New Hope Corporation Limited

Hi, I'm Rob Bishop, the CEO of New Hope Group. Today we released our financial results for the year ended 31 July 2024. I'll take you through some of the highlights now, alongside our CFO Rebecca Rinaldi, but I encourage you to review the full reporting suite available on our website. While this year we've seen positive production outcomes at our mines, I first wanted to talk about safety. Regrettably, our total recordable injury frequency rate has increased from 2.12 at the end of FY23 to 5.32 this financial year. The safety of our people is paramount and takes a precedence over other aspects of our business. Whilst any deterioration in safety performance is disappointing, it's important to note the restart of operations at Ackland Mine in Queensland means we have new people operating new equipment, resulting in additional operating hours and naturally a higher likelihood for an incident to occur. Additionally, there were no critical incidents during the year and the majority of injuries were minor first aid cases. Our full focus is on reversing this trend and performance has already started to improve with initiatives including targeted training, analysing exposure risks and reviewing fitness for work criteria already being implemented. Turning to operational highlights, this year we increased our coal production and sales as we continue to execute our targeted organic growth pipeline. This increase in volumes reflects both additional tonnes from Bengala mine in New South Wales and the successful restart of operations at New Ackland mine, marking a significant milestone for our business. As a result, we've seen a 32% increase in run of mine coal production, a 26% increase in saleable coal production and a 14% lift in coal sales. I'll now hand over to Rebecca to take you through the financial highlights for the year.

Thanks Rob. This year we delivered $860 million in underlying earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, the third highest result in New Hope's history. This result is due to strong operational performance, disciplined cost control and a robust thermal coal price environment, which remains well above long-term historical averages. The average coal price New Hope achieved for the year was $195 Australian dollars per tonne, including hedging. This supported an underlying margin of over 45%, or $89 per tonne sold, despite New Ackland being in ramp up stage. We also reported $562 million in cash flow from our operations. This funded investment in our organic growth pipeline and enabled us to return value to our shareholders. On that matter, I'm pleased to announce the Board has declared a fully franked final dividend for FY24 of 22 cents per share, which will be paid to our shareholders in October. This brings the full year FY24 dividend declared to 39 cents per share, all fully franked.

Thanks Rebecca. This strong performance was made possible due to the execution of our growth pipeline, which will continue to provide benefits over the coming years. Our organic growth pipeline includes the successful restart of operations at New Ackland Mine, which is ramping up to a 5 million tonnes per annum operation. The Mangala Growth Project, where we are expanding our run-of-mine production capacity to 13.4 million tonnes per annum. And our investment in Malabar Resources Limited, which we increased during the year from 15% to 19.97%. We also progressed other organic growth opportunities during the year, with exploration drilling commencing at EL9431 and the acquisition of the West Musselbrook tenement, both of which are located to the west of our Bangala mine and will provide us with longer-term optionality as mining progresses in a westerly direction. These investments were supported by our robust balance sheet, which was further enhanced in July with a $300 million senior unsecured convertible note offering. This transaction offers financial flexibility to further pursue our bright strategy and to explore new opportunities which maximise returns to shareholders. Looking ahead to FY25, our cost and operational discipline means the company is well positioned to continue to take advantage of robust thermal coal price environment. In FY25, we will see the positive impacts on volumes and unit costs related to the continued ramp up at New Ackland Mine and a full year of Bengala running at 13.4 million romtoms per annum rate, which will subsequently contribute to our longer term targeted production increases. Once again, I invite you to review the full reporting suite available on our website. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated workforce for their contribution this year. I would also like to thank our shareholders for their continued support in New Hope.