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# The Metal Almost Nobody Can Make More Of
- URL: https://the-capital-memo.ghost.io/the-metal-almost-nobody-can-make-more-of/
- Published: 2026-09-15T10:13:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T10:13:29.000Z
- Author: James Coleman

The World Platinum Investment Council put the 2025 platinum deficit at 1,191 thousand ounces, with supply of 7,240 against demand of 8,431\. Its forecast for 2026 is a further deficit of 297 thousand ounces. That will be the fourth consecutive year in which the world consumed more platinum than it produced, and the arithmetic of consecutive deficits is not complicated. The gap has to come from somewhere, and where it has come from is inventory.  
  
Above ground stocks stood at 2,044 thousand ounces at the end of 2025 and are forecast to fall to 1,747 by the end of this year, a decline of about 15 percent in twelve months. At that level the world's visible platinum inventory covers under three months of demand, the thinnest cover since 2014\. The price has behaved the way a market with thin cover behaves, which is erratically. Platinum opened the year near $2,137 an ounce, reached an all time high close to $2,920 in late January, fell to a seven month low of $1,565.80 by the end of June, and has recovered to the neighborhood of $1,834 in early September. None of those moves reflected a change in the underlying scarcity, which has been grinding along in the same direction throughout.

### The Historical Echo

South Africa produces roughly 72 percent of the world's mined platinum, and the country has already demonstrated, within living memory, what that concentration means in practice. On the twenty third of January 2014 the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union began a strike across the Rustenburg platinum belt. Roughly 70,000 workers stopped at operations that between them accounted for around 40 percent of world supply. The strike ran until the twenty fifth of June, five months, the longest wage strike in South African history.  
  
The production loss was about 1.2 million ounces. The cost to the industry ran to roughly 24 billion rand, and the workers themselves forfeited something on the order of 11 billion rand in wages for a settlement that raised the minimum to eight thousand rand a month. The platinum price rose about six percent over the strike and palladium, similarly concentrated between South Africa and Russia, rose about fifteen.  
  
That is the part worth noting. Forty percent of world supply stopped for five months and the price moved single digits. The reason was inventory. There was enough metal sitting in stock, in refineries, in pipelines and in exchange warehouses to absorb a shock of that magnitude without a repricing. Inventory is what converts a supply interruption into an inconvenience. The question a market with under three months of cover has to answer is what the same strike would do now.

### Where Patient Capital Is Positioning

The concentration has if anything intensified. South Africa, Russia and Zimbabwe together supply roughly 90 percent of primary platinum group metal output, and South Africa alone holds about 91 percent of global platinum reserves. South African production has fallen from around 5.3 million ounces in 2006 to about 3.9 million in 2025, a quarter gone in two decades. In the first quarter of this year Norilsk Nickel's platinum output was down 26 percent year on year and Zimplats' six element output down 56 percent. Recycling has grown, at about nine percent a year, but it recovers metal that was already mined and cannot expand faster than the vehicle fleet retires.  
  
Demand has actually softened. Automotive use is down slightly, jewellery down twelve percent, investment demand down more than half from an unusual 2025\. The market is still in deficit anyway, which is the whole point. A shortfall that persists through a demand decline is a supply problem, and supply problems in mining are measured in decades because that is how long it takes to sink a shaft.  
  
For capital that thinks in generations, the platinum group metals sit in the same category as the other physically constrained assets this letter returns to. They are not a currency, they pay nothing while held, and the price will keep swinging on sentiment in ways that have little to do with the ounces. What they offer is the property that no policy decision, no balance sheet expansion and no amount of capital can create more of them on any timescale that matters to a living investor. Four consecutive deficits and three months of cover is not a forecast. It is a subtraction that has already happened.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/44/88/44885750-7681-4d57-825f-5d69f4c60045/content/images/2026/09/the-metal-almost-nobody-can-make-more-of-photorealistic.jpg)

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