Seventeen years of deliberate growth

In 2009, with credit markets frozen and commodity desks closing across Europe, brothers Mateo and Adrián Blanco began brokering copper concentrate from a rented office in central Madrid. They had two laptops, a network of smelter contacts and a simple conviction: physical assets, held patiently, outperform paper traded quickly.

That conviction shaped every decision since. When shipping costs threatened margins, the firm chartered its own vessels. When a concession came up at a fraction of replacement cost, it became a miner. When its mines needed power, it built plants. Each division exists because the group needed it first — and grew because others needed it too.

Today BlancoGlobal remains wholly owned by the founding family and its employees. Independence is not a slogan for us; it is the structural reason we can hold assets through cycles others cannot.

Being privately held does not mean being loosely run. The group is governed by a nine-member board — four of them independent non-executives drawn from mining, energy and infrastructure — which meets eight times a year and holds sole authority over capital allocations above €50 million.

Audit, remuneration and sustainability committees are each chaired by an independent director. Group accounts are audited to IFRS standards and shared in full with lenders, host governments and rating agencies, even where no listing obligation requires it.

A family ownership council, separate from the board, governs succession and long-term shareholding policy — ensuring the questions of the next generation never crowd out the decisions of the current one.