AngloGold Ashanti Plc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Anglo-Goldashanti Full Year 2024 results. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stuart Bailey. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Danae, and welcome, everybody, to our call for the full year 2024 and Q4 2024 financial and operating results. You have on the call, as always, Alberto Calderon, our CEO, Gillian Doran, our CFO. Other members of our executive team are present. You'll have the opportunity to ask questions either on the phone lines or on the webcast after the presentation. And before we commence, I'd just like to point you to the safe harbor statement on slides two and three of the presentation that contains important information regarding forward-looking statements that may be made, and I encourage you to read it. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Alberto.

Thanks, Stuart. Safety is a priority. We're proud of the strides we have made in recent years, but mindful always that we're only ever as good as our last day. This year, we had a painful reminder of the fact following the light vehicle accident in May that claimed the life of Obeid and Keita. We have investigated that incident and implemented a range of recommendations to mitigate risk of a recurrence. As we pan out and look at the company's performance as a whole, we reported a triffer of 0.98 injuries per million hours worked in 2024, the first time below one in our record for our portfolio, moreover, less than half of the average of the ICMN number. It's my privilege to report back on this third year in our journey to transform Anglo Gold Ashanti to one of the world's most valued gold mining companies. You'll remember in early 2022, I sketched out a clear strategy to do that. We started by replacing the old confusing operating model with one that was not only simpler and clearer, but which empowered and resourced our operations and properly located responsibility at every level. With that foundation in place, we moved quickly in a number of key areas. First was to improve safety outcomes. We immediately narrowed our focus on the main fatal hazards that exist in every mine site and created clear controls to mitigate them. We set a clear pathway to regain cost competitiveness relative to our peers. My key neighbor here was the rapid rollout of full asset potential, not only to assist on that efficient journey, but to improve the resilience and predictability of our business. Third was to improve focus and execution in every part of the organization. We did this by stripping away distractions and focusing on the work essential to delivering the right outcomes. Four was to prioritize a strong balance sheet and improve returns to our shareholder. And fifth, which we announced a few months later, was to overhaul our corporate architecture by moving our corporate headquarters and listing to the United States. So how is that all going for us? It's no exaggeration to say the operating model has revolutionized our business. Internal processes have been modernized. Decision-making is more agile, and in my view, we have the best senior leadership team in the industry. The new structure and expertise has allowed a highly successful rollout of full asset potential across the business. Our costs, which have blown out to their widest gap relative to our peers at around $300 an ounce, are now within double digits. In fact, we've seen real cost improvements in each of the past three years, and that's against the background of the worst inflation in a generation. We have dramatically reduced our cash lockup position, and we're reliably hitting guidance on our managed assets. We've stripped away long-running projects that never seem to move to an investment decision like Ramalote and Mossball CDS. Free cash flow is at its strongest in well over a decade and leverage at its lowest since 2011. And you'll see dividend payout ratio has been increased to half of free cash flow with a 50%, 50 cent per share minimum. We've successfully relocated our base and listing while maintaining an important presence in Johannesburg. That's placed us in the world's largest capital market and alongside the industry's highest value peers. The stock has responded, providing us a currency we were able to use to make our first meaningful and accretive acquisition in two decades. We've come a long way, but there's, as always, more to do. So, let's look at the numbers for Q4 and 2024. What we could control last year, we control very well. Production was up in Cuyabá, Cerro Vanguardia, Sigüidi, Sunrise, and Tropicana. Our cash costs and all in sustaining costs were again down for the third year in a row in real terms. Our free cash flow was dramatically stronger. We have found a way to optimize production at Opuasi, one of the most magnificent but also complex or bodies in the world. and we have charted a path forward to its potential above 400,000 ounces per year. As is usual in mining, we were hit by unusually high rains made in Tropicana and Iduprim. They both operations made the best in dealing with the unforeseen, best demonstrated by the 5% year-on-year increase in Q4 production. And finally, our non-operated JV Kibale came in significantly below plan. The key takeaway from our results is our ability through disciplined costs to ensure the full benefit of the higher gold price flow straight through to the bottom line. You'll see here close to a tenfold increase in free cash flow to $942 million. Adjusted EBITDA almost doubled to 2.8 billion, and there's a 1.2 billion turnaround in basic earnings over the prior year. Our balance sheet has rarely looked stronger. We have no material near-term maturities. Leverage is almost zero. To match that reality and the valid expectation that shareholders should see greater benefits from our improving business and higher gold prices, We increase our dividend payout ratio to 50% of free cash flow, payable quarterly, and a minimum dividend which we commit annual payment of $250 million. What does this look like? Gillian will talk to the detail, but we will pay an interim dividend of $347 million for H2, taking the 2024 full year payout to $439 million. next slide look at our portfolio tier one assets account for almost 70 percent of production including cicada's 2024 production these assets account for about 80 percent of our reserves and about half of the resources we will see those production numbers improve once obelasi ramps up and we bring our nevada asset into production Our tier two assets are operating very well, too, with healthy margins and cash flow leverage especially pronounced in the current gold price environment. We continue to look at other assets in the portfolio with an eye on capitalizing on this market to realize value. On Oboasi, just to recap. Oboasi battled for the greater part of the year to grow volumes from conventional sub-level open sloping areas. That's because of difficult ground conditions at very high grades. We've now successfully pivoted to a hybrid approach with conventional sloss mining deployed in relatively lower grade areas. That is less than eight, around eight grams. A ton and more selective underhand drift and fill where we find higher grades. You'll see in our resource book that the site is busy with development stepping up aggressively in preparing for access to the higher block rate, Block 10, and eventually access to the even richer Block 11. The good news is that we met a revised target for Oboasi in Q4. We delivered 221,000 ounces in total with around 12.5,000 ounces from underhand drift and fill. As we mentioned in November last year, this is from a single mining front. and we plan to open at least three more this year. That improved flexibility of additional mining areas along with the higher tons from underhand drift and fill and the significantly quicker times to open our slush soaps give us improved confidence in hitting our marks this year. Our guidance for this year remains for 250 to 300,000 ounces. Finally, it's worth noting that even with the slower ramp up we announced last year, Oboassi continues to deliver healthy cash flows to the business. In the second half of 2024, it was roughly $300 of free cash flow per ounce in the H2. Full asset potential. It remains a cornerstone of our ability to operate predictably, to drive better cash flows, and to improve the long-term value of the business. Over the past three years, we've delivered value from 200 individual projects, half of which have exceeded our target value. Around a third of those are mining with processing and maintenance, the next big area of focus. Interestingly, around two-thirds of the initiatives were geared to efficiency improvements and a third to cost reductions. That's a good split. This is a powerful illustration of the improvements we've seen in different areas across various sites. The gap between the dotted line is not only progress, but it's cash flow. And we believe there is more to come. To dive in one of the assets. After three years, we're now in the second or refreshed phase of full asset potential with Sunrise. We expect this second round to deliver another exciting set of initiatives. The largest opportunities include accelerating drilling and development of multiple small open pits which could add as much as 1 million tons of ore over the next two years. Every ton from a pit will displace very low-grade stocks that we're using to fill the mill, so the upside is significant. We can also continue to increase underground ore volumes by redesigning stoves, having more stoves available, and making better use of remote logging from the surface. Building on the work done in wave one to improve recovery, we're now seeing that the current leach strain lacks resident times and has scoped the project to introduce concentrated leach. A payback period at more conservative gold price assumptions is close to one year with a benefit of around $1.6 million per month. What is remarkable was that once we had completed the detail analysis, construction started almost immediately, as you can see from the slide. Finally, a key success for the program has been the introduction of league tables to compare the performance at each site. It's injected some healthy competition into the business. We started with processing, which included comparing recoveries, run times, and time process as a percent of the theoretical maximum at each site. this slide shows the relative improvement year on year with an improvement of almost two percentage points between 2023 and 2024. what is even more exciting is the result we got in q4 where plants reporting closing the gap to 99.6 percent of theoretical maximum everyone wants to be at the top Nobody wants to be at the bottom. We're less fixated on that and focus more on the upward trend improvement. We've now rolled out league tables to open pit and underground mining and hope to see similar results. And finally, for full asset potential, the proof is in the numbers. And you can see the benefits in the incremental EBIT, EBITDA of more than $600 million. I will come back to that slide, but just, If you do a quick sum, $600 million on 3 million tons, it's about $200 per ounce. You will see how every single dollar of that has flowed to the bottom line in the last slide. Let's go to the sentiment acquisition. Since the completion of the transaction, we are pleased to report a seamless transition since week one. The major achievements to date include deployment of AGA values and code of business principle and ethics, focused engagement and onboarding connecting teams to the AGA model, integrating into year-end process and AGA management rituals, site rebranding largely complete, relationships established between Sukari teams and AGA technical teams, maintaining Sukari safety performance and production volumes. As we have mentioned before on the synergies, we currently are assessing sentiment corporate overheads. We probably continue that. It's about $32 million of savings per year. Supply chain purchasing capacity, there's going to be a visit in the Q2 of this year. We're expecting about $30 million per year. And projects and exploration costs will probably reduce about 100 million of what they plan to spend in 2025. And we've leveraged AGS full asset potential program. We expect a significant visit in Q3 of 2024. And we're still confident that we'll get benefits or increases in EBITDA in a range of between 50 and $100 million. For 2025, we expect Sucari's cash cost to be slightly lower than 2024. i will mention something you will see in the growth cap ex that it is growing we are expecting a free stripping in sukai of about 140 million dollars increase that will have a significant impact about the increase of 10 percent in volumes in the medium term in 20 probably 26 and maybe in 27 and 28 so this is growth capital and this is in our objectives to carry that asset to even better days than what it has had in the past. Let's look at Nevada project. And the title, it's a new 20 million ounce district. That is quite remarkable when three years ago we had zero. In the U.S., we continue to make very good progress this year on the professibility study at expanded silicon and have continued to add answers through the drill grid. the smaller north small project remains in the federal permitting process we have no fresh update on the timing of that project although we are in any event working on an integration to our initial plan that will use far less water which will be beneficial in the longer term we expect an update in the next few months from blm and as soon as we have that update we will let you know As you can see, we've been busy growing this part of our business in the BT District. North Bullfrog has added ounces in reserve and resource. We continue to optimize our project plans and remain excited about the potential for this project as a manageable, profitable, albeit small-scale start to our reentry as a major operating in the U.S. At Expanded Silicon, we completed a large drilling campaign last year, which has vastly improved our knowledge of the ore body. We've also improved our infrastructure in the district and will soon put the finishing touches on the pre-feasibility study before releasing it to the market in the second half of this year. Here's a quick look at the familiar slide of the Merlin ore body, our initial point of attack to the expanded silicon project. We managed to add another 3 million ounces of resource, taking it to 12 million ounces. Once again, you'll see a number of new very exciting intercepts of high-grade over significant widths. The infill drilling to classify a portion of the deposit from an indicated resource in the 3,500 zone has continued to intercept broad zones of between 0.5 and 1.8 grams per ton mineralized intercepts. Foundational of our business, Sukari has provided an injection of new resources to supplement an already healthy mineral inventory. But you'll see from the top waterfall that we've also had good success from our own brownfield efforts across a range of facets. All told, we've added almost 16 million ounces of resource into resource. On reserves, we're pleased to see a good showing again from Gaita and Cuyaba, which both managed to replace depletion. But it's important to zoom out and look at the longer-term picture to understand the quality of exploration effort and the potential in our portfolio. We continue to invest considerable effort and resource in both reserve deployment and brownfield exploration. This has multiple benefits, in reserve conversion, extending my lives, improving operating flexibility, and supplementing our knowledge of our ore bodies. We have established a good track record. Over the past four years, we've added almost 15 million ounces of reserve, a little over $60 an ounce. That is very good value. I will now hand over to Jillian to cover the financials.