Applus+ is a testing, inspection and certification group whose head office is in Madrid, with further group headquarters in Barcelona and A Coruña, an automotive head office in Madrid, the IDIADA vehicle engineering business in Tarragona and the Applus+ Laboratories division in Barcelona. The company reports more than 29,000 employees working in over 58 countries and is privately held; its main customer-facing divisions are Energy and Industry, Automotive, IDIADA and Laboratories.
The Energy and Industry division
The Energy and Industry division employs over 18,000 specialists in more than 50 countries and works through inspection, testing, supervision and QA/QC activities, engineering and technical consulting, with many of its tools developed in the group's own research and development centres. Its end markets are renewables, infrastructure, conventional power and oil and gas. Accredited inspection and technical consulting are kept in separate legal entities so that the group never provides consultancy and accredited inspection to the same client within the same scope.
Services for oil, gas and heavy industry
The division covers the upstream, midstream and downstream oil and gas sectors both onshore and offshore. Its technical offer is built on non-destructive testing for pipelines, welds, pressure vessels and structures; inspection services that check whether products, processes and services meet regulatory or voluntary standards; and asset integrity management running alongside statutory compliance-based inspection.
Specific techniques are marketed individually. These include IWEX, an inverse wavefield extrapolation method that uses full matrix capture ultrasonic testing and records individual A-scans for each element of an array. Other published lines are renewable energy services across the development, construction and operation phases of renewable and storage projects, and environmental management work, including environmental monitoring and permitting support.
Oil and gas contract record
A framework agreement with Equinor, first signed in 2016 and renewed for up to nine years, covers inspection and vendor surveillance across the supply chain with particular emphasis on line pipe fabrication, coating, transportation and installation, and the scope has been widened across Equinor's operations. Applus+ also holds an extension of its inspection and non-destructive testing contract with Chevron in Australia and was selected in Norway as a framework partner for Statnett's supplier compliance and sustainability programme.
Project work published by the group covers quality assurance and quality control for a tailings dam expansion at Cusco in Peru, environmental monitoring for gas transportation infrastructure in Colombia, mechanical integrity and API inspection work during a large oil and gas shutdown in Colombia, independent inspection and NDT for metallurgical and mining equipment manufacturing in China, and support for the resilience of electricity infrastructure in Central America. The division also reports on-site expediting work in China to control production and manage risk in real time, and runs PCI and TFM imaging in parallel on the same inspection to improve assessment accuracy.
Other divisions and group reach
Beyond Energy and Industry the group operates Applus+ Laboratories, which tests and certifies products and components, and IDIADA, the automotive engineering and homologation business based in Spain. It runs statutory vehicle inspection networks in countries including Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia, and it provides management system and product certification, global market access services, cybersecurity and connectivity testing, and cross-market services covering advanced NDT, environmental management, energy efficiency and health and safety. The group also publishes QHSE and cybersecurity policies and runs an innovation and digitalisation programme with a corporate ventures unit.
Certification, ethics and reporting
On the reporting side the group publishes an annual sustainability report, most recently for 2025, and maintains a directory of certified products in Spain in line with ISO 17065. It is privately held and keeps historical public records online rather than regulated market information. Its published code of ethics is drafted against the United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights, the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises, the International Finance Corporation performance standards and the ten principles of the UN Global Compact, and the group states that the commitments extend to its value chain and to communities, including indigenous communities.