Polyus Brand Guidelines: A 1980 Prospectors’ Artel, Norilsk’s Gold & Olimpiada

A prospectors’ cooperative, then a Norilsk subsidiary.

Polyus is older than its listing. Russian Wikipedia says the company first took shape in 1980 as a prospectors’ artel, a mining cooperative, called “Polyus,” which worked on Bolshevik Island, some 900 kilometres from the North Pole. In 1988 the artel won the right to develop the Olimpiada gold deposit in Krasnoyarsk Krai, which is still the company’s largest asset.

The artel became a closed joint-stock company, ZAO Polyus, and in October 2002 Norilsk Nickel bought all of its shares, Russian Wikipedia says. Four years later Norilsk separated its gold business. English Wikipedia dates the spin-off to March 2006, when the new company was founded as Polyus Gold; its shares were admitted to trading on Russia’s RTS and MICEX exchanges in May 2006, and its American depositary receipts were listed on the London Stock Exchange in December 2006.

The holding structure then changed several times. In 2009 the businessman Suleyman Kerimov bought a 37 per cent stake from Vladimir Potanin, English Wikipedia says. In 2011 a reverse takeover made a London-listed company, Kazakhgold Group, the new parent, renamed Polyus Gold International that year, and its shares gained a premium London listing in June 2012, Russian Wikipedia says. In December 2015 the Kerimov family consolidated full control of that parent and took it off the London market, and the Russian company, PJSC Polyus Gold, became the group’s holding company again.

In 2016 Polyus Gold changed its name to Polyus, both Wikipedia articles say. Its shares returned to trading in London in June 2017, English Wikipedia says; Russian Wikipedia records a secondary share placing the same month.

Open pits in Siberia and the Far East.

Polyus mines in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. The company names five operating mines: Olimpiada and Blagodatnoye in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Verninskoye in Irkutsk Oblast, Kuranakh in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and Natalka in Magadan Oblast. Its pages for all five describe conventional open pits worked with shovels and trucks.

Olimpiada, in what Polyus calls one of Russia’s most prolific gold provinces, feeds three mills, and the company says it treats the mine’s sulphide ores with BIONORD, its own bio-oxidation process. Natalka, in the Tenkinsky district of Magadan Oblast, began hot commissioning in September 2017 and was fully ramped up a year later, Polyus says; the company has since expanded its mill.

The project that dominates its plans is Sukhoi Log, in Irkutsk Oblast, which Russian Wikipedia calls the largest undeveloped gold deposit in Russia and one of the largest in the world. In February 2017 Russia’s subsoil agency granted the licence to a joint venture of Polyus and a subsidiary of the state corporation Rostec; in 2020 Rostec left the venture and Polyus took full ownership, renaming the company Polyus Sukhoi Log, Russian Wikipedia says. In 2024 Polyus began pilot processing of Sukhoi Log ore at the Verninskoye plant, and the first tonne of gold from that work had been produced by October 2024, according to both Wikipedia articles. The company lists Chertovo Koryto and Chulbatkan as further development projects.

Polyus describes itself as the largest gold producer in Russia and one of the five largest in the world. English Wikipedia gives its 2019 output as 2.84 million ounces and places it among the ten largest gold miners by production.

Bullion, headframes and reports.

Gold miners sell a metal that looks the same whoever digs it, so much of their visual identity is borrowed from the work itself. Their reports and websites return to a few images again and again: a doré bar being poured from a furnace, stacked bullion glowing under warm light, a headframe against the sky, and the long terraced walls of an open pit seen from the air.

Each region adds its own scenery. South African producers show the steel headframes of the Witwatersrand and underground stopes lit only by cap lamps; Australian miners show red earth and haul roads in the outback; Canadian companies increasingly show the Arctic, where Agnico Eagle’s Meadowbank mine poured Nunavut’s first gold bar in 2010, according to English Wikipedia, and where B2Gold’s Goose mine reached commercial production in October 2025. West African operations, such as B2Gold’s Fekola mine in Mali, bring savanna landscapes and the paperwork of new national mining codes.

Much of the industry’s printed identity sits in documents rather than products. Annual reports, sustainability reports and technical reports carry the logos, colours and photography; so do the slide decks shown to investors at gatherings such as the Denver Gold Forum in Colorado and Diggers and Dealers in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Community programmes, safety campaigns and agreements with Indigenous partners appear prominently in that material, alongside the maps and drill sections that geologists read.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it began, how its name and ownership changed, and where its mines are — and attributes figures and claims to the sources that give them. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretations, not the companies’ brand assets.

One word, from artel to listed group.

Since 2023 Polyus has operated under US, UK and Australian sanctions. On 19 May 2023 the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on Polyus and several of its group companies, and the United Kingdom and Australia announced sanctions against it the same day, Kitco News reported on 22 May 2023, citing the company’s statement. OFAC’s general licence gave holders of its shares and bonds until 17 August 2023 to wind down their dealings, the company said, adding that it considered the sanctions unjustified. Polyus’s depositary receipts were delisted from the London Stock Exchange in July 2023, both Wikipedia articles say, and the company’s website still quotes its Moscow Exchange share price.

The ownership changed again over the same period. Russian Wikipedia says the Kerimov family’s controlling stake was divided in 2022, and that in August 2023 Polyus bought back the shares of one of the new holders; English Wikipedia reports a buyback offer for about 30 per cent of the company announced in July 2023. The company is headquartered in Moscow, and its mines are run through regional business units, such as Polyus Krasnoyarsk and Polyus Magadan.

Through all of this the name has stayed close to its origin. The artel’s “Polyus” became ZAO Polyus, then Polyus Gold, then simply Polyus again in 2016, and the company still publishes its website in Russian and English under that one word.

For a design guide, Polyus shows how a short, single-word name can carry a company from a prospectors’ cooperative to a listed group without a change of identity. Compare Newmont and Kinross, two other gold miners. For this guide we use a deep blue, a muted gold and a pale frost with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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