Sibanye Stillwater Limited (SSW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining us and to everybody online. I'm not sure where you are in the world, but good afternoon or good evening. I think it's a real pleasure to have you with us today. This is going to be the first session of a few that we plan over the next coming months. Today is very much just a high-level overview of the strategy that the team and ourselves and the Board are looking at for the next couple of years for the company. . As we move a couple of months into the year, we'll also be having a couple of market days where we do some deep dives into the projects and operations that we will be sharing with you today, both in South Africa as well as on the international operations. So we will certainly let you know about those going forward, but thank you again for being here today. I think just to kick off, we have a rather simple agenda, but we have just heard at least for the safety side from the evacuation perspective for the JSE, but within Sibanye-Stillwater, we start all of our meetings with a safety share. I think very privileged that our Chairman today, Dr. Vincent Maphai, has kindly offered to do the share for us. So with that, if I could just briefly hand over to Dr. Maphai for that safety share. Thank you.

Thanks, Rich, and good afternoon, everyone. When Richard asked me to do this, I thought I'll use it as an opportunity to share an observation I've made and a perception of myself as [indiscernible]. Three things strikes me. I worked for alcohol. I was also associated with gambling. And with banks, but not with cigarettes. What's interesting about these 4 is that they are always held responsible for any disaster that happens. We are responsible for all social problems and for us in mining, people don't recall that in every room they are, whether it's in [ Sandhurst ] or in an informal settlement, you are surrounded by products of mining from your roof, your electricity, everything. And I think there is a reason for that. In our case, our products are not very visible, where people notice about us is when people die underground. That's really our vulnerability. Nobody associates anything in this room with us except maybe analysts. But outside there, we are seen as killers of people. And so this is something that makes us very vulnerable. As I say, in those industries, I've mentioned, all of them are held for one tragedy or the other. So I'm very privileged today in the presentations, where we are dealing with a topic that defines who we are, our strategy. I'm delighted to be here. But before we talk about capital allocations, about returns, about growth, let us talk about the point I made earlier, our safety. It is important. It is our priority. Safety is and will always be our #1 priority because it underpins everything else we do. It's essential to our operational delivery to workforce engagement and to our perception by public. And ultimately, it is the core of our sustainability. In other words, safety is core for our license to trade. But even more than our license to trade, it is a moral imperative because we are talking about lives, about people. We have seen meaningful improvement in our safety performance over the years. That is encouraging and it demonstrates our increasing discipline in our operations. However, we are very clear that positive trends and statistics do not diminish the pain that comes from fatal accidents. So safety is not our aspiration or a target. It is absolute non-negotiable. It is a desperate imperative to us. We believe that every fatality is preventable. There's nothing ingrained about it in the work we do. And every employee and all of us at Sibanye have a right to return home safely. As investors, you will rightly assess us on our ability to deliver predictable performance and sustainable returns. We believe that you also value strong safety culture in our work, and we do not regard safety culture and our strong performance as contraries. In fact, safety is a prerequisite for it. So as we go through our strategy today, we ask you to see safety as the foundation on which our performance and long-term value creation are based. It is a mindset we carry into every decision we make, every action we take every day because nothing is more important than that to us. Thank you for your attendance, and we look forward to your participation. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Vincent. And I think if ever there was a question that safety percolates throughout the entire organization, I trust that, that has been answered. So just before we jump straight into our agenda, I mean, I guess, firstly, it does go without saying this is a strategy presentation. So we have a lot of forward-looking statements. Please do read through the safe harbor statement at an appropriate time. But before we jump straight in, I thought it might be good just to share with you our strategy that we'll be discussing today is really focused on the next couple of years of where we're going to take the business. But of course, as a management team and as a Board, we have given some real thought to where could the business be going in a second chapter of this phenomenal company called Sibanye-Stillwater, where do we think it might be in the next 5 or 10 years? And some of this informs some of the short-term thinking. So just to share with you a little bit of that long-term vision. Well, really, we have a strategy about building a future-focused metals business. The world around us is changing rapidly. The way mining companies have operated for the past few decades is not going to be the way they operate going forward. Capital has changed, supply chains have changed, the type of metals that you're wanting to be mining has changed. And in fact, it's not just going to be about extracting metal on to an exchange. It's going to be about inserting yourself into value chains. And that excites us. This is a very rapidly changing world. It's going to be different. We don't see that as a challenge. We see it as a massive opportunity. We're developing a strategy that will be underpinned by performance excellence, and I'll unpack that today. Spoiler alert, it's boring, it's back to the basics of good business. That's really where our focus is going to be. We're also looking at ultimately positioning ourselves to look at metals that will power clean energy and ultimately, in fact, just total energy demand of the future. This is one of the megatrends that I think will be driving the next super cycle in commodities, but very much still underpinned by precious metals base which again, we'll touch on a little bit later. One of the things where I believe we have a real strength and an opportunity going forward, and that's why we call it's more of a metals business than pure mining business is going to be how you deliver those metals into the market. And there, we have a model that we've embraced called our resource stewardship model, and we have 3 sources of metals that we provide the market. One is our primary mining. The other one is our secondary or waste mining and recycling. And why are these critical? I often get asked the question, how do we see all of these coming together. Let me start with primary mining. Today, a lot of the discussion around the world as we're seeing the geopolitics is around how we're securing metals for our own countries, our own regions. It's all about security of supply. What's being missed is while we're trying to carve up the pie is we better grow that pie. If we don't grow that pie, there's not enough metals for us to continue the livelihoods that we've come to know on this planet. And primary mining is the only way you can grow that pie. So that's critical to our strategy. Secondary mining is probably the only form of getting hold of a metal where you can actually have a net positive environmental impact. What do I mean by that? These are dumps that have been mined already. They're sitting on surface. And as we get better at processing, as we get better at extraction, as we get new technologies or economics change, we can actually extract metals out of those already mined dumps very profitably. And we'll show you some numbers on DRDGOLD and just what that's meant certainly in the gold space that we see it happening elsewhere. And then finally, recycling. Well, I think anybody who's dealing with a finite metal in today's environment, if you do not embrace the circular economy, you're missing a significant opportunity. But not only is it the right thing to do, today, strategically, I dare say you look at countries who are trying to secure their own metals. And those that do not have significant resource endowment, where is the first place they end up going, recycling. It's a different business. It's a different business model. It's got different risk profiles. But it's a business we are really starting to understand and can see significant opportunity in the future as we move forward. So today, I'm going to be sharing with you very much about what is going to drive our returns today. Where is our focus going to be in the next 3 years. But please be assured that we are very excited as well about how we're going to position our business to truly deliver into a very different world and the economy that we anticipate coming tomorrow. I think whenever we are looking at strategy, it's always a good idea just to look backwards briefly and understand where you've come from, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses? What have you learned? I'm going to assume most people know a bit of the history of Sibanye. So I'll go through this relatively quickly, but just in case. If I had to try and classify our journey to date over the last 13 years into 3 words, it would be entrepreneurial growth story. That's what our company has been about. We started off life with 3 gold assets, deep level, high-cost South African gold assets. And through that, through a combination of good operational skills applying good, solid, sound business models as well as some very transformative M&A, we've built the company that we see today. Started off turning around gold assets. We use that operational model into PGMs to turn around PGM assets. We use the PGM assets to take our first step globally. People have often asked me about the Stillwater operation, and let me repeat it again, if you are a major producer of PGMs, where they all come from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Russia, owning the only significant PGM operation outside of those regions is a real strategic advantage and something we're incredibly proud to have within our portfolio. One of the interesting things when we got into PGMs though was we studied the market. And what we realized in studying that market was cars were going to go electric. I should note this was back in 2014, 2015. The only person who was making a lot of noise about this at the time was Elon, and quite honestly, he wasn't given much credibility. But we recognize this trend was coming, and that was the birth of the battery metal strategy. This was not about hedging against PGMs. This was about recognizing that there was going to be a fundamental growth opportunity and the very customers we were delivering PGMs to would be the same customers who wanted battery metals, and we could offer a solution for them. That was the beginning of that strategy. We acquired the Keliber operation in Finland, the Sandouville nickel processing plant in France and we had a look at a couple of others. Nickel operation in South America and a lithium operation in North America, which we ended up walking away from. In parallel with that, I think we started embracing our resource stewardship model. And how was that born we had significant resources on our gold operations in our tailings in South Africa, resources that could sustain us for 30 to 40 years. But there was a company specialized in this called DRDGOLD and together with them through vending those resources into them and taking a position. So we've built up a substantial secondary mining business with DRDGOLD and have subsequently expanded that into our PGM operations, which we are looking to grow as well as taking a position in a company called Century or acquiring a small company in Australia called Century Mining that was zinc. What came with Stillwater that was quite unique, and I think a little bit of a hidden gem was that at the time we acquired it, it was the largest PGM recycler in the world. That gave us an incredible insight into what is effectively 30% of PGM supply globally comes from recycling. We started understanding that market. What drives that market is very different to primary mining. We started realizing the importance of what recycling was going to have. And while most of our peers see recycling is a significant threat, we embraced it as part of our business. And getting to learn and understand that is where we then branched out further with the acquisitions of Reldan in the U.S. 2024 and Metallix last year. These are very specialized recycling businesses that I dare say have got a huge strategic opportunity and will have an impact on our business going forward. It has been an entrepreneurial growth story. We can look back on it on hindsights 2020. Some things worked spectacularly well, much better than we ever thought they would. Some perhaps not quite pound out as we thought. But if there's one thing that you cannot deny about the story. Had we done nothing, that's the company we would be today. We would have about 2 years left at Driefontein Gold Mine, Kloof would have closed, Beatrix would have closed, and we would be busy closing Sibanye-Stillwater. What we actually have is almost 3 million ounces of equivalent precious metals production. Let me put that into perspective that is comfortably in the top 10 of all precious metals companies, largest Newmont at 6 million. And so you quickly come down. I actually think we might be in the top 5, but I couldn't quite verify that today. But this is a substantial business that's been built. And I think when we look forward, a profile that still gives us 2 million ounces after 2040 is a profile most people would be envious of. But the implications for us and what we are proud of, and I believe very fortunate to have as a management team is we look at that profile and say, we don't have to continue on the aggressive entrepreneurial growth route that we had to undertake during the last period. We've got a huge amount of value sitting within our portfolio and how do we unlock that going forward. And that will be the strategy I discuss with you today. I think many of you will be familiar. I mean we have diversified the earnings. That's helped us through difficult cycles and different cycles. We've always said we'd like to maintain gold in our portfolio because the rest of our metals are industrial. Typically, it's supposed to be countercyclical. Who would have ever thought we'd be sitting here today with both of these precious metals rising at the rate they are, and we're getting exposure to both. We have ended up with a pretty extensive geographical footprint through this period of growth. I think in some ways, quite strategic in many ways, we recognized when we got into battery metals that you could follow one of two routes. You could mine and concentrate metals and ultimately sell it to the east, which is the common model, where they are beneficiated, fabricated and sold the rest of the world. Or we could go a step further to our own beneficiation and fabrication and try and sell towards Western supply chains, where we saw ourselves being far more competitive. So we have positioned ourselves for that. The second point to note on there is South Africa remains very dominant in terms of our earnings. South Africa is a country we are comfortable to operate in. We know how to operate here. We've made significant value and that will continue to form a significant part of our base as we move forward. So while we have a lot of optionality, arguably, we could look at how to optimize that footprint to align with our strategy going forward. And then finally, I think just to say, part of what really attracted me to Sibanye and I think so many of our leadership was back in 2013 and 2014, we defined a model that we called shared value for all stakeholders. Today, I think that's something you see in most companies' strategies or documents. Back then, it was quite unique. There still very much companies were there for shareholders and shareholders only. But we recognized how important this was today's stakeholder capitalism. But not only did we talk about it, this has become the ethos of the business, and we've delivered on it. Our shareholders have got phenomenal returns. We've invested huge amounts of money in our communities. It's not about the money, though, I think. When we look at that, what does a 600% return mean? That means people have retired more comfortably than they would have had we not delivered on this. What does $30 billion mean into our communities. It means we've put kids through schools, we've built, we've put teachers into and giving them the opportunity to uplift themselves. That is a modern mining company. So the strategy I'm going to describe today, again, if I had to just pick 3 words to describe it, it's about unlocking, unrealized potential within our existing portfolio. And let me try and give you the executive summary on a page, and then we'll unpack it. I want to come back to the ethos of the business. This will not change. This is who we are as a company. This will outlive any managers. This is who we are in terms of our Umdoni tree, our values remain the core of the company and our entire purpose is about stakeholder creation -- value creation for our stakeholders. And I think as our Chairman, so aptly said, our purpose is actually about delivering metals that are going to improve the lives of people and the planet. Mining is what enables us to live the lives we live today. And we can do it in a way where those metals not only improve our lives but in a way that the planet is protected at the same time. The first part of our strategy is very much around strengthening our fundamentals. Performance excellence as we call it. And we'll unpack that a bit more, but it's a holistic look at the business and how we can run that holistically. Very simply put, it's about increasing our operating margins by focusing on the basics of our operations. It's about increasing the efficiency of how we work through applying a new and appropriate operating model, and it's going to be about simplifying our portfolio, again, to get focus and return on capital into the right place. Ultimately, all of that to be successful, does need to be underpinned by the right systems. We will be looking at technology and how that can help. But again, it is about our -- and these might sound like soft factors, but what pulls things together, we are a labor-intensive business. We're about people. We're a people's business. It's about our performance culture and our culture of care that ultimately will enable the strategy to be delivered. If we are successful on that, and we certainly believe we will be, then we have the opportunity to solidify our business essentials. And fundamentally, today, that is our balance sheet. We will strengthen our balance sheet by reducing our total gross debt and we'll have a disciplined capital allocation model that looks at returns to shareholders that manages our debt and ultimately looks at growth and how we can move forward. Get all of that right, and it will give us the flexibility to position ourselves for that economy of tomorrow. Our first focus will very much be on organic projects, and we'll go through which those are in a second. But of course, ultimately, I think entrepreneurial growth remains in our DNA. It will be part of the company as we move forward in the longer term. And we will look to continue to build on this resource stewardship model we have built. And we'll share with you a little bit of the geographies where we believe we do have a competitive advantage. And then on the metals again, I think we very much are focused on having precious metals underpin and looking at how we can grow into the more, I guess, what is commonly called critical metals today that will facilitate clean energy, in particular going forward. The reason for that is, I think many of these critical metals are actually quite difficult metals to build businesses off. We're seeing many people trying to do it. Small projects, short life of mines, rapidly changing supply dynamics to have that critical underpin of a precious metals base is a way I believe that this can truly be unlocked in a value-accretive manner. The context that we're operating in, I think many of you will be familiar with, and I don't need to spend a lot of time discussing the geopolitical fragmentation. Again, it's something we picked up probably 5 years ago and started talking about in some of our presentations, multipolarity, we called it. We had to then explain what that was. I think today, fully understood. But this is changing the way we're operating. It's changing where we find capital. It's changing the supply chains, it's changing who we can sell our metal to, it's changing where we're going to build our mines. Life is becoming far more complex in this world. I think we all know, overall, growing middle-class boost for commodities across almost all of the commodities. And then the -- tied up with that geopolitics, I think the regulations reshaping value chains. And this is where I think we have again very distinctly made some key strategic decisions. Almost all of the metals we produce, we take through to a final product. Our PGMs, we mine to market. We produce refined metal. When we built Keliber, a key consideration in building Keliber, do you produce a spodumene concentrate that can get shipped to the east or do we build refining capacity for a final product. Sandouville actually was part of that thinking as well and nickel refinery was part of getting to that end product. Why is that important? Because it allows you to deal directly with supply chains. It allows you to offer a product into supply chains as to what they want. And today, we can -- we see how beneficiation is being shaped, resource-rich countries want beneficiation. Countries without resources don't want mining, want minerals in, want beneficiation, becoming a key strategic advantage to mining companies, and hence, my comment about a metals business going forward. Growing energy demand I've touched on and then technology, technology a bit of a 2-edged sword. Certainly it's got real benefits in terms of helping us run our business more efficiently. But the rate at which technology is changing the demand for so many of these critical minerals, we all know mining cycles. 10 years to find, 10 years to build, at least 20 years to get a return. That is not the rate at which technology is changing today. And if producers of these metals, if we can't get our heads around how to manage that volatility, we are not going to be able to grow in the economies of tomorrow. So moving on to our strategy, I guess, certainly for the next couple of years, we define it by 4 pillars: simplification, performance excellence, growth and capital allocation and we'll unpack each of these. So talking about simplification. I think 5 years ago, we had a model as a company. We were very much about growth. We had strategies in different regions. Our strategy was to grow a significant battery metals business in Europe. Our strategy in South Africa was very much about our operations producing cash. Our strategy in the U.S. was mixed between operations at Stillwater and growth and recycling. And as a result, we set up decentralized regional teams essentially to run their own strategies in line with that business model. I think today with our focus, what we are going to look at is a slightly hybridized model where we still have decentralized teams on operations, very much empowered to run operations but operationally focused. We will look at opportunities where we can centralize some of our group services to realize synergies and then we were looking at a complete centralization of all things growth related. How do we rank our projects, number one. How do we look at capital allocation, number two. And critically also developing project skills within the business. I think when I talk about growing that pie and when I talk about a lot of the metals of the future, these are not metals that are currently being mined. Many of these will require new resources, new ore bodies and new mines to be built. And certainly, we see the development of that project skill as a key driver for our strategy going forward. The benefits of doing this. I think we have a far greater focus across the entire team on operational accountability and operational delivery coming back to that core starting point of driving higher margins. Of course, it's about efficiency and cost savings through synergies and ultimately how to get agile decision-making on the ground. We do see some opportunities in terms of the productivity improvements just from changing this model, to increase our revenue or production by about 2.5% over the next 12 to 18 months and to realize about $3 billion in cost savings through the new operating model. I think, of course, when it comes to centralizing our growth amongst the group, there, the ultimate objective is to increase our return on the capital that we invest and deploy as well as developing project execution as a core competency within the group. I think I'm extremely lucky and proud to have a very experienced team who's been with the business for a long period of time. As you can see, our new model does reflect delivery structure follows strategy. This does reflect the strategy that I have outlined. So what we will have going forward is recognizing South Africa is the key base that I mentioned to you and the importance of the South African operations. We have dedicated operational focus in South Africa, and that will be looked after by Richard Cox. And the new model, as you can see, is no longer a Chief Regional Officer, which was essentially a regional type of [ CEO ] but there's rather a COO model focused very much on operational delivery and Rich will be looking after the South African operations. Charles Carter will take over looking after the international operations, which will include recycling. And then Ralph Lombard will be stepping up to look after the project specifically, and that's projects going all the way through the value chain from pre-feasibility, feasibility into execution and building that capability that I have discussed. On the right-hand side are our support functions, starting off with Rob van Niekerk. Rob's previous role was Chief Technical Officer. The T has actually changed in this one. He's now going to be the Chief Transformation Officer. And Rob will have 2 separate focus areas underneath them. The one is he's still got a core technical team, and that core technical team will be going through all of our operations and looking at how we can optimize the long-term strategic extraction of those, and I'll touch on those in a second as well on that part of the strategy. In addition to having effectively subject matter experts in his team, who will provide support to the operations. Themba remains as our Chief People Officer; Melanie is our Chief Sustainability Officer. And then Mika will be taking on a new role for the next year in terms of Chief European Advisor is what that stands for. And currently, Europe is critical to our success around Keliber and how we integrate that into the European strategy regarding securing their own critical metals for batteries and Mika will be heading that strategy for us. I think I was very happy to have him do join us in October of last year and [ Daw ] will be taking on the growth portfolio. But I think please read those words underneath growth there. We're actually talking about a role that needs to optimize our portfolio. So it could be about capital allocation, it could be about divestment where that's needed, and of course, also looking at the longer-term growth that I outlined earlier. And then Charles, under this strategy, of course, his key driver really around the disciplined capital allocation. Just in terms of the portfolio simplification and how we're thinking about that, we are currently going through a process where we are looking at every single one of our assets. We're putting that through a process that I don't think would be new or terribly different to what many people have done in the past, but putting it through a process of looking at how does this -- any of our particular assets or projects align with our strategy in terms of geographies, in terms of commodities, in terms of whether or not we can add anything competitive to it to add value or if it adds any competitive advantage to us. Of course, looking at projects of normal project economics, and we have developed very strict criteria on hurdle rates as we take projects through their development stages. I've mentioned a couple of times how capital is changing. The old historical way of thinking of just equity of [ vanilla ] debt, the type of capital we're seeing today is very different. People upstream coming in and funding projects, different project structures, sovereign funds getting involved. There are multitudes of capital options, which we will look at with some of these projects as well to see whether or not there's an optimal way to fund these if it doesn't fit our balance sheet and capital allocation. But of course, an ultimate measure is of generating cash flow for us today or in the near future. And finally, value realization. Naturally, if we think we can realize more value by exiting an asset today than what we can in the future, that is, of course, something we will look at. So where are we today? Much of this is still ongoing work. But what I can share with you today is what do we classify as being a strategic priority. And to put that very simply, these are operations or assets that have found their way underneath the COO. And therefore, they are going to get the attention of that COO to drive that operational excellence we discussed. South African gold is a priority, and that includes Burnstone, South African PGM is certainly a priority, and that includes the projects that I'll be discussing today. And Keliber lithium is a strategic priority that we will be developing going forward. When we look at our secondary mining, DRDGOLD remains a strategic priority for us. We don't manage it, of course, it has its own management team, but that remains very strategic to the business as does the responsible mining of Century zinc for the next 18 to 24 months as that comes to a close and then our recycling operations, which are currently being consolidated into a single business. That means the other projects we are evaluating and reevaluating carefully. I think many of these, some of these have got feasibility studies, which are currently being completed, a project like Mount Lyell, copper project in Tasmania, very exciting project at the moment, but we need to complete a feasibility study, which will be done this quarter to understand what those economics look like and how it fits in with the strategy going forward. I think clearly, from what I've been saying, some of these others are not necessarily within our strategic priority and those we need to evaluate what is the most responsible way to realize value going forward for those assets. What we hope to achieve through this portfolio simplification, of course, is a focus of our resources. Our human resources, our management resources, focusing on those assets that are generating the best returns and cash for the business today. Financial resources, where are we investing capital so that we can maximize those returns and of course, a portfolio that's aligned with a more focused strategy as we move forward and any exits that are or divestments that are realized, of course, will crystallize some immediate value for the company. Looking at performance excellence, as I mentioned, when we talk performance excellence in the business, this is about holistic improvement. I think we've heard the terms, operational excellence coming in more and more recently, but this is really about looking at the business as a whole. I dare say you heard from our Chairman today about the importance of safety. Without a doubt, our initial milestone that we absolutely have to hit in safety before anything else is the elimination of fatal incidents, that is our first and foremost commitment that we continue to drive with an absolute passion. Operational excellence, and once again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on here. I don't think this is rocket science. I think this is things you've probably heard from any business. It's about focusing on productivity. It's about focusing on cost efficiency. It's about consistent and reliable delivery, and it's about executing on your capital plans. Resource optimization is possibly the one where I see a lot of opportunity for us that we haven't necessarily done in the past. Today, we've got extensive resources. We've got less than a 25% conversion from resources to reserves. And we also haven't really spent a lot of time strategically looking at these assets to say, how can we optimally extract them? And what I mean by that is when you think about mining companies, we all know the easiest way to reduce your unit cost is to mine more. And we all want to reduce our unit costs when prices drop, which means we mine more when prices drop and you actually end up mining more at lower margins. These are the trends that need to be reversed. You actually want to mine more with higher margins and less lower margins. Do not extract a finite resource when you're not making money. And how do you tactically get that embedded within your operating psyche, within your planning and within your flexibility, that is resource optimization, and that is something that we're going to be driving hard going forward. And finally, sustainability. I think we, again, as geologists, as engineers, as miners, this is the soft fluffy stuff, but most certainly is not. We hear people talking about social compacting. This is something we are doing. It's not just something we talk about. You take our Good Neighbors Agreement in Montana. This is a legal agreement between us and the neighbors and our property. What does that mean? Montana is probably the only mine in the U.S. that does not have any legal environmental action against it in 2.5 decades. That's got an impact on the bottom line. That's sustainability, something we take very seriously and drive so much of the business today. And again, the last soft fluffy stuff, but it's not. These are the people of our business. The strength of our tree is our people. And continuing to foster a culture, a culture of care, a culture of performance and a culture that embraces what I call is Sibanye Spirit, the entrepreneurial part of the business is what will enable us to deliver on this strategy. So looking at the growth side. I think as I've mentioned, the best opportunities we see for growth at the moment is within our own portfolio. And within that portfolio, the highest priority will be at our South African PGM operations and worth just stepping through this a little bit. For those who are not familiar with these operations, they comprise 3 separate companies that we acquired and put together and the intent of acquiring contiguous operations was very intentional. So on the right, you have what was the old Marikana operations or Lonmin today we call Marikana. On the left, the Rustenburg belonged to Anglo Platinum, now Valterra, and then the Kroondal operations following the shallow mechanized mining on this part. When we put these operations together, originally, when we acquired them back in I think ranging between about 2016 to 2018, we were able to realize about ZAR 3 billion a year's worth of synergies. That initial round of synergies came from cutting overhead costs and optimizing infrastructure, optimizing concentrators, et cetera. That was the first round of value that we saw. And in fact, if we hadn't have done that, I dare say many of these operations would not be around today, those synergies is what made them survive the downturn. But where another round of value exists is by being able to drop those mine boundaries, and I come back to that resource optimization piece of the performance excellence, how do you drop mine boundaries and optimize the extraction of this resource in the most profitable way. And in order to truly unlock that, we had a couple of last little hurdles we had to jump through. The Kroondal operations were, in fact, 50 -- own 50-50 between ourselves and Anglo American, now Valterra. We needed to own those 100% to utilize that infrastructure. We concluded that transaction in 2024, we bought those operations for a rand and picked up the historical liabilities with it. What that unlocked is most of these operations at Kroondal are reaching the end of their lives. They're mining down towards the boundary. The challenge with mechanized operations is the deeper you go, so your productivity levels drop off simply because of the time taken to get people underground their working faces. What we have on the other side is a vertical shaft. You can put people down vertical shaft very efficiently and very quickly. And by linking a vertical shaft to the deeper portions of Kroondal, you can now get people underground and take productivity levels up exponentially. That also means you can mine resources of Rustenburg now in a mechanized manner that whenever even contemplated being mined before because you could not access it through conventional vertical infrastructure. We have just unlocked a significant amount of resources, UG2 resources, mine mechanized that were never previously considered and could not be considered because of mine boundaries. That's the value of putting contiguous assets together. Likewise, when we look at Marikana, Marikana came with a rather onerous chrome contract. And again, when we look at PGM is particularly in difficult times, it's often chrome that is actually the savior of those assets. Chrome is what carries it through when PGMs go through down cycles. And through extensive engagement with Glencore and the Merafe JV, by pooling all of our chrome assets. We've been able to come up with a model where we can realize value at Marikana for our chrome a lot quicker. And what that's done is give us the confidence to start opening up what I would argue are the best shallow resources in the entire PGM industry. These are not depth extensions. These are shallow resources on strike mined from surface in a mechanized way. To put this into perspective, UG2 today, which was always the poor sister to the Merensky Reef. Today because it contains Rhodium, Iridium, Ruthenium and Chrome on our operations has anywhere between a 20% to 30% higher revenue per tonne, than the Merensky. These are the ore bodies of the future in PGMs, and we have got 4 mechanized projects that we are looking at implementing across our existing operations, not yet looking at the rest of the open area that hasn't been considered. And the last piece we had to unlock to really optimize the timing of these projects was processing flexibility. We do have our own processing facilities. But we have very recently been able to renew the tolling contract we have with Valterra, and that gives us significant flexibility on the timing and how we can bring these projects to book. This is what profile could look like some of these projects, we actually -- I know we often hear about investing through the cycle. I think people are being quite critical about not investing through the cycle. We have been through the cycle, we've invested in K4. So that was the original profile when we acquired these assets, the gray that we put out in the market. We have through the cycle invested in K4 which is here the light gray we see. We very recently towards the end of last year announced that we're starting with what we call the Siphumelele Mechanised project. That's that vertical shaft I spoke about, which is the first line. And here the balance of the projects, which range from prefeasibility and feasibility study that we will be looking to progress. And assuming it meets all the hurdle rates and of course, goes through our capital allocation framework and gets approval. These projects would ultimately sustain about a 1.5 million ounce production profile for the next 10 years for our company, which when we look at where the PGM markets are going in our view of the PGM markets that for us is an ideal position to be in, in terms of these assets. And as I've mentioned, we've done some comparisons to capital intensity here, and that's just comparing to other brownfield mining projects. These are low risk, we understand the geology, the extensions of our current mines. They do not require any additional surface infrastructure or capital. These are probably the lowest capital, lowest cost new projects that can come online within the entire PGM industry, and they can come online fast. I think looking at our gold business. And here, I would like to just step back for a second. I showed you the slide upfront where we should have been with our gold assets. Beatrix should have been closed, Kloof should have been closed and Driefontein, we would be wrapping up today. In fact, we still have almost 10 years at Driefontein. We've just opened a whole new area at 5 shaft on the VCR. Driefontein is still a reasonably long-life asset. The reason I raise this is these assets are inherently becoming more difficult to mine. These are big fixed infrastructure operations. We run big vertical shafts, big cooling systems to run them. They have got big fixed costs, and they no longer have the flexibility that they had 10 years ago. That does mean that when things do go wrong, they have quite a significant impact. That is the reality of these mines today. But where the gold price is today, they are generating significant value for us, and they will continue to generate significant value for us while these prices remain where they are. We've kept these operations going and not only have added huge value to shareholders, they also still employ about 25,000 people in the country where our dependency ratio is 10:1. That is looking after 0.25 million people that is responsible operations. And we will continue to mine them for as long as we can, but recognizing these are tough assets. They have gone well beyond what anybody ever imagined their useful and valuable life would be. But Driefontein, in particular, we do still see having a significant life and how we see our gold business in South Africa is actually transforming over the next 5 years from what has historically been deep level, high-cost, difficult mines to operate, transforming into a much shallower higher-margin business over the next few years. And that comes in through our exposure to Durban Roodepoort Deep Gold. As I mentioned, I think that's probably been one of our most successful investments, both from a production and a financial perspective. Today, DRD is worth in total, I think we invested about ZAR 2 billion to get our stake in DRD. Today, it's worth ZAR 27 billion to us. But more importantly, we have exposure to a 40- to 50-year life of mine of a substantial low-risk gold business. We also have the Burnstone operation, shallow producers could produce at about 120,000 to 130,000 ounces per annum. Burnstone has been going through a full review, and that review will be completed during the current quarter and ultimately towards the end of this half we will look at an investment decision on Burnstone. And then we have other conceptual projects, some we have been working on, our Cooke Tailings Dam, a gold and uranium project [indiscernible] uranium another commodity, we said we would get excited when uranium went through $60 per pound for that particular project. We've sustainably been above $80 for the last couple of years, an exciting project that we're also finishing a feasibility study on. And then we have some significant shallow resources in the Free State. These are resources that we haven't looked at for many years. We actually acquired them back in 2014. And we haven't looked at them because growth gold in South Africa was just not on the table. But shallow gold in the current environment, [indiscernible] definitely deserves being dusted off. And with where we could see a business potentially with all of those is not too dissimilar to what we've had in the past. But a shallow, a very different profile to that gold business from where we have been. We would like to continue to grow in gold. Clearly, today is not the time to be considering external gold acquisitions. But down the road, that is always a commodity, which we would like to hold in the portfolio. And then I think finally, Keliber. Keliber for us is a very strategic asset. And why do we say that? Well, when we look at processing capacity of lithium outside of China, well, more than 70% of all lithium processing capacity sits within China. In fact, across the whole of Europe, there are only 2 other refineries and they're stand-alone, one in Germany and one in the U.K. We have the only project now that's been built that is mine to refine final product of lithium within the EU. It has been declared a strategic project. And [indiscernible] with the rising discussions now, Europe -- the EU has never been closer to starting to take some real action to develop its own supply chains of critical metals. And we sit in the middle of being able to offer that particularly for lithium. We have come to market. I think we said last year that we would look at a responsible way to ramp up this project. And what did we mean by that? And where have we landed. A responsible way meant clearly, we had to take account of the markets. This is not about trying to perfectly time the lithium market. But the lithium market has been under pressure. And I think a very clear message was, unless we can get support ourselves as a company taking on that level of risk against China essentially had been oversupplying the market was not a risk we were prepared to take. But was there a way we could start it up a bit more responsibly in a phased manner. And I think through a very detailed set of work that's been done by technical teams, by commercial teams, looking at sales options, what we've effectively come up with is a way we can start up the project in phases, initially with the mining and the concentrator. And we have already commenced slowly with the mining. We'll be looking at commissioning the concentrator in the third quarter of this year. And that gets us to a point where if we wanted to, we could, in fact, stop there. And today, in today's market, be commercially viable at selling spodumene concentrate, if that's the level we want to go to. Depending on where the markets are at the time, we could commission the refinery and take that to an initial step of producing a technical grade lithium hydroxide. And in fact, that in its own right, lower cost, lower risk to get to that point, that is commercially viable in today's environment or you can go the whole way to producing a battery grade lithium hydroxide which, of course, is the endpoint. We are now able to assess each stage before we commence with it. And certainly, the first stage that we are starting with now, we see as relatively low risk, and we'll commence with that commissioning where we have commenced with that commissioning from the beginning of this year. With all of this, I'm sure a question on everybody's mind is can we afford this, and we will be coming on the capital allocation. But if we look at the capital profile, the gray bars based on our 2024 life of mines, those will, of course, be updated within the coming months. Those are the projects that we have already committed capital to, essentially the K4 project at South African PGMs, Keliber in Finland and more recently, the Mechanised Siphumelele project. The Orange is the project or at a feasibility study level, and I think you could say we've got a pretty high confidence those are going to go ahead. I would not have been discussing them today if we didn't believe we'd be pushing ahead with those projects. But of course, they do need to go through unnecessary approval framework. And then the not yet at feasibility, either conceptual or prefeasibility projects, if we were to develop all of them, that is what the capital profile would look like. This is not a capital profile that is very different to the past few years that we've had. So it's not like this growth has a significant capital hump immediately ahead of us, that's very much the type of business that we have been running for the last few years, I dare say in much tougher economic times. How will we assess external growth? So our focus is very much on the organic. That's where we're going to be going. But how are we thinking about external growth as we move forward. Well, as I mentioned, I think very much of precious metals underpinned and then looking at those commodities that will enable particularly the energy transition. We do still look at our 3 pillars. We will still be driving recycling, primary mining and secondary mining. Our far less of a priority would be stand-alone smelting and refining. That's not really a business we are into and manufacturing of any sort of product or commodities. Those are areas we would either look to realize value for or form partnerships with. The geographies we're looking, primary mining, I think we do believe we have a real advantage in South Africa and South Africa. We understand operating in socio-politically complex areas. We understand hard rock mining. We understand underground mining. We know how to run those operations. Both here and within Africa, we see significant opportunity to look for the metals that are needed. It doesn't mean we will not, should opportunities arise in either jurisdictions consider them. But we do not necessarily see a significant competitive advantage we have in those regions and that something comes up that suggests otherwise. On the recycling, we will very much focus on our existing footprints and develop commodities where we understand those supply chains. We understand the businesses. We also crucially understand the importance of responsible sourcing and recycling, critical that you are driving responsible sourcing. We've been very -- we've been part of designing responsible sourcing policies across the world, regulations across the world, key aspect in recycling easier to implement in developed countries. And then secondary mining, again, we have had a look across the planet, where do we see a lot of tailings dams, a lot of rock dumps, where there is potential to apply new technology to extract real value and Africa, North America and Australia, all come up favorably in those jurisdictions. And finally, to deliver this, I guess, how are we thinking about capital allocation going forward? Again, I think a very simplified model shouldn't be surprising to anybody. But of course, we -- any net cash we will generate from our operations. We have 2, I call them nonnegotiables. That is the money we will invest in sustaining our current operations, in other words, delivering the life of mines and the basis of what underpins our equity value today. And we also do believe in keeping a buffer of liquidity, roughly 2 months' worth of capital and OpEx, which we'll retain a bit of cash to ensure we have that flexibility. The balance, we are looking at broadly 3 buckets in equal proportions, shareholder returns, debt reduction and growth. That available capital allocation is pretty close to what we already called today in our dividend policy. We talk about returning 25% to 35% of normalized earnings. That is our dividend policy today. Normalized earnings pretty close so that capital available. So not a significant change in that regard. When you think about our debt, we have historically said that what we want to target on our debt is manage our net debt-to-EBITDA of below 1x. I think in today's environment, we are comfortably below that. But certainly, we have seen that when times are tight through the commodity cycles that has been a little bit uncomfortable. And as a result, reducing our gross debt. And we've set a target of reducing gross debt by about 50% over the next 2 to 3 years is certainly part of our capital allocation strategy moving forward. And if you look at that broad makeup, when we put this plan together, which was at prices lower than where they are today, we could comfortably see for the next couple of years being able to meet all of those requirements comfortably on our capital allocation. Ladies and gentlemen, I think there's been a huge amount of information that we've dumped on you today. I'd actually like to use the last couple of slides to try and summarize it. And if there's a couple of points I would like you to take away and just think about what is the strategy, how should you be thinking about us, quite frankly, what is 90% of our internal executive meetings looking at and discussing, that's the following. So we have come through a period of phenomenal growth. The a history of the company I'm proud of, has set us up in an unbelievable position to look at huge optionality as to how we can take this company forward in its second chapter. And a lot of that optionality is first, how do we realize the inherent value we have within our existing portfolio. We've looked at the world around us. We're excited by the change that's coming and we can see ourselves building a modern metals business moving forward. But as a first step, it's about driving our margins through operational excellence. It's about getting stability on our balance sheet and it's about value-accretive growth predominantly from our organic projects. We've set ourselves some hard numbers that we would like to achieve through this. Some real value realization in the very short term. I think this is often quite an interesting one. When we looked at this and built it, commodity prices were nowhere near where they are today. That's almost one of the risks we often fall into. When commodity prices go high, you start losing touch with some of these small drivers, but that's the real value that gets driven. When prices are low, that's the discipline we've got to help hold ourselves to continue to driving a tight and efficient ship. But we see an opportunity to increase our revenue base without any investment. That's no investment considered or any changes just through our new model by about 2.5%. And of course, when you do the numbers, that flows straight through on to the bottom line. We can see about $3 billion in cost savings through our new operating model. And through a much more focused and centralized focus on growth and capital allocation, we certainly look to improving the return on capital we employ as we move forward and potentially some value realization from assets that's not solely within our control, but certainly something we will be looking to realize. The projects, the organic projects that I've shown you, just the feasibility versions, not the conceptual ones or anything else. When you look at that profile that I put up front, from where we are today, at just shy of 3 million ounces to 2035, we dropped by about 30%. That's roughly what we dropped by, which, in fact, is pretty normal for most companies, if you go out there and look at it. But just these organic projects alone, full half of that decline. So more than 15% can be filled just through the feasibility projects we are fairly confident of today. And of course, we have significant resources in over 10 years' opportunity to more than fill that and continue to grow going forward. And then we have a very disciplined capital allocation framework we'll be working towards to ultimately continue strengthening our balance sheet. This is something I know as a management team, we look at a lot and wonder about. We know we've traded at a discount to our peers. I think we sometimes think we know why. But what we really believe is that if we can drive some of these fundamentals of our strategy, if we can maximize our margins through operational excellence. If we can increase our capital returns through our capital allocation model and if we can focus on our growth and returns to our growth, we might close some of that gap. And that is pure upside in value for our shareholders. So ladies and gentlemen, I think, once again, I'd really like to thank you for joining us today. I know this has been a long session. It's been a pleasure to have you with us. And I'd really like to invite you to join us on this journey as we move forward in creating what we truly believe in as a high-performing modern metals business for tomorrow's economy. Thank you very much. Great. I think we do have some roving mics, so happy to take any Q&A. We've got a lot of the team here today. We also have the team who couldn't be here today online. So I'm pretty sure between us, there shouldn't be much we can't answer.

Sorry, can I just ask that everybody announced who they are, please, when they -- before they ask a question.

Ed Stoddard with Daily Maverick. Thanks, Richard, very interesting. I just want to ask, it seems to me that if Sibanye had not diversified, we'd all be writing Sibanye's obituary in about 2 years' time. But now -- so it was a case of diversify or die, I guess. But now that you have this very diversified asset base, you want to focus on -- your strategy now seems to be to focus on organic growth. Is that a fair kind of summary?

Yes. I think that's exactly a fair summary. Perhaps the only thing I would maybe tweak a little bit in your statement, it wasn't just about diversification, it was also about growth. But I think let me give you a good example around how I think about this and why we have this opportunity. So let's just take the PGM asset as an example. When we bought Rustenburg, Rustenburg was losing ZAR 1 billion a year. When we bought Lonmin, it was losing close on ZAR 2 billion a year. And the only way Lonmin could survive was with a capital hump of about ZAR 13 billion invested over the next 3 years -- per annum over the next 3 years to get themselves out of that hump. There was no ways we could go to shareholders at the time and motivate buying assets that required a ZAR 13 billion per annum capital hump, and we're losing ZAR 1.5 billion per annum. What we were able to do with those assets was to actually cut the capital, cut the life-of-mine profiles and justify the acquisition just on a much more diminished life-of-mine, but that we could motivate and still in its own right, created value for that period of where we were in the cycle. We've never really gone back to say, now what? Now we've got through that. Now we've got stable operations. Now we've got operations that are making money again, and we've got flexibility. How do we go back to optimize it? We've done one or two, K4 was obvious. And now we're starting to look at, okay, let's look at the slate now and how do we maximize that value and bring that back to account. So it is that kind of thinking absolutely. We've got a huge amount of opportunity in our portfolio, and it's how we bring that to account.

My name is [indiscernible]. I think for me, it's mainly two questions. One is around the appointment of Mika for the -- as a European Advisor. Is mainly the reason because you've identified Europe to be more riskier than any other regions, such that you have a special person to looks after that region. And the second one is around the growth and the capital allocation because you've indicated that those assets that are tough because of the big fixed cost and that. And yet in the capital allocation, you're looking at reducing the debt. I think there was a number there around 50% or so. And then one then would be curious to say what then becomes the impact of those tough assets in the working capital?

Thanks very much. So let me start off by saying no, it's got nothing to do with seeing Europe as a higher-risk destination, not at all. I think what we recognize is so Mika just historically was the Chief Regional Officer for the European operations. Clearly, in our model going forward, that's not a role that we see. We've got dedicated focus on Keliber specifically. But we do have other operations that we need to deal with, looking going forward being Sandouville, the GalliCam project. But also very importantly, is how we engage with European stakeholders and help promote the need to look at mechanisms to develop and protect their own critical supply chains. I think the European Union has realized fairly recently, that they need to do this. They've come out with lots of models, lots of proposals, whether that's got to do with stockpiling, whether it's got to do with driving local supply chains in terms of metals produced locally. There's a lot that's going on in the EU space today around how to manage this risk. And what we would like to do is throw some of our highest capacity who has been dealing with this problem over this next period of time to do that because it's got a very -- we are a very material player, particularly in the lithium space in Europe. So it's very much about putting the right capacity to drive that value for the Keliber project, not about a risk at all, but seeing that opportunity at the moment. I think to just talk about it, I'm guessing you're referring to our South African gold mines. Our South African gold mines at the moment, I think the point I was trying to make, there's no new investment going into growth in those gold mines. I think they largely are reaching an end of their life, and we were mining out those reserves. They still have significant value today. And as we saw on those earnings graph and I dare say we'll show at our results later in February. These are still assets that are contributing huge value to us. I think we often get asked about them, and I think it's to acknowledge that these are assets though, assets like Kloof, as an example, is an asset that last year, we made some very big decisions with regards to safety. We stopped mining certain areas from a safety perspective. The knock-on impact on that on the Kloof life-of-mine is significant. These are asset at the end of their lives. We don't have other areas that we can suddenly replace with them. And therefore, we'll be looking at new life-of-mine for Kloof going forward. That's the stage of the life that these assets are in. But we certainly believe that we can still responsibly mine them with sustaining capital, but no growth capital or extension capital, but we can still sustain those operations for a good period to come. And again, at these prices, in particular, they're generating big value for us.

Richard, it's Chris Nicholson from RMB Morgan Stanley. Thank you very much for the presentation. Lovely to hear from you as the CEO, I think, in your first big presentation to the market. I've got two questions. First question on SA gold, you're still using the $1,750 as a reserve price. So I guess the question is we completely -- I think those of us in the market, I understand the context of the depth and the cost base and the safety issues. But at a higher gold price, are there not further lower grade sections that potentially could come off and be mined? Or do you just think of it from a broader portfolio aspect where maybe it makes more sense to allocate capital elsewhere? That's one. And then two, you didn't really talk to it in your presentation, but that wedge of U.S. PGMs grows quite materially post '28, '29, back end of the decade. What's the thought process there? Is that optionality around bringing Stillwater West back? How do we think about that around your whole repositioning plan and obviously with this whole multipolar world, yes, just maybe some thoughts behind that.

Yes, awesome. Chris, thanks very much. Good to see you too. And listen, some great questions, well spotted. So first, let me just make it clear. The life-of-mine or all the plans you saw here were our 2024 life-of-mine plan. So we will be coming out with updated life-of-mine plans done at the end of last year, and those will be released in the next couple of months. Of course, there will be some updates to that, but that's the last publicly available information. So the $1,750 that you see there, that was our reserve planning price for end of 2024. Listen, we are still planning quite conservative prices. And to be honest, I don't think a lot of the market has caught up with that yet. The difference between planning a life-of-mine versus what are we doing now with prices and you're 100% correct. So what we do tend to do is looking at long term, so where are you prepared to invest big capital for either growth or extension. There we use conservative through cycle prices as we see it. And it will go up quite a bit relative to what we used in 2024, but it certainly will not be anywhere close to where spot prices are. But in the short term, over the next 12 to 24 months, can we maximize output there through either accessing any other shallow or lower grade areas or add-ons? Absolutely, we push that wherever we can throughout our operations. And I think that's -- you're almost picking up on what I describe is that optimal resource extraction, just during times like these where you want to maximize that output, even if it is higher cost ounces, you're getting significant margin for them and be able to turn those off, in fact, during the opposite time. So we're absolutely looking at that. But what we don't see is any big projects per se within those operations where we'd be investing significant sort of growth type capital for there, we see that capital going somewhere else and being better spent, Chris. But are there some small opportunities? Absolutely, and we will maximize those in the life-of-mine plan. Something like Kloof, if we were to plan at $1,750, we would be closing it tomorrow. But of course, that will not be the intention. I think we can still see significant value at today's numbers. To touch on your second question, that's exactly what's depicted in the life-of-mine. So what you're seeing both in the capital profile and in the volume is -- was still a plan or the assumption that we would be turning on Stillwater West from 2028 onwards, I think it was. That is something that, of course, will be assessed. Where we are today, and I think our strategy for Stillwater in particular, remains getting our costs down to about close to $1,000 per ounce because that is where we see the through price. There is a distinct program to get there, which Charles and the team will unpack in a lot of detail at that Capital Market's Day. It does take a couple of years for us to get there. There's about a lot of investments and fundamentally changing the way that we're looking to extract the Stillwater ore body. Our initial focus is very much going to be on Stillwater East and East Boulder. That is where the big revenues and drivers come on a capital basis. So the amount of capital we've got to spend versus returns, that's where it will start. At prices sustained today, relooking at Stillwater West makes a lot of sense. I think what we would have to still do, though, is go through a proper valuation, again, as part of our capital and say, when would it make sense? What sort of sustained price do we want to see to bring Stillwater West back online. But as it stands in our plans, we have planned that capital. If we were to take it out, it would be a drop in capital and an overall sustaining of those ounces basically pushed out longer life-of-mine lower profile.

Nkateko Mathonsi from Investec Bank. So I also have two questions. If you can just help us with how we should think about the cost profile of your SA PGM business. Because even with the new projects, the trend is still downward. What happens to the cost? You are bringing in mechanized operations, which should come at a lower cost. Bathopele, which was also a shallow mechanized mine is reaching end of life, I think, by 2029. So what happens to the cost of the SA PGM business? And then the second question is around your TSF. I think, on both Rustenburg and Marikana, you've got a life-of-mine is up to 2026. Are you opening up new dams? What are the opportunities there?

Yes, absolutely. Nkateko, thanks very much. I'm not going to try and give you absolute numbers on that cost profile now. But what I will say is we do -- our new life of mines will be published in the next couple of weeks, I think, 1 month or 2. And all of those profiles will certainly be in there with the economic models. But you are correct, listen, we do see some of the mechanized operations coming off. So Bathopele does close shortly as does some of the Kroondal shafts. And this is being able to extend that and therefore, maintain those costs by continuing into Rustenburg and maintain that volume and output. So that's sort of the way to think about it. I mean there will be a slight increase. We -- the shallow mechanized mining. That is coming to an end of its life. This is slightly deeper. But certainly, the mix in terms of conventional mining to mechanized mining if you look 10 years out, is very different. And that is where we will see a difference in terms of that balance of costs compared to the current life-of-mine plan, which will see cost increasing with that predominantly conventional mining, which is what you would see today. But certainly, a lot of that detail will be in the new life of mines and definitely during the Capital Markets Day later in the year, we will unpack a lot of those numbers for you. Similarly with the deposition, that is something that's received a lot of attention on the PGM operations. I think I did allude to, we're also looking at a big surface project and how we can reprocess a lot of our tailings dams within the PGM, similar to what we've done on the gold side. And the whole deposition, strategy and plan is very much tied up within that. So again, I think we can share those details with you. What I can tell you to the deposition is not something I'm losing sleep over at our SA PGM operations, that's well in hand.

Arnold Van Graan from Nedbank. On the gold side, DRD is the key to the strategy there. And you don't have full ownership. I'm assuming -- hopefully, at this gold price, you're not looking at it. But longer term, I guess, there has to be benefits to bring in the rest of that and have the full ownership, what's you're thinking around that. And then maybe, sorry, a second question on the recycling. I sort of get your rationale around it, but those are still fairly small businesses, slightly lower margin than mining. So how do you think that contributes to the valuation? Because it does also add to the complexity. I mean, I welcome the more simplified structure. But is there another round of simplification in the portfolio and the strategy, especially when it comes to some of these smaller businesses.

Arnold, thank you. So perhaps let me quickly address the recycling question. Well, so with regards to DRD, you're absolutely right. Just to be clear, we have no intention of trying to take a bigger stake in DRD, not trying to generate that kind of speculation or thinking. But in terms of where we go forward, you're 100% correct. So if you have a look at it today, we've got DRD secondary mining at our gold business and generating a lot of value. We are still doing secondary mining at our gold business as well and we've got projects like the Cooke tailings dam, which has significant value in terms of both gold and uranium. We are also ramping up as with -- as well as the case with gold, we do these on little bitty pieces. But when you start looking at a big project and the volume and the scale of what it could be, that's where the real value comes. We're looking at that within our current PGM operations as a project at the moment and what could be realizable. So just looking at the South African footprint, would it make sense to be bringing all of these skills, they're very similar skills, with similar processing, similar mining skills, couldn't make sense to bring all of that together under a single basket. I think it certainly could if there's value to be created from that. So is there a model that could look like that going forward? I think there could be, but it's nothing we're working on now just to be absolutely clear. Your second question on the recycling. So let me maybe just share with you how I think about recycling purely from a value perspective, and then I'll come on to the complexity. So these recycling businesses tend to -- you are right, the margins are a little bit smaller than mining, but they're steady. That's the first point I would make. And some of them range from -- it's not easy to always just say 1%. Some of them range from a 2% or 3% margin through to a 30% margin. So they are very different businesses, and we are focusing those businesses on where those higher margins are. But the way to really think about the recycling is you have invested or fixed assets that are largely paid off in most of these businesses. And then they run at a high working capital. That working capital gets turned about every 3 months. So if you have a 10% operating margin in a recycling business and you're turning that every 3 months, what you're effectively looking at is times that by 4 is a 40% return on that working capital investment. Those are phenomenal returns. And that's the way to think about the recycling from a valuation perspective rather than purely a margin and a cash business. But the strength in the strategic opportunities it brings us, as I mentioned, one, being able to get access to metals. I mean how many people can go and try and start new rear earth mines today or Germanium mines or Scandium mines, but are there ways you can look at it feasibly through recycling? Absolutely, they are. It gives you a much easier, lower capital, lower risk access to many of these critical metals. As well as the skills that come with it, I think we're developing skills in those businesses, which are going to hold us in good stead for the years ahead. So can we simplify it? Yes. And I think that is where what we are doing at the moment is bringing all of those businesses together under a single leadership because there are also significant synergies between them. Reldan, Metallix, they also process PGMs, huge synergies we can realize but bringing them together as a single business. And quite honestly, the way I would think about looking at in the future, that's another mine. You have a Driefontein Vice President, he's running 4 or 5 very complex shafts. Running those 3 businesses together as one is far more simple than running Driefontein. It's not a significant added complexity to the business. James do you want to...

Thanks. I think let's go to the webcast questions then. I'm going to try and consolidate them because there are a few that are similar. So the first couple are in relation to Stillwater or the U.S. PGM operations. So talking about the -- what the plans are given the current palladium price, but I think we've covered that, that it's already in that profile, and we'll be bringing more details to the market later. I don't know if there's anything else you want to add.

No, I think that's broadly correct. Yes, I don't think a lot more to add.

Then in terms of the recycling business, do we foresee significant like-for-like volume growth in the recycling business given the current price environment? And what is the lag between prices rising and recycling volumes rising? And then a linked one was from Adrian Hammond is what is the outlook for our recycling volumes. Some of our peers there, I assumes it means in the U.S. have increased volume substantially. So there's a two-part question to that. It's when do we expect to see volume growth given the prices? And then are we losing market share maybe to our peers, I guess, is the question.

So I think one of the first things, just to say, and that is one of the interesting things with recycling is it's not purely driven by commodity prices, particularly something like PGM. These are working capital-intensive businesses. So they're often driven by the cost of lending, the cost of your debt and your working capital, how many cars are getting scrapped, Prices is only a small part of it and, of course, disruption to supply chain. So one of the things about the recycling business is it's actually far more price inelastic than, say, more primary or secondary mining. So I don't think the price is necessarily is what drives it. It's often far more around the supply or obtaining that recycling material that is a far bigger driver. I certainly haven't seen any new numbers being put out. I do not believe that we've lost any significant market share if that was the question from Adrian. As far as I'm aware, I think -- I don't know, the forecasts might be different, but certainly looking back over the actuals, I haven't seen any significant changes. So Adrian, would be happy to engage with you on that one, not that I'm aware of.

Yes. I think we can follow up on that. There is some talk about some of our peers having a bit of a margin war as it were to get market share, but we'll get -- follow-up with our team. Then questions on acquisition strategy. There are a few different views. First of all, any interest in acquiring Barrick's Africa mines? Would we look at some of the South African copper juniors? And yes, I think that -- what African markets ex South Africa, do we believe to stand to drive growth in primary mining for the business?

Thanks, James. And let me just be absolutely clear with answering the first part of that. We do not have an acquisition strategy. Let me just say that. We have a strategy today to develop and grow off our organic resources. That's the strategy we have. That's where our focus remains. I think what we are trying to say is there's no doubt that acquisition and growth will be part of our DNA going forward. It always has been and will be as part of the growth. We will continue to look at it. But our immediate focus on our strategy today is unlocking the potential we have within our current resources. So we will continue to watch the market and should the right opportunity come up, of course, we look at it, but it's not part of the current strategy today. Let me just say that. So are we aware of Barrick is selling assets? Yes. Do we have a strategy to go knock on Barrick door today? No, we don't. And I think we'll continue to look at the opportunities. We've developed the framework I shared with you as to how we will consider external growth. But our focus today is on unlocking the value from our current resources.

Thanks. Then a couple of questions on cost curve position on the cost curve. How do we expect that to evolve as production transitions towards projects at the SA PGM and gold operations. And slightly differently put, cost curve development in SA gold, SA PGM and U.S. PGM. And do we have any targets in terms of U.S. dollars.

In term of U.S. dollars?

Well, yes, what did U.S. dollar per ounce costs?

Okay. Yes. So listen, I mean I think looking at the -- certainly, looking at the PGM cost curve, when we started out with these assets, they're very much at the top end of the cost curve in the fourth quartile. I think today, looking at the cost curves that we've seen, generally speaking, most of our asset sit at lower end of the third quartile. Marikana, of course, has been slightly higher as we've been ramping up K4. But with these initiatives, we can see all of our operations moving to the middle, top end of the second cost curve with the projects as they get implemented and these coming through. One or two could be a little bit further down. But on average, towards the middle and upper part of the second quartile. I think on the gold side, listen, certainly from our existing assets, our gold assets are on the far right of that cost curve, not quite the extreme right, but certainly at the top end of the fourth quartile. And I don't think that's going to change for the reasons that I have mentioned. These are high fixed cost assets. And ultimately, we are not looking at producing significantly more volume. And therefore, they will remain there. But the margins that we are getting even at those higher costs relative to the prices today are substantial, and that is why we will continue mining them in a responsible manner. I think with regards to the U.S., as mentioned, we'd like to see our costs there getting down to the $1,000 per ounce number. The U.S. operations are, in fact, I think, in the second cost quartile. They are quite low on the overall cost curve. The difference, of course, being the metal mix that they have, and therefore, the basket price they receive is lower than most of their South African peers, and the margins, therefore, tighter. But on a cost basis, they actually are pretty competitive.

This question, I'll just summarize, what does it take from a capital point of view to improve our reserve to resource conversion rates. I think we've spoken about that already in the PGM portfolio. And then under what average basket price assumption is it no longer economical.

What the project?

Yes.

Well, I mean, I think we've done most of this planning before it took it to run, and let me talk about it in South African rand terms. Anywhere, I mean we were looking at this planning when the basket price was ZAR 24,000 to ZAR 25,000 before E-ounces. Certainly anywhere sustainably above ZAR 30,000, which was our sort of through-the-cycle view on prices. All of these projects met our required hurdle rates. So let me put it into those terms. I think the spot price today is somewhere close to ZAR 50,000 was the last one I saw, so significantly higher.

And low capital intensity obviously makes them attractive. Just on the -- a question on capital allocation and talking about reducing our gross debt. I'm not sure if you want to take this or Charl. But what are the plans regarding the upcoming bond maturity in November. And what plans in debt capital markets for this year and next year?

I'm happy to take a sip of water if you're comfortable, Charl.

Thanks. Just in terms of the upcoming bond maturity, which is in November. The plans are to refinance that in the first half of the year. As we've said and signaled all along, I mean, that is $675 million. And the first step for us will be to take that down to $500 million. Clearly, in this environment, we would love to cut back more in terms of debt, but I think we first have to fill the piggy bank before we can start spending that money. So the upcoming maturity is November. We're going to refinance sort of midyear, probably mid-May. And then, yes, that will be the first step for us in terms of the upcoming maturity.