A claim pegged in 1883 and a company incorporated in 1885.

BHP’s three letters stand for a place and a legal form. English Wikipedia records that The Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited was incorporated on 13 August 1885 to work a silver and lead mine at Broken Hill, in the far west of New South Wales. The hill itself had been named by the explorer Charles Sturt, and the mining town later took its name from it. Miningmx, reporting in May 2017, put the origin plainly: the miner started out in 1885 as the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, or BHP.

The story behind the incorporation is a prospecting one. English Wikipedia says that on 5 November 1883 Charles Rasp, a boundary rider on Mount Gipps Station, pegged out a claim on the hill with the contractors David James and James Poole. With a handful of backers, including the station manager George McCulloch, Rasp formed a company that staked out the whole hill. The encyclopedia adds that the first prospectus for the float was printed at Silverton, near Broken Hill, in June 1885, before being taken to Adelaide.

The company did not stay a single-mine business. English Wikipedia says that in 1915, encouraged by the New South Wales minister for public works, BHP moved into steel making, with its operations based at the Newcastle Steelworks. The encyclopedia records the Newcastle operations closing in 1999, the long products business being spun off as OneSteel in 2000, and the flat products business being separated as BHP Steel in 2002, which took the name BlueScope in 2003.

Along the way the company picked up a nickname. English Wikipedia says the Broken Hill Proprietary Company was also known as “the Big Australian”, a phrase that later served as a corporate slogan. The company has its headquarters in Melbourne, Victoria, where the first ore from Broken Hill had been smelted, at a works in the suburb of Spotswood.

A Dutch tin company, an island name and a merger.

The second half of the name BHP carried between 2001 and 2017 came from far away. English Wikipedia records that Billiton Maatschappij was founded on 29 September 1860, when shareholders approved its articles of association at a meeting in The Hague. Two months later it acquired mineral rights on the islands of Belitung, then known as Billiton, and Bangka, in what was then the Netherlands Indies. The company’s name was the island’s name.

Billiton changed hands several times before it met BHP. English Wikipedia says Shell acquired it in 1970, that South Africa’s Gencor took over its mining division in 1994, and that Billiton plc, listed in London, joined the FTSE 100 in 1997. Miningmx described it in 2017 as the Anglo-Dutch mining company Billiton, citing the Guardian.

The two companies combined in June 2001. English Wikipedia says the merger created BHP Billiton, a dual-listed company with BHP Billiton Limited in Australia and BHP Billiton plc in Britain, run as one business with identical boards. Business Day, carrying an AFP report on 16 May 2017, likewise noted that the Australian roots of the company stretched back to 1885 and that it became BHP Billiton in the 2001 merger with the company that bore that name.

Between 2001 and 2017 the double name sat on the group’s offices and reports. A news photograph used by Business Day in 2017 showed a BHP Billiton sign at the company’s office in Perth, Western Australia. Over the same period, English Wikipedia notes, many of the former Billiton assets were sold or demerged, including those placed in South32 in 2015, so the second word described less and less of what the company owned.

Mining company names and their marks.

Heavy-industry names tend to be built from the facts of their own formation. A merger of two firms often produces a compound name or a short string of initials, and those initials can outlive the words they once stood for, so a company is later known only by its acronym. Other names come straight from geography: a river, a hill, a harbour town or a mining district gives the company its word, and the place name travels with it to sites and offices far from the original ground.

The surfaces that carry these identities are unlike consumer packaging. A mark has to read on a gatehouse sign, on the side of a blast-furnace building or a conveyor gantry, and on stacks of coil and plate leaving a mill. It is printed on hard hats and high-visibility clothing, stencilled on ore wagons and locomotives, and painted on the hulls of ships and the bodies of haul trucks. Distance, dust, weather and heat all shape the design choices: heavy letterforms, a small number of solid colours and a symbol simple enough to survive being stencilled, embroidered or seen from a moving train.

Dropping Billiton in May 2017.

The return to three letters was announced in May 2017. Business Day reported on 16 May 2017 that BHP Billiton would drop the word “Billiton” in a rebranding exercise intended to build its standing as an Australian company rather than a multinational. Chief external affairs officer Geoff Healy said a new “Think Big” advertising campaign was designed to show the role BHP played in the Australian economy, and that the company would also change its logo.

Miningmx, reporting a day earlier, gave more of Healy’s account. The work, he said, had begun eighteen months before, when the company realised it had to start by telling people what BHP Billiton was and what it did. He described the result as “a clean brand change for the company”, and said the timing was not a response to shareholder campaigns. The campaign’s payoff line, the same report said, was “Think Big”.

English Wikipedia sets out the sequence that followed. The company began calling itself BHP in Australia first and then globally, and it replaced the old slogan “The Big Australian” with “Think Big”. The legal names caught up on 19 November 2018, when BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton plc became BHP Group Limited and BHP Group plc. In January 2022 the company gave up its London listing, so the British half of the dual structure that had come with Billiton ended as well.

The result is a brand that has gone back to its earliest form. Broken Hill Proprietary became BHP in everyday use, BHP Billiton for a period after the merger, and BHP again from 2017, keeping the initials that point to a hill in outback New South Wales.

For a design guide, BHP shows how a company can use a rename to reach back to an older identity, letting the merged name fall away while keeping the initials its home market already used. Compare Rio Tinto, which also restored an older name after years of initials, and Anglo American, another mining group shaped by mergers. For this guide we use ore orange, burnt copper and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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