Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (IVN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Industry leading.

Amazing.

[Foreign Language]

I'm standing here with Dr. Patrick Kasongo Ngoyi at the Kamoa-Kakula medical facilities. Dr. Patrick and his team were instrumental in a successful mission to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

We take the health and well-being of our employees and contractors seriously. We proactively instituted enough solution and quarantine system based on good practice standards and ensured that we have the appropriate equipment to test and treat patients if the need arises.

We realize that without the ongoing support of our host communities, the development of the Kamoa-Kakula mining complex will not be possible. In 2010, our vision started taking shape to establish a livelihood program in Kamoa-Kakula's host communities. The fish ponds we are viewing now is testament of decades worth of collective effort between the Kamoa team and the local community who work together to create share value. The main objective of our Kamoa-Kakula livelihood program are to build sustainable communities, increase the full security and improve the living standard of the people surrounding us. Local community farmers are equipped with training and start-up kits with the facilitation of Kamoa's agronomists until they are able to independently farm. These farmers also receive business training and ongoing support from Kamoa sustainability team. We also focus on preparing local small businesses to be part of our supply chain. Tujenge brick manufacturers are delivering over 45,000 bricks per month to add to build Kamoa-Kakula.

We are proud to be the first customers for these hard-working entrepreneurials. The livelihoods projects initially began with the plantation of maize. We have now duplicated and expanded the higher successive model to include an area of vegetables, fruits, poultry, honey and fish. The vision is to continue to expand these projects and to diversify into other business opportunities, such as agroprocessing.

[Foreign Language]

The livelihood program also forms an essential part of our livelihood restoration initiatives and the chicken at Kamoa-Kakula as part of their settlement and economic displacement activities resulting from the loss of access to fields due to mine infrastructure.

Joy.

Empowering.

Community development.

Ivanhoe Mines' is in a privileged position of owning 100% of the exploration right for this massive land package you can see behind me.

The Western Foreland has outstanding geological potential and is situated next door to our Kamoa and Kakula discoveries. Kamoa-Kakula already has been independently established as the world's fourth largest copper project and is still growing. It has copper grade that are the highest by a wide margin of the world's top 10 copper deposits.

Our exploration model for the geological features controlling the high-grade copper mineralization in the region reflects the accumulation of in-depth proprietary geological insights gained by Ivanhoe's exploration team during nearly 2 decades of regional exploration. Given the early drilling success at Makoko, we are highly confident that we have the knowledge required for additional exploration successes in the Western Foreland area for many years to come. Ivanhoe's philosophy is to think big and think long term. Our geological team has done an outstanding job of executing our strategy to continue to add shareholder and stakeholder value by keeping the drill bits turning and delivering spectacular exploration results.

At Kamoa copper, we're busy with the Phase 1 of many. We believe that this company will become a massive mining district, which will be strategically important for the DRC, the government and its people as well as our strategic investors. I think we've started well, and it's going to be a fantastic project.

Thank you for joining us on this site visit experience and accompanying us on our 2-decade journey.

For more information on all our projects and initiatives, please visit our website at ivanhoemines.com.

The objective of the company would be to create shareholder value. And shareholder value, it's also about creating a sustainable footprint, and it's about building mines in communities where you partner with your communities and your interests are aligned. So how we see this is if we build successful mines that will generate revenue and good returns for our international shareholders, we want to do it in such a fashion that our host communities are part of the success story and they see the benefits as well. We are there for the long run. It's not just a short-term project. Both Platreef and Kamoa-Kakula are very long-life assets, and that's why it's very important that we maintain our social license to operate while we create shareholder returns, which includes our communities. What we are finding across Africa is a willingness from governments to engage with international investors and finding solutions that speaks to both the social and governmental prerogative as well as the business prerogative. And it's a mutual relationship. The one needs the other, and especially, it's highlighted through these crisis that we've been going through, the pandemic. Internationally, we needed each other. There was a lot of support from China to Africa during this period, which was very important. It was a rapid learning curve for all of us to deal with the pandemic. We had to roll out protocols in terms of international standards, which they weren't because the pandemic didn't come with a manual. So there were a lot of elements that you had to think about, that you had to deal with. What do we have available for our people to ensure that they've got proper medical care in the case that you have to deal with a situation like COVID-19? And that's really where the team came together. We had to build a hospital last minute on site. We had to kit it out with ICU facilities, ventilators. So it was a tremendous effort to deal with the pandemic, especially in the first couple of months. And I think it's about the time at the top. If management show they care and we implement it, we should take the health of our people very, very seriously. And you need to ensure that you can be responsive and that you can react to these situations as and when they occur. It's brought all of us closer together. We're working seamlessly. We're integrating seamlessly. And we talk to each other daily, even though we're in different parts of the world. I have a senior executive team of very competent people working alongside me. There's Pierre Joubert, EVP, Technical Services, who looks after everything technical as well as information technology. And then I have Dr. Patricia Makhesha. She's EVP, Sustainability and Special Projects, assisting with anything ESG as well as everything we need to do in Africa. And then I've got EVP China, Peter Zhou, who is assisting with stakeholder relationships in China as well as all our corporate development initiatives throughout China. There's a lot more communication amongst the smaller team and a lot of initiatives and ideas are developed through this committee.

Ivanhoe is taking mining and lifting it up to a new level that youngsters can aspire and be proud of being part of this dynamic company. Ivanhoe is epitome of innovation. Innovation has always been a passion of mine. If you look at mining in general, and I think the ore bodies that we have, it is absolutely fantastic to see that with the designs that we've put in place, that you can actually reduce your footprint of the mine dramatically. The mining methods that we're using, you can take waste material, transport them back into the underground again. So what that means is that you will have a small-as-possible mining footprint. We're really aspiring to become carbon neutral and to have a lower carbon footprint as we possibly can have.

Ivanhoe Mines is totally different generation of leadership altogether. And I believe we're going to leave a legacy that is totally the opposite of how mining was done because we are a mining house with a conscience. We are a mining house that believes in changing lives. We are a mining house that believes in strategic partnership with all spheres of government to make sure that our continent becomes a different continent, and not only for Africa, but for the whole world. In all our projects across the board, whether it's South Africa, whether it's DRC, we start with the component of skills development. It's not a question of saying, "I'm going to catch a fish for you." It's a question of saying, "I'm going to teach you and give you the skills how to catch your own fish," and that's what we are doing. And it doesn't matter which generation. It doesn't matter which gender. It doesn't matter which race. You need to provide a platform for people to flourish. And that's what Ivanhoe Mines has been doing in a very, very effective way.

How we can unify people together, align each other and also to respect the difference, it is the Ivanhoe ways. Ivanhoe Mines is about the entrepreneurship. It's about the teamwork. It's about carrying each other. It's about supporting cultures. And my role at Ivanhoe Mines, which has continued to contribute the special friendship between China and Africa. It's my dream that when we become producers, that we will gradually to bring some of mine workers, the best of mine workers to have a chance to come to China to look what they have impacted to the electrification revolutions in China, to witness the electric cars being running around the street and to witness that the happy next generations are playing on the play yard and enjoying a better environment and enjoying a clear airs. I think bringing them to see what's the real impact that whatever they put out from the ground and being able to help in China, I think making that connections is also majoring that I can hope to achieve.

We are really trying to do things differently. We don't want to be the all-status-quo type of mining company. We want to be seen as modern. We want to be innovative. We want to be entrepreneurial. We want to look after our people and not just our employees and our host communities that's around our mines.

Thanks, guys. Okay. Now Marna, who you've just met in our last video; and Alex Pickard, our VP, Corporate Development, okay, will give you a brief corporate and project update. Marna is joining us from Johannesburg, and Alex is joining us from London. We also have Mark Farren, Steve Amos and George Gilchrist joining us from the Kamoa-Kakula mine site. These are the guys that are leading the team that is building the Kamoa-Kakula into a modern, world-scale mine as well as exploring for our next major high-grade copper discovery in the overall Kamoa-Kakula district. Marna, over to you, please.

Thank you, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm joining you here from Sandton. And my dad always says, "Start little. Dream big." I still, to this day, remember my first trip to Kamoa-Kakula. We didn't have camp base set up yet at Kolwezi. We took a Toyota Land Cruisers out. It took approximately 4 hours to get to site. Today, you can get to site in 45 minutes on our nearly constructed highway from the airport. When we got to site, there were only 2 brown tents. The one was the office, maps, scrappy geologists all around. The other one was the living quarters. And let's just say it was a very hot day in Africa, and I consumed about 6 bottles of water. Not a very good day for me, a very long drive back to Kolwezi. But what this shows is how we've progressed over the years. Looking at the site video our team produced, I see a lot of my friends. These friendships were formed over the past 14 years. We've built a magnificent project together, but not just at our Kamoa-Kakula project, also at our Platreef project and our Kipushi project. And this wouldn't have been possible without the help of our strategic partners. These relationships have been formed over the long period of time. At Kamoa-Kakula, we partnered with Zijin and the DRC government. We also have CITIC at an Ivanhoe level. And at Kipushi, we have Gécamines as our partners. Here in South Africa, we partnered with the government. We've got our host communities as our black economic empowerment partners. And we also have the Japanese consortium led by ITOCHU as a partner. And more recently, we've announced CNMC as a new strategic partner to Ivanhoe Mines. So let's just pause a little bit at Kamoa-Kakula. Robert keeps on boasting about our green metals. And about 2 months ago, we met with an ESG fund, and they were curious to know if we have determined our greenhouse gas metrics. We didn't at the time, so we decided to commission Hatch and ask them to independently verify our greenhouse emission metrics. And I'm proud to announce today that we are the greenest copper on planet Earth based on this benchmark study. So yes, Robert, you are always right. But Ivanhoe Mines is not just a one-trick pony. We also have the Platreef PGM project here in South Africa, where we've just finished sinking Shaft 1. We will shortly start equipping the shaft, and we hope to use Shaft 1 as our first production shaft. At 12 million tonnes per annum, Platreef will be the largest PGM producer mine in the world. This is a truly magnificent ore body, high grade with a large nickel, copper and gold content as well as rhodium. We are currently finalizing the numbers for an updated DFS and phase development plan PEA, and we are very excited with the results we are seeing. Hopefully, this will be published within the next month. So watch the space because there's some exciting news coming out of Platreef. And then last but not least, our Kipushi project, also in the DRC. Kipushi is a zinc, germanium, lead and copper mine. It's a brownfields project, so there's significant infrastructure in place, and it can be brought back into production within a relatively short period of time. We are truly encouraged with the boost in zinc prices slightly in the market. So hopefully, Kipushi will also be as another success story to add to the Ivanhoe story. With that as the introduction, I now hand over to Alex to take you through our integrated development plan at Kamoa-Kakula. Over to you, Alex.

Thank you, Marna, and good day to everybody on the call. And as Marna mentioned, my name is Alex Pickard. I'm VP Corporate Development for Ivanhoe Mines based here in London. And as part of my responsibilities, I work on the financial models and projections for all of the projects, but also, I'm partly responsible for the 80-page press release that we put out on Tuesday. I'm assuming that only our analysts and perhaps some of our most committed investors managed to read the entirety of that release. So I'll try and touch on some of the key highlights here. So just taking a step back to describe the integrated development plan to you, and I'll try and do that as concisely as possible. Well, really, what is it? It's actually 3 studies rolled into one to look at how we're going to build this great mining complex over the coming years and decades. So starting with the Kakula mine, which is shown on the image on the right-hand side at the bottom in the blue dotted box. Kakula, we have a definitive feasibility study that outlines a 6-million-tonne per annum mining operation with a 7.6-million-tonne per annum milling capacity, and that mill will be built in 2 modules of 3.8 million tonnes, the first of which you will have seen in the presentation is effectively already half built. Then the second mining area that we bring on stream is Kansoko, and that's captured in a 7.6-million-tonne per annum prefeasibility study. But really, the way to think about this is we're just taking 1.6 million tonnes per annum of ore from Kansoko, and we're trucking it to Kakula to fill that spare capacity in the mill. Ultimately, though, Kansoko can support a much higher mining rate of up to 6 million tonnes per annum. Finally, the big picture is the Kamoa-Kakula 19-million-tonne per annum PEA, or preliminary economic assessment, that's shown in the green dotted box. And the PEA captures all of the resources we found to date across the mining license, and it's a phased expansion up to 19 million tonnes, where we bring on additional mining areas at Kakula West and several mines in the Kamoa North area, including the Bonanza Zone. But that's only really half the picture. I think over the past decade, Kamoa-Kakula has proven time and time again that the geologists are ahead of the engineers, and we find more metal than we can scope out in these studies continually, and we fully expect that trend to happen as we continue drilling. This slide really just provides a graphical interpretation of that phased ramp-up to 19 million tonnes that I described before. So you can see the Kakula mine at the bottom in the light blue is the first phase, which we've already half constructed. So by Q3 of next year, in fact, less than a year from today, we'll be producing metal and producing cash flow, mining and milling at a rate of 3.8 million tonnes per annum. At which point, it's a case of expanding that mill to the second phase of 7.6 million tonnes per annum as quickly as possible. In the feasibility study, we do that starting in 2023, but right now, we're looking with our engineers and plans to optimize that, bringing it forward by at least 6 months to Q2 of 2022. From that point on, the philosophy is really the same. We will have a great deal of cash flow generated by the Phase 1 and Phase 2 mines, which we can continually reinvest in further expansions, building additional modules of 3.8 million and bringing on new mining areas such as Kakula West as and when we need them. I appreciate there's a lot of numbers to cover in the full 8-page documents, so I'll try to pull out some of the key highlights here. Starting with the Kakula DFS, which is shown in the first column in blue. That's the 6-million-tonne mine running through a 7.6-million-tonne milling operation. And I think, by far, the most standout feature of Kamoa-Kakula is the copper grades that we encounter there, and we have a quite remarkable 10-year mill feed grade of 6.2%, which produces almost 300,000 tonnes per year of metal from a relatively low tonnage of only 6 million tonnes per annum. The remaining capital to build this first phase of the mine is $650 million, and that compares to our original budget of $1.3 billion, so we're very much on budget there. And that $650 million will be funded approximately 50% by Ivanhoe Mines. The expansion capital of $600 million is to build that second line of the mill and bring the mining rate up to 6 million tonnes. And really, the economics of this project tell a story for themselves. It's not often you see after-tax NPV is $5.5 billion and a real IRR after tax of almost 80% for a project of this magnitude. Just focusing on the second column for a moment. That's the Kakula-Kansoko PFS at 7.6 million tonnes per annum. As I mentioned before, this is based on the exact same infrastructure that we have in the DFS, and all we're doing is bringing on stream the Kansoko mine to fill that spare mill capacity that we have at 1.6 million tonnes per annum. So we produce a bit more copper metal, over 300,000 tonnes, but really, the story here is that we only need to spend around another $50 million over the next 12 months to start ramping up that mine at Kansoko, and we already have 2 crews mining there today. But the returns that, that can generate are quite significant with the NPV boosted to $6.6 billion and the IRR maintained at around 70%. Finally, the big picture is the Kamoa-Kakula PEA, shown in the green on the right-hand side. This is the phased ramp-up to 19 million tonnes over a remarkable mine life of over 40 years. Over that first 10 years, we produced 500,000 tonnes of metal, but really, you have to focus on when we get to 19 million tonnes, this mine will be producing well upwards of 700,000 up to 800,000 tonnes of metal per annum. The initial capital cost is really the same as the PFS over the next 12 months, and the intention is that the expansion of capital can be funded from the internal cash flows generated from that 7.6 million-tonne per annum PFS operation. The after-tax IRR of $11.1 billion is quite remarkable. I'll show you a few slides of benchmarking that was independently verified just to put the Kamoa-Kakula mine into a global context. And this one shows the world's largest copper mines today. Even at the sort of initial production rate of 7.6 million tonnes per annum, producing over 300,000 tonnes of metal, Kamoa-Kakula will be well ranked among these top 20 mines. But as I mentioned before, once you get to 19 million tonnes, you can produce up to 800,000 tonnes of metal, which replaces as the second largest copper mine in the world. Finally, just to mention our cash costs, which lead the entire copper mining industry. This really is a function of the incredible grades of over 6% that we have at Kakula. We can produce -- well, we can mine and process a copper concentrate of $0.52 per pound, but even when you include realization costs to ship that concentrate to China and also all of the royalties that we will pay to the DRC government, we're still very competitive around $1.15 per pound of copper. So just to conclude on the IDP 2020. We're fully funded and in fact, half built to produce first copper in less than 1 year with around $350 million remaining to Ivanhoe Mines' account. Kamoa-Kakula is undoubtedly the copper discovery of the past several decades, and we will, of course, be one of the largest and lowest-cost mines around with the ability to generate strong cash flow throughout multiple commodity cycles. The financial returns, as I mentioned, the NPVs and IRRs speak for themselves, and we think they are unparalleled for a mining project of this scale. And we have significant expansions planned to 19 million tonnes and potentially beyond as we keep the drill bit turning, and all of this can be funded from the initial mining operation. I think there's a lot more to cover, but I've hopefully touched on the key highlights, but please get in touch with me if you have any questions. I'm based here in London. My e-mail address is alexp@ivanhoemines.com, but in the meantime, I'll hand back to Bill to run our Q&A session. Thank you.

Excellent. Thanks very much, Alex. That was an excellent summary of the IDP. We will now begin the Q&A portion of the event, and we'll try and answer as many questions as possible. But given the time constraints and given the hour that it is in Asia right now, we won't be able to get to them all. So if you do have follow-up questions, again, reach out to any one of us. My e-mail is billtr@ivancorp.net, available any time to answer questions, and we'll endeavor to get through as many as we can.

The first one is from Andrew Mikitchook, Bank of Montreal, and his question is, "When can we expect to see the Kamoa partners making commitments for the second phase of the concentrator expansion from 3.8 million to 7.8 million tonnes in terms of ordering long lead time equipment?" Robert, do we have you on the line?

I'm here. Thank you, Andrew, for your interest. And before I answer the question, I want to thank this incredible united nations of people that have gotten us this far. When the world suddenly needs copper as the world comes out of this pandemic, I want to tell everybody it takes decades to bring on stream to discover, to develop and to build a tier 1 copper mine. So we're in the 27th year of this effort. We only have a year to go. Our Chinese partners have a very big hunger for copper. China is importing about half of the copper in the world, and they're always encouraging us to go faster. So I think our Board will look at ordering an acceleration of the project, and the long lead time items will be seriously considered in less than 30 days. The commitment capital this year to order the lead time equipment is trivial at the scale of this project. We have about 5,000 people working there, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to send everybody home and then bring them back a year later to do the expansion. So we are looking at actually just continuing to build a second module and pull the expansion forward early into 2022. So I think you'll see that answered in the very near future.

That was great. Okay. Second question is from Miles -- sorry, it is for Miles. He's from [ Bill Geddie ], a shareholder. Miles, the question is, "CITIC Metal has invested well over USD 1 billion into Ivanhoe Mines in the last few years. Can you comment on why CITIC chose Ivanhoe Mines?"

Thank you very much, Bill. We have only 2 reasons and 2 reasons only. One is the people, and the second reason is the assets. We talk a lot about the assets, so I'm going to focus on the people. We have a lot of extraordinary individuals working for Ivanhoe. We have a very serious Board. We have a very strong Chairman, Mr. Robert Friedland. We have a very strong independent -- lead independent director. The Board are working very seriously on different issues. We also have a very strong management team led by Marna. We have people from a different background. The value of this is the diversity. People contribute different ideas and different perspectives. So that brings a lot of value to the company.

Fantastic. Thanks very much. We've got a number of incoming questions with respect to the copper concentrate and where it's going to be treated until the project builds its own smelter. The one we will take is from Greg Barnes, TD Securities. And the second part of that question is really, how long will the road rail connection to the Angola port be completed. So Robert, if you could take the lead on it, then maybe turn it over to Alex and/or the guys at the Kamoa site to help out.

Well, to begin, it's a 57% copper concentrate. It's astonishing how low it is in our snake. So it's a very valuable commodity, so it travels well. And it will be shipped the way all the copper is leaving the Congo because shipping costs heading south have been dropping. We have been talking to CITIC Construction who has a very big history in Angola, about the refurbishment of a highway to the railhead, the existing new railroad and going through Angolan ports, and that's under continuous development. So right now we're focused on getting into quick production. We've told you it's going to be less than a year. We're currently focused on how much less than a year that it's going to be. We need to get up and running. But going to Angola will cut the distance of the ocean in half. It will put us on the Atlantic Ocean rather than the Indian Ocean or Pacific Ocean, but it will really, really, really cut transportation costs. So I think this is something that's really being accelerated by the development of Kamoa-Kakula itself. As the mining industry shows up in our part of the world, and as we find more and more mines, it becomes self-evident that the Angolan door will open. And I think that's something else that will accelerate. As Marna said, when we first went to Kamoa-Kakula, there was nothing but bush. And when you get there now, you can rapidly see 5G wireless is coming and young kids that are writing their own software right at our mine. So we very much want to accelerate the most efficacious way to evacuate the copper. There's also smelting capacity, very, very close by, about 40 kilometers away, held by China National Nonferrous Metal Corporation. And we can use that smelting capacity and expand that site as well as a potential in the very near future.

Excellent. We've got a number of incoming questions with respect to our exploration activities on the Western Foreland package, including one from Brendan Cochrane of Fidelity. So perhaps, George, if you're on the line, could you take a crack at answering that question, please?

Sure. Welcome. George from Kamoa, beautiful DRC. The exploration activities that we've been doing in the Western Forelands, normally when you get a big land package, you take quite a few years just to get familiar with the geology and the lay of the land and understand the controls and the mineralization. We've been doing that here at Kamoa for years. And I think the drilling that we've done on targets such as Kakula West, Makoko, Bonanza Zone, those were all discovered very quickly. And it's nothing more fulfilling than being able to have a model, test it and actually getting it to work, and then you know you're on to something. So that's what we've had here at Kamoa-Kakula. And now we've got this land package to the west and to the south that's just expansive. That's 6x larger than just the Kamoa-Kakula mining license. So we're like kids in a toy store. It's -- you very rarely get this opportunity. So what we're doing in terms of exploration at the moment is the real groundwork that we know gives us the clues that we need to target the grade. So we've been doing a lot of the groundwork field mapping. We're in the dry season, so the geologists in the field collecting samples, soil samples, stream samples. And then we're busy preparing the geophysics at the moment. That's airborne, so it's not as reliant on the dry weather. But the geophysics that we know has successfully been used to target the resources here at Kamoa-Kakula. So that's what's happening for the rest of this year.

That was great. Thank you very much. We have a question from Sam Crittenden from RBC Capital Markets, and maybe Marna can take a first crack at this, is, "How can Platreef development be accelerated to take advantage of the strong PGM prices?"

It's something we've been working on for the last year, developing a phased development plan that would allow for early production. And there's more to come on this answer within next month when we publish the PEA around our phased development plan. And hopefully, that will allow us to fast track production at Platreef to be within the next 2 years.

Great. Robert, do you want to add to that? Or is that good?

My favorite project is Platreef because we have 6 metals. It's a deeply negative cost nickel mine. It's an enormous endowment of nickel. So if you assign the rhodium and the platinum and the palladium and the gold as byproducts, it's a wildly negative cost nickel mine. If you look at it as a precious metals mine, rhodium is currently at $13,000 an ounce, and palladium is north of $2,000 an ounce and gold is almost $2,000 an ounce. So the streamers are all interested in those very high-priced metals. When you mine stream 1 or 2 or 3 of them and leave the nickel and the copper and the platinum, which is still too cheap all alone, so there's a lot of financial flexibility, and it's an incredibly large resource, on the order of 200 million tonnes of precious metal at a 1-gram cutoff at way over 100 million tonnes at a 2-gram cutoff. So I keep reminding everybody, we're not just a copper mining company. We're an enormous precious metals development. And we're going to be saying a huge -- about more about that, maybe repeating this exercise, in a month or so when we announce our updated feasibility studies. From the day we first got there, there was really nothing to see when it was the Lebowa Homeland administration. Through 27 years of work, you could now go down underground, and we've got the access to the ore body. We're 350 meters away from the #1 shaft to extremely high-grade palladium, platinum, gold and rhodium. And the rhodium reserves alone is the gold equivalent of 25 million or 30 million ounces of gold. So for all you precious metals freaks out there, you're looking at various mines. That's not -- to quote Crocodile Dundee, "That's not a mine, mate. This is what a real mine is." You want to see a precious metals mine, come look at Platreef, where, in our region, something like 75% of the world's precious metals for platinum and palladium are actually produced. And this is going to be the biggest one of them all. So opening soon at a theater near you, we'll give you all the numbers.

That was great. On that follow-up basis, we have a similar question on the plans for moving Kipushi ahead. So Robert, I'll let you take the lead on that one, please.

Look, Kipushi is -- a lot of very valuable work is going on at Kipushi, but we're like a father with 3 daughters. We've slowed down our developments at both Platreef and at Kipushi temporarily while we rush production ahead at Kamoa-Kakula. But we have entered into very significant, strategic discussions with various parties that are interested in what we have at Kipushi. It's not just a zinc mine. It also will produce copper and silver, which has gone up a lot in price; and also germanium, and germanium is a very important, strategic metal used in a plethora of high-technology uses. So we hope to be able to make an announcement about more detailed plans where we're headed with Kipushi before the end of the year. And for those of you that are coming to visit us physically, we'd love to take you underground and show you how clean and advanced the Kipushi project is at this point.

Great. Okay. This is a question from an old friend of ours that Robert, you know well, and he was involved in us in the first Ivanhoe Mines as well as Diamond Fields Resources 25 years ago. His question is for you and "Is there an update on a potential listing of Ivanhoe Mines' shares on Hong Kong, London or U.S. stock exchanges?"

Wow. Well, yes, we're very anxious to see the broadest global audience addressed. As our market cap gets up, tier 1 banks are approaching us and saying, "It would make a lot of sense to get more listings." And so we will address that before the end of the year. And our Board is very enthusiastic about having more than 1 listing for our Canadian company. If we were listed in Hong Kong, there's probably 400 million people in China that could buy our shares on their hand phone. Our partner, Zijin, is our equal partner at Kamoa-Kakula, has about a $43 billion enterprise value, something in there of 8 or 10x our own. So sometimes we have red eyes, that's the Chinese expression for jealousy, about their Hong Kong listing or their Chinese listing. We think Africa also travels very well in London. London is sort of in the same time zone. So I think if we dream ahead, we'll be listed in several other additional markets around the world.

Super. Moving over to the next question. This comes in from our good friend, Oscar Cabrera at CIBC. And perhaps Steve can take a lead on this one. The question is, "The developments at Kamoa-Kakula project has been very impressive. Can you talk about the transportation and road infrastructure you've developed to ship the copper concentrate?" And the second part of that, "Will rail be part of this infrastructure?" And the third part, "What routes and ports do you plan to use?"

Okay. So our end game is Angola. That is our key focus at the moment. There is a fully functioning rail link between the border with DRC at a town called Dilolo and the Lobito ports, and the Lobito port is also fully functional and able to ship concentrates. The areas that we are working on at the moment is the road link between the mine and the Angolan border. That will not be ready for our Phase 1 -- or the start of our Phase 1, and we estimate that's probably another 1.5 years away from being useful. There are a number of export routes out of the Congo. The main one is Durban. And I envisage that the bulk of the concentrate produced will go out of the Durban port just because the storage and the warehousing and the facilities and the size of Durban is good. The other 2 are Belfast and Dar es Salaam. And so more than likely, we will send a small amount of concentrate out through 1 or 2 of those ports, but the bulk, in the short term anyway, out of Durban.

Thanks, Steve. This is a question for Mark Farren if he's there. Mark, you've been involved in many big mining projects on the African continent. How does Kamoa-Kakula compare to the other ones you've been involved in? Mark, we can't hear you.

Hello? Can you hear me now, Bill?

Yes. Perfect. Thank you.

Yes. Sorry. Okay. So I mean we've got these assets here. Kamoa-Kakula, in my opinion, and I must mention Platreef in the same breath. They are 2 best projects I've ever seen in my life. So Kamoa-Kakula, we talk about ramping up to 8 million tonnes and then taking it to 19 million. And we're in execution at the moment, and things are going, well, not so well. They've gone well from the beginning, and they've gone quickly. And any investor might normally doubt the team that's executing. But I think in this case, Robert spoke earlier about announcing the fast track of the Phase 2, which is basically bringing in the second mill. You won't do that on a normal project, but you can do it if you have the resource and ore body that we do have here. So it's normal thing. If you listened to Robert talk, he likes flat, he likes sick and he likes high-grade, and I think that's what you have here. So personally, I don't think you'll see a better copper project anywhere. That's honest. And if I do talk about platinum, I doubt very much you'll see a better platinum project in the world ever anywhere.

Thank you, Mark. We have a question, and it's really for Robert. Robert, few weeks ago, we announced a partnership with CNMC. Could you elaborate on what this partnership involves and how you see it evolving in the future?

When I first went to China in 1981 and in the early 1980s, there was only one mining company in China. And we have had a long, friendly relationship with CNMC going back decades. When we come forward to the current day, CNMC has built the only copper smelter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our concentrate is fairly low in sulfur. And so the smelting technology we're thinking about using is direct-to-blister technology that takes advantage of our metallurgical characteristics. But they have a fully permitted smelting site very close by to our mine that could easily be expanded in additional units. And CNMC is also the engineer design constructor of a very large copper and cobalt project in our backyard retreating tailings in Kolwezi. So the company has developed very good relationships with the Congolese government and has the capability to engineer, design, instruct and construct as another Chinese state-owned enterprise. CITIC is a central government enterprise in China as is CNMC. So there's enormous strength because CNMC develops mining assets in over 80 countries. They're all over the world. And I'm sure that as our relationship is sort of brought up-to-date and deepens, we're going to show you a lot of pleasant surprises about the things we can do together. So let's just leave it at that for the moment. We've -- in China, you start with a sincere updating of your relationship at the level of the Chairman of CNMC and the Chairman of NFC. They're a local Congolese organization. We're delighted to be working with another company that can bring a lot of strengths to what we're doing locally.

Thank you, Robert. Our time is we've got about 5 minutes left, so we have time for one more question, then we'll have Robert wrap it up at the end. The final question is a follow-up question from Greg Barnes, and it's, "If you make a major -- another major discovery on the Western Foreland ground, how do you expect it to be incorporated into the existing Kamoa-Kakula operation?"

No. The highest-grade ore is the enemy of the second-best ore, and the highest-grade mine is the enemy of the second-best mine. So if we find a better discovery and it's geologically perfectly possible, we'll just amend our mine plan. Now all of the ores that we've discovered in the district are part of one giant genetic event. The whole basin is part of one giant genetic event like the Witwatersrand Basin. There are hundreds of mines on one geological structure. So if we find more high grade, it will just come forward in the mine plan. If we find something better than Kakula, we'll go there next. At the Colorado School of Mines, they have a bumper sticker on most of the cars that says, "Earth first. We'll mine the other planets later." So for us, it's Kakula first. We'll mine the other ore bodies later, unless we find one that's even better than Kakula. So the district is permissive of -- well, there's really nothing like it on a global scale. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was the world's largest producer of copper metal until the 1970s. And so if you want to use hydroelectric power and you want to produce green copper, come join us in the DRC. I sincerely believe it's the world's best place to be mining copper. And the young Congolese people are fantastic, and the benefits we've gotten from our Chinese friends have been fantastic. And so watch this space. It's a very elegant problem to have to find another Kakula. We'll cross that bridge when we get there from here. And I'm sure there are a lot of people that are interested in coming to join us to help us bring this whole district up to scale. Nothing could make me happier than to bring additional western or global partners to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The more, the better. For the new administration in the country, for the stabilization and the improvement of the country, the more partners we can bring to the country, the happier we are. So watch this space. And thank you for that question.

Okay. Robert, you have 2 minutes left. So if you can end it with some concluding remarks, that would be fantastic. Thank you very much for -- everyone for joining us.

Well, the only thing I want to say to the analysts and the investors, you've seen the market capitalizations of the FAANGs. How do you get Apple to a $2 trillion valuation is you just assume that you use a 0% discount rate for all the money Apple is going to make in the future, and it's $2 trillion. And maybe you could play that game with Tesla as well. But if you use a 0% discount rate for our copper, which enables all these tech companies to exist, it's ludicrous to say the net present value is only $11 billion. The asset is not static. Yes, it's still growing. And so we want to remind you that if we're going to have a better world for our kids and our grandkids, we need sustainable copper. We need sustainable metals. And I think the greatest value, looking at the 27 years I've been privileged to work on this company, is the corporate culture is so radically different than what's happened in the past. It's a corporate culture that could go and really partner with governments on the African continent. And it's leading to heads of state calling us, offering us opportunities that we can scale. So we want to develop a world-leading, tier 1 mining company, listed internationally and making a huge amount of wealth for all of our stakeholders. And so normally, I'd go on a road show going up and down elevators, talking to kids half my age, mostly Greek-god-named hedge funds. This is a new experiment. We're using technology. We can reach everybody in the world. For people like Elon Musk that are looking for green nickel or green copper, here we are. We're available. We're on stream, and we're doing it in real time. So please come along and join us. We appreciate the support of Fidelity, who've backed us for many, many years in the very beginning. That's discretionary money that had a lot of faith in the beginning. Fidelity helped us buy the Kipushi mine during the 2008 financial crisis. We've had huge support from our Japanese friends, the Japanese government and ITOCHU. And of course, our Chinese partners bring incredible strength in infrastructure development, marketing, technology. And so -- and then there's our Congolese and our African partners. We'd like you to really learn how different we are, and we openly ask for your help and support. So with that, we are trading around an all-time high today after 27 years of work. So I guess we're an overnight success after 27 years of effort. And here's to the future. To be continued. And thanks to all of you for attending this session. Cut. Right?