South32 Limited

Yeah, but I do know that when you look past budgets, you can see that...

If you combine what Worsley do, South 32, and add that to Alcoa, the sort of return for the state government on revenue on alumina exports is around 130 million tops.

If I go back 10 years, it's about 135 was the most for those two.

At the moment, Alcoa is, of course, looking at taking over Worsley and South 32's operation.

so we heard this story and now look see with with journos and you know to give people a bit of sort of in-house baseball here i mean what we do is we we hear something uh sometimes we try and stack it up by calling people that might be in that in that world um we put questions to the government very specific questions to the state government this week and it was in relation to the Alcoa royalty rate.

It has been set at 1.65% for decades under the State Agreements Act.

fair.

You obviously know more about this than me, I suppose, from your experience.

There are a number of them.

And we approached South32 about their aluminum assets.

And so it took us, what, two years, close to two years to get a deal done and announced.

So what was it about South32 and those aluminum, as you say, or aluminum, as I would say, assets that attracted you? And what did they bring that Alcoa didn't have?

So let me just back up and talk about when I became CEO, we spent the first three months thinking about where we wanted to take the company, what we want it to be.

And we looked at everything.

And that's a dream.

Over time, they will feel more like they're part of the Alcoa team.

You can see here up 4.25% after big falls in recent times.

The other one, the base metals minus South32, which was spun out of BHP, remember? It was up by more than 2.5% today.

The other one that did really well, Qantas shares, it jumped by almost 3% as oil prices fell.

There was also the network software company Megaport was the best of the biggest stocks.

I mean, there are two large operations, but that's kind of it.

And I'm talking, I'm referring to the Groote Eiland manganese operation that's been running out of the Northern Territory for some years, owned by South32.

It's larger scale.

And then also there was Woody Woody, which is located about 80 Ks north of us and that's still operating as well, albeit on a, I think it's on a reduced output at the moment.

You

mentioned the pricing there.

There was, of course, the fly-up in prices back in 2004 when South32 had problems at Groote Eylandt when a cyclone came through.

What's been the general trend in the price recently, and is there any reason to expect there might be improvement in pricing in coming years?

It was down 13.7% today.

South 32.

Well, it certainly went south more than 32 miles an hour, 5.3% down for that one.

So no good news for any resources at all, really.

zinc, 1.48% copper, 1.11% lead, 60 grams per ton silver, and a little bit of gold.

So very polymetallic, right? Like how should our audience understand like what this resource is and how you are going to kind of attack it, right? Like how do you want to develop it? What do you see? Are you thinking of it in the way of the, you know, the trilogy and sort of the South 32 other assets in Alaska? Like just kind of break that down for us.

Yeah, of course.

Uh, yeah.

So if, if you look at the, uh, the Arctic, uh, project, which is our, uh, our neighboring, uh, project owned by Trilogy on South 32, just by way of background, uh, that project, uh, was initially acquired by Rick, our chairman, uh,

at Novogold.

Rick Van Nuenhuis of Contango.