Article by Adrian Rauso, courtesy of The West Australian
31.12.2025
Almost 100 employees of Iluka Resources were made redundant in December, with the wave of white and blue-collar job cuts linked to a mine suspension near Perth announced three months ago.
The West Australian understands that the mineral sands miner rolled out redundancy packages for 91 people, including 38 at its head office in Perth, during the final month of 2025.
Those 38 workers represented about 13 per cent of Iluka’s Perth office headcount.
The remainder of the redundancies were spread across Iluka’s Cataby mine 150km north of Perth, its Capel processing operation 210km south of Perth, its office in Adelaide and the Hamilton site in Victoria.
Iluka ended 2025 with 956 employees.
In September, the Tom O’Leary-led company announced it would pause mining at Cataby from December 1 and switch off one of the two synthetic rutile kilns at Capel that processes Cataby’s output.
Mr O’Leary at the time said the decision was “prudent” in dealing with the demand uncertainty and would position Iluka for recovery.
“It reflects the discipline that is a longstanding feature of Iluka’s approach,” he said.
The main commodity produced at Cataby is chloride ilmenite, which is processed at Capel to produce synthetic rutile — a high grade titanium dioxide product used predominantly as a feedstock to make pigment.
Weak global demand for synthetic rutile was to blame for Iluka scaling back operations.
Cataby employed about 130 in-house Iluka workers and 200 contractors via Piacentini & Son.
Contractors bore the initial brunt of the Cataby job losses, with most of Iluka’s in-house workforce either staying on at site or deployed to other projects, including the $1.7 billion Eneabba rare earths refinery currently under construction.
Eneabba — just north of Jurien Bay — will be fed old monazite stockpiles from Iluka’s Narngulu mineral separation plant in Geraldton, plus ore mined by other companies, and transform it into valuable refined rare earth materials.
First production at Eneabba is slated for 2027 and it is understood the December job losses will not impact the project’s development.
Iluka’s push into the vaunted rare earths space delivered it a 13 per cent share price rise in 2025, despite a prolonged bottom line slide from its core mineral sands mining business.
Iluka’s net profit for the first half of the 2025 came in at $92 million, down from $134m for first half of 2024 and less than half of the $204m net profit it generated for the same period in 2023.