2024-02-21 11:05:18 ET
Glencore PLC (GLCNF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
February 21, 2024, 05:00 ET
Company Participants
Gary Nagle - CEO & Director
Steven Kalmin - CFO
Martin Fewings - Head, IR & Communications
Conference Call Participants
Myles Allsop - UBS
Liam Fitzpatrick - Deutsche Bank
Jason Fairclough - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Anthony Robson - Global Mining Research
Robert Brackett - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Dominic O'Kane - JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Srivathsan Manoharan - RBC Capital Markets
Matthew Greene - Goldman Sachs Group
Ian Rossouw - Barclays Bank
Presentation
Operator
Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our 2023 financial results. Joining us today is Gary Nagle, CEO; Steven Kalmin, our CFO; Peter Freyberg, our Head of Industrial Assets, and [indiscernible], who's going to be replacing Peter when Peter retires next week.
I'll hand over to Gary.
Gary Nagle
Thanks, Martin. Good morning to those in the room. Good morning and good afternoon, good evening to those dialing in or by the webcast. Appreciate your time, and thank you for joining us today for our 2023 results presentation.
So we'll follow a similar format to previous years. We'll start with the scorecard on how we've done and a very, very strong financial year for Glencore, adjusted EBITDA of over $17 billion, made up predominantly, obviously, given our business structure of asset business of $13.2 billion. That's the biggest proportion of that coming out of our energy business, in particular, our coal business. Coal had a very strong year. Clearly, lower than the previous year after the extreme highs we saw in 2022 given the geopolitical tensions and the higher energy markets, but still a very strong coal year and a pleasing result for coal.
Metal is a little bit weaker as a result largely from weaker metal prices, particularly in cobalt and cobalt payables and some weaker nickel process. Our marketing, once again, achieving above the top end of our range. As you know, our EBIT range and guidance for marketing is $2.2 billion to $3.2 billion. So a very pleasing result of $3.5 billion above the top end of the range. We've done that a number of years in a row now. And the opportunities have been in the market for it. We've seen arbitrage opportunities. We've seen higher vol, and that's allowed us to capitalize on these opportunities and post very good numbers.
The other pleasing aspect about our marketing results this year is it's pretty much a 50-50 split between energy and metals. Metals coming back very strongly. So we're very happy to see all parts of the business contributing very strongly in the marketing business. Net debt at $4.9 billion. Steve will talk a little bit more about that later. And distributions to shareholders during the course of 2023, a little over $10 billion. So we've really paid back our shareholders, given back $6 billion in cash, approximately $6 billion in cash and $4 billion by way of buybacks during the course of 2023.
And then lastly, today, we announced our dividend, as you all know, we have a very transparent and open dividend policy. We always pay $1 billion of cash from our marketing business and 25% of our equity free cash flow out of our Industrial business. So this is something that has clear transparency for the market, much of the street expected this dividend. So it's a $1.6 billion return to shareholders.
Now obviously, in other years, we look at top-ups around our net debt target. But given the EVR transaction, the capital to be spent to once we close that transaction by Q3 of this year and our intention later on to bring net debt down and spin out the business. We are not declaring any top-up, but this is our normal transparent and base dividend that we declare. ...
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Glencore PLC (GLCNF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript