The company was founded on June 15, 1917, with Spanish-French financial support, with a capital stock of 25 million pesetas. It was born in the context of a boom in Spanish industry, in the heat of the First World War. Two foreign capital companies were involved in its creation, the Sociedad Minera y Metalúrgica de Peñarroya (SMMP) and the Rio Tinto Company Limited (RTC), both of which became shareholders of the new company. The SECEM owned an important plant in Cordoba dedicated to copper metallurgy, brass production, manufacture of motors and electric transformers, etc. Over the years it ended up becoming one of the main companies in the sector, having also a great importance in the local context of Cordoba.
The company came to manufacture nearly 40% of all the electrolytic copper produced in Spain, being supplied to a large extent by the material coming from the Rio Tinto-Nerva mining basin. In this sense, SECEM became an important client of the Compañía Española de Minas de Río Tinto (CEMRT), and later the companies Río Tinto Patiño and Río Tinto Minera would have an important shareholding in SECEM. In spite of this privileged situation, the lack of internal competition meant that the machinery and technology of the Cordovan factory were not modernized, which in the long term would end up causing serious problems for SECEM's economic viability. Towards the end of the 1970s, the industrial crisis had a considerable impact on the copper sector. Taking advantage of this context, in May 1978 SECEM —with the financial support of Banco de Bilbao and Banco Hispano Americano— proceeded to acquire the companies Pradera Hermanos, Sociedad Industrial Asturiana and Earle; at the end of the year, all of these companies formed the conglomerate Ibercobre, which controlled 60% of the copper market.
The SECEM complex in Cordoba remained intact until 1989–1990, after the purchase of Ibercobre by the Finnish company Outokumpu, which decided to split it into three separate industries.