DRDGOLD

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Hey, Neil. OK, I think, I think we'll get started. We're just, just shy of 150, but, So, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Don DeMarco. I'm a mining analyst with National Bank Capital Markets, based out of Toronto. And, so I'm pleased to, be moderating this session here. We got a number of great companies starting off with DRD Gold. And so, Neil, I'd like to invite you up to the podium. Neil Pretorius has two decades of experience in the mining industry, appointed Chief CEO designate of DRD Gold. In 2008 and CEO proper in 2009. And You know, he's been with the company a long time. There's nobody knows this company better than Neil. And with that, Neil, I'd like to hand it over to you. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. Thank you very much, everyone, and, and, for also taking the time to come and listen to our presentation. With me here today is our company's Chief Operating Officer, Jacob Schoeman. So if you have any questions, I might defer some of those to him. the. company, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is JSE and New York Stock Exchange listed. It's been around since 1895. It's a 131 year old company, but obviously in the last few years, the model of the company has changed quite significantly. The operating model has changed quite significantly. We are primarily based in Johannesburg though, and we have two projects in close vicinity to Johannesburg. One is called Ergo, the other one is Far West Gold Recoveries. The company produces roughly 150,000 ounces of gold per annum. it's running at an all sustaining margin of roughly 48% and a cash operating profit margin of roughly 54%. So it is a company with relatively robust financials, well established. we do not do any primary mining. The entire model is premised on the reclamation of old mine tailings. So it started out like most other gold mines, all of the other gold mines in South Africa as a primary miner, but it's transitioned completely now into the reclamation of tailings, which has become a very big part of our brand identity since that we do not produce any new tailings or any new waste. It's a company that is waste neutral. Market capitalization of the company is roughly $2.8 billion depending on which time of the day you watch and you know, what's been happening in Iran in the recent past. So it does fluctuate quite significantly. It's added to by the fact that we do not hedge at all. So the company is an entirely unhedged company, unhedged gold producer. The process that we follow, we believe we've also developed to a highly efficient process. It's a mostly mechanized process. So the tailings is moved by dislodging it with high-pressure water and then pumping it to a plant. The plant is processed and there it goes to I, Long-term tailings storage facility, and we move roughly 1 to 1.5 tons of material per minute. That's what each of these material, these jets, these hydro jets, what they actually, managed to move. And then the land where the tailings are reclaimed from, that land is completely restored. So there's a big environmental story that's also embedded in our brand identity. And I'll, Elaborate a little bit more on that as we get through the, the presentation or deeper into the presentation. So, I've given you a bit of a profile of the company, what it does, where it's listed and how it produces. And these are the financial implications of our endeavors. And this is a snapshot of our performance for the six months ending in December of 2025. There you see the company was on track with that production profile of 150,000 ounces, producing 75,000 ounces. You could see what the all in sustaining cost is and you can also see what the revenue numbers look like. So Just under $300 million in revenue. So that's for the half year. That was significantly up from the previous comparative period, about 33%, and that's by and large attributable to the fact that the gold price had skyrocketed in the recent past. And as I said earlier, as an unhedged gold producer, we take full advantage of that movement in gold price. Obviously, we also take full exposure once it decides to turn south. We have cash and cash equivalents in the bank as at the end of December of $104 million. That is notwithstanding the fact that roughly $95 million was invested, reinvested in capital infrastructure towards organic growth in the business during that same period. So cash flow has been really robust for that period. We paid $28 million in tax and had a profit before tax of roughly $140 million for that period. So $291 million in revenue, $140 million in profit before tax, take off $28 million in tax. You add $73 million to your cash balance. And the cash balance that we ended that period with, as I said, was $104 million. So the business has done really well. It is doing really well. It's been positioned to take full advantage of this gold price climate. And it's also enabled us to, notwithstanding the fact that we are in a very steep capital reinvestment period, to still pay a handsome dividend. And it's been 19 years that we've been paying dividends, 19 years without disruption or interruption. So moving to the next slide. So what does maximizing shareholder return look like in our universe? And I know you look at a lot of companies where it's all about growth and the holes that are being drilled and the project and the progress and so forth and so forth. There is an element of growth in our story, and I'll elaborate on that later on. But really, our entire shareholder return approach and our value proposition has been one of optimizing our asset portfolio. Which basically means the following. We have roughly 6 million ounces and resources and we want to mine as much or as many of those as we possibly can. So we deal with our capital in a particular way. Firstly, we do not take any shortcuts in terms of sustaining Capex. So the sustaining Capex regime is followed to the T. We spend the money that we need to continue to spend that we need in order to continue to produce to produce at the requisite run rate. And achieving the requisite efficiencies. We also set aside capital towards organic growth, which is an integral part of optimizing your asset portfolio. Organic growth in in in our universe means A series of projects aimed to deliver a particular outcome during the 2028 financial year. And I'll elaborate a little bit more on that because that is essentially the story that we wanted to bring to this conference this year is vision 2028. Then, of course, because we are cash positive, and a part of our value proposition is Return on investment by way of dividends. We take a big chunk of that and we apply that towards a dividend distribution. And we've been paying two dividends, both an interim and a final now for a number of years, but not skipping a single year for 19 years. It also enables us having this fairly robust cash flow profile and also a very strong balance sheet to take full exposure to the gold price. And that is something that we say to potential investors is that we do not protect the revenue line. We do take full exposure to the gold price because we do believe that we offer the sort of volatility associated with movements in the gold price, but it is a geared volatility. So trade the share, even if you're long DRD trade the share depending on where you believe the gold price is going to go. In the meantime, we look after the business, we'll look after the cost, and we'll pay dividends out of our free cash flows. If you had followed that philosophy, trading the stock in the way that many of our long-term shareholders have been doing it, then potentially you would have had a return of 200% over the last 12 months because that's been the growth in the share price. Before that, there was a dip, there was a buying opportunity. If you came in at 2018 and you sold your shares in 2021, there would have been an 800% return on your investment. So, taking away that exposure to gold price volatility, we believe would be undermining one of the key value components that form part of our value proposition is for exposure to the gold price. The only way we could do that though, as I say, is because we have an embedded resilience and embedded robustness in our model because of the way that we've been expending money on capital infrastructure and also in optimizing our asset portfolio. So, moving on to the next slide. This is a compelling slide. if you have very strong eyes, what you'll see there, once you maybe print it out and enlarge it 50 times, is where our assets are located. So it is on the 26th. longitude, rather, 27 longitude, 26 latitude. It's about 30 miles deep and 60 miles wide. And that's in and around the Johannesburg area. So obviously, tailings dams are where they are because they are where they are because people that mined there and then they left them behind. So tailings dams, you know, these are stockpiled mine waste and our entire, portfolio of assets is made up of tailings and scattered across the landscape which we connect by way of a series of pipelines. because it is where it is, we have to be very careful in our relationships with our stakeholders. And that's where the second part of our strategy comes in. So there's one part, and I think I actually deal with that in this slide. So I'll go back to the previous one. but maybe just elaborate a little bit on our strategy. So. Take full exposure to the gold price, which is part of the optimization of the asset portfolio part of our strategy. Second part is our strategy is driven by sustainable development. And that's played an incredibly important role in how we applied our capital over time. Now, I want to ask you a question. Because this is something that's been a very hot topic in the last few years in the mining space. And that is what you believe the difference is between ESG and sustainable development. And I will, I will offer an answer to that because I have a very clear view and a firm view on what it is. So ESG as you know, stands for Environmental, performance, for social responsibility and for governance. The way that ESG has been applied though, in the industry in recent times, and that's why Maybe the appetite for it is diminishing. It's almost like a tax. So people pay money in order to deliver to these things. If you compare that with sustainable development, you'll see that sustainable development is actually the opposite because sustainable development is an idea, a management approach that assumes that everything is pulling in the same direction. So there are 5 capitals, two of which include Your environmental component or your natural capital and your social component, your social responsibility component. But instead of these things now being a tax, a cost that you have to fund with your operations, they actually become part of your value proposition because the sustainable development assumes integrated value at various levels. Integrated aligned value at various levels. And in DRD this is a decision that we took roughly 20 years ago. And we built a business in pursuit of those ideals. And in terms of natural capital, by way of illustration, it simply means the following. We've built a solar farm that generates 60 megawatts of power. It's a 60-megawatt per hour solar farm. Now, firstly, from a natural capital perspective, it reduces our carbon footprint by roughly 50% because how much, that's how much less power we now use at this particular project. Secondly, what it does, it, it reduces our electricity costs year on year. And not assuming an increase in electricity costs, the actual cost last year compared to the actual cost this year by 23%. So now there you cover both, you cover two components of sustainable development. You cover your natural capital and you cover your financial capital. It flows to the bottom line. And of course, when it comes to simply just sustainability in broader terms, it means that your business now has a reliable source of electricity going forward, which adds to its resilience. And the resilience is the reason why we can offer full exposure to the gold price. So that's where everything comes together. Not a tax. It's a system where everything comes together. So, I want to just go back very briefly and talk about how we apply those principles to this footprint. The only way that you can successfully And sustainably mind the stuff that other people have thrown away. As you apply these principles and you apply them diligently, you need to take a long-term view, which basically means you invest in the ability to cover or deal with your two key vulnerabilities. That is volume throughput and extraction efficiency. And if you look at the The next few slides that I'll take you through, which form part of our investment vision for this business over the next few years, you'll see that it's squarely aimed at those two things. Compelling part of this as Unconvincing as the graph is, the compelling part of this slide really is the summary of our mineral resource, which is what our business is all about. And that is the optimization of the 6 million ounces, divided between these two operations. So, this is a graph that sort of summarizes how the whole thing works, but I think I've pretty much summarized that. It's a 24/7. process. It never stops. We wash this material with water into a network of pipelines. It goes into a plant that's driven in part by a solar, solar plant and then the, the rest goes onto a long-term tailings facility that is managed to modern standards. So, how this whole strategy comes together in terms of our vision for the future and as I say, our, our key message going forward. There are 5 projects that form part of our vision 2028 initiative where all of this capital is going towards where the $95 million had been spent in the previous 6 months and a similar amount will be spent this year or this 6 months plus Doing it for another about a year and a half and then we will be pretty much there. And those 5 projects are aimed at the exhaust of the business, sufficient storage capacity to store the residue tail after it's been reprocessed, setting up the infrastructure to combine all of these different pieces of infrastructure and also increasing the size of our plant infrastructure for that throughput. The objective here is to take current throughput capacity of 2.1 million tons per month to 3 million tons per month. Ultimately, the idea is then to organically take production from 150 50,000 ounces per year to just over 200,000 ounces per year. That's what all of these projects are all about. I told you earlier that we have these two projects, Ergo and Huawei's goal operations. At Ergo, it's all about the exhaust, about creating new residue capacity, long-term residue storage capacity. We call this a TSF or a tailings storage facility. The one that we have, which is a very large one, about 300 hectares in size, is coming to the end of its life, and we need to build new capacity. The two initiatives here are aimed at adding 120 million tons. Which over a period of 20 years at the so-called Daggefontein Tailings facility. That's just restarting their position on one that's already there, and the completion of a second one, the Withoek Tailings Facility, which was an old one, which we want to rebuild. And that will give Ergo the capacity to continue to produce until post 2014. And the pipelines in between those as well. The exciting one here is Huawei's gold recoveries. So this is a boutique operation that only treats 500,000 tons of material per month. We want to take this 1 to 1.2 million tons. That's a real picture of the situation as it looks now. This plant needs to go to 1.2 million tons and it's nearing completion. It will be done by the end of this year. In addition to that, We are building one of the largest lined tailings facilities in the world. It's called the RTSF or the Regional Regional Tailings Storage Facility. This tailings dam will have a circumference of 14 kilometers and a surface area of 8 million square meters. And this is what it looked like in June 2025 and what it looks like now. Or rather June, yeah, June 2025 and January 2026. And the black area that you see there, that is a liner. So that is a plastic liner that will cover that entire, dam. It will ultimately hold roughly 800 million tons. All of these done to organically grow this business from 150,000 ounces per year to 200,000 ounces per year. And remembering also then that once it's done, our business is long capex. So we put up The technology, we put up the manufactured capital and then it's done. Then we go back to roughly 5% of cash operating costs sustaining Capex. We no longer have to spend the $95 million per year in Capex. So think of additional revenues of about a ton of gold per year and factor out $95 million in actually $95 million over six months. Let's say $150 million odd dollars in a period of one year. Factor that out of your cash flow model and it gives you an idea of what the free cash flow of this business will look like. And then maybe there is, maybe there isn't a re-rating of the stock. Ladies and gents, that's our story. I'm not gonna go through anything else. What I do want to tell you though, is that at the end of our presentation, there are a number of annexures and these annexures cover some of the more detailed message. But the message today really was to come and tell you about this. Debt-free, dividend-paying New York listed entity with a $2.5 billion dollar market caps that will go from 150,000 ounces a year to 200,000 ounces per year at very low capex from three years from now onwards, from 2028 onwards. Thank, thank you very much, Neil. we don't have any time for questions, but I, I think I'd just like to emphasize some of your concluding remarks there and that, long mine life dividend paying with production growth. So congratulations and thank you very much, Neil. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks. OK, so up next, we've got a Cisco Development Cork. I'd like to welcome to the stage, Sean Rosen. Mr. Rosen has. Over 30 years, progressive experience in the mining industry as founder, president, CEO.