Umicore

Umicore N.V.. formerly Union Minière, is a multinational materials technology company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

Formed in 1989 by the merger of four companies in the mining and smelting industries, Umicore has since reshaped itself into a more technology-focused business encompassing such areas as the refining and recycling of precious metals and the manufacture of specialised products from precious metals, cobalt, germanium, zinc, and other metals. The company has been a component of Belgium's benchmark BEL20 stock market index since its 1991 inception.

To symbolise this trend of moving away from mining and the production of commodities and base metals, the group Union Minière changed its name to Umicore in 2001.

History

Colonial origins

The main thread running through much of Umicore's history is the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), a company incorporated in 1906 to exploit the vast natural resources of the Congo Free State, later the Belgian Congo and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Initially the UMHK concentrated on mining the state's extensive copper deposits, before diversifying into cobalt, tin, uranium (in which it at one point held a near-monopoly in global supply) and other precious metals. The company also constructed casting and smelting facilities, eventually growing to such an extent that it represented around half of all revenues taken in by the Congolese government. In early January 1967, the UMHK was nationalized by the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko, and over $800 million of the company's assets were seized by the state.