Coated Steel Corp history

BlueScope Steel is one of the leading suppliers of premium steel building products, since year 1885.

The ambivalent attitude many Australians still retain toward their country's largest company arose from the 1892 strike and the many others that followed.

Delprat had become BHP's general manager in 1899 and under his careful but imaginative stewardship BHP's productivity rose steadily.

Guillaume Delprat, a Dutch engineer and chemist whom BHP had brought to Australia from Europe, provided the solution to the problem of treating sulfide ores with his invention in 1902 of the flotation process.

The union movement disagreed with this analysis and in 1905 militants urged the NSW government not to renew BHP's leases at the Big Mine.

Charles Hoskins had been the first person to profitably make steel in Australia, having taken over in 1908 the Lithgow steel plant of William Sandford Limited which had gone into liquidation.

Early in 1909 the AMA launched a new strike.

The company’s history dates back to 1915, when BHP established a steelworks at Newcastle in New South Wales.

British company Lysaght started an Australian operation in 1918 to serve the building and construction industry.

In 1921 Delprat was succeeded by Essington Lewis, a mining engineer who had joined BHP in the first decade of the century and risen swiftly in the corporate hierarchy.

AIS was formed in 1928 by the Hoskins family to establish and operate a steelworks at Port Kembla.

Thus the Depression, which began in 1929 and devastated other Australian industries, left the steel industry comparatively unscathed.

In 1938 BHP became embroiled in another political battle when union labor refused to handle cargos of iron ore destined for Japan, at that time engaged in a brutal and aggressive war in China.

By this time, however, BHP's energies were focused on its expanding steel business and the Big Mine played a progressively smaller role in the company's calculations, closing altogether in 1939 and thereby ending BHP's association with Broken Hill.

In 1940 Menzies appointed Lewis Director General of Munitions with the responsibility of harnessing the nations' entire manufacturing industry to the war effort.

In 1976-77, BHP acquired Peabody Coal's Australian assets, thereby gaining a 60 percent interest in the Moura and Kianga coal mines in Queensland.

In 1984 BHP bought the United States mining and construction company Utah Mines Ltd. from General Electric.

BHP initially held a 30 percent interest but in 1985 bought out the remaining AMAX and CSR shareholdings.

1987: Hamilton Oil is acquired.

1988: Gulf Energy Development is acquired.

Loton advanced to chairman in 1991, at which time John Prescott succeeded him as CEO. While remaining focused on BHP's core businesses, Prescott aimed to broaden the conglomerate's global reach.

By 1992, it ranked tenth among the world's oil companies, and petroleum had become a significant contributor to overall profits, which totaled $900 million on revenues of $12 billion in 1992.

1996: The White Pine refinery is acquired from Inmet Mining Corporation.

Part of BHP Steel’s assets had been spun off as OneSteel in 1999.

In 2000, the company continued its restructuring, launching a AUD 3 billion sell-off of noncore steel assets in the United States and Australia.

The remaining assets were spun off in 2002 and eventually became BlueScope Steel, and now BlueScope.

2003: The company begins a $5 billion investment program to boost oil operations.

In 2004, BHP Billiton posted revenues of nearly $25 billion.