Platinum is a beautiful, naturally white metal with great durability and wear resistance. These qualities make it one of the most highly coveted premium jewellery metals globally, especially for engagement and wedding rings, where the ability to securely hold a diamond or other gemstone is vital.
Platinum’s strengths can conversely make it challenging for designers and manufacturers to work with, particularly in comparison to other premium jewellery metals such as white gold.
Recognising this problem, Anglo American’s Market Development team – which works to stimulate demand for our platinum group metals (PGMs) by both developing new opportunity areas for PGMs such as fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), and by resolving bottlenecks in existing demand – set out to fix this.
The team first identified a partner, Alloyed, a materials designer and developer that was spun-out from the University of Oxford. We decided to help Alloyed grow its business by investing in it and providing dedicated funding to pursue a targeted research & development programme on platinum alloys that would test thousands of potential alloy compositions using an alloy development platform powered by digital models and artificial intelligence.
Following three years of hard work, the teams settled on a formula that is 95% platinum and 5% other metals, including ruthenium (another PGM that we produce) and a mix of proprietary materials.
We then consulted jewellery industry experts and tested the alloy with designers and manufacturers. Once the formula was perfected, we passed it to Platinum Guild International (PGI) – a leading global platinum jewellery marketing organisation, of which Anglo American is a major funder – to create a new brand to market the alloy: Inoveo Platinum.
Inoveo Platinum has all the benefits of platinum, with the ease of white gold. Users of the new alloy can expect to experience benefits including up to four times less porosity and four times higher production yield, with Inoveo Platinum being 40% harder than standard platinum alloys.
In addition, Inoveo Platinum offers a smoother, more consistent fill due to its lower melting temperature and high fluidity. It also allows for faster polishing and setting times, leading to a lower rejection rate compared to standard platinum alloys.
Launched in June at JCK in Las Vegas, the most important global gathering for the jewellery trade, the new alloy – made with our responsibly mined platinum – is now available exclusively from Stuller, a leading US jewellery manufacturing supplier.
Benny Oeyen, Executive Head of Market Development said, “We are very proud to have shaped the formulation behind Inoveo Platinum, as co-developers with Alloyed. Utilising the power of digital simulation and artificial intelligence, this formulation was developed with the goal of elevating the manufacturing experience for platinum jewellery-makers.”
Benny continued, “We really made a splash in Las Vegas with Inoveo. This will enable us to create additional demand for Anglo American platinum.”
Inoveo Platinum’s launch shows the potential of our market development work to make a difference to the demand dynamics for our PGMs – through collaboration and cutting-edge innovation, we have been able to provide a targeted solution to an industry challenge.
Our broader efforts here, across a diverse ecosystem of workstreams, to support PGM demand and technology – from the spark of an idea, through commercialisation to creating and sustaining scale – must now continue.