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Article Excerpt
Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE
STUART MURRAY, CEO, AQUARIUS PLATINUM LTD: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, Stuart Murray here. I'm not used to being called the moderator, but I think that's a Church of Scotland term for the boss of the Church, so that's maybe a little inappropriate at this time. But anyway, welcome to this half-year results announcement for Aquarius Platinum. Sitting with me we have Willi Boehm, Company Secretary and Financial Manager for the Group, and Nick Bias, Investor Relations Coordinator. We'll take questions later and they can be directed to those gentlemen as well.
I'm going to basically just kick off with saying that we're delighted to see that we've achieved the $1-a-share mark for earnings in the half-year rather than in the full year, which is what we had always promised once upon a time. On the back of good production improvements as well as very strong prices, which I think most of you will be aware of. On the website there has, today, been the release of the Appendix 4D, the announcement created by ourselves, as well as the presentation and I trust you've all got access to those documents.
I will use the presentation going on here on out, in terms of my discussion. But I think, just to start off with, when you turn to slide four, the Corporate Platform unchanged since we last presented. But importantly for us, we have noticed a very significant updraft, both in the trading of the shares and in the share price itself, mainly driven by strong index fund buying out of the United Kingdom, which has occurred in recent months. And we have been very gratified to see the volumes lift very dramatically in the stock.
Moving on to slide five, I think it's entitled The Highlights. You will have seen from the presentation ramp-up has continued across the operations half-year on half-year. Production is a new record for us, 277,000 ounces of attributable production for the six months, coupled with good prices, has seen net profit triple to $85m, or just over US$1.00 a share.
Dividends we've increased by 100% to $0.12 and I'll cover that a little bit later as to cash balance, dividend flow and cash management into the future as we see it at this stage.
On page six, I think most of you are aware of what has happened to the dollar prices of the various commodities we produce. Strong performance out of platinum, outstanding performance out of rhodium and for platinum -- palladium and gold life continues to bumble along, I guess, in our sector. But one metal I would like to just draw attention to you is that of ruthenium.
The ruthenium price has moved from $60 an ounce to over $800 an ounce in the last year, and it is a metal for which we produce quite a substantial number of ounces and are paid for by the smelters, in fact, I think another $100 or so more. And we'll probably see ruthenium overtake palladium as a -- in terms of revenues there. So I'll just draw your attention, people sometimes do get the revenue line of the business a little bit out by not paying attention to the by-products, as we call them - iridium, ruthenium. And nickel has of course put in an outstanding performance, particularly in respect of Mimosa, which has a significant nickel by-product [growth].
Moving on, how does it look for the basket? When you translate those dollar prices through, we find that in South Africa we've had a strong run up in the average price for the first half relative to the FY06 average. Almost in excess of 20%, in fact, up on the dollar prices. Couple that with the rand/dollar -- the little bit of weakening that we've had in the rand/dollar year on year, and we're seeing basket prices in South Africa sitting at around the ZAR10,000 per ounce mark. And that's a very significant level compared to as little as three years ago, when we were only enjoying ZAR3,300 an ounce on average in the South African basket.
In Zimbabwe, as many of you are aware, a more palladium rich ore body, a less rhodium rich body, but nonetheless significant jump in the PGM basket to $949 per PGM ounce for the half-year, relative to $741 for the FY06. As I mentioned earlier, nickel plus the copper price, we've seen revenues for the half-year from the base metals represent almost a third of all revenues for our mine in Zimbabwe.
Moving on to the fortunes of the rand/dollar, somewhat volatile. We have -- we saw it almost touch 8 during the half-year, only to come...
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