Historic engineering brand streamlines name to Haskoning

One of the professional services industry’s most famously complex names has been retired. After years of testing the recall of clients, consultants and reporters alike, Royal HaskoningDHV has rebranded, and will now be known simply as Haskoning.

Royal HaskoningDHV is an international engineering and consultancy firm. Formed in 2012 by the merger of Royal Haskoning and DHV, two Dutch professional services firms, the firm today has more than 6,000 professionals across offices in 30 countries, with several offices in the UK.

Worldwide, Haskoning sees ample growth opportunities through the energy transition, digitisation, climate change and replacing ageing infrastructure in the built environment. According to a release from the firm, its new, shorter name, will be “easy for everyone to remember and use” – and supports ambitions to further expand its international presence.

“We are saying goodbye to a long name that, although it reflected our roots well, led to various names and abbreviations in practice,” CEO Marije Hulshof explained.

Things aren’t quite that straight forward, though. While the firm now known as Haskoning has dropped refence of ‘Royal’ from its name, the firm insists it “retains its Royal designation”. The firm’s release added that Haskoning “continues to cherish this royal distinction as an affirmation of its quality, integrity, and reliability.”

Hulshof continued, “With this new but familiar name, we build on our 144-year history and the foundations laid by Haskoning and DHV, along with the many other companies that have joined us over the years.”

There was a notable history of brand-simplifications withing Royal Haskoning and DHV, long before they merged. After Johan van Hasselt started an engineering firm in Nijmegen, Jacobus de Koning joined as a partner to establish Hasselt & De Koning. The acronym Haskoning started out as a telegram address, before becoming official letterhead in 1976.

Meanwhile, the merger of firms founded by Adriaan Dwars, Arnold Groothoff and Bastiaan Verhey initially created a firm called ‘de Vereenigde Ingenieursbureaux voor Bouw- en Waterbouwkunde te Rotterdam en 's-Gravenhage’ – mercifully reduced in 1934 to ‘Ingenieursbureau Dwars, Heederik en Verhey’, abbreviated as ‘DHV’.

Had these changes not been realised, Hasselt, De Koning, Dwars, Heederik and Verhey might have carried an even more punishing moniker since their 2012 merger.