Outokumpu copper

A copper deposit found in 1908 turned into the largest stainless steel producer in Europe.

The ore was discovered at Outokumpu in Northern Karelia, and a company was established to work it. The US Geological Survey lists the Outokumpu Copper-Cobalt Deposit in Finland as a producer of cobalt and copper, about 30 miles northwest of the town of Joensuu. The mine itself is now exhausted, which is a plain way of saying the company outlived the hole it came from.

What it left behind is a piece of industrial chemistry used worldwide. Outokumpu developed the flash smelting process in the 1940s for smelting copper, a method that turned out to be considerably more efficient than what came before and spread far beyond Finland.

The company today is headquartered in Helsinki with 10,600 employees in more than 30 countries. It is the largest producer of stainless steel in Europe and the second largest in the Americas, and it still has a mining arm, taking chromium ore at Keminmaa for use as ferrochrome in stainless steel. The Finnish state is the largest shareholder at 26.6 per cent, counting the holdings controlled by Solidium, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, the Finnish State Pension Fund and the Municipality Pension Agency.

The record is not spotless. Outokumpu took part in a stainless steel cartel from 1986 to 1988 and was caught in 1990, though not fined. It then joined Swedish company Boliden in a cartel for copper tubing in the European market running from 1988 to 2001.

The mining did not stop when the copper ran out, it only moved. The company still mines chromium ore at Keminmaa for use as ferrochrome in stainless steel, which is the through-line from one 1908 ore find to a modern steel group.