you can't use PE to evaluate a mine - DCF is a more reliable measure - or ROE. Mines are capital intensive - and the capital deployed has a fixed return. You dig a hole, prop it up, aircon it, nice fancy elevator, house for the miners, conveyer belt to get the 6bn tons of rock from the hole to the crusher, another conveyer belt to get the 5.999999995bn tons of crushed rock back from the crusher to the dump, (although that is already a sunk cost), bribes, mineral rights, guestimates as to how much platinum is actually in the rock, your hefty eskom bill, plus the new capital that will be required because Eskom doesn't actually have anything to sell you anymore, less the stuff(in Impala's case) that uncle Bob next door is continually threatening to nationalise (oh wait, that is actually brother JuJu), etcetera etcetera. Then you guess how long the shaft will last and you get x number of years at yield Y. There you have to build another shaft. Trick is to figure out expected yield, less costs, times prevailing platinum price * rand / dollar to get free cash flow - which can then be compared to your capital employed (minus the ton of pref shares, loans and other borrowings that will have precedence to your measly 10k) - and you will soon realise that PE has nothing to do with it.