Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the annual financial results presentation for Impala Platinum. Joining us today on the webcast and also on the call will be some other colleagues. As usual, we'll do a high-level reflection on the results and then provide an opportunity for robust engagement. I'll take questions in the room first, and after that we will divert to the webcast and the call for questions as well. So very, very welcome. You'll see today a slight deviation from what we've done in the past. I'm going to ask the expanded team to just talk at a high level to the results before we go to the Q&A. So following me, I'm going to ask our CIO, Patrick Marutla, to just reflect on the operations. mernisha kerber our cfo will then just give a highlights on the the financial side and then we'll ask nico just to close the formal proceedings before we jump into q a we operate as a team so we felt it's very important that you also get the faces and the sound waves of the entire team so you know hopefully that they don't disappoint me too much. So no pressure, guys. So without further ado, let's start. I just want to point out to our forward-looking statement. Just please take note of that again. And then without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Patrick. Patrick, please.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let's start first on the safety side. Regrettably, we had a regression in our fatal injuries. We recorded 19 fatalities for this year. And this is despite year-on-year sustained improvement on our LTE frequency rate and total injury rate. If you look at it from 2019 until last year, we've seen a 29% improvement on our rates, but it's not necessarily translating in reduction in fatalities. We have a plan, and I'll present that plan in the next slide. Moving over to operations, we had a strong performance from our operations, 13% year-on-year, mainly because of the inclusion of IBR, but we also had strong performance from our key asset, Drostenberg. We've seen a 4% improvement year-on-year. Zimpler, 6%. We also have seen 4% from Mimosa. And Canada, despite us changing our operating strategy in response to the low palladium price, they've actually also performed very well. uh the unit cost uh below the inflation of 4.6 percent primarily also driven by good production and also the cost cutting that we've done during the course of the year as a response to low platinum prices capital mostly is because we've now included ibr and also our expansion capital mainly from zim during this year we've also completed our key project All our three fenders and rusting bags have all been rebuilt, which comes in handy to work down the work in progress, stocks that we have. We have completed 35 megawatts solar project in Zimplats. We've also now completed our 38 megawatts failures in Zimplats. We should be bringing it online now in October. And also lastly, we have seen us completing the BMR debotting project that will give us about 10% more capacity. So very, very disciplined execution of our project in this year. So we also see improvement for this year at Marula and Stair Drift. Let me know for now, talk about Marula. So Marula did not perform up to expectation, mainly because we have encountered difficult geology that actually decimated our face land. We have plans in place to restore that face land. I'll touch on Stair Drift. In the following slide, Steldrift, it is still very key to our success and future at the Western Limb. Let me try and dive deeper on safety. So on the 24th of November last year, three days before the 11th fatality, we actually called a safety summit where over 150 of our leaders led by ESCO, we convened in Rostenberg. We also had a minerals council attending because we felt after the third fatality last year that we should reflect on the next steps and really come up with plans to eliminate fatalities from our business. We also had a follow-up in May this year, and from those two safety summits, what you see on the board, that's the plan that we've come up with. Because as employers, we believe without any shadow of doubt that Fatalities can be eliminated. We have points of excellence within our own group, which has proven that it is possible. And I'll just mention one. We have a shaft at Marula Dricop. Since its inception 14 years ago, it has never had fatalities. So we can learn from this point of excellence and actually eradicate fatalities. Since the implementation of this plan somewhere early May, I know it's still early days, but we've seen some promising green shoots. If you look at quarter four in particular, it was the lowest quarter in terms of LTE frequency rate and total injury frequency rate for the last 20 years. Within a very same period, we have seen what we call white flag days. We have seen three of them. Two of them actually happened now in August. So white flag days is a day where all our employees, all the way from Canada, all the way to Marula, they go on for 24 hours and none of them got injured, even in a medical treatment case. So we've never seen this before in implants. So we believe that this plan that we have in place It is starting to show that if we are relentless, disciplined in execution, we will definitely be able to see the elimination of fatalities. Personally, I have been part of this journey before, so it is possible to actually eliminate fatalities from high labor intensive environment like what we see in Rustenburg. So we beg ourselves. with the team that we have, both operational and also from the safety front, and all the changes that we've made to strengthen the team in this previous year to be able to eliminate a schedule of fatalities from in place. So what has happened has not deemed our belief and commitment to see fatalities being eliminated from our business. Moving over to Stellar Drift, you all remember that last year we stood here. Really, just this time in August after we've taken over IBR. And we told you that IBR have got three parts. We said BRPM, it is meeting the expectation. And you will have seen that despite the labor unrest that we've experienced in that shop in particular, it's still delivered according to plan. We told you at the time that processing, we were unhappy with the recoveries. And because of the extensive knowledge and expertise that we had in Rostenbeck and MIMPRO, we believe that we will be able within 12 months' time to reverse that trend when it comes to recoveries. And I'll talk about it now. And lastly, Star Drift, we acknowledge that it was lagging behind in terms of the ramp up. And we said it is about 18 to 24 months job for us to get it set up to be able to ramp up the full capacity. So today I want to take you through this simplified value chain. But before I dive deeper into it, I really need to tell you that it is supported by a very comprehensive framework of work that we're doing. For example, we are integrating IBR now into Impala Rostenberg to leverage the synergies that were identified before the acquisition. We have changed the reporting lines. The executive head of IBR reported directly to Moses. And from last year, the processing division has been reporting to Rustinburg. So now going into the value chain. Last year, we told you there's nothing wrong with the mine design. We still maintain that. The bulk infrastructure is still in place. We have no problem with that. Development is actually going very well to a point where we had to stop some of the main capital development because they're actually far ahead of schedule. Last year, it was very clear that our bottleneck was the mineable face length. And that's what we've been working on for most part of the last 12 months. So the graph at the bottom, you see that last year we had only seven workable phase length instead of the 16 that actually was planned. And just mainly because most of the sections were flooded. They had backlog in terms of support. ventilation issues, so literally you could not complete the whole mining cycle in those sections. So I'm glad to say that by the end of this financial year, we're now sitting on 16, we've got 14 stopping crews, so literally we're sitting with the flexibility of 1.2. So, yeah. Then the other problem that we had at that time was sectional infrastructure. That's your tip-to-face distances, your roadways. We have done a lot of work. You can see the graph tip-to-face distance that we've managed to drop it to 116. The ideal is about 110, so there's still work to be done together with the roadway conditions and also water management. At that time, also, we were not happy with the grade. So for us, it's quality before quantity. So there was a lot of work we've done to fix the grade. As you have seen, it's now responded. We're now at 4.01. There's still a bit of work to be done, but that turnaround has been effected. And so as I speak to you now, where we have a bottleneck, as you know, the value chain, if you solve the problem here, the actual move down the value chain, it is now our ability to move the ore. But like I say, it is also a component of some of the problems are talking about leadership that we're dealing with. We now have brought Sandvik on board to really look at the whole fleet management to really to empower ourselves to be able that if when we blast and generate this all from this section that we have now created, we have the ability to move that. For completeness sake also, as I said that another area of improvement was the processing division. We have brought the expertise that we have in Rastrimberg and we have been able to turn around the coverage now to about 82.2. The ideal we're looking for is 85, so more work is still to be done in terms of changing the reagencies, continue with the work that we actually put in place to embed those changes that have become now ways of how we do things. As I close on steel drift in particular, is that it is still a world class asset. It is still high grade, long life and shallow and mechanized fleet. And that's where we believe that the future of the Western Leap actually resides. And that's why we beg ourselves that in the next few years, we should be able to be exact about FY27 towards the end of it. We see ourselves that we will get steel drift to full capacity as stipulated on the nameplate. On that note, I'll hand over to Melanesia.

Thank you very much, Patrick. Maybe just to start off with, notwithstanding the combination of a very commendable operating performance, excellent cost controls, and several initiatives that we implemented around prudent capital allocation. The key feature of the results was essentially the lower PGM prices. That affected profitability and free cash flow generation. If you look at our earnings for the year, there were two notable once-off non-cash items. The first was the combination of impairments at our Impala Rustenburg, Impala Canada, and both our JVs. And that was largely just due to the lower pricing environment, as well as the elevated levels of interest rates that we're seeing at the moment. The other significant charge that we had during the year was a 1.9 billion Rand once-off IFRS 2 BE charge. And that arose on the conclusion of our landmark empowerment deal, which we did for value. and which basically underpins our commitment to sharing value even whilst the sector faces reduced profitability and margin compression. If I look at the cash flow, similarly, the cash flow was impacted by two large items. The first one was the conclusion of the RB Plat transaction. we had an 11.4 billion rand outflow to acquire the remaining equity of RB Platt. But we also funded almost 900 million rand worth of transaction-related costs, largely from Impala buffeting. The second material item on our cash flow statement is really, and you'll see it, the significant increase in capital expenditure. As we basically progressed many of our processing expansion projects, as well as the installation of solar at our Zimbabwean operations. Despite the lockup in working capital, so you'll see our in-process inventory went up to 390,000 ounces as a result of constrained processing capacity, but also the receipt of Impala Buffer King data, which is really just due to contractual terms. I think what we're very pleased with is that all of the growth we managed to fund from our internally generated After three years of really elevated capital expenditure, following the decision we made to strategically expand our processing capacity, you should see the business return to more normalized levels of capital intensity. I'm particularly pleased with where we ended up on the balance sheet. We ended the year with strong adjusted net cash, with only one billion rand worth of, Nico calls it real debt. And that was largely on, you know, Zimplat's drawing down to fund its peak capital funding requirements. But also, more importantly, 17.7 billion of liquidity headroom. So when I look forward into FY 2025, I certainly think the company is going to benefit from the labor rationalization or restructuring that we did, which underpins our commitment to controlling costs. Secondly, reduce capital intensity. This is because of decisions we made around the portfolio around Impala Canada and Merula, where we adjusted production and project plans. But also given that most of our operations are through the peak funding of expansion and replacement projects. Patrick talked about our expanded processing capacity. I'm very pleased with that because that now gives us the opportunity to basically systematically work through the 390,000 ounces of excess inventory that we've built up over the last three years as we've rebuilt our Rustenburg furnaces. The unlock of the stock should support free cash flow generation and more importantly, protect the balance sheet. I think all of this actually positions the company well to navigate through and provides it with the flexibility to navigate through a period of low pricing environment. I will now hand over to Nico. Thank you.