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DRDGOLD

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September 17, 2024 at 3:50 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

Niel Pretorius

CEO

Niël Pretorius has two decades of experience in the mining industry. He was appointed Chief Executive Officer designate of DRDGOLD Limited on 21 August 2008 and Chief Executive Officer on 1 January 2009. Niël also serves as an elected Board representative of the Minerals Council South Africa.

Niël initially joined the Company on 1 May 2003 as a legal adviser and was promoted to the position of Group Legal Counsel on 1 September 2004 and then General Manager: Corporate Services on 1 April 2005. Niël was subsequently appointed Chief Executive Officer of Ergo Mining Operations (formerly DRDGOLD SA) on 1 July 2006.

He has been instrumental in implementing several corporate social investment strategies and environmental, educational and rehabilitation policies during his tenure, in line with the Company’s strategy to deploy its resources to maximise economic value through sustainable and responsible mining, while releasing land back to the greater Johannesburg for redevelopment.

One of the Company’s key objectives is to generate a financial return for shareholders by maintaining healthy cash flows. This focus on cash flow has enabled the Company to preserve the value created for stakeholders in the form of dividends for 15 uninterrupted years, making a total distribution of 60 SA cents per share for FY2022.

Under his leadership, DRDGOLD was nominated as the Sunday Times Top 100 Company in South Africa in 2020. DRDGOLD has been ranked in the top 14 companies over the last five years.

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Very well. Ok, thank you very much. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. And thank you so much for attending this presentation. I'm gonna be focusing on three main themes. The first talking about the operational and commercial performance and success of the business, how it's been established. Secondly, I want to reflect a little on circularity and how that's embedded in our model. And then finally talk a little bit about vision 28 and how we're positioning the company towards Financial 28 in order to take full advantage of our body and our resource. So we do have a number of forward looking statements based on current assumptions. And I ask that you take cognizance of the content of the, the disclaimer. So at a glance, Drd Gold has been around 429 years. It's the oldest listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange that is still in business. Like most other miners in South Africa, it started out as a deep level underground mine. but over time, it's had to adapt and it's now transitioned fully into a surface reclamation operation. So we no longer have any deep level mines all of our operations. All of our production is from the retreatment of mine tailings and it's nice to be in a jurisdiction where there's probably north of a billion tons of material stockpiled across a relatively concentrated area that we have access to the business has been successful in recent years. Commercially, we have we have 17 years of uninterrupted dividend payment. When we started out with this particular business model years ago, the only money we had was the money we made. So cash has been a very important focal point in the the recent past of this business. And we do believe that in order to qualify as a business, you need to generate cash flows and show profit. So listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, as well as the New York Stock Exchange where we have an AD R program back on the first of September 2024. When we did this presentation, the market cap was $705 million. The market's been kind to us in the last week or so. Market cap at the moment is just under $800 million which we do believe is a fair reflection of what we can support based on a fundamental analysis. And obviously, we'll endeavor to keep it there and hopefully add some more value going forward. As you could see the shareholders split in terms of free float is divided virtually equally between South Africa and New York, our largest shareholders, Sbaa Stillwater and I'll talk a little bit about how they became a shareholder of Drd Gold later on in this presentation. So I wanna talk to the pictures in this light more than the words because this summarizes pretty much what we do on the left hand side. You see the picture of the the high pressure water jet and this is how we mine and the person operating this water jet moves roughly five a ton of material every five seconds. So in the industry, we probably, in terms of per capita output, we probably maintaining one of the best ratios that slurry mix is then pumped to a conventional cil plant. But conventional only in terms of operation, certainly not conventional in terms of size because the two plants that we have and I'll elaborate on the operations are high volume throughput plants where we do mega volume in and nano extraction out. The third picture there is that of a solar farm and I'll elaborate on that as well, but about half of our electricity requirements now are generated through the solar farm which we constructed over the last year or so. nice picture of the plant, all 13 tanks. There's a second one. There's a picture of that one too. And then once we've finished the material that we reclaim does not go back to the site where we reclaimed it from. It's in fact placed on another very large tailings facility and one that is obviously managed to a different set of standards that I'll elaborate on under the slide for governance. And then the last picture we just put in there because it's a nice picture. It shows you what a Tailings Dam looks like once we're done. And that's just how we vegetate it. We put a mulch on the side and then we put some irrigation onto it and then vegetation is established and becomes permanent after roughly five years. So about 12 years ago, we took a very deliberate decision to bring sustainable development into our strategic thinking. And and this was based on, on extensive studying and reading at the time as to where sustainable development can take us. Now, we firmly believe that ESG is a subset of sustainable development. But why we prefer to use the term sustainable development as opposed to ESG is the one capital stock that you can never exclude in the conversation regarding sustainable development is financial capital. And what we try and do is to overlay and integrate value creation in respect of the various capital stocks in such a way that each delivers into the other. And ultimately, with regards to environmental capital, with regards to our social initiatives, we ultimately want all of these to deliver into the financial bottom line, if not, it is not sustainable development. Now, I want to reflect very briefly on our near term strategy, medium and near term strategy and focusing specifically on that portion that says medium term because this is where Vision 28 comes in. And Vision 28 is an initiative. It's a capitalization program, capital development program to establish throughput capacity of 3 million tons per month between the two plants and output capacity of six tons of gold per annum. What's driving us in terms of some of the underlying core fundamentals are operational efficiency and long term profitability, effective capital allocation and very importantly, not leaving anything behind on the slide here, it says leaving no value behind, but we want to leave nothing behind, nothing in terms of waste, but also nothing in terms of value. Asset optimization is key to our strategic thinking. We're not looking or stepping over as a value under our noses in pursuit of value in a distant horizon. We optimize what is right there in our vicinity. It's a very mechanized process and I'm gonna skip over this because I think that message is pretty clear as we go through the slides and pause very briefly on our operational footprint. So two operating or two operations or two projects as our friends in Australia call them. The one is Ergo, which is a 1.65 million ton a month processing plant. And the other one is Huwe gold operations and Huawei's gold operations or got Far West gold recoveries is an asset that we acquired from Sibanye Stillwater in exchange for a 38% stake in the company. They up that stake to 50% or 50 plus 1% by subscribing for roughly $80 million of shares in the company. I think it was in 2020 or 2021 between the two operations. We have 6 million ounces in reserves and a lot of vision 28 is to extend the life of mine of both of those two operations to 13 years and 23 years respectively. And I maybe just wanna pause briefly on the Ergo life of mine. So Ergo was started around about 2008. It was required or acquired rather from Anglo Gold, Ashanti and initially in a joint venture with a company called Mint Health. Very shortly after the establishment of the JV, it became the sole property of DRD Gold. Now the initial life of mine of Ergo was going to be 12 years calculated from round about 20 tw 2010 rather. And mining a resource of 227 million tons. It became apparent towards the latter portion of that period that Ergo was far from over. It was a different or a changed economic or financial environment or reality, the gold price had rebased at significantly higher levels. And it was also clear that the skill set and the infrastructure that we had built up over time was just not ready to give up on Ergo. There's multiple resources around the Ergo footprint which we managed to accumulate and consolidate into Ergo. And Vision 28 is aimed at taking Ergo into another 13 years of production with effect from financial 28. What you'll see in terms of production profile though was the impact of that decision in positioning Ergo for that development period. So a lot of what's gone down in terms of volume throughput was us replacing some of the initial core Ergo sites which systematically became depleted from roughly 2020 onwards with a whole bunch of new sites. And we had certain delays with regards to regulatory approvals on some of those sites. They were also with all of these sites often times. There's some interesting surprises when you start mining into a mine dump that's been part of the Johannesburg landscape for the better part of 50 years. It's it's been used for more than just dumping mine waste. It's also a favorite dumping site for several other materials, some of them official and some of them unofficial. So you work your way through that and we finally sort of towards the end of the 24 financial year, we finally managed stable state and Ergo is now positioned to provide the cash flows and the operational throughput to position this operation for the additional 20 years rather the the additional 13 years starting financial 2028 while we were cleaning up. And while we were replacing all of these sites, there was a lot of lifting of old legacy sites,, cleaning up of old legacy sites and that contribute to an extent to an increase in,, in yield., but that was,, only there to offset some of the drops in throughput. That production profile that you see there roughly five tons. We think we'll take it to about 5.1 for the foreseeable future. And then there's a nice bump come financial 28 the financial performance though has still been really good. We managed to maintain a operating margin north of 35% during that entire period. very, very keen discipline with regards to costs, but also on the back of a of a very, very good gold price all in sustaining margin stayed high at 28%. The free cash flow and the negative 826 million rand, which is roughly $40 million. That was part of capital infrastructure investment that formed part of vision 2028 this was done out of savings at the start of financial 24 we had roughly 100 and $20 million in savings that had accumulated over time. This is what we held back after paying tax and, and the dividend and this was always going to be used towards capital reinvestment of the business. And then headline earnings have been fairly constant and, and encouraging too. And it's out of that, that we justify or motivate the dividend payment. So I said that I was gonna talk a little bit about circularity and how ESG is a subset of sustainable development focus. So maybe with regards to circularity, one of the, the first points that I try to make in this regard is that DRD gold does not produce additional waste. We do not add to the amount of mine waste that's that's been generated over time. We waste neutral because all of our production is from existing waste. We also use mostly recycled water and now with the solar plant, most of or about half of our energy is also going to be coming out of solar. Importantly, though we do believe in restoring land back to at least a state where it could be used for sustainable use, commercially or residential or in instances where it was an environmentally sensitive area back to its original natural state. And that's both in terms of sites that have been cleared and also positioning the final resting place of our waste, our large tailing facilities creating some sort of a biosphere in that regard as well. But you could see very significant progress in terms of vegetation in terms of clean up and also in terms of environmental spend. In fact, I remember that for the first five years or so of this 17 year period that I was talking about, we spent more on the cladding of our tailings facilities than we did on on dividends. So, environmental restoration and ongoing environmental reinvestment, so to speak has been very much part of our business model from the outset. This is a picture that we're very proud of. This is a picture of the solar farm that we built and that is now fully operational 60 megawatts of power. This plant is also linked into the national grid so we can offset power usage at other sites with units that we push into the national grid to the extent that we're not using. All of that Ergo itself uses about 30 megawatt at any particular point in time. So there is surplus, a lot of that surplus is also going into a battery storage facility which is in the final stages of construction. It's 100 and 60 megawatt battery storage facility. Big advantage of the storage facility is that we'll be able to avoid peak out or peak tariffs power tariffs, which is about three times higher than normal tariff throughout going forward because we'll be able to draw power from the batteries. As and when peak hour rates are charges charged, rather, there's a lot of focus on ESG. as I say, we, we, we consider that to be a subset of sustainable development and our focus with regards to social capital that's over and above the human capital that we invest in within the company itself. Our focus in terms of social capital is to provide the means for communities to take that first step out of abject poverty. A lot of the communities living in the areas around our operations do live in po poverty. They do form part of the, let's call it the informal economy. It's estimated that roughly 11% of all notes and coins that are exchanged in South Africa are exchanged in the informal economy. And therefore our social investment programs are aimed at empowering people with knowledge. We call it knowledge and a nudge to take part in that informal economy and to take that to be a sort of a an active participant in that informal economy. And it's been a very, very successful program. Initially, we thought that we would reach about 250 families and we will pass 8000 families. Now with the programs that have been rolled out across our entire footprint, I do want to pause briefly on governance and deal with that. Firstly, with regards to the compliance regime that we are required to to deliver into. So both JSE and New York Stock Exchange. So the SEC is one of our regulators. We file a 20 F, we file a technical report summary. It's interesting reading, if you want to see where this company believes it could go or where the independent expert that we retain to, to write the, the, the TRS believes that the company could go based on the snapshot taken in 2022 sustainable development. I think I've, I've covered that, that theme quite well or extensively, maybe not, well, but at least extensively apologies. We have also recently become a member of the World Gold Council and as a consequence, we are now working towards conformance with the principles of responsible gold mining. And we believe that we'll be able to present ourselves for assurance by 2027 or conformance by 2027. We also got the letter from Church of England with regards to tailings governance. We responded to that letter and pointed out to them that firstly, we're not aware of a single Tailings dam in South Africa that failed while in compliance with the South African standards. But we will nonetheless align with the GISDM as well and work towards conformance in that regard as well. And you have to, if you own the largest tailings dams in South Africa, that picture is, is an important picture also perhaps more from an environmental governance perspective because that's how we clad our tailing dams. And what is really wonderful to witness is how once you put natural soil onto a tailing STM, natural vegetation comes back and once natural vegetation comes back, insect life comes back, bird life comes back, small animal life comes back. These creatures don't know that they're living on a Tailings Dam. They think that they live on the restored Savannah of the Highveld and, and that is something that we particularly proud of and we're building on this,, by the reintroduction of all sorts of antelope and so forth. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a serene place. So vision 2028 this is the capital that we have spend and that we are going to be spending over the next few years. The $160 million on the solar plant that's been done. We're doubling the size of the Far West gold plant over the next 2.5 years. It's gonna cost 100 and $10 million and $200 million is going into a very large regional Tailings facility. One that is big enough to facilitate and enable a regional consolidation of Tailings retreatment in that area. It's large enough to receive the waste from each and every Tailings Dam in the Far West Rand and then of course, Ergo as well, the extension of Ergo S life spending 85 million over the next two years to establish new sites and new pumping infrastructure to link Ergo up with the rest of its additional this new resources, the new life and this is what vision 28 is all about. So we wanna go from 2.15 million tons per month, throughput to 3 million tons per month and we want to take production from 5.1 tons per annum to six tons per annum and an extension of life 13 years and 20 years respectively for the two. Now, an interesting slide, I'll maybe wanna just go back to, is it possible to go back? Yeah, I wanna go back to this quickly. So the impact that this will have by financial 2028 imagine by 2028 there is no longer an annual reinvestment of capital of 100 and $10 million. And imagine that you have the additional cash flows of one extra ton of gold production, which at today's numbers works to or comes to about $75 million additional revenue at a relatively stable fixed cost and a a decluttered operational footprint with high output operational sites. So we believe that it is it's the right thing to do. We believe that by investing this money, we're creating potential for future value generation. Pay back of all of this starting when we did the first work on the solar plants between four and five years. So the last 15 years or so, once this has been repaid, that should be interesting years with regards to net cash flows. It's a business that we believe in. It's a business that we believe is making a difference and that's a business that we are proud to be part of. So, thank you very much for listening. Thank you.


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