Saint-Gobain

Saint-Gobain is one of the world's largest building-materials companies, headquartered at La Defense near Paris. It was founded in 1665 as the Manufacture royale de glaces de miroirs, a royal mirror-glass works established under letters patent from the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. It became a public limited company independent of the state in 1830 and was re-privatised in 1987.

Roofing activities

Saint-Gobain does not trade under its own name as a roofing manufacturer, but owns roofing businesses through subsidiaries:

• CertainTeed, founded in 1904 as the General Roofing Manufacturing Company and now a wholly owned Saint-Gobain subsidiary, is a major North American producer of asphalt shingles, as well as siding, insulation, gypsum and ceilings.
• Building Products of Canada (BP Canada), a producer of asphalt shingles, underlayments and low-slope membranes in Canada with more than a century of history, whose acquisition by Saint-Gobain has been completed.
• Saint-Gobain's Construction Products segment includes an Exterior Products business area that manufactures roofing alongside other exterior products.

The group was previously linked to clay roof tiles through Terreal, formed as Saint-Gobain Terreal in 2002 and spun off the following year, and through CertainTeed's 1989 purchase of Ludowici.

Other businesses

Saint-Gobain's construction-related brands include Isover (glass-wool insulation, founded 1937), Gyproc and Weber, and it acquired the UK plasterboard maker BPB in 2005 and the US construction-chemicals firm GCP Applied Technologies in 2021. In 2024 it agreed to acquire the Australian building-products company CSR. Saint-Gobain is listed on the Paris stock exchange. Its head office building, Les Miroirs, has served since 1981.