Gemfields Group Limited (GEM) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to Gemfield's 2025 Half Your Results Shareholder and Investor Webcast. Sean Gilbertson, CEO, and David Lovett, CFO, will present Gemfield's financial results to the end of June 2025. At the end of the presentation, we will go into Q&A. If you'd like to ask a question, please write it in via this webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. Before we start, please take a note of the important information in our disclaimer on slide two, with a full disclaimer in the appendix. And with that, I'll now pass you on to Sean to start on slide three. Good morning and welcome. Thank you very much for joining us this morning after what has been a seriously challenging first half for Gemfields. MRM experienced lower premium ruby outputs, while Karjam suspended mining altogether at the end of 2024, with only limited operations resuming again in May of this year. The beginning of the year was also marred by civil unrest in the wake of Mozambique's disputed general election, and of course the surprise implementation of the 15% export duty on emeralds in Zambia. Both of those issues are now thankfully resolved. These factors, combined with Chinese luxury consumption effectively being offline, contributed to cash flow pressures and certainly tested both our team and our business. With thanks to the strong support from our shareholders for our June rights issue, Followed after the period end by the sale of Fabergé for a headline 50 million, we have a considerably improved balance sheet. Significantly, our new processing plant in Mozambique produced its first rubies earlier this month and is expected to be fully operational next month in October. We also reported earlier this month the remarkably strong results from Cardium's auction of higher quality em...