Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Caledonia Mining Q4 results presentation. I'd now like to hand you across to Mark Learmouth, the CEO. Mark, over to you.

Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. Welcome to this webinar to discuss Caledonia's results for the fourth quarter of 2024 and for the year. I'm here in Jersey. also in Jersey by Ross Gerrard, our CFO, who joined today. And then in Johannesburg, I've got James Mofara, our chief operating officer, and Victor Gapari, an executive director who is based in Harare, Zimbabwe. And in case I need them, I've got accounting support in Johannesburg and Bulawayo. OK, so shall we get into this? If you could move to the next slide, please, Tara. If you just move forwards, we've got the disclaimer next, which I think we just need to pause on, Daryl. Okay, that's the presentation team which we've already dealt with. Okay, let's move on to the summary. So record gross profit for the year of nearly 77 million. That's up 86% from 2023. That pretty much flowed down to the bottom line with net attributable profit of just under $19 million compared to a loss of $4 million in the previous year. That's reflected in stronger operating cash flow. So that's after tax and interest and working capital before capex and dividends. And that was nearly 42 million compared to just less than 15 million in the previous year. Production of blanket was within guidance, slightly towards the top end of the guidance range. And there was also continuing very small production and Bilbo's oxides, which I'll refer to very briefly. So there's a lot more information on these results as we go through this presentation. Last week, we announced that we're going to extend the period of time we need to look at the feasibility study for Bilbo's. That gives us time to assess some factors, some of which have only materialized within the last month, and to optimize the project economics. So we have a little bit more on that. We had some good exploration success at Blanket and Matapa, which has encouraged us to do more work in that area. So we'll have a slide on that. And just to say that we, on Monday, we announced a further dividend of 14 cents for the quarter, making 56 cents for the year. And it's fair to say also that we've had some fairly significant changes to the board and to management. over the course of the last year or so, with James joining us as COO in May. And that's given rise to a very substantial turnaround in the operating performance at the mine, particularly at the mine, as opposed to the metallurgical plant. And you've seen also that we've refreshed the strength of the board with some recent board appointments. And then we're joined today by Ross, who's taken over from... Chester as the CFO. So Ross is very welcome. So shall we move forward? Next slide. Before we get into this, I just want to touch very briefly on the delay in the publication of the accounts. We put out a press release about a week ago which notified people that we needed an extra week to evaluate an accounting issue that had been identified right at the end of the audit process. The accounting issue really relates to the calculation of deferred tax for the year to 31st December 2019. So this is about five or six years old. And that then flows into subsequent years. Just to be absolutely clear, this was an error relating to the calculation of deferred tax. It also flows through into the calculation of unrealized foreign exchange gains and losses. And then below that, it then flows through into profit after loss. I want to make it absolutely clear that this error had nothing to do with actual tax payments or any submissions that were made to the Zimbabwean tax authorities. And also make it very clear that this has nothing to do with cash. So the accounts that we published this morning for the year to December 2024, they also include restatements of the prior year accounts for 22 and 23. And at the back of the audited financial statements, I think note 40, you will find full disclosure of the various line items which have been affected by this restatement. But in summary, it's deferred tax, it's IFRS profit, and retained earnings. So to be absolutely clear, this has got nothing to do with cash or with actual income tax calculations. Okay, should we just move on to touch on the results themselves? Starting off with safety and production, it's probably best if I hand over to James at this stage, if you'd just like to say a few words about safety and production, please.

Thank you very much, Mark. Good day to you all. So on the safety front, I mean, following the loss of life incident that we had on the 21st of September, which was the previous quarter, which we already reported on, we embarked on a journey to see real risk reduction and to put controls, better controls to make sure that we actually move up the cave with regards to our safety. We wanted to embark on a culture, if a lot of you would remember, I joined on the 1st of May, and we wanted to embark and we realized that there was quite a lot of safety protocols that we legged on, and we had employees basically that... follow safety protocols primarily out of obligation. And the idea is to want to move the dial where employees work, not because I have to follow rules because I have to, but you need employees to have an identity that I need to follow rules because I want to. So, over and above the internal audit that we did with regards to the incident that we had, we decided to also put in place a number of measures, the first of which was to appoint a group shift manager, an experienced group shift manager coming from Harmony, who himself put a structure in place with regards to ventilation, health and safety, and split all the departments into the appropriate departments. You also looked at five other areas that we will be embarking on so that we can actually have a better safety culture on the mine. The buckets would be to strengthen governance and risk management, to strengthen emergency preparedness, to strengthen safety practices, organizational capability, and to look at the whole safety culture and improve it. So the safety culture, in terms of the safety culture, the flywheel has started to move. It's started to turn now. It's a question of getting the momentum in place. And we can already see the massive improvement that we are gaining with regards to that. In the last quarter, which is the fourth quarter of Q4, we actually had 88 out of, you know, 100, you know, exceeding three days, which is a marked improvement or the record within Q4. uh the the safety history in terms of production as well we had a very good um you know production quota and we also had a very good uh you know end of year uh ending up on 19 841 um sort of tons of ounces i mean compared to quarter three which was eighteen thousand nine hundred ninety two uh ounces i will touch um further on production uh with regards to the next slide over to you mark