PLS Brand Guidelines: Pilbara Minerals, Pilgangoora & a Ticker Turned Name

A pegmatite field in the Pilbara, worked for tin and tantalum long before lithium.

PLS is the Perth lithium miner that traded for most of its life as Pilbara Minerals. Its business rests on one deposit: Pilgangoora, a field of lithium- and tantalum-bearing pegmatites in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, about 140 kilometres from the port of Port Hedland. English Wikipedia describes the ore body as one of the largest hard-rock lithium deposits in the world, and the trade title NS Energy, in a January 2025 project profile, places the mine on Nyamal and Kariyarra traditional lands.

The ground was worked long before lithium mattered. A conference paper by a Pilbara Minerals senior geologist on the geology and discovery of the deposit says pegmatites carrying the tantalum mineral columbite-tantalite were described in government geological surveys in 1906, and places Pilgangoora among the large pegmatite fields of the northwest Pilbara, alongside Wodgina, Mt Francisco and Strelley. Small-scale hard-rock and alluvial mining for tin and tantalum followed, chiefly between 1947 and 1978, the paper says, with larger alluvial campaigns by junior companies in 1978–1982 and again in 1992–1996.

Pilbara Minerals bought the Pilgangoora project in 2014. The company paper gives the month as May and says the project was bought “for its lithium potential”; it adds that the company went on to drill more than 1,950 holes there. NS Energy says the project then consisted of five tenements over about 31 square kilometres, and that it began production in 2018. English Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own account, says the path from the first drill hole to production took less than four years.

Two concentrates, two plants and a stake in a Korean chemical plant.

Pilgangoora produces two concentrates: spodumene concentrate, the lithium-bearing mineral that chemical plants convert into battery materials, and tantalite concentrate. NS Energy describes two processing plants on the site — the Pilgan Plant, which makes both spodumene and tantalite concentrates, and the Ngungaju Plant, which makes spodumene concentrate. In its own announcements the company calls Pilgangoora “the world’s largest, independent hard-rock lithium operation”; that is the company’s description.

Resource figures also come from the company. In June 2025 Small Caps reported that Pilbara Minerals had raised the contained lithium in its Pilgangoora resource by 23%, to a total of 446 million tonnes grading 1.28% lithium oxide. A larger expansion, called P2000, was then at the study stage: NS Energy reported in January 2025 that a pre-feasibility study released in June 2024 had concluded output could be raised to more than two million tonnes a year, with a full feasibility study expected in the December quarter of 2025.

Reserves have grown with drilling. NS Energy reported that in August 2023 Pilbara Minerals announced a 35% increase in ore reserves at Pilgangoora compared with its June 2022 statement, to 214.2 million tonnes grading 1.19% lithium oxide. The same profile says the P2000 plan would add a third concentrator on site, a larger mining fleet and a new storage and loading facility at the port’s Lumsden Point, and that mining at that rate would shorten the estimated mine life from 34 years to 23.

The company also has a foothold further down the chain. English Wikipedia says PLS holds an 18% stake in POSCO Pilbara Lithium Solutions, a joint venture with the Korean steelmaker POSCO, which completed a lithium hydroxide plant at Gwangyang, in South Korea, in 2024 and takes spodumene concentrate from Pilgangoora under a long-term offtake agreement. In its November 2025 announcement the company named POSCO, Ganfeng, Chengxin and Yahua among its partners in the sector.

English Wikipedia also records a battery installed at the site in 2025 to work alongside its solar and gas generation, citing the trade title Energy Storage in May 2025.

How the category presents itself.

Lithium and battery-materials companies sell to other companies, not to shoppers, and their imagery is built for investors, carmakers and governments as much as for the public. Most of it starts at the source. Brine producers show their evaporation ponds from the air: long rectangles of turquoise, green and pale yellow laid out across a white salt flat, with mountains on the horizon. Hard-rock miners show open pits cut in terraces into red or ochre earth, haul trucks on the benches and stockpiles of pale spodumene ore.

The next layer is chemistry. Company photographs move indoors to white lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide powders held in gloved hands or poured from a scoop, bulk bags stacked in a warehouse, and the long kilns and furnaces of refineries and cathode-material plants. These images carry the industry’s main argument: that a mineral dug or pumped in one country becomes a battery-grade chemical in another.

The end use usually appears last, and it is almost always the same: battery cells, electric cars, charging cables and grid-scale storage containers. The pictures show where the material is meant to go.

Much of the visual language is corporate rather than consumer. Investor-day slides and annual reports lean on world maps dotted with mines, plants and offices, flow charts of the supply chain from resource to cathode, and the logos of listing exchanges. Industry gatherings such as Fastmarkets’ Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials conference bring producers, refiners and buyers into the same rooms, and the same maps and pond photographs reappear on stage. In a sector where few people see the product, the identity rests on landscapes, laboratories and the cars at the end of the chain.

From Pilbara Minerals to three letters.

The name changed in 2025, after the company looked beyond the Pilbara. In February 2025 it completed the purchase of Latin Resources, which brought a lithium project near the town of Salinas, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais; the project now carries the name Colina, and the company describes it as a development project. In words quoted by The Motley Fool in December 2025, the company called that deal “the catalyst for our rebrand from Pilbara Minerals to PLS.”

The company’s code on the Australian Securities Exchange had always been PLS, so the new name took the ticker as the brand. Shareholders passed a special resolution to change the company name at the annual general meeting on 25 November 2025, the company’s ASX announcement of that day shows, and The Motley Fool reported that the change to PLS Group Limited took effect on the exchange on 3 December 2025, with the ticker unchanged. Its announcements carry the web address pls.com.

The headquarters is in West Perth, according to English Wikipedia and the company’s announcements. The November 2025 announcement describes the group as owning all of Pilgangoora and the Colina project and as part of the lithium chain through its Korean joint venture.

For a design guide, PLS shows how a stock-exchange code can become the whole name of a miner once its assets reach beyond the region that first named it. Compare Mineral Resources, another Perth company with Pilbara lithium mines, and Liontown, a Perth lithium developer. For this guide we use a red-earth brown, a pale spodumene green, an ochre and a deep ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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