South32 Limited (S32) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. On the call with me is our Chief Financial Officer, Sandy Zimbala, our two COOs, Jason Economides and Noel Pelé. I'll give a short summary of our results before handing back to the operator for questions. Before I go into detail about our results, I'd like to talk about safety. Nothing is more important than the health, safety and wellbeing of our people. Tragically, two of our colleagues, Tonello and Alfredo, lost their lives in the fatal incident at Moselle Aluminium in November. Our deepest sympathies remain with their families and colleagues. In response to the incident, we continued our work to fundamentally shift our safety performance and implement our multi-year safety improvement program. Turning now to our FY23 results. Our teams delivered strong production results during the year, achieving annual production records at Hillside Aluminium, Australian Manganese and South African Manganese. We also embedded our recent portfolio improvements in copper and low-carbon aluminium, key metals needed for a low-carbon future. This underpins strong growth in aluminium, up 14%, base metals up 17% and manganese up 4%. This growth, coupled with our focus on cost efficiencies, has resulted in one of our largest underlying financial results to date, with underlying EBITDA of US $2.53 billion, despite a challenging backdrop of declining commodity prices and industry-wide inflation pressures. A record US $1.2 billion was returned to shareholders during the year, equivalent to 11% of our market capitalisation. And today, we have announced a fully frank ordinary dividend of US $140 million or US $0.032 per share in respect of the June 2023 half year. We have also increased our flexible capital management p...