Hello and good morning. Thank you for joining Alcoa's Investor Day 2025. At Alcoa, safety is a core value and something we take seriously. Before the formal presentation begins, we ask that you settle in and silence your cell phones. We also ask that you identify the nearest exit in the event of an emergency. There are no alarm tests scheduled for today, so if alarm tones can be heard, please take them seriously and follow the instructions closely. For those joining us online, please ensure your work environment is safe and clear of risks. Thank you for your attention. Please welcome to the stage, Louis Langlois, Senior Vice President, Treasury and Capital Markets.
Hello and welcome to Alcoa Investor Day 2025. I'm Louis Langlois, Senior Vice President of.
Treasury and Capital Markets.
You will hear a great agenda today.
First, we're going to hear from our.
Chairman of the Board, Tom Gorman.
It's going to be followed by a.
Video of our new vision, which is very inspiring. William Oplinger will walk on stage and talk to you about his strategic vision and market position. Matthew Reed, our Chief Operating Officer, will cover operation, excellence, and innovation and how.
This adds value to Alcoa Corporation.
Tammi Jones, our Chief Human Resources Officer, will join Bill on stage to talk about our vision, our talent, and our high.
Performance culture and why this matters to you.
We're going to take a short break. Molly Beerman, our Chief Financial Officer, will cover our market outlook and the opportunities for Alcoa.
Our CFO, Molly Beerman, will cover financial.
Outlook and capital allocation.
Bill will come back on stage to sum up the day.
This will be followed by a live Q& A session where the whole.
The executive team will be on stage on this.
I ask your attention on the screen for Tom.
Hello.
This is where it begins. Not in the plans, not in the headline.
Hello, I'm Tom Gorman, Chairman of the Alcoa Board. I would like to welcome you to Alcoa's Investor Day 2025. It's a pleasure to have you with us, whether you're joining us in person or virtually. I'm honored to open today's event and share our enthusiasm for what lies ahead.
We will be sharing with you the ways in which we put our purpose.
Vision and values to work.
You'll hear from our executive leadership team.
About why Alcoa is the investment of choice in aluminum.
We believe the long term outlook for.
Aluminum combined with the strength of our.
Assets and capabilities of our people positions.
Alcoa to deliver long-term shareholder value. Thank you for your time and for putting your confidence in Alcoa.
This is where it begins. Not in the plans, not in the headlines, but in the shift in the start. In the small decision no one else sees, but everyone feels. Legacy doesn't come from standing still. It comes from showing up, from building better, from choosing to care. It's not a speech, it's a standard. It's not pressure, it's pride. What we make moves the world, but how we make it, that's what moves people. With us, precision means respect. Responsibility means trust. Progress means doing what's right, not what's easy. Learning from others and looking beyond what's right in front of us. We don't wait for legacy. We build it. We carry it. We move it forward. Because legacy doesn't live behind us. It lives in the work, in the handoff, in the choice to raise the bar and look beyond ourselves to what's next.
Together, right here, right now, in motion, in the last century.
Good morning. Welcome to Alcoa Corporation's 2025 Investor Day. It's great to see many of you who I've known for a long time and a few new faces in the audience. Back in 2023, when I became CEO, I was really excited to become CEO. You can imagine my excitement to become CEO. I was excited for a number of reasons. First, I had been preparing for that for over 20 years and worked for the company now for 25 years. More importantly was the opportunity that I saw for the company. Tremendous opportunity, tremendous potential for the company. Today we're going to talk about that potential and the opportunity over the last two years.
We're not going to spend a lot of time today on a retrospective, but over the last two years, we've done a tremendous job capturing a lot of the opportunities and the potential for the company. The point I want to make today is that we are the investment choice in the aluminum industry. I say that for three reasons. First of all, strength of our assets and the capabilities that we have within the company. You're going to get to see today many of our leaders and you'll get a good sense for exactly how strong the leadership team is. I really want you to understand that that transcends through the organization. Strong assets, strong capabilities. Secondly, the market today is different than the market has been over the last two decades. Today we're going to talk about growth in the aluminum industry.
We're also going to talk about constrained supply. That's not been the case over the last two decades, and that's different today than it has been. Thirdly, you're going to hear us talk about disciplined growth. We have opportunities to grow this company. We grew this company substantially in 2024 with the acquisition of Alumina Limited. It was a tremendous acquisition. It went better than expected and we grew the company. We will have opportunities to grow the company again in the future and you'll see us do that in a disciplined, value creating way. We invented this industry in 1888. Charles Martin Hall invented the process for making aluminum, similar process that we use today. For 137 years, Alcoa Corporation has been focused on improving our company. In 2016, we spun out of Alcoa Inc.
Had a fantastic time over the last nine years running the upstream business as an independent company. It's brought us to our Investor Day today. We're global. In today's world, that's important. Supply chains can get challenged all over the world. We're truly global. Not only are we global, we're near our end markets, very focused on North America and Europe. Renato Baki is going to talk to you today about how those two markets will be in deficit in the future. Not only are we global, we're relevant. We produce about 40 million metric tons of bauxite every year, 10 million metric tons of alumina, and 2 million metric tons of aluminum. We have nearly 14,000 employees around the world, 25 operations, 8 countries. We have that breadth and relevance that other people in this industry don't have. We're profitable. $1.6 billion of EBITDA in 2024 generating cash.
Those three things are what I want you to remember around our assets and our capabilities. Significant improvement over the last five years. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the last five years because I know you want to know about the future. I think the last five years are indicative of the capabilities that our organization has and our focus on performance. Haven't shied away from some of the hard decisions. We've taken the decision to close Kwinana. That facility was an older facility, not as cost competitive. We're closing Kwinana. We've restarted the San Luis smelter. We're at about 95% of that restart today, and San Luis is extremely focused on improving the product, the profitability of the site. San Ciprián, we're meeting the viability agreement requirements in San Ciprián. We're about 35% through in the restart of San Ciprián today.
We're making really good progress there. The Alumina Limited transaction, Molly's going to cover. The Alumina Limited transaction was a transaction that was 20 years in the making and is truly a transformational transaction for our company. We increased our exposure to historically the most profitable part of our industry, which is bauxite and alumina. The Alumina Limited transaction allowed us to get the Ma'aden transaction done. For those of you who don't remember, we swapped out 25% stake in the ownership of the refinery and the smelter, and now we own shares in the parent company. 86 million shares of the parent company. We're very excited that gold prices are going up, copper prices are going up, and our ownership stake, the value of our ownership stake has increased in Ma'aden today. It's worth around $1.5 billion. A tremendous asset that we have on our balance sheet.
I'll remind you that we've been very disciplined about monetizing assets. Some people talk about this. We actually do it. We've monetized $1 billion worth of assets. When Molly comes up here, listen to what she's going to say about the future of monetization of assets. That's allowed us to pay down debt. That's allowed us to strengthen the balance sheet. The balance sheet is as strong as it's ever been in the company. We have a net debt target of $1 billion- $1.5 billion. We sit currently at about $1.7 billion. We're very close to our optimal debt structure. That leads to optimal WAC, leads to the highest firm value. We've returned money to shareholders, $1 billion over the last five years. Today, I think the company is better positioned than it has ever been to execute on our strategy. In addition to that, the market is improving.
You see metal prices today, $2,852, $2,900. The market today is not the same market that we've had over the last two decades. Renato will run you through that. I won't steal all of his thunder. We see underlying growth in demand, especially in our two key markets in North America and Europe. On the supply side, this has never been a demand problem in aluminum. Demand for aluminum grows every year because it's used in so many different applications. It's been a supply issue. We're now seeing that with the Chinese sticking to the 45 million metric ton cap, supply is actually being constrained at the same time. In addition to that, capital costs outside of China are rising. The first question on your mind may be, what about Indonesia?
We're seeing that Indonesian capital costs are two and a half to three times what the capital costs were in China. That's an important fact. Our assets are strong, our capabilities are great, and we're in a growing market. I'm going to take just a moment to talk through differentiators that make Alcoa different than other companies in this industry over the last three years. Something is fundamentally different in Alcoa, and what that is is the proven operation model. You're going to get to meet Matt Reed today. You're going to see how impressive of an operator he really is. We have structured the organization so that there is responsibility in the regions and they are supported by the centers of excellence. We have over 300 people in our centers of excellence that ensure that our operations run safely, run stably, and run profitably.
We've reintroduced the Alcoa Business System. The Alcoa Business System has been simplified. If you have followed us for as long as I've been with the company, we had made it a little bit too complex. We launched the Alcoa Business System in the late 1990s. Today we're relaunching it in a much simplified fashion. It's focused on problem solving on the shop floor. I've talked a little bit about it, but our closeness to customers. In a world where there are tariffs, it's important to be in those regions. We have operations in the U.S., Canada, and so we have good, strong proximity to our customers. We are going to have an interesting session. It was interesting because I was talking to somebody outside over coffee this morning around culture. Can you really change culture in a company?
My answer was, I think we already have changed the culture in Alcoa. It might not be exactly where we want it to be, but we're in the process of significantly changing the culture of Alcoa. Tammi and I, Tammi's the Head of HR, will talk about how we're doing that. You will also see around you some of the—what would you call these things—some of the pictures around you. What this does is it shows that we are reinvigorating the company around a new vision, which is to build a legacy of excellence for future generations. You saw that in the video. It's the new vision. I believe that's a vision that can completely engage every one of our 14,000 Alcoans. We're going to have that discussion with Tammi. I'll leave it to that. We're global, we're large, so we're relevant.
We all know in a commodity business you have to be low cost. Our bauxite business is first quartile, and these are crude numbers. Our alumina business is still first quartile, even with the poor bauxite quality that we have in Western Australia today. We're going to talk about how we fix that and the timing around getting into better bauxite, but still low cost alumina refineries around the world. Aluminum, we're in the third quartile now. We've bounced between the second and the third quartile and we've eliminated the Moden smelter out of those calculations. Moden was a low cost smelter, but we've obviously monetized it for a huge amount of value. The cost curve is very flat between the second and the third quartile. We typically will bounce between the second and the third. Not only are we low cost, we have the broadest suite of green products.
We're the only company that has an alumina low-carbon product, and we've got two aluminum low-carbon products. 86% of our energy is renewably sourced. We're really in good position for the green transition. We continue to invest in technology. We continue to invest in technology that will do two things for us. One is breakthrough technologies. You've all heard about Elysis, Astraea, and the refinery of the future. We continue to invest in those, and we will give you an update on where those stand. There are small technology applications that help us creep our production around the world. When you look at our refining production, we've been able to creep it generally between 1% and 2% a year, same with the smelting production. Matt's going to walk you through some of the production records that we've had over the last couple of years.
You may be wondering what are we doing in the AI space, right? We currently have about 70 use cases in the AI space that bubble up from the shop floor that will make incremental improvements in the company. We're closely connected to our customers. We launched a Commercial Excellence program in 2024. That Commercial Excellence program is really meant to make sure that we're as close as we possibly can to our customers, to ensure that we deliver the most value to our customers and ultimately get paid for delivering that value to our customers. It ends with financial discipline. We will walk you through the capital allocation model. This hasn't changed fundamentally from what you've seen over the last few years. It starts with a very strong balance sheet. That's the core of being a strong commodity company, having a strong balance sheet.
It then gets to sustaining the operations that generate the cash flow. That's critically important because they generate the cash flow. Once we have excess free cash flow, we'll use it in three different places. These are not necessarily in rank order, but we've shown that we're willing to return cash to shareholders, stockholders. We've done that in the past. It will be a priority out of the different options. We transform the portfolio. We spent a lot of money over the last couple of years. We're going to continue to spend money on things like Kwinana, closing it in a very responsible way. In addition to that, there will be opportunities to grow this company. We have had targeted growth over the last couple of years where we've invested in our cast houses to meet customer demands.
We had the big growth program in the Alumina Limited transaction, which has been very successful. We will follow a disciplined capital allocation model. I bring it back to where I started two years ago, got the top job, super excited. I recognized that there were really three things that would make us the investment of choice: strength of the assets and our capabilities, the fact that the market has changed, the market has turned, and we have disciplined growth opportunities. The other thing that I'm super excited about is that you're going to get to meet Matt Reed, and Matt will walk you through the operations.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Matthew Reed, I'm Alcoa's Chief Operating Officer and I'm really excited, actually, to be talking to you today about operational excellence and innovation. Over the course of the next 20 minutes or so, I'm really going to be emphasizing three points. We are a production company. Operations are absolutely central to everything that we do. We have a constant drive to improve every day, every level, every part of our operations organization to improve. I'm going to show you some examples of that on the way through. We've got an organizational model, and Bill referenced it briefly, that facilitates nimble decision making and execution throughout. We're building a philosophy, a mindset, a capability based on speed and on ambition. I'm going to start with safety.
Safety is not only our number one priority, but it's also really very much at the heart of our identity as an organization, as Alcoa. Sadly, as I suspect many of you know from Bill's update during our most recent earnings call at the end of July, one of our employees at the Alumar Mass Melter was fatally injured. That's our first fatality in over five years and was very much a sobering reminder for us of how important building, strengthening our culture of safe behavior is. That building of a safe culture or behavior is not just about safety, but it's also about strong operations because we know that a safe organization is also an organization that has capable, delivering operational performance. We're working on not only building that culture of safe behavior, but also in parallel, engineering out fatal risk.
I'm going to spend a couple of minutes talking about some of our key activities. Over the last 18 months we have developed a tool in order to assess safety maturity at each of our sites. We have an understanding of safety maturity across each of our operating sites and we're using that to drive behavioral improvement in three key areas: what we call leadership time in field, our three critical risk, or that's Alcoa speak, fatal risk questions, and then the courage to stop. I'm actually really excited about our leadership time in field work because we're getting really strong feedback from both leaders and frontline employees alike as to the power of that program.
This is about us getting our leaders more often in the field, where the work is done with our frontline people, where the risks are engaging, deeply coaching, but also getting a better understanding of the business. That is not only improving our safety performance, it is increasing engagement and it is also driving, therefore, improved productivity. I was at our Warwick Smelter six weeks or so ago and I suspect that a number of you, probably most of you here and also online, have got a better understanding of what Indiana is like in summer than I do. It was 100 degrees or so outside and in our pot rooms it would be 120+ degrees . I spent some time with our pot tenders and that group. The conversation I had with that team, the level of engagement from that team was night and day compared to previous interactions.
I completely put that down to the effectiveness of our leader time in field work. I spoke about the three critical risk questions. This is about making sure that our systems and our behaviors line up and support each other to ensure that our people understand the fatal risk associated with their tasks and that they are certain that those fatal risks are controlled before that task commences. You have got in front of you on my left hand side, your right, some examples of our risk reduction work and in particular chemical burns. Over the last three years we have achieved something like a 50% reduction in serious injuries associated with chemical burns across our refineries. We have done that through deep engagement with our workforce, thousands of interactions.
In fact, we have done it with engineers spending considerable periods of time with frontline employees, taking those ideas from frontline employees, putting the engineering effort and hours in and developing a range of really innovative solutions to eliminate that risk. We have now a whole range of tools, equipment, and technologies that are named after those frontline employees that we are deploying throughout our organization now. We are, as you know, a fully integrated, pure play aluminum company. We have got high quality, in fact, we have got world class bauxite deposits. Through years, decades, in fact, of research, improvement, and hard work, we have world leading post mining rehabilitation practices. Our refineries have long been considered a benchmark in the industry and today that remains the case.
Our refineries in WA and our teams associated with them, the work they have done to adapt to the lower grade bauxite that we are currently consuming is so impressive. It's not only impressive because of the impact of that work, but it's impressive because of the speed at which we've been able to pivot. That comes back to the point that I made earlier about driving a culture and mindset of speed and ambition. We invented the smelting industry. We invented aluminum smelting 137-odd years ago. Even today we continue to drive productivity improvements, production improvements, to innovate, to develop proprietary technologies, to develop new alloys. I'll reference a couple of those things later and certainly Renato will as he talks after the break. What makes all of this possible, and Bill referenced it earlier, is our global operations blueprint.
This is why I say that we're the premier aluminum operator. Three points again. Firstly, our business system, or ABS, this is an industry benchmark. It's been an industry benchmark for decades. It continues to be an industry benchmark and I'm going to spend some time talking about it in a minute. We've got a global network of mines and refineries that are supplying our smelters. They provide security of supply, they allow us to optimize across the full value chain. Because of our geographic spread, we've got the opportunity to take opportunities as they present locally, regionally, or globally. Thirdly, our operating model leverages our global scale alongside regional leadership. I'm going to spend a couple of minutes on that operating model because I think this is really fundamental and this is a real differentiator for Alcoa against other organizations.
Our organization is set up such that we have regional leadership, so we're organized in regions. Our regional and local leaders are connected to local context, they're in country, they're empowered to make decisions, and they're in a position where they can listen and respond to stakeholders. That's particularly important when we think about regions like Australia and Brazil. They're supported, as Bill mentioned earlier, by our global COE. We've got deep subject matter expertise. There's 137 years or so of subject matter expertise that this organization's built up and that's looked after by those global centers of excellence. If you're a site manager in Alcoa, you've got accountability for safety, for environment, social performance, production cost. You've got accountability for your capital program, for your long term plans, for the vision, indeed for that site. Most importantly, you've got the authority that matches that accountability.
You're supported by a group of centers of excellence that you can pull upon whose interest it is in making sure that you succeed, that you're able to take the right decision and deliver the outcome for your site and ultimately for Alcoa. Again, connecting authority and accountability, connecting the organizational model such that we can move with ambition and with speed. Local and regional leaders fully empowered to make decisions connected to local context, supported by global centers of excellence. I move now onto ABS and I referenced a moment ago that ABS is an industry benchmark. It's been replicated across the processing industry many times. Over the last 12 months we have refreshed or modernized ABS and we focused again on making sure that we're connecting that to our operating model.
We've got a simplified ABS, our Alcoa Business System model, that now is our global standards and expectations, but with enough space that our operations people locally can adjust to their local context. It's a simple, pragmatic, practical set of tools that people can apply. It's a system that is about helping us perform. It's a system that's about helping us continually improve. You can think about it as making sure that people have got the right information at the right time to make the right decision that allows them to succeed. In other words, identify and align on objectives, develop the right measures, provide a series of tools that people can use to identify early if they're deviating, or if indeed there's an opportunity, then a further set of tools that allow people to address that opportunity or that deviation. Look at the result, lock it in, celebrate success.
It's continuing to have a real impact on the performance of our organization. North America, a 75% reduction in serious injuries over the last several years, driven by the application of ABS routines. 75% reduction. That's a recipe that we are now applying across our global operations. ABS helps us build our leaders, it helps us develop leaders faster, it helps us retain them, it helps us transfer learnings across the organization. Because we've got a common language, a common set of tools, we can easily translate that from site to site, only need to adjust to local context. What that means is we can drive operational stability, and when we drive operational stability, we've got a platform from which we can improve. The example that you can see there on the bottom left shows Alcoa Business System in play at our Alumar refinery over the last 12 months.
Application of Alcoa Business System to stabilize and Alcoa Business System routines in particular to stabilize, provide a platform, drive improvement. We've increased production there in our refinery at Alumar by something like 330 tonnes per day this year. If we've got activities like that occurring across the range, across the network of our Alcoa sites, then that's driving an overall improvement in the bottom line. In 2024, as part of our profitability improvement program, we delivered $80+ million of benefits. As the Alcoa people in the room know, this is one of my favorite charts. The truth is, this is a very neat example, but I could show you an example, many examples indeed of this sort of improvement across the network. This happens to be Deschambault. At Deschambault, we have increased production year on year for the last 15 years. 15 years of improvement.
We are on track to deliver that improvement again in 2025. When we do that, 16 consecutive years of production improvement, no enormous capital expenditure. This is just about day after day, week after week, month after month, driving operational improvement, operational discipline. We are one of the best, if not the best, at that sort of low capital cost, incremental day after day improvement. The reason is the blueprint that I spoke to you about earlier. Alcoa Business System matching authority and accountability locally, global centers of excellence in support. Alcoa's always been an innovator. I said we invented the industry 137 years ago, and today we continue to innovate, we continue to look at the application of new technologies to improve the performance of our business in operations. That's really about the practical application.
We've got long-term roadmaps associated with technology, but for us in operations, it's about delivering those practical applications over the course of the day. The year at Mosion, we're using autonomous vehicles in our pot rooms. We're also using robotics. We have robots at Mosion to build our furnace flue walls, robot to repair anode rods. I was at Mosion in June and I was with the team there and they were showing me the work that they're doing on fully automating pot tending. This is a remarkable opportunity, pot tending. I spoke before about the pleasure of being a pot tender at Warwick. This is one of our highest risk tasks. If we can get people out of the line of fire at the same time as increasing precision, and by increasing precision they will increase productivity and production, then that's a fantastic result.
The team at Mosion are doing a great piece of work there. I was at Alumar in August and there the team was showing me the work they're doing with an AI augmented package that allows us to take video from operators doing their tasks, combine that with existing procedures and then interviews with operators and bring that together to produce very simple visual tools, procedures and training that can allow us to upskill our operations people very quickly. I spoke about the innovation associated with reducing chemical burns in Australia, but also in Australia, we are trialling the use of drones for aerial seeding and aerial fertilizing as part of that rehabilitation that, as I said to you earlier, is world leading. A number of you have requested in the past that we spend a bit of time walking through our operations.
The next few minutes I'm going to start globally, then break down into regions, our operational organization. As I said before, we've got a global network of mines and smelters. Our mining operations in Australia and Brazil are supplying adjacent refineries and then our smelters, predominantly in the northern hemisphere, close to their market, as Renato will talk about a little bit later. If I start at North America. North America really is anchored by our three smelters in Quebec, but we also run two of the remaining four operating smelters in the U.S. Of course our head office is in Pittsburgh. I spoke earlier about and I showed you my favorite example of Deschambault and the year after year improvement at that site.
Indeed we are consistently increasing production across the full North American chain via creep or incremental improvement in Quebec and then also at Warwick, most recently in restarting one of our lines back in 2024. In fact, for 11 of the last 12 quarters, we've achieved production milestones out of our Quebec smelters. Again, this mindset, this culture of continuous improvement. If North America is anchored by Quebec, then our Australian region is anchored by our Western Australian operations, the Huntley and Willowdale bauxite mines and the adjacent Pinjarra and Wagerup refineries. On the east coast of the country in Victoria, we've got our joint venture, Portland Aluminium Smelter. Australia is a great example of innovation. We've been operating for over 60 years in the country. We were one of the original downstream processes in Western Australia.
I made mention earlier of the innovation associated with managing lower grade bauxites in Western Australia. The team have done a stellar job. We've offset something like $100 million of the impact of lower bauxite grade through the work that our team have done to drive up recovery. Local teams working with global centers of excellence to drive recoveries to the point where they are among, if not the best in industry. We are going through an approval process to extend the life of our Huntley mine site via the Myara North and Holyoake mining regions. Approvals, modern approvals, are very appropriately a transparent process and we operate in a very sensitive area close to metropolitan Perth in Western Australia.
Our team has done more than 1,400 stakeholder engagements to ensure that we are putting forward a proposition that not only maximizes value for Alcoa and therefore for our shareholders, but also meets the needs of a wide range of stakeholders. We've laid out here a series of the milestones associated with our approval process. We're currently at a point where we are responding to public comments that have been gathered by the Western Australian EPA. We anticipate that in the middle of 2026 the EPA will put forward its recommendation and then by the end of 2026 the Western Australian State and then the Australian Federal ministerial decisions will be received. That allows us to start the transition into Myara North in 2027 or in 2029 and then the first full year of benefits, and there's significant benefits in 2030.
If we think about the opportunity, the work that's been done to minimize the impacts of those lower grades, then we've got some really exciting times ahead when that grade returns to historic run-of-mine levels. In Europe, we've got our two smelters in Norway, a smelter in Iceland, and then a combined refining and smelting operation at San Cyprian in Spain. Europe has, I think, one of the best, in fact a textbook example of the application of ABS. Over the last two years, we have worked very hard at Fjardaal, our smelter in Iceland, to implement the rigor and the discipline associated with ABS. Fjardaal has historically been a bit of a challenging site for us. It's very remote and it's difficult for us to retain strong talent.
ABS has allowed us to improve all of our internal stability metrics over the last couple of years, and in fact that facility is now running at such a level that we are consistently producing high purity metal, which has an increased margin for us. That's something that previously had eluded us. I spoke, I think now I've mentioned the Deschambault example three times. We've got a not dissimilar example in Mosjøen in Norway. Eight consecutive years of improvement in our pot rooms at Mosjøen. We're currently restarting a line at Lista that's progressing per plan. We're also, as Bill mentioned earlier, restarting at San Ciprián and that's progressing per plan as well. If I move now to Brazil, we've got our mining operations at Juruti and Poços. We've got refineries at Alumar and also Poços, and then our smelter at Alumar.
We have been really focused over the last couple of years in Brazil on improving the health of that business. We've been focused on safety improvement, on environment improvement, and the financial health of our Brazilian region. That's now starting to pay off. You can see increases in production agility. I spoke to the improvements we've delivered at the Alumar refinery, and then Bill stole my thunder a little bit. We're at 95% now of full pot complement at the Alumar smelter. I've used a number of examples of the ability that Alcoa has to incrementally improve production and performance with low capital expenditure. We've got more of these opportunities, and here you can see a couple of those that are currently in train at Baie-Comeau and Bécancour in Quebec.
Small investment here, increasing VAP, improving margin at Mosjøen, again, low capital intensity investment, allowing us to increase the capacity of our pot rooms and increase total production. As I said, we've got plenty more of these opportunities and we continue to feed them through our pipeline. We're really proud, and I'm really proud not only of what we do, but the manner in which we do it. As our colleagues, I've spoken to you about our safety performance. 75% reduction in serious injuries in North America. 50% reduction in serious chemical burns across our refining network. The work we're doing on safety maturity, the work we're doing on engineering out fatal risk. 18 of our sites are ASI certified. We have been working really hard to build strong relationships with First Nations and traditional owner groups in Norway, in Quebec, in Brazil, and in Australia.
I spoke briefly about what is world leading rehabilitation efforts that we undertake across our mining operations. I'm going to hand in a moment to Bill and to Tammi Jones, our Chief Human Resources Officer, to talk about our performance culture, talent. Before I do that, I'm going to show an end to end video. Before I do that, I'm just going to summarize. We've got 135 years of operations. The desire to get better, the drive to get better is burning brighter today than it has at any point. We are laser focused on our operations. As I said earlier, we are driven to improve every day, every site. We're aligning our systems, particularly the industry leading Alcoa Business System, but our other systems as well, to support our organizational model, authority matching, accountability, completely scalable.
There's plenty of further opportunity that we have to chase in the operations, plenty of further opportunity to generate more value for shareholders. There's plenty of opportunity for us to go after with both speed and with ambition. We'll throw to the video and thank you very much.
In the last century we've seen innovation in design, technology, and transportation. What has helped open up this world of never ending possibility? Aluminum. To make aluminum, you need bauxite. Each year, Alcoa yields tens of millions of metric tons of bauxite, an ore that is rich in aluminum oxide. This bauxite is refined into alumina, which can then be processed into aluminum at our smelters throughout the world and then turned into products we use to drink, ride, and fly. Our drive to innovate means we use pioneering technology in our mine planning and rehabilitation efforts. The exploration process uses specially developed drill rigs. They let us explore uncleared forest while leaving virtually no footprint. Our highly talented teams collaborate with stakeholders and research institutions to study, understand, and continuously improve our rehabilitation practices.
These people and innovations help us achieve further excellence in our safety, mining, and rehabilitation practices. Alcoa rehabilitates more land than it disturbs. In 2024, we achieved a 2.031 rehabilitation to disturbance ratio. We respect the trust placed in us to responsibly mine in the Amazon rainforest and the Jarrah Forest. Alcoa's achievements in reestablishing self-sustaining ecosystems means we're recognized as a leader in mine rehabilitation. In fact, our Australia operations earned us the honor of being the first ever miner to receive recognition from the United Nations for rehabilitation excellence. Because at Alcoa, we are building a legacy of excellence for future generations.
Steal my water.
Yeah, I'll stay away from your water.
Good morning. My name's Tammi Jones and I'm the Chief Human Resources Officer for Alcoa. Welcome to a conversation about how our high performance culture is driving results for you. I'm joined here by Bill to talk about what that all means in practice. Hi Bill.
Hi Tammi.
We've seen the video this morning, which I think is super cool. Tell us about the new vision and why it matters to Alcoa and to our shareholders.
Good. You're probably sitting there saying why are we talking about HR stuff in an investor day? I talk a lot about culture in the company. I talk about changing the culture in our company and we really want to change our culture to a high performing culture. There are a lot of things that are changing, but there are a few that are staying the same. For instance, the purpose of the company is to turn raw potential into real progress. That's not changing. Our values, we've got four values. Those are in our DNA. Those aren't changing. What has changed, what is changing in the company is the vision for the company. The vision that we've launched over the last few months within the company is one that totally resonates with the employees.
I wanted something that at the shop floor level was something that people could buy into. We'll talk a little bit more about that. The new vision is to build a legacy of excellence for future generations. As I talk to employees, I ask them, are you building that legacy? I think you should see today that we are building a legacy.
How are we bringing it to life?
Three strategic priorities: those three strategic priorities are excel today, continuously improve, and invest for tomorrow. What does it mean when I think about excel today? If you're a pipe fitter in Pinjara, if you're a pod operator in Warwick, do you do your job really, really well or do you just come in and good enough is good enough? I was having this discussion with somebody outside earlier today. Good enough at Alcoa is no longer good enough. I want you to do your job really, really excellently. That in and of itself isn't good enough. What is good enough is coming into work every single day and trying to figure out how you improve this company, how you make it incrementally better every single day.
Whether that means taking out cost because we are a commodity company, or increasing production, finding every single small way to make the company better. The third is that we are investing for tomorrow. I ask employees to take the long term view. We've been around for 137 years. I want to be around for another 137 years. How do we invest in the business so that we'll be successful in the future?
One of the things that we really like is that sense of alignment. When people understand what the direction is, where they should be focused, where they place their energy, at that point you really start to move from words on a page to catalysts for action. That's what we're seeing. There's a real sense of energy around this renewed vision. You started before about talking about can you really change the culture? I heard you say that you'd had conversation with somebody outside and that's an interesting one, right? I always say that you can't dictate culture, but you can in fact do things that help contribute towards the desired state. In the same way, you can do things that can act as a detractor. It's super important that we focus on those things that we really want to encourage and also those things that we want to eliminate.
That's exactly what we've been doing over the course of the last two years. We've been really promoting accountability, empowerment, providing clarity around expectations, upskilling, and leader time in field. As Matt talked to you before, coaching every single day. Bill, for you, what does a high performance culture look like at Alcoa?
The concept of a high performance culture is very simple. It's hard to implement, but the concept is simple. The concept is that we have aligned goals throughout the entire organization. Those goals are at the Board and Executive Team level, down to the shop floor level. We know what our goals are for the long term and for the current year. Secondly, and probably most importantly, is having aligned metrics and incentives so people know what good looks like, and inherently people within the organization want to achieve. If you have aligned metrics and incentives, you will get that achievement. Thirdly, it's around having open and honest dialogue. You don't get to the end of the year and wonder how things went during the course of the year. You know exactly how things are going. That's both positive and negative. I don't want people to read that as negative.
Right. When we succeed, and I think Molly's going to talk to you about the ATO case where we succeeded in the Australia Tax Office case, we celebrate. We celebrate like crazy for a short period of time, not very long, maybe 30 seconds, but we celebrate like crazy. When we don't perform and there are areas that you know that we haven't performed on, we honestly address them and we have the conversation. This project did not go well. This project was a failure. Until you honestly address what doesn't go well, you don't know how to get it changed. All that results in empowerment. Right? I give the example, and I won't use the specific regions, but when I was the COO in 2023, I had two regions. I had four regions, but two regions, one everything touched went well.
I did not talk to that RVP but once a month. Everything he did went extremely well. I only talked to him once a month because he wanted to talk to me. I had another region, some of you may guess in 2023 which region this was, where things didn't go well. I was talking to that Regional Vice President probably once a day. Once you do those first four things, the empowerment comes and that's where you really start to get the performance. I can talk about it, I can talk all about that, but until you fundamentally make some people strategy changes in the organization, that's not going to land, it's not going to make a change. Why don't you tell the group a little bit about some of the things that we've done on the people strategy side?
Yeah, I'd love to. We've done so much work in this space and I have to say it's been a lot of fun and my team's absolutely loved doing it because it's just so well integrated. We really started by tackling the performance management system and with that we really wanted to provide clarity around both what we needed to focus on, but also how we needed to deliver. One of the things that was really important to us as we set about this high performance culture is that we didn't just go after the results and not think about the how. The fact that we were a very values driven company. We care about the what and we care about the how. I think Matt referenced that earlier. Providing expectations, we also started to focus on feedback. You know, how do we give and receive feedback? That's not easy.
That's a skill that you have to build. That's something that we've been investing in and continue to invest in. We started to turn our attention to aligned incentives. You referenced that before. Aligned and differentiated incentives. You are paid, you are compensated on what you deliver, but again, how you deliver it, both are equally important. We rolled out a behavior model. This is a five point observable behavior model that we rolled out to the entire organization so people know how they're expected to show up. That starts with us. At the same time, we rolled out a series of opportunities to upskill targeting the various levels to enable people to build those skills so that they show up in the way that we want in service of the vision. We then turned our attention to the role of the leader.
Regardless of the opportunity in the organization or the risk posed to the business, we very quickly figured out that it's our leadership capabilities that will determine whether or not we're successful. We've been focusing on the role of the leader, being very clear about what leadership looks like at Alcoa and then again upskilling. We're focusing on helping people develop the skills, we're helping support them with tools and techniques at the point of need. We're contemporizing the way we learn as well, recognizing that it's not the same that perhaps it historically once was. You could ask me what the results are. I believe the results speak for themselves. We retain 97% of top performers, 50% of our critical roles. We focus on critical roles for succession planning, have ready now, already soon successes, with the remainder having a proactive buy strategy.
Our turnover levels, this is voluntary turnover levels, are less than 6%. Less than 6%. Let that sit there for a second. When you think about that compared to any industry benchmark, I think that's enviable. There's reasons for that. When you look at our employee engagement survey, the most recent one we had was earlier this year. We demonstrated a two-point improvement versus our prior one. That's in excess of our benchmark. We're 77 versus 75, and our intent to stay metrics are enviable. The other thing that really came out from the survey is that there's a real correlation between people understanding what the priorities are of the organization and how they feel about the company and how engaged they are. We were delighted about that because we've been doing so much work to try and give greater clarity around what are the priorities of the business.
What does all this give us? It gives us a highly performing organization or workforce that are not only engaged, but they're equipped, they know exactly what the priorities are, and they're going after it. We've been so excited to do it. I can tell you my team is delighted. When they see the videos of this, they're going to love it because we've got these images all around the room, which also talks to the work that they've done.
Tammi, let's just talk really briefly about the what and the how for a second.
Yeah.
When we refer to the what and the how, we want people to deliver safety performance, we want them to deliver production performance, and we want them to deliver financial performance. That's what you have to deliver in Alcoa. Right? The way you do it is important. We've launched these five behaviors, and they're very simple behaviors. Drive a safe, inclusive, and collaborative environment. It's very simple, right? Communicate clearly and effectively. How simple is that? Communicate clearly and effectively. It's what we ask people. We ask leaders, but not just leaders, people on the shop floor. Let's have open conversations, prioritize, be decisive, and execute, execute, execute, execute. Sometimes one or two of us have been known to maybe bite off more than we can chew. You've got to prioritize and execute. Take accountability for the work that you do. Take accountability for the success that you have.
On top of that, continuously learn, adapt, and grow. We have 14,000 Alcoans. You want them growing and learning individually and as a team. I think the what is important. You have to deliver the results, but how you get it is equally important.
I agree. The beauty of all those behaviors, as I said before, is they're observable. You can see whether or not somebody's doing it. You referenced the importance of business outcomes and results. How is it impacting that? How do you see it?
You want to measure culture, but gee, is it hard to measure culture? You can do employee surveys. To me, the culture will show up in the results. We're seeing that now. We're seeing production records, we're seeing safety improvement, we're seeing delivery upon the financial commitments that we have within the company. That's where you see the culture change. Somebody asked me outside earlier, can you really change a culture? I think you can and I think we have to some extent. Are we where we need to be? No, but it's a journey and I think we're getting there.
Tell us about how the culture is aiding our innovation and sustainability agenda.
The three are not mutually exclusive. If you're going to innovate successfully, I think it helps to have a performance culture. It again comes back to having alignment of goals, having the right metrics. When we look at the breakthrough technologies we're driving towards, having a performance culture in the breakthrough technologies is a little bit harder, right? Because breakthrough technologies by definition aren't necessarily something you can forecast that this is going to work by this particular day. The concept still works. On the sustainability side, it's just as important, if not more important, to have a performance culture. On the sustainability side, some of the things that we have to do to successfully work in Western Australia now require a level of precision that we have never had in our mining operations, and we're doing it successfully.
It comes down to again having that performance culture that holds people accountable for delivering the results in the right way. Good.
We've heard the stories, Bill, about how our culture is going, coming to life through leadership systems and employee led improvements. Beyond the stories, we need scale and consistency. One of the things that we've been really focused on is driving this culture across the organization. We're focusing on individuals, we're focusing on leaders, obviously teams, locations, regions. I could go on, but when you think about the amount of effort we're placing on this, how do you really know whether it's making a difference?
Ultimately, it'll show up in the financials, it'll show up in the results, it'll show up in higher cash flows. One of the interesting points that you just made around, you know, we're focusing on the individuals, we're focusing on the teams. I was having this discussion with someone earlier. There are parts of the world who really are more focused on the success of the team than necessarily the individual. There are parts of the world where a performance culture really has to be done at the plant level because culturally, they don't want to see one person succeed versus the other and they want to do that at the plant level. I'm great with that. You want to have a performance culture at the plant level. We have aligned goals, we have aligned incentives, we have open and honest conversations.
We hold people accountable and you deliver and you get empowered at the plant level. That's fantastic. There are different applications of this around the world.
I think that's an interesting point. I think about company culture, and then you think about country culture, and you think about plant culture, and you have.
To fit in within the culture, country culture, culture. You know, you can in many places around the world. I get accused of being very American, right, and this really appeals to me. There are parts of the world where the plant, the community, is the unit that you want to see succeed. I'm great with that.
Yes, we do. I think it talks to Matt's point before about you've got to give some room for that because it's very relevant, it's super important, and we've done that and we continue to do that. It's a really exciting time to be at Alcoa. I hope you feel that. It genuinely is. Our employees are telling us that they're excited. You can feel it. They're loving the fact that we're starting to get some runs on the board and you can see us making progress. I loved Matt's chart for Deschambault and he's right. We do have many others of those. It's really, really exciting and I think we're all delighted to be part of it. Any final thoughts from you, Bill?
I guess I'll come back to where I started. I think culture is what's going to change our company. It is what is going to lead us into the future. Alcoans are going to make the future for Alcoa and this cultural change. I think we've been successful in the first three years, and it'll take us some time, but we're really getting there and I really, really believe in it.
If I was to summarize in three words or three statements, my takeaways would be our vision and strategy are aligned for long term value. Our high performance culture is a catalyst for results, and the quality of our people are an absolute differentiator. Thank you for listening. We are going to be taking a short break now of about 30 minutes. For those of you that would like to continue the conversation, we do have an Alcoa show showcased just outside where we've got two of our high potential people that will be demonstrating commercial and innovation in action. I'll also be there to continue the conversation on how our culture is leading to excellence. Thanks so much for being with us.
Thank you.
Thank you.