Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everyone to the Jupiter Mines Q4 call. Today, we have Jupiter Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Brad Rogers, and Independent Non-Executive Chair, Ian Murray, to provide a brief update on the fourth quarter of the 2023 financial year. We will open up for questions from callers. Thank you so much, Ian.
Thank you very much, Lisa. Welcome everybody to our February quarter quarterly report. You would have seen from the announcements today that it has been a busy quarter. This is Brad's second full quarter that he's reporting on. The company is making good progress. Over to you, Brad.
Thanks, Ian, thanks everyone for joining on a Friday afternoon. We will actually have a look at the time of these calls going forward so that we're recording Friday afternoons. Thank you to those who have joined us. You would have seen this morning, no doubt, that the company put out three releases. The most straightforward of which was our notification that we're intending to change our financial year reporting date from what is currently on a South African financial year end of 28th February to the 30th of June. That's a relatively simple change, notwithstanding it requires some work on our side, but the intention there is that that brings our reporting dates in line with the usual Australian cycle, that should make us easier to follow, hopefully, from an investment perspective.
The second update was the quarterly report, which I'll provide some more detailed comments on in a moment and take questions in relation to. The third document we released this morning was a company strategy. That is a very detailed document, as you would have seen. Hopefully, people find it useful. It is representing a comprehensive amount of work and thought that has gone on within the company in working out what the most valuable executable plan forward is, and we're excited by that plan, and we think it's achievable. You will see within that plan that a number of the initiatives, in fact, all of the initiatives outlined within that strategy are underway.
We've been working on bringing that strategy out, but we've also been working on the elements within it, during the course of, over the last period of time. I think that is a very detailed document. What we're proposing to do is leave that with people for a while. We think it's something that will take a bit of time to digest. It does stand alone. We think it's able to be read on its own, but we also think it might be helpful to host a webinar in due course once people have had time to digest and once we fit it in with our various, priorities or sequencing in terms of things we're working on here at Jupiter.
We'll hold a webinar where I will walk interested parties through that document and take questions on that strategy, at least if people have any. Clearly, we don't have time in this session today to do that, and that's why we're proposing a separate, dedicated webinar session to be able to present that strategy. For today, what I'm proposing to do is present the quarterly and take any questions that you may have with respect to that quarterly. In relation to the quarterly, you would have seen that Tshipi has had an extremely strong end to the financial year, really across the board. Starting with safety, which is a continuing strong performance from site management. No lost time injuries for the quarter reported, and we're now approaching two years lost time injuries free, which is fantastic.
The Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate, or TRIFR, is also improving over time consistently, and at the end of the quarter was down to 0.2, which is fantastic. From a production perspective, that was also stronger. Quarter-on-quarter, up 14% on total production volume. Sales, we saw the strongest quarter for the year. We were up 29% quarter-on-quarter. In the last quarterly call, we held late last year, I mentioned that we expected the fourth quarter to be strong, and clearly it has been, and that we expected to come in at about 3.4 million tons for the year off the back of an expected strong quarter. That would require, you know, a step up in sales and land logistics supporting that level of sales. That's what's occurred.
In fact, we've beaten that guidance and come in at 3.48 million tons for the full year. Given that performance was almost entirely comprised of high-grade ore, the year just closed in this quarter represents the highest high-grade ore sales ever recorded by Tshipi. You'll also note, just as a side note really, that costs were up by AUD 0.09 quarter-on-quarter, that was almost entirely a result of royalties and royalties particularly are linked to profitability. EBITDA profitability in the case of that royalty calculation because our EBITDA profitability was up on the quarter, the accrued royalties were also up and that comprised almost all of that cost increase of AUD 0.09. AUD 0.07 of that was due to royalties.
From a price environment, you would have seen that FOB prices during the quarter were higher, and that was largely a result of shipping rates improving during that period of time, and that's something we've been mentioning in the last couple of quarters. That was coming through, and we've seen that in the fourth quarter. It was also due to some temporary disruption that occurred in Gabon where there were droughts in late December which interrupted exports from Gabon, and Gabon is a major manganese exporting nation. That caused the price to increase through a period of this fourth quarter, and that all kind of provided some price support. Overall, mainly because of those two things, S&P prices were better for the fourth quarter.
Post-quarter FOB prices have moderated somewhat, back down to around $3.27 per dmtu currently. That's a combination of, you know, continuing fairly muted Chinese demand, rectification of the Japanese issue I mentioned a moment ago. Also a slight seasonal uptick in shipping rates, and that's due to South American grain exports. Those exports use the same ship types that we use for our South African manganese exports. Having said that, it's not a dramatic increase. We've gone up from about $25 a ton at its lowest during the quarter to in the range of $27-$30 a ton currently, and we'd expect this to moderate. From a financial perspective, also improved, quarter-on-quarter, quite markedly in fact, if you're looking at the quarter-on-quarter performance.
That's been a good result overall for the financial year, given the prevailing level of the manganese pricing during the year. If you look at the full year, FY 2023 versus FY 2022, it shows a good level of improvement. If you look at the quarter-on-quarter EBITDA and NPAT results, there's quite a material step up through the fourth quarter. EBITDA was up 50% and NPAT was up 62% as a consequence of the drivers I've just mentioned. Strong sales, favorable freight rates, relatively favorable manganese price compared to the previous quarter.
Tshipi paid a dividend during the quarter, so if you're looking at the cash movements at a Tshipi level, that's the reason why, and obviously we're, we'll be announcing our own dividend to shareholders as part of our final year lead up to that's yet to come. Those are the kind of highlight comments I wanted to make. Just concluding again that that was a great quarter from Tshipi really across the board, off the back of a continuing strong performance and benefiting from the shipping rates coming down as well. That was good to see the result of in a strong financial and production quarter. Lisa, I'll just hand back to you in case there are any questions.
Thank you very much, Brad. If anybody would like to raise their hand to ask a question, please press star one on your phone keypad now. That's star one. Thank you. We do have a question. It's from Mark Fichera from Foster Stockbroking. Go ahead. Thank you.
Yeah, hi, Brad. Congratulations on a great quarter. Yeah, just a couple of questions. Firstly, just on the sales side of FY 2024, I know that Jupiter previously sort of guided expectations, for the new year in previous reports. I was wondering, have you got any guidance on that? Also if so, the breakup, say, between the high-grade and the low-grade? Thanks.
No, no guidance, Mark. Look, I'm kind of... I don't think we normally do give guidance of that type. Obviously last quarter, I could give a bit of a view for the full year. I'd just give some guidance in relation to the fourth quarter. To my knowledge, no guidance has been endorsed to floor for the full year. What I would say is that we are looking to, as a rule, you would've seen that in the strategy document, maintain stable, at a minimum, stable production from Tshipi, notwithstanding the manganese price environment. If you look at the historical figures, the sales have come in at an average of 3.4 million tons per annum.
The composition of that will be a factor of counter markets to some extent and our ability to profitably be able to sell low-grade. Over time, over the much longer term over coming years, we want to be able to sensibly increase that production target. If you're thinking about the forward year, I'd sort of guide you towards recent history of around that number of 3.4 million- 3.5 million tons.
Okay, great. Thanks. A second question that I had was, you mentioned in your report about your mix of CIF and FOB sales.
Yeah.
I'm just wondering, have you got any sort of guidance or expectation of that split going forward? Also the reasons for the difference, why some sales are FOB and some CIF? Thanks.
Yeah. Tshipi, historically has been almost entirely, CIF-based market, and you can see that in the numbers. It's still predominantly, a CIF-based market. It's just really, there's no particular policy on CIF versus FOB in terms of target mix of sales currently. We're looking at Jupiter's marketing here when you're talking about that. Obviously we're marketing our share of Tshipi ore. We are always trying to just see if we can optimize through mixes of FOB sales. We're looking to diversify where in the world we are selling our ore to. It's predominantly sold to China as raw manganese ore, but we've been looking at some Indian sales and had some success in that.
It partly comes down to where we think the value is, what some of those new customers might want. There's no particular policy about what target level of FOB versus CIF sales we should have. More something we are just open to and testing from a value perspective going forward. I wouldn't rule out coming up with some more, kind of determined policies around that, but at the moment it's opportunistic rather than targeted.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. If anybody else would like to ask a question, please press star one on your phone now. Brad, we don't have any further questions.
Okay, perfect. Thank you all for your time, and look forward to speaking to you soon.
Yeah. Thank you, every—
Okay. I'll just—