Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Gold Fields third quarter 2026 operating update market call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the call. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero. Please note that this event is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Mike Fraser, CEO of Gold Fields. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator. Good day, everybody. Welcome, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our quarter three operational update, ended September 2026. I hope none of you had to suffer the music that we listened to on the introduction, but welcome to all of you. Just on the call today, Alex Dall, our Chief Financial Officer, Francois Swanepoel, Chief Operating Officer, Chris Gratias, our EVP Strategy and Corporate Development, Jongisa Magagula, EVP External Affairs, and Shilan Modi, our VP Investor Relations. Earlier today, we released our quarter three 2026 update. What I'll do is spend a few minutes just providing a bit of an overview on what we spoke to today, and then open up for Q&A at the end. Just firstly, on the operating performance, for us, this was a safe, steady quarter, largely in line with our plan.
Whilst some have reported as being slightly weaker, we really demonstrated good progress, particularly in the assets that were showing improvement. We did have good material movement with an increase in tons milled, and really, the lower production was largely just to mining lower grades, particularly at Tarkwa and at Agnew. I think from a safety performance, again, we continue to see the progress on our safety improvement program. We didn't have any, again, no fatalities year- to- date, which is what we aspire for every day. But we did have one serious injury at Windfall in July, and that was the first that we've had this year, again, reinforcing the need to continue to focus on our program. Again, attributable production was 605,000 ounces, slightly lower quarter- on- quarter at a group level, but we did see improvement at Gruyere, St. Ives, Tarkwa, South Deep, and Cerro Corona.
I'll talk a little bit about this later. We are seeing strong physical performance, and with the improved grades, we will see a much improved and better quarter four, and have a high degree of confidence we'll deliver at the top end of our guidance range. We expect this to come from Gruyere. We're seeing good improved productivity coming through. We've had three new excavators delivered. They're fully operational. St. Ives, we're seeing improvement from Invincible Underground and more material movement. Agnew, we are seeing better performance, particularly higher production out of Kath and Redeemer, which come with higher grades. We are seeing Tarkwa starting to deliver into higher grades from Mantraim. I think just to highlight Salares, whilst it was lower in the quarter, that was as planned. We did plan for a shut and slightly lower production in quarter three.
Whilst we weren't impacted by winter, it is a planned lower quarter for us. We also were ramping up Circuit C in the quarter. I think just on costs, what was pleasing, whilst we've all seen inflationary impacts over the last 12 months, despite the lower ounces, we were flat largely quarter-on-quarter, and still well within guidance. Really confident that from a guidance point of view, on track to deliver at the upper range of our production guidance and within our overall cost guidance. Just a quick couple of comments that we also spoke to is on Windfall, and we did release earlier this week that we've received the Global Certificate of Authorisation.
We've also received the key secondary permits, including the mining lease, and we're now just going to continue with the site preparation, which would allow us then to start looking at a FID to be announced with the February 27 results. At that time, we'll also deliver and publish the mineral reserve and resource update. I think this is a truly exciting time for us. We're also really excited about the district scale potential of this asset, and even some of the early drill results on the broader land package are pretty exciting. Just on Northern Star, we had spoken about the non-binding indicative proposal that we put in front of the Northern Star board, which was subsequently rejected.
We have spent the last month talking to a large number of shareholders on both sides, and I think everyone largely sees the industrial logic and opportunity of what comes with the proposed combination. We made it very clear that any potential transaction would need to be consistent with our approach to capital allocation. Whilst we believe this has a compelling value proposition for Gold Fields shareholders and for Northern Star shareholders, and remain open for engagement, there's certainly no certainty of a transaction occurring. Just the other big corporate activity is on the Tarkwa mining leases. We have five leases expiring in April. We did submit a lease application in November 2025 and a commercial proposal in July of 2026. We are still waiting feedback on that.
We continue with engagements and lobbying at various levels of government, but again, we have no committed timeframe from the government, despite that there's only six months remaining on the expiry of leases. Whilst we are still hopeful that we will be treated fairly and reasonably, and the terms of the renewal will enable us to continue to invest in this operation. We will continue to consider all options available to us. Obviously, we'll provide updates as soon as we have further information. I think just before I close, I'll maybe just hand over to Alex to talk about just the balance sheet and returns, which we think are also, again, in line with our commitment to ensure that we invest in our business and return to shareholders. Alex, over to you.
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I think it is important to outline that in the quarter, we realized the gold price of just below $4,300 an ounce, or 5% lower quarter-on-quarter. On the back of the production and the cost that Mike outlined, we obviously continued to generate very strong cash flow. We ended the quarter at net debt of $981 million, or $410 million excluding leases. This is after paying an interim dividend of around $900 million, an additional $215 million of buybacks, as well as $105 million of investments relating to Founders Metals, as well as an investment we put into our cell captive to reduce our insurance premiums. In addition, we saw about $120 million of leases capitalized relating to Gruyere and Granny Smith.
I think those are the sort of unusual items impacting the net debt, and that put us at a net debt to Adjusted EBITDA of 0.13x. Obviously, we are comfortable that the balance sheet remains robust, giving us the flexibility to deliver on our capital allocation priorities. I thought it was also worth focusing on shareholder returns. As we announced in our H1 results, we had executed $300 million of buybacks between March and July of this year. Since then, we have done a further $554 million of buybacks as at the 3rd of November 2026, and this is at an average price of around ZAR 590 per share, which we think is being opportunistic and delivering significant value to our shareholders. That brings total shares repurchased as part of our additional shareholders program to $854 million.
If you add on the special dividend of $253 million, we have already delivered $1.1 billion of the $1.25 billion allocated to our additional returns program, and that is all done this year. We are going to continue to assess the ability to deliver additional returns, and we will continue to look at buybacks when the opportunity arises, and we will be opportunistic as we do that. Thanks, Mike. I will hand back to you.
Thanks, Alex. Just in closing, before we go to questions, we think the quarter was largely in line with plan. Our costs were flat, despite the inflationary pressure. With Windfall permitted and now being able to move into investment decision, that removes one of the uncertainties in our portfolio. We continue to execute against the internal growth program that we communicated at our Capital Markets Day in November. As Alex has spoken, we have been committed to returning value to our shareholders and have been able to execute that successfully. We still have a strong balance sheet with a clear growth pipeline and are well-positioned to finish the year strongly. With that, thank you, and we will open to questions.
Thank you. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. We will pause for the first question. The first question is from Sam Overwater, Scotiabank.
Hi. Good morning, afternoon. Can you guys hear me all right?
Yes, can hear you perfectly, Sam. Hello.
Great. We've been having some issues on other conference calls, so it's good to hear. Just looking forward, Gold Fields has done well managing costs thus far. Could you please share what you're seeing on your input costs, specifically inflation going into 2027? I think in 2026, inflation was around 7%. Can you tell us what you're seeing overall and how you're thinking about 2027, specifically for labor and consumables within your cost structure?
Yeah. So, Sam, I will ask Alex to add some color onto it. I think the one thing that we acknowledge is that we operate in different jurisdictions, so there are different elements to it. Typically, I would say on average, we would be looking at, on labor, a couple of percent real. Probably the real pressure is what we are seeing in Western Australia. It has always been, over the last number of years, a fairly tight market. Clearly, the other driver of cost is fuel and diesel, and we have seen that increase this year. Now, it will depend on what happens in the Middle East as to whether we see a retreat on that pressure or not.
Then probably the third area is just on construction costs, which is probably linked to labor, where we are seeing, as we are hiring contractors to execute sustaining capital works, that is probably the other area where we have seen slightly higher costs coming through on a unit basis. Alex, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah. No, thanks, Mike, and I think you covered it well. Obviously, Sam, where we also experience additional cost pressures is on just strengthening of producer currencies. Especially in Australia and South Africa, our cost bases are basically principally Australian dollar and South African rand. So we have to obviously watch those exchange rates, which can have a significant impact on our group US dollar costs. Then the other one is royalties, which is so dependent on gold price. Just from the consumables perspective, we obviously use Brent crude as a sort of proxy of where we see that driving diesel, shipping, freight costs that also impacts the likes of It is a good proxy for the explosives, but not a perfect proxy because of stabilization mechanisms.
A simple way to sort of think of it across the portfolio is every $1 barrel increase leads to roughly a $1-$1.50 impact on our all-in sustaining cost per ounce.
Okay, great. Thank you for the color on that. Last question from me. As we are moving to the end of the year and moving into Q4 reporting, how are you thinking about reserve and resource pricing, things like cut-off grades, et cetera? How are you looking at that in regards to your mine plan into 2027?
Yeah, Sam, going into 2027, at this stage, our strategic plans are all being based on our current reserve prices. We have not changed anything in terms of our strat plan and going into our planning horizon. It is something that we will just keep an eye on, see how things move. At this stage, we have not made any decisions on changing reserve prices.
Amazing. Thank you. That is all for me, and hopefully these energy prices come off for everybody's sake.
Yeah. Sam, maybe just the last comment I would make on costs. I think we probably have done a probably not as great a job as we could have on just explaining what we are doing to improve our relative cost position. At the full year, hopefully we can just kind of again talk a little bit more about what we are doing and how we are trying to offset some of these inflationary impacts.
Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to that. Thank you.
The next question is from Ephrem Ravi, Citi.
Hi. Sorry, just had an additional question on Windfall. Obviously, you have received environmental approval, and you are going ahead with the FID in February. Is that a deadline, or you expect to kind of publish before that? It just happens that the full year results is happening in February. Were there anything from the environmental approval process which could materially impact the CapEx estimate for the FID that you could kind of call out for? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Ravi. Look, I think it was just from a timing of execution that it made sense that that is when you would formally ramp up at the end of the next winter. We are not sitting on our hands, and as I said, we are doing the site preparation work and doing as much as we can through winter. I think the February date was just, well, that is a kind of an elegant date to line up to. We could move sooner if we so wished, and I think we would probably say that it would be no later than the end of February. I think from an environmental point of view, nothing material came up since we submitted the EIA. I think there were a couple of things that we flagged.
There was an additional nitrate treatment plant that was required, which was not in the original capital estimate. I think there was another water-holding pond that was required. But nothing material. I mean, it's on the edges of the capital that will come in, but nothing material on the environmental requirements.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is from Matt Greene, Goldman Sachs.
Hi, Mike, Alex. Hope you're both well. Mike, just a question on Tarkwa. Appreciate a lot of uncertainty, but if I can just isolate a comment from your release that you're experiencing increased levels of regulatory activity. What do you mean by that? Is that good regulatory activity?
Look, all it is that it is trying to distill between what is being experienced across the industry versus what is maybe being, I wouldn't say targeted, but accelerated for Tarkwa, given that we are in this lease renewal process. We just wanted to flag, I guess, that the regulators, whether it is the EPA, Minerals Commission, are certainly doing their work in a very comprehensive way. Certainly, we are not afraid of it because we are quite clear that we are fully compliant and we get ourselves externally assured anyway. It is interesting that it appears that the regulators are getting much more active.
Now whether that is political pressure on them because of what is happening in other parts of the sector, because we know that the gold sector in Ghana, particularly as you get to the smaller end of town, have probably got a lot to answer for. So they are trying to step up. It is just interesting that it is happening at a time where we are in the midst of this lease renewal negotiation. So I guess we just wanted to flag that this is, again, not a country that is business as usual at the moment.
Got it. That is very clear. Look, wishing you all the best with those in the months ahead. My second question is just on Agnew with the ventilation disruption. Could you just expand on what happened there, and is that now behind you?
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. I might just hand over to Francois. He can probably take that one better than I can.
Thank you, Mike and Matt. Yes, we did have a ventilation blockage in one of our return airways, which was a scaling event, but that's all been resolved, and I'm glad to say that we're back up to normal production levels.
That's great. Thanks very much.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Mr. Fraser, gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.
Great. Thank you very much, and thanks, everyone, for joining. Look, from our point of view, whilst the ounces might have been slightly lower, we're fully confident that we're on track to deliver at the top end of our guidance. I think strong focus on costs, and we'll continue to look how we relatively outperform on that. There's obviously some really exciting corporate opportunities ahead of us, Windfall, Northern Star, which we'll continue to progress, and clearly, Tarkwa would be a really good one to get certainty on. But I think our strategy is being executed strongly by our teams, and we feel confident with the outlook on the business. So, thanks, everyone, for joining, and look forward to chatting you at the year-end. Thanks all.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.