South32 Limited (S32) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. On the call with me is our Chief Financial Officer, Sandy Silvano, and Chief Operating Officers, Vanessa Torres and Noah Paley. I'll give a short summary of our financial results and outlook for the first half of FY25 before taking questions. Firstly, I'd like to talk about safety. In September, we tragically lost our colleague, Jose Luis Perez, who was fatally injured in an incident at Cerro Matosa. An investigation into the incident was completed during December. Key learnings have been shared across our organisation and improvement actions are underway to prevent a similar incident happening again. We continue to implement our global safety improvement program and we're determined to achieve a step change in our safety performance. This includes a significant investment in safety leadership through our Lead Safely Every Day program. While we have more work to do, this program has supported measurable improvement in our safety performance. We've had a strong start to the year off the back of our improved operating performance. To call out some of the highlights from the half, we increased aluminium production by 5%, copper equivalent production increased by 21% at Cerro Gorda, and we maintained production guidance across our operations, except for Moselle aluminium, where we have updated guidance as we continue to mitigate the impacts of civil unrest in Mozambique. As announced yesterday, we have now received primary state and federal environmental approvals to the Worsley Mine Development Project. The project will enable access to new bauxite mining areas that are expected to sustain production to at least FY36. At GEMCO, we have commenced a phased restart of mining activities and export sales are expected t...