Caledonia Mining Corporation - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Caledonia Mining Q4 Results Presentation. I'd now like to hand you across to Mark Learmonth, the CEO. Mark, over to you.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. Welcome to this webinar to discuss Caledonia's results for the fourth quarter of 2024 and for the year. I'm here in Jersey. I'm joined also in Jersey by Ross Jerrard, our CFO, who joined today. In Johannesburg, I've got James Mufara, our Chief Operating Officer, and Victor Gapare, an Executive Director who is based in Harare, Zimbabwe. In case I need them, I've got accounting support in Johannesburg and Bulawayo. Okay, shall we get into this? If you could move to the next slide, please, Daryl. If you just move forwards. We've got the disclaimer next, which I think we just need to pause on, Daryl. Okay, forward a little bit. That's the presentation too much we've already dealt with. Okay, let's move on to the summary.

Record gross profit for the year of nearly $77 million. That's up 86% from 2023. That pretty much slowed down to the bottom line with net attributable profit of just under $19 million compared to a loss of $4 million in the previous year. That's reflected in stronger operating cash flow. That's after tax and interest and working capital before CapEx and dividends. That was nearly $42 million compared to just less than $15 million in the previous year. Production of Blanket was within guidance, slightly towards the top end of the guidance range. There was also continuing very small production from Bilboes oxides, which I will refer to very briefly. Last week, we—so there's a lot more information on these results as we go through this presentation.

Last week, we announced that we're going to extend the period of time we need to look at the feasibility study for Bilboes. That gives us time to assess some factors, some of which have only materialized within the last month, and to optimize the project economics. We have a little bit more on that. We had some good exploration success at Blanket and Motapa, which has encouraged us to do more work in that area. We will have a slide on that. Just to say that we, on Monday, we announced a further dividend of $0.14 for the quarter, making $0.56 for the year. It is fair to say also that we've had some fairly significant changes to the board and to management over the course of the last year or so, with James joining as CMO in May.

That has given rise to a very substantial turnaround in the operating performance at the mine, particularly at the mine as opposed to the metallurgical plant. You have seen also that we have refreshed and strengthened the board with some recent board appointments. We are joined today by Ross, who has taken over from Chester as the CFO. Ross is very welcome. Shall we move forward? Next slide. Before we get into this, I just want to touch very briefly on the delay in the publication of the accounts. We put out a press release about a week ago, which notified people that we needed an extra week to evaluate an accounting issue that had been identified right at the end of the audit process. The accounting issue really relates to the calculation of deferred tax for the year to 31 December 2019.

This is about five or six years old. That then flows through into subsequent years. Just to be absolutely clear, this was an error relating to the calculation of deferred tax. It also flows through into the calculation of unrealized foreign exchange gains and losses. Below that, it then flows through into profit after loss. I want to make it absolutely clear that this error had nothing to do with actual tax payments or any submissions that were made to the Zimbabwean tax authorities. I also want to make it very clear that this has nothing to do with cash. The accounts that we published this morning for the year to December 2024 also include restatements of the prior year accounts for 2022 and 2023.

At the back of the audited financial statements, I think note 40, you'll find full disclosure of the various line items which have been affected by this restatement. In summary, it's deferred tax, it's IFRS profit, and retained earnings. To be absolutely clear, this has got nothing to do with cash or with actual income tax calculations. Okay, shall we just move on to touch on the results themselves? Starting off with safety and production, it's probably best if I hand over to James at this stage. If you'd just like to say a few words about safety and production, please.

James Mufara (COO)

Thank you very much, Mark. Good day to you all. On the safety front, I mean, following the loss of life incident that we had on the 21st of September, which was the previous quarter, which we already reported on, we embarked on a journey to see real risk reduction and to put better controls to make sure that we actually move up the cave with regards to our safety. We wanted to embark on a culture, if a lot of you would remember, I joined on the 1st of May. We wanted to embark, and we realized that there was quite a lot of safety protocols that we left on. We had employees basically that followed safety protocols primarily out of obligation.

The idea is to want to move the dial where employees work, not because I have to follow rules because I have to, but you need employees to have an identity that I need to follow rules because I want to. Over and above the internal audit that we did with regards to the incident that we had had, we decided to also put in place a number of measures, the first of which was to appoint a group chief manager, an experienced group chief manager coming from Harmony, who himself put a structure in place with regards to ventilation, health, and safety, and split all the departments into the appropriate departments. He also looked at five other areas that we will be embarking on so that we can actually have a better safety culture on the mine.

The bucket would be to strengthen governance and risk management, to strengthen emergency preparedness, to strengthen safety practices, organizational capability, and to move to look at the whole safety culture and improve it. The safety culture, the safety culture, the flywheel has started to move. It started to turn now. It's a question of getting the momentum in place. We can already see the massive improvement that we are gaining with regards to that. In the last quarter, which is the fourth quarter or Q4, we actually had 88 out of 100 accident-free days, which is a marked improvement or a record within the safety history. In terms of production as well, we had a very good production quarter. We also had a very good end of year ending up on 19,841 ounces, I mean, compared to quarter three, which was 18,992 ounces.

I will touch further on production with regards to the next slide. Over to you, Mark.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah, we'll go back to production in more detail later. It's fair to say across the board, a substantial increase in performance, obviously helped by the higher gold price. The average realized gold price in the quarter was just over $2,600 compared to just over $1,900 in the comparable quarter. For the year, it was just over $2,300. For those of you who follow the gold market, that won't come as a great surprise to you. That supports the substantial increase in revenue and also supports the increase in gross profits. $21 million for the quarter and $77 million for the year compared to clearly lower numbers previously. I already mentioned the increase in net profit attributable to shareholders.

One thing I would just draw to your attention, we declared a dividend again, $0.14, just to reinforce the fact that previously we used to declare dividends on a sort of metronomic quarterly basis. We've disclosed for several quarters now that that's now been changed slightly so that we declare the dividend at the same time as the board approves the accounts. It just sort of streamlines board processes. Now, for most quarters, that doesn't really make much of a difference. For this particular, for the publication of Q4, it does mean that the dividend that we declared, or we used to declare and pay at the end of sort of March or something, that does get pushed out a bit. There is a little bit of a phasing issue. For the year, the total dividend is $0.56, and that hasn't changed.

Shall we just go into a little bit more detail on production? James, can I ask you to talk to this slide?

James Mufara (COO)

Thank you very much, Mark. As already previously stated, we had a very good end of year and Q4 in particular, ending up on 76,656 ounces, which is a 1.6% improvement compared to 2023. The tons for 2024, which is 797,479 tons, is a record. As you can see from the graph, it is the first time that we actually hit those sort of numbers, which is 3.5% higher than the 2023 number. This was primarily as a result of three areas where we saw quite a good improvement. It was better utilization of central shaft, which is now fully operational after all the work that we have done over the years. It was secondly as a result of better equipment availability that we have underground. Thirdly, it was also due to better labor productivity within our sections.

As you'd see, the grade has remained almost the same for a number of years, almost from 2014 to where we are. If you look at sort of year on year, we actually went down from 3.255 to 3.2 from 2024 to 2023. Although specifically, quarter four was 3.18 grams per ton, quarter three, which we have already reported on, we had a fall of ground in one of our high-grade stopes called Heroica, which actually exposed our need for better flexibility with regards to mining space. We have since embarked on better development. As you can see, our tonnage has been going up year on year, meaning to say that we actually need to open up more areas so that we can have better flexibility.

This year's development, which is really well improved, and last year's by end of year will actually help us in the years to come with regards to flexibility. The reserve grade for Blanket is sitting around 3.3 grams per ton, and we will not mine further than the, I mean, not much higher than 3.2 grams per ton, which is where we expect to land in this year. The mine had an excellent production year in 2024. I mean, December month actually summed up, it was the icing on the cake where we ended up on 89,727 tons, a record for the month. I mean, we had never reached such a milestone. It actually exceeded our crushing and milling capacity at Blanket. We ended up with a stockpile of 8,487 tons, which we created.

It is good to report that actually that stockpile has been growing as well, even in this financial year. If you look at the bottom graph, one of the graphs that you'll see is the recovery, I mean, which has been sort of taking an up and down movement. However, for the year, we ended up on 93.6% recovery, which is still very, very high, and which is our plan. Last year, it was just higher at 93.8%. It was just higher than our plan, which is not really going to be sustainable.

By world-class standards, 93.6% is still quite a high recovery, which we have actually managed to keep there because of the work that we've done with regards to the oxygen plant that we've installed, the Knelson concentrators that we have been replenishing over the years to make sure that our free gold recovery is on point, and the tanks that we've also been installing. We can see that production is really stabilized. This year, we've started off with a huge stockpile of 8,487, and we expect that this production should stabilize and be better going into the future. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah, no, thank you, James. I mean, the difficulty we've always had, or we've had over the last year or so, has been our inability to blast the ore, tram the ore, and hoist it. We had sort of, I'll just say, breakdowns. We had breakdowns in that process somewhere. What James has managed to do is he's managed to get this whole operation working much more cleanly, much more efficiently with blasting, with tramming, and with hoisting. The growth of the stockpile is very welcome. That's something we've not had before. Okay, thank you very much, James. Shall we move on to the next page? What this shows us for the quarter, it breaks down the consolidated results.

It shows you what's been going on at Blanket, what's been going on at Bilboes, and other, which is really sort of intercompany eliminations and head office costs. You can see quite clearly at the Blanket level, revenue very strong. The royalty stays the same. The government royalty stays the same at 5%. Production costs at Blanket, broadly the same, about just $19 million, although we would like to get that down a bit. Depreciation very slightly down a bit. That's for sort of technical reasons. Gross profit is, what, $20 million compared to $11 million in the previous quarter. Quarter on quarter, Bilboes has had very little impact. There is a slide coming later which shows how we've quarterized the losses from Bilboes. At the moment, we're continuing to re-leach the heap pads at Bilboes, helped by the slightly higher gold price.

We will continue to do that for as long as that leaching process covers the direct costs. It is basically washing its face. Other, as I have said, is corporate and group adjustments. Shall we move on to the next slide? What you see are two graphs. Left-hand side is the on-mine cost. Right-hand side is the all-in sustaining cost. It just basically shows how our costs have developed and progressed from quarter four, 2023, to quarter four, 2024. Looking at the on-mine cost, you can see we had a benefit, 7% odd benefit as a result of putting Bilboes back onto care and maintenance. Negligible movement on power. Some increase in labor.

Now, part of that in the quarter would be we had to rely very heavily towards the end of the quarter on overtime and a special bonus system that we introduced specifically for December. Because, truth be told, the first half of the fourth quarter was very difficult, largely because of a sharp deterioration in the electricity supply. Had we not made those interventions, I suspect at the end of November, I think actually quarter four would look quite sick. Thankfully, we made those interventions and we pulled quarter four round very nicely. Then an increase in consumables, which is largely costs relating to equipment, underground pumps, LHDs, that sort of thing. That walks the cost up from what it was in 2023 to 2024. You can see on the right-hand side, you have how the all-in sustaining cost moves.

Some increase due to on-mine cost, some faffing around with share-based expense and sort of accounting jiggery-pokery, sustaining CapEx, and procurement margin. Okay? It is fair to say that management is very conscious that these costs are higher than we've had historically. We are exploring ways over the course of the next few years to get down the on-mine cost, particularly focusing on labor and electricity. Use our labor more intelligently and actually reduce our electricity usage. At the all-in sustaining cost level, that will obviously benefit from any reduction in the on-mine cost. We are also looking at what we can do to reduce our sustaining CapEx. Sustaining CapEx does remain very high. In 2024, sustaining CapEx was $19 million, which equates to about $240 an ounce. In 2025, it'll be about $30 million, which is about $400 an ounce.

That really goes in that sustaining CapEx is going to things like development, which James has explained is important to improve our mine flexibility. It's got to go into things like milling and the tailings facility. The work on the new tailings dump continues, including we need that because we need somewhere to deposit the waste. We have continued to spend heavily on engineering to increase the robustness and the resilience of the equipment at Blanket. That higher level of sustaining CapEx will continue for 2025 and 2026. We would expect it to begin to fall away from 2027 onwards. Can we move on? Right, this really just shows everything below gross profit. We discussed revenue. We discussed on-mine costs. Below gross profit, you've got net foreign exchange losses in the quarter, which were only $600,000 in the fourth quarter.

For the year, they were much higher. It was very pleasing to see that the local currency, the ZiG, has stabilized in the fourth quarter. That has continued through into the first quarter. We are not seeing a recurrence of the very substantial FX losses that we incurred in the first nine months of the year. Other is a ragbag of stuff. It primarily includes $2 million of retirement costs. As you will recall, in the third quarter, we initiated a retirement program, which affected just over 100 people who were over the age of 60 for manual work and 65 for non-manual. That was an action that really should have been taken some time ago. We bit the bullet. 104 people were retired.

I'm also pleased to say that as part of that retirement program, you have seen a very significant cultural shift at Blanket, which has contributed to the very strong performance in the fourth quarter. Tax is a combination of income tax, our old friend deferred tax, but also a significant component of withholding tax that we incur as we move money around the group. The NCI, the non-controlling interest, that is the minorities at Blanket. That takes you down to adjusted earnings per share for the quarter, which was $0.443 compared to $0.02 in the fourth quarter of 2023. Okay, shall we move forward? This graph looks a bit stark. All I was trying to do here is to show, to split out gross profit at Blanket from gross profit at Bilboes.

Blanket's in the top half, and you can see that gross profit in 2022 was $17 million, down to $11 million. In that first half of 2023, Blanket's performance was really not very good, largely because of lower production and higher costs. You can see now towards the back end of 2024, we're now getting a gross profit of $22 million, nearly $20 million, and then just over $20 million. The point of this graph is to show that Blanket, as a cash-generative engine, is back where it should be. On the bottom half, you can see that Bilboes incurred losses of $3 million, $2 million, and $1 million in the first three quarters of 2023. In 2024, we've now quarterized that, as Blanket is now on care and maintenance and is just running so long as it will cover its operating costs.

I just want people to understand that the cash drain that was coming out of Blanket's poor performance and the cash drain that was coming out of Bilboes has now been dealt with. Okay, shall we move on to cash flow? Let's go to the next slide. Right. It's quite a dense slide. Frankly, I think this is probably the most relevant slide of the whole thing because really it all comes down to cash at the end of the day. Cash from operations before working capital, that's the first line. 2024, it was $65 million, which equates to about $1.25 million a week. In quarter four, it was $19 million. That's about $1.5 million a week. A very substantial improvement in the rate of cash generation in the fourth quarter compared to the previous three quarters. Right?

Below that, you've got the movements in working capital. If you look at these closely, you'll see that in the year, we absorbed $10 million into working capital. In the quarter, it was about $3.5 million into working capital. Quite substantial amounts of money being absorbed into working capital. There are really two main areas. One of those is inventories and prepayments. One of the ways we manage our exposure to possible devaluation of the ZiG is to make sure that if instead of holding ZiG cash balances, we use the ZiGs to buy inventories or to make prepayments as a way to reduce our ZiG holdings. That has given rise to some increase in the inventories and prepayments. Receivables has increased largely because of the high gold price, which just means there's more money flowing through the system.

There has been an absorption into working capital. The other area of significance here is net cash used in investing activities, which was $32 million for the year and nearly $13 million for the quarter. That is mainly sustaining CapEx at Blanket. Of the $32 million spent in a year, $27 million was spent at Blanket. Of that $27 million, that's broken down in paragraph 4.4 of the MG&A. That's broken down as the main components being the continued work on the tailings facility and on development. Bilboes and Motapa also absorbed $3 million in a year. That was largely on the ongoing work on the feasibility study and exploration at Motapa, which actually turned out to be rather good. The final thing would be cash used in financing activities. That's a combination of the Caledonia dividend, which is just under $11 million.

Dividends paid to the Blanket minorities, which is about $1.6 million. Offset against that will be increases in debt, which includes further modest issues of bonds to institutional holders in Zimbabwe and movements in overdrafts. Some improvement in cash, but we do intend, at this high gold price, to focus on improving our cash position. Okay? Shall we just move on? This, again, very similar, this slide, very similar to the one I showed you about gross profit, is intended to show how the quarter-on-quarter cash generation in the last sort of three quarters or so has improved after the sort of the dip, the sort of hiatus in late 2022 and early 2023. Okay, let's turn to the feasibility study. Work on that's progressing well with support from DRA and other technical consultants. The feasibility study will supersede the PEA that was published in June 2024.

We put out a press release last week, the fact that we want to extend the timeline that we need to complete this feasibility study. That's for several reasons. The first is to give DRA more time to do their work. We also want to explore some new development options which have become apparent. One of them will be the potential, and I say the potential, to export concentrate in the project. Previously, we thought that we'd had very strong indications that that would not be acceptable to the Zimbabwe government, and they wanted very strongly to have in-country beneficiation. Now we understand that given the complexity of processing complex gold metallurgists such as Bilboes, the Zimbabwe government may be more flexible on this.

If we can export concentrate, that will mean that we would not need to incur the whether we can get that for a short period of time or for the entire duration of the project remains to be seen. If we can achieve that, that would significantly reduce the capital expenditure by removing the need to build a BIOX plant. It would de-risk the project, particularly in the eyes of North American investors who are probably more wary about BIOX than investors elsewhere in the world. It may also have implications for the eventual tailings facility. Just looking at the tailings facility, currently the TSF, we intend to locate it on a very flat area in Bilboes.

We may be able to move it to an area at Motapa where we can effectively lean it against a hill and thereby reduce the need for one or more of the retaining walls, which again would reduce CapEx. The tailings facility is the biggest component of the entire capital of the project. It's nearly $100 million. Anything we can do to reduce that cost will benefit the project. Also, having seen some good results coming out of exploration at Motapa, we want to continue to do more work at Motapa and potentially one day fold into the Bilboes feasibility study a resource at the neighboring Motapa property. Okay? That's the work that's going on at Bilboes. Just turning onto the next page, just to reiterate, and I think I've said this before, just to reiterate our approach to funding Bilboes. Our objective is very simple.

It is to maximize Caledonia's NPV per share. That really includes three elements to it. The first is to optimize the overall project economics, get the best internal rate of return we can get on the project. That is why we are looking at areas of things like the potential impact of concentrate and/or moving the tailings facility. The next thing we want to do is to maximize the debt funding for the project within the constraints of financial prudence. The whole point of this is to minimize equity dilution. As part of that, we are also evaluating the potential for near-term revenue opportunities elsewhere in the portfolio, by which I mean potential to really heap pads at Bilboes, which is in the Bilboes property, and at Motapa.

We also think we may have some near-term revenue opportunities at Blanket on an oxide resource that we found late last year. In terms of debt funding, we think the project, the Bilboes project, has a very high capacity for debt. We think the non-recourse debt is more likely to be limited by overall banks' lending constraints of about 65-70% of the total cost of the project. If it was not for that, we believe that actually Bilboes could carry more debt. At this stage, there are three potential funding sources which are coming into focus, and they are set out there. One of them is African DFIs. The other one will be South African commercial banks working with ECIC Cover. The third is a resource specialist credit or private equity outfits. It could be one or any permutation of those three.

It is safe to say, whilst we've had preliminary engagement with all three of these groups, we can't really get down and get dirty until we have a feasibility study completed. Okay? At this stage, all the indications that we're receiving is the project is eminently fundable. Our focus now is on how do we optimize those projects' economics with a view to minimizing dilution. Okay? Shall we move forward? Just a word on exploration. At Motapa, the exploration focused on three areas which have historically been mined. That is Motapa North, Motapa Central, Motapa South. Very imaginative. We are very excited to have actually got good results from a new area called Mpudzi. Over the course of the year, we did just over 5,000 meters of RC drilling, 4,000 of DD drilling. That shows widespread mineralization of a 9-kilometer strike length.

This year, the program for this year is targeting shallow oxide potential at Mpudzi, and then also the deeper sulfide resource, which in due course, if we can find anything, would form part and parcel of the Bilboes project. That's Motapa, looking very exciting. At Blanket, as you know, in May, we did a resource upgrade. We more than doubled our S-K 1300 reserves and a very substantial increase in resources. This year, we're focused on increasing the confidence level of those resources to push more into reserves. We're also now beginning to evaluate new areas, and that's outside the existing mine footprint. That's on the Banded Ironstone Formation, which is about 800 meters to the east of the current mining area. We believe we've got potential for some shallow oxide resources at Blanket.

We're beginning to look more expansively at Blanket instead of the traditional areas that we're currently mining. I think we've pretty much finished. In terms of the outlook, as you can see, with James, James as the new COO, we're focused on maintaining stable production at Blanket. We want to get away from the gyrations that we've had over the course of the last two to three years. We're investigating near-term growth opportunities across the portfolio: Blanket, Bilboes, and Motapa. We continue to advance the work on Bilboes and how we can convert that into an asset, a producing asset. We're doing further exploration at Blanket and Motapa. In the next year or so, we'll continue to invest in Blanket with a view to achieving longer-term cost reductions and improving the reliability and the resilience of the Blanket operation.

I think we're finished, in which case we can open this to questions.

Operator (participant)

Thanks very much for that, Mark. If I could ask people to please raise their hand if they would like to ask a question, then we will bring people in to ask the questions. If I could just pause for a second, just whilst people raise their hands. Just give us one moment whilst people raise their hands. Okay, we've got our first question, which is from Nic Dinham. Nic, if you could please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Can everyone hear me?

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Okay, hi. Good afternoon. Great. Thank you. Just a couple of questions. One is, what is the status of the solar power project, the sale of that asset? That'll be the first question.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Sometime this week, we expect. Next.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Okay. The second question is to James.

It's a little bit about your sense of reliability of what you can produce out of the mine. I know we have a target that's gold-related. It seems to indicate that you should be able to pull out 800,000 tons out of the shaft, not necessarily process it, in the next year. Is that the right sort of number we should be pegging into our models?

James Mufara (COO)

Yes, Nic. That's the right sort of number. 800,000 we should pull out of the mine, yes. Excellent.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Okay. Welcome, because that's a very stable number. The third set of questions relates to Bilboes, and it's back to you, I think, Mark.

The tie-in with getting a resource or a reserve out of Motapa somehow gives me a sense that this could be almost like a year or two years to develop a reliable reserve that you could weave back into your feasibility study. That's the first question about the Bilboes.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Oh, sorry, you want me to answer? Yeah. Look, Nic, we'll take as long as it takes to get the best project we can. Okay? If we feel we've got a project that works, that's fundable based on just what's at Bilboes right now, that's fine. We'll run with that, and we can introduce Motapa at a later stage. If we feel that the introduction of Motapa would materially affect the equity and the debt story, we owe it to ourselves to consider that. Okay?

Like I say, if you go back to what I said, we'll consider things on the basis of net present value per share. Okay? That includes the effect of any delay in the project. Okay? Time value of money. The various sort of competing tensions will be optimize the project in terms of maximizing NPV, minimizing dilution, and doing something quickly or slowly.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Okay. The second. Sorry. No, that's fine. Thank you. The second thing was you're talking about maybe a change in the tailings dam strategy because you're looking for a hill. You also mentioned in passing that it could affect what you do. Obviously, the input there is if you are able to get your concentrates toll-treated by somebody else, the nature and designation of the TSF is going to change. Is that what you're thinking about?

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Correct. Yeah.

Now, that really only works if we can get permanent permission to export concentrates. If we only get temporary permission, that will still mean that we're going to need to set the tailings facility up from the outset so that it can receive material from a BIOX plant, even if that BIOX plant may not be in place for two years. 100%.

Nic Dinham (Analyst)

Okay. Finally, the toll-concentrate idea is awesome, I mean, from an outsider's perspective. It does seem to be the other side of the coin, which you may be limited in scale and volume of those exports simply because one can't imagine that too many people within the economic catchment area of your concentrates are going to be able to accept what you initially proposed to be your production.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah, correct. I would just say this opportunity has emerged very, very recently.

We do need time to consider it. There are swings and roundabouts. You're quite right. It is something we need to consider. This has only materialized within the last four or five weeks.

Operator (participant)

That's great. Thanks very much for that. We're now going to move on to Howie Flinker. Howie, if you'd like to unmute yourself and then talk to the team.

Hello, Mark. Hello, Victor.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Hi, Howie. Hi.

I have three short questions. One, do I read correctly that your bank debt is down to about $2 million?

No, slightly more than that. On net, it's in the slide somewhere. Our net cash would be let me just find it.

Thank you. Cash exceeds that.

You've got more cash than debt, yeah. The strategy will always be to have debt in country and cash out of the country. That will always be the strategy.

Okay. Second. Second, are your taxes going to be 42% as they seem to be in the fourth quarter?

Yeah, pretty much. If you were to look at the in the MG&A, we break down the tax. We break it down into Zimbabwe income tax, Zimbabwe deferred tax, South African income tax, and various bits of withholding tax. If you look at Zimbabwe income tax plus Zimbabwe deferred tax and express that as a look at that as a percentage of gross profit, which equates pretty closely to Blanket's PBT, you'll actually find that that rate is about 20-odd percent, 20, 24%. That's the underlying sort of proper commercial tax rate. The commercial tax rate in Zim is 25%, 24%. On top of that, we incur tax leakage.

I think it's about $1 million of withholding tax as we move things around the group. The management fees that we pay from Blanket to South Africa aren't tax allowable in Zim, but they also incur withholding tax. We have all of the expenses that we pretty much incur outside Blanket. That will be in Johannesburg, Harare, and here in Jersey, and they aren't offsetable against profit because either here in Jersey, it's a zero tax regime, or there is no taxable profit. You'll find that we're doing the best we can, but you're going to find that our effective tax rate does remain somewhat high because of structural inefficiencies, but not things that we can readily address.

Okay. The last question is probably some technical error. I got a weird announcement this morning.

You bought back 11,500 shares at $42 or something there. Is that some technical error by the service provider?

I got quite excited about that. Yeah. So that's a company called Caledonia Investments, which is a U.K. investment trust. And somehow, I do not know how it happened, but somehow their announcement ended up on our website. I think it's been rectified. I hope it has.

I'm slightly excited about that, but I wanted to verify.

I got slightly excited about that as well.

That's all I have. Thanks.

Thank you, Howie.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tate Sullivan. Tate, if you please go ahead, unmute yourself, and put your answer to the team.

Tate Sullivan (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you. Hi, Howie, Mark. You mentioned retirement expenses in Q4. Within your cost guidance for 2025, are you planning more retirement expenses?

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

No. No. They will be, but they'll be damn enemies.

I mean, 104 people out of a workforce of 2,200 reflects the fact that we haven't really, well, we haven't imposed this policy for very, very many years. And we had people doing pretty much full-on physical exercise, physical jobs. I mean, even if you're in a supervisory role, going underground is hard work. In their mid-70s, and that was clearly inappropriate. So the retirement policy will continue to be enforced, but it will now only affect a few people a year. It will be nothing like the magnitude that we saw in 2024.

Tate Sullivan (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

You paired, if I might have misinterpreted, but in terms of the 4Q costs, were some of the higher labor costs associated with the lower availability of electricity? If so, why?

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah. Maybe James can commence this, but the first part of the quarter was terrible because we had some really serious electricity problems. It started raining, which meant that the grid collapsed. We were getting very poor power from the grid. Because it was raining, it was cloudy, which meant that the solar plant does not work particularly well when it is not sunny. There was also an equipment failure within the solar plant, which we managed to rectify, but it was a bit of a problem for some time. I think pretty much I will hand over to James in a minute, but I think by the time we got to the end of November, things were looking a bit bleak. James had to do some fairly fancy footwork to get his team together to raise morale and get them focused on delivering in December.

James, do you want to talk about what you did? Because it bloody worked, whatever you did, hey?

James Mufara (COO)

Yeah. Thanks, Mark. I mean, we had a very bleak start to the quarter. Like Mark is saying, we had the resources infrastructure is not that well equipped. I mean, they collapsed with the rains. We had quite a lot of high rains this last rain season. I mean, the grid part of they supply us, the wayfare had not been done. We actually had to jump in with the lightning strike that actually caused some of our transformers to be burned. We had to run around and get that equipment to start operating again. Solar was not working.

We then regrouped the troops to say, "Guys, I mean, we need to get what we need to get." We've got a bit of spring capacity within the plant that we also utilized. Unfortunately, it meant that we had to bend the midnight kettle, and we worked sometimes through Sundays to try and get the production machine going again. I have to say it worked.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah, it worked. I mean, look, I don't like to see people having to work overtime and work hard, but they were paid for it. They were incentivized to do it. They left. They finished the quarter with their tails up. Clearly, that now continued into this year. It's a virtuous circle. The mine's performing well. They're getting production bonuses. Everyone's happy. It's a virtuous circle.

Tate Sullivan (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

My last question, thank you. Great context.

For 2025 costs, Mark, is the greatest variable you mentioned slight impact from higher employee costs, but is it higher costs of consumables, unpredictable electricity, or another factor?

Yeah, the one that is least predictable is electricity because, to be honest, if the grid collapses and/or we have the solar plant works very well. The solar plant works better than we'd expected. When it's cloudy, and I don't just mean super cloudy, just a gossamer thin piece of cloud, I mean, that will reduce your power generation by about two-thirds. If we have any interruption to power, that means we've got no choice. We have to run the diesels, and they're very expensive. That, for me, is the biggest cost risk.

Over the course of the next two years, we've taken the decision as the board that we must look at ways to try and insulate ourselves further, if not completely, from the vagaries of the grid because this situation is not going to get better, and we must fix it.

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you very much for your question. Just a reminder, people, if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand. I'd now like to invite Duncan Hay to ask his question.

Duncan Hay (Mining Analyst)

Yeah. Thank you. Hi, Mark. Hi, everyone. Just going back to Bilboes and the concentrate sales scenario, you mentioned time value of money, which suggests that you don't want to hang around too long sort of waiting for approval. Is the strategy initially to try and get sort of no commit? An ideal scenario would be that you sell concentrate.

There's no commitment to put in the BIOX. Is that sort of preferred? But if you have to compromise, then the priority would be to sort of get moving on the project and try not to not hold out too long.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

Yeah. I mean, the lever the government's typically got is they'll allow you to export concentrate for a period of time, say, two years, during which or after which you're then supposed to put in a plant that can do the in-country beneficiation. If you fail to do that, then you'll be hit with punitive taxes. That could be one option. Unless the government just decides that, frankly, they'd rather have a project than not have a project, in which case export concentrate forever.

Duncan Hay (Mining Analyst)

Yeah. Because that's what they've been doing on the platinum side, isn't it? They've reduced the plastic yeah. Yeah.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

The platinum side, that's where they have actually held out and forced the plastic producers to do low in-country beneficiation. I think there seems to be an increasing pragmatism from government. We will explore it.

Duncan Hay (Mining Analyst)

Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thanks very much. We have got no further questions at the moment. Mark, maybe back to yourself for any closing remarks.

Mark Learmonth (CEO and Director)

No, look, it was a substantial improvement. 2024 compared to 2023. Very pleased to see stability of the ZiG, and that's continued into 2025. Very pleased to see an improvement in cash generation and much better reliability in terms of mine performance. We are genuinely very excited about some of these near-term opportunities, which could make a significant contribution to our cash generation.

I think we've come through a fairly difficult 18 months or so, and I'm hopeful that certainly Q4 and then into Q1, you'll begin to see a substantial improvement. I look forward to sharing that with you. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thanks very much, Howie. That concludes the presentation today, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.