Platinum is back, but its miners are still shunning big growth bets

Platinum, palladium and rhodium prices had nearly doubled over the twelve months to March 2026, and the share prices of the major South African producers were up more than 70% over the same period, yet the heads of the country's largest platinum miners used the moment to argue for continued capital discipline rather than a new wave of mine-building. Implats chief executive Nico Muller told an industry audience he wanted to avoid a repeat of 2019, "when I sat across the table from investors who basically said the company had become 'uninvestable'," a reference to the balance-sheet strain that followed the industry's last major capital cycle.

What it would actually take to unlock growth

Muller said large-scale new investment would require platinum sustained above $2,000/oz, palladium above $1,500/oz and rhodium around $12,000/oz, a bar current prices had not yet convincingly cleared on a sustained basis. Sibanye-Stillwater chief executive Richard Stewart was similarly cautious, saying "in the longer-term there is not yet an industrial growth area underpinning for a stronger price," a reference to lingering uncertainty about how quickly electric vehicles would continue to erode demand for autocatalysts even as new industrial uses emerged.

Brownfields over greenfields

Rather than new mines, executives pointed to life-of-mine extensions at existing operations, citing Valterra's Mogalakwena underground project and Sibanye's K4 shaft at Marikana as the kind of lower-risk capital South African producers were prepared to commit. Structural constraints reinforced the caution: regulatory uncertainty, a shortage of processing and refining capacity, and the practical difficulty of getting neighbouring mines to cooperate on shared infrastructure all featured as reasons growth capital was staying on the sidelines.

The commentary captured a defining tension in the 2026 PGM bull market: prices strong enough to fund record dividends and reverse years of impairments, but not yet trusted enough by the industry's own leadership to justify the kind of large, greenfield investment that would meaningfully lift South Africa's PGM supply over the following decade. That caution would be echoed repeatedly through the rest of the year, even as individual companies like Northam pushed ahead with more targeted expansion projects of their own.

Sources

• Miningmx: Platinum is back. So why are its miners shunning growth?, 20 Mar 2026

Photo: Gabbro from the Bushveld Complex, source of most of South Africa's platinum group metals. Kevin Walsh from Oxford, England, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.