Good morning, and I would like to welcome everyone to the Jupiter Mines Q4 call. Today, we have Jupiter's Acting Chief Executive Officer, Scott Winter, and Independent Non-Executive Chair, Ian Murray, to provide a brief update on the last quarter of the 2022 financial year. We will open up to questions from callers. Please go ahead, Scott.
Thanks, Erica. Much appreciated. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Jupiter Mines Q4 results. End of year for us, so we'll talk through some of the end of year performance as well. Before I go on, I suppose I want to introduce Ian Murray. First investor call for Jupiter Mines. Certainly not a stranger to investor calls in the Australian Securities Exchange, certainly the first one for us. Ian, maybe I'll hand over to you to say good day.
Thanks, Scott. It's a pleasure to be on here, and especially after we visited the project a few weeks ago. I look forward to answering questions later in the session.
Thanks, Ian. Much appreciated. Look, as Ian said, we'll just gonna take you through some highlights to the business, a little bit about the visit that Ian mentioned, into the Kalahari very recently. Take you through some of the highlights, as we saw it, and then run into some of the detail around safety, environment, production and processing, logistics. Run through some of the costs and obviously some of the marketing. And at the end, we'll run over some of the corporate bits and pieces that we can walk through and Ian can make some comments through there as well. At the end of that, we'll have some questions. Send them through or get them ready and we'll welcome all of those.
I wanna start with the trip. At the start of March, the board, Pat , Melissa, Ian Murray, myself, went across to South Africa. We spent a week seeing the Jupiter team and major shareholders in Ntsimbintle in both Johannesburg and then out on site. It was a terrific visit. The Kalahari is supposed to be a desert, but I tell you, it certainly wasn't. Very green when we went over there. It even rained while we were there and some of the locals were telling us that some of the tributary hadn't flowed in 50 years, but they had just recently. We saw a very different Kalahari and certainly Tshipi to what we've been used to in the past. Look, really impressed with the visit.
You know, one of the things we look forward is, you know, meeting the team and the partners and really they were all very across the detail, knew the main areas of focus, knew their pit, knew the numbers, and really could talk about what they were focusing on in the, you know, the short and medium term. The site looked. Well, it looked wet, actually. It was raining when we were out there. You know, some of the diggers were still operating, moving some of the Kalahari sand. That was pretty good. But certainly it had been affected by rain and you know, we've made mention in the past around rain affecting some of the production. We could see the, you know, the reality that that had actually occurred.
You know, it was a good trip. The pit looked pretty sharp. You know, one of the things that stood out from our visit was the barrier pillar was very much there, available, full of graded ore. Number 20 is just there, but you know, that graded ore, that 1.4 million tons sits there and is available for us in spring capacity and, you know, we'll talk about that a little bit later. I suppose on ground, we saw some opportunity there as well. You know, we're always looking for where we can pull some operating costs out.
I think with you know, some investigation, a little bit of capital into the operation, we can look at some of the material handling that is there on site and see some operating cost improvement over time. You know, it's a long life, low cost asset, so it does lend itself for putting sort of money into infrastructure on site. I suppose another standout was the train loader. We actually saw a train get loaded, which was terrific. You know, it is a significant asset for that mine and Transnet know that and Tshipi benefits from that. It's a fast train loader. It loads a train in about two hours.
You know, Transnet, when they've got wagons that are loose and you know other companies can't pick them up, then they give Tshipi a call and we pick up extra trains, which is terrific for us. That was a real benefit. I suppose we also took a ride up the Kalahari itself, up the belt and dropped in at Makala, had a look at that new operation. That was pretty sharp. We then took sort of a drive through up to Wessels. Didn't go underground, but just had a look at some of the lay of the land and where those operations were in the vicinity to Tshipi.
You know, it is a very sort of condensed area and a lot of support infrastructure around to really make that a central manganese area for the world, really. It was a great visit. Got to meet the face to face, the team and the Ntsimbintle team as well. We have great partners over there and really look forward to working with them in the future as well. Any other comments on the trip, Ian, that you wanna pull out?
No, I think it's very professional meeting the team at Tshipi. They certainly know what they're doing. They've been doing it for about 10 years now. To comment just on that, the efficiency of loading the trains relative to our peers is a real standout.
Thanks, Ian. Appreciate that. Look, I'll just touch on some overall high-level comments that we'll go into a little bit of detail, but I'll just touch on these briefly. For the year, 3.3 million tons sold and about 3.7 million produced. Slightly down on sold from last year, 3.4 million, but you know, 3.7 million greater than 3.4 million produced last year. It was a good production year. EBITDA was obviously down largely on the back of manganese price being down. EBITDA this year is AUD 140 million and PAT of AUD 86 million, compared to last year of AUD 206 million and AUD 135 million respectively. Great safety year points . No LTIs for the year and the TRIFR is slightly coming down.
We'll talk about that a little bit more later. From a mining perspective, the graded ore was on target. Slightly down on Q3 last year, but going well. The waste movement was down, but largely as a result of sort of moving rehandle. It just doesn't get counted in the in-situ volumes. Again, I'll talk about that in a minute. I mentioned the barrier pillar exposure of 1.4 million tons, which is a really terrific asset sitting there available for opportunity. High-grade production through the plant exceeded targets for the year and for the quarter, so happy with that. I suppose the standout and, well, I suppose the issue to manage is inland logistics.
We're seeing certainly some issues with the rail network running at about 90% capacity. Certainly that's being made up or those volumes are being made up with trucking capacity. We can go into some details why. We have a AUD 75 million attributable cash balance at the end of the quarter and, you know, largely supported by the dividend, the Tshipi distributed of about ZAR 500 million. They're the highlights. I'll go into some detail now. Certainly starting with safety and the environment. I'm really impressed with the focus they had on safety. They have no LTIs, but as we know, really the focus then becomes down onto some of those lesser grade injuries, and TRIFR is a focus for them.
They see that improvement coming through addressing the culture on site. They've run a new program, My Safety, My Family, My Community. A terrific program. It is starting to show some improvements with the TRIFR slightly coming down. It's crept up over the last 12 months, so they know that they've got some work to be done there and that program will be a great benefit to that. From an environmental perspective, two things I wanted to pull out, that is work on the biodiversity programs they're doing, securing land to put some of those biodiversity programs in the offset lands. That's progressing to plan and will continue.
I suppose the main work stream in the environmental management plan is the amendments that they're working through with EMP3, which is regarding the closure commitments for Tshipi, which is in 100 years. It's one of those things that will continue to be worked on, but certainly in the very short term, there's some changes being made that are going through the department at the moment. That is a sort of focus of everyone both in Jupiter and the Tshipi team as well. Moving on to mining and production. Look, we're focusing largely on sort of graded ore through. We're slightly behind on overall movement for the period.
That is, I suppose affected by some of the rain that we saw in January, February and some of the performance that was coming out of Moolmans with some of the efficiency on the excavators. It has affected them, which is why, and I'll talk a little bit later about why we're talking about Moolmans with their contract and the introduction of some new equipment later in the piece or probably at the later part of this year. We do see some improvement with the efficiency program running across the site. We did see a volume improvement in Q4 over Q3, which is terrific.
One of the other areas that we have been focusing on, and I come back to that point around rehandle, is the barrier pillar and the associated ramps in and around that barrier pillar. We have exposed, by removing all the waste, this 1.4 million tons of graded ore. And in doing so, we've had to move one of the cross bridge ramps, which is about 300,00 cubic meters of waste and doesn't get captured. Overall waste movement was actually better than reported, but it doesn't get reported as in-situ. I'm sort of happy with how that is going. I wanna make a particular point here, which is we've got a really, I suppose, an opportunity in that 1.4 million ton of ore.
We're not planning in our medium-term plan to, I suppose, high-grade that, so to speak. We are planning to mine on a life and mine strip ratio, so our cost profile will remain sort of constant as we expect. We address or, I suppose, capture graded ore as the market presents opportunities. As the price rises, we can quickly get to graded ore and put it into market. That's sitting there as a terrific asset for us. Processing of high-grade ore was on target. It actually ended up slightly ahead of targets for the year. We took a deliberate decision to suspend the low-grade tons, but largely on the back of manganese price being lower than expected.
It really doesn't pay dividends for us to consume trucking capacity to put low grade into the market. So obviously flicked some of the trucking across the hauling high grade to port. With some of the mining of the barrier pillar ore has a slightly higher fines content. So we did see a slightly higher fines content in the quarter. But overall for the year, we're on target around 15%, so that's fine. Moving on to logistics. I come back to that point again. The rail is being hampered by maintenance delays, power outages, and some of the cable theft, derailment. Transnet's very aware of it. They are putting things in place to address some of those, but it's certainly not showing immediate signs of improving.
The capacity is around the 90% of what is expected. As I mentioned before, we are consuming some of the trucking capacity that we've used for low grade. We're putting that into hauling some of the high grade. As an example, we moved inland about 750,000 tons this year, and the inland logistics was sort of split evenly with, almost evenly with trucking and rail transport. I suppose the shipping team continues to be a leader in innovative logistics solutions. They really do apply themselves on trying to come up with new solutions around logistics. The shiptainers was a classic example of that in the past.
They are looking for this next financial year and beyond to look at logistic solutions to pick up where Transnet's failings are being created. Happy with the overall shipping for the year. We shipped 3.3 million tons for the year. We had actually two vessels that sort of fell over into March that were booked into February, so it would have been slightly higher than that should that have occurred, but it just fell over. Moving a little bit on to costs. If I look at holistic costs for the business, you know, we were down on revenue, obviously, as a result of manganese price, but the overall FOB costing was actually quite good.
Apart from, I suppose, the fact that trucking is slightly higher than rail, the FOB cost was great. If you look at it on a DMTU basis, this quarter was even lower than last. We sort of had $60 per DMTU compared to $75 last quarter. The year ended up at about $86 per DMTU, which is 15% below the plan that we had. That's terrific. On a CIF basis, obviously, that's a different story 'cause of the freight rate pushing up way in excess of where we thought. It's even now starting to be quite volatile. We did see prices in the last quarter up to $60. It's sort of come down to around $52-$55 mark.
It is volatile, and we're sort of expecting it to be volatile into the near future. From an overall year perspective, just give you some numbers. You know, our CIF price, high-grade lump was about $460 in the market. Fines obviously sort of around $410. Low grade is even lower than that, and fines is sort of about $380. So our overall price, revenue for the year on an average basis is about $430, which puts our margin in the range of about $0.80 per DMTU, just to give you some rough numbers. A little bit on the market before we get onto corporate.
Look, the market, I suppose in the last quarter was sort of relatively stable, but it was low. Only at the end of February, we started to see an uptick, and obviously into March, we've seen a significant uptick. The reason for that is largely around, you know, we're post-Chinese Spring Festival and New Year. The alloy plants are looking to restock. Both Australia, Brazil and Gabon have come out and indicated that their production levels for the year are going to be lower. That's sort of driven up the 44% rise in the manganese price. Semi-carbonate at $0.37 has jumped on the tail of that and has obviously seen a rise along. You know, lagged sort of one or two weeks, but it's driven up.
There was a little correction over the last week, so you know, came off the $570. There wasn't a lot of liquidity in the market at $570, but there were cargos sold, obviously. We've seen it sort of coming back this, sort of at the moment, around back to $540. You know, we expect this to remain for a while. We actually expect this year to sort of sit north of $5, which is good. That's largely off the back of China. They've expected their steel production to not go below what they had last year. The rest of the world steel production is actually forecasting a growth, which is good. The alloy plants start to see growth, not only sort of in China, but in the rest of the world.
We're seeing a sort of fairly significant increase in Asia, and particularly India sort of starting to take more cargos. We're certainly trying to put more cargos into, you know, diversified markets other than China, which will help in the long run. We do have a you know a positive outlook for the manganese price. We do have a positive outlook for, you know, our cost profile going next year. You know, again, we're sort of looking, I suppose, happy for what we're expecting next year.
The budgets at the moment are, you know, just getting finalized with the medium-term plans and, you know, we should be able to give some indication soon. Look, from a corporate perspective, just quickly, I might hand over to Ian shortly to talk about some of the things we're doing in corporate. From an overall EBITDA, I mentioned before, AUD 140 million, NPAT AUD 86 million, compared to last year's AUD 206 million on AUD 135 million. EBITDA for the quarter is up against last quarter, so EBITDA AUD 44 million, NPAT of AUD 28 million, which is good, you know, largely because of low cost actually and production levels. We received the ZAR 500 million dividend from Tshipi.
In the last quarter, our cash went from AUD 17 million to AUD 39 million, and overall, we have an attributable cash of 75 million. I was gonna mention the Moolman's contract discussion, but I mentioned that before. The budget I just recently mentioned was certainly something we're finalizing at the moment. Really looking because of the prices around that $ 5.40, a little higher than what we expected, when we sort of started putting it together last year. But it's, we're looking at what opportunities we can place in the market in the very short term. Ian, I might hand over to you to potentially talk about some of the appointments in the near future and, engagements around strategy, if you don't mind.
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. The next key thing that the board's focused on delivering is the appointment of the CEO. We are well down the track of that. There are very good candidates, both internally and externally, that we presumably go to the next phase of interviews with. We are aiming to have that wrapped up in the upcoming quarter. The thing that flows from that is in the corporate strategy. There's no point coming up with a strategy before we appoint the CEO. We're focused on the CEO first and then coming to the market of what the corporate strategy is.
It was pretty clear to see from the visit that we did to the Kalahari Basin that there are a number of assets in that region that are close together that make sense for some form of consolidation, and certainly, Jupiter wants to be a participant in that strategy and in that process. That's stuff that we're aiming to deliver in the next quarter. Thanks, Scott.
Thanks, Ian. Appreciate that. That's largely where we are, I suppose, to make comment around the strategy work that we're looking at the moment. We, as you know, appointed Treadstone to help as a corporate advisor to sort of do the strategic review and help with the growth strategy. You know, in respect to that, looking at some other advisors and support for the work that is really up and coming. That concludes really the detail across the quarterly. Really open then now for questions. Happy to answer any that you might have. Really thanks for jumping on board, and I really appreciate your time.
Thanks, Scott. The question and answer session has now commenced. Guests are invited to ask a question by pressing star one on your telephone keypad now. You will hear a tone as you're joined to the queue. Please listen for your name, and I will introduce you through to the call. That's star one on your telephone keypad now if you would like to ask a question. Just a reminder, if anybody wants to take this opportunity to ask a question, star one on your telephone keypad now. We don't appear to have any questions coming in at this time, Scott. Would you like to hand back to yourself or keep it open for a little bit longer?
Oh, we can keep it open for another little bit. Always happy to do so. That's for sure.
We have had a question come in. Just one moment. We have a question from Michael Scantlebury from Euroz Hartleys. Please go ahead, Michael.
Yeah. Scott, thanks for the call. Just a quick one around going potentially downstream in the manganese space. Would you consider this and yeah, and what kind of value chain would you kind of look to exploit in going in that kind of direction? Or would you look to consolidate upstream first in that kind of area? Thanks, sir.
Well, thanks, Michael. Yeah, and thanks for jumping on board, too. Look, as Ian said before, you know, one of the first things we're looking at is obviously the strategy and what does that mean for Jupiter and what can we do? The most obvious thing is, and mentioned is the consolidation piece. You know, manganese, we are currently a manganese for steel production, you know, producer. But certainly in the strategy discussions we've had so far, you know, manganese not only is, you know, a key product in steel, but it's actually a key product in, you know, the battery space as well. So we are looking, well, when I say we're looking and investigating and educating ourselves on what we can do, down the track.
You know, there's an ordering that we would like to step forward with in regard to the growth, and that's largely going to be consolidation of, you know, manganese within ourselves and some of those opportunities around Tshipi. Downstream processing, you know, high-grade manganese and purification is definitely something we're learning about, trying to learn more about and is a future opportunity for sure.
Thank you, Michael. We don't appear to have any more questions coming through at this time, Scott. Would you like to end the Q&A now?
Yeah, I think so. I think hopefully everyone has got a really good perspective on the quarter and some of the end of year results. Certainly, you know, we're having another call in the near future, so I'm sure questions will come at that point as well. Really appreciate everyone jumping on board and listening to the quarter and look forward to talking to you next time.
Thank you. That now concludes today's call. Thank you so much for joining, and enjoy the rest of your day.