Palabora Mining Company Limited (founded August 1956) is a publicly-traded mining company headquartered in Phalaborwa

Phalaborwa

Phalaborwa is a town situated in the Mopani district, halfway up along the length of the Kruger National Park in the Limpopo province in South Africa. The Lowveld, also known as Valley of the Olifants, has the highest winter temperatures in South Africa. The rainfall is low and the average winter...

, Limpopo

Limpopo

Limpopo is the northernmost province of South Africa. The capital is Polokwane, formerly named Pietersburg. The province was formed from the northern region of Transvaal Province in 1994, and initially named Northern Transvaal...

 province, South Africa. The company operates a single cluster of open-pit

Open-pit mining

Open-pit mining or opencast mining refers to a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth by their removal from an open pit or borrow....

 and underground mines producing mainly copper as well as byproducts such as anode slimes, nickel sulphate, sulphuric acid, magnetite

Magnetite

Magnetite is a ferrimagnetic mineral with chemical formula Fe3O4, one of several iron oxides and a member of the spinel group. The chemical IUPAC name is iron oxide and the common chemical name is ferrous-ferric oxide. The formula for magnetite may also be written as FeO·Fe2O3, which is one part...

, and vermiculite

Vermiculite

Vermiculite is a natural mineral that expands with the application of heat. The expansion process is called exfoliation and it is routinely accomplished in purpose-designed commercial furnaces. Vermiculite is formed by weathering or hydrothermal alteration of biotite or phlogopite...

. Palabora also has processing facilities on site for the production of purified copper from mined copper ore, and a vermiculite recovery plant. Its final copper product has two forms namely, copper cathode and copper rod.

PMC's open cast mine is Africa's widest man-made hole at almost 2,000 meters wide.

In addition to its mining activities, Palabora maintains subsidiaries located in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 for the marketing of vermiculite.

A majority of the company's stock is owned by the international mining conglomerates Rio Tinto Group

Rio Tinto Group

The Rio Tinto Group is a diversified, British-Australian, multinational mining and resources group with headquarters in London and Melbourne. The company was founded in 1873, when a multinational consortium of investors purchased a mine complex on the Rio Tinto river, in Huelva, Spain from the...

 (57%) and Anglo American PLC (17%), with the remaining 26% available as public float

Public float

The float of a company whose stock is publicly traded has different default meanings depending on the presumed context.Without a qualifier it may refer to the entire market capitalization of the company or only its publicly traded equity....

. The share's stock trades on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange under symbol PAM.