Metalloinvest Brand Guidelines: Lebedinsky & Mikhailovsky GOKs on the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly

Soviet ore plants at Gubkin and Zheleznogorsk.

Metalloinvest is a holding company assembled after 1990, but its mines were built by the Soviet state. Both sit on the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, the vast iron ore province of central Russia, and both are run as GOKs — the Russian abbreviation for a mining and processing combine.

The older ore field is at Mikhailovsky. Russian Wikipedia says the Mikhailovsky iron ore deposit was discovered in 1950; on 3 August 1957 the Soviet Council of Ministers decided to build a mine there, and the first rich ore was dug on 10 June 1960. Construction of the processing complex began in October 1967, and the first iron ore concentrate followed at the end of October 1973. The plant stands at Zheleznogorsk, in Kursk Oblast, and became a joint-stock company in 1996.

The larger combine is Lebedinsky GOK, at Gubkin in Belgorod Oblast. According to Russian Wikipedia, the Soviet government decided on 20 July 1967 to build a combine on the Lebedinsky deposit; the quartzite pit opened in 1971, the plant, named after the deposit, produced its first concentrate in 1972, and a pelletising plant followed in 1975. From 1985 it made concentrate with an iron content of 70 per cent or more, Russian Wikipedia says, and it was privatised in 1992.

The third main plant is a steelworks: the Oskol Electrometallurgical Plant, known as OEMK, at Stary Oskol in Belgorod Oblast, which English Wikipedia lists as the group’s steel division.

Gazmetall, a 2006 merger and USM Holdings.

Russian Wikipedia traces the company’s history to 1999, when its shareholders acquired OEMK and Lebedinsky GOK. In 2000 their owners and a Gazprom subsidiary set up a holding company called Gazmetall; a year later Gazprom sold its share to its partner, the Interfin group. Between 2002 and 2004 the group acquired the Ural Steel works at Novotroitsk and Mikhailovsky GOK, which Russian Wikipedia’s page on the combine says joined the holding in 2005.

In 2006 the assets of Gazmetall, which held Lebedinsky and OEMK, and of a company called Metalloinvest, which held Mikhailovsky and Ural Steel, were combined into one holding. On 2 April 2008, Russian Wikipedia says, Gazmetall was renamed Holding Company Metalloinvest, and later that year it became an open joint-stock company. After a series of share sales ending in December 2012, all of Metalloinvest came under USM Holdings, which English Wikipedia says still owns it outright; the Russian news agency AK&M, in a July 2023 report, described the owner as a USM company holding 100 per cent of the shares.

The group’s shape has changed since. English Wikipedia says Ural Steel was sold to the Zagorsky Pipe Plant in February 2022, leaving the two GOKs and OEMK as the core. It also says Bloomberg reported in 2021 that the company was weighing a share listing, and that as of 2025 it remained privately held.

On 12 April 2023, the US Treasury said in a press release that the State Department had designated Metalloinvest and its parent USM that day, in an action taken in coordination with the United Kingdom. Russian Wikipedia says the company and both GOKs were added to US and UK sanctions lists on that date, and that Ukraine added the company to its own list on 23 November 2023.

Iron ore and how it is shown.

Iron ore miners sell a raw material that few people ever see, so their public image is built from the places where it comes out of the ground. The standard picture is aerial: a red-earth open pit cut into benches, haul roads spiralling down its walls, trucks reduced to specks. Underground miners show the opposite view — tunnels, drill rigs and lit caverns far below the surface — but the aim is the same, to make scale legible.

The second set of images is about movement. Iron ore is heavy and cheap to dig but costly to carry, so miners photograph the chain that gets it to customers: ore trains kilometres long crossing dry country or snow, pellet plants and stockpiles, and export jetties where bulk carriers load at the end of a long line. Rail and port pages often get as much space as the mines themselves.

Much of what these companies publish is explanation. Websites and reports carry geology and grade explainers, describe ore types such as lump, fines and pellets, and set out reserves and production as the companies report them. Alongside sit pages on rehabilitation of mined land, water use and tailings, and on newer projects to cut emissions in steelmaking.

The last layer is accountability. Miners publish community and Indigenous-partnership reports, accounts of resettlement where mines reach towns, sustainability reports and, for listed or state-owned groups, detailed annual reports. For a designer, the identity of an iron ore company lives as much in these documents, maps and diagrams as in any logo.

Concentrate, pellets and hot briquetted iron.

What sets Metalloinvest’s product range apart is how far it processes its ore. Beyond concentrate and pellets, Lebedinsky GOK makes hot briquetted iron, or HBI, a dense form of directly reduced iron used as a feedstock for electric steel furnaces. In a release distributed through Media OutReach in February 2024, the company said Lebedinsky had begun building its first direct reduction plant in 1997, that the plant reached its design capacity of one million tonnes a year in 2003, that a second plant started in 2007 and a third was commissioned on 14 July 2017, and that the combine had just produced its 60 millionth tonne of HBI. The same release calls Metalloinvest the world’s largest producer and supplier of merchant HBI; Russian Wikipedia describes Lebedinsky as Europe’s largest HBI producer.

Trade press follows the plants’ upgrades. SteelOrbis reported in December 2023 that the company had modernised a production section at Lebedinsky to make an additional 250,000 tonnes a year of high-quality concentrate, and in February 2025 that it had completed a second phase of work on the gas-cleaning units of the Lebedinsky pelletising plant, begun in 2020. In February 2026 AK&M reported a company presentation at the Miner’s Week symposium at the MISIS university, which said more than 70 per cent of ore from the Lebedinsky and Mikhailovsky pits is now lifted by conveyor, with a goal of 80 to 90 per cent.

The company also opens its plants to visitors. AK&M reported in July 2023 that Metalloinvest had launched industrial tours at Lebedinsky, completing a programme that covers all three of its production towns: Gubkin, Zheleznogorsk and Stary Oskol. The Lebedinsky routes include a museum and careers centre, a viewing platform over the pit, the processing plant and the HBI factory.

For a design guide, Metalloinvest shows how an ore group can present itself through its processing chain, from open pit to briquette. Compare Ferrexpo, another iron ore pellet producer, and LKAB, another European ore miner that makes pellets. For this guide we use a magnetite brown, a briquette grey and a chalk white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Metalloinvest’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.