s Mining Arm, Spun Off in 2018 Under a Coined Name

A young company with an old trade.

Epiroc is a young company with an old trade. Epiroc AB was created on 1 January 2018 and listed on Nasdaq Stockholm on 18 June 2018, English Wikipedia says, when Atlas Copco separated its mining and civil engineering business from the rest of the group. Atlas Copco had first announced the plan on 16 January 2017, when its board said it would propose to the 2018 annual general meeting that the group be split into two listed companies: Atlas Copco for industrial customers, and a second company for mining and civil engineering customers.

The annual general meeting of 24 April 2018 voted to distribute all the shares in Epiroc to Atlas Copco’s shareholders, Rental Equipment Register reported on 18 June 2018; holders received one Epiroc share for each Atlas Copco share they owned, KHL reported the next day. In the United States the business had already begun operating on its own on 31 December 2017, RER said, with Epiroc USA based in Commerce City, Colorado. At the listing, KHL wrote, Epiroc served customers in more than 150 countries, and its first president and chief executive, Per Lindberg, said the company was proud of its “long and productive heritage” in the Atlas Copco group.

The name itself was new. Atlas Copco announced it on 2 May 2017 and said it had been chosen from almost 1,000 names. In the company’s explanation, “Epi” is a prefix meaning “on” or “at” in Latin and Greek, while “Roc” signals stability and durability and points to rock, one of the most important materials the business works with. In the announcement, Atlas Copco’s communications chief, Annika Berglund, called it “short, distinct and timeless.”

Rock drills since 1905, loaders from Oregon.

The heritage is Atlas Copco’s. That company was founded in Stockholm in 1873 to make products for Sweden’s railways and began producing rock drills in 1905, according to its own group history. In the 1950s the so-called “Swedish method”, which let one person operate a drilling machine where several had been needed before, brought it success around the world, the same history says, and by the early 1980s the group regarded itself as a world leader in both rock drilling and compressed air. Swedish Wikipedia lists the purchases behind today’s Swedish factories: AB Växlar och Signaler in Örebro in 1951, where rock-drilling rigs have been built since 1992; Secoroc of Fagersta in 1988; and Ingersoll Rand’s drilling business in 2004.

The underground loaders came from America. Wagner Mining Scoop Company was founded in Oregon in October 1958, after Eddie Wagner shipped what a supplier profile on Tunnelbuilder calls the first articulated, rubber-tyred front-end loader mining scoop that summer; its Scooptram load-haul-dump machines followed, and by 1970, the profile says, Wagner offered 18 Scooptram models alongside its scoops, mine trucks and utility vehicles. Atlas Copco bought the company in 1990 and renamed it Atlas Copco Wagner in March 1995, the profile says. The Scooptram name lives on in Epiroc’s loader range.

English Wikipedia describes Epiroc as working in five divisions — Surface, Underground, Parts & Services, Digital Solutions, and Tools & Attachments — and names drilling rigs, rock drilling tools, loaders and trucks, and ventilation systems among its products. It gives the company’s manufacturing locations as Sweden, the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Japan and Germany; Swedish Wikipedia names Örebro, Fagersta and Kalmar as the main Swedish plants. KHL reported in April 2022 that the battery-electric Scooptram ST14 Battery loader and Minetruck MT42 Battery hauler, ordered for the Black Rock manganese mine in South Africa’s Northern Cape, were manufactured in Örebro.

How the trade presents itself.

Mining equipment makers sell machines that most people never see at work. Their customers are mine operators, tunnelling contractors and quarry owners, and the machines spend their working lives underground or at the far end of an open pit. So the trade’s imagery tends to bring the site to the viewer: a drill rig in a floodlit tunnel, its booms reaching towards a rock face; a loader or haul truck in yellow or orange, picked out against grey stone; the beam of a headlamp in the dark.

Above ground, the favoured view is from high up. Photographs of open-pit mines show stepped benches cut into the earth, with trucks and drill rigs reduced to small bright shapes on the terraces. Underground pictures work the other way, close and cramped, with the machine filling the frame and the rock wall just beyond it.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from proving that the machines work. Makers show equipment in test mines and at customer sites, and show it to the trade at fairs such as MINExpo International, which is organised by the US National Mining Association and describes itself as the industry’s largest global mining event; its next edition is scheduled for September 2028. Stands at such fairs put full-size rigs and loaders on display, often alongside screens showing the same machines below ground.

Behind the pictures sit very different companies. Some are divisions or spin-offs of large listed engineering groups; others are family firms or privately owned specialists built around one process, such as spraying concrete or charging explosives. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Batteries, sensors and a name customers knew.

Electrification has become one of the company’s main public themes. In March 2025 Heavy Equipment Guide reported that Hudbay Minerals had ordered battery-electric versions of the Boomer M20 SG face-drilling rig, the Scooptram ST18 SG and ST14 SG loaders and the Minetruck MT42 SG hauler for its Lalor mine at Snow Lake, Manitoba, with deliveries during 2025. The same report said Epiroc had received orders for battery-electric vehicles from 39 mine sites around the world, and quoted Helena Hedblom, Epiroc’s president and chief executive. In April 2022 KHL noted that the machines for South Africa would carry the Certiq telematics system, and that the mine operator had chosen Epiroc’s Mobilaris mining software in 2019. English Wikipedia adds that in 2022 the company moved into hyperspectral imaging of drill-core samples.

The brand rests on two things: the coined name that marked the 2018 separation, and long-running product names such as Scooptram that customers already knew. RER described the new company in 2018 as a developer and producer of drill rigs, rock excavation and construction equipment, with service and consumables alongside, and noted its growing fleet of battery-powered mining vehicles and its work on automation.

For a design guide, Epiroc shows how a spin-off can take a new name while keeping the product names its customers recognise. Compare Atlas Copco, the group it came from, and Sandvik, another Swedish engineering group. For this guide we use a slate grey, a pale stone and a lamp yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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