What the company or idea is
BHP Group Limited, founded as the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, is an Australian multinational mining and metals corporation. It was established in August 1885 in Broken Hill and is headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria. It specialises in mining and selling iron ore, copper and coal. In June 2001 it merged with the Anglo-Dutch Billiton to form BHP Billiton, a dual-listed company on the Australian and London exchanges. In 2015 some assets were demerged as South32, and the scaled-down BHP Billiton became BHP again. It became BHP Group in 2018 and gave up its London listing in January 2022. As of 2025 it is the largest mining company in the world by market capitalisation and the second largest public company in Australia.
How it actually makes money
It makes its money by mining and selling commodities. It has five primary operating units: coal, copper, iron ore, potash and nickel. The assets include the Mount Arthur coal mine in New South Wales, five Queensland coal mines held 50% with Mitsubishi, the Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium mine in South Australia, a group of iron ore mines in Western Australia, and a 57.5% stake in the Escondida copper mine in Chile, the world’s biggest copper mine. The mix of what it sells has shifted over time. BHP began with silver and lead, added steel in 1915 and petroleum in the 1950s, then agreed in 2018 to sell its US shale assets to BP for $10.5 billion, announced in 2021 that it would merge its oil and gas business with Woodside, and took over Oz Minerals in a $9.6 billion deal in 2023. In December 2025 it agreed to sell a stake in a Western Australian power network for US$2 billion to free up capital for copper and potash.
What works
The company has repeatedly changed what it sells. In 1915 it turned to steel because it could not recover value from the lower-lying sulphide ores at Broken Hill. Its metallurgists also refined the froth flotation technique for separating zinc sulphides, which, with the discovery of Iron Knob and Iron Monarch, let it economically extract valuable metals from the heaps of tailings at the mine. It left steel in stages, closing Newcastle in 1999, spinning off OneSteel in 2000 and BHP Steel in 2002, which became BlueScope. Overseas, it had better success with Escondida than with Ok Tedi.
What does not
Several large bets failed. Ravensthorpe nickel cost A$2.4 billion to build, was shut in January 2009 after less than a year, produced US$3.6 billion in write-downs and was sold for US$340 million. The Rio Tinto bid was withdrawn in November 2008, and the US$40 billion PotashCorp bid in November 2010 after Canada signalled rejection. The record also includes the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, which discharged 90 million tons of waste a year into a river for more than a decade, and the 2015 Samarco dam collapse in Brazil, which killed 19 people. In November 2025 a UK court ruled BHP strictly liable for the collapse, and the group said it intends to appeal.
What to take from it
BHP is one company from 1885, not a defunct one. A mining group carries its liabilities with it. A failed mine produced billions in write-downs, and the Ok Tedi and Samarco disasters led to settlements and lawsuits, one of which was heading for appeal after a November 2025 ruling.
Is it worth your time
Yes, if you want a long case study in how a resource company reshapes its portfolio and what that costs. It is thin on financials and does not explain how BHP sells or prices its output.
