Natascha Viljoen and the value of going back underground

On her fourth visit underground, Natascha Viljoen finally got a different conversation. On the previous three, colleagues had been reluctant to speak with her. Now they were prepared to discuss what worked, what failed and what needed changing. For the chief executive of Anglo American Platinum, this counted as progress worth celebrating. A company could spend a fortune moving rock and still struggle to move a conversation.

“We spoke about the good, the bad, and the ugly,” she recalled. The episode offers a useful way into a career that now reaches from South African processing plants to Newmont’s headquarters in Denver. Viljoen has spent more than three decades around the machinery of mining. She keeps returning to the people who understand how it actually runs.

The girl beside the winding engine

Viljoen grew up in Klerksdorp, a mining town in South Africa’s North West province. Her father was a winding engine driver. She accompanied him to work, getting an early view of an industry that would eventually become her own. Long before she held responsibility for a global portfolio, mining was something her father did for a living.

That distinction matters. A mine can appear in an investor presentation as an asset, a reserve or a production forecast. For a child visiting a parent at work, it has people attached. Newmont describes Viljoen as a second-generation miner. The phrase connects her present responsibilities to a working life she encountered before she had qualifications, a business card or a reason to think about succession planning.

She completed her engineering degree at the institution now known as North-West University in 1991. The same year, she began as a trainee engineer at Iscor. Extractive metallurgy became her professional grounding: the business of getting useful metal out of material that does not conveniently surrender it. Gold may attract poets. Processing requires someone to check the equipment.

Her subsequent career took in AngloGold, BHP’s coal and chrome businesses and the Modikwa joint venture. She became general manager of BHP’s Klipspruit Colliery. In 2008 she joined Lonmin, where her responsibilities included processing and, at different times, sustainability and stakeholder relations. These were jobs that connected technical performance with the complicated world outside the plant fence.

A chaperone for the engineer

The industry did not always make it easy for her to do the work. Early in her career, Viljoen needed special permission and a chaperone to go underground. Her engineering training required shift work; that, too, required a chaperone. She later described mining as “a workplace designed by men for men.”

There is a faint absurdity in training an engineer to take responsibility for an industrial process while treating her presence beside it as an exception. Yet the practical consequences lasted beyond permission forms. Viljoen discussed changing facilities and work clothing as part of making the workplace usable for women. Inclusion had to survive contact with an ordinary shift.

She has also resisted the convenient idea that women executives all bring an identical leadership style. In 2021, she argued that individuals bring their own strengths and weaknesses. That is a more demanding position than collecting flattering stereotypes. It asks an employer to judge someone’s work while examining the systems that determine who gets a chance to do it.

Technology, in her view, could help broaden the pool. More precise mining and lower consumption of water and energy could make the industry attractive to people who had never imagined working in it. Her argument for change extended beyond the executive suite to the design and appeal of the work itself.

Where the metal meets the balance sheet

In 2014, Viljoen became Anglo American’s group head of processing. The role put her technical experience to work across the group. When Anglo American Platinum announced her appointment as CEO in February 2020, its chairman, Norman Mbazima, pointed to her work improving the performance and commercial value of processing operations.

Processing has fewer romantic associations than discovering a deposit. It also has a habit of determining whether discovery turns into revenue. In appointing her, the company stressed that her team had used technology to release more value from mineral resources. Her credentials rested on a part of mining where a good idea must eventually work in a plant.

She took office on April 16, 2020. The Anglo Converter Plant was already a central operational problem. Temporary shutdowns and repairs disrupted the business, giving its incoming leader a very immediate reminder of how closely a company’s financial performance depends on its physical systems.

The following year’s production figures needed careful reading. In a 2023 interview, Viljoen explained that Anglo American Platinum had refined and sold more than five million ounces in 2021, including roughly a million ounces held over from the earlier converter interruptions. An impressive annual total could contain work displaced from another year. Understanding the sequence mattered as much as admiring the number.

That is an operator’s useful contribution to the financial conversation. A headline figure invites a quick verdict. Someone familiar with the flow of material through the business can explain what sits behind it, and whether the apparent pace is likely to continue.

A very large experiment on wheels

During her platinum tenure, the argument for different technology acquired a particularly conspicuous form. In May 2022, Anglo American unveiled a hydrogen-battery hybrid haul truck at Mogalakwena in South Africa. It had a two-megawatt power system and could carry a 290-tonne payload. This was an experiment with rather more presence than a laboratory sample.

For a platinum producer, hydrogen connected the operational and commercial sides of the business. Platinum group metals have catalytic uses in hydrogen technologies. A mine exploring a different way to power its own equipment could also help develop a market in which its products had a role.

The project involved more than exchanging one drivetrain for another. Anglo American presented it as a system covering hydrogen production, refuelling and haulage. That wider frame fits Viljoen’s processing background: a machine needs the arrangements around it to work, too. A truck cannot run on a promising conference presentation.

In July 2023, she argued that the hydrogen discussion had moved toward infrastructure and end-use development. Her assessment was about what had to happen next across the system. The prototype’s unveiling was a specific achievement; the broader transition still required investment and customers. Keeping those stages distinct gives the story more substance than a photograph of an enormous vehicle alone.

The deliberate step to Denver

When Newmont approached her, Viljoen had an ambition she was willing to state plainly. “I am hoping to one day run a global mining company,” she said in 2023. Accepting its chief operating officer role was a step toward that goal. Moving from a CEO position into an operating role at another company made sense within the career she wanted.

She joined on October 2, 2023. Newmont was preparing to incorporate Newcrest’s people and assets, and her initial responsibilities included operations in Australia, North America and Papua New Guinea. The assignment combined running a business with helping join two businesses together. An organizational chart can announce that combination in a morning; the work underneath takes longer.

By September 2024, her emphasis in public interviews was on costs, productivity and mine design. Higher metal prices gave Newmont room to consider its cost structure over a longer period. The questions she raised were practical ones about how the mines worked and how to improve the value they produced.

Newmont promoted her to president and chief operating officer in May 2025. That September, it announced she would succeed Tom Palmer. On January 1, 2026, she became president and CEO and joined the board, becoming the first woman to lead the company in its more than 100-year history.

“I am grounded about the work ahead.”

Natascha Viljoen, on her appointment as Newmont CEO

The title, and the work underneath

Her first year as CEO has supplied concrete measures of that work. In July, Newmont reported approximately 1.3 million attributable ounces of gold and $2.2 billion in free cash flow for the second quarter of 2026. Those are company results, produced by operations and teams across its portfolio. They also establish the scale of the decisions now reaching her desk.

In June, British Columbia approved key authorizations for Newmont’s Red Chris Block Cave project. The environmental assessment amendment came through a consent-based process with the Tahltan Nation. The company described the approvals as a milestone toward an investment decision, preserving the distinction between permission to advance and a decision to spend.

Viljoen also shaped her leadership team. Appointments effective July 1 put Brian Tabolt in the CFO role, Mark Rodgers in charge of operations and David Thornton in the chief technical officer position. David Fry was promoted to executive vice president for project development. Finance, operations, technical work and projects each had a named leader accountable for delivery.

Then came a return to South Africa. At the opening of the Joburg Indaba in October 2026, Viljoen entered its Mining Hall of Fame. Her acceptance remarks made room for the industry’s achievements and its history of exclusion. She remembered Marikana, where the tragedy had occurred while she worked at Lonmin, and thanked the people who had taught her the industry.

She urged her audience to “never confuse a title with knowledge and understanding of the industry.” For someone whose new title had attracted considerable attention, it was a useful choice of emphasis. The engineer who once required a chaperone now leads Newmont. Her account of how to do the job still leaves room for a conversation underground, and for going back until people are ready to speak.