Glencore plc

Good morning. Welcome. Thank you for joining us for our 2024 financial results. Joining today from Glencore, Gary Nagel. Gary Nagel, CEO and Stephen Kalman, CFO. Gary, would you like to?

Good.

One year later, now we have reading glasses. Okay, morning. Thank you for joining us, and those joining us from other parts of the world, good afternoon. Those who are here in person, we really appreciate the in-person results presentations. Always think they're very constructive and positive. And those online, thank you for joining us. We'll follow similar format in our presentation, and we'll skip ahead to our scorecard for 2024, which very pleasing results, a very good year for Glencore. We finished the year with an adjusted EBITDA of $14.4 billion. Now, if we split that out a bit, as we always do between our marketing and our industrial business, industrial business was very strong this year. As you know, and as we commented in our production guidance earlier in the year, or our production results earlier in the year, we met our production guidance, the initial guidance that we put out in the beginning of the year, we met that, which is a terrific achievement operationally. We printed a $10.6 billion adjusted EBITDA result for our industrial business, and that largely on the back of a very, very strong metals business, and that despite being a weaker environment on the metallurgical side, on the TCRCs, but our metallurgical business has been very, very strong. Offset a little bit by our energy business. As you know, energy prices down. So we've seen lower energy contributions to industrial adjusted EBITDA. But also very positive is a contribution of a billion dollars from our new EVR business, our best in class tier one steelmaking coal business in Canada, which we're hopefully arranging a visit for analysts to go and see in the middle of the year. So very happy with that. So a very pleasing result on the on the on the industrial side. And the marketing side, also a very good year. As you know, we guide annually to a 2.2 to 3.2 billion EBIT marketing result. We hit the top end of the range again. I know the question will come later to Steve, when do you change the range? I'll leave him to answer that. But from our perspective, another very, very pleasing result. Again, a big contribution from the metals business. Very pleasing to see the metals. You know, in previous years, we've had a very strong contribution from energy, and that just proves the value of this diversified portfolio that we have, the franchise that is Glencore, that in years where we see lower vol and movements in energy markets, we've seen the opposite in metals, and we've done very well in metals. Not to say there hasn't been a very good contribution from the energy side. There has been, but this year it's been about metals, and very happy with that. So, Overall, a very, very pleasing contribution across the business. I guess, you know, those who are in the room, the experts on the mining industry understand that this is where it all is about. Adjusted EBITDA and cash flow. There's some accounting adjustments which get to a net income or a net loss. Some of those who aren't fully across the understanding of how accounting works in the mining industry always seem to report on net income. That makes no sense, as we all know. What really makes sense is cash generation, adjusted EBITDA, and that's what we produced a very good result this year. On the balance sheet side, net debt to adjusted EBITDA below 0.8. Steve will get into the details of the balance sheet a little bit later, but very, very strong result allowing us to return cash to shareholders. So we're very, very pleased to announce today a cash distribution to shareholders following our normal distribution policy of $1.2 billion of cash. as you know how we split that between our trading business or our marketing business and our industrial business. And then over and above that, very happy to resume buybacks, a billion-dollar buyback starting immediately. And the nice thing about this billion-dollar buyback also is that we're going to have this done by the 6th of August. So by the time we get back to our interim results and we're all together or virtually whatever we do on the interim results, we'll be back and be able to look at any additional buybacks cash distributions or buybacks in the middle of the year. So it's been probably, Martin was telling me yesterday, we've been out the market for about a year, not buying our stock. As you know, the reason for that is we bought EVR, $7 billion. So we've been able to consolidate that business into our business, work down the debt. So very pleasing to be only 12, 13 months out of the market, not buying back our own stock, back in the market in a substantial way, a billion dollars and the potential for a lot more to come once we get to August of this year. And then onto EVR, and a little bit of an overview on EVR and how we're going. Very successfully integrated into Glencore's global coal business. As I said earlier, this is a tier one, best in class asset, long life, high quality coal, high quality geography, terrific management team, and integrated very well into Glencore. We're very happy with this asset, a billion dollars contribution to EBITDA just in the second half of last year. And we look forward to continued growth in that business. The 2024 performance, in fact, was a very good performance. If you look at how we performed for the year, 2024 is the highest production that business has had over the last three years. Very much back-weighted and back-ended to when we took over as owners of EVR. So some of the numbers are in the presentation, but nice to see that our production in the second half of the year up 8% off the first half. We took over, I think it was 8th of July or 9th of July, whatever it may be. So production second half and the first half up 8%. But even more pleasing, because it's not just about production, is what our costs have done. And our costs have come down materially, costs down 14% first half versus second half on a FOB cash cost basis. And for those mining engineers or miners around here, before you start thinking there's any sort of high grading or games going on on our BCM rates, down similar amount. So this is real cost savings Glencore's brought to this business. Very, very excited with this. Synergies, we are seeing the synergies. We'll report more of those when we go visit the operations with you in June, but they are synergies across the board. Where we're seeing just synergies, we're seeing them through the value or through the coal supply chain, where we're able to move the tons down the coal chain and create synergies through our expertise having coal chains around the world, procurement synergies, cost synergies, maintenance synergies, mine planning synergies, marketing synergies, you name it. In fact, we had a lot of positive feedback from our customers. Here we are now with these marketing synergies, which are in fact benefiting our customers as well as benefiting us. We are delivering them the call that they need the right quality, the right spec on time as they need it as required. And that's creating value for them and it's creating value for us. So the whole integration of EBR has gone very smoothly. As I said, we're very fortunate to have inherited a fantastic management team there and to be able to have this tier one best in class asset Very exciting for Glencore for many years to come. And with that, I'll hand over to Steve on the financial side.