Earnings Labs

DRDGOLD Limited (DRD)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Oct 22, 2013

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Transcript

Craig Barnes

Management

Thank you, Niël. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As Niël mentioned, the transition to the flotation and fine-grind circuit has obviously had an impact on our numbers. And although expected, unfortunately it’s been quite a while since we’ve produced results like these ones returning to headline last -- I think it was since probably September 2010, but as I said, anticipated with a strong decision into the new flotation and fine-grind circuit. Operating margin, as you can see dropped quite significantly in this quarter. If you compare it to the 2013 -- the September 2012 quarter sorry, you can see that we had operating margin of 32% back then and we are now sitting at 13%. Our all-in sustaining cost margin, which is a fairly new measure. You can see most of the mining companies since -- especially the gold mining company since the last quarter have been presenting all-in sustaining cost margin which basically shows -- it basically includes all your costs, including corporate costs and sustainable capital which I think is a better indication of exactly what margins the company is achieving at obviously the current gold prices. You can see there as well for the first time as I mentioned since 2010, our all-in sustaining cost margin decreased to, in fact a negative number of 2%. Our EBITDA however was still positive, even though we had the impact of the flotation and fine-grind circuit and also the lower gold price this quarter, and then also the higher costs that we saw coming through for wage increases, electricity cost increases and also 2 months of winter tariffs during this quarter. Free cash flow, which is an important number that we keep track off, obviously impacted by the capital that we’re still spending on the flotation and fine-grind circuit…

Charles Symons

Management

Thanks, Craig. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. What I’d like to do this morning is really just to give you bit of an insight into the fine-grind project. I’m going to just deal it from 4 - sort of 4 segments. The first being just the rationale that we use originally when we embarked on this process; then to give you a little bit of insight into where we are in the -- I’ll describe the flow again. And for those that haven’t heard it, I do apologize beforehand, to just give you sort of general understanding exactly where it is will be coming from, where we are in the process itself and then looking towards to where we’re going to find ourselves going into the future. As you can see from the slide that I’ve got up over here, there is a photograph of the flotation building that we inherited from Anglo when we bought the Ergo plant. And this was part of the capital project that we -- or part of the capital that we used was to refurbish. There are 6 banks of flotation cells and this is where the bulk of the work is done. This is now all being commissioned and is ready to run. To say the rationale behind why we embarked on this. For those that have been around and watch the Ergo story since we started, I think you can remember way back in the early days when we first started up the operation with the feasibility study that we presented for starting up the Ergo operation took into consideration things and certain aspects with regards to how much tonnage were we going to feed, to how much cost were we going to use, how many people we’re going to have, what…

Adrian Hammond

Management

It’s Adrian Hammond, BNP. I have four questions. The first one is for Charles, and then I’ll move on to you Niël. Charles, just thanks very much for the detailed overview of the new ultra-fine grind. We’ve spoken of head grades, problems at city there with sand coming off and going on to slimes. So on one hand you’ve got head grades falling and then on the other hand you’ve got this new ultra-fine grind circuit with potential for an increase in recoveries. If this circuit performs in line with what you expect, what can we expect net from production?

Charles Symons

Management

We target the average yield is going to stabilize, so around about between 0.19 and 0.2 in that sort of ballpark. [Indiscernible] just in the order of between 380 to 400 milligrams of gold. Problems with the feed stream, at this point in time, [Indiscernible] that the grades are going to start dropping off [indiscernible]. But ultimately the grades do drop off and maybe either have to cut the volumes a little bit more or go in search of higher grade materials [indiscernible].

Adrian Hammond

Management

Thanks. And my next question for Niël. The cost you have now, all-in cost and more importantly your sustaining costs are above the gold price. What can you do to cut costs and if you -- or can you cut costs and what you plan on doing about it? Daniël Pretorius: I think what you’re seeing is unit costs, and obviously unit costs go up in proportion to the drop in kilos. So because we came in way below the average production, the unit costs were probably, I wouldn’t say artificially high, but a lot higher than what a stabilized circuit would offer. So I think once we starting the hitting the anticipated targets production-wise, those unit costs are likely to come down. Look, you’ve always got to be very mindful of your costs and not just saving costs at the lower end but also savings costs at the higher end. And I think we’ve been very disciplined in managing costs both at the operations and also at corporate. The corporate costs I think over the years have been either stable and in fact have also come down a bit. We had to invest in additional skills last year and we actually increased one particular components of corporate, the skill set there quite significantly or the resources that bear with our disposal, they are quite significantly, because ultimately the best counteract to increasing costs are better efficiencies. I am personally not very much in favor of increasing volumes because as it is, managing 2 million tonnes a month is a lot. It’s a lot of material that you move and then sometimes we do these little exercises just to say, well if these are little buses or normal size buses and you park them in a line to Durban and…

Brendan Ryan

Management

Brendan Ryan, Business Day. Niël, if I could just pick up on what you were saying, so for 2 to 3 years you’re going to fine tune this business, create a platform to show what it can do. Then you’re talking about future possibilities. Can you elaborate on what this future possibilities are please, so what are you looking and doing beyond in three years’ time? Daniël Pretorius: Yes. Brendan, look, I don’t think anybody else is really as well positioned to bring resources that we’d recognized as part of our resource base into an operating circuit, something because the CapEx of establishing something as the volume capacity to delivering to the required economies of scale. Those capital requirements are enormous. We bought this plant for R 40 million. I think we worked half now when we did this flotation circuit, the refurbishment of the flotation circuit that the saving just on what was already there, was it R 400 million, Charles? Just on the float circuit or R 300 million? It was roundabout there, but it was a lot of money. I mean you could express it as a double-digit percentage of market cap, just on the flotation circuit. And this is to give us the tiny little extra gold that could potentially open up these other resources which would otherwise are being non-paid. So that is a strategic advantage, but I think in so far as availability of infrastructure capacity is concerned and realistically taking a rubbish heap and turning it into a resource, something of value, before we -- I think take off and start conquering the world, we would like as a management team to see just exactly how far our fine-grind and flotation technology takes us. And we considered and it was obviously having the…

Brendan Ryan

Management

So if I got, it’s about using the improvements in technology to make it profitable to retreat material that’s available that is not profitable at the moment? Daniël Pretorius: Yes, or that is marginal. Obviously we want to maintain the same sort of return. You’re not going to grow the business and give a similar return to more shareholders and increase your profile. You want to increase that return to the same number of shareholders or increase it for a greater number of shareholder so that you’ve got real growth in relative terms. So that’s essentially where I think we would be targeting, but we’re definitely not going to rush off and gone by all the dumps and increase our environmental expenditure just for maintaining good governance on these dumps for the stake of creating the impression that there is robust growth. There has been seven years of spending a lot of our shareholders money and now we’ve got something that I think can take us in to a phase where we could spend some quality time studying the best next move for DRDGOLD. But anyway we’ve put up charts to match the whole available surface resources around South Africa. What’s out there? What is potentially treatable? What could ultimately be feasible and viable, looking at our current collection or combination of technology and skills? And you know what? We don’t have to go anywhere else, because what we’re sitting on here is an enormous stockpile of material and a significant strategic advantage in the combination of these various components that we’ve managed to assemble over the last few years.

Brendan Ryan

Management

One more question, this one is for Charles. I’m not a metallurgist, and I followed your explanations closely as I could, but there seems to be a different version in your report where you say that the flotation circuit worked, the mills however were slow to get going, this meant we created a very rich concentrate, which resulted in a bottleneck at the mills, which meant that most of the gold and concentrates remained in concentrate. What exactly -- so it’s the mills that are not working and what exactly does that mean is my question?

Charles Symons

Management

Brendan I think what -- I think it really sums up in one word and that’s lock-up, is that your -- in general, I think the concentrate, you’re concentrating gold into reasonable portion of product, to see the 4% - 40% of the gold into 4% of the mass. Now there is a whole train of pieces of equipments, tanks, pumps, pipelines, the mills, the leach circuit, the CIP circuit. And at the time when we were writing up that report, we had the bottleneck around the milling circuit, okay? But what is -- all that’s happened is that you’ve got gold which normally would have come out in the smelters through the normal process, but now you have to full up this whole new circuit and that’s what basically what we call lock-up.

Brendan Ryan

Management

That is [Indiscernible].

Charles Symons

Management

Yes. Well, it’s not gone. It’s there, but it comes out at the end. Yes.

Unknown Analyst

Management

I have two questions for Craig. I wondered if you’re going to remember that you had 2 more questions. Just firstly, you talked about cost inflation briefly in the report and you also alluded to I’d say consumables I think it was but -- which for me is more important, what is your sort of inflation for these consumables and what is it overall? What you’re experiencing on it now? And the second question, what have you thought further about your investment in Village Main Reef? Thanks.

Craig Barnes

Management

Okay. Our cost inflation is around about 10%. That’s just on price increases. So it doesn’t take into account, if there is an increase in volume, so that’s how inflationary price increase that we’re budgeting for this year. The recent wage settlement shouldn’t have an impact on it. We should still be sitting around about the 10% mark. Then, on the Village Main Reef shares, no, I think the board hasn’t made a final decision on whether we are going to look to disposing of those shares as yet. As you know, I think about 20 million of those shares are still in escrow, which we’re going to have to deal with going forward, but that decision hasn’t been made at this stage. I don’t know if you want to add anything. Daniël Pretorius: The idea is to maybe take advantage of if and when the gold price goes up, slight increase in the Village share price. I think there are certain -- steeply get to the gold price and then maybe looking at all floating at then, but at this stage, it’s not really in the way.

Unknown Analyst

Management

Those shares in escrow, is it a complication because of this liquidation and [indiscernible] going to? Daniël Pretorius: It was as a consequence of the…

Craig Barnes

Management

Ministerial consent. Daniël Pretorius: The ministerial consent having been delayed because of the fact that the conversion of the mining rights didn’t go through. There was an attempt to convert the mining rights for a period of only 1 year, which was odd, and Village Main Reef management at the time thought that they were not going to execute, they will wait until they will get a more sensible extension. And there is talk at the moment that the conversion might actually take place now while it’s in provisional liquidation because then the business components that are being offered for sale could be sold within a far titled to the mining asset attached to it. So that process is still ongoing. And we’re certainly not forcing it. I think -- Marius has enough to deal with as it is, managing his way through the provisional liquidation process which I must admit or I must remark he has done a really good job at managing. And once it’s settled down, we will take up the discussion with him again and see where we take it, where are we going to go with it.

Unknown Analyst

Management

And are you exposing potential liability? Daniël Pretorius: No, we’re not. We’re not providing for a potential liability, nor does it seem at this stage as there is any - as if there is any expectation on the part of any party at this to call on DRD, for any kind of liability. What we did do though was, the Blyvoor employees were still beneficiaries of our employee trust and we had arranged with those beneficiaries, with those trustees for the distribution of a special dividend to alleviate somehow, there was a special dividend out of savings of the trust itself as part of an exit of those employees as a group of beneficiaries. But there is not a liability really, that is a distribution that was due, and which we managed to accelerate through discussion in order to alleviate some [indiscernible].

Craig Barnes

Management

Just to explain this, trust falls outside of our group structure. It’s a separate entity on its own. Daniël Pretorius: Is that it? Okay. Well, thank you very much everybody. We’ll be hanging around for a few minutes. If there are any further questions, please feel free to come and chat with us.