Glencore

The name compresses Global Energy Commodity Resources, and the business is two things at once: a merchant trading more than sixty commodities on its own book, and a producer that mines many of them. It traces to Marc Rich + Co AG, founded in 1974, which a 1994 management buyout led by Claude Dauphin reconstituted under the Glencore name.

The 2013 merger with Xstrata turned a trading house with mining interests into a fully integrated resource group, spanning copper, zinc, nickel, and cobalt alongside thermal and coking coal and oil. It listed simultaneously in London and Johannesburg in 2011 and joined the FTSE 100. The group is run from Baar in the Swiss canton of Zug, with its oil and gas head office in London.