Valterra: platinum’s poster child? 

Though the platinum price has taken a slight fall in the past few months, you wouldn’t know it by Valterra Platinum’s smashing 2026 interim results, released yesterday. In any case, “the prices today are still 30% higher than where they were for 2025”, says Valterra CEO Craig Miller.

That’s abundantly clear in the miner’s results, where the platinum group metals (PGM) basket price jumped 85% to $2,801 an ounce, compounding an 18% increase in Valterra’s sales volumes, to 1.7-million ounces.

It means a startling rise in headline earnings per share: just R4.73 in the prior period to R82 for the half, up 1,663%. Headline earnings overall came in at R21.5bn on revenue of R82bn, itself a 93% increase. To top it all off is the dividend of R15bn, or R57 a share.

Happily, Valterra, which separated from former parent Anglo American last year, is also swimming in cash: R23.7bn, up from R11.5bn as of December 2025. This is partly thanks to a 20% decrease in capital spend, to R6.2bn.

Miller is adamant that the results are not simply thanks to an upswing in
PGM prices, but the result of consistent work through the cycle. “We are really quite comfortable that we will be able to achieve our full-year guidance,” he says. “We still think we will generate pretty healthy cash margins in the second half of the year, which will enable us to continue to invest into the business and return excess cash to shareholders.”

Flying solo

Arguably, the world’s largest platinum producer has come into its own since its demerger from Anglo in May 2025, experts say.

As Miller describes it, a “one in 1,000-year flooding incident” at Valterra’s Amandelbult mining complex last year was devastating for the business. But, says Muhammad Docrat, an analyst at Ninety One,“because they were unbundled, they could focus and implement decisions quickly without having to go through all the corporate structures up to the top. They were able to recover much quicker than anyone had anticipated.”

This speedy bounce-back directly led to a R5bn lift to earnings as a result of Amandelbult coming back to full production this year.

Docrat notes that Valterra’s management seem “a lot nimbler” in execution, but also in the way they deploy capital now. “You’re only managing one kind of business, [and] you know your assets,” he says. “It’s not like money from PGMs is going to get funnelled towards copper growth expansions in South America.”

Miller seems to agree. “Now we’ve exited all of the Anglo American systems and infrastructure … we’ve got greater flexibility to really progress some of the opportunities that we see.” Miller alludes to technology improvements, with the possible introduction of AI-based systems to improve safety conditions for workers.

Playing the long game

Valterra has “always been the industry leader”, Docrat says, for a number of reasons. Most notable is the Mogalakwena mine, “the best asset in the world”, from which 500,000 ounces of PGMs were processed and sold in the interim period.

“But in general, if you look across their portfolio, all of their managed assets sit in the first half of the cost curve, and they very consistently invest through the cycle,” he tells Currency.

Countercyclical investing is not a gimme, with mines more inclined to spend money when times are good and cut back on expenses when things get tough.

But if assets are well capitalised, explains Docrat, “when you get pretty good pricing like you are at the moment, they don’t suddenly have to change their capital allocation plans or start spending money which they weren’t before. So, they’ve actually reduced capital allocation guidance for the next few years, where everyone else has been increasing.”

Consistently paying out dividends has almost certainly kept investors onside, too.

“I think that is quite a key differentiator in a very cyclical sector that’s got a bad history of capital allocation,” says Docrat.

Value over volume

The question then remains: how will the company continue this massive upswing in growth? Most PGM miners locally are hesitant to funnel money into major new projects or mines, and Valterra is not much different.

“Mining is a tricky thing. It’s such a long lead time between making a decision to invest money and actually seeing those assets come off the ground,” Docrat points out. “So, over the last few years, the industry was kind of capital starved.

“It’s quite difficult, especially with PGMs, where people are very uncertain of the long-term demand. Are you going to sink a shaft now when in 10 years’ time, you don’t know if that demand’s going to be there?”

Instead, Valterra is chasing expansion through opportunities already within its portfolio, choosing to lengthen the life cycle of an already large mineral endowment.

“Our Sandsloot underground project at Mogalakwena is progressing, and we’re completing the feasibility study and hope to take an investment decision in the first half of next year,” says Miller, as one example. “If everything goes according to plan, we would look to increase our production from Mogalakwena by between 10% and 20% by the end of the decade, and that’s relatively capital light, so that’s an exciting opportunity for us.”

The other growth opportunity on the radar is the Mototolo mine. “It’s an extensive resource base with multi-decades of life, and we’re looking at increasing potential output there by another 10%-20% as well.”

The company is also looking to expand chrome production.

All-weather operator

The PGM sector is one of short summers and long winters, and analysts are torn as to whether prices will hold here, or fall.

“We think that the current PGM basket price is reflective of the underlying fundamentals for PGMs, particularly in terms of where they are used,” says Miller. He holds a “positive outlook” on the future, given the newfound importance (and value) of other PGMs in the basket such as ruthenium, and iridium, which are used in AI-related technology.

“There’s probably 200,000-300,000 ounces of PGMs used today in AI-related development, and we can see that growing four- or fivefold over the next five to eight years,” Miller says.

Even if prices were to fall, Miller notes that Valterra has worked “incredibly hard” over the past two years “to really improve our efficiencies”, pointing to flat costs year on year despite inflation increases.

“If prices fell from here, then we’d be able to withstand that as a business,” he says.

This story was produced in partnership with Stanlib Asset Management.

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_{Top image collage: Rawpixel; Currency.}