Kazatomprom Brand Guidelines: Kazakhstan’s 1997 National Uranium Company, Listed in 2018

Set up in 1997 for uranium and nuclear fuel.

Kazatomprom — in full National Atomic Company Kazatomprom, Qazatomónerkásip in Kazakh — was established in 1997 by presidential decree as Kazakhstan’s national operator for the import and export of uranium, rare metals and nuclear-plant fuel, according to English Wikipedia. It is based in Astana. Its status as a national company, Wikipedia says, lets it obtain subsoil-use licences by direct negotiation with the government.

The resource behind it is older than the company. Kazakhstan’s first commercial uranium deposit, Kordayskoye, was discovered and explored in 1951, and exploration through the late 1960s found the uranium provinces of Shu-Sarysu and Ili in southern Kazakhstan, English Wikipedia says. Kazatomprom’s geological subsidiary, Volkovgeology, is the successor of the Volkovskaya expedition that opened the Kordayskoye field, according to both the English and Russian Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia counts 56 identified uranium deposits in the country, of which the company mines 14.

When it was founded, Wikipedia says, Kazatomprom ranked thirteenth among the world’s uranium producers. Kazakhstan became the largest producing country in 2009, a year ahead of its own target, and Kazatomprom the largest single producer in 2010; production peaked at 24,586 tonnes of uranium in 2016, by Wikipedia’s figures. World Nuclear News, the news service of the World Nuclear Association, described it in November 2018 as “the world’s largest producer of natural uranium in terms of production volumes.”

Almost all of that uranium is exported. Kazakhstan has had no operating nuclear power plant since the BN-350 reactor at Aktau, built in the Soviet period, was shut down in 1992, Wikipedia notes.

Wellfields, Ulba and the fuel cycle.

All of the company’s mining is by in-situ recovery. As English Wikipedia describes the method, a production solution is pumped down injection wells into a porous ore layer, dissolves the uranium and returns through production wells to be processed at the surface, without blasting or sending miners underground. Wikipedia says the company works 24 deposit areas grouped into 13 mining subsidiaries, joint ventures and associates, all in Kazakhstan. One of them, JV Inkai, is its venture with the Canadian company Cameco; World Nuclear News reported in March 2025 that a temporary suspension there in January, over permit approvals, had been resolved. Cameco’s own history records a non-binding memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies in 2007, on cooperation in uranium conversion and further production, and a 2016 agreement to restructure JV Inkai, which took effect on 1 January 2018.

From 2017, Wikipedia says, management moved from a strategy built on volume to one built on value, planning output 20% below the levels in its subsoil-use contracts for 2018 to 2020 and later extending the reductions to 2022. In March 2025 World Nuclear News reported that its board had approved a development strategy for 2025 to 2034 that keeps uranium mining as the core business while planning to expand in the fuel cycle and in rare and rare-earth metals.

Its processing arm is the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Oskemen, in the east of the country, which makes uranium dioxide powders and fuel pellets for light-water reactors. According to Wikipedia, a fuel-assembly project with China General Nuclear Power Corporation began in 2014 and Ulba started producing finished fuel assemblies in 2021. Ulba also makes beryllium, tantalum and niobium products. The site hosts the International Atomic Energy Agency’s low-enriched uranium bank, which the IAEA owns and whose stock was delivered by Orano and Kazatomprom, Wikipedia says.

Other fuel-cycle ventures have come and gone. Through the Uranium Enrichment Center, a Kazakh–Russian joint venture, Kazatomprom became a shareholder in the Ural Electrochemical Plant, an enrichment plant, in 2013; in 2020 it sold its interest in the venture to its partner TVEL while keeping access to enrichment services, according to Wikipedia.

How uranium companies present themselves.

Uranium companies sell a commodity that few of their audiences will ever see, so their visual material leans on the stages around it. Mining reports and investor decks in this sector commonly show drill core laid out in trays, drums of uranium concentrate, the yellowcake of the trade, and the plants where ore is milled. The product itself is a powder; the imagery is of the places and steps that produce it.

Geography does much of the work. In-situ recovery, the method Kazatomprom uses for all of its production in Kazakhstan, pumps solution through wells rather than digging a pit, so its pictures tend to be wellfields of wellheads and pipework laid across open steppe and prairie. In northern Saskatchewan, the Athabasca Basin, where Cameco mines McArthur River and Cigar Lake, appears as lakes, forest and snow, with headframes and camps in winter light.

The fuel story widens the frame. Companies that sell uranium into conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication often finish their presentations with nuclear power plants, cooling towers and control rooms, and with the language of low-carbon, reliable electricity; when Cameco and Brookfield completed their purchase of Westinghouse in November 2023, World Nuclear News quoted Cameco’s chief executive on demand for nuclear power and energy security.

Much of this material is made for investors and for the industry itself. Producers and developers publish decks and annual reports for listings in markets such as Toronto, New York, London and Astana, and present at industry events, among them those of the World Nuclear Association, whose public information service is World Nuclear News. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — its origins, owners and mines — and treats its colours and type as an unofficial interpretation.

From a state fund to London and Astana.

For more than twenty years Kazatomprom was wholly owned by Kazakhstan’s national wealth fund, Samruk-Kazyna, itself wholly owned by the government. On 13 November 2018, World Nuclear News reported, conditional trading in its shares began on the London Stock Exchange, with trading on the Astana International Exchange due to follow; Samruk-Kazyna offered 15% of the company, as shares and global depositary receipts, and kept 85%. Wikipedia says it was the first Samruk-Kazyna company to offer shares on international markets, under the government’s privatisation plan for 2016 to 2020.

Further sales in September 2019 and June 2020 reduced the fund’s holding to 75%, according to Wikipedia, and in July 2024 the company announced that Samruk-Kazyna held 62.99% and the Ministry of Finance 12%. World Nuclear News gave the same split, about 63% and about 12%, in March 2025, and noted that the company’s securities are listed in London and Astana. In 2018, Wikipedia says, the company also adopted a development strategy for 2018 to 2028.

For a design guide, Kazatomprom shows how a national company presents a single country’s uranium to international buyers and investors. Compare Cameco, its partner in JV Inkai, and Orano, which with Kazatomprom supplied the IAEA fuel bank at Ulba. For this guide we use a steppe-sky blue, a sand and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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