Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc

Welcome to our Q1 2024 results call for shareholders. On the call from Caledonia, you have Mark Learmonth, our CEO, Chester Goodburn, our CFO, Victor Capari, our Executive Director, and then myself, Camilla Horsfall, I'm the Vice President of Group Communications. As always, we're going to run through the presentation and we will have questions at the end. If you do have a question, we just ask you to raise your hand. We find that's a better format than the written Q&A. I'm now going to pass you over to Mark who will start the presentation.

Thank you. Thank you, Camilla. Can we move forward? That's the disclaimer. Moving on to the next page. Okay, so just a quick overview before I hand over to Chester, who's going to do most of this presentation because it relates to the financials. On the whole, it was a much improved quarter from certainly the first quarter of 2023, which was very challenging. Before we get into production and costs, pleasing to see an improvement in safety. It's an area of enormous focus and will continue to try and improve further. So it's a strong start to 2024 with higher production supported by a favourable gold price. We produced just under 17,500 ounces in the quarter. compared to just over 16,000 ounces in the first quarter of 2023, we wouldn't In the first quarter of 2024, we only had 78 production days. And that was due to the early production cutoff due to the logistical challenges relating to moving quite large amounts of gold between the mine Harare and Dubai. So we had to cut off relatively early. So only 78 working days cutoff. in the quarter compared to 86 working days in the first quarter of last year. So in that context, it makes quarter one look even better. So we're standing behind our production guidance for the year of between 74 and 78,000 ounces. On a personal matter, as you all know, Dana Roots, the previous chief operating officer, left the business at the end of February. We're pleased to say that James Mofaro has joined us with effect from the 1st of May. He joins us from Harmony, which for those of you who are not familiar, don't know South Africa very well, is one of South Africa's very large gold miners. James was responsible for five mining operations, employing 16,000 people and producing about half a million ounces of gold a year. He would have been on the call today, but he is at the mine at the moment and is hopefully at this minute 3,500 feet underground. James is a Zimbabwean. Initially, he'll be based in Johannesburg. In due course, he will relocate to Bulawayo, which puts him in a much better position to have much closer sight of what's happening at Blanket and then in due course at Bilbo. So we're very pleased to see him. We also announced earlier on in the year some very encouraging exploration results of Blanket. Basically we restarted the deep level exploration program early 2023. We've put out two sets of drilling results, one in I think August last year and then another one in January this year. About two-thirds of each hole we drilled came back better in terms of width and grade and that will be converted into a a revised mineral resource statement, which will be published very shortly, and an increased life of mine. So you should look out for that very shortly. We maintain the quarterly dividend, 14 cents. A share was paid at the end of January and again at the end of April. And we're very, very advanced on the work, on looking at the ways to commercialise the large-scale sulphide project at Bilbo's with a view to optimising the uplift of Caledonia shareholders. I'd expect that we're about two weeks away from making some announcement on that, certainly by the end of May. Can we move on? Yes, we've mentioned safety, a pleasing fall in safety incidents. We've mentioned production and uptick in production from 16 to 17.5. Clearly, the higher gold price helps, 1860 increasing to 2040. That's the average for the quarter, clearly since 2019. The end of the quarter, we've been running pretty much consistently at twenty three hundred, twenty three fifty. I mentioned production days revenue up from just less than 30 million to thirty eight and a half million gross profit up from less than six million to nearly 14 million. And net profit to shareholders swung from a loss of five million dollars in the first quarter of the last year to a profit of. $2 million this year. It's fair to say that the annual fly in the ointment in the first quarter was a substantial foreign exchange loss of about $4.1 million, which Chester will talk about in due course. I don't want to pretend that that foreign exchange loss doesn't exist. I can't wish it away. If we're going to continue to incur losses at that rate, that makes life very challenging for all of us. But putting it on one side, if you pretty much ignore the various bits and pieces, including the foreign exchange loss. A 30 cent a share loss in the first quarter of last year has now been converted into a 27 cent profit in this quarter. So operationally, a very significant turnaround. Shall we move forward? Okay, there's quite a lot of information on this graph. I mean, it basically just shows you quarterly going back to 2012. The top graph shows the grade and the tons. The bottom graph shows the quarterly production at blanket and the recovery. I think there's a lot of information here, but I think what is... what I would point out is in the top graph, you can see that the grade, the orange line, has pretty much gone down steadily from about four and a half grams a tonne in 2012 to a much lower level, say three, 3.1 grams a tonne. And one of the things that will come out from the revised resource statement that gets published shortly is an improvement in that grade as we go forwards. And of all the ways to benefit from far the best. It has a much better effect on cost per ounce and recovery. And again, if you look very closely at the bottom graph, you can see, if you look very closely, you can see there is a very clear pattern during the course of each calendar year. Q1 typically starts off on a relatively subdued note, and then it improves as the year goes on. And then when you get into the next year, again, it's a relatively subdued quarter one. Based on what we've seen happening at the mine in April and into May, we're very comfortable that that will continue in 2024. Shall we move on? Okay, I'll hand over to Chester now, really for the bulk of the rest of the presentation, to run through the financials. So, Chester, over to you.

Thank you, Mark. It's really good to see that we've produced just under 19,000 ounces for the quarter. That includes 3,000 ounces that was produced in Q4. and sold in Q1. And similarly, we've had 1,600 ounces that we produced in Q1 and sold in Q2. So our sales also comes at a time where we've seen record gold prices. Our average gold price for the quarter was $2,040. And that comes with an online cost of $993 per ounce, pretty much flat quarter on quarter. And we should see that coming down in the latter parts of the year. At Blanket Mine, we've got a very big fixed cost base. So that means if you've got more days in your quarter, that we will have in quarter two to quarter four, that should bring down our online cost per ounce going forward. So we've maintained OPEC's guidance of between 870 and 970 per ounce on an online cost basis.