DRDGOLD Limited (NYSE:DRD) Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call August 24, 2022 4:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Niël Pretorius - Chief Executive Officer

Riaan Davel - Chief Financial Officer

Jaco Schoeman - Chief Operating Officer

Conference Call Participants

Niël Pretorius

Good morning, everybody. And thank you very much for joining us for our Results Presentation for the year ended 30th June, 2022. I am Niël Pretorius and joining me is Riaan Davel, who is our Chief Financial Officer; and Jaco Schoeman, who is the Chief Operating Officer.

I would like to provide a little bit of context before we kick off, just in terms of the year. It’s certainly been a year like no other. We are almost at a point where we were the sigh of relief, saying, we made it through another winter.

Just in terms of local context. Beginning of the year was deeply unsettling with some of the riots that we saw in KwaZulu-Natal freaking to spill over into Gauteng. We also saw how vulnerable we were in terms of just logistics into Gauteng from the coast, with the collapse of Transnet and over reliance on ground transportation.

Globally, what we witnessing is more and more uncertainty against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine-Russia, an increase in international tension. We have seen economic uncertainty, inflation going rampant America for the first time in decades, seeing double-digit inflation and the accompanying increase in interest rates.

Closer to home, we have had weather like we have never seen before, the amount of rain that we experienced, especially in the East. It’s just been different from anything else we have ever experienced in the past and we had our hands full in terms of clean and warty, clean and dirty water separation rather.

Again, we had these blackouts, rolling blackouts, Eskom, really batting under the strength of delivering into the energy requirements of the nation. And then, of course, coming out of COVID impact that it’s had on our economy, hardship experienced in many of the communities where we operate, definitely saw an increase in the, let’s call the, level of anger, the intensity of social discontent, and worryingly, the changes in the patterns of organized crime and violent crime in particular.

We definitely saw that crimes that in the past were simply just theft that now become armed robbery relating to cable theft, et cetera, et cetera. So all of these things were certainly dynamics that, that were new, dynamics that we had to deal with and we had to navigate our way through that.