Earnings Labs

Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited (HMY)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Mon, Feb 3, 2014

$15.63

-5.07%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited Second Quarter 2014 and Six Months Ended the 31st December 2013 Results. (Operator Instructions) Please also note that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Graham Briggs. Please go ahead, sir.

Graham Briggs

Management

Thank you Dillon, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you may be. With me I have Frank Abbott to help me through the financials. We also have Mashego here. So we can pretty well answer hopefully most of the questions that you have. And if not of course Marian and Henrika are available on the e-mails if you want to send them [inaudible] questions. On Slide 2, the Safe Harbor statement, and I'm going through the presentation as you have hopefully picked it up off the website. Agenda, Slide 3, we'll talk about mining, profitable ounces, where our focus is and our focus is on margin, talk about Wafi-Golpu, a little bit of information about Wafi-Golpu and what we are doing there. Frank will take us through the financial results and then I will conclude. On Slide 5, our strategy, this is a slide that has not changed much over the many years that we've had it and it's certainly our intent to continue to pay dividends into the future. So we're really looking and focusing on margin and therefore growth in profits. Then it comes out of the second bullet point down growth in margin and therefore the free cash flow [inaudible]. A lot of work we've been doing in the last few months, in the last few quarters in fact, and will probably continue until the next six months is really looking at optimizing the operational delivery, trying to deliver on the projects that we spent capital on and really focusing on our operational plans to be able to deliver on those. Sharing our rewards and profits, we've talked about dividends. And obviously we have a host of other stakeholders as well. Slide 6 is the rand per kilogram, the all-in sustaining costs but I like us to…

Frank Abbott

Management

Thank you Graham. If we go over to Slide 28, look at our income statement and quarter, you see there, there is the September quarter in dollars. If you look at the revenue line, it is flat, and that's because of the gold [inaudible] increased by 5%, but also offset by the 5% reduction in the gold plants. Our cash operating cost reduced with $24 million; the savings in electricity, $19 million. In South Africa, we didn't have the [inaudible] during the quarter of December. And from Hidden Valley, we had a $5 million [inaudible]. Inventory movement was negative $15 million. And this is a result of the reduction in gold inventory over this period, the previous period we build up gold inventory and in this period it reduced. Our operating profit was $7 million lower. Amortization was pretty much same as the previous quarter. Exploration expenditure was slightly lower. Foreign exchange translation loss, $13 million, this is only $270 million loan that we had for Papua New Guinea [inaudible] [our income statement in rand] [ph], we convert that to rand and the rand weakened against the dollar. And then we convert that back to dollar for purposes of these statements. Our taxation was $1 million versus $4 million in the previous quarter. That gave us a loss of $3 million. The exchange rate for the quarter 10.12 versus 9.96 for the previous quarter. If we turn over to Slide 29. We wanted to just show the impact of the foreign exchange translation on results, the net loss for the period was $10 million. The foreign exchange translation loss was $13 million. Our net profit, excluding this, was $3 million. If I turn over, I’m on page – Slide 30 but Slide 31, we have our cash flow summary quarter-on-quarter…

Graham Briggs

Management

Thanks, Frank. For conclusion I'd like to go to Slide 34. This slide is really about the sort of foundations again in our strategy, what we've said, what we've done and the picture going forward. Growth in margin, we have, as indicated some time ago, we closed the last shaft that we intended to close. Now we're looking down every operation and looking at the unprofitable areas like we have at Doornkop closing that. We've had some changes in management. Those changes mainly have happened in the general manager level and the human resources management level, and then done quite a bit of restructuring of the labor force, [inaudible] should be below R400,000 a kilogram on an all-in sustaining cost. At the same time, focusing on operational delivery and optimization, we have the advantage of the lowest rand per tonne and we need to continue to keep that advantage. Capital and other costs we've been reducing. That has gone through the whole company. There's obviously still more work to be done. The easy stuff is done. And we need to do some more of it. And then we’ve got the ore reserve flexibility. Slide 35 is just an indication of what we think is where the upside in the share price is, we’ve got increasing grades, lowest rand per tonne, good capital discipline, free cash flow, we still remain unhedged both in gold terms as well as in exchange rates, certainly got balance sheet strength and [inaudible] low debt. We're geared very much to the South African currency, because 93% of our gold is produced here in South Africa, obviously what happens in South Africa and to the currency is very important. We've got earnings growth, and then Golpu one of the top gold/copper resource of the world, there's no doubt about that. from the graph on the right-hand side gives you an idea of what the market cap for reserve ounce is in Harmony versus other companies, and $24 an ounce versus $65 on a South African peers, and then of course internationally the cost per ounce is very much higher. In short, we really have been focusing on managing costs and production. Kusasalethu was a bit of a disappointment on the production but certainly we believe we're over that. We’re going to mine profitably in future, there's no doubt about that. And that's really what management's approach is. There is in the presentation some appendices, some detail on grade, detail on rand per kilogram, cost year-to-date versus what we gave guidance about, both in rand terms and in dollars and then a graph on all-in sustaining costs at the rand per kilogram dollar per ounce level. Thank you very much. I'd like to open up the call now to questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) It appears we have no questions. Do you have any closing comments?

Graham Briggs

Management

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for listening to us. Thank you for taking the time out to read through our presentation. Hopefully you will find further information in our quarterly booklets. And obviously there is a lot of financial information there as well. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of the day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. On behalf of the Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect.