Barrick Gold Corporation

Barrick Gold Corporation

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Barrick Gold Corporation (ABR.DE) Q2 2011 Earnings Call Transcript

Published at 2011-08-08 17:00:00
Dennis Mark Bristow
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Again, welcome to Mid-Year and Second Quarter Results. Those of you know, in the team we’ve got a few extras this quarter. We’ve got Donald in the back there, David Haddon, our General Counsel; John Steele who runs our capital budget; Nick Norman who’s in the generative side exploration; Paul Harbidge, Head of Exploration, is somewhere, I can’t spot him right now. There he is at the back corner, and Raul from IT and Lois in Communications and our CFO, Graham, right up in the front here. And they’ll be hanging around afterwards if you want to corner any of them. And to kick off, I’d really ask you to cast your line back to last year where we said it’s a market that 2010 would be period of consolidation for Randgold as we build the platform and strengthened the teams to handle the growth we planned for this year. The evidence of that investment in time, efforts and money is plain to see in this quarter result. And it’s amusing for me to see how many people are surprised. We did explain this result to everyone this time last quarter. Nevertheless, it’s very pleasing to be able to report a big step-up in production in the back of another – last quarter’s significant rise in output. Today, we also announced record profit. In fact, number – we broke of records this quarter, record profit, record production, record gold sale. And this really underlines our continued focus on profitability, and concerns again our view that profitability is a function of quality assets and effective cost control. On top of that, exploration remains the core driver of our strategy and to create value through the discovery and development of world-class deposits. Safety of our workers is core to our performance and on this front, through the trend is heading in the right direction, with only one lost-time injury reported this quarter in the group. As we continue to go to our safety awareness, we’ve really got ahead around there and all levels throughout the group. Morila has subsequently renewed its accreditation for safety and environmental programs, while Loulo and Tongon are well on their way to achieving their accreditation on their OHSAS 18,008 program. Moving on to the headlines, whichever way you look at this result quarter-on-quarter, half year and half year, year-on-year, it’s been a record performance. Again, record production was achieved across the group and by another big delivery from Tongon and other commendable achievement from Morila and re-insuring improvement at Luolo. With costs down for second quarter in a row, thanks for better grades, we were able to post record profit and it’s flowed down to the bottom line in terms of earnings per share. This solid operational performance aside, the quarter also saw been deliverable from the various team including first gold from Gounkoto, the steady advance of Kibali and identification of our new next generation of growth opportunity by our geologist. And moving directly to the numbers and how they are, which really speak for themselves. So I’m showing, as I pointed out substantial improvement across the board. I’ve already mentioned our record profit, but importantly, we have also grown our cash on hand for the first time for some time now despite significant investments in this year 2011 as our biggest capital year, and we’re forecast to spend just over $400 million in capital and then we’ll see that stepping down to sort of the – around the mid-200’s and then about 200 million. 72% increase in gold sales reflecting the across the board increase in production from operations as well as the sale of gold in-hand carried out over the last quarter as highlighted to you all at this time last quarter. This is all translated into record profit from mining and even more importantly bottom line profit of the capitalized asset that are being depreciated. Cash costs are important, but as you all know, profits are Holy Grail. At the halfway mark, we’re well positioned for a strong finish in the year as I’ll explain a little later. One comment on the exploration line is that we pride ourselves on being one of the best, if not the best explorers in our business, that I also believe and we have to raise this time and again, that exploration success is not a product of the amount of money one budgets to spend on the exploration, but on the qualities of the knowledge in the way it’s applied when the exploration progress. And so if you look at it, we’ve been very consistent in our exploration spend and we’ve been very consistent in our success. Let’s then quickly look – skip through the operations, starting with Morila. Despite being in the squalor of its life, it continues to operate like a well-oiled cash machine and the borders to declare another $45 million dividend for shareholders last week, bringing dividends paid to date this year to $95 million. Given the efficiency of the Morila team and the high gold class, we’re actually looking at ways to extend Morila’s life beyond the current 2013 horizon. The feasibility study on the reprocessing of the Tailings storage facility, which contains approximately 350,000 ounces, is well underway and the schedule is completed as planned towards the end of this year. And we also subsequently evaluating the possibility of enlisting the last 200,000 ounces below the pit through our push-back program. Every indication is that the Tailings retreatment study will show viability and a break-even around $900 of gold. Push-back, of course will require more risk because we’ve got to invest by a lot on the push-back. So, that is still something that we are looking at. We’re going to be in days with the government fund. Maybe it’s looking at some of the interest, but the – everything indicates that the Tailings retreatment opportunity will happen. In the meantime, the development as you see on the picture – of our sustainable agribusiness initiative has continued and we’ve now started with progress on projects on each aspects of the agri-business. It convince ourselves that these are viable businesses and they are sustainable as we win re-rolling up into the community. On the numbers – these are the numbers at Morila. You’ll see the costs are very well contained and if you look at the total adjustments and use the fact from the total cost plus debt, the real cash cost and very steady at $500 a month quarter-on-quarter which is a good for a business operation as Morila is. With Gounkoto now on production, we’re reporting on Loulo and Gounkoto on a consolidated basis as I’ll show you in the next couple of slides. At the same time, we’ll also separate the mass. I think it’s important for everyone to get their head around Gounkoto/Loulo complex is composed of three mines Gara which has got 800,000 tons going open pit and it goes underground. Yalea which is now all underground and Gounkoto which is all open pits. And we’ve got 3.6 million tons. We’re installing another 7 megawatts of milling capacity. We sold today is nine, so a significant increase in milling capacity; one, to deal with the harder ore and address the check reject issue as we referred to last quarter. And then we worry about how much more percent we can get above the 3.6 million tons a year. We haven’t – both any of that into our guidance. We are just starting 3.6 million tons. On the key takeaway as the Loulo/Gounkoto complex is that we – one had first gold at Gounkoto bringing in that flexibility of another open pit mine, high grade open pit mine. Secondly, we’re starting to see the increase in grade which we guided at Loulo itself and we still, as I point out managing another recovery and as you see and as it stated in the slide a big step up in the development acreage across the operations. And that really has clearly has working – further on these are the numbers this is the consolidated numbers. As you will recall, we guarded under three brands for the first quarter, three brands for the same quarter, four brand for the third quarter and there’s a possibility we can get the five brands in the fourth quarter and that brings us back to an ecstatic number of brand programs for the year. We’re definitely on that spend and there’s been a quarter now feeding into the complex. We have the flexibility to manage there a little bit more efficiently as we bring up the underground reduction and I’ll touch on this in some detail. Again, the first time for a long time as we combine the numbers are showing a drop in total cash cost and even standalone is the first time saying, first time in total cash cost. It is slightly inflated but quarter two the total cost it was included is a one $3.2 million write-down on the MDM Eagle process which led us back to the original construction of the mines at five years now with the original construction contract for the mine. If we just stop for a moment and address the most topical point of conversation with the market and that is our Yalea underground operation. This quarter a very big milestone and that is we anticipate the purple patch that you can see all about standing around here looking at the purple patch. For those people who wonder what it means and our lawyers have asked us to define it, it’s a patch within the main Yalea ore body that grade is above 10 grams a ton and we’re definitely in the purple patch because the grades are above 10 grams a ton and what’s important for a company like ours that is driven by geology, we’ve modeled part of the ore body with borehole and when it’s so good to go underground and see and it looks just like what you model from the borehole intersected. And that’s really what differentiates us. That’s why we’re being so determined that we will get it right. When you get in to these, these very high grading, there will be some stopes here that run it well north of an ounce and that really takes away as I’ve always said the greatest thing that’s the best in gold mining. It’s taken us four years to get there so, we’re very happy to be there and it’s still going to take another couple of three quarter before we really start benefiting consistency from this part of Yalea. But what I can say is that we we’ve learned a lot about underground mining. We are very comfortable with our ability to mine underground now. It’s taken us some time and for anyone who is coming down to visit at the end of the year, you go and check that out. Interestingly, now everyone has said that Yalea is the underground mine that really – but when you stack it up against Gara, Yalea is a much easier mine to mine, now that we know and we’ve got our head around mining underground. It’s a lot less, it’s a lot better rock mass. It’s just easier to mine but it’s taken us some time get there. This is a long section showing where we are and it’s very important now we’ll bring that access down and then we are going to follow down and we’ll do the same of over here and get to the main ore body at the same time we will develop that off. And just for everyone’s edification, this is just a hard boundary of in-gram ore which is about six and seven gram ore all the way around here. So this is particularly high-grade ore body. This is where we’ve been mining in the P125 ore body for some time. We’ve got some – that we’ll continue to mine here. We are opening up a sloping section here and so slowly we’re above the flexibility back into Loulo. And this is key – what’s key is that Gounkoto helps us get over the hump that it’s really Yalea that drives the long-term grade and therefore cost and profit in the complex going forward. Gara, as I said, Gara – with everything we’ve learned at Yalea, you can see applied to Gara. Again, the most challenging underground project that we’ve handled it better because we’re more experienced. We’re already opening up the second level as far as starting horizons go and we’ll start sloping this towards the end of this quarter early next quarter. And in fact, Gara had been built up faster than Yalea as far as Again, we’re well on the ore body and when you go down there, you see that the ore body is exactly as we modeled it. The last thing about Gara is it’s like reading a newspaper – the black stuff you mine and the white stuff you leave behind. It’s very visible, very well-constrained as an ore body. Just stepping back, which is the driver geology. We continue to explore and as you know, working on a project to see what we should do with some of the lower-grade material that’s been excluded from the long-term life of mine because of the higher-grade reserves being brought in from Gounkoto. But to date, the geos in the northern – has been able to define about – just on a million ounces at about 3 grams. So not by any means low-grade. But that’s part of the feed into our heat bleach strategy and whether it actually works out to be a heat bleach or something else is – we’ll do the study as part of the pre-feasibility which is scheduled for. Moving back down to the south to the copper, this is again if you look at the capacity we installed last year, everyone’s focused on our production. But if I take you back last year, from January last year, we brought in a new mine in the form of Tongon one time profitably. We’ve established ourselves in no uncertain terms in the Congo and we have the Kibali project still on track. We’ve pulled the first gold in Gounkoto, our second mine in gold and food production and staff. So a lot happened and Gounkoto is – we’ve been able to – we discovered it in January 2009 and it pulled its first gold in June 2011. That’s a pretty good job. So we’re fully operational in the open pit operations. We just started receiving a new mining fleet because we’ve been mining with some of the older fleets on river up until now. And the focus is now on putting the finishing touches to the infrastructure, mainly the civil foundation for the crushing site. At the moment, we’ve got a mobile crushing site as we – and it’s quite capable of managing the transition ore that once we get into the fully hard ore then so that beginning quarter four, we will have the new crushing plant in place and we’d be building a brand new, high capacity crushing plant on the site and then we’ll truck the crushed ore to Loulo. And you see the third bowl as part of the Loulo expansion is – I think it’s just arrived in the parts on its way. So yes, last time we told people that the more was on its way, it fell off the truck. Do you remember? Which could dilute that more, so I’m a little bit anxious to tell you between the data on the truck, and two of the truck as far as I’m aware. And these are – and we will report both on a consolidated basis and we’re only excited beating some ore into late in June which is 80,000 tons – a ton. You can see what it does as far as the contribution to profits. And we continue our deep drilling at Gounkoto. The focus is – as you know, we’re aiming to get a feasibility study around the ground at end of the year and we’re ready converting the resources to reserve. The point I’m making in your report that you’ve got in front of you is the indication of about 2 million ounces of underground reserve, we believe we’re about to convert into reserve that led to the 3.8 million ounces in the foot. And at this stage, we’re intersecting significant for the 600 meters 700 meters if we’re not showing that continuation of the very high grade zone and we’ve got a little bit more work to do on that. So we’re just at this stage, indications are would be a floor underground mine but high grade and very shallow, but still lot more to get done. And as you are aware, I mean, I don’t know if you recall but part of – we end up about $650 gold and that’s half a million ounces relatively lost the pressure. So we’ve got a whole reloc briefing in this region as far as some of the (inaudible). Getting back because I’ve done in every section, looking at our geology, The big challenge for us and we spent a lot of time wondering and worrying about how do we find the next one and one other question is why these massive deposits, we know about three multi-million on deposits on one structure and the general feel is really being trying to understand that and it’s interesting that if you look at the gravity work there’s a sharp contrast between the Eastern part or the right-hand side of the slide, and then left-hand side of the slide. You can see it even there’s non – even mining into this affects largely the break there. And you can see that the big deposit locates on the structure, and that’s very, very key for us. We at least can see the correlation. And now, how do we model again that anything and trying to find some more. And we believe that – I mean if you follow the structure we’ve Yalea in the north, Lutela and coming down there was a real old province and we were fortunate enough to control at least 75% of that project. And stepping across into Senegal, you can see the box labeled Luolo is the one we’ve been talking about, if you step across left to Massawa, it’s a 3 million ounce resource. As you know, we’ve done a pre-feasibility of work but certainly works this $1,600 gold but it’s metallurgically challenging and we’ve charged the exploration guys with the challenge of adding another few million ounce of more friendly material and you can see in the resource side of which many of you are familiar with that’s the way we run our exploration. That’s got out there that there’s enough early stage – at the base of the final and the focus is really to see what else we can dig up in Massawa before we go barreling off to and if you look at the history in Loulo, we’ve really bought a significant portfolio and a reserve base in Loulo just by doing exactly that though, that’s what we’re doing with Massawa. Stepping down to the Cote d’Ivoire, another – I guess the best to sum it up is against some chess competition. The star of our show last quarter was undoubtedly Tongon. It’s been an amazing journey for me and the team and it’s been challenging to keep phase with an asset in its host countries through the years of turmoil and in the face of considerable profit emphasis in particularly at the back half of last year and then to see our new team establish and deliver. Tongon is a mine we found with gold we startup the thing, we turned on the switch and we made it profit in the first quarter of switching it on and that’s exactly what we’ve done in all our operations, Yalea and Luolo and it’s really rewarding to see that. And it’s been an excellent pleasure working with the new government in the Cote d’Ivoire. They’re really friendly to investments and in fact, the first thing they did in forming the new cabinet was the embark of the entire mining industry today think tank and we were invited to come and give them guidance on how we think they should be attracting capital in their country. People are talking about privatization – everything opposite to what we had in South Africa. How do we get capital? How do we privatize? How do we simplify those? All those sort of things that one would have set in the country with infrastructure and natural resources like the Cote d’Ivoire and so we are very happy to be there and we certainly – we are the biggest investor in the mining sector in the Cote d’Ivoire and we – and think we maintain that position. One of the big focus of the new government now is to liberate the permits and get people to really get on start exploring. And for Randgold that’s also our focus as we get away from the Tongon region and start building our portfolio across the country. These are the numbers. They speak for themselves. I placed the cash cost 477, a little higher than what we would expected because we’re still running on diesel. We – and that with a higher fuel prices added $2 million a month to our cost over the last quarter, the $6 million which nearly doubled our cash cost. But we are and we’re busy with the final process with the National Electricity Supply Commission and signing off and being able to start going down from the grid and we expect that to happen at this month and therefore we moved our half of the upper city, $0.30 plus (inaudible). Apart from that, everything is normal, a little bit higher production and at quarter two what we were still taking gold out of the circuit. There’s still some gold, but we’re not at the steady state as far as lock up goes in the circuit. And as you know, we do not fund try and pull gold produced when it’s in the circuit. We only pull production that’s in the back of. That’s how we produce gold. So a little bit more to come, but we’re really going to steady out now in a run rate of around 270,000 ounces a year going forward. We should beat our 270,000 ounce guidance this year. So we’re on the positive side somehow we’re on the positive side on Morila and we’re slightly soft on Loulo. I think we have the flexibility with Gounkoto if we manage that. Our guidance remain as our original guidance for G&A. And just as I pointed out, we’ve been very focused within the immediate confines of the plant and the main ore body, and now what we’ve started is getting back out across Northern Cote d’Ivoire and really try and pull the base of our triangle as we develop our own corporate footprint in this country. If we now move across to the DRC. And before I update you on Kibali, I’d like to say that while this country also suffers from perceived political risks particularly in city. Our own experience is that as government is not only engagement for construction engagement that has the capacity to deliver on the start of a partnership, so that’s how we’ve – that’s what we’ve experienced working in that country since we acquired (inaudible). Against this background, we’ve continued to make steady progress with the Kibali project. The relocation program is well underway and we started tearing with the spot in preparation for the plant and soft infrastructure. And we are busy with the various details designs for mining processing and power. What we would refer to as the development program with our partners – referred to as the final feasibility study. We’re currently spend adjudicating at the end of sort open pit mining. We have secured the ground-engaging equipment. That was one of the critical items – the big shovels. We’ve secured them. We have secured the turbines for the first hydro station. We are about to issue the tenders for the shaft development and the twin decline development. That will be sorted out this quarter. We have just thinking through the order in the most this quarter. We’ve got nothing on the critical part, there’s nothing on the critical part, so, first gold back in 2013. We’re commissioning. Our plan is to have this commissioning in place 2013 and a full year of production in 2014 and there’s no reason for us to believe on why we see that program. We have secured the hedge year and the wider for the front for the vertical soft. And we’re busy – we’re about halfway through the expansion of the construction village. This is about capacity for 500 workers. So everything is on track and you will see the relocation, that’s a huge project. In fact and part of it is the moving of the St. Barbara Church, Catholic Church. In your report that you got in your hand is we actually laid at the first time with bishop of the Catholic Church. This is important to us. Very critical in our social program that we are ensuring that we bring the Catholic Church along with our social plan. As I have in all the projects, let’s get back and look at a bit of the geology. This really summarizes – we really as I said in quarters ago, we’ve got ahead around the model, absolutely. And basically, there’s a series of guards over these – that plunge down in the direction of these arrows. This is a bit of younger cover, so they’ve just peaked out along with plan. So this is not a truck, the truck is actually this way, the train is that way. And each of this red signs on non-deposits, some of them being just drilled to 50 meters some of them have old mining underground and/or open cost mining from the Belgium base. The yellow ones are exploration targets. Those are taking our modeling and having disclose or have additional occurrences. And the arrows indicate where we have got enough geological information to look down dip to predict the geology and we now have a program of shifting those down dip those projects. And to put in perspective, just this little KCD and Sessengue zoning are that’s hosted about 80% of the 10 million ounces of reserve. So a lot of upside in the immediate extension of known resources and that’s been a big focus of our ore ounces. We convert those resources into reserves. In addition to that, Paul has now separated the team. We’ve got a team focused on what we call a feasibility and mine work and then an exploration team and we’ve now covered about 60% of the greater tenement on soil survey. And we’re starting to see the first results come in. It’s very interesting. About 300 kilometers of continuous soil anomaly along here. And I’d point out that this Zambula soil anomaly is a soil anomaly that runs up to half a gram in the soil, about 3 kilometers long, hasn’t got a borehole in there. But it’s the best target we’ve seen in the Kibali tenement bar none. So, what do you take away from that is that we bought this mine or project because we really believed in it. It has the real opportunity to be able to add or convert the known resources to reserves and it runs the risk of being able to deliver another world class discovery? So, it’s a really significant geological anomaly and we’re definitely not disappointed in our acquisition. And finally in summing up, some people point to the disappointing 2010 results that is – just reminding people that we’re on a mission start building up our discovered project development. And you can see that we’ve delivered a pretty steady growth in production. And most comforting is the growth in shares as we’ve brought this to account, and of course, when you do that and the gold price goes up as it is, it’s even better. And the results in what you see in the first and second plan, the first time we’ve actually started holding a cash position in our balance sheet despite the high our capital expenditure. And when you get that right, after a period of punishment from the market, we’ve really come a long way back to regaining our losses, and we’re certainly in the front of the pack again as far as geographic performance goes and we – but no doubt, as we continue to deliver on our plan that we should remain with the leaders in the pack. Again, thank you very much for coming. We’d be delighted to take your questions either here formally and then we’re going to open the call further, have a glass of wine and have a talk with us and we can carry on, get into the Q&A.
Unidentified Analyst
(inaudible) with Citi. I want to say congratulations on a superior result. You touched on your – the – of Massawa. Could you just put any color on that? And what about with that?
Dennis Mark Bristow
Yes it’s refractory and we’re ready as best choices for fresh oxidation process. We’ve done all the first work and had worked with – the fresh oxidation is the way to go. We get up to 90% recovery on that process. The challenge is that it’s located an area we have to use diesel car and so that expensive and we’ve been looking at different ways to bring in to account. There are two big hardware stations in plan. One, only 50 kilometers away but it’s far, which would change the economics of that deposit. At the same time on the offsite zone, it’s very good methodology, it works really well and so the point is if you look at after shares new loss, we’re in a very similar taking and we feel like we could save the best more time in geology just a note and in fact some of them potentially. It’s a 3 million ounce ore body, it’s relatively good grade up at – and it certainly process our full-bed $800 load but doesn’t quite get to the 20% return that is what we look for.
Unidentified Analyst
I’m (inaudible). Just a question on Gounkoto, and also the Yalea the purple path. What is there to say that there it’s not a repeat of those shoot at depth. Have you done any deeper drilling that indicates or if you got plans for deeper drilling on the honey pot?
Dennis Mark Bristow
Basically in Gounkoto that’s real and that’s what we’re looking at because if you look on stock Gounkoto has big ores there. We followed Gounkoto is one that if you follow the history of Gounkoto, when we followed it, we thought, wow. Then we built in the middle over here and it dropped down Then we found an offset in this and we continued. So it’s got the southern zone and then a sort of a tighter zone which is lower grade and then you have the northern zone. And those – if you look – if you flip that around and you look a bit and you have offsets in the same direction, which is geologically quite feasible and it’s a real potential. And as we build for Faraba – remember, Faraba is part of T64. We’re still wrestling with the structure. So that’s – we’ve pretty – I mean we’ve got lots of time to get our head around it and that’s what Paul’s view is. And we’ll – should be pulled down. The same as in Yalea. As soon as we established that depth and the underground, we’ll go because we built out 800 meters. But we’ll step back from underground and have another crack at that. We haven’t closed a bit.
Unidentified Analyst
Thank you.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi, Mark. One was clearly to, just three questions. Firstly on Morila, the Trailings retreatment. Can you give us an idea of the scale it’s going to be?
Dennis Mark Bristow
Earlier, we’ve got 50,000 ton capacity. That’s about something that’s through – it about three years. Right John? And you got 50,000 ounces. NTV is around 150 million at $900 gold breakeven. Because the underground we’re looking more at $1,200 gold basis, I mean not withstanding other pushback and it’s $17 million pushback and regarding the 70% of the revenue and we should see it more equally in.
Unidentified Analyst
Thanks. The second question just on Gounkoto the underground. I mean does it shaping up do you think you’re going to bring the underground development forward at the Gounkoto underground operation?
Dennis Mark Bristow
That’s something that we’ll have – once again, plenty time to do – look at as part of the study, inside of study this quarter, I mean not this quarter this year. By the end of the year we would have looked at that, how do we actually schedule that and very high grade and – but on last mine and we’re pretty sure to pull another one up say before we get – so, just how you manage it. That’s the key for us to – 3.6 million tons a year to 4 million tons a year. At Loulo’s it’s a good number when you look at the stock, the grade. It has a good – plus 500,000 ounce for the year, we’re happy with that.
Unidentified Analyst
It doesn’t seem probably it’s going to be down? Is that correct?
Dennis Mark Bristow
Yes. Once we’ve got the third mine, we’re bulletproof.
Grant Sporre
Hi, Grant Sporre from Deutsche Bank. Just two question follow-up on Gounkoto. The first one is I think you said you’re still in discussions with the government in terms of – does that include things like the obvious tax holiday that you normally get? That hasn’t been decided or agreed on yet.
Dennis Mark Bristow
I think the principle is that there’s a bank holiday. How long it is the point that we are devising with the government. We developed Loula into the 1991 code. Subsequent to that, there’s a 1999 code and there’s now a draft 2011 code. Under our license, we have a right to acquire tax relief on a new project, on a substantial project. What we’ve and we presented that to governments where we’re right in the middle of negotiations of German holiday losses and we’re making good progress on that and I think the principle is accepted. If I were to summarize it, it’s too funny. Whether it’s going to be three years or five years or somewhere in between, we’re negotiating there. But the results that we presented are attuned with – to say but we haven’t – as we point out in our display so we haven’t used that. The other thing too is that we’re arguing with the government, the tax rate in Morila is 35%. This is the highest in West Africa and we’re lobbying to get them to align themselves with the rest of the region, which our next old part and remember, we’re a big revenues earner for the treasury so all of that is part of the debate. And unlike some people say it’s because everyone else is deep enough on negative. We’ve actually show you that when you pay real money, they understand that there are possibilities. They’re partners are enough to keep the thing. The debate now is how do we collectively make their investments and what we’ve said is we’ve offered them – we fund their 20% in Loulo. But Loulo hasn’t paid dividends yet because we were keeping (inaudible). But Gounkoto as a standalone has an opportunity to start a little bit early because it’s got very limited sample and a very strong cash flow. So there’s – the last just sort of debate we had with the – the Ministry of Mines has signed off on our strategy where we’re at the moment dealing with the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Tax.
Grant Sporre
Thank you. Just to follow up on Gounkoto just lumping on technical. Using mobile crushing equipment at the moment, crushing should be quite a simple operation but there are directly in the gold space but it has had problems with crushing equipment specifically on certain suppliers. You’re not concerned about that at all?
Dennis Mark Bristow
No. I think we’re – I mean we’ve gone the big tender crushing – and the toughest foundations is those towards the front end of the plant because it’s important and we’ve got those crushers in our operations. They’re pretty tough. And we have – my experience in crushing is when you look at how much you’re going to put in the front end of the plant. Yes.
Grant Sporre
Thanks very much.
Dennis Mark Bristow
Thank you
Unidentified Analyst
(inaudible) did much exploration did inform the fact that you’ve started doing non-near mine exploration, but presumably, exploration has been on hold while it is being...
Dennis Mark Bristow
It was in – the only effect is on the immediate which is passed on with the radio around the plant. And we’ve done some drilling and we’ve been looking at just putting up some of the satellites and we’re on a bit of public generation. So we’re trying all in the very bleak at the bottom because we’re being on the stuff we know. But now, with the return to normality, we control that zone, that whole Tongon zone and we also control the Budiali Belt, which is parallel for the wide arm of the same structure. And now, we started raining out those, what we’re doing is, at the moment, is work shopping where we had left off and reestablishing those in. And we’ve got a number of applications, very good applications that have been outstanding because of the paralysis that followed the conflict. And we’re really keen to get that lifted. We’re also cleaning up a lot of our permits of course, under force majeure. We’re cleaning that up. So by the time we come out of the rains in October and November, we’ll be ready to reestablish in the field. We definitely got some very good young geologists. We’ve moved there are boring geologists into the other projects and bring them into the countries. So that’s exactly right. You can look to quite a substantial peak up in our exploration efforts in – both around the mine and also in the whole part of the country, Northern part of the country.
Unidentified Analyst
What’s the sort of staff complements in growing like how this will attract people across the whole Board?
Dennis Mark Bristow
I think the key is, easy to attract people, how do you affect the right people? This was – one of my biggest challenges is being, is our culture and to keep entrepreneurial – we don’t have a head office. We do have a head office that three people are getting busy update and what somehow. And the concept of getting people to drive to the problem, and if you look at it and people say directly last January some of our shareholders were saying Mark how you going to manage – 18-months on, we’ve got a brand new mine with over 1,000 employees in Tongon from scratch, and 90% of the process people are. We trained them to Morila. So we didn’t go and just steal from other people, we actually trained them. And with all the key positions in the mine are held by our own people of which 50% are because we’ve trained them. So we have that and the same with Kibali. More than 50% of the Kibali managements today are Congolese. We’ve gone and in fact our guys are down at the Katanga doing an employment drive right now where we put out achieve these things different national to get a real and that my passion is and we’ve been able to do that if you look at the underground now, all our key operators are, backed up by some Ghanaians and some very in the form of rock mechanics and ventilation and skills like that. And then I think we’ve got the engineer, the construction engineers our team. So, we’ve been able to pay out of that existing capacity. And it’s been rewarding to do that. On the corporate side, the new – we’ve got – John’s built a much bigger team. It’s got three big capital projects. Graham’s team has grown substantially, because that’s the control of the systems that we needed as we get bigger. On the technical side, we broaden say the value who’s our executive for underground – for all mining. He’s mining engineer. But there is – we pushed the growth of the team to the operation while they have a better quality first in that three more head office. And I’m very happy with that and our biggest driver is being what we call integration in other word for teams to be able to operate or to take somebody out. And lots are shooting the executive level. And we’re – must better off against our own integration strategy than we were a year ago. And it’s being misguided that the team operates smoothly. We haven’t the challenge is not to get people, the challenge is to get right people and we need to find people that have the passion to work we’re after now culture rather than keeping the head of and then worry about company cost.
Unidentified Analyst
First of all congratulations Mark, great quarter, with the diesel? You’re hopping after the grid soon. I just want to make I missed it probably what you said about $3 million per month. Is that additional – additional cost as a result of diesel?
Dennis Mark Bristow
The cost of power for – to get it right as it advance in technology, $2 million is the cost of power. Its diesel extra diesel cost. Okay. If you look at that – if you look at the cost of power on a direct basis that cost is could about $0.36 $0.37 a kilowatt hour it’s going to come down to 10 to round numbers off. So you expect that equivalent reduction of that $2 million.
Unidentified Analyst
So in other words, cost will go down when you hook up to the grid that is coming imminently.
Dennis Mark Bristow
It will go down to I don’t know about 600,000 from 2 million and our total cost in (inaudible) is about $7.5 million and then the extra cost will add another 7.5 million for the quarter and another 6 million of diesel. You see on going oils worth because of the grid it makes it a really. With diesel power you got to have a better grade – grade and this all cost here. Look, that’s all going out of the window its $1,600 combined with grid pie is between $450 and $500 (inaudible).
Unidentified Analyst
And there’s a follow-up. I mean, the thing that strikes me if I look at all of your operating mines and nearby that you’ve got an embarrassment of geological targets all around them. Is that the focus of all of your activities or are you looking at the very early stage (inaudible).
Dennis Mark Bristow
Well, we’ve really got – and eight years to find some copper that’s only 20 kilometers away. So we really – we worked hard. Every time I think we’ve redone the data there as in Loulo probably five times, Paul? Five times? Every time we’ve done it, we found something. And so, it’s a big – and we’ve always said let’s start it already, end up in country. We want to find elephants, and if you look at the footprints we’ve got – that’s why in Massawa, we’re reluctant to walk away from it. It’s geologically very attractive as big systems. We can see the fluid and gold in the system and just sort of find the right setting to find the deposit. The same Northern Ivory Coast. Exactly the same. Kibali is just a ringer. When we saw it – when we went to do that due diligence 2006, we were –- that we wanted that. And we’re now looking – and so we look at – we’ve got probably 75% of our exploration as one would call Brownfield, 25% is Greenfield, but all within our own tenement. And then we’ve got real generative work that work. And that, we’re really looking at sub-continental models within the Tongon Central Africa Republic, Southern Sudan, relooking at the home belt from Mozambique we do that. That’s how we found, we put part of that, if we go back to our quarterlies we were talking CAR, Northeastern Congo and we put a whole geology map together, I mean, we have to look at it. But that was in the early 2000. So if you look at the world addresses for multi-million ounce discoveries, it’s West Africa, Central Africa this is Eastern three places to find mega deposits over the place.
Unidentified Analyst
The last one, underground mining has been a learning curve compared to where you were, say, four months ago? How far along are you in that learning curve, are you 75% way there? 90% there.
Dennis Mark Bristow
Yes, we’re at the stage where we have plans and we feel confident in what – with our own plan and you stepped with the engineers and they know what they’re doing and we’ve been able to transfer that to Kibali. And we’re comprehensively ahead of the curve as far as underground mining in Africa goes without a doubt. Because there’s no one else has made it work and we still haven’t made losses. That’s the point to go takeaway is that if you – the only other big underground mine in Africa is Agbarabo hasn’t made a profit for a very long time. And we’re dealing with low grade, but once we get into the real (inaudible). So for us the big challenge now is as far as up and running we’ll be slow in building up our mineable reserves in Yalea because one of the things that’s in the studies is we want 100% inspection in the Purple Patch. So we’re going to mine plus about 30% to 40%, we’ll expect. We’ll leave 60% to 70% and then it’s going to take us a year to 18 months to get the backpull system where we want to get it because we’ve really got to go full backpull where you can work under the backpull. We’ve done all the test work. John’s busy with the processing. And so, then we’ll – but once we commission that backpull, you’ll have an instant step-up in available mineable reserve in Yalea. And then really, we’re not under pressure. So we’ll be putting a lot of effort in the development because mine that way, you’ve got to have and a still keep your reserves intact. That’s our build-up. So the point I’ll make is that there’s going a tightness in the next couple of quarters but we’re targeting to break the 100,000 ounces in Quarter 3 and we’ll – it should be about 140,000 ounces in Quarter 4. And we’ve got some upside to that. And we can manage it with Gounkoto, but we are managing a steady improvement to the sort of steady in the Loulo/Gounkoto complex. So we’re at a stage where we’re not – and we’ve got another option and that’s – we’ve got that 6-gram oxide ore at Yalea South we talked about before. These process is a winner. And we’ve looked at (inaudible) should we strip that will give us a whole lot of flexibility, especially our ore on the surface. It’s high grade and so we’re running a study at the moment through those three prospects and the Yalea South prospect along with the build-up in the purple patch in Gara. We’ve got some flexibility, as we’ve always had. The big challenge has been great in July, had picked up last year, didn’t get a February.
Unidentified Analyst
In terms of from (inaudible), just on the purple patch while you’re talking about it. Is that something you’d maximize to accelerate the cash flows now? Or is this something you’re going to leave and go back to every time you got to make call on for?
Dennis Mark Bristow
No. You’ve got to optimize the ore body to exploit it so you’ll see as we roll out the development and the access as we cut through it, and we mine with a long strife we could see from that with a 6 kilogram ore. So your access, you need to balance it out. Repeat for 10 years, about 700,000, about 500,000 ounces goes up to 700,000 ounces – for about 10 years. So there’s a long – we should be around that 450, 500 after that for some time.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. Another question, you alluded to it earlier but as I walked across here there was a news flash talking about Randgold and Russia and another. Are you (inaudible) something? That’s not on your long-term...
Dennis Mark Bristow
We’ve been there, done that. I’ve always said, 5 to 10 years, we should be in Russia if the situation is right. Remember, our criteria is, as far as risk goes, first of all, you’ve got to have (inaudible). And the big challenge in Russia is you get it, you have exploration in the last month, the sales were up. It’s always been a lot of – we’ve had discussion in the past with every Russian player looking – we’ve looked at every single Russian project. Archeologists know Eastern Siberia as well as they know Central Africa. But we have no intent of starting up a Russian division of Randgold Resources in the near term but we certainly learned a lot. And every bank is trying to get us today with (inaudible). I think I’ve already been.
Unidentified Analyst
I was wondering what the changes then over the last year as to your deliverables on equipment and supply, and whether there’s been significant delays from your order term. And the second of all, whether there’s been any port capacity constraints that are developing because of all the Western activities?
Dennis Mark Bristow
Yes. We’ve had – really, we’ve had nothing immaterial yet. Regarding on this field, regarding very well – I mean, Tongon great. We’ve got 2008 – to everyone else on a whole lot other types of orders. That was good for us. On the, it is the partner, Caterpillar, but it’s also northeast. Caterpillar’s northeast and they’re going to lose their market share because the Japanese are there and their equipment is getting as good as Caterpillar’s and it’s cheaper. And they’ve got a real commitment to back it up with service. And it’s all about service in Africa because of the long supply chain and lead chain. So, we’ve actually put Caterpillar on notice. We’re the biggest supplier of Caterpillar in West Africa. And we are looking at other suppliers. Like all our shovels are leader and the big shovel and we’ll manage that, but at this stage, Caterpillar through our partners, we don’t have a problem getting delivery. On the other side has been easy – the other – we were very fortunate with the position. It’s been our engineers and angular gold engineers we found the gold here in Gwanda and we done that – we just finished all the x-rays on that on Gwanda. Gwanda is a big thing, it’s a three year delay. and I believe (inaudible). It’s one of the South African other than (inaudible). Thank you very much.