Richard C. Adkerson
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you, Kathleen. During the quarter, we published our annual report to shareholders for 2011 and Slide 3 talks about the themes that we spoke to in the annual report about our leadership position in global copper markets, the gold production we have out of our Grasberg mine in Indonesia, our world-leading low-cost molybdenum business, our growing cobalt business and our company, with its very substantial proved and probable reserves of resources -- and of reserves of our products, as well as our significant resources, is particularly well situated to take advantage for the global demand in the future. For these products, we are geographically diverse, long-lived reserves. Within our set of assets, our existing assets, we have a very attractive growth profile, both in the intermediate term and the longer term. Our financial position is strong with our recent financing and with our focus earlier in reducing debt and we continue to recognize our responsibilities for environmental, social and sustainable development activities and it’s an important part of what we do. In the mid May, we celebrated the 5th year anniversary of the Phelps Dodge deal. When I visited our mines and our team here in mid March -- when I visited with our team at a number of our mines and here in Phoenix and Indonesia, I was just so encouraged by the quality of our people, the very high morale that we have and our focus on creating shareholder value. Kathleen reviewed our financial results, and it showed strong performance in the Americas and in Africa, which reflects the geographic diversity impacts of our business. I'm happy to report that we are making continuing progress in restoring normal operations in Grasberg, following the 3-month strike and the issues associated with returning the workforce after the strike and our work with the Indonesian security organization in terms of dealing with the security situation in Papua. We are advancing our growth projects. We're targeting increasing sales of copper by 25% over the next 3 to 4 years and that is progressing well. Kathleen mentioned that we took advantage of these favorable credit markets and our company's strong financial position to refinance debt on very attractive terms and our board has increased our common stock dividend. The details of the financial results are reflected on Page 5. Now, I just referenced that for your information as Kathleen has just gone over that. To give you an update on where we stand with Grasberg, following a 3-month strike, we reached agreement with our basic labor union on a new 2-year labor agreement for PT-FI employees in the mid December. During the first quarter, we continued to face some work interruptions in connection with our reintegration of the labor union workers back into our operations and we had a roughly 3-week suspension of activities as we met with our workforce to resolve certain issues and to undertake a socialization of the new labor agreement. And that had an impact in the first quarter of about 80 million pounds of copper, to 125,000 ounces of gold. We are seeing progress in returning to normal operations. Second quarter to date, our mill is operating at over 200,000 tons per day after being limited to 115,000 tons per day in the first quarter. And full operations are online to return to normal levels in the second quarter, of course, depending on our ability to continue the productivity in our work force and a secure workplace. Slide 7 shows our first quarter unit production costs. Indonesia was affected by the lower volumes. It was also affected by lower grades that were available to us in our open pit operations. Our costs in our other operations were in line with our plans. It does reflect higher input costs than in the prior year. And also, the fact that as we expand operations, unit costs are higher but our team has done a good job in managing these costs and results in an overall consolidated attractive cost level for our company. Markets continue to be very positive this year. For copper, we saw a stronger-than-expected start for our business in the first quarter in the United States. Europe is weak but it is not as weak as some feared going into the second half of 2011. China has taken steps to control growth, and there's a lot of commentary about the outlook for the Chinese economy but China continues to spend money on infrastructure projects, its fundamental economy appears to be strong, and overall, the copper market is very positive, given the uncertainties of the world that we've been living with. 2012 appears to be another year of a deficit in the copper markets. Gold prices remain at strong levels. Molybdenum prices are relatively stable and these levels supports our expansion plans and our high profitability of our moly business. China remains the important demand driver. As I indicated, investments in urbanization and infrastructure support that marketplace. All of those investments require significant amounts of copper. While the government has taken steps to control inflation by limiting growth, it's done so in a very effective way and growth levels, growth percentages, on the increasingly large Chinese economy still results in significant consumption. As I mentioned, the first quarter in the U.S. started out strong. Of course, there are uncertainties in our economy that all of you are aware of. But manufacturing, particularly auto sales, have contributed to this positive situation in the U.S. In the U.S. and Europe, we see very low inventory stocks as that's been managed to be low because of the economic uncertainties and on a big picture basis, copper has tended to move more into China than in Europe and the U.S. and the market remains tight there. But global inventories overall remain relatively low. The industry continues to face supply constraints from interruptions to existing operations and the challenges of bringing on new production because of a whole variety of issues: technical, cost constraints, environmental constraints and so forth. So the fundamentals of the copper market remain strong. Slide 10 gives some comments about our PT-FI contract of work. We signed a contract in 1991 that had a 30-year primary term and provided for 2 10-year extensions through 2041. On the terms of the original contract, applying for those extensions, which we have started that process now, requires government approval but the contract provides that, that approval cannot be withheld unreasonably. The contract provides for fixed taxes and royalty rates. After several years of consideration, Indonesia has now passed a new mining law which applies to new projects that are developed within the country. Under our contract of work, we pay a 35% income tax rate. The current statutory rate in Indonesia is 25%. We pay royalties at these prices of 3.5% on copper. The new mining law provides for 4% and 1% on gold while the new mining law has 3.75%. We also pay a 10% withholding tax on payments of dividends from PT-FI to FCX. And in total, including the 9-plus percent equity interest that the government has, the government gets more than 50% of the benefits of the cash flow that's generated by Grasberg. Also, our COW payments to the government are higher than prevailing law, and in fact, they are higher than would be made if the laws of any other country were applied that has mining operations. There's been a lot of discussions about in-country processing of minerals within Indonesia. We arranged for the construction of Indonesians’ only copper smelter in the 1990s and it is world-class, arguably, among the most efficient copper smelters in the world, processing 280,000 tons of metal per year. We are in compliance with our COW during all of our years of operations since 1972 in Indonesia. We've had 2 COWs during that period. The government has also complied with the COW. We have no issues of noncompliance on either side. We have no divestiture obligations under our COW. The new mining law provides for 20% of divestiture obligation but we are under our existing COW, not the new mining law. We have, as we've reported for several years now, voluntarily agreed to offer a 9.36% interest in PT-FI to Indonesia nationals. That's fair market value on a business-to-business basis. We have a very positive relationship with the country of Indonesia and with its government officials. The government has undertaken a review of all mining contracts. We are working cooperatively with the government, and I'll say that we will continue to do so to be responsive to issues raised by the government in the context of protecting the values of our contract for our shareholders, and we're very encouraged about the outcome of that process. Our financial benefits to Indonesia are large. We contributed over $60 billion to national GDP in Indonesia since 1992. With our development of our underground resources at Grasberg, we have plans to spend $15 billion in new capital. We're by far the largest employer in Papua and one of the largest if not, the largest, income taxpayer in Indonesia. We're 2/3 to 3/4 of the GNP in Papua and in the Mimika region, we're roughly 95% of the economy. You can see the very large taxes that we pay under our existing COW, $2 billion in 2011 plus dividends and royalties and we make voluntary contributions to the community. We have a partnership fund for a community development, and we've contributed over $500 million for that fund since 1996 through 2011. We do have a diverse set of assets geographically, and we are focused on converting these very large mineral resources that we have to reserves, to evaluate our reserves aggressively, to identify development projects that will lead to production growth and cash flows. When I say large resource reserve base, our recoverable reserves at an average copper price of $2 is 120 billion pounds of proved and probable reserves according to SEC definition requirements. In addition to that, based on drilling and exploration analysis we've done to date, we have contained copper at a long-term price of $2.20 of mineralized material that's not included in these reserves of over 100 billion pounds of copper in place. Together, this is an enormous resource that gives us the chance to have growth both in the near term, midterm and long term. And we have that growth without having to make acquisitions with spending capital prudently on projects that make sense from an economic standpoint. We have a greenfield exploration program but we're not dependent on greenfield exploration for growth. Slide 13, you can see these resources and reserves summarized and you can see the location. It's noteworthy that over half are located in North America. Not too many years ago, the Southwest copper district was considered to be uneconomic and short-lived. With the demand for copper in the world today, we have plans that will lead us to invest billions of dollars, employs thousands of people in North America as well as growing in South America, Africa and continuing to maintain our profitable long-term, low-cost operations in Indonesia. Our near-term projects, copper projects, include as shown on Slide 14, our projects that were deferred during the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. We've restored the Morenci mill, our flagship operation in the U.S. here in Arizona and we've increased our mine rates. We have begun to mine and produce copper from the Miami area, the historical Miami Globe area where we have significant reclamation obligations and we're making money out of that as we fulfill those reclamation operations. We restarted the Chino mine in New Mexico and are ramping it up. And in South America, we've completed the Sulfolix project which replaced the depleting oxide production that had been the basis for that El Abra mine for years. All of these projects are going well. In Colorado outside Leadville, we have started up the Climax Molybdenum mine. We had invested in this project and deferred it in 2008. Now, we've gone back in and we've spent the capital. Construction is essentially complete. We're ramping up to 20 million pounds of molybdenum a year during 2013 and depending on market conditions, we can increase it to 30 million pounds a year. We'll be responsive to the market. Of course, we produce molybdenum at our Henderson mine in Colorado and it’s a byproduct in a number of our copper mines. I mentioned earlier, the very significant investments that we're making underground in Indonesia. The Grasberg pit, which we began to develop in the 1990 timeframe, is -- will reach depletion of the surface mining opportunities in roughly 2016. That's a fluid number depending on our experience between now and then. But we have very significant underground reserves, aggregate reserves total and these are reserves, 37 billion pounds of copper and 32 million ounces of gold. Our existing DOZ underground block caving mine has a capacity of 80,000 tons per day. We are developing the Big Gossan mine, which is a high-grade mine with 7,000 tons per day production rate. The Grasberg block cave, which cannot commence until we complete mining in the pit is being prepared to do just that. And then as an extension of the DOZ mine, we have, where we begin mining in this area in the early 1980s, the Deep MLZ mine where we've completed a feasibility study and has a startup in 2015. Our underground production is expected to reach 240,000 tons per day for our mill and our share of development costs will be spread over a number of years. The aggregate is large but expecting to average about $550 million per year over the next 5 years. The Grasberg block cave and the Deep MLZ mine will be the source of ore to our mill as we complete mining from the pit. We've completed significant development for access to these orebodies and over recent years, have made very good progress. The development capital is significant but it is spread out over a number of years. We're showing at the bottom of this chart, the ramp up of the Deep MLZ as we transition from the DOZ mine to the Deep MLZ mine and when -- and the startup of the Grasberg block cave. Because of very high grades at the Deep MLZ mine and because of our plans to have a significant stockpile of material from the Grasberg open pit, we see that we have been able to offset to a significant extent, the drop-off in production from the open pit and with these higher-than-average ore grades, our share of production is expected to average 1.1 billion pounds of copper and 1.4 million ounces of gold between 2017 and 2021. This transition is obviously a big focus of our team and will continue to be. Beyond the startup projects, we do have very significant investment projects that we are progressing and investing capital in. At Cerro Verde, we are -- have a project to triple its mill throughput. This would be the largest concentrating mill operation in the world, a significant capital at $4 billion. We've filed our Environmental Impact Statement in the fourth quarter, engineering and long lead line procurement -- lead time procurement is progressing and we expect to achieve full rates in 2016. We are also investing in a mill expansion at Morenci to take advantage of the resources that our exploration program has identified for us there. And we are involved in our first expansion project at our Tenke Fungurume mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo where operations have progressed in a very reasonable fashion. This project is going much more smoothly than our initial development project because of our experience in that project and in conducting operations there. These 3 projects involve $6.3 billion of capital and roughly 1 billion pounds a year in incremental copper. Now, some information on the Morenci mill expansion which is a very high rate of return project is included on Page 19. It involves increasing the mining rate, expanding the mill to 115,000 tons per day, 1.4 billion pounds of capital for 225 million pounds of copper a year. We've completed the feasibility study. Permitting is going well. Engineering and procurement is going well. We expect to achieve full rates in 2014. And as we do this, because of positive exploration results, we're continuing to look for a larger mill expansion to mine sulfide material at Morenci. The details of the Cerro Verde project are shown on Page 20. As I mentioned, we will be going to 360,000 tons per day through a mill, basically expanding our existing mill facilities and footprint. All aspects of this project are very favorable for this sort of development. Significant increase in mine rates take advantage of the resources that we have. Our exploration is expected to continue to add to these reserves and resources. This is the same basic technology that we've had with our existing operations, which was -- had its last major expansion that was completed at the end of 2006. We've developed a plan for obtaining water for this operation. And water is -- those of you who follow the industry in Peru and also in Chile, anywhere in mining, is really a critical factor. But by working with the local community of Arequipa, we are working to develop the wastewater system, which will be of benefit significantly to the community but also, will provide the water for our project and we believe this will avert any controversy over water for our project. At Tenke, the project that we're currently investing in, it would expand the mill to 14,000 tons a day. Our mine rate would increase. We're adding tankhouse capacity. It's about $850 million of capital to give us 150 million pounds incremental copper per year. We are under construction and we're targeting completing at the end of next year. We're continuing to conduct exploration drilling and analysis of this large 600-plus square mile concession, which has additional oxide resources, additional -- significant amounts of sulfide resources are indicated. Some of it's mixed ore but all of the metallurgical work and exploration work we have there are expanding, and we are very optimistic about future expansions at Tenke. We also have, beyond these projects, additional significant projects that our team is working actively on. And this includes taking advantage of those U.S.-based resources that I mentioned earlier. Looking at a further large-scale expansion of sulfide processing in Morenci, looking at the Sierrita and the adjacent Twin Buttes property for expansion activities, expanding our Bagdad project, potentially reopening the Ajo project in Southern Arizona, which is a historical mine for our organization. And at Safford, looking at the Lone Star project that would add significant life to the Safford facilities. In South America, we've had great success through our exploration program in addition, identifying new sulfide resources at El Abra and we believe we will have the opportunity to consider investing in a concentrator operation there to expand production beyond the Sulfolix project. And in Africa, there's still opportunities to expand based on our oxide resources and to have a major expansion in the future with what appears to be a very significant attractive sulfide resource. 23 shows the growth outlook just for the Americas. Our operations in the U.S., Chile and Peru. With that expansion, you can see that we have a very attractive growth profile in the Americas, looking at 3.5 billion pounds of copper per year for a company that's been producing consolidated worldwide, about 4 billion pounds a year. And then, the projects that I mentioned beyond the ones that we're investing in currently have additional potential production volumes in a range of 1.5 billion pounds of copper a year incrementally. At Tenke, we've got a chart that shows our growth from our original project of 150,000 tons and now, we're moving up with our Phase 2 50,000 pounds -- 150 million pounds to 2014 with 400 million pounds. We see another further expansion with oxides and then, Phase 4 would involve processing the sulfide and there's question marks about that but we think it will be a significant improvement to our existing production. We are spending money on exploration, $275 million this year. You can see that's a global spend spread around the world. It's really focused on our existing orebodies in these great brownfield expansion opportunities that we have. For 2012, we are currently providing an outlook for 3.7 billion pounds of copper sales, 1.1 million ounces of gold, 81 million pounds of molybdenum. Our current outlook for unit costs adjusted for our experience in Grasberg in the first quarter is $1.43 a pound, which reflect the lower volumes that we've had. Cost in future years at Grasberg are expected to decline to historical levels as we get back to normal levels of operation. At those levels of production, at $3.50 copper, we would have $4.2 billion of operating cash flow. We do have some $1.1 billion of working capital used as anticipated this year, a significant leverage to copper prices. Our capital disclosures, capital expenditures disclosures have been increased to reflect the Morenci mill expansion and now $4.3 billion this year. Page 27 gives our outlook for copper sales. You can see the growth that occurs. We've added in, in 2014, 200 million pounds for the Morenci expansion, moving towards a 5 billion pound level with our current projects. Gold sales this year at Grasberg are affected by both grades and the situation of low productivity in the first quarter, returning to more normal levels in 2013 and 2014. Our quarterly outlook for sales of both copper, gold and molybdenum are presented on Page 28, again, showing the ramp up at Grasberg. Our operating estimates in terms of cash unit costs and sales by region are shown on Page 29. As I mentioned, the consolidated expected net cash cost of $1.43 is impacted significantly by the abnormal year that we're having in Indonesia as a result of the first quarter situation at Grasberg. The reconciliation of unit costs are presented on Page 23, showing our $1.01 net unit cost in 2011 reconciled to $1.43. $0.24 of that is resulting from the higher cost of Grasberg because of volumes and work productivity. As I indicated, with a successful ramp up, we would back to normal levels going forward after this year. Page 31 is our standard slide that we show, showing average EBITDA numbers and operating cash flow numbers. This is at $1,200 gold, $12 molybdenum and varying copper prices. At $3.50 copper, we would have $9.3 billion of EBITDA and just under $7 billion of operating cash flows and you can see how that varies as prices change. And then, for your use in looking at sensitivities to these outlooks, we present on Page 32, the impact of changing commodity prices in certain of our important input costs. Capital expenditures, as I mentioned, have been increased in 2012 and 2013 for the Morenci mill expansion, now stand at $4.3 billion this year and roughly, the same level next year. Our balance sheet is strong. We've gone from 5 years ago with $17.6 billion of debt, now down to $3.5 billion of debt, with consolidated cash at $4.5 billion and you can see that our credit ratings have improved over time and we took advantage of our investment grade credit rating to do this very attractive debt refinancing, and the details of it are presented on Page 35. We issued $3 billion of new notes in mid February, which in hindsight, turned out to be out to be a good time, with varying maturity rates but with an average interest cost of 3%. We used these proceeds to redeem $3 billion of debt that carried a coupon of 8.375% which we issued in connection with the Phelps Dodge transaction. This gives annual significant interest cost savings. We don't get a significant tax cover because of our structure from interest costs, so this is a significant savings for us, and since 2009 through repaying debt and refinancing debt, we've got $420 billion (sic) [million] of annual interest cost savings, which is very significant. From a financial policy standpoint, we're committed to a strong balance sheet, strong liquidity. We are investing in attractive growth projects. And I want to emphasize attractive projects. We're going to be disciplined in the way we look at this so that we add to our portfolio of assets, those that provide incremental benefits in positive times but we will have a portfolio that we can manage if we have to adjust it in response to, let me just say, non-attractive times like we did in 2008, 2009. We're increasing our common stock dividend. We have increased it. That reflects a long-term Freeport board philosophy of shareholder returns and our board discusses financial policy with us and reviews it on an ongoing basis. That is a summary of our current situation and outlook. We'd be happy now, operator, to open the line for questions.