Mark Bristow: So Tanya, thanks for that. I’ll start with the last question. So we do not have enough copper, but we’ve certainly got visibility of where we want to go. And again, it’s fundamentally driven by our exploration investment. And again, while everyone else has been talking about it, we’ve actually gotten to the field, and we’ve focused, and as we shared with you in our Investment Day. Certainly, within the United States, that’s a significant endowment, particularly in Arizona. And then also South America and they’re along the Andy’s and particularly, the historical legacy permits of Barrick. And a big focus in on Central Africa copper belt. And as you know, we are well-entrenched in Zambia, and we have a very strong long-term relationship with the DRC government.
And again, that we believe puts us in a very strong position, and we organically led. So — and that’s what we can offer to governments is long-term value creation, not a sudden arrival with a short-term promise, and those countries are wanting to see that whether it’s copper, cobalt or any other EV, we’ve got a gazillion people arriving in these prospective areas around the world. They’re not miners. They have a lot to say, but very little expertise and how they can bring their claims to fruition in the form of value for their host countries. So copper is very much, as we said in 2018, when we put the two companies together, an integral part of our strategy. And by the way, that doesn’t detract from our ongoing commitment to continue to grow our gold portfolio.
And again, if you look at it, if you look at the size of our businesses, so Nevada speaks for itself. Kibali, so six Tier 1 assets, 500,000 ounces and more, significantly more in most cases, beyond 10 years. Then you look at Tanzania, that’s two mines producing 500,000 ounces. So that takes it to seven. And then we’ve got the opportunity with Reko Diq. It’s a Tier 1 copper asset that takes it to eight. And then we’ve got Lumwana that we’re looking at, and that has real potential to be as big as far as production goes as our share of Reko Diq. That takes it to nine. And so you see — and then Porgera, which I’ll come back to that takes it to 10, because it’s a plus 800,000 ounce producer. So then what our focus is, add those chunky assets into our portfolio.
And as you know, Tanya, there are not many around to go and buy. So it leaves us the challenge to be able to hunt those down, and that’s really our focus. Health and safety, a very good question, and as you can imagine, I mean, this — for me, personally, it’s been a traumatic time. It’s multiple more than all the fatalities I’ve experienced in my 35-year career. And so, as a team, as an executive, as a management team across the group, we’ve really had a lot of introspection, looked at these issues. We spent an hour with our Board yesterday working through what we’ve discovered, and the challenges that our lagging indicators have come down materially, as I showed, and — but we’ve had this sudden pickup in fatalities, largely with our contracting partners.
And the point is, my commentary is that what — where I come from and what we’ve introduced in this group is a very flat structure. As you know, we embrace local-local. So we embraced the local partners in building capacity to invest our growth projects into the host country economy. And at the same time, in Africa, as you know, we’ve changed the management team considerably in Africa. And I believe that one of the drivers of this is the fact that we didn’t invest enough time in getting to know our contractors, which was a traditional thing. When you’re flat, you don’t have that big corporate sort of weight. And so, it’s all about interaction on a personal basis, and particularly, when you bring in contractors that are not international in size and capacity.
We’ve got to ensure that we instill that in them. And, again, as we’ve changed and continue to change that culture across the Americas, both South and North, we see that we’ve got to invest more, and we’ve got to specifically look at our induction of our contractors, making sure that they have the systems that we expect they have and to spend more time engaged with them to ensure that they lift their game to the level that we expect anybody to have when they operate in our operations. And I think that, apart from just making sure this is a very significant effort across the group, I’ve spent a lot of time personally, our whole executive has spent time, we’ve really reinforced the responsibility of everyone to stop unsafe work. And again, we’ve moved it from being the right to the responsibility.
And I’m pleased to say, we’ve had some significant examples of our people exercising that responsibility just in the recent weeks. So — and this is — like this, it’s a tough thing because it’s not very tangible, and I’m a person who likes to have absolute control of things. So it’s been a big challenge for me personally, and the team has stepped up. And we — this is more important to us than anything else, and I’ve got no doubt that we’ve as a team are absolutely committed to making sure that we get on top of this challenge. Then Porgera, one thing about operating in Papua New Guinea is, if you get your agreements right, then you can operate freely until they come up for renewal or renegotiation. And so that’s our intention. It’s a challenging environment to work in, extremely challenging.
Probably, the most challenging environment I’ve worked in, and I, as you know, have worked in quite a few of those. We have now incorporated a company that will be the vehicle that has the new ownership and will eventually end up with the special mining license. The steps we’ve got to go through to get there is, we’ve got to transfer the exploration license from B&L, which is the Barrick vehicle, into the new vehicle. And once we’ve done that, we can apply for the special mining license. And as part of that process, we start the consultation with the communities. We have agreements with the various landowner representatives, but we’ve still got to go in and consult under the auspices of the MRA, the government mining authority, and — but we are moving in that direction.
We are employing people. We have reviewed and as part of our care and maintenance responsibilities, make sure that we’ve inspected and ensured that our mobile fleet is operational. We’re beefing up the spare parts. We are doing some maintenance. We’re going to replace some of the tanks in the processing infrastructure. And so we are moving. It’s not going to be a sort of a dead start. It’s going to be a running start as we get there. And again, our team is progressing these agreements with the government and the other authorities, the state mining company, which is our major partner, has just had a big management change for the good, I might add. And so that’s helped a lot in getting — moving on with getting these agreements signed. So it’s — we’re — it’s going to be this year, I believe, exactly when — I think one thing I can tell you is, the Prime Minister and myself are equally motivated to get this mine started.
So — but as far as we’re concerned, we’re not prepared to take any shortcuts, and we’ll get there.
Tanya Jakusconek: Okay. Thank you. I’ll leave it to someone else to ask questions.
Mark Bristow: Yes, thank you, Tanya
Operator: As there are no more questions from the phone lines, at this time, this concludes the telephone question-and-answer session.
Mark Bristow: So are you going to go to the room now, ma’am?
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Fantastic. Mark, thanks for the presentation. Two questions. So first one, on the buyback. You commented earlier, I saw a press headline that you believe Barrick is undervalued to peers. Certainly, it’s trading at a discount. That was also the case a year ago, though, and you had $1 billion buyback and only used $424 million of it. Will you be more active on it in 2023?
Mark Bristow : So, Nelson, it’s a balance. So it’s about allocation of capital. One of the things, I’d go back in 2021, you remember, we had a short run on our stock, and we had no ability to stop it. And that’s what motivated us to file for the authority to do buybacks. And so last year, we have — Graham and I and Graham’s team, we analyzed the register and the trade and at times when we believe it’s fundamentally undervalued, we will by those shares, and we had a program to do it. And if you look at how we bought it, how we bought the shares last year, we did very well. We started at the right time. We stopped at the right time. And we were able to tighten up the market a little bit during those weak periods. The reason we’ve requested authority again is that, again, we just don’t want to be caught without a way to stop a negative run on our stock.
And we believe when you look at it, unlike some other companies who bought high and didn’t buy low, we did. And so we see it as a tool to manage the fundamental value of our owners’ assets. And so that’s the way we do it. I know it’s not absolutely specific, but I can tell you that we spend a lot of time worrying about why we’re buying it and under what circumstance. And then we also balance it against our own long-term capital allocation strategy. So last year, as you saw, that buyback impacted the dividend, because we used up cash on the balance sheet. But at the same time, we still delivered value back to shareholders. So that’s — if that makes sense. Graham, do you want to add anything to that?
Graham Shuttleworth : Yes, just reiterate the point that it’s all about a balanced approach to using our capital. And as you saw, one of the opportunities we took advantage of in the fourth quarter was to buy back some of our debt very favorably and at a discount to par, which is saving us interest charges going forward. So it’s all about a balance. And then at the end of it all, we’re very focused on having a strong balance sheet, because we think through the cycle, that’s a differentiator. And so again, that’s reflected in our current rating. So it’s a balance.
Mark Bristow : And fundamentally, Lawson, we’re business people. We’re owners. We treat this company as a business, and so we run it as a business. We run the balance sheet properly. We look at the whole, to Graham’s point, the whole business profile and manage it accordingly, and we will continue to do that.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. That’s fantastic. Thank you both. And then I wanted to ask about one of your favorite countries, Argentina and Veladero. Maybe if you could just speak a bit to the recovery issues occurring at Veladero and just what the plan is at this point to address those? And then a further comment on the CapEx being deferred from this year into next year. Do you have a number of how much that deferral was?
Mark Bristow : So what we’ve done, first of all, let’s just — as you see, there’s a softer outlook for this year. So as far as production goes, we’ve been conservative in the way we’ve treated this. The reason is that, we’ve intersected €“ we didn’t get the drill rigs ahead of us during COVID. There was a real battle there. We did cover some of it, and we manage that mine on both bottle rolls and column leach test, because the bottle roll doesn’t always give you the right recovery. And there was historical periods of cover where we just had bottle rolls. So we had to make the best estimate, and there’s different categories of ore in that ore body. Some, we call it T2, T1. We have different carriers and some of them are more lower recoveries.
Over time, you get the gold out, but the leach profile is a lot flatter. And we €“ when we manage through this last winter with a new pad, it’s a much more dynamic because there’s no inventory in the pad. And we saw a slow, a very flat curve developing on the leach. We also saw €“ recognize that some of the ore body is more silica rich, which impacts the leach. So what we did is, we’ve reduced €“ or we are in the process of reducing the manpower. We’ve delayed the second €“ the lifted phase 7.5, because we’ve got enough capacity, but we’ve shifted it out into next year. I mean it’s €“ again, to the point of managing it like a business. We’ve mobilized the rigs now because we’ve got them, and we’re drilling out the ore body. At the same time, we’re chasing the exploration opportunities within trucking distance of the mine.
And the view is, we didn’t just want to keep barreling along without €“ as you know, my whole being is around knowing your ore body. So we want to get that clearly understood, and there’s no impact in the long-term opportunities at Veladero, but it’s good practice to do what we’re doing. And that’s what €“ that’s the reason behind that slowdown this year. Of course, you’ve seen PV’s picking up. Nevada is picking up. So we can cover that lower production out of Veladero. And again, from my career, when you’re in these situations where it’s completely artificial in Argentina, because the exchange rate are artificial. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense mining a lot of gold when you’re not making a pile of money. So again, all around, it’s a considered approach with €“ we’ve debated it with our partners in Shandong.
And we’ve also spent a lot of time with the province. And again, what we’ve done is, as is traditional in Argentina, all big capital projects come with a royalty that goes into a fund to support economic development. And what €“ and we have a say in how it’s spent. What we’ve agreed with the province is, we’re going to use some of those funds to really focus in on employment generation outside the mining industry, which I think is a good thing. So all around, we’ve covered the basis to be able to manage this period.
