SCG Brand Guidelines: Siam Cement, 1913, a White Elephant Emblem & Three Letters

A royal decree and a cement works at Bang Sue.

SCG began as The Siam Cement Company, set up in Bangkok in 1913. English Wikipedia says the company was founded by royal decree of King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) to establish the first cement plant in Bangkok. SCG’s own Thai-language timeline gives the registration date as 8 December 1913, which the company treats as its birthday, and says its first meeting was held at the offices of the newspaper The Siam Observer. The aim, SCG says, was to make good use of the country’s own resources, cut imports and build Thai experience in running large-scale industry.

The early managers were Danish. SCG’s timeline names Oscar Schultz as its first general manager from 1914, and a run of Danish managers followed until 1974, when the company appointed its first Thai general manager. The Bang Sue cement works in Bangkok began production in 1915 with a capacity of 20,000 tonnes a year, according to the same timeline, and new raw-material deposits were found at Ban Mo in Saraburi province the following year. Saraburi would become the centre of the company’s cement making.

The business widened early. SCG dates its building-products arm to 1938, when Siam Fibre-Cement was founded to make roof tiles, and says it began producing steel in 1942 under a government programme to develop the industry. Its timeline records that Allied bombing damaged two kilns at Bang Sue in 1944, during the Second World War. A second cement plant opened at Tha Luang in Saraburi in 1948, and in 1966 the Thung Song plant in Nakhon Si Thammarat became, by SCG’s account, the first in Thailand to use the dry process. The company also traces its charitable foundation to a fund it set up in 1963.

From Siam Cement Group to SCG.

In 1972 the companies were brought together as the Siam Cement Group and, according to SCG’s timeline, adopted a shared emblem: a white elephant inside a hexagon. Shares began trading on the Stock Exchange of Thailand in 1975, and the parent became a public company in 1994; English Wikipedia lists it as The Siam Cement Public Company Limited, trading under the symbol SCC.

Growth came through new sectors and joint ventures. SCG says it entered packaging in 1976, when it rescued Siam Kraft, a kraft-paper maker in financial difficulty, and formed its first joint venture, Siam Kubota Diesel, with Japan’s Kubota in 1978 to make small diesel engines. Chemicals followed in 1983 with Thai Polyethylene. English Wikipedia lists joint-venture partners including Kubota, Toyota Motor, Michelin and Dow Chemical. The Bang Sue cement works stopped production in 1983, the year the group opened an eleven-storey head office in Bangkok.

The short name arrived in 2006, when, SCG says, the group changed its corporate image and its name to SCG. At its centenary in 2013 it merged cement, building products and distribution into one business and named three core businesses: cement-building materials, chemicals and paper. The paper business became SCG Packaging in 2015, and as SCGP it began trading on the Thai exchange in 2020. A 2023 restructuring, according to the timeline, created units including SCG Cement and Green Solutions, SCG Smart Living, SCG Distribution and Retail, SCGP, SCG Chemicals (SCGC) and SCG Cleanergy, and the decor business SCGD listed on the exchange that year.

The chemicals side is changing again. Hydrocarbon Processing reported on 29 October 2026 that Siam Cement and PTT Global Chemical plan to combine their olefins and polyolefins businesses in a joint venture, with SCG Chemicals holding 44 percent and PTT Global Chemical 56 percent. Completion is targeted for the second half of 2027, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals, so the deal was announced in October 2026 and not completed at the time of writing.

Design and documentation.

Cement is sold in bags by the million, so the makers in this guide mostly present themselves through plain, solid wordmarks that have to read on a sack, a lorry, a silo and a dealer’s signboard. Their palettes tend towards greys, reds and greens, often with one strong colour that can be spotted across a building site. Imagery leans on the industry itself: quarries, kilns, grinding units, bulk terminals and finished buildings, more than people or lifestyle scenes.

Their websites are usually split by audience. Pages for individual home builders sit beside pages for engineers, contractors and infrastructure buyers, and products are often listed by cement type — ordinary Portland, Portland pozzolana, slag and composite cements — and by strength class or intended use, alongside ready-mix concrete and building products such as plasters, waterproofing and tile adhesives. Several makers add home-building guides, how-to videos, store locators and calculators for estimating materials.

Sustainability has become a standard section. Many cement groups publish sustainability reports and pages on lower-carbon or blended cements, alternative fuels, waste-heat recovery and water use; this guide reports such material only as the companies or dated sources state it, and makes no claims of its own about emissions or performance. Investor pages, annual reports and capacity figures in million tonnes a year sit close by, because many of these makers are listed companies that grew through acquisitions.

Community and safety programmes complete the picture, from local schools and water projects near plants to training for masons and contractors. For a design reader, the interest lies in how heavy, commodity products are given a recognisable face: a name on a bag, a colour on a truck, and a tone of voice that speaks both to a family building one house and to a highway contractor.

A hexagon, an elephant and three capitals.

SCG’s visual history is unusually easy to date. Its emblem of a white elephant in a hexagon goes back to the 1972 restructuring, by the company’s account, and the 2006 switch to the three letters SCG replaced the longer group name in everyday use. Today the group runs its website in versions for Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, all under the same short name.

The milestones show how much a single identity has to cover. SCG’s timeline lists cement plants in Saraburi, Lampang and Nakhon Si Thammarat; cement plants it says it built in Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos from 2016; a parcel-delivery joint venture with Yamato, launched as SCG Express; a petrochemical complex at Long Son in Vietnam; and AddVentures, a corporate-venture arm set up in 2017. SCG also says its Thung Song cement company received the Deming Application Prize from the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers in 2002, and describes it as the first cement maker to win that prize.

The timeline itself works as a brand document. It is organised by Thai Buddhist Era years, names each general manager in turn, and marks the points where the company renamed itself or regrouped its businesses, from the Siam Cement Group of 1972 to the SCG of 2006 and the separate units of 2023.

For a design guide, SCG shows how a century-old cement company can compress a long name into three letters while keeping an older emblem as part of its story. Compare Anhui Conch, another Asian cement maker, and Holcim, the Swiss group that began as Holderbank. For this guide we use kiln red, charcoal, concrete grey and limestone white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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