DAVOS – South African Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies said on Wednesday that his ministry hoped to declare a platinum beneficiation special economic zone in the course of this year.

In an interview with ANA on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Davies said that one of the industries they were looking at was one in which fuel cells were created using platinum as the catalyst.

South Africa’s platinum industry has been devastated by the commodities price crash, with regular announcements of mining companies downsizing operations and laying off thousands of workers.

With 85 percent of the world’s platinum deposits, the country has long been under pressure to do much more than just mine and export the commodity for other countries to gain the real value in processes further down the line.

The declaration of a special economic zone would tick a number of boxes on Davies’ to do list. It would certainly mitigate the challenges in the mining industry created by the commodities price crash and would advance South Africa’s position on the manufacturing value chain.

“We’ve got quite a lot of buy-in from stakeholders around the importance of this … to beneficiate and create a new use for platinum.”