News

December 19, 2008

Eastplats Rolls With The Punches, But Is Still In There Fighting

By Charles Wyatt

There is nothing that a producer can do about the price of platinum at the moment except pray and come up with some concrete plans to ride out the present difficulties. Unlike Aquarius Platinum which seems to move from one problem to another Ian Rozier, chief executive of Eastern Platinum, announced last month that he had re-evaluated his company’s short term plans, but still expected to increase production in 2009. It has been a pretty horrendous fall that producers have had to contend with this year as the price of platinum was rocking along around the US$2,000 /oz mark and above in the first half of the year. It then nose dived and hit a low of US$767/oz. It has since recovered a shade to US$853, but with car factories all around the world closing the outlook for demand can hardly be described as bright. In these circumstances investors look for managers with a plan and the guts to carry it out.

Asked what he thinks about prospects for 2009 Ian says that he had been worried that Anglo American might be disruptive on the supply side. In other words it might continue to ramp up production at a time when demand is falling. In the last couple of days the big South African has announced that production will be maintained at 2.4 million ozs of refined platinum in 2009 which is the same as this year. It is also cutting its capital expenditure  plan for next year quite significantly to...