Earnings Labs

DRDGOLD Limited (DRD)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 25, 2013

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Transcript

Craig Barnes

Management

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our third quarter results presentation. Just while you’re looking at the disclaimer to explain how we’re going to run the presentation today, Niël is actually in London and he is going to be video conferencing in. So he will be doing the first part of the presentation and then he will probably hand back to me to go through some of the numbers. So let me hand you over to Niël in London to start off with some of the quarter features. Thanks, Niël. Daniël Pretorius: Thank you very much. Good afternoon everybody and thank you very much for taking the time to attend this presentation. As Craig said, I am currently in London, hopefully the line is good and there is not too much of a lag on the visuals. So I will keep it short and get straight into the key features which you will see on Page 3 of the results presentation. As in the past, we are comparing our results to the competitive quarter in the previous financial year and based on those, we are encouraged by the trends that we are seeing developing. The circuit is increasing the end, outstanding of our Brakpan circuit is improving as we go along. And these numbers are pretty much in accordance with expectations based on forecast looking at volumes and also looking at net rate going into the plant. Recoveries have been very consistent now for quite some time. You will see on the next slide that our gold production compared to the third quarter last year is up 3%, while revenue is up nicely to just over R0.5 billion. Operating profit is trending in the right direction, our focus is cash and cash flows. Cash operating costs that’s in…

Craig Barnes

Management

Thanks, Niël. Just on the group trends I’ve got some graphs. You would be familiar with these graphs from previous quarters. I have changed the format slightly. You will see that on the gold bars is fiscal 2012 and black bars are fiscal 2013 and then in the first t3 graphs you got quarter-by-quarter, quarter 1, 2, and 3 and in the numbers here to date. So I think it’s quite good to put it that way, because you can see the trend in quarter-on-quarter and you can also see where we are year-to-date. So our current operating margin is sitting at 35%. It is slightly down from the previous year’s 37% and you can also see the Q3 or the third quarter margin would have also been impacted by the drop in production quarter-on-quarter, it was at 33%, but still overall healthy margins for our business at around 35% on average for the year to date. The EBITDA or earnings before income tax, depreciation and amortization, you can see the trending quarter-on-quarter for each quarter it has been up for the first 3 quarters and therefore for the year-to-date is also up to R401.3 million for the 9 months ended March 31, 2013 and that’s obviously is a result as Niël mentioned, the higher production year-on-year, the higher gold price year-on-year being the major contributors towards this. Then on the headline earnings per share similarly, you will see the same trends each quarter on the previous quarter or on the quarter in the previous year is up and similarly also for year-to-date numbers up to R0.59 for the 9 months compared to R0.39 in the previous year. On free cash flow, you wouldn’t see the same trend because firstly, it explains if you just look at the year-to-date number,…

Adrian Hammond

Management

Good morning. It's Adrian Hammond, BNP Cadiz. A couple of questions for Craig and Niël. Just firstly for Craig, can you give us indication of your staying business capital once everything is normalized, after fine-grind project and I’ll follow-on with the next question after this?

Craig Barnes

Management

Going through a budgeting process now to have a look at our next year’s capital spend. I know Niël has provided guidance previously to the market on that number and we’re going to be trying to get as close to that I think it was close to R50 an ounce. We will be trying to get as close to that as possible, but I think for this next year we definitely going to be seeing a significant drop in our capital from what we -- I think we budgeted this year around about R340 million just over. And I think we will see a substantial decrease in that number, probably less to around 50% of that number, less than 50% in even in the next year.

Adrian Hammond

Management

And then just -- I think just touching on Niël saying leading to dividends and you got the cash in the balance sheet, you got some bullet shares, CapEx spend as you say is coming down, business is cash generative, other than potential increase in dividends as you alluded to, what are the plans to do with that cash? What’s beyond after fine-grinding for the business? Daniël Pretorius: I think the saving on CapEx is only a very moderate 50% -- a little bit more than 50% in the year [grind], we have never spent any serious money on the research and development. We’ve appointed some of the set of people to do enough test work and so forth and they have come up with what I think is a very good solution around fine-grind and flotation, but going forward we are certainly going to spend a little bit more money on external expertise towards research and developments, maybe 1 or 2 laboratories to assist us. Just to do a bit of analysis around what it is that we can do in addition to our current metallurgical process to improve gold recovery. Even after fine-grind -- flotation and fine-grind we’ll still be putting almost half of the gold that goes into our plants, back on to the tailings stand. And technology to get that I think is out there, we just need to go and find it, and we need to align it with the ultra-volume environment in which we find ourselves. Also with regards, I think there’s always a question of growth over the growth. Our business is essentially only 7 years old, and may be even younger. Although it’s the oldest listing in Johannesburg, and although it stands on either side of mineral exploitation both the underground site…

Craig Barnes

Management

Can I check if there are any questions on the conference hall?

Operator

Operator

There is no question from the conference hall.

Craig Barnes

Management

There is one question from the webcast. It's a question from [indiscernible]. What products you're looking to complete after the fine-grinding project is complete and where will CapEx flow to? Daniël Pretorius: Fine-grind is the last of the major strategic investments that we will be making for quite some time. We are continuing to open up a bit of daylight between the revenue line and volume cost line as a consequence and we are not gaining any major projects at this point in time. As I said earlier we want the business to settle in and for the model to prove itself.

Unknown Executive

Management

Any questions from the audience from Johannesburg?

Julie Bain

Management

I am Julie Bain from Miningmx. And just a quick one in terms of investing more in your R&D will you just think you would be developing noble ways of releasing the gold from the dumps and will you be able to sell that intellectual property in time?

Unknown Executive

Management

I'm going to be retaining the couple of people that I spoke about earlier so also find me the question to answer to that question, I just don’t know, but we may have to think out of the box a bit technology wise. Technology has improved so much for us, changed so much over the last few years from such a large-scale I don't really know what the technology is going to look like. Maybe it is nanotechnology, maybe it is some sort of laser optical technology, I have no idea. I think the scope is wide open.

Julie Bain

Management

Okay. And one last one in some bad way where, have you're basically selling of the stake -- sale off the stake that you had there. You said you hope to kind of, by recycling some dumps up there that would make up there capital expenditure the exclusion expenditure that you did invested up there is that right, did I interpret that correctly?

Unknown Executive

Management

I think what I said was, what I mean, we want to do that process that make sure that the R40.5 million that we spend from Zimbabwe that doesn’t correct, so we want to do the transaction then it was at least that plus whatever value we think, we may have created by identifying these ore bodies. That is recognized.

Julie Bain

Management

And would that involve processing dumps in Zimbabwe? Daniël Pretorius: No the processing dumps in Zimbabwe is something that we think we might do either on our own or in collaboration with whomever is willing to work with us. But that's not part of the transaction, and transaction that we are looking it now if the disposal or a cycle that would realize what we spent plus some more. Whereas the treatment of dumps is something that we would look at and I think probably and only after we've seen what the fine-grind technology offers, it may open up for us. So we do have this technology and we could potentially [indiscernible]. Maybe you want us to come and treat your dumps and we’ll come and take something up and you can give us percentage of the growth reduction with the offer something to that. The asset when it becomes more tangible as you remain if we come something that requires disclosure or any kind of announcement then we will do that, is the stage is very much conceptual. We know that they pick, we know that lower those dumps or would be refectory nature your normal -- specially to add anything else that really be in effective in treating those, may be fine-grind assets proceeds and do the test works and see, works that will taken in that.

Adrian Hammond

Management

Just a follow-up if I may, just on the dumps on end zone, can you just give us some more detail on tonnage or grade? Daniël Pretorius: Not really, no. It's early day.

Craig Barnes

Management

Daniel, I think that’s probably the end, do you have any video or anything? Daniël Pretorius: No video. Okay thanks very much for attending ladies and gentlemen and please help yourself to some drinks and some eats outside. Thank you. Bye-bye.