Valterra Platinum, South Africa’s impressive 2025 platinum group metals (PGM) creation, brought its inaugural 2025 year to a massively fruitful close with a market capitalisation that has sky-rocketed to north of R300-billion.

Since demerging from Anglo American mid-year, the value of this strongly performing instant stalwart is up just shy of 100% on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), and also up 60% on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

“We’re absolutely delighted at how Valterra has played itself out,” an upbeat Valterra Platinum CEO Craig Miller told journalists attending the company’s year-end media event last month.

“It’s been a year defined by both confidence and delivery,” Miller noted, after Valterra Platinum executive head corporate affairs and sustainability Yvonne Mfolo, in her introduction, had described the PGMs sector as being “technically complex and absolutely critical to the South African economy and to growth”.

On the factors that helped Valterra to become the fourteenth largest company on the JSE, Miller put “coherent strategy” on the top of the list of what had helped to remove the uncertainty surrounding Anglo American’s demerger decision and, moreover, PGM prices failing to fairly reflect the real market tightness.

“I’m pleased to say that we predicted that the prices would rise, and they did. But I think the real driver for us – and how we look to the future – is continuing to build that credibility as a company – and as an organisation, and remaining focused on delivering what we say we’re going to deliver.

“We’re not going to give you a production or cost update or anything like that, but our firm commitment is to continue to deliver to our shareholders and to all our stakeholders around what we’re going to do as a company,” Miller outlined, while also acknowledging that “the world around us is shifting, and we’ve certainly seen a lot of geopolitical shifts this year”.

Regarding the domestic front, he added that “we’ve certainly seen changes in terms of how the energy transition is going to play itself out and we’ve certainly said before that it’s not going to be just one size fits all, and I think that’s starting to play itself out.

“We’ve certainly seen the scramble for critical minerals, and where PGMs feature on the critical minerals list. Therefore, it’s going to continue to give us confidence about just how amazing the important properties of PGMs are and the uses that they can have in so many economies globally, and therefore, as a consequence of that, how we then invest capital back into our business.

“We’ve certainly had a more vocal and more demanding public and that includes our communities, and we certainly hope to demonstrate how we engage with the issues at hand, and how we try to lead and create solutions for those issues.

“We’ve seen the rapid impact of technological disruption and the opportunities a new technologically advanced world will have and the role that PGMs can play,” Miller told the journalists attending the year-end event.

Also at home, Engineering News & Mining Weekly can report that Valterra Platinum has been engaging with Minerals Council South Africa and other peers regarding chrome tax and chrome quotas, and what that could mean for the PGM industry.

The company has also worked collaboratively at public sector and private sector levels regarding the proposed amendments to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act and will keep ongoing sight of what the beneficiation chain can bring for South Africa as well as the jobs that need to be created.

Against all that background, is Valterra Platinum still optimistic about PGMs?

The answer to that, as has been firmly stated since its Capital Markets Day last year, is “absolutely yes”, amid a 70%-higher PGMs basket price in the year to date and the PGMs basket price being 50% higher since the demerger with Anglo.

“Despite the volatility that you see in prices, and certainly they have their moments, we still fundamentally believe in what we’ve been saying for the past 12 months – supply is constrained and is likely to continue to decrease, because of the lack of investment by others in the PGMs space in growing their own production.

“Demand, from an automotive perspective, continues to be robust. We continue to see the opportunities in the industrial space, which we will accelerate, and we’ll certainly continue to support PGMs utilisation in cleaner mobility and other industrial applications.”

As a PGMs producer with a positive outlook, Valterra Platinum is continuing to look for new markets into which it can invest and which can utilise its products.

The company highlights the utilisation of PGMs in cleaner mobility, in fuel cell electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles and more recently, how PGMs could be used in other technological applications, including data storage and electronic chips.

It is seeing now how the market is not only shaped by supply and demand, but also by financial flows and sentiment, and right now, the dynamics of that are also pointing to a much tighter market, which could continue to see prices at the current levels and at those levels for a bit longer.