Earnings Labs

AngloGold Ashanti Plc (AU)

Q3 2011 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 9, 2011

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Transcript

Stewart Bailey

Management

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the presentation by the AngloGold Ashanti Executive Team for our results for the quarter ended 30th of September. And before we begin, the meeting, as is customary, we'll go through the safety procedures. As usual, in the event of an emergency, a siren will sound and the information will be broadcast over the building's public address system. Please move quickly within an orderly way to the nearest exit points, which are behind me and to the right and gather in the open space on Miriam Makeba Street to the west of Turbine Hall where our safety wardens will advice on additional safety procedures. Our agenda, the format will be as follows: Mark, to my left, will review the company's performance over the quarter; Venkat, on the far left, will walk through the financials before Mark will wrap up with a discussion on projects and exploration before taking your questions. Other members of our leadership team are present in the audience and will be available during Q&A and for discussion afterwards. We also have Frank Arisman, one of our nonexecutive directors, present as well. And I'll just run through the disclaimer very briefly. Certain statements made in this communication, including, without limitation, those concerning the economic outlook for the gold mining industry, expectations regarding gold prices, production, cash costs and other operating results, growth prospects and the outlook of AngloGold Ashanti's operations, individually or in the aggregate, including completion and commencement of commercial operations of certain of AngloGold Ashanti's exploration and production projects and the completion of announced mergers and acquisition transactions, AngloGold Ashanti's liquidity, capital resources and capital expenditure and the outcome and consequences of any litigation or regulatory proceedings or environmental issues, contain certain forward-looking statements regarding AngloGold Ashanti's operations, economic performance and…

Mark Cutifani

Management

Ladies and gentlemen, it is good to be here this morning. Before I actually start talking to the results, I think it's important to maybe reflect on the important event we've just seen. Unfortunately, I can't say much, many positive things about South Africa or Australia's performance in the World Cup but I know we do have at least 1 kiwi in the audience, so we should acknowledge New Zealand's win in the World Cup. And if I could say and I know I speak on behalf of most of the people in the room, I can only hope that the next 24 years are as rewarding as the last 24 years for New Zealand in terms of the World Cup. But congratulations. Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to report another record earnings result for the quarter against the backdrop of a record gold price. Bullion touched yet another new record during the quarter, driven by similar frames that have pushed it progressively higher this year. Lest we forget, we have the U.S. debt downgrade, and now we have a worsening sovereign debt crisis in Europe. The default by Greece or others may open Pandora's box for the global credit markets. Physical demand meanwhile has continued to give bullion a solid fundamental underpin. During the quarter, we continued to see strong demand from Central Banks with Russia, Tajikistan, Thailand and Bolivia are all adding to their gold reserves. ETFs have also provided another good source of demand, highlighting the broad-based demand for what remains the ultimate safe haven. And jury demand remains robust in key emerging markets despite record gold prices. While we continue to see a high degree of volatility, the fundamental picture is bullish for the market to remain short new gold supply and coupled with macro…

Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan

Management

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'll be covering the following 3 areas in today's presentation. Third quarter's financial results, free cash flow and balance sheet, and outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2011. As Mark mentioned, we posted a new record in terms of adjusted headline earnings of $457 million, which represents $1.18 per share or ZAR 8.57 cents per share. The quarter-on-quarter increase of 34% was on the back of a 13% rise in the gold price receipt and a deferred tax credit of $70 million. Looking at the total unit cash costs, our market guidance, using stronger local currency assumption, was around $775 per ounce for the quarter. If this were to be revised for the actual average exchange rates that prevailed during the quarter, the equal number will have been approximately $745 an ounce. And our third quarter cash cost of $737 an ounce came in better by around $8 an ounce. The quarter-on-quarter increase in groups total cash operating cost of $32 an ounce is made up as follows: Annual wage increases in South African winter power tariffs of $15 an ounce, higher royalties on the back of stronger gold prices, $8 an ounce. These were partially mitigated by weaker local currencies of $17 an ounce. However, as flagged in August, the second quarter's cash cost included the benefit of high-grade feed to compensate for Geita's SAG mill downtime, which accounted for a quarter-on-quarter swing of $24 an ounce. We've had a challenging third quarter in South Africa, which has had an adverse impact on our rand-denominated cash cost for the region, although it will not be apparent on a U.S. dollar basis. The quarter on quarter increase of 15.7% or ZAR 23,000 a kilogram in the South African regions cash…

Mark Cutifani

Management

Thanks, Venkat. Notwithstanding some of the challenges we've had this year, we've continued to generate robust cash flows. We continue to make good headway on project development as we push to our 5.5 million-ounce target by 2014. And the affordability of our blend of green and Brownfields growth opportunity remains a key competitive advantage for the group. Looking to our project pipeline, you'll know we've worked hard to build capacity in our project team over the past year. And certainly, the talent we've been able to recruit, put into the teams on the ground have certainly made a difference in terms of project development and performance. This has been crucial given that our balance sheet constraints for the past years impeded our ability to meaningfully invest in growth. Already now, we're seeing the benefits of an improved execution capability. Looking back to 2007, we missed, and this is on major capital projects, we missed our capital schedules on projects by more than 17%, and the budget miss was 49%. Those numbers are now 7% and 14% respectively, and improving all the time. At the same time, or in the last 3 years, we have hit our capital forecast each year over the last 3 years. And so I think the turnaround, in terms of hitting the numbers, improving our performance and continuing to improve as we have more improvement and initiatives in place, I think it's demonstrating that we've got the capacity, that we've introduced the management processes and we've improved our operating disciplines such that we're well-positioned to deliver on the growth strategies that we've been talking to. And whilst the industry is certainly being challenged and we've seen massive capital blowouts across the industry, I think it's another area of performance that we've demonstrated an ability to turn…

Stewart Bailey

Management

First we've got Johann Steyn from Citibank.

Johann Steyn - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Management

Just a quick question on the dividend and the CapEx outlook. Yes, justifiably the absolute number of the dividend of the covenant has gone down quite a bit. And I would assume this is because of high CapEx outlook for next year, et cetera. So please can you just give us a bit of guidance on the capital budget for 2012, and maybe even the capital years after it as well.

Mark Cutifani

Management

We haven't formally -- we're not formally guiding yet on the capital number, Johann. But if you look at this year, we'll be around $1.6 billion. If you take some overruns into next year from this -- not overruns, timing, scheduling issues, you add some inflation numbers. Certainly we'd expect to see the capital north of $2 billion, but again, we haven't formerly guided. We'll do that in the next set of results, but the profile looks good. We're not seeing major blowouts in our capital numbers. So when you adjust for year-on-year inflation and some timing issues, we're going to be, maybe a little bit north of that number. And you'd certainly expect to see that again in the following year. Then we start to sort of tail off because we hit the 5.5 million-ounce production level. The next capital set will be around the big new projects, the Kibali really starting to kick in, the Colombia propositions, but given where we are and given that we'll be at 5.5 million ounces when those cash cost start to hit, our underlying cash generation will be 24%, 25% better than it is today, all things being equal. So we're pretty well-positioned we think. And in that context I think out of the dividend question, we've looked at the dividend very closely. We used free cash flow as the appropriate metric to gauge what the dividends should be. As a point of principle, we won't borrow to fund the dividend and we do look beyond the quarter in making those decisions. But we've doubled the dividend -- we've almost doubled the dividend this year. If we see continuing strength in the gold price, if we continue to improve the operations at the underlying level, we should improve our underlying free cash flows and we will try and return a material amount of that free cash flow back to our shareholders in the forms of dividends. So without giving you a hard metric, if I could make one point, our view would be that we should be returning a material component of our free cash flow to our shareholders in the form of dividends, contingent on making sure that we keep the balance sheet in shape and that we don't threaten our investment grade rating. And Venkat, if you want to give that a little more shape?

Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan

Management

No, that's fine.

Johann Steyn - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Management

And maybe just one last question, is in terms of the 5.5 million ounces that you've mentioned, historically, what we've seen in the gold sector is a lot of these projects do come online, but people underestimate the decline of the baseline. So how do you guys factor that into your planning, which mines will reach end of their lives and then how do you see the baseline declining?

Mark Cutifani

Management

Well, let me acknowledge the observation you make. You do make an astute observation that many companies underestimate the decline in the baseline. And if you go back to our operations back in 2007 and when we did our forward-looking assessments, we underestimated the grade decline. And we've seen about a 20% grade decline. Now we're mining and we we're mining above reserve grade at that time, I'm not high-grading, but we had a high proportion of high-grade assets that we're mining. And we've seen about a 20% decline. We are now mining just under reserve grade. So we've actually got the operations now, I think, in a much better balance. We have in the 5.5 estimate assumed a baseline decline somewhere between 3 to 600,000 ounces over time. So I think we've done a much better job in understanding the business, forecasting a decline in the base to come up with that 5.5 number. So it's something we watch closely. In fact, our operating range was 5.4 to 5.6. And you know that the internal target for the team is 5.5. So I think we've done a much better job, but we continue to watch that closely and our business improvement worked that we're focusing on in the next 12 months is to make sure we hardwire and nail the key elements to make sure we deliver that number in 2014. And for us, it's a very important number to get to in terms of all the hard work we've been doing in terms of the future.

Stewart Bailey

Management

Allan Cooke, JPMorgan. Allan J. Cooke - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Mark, Venkat. Just on the SA ops and your guidance for the fourth quarter, it seems a little conservative because we had a really tough quarter in the September quarter from a production perspective. Could you just talk to the guidance specifically and the status of this and perhaps outline what you've lost in terms of safety stoppages year-to-date in the quarter and what you factored now in the December quarter with your guidance. And then, Venkat, if you will, if you could just give us some detail in that deferred tax credit, the $70 million, that's around ZAR 500 million, I think. Should we be taking about ZAR 130 out of that ZAR 857 adjusted headline in earnings per share to adjust the adjusted headline in earnings per share to normalize the core earnings, if you like?

Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan

Management

If I can pick up the second point -- the second question, you're absolutely right. The deferred tax arose because CC&V carried the hedges in their accounts. And it did have accumulated losses, but there was a valuation allowance against it. Once it's got a track record of generating 12 months worth of profits and the shareholder reserves goes into positive, the valuation allowance has to come out. That creates the deferred tax asset. On a normalized basis, the effective tax rate around 33% to 35% has to be maintained for the group. But what we do have is a very good schedule showing the effective tax rate for cancellation between the various quarters which I'll get John to e-mail to you later on. Now, if I can cover the South African operations. In terms of the safety stoppages for the full year, we have had safety stoppages amounting to around 69,000 ounces versus for the 3 quarters. In the third quarter alone, we have had 34,000 ounces impacted out of the safety stoppages. And it's around 50% BMR import, 50% has been mine import safety stoppages. And in terms of the South African production numbers, we've had production at around 394,000 ounces for the quarter. We are looking at getting a production level of around 415,000 to 420,000 ounces for the fourth quarter.

Mark Cutifani

Management

Allan, I might add to that, you suggested that maybe our forecast for Q4 is, let's say, prudent. We have had 1 fatality this quarter already. So in that context, we have taken proper account of that. It is prudent. We've missed our last 2 quarter guidance by around 1.5%. For us, that's a personal issue because it's a personal integrity issue in terms of our shareholders, so we're very sensitive to it. And each of the EVPs has taken a long hard look at their forecast for the quarter and our commitment is to deliver on that guidance, so there is some sensitivity. There is, we believe, a prudent approach being taken. But I think it's appropriate, given that we've bumped around a bit this year and we got to demonstrate that we got the operations back in the control. So one could say we've been a little too prudent. But at this stage, I think it's important to get that control and that credibility back.

Stewart Bailey

Management

All right, any further questions? All right, I think that's about it. As always, thank you very much for coming, and we'll see you again in February. Thank you.