/biz/ - Business & Finance

Amplats has declared Force Majeure.
This is the biggest platinum and rhodium miner in the world.
They fucked up and exploded a converter plant due to being under pressure of trying to supply as much rhodium and palladium to those overheated markets as they could.
Amplats is responsible for the production of 2.1 Million ounces of Platinum, 1.4 Million ounces of Palladium and 0.3 Million ounces of Rhodium.
This makes it responsible for about 30-35% of the global platinum and rhodium mining supply and about 20% of global palladium mining supply.

Due to this fuckup, they have revised their 2020 expected output down with 900k ounces or a good 20%.
So this means that rhodium and platinum will see the mining supply drop 7.5% this year and palladium about 5% from Amplats only.
As if this would not be enough also smaller miners depend on this converter plant and now cant get their ore converted in ready to sell bars. Too bad.
https://www.fin24.com/Companies/Mining/amplats-force-majeure-to-impact-royal-bafokeng-platinum-operations-20200310
Royal Bafokeng is a minor player with just 260k platinum, 107k palladium and 22k ounces of rhodium in annual production. It is still unclear how deeply this will affect them but maybe this can cause another reduction of 0.5% in mining supply.
All this whilst palladium and rhodium markets are already in increasingly tight supply and platinum is still near a multi year low.