Peter Steenkamp - CEO Marian van der Walt - IR Frank Abbott - Financial Director.

David Leffel - Deutsche Bank Daniel McConvey - Rossport Investments.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Harmony Gold Mining Company Ltd. operating and financial results for the six months and year ended June 30, 2016 question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please also note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to the CEO, Mr. Peter Steenkamp.

Please go ahead sir..

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our results discussion. Just before we start, I’ll just a little bit of highlights for the year for FY'16 year. First of all, we had a net profit of $64 million. We had a 1% reduction in net debt to $74 million. We had headline earnings per share of $0.15 per share.

We’ve paid a dividend of $0.04 per share, we actually just on the back of very, very good grades and a production that we see improving. And then also we’ve, for the year, we also enhanced our copper and gold assets in Papua New Guinea by the exploration that we’ve done in the area. We are open for any questions from anybody from the floor..

[Operator Instructions] Sir, I don’t have any questions in the queue at the moment..

Chris, good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for joining this call. As per our invitation, we are no longer doing the full presentation. We are relying on the webcast that was done this morning.

Be that as it may, we will take you through a couple of slides which we believe is important just in terms of where the Company is heading and what we believe is important for you to know. And then we’ll continue with questions and answers. So I’m going to hand back to Peter..

being proactive, the proximity of having our health hubs at the operations and our doctors being part of the management team, and also a curative pillar. The long and the short we are on this track now for probably three/four years. We now have about 1,000 more people at work per day than we used to have in the past through this approach.

And I’m very proud of that. Our mining rehabilitation is also one of the areas that we distinct ourselves from our peers. We are really doing well. We rehabilitated 32 disused or closed shafts and a number of processing plants. And we’ve created a lot of jobs through that.

But we are also working on commercial agriculture projects that’s coming from the implementation of some of the areas that we don’t use anymore. And then we are also commissioning a bio-energy plant, which is -- we will start at the end of this month we’ll start with the first gas.

We will be able to generate 1 megawatt of power that we are going to use in our processing plants. I’m going to ask Frank just to maybe give some points on the balance sheet under heading of the strong balance sheet, so Frank can maybe give us some -- just a short summary of what we see..

Thank you, Peter. The middle of last year we made a decision that it was very important to get a strong balance sheet. We were very fortunate with the increase in the rand gold price, and our good production last year. We were able to buy back a major portion of our debt.

We’ve also been able to, if we page to Slide 39, when the rand/dollar currency weakened in February we were able to lock in at a very good rate the rand/dollar exchange rate. We did a zero cost collar there. And you can see on the blue line that was at ZAR15.60. We locked in the exchange rate, so for $500 million.

So it means that for $500 million of gold sales we will be receiving ZAR15.60 for our dollars, our gold sales. If we assume the current rand, gold, if the rand/dollar exchange rate stays the same at the current level of ZAR13.50 that’s a gain of more than ZAR1 billion. And the reason we did this is because there was a very good margin in our profit.

We believe that the rand was very weak at that stage and they were specific reasons that led to it. And we wanted to lock it in, and to make sure that we can pay back our debt. If you turn to Slide 40, we also did a rand gold hedge. We hedged 20% of our rand gold sales. And we were very fortunate to do that at the beginning of July.

And you can see that we did it from a level of ZAR640,000 per kilogram. And we did it for a two-year period that’s 20% of our gold production. I think it’s 432,000 ounces over the two years. And the average price that we are achieving over that period is ZAR680,000 a kilogram.

So if you look at where the rand gold price is now we are well in the money on that hedging strategy too. And the purpose of all of this was to make sure that we can pay back our debt. If we turn over and we go to Slide 42 this is the extract of our income statement six months on six months US dollars.

You can see that our revenue came down very slightly 2% for the six months, which was due to lower gold produced during this period although our production costs came down quite substantially. And this was because of the exchange rate that was much weaker in the second period than in the first period.

This linked to a production profit of $200 million. If we take that down to the bottom line, our net profit for the period was $91 million compared to a loss of $33 million the year before.

If we page over, and we go to Slide 44, and we look at the extract from our income statement year on year in US dollars, our revenue reduced by 6% over this period. Our gold production was the same year on year. But the dollar gold price was slightly lower.

If we look at our production, costs came down substantially and that’s because of the exchange rate over this period. You can see that our production profit was $350 million. That was fully 3% more than the year before. If we go down, we’ll see that our net profit was $64 million versus a loss of $374 million the year before.

The year before we not only had a lower production profit but we also had impairment of certain of our assets. But you can see that’s a very good turnaround from where we were the year before. If we turn over, in regard to Slide 46, this is the slide where we tried to unpack our net debt figures.

In the first column, you’ve got your debt, so we start with our opening balance. That’s what our debt was, $290 million at the end of June. You can see we’ve repaid it and it’s currently $159 million, so we paid back $120 million.

Our cash in dollar terms have gone down slightly with $3 million, so if we look on the right-hand side when we look at our net debt situation, you see our net debt has come down to $74 million. Our net debt came down by $118 million year on year.

We are very confident that the $74 million net debt we’ll be able to repay before the end of the calendar year. Thank you, Peter..

Thanks. Maybe just before we close, first of all, our FY'17 production guidance that we obviously shared with everybody this morning, we plan to produce approximately 1.05 million ounces. Obviously Hidden Valley is not a part of that going forward.

Or Hidden Valley is actually just a [indiscernible], mining the stockpiles, and then an average recovery grade of 5.13 grams per ton, with an all-in sustaining cost of $1.1 million an ounce at the exchange rate of ZAR14 to the dollar.

We also just shared our earnings per share in rand terms have dramatically improved, and then we also then obviously concluded with the whole thing about aspiring to grow our ounces to 1.5 million ounces by being -- mining safe and profitable ounces, increasing our margins through operational excellence, cash certainty and effective capital allocation.

Are there any further questions?.

Chris, just before we hand over for questions and answers, I would also just like to refer the listeners to the appendices to our presentation that was shared this morning, where we have shared more detail on the guidance as well as more detail on the hedging. And with that, we are happy to take some questions..

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from David Leffel of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead..

Good morning. Great results, guys. Excellent job.

I guess on the asset disposals, where are we at with those and how much would that reduce the guidance around the 1.05 million ounces if that as identified for sale were actually completed or will they be completed in this calendar year?.

David, thanks for the question. The only asset for sale we had was Hidden Valley. We put it up for sale. We didn’t get an offer that was a suitable offer, so we decided to pull it out of the market, ourselves and our partners. We have not made a decision in terms of how we’re going to take it forward.

We’re still at the moment debating it with one of the partners. We still have that discussion. We will -- as soon as we’ve got certainty, we will disclose it to the market in terms of what we want to do with Hidden Valley. But Hidden Valley at the moment, we are mining the stockpiles.

We did not start the cutback of cutback five and six that’s still outstanding, that need to be done. We had not started that. Obviously, the gold price has improved a lot and the dollar price in the last few weeks and months, and if we are bullish in the gold price, it actually becomes quite a lucrative operation.

But we have made no decision to start that operation yet. In our current plan, the stockpiles, the mining of the stockpiles and also the last part of Hamata pit, which is a smaller pit in the area, is actually part of the plan..

Okay. Well, I wasn’t really focused on Hidden Valley, but maybe I’ll ask it.

The cutbacks of stage five and six are still about $50 million, and what would be the operating costs of that asset if you actually proceeded?.

We’re actually busy with that study now, David, so I don’t want to dilute much. The total forward, obviously, with a 50-50 JV, is the total of the cutback will probably be in the vicinity of about $100 million. You’re quite correct, and $50 million for Harmony, but we have not actually completed that work to see precisely what it will cost..

So you don’t actually know what the operating cost might be for that?.

We’re actually busy with that study at this point in time..

What was the cost per ounce in the previous days when you decided not to proceed with and put the asset up for sale.

What were you guys working with as a cost per ounce on cutback five and six ounces?.

David, being open of course, it’s very much dependent on the volume that we produce.

So if you look at the cash cost or the cost for Hidden Valley over the last few years, depending on what the volume is, the first portion of this, yeah, sorry, in the second part of this year, we actually had pretty good costs at Hidden Valley because of the high volumes that we were mining.

So it’s very dependent on the volumes that we’ve been mining..

Okay. I was just trying to understand where this project might sit with any acquisitions that you’re looking at in that regard and the capital demands on the Company. But my original question, I guess I was really wondering where we are in the status of the disposals of Masimong and Unisel..

We’re not disposing of any of those operations. We’re in actual fact mining now to completion Masimong and Unisel, what we share in the harvest form of the operation. There’s not much more to mine. The places are really mined out. They’re in the final stages of the results. The one big one is obviously Kusasalethu.

This we say that with Kusasalethu, I think I explained that when we were previously, is that Kusasalethu, we’re in the high grade at the moment, so we’re going to make good money going forward for the next five years. Going forward, when we want to actually get into low grade, we’ll have to increase the volume dramatically.

There’s only four levels available to be mined and to mine the top of 25,000 square meters a month out of four levels is going to be quite tough to do from a mining perspective. It’s not impossible but highly unlikely. So we don’t believe that that’s the right place to spend more capital, to build up that volumes.

So we in actual fact want to for the next five years mine Kusasalethu and harvest some good profit out of that..

I guess for the next 12 months or 24 months, what sort of volumes, what sort of tonnage and grade should we model for Kusasalethu..

At the back of the guidance you’ll find it. Let me just be clear. Kusasalethu, there’s the cost one, grades. The production for Kusasalethu for the next year is 140,000 ounces per annum..

Okay. Thanks so much..

That’s up from 124,000 in the previous year..

And then the costs are sitting at about $1,170 per ounce..

Yes, and have you given us any guidance where you think you can get it under the new plan?.

Well, that is the plan that we started. This is the plan..

Okay, so $1,170. Okay, okay great. So maybe one last question, international acquisition for South African gold companies, in recent years there haven’t been very many examples.

I think a lot of investors wonder as you may be set out to try to do acquisitions outside of South Africa and PNG, what core competencies you might bring that others wouldn’t bring. Clearly, gold assets are -- there’s a substantial demand for gold assets at this point in the cycle..

Well, David, we’re fully aware of that and it must make financial sense for us to do, but what we need to do and that is I think important for us is that we need to do either a merger or acquisition to give us the firepower to build or to beef ourselves up to build to Golpu.

Otherwise, if some of these production operations, if they actually go much smaller, then as a small operation we’ll never be able to fund and to build Golpu..

Okay. Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate that..

Thanks, David..

Thank you. Our next question is from Daniel McConvey of Rossport Investments. Please go ahead..

Good day. I think we’ll have to do our homework next time, so we’ll be ready for your questions right away. Just two questions. The first one is the top one. I’m a little rusty, but on the fatalities are a tragedy for the people. They’re a tragedy for the Company and it’s tough for the investors.

What kinds of things are in the program just in terms of trying to improve that down the road? In the platinum industry, there’s been more ground support put in the last, what, five to seven years that has been helpful.

What kind of things are happening in your industry and definitely your mines are older and a lot of them are deep and tough? How do you marginally at least go ahead and improve that?.

Daniel, yes, thank you for that. Obviously like you said, fatalities are very traumatic for everybody involved. It is extremely -- obviously for the morale of the operations, if there’s something that really derails an operation, it is a fatality. Now, we -- Harmony has been very, very active in the so-called MOSH adoption.

MOSH is the Mine Occupational Safety and Health initiative that was started in South Africa some time ago. It’s really focusing on fall of ground. It’s focusing on rail-bound accidents and focusing on dust and noise. In those four areas, we very much adopted all the things that we had to do, and we saw very good successes.

If one looked over the years, our safety improved dramatically from where it was like 10 years ago. We saw very good improvements on that. So like everybody else in South Africa, we’re somehow in the beginning of this calendar year had a bit of laxity in terms of fall of ground accidents. It’s not only Harmony.

There’s been quite many companies that had fall of ground accidents start to raise its head again. We reintroduced all of the things that we’ve put in place in the past, making sure that we actually have all of those actions that we’ve put in place put back in place.

But in the meantime, if you look at my structure that I’ve put together, I took one of the Chief Operating Officers looking after the long-term plans, long-term growth of the Company and also looking after the safety strategy.

So we are at the process of really looking at what is the best possible, world-leading safety and management systems that we have to put in place for Harmony. And we’re not only looking at the mining companies.

We’re also looking at many other type of companies, typically petrochemical companies and those type of things to see what are the things that they’re doing that we can learn from. So Phillip is at the moment quite far down the line.

He’s been interviewing and actually visiting and going underground on the different operations or onto site to verify how the strategy actually gets into action on the ground.

So we certainly would like to, by the end of this calendar year and to be in the position that we have a world class safety management system that is probably unique to everybody else. We are obviously looking at all the stuff that everybody else is looking at.

We’re looking at our fatal risk management, making sure that those risks are properly assessed. We’re looking at leadership, visible self leadership, making sure people are in place, in the faces of the people. We’re making sure that we have included everybody in our operations, recreating the culture of care.

We’re looking at continuous improvement and all the different things we’re trying to roll out, all the learnings from different accidents, not only in Harmony but everybody else.

But the one thing that I think we really distinguished ourselves from everybody else is that we’re really focusing a hell of a lot on our housekeeping, making sure that our places are in really good order and neat.

For that reason, we have not seen the big uptick in Harmony that many of the other companies in terms of so called safety stoppages, because we are really, and I’m really proud of what I’ve seen so far in the organization in the last six months I’ve been here.

My team that I’ve got now is all fully aligned in terms of focusing on these things and making sure the housekeeping is in packing order. Obviously, it’s not always perfect and sometimes we do find places that has not done the right thing.

Certainly our fatalities in the last few of them were really the ones of specialized type of job, not a typical fall of the ground or rail-bound equipment type of fatalities. It was different fatalities than that, when we talk about the last ones we had in the last quarter. But certainly we are, we know that we have to stop fatalities.

We know that we have a big impact on that, Daniel..

Thank you, on a lighter note just for Frank, on the hedging, the hedging looks well timed. Just in terms of credit, I guess the exchange rate was a put cost.

I’m guessing it didn’t add much to your credit, but in terms of your credit impact and how much credit capacity your hedges use, but did it use a fair bit? Could you do, I’m not saying you want to but if you [Technical Difficulty]..

Yes, thank you. That’s a good question. You remember at the time when banks only lend you money when you’re hedged, today they are concerned when you hedge. Then that takes up your credit. In the old days, you only got credit if you hedged.

If you look at what we’ve got now, it’s always relative to where you are, and if you can look at those two, you find that both of them are actually in the money. So no, it’s not taken up our credit..

Thank you. Our next question is from James Whitecross. Please go ahead..

Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Good results.

I was just wondering, on the grade control side, could you provide us some more granularity just on the improvements ahead and how this has helped costs with your expected productivity gains? I guess the third part of that thesis is if you do go ahead with the consolidation of Phakisa and Tshepong, does that accelerate the grade improvements or does it change something else? Thank you..

You take the first part? The first part of the question on the….

On the grades?.

No..

How the grades affect the costs..

No, I would do the grade one. You do the [indiscernible]..

I missed the first part..

Let me talk about the grade of Tshepong and Phakisa. What Phakisa and Tshepong will hold with one another in the bottom part of Tshepong and also obviously in Phakisa’s side, that is the high-grade area. If we are able to mine more from that higher grade, we will as a fact [ph] mine more high grade earlier in the combined unit than the earlier.

If one looks at Tshepong, Phakisa, we’re probably doing about 300,000 ounces a year out of those two operations, and we’re probably going to go to 350,000 to 375,000. We haven’t finalized the feasibility studies and everything on that, but that is a possibility in terms of where we can go.

Now certainly we’re going to mine more of the high grade during that period, but we’re also very excited about Tshepong and Phakisa because we identified a lot of B reef, secondary reef to the basal, which is the main reef in the area. We’ve been very successful at Tshepong -- at certain parts of Tshepong and then also at Masimong to mine the B reef.

And those shoots we know is extending into Phakisa and also certain parts of Tshepong. So we are spending some money at this point in time to draw for them. We are very high levels of confidence that we will be able to get those reefs. We know we’re going to get them.

So we need to identify them, where they are and actually in fact then start mining them. But yes, it will increase the grades and it will then obviously -- I think we will be probably four to five years be in a very sweet spot as far as those two operations are concerned..

And sorry, just to add to that, of course we know grades improve and that increases -- that reduces our cost per kilogram, our unit cost. So we can mine less tons and get more the same gold and are therefore ore. Seen the other way, we’ll mine the same tons but get more gold, and that’s going to reduce our cost per unit..

Do you have any idea of the scale of that? Is it 10% or 3% or…?.

I think it will probably be from about 280,000 combined. Currently, they’re doing about 280,000 ounces a year to 350,000 to 375,000. Probably that’s the kind of uplift that we’re going to see..

[Operator Instructions] Sir we have no questions in the queue at the moment.

Do you have any closing comments?.

First of all, just thank you for joining us. I’m surprised it’s the afternoon already. It’s really nice having you on the call. We are really excited about Harmony and also the momentum that we started to gain on all our operations. I’ve got some very young and energetic RGMs and Chief Operating Officers that really are busy making the difference.

So we are very confident of the future of Harmony and especially over the next few years. Thank you very much..

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines..