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OPERATOR: Good afternoon and welcome to the Aquarius Platinum's half-year results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions at the end of today's presentation. (Operator Instructions). Please note that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Stuart Murray. Please go ahead.
STUART MURRAY, CEO, AQUARIUS PLATINUM LIMITED: Thank you, Dylan. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to you all from a hot and sunny Cape Town. I trust all of you have been able to download the results announcement earlier this morning, and the presentation from the website which went up a little while ago. And that's the presentation I will be talking to. And at the end we can take a few questions.
I think as everyone is probably quite aware the mining industry is a bit like the banking industry. I'm not sure which one is the worst one to be in. But suffice to say we're alive and kicking, and surviving what has been quite a dramatic downturn in prices and the operating environment for the platinum group metals.
The highlights on page three, I think most people are aware from our quarterly reporting. We've had a good improvement in production and operating performance at Kroondal and Marikana. As previously reported, a great disappointment with subsidence have entered our Everest mine which has blocked the access way. The decline for the time being, and therefore we have suspended operations for at least six months and then, of course, update on that further on.
Production gratifyingly up on the last half year, albeit slightly down on the previous corresponding period. Prices we'll talk through. A little bit of respite from the rand and a net loss largely driven off the impact of FX on the income statement, the impact of re-pricing of the metals in pipeline leading to a net loss of $70 million. Slightly better than we put out in our guidance last week.
Just in terms of the guidance we put out last week, it's not something we've done before, but the Australian stock exchange has written basically to pretty much every company in Australia, or every company who is listed on their stock exchange, and has enforced a rule that companies will try and give some direction on profit in these difficult times. And that is why our quarterly report was a few hours late, because we had to try and get agreement with our auditors on what number we put into the public domain, because the order does not complete at the review stage.
Cash remained at $87 million, down significantly as we repaid significant pipeline advances. And after the Board meeting on Tuesday a decision was taken that the interim dividend would be deferred at this stage, pending one or two activities that are going on on the refinancing front in the business.
If I could move on then to the commodities. I think enough said on the dollar front of what has happened to the prices. I said in August at our full year, I said this remained an attractive industry to be in despite the fall in prices that had occurred by August. But I don't think anyone, and I think anyone who says they could have foreseen what has happened to the platinum and rhodium and nickel price, three of the primary revenue drivers. If people could have foreseen what was going to happen I'm sure they wouldn't be out there being analysts, they would probably be very rich entrepreneurs on the beach in Cape Town.
That said, the dramatic impacts that have hurt us, in addition to platinum, are of course the rhodium price which over the half year has come down from a shade under $10,000 an ounce to a shade over $1,000 an ounce. That has a very significant impact on our South African operations where we mine UG2. And in Zimbabwe, to a lesser extent, the impact of the fall of the nickel and copper prices has damaged the base metal byproduct credits that you receive out of the [Great Lake] in Zimbabwe.
Turning the page and translating that into the rand effect. I think you can see that over the reporting period we've come from a little under ZAR20,000 per PGM amounts in South Africa to a low in December of ZAR5,600. A fall of almost 70% or so in terms of the revenue numbers that impacted us.
What we've tried to do though, this time round, because of a lot of confusion around how does the revenue recognition statement work and the pipeline process work, is we've tried to give you an example of what happens for us. We are akin to a copper concentrate producer, for instance, (inaudible), who yesterday announced a provisional pricing impact on their business of $540 million. And we have had a similar kind of impact to that on provisional pricing of circa $90 million in our business in the half year.
Effectively, we book revenue as a truck of concentrate leaves the mind at Aquarius Platinum South Africa and at Mimosa. And that revenue stays in the books until it is settled at the end of the metallurgical smelting, refining, and marketing pipeline and you receive the payment at that stage against which you then have to take an overage or underage against the provisional pricing. But of course in these times of rapidly falling prices you take a very large negative sales provision.
As a company we pointed this out to the market in the first quarter of the calendar year of 2008, where post the [Eskem] event the prices did the same. And interesting how very few people seem to pay attention to these adjustments that go through the P&L in a rising market, but certainly have all feigned a lot of surprise in a falling market. So we have tried here to explain that for a provisional pricing period, which is what the revenue number shows, June to December, we will as a company realize the prices that are achieved from September through till about March. And that's quite important to understand because going forward we seem to have hit a bottom. In fact we're in moderate rising dollar prices, and the impact of these adjustments we think are now going to be basically neutral if not mildly positive over the next few months.
The worst of it is over in terms of the peak pricing, was around June, and all of those adjustments are through the books as we speak. Just to quantify that, give you a feel for that. Aquarius Platinum South Africa booked revenue in July of $61 million and was finally settled with revenue of $25 million in October. And that gives you a feel for just what has happened with these pricing adjustments.
Moving on, just talking about the spot prices of which all of this is platformed. We've had the most unusual situation where South Africa and Zimbabwe the basket is almost identical now, and that is primarily because of the drop in the rhodium price in South Africa, has completely taken away the cream in South Africa for miners down here. And we haven't had as large as an exposure to rhodium in Zimbabwe and platinum very much similar basket percentages. So you see a situation where Zimbabwe has had some moderate impact from nickel and copper collapse, and South Africa has had a dramatic impact from rhodium. And therefore, we now see a situation where the baskets in both countries are very similar.
So now it stands margin is down to the cost side of the business, and of course in Zimbabwe at Mimosa we do have a much lower cost operation in South -- than in our South African operations and that has contributed -- Mimosa has in fact contributed quite handsomely to the Group's half year results.
The rand-dollar most of you will be aware of. We've had some respite since June. That seems to be a fairly -- there seems to be a reasonable correlation that in falling dollar commodity prices the rand weakens and vice versa, and that's very much been the situation. But I think importantly for us in South Africa, South African ops, is that rand basket price which is currently hovering at around ZAR7,600 per four element and for a UG2 producer. And that number has been now...
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