Johannesburg - Anglo American Platinum [JSE:AMS said first-half profit probably fell by 50% to 70% after inventory gains last year weren’t repeated and the dollar price of the commodities it mines declined.
Headline earnings for the six months ended June 30 probably dropped to a range of R745m and R1.24bn from R2.47bn a year earlier, the Johannesburg-based company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Amplats, as the Anglo American [JSE:AGL] unit is known, last year had a R1.6bn gain after its annual metal-inventory count, less than the R424m increase for this year, it said. Platinum fell 6.5% in the year to June and has almost halved since August 2011, while palladium decreased 13% in the period.
The company and other major producers such as Impala Platinum [JSE:IMP] and Lonmin [JSE:LON] are staving off the plunge in prices by selling or closing mines, reining in expenditure and reducing thousands of jobs.
The cutbacks are weighing on growth in South Africa, the source of more than 70% of the world’s platinum and a country where more than one in four in the workforce is unemployed.