With oil market uncertainty bringing fresh impetus to clean energy transition planning, South Africa finds itself at the centre of a new international resource race — with an abundance of the very minerals the global economy increasingly needs.
Already the world’s leading supplier of platinum, manganese and chromium, the country also produces gold, vanadium and a range of other commodities that are central to energy, technology and advanced manufacturing.
But while extraction of these minerals is attractive in itself, the real economic opportunity today lies in downstream development. Minerals are part of a far broader opportunity to build globally competitive value chains.
To capture it, South Africa must first tackle local energy, infrastructure, logistics, policy and investment constraints that stand in the way.
Extraction the starting point
Mining already plays a substantial role in South Africa’s economy. According to the Minerals Council South Africa, the sector contributed about R439bn to the national economy in 2025, equivalent to about 5.8% of GDP, directly employing close to 470,000 people and generating employee earnings of about R200bn.
But extraction captures only part of the potential economic value. Processing, refining, advanced materials, manufacturing, recycling and technical services can create additional activity around a mineral value chain — but only where the economics support it.
South Africa should not seek to process every resource found locally simply because the opportunity is there; it should instead identify the specific value chains where the country can genuinely compete on energy costs, infrastructure, scale, skills, technology and access to markets.
Where those conditions align, downstream development can support skilled jobs, deepen local supply chains, broaden the tax base and reduce exposure to commodity cycles.
The above-ground competitiveness test
Geology determines where a resource is found, but competitiveness determines where the value is created. For any prospective value chain, investors will ultimately ask, Can power be accessed reliably and at a competitive cost? Can inputs and finished products move efficiently? Is there sufficient scale? Are the necessary skills and technology available? Is policy predictable? And is there a market prepared to pay for the resultant product?
South Africa has made progress in some of these areas. Ongoing logistics reform includes opening the freight rail network to private train operators, while greater private participation is also being introduced into port operations, propelling Durban from one of the world’s worst-performing ports to the most improved, according to the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index 2025.
Freight volumes have begun to recover, with the first private train operators expected to start open-access operations in 2027. The direction of reform is positive, but it must now be translated into sustained improvements in cost, reliability and capacity.
Meanwhile, the same execution test must be applied to energy, water, skills, permitting and finance. For investors weighing projects with long payback periods, these are not secondary considerations but fundamental to the investment case.
Long-term capital follows clarity on policy, infrastructure delivery and risk allocation as much as it follows the quality of the resource itself. Improving one constraint in isolation will not make an investment bankable if several others remain unresolved.
Regional scale
South Africa should also consider where regional scale can strengthen the investment case. Southern African Development Community countries bring different combinations of mineral resources, energy potential, infrastructure, skills and industrial capability. In some value chains those capabilities may be more competitive when connected across borders than when developed country by country.
Regional corridors can connect mineral production with processing, manufacturing and export markets, while shared infrastructure can help create the scale required to justify investment. Southern Africa has already proven that cross-border energy and transport frameworks can improve the commercial economics of a value chain.
For more than 30 years the Southern African Power Pool has allowed countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to actively buy and sell surplus or deficit power from each other. The opportunity now is to build on this foundation to harness the opportunities of the clean energy transition.
Successful value creation
The ultimate measure of success in this new era will not be in tonnes extracted or even the share of a mineral processed locally, but in creating and retaining meaningful economic capability around the value chains in which South Africa chooses to compete.
That means skilled employment, stronger local suppliers, technical expertise, investable businesses and more resilient communities, alongside export revenues and returns on capital. It also means ensuring local development and environmental accountability are part of the investment proposition rather than treated as separate considerations.
While South Africa has already shown ambition, it must now sharpen its execution, choosing the value chains where the country can win, testing them against commercial reality, aligning infrastructure and energy around them and measuring whether genuine capability is being built.
Geology has once again given South Africa an opportunity. Competitiveness and execution will determine how much of its value the country retains.
• Evans is a partner in the energy & natural resources practice at Oliver Wyman.