Regis Resources Limited (RRL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Welcome, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is James Mactier, non-Executive Chairman of Regis Resources, and I welcome you all to our 2022 and your general meeting. We welcome shareholders again to the AGM, both in person and also online. I am glad, this enables some of shareholders to join us. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're holding this meeting, Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation. We also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands in which we operate, Mantjintjarra Ngalia, Spinifex and Wongatha people in Western Australia, Wiradjuri people in New South Wales and wherever our online meeting participants are based, we recognize their ongoing connections with land, water and community and pay our respect to their elders, past and present. The agenda today commences with my Chairman's address. We'll then move through to the formal meeting with some meeting administration and then resolutions. Shareholders will have the opportunity to ask questions about the resolutions. And after questions, final votes will be cast and the formal meeting will be closed. I will then ask our Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Jim Beyer, to give his presentation on the operational performance, financial performance and outlook. Questions relating to Jim's presentation may be lodged anytime online during his presentation, and he will answer them along with any questions we have from the room following his presentation. Both Jim's presentation and my address have been lodged with the ASX this morning. I'd like to introduce my fellow directors, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Jim Beyer; Mrs. Fiona Morgan; Mr. Steve Scudamore; Mrs. Lynda Burnett; our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Anthony Rechichi and our Company Secretary, Ms. Elena Macrides. I'd also like to welcome Paul Arndt unofficially at this stage, who joins the Board tomorrow. As you've seen in the announcement we made a week or so ago, Paul comes to us with extreme, tremendous amount of operating mining experience and qualifications, and we're looking forward to his contribution. 2022 is a year of consolidation for Regis. Significantly, it represented the first full year of ownership of about 30% interest in the Tropicana mine, and we remain pleased with its performance, outlook and strategic fit. As expected, it has delivered significant production and free cash flow to Regis, both of which are set to increase substantially in the near term. Furthermore, exploration results at depths reinforce our expectation that Tropicana will continue to provide these benefits for many more years to come well beyond current reserves. I said last year that we paid a fair price for an exceptional asset. And I believe the market is now beginning to appreciate this. Tropicana truly is a Tier 1 asset in a Tier 1 jurisdiction. And the current production rate approaching 0.5 million ounces per annum, it is one of Australia's largest gold mines. Throughout the year, we continued to invest in our Duketon assets through open cut and underground development, plant maintenance, modifications, process improvements, resource and reserve definition drilling, and exploration target generation. Whilst we had some significant operational challenges in the first half at Duketon, our team worked very well to recover from these in a position for a stronger future. This week, we released our biannual exploration update, and I'm sure you will agree that we are generating some very exciting results and prospects for both the Duketon and Tropicana. These give us a high degree of confidence in significantly along the mine lives at both these operations. Our sustainability journey also continued with commitment to a solar farm at Duketon as well as other environmental mitigation and cost saving initiatives and plans. We maintained an industry-leading safety performance and female representation in our workforce continues to be above industry average. I encourage you to read about these achievements and other progress in our 2022 Sustainability Report. Speaking of Journeys; last week, we announced the achievement of a major milestone in the permitting process of our McPhillamys project, with the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment concluding that the project is in the public interest and is approvable. Accordingly, department has now referred it to the Independent Planning Commission for final determination. This is a very significant step forward, and I'd like to thank our staff for their considerable efforts so far. The IPC will now consider our application. Part of this process involves the public hearing on December 8 and 9 and we encourage all our shareholders and project supporters to provide written support by the IPC online portal. There will be shortly be a link to this on the Regis website when submissions open. We are hopeful of a positive outcome towards the end of the first quarter in 2023. During the year, the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 continue to require a strong focus to limit the effects on our business. Notwithstanding our efforts and planning, the resulting impact on costs, workforce availability and logistical constraints made for a very challenging operating environment. Surging diesel price added to these industry-wide pressures and in combination with a softening of the U.S. dollar gold price resulted in a very significant downward rating of gold sector valuations globally. Whilst our share price performance was very disappointing, largely because of these sector-wide concerns, our underlying business continues to strengthen. We expect production, cash flow, earnings and resources to grow as we realize the benefits of our investments over the past few years. Our balance sheet remains robust and conservatively geared and our hedged ounces have reduced significantly. Even after considerable investment in our business in a challenging operating environment, we declared a final fully franked dividend of $0.02 per share. Recently, buying of gold by central banks, a weaker U.S. dollar, stabilizing bond yields, continued geopolitical risk and the unraveling of cryptocurrencies are combining to give renewed support to the gold price and gold equities. This, combined with our own improved performance and growth initiatives, bodes well for the future of our company. Finally, on behalf of the Board, I'd like to thank our management team led by Jim, all our staff, contractors, our joint venture partner, AngloGold Ashanti and the communities in which we operate. It was a particularly challenging and busy year. I'd also like to thank Mr. Russell Barwick for his contribution during his time on the Board as well as welcoming Paul who joins the board tomorrow. Now to conduct, move to formal part of the business of the meeting, I was advised meetings is being properly constituted with a quorum of shareholders present, and I declare the meeting open. Notes of the meeting dated 25th of October 2022 has been provided to all Regis shareholders on the company's website in accordance with the Corporations Act, and I therefore take the notice as read. As this meeting is being held both in person and online, there's some housekeeping that will run through. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting. In addition, shareholders and proxies have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. For this meeting, we will table each resolution and then answer any shareholder questions after each resolution is read to the meeting. We acknowledge that there is a short time delay between our meetings here in the room and those listening online, so we have extra time at the end for anyone who would like to ask questions online who did not get the opportunity during the resolutions before voting is finalized. I will now go through the online questions and voting in more detail. There's an online meeting guide link in the notice of meeting, and there's also a help line that you can call. Online attendees can submit a written question at any time. To ask a question, select the Q&A icon, type your question into the text box and once you finish typing, please hit the Send button. Please note the way you can now submit text questions they will not be addressed until the relevant time in the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated or if we receive multiple questions on one topic, they'll be amalgamated together. For those shareholders who wish to ask a verbal question, an audio questions facility is available during this meeting. To use this service, please follow instructions written below the broadcast. If you're in the room today, there will an invitation at the relevant time to come up to the microphone to ask your question and please make sure you introduce yourself. We now move on to the voting. Voting today will be conducted by poll on all items of business. Mr. Rod Somes from Computershare Investor Services is present and will act as returning officer for the poll. The voting online will shortly open for all resolutions. If you are eligible to vote, once voting opens press the Vote icon and all resolutions will be then activated with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There's no need to hit a Submit or Enter button as the vote is automatically recorded. You will receive a vote confirmation notification on your screen. You can change your vote up until the time I declare voting closed. If you're attending in the room today, you can vote using the green voting slips provided to you at registration. I'll now declare voting open on all items of business and will remain open until questions related to the resolutions have been answered. I'll give you a warning before I move to close the voting. Proxy votes have been received. The total number of valid proxy votes and the manner in which the proxy got to vote would be displayed before each resolution considered and voted upon. Where a proxy vote has been given to the Chairman without voting instructions, in all cases, the Chairman intends to vote in favor of the resolution. First item of business for the meeting is to receive and consider the financial report, the director's report and auditor's report for the year ended 30th of June 2022. These reports are all included in the annual -- in the company's annual report and are also available on the company's website. Derek Meates and Michael Bohn from the company's auditors, KPMG, are here today and are available to answer any questions on the audit, if needed. I now call for questions on this item. Please make a way to the microphone if you're in the room, We'll ask a question online. Elena, is there anything online? Any questions in the room?

There are no questions in this room.

Okay. Thank you. We'll now move to the resolutions to be put before shareholders. Resolution 1 is the adoption of the remuneration report. We'll now move to consider the first resolution for today, which is the adoption of the company's remuneration report. The Corporations Act requires that at the Annual General Meeting Resolution that the remuneration record is adopted, be put to vote for shareholders. The remuneration report details the company's policy on the remuneration of directors and senior executives. This vote is advisory only and does not bind the company or directors. For the purposes of today's Annual General Meeting we ask the shareholders to consider and if thought fit to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that the remuneration report for the year ended 30th of June 2022 is set out in the annual -- in the 2022 annual report be adopted. I note the proxy votes have been received and shown on the slide. I now move the adoption of the company's remuneration report and call for any questions. Any questions in the room? Any questions online? Yes, sir.

My name is David Brook. I'm the representative for the Australian Shareholders' Association. One of the things that we find a little bewildering is that you have a relative TSR. While you form your own companies, and there's always arguments over the constituents of those companies, some of the companies have adopted [ ETF which is unarguably ] As being a comparison. Why do you continue with this practice?

Yes. I mean it's something we have considered in the past. It's not -- it's not an uncommon practice. Many of our peers do exactly the same thing. We've chosen that group of about 12. I think it is from memory, which our ASX listed peer group, what we consider to be our peer group. Some of them are mining overseas, but they're predominantly listed on the ASX and with our investor base, it's typically what they look to when they go to invest in gold mining companies, and that's sort of who our peer groups and our competitors if we like for the investor dollar. So, that's why we've done that. We chase we -- every year, we review that list to see who comes in, who goes out and that's done primarily on a market cap sort of north of -- it depends on the year, but it's $0.5 billion or $1 billion sort of thing and upwards from there. So yes, that's why we do. We think that gives a very fair representation of the investors sort of dollars and where they would like to put their money. That's something we do consider.

It's just something that we would like you to consider because it's always an argument, you're picking an unrepresentative group. I'm not accusing you but I know that Northern Star and some others are now adopting that practice of having something which is independent just like you would certain.

No, certainly, we will consider. We have considered it. We'll continue to consider it. And you mentioned Northern Star. They are the very large companies now and competing very much -- the sort of peer group is -- there's less of them in their peer group. So that's how we got a global peer group. We still have a -- and when you see the research reports, the analysts tending to focus on this sort of peer group that we've nominated in the rem report. But yes, absolutely. It's something we do consider and we'll consider it again -- thank you. Anything else, anything online?

The directors have signed off. Have the director signed off the account saying we've met net assets of $1.57 billion, yet our market cap is now down to $1.43 billion. Could Fiona Morgan, as the only director up for election, comment on whether the directors have considered writing down Tropicana?

It's not a question for Fiona. It's more a question for CFO and audit or Jim or our auditors, Derek. In general terms? Yes, we have signed off on that. That's exactly what we've done. And we have considered any impairments that should have been taken with advice from our external independent auditors. And we spent quite a lot of time on reviewing the carrying value of our assets and looking at things like gold price, cost to complete, et cetera, et cetera, you will note there were some impairments and some write-offs taken during the year. So yes.

There's also a question for the auditors. How rigorous was the testing process, the impairment testing process.

Derek can answer. Derek Meates at KPMG, auditor.

Thank you. For the benefit of people online. Yes, I can answer that, if you have a look at our audit report at the back. Can you hear me now? It's hard to talk this way. But for the benefit of most people online and for the shareholders in the room. Yes, we did spend a fair bit of the audits in terms of looking at the valuation of the assets. And if you look at our audit report, which is down the back of the annual reports and in particular, Page 101, we do call out Tropicana as an area of focus. And on the right-hand side of that page, we list probably about 10 or 12 procedures that we performed in terms of looking at management's view of FX, management's view of gold price, reserves, resources, future costs. So as part of the audit, we challenged each of those. And then our opinion is a clean, unqualified audit opinion in that manner.

Okay. Any other online questions.

Not on this resolution.

Okay. If you'd like to vote now on this item, please select the voting icon and cast your vote. Resolution 2, the reelection of Fiona Morgan. Mrs. Morgan is due to retire from office and being eligible, presents herself for reelection. The Board, in the absence of Mrs. Morgan unanimously supports her reelection. I ask shareholders to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. Mrs. Fiona Morgan, who retires in accordance with Clause 12.7 (a) of the constitution and being eligible for reelection, be reelected as a Director. I note the proxy votes that have been received are shown on the slide. I move the reelection of Mrs. Morgan as a Director of the company and now call for any questions we have in the room or online in relation to this resolution?

[Technical Difficulty] It's unusual to have a single institutional investor like an VanEck as the biggest shareholder of our ASX 300 company with a 9.72% stake. Did VanEck meet with Fiona Morgan ahead of her reelection today to assess their position? And have they ever requested a board seat? What sort of access do they get to directors and management?

VanEck is an ETF. So they have very little correspondence with the company or any of the companies they're invested in. They're invested in probably the major shareholder in all of that peer group, and they're purely a sort of, if you like, while I'll look through ETF and they're just investing their invested dollars on a quantitative basis and have very little engagement with the company, and they're very hard to engage with because that's their investment model. So Fiona, I don't believe they would have met with her. And we spend -- we have very little engagement with them coming and it is frustrating on the way up when they're buying shares. It's fantastic on the way down when they're selling shares indiscriminately. So It's a bit of a worry, but that's the world we're living in at the moment with the rise of the ETF and passive investments.

I've got a second question. With the newest Director, Paul joined the Board tomorrow, why wasn't he put up for election today with Fiona. So there would have been a mandate from shareholders.

That was a timing thing in terms of finding Paul and getting his agreement to join the company. That wasn't in time before the notice of meeting went out. The notice of the meeting went out on the 25th of October and as preparations had to be before that. So it is just the way the timing worked out. Paul will come up for election at next year's AGM. Any other questions? Okay, if you'd like to vote on this item, please select the voting icon and cast your vote. Resolution 3. Approval of the plan. The next resolution is for approval of incentive plan, staff incentive plan such as this one require approval of the shareholders every 3 years and the current plan was last approved in 2019. An overview of the plan is detailed in the notice of meeting. The Board, in the absence of Mr. Beyer, unanimously supports the approval of the incentive plan. Please note there is a voting exclusion on this resolution as detailed in the notice of the meeting. I ask the shareholders to consider and if thought fit to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That pursuant to and in accordance with the listing rule 7.2, exception 13(b) and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the issue of securities under the Plan for Eligible Participants (as that term is defined in the Plan) known as the incentive plan, a summary of the rules of which are set out in the explanatory memorandum as an exception to Listing Rule 7.1. Now proxy votes have been received and are shown on the slide. I move the approval of the incentive plan. Now call for any questions in the room or online. Any questions online?

There are no questions.

If you like to vote on this item now, please select the voting icon and cast your vote. Next resolution is for approval of -- Resolution 4 is for the approval of termination benefits under the incentive plan. This resolution is required by the Corporation's law and the ASX listing rules to allow termination benefits under the plan. If shareholders approve this resolution, such benefits will not count towards the 5% threshold limit. I ask shareholders to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. Subject to the passing of Resolution 3, that for the purpose of Listing Rule 10.19 and Part 2D.2 of the Corporations Act and for all other purposes, approval be given for the giving of benefits to any current or future person holding a managerial or executive office in the company or a related body corporate in connection with that person ceasing to hold that managerial or executive office as a result of the terms of the Plan as set out in Explanatory Memorandum. I note that the proxy votes have been received showing online. I move approval of potential termination benefit under the incentive plan. Call for any questions. Any questions in the room or online?

Nothing online.

Just give me a few seconds. Okay. No questions. If you'd like to vote on this item now, please select the voting icon and cast your vote. We now move to consider the fifth resolution, which relates to the approval of 120,322 short-term performance rights to Jim Beyer as detailed in the notice of the meeting. The performance rights proposed to be issued to Mr. Beyer represent 50% of the short-term incentive component of Mr. Beyer's remuneration package. The other 50% is paid in cash. These short-term incentive rights were vested on the first of July 2022 -- 2023, if Mr. Beyer is still an employee of the company at that time. The Board, in the absence of Mr. Beyer unanimously supports the award of the short-term incentive performance rights. Please note there is a voting exclusion on this resolution as detailed in the notice of the meeting. I ask shareholders to consider it and if thought fit to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That for the purpose of Listing Rule 10.14, Sections 200B and 200E of the Corporations Act and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the grant of up to 120, 322 short-term incentive performance rights to Mr. Beyer, Managing Director of the company or his nominee under the Plan on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum. I note that proxy vote has been received and shown on the slide, I move the vote on short-term performance to Mr. Beyer in accordance with the resolution detailed in the Notice of Meeting, call for any questions?

Yes.

My name is James Forbes. I am an ex-Forbes business owner. I've never quite understood why people need an incentive to do the job they're very well paid for, but that's a discussion for another time. And my question is what sort of price are the shares given in both the short-term and long-term incentive and do people get perks short term every year, and then after 3 years, on top of that, a long-term incentive, it seems an awful lot to me when our share price is nearly half from when I bought it.

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Forbes. Yes. There is -- we have a short-term incentive package and a long-term incentive package. The short term is over a 12-month period, the long term is over a 3-year period. And essentially you will see they're well paid for what they do. And that's a fair opinion really -- we operate in a very competitive environment, and that's how remuneration is set in our industry. I dare say if there weren't short-term incentives or long-term incentives, then the base salaries would be significantly higher. But we operate in a competitive environment for management, senior execs and all the way throughout the organization, we have been very conscious of that and that's part what drives us. But clearly, it's about choosing the right sort of hurdles that do incentivize that are able to be achieved. There's no point having incentives that are so far that they are too far away that there's no incentive for management. So the Board through the remuneration committee as well looks for what's a fair thing and tries to come up with a structure that we think strikes that right balance between rewarding management and encouraging them to achieve certain goals, some financial, some nonfinancial. That's another discussion as well. And we think we've achieved that. Our proxy support for this resolution has been overwhelming as it was last year. So I think our remuneration structures are very well structured and thought through. They change every year. We [ change it ] with them, but I don't see a massive change going forward in the concept.

What are the incentives based on? Is it the share price? Or is it profit?

No, it's not. Over the years, we've had different metrics. We did once they have had earnings per share and other things, but then feedback from shareholders then was that wasn't visible enough. They wanted it to be more visible and recordable or more reportable, but yes, much more visible and to take the gold price out of that calculation as well, which they thought was probably giving a free option to management. So we sort of moved away from profit some years ago. So this year, the short-term incentive is around as it has been for the last few years, safety production costs and various other things. So it's doing things that they can achieve in the short term, the long-term incentives and then obviously, what we want them to do, looking forward down the track and adding shareholder value through that way, so.

David Brook. Our policy is that we have long-term incentives should be over 4 years with a lock. Some other companies, Northern Star, for example, are moving in the same direction. That is one of the issues. The second point on top of both at the same time is other companies often have a complete cutoff in the sense that you've got to have a total shareholder return, which you haven't had in the last 12 months. And that forms a sort of another hurdle in the thing. Maybe we should ask these questions in the remuneration report area, but I... And basically, I would like to see you going over to [ trends ] which are within our policy. And indeed, it looks if other people within the industry are moving that way. Thank you.

Thank you Mr. Brook. They are all things that we consider. We're aware of that, and we will consider another time. At the moment, I think we've got the right balance between aligning with shareholders' interest and being able to track and retain right sort of talent. The voting suggests that we're pretty close to it. But this is the continual process over the years. I've seen since I've been involved with the company since 2017, we've seen quite significant change in this. And in part, it's driven by shareholder expectations, it is driven by a competitive environment, a whole lot of things. So...

One of the things that for me as a shareholder and others, the crunch is that we lose money but the management of the company gain money. We like to see us all suffering to get over.

Thank you Mr. Brook, we are all suffering. And I don't say that and yes, that's the reality. All your directors are shareholders. And Mr. Beyer, for instance, what we introduced some years ago, which was a market-leading practice at the time, I believe was to defer 50% of the short term incentives from cash into the short-term performance rights, which you've just been hearing about. And that's another reason to keep the management incentivized, keep them having more skin in the game, so they don't just get cash at the end of the year. Half of that cash gets converted into shares or performance rights, short term performance rights, and then not -- it doesn't go to them until 12 months hence. So they keep, they build up equity and they have more risk -- and the reality is, as you know, share price has been falling for the last few years. So the value of those retained rights with Mr. Beyer and other senior executive has actually been going down. So they've been wearing the pain, [indiscernible] been wearing the pain as well. And we do have 2 other gateways. We don't have an absolute shareholder return gateway? And one of the reasons we don't is that what you've seen, as I mentioned in my address, the global -- the valuations for gold mining companies globally has dropped significantly probably 50% in that 12-month period. So you're going to have a situation there where Jim and his team are adding considerable value, short and long term, for the benefit of shareholders, but the global environment goes completely against them. I don't think that would be fair to them, so you get nothing. So we consider all that. They're all very valid. Right. So we voted on that very much too. We're voting on Resolution 5. Okay. You can all cast your votes through the voting icon. That brings us to resolution 6 which relates to the approval of 664,763 long-term performance rights to Jim Beyer detailed in the note of the meeting. The performance rights proposed to be issued to Mr. Beyer represent a long-term incentive component of Mr. Beyer's remuneration package and the performance rights will only vest if he achieves his respective threshold and target levels of performance during the performance period. The Board, in the absence of Mr. Beyer unanimously supports the award of the long-term performance rights. Please note there is a voting exclusion on this resolution as detailed in the notice of the meeting. I ask the shareholders to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That for the purposes of Listing Rule 10.14, Sections 200B and 200E of the Corporations Act and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the grant of up to 664,763, long-term incentive performance rights to Mr. Jim Beyer, Managing Director of the company or his nominee under the Plan on the terms and conditions are set out in Explanatory Memorandum. Now the proxy votes that have been received as shown on the slide, I move the award of long-term performance rights to Mr. Beyer in accordance with the resolution detailed in the notice of meeting and I call for any questions in the room or online?

We have 1 online question. Shareholder asks, could the CEO summarize his past LTI grants as to whether they've vested or lapsed. Also, have you ever sold any ordinary shares in the company or brought any on the market without relying on an incentive schemes to build his equity position? Please don't say look it up in the annual report or through ASX announcement. It's complicated over many years, and if the CEO could actually summarize the situation in 30 seconds.

Mr. Beyer, you've got 30 seconds.

Thanks. Right. So 30 seconds. Well, it is complicated, and we do recognize that, and I think that's somewhat reflected in the nature of the questions that we were just asking because there's actually 2 elements of the shares that are allocated. Part of it is a short-term incentive, which we've already spoken through. Short-term incentive tends to focus on safety, production, costs; the key elements, quite short term, exceeding short-term targets, short-term being a year. The long-term incentives are set over 3 or 4 years to 3 years. The first lot for me, I joined the company just over 4 years ago. The first lot was tested. So basically, in simple terms, the way the LTI scheme runs is that the company says, "Jim, you are going to have the potential to get a certain amount of shares." And you can look and see, I think this year, the approval is something like 600,000 shares. And that doesn't mean that you get them if I'm alive and breathing in 3 years' time. There's a series of tests. And the tests are total shareholder return relative to its peers for all the reasons that James just went through, it's a relative measure, not an absolute. In some years, it's related to, have we increased the reserve growth. So have we added long-term value to the company. Has Mcphillamy been approved, adding long-term value to the company or increasing production over what we consider to be the long-term objective. Now there's a few others in there, and they do tend to shift from one year to the other. So 4 years ago, those -- and it's taken more than 30 second, because I think it's important that people understand how it works. So 4 years ago, they were put in -- the first time that we tested was last year. And of the -- I can't remember the exact number that we're allocating, but the number that I actually received was something like 10% or 15% because a lot of the other measures [ weren't triggered ]. We didn't get a good enough shareholder return. We didn't get McPhillamys approved. We're still working on it. And there's a couple of other things that we didn't do. What we did do, we were able to add some reserves, which would add significant value. So I did get some. And it's the same test that's being done this year and has been reported in this year's annual report along very similar lines. So the proportion that I've actually received in the last 12 months for the LTIs that were approved 3 plus years ago, has been -- look, you're quite me on this, but you can't quite me because I don't have the exact numbers, but it's something less than around 10%, over 10% or 12% of what was actually targeted to achieve. The second part -- so that's an explanation of how it works. -- and how they've been -- I've only received them in the last 12 months, and it's to the sum total of probably a little bit over 100,000 shares I would estimate. The other part of the question was, have I taken personal money and invested it in it? Absolutely, I did. The day that I walked in through the door, I took some funds and I invested, I think it was approximately 39,000 shares or just a little bit under 39,000 shares, which I still hold and a part of the package, which I do, I have earned as James said. Other organizations or other recommendations are to take just no shares, don't worry about it, just pay cash. I have not sold any of my shares and I've continued to hold on to them. So when we talk about sharing the pain, I can absolutely agree in sharing that pain -- so I've just taken almost 30 minutes rather than 30 second. But I hope to sort of lay out a little bit of how that's what I personally have done, just on joining and what -- how also that LTI scheme has actually worked in practice, how it appears in what's approved to what are being allocated, but what actually transpires in practice as to what I've got, it's very quite clear hurdles, and I can tell you that they are applied very rigorously.

Thanks, Jim. Any other questions? Okay. I like you now to vote for the resolution, please select the voting icon and cast your vote. Having moved each of the resolutions, I'll call for any final questions that people don't get a chance to answer either here in the room or online in relation to the resolutions. Got some more online questions?

Shareholders asked this, did any of the 5 main proxy advisers recommend a vote against any of today's resolutions, including the rem report. Which of the proxy advisers are covering us? And have there been any material protest votes. Also why not disclose the proxies to the ASX with the formal addresses like the others do now? I can answer this one. So proxy advisers reports are prepared for their clients, not for us. So we aren't able to release them. We don't actually receive all of them. So if the shareholder wants to receive those reports, they are able to get them from the -- approach to the proxy advisers directly.

Were there any significant votes against? So I think well, we're saying the proxies, the numbers speak for themselves between 93% and 97%. I think voting in favor of all resolutions, there's always people who vote against. I am absolutely stunned. I think that's fairly overwhelming. We engage with proxy advisers where we can. Not every proxy adviser wants to engage fully with us and we take their feedback of which one is from Shareholders Association, and we take on board their feedback. And I think as you'll see the overwhelming support, we've reached pretty good compromise. Mr. Brook.

Not really a question, it's a more of a comment. On our website, we actually have the way we intend to vote. So people can look at it if they wish.

That is Mr. Brooks, Australian Shareholders Association. I think we answered that question. Anything else, Elena?

Sorry. So shareholder asks, there are 25,000 shareholders and the Chairman's used his chair address to encourage shareholders to make a submission to the New South Wales government planning review to support the new gold project in Blayney. How many shareholders would you like to lodge a submission? And would 1,000 be a good number? I'd say it.

25,000 would be better? It's up to each and every one if you'd like to support, clearly, Clearly, we think it's a project where we're supporting for the benefits over there and for the benefits of shareholders.

One final question. Sorry, it's a long question. Not directly related too may be. John Howard and Peter Costello foolishly sold off 2/3 of the Reserve Bank's gold reserves at historically cheap prices shortly after being elected in 1996. This move cost Australian taxpayers billions. How important is Central Bank reserves to a strong gold price and have we lobbied the new Albanese government -- had the company lobby the Albanese government to set some funds aside to rebuild the reserve bank gold reserves. Also, the Chair mentioned, Central Bank purchases has helped the price recently, which Central Banks have the biggest gold reserves and just how much gold is owned by governments around the world.

Yes, the short answer is no. We have haven't lobbied the Albanese government. And Central Bank buying is very important. It's been -- the ETF investor flow has taken on greater importance over the last few years, but that's beginning -- it's been waning, as I said, with U.S. dollar appreciation and rising bond yields, et cetera. So the opportunity cost of holding gold has hurt generally investor flows, but central banks certainly have increased their buying, and there was a report out by well, Gold Council, I think it was in the last quarter and you can Google that and find the exact numbers on that, but that was quite a significant turnaround, I believe, over the last few years. The biggest -- look for the data, that it's the U.S., Russia and China, I guess, is probably the largest net bank and maybe England is the biggest holders of gold reserves off the top of my head, but central banks, but go and get the official data from Gold Council. Okay. Any other questions?

Yes one more. Does the long-term incentive only vest if the person is still employed?

Yes, that's correct. We do under the termination benefits have the ability to award some of the termination -- some of that as termination benefits in the event of a resignation.

But it's not something we've used.

We haven't used it today. No, not expecting to use it, but it's there should we feel like we need to or wish to.

No more questions.

No more questions. Right. So I'll shortly close the online voting system. Please ensure you have cast your vote on all resolutions. You will of course finalized some time for that to happen. Whilst it's happening, Rod Somes from Computershare will walk around the room here, collect the green voting cards. If you require any assistance, please raise your hand. Once counts have been reviewed, the results of the poll will be announced on the ASX via an ASX announcement later today. Everyone had it in the green slips here in the room Okay. Confirm all voting cards have been collected, and the poll has been conducted. Ladies and gentlemen, voting is now closed. I now formally declare the poll close. The results will be published, as I said, later today on the ASX. This concludes the formal proceedings of today's Annual General Meeting. I'd now like to introduce, call upon Mr. Jim Beyer, your Managing Director and CEO to give his presentation, and take questions afterwards.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you, James, and thank you all for joining us today for the FY '22 Annual General Meeting or the 2023 Annual General Meeting. First of all, before we kick off, I'd just like to introduce a couple of people -- a few people around the room that are members of the executive team that weren't introduced when James kicked off sitting down here on the front left is Ben Goldbloom. Ben is our Head of Investor Relations. A couple of rows back from that. We've got Wade Evans, Wade is business development and exploration General Manager. Couple of rows behind that, it's Stuart Gula, our Chief Operating Officer; Tim Conversi, our HR people manager is at home with a family full of COVID, so he thought best not to attend. And of course, you met Elena. This is -- does have forward-looking statement. So obviously, there's no chance of being able to read that while it's up on the screen. But this presentation and material is available on the website and has been loaded on the ASX this morning, but I do encourage people to make sure they take the time to have a look at it. Okay. So just covering briefly what is Regis and where are we at the moment? We have 3 key stages or legs to our business and the first is Duketon. We have about 1.4 million ounces of reserves, so that was at the end of -- at the beginning of the year. It is an operation that is stabilizing. In fact, it is historically now probably -- if we haven't been undertaking some of the actions, it would be in decline. The reserves were starting to run out, and you'll see some of the work that we're doing to abate that decline. And we see some -- certainly now some substantial growth opportunities, but of course, growth comes with time and with investment. Tropicana, a little bit to the Southeast of Duketon or Fairway if you're walking. It's -- Tropicana is a great asset. James touched on it. We own 30% of that. It's managed by AngloGold. -- and they do a very good job of managing that for us. We go there regularly. We get all the reports. We visit the site at least once every 3 months to see how it's running. It is a great asset and one that's got about just over 700,000 ounces of reserves. That's our 30% share which if you do the math is roughly maybe 5 or 6 years, but we all know Anglo say in their release as well, this is a mine that's got at least 10 years of life sitting in it, and we can see it going well beyond that. Tropicana is really playing out to be the value that we saw. And this is one of the important pieces about the Tropicana acquisition. It was not something that was going to be spectacularly different in the short term. It was really a business that was run and it was mature in the way that it was operating. There is a little bit of benefit that we're going to see. I'll talk about in a moment. But what we really see the value here, is this is a major cornerstone for our business. This is going to have a 10-year-plus mine life running at these type of production levels. This is something that not a lot of other gold mining companies, certainly in Western Australia have -- this was a very important long-term investment we made. And you really -- you won't appreciate some of the benefits of this for several years as we will see this life just continues on. Although it does one of the key elements of it as well, it starts to generate more cash flow as the cutback gets completed at Havana. And finally, the other area where we have a significant asset base is in McPhillamys in New South Wales, 2 million ounces of reserves and a project that is finally starting to make its way through the approvals -- the formal approval process. So touching first on the financial results and highlights for FY '22. It was our first year, and I won't spend a lot of time on this. James did cover it earlier, but it was our record year, clearly, with significant contributions from the first full year of Tropicana. Cash flows for our operations. I'm going to talk a little bit about where our cash flow has gone and where our cash and what we're doing. But our cash flow from operations, $347 million. All-in sustaining costs were sitting at $1,556. Our EBITDA, $336 million for the year, and we paid a $0.02 share -- $0.02 dividend -- we paid that as a full-year dividend, there was no interim. And that will probably be something that we'll keep an eye on and certainly, as you start to see, we've got these big growth projects coming forward, things like McPhillamys, we'll look to see what is the appropriate timing of that, particularly given ebb and flow of our business from one half to the next. And we'll look to see how that relates to how we fund and what we set up and how we fund the McPhillamys project in the event that it gets approved, which, of course, is what we're driving towards. So let's talk on the financial part, but a little bit more on what's some call ESG, but we call it working on making sure we maintain and build on our social license to operate. Make no mistake, this is not an area of soft effort and touchy feely, which is what we do get occasionally if we talk to some investors, they just feel that this is acute area. This is very important. -- society is shifting significantly in its expectations of mining companies. What the industry could do 20 years ago and how it could go about getting its approval is very different to today. And it's very important that we demonstrate that not just are we a financial company, but we're a company that contributes and how we go about doing that. So where do we sit when we look at that license to operate -- on diversity, in terms of male-female, 22% of our workforce is female. That's higher than the resource industry average for Western Australia. The number 1 thing that we focus on, though, is capability and quality. We don't play a numbers game. We just make sure that we make the effort to find people who are capable and are good quality for our roles. We can't afford to do anything else. We've reduced the water that we abstract from groundwater. So we are reusing water and recycling. We've set ourselves an understanding of achieving net 0 by 2050. That's a little bit more complicated than it sounds. I mean, if you look at our reserves and the life of the business, we won't be around in 2050. So it's kind of an easy target arguably for us to achieve. But what we're actually doing is we're looking and we're setting very clear why is that we can deliver on a reduced carbon footprint by 2030. And we haven't just sort of torn some numbers off the wall and said, here they are. This is what we'll have a cracker, trust us. We're setting in place very clear deliverable plans. There's no point making promises that you can't deliver. And one of the first things, and these have potential not just to reduce our carbon footprint, which is clearly an important element, certainly in the global investment community. That becomes an ever-growing question as to why a fund would look to invest in you. And of course, remembering more people that are interested in investing in you, more people buy the shares, if there are more people buying than selling, then the share price goes up. So it's very important that we explain to people what we're doing. One of our projects, which James touched on, is a solar farm that we're putting in a Garden Well, 9 megawatts. And that will reduce our carbon footprint. But importantly as well, it reduces our costs. It reduces our usage of fuel by almost 6 million liters a year and $1.48, that's a $6 million a year saving in round numbers for us. So we're not -- there is a very clear financial benefit to do this the right way. You can see some of the -- and of course, ones that we really value is our safety performance. If you aren't performing safely and if you aren't demonstrating to your workforce that you care about them and you're doing things in this current labor environment, people will leave, and they will move. I'm pleased to say that over the last 4 years or 3 or 4 years, we've been able to reduce our lost time injury, which means somebody got hurt to the point where they couldn't go to work. We've reduced it from being 2x or 3x the industry average. -- to being about half, a pretty good performance by the team and something that potential employees and our current employees take notice of. So moving on to what have we been doing? And importantly, what have we been doing with the cash that the business has generated -- now this is using non-IFRS terms, nonstandard accounting terms, but the numbers are real. You can see that we started the year with $269 million in cash, and we finished the year at $231 million -- with $231 million, that's gold and cash -- and you might look at that and think, we went backwards. But in reality, you have a look at what we've done with the numbers. We are setting the business up for future growth. So what we've done here is the business itself as it stands in its -- it just runs across its normal reserves and runs and it will close, our business will close without growth. Our reserves will run out in forward 6 years. So we have to make sure that we're looking for the future. That is one of the most important things to understand about mining is that the second you start mining you start mining and you start losing your asset because you're turning it into revenue. And if you don't grow and if you don't look to explore and find new -- new gold, you will go back -- you will eventually close. So what have we done? Well, our business -- underlying business made about $250 million in cash. We've invested $67 million of that at Tropicana; we've invested $46 million of that at Garden Well Underground. And we invested $56 million of that across our exploration and a few other smaller projects and also McPhillamys. And then with our hedge book, our hedge book also cost us effectively another $96 million in cash. And then at the final end, of course, as you'll all be well aware, we also paid $22 million in fully franked dividends. And that's where the money has gone. So what does it actually mean? Because that's just a waterfall chart -- this is Garden Well South underground, the project that we approved back very late 2020. I think it was around December in 2020, we approved it. You can see we took our first cut there with the jumbo on the face back in March. And a couple of weeks ago, we filed our first stope. Now that's just a -- this is a relatively small underground mine. That's how long it's taken us to get down there, establish it, get it ready. And last year, we spent $47 million, getting ourselves to that position. We put in drives. We put in a substantial substation. Garden Wells South is quite a wet mine. And in some areas, when you first go to them, the water, it's unbelievable how much water comes out. But it drains away. You just got to have the pumps to deal with it, and eventually, it dries out. Vent fans are required to make it safe underground. So this is what we've been setting up. Garden Well really didn't produce any ounces and contribute anything to production last year. It will this year, it will start production in the second half. Really, as I say here, we've started our first stope, mines take a while, underground mines take a while to get going. Importantly, -- and this is one of our -- I'm going to jump ahead a little bit in terms of our growth. You can see the underground. So those that are online, won't see this, but I'm putting a little circle, the laser pointer around the purple area on the diagram that you can see, which is where we have approved, and we've already got a mine plan where we're going to open it up. But if you look to the north and that green dash line, we've got mineralization all the way along there, and we're very excited about the potential for Garden Well to be much bigger and much longer life than we currently expect it to be in our plan. So I mean at the moment, when we approved it, we thought we'd get 190,000 ounces out of it roughly. And we're already seeing, this is open at depth, it's open along strike. It could be twice as -- on a vertical basis, it could be as big again, if not more, on a long strike or a long horizontal on the same level. We think that Garden Well South is only just starting. That's the part of what we've been putting our effort and our money into. And this is an underground mine that could produce just alone 60,000 or 70,000 ounces just the way it is, forget about if we find more further to the north. -- and will produce that over the next 3 or 4 years. If we weren't doing this, our production would be dropping off. And these are good value ounces. The other big investment that I mentioned was a Tropicana, the $67 million we spent on the cutback. So the cutback in total is about 459 odd thousand ounces. Our share of that is about $135 million. So we've been -- and you see on these diagrams here, the diagram on the top right-hand corner for those online shows the schematic of where the material is that we have to remove to get access to the ore that's underneath it. And it's taken a couple of years to get there. We're only just starting to get to that ore now. And you can see in these 2 photographs, 1 on the left was a photo that we took back when we first went up and started to look at the place just before we bought it. And the photo on the right is a taken from exactly the same spot -- so if you that's what -- mining takes a long time. That's a huge amount of material to move -- in fact, it's very hard to try and [indiscernible] something in there to scale. But when you go home or you have a look at it alone, you can see these tiny little drills that are sitting on top, and they are large drills, that are probably about quarter of the size of this room. This is big scale. But once we get down there, I mean the open pit reserves at Tropicana are 2 grams a tonne. This is part of the reason why we're so excited about Tropicana was the production that we will -- the increase in production that we'll see. So that's taken a near-term investment. And that investment will start to pay off. Next year, we won't have to mine as much material. The year after that, it really starts to drop away, and we just start to produce iron ore. We just start to produce -- I think I got that out of my system -- we'll just start to produce gold-bearing ore and it will just continue to flow on for at least 5 or 6 years. And that's the open pit. The other part of where we've been putting our funds -- and I say our shareholders, I'm a shareholder, we're all shareholders here, where we've been putting our funds is in exploration. Exploration is the lifeblood of where we find more ounces. They do not appear by accident. -- they take time, they take money, they take intelligence and they take -- you've got to make luck, but they take time. And so what we've been doing, and you will have -- if you've been along to these over the last couple of this meeting over the last 2 or 3 years, you've heard that we've really started to lift our exploration focus. And why have we done that? We've done that because we need to. We need to find more gold. And we've been spending last year, $37 million across the Garden, the Duketon Greenstone Belt and also over at Tropicana, probably about 3/4 Duketon, quarter a truck. And we've been very excited by what we've been able to find. I don't have a picture in here if you want to really understand what it is that we're doing and where the value is that we're adding, get the exploration book release out that we put out last week. These are just a couple of snapshots out of it to a bit of a teaser as to what's in there if we haven't already read it. So we found -- it looks like we're finding more mineralization at Rosemont Underground. -- whole potentially a new production area. We're still working on it. We're still drilling it, but it's added ounces. At Garden Well, I already talked about that. You can see here, these are the far right-hand side of this diagram with the rainbow colors on it. That's a whole new potential ore zone that we've identified just in the last 12 months or so. That one there is called Maverick. There are some -- that's a long -- it's a shear zone, and it sits between Garden Well and Rosemont, at pretty good location. And it's got very, very interesting results that we're pursuing there. It's early days, but these sort of results can be particularly exciting. And that's not the only area that we've identified. Commonwealth is a new potential production zone that we're working on to see whether we can convert into reserves. I talked about Rosemont, there's another area called [ McKenzie ], which is not too far away from Maverick. And then there's an area that you might have heard me talk about a little while ago called Betelgeuse, and there's an area there that Bandya, which we've identified as having good potential as well. Now these are early stage exploration. But if you're not finding these, these are what eventually out of the 3 or 4 or 5 that you find, even if one of them comes off, that's how you find 0.5 million or 1 million-ounce deposits. So we're putting the effort into that. And the other area where we're seeing life extension growth at Tropicana is in the underground. If you look carefully at that diagram that we've got there, we show you how much of the underground material, which is that sort of downhill slide that goes into the deeper -- there's an area that's already proven up as reserves. There's an area below that, that is a resource. So it hasn't got enough drilling in yet to make it reserves quality. But if you go 350 meters below where the reserves area are, we've got drill holes in there that are telling us that ore body continues on at depth. This is exactly what we were looking for, a lot of gold mines in Australia, they don't get drilled out like they do in North America. You just get reserves and you replace your reserves every year or so, and you just keep rolling and you just keep going down into the bowels of the earth. Rosemont last year was the first year we actually replaced more reserves at Rosemont than we mined. And that won't happen every year, it's a bit of ebb and flow, but that's what we get. So we've been putting a lot of effort into that. And I think the pleasing part is we've been getting some good results as well. The last place to talk about is our big project over in New South Wales. We're particularly pleased. It's 2 million ounces of reserves sitting in the ground there. It's a Tier 1 project. It's in a Tier 1 location. Which makes it gives it part of its challenges. This is a large project that is requiring us to do a lot of work to understand and research carefully the impacts of mining in that area. We don't ever pretend that we don't have an impact. The most important thing that we understand is what that impact is and what we need to put in place to manage that -- and we think we've done -- we've always thought we've been doing some excellent. This has taken us since we put in our first application, which was in the middle of 2019, it's taken us until now to get us through this recommendation phase. So the department, as James mentioned, has said that on balance, it's in the interest of the people and the project is approval is now goes to what's called the Independent Planning Commission, the IPC, which will take work over a process of several weeks into new year. Now the question was asked how many people would we like to register an interest and offer support -- we just want people to be sensible. We know that there is an element to every project where there's some resistance. Unfortunately, what we're seeing is that not everything that's being said about our project is actually factual. But we needed -- we're encouraging the local. We know that we have a quiet but very significant degree of support locally because we've done surveys. But it is an important project for all of us. So we are very pleased that it's gone through that phase, and it's now into what we would call the final approval phases for the state. There's another element in the federal level of the Section 10 that we're working our way through as well. We're very confident that, that will be resolved over the coming weeks as well. The most important thing that we're focusing on here is the IPC and getting it through the IPC approvals. Where does all that lead us? We see we've got a story of growth with the investment and with the investment in growth comes growth. While we're doing all of this, this is where we see us going -- you can see where we've been for the last few years. You can see the contribution that Tropicana is starting to make in terms of our overall production level. And you can see where we're wanting to take the business. We can see that with these new discoveries and these new additions, the Duketon is actually not going to decline as it would have done had we not do it. It will actually hold quite steady, and we can see a good pathway for that in the near term. Our exploration needs to contribute over the coming years to make sure that we can sustain that out beyond the existing reserve levels. On the surface, the underground, we're quite confident of that. And we also see that out there in a couple of -- 3 or 4 years' time that the McPhillamys project has got the potential to make a material contribution to our production levels. So in closing, where do we -- where do we sit? And you are shareholders, so I'm sure you understand this, but I'll state it and this is part of the message when we talk to new and potential shareholders. We're in a strong financial position, we do generate robust operating cash flows, we have a long reserve life in parts of our business. and we're looking to build on that reserve life in the areas where we need some more, which is, for example, at Duketon North. We are exclusively in a Tier 1 location. We have a progressive measured approach to ESG. We do -- it is important, and I can't emphasize enough that the way the approvals and the way that the states fit federally and also internationally, -- we need to understand this is an important part of our license to be able to continue to operate. We are returning to consistent plan delivery. There's no doubt that we -- this time last year, we were struggling with some operational issues. We've put in place a plan, and we got on top of them. We're pleased to deliver on them. And we are seeing, as part of that exploration story, confidence in the prospectivity of the Greenstone Belt but not only the one that we're on, but also the exploration around Tropicana as well, which really has gone somewhat unloved as well for a number of years while the operation has been running. But now Anglo and ourselves both recognize that there's opportunity there, and we're excited about where that's going. So a year of challenges. Hopefully, you can understand and see how we're building and putting things in place for the future of the company beyond the current reserves. And I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the Regis team, those that are here, those that I know are listening online. It has been another interesting year of challenges, as I said, our Regis direct employees, our contractors, I think everybody has worked very hard to deliver on the outcomes of the last -- of the prior year, and we continue on into this year. And I'd just like to personally thank all of them for the contribution that they've made. And I'd also like to thank the Board and the Chairman, James, for the support that they have given to myself and to the team, who has been working on these multiple areas. I'll now throw it open for questions. Any questions from the audience?

When you talk about McPhillamys, the next thing is about [ 2030s ]. Way is Cadia from -- that's largely a copper mine. What prospects are there for copper around McPhillamys. if any?

Yes. Cadia is an interesting mine. It's actually a combination of copper gold. It's owned by Newcrest, which are a gold mining company. But the revenue that they get there is a significant amount that comes from copper, which is so much so that the gold they actually produce is at a negative cost -- so yes, it is arguable whether it's copper or gold but they produce both. The region is quite rich in opportunities. We have extensive exploration holdings through the area, and we have been doing a little bit of work -- our focus at the moment has tended to be on getting McPhillamys approved and getting that through and putting our focus on that. Frankly, we see that we need to be able to satisfy ourselves and demonstrate to our shareholders that if you find something, it's approvable. -- how it's -- I mean, I think we do believe -- we held some of the best ground through that Lachlan fold belt, which is all part of that region. Cadia is only about 15 or 20 K away. So we think it's got great potential, but now our focus for a number of years will continue to be on just getting McPhillamys approved and completing the construction and getting it into production.

I think the question was also -- I mean, you must know from [ GSI ] whether the gold is there, whether the copper is there -- and I just want to know a little bit more..

McPhillamys, itself?

Should the approvals be extended? Yes.

McPhillamys is quite a different geology deposit to Cadia. There is no copper at McPhillamys unfortunately.

David Kidson, shareholder. A very commendable expose there by Jim -- thank you on the morning aspect. For me, the elephant in the room was the bar chart, he put up near the beginning of his presentation in green $250 million income, $22 million or $0.02 per share dividends, $22 million. But 4x that was the elephant in the room was the hedge cost. Could you talk to that, please?

Whole day, if you like. It is a -- I mean, it is a frustrating point. As I think we highlighted there, the hedging book -- the hedge book that we currently have got cost us effectively nearly $100 million. That is a hedge book that has been in place for a number of years. I think when we -- I think the maximum amount that was around about 460,000 ounces, 470,000 ounces. We have been running it down now over the last a bit over 3 years. I think we -- I was just trying to remember when we kicked off selling into it in earnest was late 2019, I think. So it is a legacy that we've got -- we've had in place. We have not taken out any hedging certainly since 2019. It's just something that we have to work our way through, and there's no way of avoiding it. No questions. There are no questions online. So before -- any other questions before I hand it back to James? Right. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you, Jim, and thank you all for your attendance, and please stay around for a cup of tea and ask any other questions you'd like. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for your support.