*Originally published on LinkedIn on 28 April 2026. This is the canonical expanded version of the story. Read the original version. This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.
South Africa supplies roughly 70% of the world’s platinum. For the first 45 years of that industry, none of it was refined here.
Forty-five years in transit
The ore came out of the ground near Rustenburg. It was smelted into matte and shipped to Brimsdown, near Enfield in north London.
There, in a refinery built in 1928, Johnson Matthey separated it into platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, ruthenium and osmium. Powell and Deering had developed the process in 1925.
Every step that turned raw matte into tradeable metal happened in England.
This was not an accident of geography.
In 1931, Johnson Matthey persuaded Consolidated Goldfields and JCI to merge their PGM interests into Rustenburg Platinum Mines, with Johnson Matthey as both refiner and distributor.
The refinery’s location was written into the ownership structure from the start.
Implats took a different route
Implats came from a different direction.
When Union Corporation formed its PGM subsidiary in the mid-1960s, it looked not to London but to Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Inco—the International Nickel Company of Canada, later absorbed by Vale—had spent decades processing PGM matte as a byproduct of its nickel operations.
Union Corporation brought Inco into the new company for a 10% stake and its process knowledge. Hambros Bank and the Industrial Development Corporation completed the capital structure.
In September 1967, Union Corporation chose Springs over Rustenburg.
East Geduld’s infrastructure was available. Johannesburg had the skills. Springs had gas that Rustenburg did not.
Nine months later, on 1 July 1969, the first matte entered the autoclaves.
Implats had built its own onshore smelting and base-metal refinery from the beginning, outside the Johnson Matthey arrangement.
Bringing the value chain home
Johnson Matthey opened Wadeville in October 1969.
The ownership was 80% Johnson Matthey and 20% Rustenburg Platinum Mines. Rustenburg matte came onshore for the first time.
From 1924 to 1969: 45 years in transit.
Base-metal processing moved onshore through the 1980s. Final PGM separation followed by the early 1990s.
Dr L.A. Cramer’s verdict in the 2000 presidential address to the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy was that it had taken 65 years to transfer the complete production technology from Europe.
Northam’s Zondereinde smelter, commissioned in 1993, took another route.
It used toll refining through Heraeus in Hanau, Germany. Heraeus had dominated European PGM refining for decades.
That partnership eventually drew Heraeus to Port Elizabeth, where it opened South Africa’s first integrated PGM fabrication refinery in 2007.
Johnson Matthey’s Germiston plant closed in October 2023.
Valterra Platinum, demerged from Anglo American in May 2025, refined 3,916,300 PGM ounces in 2024 through its Waterval and Polokwane smelters.
No gram went to England.
What Johnson Matthey and Inco transferred—the knowledge, process chemistry and capital—deserves as much recognition as what South Africa brought home.
That transfer is the achievement.
But achievement is not a permanent condition. The economic floor on which it was built is no longer what it was.
The condition beneath the achievement
Every refinery and smelter in this story was commissioned when South Africa had some of the cheapest industrial electricity in the world.
Eskom’s industrial tariff in 2000 was 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2026 it is 234 cents—a 1,571% increase in 26 years, running roughly nine times faster than general inflation.
This is not background. It is one of the conditions on which the entire onshore processing story depends.
Webber Wentzel, one of South Africa’s major transaction law firms, published an article in April 2026 on bankable beneficiation in Africa.
Its conclusion was precise: energy instability remains the primary reason beneficiation projects underperform. Electricity can constitute a substantial share of operating costs, and energy regulation is a core determinant of bankability.
That is not an academic observation. It is a transaction adviser describing what the numbers look like when a deal is being structured.
The investors sitting across the table are putting energy first. The law firm is reflecting that back.
Johnson Matthey cited significant increases in manufacturing and operating costs when it closed Germiston in October 2023.
The number behind that statement is a 900% increase in electricity tariffs since 2008. Johnson Matthey did not make that connection directly. The arithmetic does.
The warning from ferrochrome
The chrome industry has made the same point more loudly.
When Cabinet approved a 25% export levy on raw chrome ore in late 2025, the Minerals Council and the Ferro Alloy Producers Association rejected it in a joint statement.
Their argument was that the price of chrome ore was not the cause of smelter closures. Electricity was.
By early 2026, only 11 of South Africa’s 66 ferrochrome furnaces were operational. Glencore-Merafe recorded no ferrochrome output in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Chrome and PGM economics are not identical. The metal values are different and the energy intensity is different.
But the structural dynamic is the same: industries built around cheap Eskom power are now carrying an energy cost the original investment logic never priced.
Northam chief executive Paul Dunne, also president of the Minerals Council, said in March 2026 that whatever Eskom does for ferrochrome needs to be replicated for platinum.
He called the ferrochrome situation a burning platform.
The PGM industry is watching the outcome as a precedent.
Could processing move offshore again?
The question is no longer only historical.
Platinum Group Metals, the Toronto-listed developer of the Waterberg project on the Northern Limb, conducted a formal trade-off study in 2023 on whether to smelt concentrate inside or outside South Africa.
Its conclusion was that cheaper electricity and water offshore could substantially offset the cost of transporting concentrate to another country.
The company has since signed a memorandum of understanding with a Saudi partner and the Saudi Ministry of Investment to explore a PGM smelter in Riyadh.
South Africa spent 65 years bringing the PGM value chain home. It is now having a live argument about whether energy costs make it rational to send part of that value chain away again.
The problem extends beyond PGMs.
More than a decade ago, a major South African manganese producer made a board-level decision to build its ferroalloy smelting capacity in Malaysia, citing cheap and stable power.
The ore is mined in South Africa, shipped to Malaysia, converted to alloy there and sold into Asian markets.
The value addition happens in Malaysia.
It was a financially rational decision because the energy economics made it rational.
What remains at stake
South Africa’s beneficiation debate remains unresolved across most minerals.
In PGMs, the value chain came home—across 65 years, through two world wars, the Cold War, apartheid and the democratic transition.
That is a genuine achievement. It belongs in the record alongside the names of the companies, metallurgists and engineers who made it possible.
But whether the value chain remains at home is now being decided in boardrooms, law firms, power-purchase negotiations and project trade-off studies.
Beneficiation cannot be mandated into existence if the electricity bill makes it irrational.
For the people of South Africa, who are the owners of these mineral resources, that is not an abstract question.
About this version
This canonical version expands the original LinkedIn article, which traced the 65-year transfer of PGM processing technology to South Africa.
It adds the contemporary question of whether electricity costs and changing industrial conditions now place that achievement at risk.