DRDGold pays dividends for 19th consecutive year, eyes expansion outside SA

There is money to be made from Johannesburg’s old mine dumps, and DRDGold has now paid dividends for 19 consecutive years to prove that assertion.

Now, the company that has helped transform the Johannesburg landscape and environment for the better while making consistent profits in the process, sees opportunities in mine dumps elsewhere in Africa and South America.

If it does so, it would be following a well-worn path blazed by other South African mining houses which have diversified their asset base and risk profile globally. But it would do so with a unique model in mind that does not involve sinking shafts and committing vast sums of capital in the process.

CEO Niël Pretorius outlined his vision for possible expansion with Daily Maverick at the JSE after the company unveiled its FY2026 results, which showed an 89% increase in headline earnings to R4.3-billion and a final cash dividend of 120 SA cents per share.

“The conversation you would have is you would go to a large, listed company with a global footprint where you know the standards of governance, and environmental standards, are being maintained, and where they have a large tailings endowment,” Pretorius said.

“So you’ve been stocking tailings now for the last 40 years and have 150 million tonnes of tailings on your footprint. And your mine is closing in four or five years. And there’s infrastructure, and there’s a massive hole.”

One prism in which to view this terrain is that those tailings hold “dead capital”, to repurpose a concept developed by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, which referred to assets or property that cannot be transformed into wealth because of a lack of title deeds and ownership. South Africa’s former homelands are a prime example on this front.

The capital in a tailings facility is “dead” on another front – it cannot be transformed into wealth if it lies dormant and the gold that still lies within is not extracted. It becomes a liability to a mining company rather than an asset that can generate capital.

“We want to look and see whether there’s a model to repurpose your plant to make it higher volume and do some of the rehab on the site by reversing the process from the tailings through the plant and back into the hole. Instead of closing your mine and dismantling all of your capital infrastructure, let’s repurpose it,” Pretorius explained.

It boils down to a value proposition for large mining companies with existing infrastructure and tailings, with DRDGold’s team bringing its expertise and experience.

“We could be a service-provider/equity partner on many of these things. We bring the capital, that gives us access to a portion of the proceeds, and we assume a measure of the risk. We run it for you and we deliver a product, and it is a self-funded outcome.”

After spinning cash and consistent dividends from Johannesburg’s mine dumps – while removing and vegetating a toxic legacy of the apartheid economy which has had a poisonous impact on mostly poor communities – there is no reason why DRDGold’s model could not be applied elsewhere.

Life has been breathed back into the dead capital that has been lying around Johannesburg and fouling the environment. DRDGold sees this model being applied elsewhere.

And would that help keep the dividends flowing?

“It’s an important part of who we are, and it would be nice to have 25 years of uninterrupted dividends,” Pretorius said. DM