Korea Zinc
The world's largest zinc smelter, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Seoul — its Onsan complex processes over 1.2 million tonnes a year of zinc, lead, gold, silver and other metals, making it South Korea's dominant base-metals refiner.
Covered in 1 MetalsCost.com News Intelligence article, most recently on August 7, 2026.
Overview and History
Korea Zinc was founded in 1974 to build South Korea's first large-scale domestic zinc smelting capacity, at a time when the country's rapidly industrialising economy needed a reliable source of refined base metals rather than relying entirely on imports. Over five decades, the company built its Onsan smelting complex, near the port city of Ulsan, into one of the largest and most technically sophisticated non-ferrous metal refineries in the world, with a particular reputation for its ability to process complex, low-grade and recycled raw materials that many other smelters can't handle economically.
That technical depth is a big part of why Korea Zinc has outgrown its original single-metal identity: what started as a zinc smelter now recovers a wide basket of byproduct metals from the same ore streams, turning what would otherwise be waste at a simpler smelter into meaningful additional revenue lines.
Operations and Products
The Onsan complex has a slab zinc capacity of roughly 560,000 tonnes a year, making Korea Zinc one of the largest zinc smelters anywhere in the world, and the company has expanded lead output as well, lifting annual production from around 420,000 to 450,000 tonnes in recent years. Beyond the two headline base metals, Onsan's byproduct recovery circuit also yields substantial volumes of gold and silver — a fact that has become increasingly significant to the company's earnings as precious metals prices have climbed — along with smaller but strategically notable output of antimony, roughly 300 tonnes a month, some of which is exported to the United States for use in armour-piercing ammunition alloys, military electronics and aerospace components.
That byproduct diversity means Korea Zinc's financial results can be driven by metals well outside its core zinc business in any given period — silver in particular has, at times, outpaced zinc as the larger swing factor in quarterly profit, a reflection of just how much value the Onsan smelter extracts from complex ore feeds beyond the metal in its own name.
Ownership and Market Position
Korea Zinc's largest shareholder is Young Poong Corporation, with further stakes held by South Korea's National Pension Service, Hanwha H2 Energy USA and HMG Global, alongside a modest treasury holding — an ownership structure typical of a long-established South Korean industrial company with both institutional and strategic corporate shareholders. As the dominant base-metals refiner in South Korea and one of the handful of truly global-scale zinc smelters, Korea Zinc's output and byproduct recovery capacity give it outsized relevance to global supply of several metals at once, not just zinc.
