Syensqo Brand Guidelines: Solvay’s 2023 Spin-Off and a Name That Spells Science

One Belgian chemicals group became two.

Syensqo is young as a company and old as a business. It was formed in December 2023, when the Belgian chemicals group Solvay split itself in two. English Wikipedia says Solvay announced the plan in 2022: the historic businesses in soda ash, peroxides and silica, with the Coatis unit and a specialty chemicals division, would stay with Solvay, while the Materials, Composites and Solutions divisions would move to the new company. The stated aim was to give each side the freedom to follow its own strategy.

Shareholders approved the split on 8 December 2023, and it took effect on 11 December 2023, when Syensqo shares began trading on Euronext Brussels and Euronext Paris, according to English and French Wikipedia. The company joined the BEL20 index soon afterwards. In September 2024 it announced that it intended to give up its Paris listing.

The first chief executive was Ilham Kadri, who had led Solvay before the split. In January 2026 she was succeeded by Mike Radossich, Wikipedia says, and he speaks as chief executive in the company’s announcements from May 2026 onwards. The head office is in Brussels.

The new company did not drop its parent’s history. Its own description, repeated at the foot of its press releases in 2026, calls Syensqo “a science company” inspired by the scientific councils that Ernest Solvay began in 1911, and in May 2026 gave its team as more than 13,000 people in 30 countries. It also continues the chemistry prize once called the Solvay Prize, now the Science for the Future Ernest Solvay Prize, Wikipedia notes.

S, Y, E, N, S, Q, O.

The name is the most designed thing about the company. Wikipedia says it is pronounced “Science Co” and sets out how it was built: SY are the first and last letters of Solvay; EN points to the founder, Ernest Solvay; SYENS refers to the group’s scientific heritage, which goes back to the first Solvay Conference of 1911, when Ernest Solvay brought 24 scientists together; Q stands for quantum physics, a subject of that conference; and QO stands for company.

Chemical & Engineering News, in a July 2025 profile of Kadri by Alex Scott, described the name as a play on the phrase “science company” and called its choice “a little presumptuous” for a business created by breaking up a venerable Belgian firm. The same article said Kadri wanted to live up to the name by combining chemistry with biology and artificial intelligence.

What the company makes is mostly hidden inside other products. Wikipedia describes two segments. Materials covers composite materials, including carbon-fibre prepregs, resin systems and adhesives for aircraft, cars and energy, and specialty polymers such as PEEK and PEKK, polysulfones and fluoropolymers. Performance & Care makes surfactants, polymers, solvents and additives for consumer care, agriculture, mining and coatings. Wikipedia also names growth platforms in batteries, green hydrogen, renewable materials and biotechnology, and lists production sites including Tavaux in France, Spinetta Marengo in Italy, Changshu in China and Alpharetta in Georgia.

The scale depends on the date. C&EN gave 62 industrial sites, 12 research hubs and about 13,000 employees in 2025; Wikipedia gives 54 industrial sites and 12 research centres in 30 countries as of late 2025.

Design and documentation.

Specialty chemicals makers sell mostly to other companies, so their brands rarely appear on a shelf. What they make ends up inside shampoo, paint, crop sprays, plastics and circuit boards under someone else’s name. Their identities have to work for buyers, chemists, investors and job seekers at once, and most of them settle on a similar, restrained toolkit.

The marks tend to be precise sans-serif wordmarks, often a coined or shortened name set in lower case or in a clean capital form, sometimes paired with a small symbol that suggests a molecule, a droplet, a leaf or a ring. Colour usually runs through blues, greens and teals, the shades a reader links with water, science and the outdoors, with one brighter accent kept for highlights and charts. Photography leans on laboratories, gloved hands, pilot plants and pipework, alongside close-ups of the everyday products that the chemistry ends up in.

Websites in the category are organised by end market rather than by chemical family. A visitor picks personal care, home care, coatings, adhesives, agriculture, mining, energy or electronics, and lands on pages of named product ranges. Product finders, technical data sheets, certificates and sample requests sit close to the top of the navigation, because that is what formulators come for. Many groups also run regional sites and separate pages for each business unit.

The rest of the site carries the corporate story. Sustainability reports, innovation pages, purpose statements and annual reports explain strategy to investors and the wider public, while careers pages show researchers, plant teams and graduate programmes. For a designer, the category is a study in clarity: a calm palette, a readable sans and a structure that lets very technical material stay easy to find.

A science company, still reshaping itself.

Since the split, the company has kept changing shape. On 21 May 2026 it announced a strategic review of its Performance & Care segment, made up of the Novecare and Technology Solutions business units, saying it wanted to become a pure specialty materials and advanced technologies company with more exposure to aerospace and defence, electronics, energy and mobility. The announcement set no timetable and gave no assurance that a transaction would follow. In its third-quarter results in November 2026, the company said the review was still in progress and had drawn interest from a range of prospective parties; no deal had been announced at the time of writing.

Its Italian plant has also changed. In October 2026 Chemical Engineering reported that Syensqo had ended production of C6O4, the last fluorosurfactant it used to make certain fluoropolymers, at Spinetta Marengo. The company had committed in 2022 to phase out fluorosurfactants by 2026; it said nearly all of its fluoropolymers were now made without these processing aids, while a small share of the site’s output, around one per cent, still needed further qualification work.

Outside the plants, the company has used sport and flight to carry its name. Wikipedia says it became a sponsor of the DS Penske Formula E team in January 2024 and is main partner, with Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and OCP Group, of Climate Impulse, a project to fly a green-hydrogen aircraft around the world by 2028.

For a design guide, Syensqo shows how a coined name can carry a long history: the letters do the storytelling that a heritage logo would once have done. Compare Solvay, the parent it split from, and Umicore, another Brussels materials group that renamed itself. For this guide we use indigo, teal and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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