Barrick Gold Corporation

Barrick Gold Corporation

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Barrick Gold Corporation (ABR.DE) Q1 2013 Earnings Call Transcript

Published at 2013-05-03 17:00:00
Mark Bristow
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to quarter one 2013 updates. I think I'm going to start with just pointing out, in case you haven't notice that the recent sudden correction in the gold price brought the market back to us with a bit of a bump. And more importantly, I believe its hammering home, a point I've been making for years, and this is that in the gold mining industry it's a long-term business and planning on that basis is essential. Selectively, the industry fails to make most of the long bull run that we've experienced over the last 10 years, and is now concerned for its survival, as the stress of a downturn thought fears everyone in the face. When times were good, the obsession with cash cost, the favoring of quantity over quality of assets, and the weakness for bad deals hamstrung the industry's ability to deliver real value. And I think we've from time to time covered those topics at this forum. And so no wonder, many gold companies and fund managers are now facing the prospect of further price correction with trepidation. And I'm sure in the question-and-answer we'll talk a little bit about it, the gold price. On other hand, hopefully I'll able to demonstrate to you today that we at Randgold Resources can continue to concentrate on creating and delivering value, because we've always been run as a business for the long-term and mining by its very nature is a long-term business. Our strategy remains intact, and when the price dropped, you'll see and hopefully I'll demonstrate that through the presentation, we reacted as one should and as over the past two-and-a-half weeks reviewed the plans of each operation and project, made some adjustments where necessary, as I'll explain later. And it's on the back of these reviews that we are able to stand here out today and reinforce our guidance of the steady increase in production and improved cost looking ahead, despite the relatively soft start to the year. And as is customary, we'll start off the quarter reporting with our sustainability outlook. We had a really good quarter this last quarter on safety. We had no lost time injuries in any of our operation, which is a no new fee, given where we operate. And the Kibali project showed a big improvement in its lost time injury frequency rate. And this is a big industrial operation in a very remote part of the world, and many of our workers in Kibali have never worked before. So it's a big achievement to the management team there. We continued with our relocation program apace moving a further 350 households in the quarter. And we also progressed with our certification of our various operations with Loulo, and both Loulo and Gounkoto being certified compliance on safety and environmental management respectively. During the quarter, we also published our annual reserve and resource updates and is worth pointing out that, when we published it we pointed to the market two things, we kept our $1,000 an ounce gold price, which we calculation and do our mine planning. And we were able to replace the reserves we mined in the record year last year. And more importantly, showed a slight increase in grade. And at the time, there were some commentators that said, where are the ounces, there was no growth in ounces, but failed to see the fact is that we kept the quality, and today given the gold production you can see why we did it, because the gold price hasn't gone up in the last two years materially, and there is no reason to look at the gold price at which one calculates the reserves. And this is a pictorial review of our reserve and resource profile. I'm also confident and you've seen us lift our exploration efforts over the last couple of months, and I am confident that our continued exploration efforts will continue to add quality ounces to our asset base. And in particular, the advancement of Gounkoto, we'll be updating you, underground is one of those. And again you'll see from this graph, we've been able to add reserves in Kibali and we've made huge progress in our understanding of the Kibali portfolio and the geology, and we are very excited about the potential to continue to add quality ounces at Kibali. As I've already touched on production and profit for this year, for this quarter fell short of our guidance, part of it plans as we guided last quarter in the decrease in grade mine at Gounkoto. And part of that unplanned was the lower recoveries from processing the Yalea South pushback ore in the quarter, which has now come to an end. But just to remind you, we decided to go back and fetch some ounce of high grade, ounces that contain copper in the old Yalea pit. We've managed to get that done and we've been able to process it at the higher gold price, and with it came, we were aware of the impact this will have on recovery such as last quarter was 3% lower than what we had forecast, which impacted on our current and also of course impacted on the cash cost. Have I lost the connection? So just along with the lower gold price and larger than usual amount of gold unsold at the end of the quarter impacted on Loulo-Gounkoto complexes performance, which also reflected in the group's results. It is encouraging to know that by March Loulo-Gounkoto grade production and recoveries were improving, and I'll show you some graphs to that effect later on. Also really encouraging is that Tongon listed its gains and it had a tough operating year last year. We pointed what we were planning to do, to deal with those challenges and it's pleasing to see that's coming through in the results, and again more of it later. And of course Kibali made steady progress, and today we're going to share with you our plan to bring that commissioning forward a little. And I always say, in mining, you shouldn't be able to just cut cost, because if you can, the question should be asked, why didn't you have it in there in the first place? But it is possible to re-plan businesses in lights of different assumptions and we have certainly done that, and I'll take you through that through the course of the presentation. In line with our partnership philosophy, we continue to engage constructively with our host government in review of their mining codes, and we led the industry in humanitarian support for Mali, which is still suffering from the strife in the northern part of the country, albeit that we're seeing material progress towards normalizing that country. And we are confident that over the next couple of quarters, we'll be gearing up to elections and reinstatement of an elected government in that country, which is important for us and also for the people of Mali. Turning to the numbers, they speak for themselves. As already stated, production was down a little more than we expected, largely because of lot of recoveries. And the other point that a lot of people don't get is that if you look at, the first thing look at gold sales, and then go down to gold produced and gold sold. You'll see that there is a 20,000 ounce swing last quarter. We sold 10,000 ounces more gold than we produced and this quarter we sold 10,000 less, because we don't cut off exactly at the end of the quarter, we just produce the gold, certainly intra-year. But at the end of the year, you'll see gold sold and gold produced comes close, because it's important to tie up the year at the end, but we don't rearrange our shipping schedules to perfectly align with the quarter. So that in fact is about $80 million on the revenue and about $35 million of assets. 19,500 ounces we had in the vault at the time of the end of the quarter. We usually have about 9,000 or 10,000 ounces, so that rolls through and it will come through on the profit next quarter. As I think to help you through, from quarter three to quarter four you saw the same sort of effect. And then the other impact on profit is that we spent $6 million more on exploration, because we're in the exploration season and it's a natural change in the burn rates of our exploration. And then we showed quarter-on-quarter $50 increase in cost, which we guided to because of the way we're accounting the development at the underground mines, moving some of our original capital into operating cost. We've always been focused and trying to make sure our total cash cost are real total cash cost related to producing a bar of gold. And if you look at it year-on-year, similar quarter and last quarter, the cash cost is up by $100, largely because last year this time Tongon was still processing upside and we've got a bigger impact on the underground contribution this quarter compared to last quarter with comes at a higher cost. The rest is really driven by grade and we've been a company that never tried to manage the grade, we mine the orebodies as we access them. Moving then to Loulo-Gounkoto, this is a snapshot of the complex performance for the quarter. And as I have pointed out already, the drop in average grade and recoveries reduced gold production and pushed up the titled cash cost per ounce. The Gara underground mine, however, achieved record tons and meters, and Yalea established its first secondary stope as we advanced the interim backfill program and to further upgrade of the processing plants, to ensure that we can keep at that higher throughput rate and still achieve the recovery is making good progress. These are the results, which clearly show the effect of the grade and recovery that I referred to. And now that Yalea South pushback is over, the average recovery is moving back into the 90s, and I'll show a little graph just to demonstrate that just now. The numbers also effect the change in accounting rules as I've already referred to you and as we guided in some details last quarter On its own, Loulo did relatively well, as you can see here, and continued to deliver a robust underground performance. The decrease in tons mined is due to the completion of the pushback and the increase in cost is mainly attributable to the recovery from the Yalea ore and also the accounting changes I've already referred to for the underground operation. As a quick update on the underground mines, which are now both settling down well, as part of the group wide business plan, you will seen in the report. We reviewed the mine plan at Loulo particularly with reference to the underground scheduling. We took out some of the capital developments and matched it closer to the production in ore. And the net result of that is we were able to remove $20 million worth of capital in the underground developments. And to reduced the amount of ore we put on stockpile by focusing on what we call mine-to-mill, so what we mine, we put in the mill. The impact of that was a slightly lower grade forecast for the year and that impacts on that 30,000 adjustments in the guidance from 590,000 to 560,000. We do have a capacity to recover some of that, as we commission the expansions in the plants, at the backend of the year it will give us some flexibility, and if we did it all right, we'll be able to step up a little bit on the throughput. And we've got some variability in the Gounkoto orebody, which I'll touch on later, which again as we move from the lower grade part to the higher grade part there's some granularity in the detail for of mining scale level. And we could get better grades than what we're forecasting, at the same time we could get slightly lower grades. And so that's also why we mined it to just give that recap on the guidance. This graph just talking about our change in plan and this is what we've done. As you'll see that we've taken out a bit of overall funds and in particular a slight drop in the ore tons mined, but we're going to process it all and a slight increase in the overall mine grade. But again, because we're not going to selectively feed the plant, the plant feeds rate will come down just a bit from that, the sort of adjustments in the grade I'm talking about is about 0.17 times per ton. And just talking about the Yalea South pit, this is good, it just illustrates that as we increase the feed, and remember when we decided to push back and take the resource at that time into reserve and process it, we reminded the market that it would come with a lower recovery, and that you can see how it relates. As we build up the percentage of feed, so the recovery came down. And as we run out of the Yalea South ore, the recovery has gone back to the 90s. It was a great little effort that had two objectives, one is we made profits out of it, which is fundamentally important. And the second is it gave us some breathing space to continue to catch up on the underground development and pushback the Gounkoto pit, which we had mined into a top position over the last few quarters with the slower buildup of the underground. And we are back in sequence now, and at the same time we've got the Yalea ore through the mills, when the gold price is still about $1,600 gold, so it worked out perfectly. In the meantime, the optimization of the Loulo power plant on the back of the successful commissioning last year of the third mill is continuing on schedule, and this is just giving a timeline of how we're scheduling those incremental improvements. Really focusing on CIL capacity resident time with their expert throughput, knowing that we're going into these higher grade orebodies in the underground mine and make sure that we do get that recovery and keep it up at 90% or thereabout. Turning now to Gounkoto, where the reduced tonnage was attributable. As I pointed out, there is some catch up on waste mining and we shifted the mine plan this quarter to softer ore. We had a breakdown in the crushing circuits and we just had to rearrange the feed program, while we fix the crushing circuit. Tonnage and grade are both expected to increase in line with plan, and the next three quarters we'll see big step-ups, in particular the last quarter as we exit the higher grade portion of the southern orebody in the Gounkoto pit. It's worth noting that in spite of the past quarter's drop in profit, Gounkoto remains a highly lucrative operation. It declared two dividends over the last couple of months, a $65 million dividend in March this year and another $20 million last quarter. And we have reached agreement with the Mali government that we'll pay off the money as we make it. And Gounkoto is important for us and as you can imagine important for the other shareholder as well. And Gounkoto has paid back its capital, it's profitable, it goes into tax in June. And we need that money, because we've got capital programs to spend it on both at Loulo and of course in Kibali. These are the Gounkoto standalone results, which I think we've pretty much covered. So looking ahead as part of our business review, we also took a million BCM cubic meters out of the Gounkoto mine plant, but kept the strip ratio about the same. Again focusing the management team into mine-to-mill and not letting them manipulate the grade and stockpile some of the lower grade, and that's the impact I referred to earlier. And I just reiterate that Gounkoto is still full costing to improve tonnage as well as grade over the next few quarters, as you can see in this graph. Again, you see the mining grade is slightly higher than the last plan, but slightly lower tonnage and we're going to process all that grade. We also plan this year to take part of that more of the stockpile 2.5 gram orebody just to manage the whole process and that all translates into our focus being cash flow rather than working profit, because as you know we're in a big capital program this year and we want to make sure that we get to our next big step which is commissioning of the Kibali project, where we'll start and really building our cash balance again. And just spending a bit of time on the grade distribution in the Gounkoto pit, this is the $1,000 an ounce Gounkoto pit. You'll see where the current pit floor is, and you can see how we've been mining through a lot of granular grade, good and bad grade. But as we go deeper, it slowly transforms into high grade, the red, the hot color. And so as we deepen that pit, so we will access more and more steady higher grade material. We'll get to 5 gram feed at the backend of this year from the Gounkoto pit, so average reserve grade is about 5 gram. So it goes without saying that if we've been mining 3.5, the residual grade starts improving and that's what we see. And that's why we were able to announce the higher grades in our reserve declaration as well. Work on the Gounkoto underground project continues through the quarter and the preliminary economic assessment, which I'll give you a summation of in the next slide, has certainly confirmed its viability. Drilling is continuing to concentrate on converting the remained inferred material to indicated category. We are slightly behind on that and that's why we're presenting an economic assessment rather than a prefeasibility study today, because we've still got too many ounces in third category. We've got about four to five holes still to drill that would convert that resource. What is interesting is some of these higher grades, particularly the hole 3A3 on the right, where you've got the super high grade and it looks like that orebody is there something driving it on a horizontal basis, very much like a purple patch rather than on a vertical basis, which we had initially and separated it. So that's why we feel that it needs a bit more time to really bank this reserve to be able to be comfortable with the grade and tonnage plan for the final feasibility, which remains targeted for the end of this year, because we want to start with our development plans in 2014. It's not in our business plan at the moment, it's just underground mine. This is the summary of the economic assessment for the Gounkoto underground. Again, the quality of the engineering is that of prefeasibility stage, it's just the classification of the resource that still keeps it under our definition as a preliminary economic assessment. You can see it's a very robust project and the big focus for us is we used an outside engineering firm to schedule the mining, and they came up with $82 a ton. We are mining at under $60 at Loulo. So we believe we can improve on it. The big focus is exactly how we engineer the backfill for this mine, because as you know there is no processing plant in Gounkoto. And what they designed into this plan is to generate backfill on a standalone basis at Gounkoto with crushers and processing, there is a waste dump. And we think we can improve on that by returning the empty trucks with material from Loulo, that's transport ore there. So there is opportunity to improve on the costing. We were pretty confident that by the time we finish taking it to the next level, it will meet our investment criteria, as you know at 20% IRR at a $1,000 long-term gold price. In the Senegal-Mali shear zone, looking for extensions to known structures and in particular looking below the Falémé River alluvials, which is where we found Gounkoto. And we remained very bullish on this corridor as we progressed some of these targets and we really do believe that there is potential to add to our reserve by substantially add to our reserve base from this exploration program, and this is just two particular. On the left-hand one is the Gara South project. You'll see there is very distinct and IP anomaly trending northwest or from bottom-right to top-left of the diagram. We've got some RC house in there, we just put some trenches in, we've build a few holes, and we're ready for the results, but certainly we can see the mineralization, and we're quite excited about the potential of this project. And likewise, the work the team has been doing on the southern extensions of the Yelea structure within the Loulo permit. Just on an aside, one thing we haven't done is cut exploration budgets and we have no intention to do that. This is the time where we go out and really build our portfolio. We've always been a company that's driven value through discovery and developments. And our biggest competitors have been the juniors getting in our road on consolidating big land packages. And you would have seen recently, we've picked up joint ventures with juniors and used this opportunity in the market to expand our footprint within the chosen target areas across Africa. Talking about exploration and project, let's just move across to Massawa, where we have made good progress with the infill drilling. Massawa is a very complex orebody. Its extensive seven kilometers of continuous mineralization. It's got lots of gold grade. It's very complex. It's refractory. So it requires special oxidation to process it. And we were struggling to really understand the gold deportment. We went back this last quarter and drill 150 meters strike in the central zone on a five-by-five meter basis to test continuity and build more resolution in our model. And the net result of that is we were able to separate multiple, but narrow orebodies and significantly higher grade. And so now we're going to the northern part of the pits, and next, the right-hand white block, and we're going do the same there. Our plan is to take this project to a bankable feasibility level by the end of next year. And whether it fits our criteria or not, we're adding value in this project. One of the other big drivers, as I've talked about in the past, is the importance of accessing cheaper power. If you get hydropower $0.10, $0.12 power into Massawa, it makes the decision for taking this project to the next level very easy. And we are engaged with both the Senegalese authorities and the Malian authorities, and looking for power solutions. It not only benefits to the power project, but it will have a big impact on the cost at Loulo as you can imagine. And down the road from Massawa, building on from my comments about expanding our footprint, we recently entered into a venture with GoldStone Resources, and this is in line with our policy of expanding our footprint as I discussed earlier. And we're certainly hunting more of these opportunities. And our big focus is being the Sabodala Belt on the transcurrent shear zone, the boundary between the belts and the basin. And then, of course sustainable Malian shear and then northern Côte d'Ivoire, I'll come back to that, and then our focus on northeastern DRC. Those are four big projects that we are focused in on. Back in Mali, Morila continue to perform and deliver better than planned again, albeit down on last quarter as we move from mining lower grade stockpiles to mineralized waste. We're still making profits as you can see. And I think the big news of the past quarter is that after intensive lobbing by management and the unions, the government agreed to waive its royalties on the pit pushback, thus securing us economic viability for another two years, before we go ahead with the processing of the tailings. This project started this week, it actually I think start today and it will continue for just under two years. And it's a very good example of how the way we manage our social license with our various stakeholders across our operations. This is a results of Morila, just reinforcing the point I made, you see the grades come down. And this is a big learning curve for us, because it mineralized waste running at one point toward the results of high grading and orebody, and we find out that the stuff you thought was mineralized waste still got grade in it. So we've been living of that, an early inefficiency in our stockpiling strategy at Morila for the last couple of years. And the cost is well constrained, given the grade. It's a very efficient operation. This is probably our best management team in our portfolio. Moving out to Tongon, where the recovery that was evident towards the end of last year has been sustained with important improvements across the board. The operation is also now recovered from the fire in December, and with the power stabilizing, mill throughputs and recoveries have increased, enabling the mine to boost gold production. There's room for further improvements. These are respectable set of numbers considering, where the management teams come from and all the arrows are pleasingly pointing in the right direction. The Tongon team is continuing its drive to get the operation up to its feasibility levels, and of course keep it there. And there is a strong focus on process optimization and the plant additions and enhancements planned for the later half of this year, which include a crusher upgrade and a new gravity circuit are expected to help deliver increased throughputs and continued improvements in recoveries as we go through the next couple of quarters. Just as an aside, Tongon is one where there's no ability to cut cost, because the real focus is to improve efficiencies, fuel the production and get the cost down and focus on profitability. So that business review is really focusing on that delivery. And we've talked about this, a couple of quarters, now you recall in quarter three we stumbled with the access to the grid power. It pushed up our power cost up substantially and you can see as we've got on safe power utility improved the blue being the access to the grid power and the gold being the use of diesel in the form of generating power. And as we've improved that availability and access are largely driven by the capacitor banks recently installed to regulate the power supply and cut out some of the very short power hiccups, which triggered power interruptions in the plant. And once you get the plant stable, then you can focused on operational issues. And so we expect this to continue to improve. Our target's being that we want to get down to 98% grid utilization by July that was our target we set with you in quarter four last year. In the meantime exploration continues, both at mine level as well as at near-mine and greenfield targets across northern Côte d'Ivoire. And that's the mine we plan to further test below the pits to convert inferred answers to measure and indicate it. The importance being that we lifted the base of the pit, because of the increased cost when we redesigned the reserves this last year. And that's driven because of the inefficiencies in the business. If we can improve those efficiencies, we'll drop the cost and we'll push the pit back down. And we just want to make sure that the gold is in a measure and indicated level of detail, so that it will come into reserve. So that's a very easy target and one that we'll be measuring ourselves against over the next couple of quarters. At Boundiali, the team is preparing to drill five priority targets, along the context between the volcanic and the sediments, and further afield we were able to add two new permits to our portfolio, and also the force majeure restrictions that we had on a number of our permits as part of dealing with the issues through the civil war period have now been lifted. And we've reached agreement with the government as they've given us an extra three years to be able to continue to evaluate those permits. So I've often said that we regard Cote d'Ivoire as having a high potential for major gold discoveries, largely because it's Berimian, it's got the right geology and it's relatively underexplored even in West African context. And so that's our focus with the review process on the mining code and the government is to ensure that we make that statement that the future of Africa's mining industry is really at the hands of what the government comes up with the new mining code. It's gratifying to hear the President of the country saying that he would like the code to be the most competitive in West Africa, so that's always a nice reference point going forward. Moving east to the DRC, I recently spent 10 days on site with the Kibali team and came back very impressed with the rapid progress this project keeps making. With the mine now taking shape, we've started selecting and mobilizing the team, who will run it. In fact, we've now appointed the general manager and all the heads of department to operate the mine. The general manger, operations, is a man called Cesar (inaudible). He's a Congolese, and not of the 15 heads of departments are also Congolese. Some of them having work for us now for a while in the construction phase and others we have recently introduced them to joining us from the Katanga region with lots of experience. And Katanga skills are very applicable to Kibali, albeit a gold mine rather than a copper mine, because our process plant is full floatation. So it has lots of similarity to sulphate copper operations. I think the other point is that Kibali is another one that we looked at our schedule with the progress that's been made, and in fact, John Steele who is our Head of Capital Projects is here today, so anyone wants to tuck his brains regarding on the details of the schedules there, he is right there. What we looked at is, we're on track and we had originally planned to commission both stream sulphide and oxide during quarter four. What makes sense now that we're at this point is to bring the oxide circuit commissioning forward because we've already got 600,000 tons of 2.76 grams a ton on the ROM pad and we will always only going to start building up the sulphide ore mining in the first part of next year. So we've delayed the detailed commissioning of the sulphide out into January and we've brought the oxide commissioning forward into back-end of September. And with that we run the risk if everything works, so speaking our guidance producing 30,000 ounces out of Kibali and cost of that rescheduling is about $50 million in the cash flow on capital for this year. And what's exciting for us and the challenge we have given the mine management is if we get that gold production in and running, we won't have to spend that money, because the mine will finance it out of its own revenue. So this is a key focus. And that's the way we run our business. And I must say that the management team is ready, committed to that, we've recut all our contracts, engineering contracts to align the contractors with those new key dates and we've recut the bonuses to be able to incentivize them to meet those dates. And we've closed that and we've already started putting the conveyor belts on the oxide circuit. This is a quick update on the various aspects of the projects and we'll start with mining. The open pits has already, as I said produced 600,000 tons and counting of full grade ore, which is stockpiled ahead of the plant. The vertical shaft is now on schedule as you can see there, we have finished the box cuts we've have started to thinking and we're targeting a 180 meters by the end of this year. So it's already on its way. And the contracting guys have done a great job. And another thing about the shaft, we've started it slightly late, we're catching up which is good. The declines are on schedule, in fact slightly ahead of schedule and we're intersecting the first on 2015. Moving on to the process plant, there is a lot happening in this part of the construction as you can see here and everyone is focused on getting that first goal as early as we can in the first quarter. So getting the commissioning up and running and getting the lock up locked up and the gold coming out. And the focus is not to produce the bar of gold by the way. The focus is to produce gold from a processing circuit. Producing bars of gold is pretty easy. The same is true of the infrastructure development. The resource service went off the Nzoro 1 to hydropower station that has been completed and we are now generating hydro power, which is the first in our history and we're on track with the Nzoro 2, the main and the first one of four hydropower stations we'll be building for commissioning so at the back-end of Q1, early Q2 to coincide with the start of the rainy season. And the complex and the sensitive resettlement program as I alluded to earlier is also making steady progress with the relocation ramped up to 95 houses being complete every week. It's a very big project on its own providing for 13 Congolese contractors and there are almost 3,000 employees. We are now starting to manage that. The big social challenge in a big projects like this, we've also found that when you start cutting down on the capital project, and operations starts up, you can never replace all the work force in the operations. And that becomes a social risk. So what we're doing is we're favoring our local employees. We have been through a datametric testing program with all the local employees. We have selected the first 60 peoples who are based on an aptitude or competence to be able to be trained as operators in the plant and other parts of the business. And they are due to leave for a three months training program in our West African operations in the next couple of weeks. And we invest in building our own operating skills, particularly from the local villagers. So that's on track. And while the Kibali capital team forges ahead and the operational team gets ready and moves into a state of what we refer to as operational readiness. The expiration team has made fantastic progress and its advances in the understanding of the geological controls of the various orebodies around Kibali. Continuing exploration as I refer to earlier has already delivered significant additional resource and reserved answers, and there is the very real prospect, we've got visibility of the potential of some of these orebodies and I'm pretty excited about being able to add quite a few more million ounces over the next couple of years through our reserved profile. And a lot of the reserves will come out of expansion of the main KCD, three lots 3,000, 5,000 and 9,000 in all those who are interested in these mineralized orebodies are cigar shapes and to give an idea of the geography, the KCD project deposited about 200 meters wide only and it goes down like a cigar. And there is 10 million ounces in it. So drilling it out is a challenge and it's really about understanding the geological controls and getting your boreholes and understanding what those intersections meet. And our geological team has really made a excellent progress in understanding those controls. So, armed with a better understanding of the geology, what we have done now, is we've been able to step out of the known reserves and look to through the potential, particularly, if you look from KCD on this left hand inset up to Mofu. And there is a whole lot of new cigars that we're starting to define the most advanced one being Rhino deposits that we talked about last quarter. And this particular cigar shape orebody it's about 30 meters wide and every indication is from the initial drilling we've done is this going to be a high grade deposits, and so with that over the next couple of quarters will be fleshing out that and others and as we progress. We've also completely now reviewed all the Motta inventory we both and we're very clear about where we have to go to continue to direct expiration dollars to the right places. As I often say, our exploration portfolio represents our future, which is why we continue to invest efforts, time and money in it. And over the past 10 years, our geologists have had to compete with the host of well-funded juniors, but with the money drying up recently company's in this sector are looking for support, and we're there to support them, certainly those with good addresses. The development has presented us with some interesting opportunities the one being Goldstone that I've already referred to, and the other more recently as well as the JV with Kilo Goldmines, which has provided us with the new package of permits on relatively underexplored, or unexplored, greenstone belt to the West of Kibali. Our generative team over the last quarter has carried out a number of helicopter-based reconnaissance sorties across the area. We already have identified 16 preliminary targets and we are now mobilizing a full on the ground exploration teams to pick up on this project. The point I made, when I started in one of the real differentiators I believe of Randgold relative to its peers has been the financial strength of our company. I have already said I want to be in control of our own destiny and not at the whim of bankers or fund managers, and certainly not have to issue equity under stress. And so that's the driver behind our record review of that project. We have a big capital call this year. We started out to beginning the year at 670. We've managed to trim that down to about $650 million with the savings that we've put in place, all the rescheduling effectively that we've put in place. And this just gives you a view of the all the new business profile and its impact on peak funding because we have our peak funding as this year. And you can see even that $1,400 we've been added to lift that the low plans in our cash balance. We also acquired some bonds with the consortium of banks led by HSBC to put in, which I refer to last quarter a $200 million debt facility. We've made good progress with the syndicates and we're expect to down the settle in terms that detailed documentation that's in the next short while and that will give us further insurance just to be able to manage whatever the market can throw at us in the short term without putting our equity at risk. As you know I've liked to finish of my presentation with some interesting market analysis and this slide is generated by Numis, peaks my interest and that it shows us interesting relation between G&A, spend, and value creation across the industry and certainly supports our thesis that bloated corporate overheads do not offer value for shareholders. And finally I'll conclude as usual with our share price comparison, which shows that even in tough times the market recognizes value and it crease it. We have the asset and the abilities to stay on course and changing circumstances and we weren't be forced to deviate from our proven growth strategy. As I have shown our optimized plan, keeps us within our guidance range and while this plan comes with its own state of challenges, we are confident that we will be able to manage them and we have now secured some extra insurance, I've referred to in the resolving credit facility. So thank you for your attention and be delighted to take any questions.
Alain Gabriel
Can you give us more color on your discussions with the DRC government and the Cote d'Ivoire government on the new mining codes? And, is there anything that worries you with your discussions so far?
Mark Bristow
That has been very engaging and I must we started with DRC, which is a fun place to work in. And as you know there is a leak of a mining code revision back in June last year and then there was a revision tables just a few weeks ago and there was a same document. What is interesting is that we picked up the document and processed it. We run a stand of gold mine reference check, which we had shared with the DRC on a number of occasions, any one who want to listen. And we read it through and if you run it through a gold mine, 3 million ounce gold mine, $400 million, 4 to 1 strip ratio, $700 an ounce. If the gold process at 1,200, DRC would earn under the new code, a 100% of the revenue and the investor would just fund it. So when we shared that with the various ministers, the government, the President, everyone felt that that wasn't fair, understandably. And we pointed out that under the current code, that's part of gold deposits delivers about 50% of the net revenues to government. And what we proposed to a number of senior ministers and the drafting committee and anyone else who wanted to listen, was that maybe they have misconstrued this situation in the Congo and that because I have numbers show that the Congo should be benefiting significantly from the mining industry, and maybe its not the mining code, it's the actual administration of that code and also that a lot of the mining investments in DRC are not actually under the law. There are five shows. They are the deals, conventions and other deals. And that really if you are looking at building on the successes we have seen in the DRC mining industry over the last five years, one should focus on briefing up the administration because the current code is a good code, well written and it's a ready ring DRC sort of 15 out of the top 18 mining destinations in the world. So it's not a highly competitive code, but it is a very comprehensive code and we felt move to invest under that code, and so that's certainly being taken on board. The whole process is being recut and the drafting committee, Ministry of Mines, he Prime Minister has got involved and they are busy in the short list with the World Bank expert to help facilitate the engagement. We have had a number of working groups. We have also spent a lot of time with the copper people because copper in DRC is very different in new investments in places like Oriental Province. And I must say personally I have been very involved in this proceeds. The reaction and the response in engagement is constructive and responsible and again at the end of the day, as we always say to people and not being in Africa for a whole lot, is that the reality of capital rules and confidence that we will come to a new refreshed code and of course position as it should be better, not worse. The adjustments in the gold price has really hit home, in reality because people do know how much this country benefits from money. So I think we've certainly got people aligned, to focus in getting something that's good for all stakeholders. An equally in Cote d'Ivoire we've made excellent progress. We've dealt with the windfall effect. We dealt with the whole lot of pretty cool issues, short term sort of trying to harvest and the big challenge in Africa is there is no industry to harvest. And the President is a big global economist and he understands the importance of these direct investments. So again, we have gone through a number of iterations and we're awaiting the next draft to be shared with the collective industry, and we'll work it. And we've been assured that it will be a constructive engagement, finally, and it will go through Parliament, as well. So for those who have grabbed onto this rule by decree we've been assured that is the day-to-day stuff, that their President isn't not intended to utilize that power to railroad a big piece of legislation like the mining code go through.
Grant Sporre
Sorry, some boring accounting questions. Just on the tax rate, it seemed quite lower in the first quarter, just on guidance on what we should expect for this year. And sorry, second question just on CapEx, could you just give us how much, I thinks, around $400 million you've still got to spend this year, but if you could just give us some guidance on that, that will be great?
Mark Bristow
On the tax, the lower taxes because Morila is coming off and it was our biggest tax payer in the group on a consolidated basis. Tongon has still got a tax holiday, the five-year tax holiday. Loulo is in tax. It's paying minimum tax, because it's still recouping it's cash flow. But we have to pay a minimum tax. Gounkoto will come into tax 30% of profits from June onwards. So that the tax will pick up for the year. I mean, if you got a feel on percentages. Graham?
Graham Shuttleworth
It really depends on your gold consumption. We do expect that at the moment our tax rate ranges, between, 10% to 15% most effectively, whilst we're in these tax holidays. Clearly, you've seen as Gounkoto comes off that definitely will have an impact when Gounkoto will be out of tax holiday, and so this was a slightly lower. The Morila made less profit as did Loulo, who are the two prime contributors. And I think as I said, it depends on your gold price, but somewhere, between, 10% to 15% is the effective tax rate.
Mark Bristow
And then, on the capital, Loulo-Gounkoto is $210 million, it was originally $230 million or $210 million now and we're about a third through that, so two-thirds to go. Tongon is most of it's capital is at back-end of the year. they've got $30 million in capital, and spend $4 million so far, really small. It's really the pushback that we're capitalizing. Kibali we've cut that capital estimate down to $700 million is really a cash flow management rather than the actual capital. And we're $100 million into that, so our shares are $100 million, so we've got $250 million to go, so group-wise $173 million out of $626 million so far, that it a nettle. And again like all things, we always bet John and Willem, we never really spend it the way we want to.
Cailey Barker
It's Cailey from Numis. Just on first question, just on Loulo's, could you just give us a bit more color, where you are in your layer with the purple patch et cetera?
Mark Bristow
We have just a couple of days ago work through the first ore drive on the purple patch. We're establishing the first. We've mined on the edge, with 7 gram ore. The purple patch, by definition is about 10. So we will slowly get into it on that level and then the next level is being developed. The plan is that we through the year with we've really been successful, we've capitalized a little bit more expensive. So ahead of the backfill commissioning at the end of the year and the Yalea we will start mining, we've scheduled, in fact, we're going to be doing our first secondary stopes. So we've mined the primaries. That's the middle between the two and this is outside the purple patch, and we're about to mine that middle to make sure, to prove to ourselves we can take the 100% of the orebody. And we will transfer that down into the purple based, so it builds up slowly over the next couple of quarters. The thing we keep having to read our management is they want to go into the purple patch and it's not what we plan to do otherwise you won't mine that orebody properly, you've got a mine it across the whole strike and take some of the purple patch and some of the lower grades stopes on either side. So it will build up into sort of 5-ish grams and the consolidated feet from underground it's going to be about 5 grams million. Part of the recutting is we will go to like 110,000 tons out of Yalea and 80,000 tons out of Gara for the end of the year that because we cut back on the development. And our run rate is 100,000 at already over the last six months at Yalea, so we're there. And again also we're just going to be of less picky on the grade and just mine them as we develop them. So I think the underground is really, from where we have come from it's in reasonable shape.
Cailey Barker
And then just a question on juniors and opportunities, things coming your way, how are you managing that presumably your inundated with offer?
Mark Bristow
Yes, we do, Joe, who's at the back and Paul spend a lot of time answering emails, we've got lots from Mongolia and South America. A lot of them are easy decisions because we're very African-focused, but everybody wants to do joint venture. But we're as a team, particularly our generative team as we have got, what we did a while back is we built a whiteboard of African targets. And we've got a pretty good handle of where we want to be and we all work on them and we're working. We've got two we've done and we have got couple more that we'll not be able lend. Our deal is simple. We'll take over the exploration completely; run five years to deliver the prefeasibility study that will bank 51% for us. The juniors got a right to stop the dilution. If they have got an enough data, if it is green-fields, we'll go all the way to 65 with the bankable, but if it is quite a data like Goldstone with data, we'll take it to 51%. They have got a right to stop dilutions and co-fund the exploration and feasibility to prefease. It's a one-off drop-dead decision and then if they don't we will take it to feasibility for 65 and then they will have another chance to either dilute or to keep their share. Good for shareholders and the juniors and it's a very good us. It's exactly the same model, how we got into Tongon, the same model. We're not big on paying upfront money for misfortune.
Bruce Always
Mark, I'm Bruce from SocGen, just to follow on from that on the exploration front is there kind of clock ticking on Massawa in terms of making a developmental decision or the license gets taken back?
Mark Bristow
No, in fact, we reset that clock. We combined the permits I think its five years. Joe, can you recall, it's substantial. These are reduction which we have done and we'll do the reductions there, but I think we have got five or six years still to go.
Tyler Broda
Tyler Broda from Nomura. I guess following on from the question about with the juniors and the JVs. In terms of your way of looking at projects, you push forward, I noticed the discount rate for the underground for the $1,000 an ounce to get the 20% return. It is 0% discount rate. I was wondering in your view, with the way the market has changed, do you believe the discount rate for gold companies is changing? And then secondly, I have a question about Kibali, just in terms of how we should be looking at modeling this sort of start up quarters, and production and how much this sulfide delay pushes back anything in 2014.
Mark Bristow
I'll answer the last one first. There is no delay. It's just that we scheduled this. We weren't going to use it until quarter one, the sulfide, because this is the mining schedule that doesn't deliver the sulfide ore. We were just going to finish the plant. So we're just being a little smarter with allocating the capital. And we're putting more effort, so it's a trade off. We're trading it with an earlier oxide circuits up and running and matching with sulfide circuit with when we can actually feed it. On the discount rate, Tyler, my retort to that, is that's what you guys do when you don't trust management. Discounts mean nothing. I will give an example. What discount rate should you have used for Tapia? 100%. So our view is that we don't lose discount rates because you use it for risk or sort of and the only risk we deal with is political risk and it's binary. You either keep your permit or you don't in Africa at least. So we have spent a lot of time worrying about Geopolitical risk and whether we are comfortable about taking risk in a country and ensuring that we have the rights to develop a mine. That's the first one. And the second then is about drilling out the orebody and getting it right, and so for us, our hurdle rate is 20% so at a $1,000. Well, it's a lot bigger in your terms discount rate than somebody using $1,500 and putting a 10% discount in. We want to make 20% that are $1,000. Why, because mining is not an exact science. And so we want to build in the profit margins and we won't get it wrong, sometimes in, sometimes we'll get it more right than wrong. And but what we are sure about is that our models work, like Tongon. We really stumbled on Tongon last year. We have still generated $168 million of net cash flow and paid off our capital. You know, why, because, we designed it at $1,000. So lot of people have said to me to do it differently and we have these big debates and we're very clear. What we do in picking our gold prices, we look back to a standard 3 million ounce project. We have got a standard project, the same one we use to test mining codes. And, when you look back at 450 that project would have given 28% return. So the point is if you Tongon in 2006 is to return of 2004 $450 gold price it's return was around 30%, today still just over 30%, because the costs have gone up. Fuel costs have gone up. Lots of things have things have changed in the market. And, I've always said once a dog, always a dog. The gold price never makes a bad asset look good, certainly in our view. A world-class asset will always be always be a world-class asset.
Graham Shuttleworth
Your problem set is definitely different than other company.
Tyler Broda
Mark, just on that question of cost, is there any sort of indication that the pressures are easing somewhat or are they just as tight?
Mark Bristow
I've got a classic slide out. I think I've said it before. There's a misnomer in costs in my mind in the industry, the inherent built-in costs. But the real cost driver in our industry and the reason that the industry is under so much stress in that $200 drop in gold price is because it's a grade issue. And, there is no alternative. The only way, in particularly the big companies, can change their long-term costs profile is to close down the low grade deposits. And that's the fact, because the fuel price hasn't changed for the last three years and the only big change is cyanide. There's nothing really, the dollar inflation is being relatively flat. Labor inflation outside South Africa has is manageable. South African errands more than paid for the labor inflation. And it boils down to grade. And this is what everyone missed is and that's driven by two things, nobody is around in terms of mining and investors have driven the industry and ounce profile rather than a profitable ounce profile. And then when you left the gold process, which you designed your reserves, you instinctively put in the grade and that's why you saw that previous graph. So what you do to shows lower cash costs as you put more into G&A, but the real numbers is the same. And I don't know the industries talking about another cost number. And I fail to see why we don't just use what every other business in the world use and that's profit; capital, depreciation, tax, all that sort of normal stuff. That's why we have all these beanies in our organization. And so that's what we've done. We've focused on bottomline profit, that's the basis of our business, if doesn't makes a profit and that's includes amortization and all of that. And of course, we look at cash flow like this year's an abnormal cash flow. We're comfortable are profitable at a $1,000, but this year we're burning our balance sheet, because our cost per ounce produced including capital is high, because of the Kibali. But our capital utilization is one of the best in the industries, because if you look what we're going to deliver on the back of this last two years capital spend is an enormous, it's an another big step. If you recall after Tongon and with the Gounkoto work the 2009 to 2010 was a massive step up. Earnings per share, net profits, cost reduction, and you're going to see that similar leverage over the 2014-2015 on the back of Kibali and the higher grades in Loulo. So that's why we said in our Annual Report this is our next big step, that's the reason.
Tyler Broda
From the examples of some of your other people up there, upon the chart their, construction cost at Kibali, one way to assume that would be about the time where you'd see a big step in the assessed capital cost there. I mean, how do you manage to continue to have that where lot of others struggled to maintain that costs?
Mark Bristow
Our senior executive responsible for capital system Kibali, and leads the owner team. We don't outsource the owner's team. So our corporate skill base is now in Kibali. Willem is our Corporate Executive for that region; John, who is head of Capital Projects. And he is the custodian of our engineering and metallurgy and all that. So those guys, our group engineers, our group metallurgist, they're all in Kibali. They travel from there to manage challenges at the other operations, they don't sit in their head office. So and that was my big debate with (Marco Tefani). As you know, he was all dismissive about whether we could this or not last year. And the point I made is that we've done this so many times and it's not about detailed scheduling; it's about can John and his team build a mine by this stage and this quality. And if he says, yes, then we give him the wherewithal to get it done, because the biggest drop on capital is driven by the time. So can you get the gold poured, and you're an investor. If we deliver gold and start making profit, it takes the edge of any additional capital overrun, because then you don't have to fund it. So the timing to get the gold produced, we developed Tongon, good for Tongon to start the challenges we've had. If you analyze Tongon as an additional, it's damn good investment. So that's our process and it is about being operating thing. The mining team, we went and bought, the best sharp thinking team in the industry as our employees. And we said, okay, the guys want to sink the shaft, we're going to do the decline. You've got four years, there's your bonus, you deliver us the best mining team on this planet. And all of them were in the 50 to 60 years old, and they've got 40 years of shaft sinking experience. And this has been an amazing, I mean that team has done exceptionally well. And they don't have long-term career, so the energy and to lifting our local skills out to their standard is tangible, and that's what we do, we're passionate about. We don't take no, because it's our business, we're all active owners, why, because we are owners. And so in summing moved out of schedule we drive it back and don't just accept, because we don't have the big, Fluor Daniel's and others representing us on site. We are paid by the hour. Does that answer the question?
Charlie Gibson
Mark, it's Charlie Gibson from Edison. I wonder speaking of unusual problems at Randgold. I was striking your group cash balance sensitivity slide about the upturn later this year, and that is the problem, if you want to see it as a problem, which I see will then get worse since 2014. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your cash balances. In particular, is there a level above which you would not want to see your cash go?
Mark Bristow
Yes, absolutely. And it's a messaging I've been saying for a long time and the market doesn't get it.
Charlie Gibson
Well, it does actually, if you look at performance relatively.
Mark Bristow
We've said consistently that 2014, end of 2014 is a time where we set a fixed dividend policy. And since we've started seven years ago, we had a growing dividend policy, and we've increased our dividend long before it was the one of having dividend. And the difference is, if you look at our dividend yield, it's directly related to our profits. We don't borrow to pay dividend. And so if you look at what you've correctly identified on a $1,400 gold price, we though free cash flowing about $500 million a year, given we take $50. At $1,600 is $600 million. And my thesis, we've started this to base of the board is that the average gold mine cost Randgold about $600 million. And so I as the CEO, I'd like $600 million in the bank. And the rest, I am very happy to give to shareholders. And it makes sense. I'll give the concept, just a concept. You take Randgold share price and you add a $5 dividend yield on it, where do you think the share price will go. It will adjust to a decent yield, it will move up, and my argument is that hearing you can put it in a share price, if it's profitable. Is Las Vegas then I see even delivering another mark, and we can do both, if we keep the $500 million, we can afford our own future. And that cash flow, I'm showing has already got another mine in that's because we've already shared you the capital from Massawa in that profile, in that scenario. So that's the secret. And that's what we've been busy at for. When we set out to build this mine, what I wanted at this company and I came from the platinum industry. The thing that fascinated me about the gold industry is you've got a premium even if you didn't like any profit. And my theory was if you could build a industry that, a mining company that made profit, we get the orders for it. And so we've have always stated one of the missions is to be sustainably profitable. And that's a tough call in consumption industry. But we certainly had for the next five years, post Kibali commissioning and post 2014. We're comfortably in that race. And what's nice is we can see life at Kibali, we can see life at Loulo-Gounkoto invest the business. Tongon is the cash cow. So it's not capital hungry. It's has got a finite life to way we've got to replace Tongon or add to it, compared to my peers that's relatively easy challenge than trying to replace $7 million ounces a year. It hasn't happened for the last six years. And you're right. There is a traditional session with a 100 glass of wine outside. And we've got (inaudible) at the back, who heads our generative team, so those who want to talk about exploration, she is there with Joe, who is Paul Harbidge's (inaudible) and runs West African exploration; John Steele, who is head of Capital Projects. You know Graham, and Lois from the Communications; we've also got our legal counsel, Martin, sitting there with the red tie looking like a lawyer because he is one. Please feel free to mingle and test the team. And Bill, is head of Human Capital, so he is the one that's being developing our skill base, our management depth and making sure that we don't end up being in seduced into our head office one day. Keep the operation focused on the sites. So thanks very much for coming again.