2022 Full Year Results Q&A
2022 Full Year Results Q&A
Thursday, 23rd February 2023
Duncan Wanblad: On Kolomela, it was hampered in a slightly different way last year from
Sishen. Some of the fundamental underlying issues are associated with the weather and the
mine development, which was very similar to Sishen. But it had a 3-4 month period where, in
addition to that, it had had a misfire on one of the main benches in the mine. Mpumi and the
team needed to navigate that misfire in a very, very careful way. That slowed the mining rate
down significantly during that period of time. By the end of the year, Kolomela was doing very
well.
In addition, there is a differentiator between Kolomela and Sishen in the context of access to
rail, and at the end of the year when we started to really struggle with rail access - during the
strike at Transnet and then the extended maintenance period at Transnet - we elected to
prioritise the Sishen material onto the rail, and we stocked Kolomela.
At Botswana, the vast majority of all the elements of the negotiation have been completed. I
cannot remember how many workstreams there are, but there is only one outstanding
workstream. And that is where the team is working at the moment.
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Ian Rossouw (Barclays): Firstly, on Woodsmith. From memory, the Sirius plan was to get
to 13Mtpa eventually, with a bigger shaft, etcetera is that ultimately the capacity the shafts
can do, or is there upside longer term?
And then, from memory, the long-term price you mentioned at the time of the Sirius deal was
like $120 to $140/t, explain the bridge to the new long-term price.
And then lastly on working capital, what should we expect for this year and roll-off of the
platinum inventories as well, please?
Duncan Wanblad: On the Sirius plan to 13Mtpa, the real constraints in that mine are not the
ore body, it is really the shaft capacity and the tunnel capacity to get to the port. And it is not
simply the size of the conveyances that you need to put in there, which are really important,
but it is fundamentally constrained by the ventilation. And ventilation is very important in the
context of the mining method that you select, the equipment that you put down there, and so
on.
Our approach was always likely to be different from Sirius. I do not want to comment on the
comparison between our plan and the Sirius plan, because from day one, we said we were
really attracted to this opportunity because of the nature of the product, the size and scale of
this ore body. We wanted to do our own review on it, work out how we were going to
optimise the execution of it, and these are our plans.
Stephen Pearce: On the price, your recollection is correct. We were talking around $140/t at
the time that we acquired the project. What have we done since to inform our view? The
economists have gone to town in terms of fundamental supply/demand balances across the
four main nutrients that make up the four main aspects of the product. And that view of the
fundamental supply/demand balance over time is expressed as a real price for the relative
percentages that informs the $170/t. We have then gone through and looked at the balance
of probabilities of where some of that value is. In a fairly conservative approach, we have
added $20/t to it. As Duncan mentioned, if you took a different approach, you could add
$100/t pretty quickly and the current market view of that it is over $300/t.
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