Perseus Mining Limited (PRU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Mac] [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Perseus Mining Managing Director and Chief Executive, Jeff Quartermaine. Thanks, Jeff.

Thank you very much, Nathan, and good morning to all of our listeners. What I would like to do today firstly is to introduce you to Jess Volich, our Head of Sustainability. Jess will give you a fairly thorough overview of the sustainability journey that this company is on, having released our report for the year ending 2021 earlier today. But before I hand to Jess, I'd just like to provide a little bit of context for what's to come. The subject of sustainability and ESG is something that has gained a lot of market attention in fairly recent times. And as a result, many of the listeners on the call today who are interested in the subject of sustainability may not be so familiar with Perseus. And I think it's important before we start talking about the sustainability journey in detail to give you a bit of context about the company, about where we've come from and where we are hoping to go in future years. So as the slide says here that we are a West African-focused gold producer, developer and explorer. Now in that context, we've been operating as a company since about -- the company was initiated in 2004, but we have been operating in West Africa since around 2006. Now for many people in Australia, in particular, and I know outside of Africa, when a discussion about Africa occurs, many people have this vision that Africa is a single entity, it's a single country and that what applies in one part of the continent applies in another part of the continent. I can tell you that it's absolutely not the case. Where Perseus operates is in West Africa. We're in 2 countries. We're in Ghana, and we're in Côte d'Ivoire. One is a former British colony. One is a former French colony. And even though the 2 countries abut, they couldn't be more different in the way they go about their business. Ethnically, they're probably very similar, but they have very different cultures, very different legal systems, et cetera, et cetera. So there are some quite distinct differences. However, both countries are excellent places to operate, and we've been very successful in the last 10 years or so in bringing on line 3 mines that are now up and running and producing very well. In doing what we've done, we've been driven all of the way by a vision that is fairly clear. What Perseus is about is generating material benefits for all of our stakeholders in fair and equitable proportions. And we aim to do that by undertaking socially and environmentally responsible and then commercially successful discovery, development and operations of mines. And through that activity, we can generate significant amounts of cash flow, which can then be converted to benefits for all of our stakeholders. Our stakeholders, of course, range through the shareholders, financiers but also very, very importantly, our host governments, our host communities, our employees, our suppliers of goods and services. And all of these stakeholders are seeking benefits from Perseus' activity. We set ourselves a corporate objective some time ago of producing around 0.5 million ounces of gold a year, and I'm very pleased to say that we're well and truly on that path. And by fiscal -- the end of fiscal '22, we expect that we will have achieved that outcome. And we're now in the process of looking a little bit further afield and looking at what our next target will be. And I think most likely, it will be to sustain that level of production out to the end of the decade and beyond. Now underpinning everything that we do, do is a very, very clear set of values that we, as a company, have worked up and we, as a company, strictly live to. And those values involve teamwork, integrity, commitment and achievement. And particularly, the last of those, achievement, is very important in the context of the sustainability journey because what we say as a group of people is that what we say we're going to do, we are going to do, and we do deliver. And I think those of you that have followed the company for the last 10 years or so would recognize that, that is something that Perseus is known for, doing what we say we're going to do. Now I'll pass to Jess, who's going to tell you about the sustainability journey that we're on. And you'll hear the sorts of things that we aim to do, the things that we have done to date and the things that we're going to be doing to deliver the outcomes that we're aiming for in the sustainability space. So over to you, please, Jess.

Thanks very much, Jeff, and thanks, Nathan. So just to follow on, hi, everyone, and thanks for joining this webinar to discuss our financial year 2021 Sustainable Development Report that was released to the ASX to the market early today. As Jeff said, I'm Jessica Volich, the Group General Manager of Sustainability here at Perseus. And thanks for everyone for attending today. We're really pleased to see the interest in our -- from our investment community, and we're looking forward to hearing your questions and the feedback on our work. As Jeff said, the purpose of today is to take you through the key highlights on the journey that we're on and also to answer any questions that you may have. But first, I just wanted to talk about our sustainability reporting journey. So our FY '21 report is our third consolidated sustainability report. You can see our reporting history here on this slide, which is summarized. And this report that we have released today is a really important one for us for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's built on and really embedded our reporting against key frameworks. Last report, we reported against the GRI and the mining and metal supplement and did a GRI-compliant report as well as our TCFD report and mapped the SASB requirements and other frameworks that are relevant to us. And this report has really built on that work. And really, we've been working hard to strengthen our data reporting and then embed it into business as usual to support both our continuous improvement in performance as well as our transparency and disclosure. And secondly, this report is important because we're transitioning from a calendar year reporting cadence for our last year reports to now financial year reporting, which is in line with our annual reporting. And this has really been important for us in driving further integration of our sustainability with our financial and operational performance. We released our last report only last April, so this is our second report in the space of 6 months. But the next one will be released this time next year, in line with our annual report. And just as a note. I guess just because of that, some of the figures that you see in the slides and also when you go through the sustainability report, you'll see that some are in calendar years and some are in financial years. And that's really because we've been transitioning our reporting. So that's just something to note as we go through today. So moving on. Just before we get into the detail, I just wanted to recap on our approach to sustainability. There's a range of things in our report that hasn't changed since our last report, and one of them is our overarching approach to sustainability. And the guiding principle for us at Perseus is really the belief that responsible gold mining can play a really progressive role into sustainable development of emerging economies whilst also delivering sustainable returns to our shareholders. We've established our framework for this, which you can see summarized in the wheel here with our material issues around the outside. And in the next -- in the blue of the wheel is how we drive continuous improvement in these material issues. And then finally, in the center of our approach is -- as our foundation is good governance. There's some key things to note in relation to this framework that we've been working on over the last 6 months that I really wanted to call out. Firstly, we did a checking on our materiality analysis following engagement with key stakeholders and investors around March this year. And the materiality of most of these has not changed significantly since our last report. However, there are 2 that have shifted, which is climate change and security. For climate change, the materiality to our business has increased given the pace and momentum behind the transition of the global economy to a low-carbon future, particularly as we head into COP26. And security has also become an increasing focus for us in Côte d'Ivoire, where terrorism risk in countries to the north in the vicinity of our Sissingué operations have increased due to the activity of the Jihadist groups in the Sahel region. So that's just an area that we're watching. We've been also working to strengthen our sustainability performance framework and governance. We have integrated sustainability further into our business scorecard, which is linked to executive remuneration, covering both environmental and social performance metrics as well as safety. Also, on governance, we appointed Amber Banfield to the role of nonexecutive director in May 2021. And Amber has a strong track in sustainability and delivering sustainable solutions for the resources industry. And in her role as nonexecutive director and Chairperson of the Board's Audit and Risk Committee, it includes leading oversight over our sustainability risks and opportunities. One of the key things we've also been working on over the last 6 months is updating our enterprise risk management framework really to drive further consistency of risk assessment across our business and increase our focus on our group enterprise-level risks, which are common across our sites, and build a consistent approach to those. And finally, we started to look at how we can more directly and closely align our sustainability work program to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of the countries in which we operate. The work to start -- this work will really start to gather pace as we progress through FY '22, but we've been taking a really good look at our community investment programs and looking for opportunities. So if I move on to the next slide. This really is the highlights of -- that are included in our sustainability report. I just wanted to call out 3 of them, which have been particularly good achievements over the past 6 months. On the social side, we have continued to have very strong performance in local employment and procurement, which is really what drives our contribution to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8 of Decent Work and Economic Growth. We remain at around 95% of our workforce as national or local. And the value of our local procurement has increased slightly over the past 6 months to around 81%, which is a really good achievement. On environment, we're continuing to have good performance there with -- the key thing to call out is that our emissions intensity, greenhouse gas emissions intensity has come down from the last reporting period as gold production from our Yaouré mine has ramped up. On governance, we commenced external assurance on our sustainability data with limited assurance by PricewaterhouseCoopers on our safety data this year. This is a really, really good first step of us for assuring our sustainability data, and we intend to have all of our data annually issued by the end of financial year '23. We also had our World Gold Council Responsible Gold Mining Principles statement of conformance assured by PricewaterhouseCoopers as we continue on our path to achieving alignment with the principles by the end of financial year '23. So moving now on to performance and specifically safety performance. Our total recordable injury frequency rate and lost time injury frequency rate did increase year-on-year. And there's been a range of factors with one of them being Yaouré entering operations and having new contractors at that site. And this month, we've kicked off a safety improvement program across our sites, where we'll be working on our safety culture, leadership and our critical control framework to ensure that we can continue to deliver and drive year-on-year improvements in this space. It's also worth calling out that we have reduced our total recordable injury frequency rate by around 20% from FY '19, but we will be putting extra effort in this space to drive improvement and get us on the path to achieving our overarching objective, which is 0 harm, of course. Moving on to greenhouse gas emissions and water, our environmental performance. As I mentioned, our emissions intensity has reduced since the last reporting period with Yaouré production ramping up. Of course, our emissions have also increased with an additional mine coming into the portfolio, and we started looking at ways to address our emissions. We kicked off a power study for Yaouré to look at different power alternatives, including consideration of renewables. Part of this is looking at the benefits of continuing with our current arrangement from the group, which already include a good proportion of renewables in Côte d'Ivoire and also looking at how that energy mix is changing over time. We will be further working through this through financial year '22. On water, our intensity there has also decreased with Yaouré coming online. On our social performance. In addition to our strong achievements in local employment and procurement, we've made some gains this past reporting period on the proportion of women employees in our business, rising to now nearly around 15%. And of course, with our activity and revenue increasing with Yaouré coming into production, accordingly, our community contributions have significantly increased to around $2.1 million. We continue to engage closely with our communities on a range of issues. And we're looking, as I said, at our community investment program and how we can align that with the UN Sustainable Development Goals more closely. Just on our alignment to the World Gold Council Responsible Gold Mining Principles. As I mentioned earlier, a key part of improving our governance is adopting the responsible gold mining principles. A critical step in this is being clear and accurate of our starting position. We had our statement of conformance externally assured this year by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And as a result, we did revise where we were at with each of the principles, as you can see here. This analysis and where we're at is informing our FY '22 and '23 work plans, where we'll be putting extra focus on systems and processes associated with our supply chain, human and labor rights and, as I've also mentioned previously, on water and emissions. Another key element of our report this year is we have started to articulate our 3-year sustainability road map. It's safe to say that we'll continue to work on this through financial year '22 to get stronger definition. But really, our assets in sustainability has 2 dual objectives, and it's around protecting financial value of our business and also growing our social value guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For us, this is all about ESG integration, and our journey to reach maturity in this integration is shown on the figure on the left here. And some key initiatives to get us there include further working on our risk and opportunity management, the World Gold Council Responsible Gold Mining Principles and governance over our data and social performance and strategic social investment. As I said, a key area is how we're looking at how we can amplify our social value and really use our strong foundation to maximize the benefits we bring to our communities, supporting them to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And we see this as our biggest opportunity. So moving on to our FY '24 goals. We started to define what our goals look like, but it's safe to say we'll continue to work on this through financial year '22 to get more definition. Key areas for us are our safety performance with our goal of no fatalities, continued goal of no fatalities and really making progress towards our zero-harm objective; also, social performance and responsible sourcing, ensuring we continue to manage our tailings dams well; and looking at reducing our emissions, discharges and natural resource efficiency. So to wrap up, I hope this has given you a clear picture of where Perseus is at with sustainability, our approach and our performance and where we're heading. The foundation has been built by the business, and it's very strong. I look forward to updating you as we build on this in the coming years. And now I'm open to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Andrew Livy at Bell Potter. He's just asked, "What are your main focus areas for the upcoming financial year?"

Thank you. The key focus areas for us is really guided by achieving alignment with the Responsible Gold Mining Principles and our gaps there and focusing on our supply chain, human rights and also water and energy emissions and discharges opportunities as well as, just in general, strengthening our governance, our systems and processes and building that consistency across our portfolio so that we can really drive improvement in performance across our key material issues.

Thank you. And we've just had a question following on from that. He's asked, "What are your next immediate steps with aligning to the World Gold Council Responsible Gold Mining Principles?"

The key things for us at the moment is really looking at our systems and processes, our policies and standards to make sure that it covers all of the principles comprehensively. And also then, it's all about implementation and building the capability on our sites for our teams to align to those principles and deliver. I think in general, we're starting out in not a bad place. It's -- we've got pretty good alignment already. But there are some key areas that we need to work on, and they're the areas that I mentioned before. But I think for us, it's been a really positive thing to look at what does best practice in the gold mining industry look like in terms of sustainability and look at where we're at and then identify the gaps. And it's been a really positive journey so far. So I think everyone is on board with working on those key areas, and I have all the confidence that we'll get there for FY '23.

I had another question come in, which is, "What were the main community projects completed in FY '21?"

The main projects were -- we spent most of our community programs in -- historically, we've spent a lot of time building the social infrastructure in our key communities. That is helping to build schools, helping to build medical facilities and community facilities. And our focus has really shifting or started to shift in making sure that we've got also the facilities, to have the professionals to come and work in those facilities. So building -- in Côte d'Ivoire, it's been on building housing for teachers to make sure that they can attract and retain good-quality teachers to our areas of operation and our communities. And similarly, at Edikan in Ghana, there's been construction of nurses' quarters and teachers' quarters to really attract the professionals to those regions. But there has been also some livelihood programs. We kicked off a pig farming pilot program in Ghana, which is looking at how we can support farmers into different alternative livelihoods which are profitable as well as some capacity-building projects in training in truck driving for the mining industry. So we are definitely starting to see that shift from construction of community infrastructure into more livelihood programs and really supporting our communities on the UN Sustainable Development Goals beyond infrastructure construction.

Great. There are no further questions at this time. So I'll now hand back to Jeff for closing remarks.

Okay. Well, thanks, Nathan. And I think you could see from Jessica's presentation that this has been an area that Perseus has put a lot of effort into in recent times, and we are starting to deliver results. At the same time as we're doing this, of course, we are focusing very heavily on our -- the rest of the business. And this Thursday, we'll be publishing our September quarter report. And without disclosing the details of that report, what you will see from that document when it comes out that the very good and strong performance in the sustainability area is certainly mirrored and then some in the production and growth side of our business. So all in all, Perseus is maturing as a business. We are starting to deliver very consistent and strong results. And I think that we can reasonably take our place as one of the more reliable, well-performed, mid-tier gold companies around the world. So thank you very much for your attendance today. And in the future, going -- or if anything has triggered a question today that you'd like to explore further, Jess is certainly available at all times to engage with you to go into a little bit more detail in some of these areas. She can be contacted either directly over the phone or e-mail or you can contact me as well. So please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything that hasn't been explained in sufficient detail today after you've had a good chance to read the sustainability report that went to the market this morning. So thank you very much, and we look forward to speaking to you again in the future.