Valeo celebrates 100 years of innovating and constantly striving to make mobility simpler, safer and more sustainable
This year, Valeo celebrates its 100th anniversary. Now a century into its industrial adventure, the Company is a front-ranking player in sustainable mobility.
Valeo has undergone a radical transformation over the past 100 years, and the Group has managed to anticipate the many changes in the mobility space. And these changes are accelerating, with their scale and pace unprecedented in recent years: the fight against climate change is accelerating the development of electric mobility; increasingly advanced driving assistance systems are delivering improvements in road safety; and the interior experience is being reinvented while lighting is being transformed, leading to new features and new uses in different areas of the vehicle.
As a result, Valeo has become a world leader in each of its businesses, with its technologies present in all areas of mobility and beyond: one in three new cars worldwide is equipped with Valeo’s driving assistance technology, and one in three cars worldwide is equipped with Valeo’s CO2-reducing electric systems.
Its solutions are now used in all forms of mobility, from electric micro-mobility (bikes, e-scooters, e-motorbikes, etc.) to new forms (driverless taxis, delivery droids, etc.), to make them electric, safer and more autonomous. The use of Valeo technologies has also extended outside the automotive world to infrastructure and new services: traffic management, pedestrian safety, smart lighting in public spaces, electric vehicle charging and data center cooling.
And Valeo will continue to innovate for a safer, low-carbon world. Valeo is the world’s leading French patent applicant according to the rankings published in June 2022 by France’s intellectual property institute (INPI). It is also committed to helping achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Christophe Périllat, Valeo’s Chief Executive Officer, commented: “We’re celebrating a great industrial adventure this year. A hundred years of history, drive and commitment. A hundred years of putting our industrial excellence to work for our automaker customers in new vehicles, and our distributor customers in the aftermarket, working to make cutting-edge technology accessible to the widest market and to meet the highest automotive standards.”
The Valeo adventure began in 1923 in France, in a workshop near Paris where the first brake linings were manufactured. The company grew its operations, expanding throughout France before going international: first within Europe, then Brazil, and eventually worldwide. A century later, Valeo is now a partner technology company to the world’s leading automakers. That small workshop has grown to become an international giant with operations in 29 countries and a workforce of 109,900 employees.
