ROYAL Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat) CFO, Hanré Rossouw is to leave the company in April next year in order to take up the role of CFO at Sasol, the petrochemicals company.
Sasol announced Paul Victor had resigned but that he had agreed to remain with the company until the publication of its annual financial results for the year to June 2022. Rossouw will officially take up his duties at Sasol in July 2022.
Steve Phiri, CEO of RBPlat, said Rossouw had been “a catalyst for transformation” having managed the purchase of a 33% stake in Rustenburg Platinum Mines and helping take the company through to the completion of its R11bn Styldrift project.
Rossouw has been employed at RBPlat for nearly three years. A replacement would be named “in the coming months”, said RBPlat chairman, Obakeng Phetwe. Previously, he was a portfolio manager at Investec Asset Management and, prior to that, CFO of Xstrata Alloys.
Rossouw has been the voice of temperance regarding the improvement in platinum group metals (PGMs) pricing lately, saying that investors would be wise to keep their cool.
“This does feel like the early stages of another bull market cocktail party,” he said in March of the improvement of PGM prices.
“And we’ve all been to such a party before with alcohol – sorry, I mean cash – starting to flow freely and the DJ playing old-time favourites such as ‘Champagne Supercycle’ and ‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger … For Longer’.
This came a month after RBPlat announced it would pay a maiden dividend for its 2020 financial year of 575 cents per share – about 50% of free cash flow before expansionary capital. It also forecast an increase in the production of platinum group metals by as much as one quarter.
This was on the back of 1,354.4 cents per share in headline earnings for the 12 months ended December and compared to 50.4 cents/share previously. The group ended the year with net cash of R2.24bn compared to R814.2m at end-December 2019.
