The impact of the 10 week old strike which has halted production at a number of South Africa’s platinum mines so far seems to have had little impact on pgm prices. Why?
LONDON (MINEWEB) – While every now and again some analyst or other comments that perhaps palladium is outperforming gold, or platinum is, on the year to date both the pgms have moved up pretty well pari passu with gold overall. All three metals are around 7-8% up since the beginning of the year. Indeed gold moved up substantially further during the height of the Ukraine crisis and while the pgms followed they did not quite do so to the same extent. As gold has fallen back though, the pgms have caught up again.
Many analysts have been preaching the investment merits of the pgms in the light of the long running platinum strike in South Africa which has seen a number of mines effectively shut down so far for some ten weeks – with no end in sight to the strikes yet.
The more aggressive AMCU which has become the dominant player among the platinum mine unions, has been demanding an effective doubling of the workers’ wages which the mining companies have concertedly said they cannot afford – and with many of the deep narrow reef platinum producers finding it tough to make any kind of profit even at current platinum prices they do have a point.
But AMCU does not seem to be giving ground, but one suspects it cannot hold out much longer given the major problems pay-packetless workers are experiencing. They are probably only remaining out on strike through intimidation (in the South African labour scene to break ranks in this respect could mean severe beatings or even death).
See: Fear of deadly reprisal, hunger, in Rustenburg as SA platinum strike marches on
With South Africa producing around 70% of the world’s platinum and perhaps 35-40% of palladium analysts had assumed the South African strikes would decimate global mine supply. However not all the South African mines are on strike, but perhaps even more importantly some have huge stockpiles and continuing supplies from these are virtually completely negating many analysts’ dire projections.
Chris Griffith, CEO of the world’s largest platinum producer, Anglo Platinum (Amplats) and second largest palladium producer (after Russia’s Norilsk), recently went on record as saying that the company is still operating at about 60% of capacity, despite the strikes, and that it also still has around 215,000 ounces of platinum in its stockpiles.
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