Saft Brand Guidelines: Victor Hérold’s 1918 Battery Maker, From CGE to TotalEnergies

Victor Hérold’s alkaline batteries.

Saft began in Romainville, on the eastern edge of Paris. The company says the Franco-Swiss chemical engineer Victor Hérold founded the Société Industrielle des Accumulateurs Alcalins in 1913, using the nickel battery technology of Edison and Jungner, and that the First World War kept production from starting. When production began in 1918, the firm took the name Société des Accumulateurs Fixes et de Traction, or S.A.F.T. French Wikipedia and the French culture ministry’s heritage inventory both give 1918 as the founding year and Hérold as founder. French Wikipedia says the first alkaline pocket-plate batteries went to the PLM railway company; the company says some of its first batteries powered luggage trolleys in Paris railway stations.

English Wikipedia says the company was partly listed on the Paris Bourse in 1924. In 1928 it was bought by the Compagnie Générale d’Électricité (CGE), the group later known as Alcatel, and it stayed inside that group for more than seventy years. In 1949 it opened a factory in Bordeaux for a new type of alkaline battery, in buildings that had belonged to a transport-equipment maker. The ministry’s inventory of that site, first compiled in 1997, records an office block, canteen and infirmary built in 1949 and 1950, and a shed-roofed workshop entrusted in 1952 to the Paris architect Marcel Taverny. The same record credits Saft’s sintered plates with taking its “Voltabloc” battery into aviation, and notes that in 1953 United States naval aviation ordered 2,000 of its 24-volt batteries.

Nickel, lithium and a long run of purchases.

Under CGE, Saft widened both its chemistry and its map. French Wikipedia says it bought Fulmen, and with it Leclanché, in 1952; the company describes that year’s purchase as La Pile Leclanché. The company says it set up Saft Corporation of America in 1955, filed its first primary lithium patents in 1965, opened a factory at Poitiers the same year, and opened its first American factory, in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1974. In 1985, French Wikipedia says, CGE sold the consumer battery business sold under the Saft Mazda name to the battery maker Wonder.

The industrial side grew by purchase. The company’s timeline lists Gould in 1983, Alcad in 1987, the Swedish nickel battery maker NIFE of Oskarshamn in 1991, Gates Aerospace Batteries in 1993, Ferak in the Czech Republic in 1995, the lithium battery maker Tadiran in 2000 and Hawker Eternacell, a supplier of lithium batteries to the American and British armed forces, in 2001. English Wikipedia says Alcatel took full ownership of Saft and removed it from the stock market in 1995.

Saft’s batteries are used on land, at sea, in the air and in space. The company groups its work into four businesses: aerospace, defence and performance; connected smart energy, built around primary lithium cells for uses such as smart metering and asset tracking; energy storage systems; and industry, mobility and infrastructure, which covers backup power for rail, telecom and utilities and the electrification of industrial vehicles. It says its nickel-based batteries flew on the Concorde prototypes in 1969, that its batteries landed on Mars with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004, and that its primary lithium battery powered the Philae lander on its comet in 2014.

How industrial battery makers present themselves.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A mark that follows its owners.

Alcatel sold Saft to the private equity firm Doughty Hanson — in 2004 according to the company and English Wikipedia, in 2003 according to French Wikipedia — and Saft was listed on Euronext Paris; English Wikipedia says Doughty Hanson sold its remaining shares in 2007. In 2016 the French energy group Total, now TotalEnergies, bought the company. French Wikipedia cites the market regulator AMF as saying Total would hold 90.14 per cent of Saft after its offer settled in July 2016, and English Wikipedia says Saft left the stock exchange in August that year. Saft says it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of TotalEnergies since then. In 2020, French Wikipedia says, Saft created Automotive Cells Company (ACC) with Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz, with the backing of the French and German governments. Today Saft says it has 16 manufacturing sites in 18 countries and more than 4,500 employees; English Wikipedia places its head office at Levallois-Perret.

Saft’s history page traces its own identity in some detail. It says its first logo dates from the late 1920s, when it joined CGE; that from 1972 a single logo unified its brands Leclanché, SOGEA and URA; that its logo followed the new identity CGE introduced for its subsidiaries in November 1990, after the group took the name Alcatel Alsthom; and that it drew up new brand guidelines and a new logo after the sale by Alcatel and the listing. A simplified logo was extended from 2017, a special logo marked the 2018 centenary, and in 2021 the mark turned red to follow TotalEnergies’ new name and identity. In 2026 Saft introduced another logo that it says strengthens the link with TotalEnergies, with a blue gradient that it says stands for electricity and technological innovation.

For a design guide, Saft shows how a supplier’s mark can follow the identity of each group that owns it. Compare Exide, another long-lived industrial battery name, and Northvolt, the Swedish lithium-ion venture. For this guide we use a deep teal, nickel grey and an ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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