DRDGOLD Ltd. H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference

Hi. Thank you, Natasha. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present, and thank you for attending. I'm going to give you a brief update, both in terms of our more recent performance, and then also talk a little bit about what we're going to be doing over the next few months to build out the business. DRDGOLD is a South African-based gold producer. We produce gold exclusively by reclaiming and reprocessing mine tailings. The company is listed on both the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as well as the New York Stock Exchange. It has, or it had as on 9 September, a market capitalization of $2.4 billion U.S.

I think it's come back a little bit since then, like most other gold equities over the last few days, which is not surprising. We do track the industry. The company has two operations, both of which are situated in South Africa, and both of those have fairly long lives, 21 and 20 years respectively. Our mothership, the first of our operations, is called Ergo. A more recently acquired asset is Far West Gold Recoveries. That's an asset that we acquired from Sibanye-Stillwater, and Sibanye-Stillwater holds 50.1% of the issued shares in DRDGOLD. A very brief summary of what we do. This is what reclaiming and retreating mine tailings or historic residue deposits, what it looks like. You'll see that the material is dislodged using a high-pressure water jet. From there, it's pumped through a network of pipelines to a very large production works or a plant.

A very large percentage of our power, roughly 50%, is from solar. Most of the processed water, about 95% of our processed water is recycled gray water or industrial water. At the plant, the slurry is then mixed through a normal CIL process or treated through a normal CIL process, a Carbon-in-Leach. The gold is extracted and then the tailings don't go back to where it was reclaimed. It actually gets deposited onto a large central tailings storage facility, and that is key in our operations. We refer to that tailings facility, the storage facility, as the exhaust, and the exhaust determines the rate at which you can process and also for how long you can process.

The net effect of our business is the rehabilitation or the restoration of land, and we sometimes say that rolling back the environmental legacy of mining and restoring ecosystems is how we make a profit, which distinguishes DRDGOLD from many other companies in primary mining or operations in primary mining. Here is a snapshot of production for the 12 months ending June 2026. You see that the company produced just over 155,000 ounces of gold or just under 4.9 tons of gold, and that was from a throughput of 25.1 million tons of slurry that was processed during the course of the year. Yield is roughly 193 parts per billion. Cash operating cost, you can see, is pretty much in the middle, $1,780 per ounce. Our all-in sustaining costs, you can see is roughly, one would say, between 10% and 15% of cash operating costs.

Whilst cash operating costs is certainly not the lowest, I think in the industry, our sustaining CapEx is by far the lowest, and that's the sustained business CapEx. All-in sustaining margin for the year off the back of steady production and a very significantly higher gold price was 53% up, just over 14% year-on-year. Production was steady year-on-year. Snapshot for our financial performance over that same period. Revenues of just over $660 million. It's the highest revenue over a year ever. I've been the CEO of the company since 2008. We've never seen these numbers, and as I say, that's off steady performance. It's testimony to where the gold price has taken us, and we're very fortunate that we actually produced the gold to be able to generate these revenues and take advantage of that gold price.

Operating profit was up almost 100% to $382 million. Cash and cash equivalents increased. That's notwithstanding the fact that we spent the better part of $180 million in capital reinvestment, was up 128%. Undrawn security. It's a security or a facility that we put in place a few years back to fund our capital reinvestment, that remains undrawn. And we've declared our highest dividends also in the last, well, since we restarted paying dividends 19 years ago, it's been our highest dividend. It was 60% of earnings, 35% of free cash. So it was a healthy dividend, and as I say, during a time of very significant capital expenditure. I said $181 million. It was closer to $209 million for the year, up 68%. And we'll talk a little bit about that capital reinvestment program and what it's all about.

These graphs show you the financial trends, and this is what steady performance and steady costs look like when the gold price goes up. You can see all of those graphs are very favorably trending. In terms of operating margin, in terms of free cash flow, all-in sustaining margin per ounce, and also headline earnings. As I said earlier, a big chunk of those earnings were redistributed or divvied out as a final dividend. The narrative at the bottom of the slide there says that as an unhedged producer, DRDGOLD retains full exposure to gold price upside, and that is deliberate. We're not fixed income. We're a gold producer. We believe that investors invest in the company because they want to have exposure to the gold price.

What we say is, for the astute investor, there's potential to generate a return on either side of the cycle, depending on where you believe it's going to go to. We remain very focused on costs. Our costs are well managed, well within industry inflation. At these margins, therefore, every additional ounce that we produce goes directly to the bottom line. With all of these cash flows, you see that we generated just on $80 million in net free cash. You need to have a clear capital allocation strategy. Obviously, sustaining CapEx is your first priority. Sustaining CapEx is the oxygen of any operation. You don't spend your sustaining CapEx, you're going to run out of breath. It's like doing scuba diving and not filling your tank. You're going to die. So sustaining CapEx is a priority.

Growth CapEx has become a big thing for us, and we call it growth CapEx, but it is really organic growth CapEx. It is making sure that our entire resource, which is just over 6 million ounces, is optimized, that we take full advantage of that, and that we do not leave value on the table over time. Gold price has been behaving differently since roughly 2018. It seems to have rebased at higher levels on the downside, and that is really enabled us to spend the money and to invest in capital infrastructure to take advantage of our entire resource in dumps that maybe 10 years ago we were not considering as part of our life of mine plan. Those have now very much become part of the life of mine plan. The advantage being that we already have very large capital infrastructure, so those ounces do not have to pay for new infrastructure.

They just have to pay for the added capacity that is required in order to bring them into the equation. Optionality remains preserved. There you could see what the cash flow numbers look like, and also the fact that we still have as a fallback, the roughly ZAR 2 billion, $120 million in undrawn facilities that we have not touched and that we have not had to touch. So the company remains debt-free. What remains, that goes to shareholders. So there is not a fixed dividend policy, but the dividend policy is the money that we make and that we do not allocate to any one of those other three allocations, capital allocations, those we distribute. So what does it look like then if you have this free cash, if you have this resource and you want to optimize it?

You apply it towards the business and you grow the capacity of the business in order to both grow output, to grow added throughput, and also extend the life of your operation so that you can mine your entire resource. We call this Vision 2028. It was conceptualized probably in the years following 2020, but we really put firm numbers down after we had constructed an important catalyst in enacting Vision 2028, and that was to build a very large solar plant and a large battery energy storage system. A 60-megawatt solar plant and 185-megawatt battery energy storage system. That was necessary to ensure that Ergo, in particular, had the benefit of a reset cost profile going forward.

We needed to make sure that an operation that was going to be processing this much material at such low grades, that it had the benefit of own power and that it took control of some of the very steep increases in power costs that we have been experiencing in South Africa since 2008. So having done that, we focused on the two operations and what this project would entail. At Ergo, because it already had the volume capacity, it meant creating additional tailings storage facility. The exhaust had to be made larger. We had to add 430 million tons of new tailings storage capacity in order for us to mine the rest of its resource. At Far West Gold Recoveries, it meant that we actually had to increase the size of the reduction works of the plant.

We had to double the capacity of that plant to 1.2 million tons per month. Building a new regional tailings storage facility, probably one of the largest in the world, that is fully lined and that is built to GISTM standards. We call it the RTSF or Regional Tailings Storage Facility, very original. A series of pipelines that connected it all, including the resources that we needed to mine in order to get to that 1.2 million tons. If you put all of this on one slide, what it looked like, these are the five main projects. The first project, Daggafontein at Ergo, that contributes towards Ergo's quest to add 430 million tons of tailings storage facility. This particular facility, the Daggafontein TSF, adds 120 million of those 430 million tons.