The Rio Tinto is the world's second biggest mining company, behind BHP Billiton, producing iron ore, copper, diamonds, gold, coal and uranium. The Alcan deal, though, makes it the world's largest producer of aluminium.

The Rio Tinto is a diversified, Anglo-Australian, multinational mining and resources group with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and London, United Kingdom. The company was founded in 1873, when a multinational consortium of investors purchased a mine complex on the Rio Tinto river, in Huelva, Spain from the Spanish government. Although primarily focused on extraction of minerals, Rio Tinto also has significant operations in refining, particularly for refining bauxite and iron ore. The company has operations on six continents but is mainly concentrated in Australia and Canada, and owns gross assets valued at $81 billion through a complex web of wholly and partly owned subsidiaries. Its head office in the United Kingdom is in the City of Westminster, London, while its Australian head office is in the City of Melbourne.

In 1962 the company merged with Consolidated Zinc Corporation, founded in 1905 in Broken Hill, near Sydney. Business for the merged company - Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation - exploded in the 1960s, with discoveries of copper in South Africa and Papua New Guinea, uranium in Nambia, iron ore in Australia, and gold in Indonesia. Now the industry is going through another boom, with record metals prices fuelled by demand from China and India. This has unleashed a wave of consolidation in the metals sector as companies seek to snap each other up to gain scale and win the ever growing profits.

Rio Tinto Group is a dual-listed company traded on both the London Stock Exchange where it is a component of the FTSE 100 Index and the Australian Securities Exchange where it is a component of the S&P/ASX 200 index. As of March 2009, Rio Tinto is the fourth-largest publicly listed mining company in the world with a market capitalisation of approximately $134 billion, and was listed in Fortune magazine's 2008 Global 500 ranking of largest worldwide companies by revenue at number 263. In 2007, the company was valued at $147 billion.

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