International Nickel Company of Canada, Limited

Product Details

Historical Context

The International Nickel Company grew out of the nickel mines in Sudbury, Ontario. The extraordinary base metal deposits there — the product of a prehistoric meteorite collision — were discovered in the 1880s and extracted in modest quantities throughout the 1890s. The Canadian Copper Company, working in partnership with the New Jersey-based Orford copper refinery, rapidly established a monopoly on Sudbury’s mineral deposits. In 1902, with the financial backing of American banker J. P. Morgan and Charles Schwab of Carnegie Steel, the Canadian Copper Company and Orford merged to create the International Nickel Company, later renamed Inco.

In 1916, when Canada was deeply engaged in the First World War (and the United States was not) the company was accused of selling its Canadian-sourced metals to Germany. In response, the Governor General issued an order-in-council banning any nickel exports outside of the British Empire. Consequently, that year Inco formed a Toronto-based Canadian subsidiary, the International Nickel Company of Canada. Because the company could no longer export the raw material to New Jersey for refining, it opened a refinery in Port Colborne — a town on Lake Erie, approximately 30 km southwest of Niagara Falls.

The company was restructured in 1928, when the Canadian subsidiary became the parent company through an exchange of shares, and additionally acquired its primary competitor, a British firm active in the Sudbury basin called the Mond Nickel Company. Throughout the Second World War, its operations expanded rapidly as it produced hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of nickel and copper.

By 1950, Inco controlled almost 90 per cent of world nickel production outside the communist states. In the subsequent decades, the company retained its leading position in the nickel market, in addition to its significant market shares in copper, precious metals and cobalt. Through its subsidiaries Inco Alloys International and Inco Engineered Products Limited, Inco additionally became the world’s largest supplier of wrought nickel alloys and a leading manufacturer of specialized forged components made from alloy materials.

In Canada, it expanded its mining operations by opening nickel mines in Thompson, Manitoba, in 1961, and at Voisey’s Bay, Labrador, in 2005. Beginning in the 1960s, the company aggressively expanded its international presence, and by the time of the company's acquisition by Vale in 2006, Inco held operations in Indonesia, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and the Pacific island of New Caledonia.

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