Impala Platinum has implemented new measures in an attempt to hang on to skilled staff, with the commodities boom leading to scarce skills being snapped up globally by poachers.

Bruce Whitfield:
David Brown joins us now, he is the chief executive officer of Impala Platinum. Safety concerns top of the agenda for platinum producers at present, of course, Anglo Platinums Ralph Havenstein lost his job as a result of the group’s recent safety record.

Impala saying today it is not satisfied that it has lost 13 of its workers over the past year at its properties and it is the first time David in five years that fatalities have risen. Is mining simply more dangerous or is it a case of training not being given the sort of attention it is with the growth in the mining sector around the world?

David Brown:
Good evening Bruce, absolutely safety is our major focus at this particular point in time. We have seen five years of previous improvement, we have now seen a reversal of that improvement and that is both on the fatality rate and on the lost time injury rate, though the lost time injury rate did not deteriorate by too much but still nevertheless not at satisfactory levels.

I think the issue is probably twofold, the first one is we have had a relatively high staff turnover in certain supervisory levels and other people leaving the businesses and going to competitors or going to other paying jobs that are competing with the skills base and as such, have brought in, should we say, people with less experience and particularly maybe not relevant experience in terms of the platinum mining.

So I think there does need to be re-emphasis on training and to that end, we are obviously putting all our teams back through training again and obviously with an added emphasis of anyone who is new to the mining or the platinum mining game, to actually re-emphasise that training aspect for them.

And then the second order point I thinks is a question that I think there is definitely a risk taking element which needs to be worked out of the system in terms of trying to concentrate on behavioural base safety initiatives. Quite clearly we have not succeeded in these last 12 months and we need to re-double our efforts in that regard.

Bruce Whitfield:
You touched on a number of issues there, the high staff turnover, you have implemented new incentive plans to try and keep within, especially middle and senior managers I guess within the Impala fold simply because we hear the stories of talented miners getting poached to go everywhere in the world at the moment because of the commodities boom?

David Brown:
Absolutely, I think if I can just caution, not necessarily only looking at retaining middle and senior managers, we are looking at retaining shall we say valuable employees throughout the organisation and that includes all our production staff and to that end, we have spent a number of months designing new initiatives that are primarily aimed at keeping that production level or production staffing up to the right level.

Bruce Whitfield:
Your margins are better, 46 percent. Perhaps worrying and it is not unexpected, but the 21 percent increase in the cost for platinum per ounce, provided the platinum price stays as strong as it has been, that is all okay. But if there is some pressure on the platinum, those costs are going to hurt.

David Brown:
Well I think just again maybe to re-emphasise the point that the 21 percent increase is in unit costs, and unit costs effectively are impacted by both production volumes as well as absolute costs. We obviously at Impala Platinum or Impala Rustenburg suffered from lower volumes six percent decrease and that had a marked impact on the unit costs.

So I would say looking forward, we are obviously working on the initiatives and they are beginning to bear fruit. We would see that our production with Impala Rustenburg will again increase going forward and that will have a positive impact on reducing unit costs in the next year.

Bruce Whitfield:
Because Rustenburg was your disappointment, it is half your output, but you were not happy with the performance there.

David Brown:
No we are not, I think we have always operated at high standards and I think we demand high standards and we should and certainly the initiatives I said earlier that we have put in place, which includes some quite ground breaking initiatives.

I think the one that immediately springs to mind is the employee share option scheme whereby all 28 000 South African employees are now shareholders in the company and I think that is a good step in terms of formulating a strong team which has a strong team which has a common goal and vision and I think we will see the benefits of that flowing through in 2008, particularly at Impala Rustenburg.

Bruce Whitfield:
David Brown thanks very much indeed, the Chief Executive of Impala Platinum. We will talk to Jason Drew from Dialogue in a moment.