BHP Billiton Ltd
BHP Billiton Ltd. is a major Australian multinational mining corporation, recognized for its extensive production of a variety of natural resources, including iron ore, coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Formed in 2001 through the merger of the Australian company Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) and the Anglo-Dutch Billiton mining company, BHP Billiton quickly ascended to become one of the largest producers in the global natural resources sector. The origins of Billiton date back to 1860, when it began mining tin in Indonesia, while BHP, established in 1885, initially focused on silver and lead extraction in Australia.
Over the years, both companies expanded their operations and diversified their resources, leading to significant growth and profitability. BHP Billiton's diverse portfolio was seen as a key strength, serving markets across nearly every continent. In 2017, the company streamlined its branding to simply BHP and shifted its corporate structure, ceasing its dual listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2022 to focus solely on trading in Sydney. Despite facing financial challenges in the later 2010s, BHP maintained billions in annual revenue, solidifying its status as a leading player in the natural resources industry.
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BHP Billiton Ltd.
- Company Information
- Date Founded:1860
- Industry: Mining, natural resources
- Corporate Headquarters: Melbourne, Australia
- Type: Public
Overview
BHP, formerly BHP Billiton Ltd., is a publicly traded Australian international mining corporation that produces iron ore, steel, coal, oil, natural gas, and various other natural resources. The organization formed in 2001 from a merger of the Anglo-Dutch mining company Billiton and the Australian mining company Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP). In the twenty-first century, BHP operates approximately ninety locations in Australia, South America, the United States, and Canada.
The Billiton mining company was founded in 1860 in The Hague, Netherlands. Its main industry at the time was the mining of tin on Belitung and other nearby Indonesian islands. Billiton thrived into the twentieth century, as it expanded its interests to other natural resources in different countries.
Meanwhile, the Broken Hill Propriety Company (BHP) was founded in 1885 in Melbourne, Australia. The mining company discovered, harvested, developed, produced, and globally distributed various metals and other natural resources such as natural gas. Expansion over the next century made BHP one of the world’s leading mineral producers.
These two mining companies merged in 2001 to create BHP Billiton Ltd. This corporation quickly became one of the world’s leading producers of natural resources such as iron ore, coal, uranium, natural gas, and oil. In the 2010s, BHP Billiton generated billions of dollars in yearly revenues from its global operations. In 2017, the company rebranded itself as just BHP. In January 2022, the company simplified its corporate structure, removing itself from the London Stock Exchange, leaving it exclusively traded in Sydney, Australia.
History
The mining companies that merged to form BHP Billiton had already been successful producers of natural resources for more than one hundred years before becoming one company in 2001.
Billiton. The origins of Billiton, the older of the two companies, date to 1851, when a group of Dutch miners discovered a tin mine on the island of Belitung, or Billiton, in Indonesia. The miners judged the island to hold even more tin than Cornwall, England, at that time the world’s largest producer of the metal.
In 1860, the miners founded the mining company Billiton, formally known as NV Billiton Maatschappij, in The Hague, Netherlands. After several months, Billiton obtained legal rights to mine the minerals on Belitung and Indonesia’s Bangka Island. These ventures quickly proved extraordinarily valuable to Billiton, as it would mine tin on Belitung until the 1950s.
In the late 1930s, after many decades of tin mining, Billiton opened a bauxite mine on Indonesia’s Bintan Island. It later started mining bauxite in South America. Bauxite is used to produce the metal aluminum, which, in the 1940s, was in high demand for manufacturing combat supplies for World War II. Billiton, therefore, experienced another wave of significant growth during the 1940s.
In 1970, Billiton was acquired by the oil and gas corporation Royal Dutch Shell. Over the next twenty years, now supplied with abundant funds, Billiton greatly expanded to become one of the largest mining companies in the world. In 1994, the South African mining company Gencor purchased a substantial portion of Billiton, allowing the company to flourish to an even greater extent. Gencor divested itself of the company in 1997. Billiton continued its global success into the early twenty-first century.
BHP. The Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1885. It was so named because its initial operations involved extracting silver and lead from an expanse of land known as Broken Hill, located in the western part of New South Wales, Australia.
BHP leadership determined to hire only those employees who were already experts in the field of mining. Worker expertise, combined with low labor costs and high global prices of silver, zinc, and lead, helped BHP to become a world leader in the mining and natural resources industry. By 1900, the company had transformed Australia from an agricultural to an industrial nation, though the company was often criticized for its poor labor standards and dangerous working conditions. These controversies brought BHP into conflict with labor unions in the early twentieth century.
BHP diversified its business interests throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Its ventures into steelmaking, oil refining, and coal generated immense profits and helped to build global trust in its brand. In 2000, BHP became known officially as BHP Limited.
BHP Billiton Ltd. In 2001, BHP and Billiton agreed to merge into BHP Billiton Ltd. Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board approved the merger but required the new corporation to keep its primary interests in Australia and retain its headquarters in Melbourne. BHP Billiton was a dual-listed company, however, meaning it functioned as one company but had separate legal identities in two countries: in Australia, it was BHP Billiton Ltd., and in the United Kingdom, it was BHP Billiton plc. The two corporations issue stocks separately until 2022.
With the combined assets of the two merged companies, BHP Billiton became one of the world's largest producers of natural resources. In the early twenty-first century, the corporation continued to extract, develop, and market products such as steel, iron ore, metallurgical coal, uranium, copper, oil, and natural gas. BHP Billiton's leadership soon came to consider this great diversity of interests as the corporation’s strongest business quality.
In 2017, the company sold off a number of Billiton assets and rebranded itself as BHP, and in 2022, it gave up its trading on the London Stock Exchange and became Australia's largest company. BHP remained one of the world's largest mining companies into the 2020s, focusing on coal, copper, and iron ore and limiting its gas and oil ventures. In the early 2020s, BHP acquired Woodside Energy, Oz Minerals, and Filo Corp. (in cooperation with Lundin Mining). BHP also offered to acquire Anglo American, but their 2024 offers were not accepted.
Impact
BHP Billiton remained a leading global natural resource manufacturer into the 2010s. By this point, it boasted tens of thousands of employees and independent contractors worldwide and multiple locations on almost every continent.
The later 2010s showed BHP Billiton experiencing financial slumps as the corporation endeavored to increase production while reducing costs. Despite these difficulties, however, BHP Billiton continued to accrue billions of dollars a year in revenues, figures that solidified its position as one of the world’s largest and most successful producers of natural resources.
In 2015, the Fundão Dam in Brazil collapsed, leading to a lawsuit. Over 620,000 individuals sought damages of $47 billion from BHP for allegedly causing the collapse by dumping toxic waste into the Doce River. The trial began in London in 2024 and was one of the largest of its kind in English legal history.
Bibliography
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Kottasova, Ivana. "The World's Biggest Miner Just Posted a Record $6.4 Billion Loss." CNN Money, 16 Aug. 2016, money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/investing/bhp-billiton-record-loss/index.html. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
Lahiri, Indrabati. "BHP Faces Multi-Billion UK Lawsuit over 2015 Brazil Dam Collapse." Euro News, 21 Oct. 2024, www.euronews.com/business/2024/10/21/bhp-faces-multi-billion-uk-lawsuit-over-2015-brazil-dam-collapse. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
"Our History." BHP Billiton, www.bhp.com/about/our-history. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.
Robins, Brian. "BHP to Drop 'Billiton' in Rebranding Move." The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2017, www.smh.com.au/business/companies/bhp-to-drop-billiton-in-rebranding-move-20170514-gw4dfz.html. Accessed 25 Jan. 2025.