Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Good afternoon. Welcome to this call to discuss Caledonia's results for the third quarter. In addition to the usual discussion of financial and operating results, we'll also discuss the preliminary results of the exploration program, the TARPA, which we published this morning. And I'll also make some brief comments regarding the progress at Bilbo's. I'm joined this afternoon by James Mufara. He's our Chief Operating Officer. He joined us in May. By Chester Goodburn, our CFO. And a new person, a new face I think to most of you will be Craig Harvey, who's our Vice President Technical Services, and he's responsible for our exploration activities, so he will say a few words about what we're doing at MATAPA. And then I'm joined by Victor Gapari, who's a director, and he will field questions relating to billboards and all the general environment in Zimbabwe. Before we get into the presentation, I just want to make a couple of observations. The first is that Caledonia is changing very rapidly. And that's reflected in the three announcements that we published this morning. First of all, we've got the financial operating results, which largely reflect the performance at Blanket. It's fair to say that production has stabilized from what was a difficult time in 2023, but we now need to address the issue of costs. And we are facing some stronger headwinds than normal, particularly in respect of higher electricity costs and labour costs and the effects of continued currency instability. We are accustomed to managing these risks and in the course of the presentation we'll set out some of the steps that we're already taking to address these areas and we'll also outline some other issues which at this stage it's too early to quantify the effect or indeed the timing when it will come into effect. So we've got the financial operating results relating to the effectively blanket We've got very encouraging results from Matapa, which reaffirms and reconfirms our strategy of investing in Zimbabwe to create a mid-tier Zimbabwe-focused Golpe Disa. I think that strategy is now being vindicated by what we're seeing at the top. And clearly we continue the dividend. The third press release this morning was the continuation of the dividend. We have attractive and competing calls on our capital across the business, but maintaining returns to shareholders remains a key part of our strategy. So with that, we'll get into the presentation. Let me just deal with that. So yes, we had a fatality at the mine in late September. James will talk a little bit more about that. Just under 19,000 ounces of gold were produced in the quarter. A little bit less than we did in the same quarter of 2023, but let's just note that was a record production quarter, so we're very comfortable with a production run rate of just under 19,000 ounces, and we remain on track to achieve the full year guidance of anything between 74 and 78,000 ounces. As I mentioned, encouraging results at MATAPA, which Craig will talk about in a moment. We've also announced the forthcoming sale of the solar plant. That's been operating slightly better than expected. We built it at a cost of about $14 million. We're selling it for just over $22 million. get the power that's generated from that solar project. So by no means using the benefit of getting that reliable power. And in addition, the new owner is now evaluating a second stage of that solar plant. So we can release the capital and use the capital elsewhere in our business. We mentioned the fact that we've declared another dividend of 14 cents. And we'll talk a bit more about Build Close, but we're continuing with the feasibility study, and we're making some progress now on funding options for that project. So moving on, I think... I think I've dealt with most of these things. I mentioned production, gold price benefiting from higher gold price, an average price in the quarter of over $2,400. That's resulted in improved revenue, improved gross profit. But the net profits attributed to the shareholders as Chester would outline, we then suffered the headwinds of continued foreign exchange losses and some of the unusual expenses which Chester would outline in due course. So I think with that we're going to move into the – yeah. So can I ask Craig – sorry, can I ask James to just run through the review of the operations of Blanket? James, could you do that?

Thank you very much, Mark. Good afternoon to you all. As Mark already alluded to, we regret to inform you that we lost one of our treasured employees, a JECAMA assistant, on the 21st of September. The said employee was in the process of installing support when this fall of ground actually occurred, fatally trapping him. Despite all our efforts with the rescue team to try and bring him out to surface and, you know, resuscitating, unfortunately, he succumbed to the injuries that he had suffered in this fall of ground. As an organization, Caledonia, we strongly believe in a culture of care and growth, and this is something that we treasure ourselves with. We also believe in total or real risk reduction all the time. And we believe in learning from the incidents that would have happened. We have given these families support and we've also supported the government with the investigation that they actually took out with regards to the employee that lost their life. Subsequent to the accident, we actually employed the services of DuPont or DSS plans to do a total diagnostic on our operations in order to see the whole of our value chain in regards to certain health. This work, we believe, will assist us in our quest for zero harm on our minds, which we believe and totally, entirely believe that is both a moral imperative and an operational imperative. On the production of of the quarter, I'm glad to announce that in terms of development, we actually came in 7% above, close to 7% above our plan for the quarter. This is good with regards to our future flexibility that we need, because the development is opening up our future possibilities of flexibility. In terms of terms, we're neck on neck with regards to what our plan was. However, we were set back because our grade was just around 4% below our plan for the quarter. This was as a result of a fall of ground that we had at the beginning of July in one of our stocks, Eroica, and we couldn't actually quickly and in time have the flexibility to replace this stock. As a result, we actually suffered this drop in our asset rate. We have ever since moved back into better stops to stabilize the grade, but it was a little bit too late to recover the quota at that moment. As a result of the grade drop that we had, we actually ended up with our ounces just on 6% or 9% below for the quota. The improvement that we see in the development and the achievements that we see with our targets at the moment will ensure that in the future, or isolate ourselves from incidents of inflexibility that hampered us in the previous quarter. Thank you, Mark.

Okay. I think we'll move on to finance. Chester, can I ask you to run through these pages to finance, please?