Mineral Resources Limited (MIN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. This is the Mineral Resources full year results. I'm Chris Ellison, and I'm going to be joined shortly by Mark Wilson, our CFO, and he'll take you through all of the financials. It's been an extraordinary year for all of us, for the world. We've gone through what we -- probably the worst bushfires in modern history. It looked like Australia was going to burn. We didn't think it would end, and they very quickly faded. And we had this virus that started hitting our shores in March, and it's changed our world. It's changed the way we live. It's crippling economies across the world. And it doesn't seem like it's going away anytime soon. So we're going to dedicate a little bit of our time this morning on how Mineral Resources has dealt with the COVID threat that we've had and how we've tried to take care of our people and their welfare and in turn our business. I'm going to tell you a bit about the past year, talk about the performance of the business, how we landed our numbers, where we are at the moment. I'll give you some high-level words on what I think of the numbers. And then I want to dedicate a little bit of time on how we have been dealing with COVID-19, and we're going to talk a little bit more about how we're going to deal with that going forward. I mean it's -- probably if we can manage that and get that right, it will probably give us security to be able to continue to develop our business. So highlights for the year. Last year, I think I said that it was a year of consolidation where we were -- a building year, I called it. We were actually spending a lot of cash. We developed sites, mainly the Wodgina site. We had a purpose in mind for doing that. We were looking to grow into a very substantial lithium business for the next 20 or 30 years, and we've achieved that. This year is a different year. This is all about banking cash, and we've been very focused on doing that. We banked the check for the sell-down on the Wodgina site, and we've been very consistently managing and running our sites and trying to deliver tonnes in cash to the bank. Revenue is up, profits are up, dividends are up. Mining Services, a core part of our business, production growth by 65%, revenue by 50%. I flagged at last year's AGM that I intended to try with my team to double the size of that Mining business over the following 3 years, and I'm pleased to say we're well on track to do that. The iron ore business has been quite exceptional. Production up 33%. We hit a run rate of 12.5 million tonnes at Koolyanobbing in June. And Iron Valley has been steady at 6.7 million tonnes. The lithium business, we've got -- as I said, it's a substantial business on world standards. We're in -- they are probably in the top 4 in the world. Prices are low at the moment. Sure, we understand that. We see that mainly, as obviously, it's demand-driven. And with the impact of the COVID-19, demand around the world has been suddenly switched off. The Mt. Marion mine has performed extremely well. Production is up 17% year-on-year. But the team down there have done an exceptional job and the annual production, I'll talk about later is even higher. Wodgina remains mothballed, and it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. But there's no doubt, we've got 2 great partners in Ganfeng and Albemarle. They're quite exceptional. They're both very strong at what they do and working with this team going forward -- this is going to be a very big part of the MinRes business. Sustainability performance, very, very important. And I think people out there are recognizing. I think 5 or 6 years ago, I used to put our safety results and then try and draw everyone's attention to it and tell them that if an organization didn't get safety, it didn't deliver on safety, it didn't bring their people home safe, the business probably isn't sustainable. I think a lot more of our investors are getting that. It's something that we've been working on very hard for a long time. You can see on that chart where we were some time back. Again, we've had another outstanding safety result for the year. Our workforce continues to grow. We're over 3,100 employees. Our safety rank is in the top 10 in the mining industry and the Mining Services industry, which is no mean feat. Our team are incredibly focused on how they deliver the safety. We're running an LTI frequency rate of 0. That means that no one has had an accident that's caused them to be off work for a full 8-hour shift. So quite remarkable again in our business when you consider how many people are out there playing with rocks around the clock. We've increased our proactive safety actions by 38%. Again, another great milestone. We're consistently growing our percentage of female and indigenous employees. We've increased our recruitment of second-generation MRL employees. And these people come into the business. So second generation, people are people, children of our employees. They come into the business with a good sense of our culture. They're a good fit, and generally speaking, I mean, they've been an incredibly good result. We've been getting out of them. We've added 15 apprentices this year as well. That gives us a total of 34 across the business. We've only, at this stage, got 3 females inside those 34, but we're focused on growing that. 13 of those people are second generation. So their moms or dads worked for us. We took in 44 trainees and graduates this financial year, 23 again, second-generation out of our MinRes family. And 24 of those are females, so we're getting much stronger in that area, and we're very focused on it. We remain highly focused on emissions, and we continue wherever we can to replace diesel with gas, LNG and solar. We're going to be adding solar to our mines of the future. We have done a significant study internally, and it's actually become a cost benefit to add solar, so even more reason why we should get that done. But any major developments we do going forward, we're going to have solar as part of our energy and power generation. We'd like to own and operate our own energy by way of -- sorry, we own and operate all our own energy in terms of our power stations, and that gives us total control over greenfield solutions, and we have direct control over the emissions. So we have the ability to make greenfield changes as we go forward, and we will be. We're a significant contributor to WA charities and community organizations, something that Mineral Resources takes extremely seriously. We believe that we're part of the community, both in the city and countries. And it's our responsibility to make sure that we provide support to a whole range of areas where we can't rely on the government to fund literally everything. And at the moment, we're heading towards $1 billion in royalties and taxes over the last 5 years. So again, we're contributing right across the board to just -- not just the people and the communities but the economy for the whole of Australia. Tailings dams. They were a hot topic a few years ago. We continue to monitor them. It's a long-term plan we have, and we do exactly the same with our open-pit walls. We have 0 risk in either of our 2 tailings dams that we operate. The Wodgina tailings dam was constructed under outside experts. And it sits on care and maintenance. Mt. Marion, we put in some plant and equipment down there where we're able to extract all of the solids out of the tails, and we actually dry stack them. So they don't go into a tails dam at all now, but the surplus, which is a slurry, is simply discharged into a below-ground open pit disused gold mine. So 0 risk with that. Heritage Management Section 18s are a bit of a hot topic in the industry. We have reviewed all our sites in our Section 18s, and we report that there's no risk whatsoever with them. But our approach on how we deal with those is still unchanged. It's fairly solid with our team. We have full collaboration with traditional owners on any sites that we work on, not just with Section 18s but with a whole range of areas. And we proceed our developments and our operations only our mutual outcomes. So good way of working in collaboration. COVID. It's probably been the biggest disruptor the world's seen in living memory. As I said before, it doesn't seem to be going away. It's a constant threat to us. The past 6 months, we thought the bushfires were probably the worst thing that could happen to Australia, but it just got worse with this virus. The performance of our people was quite extraordinary when the virus sort of hit, and we realized that it could have an effect on our families, and it could take the lives of people close to us. All our people pulled together in a way I've never seen before. The culture and the business has always been strong, but it just went to a whole new level. So the most important thing that we focused on, once we recognize the threat of this virus, was to make sure that every person in the business kept their job, they kept the same pay, they could collect that pay, they could take it home, they could support their family with absolute certainty. The wives didn't have to worry and the husbands about where the income was coming from or whether they were going to have a home to live. And we got that right. We made sure that no one lost their job, and they didn't. And we think that if we got that area right, the rest of the business would follow. We'd have a workforce that appreciated the fact that we were living as a family and that we cared about them. You're about to watch a 60-second video right now, and that's going to give you a sense of how we managed through this COVID. And then I'll follow on with a few more remarks on where we've been. [Presentation]

Okay. So when we recognized that there was a threat coming, we got our people together. We drew up a plan very quickly. We got an understanding of the initial steps that we could take. The discipline from our people is quite extraordinary. We took on board all the government guidelines. We made sure that they were clear. We got them to our sites. We got them to our people. We made sure that everyone was kept in a bubble as best we could, certainly at work, some working from home and ensuring that our people clearly understood that if they stayed in a bubble at home, that was the safest approach for their family. We relocated a lot of people from the eastern states who come to live on a single status basis here in Perth. We've done the same with our people in the territory, had to R&R out to Darwin and be without their families for long periods of time, and that's still ongoing. I mean they've been amazing, those people and very unselfish in making sure that they've done that to make sure that their families continue to have an income. The kids get skilled and the life continues as it should. It's going to be a period of time before we can do anything more about that, and we're trying to make them as comfortable as we can. We introduced new technology to keep everyone connected as we're doing right now. We've learned to meet, to communicate on screen rather than being face to face in person. We went out and we hired some of the Eagle's assistant coaches, and we got them out around our sites. They were pretty amazing. They provided physical training and mental health support to all our people were -- and that was a breath of fresh air. Our people were on lockdown on site, they were isolated in their rooms, going to work, coming back, eating in their rooms and trying to give them something a little bit different to make sure that their mental health was supported as best we could. We did live weekly broadcast hosted by the comedian, Peter Rowsthorn. We had a whole new level of hygiene and cleanliness and awareness that went right through our office, our sites. We provided a range of products for people to take home to make sure that they tried to keep clean and they understood how important it was. The net result of that has been quite extraordinary. I don't think I've seen anyone with the flu for probably about 4 months, and we're probably going to go right through this winter without anyone catching it, simply because of the hygiene practice we put in and the safe distancing we will try and maintain. And our sites, we have them lockdown. There's still lockdown. No one gets on or off site without being tested. And if you consider that, it's quite a good result for everybody in the community. So if we can put our people on a plane, they know the person next to them hasn't got the virus because everyone's been tested. When they get to site, the site's entirely clean. When they come home, if they stay in their bubble, they can actually -- they're not bringing anything home to their families, so we can keep WA clean. I mean if we can do that, the economy will keep ticking along. Our screening process, we installed and operate WA's largest PCR testing facility. We were very fortunate or not probably fortunate, but we got very focused when we saw what was happening in Wuhan. And we were probably one of the very few in the world that we got in and bought equipment out of the U.S., and we got it out of the U.S. as they were locking that down and stopping all the test equipment leaving. And we've been incredibly well supported by the manufacturers of that equipment in terms of making sure that we've got endless reagents. And we've got the world's best reagents. It's not cheap, but I mean, to put a price on someone's life, it's incredibly economic. This equipment, it is the most accurate test equipment available in the world. It's gold standard. It's U.S.-made. It's run by highly qualified technicians and lab people. A health division inside our business, it's not for profit, it's run by and managed by Neil Fong. And I got to say he'd done an exceptional job to get our facilities up and running. West Australia does not allow healthy people to be tested. So Neil worked through that and helped us get on top of that. And he gives us constant guidance on a week-by-week basis. So outstanding to have him on board. We test all our work, he's going to site. On every time they hop on a plane, they all have to get tested. We've entered into a partnership very early with the help again of Neil Fong with the Curtin University on a COVID-19 research program. And all the test results that we get, by the way, are all available to the WA Health Department, which they like to use, and it helps them to predict. But as I said, when the people are on planes, on our sites, when they go home, it's a pretty good feeling for them to know that they're not taking anything with them. And that means all of our MinRes family is safe and very financially secure. We don't know what's around the corner. We have no idea when this is going to end. We keep managing our business on that basis. It hasn't been easy for management or for any of our staff. But they've taken it in their stride and they've dealt with it. And as I said earlier, everything we did upfront, and we continue to do it simply to make sure that we keep everyone employed, and we keep them secure. Everything else behind that falls in place as secondary. Our business is very strong, it's very resilient. All our sites have run exceptionally well throughout this whole period. We haven't shut any of them down, and we don't have any plans to do so provided we can keep managing the way we do. The ownership taken by management staff, it's been transformational for the business. It's been ridiculously good. It's a culture in the business that I've never seen before in my career. It come on board right upfront when everyone had to pull together, and it hasn't changed. It simply got stronger. And I'm very proud of the people and the culture and the can-do attitude that we've got in this exceptional business. A few quick highlights on financial performance. As I said, probably the best result we achieved was not losing anybody through the virus and keeping all our family together. And that's the family that runs this machine that turns out these numbers. We're developing an exceptionally good Mining Services and commodity business that -- it has 30- to 50-year horizons we're building into it. Again this year with the opportunities sitting in front of us that I'll talk about, we have the ability to be able to do even better than that. The key figures. Revenue is up 41%. Statutory EBITDA had a fairly decent number. That, of course, includes the capital gain we had on the sell-down of Wodgina. At the end of June, we had over $1.5 billion cash at the bank. And we paid out $1 a share for the full year, so $0.77 for this period, $0.23 for last. So again, I think, good performance. The shareholder value creation inside MinRes from listing in 2006 has been very strong, very compelling. Over the 14 years, we've averaged 30% earnings per share growth, almost 27% average return on invested capital, which is quite extraordinary, and that's after tax, 27% shareholder return growth per annum, and we've converted 101% of our EBITDA to cash. We paid a dividend every 6 months since we listed. Total EBITDA earnings hit $5.78 billion and total dividends $5.81 on a $0.90 share. A great track record. And I think it's one that we're all extraordinarily proud of. All right. I'm going to let Mark come up and take us through the numbers, and then I'll come back and let you know where we're going.

Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here this morning to walk you through our financial results. 2020 has been a year of significant financial milestones for Mineral Resources. As Chris said, we delivered revenue of $2.1 billion for the year. That's the first time we've been over $2 billion as a company. Our statutory EBITDA, just over $2 billion. Contribution from the sale of Wodgina through the year in the first half was $1.3 billion of that. The underlying EBITDA figure of $765 million is also a record and that was driven -- was supported by a strong second half of $435 million in the half. Our cash has finished at $1.522 billion. That's a record, bringing us back into a net cash position for the year of $231 million. The strong performance through the year and the strong outlook going forward has enabled the directors to declare a final fully franked dividend of $0.70 -- sorry, $0.77 per share, taking the total dividends for the year to $1, again a record. Pleasingly for me, we've been able to continue to invest to grow a platform for continued success and growth in our core operating segments of Mining Services and Commodities. Just unpicking the growth a little bit more, the records. We've seen very strong contributions from each of the segments, Mining Services and Commodities. As Chris said, the volumes in our Mining Services business were up 65% year-on-year. And that was driven both by internal contracts as well as securing some additional external contracts. Our commodities exports have been very strong. Iron ore, as Chris said, up 33%, largely off the back of increased production out of Koolyanobbing. We invested heavily in Kooly through the year to make that happen and to set us up for the coming years. Iron Valley continued to perform strongly. And lithium, we saw production up 17% and shipments up 7% in a very difficult market. In terms of other aspects of the P&L that should be noted, depreciation, amortization and interest costs have all risen through the year. That's in line with our expectations and reflective of the businesses it scales up in terms of size. Through the year, we took a decision to -- well, at the half, we took a decision to impair a number of assets. The $114 million was impaired at December. And in the second half, we've taken a further $86 million across 4 categories. So we've identified a series of tenements that were required more than 10 years ago. And those tenements are no longer required as we progress through our Yilgarn 10-year strategy. So we've taken a charge against those. We also have various items of plant and equipment that we will probably not be putting to work going forward, given the success we've had with the development of our crushing strategy, particularly around the NextGen plant that we've taken the charge against those. We've also taken the charge against some of the intangible assets, the development costs and some low-value ore stockpiles in the business. In terms of the movement year-on-year, we've seen strong contributions from the Mining Services business, as I've said as well as from the Commodities business. The performance over the year, taking us to the $765 million has been achieved despite a $44 million reduction in the contribution from lithium segment over the year. That has been driven by 2 factors. We had care and maintenance costs and the cost incurred in actually setting Wodgina up for care and maintenance of about $18 million in the year. I would expect that number to be less in this coming year or in this current year. And the balance of that $44 million decline was also driven off reduced sales in lithium out of Mt. Marion. We don't have a benchmark price for lithium globally. But in round terms, lithium pricing was off, we think, about 40% in the year compared to the prior year in Aussie dollar terms. So that's been a big drag on earnings for the year. In terms of cash, we've seen very strong performance at a cash flow level through the business this year. FY '19 saw us invest heavily for growth in Koolyanobbing and that consumed considerable working capital. In FY '20, whilst we've been able to grow the business, we've been able to grow the top line, 41%. We've been able to grow the tonnes. We've been able to do that whilst holding our working capital pretty much level, which is a great result. And that's meant that the operations have generated close to $800 million in cash over the year. We've invested, as we foreshadowed we would through the year, in developing capacity and capability at Koolyanobbing, in particular. We've also incurred CapEx in the build-out of Wodgina at the start of the year and 1 or 2 smaller acquisitions. So the CapEx for the year was $391 million. As Chris said, we've had a significant cash injection, over $1.2 billion from the part sale of Wodgina through the year. And that's left us with 1.2 -- sorry, $1.522 billion at the end of the year, an increase of over $1.2 billion for the year. In terms of our balance sheet, balance sheet is extremely robust. It's liquid. It's conservatively geared. We're in a net cash position at 30 June. As I said, that allowed us to pay -- or sorry, to declare a final dividend of $0.77, slightly higher than we would normally do under our traditional formula of 50% of NPAT, but certainly with the headroom to do that. This next slide shows a build over the course of the year from 30 June 2019, through to 30 June 2020, of our cash. And you can see the contribution there from Wodgina and then the earnings, payment of dividends and taxes, CapEx and so on to arrive at the concluding balance of $231 million. We've also shared with you there a little bit more information about CapEx and the way that we've spent the $391 million over the course of the year. Deferred strip is a significant spend of almost $90 million. That's an investment in the future, investment in the future at Koolyanobbing, in particular, but also at Mt. Marion. Just want to share a couple of slides with you to talk about our -- the way we think about value creation. So this slide in front of you now shows the track record on 3 of the investment decisions taken by this company over the last decade or so. These are commodity investments. And the numbers that you see are after tax -- presented on an after-tax basis, and they do not include any allowance for margin from the Mining Services segment. So this is the performance of the business on a commodities-only basis. You'll see there very, very strong performance on each of those investments, particularly noting that both and each of Wodgina and Mt. Marion have a couple of decades, at least, of production left in them. The way that we think about value investment decisions is governed by a strong focus on capital and the way we allocate capital. That's really fundamentals the way we think. So this last slide that I want to share with you shows the translation of that investment decision through the value creation into results for our shareholders. We focus as a business when we think about deploying capital on the returns that we're going to generate from that capital. That's really important to us because the resources industry is a capital-intensive industry. And development of these projects can take a number of years at times. So it's important that we get these allocation decisions right. We target projects that will generate a return after tax of at least 20%. We do that, so that we can deliver corporate results in excess of 12%, which is well in excess of our weighted average cost of capital. The chart on the left shows our track record since listing of doing this. It shows it annually, and it also shows that on a smooth basis on a 4-year rolling average. So you can get a look-through the cycle. You can see the track record of performance in that respect. Our ability to generate returns on the capital we invest translates to operating cash. Since listing over $4 billion of operating cash, that has allowed us to pay dividends, totaling almost $1 billion to our shareholders, representing growth of about 19% per annum. And we've been able to do that while maintaining conservatively geared balance sheet. That's going to be the way we think about going forward. Careful deployment of capital in the wealth of opportunity in front of us. We'll continue to take this business forward and set it up for the next 30 to 50 years as Chris outlined. I'll now hand back to Chris, and he'll take you through the performance through FY '20 and the outlook into the current year. Thank you.

Thanks for that, Mark. Well done. Okay. So I'll just run you through very quickly on the performance of the business over this past year. As most of you know, the business in MinRes is made up of 4 key pillars. So we have the Mining Services part of the business. We have the commodities, the profit share, and then we have the innovation and infrastructure. So inside the Mining Services, that's where MinRes started their business. We draw our heartbeat from that culture. It's the foundation of how we operate. It creates this can-do attitude that we've got down deep in the engine room of Mineral Resources. That means we get things down efficiently. We get them done now, not next week. Time costs money, and our entire team have really got that concept. The Mining Services business, it generally grows, as I said, always about 15% a year. We're probably running at double that at the moment from last year going forward. I said we're going to double the size of that entire business. We're well on track to doing that. This year has been no exception. The commodities business, we've got 4 operating mine sites sitting in there and a fifth under construction. So we've got 2 lithium mines, 1 in the north and 1 in the south. We've got 2 iron ore mines, 1 up in the Pilbara, 1 down in the Yilgarn. So different weather patterns, different locations, different ports, different people almost working on them. So we get a good geographical spread on that. And of course, we're going to take up ownership in the Kemerton hydroxide plant in partnership with Albemarle. That will start happening as it completes in '21 going forward and commissioning into '22. Profit share. What we do with that is we go out, we take up an equity position in an asset, primarily in commodities. And then we fund the development of our balance sheet. We use our skill and expertise and know-how on how to bring those on to line, and then we generally operate those on a life-of-mine basis. Then finally, the infrastructure and innovation part of our business, it's where we have strategic port and rail allocation, supply chain networks. And then the innovation technology we have, the most recent one that's on the ground at the moment is the NextGen 2 plant, we call it, 15 million tonne crushing plant, and we've built that in conjunction with Metso Minerals, but the design and the ownership of that proprietary information rests with MinRes. So I'll just run you through the Mining Services business. All the sites have delivered extremely strongly this year, growth up by 65% over the past 12 months. EBITDA up 72%. Two new contracts, 4 contracts renewed, and we continue with our extremely high customer retention, all because I think good, high-quality equipment, incredible safety record. Quite a number of our sites have 0 TRIFR on them. Some of our clients say that their safest sites are the ones that we run. But quite a significant program that we have that brings all of these elements together that makes us what I consider the contractor of choice in the Mining Services industry in Australia. Crushing and processing. We're running 22 operating sites. Kooly increased over the last 12 months. So we're originally going down there to have a run rate of about 6 million tonne a year for about 5 years, and we're going to do twice that now and for twice as long. So on the crushing and processing, every single site we've got out there is seriously delivered. On the mining -- or the contract mining, there's 21 open pits. They sit under commodities. We own and operate all our own drill and blast equipment now, and we own all of our yellow goods. Supply chain logistics. We hold about 14 bit million tonnes on highway and about 7.5 million tonnes on rail, and all of that's going to go up next year substantially. Construction. Our construction division, it's a well-oiled machine, high-quality people that have been there, some with the business for many, many years. We completed Wodgina. We've now got a large fleet of our cranes and our people down at Kemerton, and they're helping out the Albemarle team to try and make sure that we get that finished on time. They built the 15 million tonne NextGen plant. They're putting that together at the moment. They're preparing to mobilize that to site. We want to have that operating well before the end of this year, and it's going to one of the large iron ore clients. And the construction boys, they also bituminized about 120,000 is a road down in the Yilgarn. So we turn our roads down there into all-weather, so that we can keep the operations running continuously. The energy. We continued -- the team in there worked very hard under Shelley. They completed a study on how to continually displace diesel power, primarily with solars where we're focused. The coronavirus has delayed us with our activities in the Perth Basin. We've sort of kicked everything out there a year, and we're sort of figuring out the best way forward out there. But we can say we got some incredibly highly prospective land out there, and all our neighbors have been very successful over the last couple of years. So the figures across will have the same results when we get to it. Long-term Mining Services performance. We just put a couple of charts there just to show you that it's consistent. The charts show growth over the past 6 years, which hang in around about 20% or better, quite an incredible outcome. But going forward, the growth opportunities are more significant than I've ever seen them before, and we're looking at projects where we're going to be, I think, successful on quite a range of them this year and next. Can never always predict what you're going to win and what you're going to achieve, but we're certainly in a good position to be able to deliver the sort of results that our clients and the like need. Our margins have been consistent through these cycles, and the business provides a very predictable cash flow. It generates long, long-term annuity streams. It's a great business to have and one that we started many years ago with one little tiny crushing plant on a manganese site. Commodities, we've outlaid the tonnes, the cost, the revenue, so you can do the math and understand what's happened during the year. The iron ore prices this year have been up on last year, about 16%. The exchange rate was pretty good at an average of 0.67. Unusual for the norm is that the U.S. dollar tracks the iron ore price, but they separated over the last year or 18 months. It would be interesting to see what happens with that. And no doubt, the U.S. selection will have a bearing on that. Our shipments, 33% up last year because we're producing more ore, obviously. Lithium pricing is down about 46% year-on-year. Kooly, it's running at about 12 million tonnes at the moment. It's -- probably can do a little bit better than that, but we won't be going too much higher than that. We originally announced last year, we were aiming for 15 million tonnes. We're not going to get there because of the rail restrictions with the guys down there. Iron Valley, it simply keeps delivering. It's a high-cost operation, but the price of ore is up. So how long it will stay there for, I don't know. But the team have worked very hard out there to try and be more efficient out there and they keep delivering the tonnes. The lithium world by demand, obviously, we saw it, it's going to say, decline, probably crash is a better word. It went down to a low number. It's still at a low number. Demand went backwards. Obviously, factories shut, they stopped making cars, they stopped making batteries and they're turning them back on now. We feel a very different feeling coming through the market over the last couple of months, and it almost seems like they've decided that they're going to simply open the factories, and they're going to work with the virus rather than trying to fight it, but certainly, a lot of good encouraging signs around the world. Mt. Marion has run now over the last couple of months. Our team have done, again, a good job. We are extracting more than 90% of the lithium units out of the rock down there, which is probably the only mine site in the world that I know that's achieving that. We've recently increased production by 31%. And the plant has always been running at nameplate. So again, extraordinary by the team. And Ganfeng, our partner in that mine. And they do 100% of the offtake. The MARBL Joint Venture, Wodgina's on care and maintenance, and Kemerton is continuing to be constructed. And we'll take our ownership on that when it commissions. Next is where are we going in '21 and beyond. The crushing numbers are going to grow. The Mining Services business will grow. The Mining Services business is run by Mike Grey who's recently taken up the position of Chief Executive across all of our Mining Services. Mike's been around with the business for some time, and it's in probably now that the team we've got sitting in there. It was undoubtedly the best team I've ever had. So we've got a huge opportunity ahead of us. The crushing will grow by numbers, Kooly will grow a little bit more. The NextGen plant is heading up, as I said, up north, we'll have that installed, and that will put an extra 7 million or 8 million tonnes of crushing capacity on that site. We have got, as I said earlier, another one that we won that we're getting ready for and we're mobilizing for. Processing won't change too much over the next 12 months. It will pretty much stay where it's at. Contract mining and haulage is expected to grow from about 42 million to 54 million tonnes. And the energy, as I said earlier, we're looking at transforming wherever we can into solar. It's actually economically viable to do that. Not that long ago, it was a cost to do it. Now there's a payback on it. And for a lot of reasons, we just need to move with the times and make sure that we're sort of out front on using as much green energy as we can. If we keep that attitude up, I mean, I think we'll be in a very strong position 4 or 5 years down the track. But we're putting a lot of funding and time and effort into making sure that happens. And as I said earlier, any new mine sites we do, they will have a plan where they're going to have lots and lots of solar panels as a minimum. On terms of the infrastructure, we intend to own and operate our own port facilities in the Pilbara. We're working on that now. We will also be building some haul roads up there for off-highway big trucks, hauling probably the biggest payload road trains in the world. And we think that we'll be able to get them autonomous somewhere down the track. Commodities outlook. We've laid out what we think the tonnes look like. We've laid out in the past what our costs were. Often with more tonnes, we are able to bring the unit cost down. We've got more tonnes to spread those fixed costs over. As I said earlier, we're developing mining operations. We're looking at 20- to 50-year mine life, and Paul Brown who's recently stepped into the role of Chief Executive of our Commodities business. He's been running it for some time, but taken on more responsibility. And again, with the workload we got ahead of us and with Paul sitting in there, I think the opportunities for that business is going to be quite significant. I think we got more opportunity than we're going to have ability to be able to get them done over the next 2 or 3 years, but we will get them done. Koolyanobbing, as I said, it will produce about 12.5 million tonnes this year. Iron Valley will do a solid 8 million tonnes. So again, we're growing our tonnes in both those areas. Mt. Marion will probably do a good 450,000 dry tonnes of spod, that will all go across to our customer with Ganfeng. Overall, costs on that side are going to come down about 15%. And we're in extremely strong position when the lithium business does start to recover, and we can feel a few of those green shoots out in the market now. Kemerton, it's being constructed and paid for by Albemarle, and we have no financial or capital risk associated with that. We are hoping that the trains are going to start commissioning around second half of '21 and get into production -- full production somewhere around mid- to late '22. And Wodgina will certainly remain on care and maintenance for the foreseeable future. That plant and that site sitting up there on its own, costs about $30 million a year, and our share of that is about $12 million. Growth projects going forward. We got some significant opportunities sitting out there. We've got 3 major projects that we're working on. We think there's no doubt that 2 of them are going to be serious winners. We're working with the government and other parties to try and finalize ownership of port access. It's been ongoing for some time in the Pilbara. We're hoping that it's getting closer. Timing is of the essence, not just for MinRes but it's timing for WA. The opportunity to get more ore into the market has a finite time, I believe. And we need to really be starting on these projects this calendar year. So hopefully, the government will start making some decisions in the very near term. Once we've got that approval, it will allow us to double our current iron ore production. So this year's production will double, and it will take about 2 years from when we get that approval. And we -- as I said, I hope that's soon. And then that production will double in the preceding 2 years beyond that. Marillana, we've been doing a lot of work on that, and we're just winding up detailed testing. What we've been doing out there, we've been doing a lot of drilling and an awful lot of metallurgical test work through the labs. And again, once we get an understanding of the port decision, we've got a good ore body there as well. We expect the ore quality to be around about 60.5%, and that's what about 7 or 8 months of lab testing has shown us. That's a partnership with Brockman. And they've previously done a lot of work, and we've got the -- about the same results. All that product will come out of there will be 100% primes. So like to be able to tell you more, but that's about as much as we can say at the moment until we get some good news. Our energy future, we're looking at ways of providing long-term energy security into the business. It's our desire to own our own gas in ground. If we do that, we know that we can have a 20- to 40-year supply. We know that the costs are fixed. And out of that, we can develop a substantial number of businesses as well as support all of our energy needs inside our mining business, and that's an association, of course, with as much solar as we can possibly put around our plants. But in the meantime, we will just continue to try and reduce the burn of diesel and change that out for whatever we can. And at the moment, the most economic one to move to is gas and solar. But we're looking at that. It's for our power generation, rail transport, road transport, it's all going to be big consumers of energy going forward. The Mining Services guidance. Again, we've given you a pretty good chart that gives you an understanding of what we're doing on both commodities and growth in the Mining Services business. As I said, there's substantial opportunities. We will double that business going forward, starting from end of '19. And we see a good solid 30% growth for iron ore. Volumes are going to be up on last year. We expect the pricing to remain quite robust through this calendar year. The lithium production, it will remain stable. And we're not expecting anything significant in terms of the pricing from now through to Christmas, at least. So next year will tell us another story. So that sort of winds it up. The business is despite the pandemic that's out there and a hardship that many, many people are going through right across the planet. And in spite of all of that, our people have been amazing on their performance, and the business has never been in better shape. In terms of its operations today and then in terms of the future outlook, it's got, where we know that we're going to be adding extra business every quarter that goes forward, at least for the next 3 years. The ownership that the management staff have taken, it's been transformational for the business. The culture is at a level I haven't seen before. This team have been incredibly efficient, and they'll get better as we go forward. The WA government, a good place to be. I mean if we're fortunate enough to live in WA, we can still go out to restaurants. We can still have all of our people safely moving around. We can expect everyone to turn up for work fit and healthy and their families to stay that way. So it's a good place to be. And we've got an extremely supportive strong WA government. Their management of the COVID throughout this whole process, I think, has been second to none on a world standard. And as long as we follow their advice and continue to do what we're doing, I think WA is going to be very, very strong going forward. And sadly, a lot of other areas across the world aren't. So that can be a market advantage for us. It can be an advantage in terms of pricing on commodities. Our Mining Services and our products are in high demand. The lithium, we're not getting a lot of money for it, but it's certainly in high demand. We're selling more than any other single mine that I know of. We've got a lot ahead of us on construction. I'm not quite sure what lies ahead of us globally in terms of consumption, again, totally dependent on the world being able to learn to live with this virus and get back into production and let the consumers start buying. I want to thank the staff. I want to thank all of my key staff. My key guys that put up with me every day, Mark Wilson, Mike Grey, Paul Brown, outstanding. I want to thank Diana for working with my temperate, very patient self on putting all of this together, always gets a great job done. And I got to thank all of the team, special thanks. You're going to see coming out of our business over out of our annual report that we've just put together, it's very unusual. It's very different as Mineral Resources is. We've been very fortunate to have a couple of people that have been locked out of New York, and they're actually stuck in Perth. So I've got Russell James. If you Google Russell, he's known to the world, he's been around, and he's captured the COVID virus on our sites, he's captured the mood, he's captured the people. I think it's something that we wanted to do, and we've done that exceptionally well. But all of the amazing pitches and shots, you see that's going to come out of the business over the next 1 or 2 years is all thanks to Russell and to his wife, Ali Franco who's also been styling and branding our business. So we're lucky to have 2 international rock stars stuck here in little old Perth and helping us with all of this. So our image is going to change. And finally, we have secured a new office building. We're working on that. We hope to be in that by June next year. So if any of you ever get out west and will let you through the border, we'll be in a new office, and we'll be able to welcome you in style. So Mark and I are very happy to take any questions of anyone out there. If you didn't think the presentation was detailed enough, you're welcome to ask us any you've got.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Rahul Anand with Morgan Stanley.

Can I please start with the Mining Services business. So you've talked about volume growth of 20% to 25% for FY '21. I just wanted to confirm firstly, are these confirmed contracts? And then secondly, purely crushing, i.e., I'm just trying to understand why the EBITDA guidance was not provided for next year. That's the first one. And then I'll come back with the second.

Okay. Generally, Rahul, welcome. Thanks for the question. Generally, at this time of year, we don't provide any sort of guidance like that at all. If we ever do, we do it down around AGM time. And the Mining Services, if you look into the Mining Services business now, it's a combination of services that we provide. The crushing is still probably the backbone of that. But there's a range of other services that are coming in there, and that's going to include the on off-highway haulage that we do rail. And the camps, of course, and we want -- we're going to be putting ownership of infrastructure in there around ports and other types of services that we do. So we just group them all together now.

Right. I mean the 20% to 25% then, Chris, is basically keeping your business composition the same? You'd basically grow everything by 20% to 25% in its current splits. Is that fair?

Yes, that's correct.

Okay. All right. And the second question then. I was just trying to drill down a bit more into the CapEx. I wanted to firstly understand the sustaining CapEx that was flagged today. Is that something that we can extrapolate and use for future periods as well as a guide? And then the second point I wanted to understand sort of -- you talked about the corporate office, you're doing about a $60 million spend there. But there's an additional $77 million that's been flagged for Central and other. Just wanted to understand, firstly, if you could elaborate a bit on that? And how much of that do you see continuing into the future?

Rahul, it's Mark. Thanks for the question. In terms of the -- I'll take the second bit first. In terms of the CapEx and the outlook, corporate and other, I think the way to think about that is this business has gone through significant growth. Balance sheet's doubled in size over the last 5 years, 41% of the top line just in the last 12 months alone. So we need to make decisions now to set the business up to sustain the growth we see in the future. So we don't see that sort of spend over the next 12 months is recurring beyond that 12 months, the numbers that you've particularly called out. Think of it more as an investment to get ourselves set for this next phase of growth. In terms of sustaining, we've shown, obviously, a step-up in sustaining CapEx. Again, that's reflecting higher tonnes, particularly out of Kooly, but also Marion, we're going to see some growth there in terms of volume over the next 12 months. So we've tried to be conservative in the way that we frame that number. It's still below depreciation, amortization. So it's -- but as a guide, yes, it's that sort of order or thereabouts going forward.

Okay. All right. Perfect. And just one follow-up there. There was a bit of deferred stripping in there as well today. So how should we think about that? Is that a one-off for this year? I assume that's for the iron ore business.

It is largely for the iron ore. It's been heavy with the growth at Kooly. We're operating out of a number of pits at Kooly, as we set that project up to really hit its stride this year for the full year and beyond. So there is this investment, again, in this particular year as we do that, but we would expect that to fall away over time.

The next question comes from Hayden Bairstow with Macquarie.

Chris and Mark, just a couple for me. Firstly, just on Kemerton, you're obviously down there helping out now. I mean we've seen issues with the other big hydroxide plant here. I mean you're saying Wodgina is sort of on care and maintenance for an extended period. So is that now a green bushes ore feed story? Is there risks around sort of the ramp up if they go from one to the other? I mean I just want to inter to see how and whether you can actually get involved in sort of trying to manage the risks around the ramp up at Kemerton? And then also in iron ore, I mean, how do you sort of manage the COVID uncertainty? I mean iron ore price is obviously, hugely buoyant at the moment. And your capital commitments that you're looking at in the Pilbara around iron ore CapEx. You obviously got a small JV partner in Marillana and sort of how you sort of manage all those risks and sort of variances to what you want to do versus JV partners?

Yes. Thanks, Hayden. And like the work you do on us, too, over time, it's exceptional. First, down at Kemerton, look, we're basically down there, helping them to make sure that we provide some key people down there and key equipment. That's been a big help to Albemarle. The plant that they're building down there is a copy of what they're running in China. So there's no new technology going into this thing. They recently commissioned a plant in China and ramped it up, and that went exceptionally well. So -- and the other thing with the plant down at Kemerton is that it's probably -- it's in modules. So most other plants out there, you have to put dirt in the front, and it has the all the way through and out the back end. At this one, there's about 3 or 4 different sections to it. So if one part of the plant breaks down, all of the rest keeps operating. So -- but as I said, the most important thing is it's another one, it's not a new one. So -- and we've got some incredibly experienced people inside our business around metallurgy when we went through commissioning Mt. Marion and Wodgina. So we don't see that as a big challenge. And then in terms of the iron ore, how do we plan and organize that? I mean trying to understand what's coming around the corner tomorrow and with all the uncertainty, it's difficult. But I mean, we just take it in basic steps. Our premier wants everyone to stay out of the state, except West Australians, and he doesn't want us to travel. So that's a good step. We test every single person that goes to every one of our sites. They stay on site, they're in lockdown, they can't get out. When we're building a new site, we're going to do the same. So we think that we can manage this provided that we don't get some sort of outbreak that gets out of control in the community. And it's regardless of whether COVID was here or not, we'd be out there building these sites or planning to build them. But it's much more difficult. We can't get our East Coast people in, but look, we will get them built, and we'll get them turned on. I'm not sure if that answered all of your questions.

Yes. It's more actually around capital and iron ore. I mean obviously, been in and factoring $120 forever, but how are you thinking about that outlook and putting serious capital in West Pilbara or Marillana or both in the next couple of years in terms of the iron ore outlook beyond, I guess, sort of 3 or 4 years' time to get your -- guarantee you returned on the investment?

Yes. Hayden, I don't know. No one uses a sale price of $120, I mean, it's way, way less than that. What we look at is the worst-case scenario, where we think the cost of iron ore per tonne gets down to its lowest level. And that's where we want to be able to survive in that environment. So -- yes, look, it's all about being in that low-cost quartile. That's what we're aiming to do. We're aiming to be there, and we think there's a 20-plus year future in being able to deliver it at that cost.

I think if I can add one point, Hayden, don't forget that we've got a very talented and very experienced internal team in terms of execution and delivery of those projects. These are guys that have been with the business for a long period of time. They've delivered projects all over the state, and they've done it exceptionally well. So we're not dependent on third-party providers to help us.

The next question comes from Levi Spry with JPMorgan.

So just following on with the iron ore and potential growth in volumes there. So what exactly can we expect from West Pilbara and Marillana later this year? Is it an FID? And just sort of talk us through what you'll deliver in terms of scope and outline to pass there for us?

Okay. Dependent on port access. And we're highly confident on the port access. We just simply need the government to make their final decision on it. Once we have that, then as we said, we intend to -- within 2 years, we intend to add about 20 million tonnes run rate on top of what we're going to do this year.

That's West Pilbara and Marillana sits out. So I'm just trying to work out how to stage them or...

Yes. Well, I'll be able to give you more on that down the track. I mean that's exactly what I can give you now. But as I said, depending on how the chips fall on the port access, will tell us what development we can do.

Yes. Okay. All right. And maybe just on Mining Services. So the guidance to double volumes over the next little while, can you talk me through the assumptions that are behind that? So does it include a Wodgina restart? Does it include some iron ore volumes from these 2 projects?

No and no.

The next question comes from Tony Mitchell with Ord Minnett.

Congratulations on a very good result. Can you just outline? Do you hedge your iron ore production at all?

No, we don't. Never.

Right. Right. Okay. Okay. Can you comment on the situation with Brazil and them ramping up production? How do you see that whole process going over the next few months?

Honestly, if I knew the answer to that, I would tell you how they're going to progress the cure of COVID in their country or reduce the numbers. So it's totally dependent. I love it when they ask our premier when he thinks he's going to be able to do something. It's like -- it's totally -- we're totally driven by this virus that's running around the planet. We all want to see it off the face of the earth, but this thing is proving much more difficult than I think anyone predicted it would. So we're totally managing our business around that. And we basically get up every morning and have a look and go, "Oh, Victoria, looks like it's going in the right direction." If we could be COVID-free in Australia within the next couple of months, there's half a chance we might get to see the ore blacks.

The next question comes from Chris Cahill with Quest Asset Partners.

Just my question is the $416 million tax liability, most of which would be in relation to the Wodgina sale. It's in the current category. When is that paid? Is that all inclusive of the complexity of tax payable on the Wodgina deal? And does that deliver a slab of franking? And what would you do with it?

Chris, it's Mark. I'll take that. So it will be paid in December this year, and it does represent the full bill for Wodgina along with the usual allowance for current year and so on. We will end up with a healthy franking credit balance. At this stage, we have no plans to do anything with that. We're not intending to return capital. Rather, we're focused on deploying the capital into new investments that are going to generate 20-plus percent returns.

The next question comes from Sean Smith with The West Australian.

Chris, I was just wondering, given your favorable comments about the WA government, can I assume that you're quite happy for the state's border to remain closed for as long as the government is prepared to keep them closed?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm with the other 90-something percent.

And another question, I'd be interested in your views on whether you think the government's legislative changes or legislative changes in regard to the -- Clive Palmer, represent any sort of sovereign risk in WA. I mean your comment is on a major investor in WA, he'd appreciate.

I'm sure he would, but you know that I don't comment on other people or their businesses, but nice try.

Well, one, I figure you haven't answered that one, one more then. You mentioned the problems in-sourcing East Coast workers during COVID. Can you anticipate any sort of changes after COVID in relation to how you source your workers in the future? I mean will there be a much more greater reliance on local workers, if you can get them?

Look, there always is. I mean we are working pretty hard to try and encourage our East Coast workers to move to WA, and we're offering them a whole range of incentives to do that. But we're also looking at significant training schools. So we're looking at taking people that are willing, able-bodied people that have never seen a mind sight or a piece of equipment before and putting them into MinRes owned training school, where they can come out and drive trucks so they can drive equipment on site. They can operate process plants. So we're going to be doing a lot more of that going forward. And that's going to be a longer-term thing as we are also with manufacturing. We're looking at how to be more WA-based for the whole range of different products that we need. So yes, we've -- I think we've learned out of this that supply is possibly more important than price.

We'll now switch over to webcast questions. The first question comes from Brian Stevens with Investments who asks will Kemerton and process from Wodgina and also from Mt. Marion?

Sorry, I missed the question. Sorry, would you mind repeating the question? I had trouble hearing it.

It just reads, will Kemerton take and process from Wodgina and also from Mt. Marion?

Yes. Look, at the moment, again, until we get a lay of how everything is going to operate, we can't comment on that. There's no decision made. We've got a range of choices on what we're working with and where all our different products go. But too much uncertainty to make the call at this time.

The second webcast question is from Mark Taylor from Morningstar who asks, could I get a bit more color around why fiscal second half interest on borrowings was this high as it was?

So it's Mark Wilson here. I think the question was, was second half interest high in terms of borrowings. We've had, certainly in FY '20, the full impact of the borrowings that we did through the bond in the U.S. last year. That bond gave us 8% -- sorry, 8-year money, which gives us a lot of certainty out into the future. So we -- it's effectively a funding strategy for our future, investing in the future. That's why the interest was high, and we'll continue to see because our bonds there, it won't amortize. It will be there, that interest expense will continue over the years to come.

We'll now move back to phone questions. The next phone question comes from Georgina Fraser with UBS.

Hoping to circle back to the port access, trying to understand what the best-case outcome looks for MinRes in terms of the access? Is it access to existing infrastructure? Or is it a completely new build that would be solely accessible by MinRes?

Thanks, Georgina. It's new infrastructure that we build and operate. We've been in line for the first 3 and 4 in Southwest Creek because they were set aside in 2008, in fact, by this government for juniors. And we have worked through the process, and we've been able to demonstrate that we are capable of building, owning and operating them. And we've also been able to show that we've got not just the orebodies, but the funding to do so. So we are probably high consideration for them. But as I said earlier, we're waiting on the final decision by the government.

And just as a follow-up, is this something that MinRes would be looking to go at alone? Or would it be in partnership with another operator?

No, the intention is that it would be a stand-alone MinRes project.

The next question comes from Mark Beyer with Business News.

The previous questions were exactly the ones I was going to ask. So I'm stumped a little bit. I think you've elaborated as much as you can on that. So thanks very much, Chris.

The next question is a follow-up from Rahul Anand with Morgan Stanley.

Just wanted to talk about Mt. Marion for a minute, if I can, please. That's my first question. You flagged recoveries of 95%. That sounds pretty good. Is that to be expected going forward? And how are you thinking about strip ratios? Also at Mt. Marion, in terms of the product grade, you mentioned SC6 again today. Is that SC5.7 now?

Yes, correct. So what we've done is we've dropped the head grade and done a number of changes in the plant. Our commodities team have spent quite some time on that. Poor brands probably lost 3 months of sleep on it, but we've actually got incredible results. So where we were tailing, generally speaking, 0.5% of lithium. We're down to like 0.1% and 0.01% and less, but we've also dropped the head grade of the spot from -- it was normally sitting between 5.8 and 6. Now it's sitting down around about 5.5 to 5.7.

Okay. And so what are the sort of impacts in terms of strip ratio then, Chris? Does that look better?

Yes. They're going to improve through the -- not in the immediate future, but during the course of this half, they're going to get better, and they should stay better. We've been in a couple of deep zones over the last period.

Okay. I might come back with a follow-up offline. I'll take the second one then on the iron ore business. Chris, in terms of the Koolyanobbing volumes expanding, I would have expected some kind of operating leverage and getting those costs perhaps a bit better than last year. Are you being conservative in the guidance? Is that fair to say? And then secondly, on Iron Valley, big step down there to back to the $72 a tonne mark. Is that mainly because the deferred stripping is done and you're making the benefits of that?

Yes. I mean look, we had a deferred strip we had at Iron Valley. We had to do. Look, there's some opportunity that we may be able to crystallize in the short term where we can reduce the strip at Iron Valley. But again, down at Koolyanobbing, we're operating down in that region from multiple pits. So look, we are, again, doing what we can to try and get those costs down. We bituminized the roads that gets the haulage cost down. We're opening at Parker Range now, been a bit late on that, but that's coming online, that's going to be good for us from both haulage and blend. And then look, there's a range of other things down there that we can do, and we're working on. We're probably going to open up Carina, not too far down the track, and that will reduce the haul on some of the other sites. And down at Carina, we've got an automatic train loading station down there. So the materials handing around the plant will go down a bit. But it's a complex site to run.

Okay. So I mean, even when the capacity goes closer to that 15 mark, you're sort of not getting much out of the cost benefits, I guess?

It's not going to see 15 because there's rail constraints down there, the cost of going from 12 to 15 or the unit cost is too excessive. So we're going to sit around about 12, 12.5. But there's opportunities down there, but we've got to have the planets aligned. But at the moment, I wouldn't count on in this half we're in, seeing an improvement in costs. We've got too many moving parts at the moment, just getting the place settled.

The next webcast question comes from Heath Andrews at PAC Partners who asks, what is the maximum shipping rate envisaged out of Kooly due to rail restrictions? And can this increase over time?

We expect it to sit around 12.5 million tonnes, and that's a long-term number. Can it? It could, but we feel like that's about the sweet spot.

The next question is a phone question, a follow-up from Hayden Bairstow with Macquarie.

Just one on Mining Service. There's been a lot of discussion, I think, from monodelphous the other day and Rio around sustaining CapEx in line. There's obviously a lot of headline megaprojects. But is your -- the bulk of your sort of outlook on Mining Services, your own projects and your plans in iron ore? Or do you actually see a considerable opportunity with some of these bigger sort of third tier operators, or first tier operators to expand your sort of third-party contract works?

Yes. No, it's -- Hayden, it's spread fairly evenly. It's quite a bit of third-party opportunity out there. We're both seeing, and we're in discussions over. And I see that just continually growing going forward. They need scale, some of these bigger guys. So it's a total package where there's not a lot of -- I'm going to say not a lot of competitors. There's always competitors out there, but to be able to have the high-quality safety that we run inside the business to have the balance sheet to have support the equipment and to have the know-how with that equipment like these NextGen plants that we're bringing out or our ability to be able to manage mining fleets is -- it's becoming rare out there in the market. I mean a lot of the competitors that we have are much smaller balance sheets and they can't deal with the volume that we can.

The next question comes from Nick Evans with The Australian.

Just on the lithium business, Chris. Do you have a sense of what it will take for Wodgina to return to production and Kemerton when it's finished, sort of get up and rolling? And is it purely price related? Is it a certain amount of demand in the market? I mean what will the JV sort of need to see to start that rolling again?

Yes. Nick, I think when Kemerton commissions, it's just simply where is the market going to be. No one really knows the answer to that, certainly, when Albemarle set out to build it, they had the market for that product. And look, I'm not sure if that's changed at all. I mean they're probably not sure either. I mean they're in the U.S., they're all working from home. They're continuing to build the plant. They have a big market share. But look, other than that, I'm not sure that anyone can understand what the demand looks like 18 months out from now. But I've had no information to say that they're going to do anything different to what they said on day 1, and that is build it, turn it on and operate it.

Yes. Okay. And just going back to the Port Hedland. I mean you've been talking about this for more than a couple of years now. The -- I mean are you in -- can you give us some insight into what is taking so long to get a decision? I don't know, I mean, you win, I guess, a competitive tender process, for example? Or is it just sort of the machinery of government grinding slowly?

No, it's simply up to the government to let it go through. I think -- look, I think there's no doubt that there's been a delay in being able to deal with it purely because our government has been really tied up on this whole COVID management. I mean they've almost -- I mean they're working pretty extraordinary hours in there. There's no doubt about that. But I mean, the most important things they're dealing with is keeping the state live. So I think that's been a delay. And look, I acknowledge I've been talking about this a long time, and I'm sick of talking about it, ideally love the answer to come out. So yes, if they do -- and look, I get the sense that if the WA government do want jobs, they do want recovery, they do want long-term income for the state. So my sense is that they're going to get a wiggle along and do something on this, not too far down the track.

The next question is a follow-up from Georgina Fraser at UBS.

Chris, just to keep the discussion going on the port for now. So you say you're looking at 2 berths and one shipload. So that's approximately 60 million tonnes per annum. But you mentioned the lift from your production perspective of 20 million tonnes per annum. So is there a requirement? Or do you guys need to secure third-party tonnage to get that project over the line? Are you going to go ahead with just your volumes and then expect to fill that subsequently? I'm just trying to understand how that -- how you're seeing that?

Yes. No, we don't have to go and get third party. We have all the ore secured that we require for that project, and we've laid all that out to the appropriate people, they're all engagement. There is a lot of information that sits inside this process that is confidential that I can't talk about. So I'd prefer just to leave it where it is. I'm highly confident. Otherwise, I wouldn't announce that we're going to have about another 20 million tonnes on top of what we're doing 2 years from now. I can say that with a high degree of confidence, but I just can't say anything else around what's going to happen until the announcements are made.

Thank you. That concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll now hand it back for closing remarks.

Well, done. Okay. Well, look, thanks to everyone for coming online. Again, thanks to all my staff that made this work, thanks to my Board of Directors, and thanks to everyone out there that supports us, whether it be Brad Shallard from Bell Potter or our bankers or I reckoned, everyone that's made the business what it is today. It's been an incredible journey for everyone, and we'll carry it forward. So we'll talk to you probably at the AGM. Thanks, everyone.