Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Freeport McMoran Third Quarter Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms.
Kathleen Quirk, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to the Freeport McMoLAN 3rd quarter conference call. Earlier morning, we reported our Q3 2020 operating and financial results, and a copy of today's press release and slides are available on our website atfcx.com. Our call today is being broadcast live on the Internet, and anyone may listen to the call by accessing our website homepage and clicking on the webcast link for the conference call. In addition to analysts and investors, the financial press has been invited to listen to today's call, and a replay of the webcast will be available on our website later today.
Before we begin our comments, we'd like to remind everyone that today's press release and certain of our comments on the call include forward looking statements and actual results may differ materially. I'd like to refer everyone to the cautionary language included in our press release and presentation materials and to the risk factors described in our Form 10 ks and quarterly reports on Form 10 Q. Each should be filed with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the call today is Richard Adkerson, Mark Johnson is also on the call, Josh Olmstead, Mike Kendrick, Steve Higgins and Rick Coleman. I'll start by briefly summarizing the quarter financial results and then we'll turn the call over to Richard who will review the slide materials and we'll then open up the call for questions. Today, FCX reported net income attributable to common stock of $329,000,000 or $0.22 per share
for the Q3 of 2020.
After taking into account debt extinguishing costs associated with our refinancings during the quarter and other non recurring net charges totaling $101,000,000 or $0.07 per share, Adjusted net income attributable to common stock totaled $430,000,000 or $0.29 per share. These special items can be reviewed on Page Roman Numeral 7 of our press release. Our adjusted earnings before interest taxes and depreciation and amortization or EBITDA totaled $1,400,000,000 for the Q3 of 2020 and a reconciliation of the EBITDA calculation is available on Page 32 of our slide deck. Our 3rd quarter results benefited from improved pricing for both copper and gold, strong copper and gold sales volumes that were above the prior estimates and solid cost performance. The average realized price during the quarter for copper was $3.01 per pound.
That was 15% above the year ago average. And the 3rd quarter realized gold price of just over $1900 per ounce was 28% above the year ago quarterly average. We generated strong cash flows in the quarter. Operating cash flows totaled $1,200,000,000 and exceeded roughly $400,000,000 of capital expenditures during the quarter. We ended the quarter with $10,000,000,000 of total debt and our consolidated cash position grew during the quarter from $1,500,000,000 at the start of the period to total $2,400,000,000 at the end of the quarter.
Now I'd like to turn the call over to Richard, who will be referring to our slide materials.
Thanks, Kathleen, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's call. I hope you and your families and your colleagues are all staying well and safe. This coronavirus situation has not ended. We at Freeport are not letting up our guard in any fashion.
We remain focused on protecting the health and safety of our people and the communities where we work. And we're all looking forward to a medical solution, which will come in time. In the meantime, though, we are staying diligent with our health protocols and we're also being conservative in the way we continue to run our business. And this has proved to serve us well over the last 6 months. I'm really proud of our Freeport team for the aggressive response we developed as an organization, how we've executed the plans that we announced just 6 months ago.
It seems like a decade ago, but it was at the end of April when we announced plans that were well received by our company in the market to take steps to reduce cost, capital cost, operating cost, G and A cost, suspend some low margin production. And we put those plans in place and we really went after them in an aggressive way and it served us well. Turning starting with Slide 3, we present the highlights for the quarter. And it's notable just how much cash flow we're generating. We've been talking about this for a long time.
Tomorrow has finally arrived for Freeport. This is the quarter where all this work that we've been doing for years years is beginning to show its presence. This free cash flow generation will actually accelerate as we go forward into the Q4 into 2021. And by the end of 2021, we'll reach really a relatively steady state of volumes and that extends for the 20 years beyond that, that our current contract rights extend to. But as you see clearly, our sales volumes, our cost and capital performance were favorable to the estimates we provided the market 3 months ago.
Our Grasberg team achieved its quarterly sales targets and continue to make excellent progress with the ramp up of our large underground mines, the Grasberg Block Cave and the Deep MLZ Mine. In the Arizona, we completed the Lone Star project during the quarter. It was completed on time and below budget. Bottom line, we generated substantial cash flows in the quarter, reduced our net debt in this quarter by $800,000,000 And this was all achieved operating safely in a challenging environment because of the pandemic. Our team maintained its focus on the health of our workers and our protocols and showed real drive and commitment in executing our plans while managing this health issue.
As an organization, we're all stepping up to meet this challenge. We've met challenges effectively in the past. Turning to Slide 4, this is LME Week and it's a strange deal not being in London. Last night would have been the night of our Freeport reception. It's such a fun event and it's disappointing not to be there.
We distributed a video to people. And if you didn't get it, contact David and we'll get it too, which is a lot of fun looking at the video and thinking about all the good times we've had in London and looking forward to coming back next year. But thinking about LME Week and the times we're facing right now really makes us all very pleased to be a company that's a leading producer of copper. And copper is critical to the economy of the world, has been, but even more so as we look to the future. Copper is absolutely essential and strategic to the technologies that the world is moving to transition to a global clean energy future.
And more and more, we're seeing the adoption of policies, both in community governments, but by companies carbon emissions. This initiative no longer is being debated as to whether it's needed or not. But there's a real commitment now to accelerate. And as a result of the steps that will be required to reduce carbon, the intensity of use of copper in those applications is really significant. Copper utilization in electric vehicles and the generation of renewable power requires 4 times more copper per unit than traditional internal combustion vehicles require and traditional power generation requires.
The coming transition to 5 gs technology will be positive from copper with required data centers to supporting infrastructure with lots of new copper wiring required to support 5 gs. These major trends, which are in place and irreversible, will bring significant new sources of demand for copper and that will supplement the already significant requirements for copper to fund global growth in the developing world. We are committed at Freeport to being a responsible producer of copper, which is a very favorable metal in terms of these positive ESG factors going forward. In addition to Freeport's commitment to the International Council of Mining and Metals, where I just returned as Chairman after serving 10 years ago, During the Q3, we committed to the copper mark, which is a new assurance framework developed by the and how operations for copper can contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And we are fully committed to these things.
Currently in the market conditions, thinking back to 6 months ago, none of us would have anticipated that we would be today to 6 months later after facing the industrial downturn that was accelerating at that time. And all of the uncertainties from a health and economic standpoints to think that here we would be at the end of our Q3 in such a favorable market condition. And this has led by the really dramatic recovery of the Chinese economy and demand that that's generated for copper. Economic conditions in other parts of the world continue to face uncertainties and we are certainly sensitive to those uncertainties. And as I said, we're not letting our guard down.
But we're encouraged by these demand trends in China. And then we look at global stimulus measures and decarbonization initiatives, which are also supportive of copper demand. At a time when supplies of copper remain limited. And this supply effect has been really emphasized by what we've gone on with the COVID situation. Prices have recovered from the lows earlier this year.
You may recall that we were preparing for a scenario of $2 copper and here today we have copper at $3.15 That's pretty remarkable. The fundamentals of copper market are increasingly attractive. We put together a slide on 5 to give a historical perspective on these copper markets. And thinking back, there are really strong similarities and parallels to what we've seen earlier. In the early 2000s when the world was coming out of global recession, there was policy driven demand, particularly in copper, combined with limited new supplies, which was a new factor in the market at that time.
And that drove a major repricing of copper to kick off the commodity super cycle. Then again in 2,009, following the global financial crisis that emerged in 2,008, China again led a significant and unexpected recovery in copper prices, which prices when prices increased over 3 times from the lows over that 24 month period. In each of these times, FCX share price performed strongly. On the right side of the chart, which shows what's happened since March. Copper is notable and this is something that I think is striking and is different.
The copper inventories have declined even with the major down term in the global economy. Who could have ever thought that the U. S. G and P would drop by 3rd in the second quarter and copper inventories would not have risen. The global pandemic resulted in disruption of supply as well as demand, of course.
And with low inventories and limited new supply, the market is positioned for additional gains as we look forward to a medical solution to COVID-nineteen and for our economies to recover with major comprehensive infrastructure spending on the horizon. Again, in the past, when the downturn occurred, inventory spilled, the inventories had to be run off. We don't have that this time. We have low inventories. And so with recovery, we're better positioned to see copper perform strongly.
Now turning to our company. The challenge for us in 2020, unlike these earlier times when we faced downturns, was along with the lower prices driven by COVID-nineteen, we were at a time of trough production at Grasberg. We completed mining the Grasberg open pit at the end of 2019. We couldn't even begin the ramp up in any significant way of the Grasberg block Cave ore body, which is our largest underground ore body until we were complete mining in the pit. So all this started and production dropped from the pit.
It was at low levels from the underground and then we get hit with low copper prices from COVID and operational challenges in the Americas because of the health situation. And so that makes what's happened for our company over the last 6 months really, really special. Our team in the Americas continues to do great work executing our plans. And the plans were aggressive and challenging. You can see the results of the execution in our financial results.
We made the decision to complete the initial Lone Star development project, which is located right in the heart of our operations in Eastern Arizona. This is a relatively small, but very positive returns initial project and it opens the opportunity for a very large future significant project. The team at Cerro Verde in Peru has done exceptional work in restoring our large scale operations there. They were really challenged by COVID. Our people at Cerro Verde lived in the town of Arequipo, which was facing a challenging community situation with COVID.
We had to work with the local community and with the government to restore operations. We've done that largely. We've had to kept a sharp focus on cost and capital management. We had one mine, an older mine in New Mexico that we shut down operations because of COVID situation. We're now taking actions to restart that mine next year at a much reduced rate.
A smaller footprint will allow us to achieve costs and capital benefits as compared with prior operations. On the call today is Josh Olmstead, and I want to recognize him and congratulate him on his expanded new role in managing our operations in the Americas. Josh was named Chief Operating Officer for the Americas in August following Red Congress' departure. Red was a great friend, a long time employee who decided to move for family reasons and we congratulate you and wish him well. Josh was Rich's right hand guy for along with the rest of our team for recent years.
He's an experienced operator, a really good strong inspirational leader. He's been with our company 28 years. He has worked in leadership roles at a number of our operations across our Americas assets. Josh is really highly qualified and well prepared for success in this new role. He's off offers to a great start.
He's been a key driver of our innovation initiatives, which all of our team is committed to and is committed to having a high performance culture. The really good thing is Josh has a terrific team around him. We have really significant technical depth, world class in every respect and we all look forward to working together with him and his team to accomplish what we have for us opportunities going forward. At Grasberg, our 3rd quarter annual sale volumes on an annualized basis reached 58% of the targeted annual run rate post ramp up. I want you to focus on this.
We generated all these cash flows by being at less than 60% of our targets of where we're going to and we're making progress on reaching those targets. For so long, I've been talking at these calls about looking at this ramp up. It's not like starting a new operation with a one point in time startup, but it was a process of increasing volumes with 58% of the target. So we generated this level of cash flows. So as we increase that ramp up, volumes grow, cash flows will grow as well.
It wasn't without us challenges this past quarter. We had a COVID related labor disruption that we had to deal with. We were actually shut down for 4 or 5 days as we worked with a group of indigenous workers in our workforce who wanted to be able to return to the lowlands where many of their families lived. We had restricted travel. We had to negotiate a resolution with that.
We also had some maintenance issues with material handling. So it's notable. And we're going to have situations that are inherent part of mining as we go forward. But here's a quarter where we had to deal with a temporary shutdown, some unscheduled maintenance issues and yet we were able to meet our metals target. By the end of the quarter, the mining rates at the Grasberg Block Cave and the Deep MLZ had reached targeted levels.
We continue to target metal production that will approach 90% of the ramp up targets by the middle of next year, middle of 2021. Note that the unit cost for Grasberg in the 3rd quarter averaged $0.13 a pound. Grasberg of course has this really significant gold component in its ore, which at full production rates makes the largest gold mine in the world even though it's a byproduct production. But using current gold prices, looking forward, if prices stay at this level, gold revenues will fund all of the costs of operations for Grasberg and we'll be producing over £1,500,000,000 of copper a year with full ramp up that we'll reach at the end of 2021 at a 0 or negative unit cost. In Indonesia, I mentioned that the discussions about the new smelter are ongoing.
They're being led by our partner
BTFI
has requested a 12 month delay in construction of the new smelter that we have committed to because of COVID issues, which affects international contractors and local workers. The government is in the process of assessing alternatives to building a new smelter. No decision has been reached. The discussions are going being led by MIND ID and the Ministry of State Owned Enterprises. The alternatives that are under consideration will be mutually beneficial to the government, 1st of all, and the PT FI.
We will keep you informed as developments occur going forward. I will note that our partnership that we established with the government of Indonesia and the structure for governance and operating management that we established in December 2018 is really going well. The partnership is strong, mutually supportive. We and the government through this state owned enterprise and the state owned enterprises, the Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Finance, we're all fully aligned now in our objectives of creating value for all stakeholders. We're working together and that's a huge positive development for Freeport and for the asset itself.
Slide 7, we're focused on execution. That's what we've been saying for so long and that's what the results show that we have been successful in doing. But with our focus on execution, continued success will drive strong and improving results. We're now in a path to double EBITDA from 2020 levels as we go forward. Execution of these plans, all well underway.
Biggest risks are behind us. There will always be risks, but the biggest risks are behind us, will allow us to grow our copper volumes by 20% in 2021, gold volumes by 70% that would result in a reduction in net used cost by 20% for the company and completely expand significantly expand margins and cash flows. You see this in our 3rd quarter results. Our financial performance will improve throughout 2021. Our current operating rights, as I mentioned earlier, extend to 2,041 with fixed fiscal terms.
This will allow BTFI to generate massive future cash flows from this set of remarkable copper and gold resources. Our company is going to stay focused on execution. As we complete this transition at Grasberg. We are deferring any decisions about major new investments. And as we go forward with the higher cash flows that will be generated, we'll be able to reduce our debt and further improve our balance sheet.
You see what we've done this quarter. I'm confident that in 2021, we'll be in a position to recommend to our Board a resumption of our dividend for the Board to consider. And that as we go forward, we will be able to generate increasing returns to shareholders from higher cash flows. In addition, we'll have opportunities to consider significant growth from large scale or Danny low cost, low risk, high return, disciplined brownfield investments in our large portfolio of undeveloped reserves and resources. Freeport can maintain its production, grow its production without having success in refueled exploration, which we hope we do, without having to do any M and A deals.
Slide 8 shows this. We have a long live portfolio of mineral reserves, recoverable reserves, extends beyond 30 years with substantial options to expand these reserves in the future considering our large inventory of mineralized material with our resources beyond current proved and probable reserves. For now, however, I want to emphasize again, we're focused on executing our plans efficiently, delivering on our targets. As we go forward, we'll be accessing growth options in a measured and disciplined way. I'll close with Slide 9 with what we adopted internally as the Freeport Edge.
Our management team has had extensive experience in managing this business responsibly. We've been together a long time now. Leadership teams across the company are seasoned, battle hardened, value oriented. We're all intensely engaged and that's one thing I keep talking about our work during 2020. It has been really intense.
But our people are energetic, highly motivated. We have an action oriented management structure. We work together collaboratively. We're experienced decisive, never cut corners on important issues like worker safety, community responsibilities, environmental obligations. We keep a long term focus on our license to operate around the world.
We work hard to earn this and to keep it. We know and we've had a long history of operating on the premise that our shareholders cannot succeed unless all stakeholders in our businesses succeed. Freeport is clearly on a global basis foremost in copper. Our portfolio of assets are large, high quality. We're an established industry leader, great track record, operate mines, develop mines among the largest in the world.
Our assets are long lived, durable with embedded options for reserve and resource growth, strong franchises in the U. S, South America and Indonesia, industry leading technical capabilities with a strong track record of project execution around the world over many years. We've earned the trust and respect of our partners, our customers, our suppliers, the financial markets, most importantly, our workers, communities and host countries. Notably, our block caving experience is, if not the most one of the most extensive and longstanding in the history of the global mining industry. And that's so critically important for success both in the ramp up at Grasberg and being able to continue to execute our plans over the next 20 years.
This is not for the faint of heart. We've been operating block cave mines in Indonesia since the early 1980s and we have an important molybdenum block caving operation at our Henderson mine in Colorado. This is critically important as we transferred Grasberg from the largest from this enormous surface mine that we completed at the end of 2018 took the largest block caving operation in the history of the mining industry. Our team has demonstrated its capabilities in good times and bad. And I want to close by thanking our people, recognizing their strength and resilience, their dedication and now what this performance is evidenced in today's report.
I'm personally proud to be part of this team. I look forward to the success we're going to have before us in the future. We're all motivated and committed to persevere and to achieve this success for the benefit of all of our stakeholders. So thank you for that. And now I will return the presentation over to Kathleen to talk about some financial matters.
Okay, great. Thanks, Richard. I'll just make some brief comments on financial matters so we can take your questions. As you'll see in the materials, our guidance is very similar to our prior guidance. We have incorporated the planned restart of Chino that Richard mentioned and that's reflected in the guidance.
But I just really wanted to make 3 points. The first one is, as Richard has said, we're continuing to focus on execution of this plan, which will generate growing cash flows and margins. Clearly, the Grasberg underground ramp up is making great progress and we're building that on that momentum each quarter. I wanted to mention the cost benefits that we're seeing and the ongoing capital management programs. We now feel that we successfully implemented the plan that we laid out in April.
I think when you look at the cash costs in the quarter of $1.32 per pound and compare that to where we were in the Q1 of this year, you see 30% reduction in net unit cash costs, also a 30% reduction in capital spending levels. With the increased volumes that we have coming in 2021 at very low incremental cost, we expect our unit net cash costs will decline below 1 point $2 per pound next year. So we're remaining focused on sustaining all of these costs and capital management programs. We've also implemented savings in a number of other areas, including in general administrative costs, which as you see in the 3rd quarter were over 30% below the Q1 2020 levels. 2nd point is, and Richard made this point as well, is that the Q3 really demonstrates the growing cash flow generating capacity of the business.
We had $1,400,000,000 in EBITDA during the quarter and $1,200,000,000 in operating cash flow. And our volumes are continuing to grow. We expect to continue building volumes during 2021 and using $3 to 3.50 copper, we would average between $7,400,000,000 to $9,400,000,000 per annum in EBITDA for 2021 2022 and generate nearly $5,000,000,000 to over 6 $1,000,000,000 in operating cash flow with $2,000,000,000 of capital expenditures. So very focused on free cash flow generation as we look forward. And the third point is that our balance sheet and financial position are very strong.
As you'll see in the slide materials, the net debt is expected to decline rapidly and continued execution and performance will allow our Board to consider resumption of dividends in 2021 and increasing shareholder returns over time. As Richard mentioned, we're also continuing to assess the sequencing of our future organic growth projects. We expect to be in a great position really maintain a strong balance sheet, provide returns to shareholders and invest in value enhancing projects that are embedded in our portfolio as market conditions warrant. So that concludes our prepared remarks. And operator, we'll now take questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer Our first question comes from the line of Alex Hacking with Citi. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Richard and Kathleen, and thanks for the presentations. I'll ask 2 questions, if it's okay. The first question on the dividend. Richard, you mentioned restarting the dividend.
Year, any thoughts on how that would be structured, percentage payout, a net debt target, something like that? And just a second quick one, if I may. Just the copper grade at Grasberg was very, very strong during the quarter. Should we read anything into this? Are grades coming in ahead of your geological models?
This was just some variance that we shouldn't read much into. Thank you.
So on the dividend, it's really going to be something that we haven't teed up for the Board yet. We're really focused on getting through this year and going forward. But we are giving thought to this idea as we make further progress on getting to our targets as to how to establish a policy for the dividend. We won't, as I mentioned, we won't reduce debt. We're on track to doing that.
We will likely take a first step of restoring the dividend, but then we'll have the opportunity of doing, as you said, of establishing a financial policy and looking to further shareholder returns, growing shareholder returns in the future. That could be in the form of dividends And depending on how the equity market reacts, we would have the option of looking at stock buybacks. But at this point, we're not we have not really engaged with the Board to establish a specific policy. Mark, do you want to comment on the grade situation? Sure.
Where we're at right now in the deep end L C, we're mining some of the highest grade sections of the Skarm sections of the ore body. Estimation of these very high grade zones is always a challenge for our modelers. The concern is always that we take high grade intercepts and smear them over too broad of an area and cause overestimation. So we've taken a conservative but appropriate modeling approach. So the grades that you've seen are a bit of a positive variance that we've had really for the last 6 months.
We believe our overall global estimate is appropriate. We didn't do anything with our sequencing of the cave. We followed our cave management plan and really the grades just came to us more or less as a bit of a positive surprise. But if you look at the grades individually, deep MLZ is very high grade. It's close to 1.9% and gold grades are about 1.8.
Percent. And what we saw was a bit higher than expected grades in that very high graded portion of the mine.
And one
of the things that Mark is doing and the team out there is doing is really focused on the long term plan. And so as Mark said, we're following the sequencing to maximize the long term values and not try to look for short term wins. And they're really doing a good job of staying disciplined on that program.
Great. Thank you so much. And I should say congratulations on the very strong cash flow in the quarter. Thanks.
Thanks, Alex.
Your next question comes from the line of Timna Tanners with Bank of America. Yes. Hey, good morning, everyone, and thanks for the update.
Good morning. Thanks, Timna.
I wanted to ask 2 questions also. I suppose, really curious about the Gresik smelter alternatives and the update there. I know you alluded to some ongoing negotiations. I'm just wondering if you could if it's more than just a delay, if you could give us any color on what that might look like? And then I'll follow-up with the second question.
So an alternative would be rather than building a new smelter to expanding the existing Graseck smelter and adding a precious metals refinery to it. That could not be expanded to a size to take all of our future concentrate production. So there would have to be an agreement allowing us to export the excess. And we're proposing if that's when I say if we, it's PTFI and this is being led by the state owned ministries in the internal discussions within the government that would involve paying an export fee on that. The benefits would be it would avoid having to undertake this major new construction project.
And the financial benefits are really positive for the government. And so with the government, like all other countries around the world, seeing its financial situation being challenged by COVID, this has some fundamental attractions to the government. As you know, when we reached our agreement in 2018, a feature of that agreement was a commitment by PT FI to build a new smelter We had years of discussions about that because it is uneconomic to everyone. But to get the deal accomplished in 2018, we had to commit to do that and that commitment is in place. So it's really in the government's hands about what they decide to do.
But this issue of the financial benefits to the government is a significant one.
Okay. That's super helpful. Thank you. And I don't want to take away from all the Grasberg progress and success, but starting to think actually about the next generation of projects and initiatives for the company. I know you've alluded to other projects.
Can you kind of run through with us where you prioritize the different options and alternatives out
there so
we can start thinking about what's around the corner?
I can point to them. We haven't prioritized them yet. We've done some initial pre feasibility, feasibility type work. We actually suspended some of that as part of our cost reduction efforts in April. But we have a significant opportunity in Chile with our El Abra project where we're essentially fifty-fifty partners with Codelco, it has a significant sulfide deposit.
It would be a major development project involving a water desalination plant, but a project on the order of our Cerro Verde expansion. But it has an attractive ore body to consider. And then in the U. S, we have a series of brownfield expansions at mines ranging from our Bagdad mine in Northwest Arizona. There's in the future a very large sulfide opportunity at Morenci, this Lone Star property as we mine the oxide cap, we're exposing what looks to be a very significant sulfide resource, which I believe will be developed.
The U. S. Opportunities have some economic advantages. We own all of our lands in the U. S, essentially all of our lands in sea.
So there's no royalties. The tax situation is very favorable and we have a big NOL carry forward. So when you have the ability to develop resources with no taxes and no royalties, that's a big fundamental economic advantage. So as we go forward, we will be doing trade off studies and making decisions about where and when to invest. That's in the future.
We have a long line of potential partners who are interested in working with us. That'd be something we could consider. But for right now, we're going to continue to focus and achieve the kind of success for the next few quarters like you saw in this 3rd quarter.
Okay, super. Thanks for all the detail. Thank you, Timna.
Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Chris Terry with Deutsche Bank.
Hi, Richard and Kathleen. A couple of questions for me. First on Gradsberg, just on the development rate for the quarter. I think you said you'll try to be at 90% by the middle of next year. Just wondering if the Q3 exit rate, that was just looking at the chart from last quarter's slide pack, I think that 94,000 tons is back on track.
I just wondered if you could give some details a bit more specifically on during the quarter some of those hiccups. It's you said COVID 45 days. Was there anything else in there? And basically what the message is sending, I think, is at the end of the quarter, you're back on to the chart on the progress chart. That's my first question.
I'll start with that.
That's right, Chris. We did have the 5 day outage for the work stoppage and then we had some overflow maintenance that was unplanned during the period. And by the end of the quarter, we had gotten back to the rates and Mark and his team do an update every quarter and went through the 5 year forecast. And essentially, there was very little change in our ramp up. So we're still on track with getting to 90% of the run rate by mid next year.
Okay. And Chris, I think on every one of these calls, we've noted that there will be things we'll have to deal with from time to time just inherent the nature of mining. And what I see is the fact that we had these and we're still able to have this kind of quarter. So as we go forward and as we open up more access to these ore bodies, that gives us more flexibility if we do have some issues to deal with of offsetting those by adjusting our operations because of this greater access that continues to emerge.
Okay. Thanks, Richard and Kathleen. And The follow-up question I had is just around the dividend. I know you commented before that it's early days. I just wanted to get an update on the target net debt level.
I think you previously talked about $5,000,000,000 as being around that level that you would think about the dividend. Is that still the thinking? Or $5,000,000,000 more correctly is about the level of net debt that you're targeting, so then you can explore other options. You're obviously at $7,600,000,000 now. So is that still how we should think about the timing of the dividend when you've reached about that level?
We set a back 5 years ago, we set a target of reducing what was then $20,000,000,000 of debt to $5,000,000,000 to $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 So that's the $5,000,000,000 nothing magic about it. In fact, in those earlier years that I referred to, when we started generating so much cash, in both of those cases, we totally paid off our debt. We were debt free 2005, I believe. We were debt free in 2010, 2011. That's just because these cash flows when the market is really good, really come at you really strong.
And so in both those cases, we were able to pay big dividends. And so we're certainly comfortable with the debt level we have now. Kathleen and her team has done a great job of structuring our maturity schedules. So we got really strong liquidity and certainly $5,000,000,000 would be a level of debt that we'd be comfortable with living within the long run. So we'll manage our business on the basis of the cash that comes to us and our expectations about cash flows.
But I think you could be comfortable in saying that that a $5,000,000,000 target is something that would be acceptable to us. Cash may come to us that we pay down more than that. But as we did that, we'd clearly be returning cash to shareholders and looking at these opportunities for future investments.
Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Kathleen, and well done on
a great quarter. Thanks. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of David Gagliano with BMO Capital Markets.
All right, great. Thanks for taking my questions. And as always, thank you for the You covered a lot of the things that I was hoping to ask about already, but
I do have a bit of
a follow-up on the capital allocation question. On the brownfield opportunities, I was wondering if you can just talk about the timing of investing in those opportunities relative to this the 2021 dividend recommendations to the Board.
Well, and this is a feature of the industry, David. Even with all of these projects and their brownfield expansions, execution of those will take a long period of time. Even if we were to start today and we're not starting today, so each of these projects that would be significant projects. Now we're going to do things to make incremental improvements through the efficiency programs and so forth. And so we have an initiative to actually increase volumes without making a capital investment.
We call it the Americas concentrator project. But for a major ground fill investment project, from the time we make the decision to start and that's not likely to occur until 'twenty two, 'twenty three, you're still in the 6 or 7 years at a minimum execution on it. So with positive cash flows, those won't stand in the way of really having significant increases in returns to shareholders.
And Dave, we'll have some incremental projects that we can look at that would be quicker than that. But Richard's talking about a major investment, but we'll have some incremental opportunities that we can evaluate as well during that period.
Okay, great. That's helpful. Thank you.
Dave, I think the way to think about it is we have a fully developed set of assets essentially now. And we're in we will be with kind of positive markets that we have now that we appear to be moving more towards in the future, we're really going to be in a harvesting set of years for the near term. And I think it's great to be a natural resource company and being able to look at the benefit of the decisions you made over many years and see that you made the right ones and you generate cash and you return it to shareholders. Perfect.
Thank you.
By the way, Dave, we thought about you on Monday at lunch. So we miss being in London.
Your next question comes from the line of Chris Worthinga with Jefferies.
Hey, good morning, Richard, Kathleen. Thanks for taking my question. It's really a strategic question about Grasberg. And Richard, it's something I know you've addressed at times in the past, but obviously the world is changing and things at Grasberg are changing pretty quickly. So the question relates to the potential rationale of selling a portion of the gold production from Grasberg as a gold stream, presumably you would get a premium multiple.
The ability to do so, I would think has increased now that Grasberg is ramping up and being derisked. This would accelerate your ability to return capital potentially via buyback, which would be pretty compelling. I think right now probably be very significant positive for your shares. It would greatly would not greatly reduce the competitiveness of some of the mine and would probably reduce the perceived risk around Freeport as it would reduce your exposure to Indonesia a little bit in the market. So I understand in the past, Grasberg was such a critically important asset to Freeport.
You obviously owned more than 90% of the mine for a long time. But now that you've done this transition, ownership is transitioning as well, but the operational transition to the underground. And again, the fact that arguably the value of the gold from the asset is not being reflected in your shares. What is your argument to not sell a portion of that gold as a stream? Thank you.
All right. Well, Chris, one bit of correction there about the ownership. Since the mid-90s, Rio Tinto had a joint venture ownership in this interest. And so while the government's interest was roughly 10%, FCX's interest was net of the Rio Tinto joint venture interest. So what we own in Grasberg today is essentially the same that we've owned since the mid-1990s.
It's just that the Rio Tinto interest was transferred from a joint venture interest of Rio Tinto to shares owned by the government. So our fundamental interest has not changed. Did you follow that, Chris?
Yes, that's right. So basically, my point is that Indonesia will the majority owner of the mine, whereas historically they own less than 10%. So the Well, they
own 51% of the shares and in the past, but that ownership interest is there 10%. They acquired about 5% from us, but they acquired the Rio Tinto interest. But when you look at FCX's ownership interest, it really hasn't changed from what we've had for over the years. And that was one of the really good things about the deal that we cut in 2018 is we were able to hold on to the interest that we had even though the government had these ownership objectives, which they reached by acquiring the Rio Tinto interest.
That's right. Interest is not.
That's right. Our economic interest has not changed. That's just a clarification. But yes, we're fully aware of the opportunity that we have to look at a gold streaming opportunity. As you know, we've assessed those over the years in various forms.
And with the spike in gold prices currently, it makes that a new opportunity for us. We need to get ramped up. You don't want to sell a stream before you have the stream in place, but we are studying various alternatives for doing that. And we recognize the opportunity to generate cash and restructure our balance sheet and our ability to deal with returns to shareholders and so forth. So that's on our plate.
You can rest assured that bankers are visiting us regularly and talking about that opportunity and it's something we'll be considering. Our first order of business though is to get it ramped up.
Sorry, second question along those lines. In terms of
the operational performance at Grasberg, can you just give us an update?
And I'm sorry if you mentioned
this earlier, I'm So second question along those lines in terms
of the operational performance at Grasberg, can you just give us an update?
And I'm sorry if you mentioned this earlier, I might have missed it on the call before, but can you give us an update in terms of number of COVID cases at Grasberg between your employees and between contractors, if things are getting better or worse regarding COVID at the mine? Just an update there. Thank you.
Yes. I mean, I'm just when COVID broke out, Grasberg was a huge concern. We have, I think most of you know, we have enormous workforce there. It was on the order approaching 30,000 people, roughly 20,000 at any point in time, we're living in close proximity to each other in the Highlands area of New Guinea where it's damp and cool and people live and work together. So we really recognize that as a problem and made major investments in medical facilities, in protocols for managing it, testing equipment, PCR labs both in the Highlands and the Lowlands.
We did all the things that the health standards say that you should do in terms of finding infected people, tracing, isolating and treating. And so over time, we've had and Indonesia is a country is a country that's challenged with COVID. So we've had a number of cases. Fortunately, the huge majority of those who have recovered or were non symptomatic. Our process of isolation and restricting travel and testing has worked.
The serious cases we have had have been few. And the most serious ones were ones where people had previous health conditions. So it's consistent with what people are faced with around the world. We've really done well in the Highlands. We had a outbreak of cases in the lowlands where our ship terminal is and where people there have more of an interaction with the community of Tamika, which is less of a controlled situation.
But we've instituted new protocols there and have made a great progress. So we've had to deal with it. We've had a number of cases. Almost all have now recovered and we continue to have very strict protocols on travel interactions and people there. So the government and with helping them with health issues and equipment and testing procedures.
So it's been an issue, but it's been managed. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Orest Wowkodaw with Scotiabank.
Hi, good morning. I'm just turning our good morning. Turning our attention back to Grasberg, obviously, there was, I guess, a bit of a setback there in the Q3, but you recovered really well with that exit rate of 90,000 tons a day. Can you give us a sense of how that's continued through October? And if I'm not mistaken looking at your slides, wasn't your planned exit rate for the year at 95,000?
So I mean, doesn't that mean you're essentially already there at the end of
September? Yes, you're right. I mean, it's going well. And I would not you got to look at where I am, I'm real sensitive about where I wouldn't call
it what we faced was
a setback. It was just a situation we had to face and we managed it. I mean, man, you look back over the years, that's always the case. It's always the case with complicated minds. So it certainly wouldn't be I wouldn't characterize it as setback.
But yes, we're on track. We're on track in October. If we had had any 2020, completing mining the pit and really taking the ramp up over the hump to the point of where it was ramping up and generating cash flows. This was a quarter that we always knew was going to be the quarter where cash flows were going to start coming in, they did. We had to do that in managing the COVID situation and we just talked about.
So it's a remarkable accomplishment that we've been able to do that. And we feel very good. We feel like we've avoided the major risk of COVID. We've now avoided the major risk of the ramp up. Mark and his team will face issues every day.
We're communicating about how things are going with various aspects of our operations, how we're doing with our maintenance programs, how we're doing. We've had lots of excess capacity in the mill, but that's we're going to start filling the mill up. So we've got to be prepared for that. But we're on track to 200,000 tons a day plus of ore from these underground ore bodies to the mill and everything's on track.
And we haven't had geologic or geotechnical type things, the kind of things that we ran into in the Q3 other than the labor issue was just more mechanical type things, maintenance type items and ore getting hung up in passes and that sort of thing. And that's going to be that's going to happen from time to time, but those things are more easily dealt with than geologic or geotechnical issues. And we're pleased to report we just feel it's been going very well on the geologic and geotechnical front.
Yes. This fracking approach this fracking approach that Martin and his team came up with, the Deep MLZ mine was delayed on the order of 2 years as we dealt with these seismicity issues, but which is not a factor in the Grasberg say. But that was an issue in the Deep MLZ. Should say. But that was an issue in the Deep MLZ.
They came up with solution and it's working. We still have seismic events from time to time, but the fracking is helping us manage those and we're being able to achieve the results that you see. And it's straightforward fracking. It's not
as complicated
as what's going on in the oil and gas industry and the Permian Basin. This is a really straightforward type of operation.
Is it possible that you may actually exit this year ahead of plan, I mean, given you're already at 94,000 tons a day?
Certainly possible and our guys are going to do the best they can do. We set our plans as being aspirational plans, but achievable. And the guys work every day to try to do better than plans. And they take a it's a great I mean, the smiles on our faces when we have these days when we go for plans, it's felt all the way from Papua to wherever we are here in the United States. So everybody's oriented to try to beat the plans.
And in the Americas too, I mean, Josh, these guys have done a great job. Our safety statistics are great. We did have an unfortunate fatality where a worker took a really unfathomable action. But we work hard, but our safety statistics are good. Our people are focused.
I think one thing about one thing I think of this COVID thing has done for all of us, it's really made us focus on our work even more intently than we ever had. I keep talking about work is intense. And so now with having restricted travel, making sacrifices in your personal life, everybody is really focused on work and we can see the results of that globally.
Your next question comes from the line of Carlos De Alba with Morgan Stanley.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the question. So first, maybe Richard, if you could elaborate, I mean, maybe early on to provide this number, but what sort of estimate CapEx do you would you envision for the alternative to a brand new corporate smelter in Indonesia I mean, the expanding of the current the expansion of the current smelter and the adding the personal metal refinery, how much would that cost relative to the 3,000,000,000 dollars I think that Kathleen had mentioned for potentially CapEx of a new smelter?
Rick Coleman is on the line and he manages our capital projects globally and is involved in the smelter. Rick, is there any way we can give an order of magnitude number on the aggressive smelter?
Yes. And I'll jump in here, Richard. The fire estimate for the new greenfield smelter was $3,000,000,000 And the estimate for the expansion Classic for 30% expansion is roughly $250,000,000 and a similar amount for the PMR. See, we're going to do a PMR anyway in the original configuration.
And it's an economic project at current PCRC rates, which the new smelter would not be.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Good luck.
Your next question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B. Riley. Please go ahead.
Hey, Lucas. Hang on just one second. I just want to say, just to emphasize, we've got financing available to us, ready to go. If we do have to build a new smelter, it would be debt financed, no capital required by shareholders in DTFI FCX. We now have to put capital into this.
It would be the losses that the smelter generate would be tax deductible. And when you look at the current situation out there with the government owning 50% of the equity, with having taxes and royalties, the government's share of the economics of the project, including the smelter is in excess of 70%. So we do consolidate this and I'm glad we do. Even though we own 49%, we at FCX control operations of BTFI. So it would be consolidated debt, but it would not require capital to be put into PPFI for the smelter from FCX?
Good morning, Richard and team. This is Lucas. Sure. Great job on the quarter. And my first question, I just wanted to explore another angle of this what's next theme that's been a part of this call here.
And would there be any interest to supplement your development pipeline with an acquisition of preproduction copper gold projects? There will be a couple of candidates in North America. And curious how you think about that opportunity set. Thank you.
Yes. We look at all of those. We're approached with opportunities. And we have our we have a long term history in the marketplace. So we are, as a company, familiar with all of these projects and mineral opportunities in North America and so forth.
The challenge that we have found today and we'll continue to do that. But the challenge we found today is we have these internal resources that have currently no value in our share price. And if we're successful in creating value, 100% of that value comes to our shareholders. If we were to acquire properties from someone else, we'd have to pay to their shareholders the current value of that. So it's hard to make the numbers work quite frankly.
Very helpful. I appreciate that. And then as a follow-up question, I wanted to follow-up on your CapEx guidance. You maintained prior guidance. Any risk to that number, any sort of cash up CapEx risk that we should be thinking about given the plans you put in place earlier this year and obviously that's been very successful, but would appreciate your thoughts on that and how we think about CapEx and long term CapEx over the coming years.
Thank you.
Lucas, we're in a next couple of years. Really, we hit the peak in 2021 at Grasberg and it will be declining after that. So, as we look out, absent other projects, our capital expenditures will decline significantly from the 2022 levels. So we're talking about something on the order of $1,000,000,000 to $1,200,000,000 in sustaining capital. And we've got some ongoing development at Grasberg, but it won't be anything like what we've got in these next few years.
So we do have lodging cash flows declining CapEx and we'll be evaluating whether there's opportunities to have some incremental expansions. But as Richard said, we're really looking forward to harvesting cash flows for a period of time.
Very helpful. I appreciate that and continue to test this luck. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Andreas Bokkenheuser with UBS.
Just a quick production question from your 2 part one. Can you just give us a quick update in terms of what the current situation is, especially in South America where you operate? Are you able to fully return to kind of pre COVID levels kind of production wise at this point in time? Or you still see any kind of lingering pressure from local communities, local governments in terms of workers returning to the site and this sort of thing? And I'm not just talking about your mind, just talking about what you're kind of hearing and seeing in the industry.
And related to that question, when we kind of think about 2021, presumably, I would think that a lot of the growth that you're going to see in power production and sales in 2021, some of that would be kind of weighted on to the back half of the year. Is that a fair way to look at it, like back half ends up a little bit stronger than the first half of the year production wise? Those are my two questions. Thank you very much.
At Cerro Verde in Peru, we've done really well. The team, as Richard said, the team has done really great job getting back to roughly 350,000 tons a day. Prior to the COVID, we were close to 400 and looking to grow. We still think that we can do that over time. But for the foreseeable future, until there's a complete return to normal in terms of people going back and forth to work and it's normal, we're going to operate at this lower rate.
So we that's all reflected in our plans. But we do expect Cerro Verde at some point next year and into 2021 to begin ramping up again. I think the situation in Peru is and then Josh Olmstead is here can comment, but this we're continuing to be very vigilant with our protocols that have been effective. Same in Chile, Chile did have some escalating cases earlier, but that seems to have abated some with the actions that the industry has taken. But still very much like it is around the world.
No one has really let up their guard and we're continuing to be very careful about how we're operating in the COVID environment.
Yes. And one thing I would say and this is true for us in managing the COVID situation and it would apply to different operations, it is site specific challenges. So you can't really generalize about what happens with us versus what would happen with other companies. We had a totally different situation at Cerro Verde than we did in Marin City or Grasberg. And so I just caution you about trying to generalize when you hear something about one company's situation applying it to other sites of other companies?
Yes. Well, I wouldn't do that. I mean, I think there was a couple of Bloomberg headlines out suggesting that Peruvian mine workers were a little bit slow returning to mine sites. So I kind of figured that, that was industry wise, just Peru alone. It wasn't something we were trying to extrapolate with Grasberg or Montmorency for that matter.
But
even within Peru, I mean, in the second quarter, the government in Peru on a very sudden basis shut down mining. And we had a different situation because most of our lived in Arequipa. And so we had to then go to work with the local community and government and we had to construct some temporary living facilities on-site for people to live and demonstrate to people that we could manage the health situation. And that would be a different situation than other operations where they have their workforce living already living on their site. So anyway, we've had to manage it.
And we our guys down there have just done a tremendous job. We're not at full production, but we're original nameplate production and we're making a lot of money out of Cerro Verde now and we have the opportunity to increase it.
And to your second question, the volumes we expect will increase quarter by quarter through 2021 and that's mainly because of the Grasberg ramp up. And as we said, we expect to get to about 90% of the run rate by middle of next year. So but the back half will be bigger than the front half, but the front half will still be significant and growing from where we were in the Q3.
That's very clear. Thank you very much for answering my questions.
Thank you for your question.
Your next question comes from the line of John Tumazos with John Tumazos Very Independent Research.
Thank you very much and congratulations on so much progress. Thank you. For the sulfide concentrators that you've talked about for a couple of years, are any of them even 10% engineered and with the 6 to 7 year time horizon you're talking about, you're saying that none of them would arrive earlier than 2027?
Rick, I think that's a fair statement, right?
Yes, that's right, Richard. With permitting and with the balance of the engineering, engineering is definitely not more than 10% on the larger concentrator designs.
And again, John, that's what he's referring to is major new projects like the Alava project would be like another Cerro Verde. As we said, we also have incremental type expansions within the portfolio that don't require permitting or don't require major multiyear planning. So we've got a combination of both, but the major projects like the one that El Abra is multi years because of the permitting that has to be done and all the infrastructure. But we do have other options within the portfolio that wouldn't be as long lead. At Lone Star, are the oxide so vast that the sulfides wouldn't be exposed or you wouldn't
need the sulfides even till 2027?
Right. And so Lone Star, what's made it so attractive initially is it dovetails in with the depletion of the Safford reserves, which was part of the mine plan there. So we had existing processing facilities and Lone Star is so close to Safford that we're able to truck the ore to the saffron facilities and anchovy facilities. The oxide resource is growing and we may have an opportunity to invest in incremental processing facilities to take advantage of that. So but this lone star sulfide is longer term even than the opportunities that we have at the other projects because we can make so much money off of the oxides before we develop it.
And we've done a lot of work on drilling over the past several years on Lone Star and we'll be incorporating that drilling results into our longer range plans. And a lot of our exploration budget over the last few years has been on Lone Star. So we're really prioritizing that opportunity.
If I could ask one more, if we just think for example the Nel Abra Sulfide Mill. If you're largely copying the 240,000 metric ton a day most recent module at Cerro Verde and the desal plant pump and pipeline is sort of an off the shelf third party design. Why would the and the pits pre stripped, why would the engineering and planning take a long time at O Opera?
There's it's not just the engineering and planning, it's the permitting. As Rick was saying, we've got to we'd have to do an EIS and you've got a baseline that you have to provide in terms of data going back on it. And so it's and then it's a new mill, new desal. We don't have a mill there now. But it's an attractive project.
It's a very attractive project. But we may have more attractive projects that are less capital intensive.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Mike Dudas with Vertical Research Partners.
Richard, I'm not going to ask you what you think is going to happen
in the U. S. Elections next month. So that's okay. But
I wanted well, if you want to, we'll pine, go right ahead. But I wanted to see what your thoughts are on, say, this month's in Chile with the constitutional vote and looking into next year presidential elections in Peru and in Chile. Any sense of how that could impact positively, negatively tenor or support for mining and overall, maybe some of the labor situations that could pop up?
Well, thank you. You're not putting me so much on the spot. It's not just next month, it's almost next week now that we've got the election here in the U. S. And it goes beyond the presidential election.
We've got complicated political situations everywhere. And Latin America is always a complicated area. The thing though that underlies this is that with the COVID challenges that economies around the world are facing, but particularly in Chile and Peru, I think that however the political situation unravels, there's going to be a need for those countries and an objective of those countries to provide a favorable environment for mining investments. In Chile, which has had such long term success from that. There's a growing recognition of the need for Chile to not lose its competitive edge that it's had.
And some of that's been eroded with some recent legislative regulatory actions. So I'm confident that those countries will see the benefits of mining investment. In Peru, the bigger challenges, which we fortunately found a way to manage effectively is how do mining investments interact with local communities because that's what's really been the barrier there as opposed to central government barriers. I appreciate that. Thanks, Richard.
Your next question comes from the line of Jitendra Gold with Exane BNP
Paribas.
Hi, good morning. Just a quick one on your 2021 unit cost guidance. You've left it unchanged at below $1.20 but there can be a lot of wiggle room based on where prices are. Are you able to indicate issued spot gold moly and currencies with your production outlook, what would net unit cost look like for next year?
We will update our guidance for 2021 quarter. Our plan right now is below $1.20 and we haven't gotten more specific than that. But we'll certainly update that when we come out with our updated guidance. But we're trending well below $1.20 at this point on our current plan at $1900 gold $8 molybdenum.
And just to confirm, you're using $1800 in that $120,000,000 or is it lower than that?
Our current plan that we're using and we just we run scenarios, but our current plan with the guidance in the deck is $3 copper, dollars 1900 gold and $8 more legitimate.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Chris Mancini with Gabelli Funds.
Hi, everybody. Thanks a lot and congratulations on Grasberg. It really is, as you've been saying, Richard, all along, having followed the company for a long time. Just the amount of tons that you're moving there every day along with building a mine, along with dealing with COVID and everything. It's really fantastic what you've done there.
You have a ways to go, but congratulations. It really is a great job. Yes, Chris, we've been talking about it for a long, long time, haven't we? Yes, yes, you have. And like you say, you're starting to inflect here and it's impressive what you've been able to do.
So I just wanted to say that quickly. And just another quick question, don't want to put you too much on the spot, but relative to Lucas' question about acquisitions and you're saying that you're not really getting seeing a lot of value and potentially buying something. How do you feel how would you feel about conceptually a merger of equals with another mining company? And just given what we've seen in the space about, like you say, kind of value destruction in the natural resources space in terms of deals that have been done at premiums. What do you think conceptually about merger of equal potential merger of equals or just conceptually in the
space? Well, conceptually, you can identify circumstances where mergers of equals makes sense because of the ability to reduce costs and operate more efficiently through asset management and so forth. But in our case, where we're on the verge of this while we made great progress now, we are less than 60% there in terms of the volumes that we will achieve at Grasberg. I also believe we have the potential even though copper markets are strong now. One of the reasons we showed that chart with the earlier years is I believe there are factors working today that could well make copper much more valuable as we go forward.
They're having all these poles in connection with the virtual meetings with Elamiwe going on. And when you look at all the polls that people are taking, copper is far outstripping other metals. So I just don't believe I'm a shareholder, as you know. I don't believe as a shareholder that there is any way that we would want to consider a merger of equals right now where we would dilute the opportunity that we have as a standalone company that's so attractive. We worked for it for a long time and I think it would I wouldn't want to the reason I'm working and everything else is I believe we're on the verge of really good things happening in Shreveport.
I just made a brief reference to what happened to us in earlier years. We've had ups and downs with the company for various reasons since then. But this time, we're committed to sticking to our guns. Our Board has made a firm commitment 5 years ago to focus on what the real value opportunity for Freeport is and that's in the copper business with this set of assets. We've shown in the past what we could do with essentially this set of assets and how we could build real value.
I'm getting to the age of where I tell too many war stories according to some of my friends, including our CFO. But there was 2011, we had a company with a $60,000,000,000 market cap and no debt. And I think we're on the verge of rebuilding that. With second steps. But this is not what this company can be and what we're on the track for being.
And I firmly believe and as I talk to our shareholders, I get nothing but from sport about it, that the best opportunity for our shareholders with this set of assets is to stick with the strategy that we're on right now. And it's not a short term strategy as we've talked about. We've got short term positives going for us, but there's a longer term set of opportunities that's really attractive.
Right. Okay. Yes, that makes sense. I mean, given where you are now. And I mean, so do you think that once Grasberg is fully ramped, you would have a different view potentially?
We'll
always view opportunities as they come about. Chris raised earlier the opportunity for this Ghost streaming deal and that's certainly something we'll consider. But yes, opportunities emerge on an opportunistic basis. That's using the same word twice, but Phelps Dodge emerged for us without having a long term strategy of doing it, but it was an opportunity that came up because of circumstances and we took advantage of it. If opportunities come to us in the future that makes sense our shareholders, then we will act on it.
But for right now, it's not the time to do that. Okay.
Well, great. Thanks a lot. And again, congrats to the team for doing a great job at Krasbury so far and the rest of the operations. Thanks. And congrats to you, Richard.
Thanks.
We appreciate your kind comments and your support for all of these years.
Now we'll turn the call over to management for any closing remarks.
Well, thanks, everyone. Appreciate your interest. Obviously, a great quarter for us and we look forward to reporting continued progress. So it's been a tough world we live in, lots of personal sacrifices. It's gratifying though to see within our company to see the success that we're all sharing together.
And I think we've made clear today our commitment to continue to move forward with progress and success for the future. But thanks for being in our call today.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.