Antofagasta plc (ANTO) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

So good morning and thank you to everyone. Welcome to our full year results for 2024. I think that we have announced today a strong set of financial results with rising margins and a balance sheet that supports an attractive balance of dividends and investment growth. So before we go into the details of today's announcement, and we will cover those, a few words on copper, which I think it's important. If we look beyond the sort of short-term instability, which is always, I guess, a feature in commodities, there is a general consensus on copper's role as the metal of the future. Copper is key to electrification and energy security, and we see strong drivers of demand ahead with new demand requirements such as AI data centers, supplementing record levels of spending on more well-established areas such as electrical grids and renewables. Despite this, the other side of the equation, global supply, is facing rising challenges. Copper producers face geological and technical constraints, rising capital intensities and permitting delays, as we know, and new deposits are simply not being discovered. However, at Antofagasta, our investment case is different. We are focused on copper. We offer a balance of both growth and shareholder returns. We operate in well-established and reliable copper jurisdictions. We also have a pipeline of projects that includes new discoveries and growing reserves and resources, and we will mention some of those in more details. And sustainability remains embedded throughout our business model. So those are the sort of key features that we have. So joining me here now is our CFO, Mauricio Ortiz, who you know, and our Vice President of Sustainability, Alejandra Vial. So as ever, we begin by looking at our safety record. 2024 was another fatality-fre...