Earnings Labs

Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited (HMY)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Aug 14, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the international conference call for Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited's Fourth Quarter Results of financial year 2014 and the year ended on 30 June 2014. All participants will be in listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity to ask questions after today's presentation. (Operator Instructions) Please also note that this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to the Company's CEO, Mr. Graham Briggs. Please go ahead, sir.

Graham Briggs

Management

Thank you very much and good afternoon or good morning if you happen to be out in the Americas and a very warm welcome to our quarter four and year ending results. I have with me Alwyn Pretorius, Chief Operating Officer; I've got Herman Perry. Herman is standing in for Frank Abbott who is recovering from an operation; and also Mashego here, you've probably heard him or maybe even seen him before. I'm going to go through the presentation, hopefully you picked that up from the Web-site, and going to focus on certain areas that certainly it's an interesting year that we've had. Let's just start off on Slide 2, Safe Harbor statement, of course worth reading, and it's my duty to bring your attention to that. On the agenda, we'll go through some of the highlights, both the annual as well as quarterly, and then go through with the Harmony story, if you like, because all from that gets a bit lost in the various strips of detail and the various issues that happened in mining. So firstly on highlights, and I'm now on Slide 5, really working towards profitability and free cash flow. The year has been nice in that there's been an increase in gold production; a reduction in all-in sustaining costs, quite marked in dollars per ounce, 18% drop in dollars per ounce, 4% in rand per kilogram; improvements in the underground grade year-on-year, there's a growth in the takes which I'll take you through. And I think we've also been quite responsible with our capital expenditure, another graph in the capital expenditure but it's 30% down and it's right on target for where we said it would be. We have recently talked about the – had a press release out about Phakisa shaft decline but…

Herman Perry

Management

Thank you, Graham. Good day, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to take you through a few aspects of the financial results for Harmony growth for the 2014 financial year. Starting at the extracts from the cash flow statement, cash [indiscernible], if we look at cash flow from operations before exploration, you see that we have generated $245 million on that line and that is a touch more than the total capital expenditure for the group over the same year. Now those capital expenditure includes both sustaining as well as growth capital. So that part of our growth we have funded internally, and the exploration expenditure, the other line on there is also an investment into Harmony's future and it is the only item that we had to fund otherwise. Looking at the net debt result at the bottom, a net debt rate of less than $100 million, or put another way less than one month's gold sales for Harmony. Moving over to the extracts from the income statement and operating results, starting at the top line, revenue line, now in the year we had, Graham had spoken about, improvements in grade and improvements in production. We had a 4% increase in ounces sold year-on-year and that has helped us to offset the 19% decrease there in the average dollar gold price, so that we ended at a 16% decrease there year-on-year. If we look at the production cost line, cash operating costs in the rand slide, you see that that has increased by only 4% year on year and that's really credit to our operation colleagues managing costs very well, particularly labor cost year-on-year in rand terms is only up about 2% and contracting cost year-on-year up by only 1%. In addition we had the massive cost savings at…

Graham Briggs

Management

Thanks Herman. Just on Slide 24, I think what you're seeing in the results there from what Herman has been talking is that we have got financial flexibility. We continue investing in our assets, we continue investing in exploration, even though sometimes we have low gold price cycle, like we probably have now, and we think we've got great exploration properties in Papua New Guinea and we'll continue exploring those. Of course very geared to the rand gold price and dollar gold price or the rand-dollar exchange rate. Slide 25 is giving a little bit more of a breakdown in the capital expenditure and also the capital expenditure predicted into the future. You can see that there's more money going to be spent on maintenance capital I guess from roughly 700 million rand to just over 1 billion, and then a slight increase in the ongoing capital development. We've got the same numbers in dollars, we've used I think 10.50 for the exchange rate share, and so you can see there is that increase. Of course that's only the prediction of the rand exchange rate. It's not what we used in our reserves calculation, we think we used 10.17, which is far more scientifically that we have just used 10.5 because probably more realistic for the day. Slide 27, this is a plan of Phakisa and you can see Tshepong on the right, the Tshepong mine, Phakisa mine. The orange area on that graph, that is the area that the declined project would have got to. The project reserve there would have been 3.4 million ounces in our previous reserve statement and we have decided not to do that project. It's basically looking at our capital expenditure and being prudent about that and rather get the production of Kusasalethu, Doornkop,…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from David [Borussia] (ph) from [Bitwire] (ph). Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Thank you for the presentation. I just wanted to ask you about the possible refinancing of your 300 million revolver. In December you were already in early talks a few months ago regarding the financing and I'm wondering if there is any update in that regard.

Graham Briggs

Management

I'm going to ask Herman to answer that question, if you don't mind.

Herman Perry

Management

Our intention is to refinance that and we will certainly communicate to the market when that is done. We're finding that the lending group is very supportive and we had unforeseen issues with that.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, that's all, thanks.

Graham Briggs

Management

Okay, then we just wrap up if I can? Ladies and gents, interesting year, a challenging year, that's for sure. There has been some changes in the Company. Alwyn has obviously taken control of the operations here in South Africa and we've spent a lot of time on safety, on the bottlenecks, on looking at the assets. Certainly there is a plan in place to get the best out of the assets. So I'm feeling more confident about that. And the big challenge that we've had during the year obviously has been the sort of uncertainty around labor, I think we have managed through that quite well, and hopefully we have a calm financial year 2015 with respect to labor. The gold price, I think everyone is sort of calling it fairly static. The bears was at 1,000, the bulls at 1,400, I think we can call it fairly flat. Obviously as gold mining executives, we are a little bit more bullish on that. But we are highly geared to the gold price and obviously the rand exchange rate. Ladies and gents, thanks a lot for listening to us.

Operator

Operator

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited, that concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines.