Jupiter Mines Limited

The conference is now being recorded.

Good afternoon and I would like to welcome everyone to the Jupiter Mines fourth quarterly call. Today we have Jupiter Chief Executive Officer Priyank Patliel to provide a brief update on the fourth quarter of the 2021 financial year and then we will open up for questions from callers. Thanks Priyank, please go ahead.

Thanks, Erica, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Jupiter Mines fourth quarter conference call. I think the key themes which Chippy has basically been challenged with in the fourth quarter have firstly been COVID, which has been rampant in South Africa and has resulted in a lot of challenging issues in terms of absenteeism of the teams. And then the other challenge which has also been faced by Chippy has been the excessive rainfall. I mean, just for example, over the course of November, we had 155 millimeters of rain, whereas the historical average is around 10 millimeters. The same thing went for December, 170 versus 44. And in February, we lost almost eight or nine days due to excessive rainfalls. So that has been the primary challenge. Transnet has also had severe issues. The railway line, which is about one and a half meters above the ground level, was all submerged. But that said, whereas Transnet and the other producers in the Kalahari declared force majeure chippy through their capable stockpile management and logistics planning were able to avoid that situation despite these challenges. The pitch was submerged, there was underground seepage, but we had the stockpile available and some more available which we were able to mine in these challenging times. So that is largely the reason why we have had a very good quarter considering the challenges we have faced. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. We had our second best financial year in terms of production. Again, we were the biggest producer in the Kalahari. Out of the 3.4 million tons which we sold, about 2.6 was high-grade material and about 800,000 was low-grade material. And we finished the year with about 1.75 billion cash in the bank, of which we kept 650 million rand for our capital.