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Private company

CSR Limited

Logo: The logo may be obtained from CSR (Australian company)., Non-free logo, via Wikipedia4

Australian building products company

CSR Pty Ltd is a major Australian industrial company, producing building products and has a 25% share in the Tomago aluminium smelter located near Newcastle, New South Wales. It is a subsidiary of Compagnie de Saint-Gobain S.A. In 2021, it had over 3,000 employees and reported an after-tax profit of $146 million. The group's corporate headquarters is in North Ryde, Sydney.2 It was founded by Edward Knox.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1855Founded1
  • HeadquartersNorth Ryde1
  • Founded inSydney1
  • Websitewww.csr.com.au
  • Legal formpublic company limited by shares1
  • Listed onAustralian Securities Exchange (CSR), Australian Securities Exchange (CSR)1
  • LEI549300TOGR54OMW2T0933
  • StatusActive3
  • LEI statusIssued and current3
  • Registered address'Triniti 3' Level 5, 39 Delhi Road, NORTH RYDE, 2113 Sydney, Australia3
  • Registered withThe Australian Securities and Investment Commission, 000 001 2763

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CSR Pty Ltd is a major Australian industrial company, producing building products and has a 25% share in the Tomago aluminium smelter located near Newcastle, New South Wales. It is a subsidiary of Compagnie de Saint-Gobain S.A. In 2021, it had over 3,000 employees and reported an after-tax profit of $146 million. The group's corporate headquarters is in North Ryde, Sydney.2

Corporate structure

CSR Limited sits at the top of its group. 2 entities, 1 country on record. Switch between the flow chart and the network, and select any entity to see its details.

Built from parent and subsidiary links from GLEIF, the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (CC0); subsidiaries, stakes and holdings from Wikidata (CC0). Each entity in the chart links to its source.

The story

Founded by Edward Knox in 1855, in Sydney.1

Leadership

Who has led CSR Limited, and when. Pick a name to see everywhere that person has worked.

Products and brands

  • building material

Listed on Wikidata.1

Early sugar refining operations

Founded in Sydney by Edward Knox in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the company first began refining imported raw sugar at its refineries in Canterbury then Chippendale. CSR expanded into the Melbourne market in 1857 with the purchase of a refinery at Sandridge through its associate company, the Victoria Sugar Company. These operations were later moved to refineries at Pyrmont and Yarraville.

Queensland and Fiji plantations

In 1880, Knox handed over the management of CSR to his second son Edward William Knox who immediately began a rapid expansion of the company's operations into Queensland and Fiji. E.W. Knox oversaw the transition of the company into owning and running large sugar plantations in these regions which were serviced on-site by high capacity mills also owned by CSR.

Queensland

The Queensland Government passed an Act in 1881 allowing CSR to acquire large amounts of land in the north of the colony and to invest £500,000 in establishing sugar plantations in these areas. The two major CSR plantations created at this time were the Victoria Plantation and the Homebush Plantation. Blackbirded South Sea Islander labour was utilised by CSR to deforest the land, plant and cut the sugarcane, and build the mills. Knox and the company's Queensland director E.B. Forrest chartered blackbirding vessels to bring Islanders to the plantations. The 1884 recruiting voyage of Hopeful blackbirding labour vessel which kidnapped and murdered many Islanders was under contract to deliver labourers to Ebenezer Cowley, manager of the Victoria Plantation. An 1886 inquiry into this type of labour found that up to 60% of the Islanders transported to the Homebush Plantation had died within four years. The kidnapping and deaths of these workers resulted in 111 Islanders being removed from the CSR plantations by the Queensland government and returned to their homelands in 1885. CSR was compensated £4,424 by the government for the loss of these labourers. CSR also experimented with cheap Chinese, Javanese, Singhalese and Japanese coolie labour on their plantations.

By the 1890s, Knox decided to abandon the plantation system in Queensland and return to the central mill method used in its New South Wales operations. CSR subdivided the Victoria and Homebush estates into small farms which it sold or leased to white farmers who would sell their cane to CSR to be processed at its nearby mills.

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Fiji

In 1880, E.W. Knox expanded the company's sugar plantation and milling systems to Fiji with a large estate and mill being established at Nausori. Another estate and mill was constructed at Rarawai in 1886. Cheap Fijian and South Sea Islander labourers were utilised with high mortality rates being recorded. At Nausori, the Agent-General for Immigration in Fiji, described the deaths of the Islander labourers at the CSR plantation as appalling and tantamount to manslaughter. Local laws made it harder to use blackbirded Melanesian labour and CSR soon turned to Indian coolie labour imported from Calcutta. By 1885, most of CSR's Fijian plantation workforce were coolies on 5 year contracts.

Later sugar operations

CSR constructed further large refineries and mills in Australasia including the Chelsea Sugar Refinery built near Auckland in 1884, a large refining complex at Glanville, Adelaide in 1891 to process sugar from Mauritius, and the massive sugar mill at Lautoka in 1903. In 1923, the Queensland state government signed an agreement with CSR to refine all of that state's sugar production, a monopoly that was to continue until 1989, 16 years after CSR had left Fiji. At that time, about 80% of production was exported.

CSR separated its sugar and energy businesses from its building products business in 2009, which resulted in the creation of Sucrogen as CSR's sugar and energy business. It then operated seven sugar mills in Queensland: Victoria Mill and Macknade Mill in the Herbert River region, centred around the town of Ingham; Invicta Mill, Inkerman Mill, Kalamia Mill and Pioneer Mill in the Burdekin Region; and Plane Creek Mill at Sarina, south of Mackay. CSR also owned a 75% share in the Sugar Australia refineries in Melbourne and Mackay (the other 25% being Mackay Sugar Co-Operative's) and in the Chelsea Sugar Refinery in Auckland. Using the molasses by-product from the sugar mills, the company also distilled ethanol for use in fuel ethanol manufacture, and varying grades of domestic industrial ethanols for food production and other chemical processes. The CSR brand was used on most of the retail sugar products produced. The production made up around 60% of the sugar on the Australian domestic market, and 80% of that in New Zealand.

Sucrogen was sold to Singapore company Wilmar International in 2010.

From Wikipedia’s article on CSR (Australian company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5

Subsidiaries and ownership

Subsidiaries

From Wikidata.1

Employees over time

  • 20142,9851

Timeline

  1. Mar 31, 1962Went public Listed on Australian Securities Exchange1
  2. 1855Founded Founded in Sydney1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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