2024-05-05 14:02:10 ET
IGO Limited (IPGDF)
Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call
April 29, 2024 8:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Ivan Vella - Managing Director & CEO
Kathleen Bozanic - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Hugo Nicolaci - Goldman Sachs
Rahul Anand - Morgan Stanley
Jon Bishop - Jarden Group Australia
Tim Hoff - Canaccord
Levi Spry - UBS
Robert Stein - Macquarie
Kaan Peker - RBC
Mitch Ryan - Jefferies
Daniel Morgan - Barrenjoey
Kate McCutcheon - Citi
Matthew Frydman - MST Financial
Lyndon Fagan - JP Morgan
Presentation
Ivan Vella
Thank you, Ashley. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our March Quarterly Results Call. Kath Bozanic, CFO is joining me again for this call and now, we look forward to stepping you through our results for the quarter. Obviously, been a challenging quarter with a number of issues in the nickel and lithium businesses.
Before I get into that, though, I wanted to talk a little bit on safety and reflect on our safety performance through this period. And while we are seeing some positive trends in our leading indicators and very good engagement from our leaders across the business, the rate of injuries and incidents continues and remains about stable its prior quarter, but it's far from acceptable level that we're all aiming for. And this is, of course, both mine and the broader leadership team's highest priority, something we're focusing heavily on.
I'm confident that the work program that we've got underway is and will make a difference. And clearly, reducing harm to our people is the most important work we've got to do. That really takes us through a strong engagement with our teams growing across the operations. And in the quarter, we actually took some time out with some safety reset, safety starts to talk about that, and everyone's role in identifying and consulting the hazards that are across our business.
As I noted in our half year results call in February, we had a very serious incident, where a contract exploration crew at Forrestania were involved in a vehicle rollover. One of the individuals involved in that was seriously injured and is continuing his recovery. Quite a challenging road ahead. And I think that is a start to mining right across our business of just how we feel safety is and the work that we need to do every day and every shift to keep improving.
Moving on to the lithium business, and I'll start there. Look, it was a difficult quarter, I think well signposted for IGO. Our balance sheet remains in a great position, and that's despite recording our first quarterly EBITDA loss for a long time, many years now since that happened. And that result was driven predominantly on the performance of the lithium business, reflecting both the roll-through and the lower prices that we saw through the quarter, but also the sales volumes that we signposted with the lower nominations from the joint venture partners.
On a positive note, though, I'm very pleased to announce that we've just confirmed an agreement by the Windfield joint venture to sell 200,000 tonnes of spodumene SC6 from the stockpiles of Greenbushes to our partner TLC. And that volume is over and above their offtake volume and that sale will be booked through the June quarter. That sale will largely clear the inventories in sight and will give us a good runway to make sure the Greenbushes is operating in full production through the rest of this calendar year.
Digging into Greenbushes a bit further, we announced, obviously, production for the March quarter was going to be lower than the mine's capacity, as the Talison team worked to manage their inventory build against the production demand from the JV partners. Production was 280,000 tonnes, 22% lower than the prior quarter, and sales were reduced even more than that....
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IGO Limited (IPGDF) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript