by Ekrem Duman | Aug 19, 2026 | Brazil Company Stories, Mining & Steel
⚡ TL;DRSamarco — the Vale-BHP iron ore joint venture — caused Brazil’s worst environmental disaster when its Fundao dam collapsed at Mariana in 2015; Vale’s own Brumadinho dam followed in 2019, killing 270. Together the tragedies produced...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 19, 2026 | Brazil Company Stories, Mining & Steel
⚡ TL;DRUsiminas, founded in 1956 in Minas Gerais as a Brazil-Japan joint venture, became Latin America’s premier flat-steel maker for the automotive industry — then the stage for one of the region’s longest shareholder wars, as Techint’s...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 19, 2026 | Brazil Company Stories, Mining & Steel
⚡ TL;DRCSN — Companhia Siderurgica Nacional — is the Volta Redonda steel mill Getulio Vargas built in the 1940s as the symbol of Brazilian industrialization, privatized in 1993 and transformed by Benjamin Steinbruch into a vertically integrated...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 19, 2026 | Brazil Company Stories, Mining & Steel
⚡ TL;DRGerdau began in 1901 as a nail factory in Porto Alegre and grew, under five generations of the Gerdau Johannpeter family, into the Americas’ largest long-steel producer — a scrap-recycling mini-mill empire spanning Brazil, the United States,...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 19, 2026 | Brazil Company Stories, Mining & Steel
⚡ TL;DRVale is the world’s largest iron ore and nickel producer — born in 1942 as state company CVRD, privatized in 1997, and transformed by China’s construction boom into one of the most valuable mining groups on earth. Its story carries both...
