Aurubis and Metallo – a growth story

The Belgian-Spanish recycling group Metallo has belonged to the Aurubis Group since late May 2020. Following an extensive review, the European competition authorities issued their unconditional approval of the Metallo acquisition on May 4, 2020. The purchase price was € 375 million and was financed through a Schuldschein loan with an ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) component. The interest rate conditions are dependent on the development of our EcoVadis sustainability rating. This underlines Aurubis’ commitment to sustainability in the company.

Achieving more together

Together, we will surpass the threshold of 1 million t of recycling material input. And this new level is only the beginning. The global recycling volume will continue to rise, and we see good growth opportunities for our business model here.

Metallo specializes in processing recycling materials with low metal contents, with a focus on tin, lead, nickel, zinc, and copper – an exciting market with potential: due to global trends, both the quantity and the complexity of recycling materials will increase significantly, along with the competitive pressure for primary and secondary raw materials that are easy to process. Aurubis is already one of the leading recycling companies for complex recycling materials. With the Metallo acquisition, Aurubis is expanding its technological processing expertise and the related capacities in order to remain competitive in the long term and to grow sustainably.

This acquisition represents an important step in the implementation of our multimetal strategy. Our stated objective is to become one of the most efficient and sustainable smelter networks in the world.

Roland Harings, Chief Executive Officer

Metallo’s processing know-how and technical processes perfectly complement Aurubis’ core expertise. The merger thus makes a considerable contribution to our multimetal strategy. Together, we will continue to expand our capabilities and capacities for recycling important industrial and precious metals, strengthening the European circular economy in a meaningful way.

Our goal is to always generate the greatest possible value from all input materials. One special feature is Metallo’s zero waste approach, with the goal of converting all input materials into marketable products – in complete alignment with our Sustainability Strategy.

Combining strengths – for optimal production

The Metallo production sites are currently being integrated in the Aurubis Group network. One stated objective of the integration is to optimize the production network of our five large smelters and thus to offer our customers and suppliers additional solutions. We will substantially boost efficiency in the Group at the same time.

What this means concretely: we will increase the precious metal inputs in Metallo’s raw material mix and recover these metals from the anodes we receive from Metallo at our plant in Olen, Belgium. Furthermore, we will recover more tin as well – thanks to the additional processing capacities for ­tin-lead alloys at our site in Beerse, Belgium. And our site in Lünen will certainly benefit from Metallo’s copper-nickel expertise as well.

The integration of Metallo in the Aurubis Group was the right decision for the future development of Metallo and Aurubis. Within the company network, we will be able to leverage significant synergies.

Dirk Vandenberghe, Metallo Group CEO 

Like Aurubis, Metallo is a company with a long history, celebrating its 100th anniversary last year. We are also bound by aspects such as innovation, technical expertise, sustainability, and tradition, too.

More information and a video about Metallo and its products are available at: www.metallo.com