New Hope Corporation Limited (NHC) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hi, I'm Rob Bishop, the CEO of New Hope Group. Today we released our financial results for the year ended 31 July 2024. I'll take you through some of the highlights now, alongside our CFO Rebecca Rinaldi, but I encourage you to review the full reporting suite available on our website. While this year we've seen positive production outcomes at our mines, I first wanted to talk about safety. Regrettably, our total recordable injury frequency rate has increased from 2.12 at the end of FY23 to 5.32 this financial year. The safety of our people is paramount and takes a precedence over other aspects of our business. Whilst any deterioration in safety performance is disappointing, it's important to note the restart of operations at Ackland Mine in Queensland means we have new people operating new equipment, resulting in additional operating hours and naturally a higher likelihood for an incident to occur. Additionally, there were no critical incidents during the year and the majority of injuries were minor first aid cases. Our full focus is on reversing this trend and performance has already started to improve with initiatives including targeted training, analysing exposure risks and reviewing fitness for work criteria already being implemented. Turning to operational highlights, this year we increased our coal production and sales as we continue to execute our targeted organic growth pipeline. This increase in volumes reflects both additional tonnes from Bengala mine in New South Wales and the successful restart of operations at New Ackland mine, marking a significant milestone for our business. As a result, we've seen a 32% increase in run of mine coal production, a 26% increase in saleable coal production and a 14% lift in coal sales. I'll now hand over to Rebecca to tak...