By William Clowes and Rivaldo Jantjies.
Valterra Platinum hiked its interim dividend almost 29-fold as the payout beat analyst expectations.
The Johannesburg-based miner of announced a payout of R15.1 billion ($903.4 million) — or R57 per share — on Wednesday when releasing the firm’s results for the first six months of the year. That exceeded the average estimate of R51.14 per share.
Valterra’s first-half profit soared to R21.6 billion from less than R600 million a year earlier, after the company boosted production and sales of platinum-group metals and prices rose.
The former Anglo American Plc subsidiary, which owns mines in South Africa and Zimbabwe, became an independent company almost 14 months ago shortly after PGMs began to rebound from a lengthy downturn. Prices soared until late January and, while they’ve since retreated, remain far higher than before the recovery kicked off.
Valterra said first-half output from its mines increased 9%, driven by improved performance at the Amandebult operation that suffered from flooding in early 2025. The firm also reported a 85% jump in the average dollar price received for its PGMs.
A handful of South African miners including Valterra and Russia’s MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC account for most of the world’s mined PGM supply. Autocatalysts that curb emissions from gasoline and diesel vehicles are the biggest source of demand for the metals. That means the industry is sensitive to the progress of electric vehicles, which don’t use PGMs.
EVs’ market share “will rise further” but “the pace at which this happens is highly uncertain as adoption rates increasingly diverge by region, sometimes for geopolitical reasons,” Valterra said on Wednesday.
The company reiterated its plan to reach an investment decision in the first half of 2027 on whether to develop an underground project at the firm’s flagship Mogalakwena mine.
© 2026 Bloomberg.