Looking at the income statement, revenue at R114 billion was down from R138 billion in 2022. Volumes at all our major primary producing operations were up, but were offset by pullbacks in PGM basket prices of between 24% and 32%. The gold price was the shining light and was up 21% year-on-year. Costs were down almost R5 billion and this is a function of solid cost control by the operations and a major contributor was lower volumes from recycling. Adjusted EBITDA halved year on year and still came in at a respectable R21 billion and we forget that not too long ago this was considered record performance, but it has been completely overshadowed by the last three years. We also, as signaled in our trading statement, booked in payments to the value of R47 billion.
This was at our USPGM operations, Mimosa, Sandouville, New Century Resources, and the Burnstone operation. The biggest contributor was the significantly lower consensus price outlooks. We also fully impaired the now closed Kloof 4 shaft. Taxes and royalties were much lower and reflects the lower profitability. The net impact of all of the above was a loss for the period of R37 billion or R13.34 per share, and this was primarily driven by the impairments that we booked during 2023. I’m now going to pass you back to our Chief Regional Officers to take you through the operational reviews. Thank you, Richard.
Richard Stewart: Thank you very much, Charl, and good afternoon or good morning ladies and gentlemen. It gives me real pleasure today to share with you our operational update. I will specifically be sharing some of the group safety and South African regional update. I’ll then hand over to Charles to talk us through the Americas region. Grant will update us on the recycling, and then Mika on the EU region, and finally Robert will pick up on the Australian region. Thank you very much. So I guess just starting off with what is our number one priority both on our operations and as a group in terms of safety. 2023 was really a story of two tales. I think it was very regrettable that we saw an increase in the number of fatal incidents that we had from five in 2022 to eight in 2023.
Very sadly, one of these incidents was a multiple fatal where we tragically lost four contracting colleagues when a conveyor belt that was under construction at Burnstone collapsed. Our sincere condolences go to the families and friends of all of our lost colleagues. I think while the number of fatal incidents experienced is deeply regrettable and I think it was took a hard toll on the team. We have since 2022 been implementing our fate elimination strategy. And I do think that there are many underlying trends that show us that we are progressing well along this journey. This strategy at its heart really looks at eliminating high energy or high risk incidents, and we mitigate against those risks through our critical controls of behaviors and also through our management routines that make sure we enable safe work.
Some of the trends that we have seen that tell us we’re on the right journey would be instances such as our serious injury frequency rate. This we use as a measure since the energy that’s involved in a serious incident is quite often similar to what could result in a fatal. And having seen a consistent year-on-year decline with many of the serious injury frequency rates we experienced last year, the industry leading and certainly records for ourselves does tell us that we are on the right trend. I also think last year for the first time, we saw that frontline stoppages, safety stoppages by our frontline employees exceeded the number of safety stoppages we saw from management and from our safety officers. This is important because it really tells us two things.
Firstly, that our frontline employees are able to identify risk within their working areas, but more importantly that we’re developing a culture where our frontline supervisors stopping for safety incidents rather than continuing work is embraced and really seen as part of our overall commitment to not working in unsafe environments. We’ve also seen a real reduction in risk where historically some of our top incidents that resulted in fatality such as fall of ground. We’ve now gone 25 months without seeing a fall of ground incident showing us that where these controls are implemented we are able to eliminate fatalities. And I remain absolutely confident that if we can continue to implement the strategy and drive it throughout our organization, we can show that deep level mining is possible without fatal incidents.
Moving on to Social, I think Charl did highlight the formation of the Sibanye Stillwater Foundation last year. I think a key achievement towards delivering on our ultimate vision of shared stakeholder value. The specific foundation allocated its first funds to the South African region last year. And through that, we’ve just imbursed our first set of funds to two very esteemed partners in gift of the givers and Breadline Africa. This specific foundation is really aimed at uplifting our communities around our operations also from where many of our employees originate with a focus on infrastructure. And Gift of the Givers will be working with us in uplifting infrastructure around schools, around our operations, and Breadline Africa investing those funds into creating sanitation and replacing put between toilets in many of our originating areas.
I think two absolutely key initiatives that really underpin our commitment to social upliftment and ultimately education in our country which is core to providing equal opportunity for all South Africans. Onto Energy and the E and ESG, I’m very proud to say today that Sibanye is one of the top three private power purchasers within the country and in fact as we stand today have the largest amount of energy projects currently under construction. Last year we concluded the financial close of three significant projects that are currently in construction and will deliver 267 megawatts of solar and wind renewable energy to our operations from 2025 onwards. This is estimated to contribute about 15% of our total electricity requirements from 2026 and will also significantly reduce our Scope 2 emissions by just under a 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum.
