Russel Ball - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Analyst
Thanks Dick and let me firstly apologize for the non-accountants that spent [inaudible] this morning at least working their way through our numbers. I will say that despite the red ink, you see in the table up there, we actually had an extremely strong fourth quarter and I will explain why in some detail. Looking at the table, equity gold sales as Dick said right on line at about 5.3 for the year. We did as Dick said made conscious decision not to push our operations right to the limit. And in fact ended up sitting on about 80,000 equity ounces and 19 million equity pounds of copper at year-end in order to affect what Dick has talked to about a level or more consistent, if you want, production profile and not always having the back-end loading. And again that gives us more confidence going into 2008. The realized gold prices you see, strong fourth quarter at 785 and around 700 for the year, but clearly a long way off the roughly $949, $950 that we are sitting at today. So to Dick's point, the company is focused on delivering the numbers that I'll point out in our 2008 outlook. And if you do that we should see significant margin expansions and significantly improve bottom line. The cost applicable to sales, again a strong fourth quarter, we were at 384 and for the year around 406. As we spoke to the analysts a couple of weeks ago we mad a conscious decision not to hedge the Aussie dollar and that cost us $9 or $10. If you subtract that, we would have been roughly… we would have been at the higher end of our original guidance back in January this year. We do have an ongoing program to hedge some of those exposures and we have to reduce some of that volatility going forward. And as I said and I will move to the next slide, the accountants, myself included, managed to put a lot of red on the income statement. The one thing even as the accountants can't mess up is the cash flow. And if you look at the cash flow for the quarter, it speaks to the strength of the operation. We were at $630 million. You see the number there for the full year at $525 million. That really is impacted by some one-off transactions that we have provided more detail on earnings release in which you can find an excruciating detail in the 10-K, which was filed a couple of hours ago. The normalized number is about 1.6, but you can see the leverage for the fourth quarter at around 1.4 million, at again 785 we produced about $630 million in operating cash flow. Capital for the year, as Dick said, we continue to continue to focus through the capital effectiveness program and we came in at $100 million or so below the low end of our original guidance. So, while it might not have looked like it and certainly I think it was Victor Flores commenting this morning that you could drive yourself nuts trying to figure out what they actually earned. Hopefully as we turn to slide 5, I can do that fairly quickly because a lot of these items we had spoken to the Street about and disclosed to the Street before we reported numbers this morning. So, focusing on the quarter, we did end up having to take an impairment charge. It is a non-cash charge related to exploration goodwill. This goodwill was put on the books in February 2002 with the three-way acquisition of Normandy and Franco-Nevada. We have spent a lot of time discussing that accounting and the model we have to substantiate that value with the ACC over the years. What the model dose do is it requires us to update assumptions every year and when we updated the assumptions this year in light of higher capital operating and finding costs somewhat offset by a higher gold price assumption, a higher risk-free rate, which results in higher discount rate to apply to future cash flows and the less than expected exploration additions that were built into the model. Again, the model was meant to extrapolate or historical results are meant to extrapolate predictive success of the future and we had to adjust what was in the model for the results over the last couple of years, which we communicated to the Street a couple of weeks ago for 2007 at least. So, when we did that in random numbers, we weren't able to substantiate the value that was on the balance sheet so we took the $1.12 billion charge in the fourth quarter. Again, non-cash because there is no deferred tax implication, both the pre and post-tax numbers are the same. We did have to write down in terms of our accounting policy to investments, one was in Shore Gold and the other in the Gabriel, the Rosia Montana project. In terms of our policy again if the securities under it cost for more than a six-month period, we write it down. Again non-cash and when those investments turn, clearly we will be able to recognize a gain if they do turn, otherwise we have recognized the loss to the end of the year. So, another non-cash charge. We, as Dick alluded to, had a very successful IPO of the royalty portfolio, another non-core asset. Again pre-tax gain of about $900 million, you will see reflected there as a post-tax gain of $600 million. Again because we made the decision in Q2 that we were getting out of the merchant banking business, which is reflected in the discontinued operation section of the income statement. We had a minor tax adjustment on Zarafshan was a gain. So we put it up there. And then we had other discontinued operations, which is basically the royalty portfolio to the date of the transaction, December 21. So, those royalties accrued to us for most of the fourth quarter but obviously one accrued to us for 2008 and onwards and a small gain from the sale of Pajingo asset. So when you do the math and as we spoke to our Board yesterday, you get to about $0.50 number for the quarter. Looking at the full year, in addition to those items we spoken to, we did have the loss in the second quarter that Dick... on third quarter at least that Dick mentioned when we eliminated the hedge book. That's reflected there of $358 million. In addition to that we had spoken previously to the Street about the charge we took on the minority interest loan repayment at Batu Hijau. In addition, we wrote off the merchant banking goodwill, again another non-tax charge. We took that in the second quarter and that again reflects our decision to exit the merchant banking business and that was again reflected in our second quarter results that are shown here for the year-to-date. Some minor other adjustments but again you can do the math somewhere in the 120 to 130 range is where we ended up for 2007. So while we do acknowledge certainly a lot of items or transactions that impacted both the quarter and the year, again a lot of them tied directly to the strategic initiatives that Dick alluded to. So, when you look at the cash flows and in particular based on the realized price, you can actually see we had a very strong quarter notwithstanding the fact that we once sat on a lot of inventory and two had a significant unrealized write... not writedown but mark-to-market adjustment on our copper provisional pricing at Batu. For those who follow the industry Freeport had a similar adjustment where essentially we reflect sales that are still outstanding and being provisionally priced at the spot price of year-end, which was I think $3.02 is what we use. Today with copper around 370 odd, we should see most, if not all of that, comeback in the first quarter or second quarter of 2008. So again it's just a timing issue and reflects the volatility, quite frankly of the copper price and the fact that all of our copper in this case and gold is unhedged. So again turning to slide 5 or 6 now, focusing on the outlook for 2008, again we communicated this a couple of weeks ago in our release and at our Analyst Day. Equity gold sales largely flat somewhere between 5.1 and 5.4, cost applicable to sales, I think it's a 6% increase. The last time I looked at it, it was about 4.25 to 4.50. I will predicate that with an $80 with taxes fuel assumption and an $87.5 Aussie, we are obviously offside on both those assumptions today, but at least in respect of the Aussie dollar we are putting in a disciplined hedging program that will eliminate some of that volatility going forward. Copper sales, slightly down as we... again we spoke to the analyst. 2008 and 2009 at Batu reflect years of lower grades and higher strip, 2010 and 11 were back in the heart of the old body at the bottom of Phase V and we will see those numbers climb significantly. The lower sales is reflected in the higher cost at Batu. Consolidated CapEx, which includes about $200 million of minority CapEx that we end up consolidating from Batu and Yanacocha somewhere between $1.8 billion and $2 billion and you can see the rest of the numbers. Just may be focusing on the tax rate for a second, obviously a lot of volatility and movement around that tax rate with all these non-recurring items, again as I've said before, somewhere between 30% and 34% is a long-term tax rate, excluding the effect of these once-off transaction, if you want, that can distort the tax rate significantly.