In 2008 Vale Inco's operations in the city were headquartered in the Copper Cliff area.

Now known as Vale LTD, on August 14, 2006 Brazilian mining company CVRD extended an all-cash offer to buy Inco for $17 billion.

According to its current web site, Inco is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Vale (formerly Vale Inco, CVRD Inco)

Most notably, Copper Cliff is the location of the Inco Superstack, the tallest chimney in the Western Hemisphere, which towers over Inco's main smelter facility.

Vale (formerly CVRD Inco) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brazilian mining company Vale. It is Vale's nickel mining and metals division and is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It produces nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, gold, and silver. Prior to being purchased by CVRD (now Vale) in 2006, Inco was the world's second largest producer of nickel, and the third largest mining company outside South Africa and Russia of platinum-group metals. It was also a charter member of the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average formed on October 1, 1928.

The Canadian Copper Company was founded following the discovery of copper deposits in Sudbury, Ontario. Initially, ore was shipped for smelting to a plant in Constable Hook, New Jersey, owned by the Orford Copper Company. Processing soon revealed that the ore was also rich in nickel and exploration tests revealed an enormous potential. In 1902 the International Nickel Company, Ltd. was created in Camden, New Jersey as a joint venture between Canadian Copper, Orford Copper, and American Nickel Works. In 1916, the International Nickel Company of Canada, Ltd. was incorporated as the operating company in Copper Cliff near Sudbury, and in 1918 the company built a new refinery in Port Colborne. The International Nickel Company of Canada, Ltd., first began using the trade name Inco in 1919.

In 1929 the corporation underwent a major expansion by absorbing the British-owned Mond Nickel Company. A head office was established in Toronto.

Copper Cliff was incorporated as a separate company town in 1901, and for a time was in fact larger than the neighbouring community of Sudbury. However, Sudbury had surpassed Copper Cliff in population by 1930, when Sudbury was reincorporated as a city. The city of Sudbury tried to annex Copper Cliff a number of times over the next 40 years, but was rebuffed by the Ontario Municipal Board because the city's desire to gain municipal taxation rights over Inco's mining facilities in the community was deemed incompatible with federal and provincial taxation rules around the mining industry.[2] The neighbourhood was eventually annexed by the city in 1973, as part of the provincially mandated municipal restructuring which resulted in the creation of the Regional Municipality of Sudbury.

# 1 "Welcome to Vale Inco" (HTML). http://www.inco.com/letter.aspx. Retrieved 2007-11-29.
# 2 "Semi-Annual Review of the FTSE4GOOD Indices" (PDF). http://www.ftse.com/Indices/FTSE4Good_Index_Series/Downloads/FTSE4Good_March_2006_Review.pdf. Retrieved 2007-11-29.