Good morning. This is Jonathan Morley-Kirk. I'm the FD of Jubilee. Today, I'll be going through the interim financials. This will mercifully be a very short jaunt. The interims have been out for about a week, so I anticipate that most of the investors have had a look at them, and I go forward on that basis. I will not be updating all the company's projects, but just really focusing on the interim financials. This is a departure from previous years, but it's more in tune with the spirit of the FRC expectations. "Morley Kirk alone," I hear you cry. "No sign of Leon". What a dull presentation on a dull subject! For this, I can only apologize. Leon is back soon for a presentation on the Molefe mine. It'll be within a month.
It is proposed to have a series of presentations on the various company projects in separate, discrete presentations. The presentation on Molefe is likely to be insightful and interesting, two adjectives that are unlikely to apply to any presentation on financial statements. The presentation will attempt to answer questions posed by investors. Thank you for all those who have sent in their questions. Some of these questions I've amalgamated to stop repetition and to make it easier. There were some extremely detailed accounting and tax questions, which were very unexciting, and I have addressed those directly with the senders and will not be in this presentation. "Thankfully," I hear you cry. The main and recurring question is on the structure and the content of the accounts in the present and past. If we go to the next slide, please.
This just shows the interims and the annual financial reports and what's included and what's not. As you can see, Zambia has always been included, but South Africa was included and then it's been excluded. All pretty predictable until the 2025 annual report. The annual financial report which had a post-balance sheet event that required when the South African operating companies were sold, and they were formed into a disposal group. They were not sold by the time that the audit opinion was signed, and that transaction was legally completed only on the 31st of December 2025. This gets a bit murky. Under IFRS, the disposal consideration was present valued back to the 30th of June 2025, although it was not completed until the 31st of December 2025. This goes against the contract. Indeed, even the comparatives were restated as though the disposal had taken place a year earlier.
Thus, the 2024 annual financial report numbers do not tally with the comparative 2025 numbers. It gets more murky. The 2026 interims have been produced on the basis of the 2025 annual financial report, but the 2025 interims have been changed to follow suit. That's as clear as mud, but is a very strict IFRS interpretation. Investors who were expecting to see the results of the South African ops in the six months to 31 December 2025 will be disappointed that they are again accounted for as a disposal group, but this time as a discontinued activity which again makes it a bit unclear again. The interims do show the results of Zambian operations in isolation as such. Tjate and the group or head office costs, which were previously covered by the South African ops, are now lumped in with the Zambian operations.
If we go to the next schedule, please. Here are the key highlights from the interim financials. These are, as you see there, factually correct. They are what they are. They all seem to be up and an improvement on previous years. That's not the entire story. If we just flip to the next schedule, please. There were a few adjustments to these earnings. Those ancients among investors may remember when accounts made sense, and there were extraordinary items or exceptional items that were disclosed. This schedule highlights the main extraordinary and exceptional items that are unlikely to reoccur. Shareholders may make adjustments to their EBITDA numbers as they see fit. Personally, I would strip out all one-off, non-recurring items. If we could go to the next schedule, please. These are the main questions we received from shareholders, and thanks again for them.
Question one: Is Jubilee Metals a going concern? The audit of the annual financial report to the 30th of June 2025 had to have a going concern signed by the auditors and by the board 12 months after the sign-off from the auditors, which takes us to December 2026, which is about the same sort of time as 12 months from the reporting date of these interims. Technically, nothing has happened to the audit opinion from 2025, nor are the directors' evaluation. I believe Jubilee Metals is a going concern, but I don't have a crystal ball, and if anybody has one, I'd like to borrow it, please. Second question is: Is a provision required against the receivable from One Chrome? You may remember that when we sold the businesses, we were to receive, over a period of time, $90 million, of which $25 million has already been received.
The receipts were absolutely on time. There was no delays. There were no deductions. There were no changes to it. As far as we're concerned, One Chrome have honored the contract perfectly, so therefore, there is no impairment review so far. We do keep the situation under close watch. Leon and Rian Smit are in very close contact with the management of One Chrome. As you can imagine, whenever a large deal is transacted, there are always one or two small wrinkles that need to be ironed out after the contract is signed, and this is the case. The relationship with One Chrome is cordial and professional, and we don't see or foresee any problems at this stage. The accounting for a receivable over a number of years is quite clear under IFRS. It is present valued back to today's value.
There is a provision in our accounts for about $12-$13 million. This is just a present value adjustment and not an impairment charge against the creditworthiness of One Chrome, just to make that clear. Were the results of the South African operations in line with management's expectations? That's a tricky one. The chrome operations were impacted mainly by the strength of the rand against the US dollar. Maybe this was the dollar weakening rather than the rand getting stronger as such. The costs of chrome or the chrome operations are largely Rand denominated. When the rand increases in value relative to dollars and we report in dollars, our costs become higher. This is not good. Chrome is sold in dollars, which is fine, but you therefore have a currency mismatch, and it worked against us at this time.
I believe over the next few years, the rand will depreciate relative to the dollar, but at the moment it has been very strong. That hasn't helped. PGMs had a much greater increase in prices that nobody could have foreseen, which is great news, and I hope it stays that way. Just going back to the PGMs, the volumes are broadly in line with our expectations. The prices are in line with the market. Obviously, we sell concentrate. We don't sell the final PGMs prices, so we generally get 75%, 76%, 77% of PGMs prices, but 77% of a large increase is welcome. However, the PGMs and chrome together, if you look at them, produced a net loss of $4.5 million for the six months, and that was much lower than the management of the South African operations was expecting, largely because of the Rand appreciation.
Turning to Zambia, were the Zambian productions in line with internal expectations? We saw earlier that the revenues were up, and the profits were up, and everything else looked good, but the results are slightly misleading to the extent that management expected a higher production level in Zambia. There are many reasons why it didn't happen, but the results look, in percentage terms, good. They are good, but they should have been better. The rains didn't help. That's one of the main problems. We're looking forward to putting a few tweaks to production, which will increase it going forward. We'll see how that goes. People are aware that we've got a CapEx program in Zambia which should help production, and the first stage of that is the centrifuge, which is just about to go online in the next couple of weeks, and we'll just have to see how that goes.
Sulfuric acid, n ow that's one of the main ingredients for our copper production. Now, we have two suppliers generally. First one is Mopani, which has a contract with Jubilee, has done for a long time. Leon and I met with Charles Sakanya, the CEO of Mopani, about three weeks ago, and we discussed, amongst other things, the sulfuric acid issue. They have stopped production. This doesn't seem to be anything other than a problem with their production facilities. It's not a management decision just to stop production because the price is going up. I don't believe that for a moment. They are working on it, and they gave us assurances that they were trying to fix things as soon as possible. The other contract we have is with a large Chinese producer who has just reduced modestly their production of sulfuric acid.
This is slightly worrying, and we're told it's not a long-term issue, just a small reevaluation of where they are. However, the Association of Copper Producers has been talking to government, as have Jubilee, just to see what we can do to make sure that sulfuric acid doesn't become a bigger problem. The government have been very open to listening to our concerns. They have stopped the export of sulfuric acid to the DRC, and it has to remain within Zambia, which has helped. The war between Iran and Donald Trump has not helped, as you can imagine, and what happens going forward may or may not impact on the price of sulfuric acid.
Personally, I've been looking at combining purchase orders of Jubilee with two or three other copper producers to see if we can club together and probably get a convoy of sulfuric acid from another jurisdiction and send it into Zambia. This is fraught with transportation issues, customs duties, and the like. However, it's early days, and we'll see if that takes us anywhere. On balance, sulfuric acid is a worry. It's not a big worry at the moment, but it is a worry, and we're keeping it very much under review. Following on from the Trump-Iran war is diesel, and I'll just mention it here. We don't have diesel power other than for emergency generators. We don't have trucks which take diesel. However, we do use transportation companies, contractors which have trucks, and we expect the price of diesel to go up in Zambia.
It goes up every quarter, and it's just gone up yesterday, I believe. That is likely to lead to increases in transportation costs. What those are likely to be and for how long, we're unsure at the moment. It's not going to go the right way for us in the short term. I had a couple of questions on tailings and waste, and people were asking how are they measured. You don't sort of have a great big tailings dump hundreds of meters long and 100 meters wide and at differing heights. You can't measure it with a tape measure and a ruler. We fly drones over it, and those drones have got very complicated volumetric calculators on board. They work out the volumes of the site. They compare the height to the ground level, and they come up with a pretty good volume.
Now, sometimes we fly them twice just to make sure that the first volumetric is in line with the second, but that's only a control. The problem is not the volume as such, it's working out the density. Now, with rains generally compact the surface, and that will have a difference to density as it might have in the middle of the waste or the tailings or indeed at the bottom. So from time to time, we will drill a few wells through the tailings just to see what the density is and then apply it to the volumetrics. In a similar way, I might add, that if we want to measure how much resource or overburden has been removed from Molefe Mine, for example, we would fly drones over there, and we could work it out that way. The last question is on guidance.
What are the issues and when it can be expected? There are a lot of post-balance sheet events from the 31st of December which impact or may impact guidance, making it rather tricky. The availability of sulfuric acid could be one. The impact of diesel prices might be another. We've got the centrifuge coming online this month at Roan. It will be set up, tested, and then ramped up. How it works, we don't know at this stage. We're always hopeful, but we don't know. The mine plan at Molefe you may have seen recently. That's up and running. Again, when you're changing a mine plan, it's never clicking your fingers and it's straight line to heaven, but it may have one or two gremlins. The rains are still with us, and not as bad as they were, but they're still with us.
What management have decided to do is just wait to see how these pan out so we've got some certainty. We could stick some numbers out there, but they would be a little bit open to interpretation. To avoid that, we decided just to hold off a little bit, wait and see how things go and tell you as soon as we are comfortable that the results are as expected. That's about all I can say on guidance at the moment. There was just one other question I received just before we went on air, and that was on the financing costs on the South African operations after the sale to One Chrome. Now, you may recall that the net assets were $90-odd million.
The debt, which was trade finance of $40 million plus a bank loan of about $16 million, totaled $56 million, which gave an enterprise value of $146 million. All that trade finance and the bank loan has rolled over to One Chrome. Therefore, the costs, or the finance costs in relation to the South African operations, has reduced and it will not come back. The only asset we have in South Africa now is Tjate. Tjate has got no lending secured against it. It's completely free. Zambia, in a similar way, does have some trade finance and some bank debt against various parts of it. This was put on over a number of years, and in what I can only say is a suboptimal manner.
It may have seemed right and relevant at the time, but now that South Africa has gone, the management team have really got to grips with what we've got in Zambia. What we have in Zambia is that we have some short-term financing against long-term assets. This is a mismatch, and it needs to be resolved. The finance team and I are working hard to rejig the financial liabilities we have in Zambia. We are looking to work with our banks to get a more appropriate form of funding, and so we will have long-term assets funded by long-term liabilities, and we will have short-term funding for short-term assets, and therefore we will be more like most mining companies. That's work in progress, and I hope to report on that in the next six-month update. That's all the questions I have to answer today.
I'm always very welcome to receive questions from shareholders if they want. Of a financial nature, I can't really comment on production and stuff as I'm not a production or chemical engineer. If you want a dull, boring accountant to have a rummage through some questions on tax and accounting, please feel free to send a question to myself or to Kathy. Thank you very much.
Perfect, Jonathan. That's great, and thank you for updating our investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Jubilee Metals Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good afternoon to you all.