Nickel Industries Brand Guidelines: Nickel Mines, Morowali & a Tsingshan Partnership

A Sydney company and a mine in Central Sulawesi.

Nickel Industries is a Sydney-based company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code NIC. It began life as Nickel Mines Limited: the company’s reports carry that name through 2021, and the name Nickel Industries Limited appears on its reports by early 2023. Its board record goes back to September 2007, when two of its directors took their seats, according to the company’s half-year report for the period to December 2018.

The business rests on Indonesia. The company holds an 80% interest in the Hengjaya Mine in the Morowali Regency of Central Sulawesi, a licence area of 6,249 hectares about 12 kilometres south of the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), the same report says. The company says the mine began supplying nickel ore to the newly established industrial park in 2015.

That supply relationship led to a partnership with Tsingshan. In September 2017 Nickel Mines signed a Collaboration and Subscription Agreement with Shanghai Decent, the Tsingshan company that runs the group’s international projects, to build a two-line rotary kiln electric furnace (RKEF) plant called Hengjaya Nickel; Shanghai Decent became the company’s largest shareholder, the company says. Nickel Mines completed its initial public offering and was admitted to the ASX Official List on 20 August 2018, the listing date the ASX’s own company data also records.

Nickel pig iron, then battery nickel.

The first products were nickel pig iron (NPI), an input for stainless steel. The company says NPI production began at Hengjaya Nickel in March 2019 and at Ranger Nickel in May 2019, followed by Angel Nickel, at the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, in January 2022 and Oracle Nickel, back at IMIP, in November 2022. It holds 80% of each of the four RKEF projects, with Shanghai Decent holding the rest, and together they run twelve RKEF lines.

From late 2022 the company began shifting toward the electric-vehicle supply chain. It converted Hengjaya Nickel from NPI to nickel matte in the December quarter of 2022, bought a 10% interest in the Huayue Nickel Cobalt high-pressure acid leach (HPAL) project in August 2023, and in October 2023 took a final investment decision on the Excelsior Nickel Cobalt (ENC) HPAL project at IMIP, in which it now holds 46%. The company says ENC is expected to produce 72,000 tonnes a year of contained nickel equivalent across mixed hydroxide precipitate, nickel sulphate and nickel cathode. Its September 2026 quarterly report, released on 22 October 2026, says ENC produced its first mixed hydroxide precipitate in July 2026, its first nickel cathode in August and its first cobalt cathode in September.

The mine has grown alongside the smelters. The Motley Fool Australia reported in December 2025 that Indonesia had approved an increase in the Hengjaya Mine’s 2025 ore sales quota to 10.5 million wet metric tonnes, allowing sales to resume, and that the company was awaiting approval for a 2026 quota of 19 million wet metric tonnes. The same report said the mine’s new five-year environmental approval allows in-pit storage of HPAL tailings, returned from ENC by pipeline, which the company called the first approval of its kind.

The ore itself comes in two layers. The company’s 2018 half-year report explains that the higher-grade saprolite feeds the RKEF plants, while the lower-grade limonite above it had been removed as overburden. Its September 2021 quarterly report records a first limonite supply agreement with the Huayue Nickel Cobalt HPAL plant and says the Hengjaya Mine joined APNI, the Indonesian nickel miners’ association, during that quarter.

How metal producers present themselves.

Platinum-group, nickel and zinc miners sell to refiners, carmakers, battery makers and investors rather than to shoppers, and their visual identities tend to reflect that. Corporate sites in this group often lean on deep blues, steel and slate greys and copper or bronze accents, tones that echo metal, rock and industrial plant without pointing to any single product. Wordmarks are usually short: a clipped group name, an acronym or a founding name kept through decades of mergers.

Photography does much of the work. Shaft heads, headgear against the sky, concentrators, smelters and refineries are commonly shown at scale, often from a distance and with people small in the frame, so that the size of an operation reads at a glance. Underground images, core trays and molten metal appear as texture beside portraits of employees and community members.

Information is organised by place and by metal. Many producers give each mine its own page, with location, depth, life of mine and headcount, and add explainers on what each metal is used for: platinum and palladium in autocatalysts, platinum in fuel cells, nickel and other metals in batteries, zinc in galvanised steel. Production updates, mineral resource and reserve statements, and annual integrated reports sit close to the surface of the site, because investors and analysts are a core audience.

Sustainability and community pages sit alongside the operations. Sections on tailings storage facilities, water, climate, employee housing, host communities and responsible sourcing are standard, and labour relations, strikes and land agreements form part of many of these companies’ public histories. The result is a register that is sober, data-heavy and place-specific, in which colour and typography stay restrained so that maps, tables and site photographs can carry the identity.

An ore supplier turned processor.

Nickel Industries presents itself through its operations. Its website is organised into mining, RKEF and HPAL operations, with a separate page on the Tsingshan collaboration, and it describes its products in plain technical terms: NPI for the stainless-steel industry, and matte, mixed hydroxide precipitate, nickel sulphate and nickel cathode for the battery supply chain. A sustainability section is split into economic development, environmental stewardship and social responsibility, and the company says its September 2026 quarter included a ranking in the top 20% of Asia Pacific metals and mining peers in S&P Global’s Corporate Sustainability Assessment.

The company is still expanding. Its October 2026 report lists a 51% interest in the Siduarsi nickel ore project and says it has agreed to acquire a 36% interest in the PT Chengsheng New Energy HPAL project and a 17.5% interest in the PT Teluk Metal Industry HPAL project, and has signed binding agreements for a stake in the Sampala ore project; those deals had not completed at the time of that report. The same report lists Shanghai Decent, with 22.7%, and PT DTN, with 20%, among its substantial shareholders.

For a design guide, Nickel Industries shows how a young Australian company can build an identity around one country and one industrial partner, presenting itself through operation pages rather than heritage. Compare Eramet, a French group that also works in Indonesian nickel alongside Tsingshan, and Glencore, another listed mining group. For this guide we use a forest green, a nickel grey and a kiln orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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