Hochschild Brand Guidelines: A 1911 Tin Group Turned Lima Silver and Gold Miner

From tin trading to mining.

Hochschild Mining traces its origins to the Hochschild Group, founded in 1911 by Mauricio Hochschild, the company says. English Wikipedia describes him as one of South America’s three “tin barons”, with mining operations mainly in Bolivia and Chile. In the company’s account the group expanded into Bolivia in 1922, where it built up large interests in tin, and began operating in Peru in 1925.

For its first decades the group was a trader of minerals rather than a miner. It began operating its own mines only in the 1940s, the company says, although commercialising minerals remained its main business. During the Second World War, it says, the group was a key supplier of tin and other metals to the Allied forces.

The Bolivian part of the business ended in 1952. The Bolivian government created the state mining company COMIBOL by supreme decree on 2 October 1952, and on 31 October 1952 nationalised the mines held by the Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo groups, according to COMIBOL’s own history. The company’s timeline moves on to Peru, where the group developed the Arcata mine in the 1960s; it produced until early 2019. In the 1960s and 1970s the group also opened or expanded mines in Brazil, Peru and Chile, among them the Mantos Blancos copper mine in Chile.

In November 1984 the group’s South American mining operations were sold to Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, which in the same month sold the Peruvian operations on to companies owned by Luis Hochschild, the company says. The present business grew from that Peruvian base.

Peru, Argentina and Brazil.

A new exploration programme from 1995 found or developed several sites in Peru, including Ares, Selene and Sipán, the company says. Between 2001 and 2006 it opened exploration offices in Peru, Argentina, Mexico and Chile and entered joint ventures that led to San José, Pallancata and Inmaculada. In 2012 Peru’s government temporarily suspended operations at Ares so that it could carry out an environmental audit, after complaints from local people in Chumbivilcas, English Wikipedia says.

The company listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, and Wikipedia records it as a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index, headquartered in Lima with a corporate office in London. In 2007 it opened three mines in quick succession: San José in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, in June; Moris in Mexico in August; and Pallancata in southern Peru in September. San José is a joint venture with McEwen Mining in which Hochschild holds 51% and acts as operator.

Inmaculada, in the Ayacucho department of southern Peru, is the company’s largest operation to date, it says: Hochschild took a controlling stake in 2010, bought the remaining 40% in December 2013, and announced commercial production in September 2015. Pallancata was placed on temporary care and maintenance in December 2023, while the nearby Royropata project is being advanced.

The company has since moved into Brazil. It announced the acquisition of Amarillo Gold in November 2021, and delivered the first gold pour from its Mara Rosa open-pit mine in Goiás state in February 2024. In late 2024 it acquired the Monte do Carmo gold project in neighbouring Tocantins, and it also holds the Volcan gold deposit in Chile’s Atacama region, acquired with Andina Minerals, a deal announced in November 2012. Wikipedia adds that Hochschild owns 55.9% of Aclara Resources, which is developing rare-earth projects in Chile and Brazil.

How silver miners present themselves.

Silver miners speak mainly to investors, governments and the communities around their mines, and their visual identities tend to follow from that audience. Palettes lean on metallic greys and silvers, often paired with a deep blue or slate, sometimes warmed by an earth tone drawn from rock or desert. Typography is usually a plain sans or a sober serif, set for long reports rather than for packaging, because there is no consumer product on a shelf to sell.

Photography carries much of the identity. Company websites and annual reports tend to show mills, headframes, haul roads and open pits set against mountain or desert landscapes, alongside portraits of workers in protective gear and views of nearby towns. Maps matter too: a miner’s portfolio is a set of places, and operation pages are commonly organised mine by mine and country by country, each with its location, ownership share, processing facilities and expected mine life.

Numbers form a second visual language. Mineral reserves and resources statements, quarterly production reports and guidance tables are published on fixed calendars, and their charts, tonnages and grades are repeated across press releases and investor presentations. Because these figures are regulated disclosures, they tend to look alike from company to company, and the brand shows mostly in the colour of a chart or the cover of a report.

The third strand is sustainability. Most listed miners keep pages on water, tailings management, energy use, community relations and human rights, often with downloadable reports and lists of the standards they say they follow. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a consistent palette, a clear type hierarchy and careful photography do most of the work, and the identity must hold together across a website, a technical report and a slide shown to analysts.

A family name carried for over a century.

The name is the identity’s fixed point. Hochschild is a family name, and the family has stayed in charge: Eduardo Hochschild, son of Luis, joined in 1987, was appointed head of the Hochschild Mining Group in 1998 and has chaired Hochschild Mining plc since 2006, the company says, and Wikipedia names him as the main shareholder. The company opens its own history page with the 1911 date and “over 100 years of experience in the Americas”.

The company states its purpose as “responsible and innovative mining committed to a better world” and describes its focus as the exploration, mining, processing and sale of gold and silver. It says it works in remote locations and at high altitudes, and calls that a core competitive advantage. On its website it presents itself by stage of the mine cycle, from exploration and discovery through development and production to closure, and it says it has more than 60 years of experience in mining epithermal vein deposits, the narrow underground veins that Inmaculada and San José follow. Mara Rosa, by contrast, is an open-pit gold mine. The site is published in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

For a design guide, Hochschild shows how a miner can lean on long history and a family name while its assets move country by country, from Bolivian tin to Peruvian silver and Brazilian gold. Compare Fresnillo, a Mexican silver miner also listed in London, and Pan American Silver, which also operates across Latin America. For this guide we use a dark olive, a warm stone and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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