We're going to kick off Teck here. We have J onathan Price, who's going to give a presentation on everything happening with this leading Canadian base metal company. Thank you, Jonathan.
All right, thank you, Matt. And good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be back in Florida with all of you today. So, getting the usual legal statement out of the way, this presentation contains forward-looking statements. Various risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to vary. Teck does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The assumptions underlying our forward-looking statements are on slide 2. I'll also be referencing various non-GAAP measures. Explanations and reconciliations for these measures are available in the latest MD&A and quarterly press release on our website. So, those of you still awake, I will start now on slide 3 with an overview of the four pillars of our strategy to deliver growth and create value in a responsible and disciplined way.
Our portfolio of high-quality copper and zinc assets are well positioned to benefit from materially higher demand for metals expected over the medium and long term. We're focused on driving excellence in performance across the operations and projects while keeping sustainability at the core of everything we do. We have a rigorous approach to our growth portfolio, optimizing development of our value-accretive near-term growth options in attractive jurisdictions. And the disciplined application of our capital allocation framework enables our operational and financial resilience by balancing investment in growth with returns to shareholders while maintaining a strong balance sheet through economic cycles. Now, as a pure-play energy transition metals company with an exceptionally strong financial position, Teck is uniquely positioned to deliver significant value to shareholders. On slide 4, we've made significant advancements in our value creation strategy in 2024, which was a transformational year for Teck.
We completed the sale of our steelmaking coal business for value, enabling us to focus on our base metals portfolio, which led to a valuation re-rating. With the $8.6 billion in proceeds from the transaction, we announced the largest cash return to shareholders in our history, and we began executing that return immediately. We returned $1.8 billion in cash to shareholders last year. We also enhanced our resilience by further strengthening our industry-leading balance sheet. We reduced our debt by $2.5 billion and retained funding for our near-term value-accretive growth projects. As of December 31st, we were in a net cash position of $2.1 billion. We completed construction of QB in Chile and ramped up the operation to design throughput by the end of last year. As a result, we set a record for annual copper production in 2024 with a 50% year-over-year increase to 446,000 tons.
We generated $2.9 billion in Adjusted EBITDA, more than double the prior year. At the same time, we advanced the pathway to further our copper growth by progressing our well-funded and value-accretive near-term projects. Overall, last year, we made significant progress across the four pillars of our strategy for responsible growth and value creation. Turning to slide 5, Teck is currently a top 10 copper producer operating in the Americas and the largest net zinc miner globally. We have a portfolio based on a foundation of world-class operations comprised of high-quality copper and zinc operations in well-understood and established mining jurisdictions in Canada, the U.S., Chile, and Peru. Importantly, three of our six operations are Tier 1 assets: QB and Antamina in copper and Red Dog in zinc. The quality of these assets is demonstrated by their strong profitability.
Around 70% of our group EBITDA is expected to come from these Tier 1 assets this year, based on consensus. As such, we are well positioned to benefit from the materially higher demand for metals expected over the medium and long term. I want to take a moment to acknowledge the economic and political backdrop in which we are operating. Globally, we are witnessing a period of significant economic uncertainty and change that will alter trade flows and potentially impact global supply chains and market dynamics. In this context, the outlook for our core commodities remains robust, driven by the underlying demand factors of economic growth and urbanization, electrification to ensure energy security, and growth in the digital economy.
These secular tailwinds underpin significant demand for both copper and zinc, and when coupled with supply-side constraints, underline the strength in our strategy as a pure-play base metals company with a deep pipeline of copper growth opportunities. We are closely monitoring the potential impact of tariffs and other restrictions between the U.S. and Canada, which is a fluid and rapidly evolving situation. Teck has a resilient business driven by the diversification of our products and operations, coupled with an agile and sophisticated commercial strategy and a very strong balance sheet. Any tariffs imposed by the U.S. are not expected to have a material impact on our business. Our copper and zinc concentrate sales would not be impacted as we primarily sell to Asia and Europe and not into the U.S.
Operations refined zinc, lead, and specialty metals such as germanium and indium, as well as sulfur products, are sold into the U.S. But in the event that tariffs are imposed, we expect trade flows to adjust. While Teck produces a large proportion of the ex-China supply for this diverse group of metals, they comprise less than 15% of our revenues. At the same time, potential reforms could also create opportunities for Teck. For example, permitting could be accelerated, enabling us to execute on copper growth projects quicker than anticipated. And some of our metals are critical to U.S. and Canadian defense applications, hence national security, creating opportunities for Teck in supplying critical minerals into these demand sectors. We will continue to actively monitor and respond to the situation to mitigate any potential impacts on our business and, of course, leverage any opportunities.
We have a strong commercial strategy and logistics capability that enables us to quickly pivot and respond to changing market conditions. And we are closely watching developments and engaging with our customers as we remain resilient and agile in the current environment. So, slide 8 summarizes our focus to creating value for our shareholders and our priorities to do that in 2025 and beyond. We've entered the year with QB operating at design throughput rates, and our primary focus is to complete the QB ramp-up to steady state. We are on track to not only grow our copper production but also reduce our unit costs and improve our margins. We will continue to focus on cost discipline at the operational level as well as at the corporate level, where we already made headway in delivering savings last year.
Importantly, we remain committed to returning cash to our shareholders through the execution of our authorized share buyback as well as our annual base dividend. And we are progressing our near-term value-accretive copper projects to possible sanction decisions in 2025, positioning us for the next phase of copper growth. And our agile commercial strategy and strong balance sheet enable resilience for us to navigate the current environment and continue to create value for shareholders. So, looking at our first priority, QB ramp-up. In the fourth quarter of 2024, QB delivered the strongest quarter to date, with mill throughput rates increasing quarter over quarter and achieving design throughput rates. We also achieved record daily production throughout the quarter. The QB plant design and build are robust, and we are pleased with how well it is operating.
Recovery has improved, and we were within design levels in November and December as a result of our successful improvement work on the grinding and flotation circuits in Q3 and early Q4. Grades were also higher in the quarter, in line with the mine plan. For the full year, copper production was within our guidance at 208,000 tons, and we're well positioned at QB for further growth in copper production at lower net cash unit costs, setting us up for improved margins and cash flow. Our 2025 guidance range for QB of 230,000-270,000 tons represents a significant increase from last year. This guidance reflects an extended 18-day shutdown that we had in January to conduct maintenance and reliability work and complete additional tailings lifts as part of the operational ramp-up. We expect to continue to have regular quarterly maintenance shutdowns per our operating plans.
In 2025, we expect to see an overall increase in average grade to 0.6%. In line with the mine plan, we are processing more transitionals, which is lower-grade material, particularly in the first quarter of the year. Grades are expected to increase into the second half. Our focus is on achieving steady-state operational performance with consistent online time, with design recovery rates of 86%-92% depending on ore feed material. We expect a significant reduction in QB's net cash unit costs in 2025 to $1.80-$2.15 per pound from $2.72 per pound in 2024. This reduction is primarily driven by a combination of higher copper production, cost discipline, and increased molybdenum by-product credits as the QB molybdenum plant continues to ramp up. Overall, QB is performing well, and we look forward to seeing the operation generate significant cash flows in 2025 and beyond.
So, turning to our second priority on slide 10, we expect significant growth in our copper production with improving margins this year. Our copper EBITDA margin increased in 2024, and we expect to improve it further to 53% in 2025, based on consensus estimates. Our copper production is expected to grow to 490,000-565,000 tons this year from 446,000 tons in 2024, due to both the ongoing ramp-up of QB and improved grades at Highland Valley. We also expect a significant reduction in our copper net cash unit costs to $1.65-$1.95 per pound from $2.20 per pound last year. And this reduction reflects an increase in copper and molybdenum production as well as continued cost discipline across our operations. We expect our molybdenum production to increase to 5.1-7.4 thousand tons from 3.3 thousand tons last year.
This is based on the continued ramp-up of the molybdenum plant at QB and increased molybdenum production at Highland Valley Copper as we mine in the Lornex pit. We have a strong cost focus, and we have implemented structural cost reductions across our business following the sale of the steelmaking coal business. As a result, we reduced our corporate costs by 21%, or $88 million last year, compared with 2023, and we expect to further reduce corporate costs this year, as reflected in our annual guidance. Now, on slide 11, we are continuing to return cash to our shareholders, and this remains one of our priorities, particularly the ongoing execution of our authorized share buyback. We returned $1.8 billion to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends in 2024 alone. This builds on our strong history of cash returns to shareholders, which total approximately $5.1 billion since 2020.
We retain our annual base dividend of $0.50 per share. In each of the past two years, we've also paid a supplemental dividend of $0.50 per share, bringing total dividends to $1 per share in 2023 and 2024. And now we are in the market daily, actively buying back our shares. We executed $1.45 billion of the $3.25 billion authorized share buyback under our normal course issuer bid as of February 19th, representing approximately 23 million Class B shares. As a result, approximately $1.8 billion of our authorized buyback is remaining, which will further improve our per-share value. Under our capital allocation framework, with the strong cash flow generation potential of our business, we could see further cash returns to shareholders. We remain committed to returning between 30% and 100% of future available cash flows to shareholders.
Turning to slide 12, another priority is to continue to progress our well-funded and value-accretive near-term copper growth projects. This includes the Mine Life Extension at Highland Valley in British Columbia and our greenfield projects, Zafranal in Peru and San Nicolás in Mexico. These are attractive projects that are simpler in scope and complexity than our QB2 project, with significantly lower capital intensities. These three projects are all on track for potential sanction decisions in the second half of this year. We also continue our work to define the most capital-efficient and value-accretive path for the expansion of QB through optimization of the mill and low capital debottlenecking opportunities that could increase throughput by 15%-25%. Through the execution of these projects, we have a clear path to grow our copper production to approximately 800,000 tons per annum before the end of the decade.
Now turning to the balance sheet, our priority here is to enable resilience through our balance sheet, which is currently one of the strongest in the sector. In 2024, our cash balance increased significantly as a result of the proceeds received from the sale of steelmaking coal. With the proceeds, we reduced our debt by $2.5 billion. We currently have liquidity of $11.3 billion, including $7.1 billion in cash. We were in a net cash position of $2.1 billion as of December 31st, and our remaining outstanding term notes of $1 billion US dollars are long-dated. We continue to maintain investment-grade credit ratings. Our industry-leading balance sheet is a competitive advantage, providing us with the resilience to navigate current market conditions and allowing us to execute on our copper growth strategy while returning cash to shareholders, ensuring we create value for all shareholders.
With our 2025 priorities and our approach to balancing growth in copper and cash returns to shareholders, we can continue to significantly impact the accretive growth potential of our metrics on a per-share basis. In 2024, with a ramp-up of QB and with a significant portion of our $3.25 billion share buyback completed, we increased our copper production per share by 48% compared to the prior year. By 2026, as we stabilize QB at full production and complete the significant remaining authorized share buyback, our copper production per share could increase by a further 32%-49%. Beyond that, our copper production per share could increase substantially as we bring on our near-term value-accretive growth projects.
And this does not consider the impact of any further share buybacks that could be authorized under our capital allocation framework as a result of the strong cash flow generation potential of our business. Through the end of the decade, our copper production has the potential to increase rapidly on a per-share basis. Overall, the market has recognized the strength of our strategy, our business, and our commitment to balancing near-term growth with cash returns to shareholders, as evidenced by the increase in our valuation multiple, which is now in line with the pure-play copper peers. So, to conclude, our focus at Teck is to create value for our shareholders, and we are well positioned to do that in 2025 and beyond.
With QB ramping up to steady state, driving further growth in copper production and improving margins this year, enabled by our strong focus on cost discipline across our operations. With continued cash returns to our shareholders, including $1.8 billion remaining of our authorized share buyback as well as our annual base dividend. With well-funded value-accretive near-term copper projects that are on track for potential sanctioning decisions in 2025, and with the resilience to navigate the current environment and create value through our exceptionally strong financial position and agile commercial strategy. We look forward to executing on our 2025 priorities and continuing to create value for shareholders. With that, thank you, and I'll hand it back to Matt for questions.
Great. Okay. We do have time for questions. Thanks, Jonathan. We did have one come through the app that was more of a macro question. It was, are there any particular metals whose demand profile you are at all concerned about in the portfolio?
In the portfolio, being the key part of that question, because I was about to answer yes. But not so much in the portfolio. Look, we think the demand outlook for copper remains very strong on the basis that I articulated previously. And that is driven by ongoing urbanization. It's the build-out of infrastructure to support that. It's the electrification that we're seeing more broadly. And of course, now we're seeing tailwinds from the digital economy as well. And China continues to chug along despite all of the headlines that might signal some risks there. The imports of copper to China and the use of copper in the industry there to build real infrastructure remains very strong and quite compelling. But more generally, we see a very strong outlook for copper into the long term. Zinc, similarly.
There is very little to no new supply coming into the zinc market, and that's been the case for quite some time, and we see a lot of positive drivers here for demand. As one of my colleagues was sharing with me earlier, rates of galvanization in automotive industries in the West are 90%. They're 50% in China and they're 15% in India, so there's a lot of zinc that we could consume to increase rates of galvanization. Of course, as we see ongoing urbanization in the world as well, that is going to areas with much, much higher humidity, and today, the world incurs $2.2 trillion of costs every year related to corrosion. Galvanization and increased use of zinc is clearly a solution to that, so we see very good underlying demand for the commodities in our portfolio. We also see shortages and scarcity of new supply.
We think both on the demand and supply side, the underlying fundamentals for the major metals that we're producing remain very much intact.
Are there any commodities outside the current portfolio that you're interested in?
Look, I think right now we're happy with what we've got. You can see that from our growth, we're very much focused on more copper. Of course, that tends to come with other products, whether that's molybdenum or whether that's more zinc. But beyond a focus on copper right now, while there are a few things that we look at from an exploration perspective, we think we're in the right place. We think we have the right portfolio of assets. We're in great jurisdictions, and essentially, the focus for us in the near term needs to be very much on execution. It's on the ramp-up of QB and stabilizing that operation. It's on execution on the next tranche of projects that we have ahead of us. And it's on execution of the share buyback.
As I said, we're in the market every day buying back our shares right now, and we intend for that to continue.
You talked a bit about the next wave of your projects being particularly executable. How do you feel about the mega projects in the portfolio?
Yeah, so the next wave of our projects, particularly the greenfields being San Nicolás in Mexico and Zafranal in Peru, are relatively simple projects in that they don't require all the infrastructure like new ports or desal plants and pipelines to support their development. Therefore, they have relatively low capital intensities, and they offer good returns even at these prices. We get asked a lot, what is the incentive price for new copper development? Well, the answer is it depends. It depends on the nature of the project you've got, the scale of that project, and particularly the infrastructure required to enable that project. And therefore, these look good. As we get into the next wave of projects beyond that, that could be Galore Creek in British Columbia. That could be Nueva Unión in Chile, or it could be another major expansion of QB.
It's clear that they would require more capital, more infrastructure, and therefore would have higher capital intensities than those we're enjoying now. Again, just to go back to San Nicolás, we said that could be in the range of $10,000-$15,000 a ton, and Zafranal could be in the mid-teens in terms of thousands of dollars a ton. I think as we look forward and you look at the industry as a whole, these mega projects seem to be trending more towards $35,000-$40,000 a ton. They require a very different incentive price to get them off the ground. Fortunately, that's not a problem we have to contend with today. We have those sorts of projects in the portfolio for future development.
They could be a path to material growth, but only in the event that they will offer good returns to our shareholders, and that will require an improvement in the current pricing environment.
There's a question about the health of the sector where you have major mining companies who are in a decent balance sheet position in a somewhat sickly junior market. What do you think about the role of the juniors in the market? And yeah, any thoughts you have on the health of the sector?
Look, junior miners are very important, of course. They're the folks who are often out there on the frontiers looking for these new discoveries and bringing forward these ore bodies that might become the next Escondida or QB or other major operations that we have. We spend consistently and have done for many years around $80-$90 million a year on exploration. Now, about half of that is Teck's own drilling on our own opportunities. The other half of that is investment in the junior end of the market, either because we see a team with a great prospect or we see a team with great capability or ideally both, and we are very active investors in the junior end of the mining market because we do believe it is the lifeblood. It's the source of future discoveries and future major operations.
So I think many of the majors would do the same thing, but it is important that we continue to support them. We continue to help build capability. And critically, we help to give them funding to continue to pursue some of the opportunities that they've identified.
And then there's a couple of questions about zinc, the zinc market in the closing minutes here. So one is about treatment charges. Are you seeing any negative? Are you having any negative treatment charges in your zinc smelting business right now? And how are you looking at the Chinese zinc market? Are you concerned at all about China property for zinc demand?
Look, I think everybody is experiencing significant pressure on treatment charges. Everybody running a smelter, that is, of course, and we're no different. We put in place a strategy this year for our Trail operation to fairly substantially reduce our production there to avoid getting caught with some of these low treatment charges. It actually offers us a very strong pathway to improve profitability and cash flow generation in addition to restructuring that we've done at that operation and headcount reductions, et cetera. So we have a very good outlook now for Trail in terms of profitability and cash flow generation, but part of that has been driven by quite a weak market for smelting and very low TCs right now. At present, our concentrate sales into China remain very strong, both for zinc and copper.
We find that Chinese customers are clamoring for more supply and generally are unable to keep their facilities full. So we see a constructive picture on both supply and demand for both of those commodities right now.
Perfect. Well, we covered a lot. Thank you, Jonathan.
Thank you very much. Thank you.