HARMONY Gold, South Africa's third-largest gold producer, on Thursday posted strong annual results despite a small drop in gold output during the 2012 financial year. "Year on year it was a great year for us," Harmony CEO Graham Briggs said. "Operating profits were 80% better than the previous year and that’s based on almost flat gold production," he said. "It was a good operating profit based on a gold price increase of 36%," he added.
Gold production slipped 2% to 1.275-million ounces for the year to the end of June 2012. Operating profit climbed 80% to R5.896bn. Headline earnings per share more than doubled to R5.51 from R2.23 before. Harmony declared a 50c dividend, taking the total dividend for the year to 90c. Harmony grew its cash to R1,77bn from R1,4bn during the year, and the company does not plan to raise capital ahead of a more detailed study of its Wafi-Golpu project in Papua New Guinea.
The results of a pre-feasibility study into establishing a mine at the copper and gold deposit at Wafi will be released on at an investors’ day on August 29 and this will give costing estimates and timelines. "The expenditure at Wafi over the next few years is affordable on our current plans," Mr Briggs said.
Our capital including exploration is likely to go up in the forthcoming years, but so is our profitability. Raising money is not on our cards at all for the next couple of years," he said. Harmony bumped up its exploration spend during the 2012 financial year to R500m from R324m in the previous year. The bulk of the exploration expenditure was in Papua New Guinea, where Harmony shares two major projects with Australia’s Newcrest Mining and where it has a number of wholly-owned exploration projects.
Mr Briggs has said in the past that Harmony is looking to reduce its high exposure to South Africa. It is the most exposed of the major gold miners to South Africa.
Source: Business Day
No comments:
Post a Comment