On May 9 2025, the historic East Rand Consolidated Limited, known since 1986 as London Finance & Investments PLC (Lonfin), will delist from the JSE, ending a 92-year presence on South Africa’s main board. Only DRDGold (1895) and PPC (1910) have been listed longer.
There will be no fuss nor funeral dirge. Just a businesslike Sens announcement. But the quiet delisting of Lonfin is more than corporate spring cleaning – it is another waypoint in the long unwinding of an exchange that once stood at the beating heart of the world’s mining industry.
First listed on the JSE in 1933, amid the currency devaluations of the Great Depression and the resulting inter-war gold boom, East Rand Consolidated, located in Boksburg and at one point the deepest mine in the world, was part of the complex world of Witwatersrand mining finance.
That world is now gone. The famed regional gold boards of the JSE have long since been consolidated. The mining houses, once financial behemoths themselves, have been dissolved or restructured beyond recognition. The local capital market, which once financed hundreds of mines, now hosts just 35 mining firms – of which only 27 still operate in South Africa. And new financings are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Yet at its peak in 1980, the JSE accounted for half the world’s listed mining market capitalisation – a high point reached on the back of that year’s gold price boom. However, that high point was also a turning point. As the gold price fell and South Africa’s political transition began, capital became more mobile, and the grip of the mining houses loosened. The JSE’s dominance slowly eroded, accelerated by the investment-hostile Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act and its increasingly onerous successive Mining Charters after 2002.
More than half the companies, of all types, listed two decades ago are gone. For smaller firms liquidity is thin, primary capital raising vanishingly rare, and direct public participation in what is now almost entirely an institutional, rather than a public, market has collapsed. For companies like ERC, whose business had shifted to the UK and whose local shareholding had withered, there was no rationale for keeping the listing.
Financial integration
Yet ERC’s historical significance deserves recognition. Though now a passive UK investment vehicle with no operational footprint in South Africa, it was once part of the country’s mining and financial ecosystem. Its origins also reflect an era of close financial integration between the UK and South Africa, when many London-headquartered companies maintained primary listings on the LSE and secondary ones on the JSE. In the early 20th century, UK capital flowed into South African mining ventures, and there was active trade in local gold shares on both exchanges.
That financial linkage was gradually broken. The advent of apartheid in 1948, the declaration of the republic in 1961, and the replacement of the pound by the rand all helped to sever these institutional ties. South Africa’s international isolation deepened with exchange controls and sanctions. The tight coupling between London and Joburg weakened.
Decades later, some of those links were tentatively re-established. In the 2000s, with exchange controls being gradually relaxed and dual listings again permitted, the JSE began reintegrating into global capital markets. But the nature of that integration had changed.
Where once secondary listings on the JSE served as a route for foreign capital to invest in South African assets, many of today’s large dual-listed entities have disinvested – or never invested in the country at all. They raise no capital here, employ few South Africans, and treat the JSE as a technicality rather than a platform for growth.
Of course, the mining finance house system that supported much of the JSE’s 20th-century growth was deeply unequal. It relied on cheap migrant labour, with gold production featuring harsh working conditions and tightly controlled wages.
That reality should temper any nostalgia. But it does not reduce the significance of the institutions that once defined the financial life of the country – or the quiet disappearance of those that remain.
Fading away
What’s striking is the silence. In London or New York, the disappearance of a near-century-old listing might provoke some eulogising. In South Africa, it barely registers. But those who remember the clatter of the trading floor, the pages of the Rand Daily Mail thick with new listings, and a time when Joburg was the city of gold, know we are losing something.
The old mining counters and their controlling finance houses have faded. Some, like Rand Mines or Gencor, were absorbed into global giants. Others, like ERC, dwindled quietly. That it remained listed this long – and its survival through depressions, recessions, sanctions and political transitions – is remarkable.
On May 9, the listing ends. All references will be deleted from the JSE systems, as if it had never existed. The local market will, absent a comprehensive policy intervention, continue to slowly lose its listed companies, with a market of just 100 or so large, liquid listed companies now surely baked in. But this quiet departure of one of the JSE’s oldest names should be cause for reflection.
Behind the name is a story of a country and economy built on its mines, financed through its markets, and shaped by its past – both good and grim.
Not every end makes a noise. Sometimes, the old soldiers just fade away.
Paul Miller has a long history in capital markets, minerals exploration and mining, and is the MD of consultancy AmaranthCX as well as Decentral Energy. He consults on renewable energy solutions for commercial and industrial customers, mines and agribusiness.
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