Movax Brand Guidelines: The Hämeenlinna Maker of Side Grip Pile Drivers for Excavators

An engineer’s idea in Häme.

Movax makes piling equipment that hangs from an ordinary excavator. Its own history says that in the early 1990s sheet piling was becoming more common on building sites and contractors needed a faster way to install sheet piles; the company began developing its side grip technology, which clamps the pile from the side, and commissioned its first sheet piler in 1993. Its list of milestones gives 1993 as the year Movax Oy was established in Hämeenlinna, in southern Finland, and 1994 as the year of the first side grip pile driver.

Finnish Wikipedia, citing the business paper Kauppalehti in 2014, credits the mechanical engineer Yrjö Raunisto with starting to develop the side grip technology in 1993, and says the first product was a sheet pile driver; piling hammers and earth drills came later. Its company listing, also citing Kauppalehti, gives 1996 as the founding year of Movax Oy, so the two dates refer to different records.

The ownership changed in 2006. Finnish Wikipedia says Matti Mustonen and his partners bought Movax that year and set out to develop its production, marketing and sales and to build a global brand; the company’s own milestones list a new factory in Hämeenlinna in the same year. In March 2020 the company described itself as part of Terra Patris, a Finnish, family-owned group. Finnish Wikipedia says Terra Patris was founded in 1999 by Jari Löfroos with a partner, and that its other companies make firewood processors, boats and contract-manufactured parts. In 2020, Movax said, Turkka Hirvonen took over from Löfroos as managing director of the group, with Löfroos staying on as chairman. In July 2026 Dieseko announced that Dieseko, Movax and Watson & Hillhouse were joining forces under the ownership of DevCo, a Helsinki investment firm.

SG, DH, KB and MPL.

The side grip vibratory pile driver is still the core of the range. Movax sells it as the SG series, with models from the SG-15N to the SG-80F, and it has added impact piling hammers, the DH series, which its milestones date to 2015; telescopic and kelly-bar piling drills, the KB series, from 2019; and multi-tool piling leaders, the MPL series, introduced in 2019 and later fitted with rotary drives for pre-augering, CFA piling and down-the-hole drilling. A column stabilisation leader, the MSL, followed in 2022. The company dates its first automatic steering for hydraulic excavators to 1996–1997 and calls its current control system mControl+, introduced in 2021.

Movax describes itself as the inventor of the modular, vibratory side grip pile driver and says it holds more than 40 patents. One of them is a United States patent, number 8,985,908, for a device for forcing piles into the ground, assigned to Movax Oy, with a priority date of March 2010, according to its Google Patents record. The company says more than 2,500 units have been delivered to customers in more than 65 countries.

Exports have shaped the business. In May 2019 the Hämeenlinna newspaper Hämeen Sanomat reported that Movax led five firms from the Kanta-Häme region on Kauppalehti’s list of the country’s most successful exporters, with more than 84 per cent of its sales coming from abroad. Finnish Wikipedia, citing Kauppalehti, says the company had sold to Russia until sanctions in the 2010s cut off financing for its customers, that it then turned to Britain, where railway renewal made the UK the source of up to half its sales, and that trade there stalled after the Brexit vote before new export markets lifted it again.

Design and documentation.

Piling and foundation rig makers sell machines that do most of their work out of sight, below ground, so their pictures tend to show what stands above it. The common image is a tall mast rising over a building site, often framed against a city skyline or a half-finished bridge, with the rig itself on crawler tracks in mud, gravel or sand. The height of the mast gives the photograph its shape, and the model code painted on it is often the largest lettering in the frame.

A second set of images is about tools. Augers, drilling buckets, casings, grabs and cutter wheels are laid out in rows or shown close up, clean and freshly painted, so that the parts that will disappear into the ground can be seen at all. Vibratory hammers, clamps and power packs are photographed the same way, as objects on their own, before they are lifted by a crane.

Trade fairs matter in this category. The bauma show in Munich is where makers stage large stands, with rigs raised to full height under the hall roof or on the open-air grounds, and where new models, electric versions and anniversaries are announced. Stand design, banners and the colour of the machines themselves are part of how a maker is recognised there.

Many of these companies also carry a family or founder’s name, or grew out of a contractor’s own workshop, and their histories are told through dates, places and model numbers rather than slogans. For this series we look at how each maker presents that history, using an unofficial palette and a stand-in typeface, and reproducing no machine, logo or nameplate.

Made in Hämeenlinna.

Movax builds its equipment in one place. Its website gives Hämeenlinna as both its headquarters and its production site, with a factory of 7,600 square metres, and Finnish Wikipedia says Movax products are made by Movax Oy in Hämeenlinna. In October 2015 the company marked the 1,000th Movax made in Hämeenlinna, an SG-60V handed to the Finnish piling contractor Maanrakennusliike Arno Ruusunlehti, which it called a Movax user since the mid-1990s; its milestones put the 2,000th delivery from the factory in 2021. That July it broke ground on a new south wing for the factory, due to be completed in January 2022.

For North America there is a licensed maker. Finnish and English Wikipedia say Hercules Machinery Corporation of Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the only licensed manufacturer of Movax side grip sheet pilers and distributes them in North America. The company writes its name in capitals, MOVAX, as a registered trademark, and uses trademarked names for its systems, among them mLogbook and the MOVAX Information Management System. Its marketing line is the “MOVAX Way-of-piling.”

The Finnish press has followed its growth. Finnish Wikipedia records that Kauppalehti ranked Movax as the most successful company in Kanta-Häme, relative to its size, in 2020.

For a design guide, Movax shows how a single mechanical idea, a pile driver that grips from the side, can carry a whole brand. Compare Junttan, another Finnish piling-rig maker, and ABI, the German maker of vibrators and leader rigs. For this guide we use a spruce green and a steel yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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