Capital Limited (CAPD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And welcome to Capital Limited Full Year 2023 Results. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. Questions will follow after the presentation. I will now hand over to Peter Stokes, Chief Executive Officer, to start the presentation.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to the Capital '23 results call. This year has been another great year for capital achieving growth for the fourth year in a row in what has been quite a challenging market. We continue to strengthen our portfolio across our 3 core businesses of Drilling, Mining and the Labs business, in addition to the Capital Direct Investments portfolio, which has also improved during the year. If I could just go to the next slide, please. This is the standard disclaimer. If we could go to the next slide, please. Just a quick financial overview. Rick, our CFO, will also go through this in a lot more detail further down in the presentation. A couple of areas just to pick out here. Revenue, while it was a growth again of nearly 10% on the previous year, it was slightly below our guidance. We had a number of various headwinds during the year, which I'll go into in a bit more detail. EBITDA continued to increase during the year, coming in at a final $91.8 million. We continued to deliver strong returns with a ROCE of 21% in the business. The dividend, which we'll go into a bit more detail, will continue at $0.039 with a final dividend payment of $0.026. And as I said earlier, the Capital DI portfolio has continued to increase with a very strong focus on the key customers that we've had. If I could go to the next slide, please. Highlights for 2023. The picture on the right here is our new operation in Elko in Nevada just a few weeks ago when we were there. A big change for us in the business and a really positive one to be starting work in Nevada in the core of the gold area in the U.S.A. We're awarded our first drilling contract there, as well as a labs contract, which is the largest labs contract for our MSA business. So very excited. They will start during the next -- the drilling will start in the next week and the Labs business will start towards the middle of this year. Additionally, we're awarded a second major mining contract at Belinga in Gabon with Fortescue first foray into iron ore. Very exciting for us to be working down there. It's both a mining and a significant drilling contract for us. The MSA business has continued to roll out labs across the world. This year or this last year, we had a number -- we've rolled out a number of commercial labs and I'll talk through that as we come into the difference between a commercial lab and a mine site lab. We've continued to grow with our current customers and also with a number of key opportunities in some new geographies, and in one case back again in Pakistan at Reko Diq, with Barrick, the Nevada Gold Mines into the U.S. and then Belinga. All of which have significant opportunity to continue to grow, both in 2024 and well beyond. Our Capital Innovation Group continues to find new opportunities in a very structured way. We're continuing to grow and look for opportunities in that part of the business as well. Our Mine Power Solutions solar system was rolled out in one of our operations in Mali and successfully ran through trials there. And we're looking for additional opportunities for that. Really excitingly, our International Apprenticeship and Competency Academy, currently based in Tanzania, has successfully rolled out many hundreds of safety training programs and additional programs to build capability of our operators and those outside of our own business. And we see opportunities for that business to continue to grow into some of the new jurisdictions, particularly Gabon, in the medium to short -- short- to medium-term. One of the very exciting projects we're working on at the moment, too, in our innovation and equipment teams, is in partnership with Epiroc to develop what will be the first blast hole battery electric operated drill rig, which we expect to be able to release later in this year, likely at MINExpo, and then go into trials later in this year. And I think underpinning all of this is a key part of what makes Capital such a great business is our safety focus in our employees. We had an incredibly strong safety record last year with a total recordable injury frequency rate of 0.75, which was nearly a 40% improvement from 2022, which was already industry-leading metric. If we go to the next slide, please. There's been a really -- for us a really strategic focus on our Drilling and Mining business to expand from some of what's been traditional areas we've worked in East and West Africa, and that we continue to be very successful in those. However, with some of the headwinds we've seen, particularly in West Africa, in Mali particularly, we're really pleased to be able to be starting to grow the business and look for -- and have opportunities on the ground in Nevada, particularly where we have a significant drilling contract and the Labs business that I talked about. In Belinga, it's a major high-grade iron ore deposit majority owned by Fortescue Metals, where we have a contract of up to 5 years on the Drilling -- on the Mining side, and a drilling contract there, where we're continuing to add further rigs. And excitingly, Reko Diq, we were there in the mid-2000s and now back again on what will be one of the largest copper gold deposits in the world. In fact, it'll be ultimately the seventh largest in the world. So really significant investment by Barrick and its local partners there to grow that project. And we're seeing a lot of opportunity for us in drilling initially and then likely in the Labs business as well. And really, I think the key focus remains for Capital on large and many cases the largest opportunities in those regions with blue chip customers, long life mining contracts, and a focus where the majority of the work that we are doing is on mine sites. And so, it takes out a lot of the lumpy nature of what would be in more exploration focus that we see in a number of other companies. Next slide, please. We've built a number of high-quality partnerships over the time that Capital has existed. And you can see in the center graph at the bottom, I think it really illustrates this well where we have -- the number of clients has become even more focused. And however, the number of projects are still -- we're doing multiple projects across a number of those, and we're seeing revenue growth in a number of our key customers. So that engagement with long-term opportunities, I think, is a really key part of it. And a great example of that is where at Sukari, we continue to -- and have just renewed the drilling contract for a further 5 years on the drill and blast and grade control. And that'll take that relationship to nearly 25 years, which is just a fantastic long-term relationship where we work as partners on that project to drive efficiency across the operations and are driving exceptionally good outcomes for both customers. At the Geita site in Tanzania, we've been there for nearly 2 decades as well. And as I said on the previous slide out, our safety record on the bottom left there really underpins and sets us apart from our peers as far as the way that we operate, the way that we engage our employees. And the really pleasing part of that is that, we drive a very high local workforce content as well. So we're continuing to train and develop our local employees and in many of our countries, our most senior people on the ground are locals from that country, which is really pleasing to see as a part of our long-term approach to engaging in various countries. And we also give a lot back in those countries engaging in local community events, local community development, whether that's schools, hospitals, local football teams and the like. It's a really strong relationship that we've built both in the communities and with our customers. On the next slide, please. We've continued to focus on capital efficiency across our business. We're delivering strong EBITDA returns in the business, still in the high-20s during the year, and we expect that to continue. We've delivered a strong ROCE again, just on 21% for the Group. And, I guess, as a result of that, we continue to drive a strong dividend return this year, again at $0.039 per share. So we've taken the allocation of our capital is in a very structured way, whether that's on the mine sites or drilling opportunities that we bid on. There's a lot of due diligence that goes into each project. Similarly, on the lab sites that we're looking to engage on, and I think, equally importantly on the Capital DI opportunities that we see in the business, they provide long-term growth for the business and in a way then to ultimately drive strong returns to our shareholders. I think importantly for us, getting into some of the early stage in some of the investments where many of the juniors are struggling is an area where we can really focus in our Capital DI business, and we'll talk about that in a bit more detail further in the pack. There will be opportunities to recycle Capital as those opportunities mature as well. And we'll be continuing to look at how we do that through to return some of those funds to our shareholders. Next slide, please. This is an important slide that we've, I guess, updated to some of the current context underlying the business at the moment is still an underspend in both exploration and CapEx by major mining companies. In order to deliver the required demand, particularly in commodities like copper and iron ore, there needs to be significant further investment to meet what will be demand in the business. We're still seeing a lot of investment by majors across the board, but the juniors and mid-tier miners are not investing at anything like the same levels. And even the largest mining companies are generally not investing as much, particularly into exploration and near mine exploration, which is where we focus as they probably need to in the longer term. So we see a really strong opportunity for the business to continue to perform strongly. In fact, to the point where the investment is nearly half of what it was in the peak of the boom. And there's also significant reduction in mining specialist capital. So this is an area that I think there's also opportunity and starting to change, and we're starting to see that happen. The energy transition is continuing to drive significant demand, particularly copper, lithium and nickel as well. And while they've had a bit of a hiccup in the most recent time, over time they will certainly lithium will start to settle down. And over the longer period, I'm sure nickel will as well, and start to continue to be reinvested in. And it still needs a significant amount of investment to bring it back to the levels to deliver what's going to be needed to ultimately underpin the new requirements of the energy transition process. So I think overall, we're seeing a really supportive and continued positive cycle. We're seeing a lot of demand for our drilling, and that's demonstrated by still utilization rates of our drills, despite us moving rigs around at the moment, as we reposition some of our business for future growth, still in the low-70s and very close to the target that we'd like to be around mid-70s. So I think a really positive and certainly some opportunity for us to see further upside as we go into the next cycle. Underpinning that is still significant challenge of getting new equipment. So there's constraints in the market, too, on additional new equipment. So we manage that with our OEMs to provide longer lead times and have locked in capability to buy equipment, given the scale that we have in the market. So that also provides us the opportunity to scale up as we need to, as we have in Nevada with a new fleet there. Next slide, please. As many of you will be aware, capital is a fully integrated provider of mining services. So we have really the 5 streams, and I've talked a little bit about each of them. Capital Drilling, which covers all of our drilling. We now have about 127 rigs at the end of last year. We've added an additional 10 for Nevada already. So we'll finish up and there's several more to come. So we'll finish up closer to 140 rigs by the end of the year. We continue to focus on mine site drilling and related near mine exploration. Our load and haul business has continued to grow with a major new contract at Belinga. We see a long-term opportunity to work with Fortescue as they develop that operation. The MSALABS business has now got the largest network of Chrysos units globally and it's continuing to grow rapidly. Capital Investments has had another really successful year and our Capital Innovation Group continues to find really exciting opportunities that we can grow both in our business and more broadly. Next slide, please. The mine site focus of our Drilling business really gives us stability. If you look at the graph on the top right, exploration is now around 15% of our business. So we continue to focus on where we know there will be stability in our Drilling. Our utilization, as I mentioned, remains strong in the low-70s. Our ARPOR is slightly up on the previous year at $186,000, which is really pleasing. We expect that will continue to increase during 2024, as well as we move into some of the larger, high productive drilling operations that we've now kicked off that I mentioned earlier. I'm really pleased to have the renewal in Sukari with our key partner there, Centamin. It's been, as I said, a very long-term relationship and we really work very closely together. And then I think importantly, the 2 new contracts or 3 new contracts we mentioned earlier. So we'll continue to focus on drilling around mine sites. Nevada is a great example of where we're doing mainly mine site related with some very late stage exploration into a mine. But, however, that will be part of a -- it is still part of that major mining complex in Nevada, which is actually the largest mining -- gold mining complex in the world at the moment. And so, I think there's equally a long-term opportunity with us, with our key partner Barrick, to continue to grow that operation. Next slide, please. The photos on the right here show some of the early stage works that we've started with Fortescue in Gabon. Gabon's an exceptionally -- this Belinga project in Gabon is an exceptionally exciting project. Very high-grade, low impurity iron ore. It's been an ore body that's been known for a while. And it's really -- I guess, Fortescue has taken the plunge to really go and now explore that operation and start to drive that business. We're doing a significant drilling program there as well. And so, we're starting to define what will ultimately be a large long-term mining operation that Fortescue and their local government partners will continue to drive. So the underpin -- the Mining business has grown another 29% with the award of the Gabon project. Very exciting to grow on that. The Sukari mining contract will finish around the middle of this year. It was a fixed term contract that will -- we've now run some 6 months ahead of the original planning. So it's been very successfully delivered by us. Very high-quality outcomes and high productivity, which has really supported the growth of the Sukari mine itself. And we're very excited to have been able to be part of that project and really establish ourselves as a major mining house in Africa, which has clearly been an underpin of winning the Ivindo contract. Next slide, please. The laboratories are continuing to grow quickly, as you can see on the bottom left here, the revenue in the mining -- in the Labs business grew significantly, again to just under $38 million or just over $38 million, slightly below guidance. Some of the ramp up I talked about, and we'll talk about that in more detail on the next slide of the commercial labs takes a bit longer than we probably originally expected, but we're seeing really good momentum now. We're still on track to be delivering 21 Chrysos units by the end of next year. We have 10 units deployed in the business at the moment. And I think that the capability that the team have demonstrated really underpins the award of this really significant Nevada contract, which was more than half of the current revenue -- current annual revenue annualized over a long period of time over a 5-year contract. Sorry. The PhotonAssay technology has some really key differentiators and really stands it alone from the traditional fire assay. Faster turnaround in minutes. It continuous -- there's a continuous quality assurance process built into it with check samples and the technology. Really significant ESG and safety benefits with no hazardous waste, no use of lead, lower CO2 emissions and significantly improved OH&S outcomes, really because of the much fewer people who need to be involved, but also not dealing with hot samples or firing crucibles to do the assay process. It's also a non-destructive process, so samples can be sent through the process a number of times if needed for checks or as they run samples to extinction. It's also automated process and still the larger sample size, which underpins this of nearly 10x the size of a traditional fire assay, is likely to lead to better recoveries given a more representative sample of the gold in the deposit, ensuring that ore grade -- ore is not sent to waste. In the bottom -- in the center, the sample volumes will continue to grow and step up pretty dramatically, particularly when we take on the Nevada business, which will by itself be about 80,000 samples a month. So it significantly drives the slight growth in that business. Next slide, please. The MSA growing -- has grown a significant global footprint. Just to highlight, the Chrysos units have a green circle. The Chrysos units don't need to have fire assay. There's a couple of the labs like Bali, you'll see has a yellow as well to do fire assay as we deploy a second unit there. So in remote locations, we do keep a little bit of fire assay capability, where we take over a customer lab. But we now have 28 laboratories running around the world, including 6 franchises, so 22 run by us. They're a mix of mine site and commercial labs, where we set up the lab ourselves. And we have a major hub in Langley in Canada. And at some point, we'll look to set up another formal hub to be able to do multi-element analysis. We are able to do some multi-element in Yamoussoukro as well, in Cote d'Ivoire. Next slide, please. The economics for the MSALABS, so we continue to have a targeted adjusted EBITDA margin of 15% to 20%. The plan is to have that at the higher end for the commercial labs and for the more consistent volumes of the mine site labs, probably more in the mid- to higher-teens. So we -- in 2023, we've grown the business pretty significantly, both in the footprints while the revenue grew nearly 40%. The footprint that we've grown has more than doubled on the Chrysos units. And we're also still seeing traditional assays grow as well, particularly into our hub in Langley, where we do multi-element analysis. So I think it's been a very pleasing year on the revenue growth side. On the samples received, on the right-hand side here, I just wanted to explain how we see the different volumes grow. And as I alluded to, when we win a mine site lab, it tends to be fairly lumpy growth. So a great example there is where Kibali started in a couple of months, in November 2022, a couple of months of startup, and then the volumes hit the lab. And so, the volumes grow dramatically in a mine site lab, whereas in -- typically in a Val d'Or is a good example, on the right-hand side, where we have a commercial lab, you need to win customers across. So there is 2 things that at play in the early days of the commercial labs, and we're seeing this less now, is that, the commercial labs, we need to prove some of the technology with new -- with customers there. Fire assay has been a well-accepted technology or capability for well over 100 years. Chrysos is a completely new way of doing the analysis for gold, silver, and copper. And so, we needed to show with trials that the samples work pretty quickly. We started to see the volumes grow, and we see that ramp up month after month in Val d'Or. Prince George came online. It took a month or 2 to get it going, and then we started receiving some significant volumes from a commercial customer that really drove that growth. And then up on the top right you can see Timmins is starting to build as we put the new lab in. We'll start to see those volumes go as well. There is a little bit of, and particularly in Canada, we see it more than others, though, there's a bit of a -- as the seasons change over December and January, we see volumes drop off a bit due to the winter conditions, but after that we start to see the volume ramp up right through to the end of the year again. Outlook for 2024 in the labs is that, we'll see -- still see continued benefit from the utilization of the commercial labs as they ramp up, and we'll see a big lift when Nevada comes online in the middle of the year as well. So we have still a strong forecast for this year, both on revenue growth and also on the underlying margins that will continue to grow. On the bottom right-hand side is an illustrative example of how we've started one of the labs and just shown how that model works, where revenue comes in over time, the adjusted EBITDA margin, as we hit particular revenue points, starts to grow. The boxes at the start, it takes several months for us to set up a new business. So when we build a commercial lab, we need to put the facility together. We need to locate the crushing units and other things and purchase that equipment, build up the team, train the team to ensure that they're fully qualified, and also now we can start to put the volumes through. You can see that starts to build and it takes 3 months to 6 months generally depending on where the lab is and the underlying customers and how quickly they come into the laboratory. Next slide, please. Really pleasingly, our investment portfolio continues to drive very strong returns. We've seen the value of our investments increased to $47.2 million, as of December, up from $38.7 million the year before. We did invest $4.6 million following the money on Predictive and WIA, and we increased our stake in WIA to just over 19%. These are exceptionally exciting ore bodies. The Predictive reserves or resources are now heading towards 5 million ounces had really good grades. We are in Namibia is now well over 1 million ounces, and we expect that will go towards well north of 1.5 million and likely higher. So really positive on those. And we're seeing still a few -- we're seeing opportunities to invest. We're very selective, where we invest over time. We've reduced our portfolio, and we want to demonstrate that we can cycle this cash during this year, and we expect to be -- we're hoping that we can do that. We did a little bit with Allied last year. During this year, we probably expect to do a bit more of the Allied sales. And then when Predictive has its feasibility study done and that it becomes a likely takeover target and then that's an opportunity for us to then look to some of that cash either back into the business, return to shareholders or to -- or through increased dividends as well, so -- or buybacks, there's a couple of options there that we look out in the future. So we continue to search for opportunities both in Africa, more recently, U.S. as well and also into Middle East. I think there's some really interesting opportunities for us that look very attractive, and we'll continue to drive a successful portfolio in the space. Just on innovation, and then I'll hand over to Rick, if I could go to the next slide, please. We wanted to put an example in here. I talked about the 2 of the 3 initiatives that are underway on the right-hand side. And the last one is on our Well Force business, and we provide directional drilling and geophysical solutions, and we're starting to see some really -- some really good opportunities both to grow that business, but also to engage with some of the manufacturers on how we bring some new capabilities to the market. So that's a really exciting place for us as a complementary skill set to some of the drilling and in some cases, it's a core part of the deep drilling that we're doing. In iron ore, particularly, there's some other technologies that we'd like to try and bring to bear on that project also, so to further streamline the outcomes of the drilling process. Underpinning a lot of what we're trying to do here is how do we take more control of what happens at the drill head. So we -- when we're drilling with our 140 drills, the more we can do and provide information to our customers at the drill head really drives quicker and outcomes for our customer and better understanding, where they can focus the drilling to be one more efficient, so not overdrill, or under drill on the programs that they hit their ore bodies, but also what other value-added services can we provide at the drill head. The example on the bottom really talks through the MSA case study. It took a while to incubate that project. But once we understood the opportunity, we really started to commit to that project, and it's starting to become a really successful part of our business, as we grow that, and it will certainly be a core part of the business into the future. On that note, I will hand over to Rick on the financials, if we can just go to the next slide. Thank you.

Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everybody. So as previously reported, another good year of growth on the top line, 10% on 2022, taking us to $318 million of revenue. Adjusted EBITDA of $92 million, so a 29% margin. So maintaining robust margin there. As a reminder, we present this adjusted EBITDA figure to better reflect the underlying profitability of the business. It takes into account the cash cost of the IFRS 16 leases. So in our case, primarily the Chrysos leases. So again, just better reflects the underlying performance. At the EBIT line, growth on the EBIT figure there up to $60.3 million with the margins remaining pretty robust at 19%. Headline net profit after tax has jumped up significantly to -- by 70%. That's reflective of the performance of the investment book. So adjusting for those gains this year, losses last year, we're showing a 16% decline in the adjusted NPAT. And that's primarily due to the higher interest costs that we're seeing in the business, reflective of -- effect of -- full year effect of the base rate increases. Next slide, please. So just on the net debt waterfall. So finishing last year at $47 million net debt, so that the first 2 boxes dotted in the -- inside the dotted box, reflective of our EBITDA performance net of the lease payments. So that's the $92 million adjusted EBITDA figure referenced on the slide before. So we saw further working [ cap draw ], which is reflective of our mobilization and ramp-up of at Belinga largely, particularly on the inventory. CapEx, I'll come on to talk about that in more detail, but $69 million there. And then just going across the boxes, we've got interest and tax payments, you can see that slightly elevated. But last year, as I've just said, the higher interest charge that we're seeing in the business. So overall, giving us a closing net debt figure of $70 million, which if you were to exclude the investments, that net debt -- sorry, that does exclude the investments. If you were to include the investments bigger, that net debt figure drops to $23 million. Next slide, please. So CapEx, so for 2023, we had initially guided $50 million to $60 million of CapEx. We lifted that guidance at the half to $65 million to $75 million, reflective of the kit purchases that we'd be making sort of Belinga mining contract. So final CapEx came out at $69 million, so firmly in the middle of our reguided range. Today, we're guiding $70 million to $80 million for 2024 reflects our ongoing fleet replenishment program, but importantly, reflects the growth CapEx that we're seeing come through for -- or we'll see come through for the drilling in the Labs business in U.S.A. So the Nevada Gold Mines contract suite, [ particular ] across drilling and labs. And then the other CapEx on the bar there, just to complete the picture, that's primarily our workshop facility that we purchased in Elko, Nevada to really give us a strong base for growth in that region. Next slide, please. So on the balance sheet, gross debt increased $29 million for the year, we just need to cover off there some key components. We doubled our RCF back in March 2023. So took it from $25 million to $50 million. We brought on Nedbank alongside Standard Bank and finished the year at $45 million drawn on the $50 million facility. We also added a further tranche of Macquarie asset-backed facility against the fleet in Gabon of $8 million, and we've actually [ take on ] a new facility with Caterpillar Finance mainly for some working cap purposes around Caterpillar parts, et cetera, of $5 million. I think it's important to say we maintain a really strong relationship with our OEMs, which Peter has alluded to already, and that pulls through to the financing as well. So we're still seeing -- we're still able to finance repurchases through the OEMs, particularly with Epiroc. And obviously, we hope to maintain that strong relationship going forward. And then, I think another important point on the page here is our net debt to trailing adjusted EBITDA is still relatively modest at just under 0.8x, and we remain well below covenant levels. Next slide, please. So as for the final dividend, we're declaring a final dividend of [ $0.026 ] for the year, which is flat on last year's. The total dividend for the year is also flat on last year's at [ $0.039 per share]. I mean, as Peter has mentioned already, we'll remain very disciplined with respect to the balance sheet. We'll maintain a strong balance sheet going forward, whilst still growing the business and still with a focus on shareholder returns, as we have demonstrated in the past. And then just for completeness and information, payment date for the [ div ] will be 15th of May 2024. Next slide, please. So if we look -- outlook and guidance for the year. So we're guiding revenue for the Group, $355 million to $375 million. So at the midpoint, that's a 16% increase on what we've just reported to 2023. The labs guiding at $50 million to $60 million, so at the midpoint, that's over 40% growth on what we've reported for 2023. Look, the -- on a more broad basis, the revenue guidance reflects the ramp-up of our key operations, particularly drilling at Belinga and Reko Diq and obviously, the Nevada Gold Mines contract comes through. On the mining side, it's reflective of continued ramp-up of our operations at Belinga. And then on the labs side, Peter talked about the commercial labs that we rolled out in 2023, so we'll see a continued uptick in the utilization of those labs, plus we have several mine site labs to roll out during the year, which will drive that revenue performs. And on CapEx, I've already touched on. Thank you very much. So I'll hand over to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Andrew Breichmanas at Stifel.

Peter and Rick, so after the significant contract win last year and the enthusiasm being about the state of the portfolio, I think it's really encouraging to see that reflected in your outlook. So I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about where those 3 key growth areas currently stand in terms of sourcing and mobilizing equipment to site, as well as hiring and training the local workforces in each location?

Sure. Well, I'll jump in on that one. Thanks, Andrew. So if I start with Nevada, as I said, I think we certainly lent on our big OEMs on that project to get new drill rigs. So we are starting this week with the first. When I was there a week and a bit ago, we had 10 rigs on site getting mobilized, 3 will start later this week or early next week. We've really -- we've ramped up a full complement of our employees in Nevada as well. So the site that we showed earlier, we bought that late last year, settled early this year to give us a strong base. So I think we've put a really strong presence into Elko in Nevada. And I think that's really helped us the -- with new drills and a site and a proper site setup and training and other things ready to go. We've been -- I think we've exceeded my expectations in our ability to attract really good people into that business. So we've got a very small number of our capital employees to ensure we drive the same safety and other outcomes in some of the leadership areas, training things, our standards. And then we brought in a large local contingent onto that project. Most of whom are based in Elko, which is also really positive. In Reko Diq, when we started that up in Pakistan, it's a great example, where we left that project a number of years ago with a very positive engagement from our local community in Balochistan. And most of our old drillers have come back and started working for us as of our support teams and others. So we're -- at the moment, we've got more people looking for jobs than -- that we need people, but that's growing now with additional rigs. So that's been a really positive reengagement on that project and particularly with those local communities. And then, probably the challenging one is in Gabon, there's very -- there's been very little mining done in Gabon, while it's a big petroleum producer. It's had -- it's got a large manganese mine and some fairly small other iron ore deposits, but nothing at the scale that Fortescue starting to build, nor the sort of drill skill sets and things that we need. So in that case, in the short term, we are bringing -- we brought in more of our local African experienced drillers. And then with also -- in that case, we've also brought in largely new or near new drills into the operation. But so, we've been able to set up the business there effectively, but we will bring in a more structured training program to do start to really train local, both mining operators and particularly drilling operators to bring the skills in Gabon, and that's been one of our commitments with Fortescue and to the government that, that will be a big focus over the coming months.

And maybe just following on from that, I believe those contracts alone are ultimately expected to generate over $100 million of annualized revenue just on their own. So appreciating that the ramp-up continues through 2025, particularly with the labs contract in Nevada, do you have a sense of how much they represent of the 2024 guidance and how we should think about the contribution ramping up throughout the year?

I probably don't have an exact number, but I can certainly give you -- so you think Nevada really, the labs, as I alluded to, will start middle of the year, so it will have a half year of revenue, and we gave some numbers when we were awarded it. So the back end of this year, probably $15 million, I guess, of revenue. The drilling business will be at full run rate by the middle of the year as well with all 10 or 12 drills up and running by then. So similarly, [ mid-20s ] of revenue into that one. The Reko Diq contract continues to grow. We'll run 6 drills there. I'd have to go Conor or Rick to just give us some -- do some rough numbers on the background on that one, Andrew. And then the other, Belinga will still -- we're growing the drilling business more than we originally thought. So we'll have 6 drills running there, and we have 6 drills there running now. So that will grow -- the drilling will grow quicker than the mining contract on that one, but it will be full run rate on the drilling within the next month. And then mining will probably go a bit slower. We're doing a slower buildup there, as they look at the, I guess, feasibility of the mining at different scale. So the Fortescue team originally, we're going to do a small-scale mining, but they want to move to larger scale quicker. So there we will divert some of our equipment to support drilling, as opposed to directly into -- as much into mining as originally planned. I haven't got -- I can't give you definitive number. We can probably come back to you on that one, Andrew.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions in the webinar. I'll now hand over to Conor Rowley, Corporate Development and Investor Relations to address the written questions. Please go ahead.

Sure. Thank you. Look, I've studied up and just [indiscernible] [ vision slightly ], we're trying to get through them quite quickly. I guess, on drilling, maybe one for you, Peter. Just can you talk about general drilling conditions in terms of pricing, cost inflation, equipment lead times, et cetera?

Sure. I'll maybe start on the hardest one first. So the lead times on equipment still remain extended. So we are able to now and then pick up drills that have either being built to spec or canceled by others. So in those cases, we're getting drills in 3 months to 6 months and then at the factory and then shipping them. But typically, minimum for new drills is 6 months, and some of our specialist drills like underground RC have now blown out to well over 12 months. Cost inflation on equipment and spares has largely flattened off. There was some -- certainly some increases during last year. There's still minor increases in some places, but it's certainly much less than it had been. And then inflation more broadly on drilling, so on labor, sorry, given most of our -- our contracts are in U.S. dollars, in Africa, U.S. dollars still remain very strong against those currencies. We've seen little labor inflation. We're certainly very conscious of that in the U.S. where it's direct labor coming through, and labor generally makes up a much bigger percentage of the operations. So that's -- I think that's a key one is that we'll continue to manage. But from what we've put in place already, the labor force that we are hiring is in line with our expectations. I think that generally, the drilling market is still -- in the areas, where we focus being on mine sites, it's very steady. So we're seeing steady or even increasing. Barrick and Newmont and Agnico Eagle and others have all announced very significant drilling programs for the coming year. Most of those 3 are committing to -- north of $300 million each in drilling around the world. So -- and the likes of BHP and Rio and others have got big volumes. The smaller -- at the smaller end of the scale, I mean, it's much more challenging programs that we see in the market that we choose not to go after a significantly smaller and stop start. So that's not attractive to us to set up new sites, so we don't focus on those.

Thanks, Peter. And maybe sticking on drilling. Could you give us an update on Sudan and the Perseus operation.

Sure. Yes. So we've been working with the Perseus team on restarting Sudan. We're expecting at the moment, we're anticipating we should be back in there drilling by midyear. We think that will be probably a slower start. We used to have -- we had 4 drills, and they are operating the 4, I'm expecting that will be a bit of a slower start to get going towards into the middle of the year and beyond. But we're pretty confident we'll get back into Sudan during 2024.

Maybe one for Rick quickly on the numbers. Question on just the general free cash flow this year in the context of our guidance?

Yes, sure. So in the context of the guidance, obviously, it's a year of revenue growth, but growth coming from our new projects, particularly in Nevada. So in broad brush terms, we expect to be free cash flow generative in the year of the base business. And as I say, just slightly tempered by that sort of mobilization, ramp-up across that sort of suite of contracts in Nevada.

I'll finish with 2 last ones. I guess, one, I guess, for the better view, Sukari contract is coming to the end. What is the plan with this equipment that we have there? Or what are the options?

Yes. So we -- I think we've talked or alluded to this a little bit, it's coming closer, so it's becoming to realization. We've got -- still got a project that we can deploy the -- redeploy the equipment to. So that's certainly one option. We've been looking -- working in the market, on market valuations relative to our net book value, and I think we're pretty comfortable with that we're pretty close. And so, we'd be looking at during the second half of this year, and there'll be a time if we finish in May, June on the contract, there'll be a time to demo, I guess, do any of the final things that need to be done on the equipment. But in the meantime, we're looking at options of either a sale or redeployment are the 2 most obvious for that equipment. And we've got good options on both a couple of sale options and at least one redeployment option as well. I should say also just on that one, Conor, as we've talked a lot about the capability of people that we've developed at Sukari, and one of the things we're focusing on at the moment is how do we redeploy as many of the good people that we've got there and to potentially into a rebuild facility we're looking at for our equipment and then more broadly into some of the key growth projects in Africa like Gabon, where there's limited skills. We think we can -- we're able to bring in skills, train our -- the local workforce again and then run through a similar program to what we've been able to achieve in Sukari and building a really strong local capability.

I'll finish with one last one, just on -- on just the regional reach here. Obviously, moving to the U.S. is a big -- is a sort of a landmark change for us, especially in drilling. Is it focus North America, Americas, global...

So yes, look, I think we already have lab franchises and capability in Central South America. But I think certainly, we need to prove that we can do what we said we're going to do in Nevada first. So there's a big focus on being really successful driving high productivity safely into the Nevada business, both in the drilling and in the labs business. We've got a strong footprint across Canada. So it would make sense to have to be looking for opportunities for drilling, where we've already got lab presence and capital people working in Canada. So I think that's another obvious one for us. At the moment, there's not really an intention to look for drilling into the South and Central America. We do get asked pretty regularly, but we're very disciplined in where we focus. I think we risk getting too spread, if we start going into [ 2 places ] all at once.

Okay. Perfect. I think we'll leave it there.

Thank you.

Close out.

Thanks to everyone.