New Areva – the mining and nuclear fuel company left over from Areva's restructuring process after the company was beset by losses – said Tuesday that several symbolic changes were in order, including giving itself a new name, a new logo and moving out of its expensive headquarters in Paris.
“We had to change our name; we are a new company with a different perimeter, focused on the fuel cycle,” said company Chief Executive Officer Philippe Knoche at a news briefing. The change in location, he said, would save the company $12.3 million per year. The company's current residents, Reuters described as a "prestigious … black slap skyscraper inspired by the monolith in Stanley Kibrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
New Areva is what remains of a larger nuclear power company. Last year, the company sold its nuclear construction company to French utility EDF. While building reactors was its largest division, the company, historically, was focused on nuclear fuel, back when it was named Cogema, the company from which it arose.
The new name Orano references ore in the ground, while the yellow background for its logo signifies yellowcake uranium. The action-swirl design references a previous Areva logo.
Orano, a company with 16,000 employees, also plans to invest about $5 billion in its mines and production plants through 2025, but Knoche also said that the price of uranium was currently too low to allow the company to sink money into new mines.
From 10 years ago, Reuters said, the price of uranium is down about 80 percent, partly due to the jolt the industry took in new construction after the 2011 Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident, which sharply slowed down new orders and lead to plants shutting down wholesale in Japan and Germany.
Knoche, however, said the company was talking with China about constructing a new fuel processing plant there, although he noted that the contract for that was not a make or break deal for the company.
He said the company would move forward “with humility.” With this in mind, Orano on the company logo “is written in lower case,” he said.