By Ed Stoddard
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s Impala Platinum (Implats) will revamp its Rustenburg mines to boost productivity, but staffing levels will stay the same at the centre of often violent labour unrest, its chief executive said on Thursday.
Terence Goodlace said at an interim results presentation that the “smaller, more concentrated” Rustenburg operation aimed to have more miners focused on a smaller area.
“Instead of having fewer people in many shafts, we have more people concentrated in fewer shafts,” Goodlace said. The plan is for to have 27,685 miners in the shafts by 2020, slightly more than the current 26,900.
“Mechanisation opportunities” will be pursued in some shafts but a whole-scale roll out replacing men with machines is not an option because of geological and other constraints, he said.
Any move to cut jobs would almost certainly provoke resistance from the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), which last year led a five-month strike against Implats, Lonmin Plc and Anglo American Platinum Ltd.
Goodlace said he had assured AMCU on the issue.
Unveiling a strategic review that sees depressed prices for the short term, Implats also announced it wanted to sell its Marula mine in South Africa and would halt expansion of the Mimosa mine in Zimbabwe because of an export tax.
Marula becomes the latest platinum mine in South Africa to come on the market. Amplats is also in process of disposing of platinum assets.
On Marula, Implats said one advantage of selling it was “the realisation of cash to strengthen the Implats balance sheet.”
Implats used up cash during the first half of its financial year, which began on July 1, ramping up its Rustenburg operations after the AMCU stoppage.
Goodlace said the company was in a “much more significant cash conservation mode than we would have been” as a result, and no interim dividend was declared, similar to a year ago.
As of Dec. 31, Implats had cash and cash equivalents of 2.7 billion rand ($235.5 million), down 37 percent from 4.3 billion rand at the end of June.
Its interim headline earnings fell 53.5 percent to 66 cents, the middle of the range it previously flagged.
Gross refined platinum production for the six months was 631,000 ounces, down from 786,000 ounces in same period in 2013. Impala’s Rustenburg shafts achieved their target of 250,000 ounces after the slow reboot.
The ultimate aim at Rustenburg is to have it churning out 850,000 platinum ounces by 2019.
