Sibanye-Stillwater set to reinstate dividends by FY2025 despite tumultuous market conditions

Sibanye-Stillwater's incoming CEO, Richard Stewart, on Thursday indicated that the company was on track to resume dividend payments by the conclusion of the 2025 full-year period.

The South African platinum group metals (PGM) and gold mining giant, however, opted to forego a shareholder payout for the June interim period due to a reported half-year loss of R3.7 billion.

Stewart said Sibanye-Stillwater was geared to “maintain healthy cash reserves” that will help with the “required liquidity and headroom to manage” the business.

The company had balance sheet liquidity headroom of R46.9bn in addition to “well structured and undemanding” debt maturities.

Sibanye-Stillwater was confident of reverting back to dividend payments at the end of its current 2025 full year. The company has not paid out dividends over the past few months as the PGM market was rocked by price downfalls that prompted it to undertake restructuring of its operations, including retrenchments.

“We are just starting to enter a position of dividend paying territory. Given the current global uncertainty and commodity price volatility, we have made a decision not to pay a dividend at the interim at the half years, but we will be reviewing this at the year-end,” said Stewart.

He explained that given the company’s rosy “outlook on the second half” and “should commodity prices remain where they are, we are confident that we will be back into the paying territory” by the end of the year.

Sibanye-Stillwater posted headline earnings of R5.4bn for the half year to June 2025, which was 19% higher than in the same period last year. It attributed the difference between headline earnings and basic loss primarily due to impairments of R9.7bn.

Despite operational challenges that reduced gold production from the SA operations 13% year-on-year, adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) for bullion mining division for the period surged by 118% to R4.8bn from R2.2bn. This was driven by a 36% year-on-year increase in the average received gold price of R1 802 580/kg.

Interim gold production from the managed SA gold operations, excluding DRDGold, decreased by 14% primarily due to ongoing challenges at the Kloof operation, with all in sustaining costs for the period increasing by 17% due to 21% lower gold sold year-on-year.

The average gold price received by the SA managed operations for the first half 2025 (including gold hedges), increased by 33% to R1 756 996/kg.

Despite this production setback suffered for the gold operations, Sibanye-Stillwater’s all other operations improved output and are on track to achieve annual guidance.  

Production from the SA PGM operations, including attributable production from Mimosa in Zimbabwe and purchase of concentrates for the first half year was 4% lower year-on-year due to surface production declining by 30% year-on-year.

Adjusted EBITDA from the SA PGM operations of R4.8bn was, however, comparative with the same period last year a 16% fall in 4E PGM sold year-on-year. Inventory built-up during the first half of 2025 is expected to be processed and sold in the second half of 2025.

“The restructuring of the US PGM operations during the fourth quarter of 2024 was successfully implemented, with production and cost for the first half of 2025 ahead of planned restructuring levels and, on an annualised basis, better than 2025 guidance,” said Sibanye-Stillwater.

Shares in Sibanye-Stillwater retreated 4.14% to R33.34 in afternoon trade on the JSE on Thursday.

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