Glencore plc

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Glencore 2024 Half Year Results Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be the question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 11 on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw a question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Martin Fewings, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us from wherever you are. Welcome to our first half 2024 results presentation. Joining us today, Gary Nagel, CEO, and Stephen Kalman, CFO. I'll hand over to Gary to commence the call.

Thanks, Martin. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, wherever you're dialing in from. In addition to Steve, we've got Xavier Wagner here as well, our CRO. So anything operational or operational results, we can revert to him. But I think we'll just kick off immediately in the presentation. Those following it on the screen or if you have a printout or a copy in front of you, we'll start on page four. The very pleasing financial results. This is the normal scorecard that we put out, so it should be familiar to most of you. And an adjusted EBITDA for the first half of a little under $6.5 billion, $6.3 billion. If we break that down a little bit into the components, on an industrial side, adjusted industrial EBITDA at $4.5 billion, that's obviously down off last year and predominantly driven by two main factors, one being the lower earnings in coal. We've seen coal prices come down quite significantly from the extreme high benchmark pricing that we saw in 2022 and into 2023. That now seems to have normalized more into 2024. Still very strong coal prices, particularly out in Newcastle. And in fact, prices have picked up since the half year, as you would have seen on your screens. So coal has come down to a more normalized pricing, and that's contributed to a lower adjusted industrial EBITDA, but still a very good result. The other area that's contributed to the lower industrial side has been the lower realizations on cobalt and nickel. We all know those markets in over supply and netbacks and pricing back on those metals have been significantly impacted along with TCRCs on our metallurgical asset business. On the marketing side, a very pleasing result, a one and a half billion dollar adjusted marketing EBIT that annualizes to $3 billion for the year. As you all know, our guidance on marketing EBIT is 2.2 to 3.2, so coming up at the top end of the range. We did guide earlier in the year 3 to 3.5, and we're on target to meet somewhere in that range. So a very pleasing result. And what we're very happy with about, again, and it does point to our diversified model, the fact that as we've seen energy prices normalize and volatility come out of that market, In previous years, we've seen a big portion of that adjusted marketing EBIT coming out of the energy side. In this year, the vast majority coming out of the metal side. It's had a very strong first half of the year, and we're very happy with the diversified model that that marketing business provides us in our operations. Moving on to slide five and onto our ESG scorecard. Earlier in the year, during our 2023 AGM, very pleasing support for our Climate Action Transition Plan, which covers the years 2024 to 2026. We have over 90% support from our shareholders, a real recognition of the strong stewardship that we provide over our climate ambitions and our climate strategy, so very happy with that, and that's obviously a big increase in terms of support from previous years. The other announcement that we've made this morning as a result of a thorough analysis by the board and by management and after an extensive consultation with shareholders is that we will be retaining the coal and carbon steel materials business within Glencore. That certainly has been an area of a lot of debate and discussion over the many months that have preceded this and since we acquired EVR. but we've seen a significant change in shareholders' appetite for holding on to these Tier 1 best-in-class assets. And that's been also associated with the fact that we've committed to our responsible rundown, and shareholders have recognized that holding these assets in Glencore in responsible operators' hands is probably ESG, is more ESG-positive and favorable than spinning these out into its own standalone vehicle. So we put out that announcement this morning, and you would notice that on the wires. The other area on the environmental side that we continue to de-risk and progress is our world-class pipeline of copper projects. As you know, these are mainly brownfields, very low capital intensity in many cases. and money being spent on those projects over the coming years to de-risk them and ready to bring those to market as we need, which can bring on up to another million tons of copper into our portfolio of an existing million tons of copper. On the social side, very sad to report further loss of lives within Glencore. This is something that we do not take lightly. This is something that concerns us immensely. We've lost three of our colleagues in the first half of this year and we are doubling down on our efforts, our commitments to send everybody home safe every single day of the week. On the governance side, late on Monday an announcement was put out that we finally resolved the last of the previously disclosed government investigations that's now behind us and we move on with none of these investigations any further. We also have completed one year with our independent compliance monitors. It's been a very constructive engagement with these monitors. As I've said previously, I believe we have a best in class gold standard compliance program in the company, and I'm very pleased to report that the monitors are helping us improve it even further. And that has always been the positive of having these monitors in our company. We work constructively with them, and we look forward to further engagement as we go forward. Moving on to slide six, a quick recap of where we are in EBR. The transaction to acquire EBR closed a few weeks ago on the 11th of July, and we're very pleased with what we bought. We bought a best in class, tier one, low cost, high quality, long life asset in a terrific geography. The amount of times in this industry that one has an opportunity to buy a tier one asset of this quality I mean, Steve and I debate this all the time. It's a once in a generation that we get to buy such a good asset and at such an attractive price. So very happy with that. And, you know, it's still early days, but we see potential upside for the business through synergies. But very happy with the assets that we bought. And also, not only the assets, but a very strong, dedicated and world-class management team an employee base there, and very, very happy to welcome them into the Glencore family. It's a business, and I'll talk a little bit more later on about our growth in copper equivalents, but this is something that certainly contributes to the growth in Glencore as we go forward. And with that, I'll turn over to Steve on the financials.