Antofagasta plc

Hello and welcome to Antifragasta's 2024 Half Year Results Call. We will start today's session with a short introduction from Antifragasta to be followed by a question and answer session. If you have a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. If you have joined us via telephone, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Once your name has been announced, you may unmute and ask a question. Please stay muted when not asking a question. You may also type a written question anytime in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. I will now hand you over to Rosario Orchard, Director of Antofagasta's London office, to introduce today's speakers.

Good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our half-year call for 2024. I'm here today with our Chief Executive, Iván Arriaga, our CFO, Mauricio Ortiz, and our Vice President of Sustainability, Alejandra Vial. In terms of process today, Iván will start with a short introduction, and then we'll move straight into Q&A, and we'll aim to wrap up in one hour. Iván, over to you.

Thank you, Rosario, and welcome everybody to the call and for taking the time to discuss Antofagasta's half-year results. I know you will have seen the details that we published this morning, but I would like to highlight as a way of introduction a few key points. Firstly, I would say that we have delivered another positive set of financial results. Revenue is up 2%, EBITDA is up 5%, and most importantly, cash flow is up 15%. We think copper plays a vital role in the transition to clean energy, and with the supply of demand expected to lag rising demand over the next decade. We have made this year investments which we will continue to undertake as we go through this investment phase and which should allow us essentially to increase production by close to 35% or get closer to 900,000 tons per year of production. I would also highlight that our projects are advancing well. They remain on track and CAPEX is unchanged. These are brownfield expansions, and we know that brownfield expansions carry certain benefits from the point of view of lower execution risk, lower time to production, and typically lower construction costs. With respect to production, we remain on track to meet our guidance, although, as we previously had announced, we expect production to be at the lower end of the range that we had initially shared with you. And you will also note that today we have announced an interim dividend, which represents 35% of earnings, which is in line with our policy. so having said that as introductory remarks we will now open up the session for questions and answers and therefore I welcome the first question