Prestige Mine Group is an American-owned rhodium producer operating one of North America's northernmost precious-metal sites — deep in the Yukon along the Alaska Highway.
Founded in 2010 by American mining engineer James Burke, Prestige Mine Group built its single-site operation along the Alaska Highway in Yukon, Canada — a region known for mineral density, regulatory rigor, and brutal winters. Today, under James's continued leadership as Founder & CEO, we supply rhodium to industrial catalysts, electronics, and high-purity refiners across North America.
"Rhodium rewards patience. Every gram we ship is the product of fifteen years spent learning this land."
James Burke was born in Singapore in 1963, the son of a port engineer and a schoolteacher. He grew up tracing his father's shipping manifests with a finger, fascinated less by the cargo than by where it came from — the iron from Western Australia, the copper from Chile, the platinum from a frozen valley in northern Canada he could only find on the back page of an atlas.
At seventeen, he took a summer apprenticeship at a tin operation in Perak, Malaysia. He still talks about the foreman who handed him a shovel and said, "The earth doesn't care where you went to school, son. Only whether you show up." He showed up — every morning, for four decades.
In 2009, James moved to the United States to take a metallurgy fellowship in Colorado, carrying two suitcases and a battered field notebook. Within a year he had his citizenship pending, a co-signed line of credit, and a stubborn idea: that rhodium — the world's rarest non-radioactive metal — was being chased in all the wrong places. The maps, he believed, were pointing north.
In the winter of 2010 he drove the Alaska Highway alone in a borrowed pickup, pulled over near a frozen creek in the Yukon, and felt the silence settle on his shoulders like a coat. He filed his first claim from a payphone in Whitehorse the next morning. Prestige Mine Group was born that week — a Singaporean-American in a Canadian wilderness, betting everything on a metal most people had never heard of.
In the first winter on site, the crew of four ran out of diesel two days before resupply. James melted snow on a camp stove and read aloud from The Old Man and the Sea until the trucks arrived. "Nobody quit," he says. "That's when I knew we had a company."
When the first refined ingot left the site in 2013, James mailed a single gram back to the foreman in Perak who once handed him a shovel. The note read: "I showed up."
"I was born on an island that exports almost nothing from its own soil. Maybe that's why I needed to find a place where the ground still had something to say."
Every gram of rhodium that leaves our gate is traceable to a specific bench, a specific shift, a specific assay. That's how a 15-year-old company stays trusted by refiners.
Geological surveys and core sampling across our Yukon claim block identify rhodium-bearing chromite seams.
Selective open-pit mining with low-impact equipment, scheduled around the territory's seasonal envelope.
On-site gravity and flotation circuits produce a high-grade rhodium concentrate ready for refining.
Concentrate is shipped under chain-of-custody to partner refiners producing 99.95%+ rhodium.
We operate a single site because we believe one mine, done right, beats a portfolio of half-attention. Our reclamation plan is funded from day one, our water program is third-party audited, and every member of our crew lives within a day's drive of the site.
For offtake inquiries, partnership opportunities, or general questions about Prestige Mine Group, reach out below. We respond within one business day.