Perenti Limited (PRN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Perenti business briefing. Thank you all attendees, in person and online. Let's begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Whadjuk people and pay my respect to elders, past and present. The purpose of today is to provide an update on our business and progress against our strategy and let you know about an exciting new development in our technology pillar of our strategy. The executives joining me today are Paul Muller, Sarah Coleman and Peter Bryant. I'll provide an overview of our business, progress of our strategy and then I'll hand to Sarah, who will expand on our technology-driven service model. Paul will then speak to the connection with our mining business. And from there, we'll move into a Q&A. Firstly, on the disclaimer. We are currently in a blackout period. Therefore, I can't talk about any FY '21 numbers beyond what's included in the presentation nor can I talk about FY '22 guidance. So on to our business. We are a leading international mining services company with over 30 years of experience. We operate at almost 60 projects across 12 countries. In FY '20, our 8,000 dedicated employees generated revenue in excess of $2 billion, which delivered solid cash back profits. Our current work in hand is $6.6 billion. So we have over 3 years of committed work based on our revenue of FY '20. And with a pipeline of $11 billion, we are well positioned for solid growth. This growth is underpinned by our strong balance sheet with over $500 million of liquidity. Over the last 18 months, we have expanded into quality mining jurisdictions, namely North America and Botswana. As I mentioned, we won't discuss FY '21 results today as they are still under audit. However, I'm pleased with how the team finished off the year, and I'm looking forward to releasing our results in August. We have a proud history. Ausdrill was established in 1987 and Barminco in 1989 before coming together in 2018. We then established Perenti in 2019. Our evolution has been strategic. And one of the primary reasons we are here today is to discuss the next milestone of our proud history as we launch our technology-driven service offering. As I mentioned, Perenti provides a full suite of surface and underground mining services, and we also provide complementary services in support of the resources sector. These brands will be well known to most, so I want to spend some time introducing the executives that lead our business. As I mentioned, here today is Paul Muller, Sarah Coleman, and Peter Bryant. Paul is our mining CEO. Recently, our Surface and Underground businesses were consolidated under Paul's leadership, and he now has responsibility over our Mining business, including our expansion in the Botswana and North America. Sarah is our CEO of technology-driven service offering, and I'll provide further background on Sarah later in the presentation. And rounding out our P&L executive is Vivienne Powe, CEO of Investments. Our executives responsible for P&L have over 100 years of mining experience combined. So we are in great hands. Peter is our CFO and has been with the business for several years and has been instrumental to ensuring our balance sheet remains robust. Our most recent addition to the executive team is Raj Ratneser, who joined us in April this year as Chief Legal and Risk Officer. This was a newly created role as I wanted to elevate legal, risk and governance to report to me given the criticality of these functions. Raj started his career with a Tier 1 law firm before taking on an executive role with the construction and services business. So we have a high caliber and very experienced executive team. Before providing an update on our strategy, I want to touch on what we stand for. Ultimately, our actions and decisions are driven by our purpose, principles and aspiration. These are more the words on a wall, and they are ingrained in our culture and drive us every day. When we talk about creating enduring value and certainty, we're talking about our clients, our shareholders, our people and the communities in which we operate. Our principles are not negotiable. Our aspiration drives us to do better every day and is a key driver for today's launch of our technology-driven service offering. We know that creating enduring value and certainty into the future will be enabled by technology. And with this launch, we expect to take a step closer towards achieving our aspiration of being the indispensable mining services company. This slide should hopefully be familiar to most people, as we have been speaking to our 2025 strategy since March 2019. This is a road map for how we will deliver value and certainty to our stakeholders. When we reflect on our strategy and what we have achieved to date, we are very pleased with progress in Horizon 1. In addition, during FY '20 and FY '21, we made significant progress on some of the Horizon 2 strategic objectives. So let me take a minute to talk about some of our achievements. This slide has many impressive achievements and in their own right, they will ultimately deliver value for our shareholders. And whilst we made excellent progress over the last 2 years, I want to specifically focus on what we achieved during FY '21. First and foremost, we delivered operational excellence and continuity of service for our clients during a global pandemic and a tight labor market in Australia. Since 30th of June 2020, we have secured $2.8 billion of new work and contract extensions. And at the end of June '21, I'm pleased to report we have also expanded our work in hand, which stands at $6.6 billion. And our tender pipeline is a very impressive $11 billion. During the year, we commenced 2 projects in Canada, established our North American office in Denver, and we are actively tendering 3 projects in North America. We have made a significant commitment to a sustainable future and released our inaugural sustainability report. Earlier this month, we received some great recognition from ACSI who advise 32 superannuation funds managing more than $1 trillion. They have recognized our improved ESG reporting performance and recently upgraded our rating by 2 levels to the second highest rating. We stabilized the performance of AMS, which included successfully exiting 2 underperforming contracts in West Africa, releasing almost $90 million of cash. And furthermore, AMS recently secured their largest contract ever, the Motheo project in Botswana for Sandfire valued at $650 million over about 7 years. Our balance sheet also remains strong, with net debt at 30th of June '21 down 10% year-on-year to $502 million. And now on to our technology-driven future pillar. To date, we have been working quietly on this strategic pillar. And today, I'm excited to announce we have taken a major step towards that technology-driven future with the launch of our new service offering. With Sarah Coleman at the helm, we expect that this new service offering will be an opportunity to generate new streams of earnings while also enhancing our current service offerings and future-proofing our business. When we first established our 2025 strategy, we recognized that the digital transformation was occurring across the mining industry and the rate of that change was set to increase. With this change driven by technology, we have established a new business to embrace the change and ensure we are future ready. A new technology business will not only deliver a new service offering, providing future-focused revenue streams but our current businesses will benefit as we look to leverage productivity improvements that this new service offering will identify. Once we were clear on what we wanted to develop and the compelling need to develop the business, we then moved to how we would establish the business. Firstly, we looked at organic growth versus inorganic growth and then an investment-light approach versus a more material investment. As you can see, we decided the best approach to establish this business was to pursue investment-light acquisitions. We felt this approach was pragmatic and low risk to deliver the greatest upside from our capital-light investments. After we decided our approach to establish the business, we went to work. We scouted over 700 businesses globally and whittled the list down and completed 20 deep dives. With these deep dives complete, we then commenced due diligence on our potential targets in early 2020. From here, we completed the foundational acquisitions of Sandpit Innovation and ImpRes followed by the acquisition of Optika. And now that we are comfortable with the integration and the value proposition that we hold, we are launching our technology service offering. The combined transaction cost was $13 million. And with this, we acquired 3 well-established businesses that have deep and unique skill sets, spanning technology and innovation who, over the past several years have generated relatively consistent revenue of $13 million per annum. The team is well established, and they have a current client base that consists of top-tier mining and resource customers globally. In Optika, they have developed an artificial intelligence and data analytics platform named Akumen, which is our entry into the software-as-a-service market. They have systems and processes that are supportive of further growth, and we firmly believe that the technology service offering that we are launching will continue to grow, delivering greater returns over time and will future-proof our business. Sarah will now introduce our technology-driven business. But first, I'd like to provide some further details on Sarah's background. Sarah holds a double degree in mechanical engineering and commerce, having started her career with Rio Tinto in aluminum before moving to iron ore where Sarah held various operations management and business improvement roles. Sarah went on to head up Rio Tinto's iron ore business improvement team during the late 2000s. Sarah was on Rio's high potential list and was set to take an executive development role working directly for the Rio Tinto CEO based in London. However, that wasn't exciting enough for Sarah, she wanted more. So seeing a gap in the market, in 2010, Sarah left the safety of Rio Tinto and started her own business. Sarah had always focused on driving operational improvement to deliver shareholder value. So her business was established to focus on this objective. And since then, her business ImpRes has provided great results, predominantly for mining and resource clients for more than a decade. Following the success of ImpRes, Sarah also took on the world of innovation and technology by creating Sandpit Innovation with her business partner, Aaron Carter, and combined ownership of ImpRes with Aaron. Through Sandpit Innovation, Sarah and Aaron focused on identifying complex problems and developing credible pathways for innovation. As well as being a mum of 3, Sarah holds many accolades, including being named the WA Business News Top 40under40 leader, the finalist in the CME Most Outstanding Young Professional female awards, the AIM WA State Owner Manager of the Year Award, and Sarah was also a finalist for Women in Industry Awards. In addition, Sandpit Innovation has also been awarded the Australian Bulk Handling Award's Most Innovative Technology. Clearly, Sarah is a fantastic addition to our executive. I'd now like to hand over to Sarah, who will provide further detail on the launch of our new business.

Thank you, Mark. I'm really excited to be here and to be introducing our technology-driven future and share some of the amazing talent we've acquired to drive our business forward now and into the future. We believe the mining sector is yet to fully embrace a digital technology. Studies show that mining industry leaders recognize and acknowledge technology is fast becoming a differentiator. However, many organizations are making slow, steady and incremental changes and they're often failing to change how the work gets done. Recent industry-leading research by Accenture shows that being able to fast track operations maturity by applying technology-driven intelligence to how work is done, which in our case, is how work is won, planned and executed in the safest, most efficient, cost-effective and sustainable way correlates to greater productivity. We've also recognized that the mining industry won't progress using the same practices and thinking that got us to where we are today. However, combining this thinking and data with some of the best digital technology and innovative thinkers will. We also recognize that sometimes the technology journey isn't an easy one and many organizations have failed to realize the full potential of technology. Therefore, we are intentionally designing a technology-driven business to avoid the potential pitfalls and take advantage of the successes. Our design will ensure we understand the real problems and opportunities, try and test in a real-world playground using real people and real data, create an environment and culture that allows collaboration to thrive and we won't do innovation for innovation's sake. We'll find a clear, disciplined pathway to enhance value. And the opportunity is broader than just automating equipment. We believe Perenti is synergistically well placed to capitalize on this trend and do something truly different and better now and into the future. We know that disruption occurs when the interface between the client and the customer is changed. In the mining sector, mining services companies have a much closer proximity to the customer and understanding of what their needs are. And therefore, we believe we have a greater opportunity of making a significant impact. Perenti and their iconic brands have a strong reputation, credibility and proven shrewdness in mining services. Therefore, we will focus on areas where digital and technology will enhance productivity or give us competitive advantage, and we already have a solid and proven foundation of improvement and innovation culture within the business to leverage upon. I mentioned earlier that technology is broader than just automating equipment. A broader view of technology is what we're seeing our clients are focusing on, and it's also aligned to what we're seeing with evolving client and societal expectations. To validate this thinking, we partnered with a global crowdsourcing group from the U.S.A. called Wikistrat. The crowd included global experts from the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto, Vale, Newmont and even NASA, to name a few. The purpose of the study was to identify the top 10 predictors for the future of mining in the year 2030. The study confirmed our thinking. The industry sees the future of mining being a very different landscape, one of increased ESG and digital technology focus, a future we need to prepare for now. So what is Perenti's answer? We have named our new technology-driven service offering, idoba. Idoba will deliver business -- value to the business now, which I will touch on in some case studies and generate new revenue sources in emerging markets with a capital-light, digital and technology-focused offering. Leveraging the existing Perenti data sets and operational expertise, idoba is an innovation ecosystem that will develop new products and services to offer to the whole mining industry. These will be applied to our current business to further drive our productivity advantage. A fun fact, where did the name idoba come from? It was actually co-created using human and artificial intelligence input, an algorithm our team developed connected with the Greek word eidos, meaning essence; and the Japanese term ba, meaning knowledge-mobilizing space, hence idoba. As Mark mentioned, for a $13 million investment, we've acquired 3 well-established companies, including a software-as-a-service digital platform. These include Sandpit Innovation, a technology and innovation consulting services firm with over 10 years of experience and a broad range of diverse mining clients covering Tier 1 miners, contract miners and engineering firms. They have strong autonomous mining, remote operations and ESG footprint in the market. ImpRes is an operational improvement consulting services firm, who have delivered billions of dollars in bottom line improvements across mining, oil and gas, manufacturing and health care over an impressive 11-year history. Optika Solutions is an award-wining West Australian software products and solutions company, specializing in data science, artificial intelligence and industrial mathematics. Having won multiple innovation awards, their [ neuro-divergent ] team actually holds more Ph.Ds than they do team members. Optika is the creator of the digital platform Akumen, a cloud-based decision support environment that brings together the best technologies of advanced analytics and simulation modeling within a single platform, allowing clients to create meaningful insights from their data and provide a pathway to artificial intelligence. This platform is a SaaS model and forms a basis of a scalable digital platform for both idoba and Perenti. Sandpit's Spidler is an award-winning patented robotic automation solution. Each of these organizations have a strong history of delivery and innovation for more than a decade in the resources sector. Each business continues to deliver revenue and value for their existing and growing client base, operating under strict confidentiality protocols between their respective entities. With a historical combined revenue of approximately $13 million, this incredible capability is well placed to scale. We also believe that innovation and disruption occurs when we truly embrace diversity and the ability to look at a problem differently. Our combined team is passionate, talented and diverse. These are actually some of the hands of our people. The Sandpit and ImpRes team are almost 50% female. The Optika team has 90% high-functioning autistic team members who have the most phenomenal complex mathematical modeling capabilities and we have representation from multiple nationalities. Our combined team comprises experience from across most of the major global mining firms as well as research, digital product commercialization, data analytics and sustainability leaders as well as exceptional mining and technology experience, some of our team members hold Ph.Ds in autonomous automation and robotics, applied mathematics and industrial systems, astrophysics, supply chain, systems thinking, renewable energy and sustainability. So while idoba is a new capability for Perenti, the broad-reaching industry and innovation thinking we've assembled shows we are already well established. We expect idoba's capability will incrementally expand over the coming years and that this inorganic growth will be achieved through a measured and disciplined manner through both value-accretive acquisitions and partnership opportunities. We'll focus on companies who are culturally aligned to rapidly drive change, have a proven track record of revenue generation and a strong understanding of what it takes to deliver value in mining through people, process and technology. It's important to also note that we're not expecting innovation to just happen. Our approach is to leverage the learnings we have seen from many other organizations and to build an innovation ecosystem to combine capability, eliminate the barriers to collaboration and deliver impact beyond what an individual business can achieve in isolation. The combination of capabilities will deliver revenue through individual businesses, continuing to work with their current clients, and the combined capabilities, developing new services together through the idoba ecosystem. Idoba will generate value to Perenti through improvements in the current business. Perenti has established idoba as a separate but connected group. The business model leverages our learnings from technology implementations that have been successful and those that haven't achieved their full potential. Therefore, idoba's business model encompasses elements that are separated and unencumbered by traditional ways of operating in large organizations to encourage innovative thinking, but is connected through the right systems, problems, data and operational sites to trial, test and implement ideas to improve the current business with the appropriate governance. These will allow idoba to rapidly scale proven solutions into new digital service offerings for the mining sector. And to demonstrate how we are already applying this capability, I'd like to talk through some examples of where we've been focusing our combined efforts. We see the future as one of connectivity, where connectivity is between human, machine and data. We see the miner of the future as a decision data scientist who uses technology, mining domain expertise and collaboration to make faster, smarter, safer and more sustainable decisions. Combining the physical industrial world to the digital world is where this can occur. And it's more than just capturing data. We need to do something with the data. It needs to be translated into actionable insights and intelligence to deliver value. And we believe the secret to success in the digital world is how we turn data into digital intelligence. What's the data telling us? What are we going to do with it? How do we make real, measurable and impactful decisions to improve our performance? This can only occur when we bring together the operational intelligence of Perenti with the digital intelligence of idoba. The most obvious area today where physical meets digital is autonomous mining. Sandpit Innovation is well known for its autonomous mining capability, having experience with some of the major mining autonomy rollouts across Australia. They, are actively working with 3 mining clients to support the various autonomous programs today. These include working with a global mining client for over 3.5 years on their autonomy program, from business case development through to implementation and now supporting the optimization of one of the largest autonomy rollouts in Australia. We're working with another client on the operational readiness and implementation of their first global mining autonomy rollout. And the third is a program we are working on both the client and the vendor side to support the first independent autonomy solution in mining. In addition to autonomous mining and in line with societal expectations I mentioned earlier, Sandpit's ESG work over the last 5 years is impressive. Working with one of the largest global miners for over 3 years, Sandpit supported the development of one of the first net zero carbon road maps, which helped set the standard for the industry. We believe this capability, combined with the digital platform Akumen will prove incredibly powerful. We mentioned connectivity is about making the best decisions with the best insights using the best data across the value chain. Therefore, we have started by looking at the heart of contract mining. Using Optika's Akumen digital platform, we've created a digital twin. Now in the simplest terms I could find to define a digital twin, a digital twin is a virtual tool or model to help engineers and operators understand not only how things are performing today but also predict how they'll perform in the future. Matt, who's the Head of Optika, can provide a better explanation at the end if required. So for us, a digital twin has the ability to optimize the contract for a comparison against the actual performance today and predict future performance based on today to better service our clients. The digital twin we've developed can ingest and analyze the actual contract's documents using natural language processing, auto generate value driver trees and link this to performance where day-to-day decisions can be optimized against the contract terms. Significant progress on the digital twin has already been made. And we've actually been collaborating with Microsoft R&D out of the U.S. Some of the capability we've built is actually at the leading edge globally. I'll now dive a little deeper into how we're combining the capabilities of Akumen, Sandpit, ImpRes, Optika and Barminco, with our digital twin to optimize our mine performance activities. This is still work in progress, but as an example where with the digital twin, we have built a model using a behavioral-based algorithm from an adjacent industry, which meant that we actually didn't need to start from scratch. Through some ingenious and innovative thinking with the combined capabilities of the idoba ecosystem, we found that the same algorithm that can be applied can be applied to underground mining data. We've taken all the operating data from one of our projects, applied the algorithm and are now able to visualize seemingly random data where we had otherwise struggled to analyze it, to determine patterns or changes in performance. This allows us to identify and apply corrective measures. As we mature this capability, our project managers will be able to make more informed decisions faster to optimize performance and use the forecasting features to test if corrective measures are having the right impact. As I mentioned, we've only recently established this capability, which will help improve productivity and performance, a significant step towards becoming the indispensable mining services company. This is also a great example where the idoba ecosystem allows ideas and concepts from other industries to be able to be rapidly cross-pollinated into the mining sector, reducing the time to value. It just requires the time and space to think creatively as well as access to the data and operational knowledge to know where to apply it. It's a power of co-creation and collaboration. So to lead into that a little further, where are we adding value? ImpRes, Sandpit and Optika are continuing to work with and generate revenue with their external clients and the Akumen platform continues to generate and grow SaaS revenue. We are focusing the combined capabilities of the idoba ecosystem into the business with projects focused on how we gain more intelligent insights from our performance data to make optimal decisions, building models to optimize margin, developing the contracting digital twin, reengineering how we work using digital workflows, leveraging remote operations to enable future growth in a COVID world with an increasingly scarce labor market and how we enable Perenti to become the decision data scientists of the future. Ultimately, and in time, these efforts will increase productivity, reduce risk, improve sustainability and drive performance for Perenti as well as creating new capabilities for idoba to offer to the broader resources sector. At idoba, we believe a better future is co-created, a better future for Perenti, the mining industry and beyond. And while we don't know exactly what the future will look like in 5 years' time, we know that whatever the future is, we'll be shaping it. I'd now like to hand over to Paul, who's going to also provide some comments.

Thanks, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone in the room and of course, those watching online. So my job here today is quite straightforward. I've gotten off lightly given Mark and Sarah have done all the heavy lifting, so I'll be quite brief. So my name is Paul Muller, I'm the CEO of Perenti's Mining Industry Sector Group, which combines both our Surface and our Underground mining businesses. I've held this position since earlier this year. Prior to which I was the CEO of Barminco and African Underground Mining Services. So my background briefly. I'm an engineer with 25 years operating experience in surface and underground mines, working for both mining contractors and mine owners here in Australia, in Asia and in Africa. Prior to joining Barminco in 2017, I was the Executive General Manager for Thiess, responsible for a large mining services business unit in Asia and Africa. Now as the CEO of Mining, my focus is very, very clear. It is mine and my team's responsibility to -- it is mine and my team's responsibility to grow organically by winning profitable new work in line with our strategy and to safely deliver excellent operational and financial performance in line with the contract and our tender. What I do know is that while some things in mining perhaps haven't changed much over the past 50 or so years, many other things in mining have. And as Sarah mentioned, we believe that our industry is on the verge of making a major operational shift driven by technology. It is our firm belief that the future of mining is technology-centric. Technology is, therefore, fundamentally important to our ability to continue to win and deliver world-class mining services. So I'm very excited to work with Sarah and the rest of the highly capable idoba team to capitalize on these exciting opportunities where technology can support us to make better decisions, to improve safety, to increase productivity, reduce waste and cost and, therefore, enhance our ability to create enduring value and certainty for our stakeholders. So thank you, and I'll now hand back to Mark.

Thank you, Paul, and thank you, Sarah. Before moving on, I want to touch on an item [Audio Gap] that's been the amazing talent in idoba. Now I would specifically like to make mention of Aaron Carter and Matt Schneider, who are here on my left. As I mentioned earlier, Aaron was Sarah's business partner in ImpRes and Sandpit Innovation. Matt Schneider is the founder of Optika. Both Aaron and Matt are here today so that Perth attendees will get an opportunity to speak with them both at the conclusion of the formalities. Idoba is in safe hands between Sarah, Aaron and Matt. As you can see, our service offering is significant, and we offer an unrivaled suite of services to the mining sector. Our Surface and Underground Mining businesses are leaders in their respective fields, and our investments businesses provide support services to the resources industry. And now our technology-based services will provide technology and innovation services to the global resources sector. We expect that as idoba grows and as we continue to discuss the opportunity that idoba represents that you will also recognize the significant and prudent step that we are taking. We have the right people in the right positions. We have a suite of offerings that are highly valued by our clients, and we have a supportive base of stakeholders who continue to support us as we deliver on our value-accretive 2025 strategy. So to round out, we set a robust strategic plan for Perenti 2 years ago. We have delivered and continue to deliver against our strategic pillars. The fundamentals of our business remain solid and despite the headwinds of COVID-19 and a tight labor market, the Underground and Surface businesses are performing well. We have continued to stabilize the AMS business to the point where we now see AMS as an opportunity with green shoots appearing and we are excited about our new project in Botswana, Motheo. Our balance sheet is strong, and we have reduced net debt by 10% year-on-year to $502 million, and we have liquidity of $570 million. I'd note that we reduced this debt during a global pandemic and in a year when we acquired 3 businesses to establish idoba. So it is a fantastic effort by the team. We have progressed with our strategic growth aspirations being awarded $2.8 billion of new contracts and contract extensions in FY '21, including our second project in both Botswana and North America. Our future growth aspirations are also positive, and our work in hand has increased to $6.6 billion with a tender pipeline of $11 billion. Our balance sheet is supportive of our current growth projects. And now we have set the foundation for further strategic growth by launching idoba, our technology-driven service business. We expect idoba will not only generate a future-proof revenue stream but also benefit our current service offerings by unlocking productivity improvements through the application of innovation and technological advances. So that concludes the formality of this presentation. But just before going into Q&A, I'd just like to pay respect to our previous Chairman, Ian Cochrane. It's deep sadness over the weekend that Ian Cochrane passed away. Ian was on the Perenti Board for almost 8 years and was our Chairman for 3.5 years before stepping down in May. And during Ian's time, he contributed significantly to the business and will be missed. On behalf of Perenti, our thoughts are with his wife, Rosanna, and 2 daughters and his much loved grandchildren. So thank you to everyone attending. We'll now move into Q&A.

So we'll start with -- [ Jeff ], could you coordinate? We'll start with the floor here, please.

Okay. Sorry, I'm just pulling up. All right. We've got one from a retail shareholder here. It says, how rapid do you forecast the mining services landscape changing?

That's a very, very good question. Clearly, we forecasted changing hence the launch of idoba today, I guess, and I'll get to Sarah and probably the rest of the group to sort of expand on this sort of area. Look, it's hard to really forecast the change in advances in technology and the application. Clearly, it's been accelerating in a number of industries. Clearly, it's been a topic within mining for some time. I don't think we've really seen the rate of acceleration and adoption of technology mining to the point it could be, and we're not, I don't think seeing the significant value generation to this point. But it will keep accelerating. So I guess this is why we are launching idoba now to capitalize on the adoption of technology in mining. Sarah, any further views on that?

Yes. I think just adding in, I mentioned that we had done the study with Wikistrat. We actually had over 90 people participate in that global research study. And you can certainly see through the conversations that were going on that people are expecting that this will start to change fairly rapidly. We're seeing a lot of other outside of the mining sector. And we're seeing a lot of interest again about saying, well, how do we actually bring our digital technology into the mining sector. So we're certainly seeing that emergence happening.

Just another one there. Can you talk about some of the benefits that you see idoba providing for Perenti and the businesses?

I guess, Sarah touched on some items there. I might just hand over to Sarah first then over to Paul thereafter.

Yes. Look, and I think as I touched on, a number of the areas that we're focusing on now is really looking at how do we leverage the operational data that we have at the moment, the operating sites and looking at how do we equip Paul's team and the broader business to make better, more informed decisions. So that's really where we're focusing. I touched on the digital twin, which is really getting to the heart of how we actually do contracting and how do we take the actual contract and start translating that into when we're performing in the business and making sure we can understand that our performance today is actually meeting what the life of the contract requires. I touched on what we're doing with the performance data, and there's also some work that we're doing in the Ausdrill business, really looking at how do we optimize margin, so looking at people and workflows and equipment workflows and how we do that. So there's a number of areas that we're focusing on, but it's really focusing on how do we actually make an impact to Paul's team rapidly today.

Yes, that's right. I guess there's a few parts to it today. One is helping us to make better decisions based on the data that we have. Matt and team have managed to make sense of some data that seemingly appeared random, which has been a fascinating start to the work that we're doing. So that's the sort of one element is, of course, helping us to make better decisions. Workflow management, digital workflow management, in particular, and of course, the depth of capability that Sarah and Aaron and team have in autonomy and automation generally is hugely important to us as we look to build upon the work that we've been doing over the past 3 or 4 years as well.

I might just see if there's any in the room that want to ask a question. If you got questions, hands. All right.

It's Hayden Bairstow from Macquarie. Just a couple of questions just on the drivers of this. Do you think it's more ESG-driven electrifying mining fleets? Or is it no one wants to work FIFO anymore, and we're just struggling for numbers in the industry? What's sort of really driving this change, do you think?

I think it's a combination of factors driving it. But I think if you think about electrification, automation, sort of remote operations, I think it's all factors that benefit ESG. I guess people have the option to sort of work in Perth rather than remote as well, being more efficient to drive sort of cost out and reduce carbon footprint. I think it's multifaceted.

Yes, I agree. I think it is multifaceted, and I think you can't focus on one and not the other in this world. I'm not sure if you read up on the study that sort of one of the #1 things was around electrification and a lot of those things were driving below that. So we see it as a combination.

Hayden, if I could just add, if you think about a fully electrified mine, which is obviously where the industry is heading for a lot of very good reasons, that will likely also be largely autonomous. So they go hand in hand.

Go hand in hand.

That was my follow-up question for you. Just on the clients you've got now, I mean if you electrify everything, you get rid of vent raises, reduce ventilation, I mean how much deeper can things go, which automatically just adds value to the customer?

Yes, it could be significantly deeper. There are some impediments to retrofitting or adjusting a conventional diesel decline haulage operation into a fully electrified mine, but there are things we're working on, so -- but they could make a very significant difference.

Jon Scholtz from Macquarie. Just how do you quantify the success of such a business? Is it on a stand-alone basis revenue wise? Or is it group EBITDA? Or is it just growth in terms of order book from this?

Hopefully, the share price sort of keep increasing. So it's going to be ultimate sort of assessment, I guess, Jon. But look, it's sort of a -- sort of, again, multifaceted in terms of how we will be assessing it. But we see it in 2 parts. One is how do we drive the efficiency to support our current offering and therefore, support our clients and capitalize on the sort of, I guess, improved value to the existing and future mines. And secondly, also, how do we take the unique position we're in with the quantity of data, plus the mining know-how, combined with the smarts that come from Sandpit, ImpRes and Optika and then develop new service offerings that are capital light. So we're going to be assessing this twofold. One is our traditional business and also this new service offering that we want to sort of leverage from the knowledge that we have through the mining services that we currently deliver. Peter, anything to add there?

It's very clear.

And I mean on the global footprint, is there something that rolls out in Australia before the rest of the portfolio? Or does it go global from day 1?

Yes. I'll touch on that first and then hand over to Paul. I guess our focus will be to sort of establish it here in Australia initially and then look at where we can sort of take that sort of more broadly, but Paul can expand probably in more detail there.

That's entirely right, Mark. I mean we were born here in Western Australia in the gold fields, and this way, we learned to do all the things that we do that now provide us with significant competitive advantage, particularly internationally. So yes, this is what we learned how to do what we do, and this, we'll continue to work to refine and improve that. So I'm not excited about doing anything for the first time in deepest, darkest Africa or North America, for that matter. We really want to refine these things here at home where we can get our arms around it, and then we will -- and then our international business where we enjoy strong margins will be the beneficiary of it.

And we know that Western Australia globally is known as having some of the best mining expertise. So it makes sense to take advantage of that here, to then look at what we take globally.

Any other questions on line, [ Jeff ]? Or you just checking?

All right. So you're making quite an investment in a new offering at a time when your share price is depressed and the sector seems unloved. Is this the right time to undertake this move?

Yes, I guess as I outlined, we see this as a capital-light investment. It's a $13 million investment, which we rank is the cost of a few trucks or excavators. And we see this as an area that we can absolutely leverage across our whole business as opposed to just some kit. But I guess, it's hard from a sort of broader capital intensity point of view. So we see it as a very light investment at this point in time that we'll leverage. We also think it absolutely is the right time to do this now. And we've been sort of working on this for some time. So it's not just a sort of recent decision. It's been part of our strategy for the last 2 years. We've considered it thoroughly, and we've looked at quite a capital-light way commits. Clearly, the sector is unloved, as you say. But we do see this as a differentiation moving forward, and we see it as the right time to sort of capitalize on this investment in technology. Anything to add there?

Probably the only other thing I'd add to our investors is that you can be completely assured that my team and I are very, very focused on winning work, winning profitable work and executing well. So we're not distracted by idoba, but we are looking forward to the insights and the value that we think idoba can bring to the mining business.

Okay. All right. That covers all the questions. I'm sure there'll be more questions sort of post this session, but to those that are online and to everyone that's joined us in the room, thank you for taking the time to join us on Monday afternoon, and we look forward to further discussions. Thank you.