Ferrexpo Brand Guidelines: Poltava Pellets, a 2007 London Listing & a Swiss Base

A Soviet-era ore combine in central Ukraine.

Ferrexpo’s roots lie in central Ukraine. English and Ukrainian Wikipedia both say the business was founded by the Soviet government in 1960 as the Poltava mining and processing combine, to work iron ore deposits at the town now called Horishni Plavni (formerly Komsomolsk), in the Poltava region. Ukrainian Wikipedia’s separate article on the plant dates the start of operations to 1970, under the name Dnipro mining and processing combine, with the Poltava name in use from 1981. The combine began producing iron ore pellets in 1977, both Wikipedias say.

The plant was privatised by the Ukrainian government in 2001, Ukrainian Wikipedia says, and the group built around it took the name Ferrexpo. In June 2007 Ferrexpo plc listed on the London Stock Exchange; English Wikipedia says it had produced 8.6 million tonnes of pellets in the year before the listing. The company’s own timeline opens with that listing and presents the years since as a long programme of investment in its mines, plants and logistics.

Today the group is run from an office in Baar, Switzerland, with its registered office in London, according to its website; English Wikipedia calls it a Swiss-based company. Its mines and processing plant remain in the Poltava region, and its sales offices, the company says, include Dubai, Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo. The website describes Ferrexpo as “a leading European producer and supplier of premium iron ore products” and says its products are “important to Ukraine and to customers around the world.” It also says it has been supplying iron ore for more than 50 years, with resources for at least another 50.

Three pits, one processing complex.

Ferrexpo describes itself as a vertically integrated producer of high-grade iron ore products. Its oldest and largest open pit is the Poltava mine, which the company says holds a JORC-compliant ore reserve of over a billion tonnes. The Yeristovo mine, immediately to the north, opened in 2011; English Wikipedia says it was the first new mine opened in Ukraine since independence, and the company says it now supplies about half of the high-grade ore processed at its plant. Belanovo, further north on the same ore body, is described by the company as its next mine. English Wikipedia lists several further deposits nearby that the group owns but does not yet work, among them Brovarkovskoye and Zarudenskoye.

Ore from the pits is crushed, concentrated and rolled into pellets at the group’s processing complex. When it listed in 2007, the company says, its output was split roughly evenly between pellets of 62% and 65% iron; it has since phased out the medium grade, and in 2020 it added commercial sales of 67% iron pellets and a 67% iron concentrate. Ferrexpo calls itself the third-largest exporter of iron ore pellets in the world, a ranking English Wikipedia repeats and Ukrainian Wikipedia gives for 2017, with an 8.5% share of the market.

Logistics are a large part of how the company presents itself. Its timeline lists the 2010 purchase of First-DDSG, a barging business carrying pellets to customers in Central Europe; the 2012 commissioning of the trans-shipment vessel Iron Destiny to load Capesize ships; a railcar fleet of about 2,200 wagons by 2013; and a 2020 expansion at the port of Pivdennyi that allowed it to load a Newcastlemax vessel for a single customer. Its website says it can deliver its products by rail, barge or ship.

Design and documentation.

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.

A London-listed pellet maker, run from Switzerland.

The company’s recent history has been turbulent. In 2019, English Wikipedia says, Ferrexpo delayed its results while it investigated charitable donations in Ukraine; its auditor, Deloitte, resigned that April, and in August the company announced that the donations may have been misappropriated. Its chief executive stood down in October 2019. Ukrainian Wikipedia records the fall in output after the war began in 2022: pellet production that year was 46% lower than in 2021, at about 6.05 million tonnes.

2026 brought further disruption. In April 2026 the company said its London listing would be suspended, and the London Stock Exchange suspended trading in the shares in May because the annual accounts had not been published on time, Interfax-Ukraine reported. In early August 2026 Ferrexpo temporarily suspended production in Ukraine, citing the threat of attacks in and around Ukrainian ports, which had restricted its Black Sea export routes, and the need to preserve working capital, the trade site GMK Center reported.

After a share issue announced on 4 September, production restarted on one pellet line over the first weekend of September 2026, with exports focused on customers in Europe, Interfax-Ukraine reported. Shareholders approved the share issue on 21 September, when the shares were again trading in London, the agency reported. In October the German financial site Börse Express, citing the company’s production report, said commercial output in the first nine months of 2026 was 54% lower than a year earlier, with access to Black Sea routes still limiting exports.

For a design guide, Ferrexpo shows how an industrial brand can rest on a single place and a single product: one ore body, one processing complex and the pellet. Compare LKAB in Sweden and Samarco in Brazil. For this guide we use a pellet charcoal, an ore rust and a river blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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